“Where is That Voice Coming from?”: Walker Percy and the Demonic

Abstract

Anyone familiar with the history and practice of literary criticism over the past several decades knows that the study of narrative voice, or what is called narratology, is a major interest of scholars of the novel. Once the belief in a logocentric tradition in language, which had affirmed an ultimate Authority for the word, was challenged, it was inevitable that the truth status of the narrating voice in fiction would become a principal focus of scholarly concern. Formalism, structuralism, Marxism, deconstruction, poststructuralism, and several other schools of critical theory all bear witness to this concern, and the work of probably every major fiction writer for the past 300 years has become the subject of narratological analysis. The study of fictional and the polyphonic nuances of point of view have reached ever-dizzying levels of dissection, often leaving the reader of such analyses feeling like the person trapped in the room of mirrors in John Barth's carnival funhouse. Who would have imagined fifty years ago how incredibly naive D. H. Lawrence seems now when he advised us to Never trust the artist, trust the talc? It seems that the talc, as well as the teller, whoever he or she might really be, are now the very last things we should trust. Understandably, Walker Percy's fictions, with their elusive language and complex interplay of voices, lend themselves to such narratological scrutiny. Most recently, Michael Kobre's fine analysis of voice in Percy's fiction studies the subject from the perspective of Bahktinian dialogism, by which he tracks Percy's development as a novelist in terms of a process of becoming (18). That is, Kobre sees Percy's protagonists as struggling with a variety of competing voices that exist within their consciousnesses--voices of fathers, friends, would-be mentors, and moral arbiters, even the silence of absent voices--all interacting in the protagonist's journey toward self-realization. Kobre's study is only the latest in a long list of Percy scholarship that has worked to pin down and define the many elliptical voices of the author, which are by turn aloof, ironic, humorous, bemused, angry, and vitriolic, yet also wonderfully generous in their appreciation of human virtues and foibles, as well as of the beauties of the natural world. The question I want to address is whether the narratological perspectives applied to Percy's fiction by literary critics are adequate to circumscribe the full mystery of voice in Percy's novels. The matter of narrative voice in fiction finally comes down to a consideration of the ultimate authority of language itself. And in Percy's case we do well to raise the question asked in the title of one of Eudora Welty's stories: Where is that voice coming The question is particularly important for scholars and teachers with Christian concerns, since the students sitting before us are almost all children of the age of deconstruction and linguistic relativism who often learn that language has no stable meanings. The answer many interpreters of Mikhail Bakhtin seem to find is that voice in fiction is a culturally constructed interplay of discourses spoken across history as it is shaped by political, social, and ideological forces. These interpreters of Bakhtin tend to regard language as being exclusively of human creation. However, a recent study of Christian motifs in Bakhtin's writings by Ruth Coates argues that Bakhtin's ideas on discourse can be assimilated to a theology of the Incarnation and that the problems of authority in narrative reflect Bakhtin's own struggle over the Fall of man, the exile of the human author from the absolute Author of language and being. However we interpret Bakhtin, the questions he raised were of central importance to Percy, a writer well read in the philosophy of language, deeply concerned with language, and one whose novels themselves often probe the key question: Where is that voice coming from? …