Beginning with the earliest expressions of Southern culture, religion has played a significant role in the literature of the region, a point repeatedly made in Jay Hubbell's The South in American Literature, 1607-1900 (Duke University Press, 1954). For instance, Samuel Davies--one of the key figures in the Great Awakening--was also a very prolific author. Not surprisingly, Davies' writings, like that of other authors during the early period in Southern history, tended to be heavily ladden with religious themes and images.

During the antebellum period, however, the South produced only a few major writers of note. William Gilmore Simms (from Charleston) and Edgar Allen Poe (from Richmond) were the only two authors of any real stature during this period. Lewis P. Simpson has suggested in an article entitled "Southern Spiritual Nationalism: Notes on the Background of Modern Southern Fiction" (in The Cry of Home: Cultural Nationalism and the Modern Writer, H. Ernest Lewald, ed., University of Tennessee Press, p. 1972) that this dearth of creativity can be attributed to slavery, and that the South continued to lack a rich literary heritage until the postbellum period when the literature of the region blossomed.

Clearly, something happened in the post-war period to encourage the development of a distinctive Southern literature. Beginning with George Washington Cable and Mark Twain, such Southern writers as John Crowe Ransom, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and Robert Penn Warren have given the region a body of literature that it can take justifiable pride in. This body of work reveals to the discerning reader the significant role that the region's religious heritage has played in shaping its culture. Not only has this religious heritage informed their writing--providing themes, symbols, and ideas--it has also formed the writer, giving shape and form to their personalities.

Resources For the Study of Southern Literature and Religion

Graduate students exploring the literary heritage of the South have many scholarly resources upon which they can draw. One might begin with George N. Boyd and Lois A. Boyd's work Religion in Contemporary Fiction: Criticism from 1945 to the Present. (Trinity University Press. 1973.) Another resource would be Augustus Hopkins Strong, American Poets and Their Theology (Griffin and Rowland, 1916) which deals with such Southern poets as Sydney Lanier, Edgar Allan Poe, and William Cullen Bryant.

More recently, David W. Noble has written The Eternal Adam and the New World Garden (George Braziller, 1968) in which he argues that Southern writers such as Robert Penn Warren and William Faulkner--like American writers in general--have tended to view America as a new Eden. Other works of note are: Marion A. Fairman, Biblical Patterns in Modern Literature (Dillion/Liederbach, 1972), John May's Toward A New Earth, (Notre Dame, 1972) Ted R. Spivey's The Journey Beyond Tragedy. University Presses of Florida, 1980, and David S. Reynolds, Faith in Fiction: The Emergence of Religious Literature in American Fiction, (Harvard University Press, 1981).

Walker Percy and The Second Coming

One of the most intriguing of Southern writers is Walker Percy. And it can be said that one of the more intriguing of his novels is The Second Coming. In some ways it is "a fairy tale," and yet it is so much more. (For a complete bibliography of Percy's work, click here. For a critical bibliography of Percy scholarship, click here.)

In Percy, one sees a fascinating interplay of Southern culture and the writer's Catholic heritage. Some scholars have been eager to link the work of Percy and another great Southern Catholic writer--Flannery O' Connor--contending that both see the world as "a sign from God," and the arena for his activity. Among those who have taken this stance is Lawrence Cunningham. Writing in an article entitled "Catholic Sensibility and Southern Writers," (Bulletin of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and Religion, 1978.) Cunningham contends that O'Connor and Percy share this "pre-modern" view of reality. Others, have been more willing to see each of these writers as unique--their common Catholicism notwithstanding--and to allow that of the two, Percy is far more existential in his approach to life.

One of the major interpreters of Percy has been Robert Coles. In Walker Percy: An American Search (Little, Brown, 1978), Coles argues that Percy's writings are heavily indebted to the philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard, something that Percy, himself, acknowledged. Clearly, existentialism plays a major role in Percy's novels. Indeed, the principle character in Percy's works is often alienated from the world around him. And certainly this is the case in The Second Coming, although Percy once claimed that this was "the first unalienated novel since War and Peace."

Whether this sense of alienation is a result of Percy's disdain (or hatred?) for modern culture, his willingness to face the spiritual dilemma that confronts a spiritual person in an age of secularity and disbelief, or a satircial examination of reality that doesn't always make sense, is not always clear. But one thing seems evident from the reading for today (Percy's Second Coming) ultimately--there is a positive spiritual resolution to this alienation through the principle character's (Will Barrett's) encounters with "persons and objects in the world around them." And despite the experience of alienation on the part of the principle character--God remains very much apart of all of life.

Autobiography in The Second Coming

If Coles is correct in asserting that Percy's work is grounded in existentialism, then it is reasonable to assume that there is much about The Second Coming that is autobiographical. (For a futher essay on this point click here) And indeed there is. The setting for the story in the mountains of North Carolina is based on his memories of a home owned by his Uncle Will and Huger Jervey, Will's college classmate in Sewanee, Tennessee that overlooked a large cove in the Cumberland Mountains filled with caves much like the one in which Will Barrett wanders and ponders suicide. The little story about Ethel Rosenblum at the beginning of the novel is based on a young woman cheerleader with whom Percy was smitten as a youth: Camille Sarasson.

But the autobiographical elements don't end there. The lugar--"the instrument and talisman of death" was a gun that belonged to Percy's father (who committed suicide). Walker Percy purchased this gun and carried it with him into the desert of New Mexico where he, himself, contemplated suicide. The hunting trip that Will remembers was based on one Percy and his brother took with their own father. The father's suicide is a "frightening recreation of the scene" of his own father's suicide in the attic of their Birmingham home.

Moreover, there is some reason to believe that the relationship of Will and Allie may also have autobiographical roots. Percy had a relationship--the exact nature of which is unclear--with a young woman named Lyn Hill. This relationship was in full swing at the time The Second Coming was written. Some have even been so bold as to speculate that the relationship with Allie is a projection of what Percy desired to have with Lyn, but felt he was unable to have because of his commitments to his wife Bunt.

Even when the The Second Coming is not autobiographical, it can be viewed as a psychological treatise heavily indebted to Jung. One wonders if it is not an effort on Percy's part to understand the melancholy and depression that he himself was prone to? Jay Tolson is thought provoking when he speaks to this issue in his biography of Percy, Pilgrim in the Ruins. Tolson writes: "One reviewer suggested that the novel contained 'enough archetypal symbolism and mythopoetic incident to employ a busy Jungian researcher for a decade.' Will Barrett's descent into the cave, for instance, is a very carefully contrived encounter between the self and its "shadow"; his relationship with Allie dramatizes the relationship between the self and its female side, its "anima." Although it would be unwise to reduce the novel to a Jungian allegory, it can be read on one level as just that. Percy even went so far as to tell one scholar that he intended 'Jungian individuation' to be an essential theme of his novel."

Differences

And yet, if The Second Coming is autobiographical, it is also something more. This has been recognized by Jay Tolson who argues, for instance, that the most significant difference between the novel and Percy may be the most significant: Barrett is Episcopalian while Percy was Catholic. According to Tolson, "Episcopalianism is the religion closes to Catholicism...Put postively, Episcopalianism is Catholicism without absolutism; put negatively, it is Catholicism without a spine, invertebrate Catholicism." Tolson continues with this line of thought, and asks "Is Percy saying something negative about Episcopalianism?" Is he judging it as a "lesser thing?" Or is he suggesting that Episcopalianism with its "fuzzy accomodationism ...may have something more to recommend it than the principled dogmatism of his own church"? Is Percy using his alter-ego to explore an issue of faith that his own dogmatic Catholicism would not allow him to pursue in real life?

While Tolson's questions offer food for thought, in the end his explaination of why The Second Coming something more than an autobiography loosely wrapped in fiction, seems less than compelling. How then are we to view this novel? One answer to that question is offered by Ralph Wood in a book review published in the October 16, 1991 issue of The Christian Century. There Wood argues that all of Percy's writings revolve around "one original thought." That thought, according to Wood, is "that this most prosperous and progressive of all centuries is the ago of a massive spiritual disaster, the Time of Thanatos." To prove his point, Wood quotes Percy: "It is the century of the love of death. I am not talking just about Verdun or the Holocaust or Dresden or Hiroshima. I am talking about a subtler form of death, a death in life, of people who seem to be living lives which are good by all sociological standards and yet seem to be more dead than alive. Whenever you have a hundred thousand psychotherapists talking about being life-affirming, and a million books about life enrichment, you can be sure there is a lot of death around."

Clearly, the issue in The Second Coming is not the denomination to which Will Barrett belongs, but the fact that the principle character is one of those who suffers from this "subtler form of death" that Percy and Wood speak about. Percy reveals in this novel--to use Wood's words--his belief that "modern life in the West is beset with a consuming emptiness, a numbing ennui, an unprecedented murderousness." The Second Coming is more than autobiography, it is the work of a trained physician (Percy) offering a diagnosis of the "madness and monstrousness of our century."

Percy as a Southern Writer

Earlier I mentioned David Noble's thesis that Southern writers have tended to view America as a new Eden. Whether it holds in all cases, it certainly is the case with Percy in The Second Coming, even though Noble does not take note of it. There is an element to The Second Coming in which Will Barrett wishes to "throw everything over," and "to start a new life--all this and to have God, too...a desire for nothing less than Edenic perfection, hope raised to the highest power." And of course, as Tolson points out, in this novel Adam does go off to join his Eve."

But Percy is Southern in ways that have little to do with a longing for Eden. Percy, himself, described what it means to be a Southern writer, and to him I will give the last word (s):

"Well, I've heard about...(the South's) storytelling tradition, sense of identity, tragic dimension, community, history, and so forth. But I was never quite sure what it meant. In fact, I'm not sure that the opposite is not the case. People don't read much in the South and don't take writers very seriously, which is probably as it should be. I've managed to live here for thirty years and am less well known than the Budweiser distributor...There are advantages to living an obscure life and being thought an idler. 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. One the other hand, if one is thought an idler and a bum, one is free to do what one pleases...

"I have a theory of why Faulkner became a great writer. It was not the presence of a tradition and all that, as one generally hears, but the absence. Everybody in Oxford, Mississippi, knew who Faulkner was, not because he was a great writer, but because he was a local character, a little bitty fellow who put on airs, wore a handkerchief up his sleeve, a ne'er do well, Count No-Count they called him...

"No, it is the very absence of a tradition that makes for great originals like Faulkner and O'Connor and Poe. The South is Crusoe's island for a writer, and there's the good and bad of it."

Students interested in doing original research on Percy may wish to use his personal papers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. For an inventory of Percy's papers, click here.