WALKER PERCY'S BIBLE NOTES AND HIS FICTION: GRACIOUS OBSCENITY

IN The Moviegoer (MG), The Last Gentleman (LG), Love in the Ruins (LR), and The Thanatos Syndrome (TS), Walker Percy uses the unlikely images of a dung beetle, bowel movements, the deaths of children, and even genocide to express the sacramental presence of God in the often traumatic mess of human existence. This article will argue that Percy's use of the grotesquely obscene is explained in part by his reading of the Bible and the notes he made in the Bible and certain other related books that he owned. Taking off from a few of those annotations in the Gospel of John, the article explores Percy's literary uses of obscenity as a means of grace.

A survey of the Walker Percy Library in the Rare Book Collection at the University of North Carolina indicates at least the following biblical volumes: two paperback copies of the New Testament, one hardbound copy of the Douai-Rheims Bible, and one hardbound (two volumes of the Old Testament; one volume of the New Testament) Bible translated by Monsignor Ronald Knox.1 All scripture references in this article will come from the three-volume Ronald Knox translation, hereafter referred to as the Knox Bible or Knox NT. Percy left more than 600 penciled notes, underlines, and marginal marks in his Knox Bible.

Reading Percy in light of the Bible is hardly original. Patrick Samway relates how Percy reported the importance of the Bible to his work (470). Gary Ciuba has considered Percy's novels in relation to biblical apocalyptic (23), and Lewis Lawson has noted the use of the Bible in Percy's introduction to "The Delta Factor" (3). Yet, little if any work has been done on correlations between Percy's Bible notes and his novels. While critics have examined Percy's sacramental orientation, no one has stressed Percy's juxtaposition of the sacramental with the obscene. Alan Pridgen has studied Percy's "sacramental landscapes," but has taken little notice of the obscene (23-24). For his part, Farrell O'Gorman has noted that Percy and Flannery O'Connor share a "sacramental vision" (146), but does little more than affirm that, "The here and now is worth writing about because God is present in it" (148). Commenting on Lance Lamar's loss of a sacramental view, John Desmond writes that, "A sacrament represents the interpenetration of the divine and the physical world, so that the physical becomes mysteriously an instrument or medium of grace" (69-70). This essay will carry these insights further by suggesting that the power of Percy's sacramental imagery derives, at least in part, from the scandalous interpenetration of the holy and the obscene as noted in his Knox Bible.

Following his notes in the Fourth Gospel, Percy stresses the issue of the Incarnation, God's participation in human flesh, including suffering, and death. Percy's notion of sacramental obscenity may derive from his reading of John 9 - the story of "the man born blind." In his Knox NT, at John 9.6 ("With that, he spat on the ground, and made clay with the spittle; then he spread clay on the man's eyes ..."), Percy writes in the right margin, "Sensible", and then with a line connects Sensible to the text ("made clay with the spittle"), and beneath Sensible he writes, "Power, obscenity, Belief." Percy graphically notes the relationship between Christ's power displayed via the earthy combination of spit and dirt applied as clay to the man's eyes. This he terms "obscenity." The obscenity manifests itself in the use of spit and dirt in the communication of divine grace in the form of healing. In the Fourth Gospel, earthy-human stuff becomes the medium of divine power leading to the insight that Jesus is, indeed, the Messiah. Thus, in John 9, divine grace operates within an obscene nexus of human bodily fluid, dirt, blindness, the divine power of a heterodox rabbi, and faith. In the Gospel, the confluence of grace and obscenity offends religious authorities who disassociate grace from obscenity and, moreover, assume such healing is not a sign of grace, but of sin. In the end, those whose eyes need no healing are blind to grace. They cannot see divine power at work in the earthy obscene - they cannot see Christ in human flesh.

But how does Percy employ obscenity in relation to belief? John Edward Hardy has noted that Percy's fiction boasts a "new bestiary," which "is a good deal more reliable as natural history than are the medieval models but is never so clear in the dimensions of its moral and theological meaning" (147). Yet, recalling the peregrine falcon that led The Last Gentleman's Will Barrett to Kitty Vaught in New York's Central Park, Hardy can say,

Still, a plainly labeled significacio is hardly required for us to see, at least in retrospect, an emblem of Christ in the triumphant falcon - something to return to modern sources, a shade more Hopkinsian than Yeatsian, though accommodating both - and perhaps, even in the victim pigeons, another aspect of the Godhead" (147-48).

Hardy is surely onto something in his analysis of the falcon - Christ or perhaps the Spirit-present in the form of a ferocious raptor. In Percy's personal bookplate - which he designed - a haloed bird-fish combine to depict the entry of Christ and the Spirit into an open book. That image seems to corroborate Percy's use of non-human creatures to illustrate the entry of the Divine through creaturely flesh. It is my contention, however, that Percy utilizes an even wider range of things than birds and fish to suggest the incarnational breakthrough of the Divine. I will argue that Percy employs various obscene things, images, and events to depict the incarnation of the Holy.