To read or not to read literary criticism, that is the question for the twenty-first century reader who prefers to process 42 characters instead of 42 minutes of reading a substantial argument. I draw the either-or dilemma from Hamlet's famous speech on suicide, whether or not to “shuffle off the mortal coil,” for it is suicide that dominates John Desmond's recent work of literary criticism, Walker Percy, Fyodor Dostoevsky and the Age of Suicide. Desmond considers these two writers as prophets and draws us towards their prophecy regarding the “cultural ethos of suicide.”
Every age needs prophets—whether or not they heed their cautions—because prophets stand out of and often against the current. They can reveal to those caught in its tide that we ought to chart another direction towards a more fitting destination. For Dostoevsky and Percy, their audience required them to create extreme characters and situations to see the unfortunate end we were all heading towards. An example: Love in the Ruins is set a dozen years in the future from when Percy published it, set in 1983 in an apocalyptic USA, vines are sprouting everywhere and taking hold, violence is an acceptable form of arguing oppositional ideologies, love equals orgies and multiple sexual partners, and demonic forces sell technology and scientific advances to eager consumers. Percy borrowed the idea from Dostoevsky's The Demons. Although both novels appear panoramic in scale, the problems arise from persons who, like Dostoevsky's title suggests, act devilishly, and the evil is contagious. Both novels depict worlds where no one believes in God any longer. Dostoevsky predicted, if God does not exist, all things are permitted. Going a step further, Percy argues that this explains “the rise of all these ideologies.” Anyone want to live in these fictional brave new worlds?
Cultural diagnoses like these are easy and go rather unheeded if an author only foretells gloom and doom. The prophets of genius must also elucidate the cause and offer an alternative vision. Novelists like Dostoevsky and Percy strive to prevent World War III not by lamenting the destruction, but by depicting narratively how a person's erroneous perception of herself may lead to nuclear holocaust.
Desmond relies on four writers who he calls “intellectual touchstones” to explain Dostoevsky's and Percy's thought: Soren Kierkegaard, Charles Peirce, Rene Girard, and Charles Taylor. All of these writers define the “self” in opposition to the vision offered by the modern world, of the self as fragmented and bifurcated. Kierkegaard places the self in “subjective relation to God,” in Desmond's words, and Percy adds the qualification that such a self is “basically social.” One cannot be a mere individual but must be known as a person among persons. Desmond relies on Girard to unpack this anthropological perspective: “Individuals and cultures develop by imitating others' desires; for, Girard, it is the founding principle of human culture.” In other words, we parrot from birth, learning what to want, and thus how to live. Girard discovered the mimetic principle by studying Dostoevsky's fiction, and it explains why Percy's protagonists, as outsiders, suffer isolation and alienation.
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