The Walker Percy Project
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LOUSIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Robert W. Rudnicki
— A provocative new interpretation of the modern southern imagination
In Percyscapes, Robert Rudnicki probes the works of Walker Percy to diagnose a fundamental but till now unrecognized aspect of southern fiction of this century. The fugue state — a form of hysterical dissociation marked by temporary amnesia and physical wandering — expresses, Rudnicki argues, the existential conflict of wanting to both integrate with the world and escape it. He offers compelling evidence that the pattern of amnesia and escape rife in Percy's fiction and nonfiction is connected to the author's absorbing interest in language. And that relationship, he shows, provides a conceptually powerful schema for interpreting Percy's literary predecessors as well as other contemporary southern novelists who make use of the literal or figurative fugue state.
Rudnicki delivers a broad and lucid explanation of how language theory dovetails with the fugal tensions between immanence and transcendence. For Percy, the paradoxes of language are in many ways simply linguistic analogues to the paradoxes of being. Rudnicki examines how three of Percy's more "fugal" characters — Will Barrett, Allie Huger, and Tom More — function as linguistic metaphors in their search for signs and meanings amid the modern human predicament. He then applies Percy's theories to familiar characters of William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Robert Penn Warren, Ralph Ellison, Richard Ford, and Cormac McCarthy, demonstrating that the fugue state is a vital feature in some of the most memorable protagonists in the fiction of the South.
Robert W. Rudnicki is assistant professor of American literature at Alcorn State University in Lorman, Mississippi.
Publication Date:
June 1999
Pages:
176 pp.