"Ineffable Sociabilities": Criss-Crossing, Game-Playing, and Sight-Seeing with Walker Percy in His Delta

Southern Quarterly, Summer 2004 by Rudnicki, Robert W

The South that Percy knew has always been known for its expressiveness, and his keen ear for the patterns and nuances of the speech he heard are a hallmark of his fiction and essays. In one essay, "Metaphor as Mistake," Percy takes great relish in listing examples of local malapropisms such as calling blue-dollar hawks blue-darter hawks, or referring to the coin-operated record players once manufactured by seeburg as seabirds (64), and he uses them to discuss how language receives it vitality and descriptive power and in fact renews itself only through mistake. Despite his formal education and commitment to reading in many fields, Percy remained attuned to both folk and popular cultures, and iconography was no less a concern for him than narrative, both operating within the realm of semiotic as Percy studied it. His characters are all eyes, ears, and "antennae," perpetually searching for signs, symbols, clues, and connections, or, as Percy named his first collection of essays, searching for "the message in the bottle."

Most often these signs, Percy suggests, present themselves in unexpected ways. Examples perhaps most familiar to readers may be found in The Moviegoer: the unintended lessons of popular film, the contents of one's pocket spread across the bureau, the peculiar gnosis of trains, the mystery of the summer afternoon, and the possible meanings of the glance askew or the pause one moment too long. Elsewhere Percy treats the signs of literal "signs" as we commonly encounter them: magazine advertisements, roadside billboards, slogans, even bumperstickers. In Percy's Lancelot, Lance describes the view from the narrow window of his cell: "if you lean into the embrasure and crane to the left as far as possible, you can see part of a sign around the corner. By the utmost effort and if you press your temple against the bricks, you can make out the following letters: Free & / Ma / B. Notice that it is impossible to see more than that. I have looked at that sign for a year. What does the sign say?" (4). In The second Coming, Percy makes reference to the sometimes laughable, sometimes maddening, but always colorful sub-culture of the bumpersticker that pervades our byways and takes on unintentionally ironic, even incongruous undertones, especially in the rural South. For instance, sitting on a park bench after her recent stay as a psychiatric patient, Percy's character Allie Huger observes her new surroundings and thinks: "Many cars had bumper stickers. Wasn't this something new? One sticker on a truck read: DO IT IN A PICKUP. Do what? She wondered. Surely it didn't mean 'doing it. ' Another sticker read: I FOUND IT. Found what? She wondered" (22). One pronoun refers to the body, the other to the spirit: a dualism Percy tried to reconcile in a great deal of his work.

I will resist listing more of these examples in Percy's writings, but whether they suggest the limitations of human or worldly perception, as in Lance's observation, or represent the daily signs and messages that confront (and often confound) us in popular culture, such examples usually concern the process of diagnosis as one of interpreting signs and establishing reference: a process of losing reference, finding or creating it, and maintaining it in a culture Percy believed was driven by a near-idolatrous seiendem and media-driven consumerism. For these reasons among others, I was reminded of some of Percy's references to unlikely messages, signs, and symbols, including the bumperstickers in The Second Coming, when several years ago I happened to cross paths with this actual license plate on Highway 61 in the Mississippi Delta, birthplace of the Blues and the location of Robert Johnson's mythical crossroads, a plate I am trying to use as a vector for these personal remarks about the good doctor.