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

Southern Quarterly, Summer 2004 by Rudnicki, Robert W

Like the narrator in Hawthorne's introduction who discovers the rag of scarlet cloth, the many possible meanings of the license plate were "subtly communicating themselves to my sensibilities. " Percy called himself a postmodern writer well before the term came into our critical discourse, and this plate I saw in Percy's Delta some ten years after his death somehow seemed to recall his fiction, an oddly emblematic sign reminding me of some of his narrative concerns and his connections to the Delta itself. Umberto Eco has said that one of the characteristics of postmodern culture is not that signs and symbols have been stripped of their meaning, as some believe, but rather that signs have come to mean so many different things to so many groups-that they have become so multivalent-as to no longer have any clear meaning to anyone. According to him, the interpretation of signs and symbols has become "semiotic guerilla warfare" replete with contextual subversions, co-optations, and recuperations, all further thrown into question by the sheer amount of available information, or individual "facts" we have before us: the "fragments," in other words, people "shore against their ruins."

So although the X on the personalized tag is of course the modern abbreviation of the word Christ derived from the Greek chi, the first letter of Xpistos or Khristos, the plate's other significations seemed relevant and consistent with Dr. Percy's interest in symbol. First of all, if one might for a moment accept that the alphabet can be anthropomorphized, especially by children, then surely the letter X has always been one of the more intriguing characters. As children learn their alphabet, "A" may stand for apple and "C" may be for cat, but X is always for X-ray or xylophone. Even the exotic Z and the regal Q have nothing on the enigmatic and ineffable X. Apparently today's marketers and PR mills have caught on to this strange attraction, and try to take advantage of the cultural intrigue that the letter seems to generate. For instance, along with phrases like "smoking gun," "shots rang out," "WMD," and "embedded journalist," the 2004 Lake Superior State University list of banished words includes the letter X itself, in protest of its modern uses and abuses in terms such as "Gen-X," "Xtreme," "Xfiles," "X-box," and perhaps the most hubristic of all, "Windows XP." But the seemingly incongruous last letter of the license plate called to mind some of the many other references and uses we have for X, a letter, like Percy's geographical and linguistic Delta, that is both symbolic and iconic: the so-called Generation X and the others I have listed, certainly, but also the American tradition of protest and iconoclasm represented by figures such as Malcolm X, whose historical relationship to Martin Luther King, Jr., W. E. B. DuBois, and ultimately Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass before him, cannot be left out of any serious discussion of a changed (and rapidly changing) South. Neither could I suppress the obvious image of the Confederate battle flag, not as it shapes an "X" of stars as it still flies atop or near some Southern courthouses, but rather as I most often see it represented: on bumperstickers, rear windshield decals, and yes, license plates. It could be that the story of Xenophanes is not without application here, either. Thus in the context of Percy's work, I began to think of relationships or analogues of faith to healing, of establishments to insurgencies, even of Christianity to Islam, or in other words, of "sonnets" to "dogfishes. " Percy of course called this a "Delta," a series of unanticipated connections-whether ones of confluence or conflict- made through "indirect approaches" and that offer the possibility of further understanding, or diagnosis.