Lancelot by Walker Percy

How strange it is that a discovery like this, of evil, of a kinsman's dishonesty, a wife's infidelity, can shake you up, knock you out of your rut, be the occasion of a new way of looking at things!

In the space of one evening I had made the two most important discoveries of my life.  I discovered my wife's infidelity and five hours later I discovered my own life.  I saw it and myself clearly for the first time.

Lancelot Andrewes Lamar is a scion of the old Louisiana guard: he lives in his family's plantation house outside New Orleans, a house open to tourists, having become a kind of theme park version of its old self.  His wife, Margot, has offered it to a group of filmmakers to stage a movie she's appearing in; the movie, too, is a symbol of the way that old traditions survive only in nostalgic simulacra.

Lance himself is a victim of the hollowing-out of the modern world.  Once he was a star football player.  In a particularly Percy-esque detail, he set the NCAA punt return record against Alabama.  (Southerners in Percy's fiction can never keep from including things like golf and football in the list of disappearing values.)  For years he lived on autopilot, until, as he tells his mysterious conversation partner, he discovered that his daughter Siobhan was not really his daughter at all.

Lancelot takes the form of an interview or confession: Lance, speaking from a cell at an institution called the Center for Aberrant Behavior, recounts how he ended up murdering the film director who was his wife's lover before blowing up his plantation home, killing his wife and a pair of other actors.  He speaks to an old friend, a psychiatrist and priest, who may not really exist.  Certainly his name, "Percival," and Lance's obsession with a lost golden age of mythic virtue, reflected in the names of those knights, suggests he's not really there.  Oh, and Lance also tells him about the woman in the room next to his, a mute rape victim who can only communicate through taps, and with whom he plans on starting a new Eden.

Reading Lancelot is... upsetting.  There's a black heart to it that isn't present in any of Percy's other novels.  Lance's megalomania, racism, sexism, and violence, make it difficult.  He enlists a clever black servant named Elgin to help him bug a hotel where his wife is staying, and every time he talks about Elgin's technical acumen he sounds like a man describing a dog who learned to talk.  Lance describes his reputation as a "liberal lawyer" defending black clients, but his politics are reactionary to the extreme.  He idolizes Robert E. Lee and talks about the Civil War as the "Second Revolution," a failed attempt to beat back the forces of modernization.  (That's why, in his fantasies, he and the mute woman next door move to Virginia, the locus of the first two revolutions and the third, which he imagines himself at the center of.)

What am I supposed to do with a narrator like this?  What makes it complicated is that Lance doesn't seem so different from Percy's other protagonists.  For Percy, the alienation of modernism always manifests as mental illness.  Like Will Barrett in The Second Coming and Binx Bolling in The Moviegoer, Lance seeks wholeness through companionship with a woman who is also mentally ill.  Lance's complaints about modern society--commercialism, pornography, the lost sense of history and myth--are reflected in the parodic dystopia of The Thanatos Syndrome.  And doesn't this sound like a really sharp diagnosis, by Lance, of The Moviegoer's Binx, who can't feel he really lives somewhere until he sees it in a movie?:

The world had gone crazy, said the crazy man in his cell.  What was nutty was that the movie folk were trafficking in illusions in a real world but the real world thought that its reality could only be found in the illusions.  Two sets of maniacs.

But it's also hard to imagine Binx Bolling, Will Barrett, or Tom More, saying a thing like this:

What the poor dears discovered is the monstrous truth lying at the very center of life: that their happiness and the meaning of life itself is to be assaulted by a man.

Yes, that's right: at one point in this novel, Lance says that the point of life is to rape and be raped.

The destabilizing effects of modernism in Percy, along with the cobbled-together language of mysticism and self-help, make them very knotty and difficult to tease out.  I find this statement particularly difficult to reconcile, even among Lance Lamar's nasty opinions.  But at the very least I'm sure it's connected to Lance's sublimated anger at his wife's infidelity, which becomes transmuted into an apocalyptic fantasia about a new world order.  In fact, Lancelot seems prophetic in a way: don't incel murderers like Elliot Rodger follow this pattern exactly when they transform their frustrations with women into fantasies of social upheaval?

What's most difficult about Lance is the way he seems to take things Percy genuinely believes, based on a wide reading of his novels, to murderous extremes.  Percy clearly agrees that modernity breeds alienation and mental illness, and I think his nostalgia for the old South is genuine to some degree.  It's possible that Lancelot is one of those rare novels in which an author looks critically at their own darker impulses.  (Doesn't Ford Madox Ford do something similar with his own Toryism in Parade's End?)

But it's not very pleasant.  I don't think Lancelot is a book made for anybody to love.  You can survive it, maybe, as Lance's wife and her lover do not.  But this is the last of Percy's novels for me, and I'm disappointed to know that my experience with them ends in such a discomfiting place.