THE DIVIDED SELF IN THE FICTION OF WALKER PERCY

Critical interest in the fiction of Walker Percy has been growing in recent years. However, discussions of the novels continue to center primarily on philosophical and linguistic considerations, with insufficient attention being paid to the use to which Percy puts his knowledge of psychiatry. Trained as a scientist at Chapel Hill and as a physician at Columbia, he underwent psychoanalysis himself and has done research on schizophrenia for NIMH. Percy is familiar with R. D. Laing's studies of schizophrenia and refers to them as convenient tools for his purposes. Though much of Laing's pioneering work on the etiology of schizophrenia is now outdated, his insights into the schizoid personality and the process of going mad remain useful and help to sharpen the focus on Percy's disturbed characters.;The Moviegoer (1961), The Last Gentleman (1966), Love in the Ruins (1971), Lancelot (1977) and The Second Coming (1980) all use the three recurrent motifs to portray what threatens the divided selves of Percy's protagonists. Plagued by all three forms of schizoid anxiety, Binx Bolling, Will Barrett, Tom More and Lance Lamar exist in a culture that sunders man from himself and promotes a schizoid being-in-the-world as sane and normal. Each protagonist seeks wholeness. And the novels show a pattern of deepening insight into the authentic connection between self and others that heals the divided self.;Brought to bear on Percy's novels, Laing's concept of schizoid anxiety illuminates Percy's portrayal of the malaise of postmodern man. Specifically, the novels reveal a preoccupation with three major motifs that reflect the three forms of schizoid anxiety outlined by Laing. First, the motif of entrapment or enclosure shows a fear of being engulfed, surrounded and consumed by the threatening other. Second, the motif of implosion shows a fear of the obliteration of an inner emptiness by an impinging other. Third, the motif of petrification, the most fully developed of the three, focuses on a fear of objectification and quantification. Vulnerable to those who would rob him of autonomy and treat him as an organism in an environment, the schizoid self fears being turned into an "it" devoid of subjectivity.