Tom More: Walker Percy's Alienated Genius

Abstract

In his novels Love in Ruins (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971) and The Thanatos Syndrome (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987), Walker Percy traces efforts of Tom More, a Louisiana psychiatrist, as he combats much of theory and technique now in ascendant in American mental health establishment Tom narrates both novels, picturing his opponents becoming more farcical with each new grant proposal or program start-up. In both cases novels are prophetic, showing a mad world just a few years into future. Disarming his readers with a ludicrous public setting, Percy is able to create vivid satire of developments in American social life that he opposes. Many of his readers see only this aspect of novels, being individually pleased or displeased according to their own outlook. Many of these same readers must see Tom More only as author's mouthpiece, one who has arrogated norm for himself. Thus they miss Walker Percy's primary subject, Tom More's consciousness, which is bedeviled by a bad marriage of alienation and genius. In Percy's anthropology, alienation inevitably occurs when self-consciousness is reached: as child gains a self, so it loses original object, maternal figure whose breast was bliss. But at moment of loss of object child reaches point at which, miraculously, it is given capacity to engage in intersubjectivity through language. Percy describes this event as the Helen Keller phenomenon when he speaks of individual around age of thirty months and as the Delta Factor when he speaks of human development somewhere between Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis. He implies that this psycholinguistic pattern is parallel to cosmic drama presented in Christian doctrine: Eden, Fall, Word. Thus, for Percy, human knowledge should be an ever-straining attempt to discover more of inexhaustible truth that is already available to faith through revelation.1 In Love in Ruins and The Thanatos Syndrome Tom More personifies quest to understand alienation psycholinguistically, but at end of latter he has not yet accepted revelation that language is a divine gift. His achievement and his limitation may be surmised by comparing him with his role model, Sigmund Freud: in Love in Ruins Tom follows early Freud of unitary drive, pleasure principle; in its sequel Tom accepts