Fyodor Dostoevsky, Walker Percy and the Demonic Self

Abstract

Walker Percy was quite emphatic about Fyodor Dostoevsky's influence on his writing. In an interview with Rebecca Presson he stated matter explicitly. I suppose my model is nearly always Dostoevsky, who was a man very strong convictions, his characters illustrated and incarnated most powerful themes and issues and trends his day. I think maybe greatest novel time is Brothers Karamazov which ... almost prophesies and prefigures everything--all bloody mess and issues 20th century. These three brothers, incarnate in themselves very deep religious themes, atheism. Ivan Karamazov says: 'If God does not exist, things are 'All that explains so much what has happened in this century. Dostoevsky forecast communism and what would take place with rise ideologies. (1) In an interview with Phil McCombs, again referring to Ivan Karamazov's statement that all things are permitted in a Godless society, Percy added, but not even Dostoevsky imagined what man without God was capable of (More Conversations 203). Percy's comment suggests that there are both similarities and crucial differences between turbulent mid-nineteenth century world Dostoevsky and Percy's mid-twentieth century western society. Though Dostoevsky was certainly attuned to increasing impact science on social order, he could not have imagined revolutionary transformation world and human consciousness brought about by growth technology, which Percy described in his essay Notes for a Novel about End World. Nor could he have imagined two world wars, destruction millions his fellow Russians in Stalin's gulags, or development nuclear weapons capable apocalyptic destruction planet. Nevertheless, through Ivan Karamazov in Brothers Karamazov and Nichoil Stavrogin in Demons, Dostoevsky foresaw a future world devoid belief in a transcendent order reality, in a metaphysical view being, or in absolute ethical norms--a world where all things are permitted. Percy characterized such a world in an interview with Jo Gullidge when he said that the twentieth century self lives in a post-religious age ... it's post-cosmological, post-mythological, post-Oriental, post-Christian. You're self and world, with God more or less omitted these days (Conversations 294). In broadest sense, Percy set out in his writings to imagine fateful consequences Dostoevsky's prophesy as manifested in postmodern, apocalyptic age. In Percy's view, crisis postmodern age is that humans have suffered a spiritual catastrophe--loss meaning existence--leaving them as deranged wayfarers alienated from their true selves and from world. Writing about present crisis, Percy constantly looked back to Dostoevsky as a model for both themes and narrative strategies. most pervasive influence and parallels, I believe, are between Lancelot and Brothers Karamazov, specifically between Lance Lamar and Ivan Karamazov. Despite differences in narrative technique in two novels, Lance's complex relationship with his listener-friend, Harry/Percival/Father John, echoes Ivan's relationship with his brother Aloysha in four crucial chapters: The Brothers Get Acquainted (Book 5, Chapter 3), Rebellion (Book 5, Chapter 4), The Grand Inquisitor (Book 5, Chapter 5), and The Devil: Ivan Fyodorovich's Nightmare (Book 11, Chapter 4). In creating Lance Lamar, Percy fused aspects personality and ideology Ivan, Grand Inquisitor, and shabby devil who torments Ivan in his nightmare in order to further develop Dostoevsky's insights about spiritual crises modernity--specifically, in order to show emergence postmodern demonic self and its obsession with eroticism and violence as extreme outcome Ivan's ideology. Percy pointed to this development in a letter to Lewis P. …