That Percy falls within a long line of eminent physician-novelists is unremarkable; like Percy some authors did actually complete their medical studies (Chekhov, Bulgakov, Conan Doyle, Wendell Holmes, Sr., Robin Cook, Michael Crichton, William Carlos Williams, Khaled Hosseini, W. Somerset Maugham, Rabelais, Namwal El Saadawi, Schiller, Schnitzler, and Abraham Verghese) while others did not (Oliver Goldsmith, John Keats, and Gertrude Stein). Though Percy was a philosophical autodidact, he was first and foremost a fully-fledged philosopher whose longest-standing and deepest concerns congealed around the relationship between science and the understanding of man’s place in the world and the cosmos, as a sentient being most distinctively mediated by language. Thus, the phrase “precision and soul” of the title (which I borrow from Robert Musil 1995), broadly connotes the idea of scientific method and the study of man qua man, the former a tradition of theorizing that for Percy has shed little or no light on the latter.
A Biographical Sketch
One of three brothers, Walker Percy (1916–1990) was born into a most distinguished family, with ancestry going back to the Norman William de Percy who arrived in England soon after the Norman Conquest of 1066. Percy’s father, Leroy Pratt Percy, was an attorney and general counsel for a major American steel manufacturer headquartered in Birmingham, AL. Conscious of their civic status, the family adhered to the notion of “noblesse oblige,” a High Toryism that had its roots in the English aristocracy. Leroy, who suffered from what we’d term these days as manic depression or bipolar disorder (somewhat of a family trait), committed suicide aged 40; Walker who’d have been 13 was profoundly marked by this event his whole life. (There has been some speculation that Walker’s mother might have been a suicidee as well, but nothing definitive has been established—she died in a car crash when Walker was 15). Either way, suicide seeped into the deepest recesses of Walker’s mind, a bête noire that was to be the source of a great deal of ongoing personal consternation but equally it was the philosophical seed that germinated into his becoming a philosopher, suicide being a prominent theme in the work of philosophical-novelists Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Walker and his two younger brothers were subsequently adopted by Leroy’s first cousin, William Alexander Percy. William (or uncle Will) was an extraordinarily cultivated, cultured, bohemian, and kind man, and yet, was someone who was equally worldly, having as a soldier witnessed first-hand the gruesomeness of the First World War earning the Croix de Guerre. William’s learnedness had a profound influence on Walker, who in turn displayed a voracious rabbinical-like thirst for study across the sciences and the humanities. Percy attended medical school at Columbia, specializing in pathology. It has been said that he chose pathology on the grounds that he preferred not to have contact with patients (Majeres 2002). As my colleague Professor David Hardwick himself a distinguished pathologist often jokingly says, “My patients don’t complain.” Another interest of Walker’s was psychiatry, Percy submitting himself to regular analysis while at Columbia in an attempt to quash the demons that were to continue to plague him all his life. Soon after Walker’s graduation, his beloved uncle Will died.
While fulfilling his residency in pathology at Bellevue Hospital, Walker contracted tuberculosis. While in convalescence and with much time on his hands to read, the realization dawned upon him that he was more interested in philosophy than in medicine. Now married, Walker and his wife Bunt converted to Catholicism and settled down in the undistinguished locale of Covington well away from the hubbub of—but still within easy reach of—New Orleans, where he lived for the rest of his life. As his father before him, Walker was very civic-minded and was engaged in the life of his adopted town. (Interestingly enough, Walker testified as an expert witness in the US District Court, concluding that the Confederate flag by and large did connote a racist outlook. The view he took predated the current controversies by half a century!) After having a few philosophical papers published in some leading journals of the time (and still are), it became apparent to Walker that not only were his career prospects slim, but that his desire to become a philosophical novelist better suited his temperament. By 1961, Walker had become a reasonably well-known novelist if only because of MG (1961) getting a boost by, as a late outsider, winning the National Book Award. His follow-up LG (1966) was a finalist as was his next work LR (1971). His next three novels L (1977), SC (1980), and his last, TS (1987), didn’t seem to garner the attention and support of the literati establishment that the first three did—perhaps by then they resented his mordant criticism of their worldview and had deemed his concerns and themes, at best unfashionable, and perhaps at worst, even reactionary. All attempts to have MG adapted as a cinematic feature have floundered—and perhaps that’s not such a bad thing given Hollywood’s ham-fisted way of going about things. There was even talk until quite recently of the philosophically literate filmmaker Wim Wenders and his collaborator novelist Peter Handke adapting The Second Coming. This too came to nothing.
The Philosopher as Novelist
I’m inclined to view Percy as a philosophical novelist much in the tradition of (in no particular order) John Henry Newman (Loss and Gain), Walter Pater (Marius the Epicurean), Robert Musil (The Man Without Qualities), Thomas Mann (The Magic Mountain), Yukio Mishima (The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea), and Hermann Broch (The Sleepwalkers), and as a philosopher-essayist, Percy has much in common with Miguel de Unamuno (Tragic Sense of Life).
For Percy, the serious writer, by definition, must be open to the “mystery of his art” and should not be shoehorned into any one world of ideas, weighed down by some thesis or other heavy-handed didactic exercise, an intellectual honesty he rigorously abided by. Moreover, for Walker, the serious writer should not be in the business of writing edifying tales. The implicit Catholicism in Percy’s novels reflects the philosophical malleability of the tradition—in this sense he’s so much more than merely a Catholic writer. With Percy’s medical training echoing in the deep background, he took the view that the novelist is a diagnostician, “a literary clinician” so to speak, identifying “the particular [cultural] lesion of the age.” Percy extends the analogy by going on to say that “the artist’s work in such times is surely not that of the pathologist whose subject matter is a corpse and whose question is not ‘What is wrong?’ but ‘What did the patient die of?’” (SSL, p. 206). Consonant with this sentiment, my colleague, the aforementioned David Hardwick, has repeatedly expressed the view that pathology is the Natural Science of Medicine. And perhaps it really was the pathologist’s perspective that Percy distinctively carried though to make him the novelist that be became (Nash 2013b; Ahuja 2013). As Percy himself colorfully put it, pathology was “the beautiful theatre of disease” (Tolson 1992, p. 148). Bioethicist Carl Elliott remarks that Percy’s
This is hardly a unique outlook. As engineer-philosopher-novelist Robert Musil put it:novels often portray medicine as a profession in decline, sold out to greedy capitalists and narrow scientists . The most appealing doctors in the novels are often burned-out and dispirited; the worst of them are quacks or crooks. … Yet Percy’s experience as a doctor and a patient shows through in more subtle ways, and perhaps ultimately more important ones. It shows through in the doctorly way that Percy writes, for example—the wry, clinical detachment with which he describes his characters and the circumstances in which they find themselves. Percy’s style is reminiscent of the way doctors often describe their patients: sometimes with affection, occasionally with condescension, often with humor-but always with an eye toward diagnosing their particular pathology. Percy himself described it as “the stance of a diagnostician.” (Elliott and Lantos 1999, pp. 4–5)
Percy’s cultural diagnostic bears a striking resemblance to Musil’s notion of eigenschaftslosigkeit, taken to connote the dual idea that a diagnosis is the beginning of the remedy. The diagnosis (for both Percy and Musil ) points to the liberal penchant for abstraction; the remedy is a return (in the current argot) to the social situatedness of the individual, or in some sense, communitarianism. The idea of eigenschaftslosigkeit as exemplified in Musil’s masterwork The Man Without Qualities has been articulated by cultural critic and philosopher Roger Scruton (2009, p. 165) as follows:Recently I invented a very fine name for myself: “monsieur le vivisecteur.” … “Monsieur le vivisecteur”–that’s who I am! My life: the wanderings and adventures of a vivisectionist of souls at the beginning of the twentieth century! (Musil 1998, p. 3)
Again, this idea resonates deeply throughout Percy’s writing as we shall soon see.Musil shows the individual conscience, surrounded by a society kept in place by empty routines. In this demoralized order the conscience becomes subjective, vacillating, profoundly unsure of anything save its own impressions. The man without qualities is in fact a man without substance, a subjectivity without a self.
For those who want a closer-grained documentation and explication of Walker Percy’s life and philosophical work (assuming of course that one’...