The Catholic Tradition Podcast: 112 – Walker Percy’s Angelic-Bestial Future

Aug 11, 2021

“Now in these dread latter days of the outdated violent beloved
U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing
Western world I got here to myself in a grove of younger pines and the
query got here to me: has it occurred ultimately?”

So wonders Dr. Tom Extra, a descendant of the good English
martyr, within the first sentence of Walker Percy’s third novel,
Love within the Ruins: The Adventures of a Dangerous Catholic at Time
close to the Finish of the World.

Written in 1971, this prophetic work presents a world
startlingly like our personal. At this time’s visitor, literary scholar Jessica
Hooten Wilson, joins the present to provide a basic introduction to
Percy and focus on elements of what’s for a lot of his most beloved
novel, Love within the Ruins, which she describes as a
“panoramic satire” indicating that modernity’s “misplaced sense of self
makes it inconceivable to reside the nice life”.

Subjects embody:

• How Percy’s Southernity knowledgeable his fiction
• His eager and ruthless remark of race relations
• His recurring commentary on the fashionable disjunction between thoughts
  and physique, what protagonist Tom Extra calls oscillation between the
  angelic and the bestial
• His use of apocalyptic themes
• His therapy of affection between women and men
• The lasting significance of his work

Hyperlinks

Walker Percy, Love within the Ruins https://www.amazon.com/Love-Ruins-Walker-Percy/dp/0312243111

Jessica Hooten Wilson https://jessicahootenwilson.com/

JHW, Studying Walker Percy’s Novels
https://www.amazon.com/Studying-Walker-Percys-Novels-Jessica/dp/0807168777

JHW, Walker Percy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the Seek for
Affect
https://www.amazon.com/Dostoevsky-Affect-Literature-Faith-Postsecular/dp/0814213499

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