CHAPTER SIX

SUMMARY A N D CONCLUSION

Walker Percy, the Southern writer, renowned for his Catholic

existentialist approach, i:j ii novelist who wrought in grotesquerie. His

childhood traumas. fatal illness and desertion of medical career rendered him

a peculiar view of life that is nothing other than grotesque. His novels

invariably portray the unitiersal condition of alienation caused by various

factors and the device he adopts is that of the grotesque.

The grotesque has risen to the level of an artistic genre though it may

have the shade of the old derogatory meaning. At present this critical term

means the conflation of opposites, especially of the horrific and the comic

inducing a disturb~ng sense of insecurity in the readers.

Originally the grotesque referred to the decorative style of art found in

the ancient grottoes where there was an indiscriminate fusion of the human

and the non-human, the animate and the inanimate. Etymologically the

word 'grotesque' was derived from the Italian 'la grottesca' (noun) and

'grottesco' (adjective), derivatives of 'grotte' which means cave. During the

Renaissance period, in Italy, the term 'grotesque' was extended to mean the

fantastic style in architecture and sculpture.

In Germany. during the sixteenth century, 'grotesque' was used in lieu

of the major prevalent forn~s of ornamental art: scroll work, caricature, and

'moresque'. The fus~on of animal and human forms in the grotesque gave

it the connotation of 'monstrous' in Italy. The word 'grotesque' appears

in English about 1640 and it took on the meanings of 'chimeras' and

'demons' gradually.

In the Neoclassical age the prevailing taste in art and literature was

'grotesque' and 'gothique'. The English manifested their predilection for the

grotesque in opera, burlesque, farce, and essays produced during the neo-

classical period. It was a time when the features of the grotesque style such

as extravagance, fantasy, and unnatural organization were ridiculed. As a

result, by the early eighteenth century it developed the meanings of

'absurdity' and 'distortion of nature'.

During the Romantic period the word took on other shades of ,

meaning such as 'highly fanciful'. 'fantastic', and 'exceedingly strange'. With

the advent of the nineteenth century the word underwent another semantic

change. Schlegel viewed the combination of heterogeneous elements and a

kind of alienation of the world as the essential ingredients of the grotesque.

Highlighting the monstrous and horrible aspects of the grotesque, Hugo

detected its presence in the confrontation of the hideous with the sublime.

Coleridge attributed the meanings of 'odd' or 'eccentric' to the term. '-

In his opinion the unusual juxtaposition of words or images creates the odd

or the grotesque. Out of the two types of the grotesque comedy that

Coleridge envisaged, the 'transcendental' grotesque comedy is moral and

sublime in contrast to the 'descendental' grotesque comedy which is sensual

and trivial. According to John Ruskin, the grotesque is purely an artistic

phenomenon. a comic genre based on the combination of the ludicrous and

the fearful. By the end of the nineteenth century, the word became an

acceptable critical term. Writers like Schlegel, Hugo, and Ruskin laid

emphasis on the fusion of opposites.

In the twentieth century some memorable contributions to the

grotesque perspective were made by Chesterton and Lily B. Campbell.

Chesterton holds the view that the grotesque is a device for presenting the

world in a fresh perspective. Campbell stressed the characteristics of

incongruity and the confusion of the real and the ideal in the literay

grotesques.

It was Wolfgang Kaiyser who took the initiative in making a profound

study of the term in its various aspects. According to him, the grotesque is

the expression of a profound sense of alienation. The grotesque world is our

world. The grotesque can be perceived in three spheres: in the mental make-

up of the artist. in the work of art and in the impact on the readers or the

audience. An artist moving in the realm of alienation or dislocation may

resort to the technique of the grotesque to fictionalize his inner world.

Usually it is achieved by suddenly changing the familiar world into a strange

one. The artist plays with the absurdities of life half-horrifyingly and half-

laughingly. As a result, the readers experience a tension or an unsettling

effect. It has a therapeutic value as it liberates the mind by externalizing its

lurking fears. This is a means t:o exorcise the demonic elements in the world.

In 1970 M~chael Sieig gave a psychological interpretation to the ;,

grotesque based on Freud's psychology. In his opinion the grotesque

involves the managing of the uncanny by the comic.

Irony, satire, parody, the bizarre, the macabre, and caricature come in

the spectrum of the grotesque. The difference between irony and the

grotesque lies in the fad that while irony is primarily intellectual, the other is

largely emotional. As far as satire is concerned, a satirist often employs the

grotesque to evoke disgust and derisive laughter in the readers, whereas a

grotesque text aims at satire.

In the case of parody, grotesque elements are used by parodists to

make it more aggressive and the device of parody enables the grotesque

artist to impart the feeling of triviality to their description. The 'bizzare',

meaning 'very strange' differs from the grotesque in its absence of the

disturbing quality of the latter. The grotesque is more aggressive.

The 'macabre', a subform of the grotesque, means 'grotesque yet

funny'; however it lacks the balanced tension between opposites which is the

hallmark of the grotesque. Caricature, the ludicrous exaggeration of peculiar

features, moves to the realm of the grotesque when the exaggeration exceeds

the point of abnormality by arousing disgust in the readers or audience.

The grotesque has some affinity with the 'absurd' and the 'gothic'

also. Though it has the meaning of the absurd, it differs from the latter. The

grotesque can take a certain formal pattern, but the absurd lacks such a

pattern; it has no structural charactenst~a. The absurd can be grasped only

as content, a feel~ng or attitude expressed through irony or through

philosophic argument or throrrgh the grotesque itself. The gothic affords the

partial sense of the grotesque; the sense of horror or terror. When the horror

element is heightened through the comic, it becomes the grotesque.

The grotesque is i3 farewell to everything that is normal and in order.

Degradation is a device to achieve the grotesque. Everything is distorted out

of its normal size or shape through underestimation, exaggeration or by

gratuitous blending of the human and the non-human or animate and

inanimate. An unresolved tension between the ludicrous and the fearsome is

the predominant feature of the grotesque.

Modern literature is conspicuous for its tension between the horrific

and the ludicrous. Percy is an imaginative and skillful artist who resorts to the

grotesque to present reality; his novels treat human problems with deep

perception providing an opportunity for the readers to look into themselves.

Like Flanney O'Connor and Carson McCullers, Percy probes the

lives of estranged grotesques of the American South. Percy's fictional world

is inhabited by a nurnber of psychological rather than physical grotesques.

He makes conscious use of these psychological freaks to portray the gnawing

pain of alienation. Focusing on two or three characters, Percy depicts them

as abnormal, but true to life; his minor characters are simply caricatures. The

major characters in all his novels are grotesques whom he portrays adroitly

revealing their mental tinkering. There are two types of grotesques in his

fictional world: those who live in the ordinary world and those who live in

the scientific world. Led by their own oddities and idiosyncrasies, these

grotesques exhibit the inability of human beings to cultivate sincere love

relations. Compared to the early novels, Percy's novels of later period like

Lanceloi. The Second Coming and The Thanatos Syndrome have more

grotesque elements.

The Moviegoer depi(cts the despaired life of Binx Bolling who is not

even aware that he is in despair. Being a victim of 'everydayness', Binx is led

by the feeling that he is 'nobody' in the world and so he alienates himself

from his friends, from the society, and even from nature by living in the

basement of a rented house. He is the real mundane man who is in ceaseless

search for pleasure to keep1 his alienation at bay. Hence he whiles away his

time seeing films and making love with his women secretaries. Binx's craze

for films may not strike us as odd at first. However, his actions touch the

realm of the grotesque when he leads a life centred solely on movies and

moulded out of movies. His grotesquerie gains intensity as he makes love

with his secretaries in the fashion of the movie stars in films.

When Binx lives a life fashioned out of movies, we feel sympathy for

him. He has no identity of his own. Taking the movie world as the real

world, he tries to transform it into an authentic world through certification.

Through him Percy paints the secluded but disintegrated life of young men

who have lost the anchor of faith and who live an estranged life in the heart

of society. Such men carve out a world of their own and try to impose

meaning on it through movies. Relatives like aunts and cousins have no hold

on them though they are in touch with them.

The case of young women is also not different from this. Kate, for

example, leads a disturbed life with her stepmother, Aunt Emily. Young

people, if they have not got married at proper age, will feel solitary and they

will try to fill in their mentnl vacuum with various pleasures.

Kate's depression, her preoccupation with suicide and dependant

personality disorder that dissuades her from taking decisions are reasons for

her bizarre behawour. Kate has a propensity for deriving pleasure from

accidents and visualizing happiness only in wounded people which betrays

her grotesquerie. Kate's indifferent attitude to her fianck at the time of his

accidental death is not orily thought-provoking but powerful in creating a

tension in the readers. Percy seems to announce through the lives of Binx

and Kate that circumstances have a ruling role to play in making a person

grotesque

Binx's father appears rather odd because of his state of being happy

only at war times. He suffers from eating disorder resulting from

psychological problems. His strange situations of not eating, of losing weight

and of being saved from that predicament only by having been read out

detective stories to him reveal his bizarre nature.

Will Barrett in both The Last Genfleman and The Second Corning are

grotesque figures. In the former one Will Barrett is a young isolated man

suffering from the pangs of alienation. He sets out with the strong

determination of 'engineering' his life. This parentless man makes a number

of travels even though he is a victim of various illnesses like amnesia, fugue,

and dqa vu. His illnesses make him more alienated from other human

beings and turn him into a grotesque.

Barrett's psychological problems make him a social misfit though he is

prone to imitating the manners of others. The situation reaches its climax

during an assault of d@a IJU, in which Barrett gets a vision of the howling

ghost of his grandfather and this brings a sudden halt to his university

education. His amnesia is such a chronic one that he spends many days

oblivious of even his name and forgetting to take food. Besides, he develops

the odd condition of getting things backward. Like Binx and Kate, Barrett is

also unhappy in good circumstances and happy in bad surroundings.

Moreover. he is not without physical deformities; he has the problem of

deafness in one ear, tics and knee twitching. In short, Barrett is both a

psychological and physical grotesque. Through the life of Will Barrett, Percy

reveals how the dearth of adequate parental affection can make a person

really sick. The only solution for this is giving and taking of love.

Some incidents in the novel create a grotesque effect on the readers.

When a woman mistakenly hits Barrett on his nose during his hay fever, the

readers are confused whether to laugh or not. In the same way, Barrett's

unfair treatment of his psychiatrist produces an unsettling effect on the

readers.

Jamie's deathbed baptism appears grotesque because of two reasons.

First of all it is the unbeiie~rer Barrett who takes the responsibility of

administering the sacrament to Jamie who himself is devoid of such a belief.

Secondly, it is performed against the backdrop of Jamie's diahorrea. Percy

conjoins the spiritual anti the physical in such a way so as to produce a

grotesque effect. Through Jamie's baptism Percy underscores the

significance of becoming a Catholic even at the point of death.

Sutter's flushed and creased face, old-fashioned clothes, and his

schizoid personality disorder characterized by social estrangement, lack of

love, and indifference to others render him a bizarre figure. Living in a world

of despair. he always carries a revolver with him. To some extent Sutter's

extraordinary actions emanate from his inordinate desire for carnal pleasures

and his arrogance. Sutter's fornication with the duty nurse, when they are

supposed to treat the patients, is a genuine case as there is the juxtaposition

of the ludicrous and the painful. Similarly, Sutter's shifting of his sick brother,

Jamie, furtively to Santa Fe without the knowledge of the family and

dragging Jamie to a state of utter alienation and desolation during his last

days is another instance. Through Sutter Percy unfolds the fad that

education which fails in inculcating moral values on people can only mar a

person's own life and that of his neighbours.

Dr. Tom More in Love in the Ruins, and Dr. Van Dom in nie Thanatos

Syndrome are the grotesques who stagger in the scientific world. Dr. Tom

More who has been leading a jovial Christian life dwindles into a grotesque

figure following the death of his beloved daughter and the departure of his

wife. He takes to drinking and fornication and clings to science as his anchor.

Catastrophes are parts c~f life; catastrophes like the death of a child often

shatter the balance of a family. When a person slips down from the rock of

faith, he falls headlong into the abyss of moral degradation. Percy underscores

the idea that those who have found their Lives on the rock of strong faith only

can make their way in the darkness of their lives; others become despaired.

Man often tries to fill his :spiritual vacuum by making scientific achievements

which can be a feather in his cap, but he will become conscious of the

absurdity of his own action as time elapses.

The most prominent grotesque action in Love in the Ruins is Tom

More's invention of More's Qualitative Quantitative Ontological Lapsometer

not only to diagnose but to heal man's spiritual maladies; thus he becomes

an 'epistemic' grotesque. The occasion of the invention of the lapsometer is

also quite odd. Tom More hits upon the idea of the lapsometer not in a calm

atmosphere but in a stormy and noisy ambience; he lies on the bed hemmed

in by a number of insane people. He becomes an 'epistemic' grotesque

because of his vain hope of redeeming the world with his puny lapsometer.

Art Immelmann smells Ck. Tom More's craze for the Nobel Peace Prize and

Dr. Tom More falls prey to his trick. Immelmann in turn produces numerous

lapsometers and generates the strange situation of students indulging in

sexual acts in The Pit. Hence the function of the grotesque is satiric. Through

this invention Percy pokes fun at the modem scientific discoveries which

promise man a 'utopia'.

Dr. Tom More's hunger for fame makes him a Faustian figure on the

verge of sell~ng his soul to the devil. Percy highlights the power of prayer in

extricating a person from moments of spiritual danger and disaster. It is Tom

More's ardent prayer to hxs patron saint that rescues him from the clutches of

Art Immelmann. The creation of the grotesque is an attempt to invoke and

subdue the demonic aspects of the world. Immelmann's physiognomy, his

old-fashioned dress worn on the wrong side, his ubiquitous presence, and his

cunning devilish behaviour of attempting to possess Tom's wife make him a

grotesque figure.

Mr. Ives, with his bald head and monkey eyes, exhibits his bizarre

behaviour by digging for the 'fountain of youth' at the Golden Years Center

in Tampa. Suffering froni 'senile psychopathy and mutism', he refuses to

walk and talk. Another character. Ted Tennis, a graduate betrays his oddities

through massive free-floating terror, identity crisis resulting from abstraction

and sexual impotence.

Lancelot appears a grotesque figure because of his insanity and

murder. His placid life was perturbed by a pang of suspicion of his wife's

fidelity. The accidental notice of the blood group of his daughter makes him

vigilant and all his subsequent actions become very sensitive. He undertakes

a search for evil. Man has ian innate inclination to probe the "speck in

others' eyes; at the same time he is oblivious of "the log" in his own eyes

(Matt. 7 :3 ) . It is the natural tendency of human beings to fan the ember of

doubt through vigilant observation. Lancelot's employment of a Negro to

videotape the infidel actions of his wife reveals his eccentricity. Lancelot's

murder of his wife and the members of the film company betrays the

horridness that revenge can take. As murder is a deviation from the normal

the very act 1s highly deplorable. His a d of setting fire on his plantation

house is either an act of revenge or an act of madness. Revenge is contented

in destroying not only the enemies but also the building in which they reside.

Lancelot's diabolic nature highlights his grotesquerie; h e compares

himself to Lucifer after committing murders. Lancelot's actions spring from

his belief that it is his bounden duty to take vengeance on his adversaries.

At the same time he spares some of them. His vision of the Lady of the

Camellias and her offering of the bowie knife to him with which he cuts the

throat of his new opponent appear grotesque as the lady has a resemblance

to his own mother who was an infidel. Moreover, there is the fusion of the

real and the hallucinatory experience. As grotesque always mixes the

incongruous elements of horror and humour, Lancelot's cutting of Jacoby's

throat with the knife in the dearth of feeling is another instance. The s toy of

Lancelot is Percy's attempt to make a grotesque version of the Arthurian

legend, with a view to pointing out the difference between the olden times

and the modern age.

Margot, Lancelot's wife, betrays streaks of grotesquerie in the moral

sphere. She is an androgynous woman with a liking for antique things.

Changing her lovers one after another she has n o prick of conscience when

Lancelot catches her red-handed during her adultery with Jacoby which

leads her to death by the hands of Lancelot.

In The Second Coming, elder Will Barrett who has been immersed in

charitable deeds and golf begins to show bizarre behaviour all of a sudden. If

younger Barrett is really sick i n The Last Gentleman, elder Barrett is sick only

psychologically. Driven into a world of childhood memories connected with

his father's suicide, Barrett its taken by an unbridled desire to commit suicide.

Will Barrett's roaming with ihis pistol, smiling, ready to terminate his life is a

horrible but ludicrous sight. Being a victim of depression, he develops absurd

notions about Jews. Through the life of elder Barrett, Percy portrays how

dreadful alienation is. When a person becomes lonesome, incidents even

from his childhood spring up with great momentum ready to crush his life.

The suicide of parents a h ~ a y s has a disastrous consequence on children's

lives. It produces an indelit~le mark on the minds of children and they tend to

be suicidal. Sights, sounds and places connected with suicide always remain

evergreen in children's memoy and they entice them to suicide.

Convinced of the .fact that his father's suicide was wasted, Barrett

challenges God demanding a sign of His existence by waiting in Lost Cove

cave. It was Will Barrett's search for God that saved him from his

contemplated suicide. Again, Percy seems to say that if a person seeks God

in his bewilderment, with i3 persistent desire, God will disclose to him a way

out of it. Hls quest for God may appear odd to others, as in the case of Will

Barrett; but it will be a rew,arcling experience.

Barrett's challenging of God in Lost Cove cave demanding a sign

from God, his arduous journey into the heart of the cave, his search for

water, and his anointrnenl: with the excrements of the bats arouse the twin

feelings of laughter and horror in the readers.

By portraying Allison Hugher, another person of the same character,

Percy reinforces his theme of the significance of parental care and affection

for growing children. Allison is a schizophrenic who has been undergoing

electroconvulsive therapy. Besides being destitute of memory, she suffers

from speech problems and social phobia which prevent her from doing

anything in the presence csf an onlooker. Escaping from the mental hospital,

she leads a very secluded hfe in her bequeathed greenhouse.

Through Allison, F'ercy manifests how the superstitions and false

beliefs of the parents, and relating them to their children, can shake the

mental equilibrium of the children. Many parents are not even aware of that.

Kitty's version of Allison as a courtesan spy and the accusation of having

misused her body in her previous life are really shocking. Like Allison's

parents. many are keen on providing everything to their children except love.

They do not realize that it is the best anodyne for any sickness. Allison is so

alienated from her parents that she does not even know what love is. She

emerges very much grotesque when she flips through the pages of library

books to understand the meaning of love. By conjoining Allison and Barrett,

through grotesque situations and incidents, Percy underscores the

significance of intersubjactivity and love in human lives.

Allison's hoisting of Barrett with the help of pulleys and ropes on his

fall into the greenhouse, is another gruesome action. It is the ghastly

behaviour of Barrett and Allison that redeems them from their profound

alienation and joins them together in wedlock. By juxtaposing two grotesque

characters Percy shows how two negatives can make a positive life of love

and intersubjectivity.

Father Smith in both Love in the Ruins and The Thanafos Syndrome

performs some stupid iadions during the Mass. In the former novel he stops

the Mass in the middle and leaves for the rectory in his chasuble saying that

the news is being jammed and the servant puts on the TV thinking that he

asked for news.

In The Thanafos Syndrome, Father Smith has gone to the top of a fire

tower and remains there refusing to come down and to help Father Placid in

carrying out the parish work. This proves to be a deliberate one betraying his

rage against the putrefied culture. Father Smith's account of Germany and

his confession during his illness are ridiculous. His appearance for Mass

without the chasuble at the inauguration ceremony of St. Margaret's Hospice

and his reluctance to commence the Mass create a commotion among the

believers. Through the grotesque actions of Father Smith, Percy highlights

the fact that though there may be failings in the Catholic Church, the faith

alone can redeem the world from its atrocities and moral degradation.

The scene of pedeuthanasia as narrated by Father Smith is grotesque

both in its appearance and action as it evokes the emotions of shock and

frivolity through its description. The geranium plant in the 'special

deparhnent' appears very important because of the utmost care rendered to

bring up this plant: however, children are slain relentlessly. The paradox

creates a sense of shock in the readers. Depicting the scene, Percy betrays

how pedeuthanasia has becorne an accepted reality in the modern society.

Percy's artistic skill reaches its culmination in The Thanatos Syndrome

which is full of grotesque actions. Though the cabal of doctors including Dr.

Comeaux and Dr. Van Dorn are hubristic of their achievements in

diminishing crimes through the Blue Boy Project, the paradox resides in the

fact that they actually unleash sexual anarchy. Addition of heavy sodium to

the drinking water of Belle Arne Academy makes even the children lustful

and the staff becomes pedoptiiliac. The photographs that Dr. Tom More

manages to procure from the Academy bespeak the unruly behaviour in

which the staff engage by making the children amenable to heavy sodium.

On their refusal to drink the highly dosed sodium solution, Uncle

Hugh, in the company of Tom More, shoots Coach Matthews and

Mr. Brunette and hurts them slightly. The situation becomes paradoxical

when they turn to Dr. Tom More for treatment. The sodium affects the

behaviour of the staff and they betray a concatenation of grotesque actions.

Tom More's addition of extra dose of heavy sodium to the drinking

water and the act of turning Van Dorn into 'pongid' behaviour are the peaks

of grotesque actions. Percy demonstrates through these grotesque actions

that when science is manipulated as a tit for tat the consequences can be far-

reaching. Man may even lose his power of speech hurling him into utter

alienation and ostracism. 'The employment of a gorilla to teach Van Dom

language sounds really irrational. Here Percy's purport is to mock the

attempts of man to teach animals language. Through this novel Percy

underscores the idea that man's attempts to create 'utopia' with the help of

science is not going to be a dream that can be materialized.

Percy's fidronal world is pervaded by manifold images drawn not only

from flora and fauna but from objects of day to day use, making it vibrant.

While most of the images i l l the gap in the delineation of the characters, the

motifs like snakes, owls and bats add to the grotesquerie of the characters,

and create a grotesque ambience. The images allow a better vision of the

characters and when they are juxtaposed with the characters they form a

pattern reminding us of the original grotesques.

To sum up, Percy's r~ovels are self-expressive and edifying. Being a

keen observer of modern society where people get enmeshed in the snares

of worldly pursuits, and become victims of depression and despair, he

transcribes it into a grotesque world of abnormal or sick characters, assuming

the role of a prophet. Grotesque is the microscope that he employs to have

an enlarged vision of man's alienation, follies and foibles, hidden fears, and

truculent behaviour. Ro:je Labrie remarks that Percy's distinctiveness as a

Catholic novelist rests in his "weighing of the effects of science and

technology on Modem American culture and in his apocalyptic

dramatization of the cost of marginalizing religion in that culture" (134).

Percy's grotesquerie is the subliminal message of his fiction intending to lead

the reader to "the incarnational and sacramental dimensions of Catholic

Christianity" (SSL 336).