angelic artist in the fiction of Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy, The

Renascence, Fall 2000 by O'Gorman, Farrell

WHILE O'Connor provides us with a few taut stories entirely focused on the flawed artist, Percy more subtly scatters throughout his novels portraits of the flawed artist-portraits which are inevitably bound up with the larger themes of the works themselves. The pattern begins with The Moviegoer, which, like much of Percy's work, might be read as presenting a dialectic between abstracted romantic theorizing and holistic concrete living. The novel is concerned with Binx Bolling's shift from what he calls the lonely "vertical search"-during which he reads "only 'fundamental' books, that is, key books on key subjects" both literary and scientific, and engages in meaningless sexual relationships-to the "horizontal search" in which he begins to look for meaning in the world and people around him (59-60). Binx's initial life, then, is one characterized by angelism-bestialism, while his new search-unbeknownst to him-will lead him, through his understated conversion and marriage to Kate Cutrer, toward a richly sacramental life.

In doing so he overcomes his own penchant for romanticism, which he explicitly connects with a seemingly antithetical scientism. Scorning his own youthful Korean War letters as those of "a regular young Rupert Brooke," he recalls that similar sentiments led his father-who was shot down over Crete with a copy of Housman's The Shropshire Lad in his pocket-to join the RCAF in 1940: "Oh the crap that lies lurking in the English soul. Somewhere it, the English soul, received an injection of romanticism which nearly killed it. That's what killed my father, English romanticism, that and 1930 science." For it was paradoxically his father's faith in science that fostered his sentimentality, as Binx muses in his journal: "Explore connection between romanticism and scientific objectivity. Does a scientifically minded person become a romantic because he is a leftover from his own objectivity?" (76).

The novel is, accordingly, concerned with romanticism in many forms. The subject is initially explored in terms of not writing but reading, for The Moviegoer is as concerned with books as it is with movies, as Binx's description of his vertical search suggests (59-60). His Aunt Emily, whom he largely ends up defining himself against, professes a detached Stoicism but is in fact romantic in her own fatalism. She is a high minded reader of Platonic philosophy and Eastern religion, a woman "of the loftiest theosophical pan-Brahman sentiments" (94); but she has probably also read too much Sir Walter Scott-whom Percy, following Mark Twain, linked with upper-class Southern romanticism-as her lament for the passing of Southern chivalry suggests (196). Her romanticism, like that of Binx's father, is also connected to science in her vision of "the new messiah, the scientist-philosopher-mystic who would come striding through the ruins with the Gita in one hand and a geiger counter in the other" (159). Binx's secretary Sharon, he is pleased to see, is a devotee of a more tawdry romanticism: he takes her reading of Peyton Place to be "a good omen" regarding his prospects for seducing her (58).