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

Southern Quarterly, Summer 2004 by Rudnicki, Robert W

Other Xs came to mind as well, often whimsical or seemingly unrelated, but somehow appropriate for what I always considered the experimental nature of Percy's writings and the various "searches" undertaken by his characters. Perhaps the iconography of the X might recall a stitch, or a medical suture, or an algebraic sign for an unknown, or a coveted and secret location on which "X marks the spot." After all, the prefix itself of the word "diagnostic" derives from the act of exploring, investigating, and identifying by means of a literal "cutting across" or cutting "through.

"Or maybe the X might remind us not of his own use of the Greek symbol for Delta in his writings to represent an interpretive completion, or even remind us of the geographical, Mississippi Delta of Percy's youth, but rather of another letter, the very one Hester Prynne transforms from a symbol of shame to one of sacrifice and redemption. Other connotations might lead to observations concerning Foucault's notion of "positive unconscious" and how the symbols and discourses that make up the cultural archives of various periods are constantly shifting, echoing, and blending with one another, or one might recall another theorist's infamous use of an X as a "cutting through" to represent his concepts of "erasure" and "absent presence," all which could serve as reminders of Percy's belief in the value of the "indirect approach" and the "circumvention of the educator's presentation." Recalling that Percy the pathologist later became Percy the Catholic and then linguist, we could risk taking this further: a diagonal cross or intersection might remind us that early Christian iconography made little distinction between the symbol we now refer to as the letter X and the mark of a cross, or we might recall linguistic "x-questions"ones which cannot be answered with a simple yes or no-and one would certainly point out that the Judéo-Christian themes of departure, search, and redemption that we associate with the book of Exodus are also central to Percy's fiction. Jesus "ex" also reminds me that Percy sometimes called his era a "post-religious" one, and that in an especially fine phrase, he was fond of referring to himself and other writers as "ex-suicides."