Relieving Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea

8/19/2019 Relieving Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea

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Christianity and Literature

Vol.

52 No.

2

(Winter 2003)

Relieving Jean-Paul Sartre's

Nausea:

Semiotics, Suicide, and the Search for God

in W alker Percy's

The Second Com ing

Everett L. H am ner

Walker Percy's interest in existentialism and especially the work of Jean-

Paul Sartre is no secret among literary critics. Kathleen Scullin has argued

that

Lancelot

is in effect Percy's response to Sartre in fiction (110); other

scholars such as Lewis A. Lawson and M artin Luschei have considered Per-

cy's first three novels—The Moviegoer

The Last

G entleman and

Love

in the

Ruins— long

similar lines.' However, Percy's fifth novel.

The Second

Com-

ing has not been examined from this perspective, despite its many referenc-

es to Sartre's

Nausea

an d its status as loose sequel to

The Last

Gentleman.^

I will argue that Nausea and Sartre's existentialism more generally pro-

vide a crucial context for understanding The

Second

Goming. First, we will

see how Percy's own statements in recorded conversations and speeches de-

mand this comparison. Th en, close attention to both novels will evoke The

Second Goming s

presentation of the interdependence of transcendence and

imm anence, especially as explored in Will's gradual confrontation with his

father's suicide, his developing relationship with

Allie,

and

his

ongoing query

about God's existence. Finally, a com parison of Percy's novel with

Nausea

will elucidate two widely debated attributes of Percy's

i th

novel: its unusu-

ally

well

developed female character,

Allie,

and its uniquely happy ending.

Ultimately, I aim to dem onstrate how The

Second Goming

honestly and so-

berly re-presen ts the nausea of Sartre's novel while also offering a more

hopeful evaluation of both individual and communal life.

I


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182 E V E R E T T L . H A M N E R

ever read was Nausea. That was a real revelation. It's funny how som ething

can be that im portant and influence you that m uch and be that valuable to

you, and yet you can diametrically disagree with it (275). Percy's profound

appreciation of Sartre's novel and its unyielding examination of the tenu-

ousness of reality is evident here, bu t we also taste his dissatisfaction with

Nausea s ultimate cynicism. Signposts in a Strange Land finds Percy describ-

ing Nausea more specifically as an example of the peculiar diagnostic role

of the novel in this century (147). Percy had a particular regard for Sartre's

ability to por tray individual experience, and especially Sartre's onslaught on

the 'norm al' or what is ordinarily taken for the norm al (147-48). Sharing

Sartre's interest in questioning common assumptions about the good life,

Percy appreciated that in Nausea the apparently well are sick and the ap-

parently sick are on to the truth (150). Nevertheless, his interest in Sartre

always rem ained critical. In his unique self-interview in

Conversations,

for

instance, Percy explained his con tentm ent w ith an obscure life: If one lived

in a place like France where writers are honored, one might well end up like

Sartre, a kind of literary-political pope, a savant, an academician, the very

sort of person Sartre made fun of in

Nausea

(161-62).

Perhaps the clearest historical evidence of Percy's wish to both hono r and

distinguish himself from Sartre is found in a 1977 lecture at Cornell U niver-

sity. As a conclusion to that address, Percy read and commented on a pas-

sage from The Last Gentleman. In this scene a young W ill Barrett runs his

hand over the bark of an oak tree and wonders about his father's eventually

successful suicide attempts. Will quietly asks, Is there a

sign?

As Percy noted

to his audience, He feels he's on to som ething, a clue or sign, but it slips away

from him. Then, Percy said something quite significant about the relation-

ship between The Last Gentleman and

Nausea:

I chose [to read] this passage because of its resemblance to the famous scene

in Sartre's Nausea—in fact, it was written as a kind of counterstatement—

where Roquentin is sitting in a park in Bouville and experiences a similar

revelation as he gazes at the roots and bark of a chestnu t tree, Sartre intend -

ed the scene to be a glimpse into the very nature of the being of things, and

a very unpleasant revelation it is, described by Sartre by such adjectives as

obscene, bloated, viscous, naked, de trop, and so on .

The scene to which Percy refers is among the most quoted in Sartre's work:


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W A L K E R

PERCY S

THE SE OND OMING 183

it, gratuitousness, but for him it is an intim ation, a clue to further discovery.

And it is no t something bad he sees bu t something good. In terms of trad i-

tional metaphysics, he has caught a glimpse of the goodness and gratuitous-

ness of created being. He had tha t sense we all have occasionally of being on

to something important.

As it turned ou t, he missed it. Tha t v as as close as he ever cam e. {Sign-

posts 221)

According to Percy, then, the young Will Barrett has the same sort of exis-

tential moment that Roquentin has

w ith

the chestnut tree. The great differ-

ence, of course, is in the characters' reactions: what Roquentin regards as

obscene. W ill perceives as a clue. Intriguingly, Percy tells us that Will fails to

follow the sense that he

is

on to something important. Instead, he missed

it. That was as close as he ever came. But

was

it really? Although Percy's

words may

h ve

been true in 1977, by the time his speech

w s

first pub lished

in 1985 The

Second oming

had appeared. Here an older WiU thoroughly

uncovers the something im portant that he had missed at the oak

tree

years

earlier, a revelation that suggests new status for The

Second oming

as the

culm ination of Percy's novelistic responses to Sartre.

II

Several basic affinities between Nausea and

The

Second oming cannot

be called coincidental. That both novels contain a strong sense of the sheer

contingency of things, the sense that the world does

not

have

to be

is no te-

worthy. That this experience leads characters in bo th novels into states of

depression, which inevitably occur in the late afternoon, suggests more th an

mere happenstance at work. For Antoine Roquentin, Three o'clock is al-

ways too late or too early for anything you want to do. [...] Today it is in-

tolerable (14). On ano ther day three o'clock finds Roquentin deciding that

things are entirely what they appear to be— and behind them . . . there is

nothing (96). In Nausea the late afternoon is the despairing hour, the time

when no thing happens and significance seems most distant. It is the time

when imm anence— an immediacy, temporally and physically, of one's be-

ing-in-the-world—seems wholly incompatible with transcendence or trust

that one's life is caught up in some greater purpose.

In seeming contrast. The Second Coming begins w ith quite dramatic late-


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184 E V E R E T T L H A M N E R

W hen she does begin to slip a little, however, it is in the late afternoon:

O nly in late afternoon did she miss people. Or, as her refreshing syntax

renders it, In this longitude longens ensues in a longing if not an unbelong-

ing (272). As in Nausea the late afternoon is the occasion for yearning for

an unknown, indefinable

something

it is the time of day when Allie's nor-

mally quite imm anent character longs for the transcendent— an experience

of something more, something or som eone outside oneself one's time , one's

place.

The novels' use of the word something is itself worth comparing, espe-

cially if we wonder what Percy meant in saying tha t the young W ill Barrett

had been on to som ething im portant. Roquentin's first sentence in the

diary that serves as Nausea s narrative premise

is,

Something has happened

to m e, I can't doubt it any more (4). The something turns out to be dif-

ficult to describe: these sudden transfo rm ations [. . .] a crowd of small

metam orphoses [ ...] a veritable revolution (5). Essentially it is a seeing

through things to pure, raw existence, an experience that Roquentin para-

doxically both desires and finds revolting. His diary is full of this unease:

Something

is

beginning in order to end (37); It

is

gone

so

quickly and how

em pty I am once it has left (56). Late in the novel, even after seemingly

exhausting every potential source of meaning , Roquentin still asks, W hat

if som ething were to happen? (158). Finally he decides that the som ething,

the seeing through, is to be avoided, and the only way to ensure this is to

do nothing. I know very

well

that I don't want to do anything: to do some-

thing

is

to create existence—and there's quite enough existence

as

it is (173).

Roquentin ultimately decides that the duality he experiences between the

self-that-is and the self that observes the self-that-is cannot be escaped; as

he puts it early in the novel, You have to choose: live or tell (39). Im ma-

nence and transcendence are irreconcilable.

Percy uses the phrase something happening even more than Sartre. A

few instances among many: the novel's first sentence refers to Will's aware-

ness of the first sign that som ething had gone wrong (3); when llie is first

introduced, she observes bumper stickers and asks herself Wasn't this

something new? (25); return ing to Will in chapter three, the first sentence

is, Undoubtedly something was happening to him (51), a statement repeat-

ed three pages later and then again later in the chapter. Had som ething

happened? Was something about to happen ? (78). As we shall see, this

becomes a crucial question in The Second Coming because Percy agreed with


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W A L K E R P E R C Y ' S

THE

SE OND OMING 185

III

Having surveyed the historical rationale for seeing The Second oming as

a response to

Nausea,

and having suggested the novels' divergent treatm ents

of immanence and transcendence, I turn now to a close reading of The Sec-

ond

oming that depends on regular comparisons to

Nausea.

As we exam-

ine three crucial developments in the novel—

Will s

immersion in Allie's sign

language, his confrontation with his father and the past, and his question-

ing of God's existence—^we will also see how reading The Second oming as

a response to

Nausea

casts new light on Percy's unusually central female

character and uniquely happy end ing.

As an increasing number of critics recognize, Allie's importance in The

Second oming can hardly be overestimated. Lawson, for example, po ints

out tha t always before, Percy has created his Eve ou t of Adam's rib; the fe-

male has been seen only through the male's eyes. This tim e, though, the

narrative structure consists of counterpoin t ( Walker Percy's 255). Elinor

Ann Walker demonstrates the particular importance of Allie's gender

through research on Percy's personal papers: in early notes he represented

the novel's two m ain characters with symbols for male and female rather than

names (104). Interpretations of Allie, nevertheless, have been divided. Is she

truly a fully realized female character, or does the male perspective ultimately

dominate this novel? Mary Grabar helpfully surveys this debate and offers

ber own conclusion that Whatever her inhe rent goodness and sincerity,

Allison is still not a religious wayfarer; her role is to help Will on his search

(123). Because so many readers share this interpretation, I want to show how

comparison of the novel with Nausea suggests that, far from subjugating the

female to the male, Allie's lack of overt religious questions is m ore than

compensated for by her questions about language and hum an relationship.

Indeed, considering The Second

Coming

as a response to Nausea demands

that we compare not only Roquentin and Will but also Anny and Allie. Anny,

Roquentin's former

lover,

lives in a dry despair, without tears, withou t pity

(144). She is admittedly selfish,

and,

when Roquentin m eets her after a four-

year separation, she treats him with forthright con tempt. The perfect mo-

m ents (143) she once sought no longer amuse her; now she live[s] in the

past (152). W hen Roquentin observes that this wouldn't satisfy [him] at

all, she sarcastically responds, Do you think it satisfies me? (153). Anny

is essentially a woman whose life is behind her, and, since this is unsatisfy-


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whatever it might be.

The opposition of these characters is clearest when we consider questions

of language, an area in which Percy thoroughly separates himself from Sar-

tre.

In observing Roquentin's and Anny's brief time together, we see that

language has failed them . It is impossible to tru ly signify, for every hint of

meaning is only a joke. True com munication is replaced by postur ing, guess-

work, and man ipulation. Roquentin thinks to himself, Do I have to ques-

tion her now? I don't think she expects it. She will speak when she decides

it will be good to do so (141). He is no t fully present to the situation; like

Anny, and in contrast to Allie, he uses words to seek a transcendence that is

devoid of imm anence. By the time the conversation is over, Roquen tin has

lost hope: I can't convince her, all I do is irritate her (151). Ultimately he

realizes that Anny is sitting opposite to m e, we haven't seen each other for

four years and we h ve nothing m ore to

say

(153). For Roquentin and Anny,

the silence that ensues is not the genial peace of genuine friendship but the

quiet desperation of profound loneliness.

In fact, Roquentin has lost faith in language even before m eeting Anny.

His experiences with the bus seat and the chestnut tree are particularly m em-

orable. In each case it is as if the surface of things peels back for a m om ent

and Roquentin is able to stare, horrified, at pure existence. First, looking at

his bus seat, he mu rm urs to himself, It's a seat. However, the word stays

on [his] lips: it refuses to go and put itself on the thing. W ith ho rror Ro-

quen tin realizes that the bench could just as well be a dead donkey [ .. .] .

Things are divorced from their names (125). Later tha t evening he stares

at a root of the chestnut tree, bu t he couldn't remem ber it was a root any

more. The words had vanished and with them the significance of things

(126-27). Roquentin decides that the diversity of things, their individual-

ity, were

sic]

only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving

soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder—naked, in a frightful, obscene na-

kedness (127). A divorce between word and world— Roquentin's sudden

inability to categorize and objectify his experience, to transcend it—leads to

a far greater divorce between world and meaning. Faced with the undeni-

able immanence of the material world, Roquentin responds with revulsion.

Turning to Will and Allie in The Second Coming we find a different

premise about such encoun ters: true com munication, true entrance into

language, requires that imm anence and transcendence be held together. For

Percy, one must engage others authentically and simply, in specific time and


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W A L K E R P E R C Y S TH SE OND OMING 187

at which she gazes. It is

[...] shaped like a head and covered by gold and scarlet trees except for two

outcroppings of rock. One outcropp ing could be seen as an eye bu t the oth -

er outcropping was too close to the center to be seen as the other eye and too

high and too far to one side to be seen as a nose. The wrong p lacement of

the second eye caused her a slight unease, enough for her to tilt her head from

time to tim e so that the ou tcropping would line up either as eyes or as nose

and

eye.

(25)

This one-eyed mountain is the antithesis of the wholeness that Allie even-

tually finds with Will. Along with various one-eyed characters that we meet

in the novel, the m ountain's m isalignment reminds us of Roquentin's dilem-

ma between living and telling, and it acts as a sign throughout

The

Second

oming for the disjunction of immanence and transcendence.'

The possibility that Percy is aiming to critique a one-eyed existential-

ism is furthered by Allie's physical situation: she is seated on a bus -stop

bench. Unlike Sartre's bus seat, this bench does not threaten to turn into a

donkey; rather, Allie thinks of it as hom e base. She rests on it as she reads

her notes to

herself,

gradually reentering the world. Allie's bench is thus a

setting for the recovery of language, not its loss. The scene parallels Nausea

quite closely in ano ther way. Like Roquentin , Allie is finding herself isolat-

ed

fi-om

other people. s she makes her forays from the bench on to the busy

sidewalk, she is unsure of how to avoid runn ing in to other pedestrians. Her

question becomes an essential problem of the novel: why do people miss

each other, and how m ight authen tic encounters be possible? For the mo-

m ent Allie imagines that it must be a trick, an exchange of signals which

she must learn (37). These terms begin to suggest the importance Percy

places on semiotics as a response to Sartre's existential dilemm a. Signals,

we see, are used not to effect personal encounters but to allow people po-

litely to ignore one another. Signals, as Sartre feared, objectify their listen-

ers rather than promote genuine conversation.

On one occasion, just as Allie is about to return to hom e base, we see a

clear example of such objectification: a woman confronts Allie with a dis-

tinctly evangelical invitation to have a personal encounter with our Lord

and Saviour (37). Here we see that, while Percy aims to critique Sartre, he

is equally dismissive of any sort of pious, simplistic solution to the problem

of existence. No less than Roquentin or Anny, this wom an is seeking to cir-


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to herself that the question did not sound like a question and the prom ise

did not sound like a promise. Sitting back down, she realizes that she has a

unique understanding of language and its purposes: She took words seri-

ously to mean more or less what they said, but other people seemed to use

words as signals in ano ther code they had agreed upon (38). Again, sig-

nals here are something less than authen tic speech. They are for m anipu -

lation, not au thentic encounter, a fact tha t is especially ironic when we con-

sider what the woman is using language to offer.*

While it might be tem pting to join G rabar in viewing Allie's semiotic in-

quiries as less im portan t than Will's religious ques tions, perhaps curiosity

about language and hum an relationships is no less religious an enterprise

than descending into a cave to seek a theophany. Allie, as much as Will, is

seeking a new way of being-in-the-world, and, while it m ay be argued that

she approaches it more steadily and less dramatically than Will, her search

is no less crucial to the novel's resolu tion .' Indeed, as we turn to Will and

Allie's first meeting, we see the seeds being planted for their com plementa-

ry discoveries of the som ethings that they seek. These revelations occur

in a sacred space set apart from the larger world, a place where triadic sign-

making takes precedence over dyadic signaling and where immanence and

transcendence are interdependent, not mutually exclusive. The transforma-

tions of the world of the greenhouse eventually extend beyond this space:

the novel implies that, ultimately, the barrier between secular and sacred

space must be overcome.

The geographic d istance that W ill first travels to enter Allie's world is not

great, since her greenhouse is quite close to his golf cou rse. Figuratively,

however. Will must go out-o f-bounds in the eyes of his culture; it is only

due to a bad golf shot in his coun try-club world that Will meets Allie at all.

The narrato r's description of this mistake gives us further reason to think

that Percy has Sartre in mind , particularly his expression bad faith {mau-

vaisefoi or self-deception (Stumpf 515). Lewis Peckham , the local golf

pro, says that he can watch a man swing a golf club and tell you m ore about

him than a psychiatrist after a hun dred hours on the couch (173). Indeed,

Will's swing has becom e an emblem of his life, a small failure at living, a

minor deceit, perhaps even a sin. One cringes past the ball, hands mushing

through ahead of the club in a show of form, rather than snapping the club

head through in an act of faith (53). Will is no t quite fitting into his world

anym ore; he is no longer able to believe that it means anything . It never-


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W A L K E R P E R C Y S

THE

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189

same path , climbing over the same granules of concrete, then descending into

a crack at the same place, then climbing out of the crack at the same place

(43).

When Will actually steps out-of-bounds, he must duck under a barbed-

wire fence that his partner politely holds up but does not offer to pass through

as well.*

It is in

this transition that Will

is

recalled into

his

past

to

face

a

mem ory that he

had

suppressed since childhood. Will finds himself clutch-

ing his club like

the

Greener shotgun, remembering

the

day when his father

had tried to kill them

both.

Soon he no longer cares about having sliced

out-

of-bounds,

and in two

seconds

he saw

that

his

little Yankee life

had not

worked after all [. .. ]. The whole twenty years could just as easily have been

a long night's dream (84-85).

His

mind

is in two

places,

at

once gaz[ing]

at the figure which seemed

to

come

and

go

in

the trembling dappled light

of

the poplar and,

in the

same m om ent, addressing his father: You were

try-

ing to tell me som ething, weren't you? Will is beginn ing to realize tha t his

father had decided life was not worth the trouble and that, in aiming his

shotgun at Will, had thought to save his son from future suffering. We see

here the first example of how closely tied are Will's honest reconstruction of

the events decades earlier w ith his father and his present po tential to move

toward

an

intimate sign-making relationship w ith Allie.

On

this occasion

Will s

m emory only

goes so

far, but he does understand that he

is

back where

we started and you ended, tbat there is after all no escaping it for us (85).

Once W ill

and

Allie actually approach each other,

the

scene foreshadows

a great deal about

the

development

of

their relationship. Before speaking.

Will

is

able

to see the

greenhouse where Allie

has

been staying. This sacred

space is as big as an ark and looks as if it had a cathedral porch (86);

eventually it will carry Will and Allie above the flood of signals in to a rela-

tionship

of

signs.

For the

present, however, we imm ediately hear

the

disso-

nance between triadic and dyadic approaches to communication. AUie can

be understood in two senses when she says, Hogan woke me up (87): she

was awakened from sleep, but Will's appearance in her life also wakes her

up figuratively. We should appreciate again how she understands words to

mean more or

less

what they said ; in this

case,

the name for Will's golf ball

is written right across the thing

itself,

and unlike Roquentin she has no dif-

ficulty holding together signifier and signified. Will, on the other hand , is

accustomed

to a

world

of

signals

in

which people

do not

need

to

encounter

each other as individuals in order to exchange goods. He simply offers Allie


10/23


less

slacks,

blue nylon shirt w ith the club crest, gold cap with club crest, two-

tone golf shoes with the fringed forward-falling tongues, and suddenly it was

he not she who was odd in this silent forest (89).

IV

Even as Will and Allie's relationship evolves alongside Will's reconstruc-

tion of his past, a third story line involving Will's questions about God con-

tinues to develop. This strand of

The Second Coming s

braid has often been

marginalized in criticism on the novel. W. L. G odshalk, for instance, decides

that the narrato r prefers reentry to transcendence (40), arguing that Will

Barrett's quest for selfhood becom es his misguided quest for God (41).

Susan V. Donaldson is similarly concerned that it is Will's own sense of

m an ho od and confrontation with his father's ghost tha t is the real focus

ofthe narrative [... ] not

Will s

comical sojourn in the

cave

waiting for God's

sign (74). Finally, Doreen A. Fowler says that Will is only ostensibly [... ]

searching for God ; the real object of his quest is [...] a retu rn to an orig-

inal unity with the maternal body and the world ( 'Gave' 82). While each

of these interpretations points toward im portant aspects o fthe novel, all shy

away from a serious consideration of Will s search for G od.

Admittedly, one of Will's original questions, one tha t

has

driven him since

The Last Centleman is whether or not his father was right to kill himself

However

Will

explicitly

ties

the question to his debate abou t God's existence,

and this is no m ere curiosity inserted into the novel by an overzealous Gath-

olic author. While the question of God emerges only gradually, we have al-

ready seen that Will has been wondering if som ething is going to happen

since the novel's very beginning. Even then he wonders if there is such a thing

as a sign. He imagines that the Jews have departed from N orth Garolina and

wonders if this is a sign; he falls down in a sand trap and wonders if it is a

sign. Ultimately Percy blurs the line between religious, existentialist, and

scientific epistemologies by allowing Will to decide that his question requires

a scientific experiment : he will descend into a cave and simply wait. If there

is a God, Will decides, God will have to do som ething extraordinary to save

his life. If there is no sign and thus no God, then Will can at least upstage

his father, wh o failed to plan his suicide well enough to ensure payments o n

his life insurance policy.^

As we follow Will into the cave, we should also see that he regards his


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W A L K E R P E RC Y S TH SE OND OMING 191

as events develop. Will's determ ination proves insufficient. His resolve is

broken by a toothache, a teasingly ambiguous outcom e to Will's quest for

certainty. However, we shou ld also pay close atten tion to the nausea that

comes with the toothache:

There is one sure cure for cosmic explorations, grandiose ideas about God

man, death, suicide, and such—and that is nausea. I defy a man afflicted with

nausea to give a single thought to these vast subjects. A nauseated man is a

sober man. A nauseated man is a disinterested man.

What does a nauseated person care about the Last Days (247)

The significance of the narrato r's repetition of the term nausea here is con-

siderable. On one hand . Will is like Roquentin in all of his sobriety and dis-

interest. Percy agrees with Sartre that nausea, literal or figurative can indeed

sap one's interest in questions abou t God. However, Percy does not make

nausea the title of his novel; instead, he replaces Roquentin's steadily

shrinking vision with Will's expanding awareness of bo th w orld and self his

second coming. For Roquen tin, nausea is only som ething to be escaped,

and it leaves him convinced like Anny that meaning exists only in the past.

For Wni, though, nausea is a brutal bu t ultimately gracious response to his

demand for answers, and the impetus toward something more rather than

evidence of a dead end.

Indeed, from this point in the novel onward we m ust ask whether or no t

Will actually received a sign in the

cave.

At least one th ing is now

clear:

God

has not offered Will a

signal

Although Will enters the cave in hopes of cor-

nering

God

of finding undeniable evidence of His existence or nonexistence,

he learns that if such communication is ever to occur it must be triadic, not

dyadic. The novel implies that, if God exists. He desires that the m eaning of

His language be held together by bo th parties, and thus refuses to force a

signal upon

Will

that would merely dem and acquiescence.

WiU

can approach

this sort of faith only gradually. In abandoning his experiment, he feels tha t

he has failed even to kill himself according to p lan. Still, he cannot simply

return to his pre-cave existence; he becomes disoriented in Lost Gove and

discovers that it is hard to get lost going down. Going up is som ething else

(260).

Ironically, it is only now, after he has abandoned his pursu it of God,

[...] suicide, [... ] or the Last Days (257), that he begins to approach an-

swers to his questions. After the toothache and the nausea disappear, he

wonders, Does fear supp lant nausea as nausea supplanted God? His ele-


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mode of ventilation. Will arrives in a tacky heaven and, upon rega ining

consciousness, decides tha t he

is in

church.

Like Allie's

oven, which she has

already hoisted out of oblivion, he is destined to be made new, transformed,

reborn (264). This religious language is no t a coincidence, for as Will and

Allie's relationship is renewed be is subtly compared with C hrist, while her

actions resemble those of a disciple on the night after Christ's crucifixion.

Allie thinks to herself that Will smells of

a grave

(268). As sbe cleans him

before he regains consciousness, bis abdom en dropp ing away hollow un -

der his ribs, the thin arms and legs with their heavy slack straps of muscle,

cold

as

clay, reminded her of some paintings o fthe body of Christ taken down

from the crucifix (270). This passage recalls Will's second visit to the green-

bouse, before

his

descent into the

cave,

when,

as Allie

watched

Will

approach-

ing,

his eyes were cast into deep shadow but as she watched they seemed to

open and close, now shut and dark, now open and pale, like a trick picture

of

Jesus

(123). Taken together, these scenes evoke Will and Allie's mysteri-

ous interdependence: they fluctuate between saving and being saved, with

Allie giving Will new capacity to live in the present and Will giving Allie the

words and eventually the physical intimacy that she needs to transcend her

self.

However far one extends this imagery, it is at least clear that Will and Allie

are good for each other. As Michael Pearson pu ts it, they are thesis and

antithesis : Will remembers and Allie forgets; he falls down, she hoists

(95). They meet now at a sort of spiritual nadir. As Allie says, I go round

and down to get down

t

myself —to rediscover her sense of immanence—

while Will responds, I went down and a round to get ut o/myself —to

pursue the possibility of transcendence (302; my emphasis). Interestingly,

Percy subverts the com mon association of up with good and down with

bad. Throughou t the novel Allie has spoken of her need to get down to

herself, something that the greenhouse has allowed but that the psychiatric

hospital did not. As sbe once told her doctor, I bave to go down down down

before I go up. Down down in me to it. You shouldn 't try to keep me up by

buzzing me up (103-04). Essentially she feels that she must be allowed to

face her depression, rather tban being artificially buzzed into unfeeling

conformity. W hen this freedom is disallowed, sbe rebels all the m ore. As she

says,

My mother refused to let me fail. So I insisted (108). In contrast, when

she explains to Will on his second visit to the greenhouse tha t I was som e-

what suspended above me but I am getting down to me (125), he responds


13/23

W A L K E R P E R C Y S TH SECOND

OMING

193

well they fit together. When Will collapses on the way to get a drink of

wa-

ter, and Allie mistakenly thinks he has simply left, we should notice that she

feels nauseated (291). The fear tha t Will has abandoned her affects Allie

bo th physically and emotionally. After she has helped h im to recover once

more, her response to him remains holistic. Although Will and Allie do not

engage in intercourse,

we

should no t miss the significance that

Allie

finds in

their intimacy: Is this

it

then (whatever

it is)

and what will happen to my-

self [...] and will I for the first time in my life get away from my everlasting

self sick of itself

to

be with ano ther self and is that what

it is

and if not then

what?

(294-95). This is the som ething that Percy suggests his characters

have

been seeking

all

along,

the

thing that Roquentin

seeks

but

does

no t know

he seeks. It is not m erely one's physical response to sexual intercourse bu t

the full emotional and spiritual experience of being in communion with an

Other. From

Allie s

perspective it is as if her body had

at

last found the center

of itself outside

itself

(295). This is a much different sexuality from that of

Roquentin and the restaurant patronne with whom he play[s] distractedly

[...] under the cover (59). It is a sexuality that celebrates and enhances the

joy of community rather than one that only temporarily assuages the pain

of isolation.

At this point in The econd Coming however. Will has not yet progressed

as far as AUie. When Will was only twelve years old, his father's suicide had

forced h im into an early adulthood. This was the experience by which Will

found his center (67), and he grew up in ten m inutes (66)—or so he

thought. The loss ofhis childhood m eant the loss of imm anence. Since that

time he has unconsciously devoted himself to suppressing the memory of

his father's actions, to transcending rather than facing them . Now, although

he has had a tremendous conversion experience, he has yet to translate it fi-om

the world of the greenhouse in to his own realm. This proves a difficult task,

bu t the crucial factor is that Will is now asking a new question: Who is the

enemy? What is keeping him from an authen tic life?

At the beginning of the novel, while rolling away from Ewell McBee's

gunsho ts. Will had asked

himself,

How do I know that somehow it is going

to come down to this, should come down to this, down to me and a gun and

an enemy? (20). Now part of this prophecy has come true , for Will is rec-


14/23


point

is

that there is no substitute for authentic living—life lived in acknow-

ledgment ra ther than denial of death. Like Jacob wrestling in Genesis, Will

decides to keep dem anding, W hat

5

missing.'' God? Find him "

{514:).

Per-

haps it is this determination to accept nothing less that most separates Will

from Roquentin. Will's greater faith is evident no t in traditional acts of pi-

ety but in his dogged insistence that God show

himself.

The biggest impediment to Will's pursuit of a new life is indeed one of

the names of

death

that he has identified: the happy life of home and fam-

ily and friends (313). Will's former lover, Kitty, and h is daughter, Leslie,

subtly commandeer his life. After his cave experience Will awakes to a world

much like the one

Allie

had to escape. He is stripped of

his

freedom , even as

he is urged to find con tentm ent. New clothes have been selected, and h is

wife's dying wishes have curiously expanded to include a new three-million-

dollar love-and-faith com munity, which when built Will is to supervise.

Even more im portan t in this signal-realm is that Will is now eligible for the

Senior Tour, as long as he will enslave himself to a pH monitor. This is what

the doctors decide is his problem : no t nausea, no t schizophrenia, bu t a

missing hydrogen ion. Amusingly, Percy's invented disease is the result of

wahnsinnige Sehnsucht or inappropriate longing (346). Longing is in-

deed Will's problem, bu t, as Percy suggests in Lost in the Cosmos, perhaps

there is nothing actually wrong with the depressed self and, instead, depres-

sion is a norm al response to a deranged world (73).

At first

WiU

succumbs to

his

imposed convalescence, asserting tha t things

do no t have significances (329) and asking himself Did it all come down

to chemistry after all? (350). Ironically, he buys a Timex watch just like the

ones Allie bypassed at the beginning of the novel. She had done so ou t of

her determination to make her own decisions in life; Will, by contrast, is

surrendering responsibility to others. Ultimately, what frees him is the real-

ization that he has been dead for years without knowing it. Will has come

to understand the difterence between feeling dead and not knowing it, and

feeling dead and knowing it. Knowing it means there is a possibility of feel-

ing alive though dead (371). Even now he can become an ex-suicide rather

than a non-suicide ; having considered self-destruction, he can choose to

live. This dawning recognition is a product of Will's increasingly direct ap-

proach to the three questions we have been tracing: Was his father right to

seek suicide? What does Allie mean to him? And,

finally

does God exist?

As

the novel concludes, each of these lines of inquiry culm inates in its own


15/23

W A L K E R P E R C Y ' S

TH

SE OND OMING 195

Appropriately, when Will reaches the barbed-w ire fence, the same place tha t

had provoked m emories of the accident with his father, he does no t stoop

to crawl through as before. Nor does he merely straddle it, as he had on

his descent into the cave. Instead, he kick[s] it down and walk[s] over it

(373), implicitly demolishing the bo undary between the sacred and the sec-

ular. As Sue Mitchell Growley notes, the sacram ent of Allie is waiting for

him (241), and the hotel that Will chooses is surely one of Percy's etymo-

logical puns (239). They will spend a holy day in, a time in which each

tend[s] to the other, kneading and pok ing sore places (390).

Before W ill and Allie come together fully, however. Will has to com plete

his reconciliation with the past. As he sleeps. Will hears his father's voice

suggesting tha t even his relationship with Allie will never satisfy. Significantly,

the novel's title appears here for the only time. Second com ing has many

possible connotations: the novel is a sequel; it concerns Will s and Allie s new

beginnings in

life;

several oblique references trope Will as a Ghrist figure; and

Will and Allie's relationship eventually becom es sexual. However, suicide.

Will's father's voice argues, is the second, last and ultimate come to end all

comes (385). Will's response is defiant, and it is hard to miss the psycho-

sexual implications as Will throws his father's guns over a

cliff.

Everything

o s

come down to a gun and an enemy, and W ill repudiates both : he will

accept neither suicide nor the living death. Not coincidentally, it is imme-

diately upon his return to the hotel that he and Allie first engage in sexual

intercourse. Only when Will decides finally hat his father was wrong to try

to kill him, and w rong to com mit suicide, is he able to be fully present with

Allie, thus making his second coming nearly complete. Here, as Gary M.

Giuba suggests, is a preem inent example of Percy characters making tenta-

tive retu rns via signs. [...] Will and Allie finally come together in the Hol-

iday Inn so completely that it is difficult to tell where incarnate words end

and speakerly fiesh begins (448).

Percy's integration of sexuality and homecoming is also noteworthy:

Entering her was like turning a corner and coming hom e (388).' Although

now in a hotel room, an in-between place beyond the sacred space of the

greenhouse. Will finds with Allie something much deeper than he knew in

his previous hom e with his late wife. That hom e was atop a pleasant Garo-

lina m ountain (229)—the same m ountain at which Allie is looking upon

her first appearance in the novel, and the same round one-eyed m oun tain

[...] with an ironical expression (6) at which Will gazes during the golf game


16/23


had, and in leaving the rest home and coming for Allie he escapes it once

more. After his bus accident Vance Battle had told h im, Let's go back to the

mountain , boy (344), and again, Let's head for the hills, son (348). The

realm of the signal, in which immanence and transcendence are divorced, is

the realm ofthe one-eyed mountain, the world in which Will's infuriatingly

pious daughter Leslie incessantly quotes Psalm 121: I will lift up mine eyes

un to the hills from whence cometh m y

help

(149). However, that world is

incomplete, and, for his new job not as a lawyer but as a lowly clerk, he is

finally confronting the mountain with its skewed face and one eye ou t of

place (380).

The goodness of what Will and Allie find together casts new light on the

question of God's existence and the success or failure of Will's experiment.

Will realizes that the economy of giving and getting may be different than

he assumed, that somehow 2


17/23

W A L K E R P E R C Y S TH SE OND OMING 197

(Lawson and Kram er 183). He also said that The Second Coming represents

a definite advance, a resolution of the am biguity with which some of my

other novels end: the victory, in Freudian terms, of eros over thanatos, life

over death (Lawson and Kramer 184).

While most reviewers have interpreted this advance favorably, othe rs

have been less pleased. Most notably, Harold Bloom calls the novel prob-

lematic (viii) and tendentious, saying that it hardly seems to be by the

author of

The Moviegoer

(1). Bloom is particularly concerned with the fi-

nal paragraph's theocentric anxiety (2). Not surprisingly. Bloom chose a

somewhat deprecatory essay by Fowler for his an thology of Percy criticism.

Fowler argues that in the end The

Second

Coming is not am biguous b ut

ambivalent and that Percy

is

poised between contradictory and seemingly

mutually exclusive truths. She scoffs at Percy because, if given a multiple-

choice question, [he] would have to answer 'both of

the

above' ( Answers

123).

Ironically, Kieran Quinlan dismisses The Second Coming s ending not

because it is ambivalent bu t because it is too

clear

It is purportedly a willed

conclusion, more a manifestation of its author's own faith and intentions

than an artistically achieved development. He goes on to assert tha t it is

hard to balance the seriousness of Will's questions against the ridiculous

means (especially from an informed theological viewpoint) he uses to an-

swer them (172). Jay Tolson similarly laments:

We need to hear from the Christian ironist before this novel

ends;

but we

don't. Instead, we have dam going off to join his Eve. What one distrusts

most about this in some

ways

brilliant and beguiling novel is that it serves

too therapeutic an end rather than the harder truth as Percy saw it.

Quinlan and Tolson are slightly more respectfiil of Percy's achievement in

The Second Coming

than Bloom and Fowler but, as Tolson puts it, only be-

cause adults need fairy tales as much as children do (432).

W hat are

we

to make of these dismissals of Percy's ending? Does the hap -

py

ending

indeed ru in his novel, or are the critics men tioned above perhaps

missing the novel's very essence?' If

we

recognize The

Second Coming

as a

response to Nausea, I would argue that nothing short of a happy ending

would have sufficed. Consider

Nausea s

ending, which has Roquentin de-

ciding to m ove to Paris, having lost any hop e of resuming his relationship


18/23


accepting myself. (178)

Roquentin decides to do exactly what he insisted to Anny would never sat-

isfy : he will live in the past. If The Second oming was to offer hope in re-

sponse to Roquentin's despair, its ending had to be quite different. Indeed,

while Roq uentin and A nny recede into their separate pasts. Will and Allie

pursue a future that honors both individuality and com munity. As Michael

Kobre appreciates. Will and Allie's relationship grows beyond themselves to

include others: [WHl's] decision to build a com munity of his own and to

rehabilitate these cast-off men [Mr. Arnold and Mr. Ryan] in the process is

only a larger version of

Allie s

determination to m ake a new future for her-

self in her abandoned greenhouse (191).

Even as we observe the disparity between the novels' endings, however, it

is important to remember how much Percy appreciated Sartre's ability to

provide glimpse[s] into the very nature of the being of things. This may

have been because Percy believed that the serious novel must explore no t

only the nature of the hum an predicament b ut [also] the possibility or n on

[-] possibility of a search for signs and meaning s {Signposts 219). Percy felt

that Nausea fulfilled this requirement quite powerfully; however, he wanted

to write a serious novel that w ould show how meaning

is

possible. For this

reason I wonder with Ted L. Estess whether our d iscomfiture w ith Percy's

language of affirmation, even celebration, signals the distance the contem-

pora ry sensibility has come from

a

stout embrace ofth e possibility of

a

happy

ending for human beings and indicates how far progressed is the 'de-Chris-

tianization' of our literary sensibility (79).

In The Second Coming then, Percy offers a novelistic response to Sartre's

Nausea that conveys bo th ho mage and critique. Percy wan ted to create a

world in which not only would something happen but, ultimately, some-

thing good rather than something bad. To do this, Percy sought to illus-

trate the difference between a mere environment of signals, as in Roquen-

tin's and

Anny s

relationship, and

a

world of true sign-making. This purpose

required Percy to bring all three of the novel's main questions to a hopeful

fulfillment. Had Will or Allie abandoned the sign-making they had begun,

had W ill listened to the voice of his father and actually killed

himself

or had

he simply been content to give up his quest for God and spend the rest of

his days in a rest home.

The Second

oming would be a m uch less significant

novel. It would no t be the intricate response of one fiction to ano ther but


19/23

W A L K E R P E R C Y ' S THE SECOND COMING 199

mean banking on a certainty. He invites us to recognize that religious

questions involve the most ordinary encounters on the street and that gen-

uine transcendence

is

possihle only alongside authentic immanence—a com-

bination for which we need the Other rather than isolation. Percy stands

beside Sartre and sympathizes with Roquentin at the chestnut tree, but

through that most extraordinary of responses, his own work of art, he asks

whether the moments in which we see through things to their very mate-

riality, when we realize that none of it has to be, are occasions not for horror

but for gratitude.'̂

Regent

ollege

NOTES

'See, especially, Luschei 6, 83n, 147n, 213-14.

^Allen even suggests that The Second oming is

the

culmination

of

Percy's first

five novels. He finds a sense of closure at the end of The Second Coming a feeling

of the rounding

off of

an imaginative world (xii). The relationship between

The

Second oming and The

Last

Gentleman is more often observed, with many critics

seeing the sequel as completing a story The Last Gentleman began (e.g.. Sue M itch-

ell Crowley, Godshalk, and Lawson in Will Barrett ) and others seeing it as an awk-

ward, unnecessary appendix (e.g., Schwartz).

'Percy may be thinking here not only

of

Sartre's philosophy but also of his phys-

iognomy. Due to a childhood illness, Sartre had a strabismus— a wandering eye—

that might well have appeared too high and too far to one

side,

thus causing strang-

ers a slight unease. In any case, it is intriguing that nowhere in the novel is a char-

acter actually missing

a

second eye; rather,

it is as if

he

(a

male

in

each case)

is

not

using

it.

In WUl's m em ory of nearly being murdered, his father is described in terms

of one glittering eye [that] seemed to cast beyond him

to the

future (62). Jimmy

Rogers, who is all plans and schemes and deals (75), has a single eye tha t had

gleamed

at

[Will]

for

years (77). Then there

is

Mr. Arnold, w ho retired too early

and whose one fierce eye gazed around the room in the nursing home, with one

side

of

his face

[...]

shut down (179). Finally, we see Will fallen

on

the path just

beyond Allie's

greenhouse,

with a one-eyed profile, an eye that didn't blink (292).

In each case, the one-eyed character is overfocusing

on

either immanence

or

tran-

scendence.

•In Lost

in the Cosmos

Percy explains tha t signals involve dyadic com munica-


20/23

200 EVERETT L . HAMNER

create a self out of its own nothingness. Other persons constitute a threat to th at

self-creation (110).

'I would join Shelley M. Jackson in pointing out that criticism of Percy s female

characters sometimes misses that many times in [Percy's] fiction, women, through

language in intersubjective relationships, hring his male protagonists to an under-

standing of their hum anity and ultimately save them from self-destruction (100).

'See also Fowler's 'The C a v e .. . the Fence': A Lacanian Reading of Walker Per-

cy's The Second

Coming

and especially Kennedy's assertion tha t Will's crossing is a

sign of his own entrance into the world of death-anxiety and suicidal compulsion

that he has inherited from his father (213).

'As Sue Mitchell C rowiey points ou t, Will's quest into the cave is essentially a

Pascalian experiment. I would note only tha t Will assumes that, if there is a God ,

he will find out on

this

side of death rather than afterwards.

*Kobre interprets Will and Allie's lovemaking as the triu m ph of im man ence

(being in the world) over transcendence (orbiting far above it in the posture of a

detached observer) (190). I would agree only if

Kobre s

negative understand ing of

transcendence is maintained . If the term is used positively to indicate a yearning

for that which is beyond the known. Will and Allie's lovemaking is abou t the

unit-

ing of imm anence and transcendence, not the trium ph of one over the other.

T h is conclusion stands in direct contrast to WUl's earlier confusion: He want-

ed what? Kitty's ass? D eath? Both? (194).

'°J. Donald Crowiey scathingly criticizes Bloom's collection for the quickness

with which religious belief is relegated to the status of

nostalgia,

and he calls its claim

to preem inent status among anthologies of Percy criticism far-fetched (25).

Percy explains that the error made by both empiricists and existentialists is in

positing an autonomous consciousness Message 282-83). This is essentially what

Roquentin represents in

Nausea;

as he himself says, he is alone in the world. Percy's

epistemology differs in being shaped not by the isolated Cartesian awareness bu t

by a consciousness defined by its etymology— 'knowing w ith' (Lawson, Walker

Percy's 255). For

Percy,

The

I

think is only m ade possible by a prior mutuality:

we

name Message

275).

'̂ I would like to thank Loren Wilkinson of Regent College in Vancouver, British

Columbia, as well as two anonymous referees and editor Robert Snyder, for their

comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

WORKS CITED

Allen,

William Rodney. Walker

Percy: A

Southern

Wayfarer.

Jackson: UP of Missis-

sippi, 1986.


21/23

WALKER

PERCY S THE SECOND COMING 201

Crowley, Sue Mitchell. Walker Percy's Wager: The Second Coming" Crowley and

Crowley 225-43.

Donaldson, Susan

V.

Keeping Quentin Compson Alive:

The Last Gentleman, The

Second Coming,

and the Problems of Masculinity. Lawson and Oleksy 62-77.

Estess, Ted L. Walker Percy's Eschatological Fiction: A Reading of The Second Com-

ing" Religion and Literature 21.\ (1989): 63-87.

Fowler, Doreen A. Answers and Ambiguity in Percy's

The Second Coming."

Bloom

115-23.

. 'The Cave . . . the Fence': A Lacanian Reading of Walker Percy's

The Sec-

ond Coming ' Lawson and Oleksy 78-89.

Godshalk, W. L. The Engineer, Then and Now; or, Barrett's Choice. Gredund and

Westarp

33-41 .

Grabar, Mary. Percy's Despairing Female in the 'Unmoved Mover.' Renascence 54

(2002): 119-35.

Gretlund, Jan Nordby, and Karl-Heinz Westarp, eds. Walker Percy: Novelist and

Philosopher.

Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1991.

Jackson, Shelley M. The Privilege of Maternity: Teaching Language and Love in

The Second Coming." Lawson and Oleksy 90 -101 .

Kennedy, J.G. The Semiotics of Memory:

Suicide in The Second Coming"

Crow-

ley and Crowley 208-25.

Kobre, Micbael.

Walker

Percy s

Voices.

Athens: U of Georgia P, 2000.

Lawson, Lewis A. Walker Percy's Prodigal Son. Crowley and Crowley 243-59.

. Will Barrett Under the Telescope. Southern Literary Journal 20.2 (1988):

16-41 .

Lawson, Lewis A., and Elzbieta H. Oleksy, eds. Walker Percy s Feminine Characters.

Troy (NY): Whitston, 1995.

Lawson, Lewis A., and Victor

A.

Kramer, eds. Conversations with Walker Percy. Jack-

son: UP of Mississippi, 1985.

Luschei, Martin.

The Sovereign Wayfarer: Walker Percy s Diagnosis of the Malaise.

Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1972.

Pearson, Michael. Language and Love in Walker Percy's

The Second Coming ' South-

ern Literary Journal 20.1 (1987): 89-100.

Percy, Walker.

The Last Gentleman.

New

York:

Avon, 1966.

. Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. New York: Picador, 1983.

.

The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is How Queer Language Is and

What One Has to Do with the Other. New York: Picador, 1954.

.

The Second Coming

1980. New York: Pocket, 1981.

-. Signposts in a Strange Land. Ed. Patrick Samway. New York: Picador, 1991.

Quinlan, Kieran.

Walker

Percy:

The Last Catholic Novelist.

Baton Rouge: Louisiana

State u p 1996.


22/23

202

EVERETT L HAMNER

McGraw, 1993.

Tolson, Jay. Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker

Percy

Chapel HiU: U of North

Carolina P, 1992.

Walker, Elinor Ann. Rereading Allison Huger: Making Silence Signify in The Sec-

ond Coming Lawson and Oleksy 102-14.


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Documents

Relieving Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea