Reconstruction Vol. 14, No. 4

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Covington is the Non-Place for Me: Walker Percy's Topophilia in the Deserts of Theory and Consumption / Chris Margrave

<1> In a short, seemingly one-off essay, "Why I Live Where I Live," Walker Percy writes that particular cities can either aid or restrict a writer's ability to make sense of one's existence in the tumultuous twentieth century. For Percy, the ghosts of the past can inundate a place. He advised writers, especially Southern ones, to "avoid the horrors of total placement." In citing Charleston, South Carolina, and Mobile, Alabama, as places where a Southern writer's family has lived for 200 years, Percy remarks that such cities are prone to be haunted places where "ancestors perch on your shoulder" (3).

<2> In a letter to Shelby Foote in 1970, Walker Percy admonished his good friend, an equally well-known writer, about settling down in Memphis, Tennessee: "I told you before you bought a house to buy it in New Orleans. No reason why any writing man should want to live in Memphis" ( Correspondence 141). Percy then suggests that he and Foote purchase a couple of houses-two each, why not?-along Gulf Shores, Alabama. Percy confesses that, ever after living for over twenty years in Covington, a town of fewer than 10,000 on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain, twenty-five miles from New Orleans, he felt himself more of an outsider than when he first moved there in 1947. Percy concludes the letter with a final thought on writers and place: "It is interesting how a writer lives in a place. I was reading about John Fowles living in this little Covington-like seaside place in England and not knowing a soul there, being flatly ignored by the locals and ignoring them and liking it. At that, I like living here better than NYC-or Memphis-or Lake Washington" (142). Although nowhere really was "home" for Percy, he was not without roots. Above all, he was a Southerner, born in Birmingham, Alabama, raised in Greenville, Mississippi, and later a temporary resident of New York City and upstate New York, Santa Fe, New Mexico, New Orleans, and finally Covington, Louisiana. Ten years after the letter to Foote, Percy was still living in Covington when he published the short piece, "Why I Live Where I Live."

<3> Writing from his practically anonymous Covington life, Percy expresses that for writers place is a special problem because they never fit in in the first place. For artists, the weight of personal history and the anxiety of latent future creativity can press the chronological present into a space in time in which the artist experiences what Milan Kundera famously termed the "unbearable lightness of being." Percy's city-centric theory of place reveals how an artist's physical residence further complicates the already-complicated quest for creative stability. Percy believes the writer's artistic goal then should be to choose a place of residence where "one's native terror is not completely neutralized but rendered barely tolerable" ("Why I Live Where I Live" 6).

<4> Percy admits that some kind of escape from one's familiar territory is probably necessary. A writer should "escape the place of one's origins and the ghosts of one's ancestors but not too far. You wouldn't want to move to Tucumcari" (3). Percy defines the idea of total non-placement as the Southern writer in Waterbury, Connecticut, or the writer-in-residence at Purdue University in Indiana. He concedes that for some writers such an extra-regional escape might be necessary. By his own lights however, and as he shows in an essay like "New Orleans Mon Amour," he would miss the South too much. Total misplacement, for himself, then would be: "to live in another place, usually an exotic place, which is so strongly informed by its exoticness that the writer, who has fled his haunted place or his vacant non-place and who feels somewhat ghostly himself, somehow expects to become informed by the exotic identity of the new place" ("Where I Live Where I Live" 4). This is Hemingway in Paris and Madrid. This is the stereotypical artist's flight to New York, the actor's pilgrimage to Los Angeles. Percy writes of New Orleans as a similarly seductive place of which a wise writer should be weary: "The occupational hazard of the writer in New Orleans is a variety of the French flu, which might also be called the Vieux Carree syndrome. One is apt to turn fey, potter about a patio, and write feuilletons and vignettes or catty romans a clef, a pleasant enough life but for me too seductive" (9). Percy claims that Americans engage in a "species of Consumption" in which people use up spaces. The more inviting the place, the quicker the inhabitants ingest it. Santa Fe, for instance, became used up for Percy. In his essay, "The Loss of the Creature," Percy discusses how this process of consumption has affected perceptions of the Grand Canyon. According to Percy, the sightseer does not appreciate the Grand Canyon on its own merits; he or she appreciates it based on how well or poorly it conforms to the preexisting image of the Grand Canyon formed by the mythology surrounding it. In Percy's estimation, cities are no different. "Free people have a serious problem with place," he says, "being in a place, using up a place, deciding which new place to rotate to. Americans ricochet around the United States like billiard balls" (5).

<5> Percy's credits Covington, Louisiana, as possessing two redeeming traits: nearness to New Orleans and a relative lack of identity and placeness. From his wooded perch across Lake Pontchartrain, he is in the South but not be of the South. Remarking on twentieth century existence in light of the Chinese curse of living in "interesting and eventful times," Percy refers to his life in Covington as being "in a certain sense out of place and time but not too far out and therefore just the place for a Chinese scholar who asks nothing more than being left alone" (9). What Covington ultimately offers Percy is a shelter of anonymous solitude in which he can heed his vocational calling and ride out the storms of personal and national history.

<6> In his book of geospatial literary criticism, Spatiality, Robert Tally addresses the so-called existentialist writers's response to the anxiety of being. In speaking of Sartre's aims in particular, Tally claims that the French writer responds to the disorientation of being by projecting a "schematic representation" onto the world that makes sense of existence. Tally calls this schematic representation a kind of figurative cartography that helps give form to the experience of what Heidegger calls human being's not-at-home-ness in the world. In the way Percy applies the ideas of placement, non-placement, and misplacement to his choice of residence, Percy engages in a similar act of existential mapmaking that affords him a home base from which he can, in his own words, "feel as good as it is possible to feel in this awfully interesting century" (9).

<7> Critics often refer to Percy as an existential novelist, an offshoot of Camus and Sartre, and his novels and essays reflect those French writers' emphasis on the use of philosophical inquiry as a means of making sense of human existence. All of Percy's novels reveal an author less interested in proscribing solutions to human's crisis of being than in articulating the ideal conditions under which an artist searches to ameliorate the ache of a seemingly contingent existence. The opening essay in his collection, Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, And What One Has to Do with the Other, embodies this theme and gets right to the existential point:

Why does man feel so sad in the twentieth century? Why does man feel so bad in the very age when, more than in any other age, he has succeeded in satisfying his needs and making over the world for his own use? Why has man entered on any orgy of war, murder, torture, and self-destruction unparalleled in history and in the very century when he had hoped to see the dawn of universal peace and brotherhood? (Message 1)

Percy once identified his novels as falling somewhere between Kurt Vonnegut and Saul Bellow. While Percy's writing does possess a playfully inquisitive tone similar to Vonnegut's, and while Percy's protagonists might as well be fictional descendants of Bellow's larger-than-life searcher in Henderson the Rain King (a novel Percy once remarked was his favorite of Bellow's), Percy differs from Vonnegut and Bellow in his ultimate embrace of religious belief. Still, Percy employs similar spatial stratagems in providing the best possible environment for his protagonists (as well as himself) to pursue the existential search for meaning. Vonnegut's Galapagos reveals its author's distrust of the power abuses brought about by humanity's big brain. In Mr. Sammler's Planet, Bellow presents the eponymous character as a "registrar of madness," a compiler of the ways humanity gone to rot. Each of these three novelists are diagnosticians who situate their protagonists as observers of society gone to hell. Percy, a trained doctor and firm believe in the appropriate use of the scientific method, believed that humanity cannot understand its place in the world through scientific methods alone, i.e. by examining the human being as an organism-such as a frog or polar bear-within a given environment. To even begin to understand and analyze himself, man must take the posture of a wayfarer. In Vonnegutian terms, this would be the Billy Pilgrim character "unstuck in time." In Bellow's world, this is Henderson alighting for Africa.

<8> As a trained physician, Percy addressed the dislocation of twentieth century man in a diagnostic manner. But since human beings cannot objectively observe themselves as a scientist observes a non-thinking, non-language bearing creature, Percy suggests a spatial reorienting is necessary to discovering significant existential truth:

The truth is that man's capacity for symbol-mongering in general and language in particular is so intimately part and parcel of his being human, of his perceiving and knowing, of his very consciousness itself, that it is all but impossible for him to focus on the magic prism through which he sees everything else. In order to see it, one must be either a Martian, or, if an earthling, sufficiently detached, marooned, bemused, wounded, crazy, one-eyed, and lucky enough to become a Martian for a second and catch a glimpse of it. (Message 29)

Percy again resonates with Vonnegut's protagonists by emphasizing the outsider's perspective. In 1975, having already written Love in the Ruins, his own quasi-apocalyptic novel, Percy was not satisfied with the questions his book raised. So he wrote an essay called "Notes for a Novel on the End of the World" (which also appears in The Message in the Bottle), in which he echoes Vonnegut when he says that "the novelist is […] like the canary that coal miners used to take down into the shaft to test the air" (Message 100). Percy remarks further that "when the novelist writes of a man 'coming to himself' through some such catalyst as catastrophe or ordeal, he may be offering obscure testimony to a gross disorder of consciousness and to the need of recovering oneself as neither angel nor organism but as a wayfaring creature somewhere between" (113).

<9> It is in the "somewhere between" where Percy conducts his and his characters' search for existential meaning. Many of Percy's fictional characters are homeless, homesick, or do not know where home is. Pilgrims looking for a foothold. Sojourners in search of stasis, in fear of stasis. The self with such a worldview is precariously nomadic and in need of stability. Gaston Bachelard, in his book Poetics of Space, explores the ways common spaces, enriched with reveries and daydreams, foster our sense of self. When speaking of spaces as potential refuge from nature's elements, Bachelard claims that "reminders of winter strengthens the happiness of inhabiting" (39). From Baudelaire and Poe to Rilke, Bachelard claims these dreamers "trust in the wisdom of the storm" to define their place in the world" (42). In the preface to 1994 edition of The Poetics of Space, John Stilgoe writes that "storm makes sense of shelter, and if the shelter is sound, the shelter makes the surrounding storm good" (viii). This sentiment resonates with Percy's thoughts on why people feel happier in a hurricane, winds whipping against a shuttered house, than on an ordinary Wednesday afternoon, exposed before the raw and seemingly meaningless light of existence.

<10> Tally has suggested that the vocation of literature lies in producing "imaginary solutions to real contradictions" (Spatiality 72), and this dovetails nicely with Percy's aims to imaginatively theorize certain cities, which also resonates with Bachelard's poetics of space. Bachelard goes on to define spaces as shelters that protect the dreamer or artist. "The house shelters day-dreaming," Bachelard contends, "the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace" (6). Bachelard's interpretation of the relationship between comforting space and wild elements, in which "everything comes alive when contradictions accumulate," allows us to view Percy's pleasant non-place as a kind of contradictory place of refuge: Covington is the non-place adjacent to the exotic locale of New Orleans (39).

<11> Many writers crave solitude. Some conceal themselves in pseudonyms, like Kierkegaard. Yet Percy warns that too much solitude can be negative. The desert near Santa Fe was too vacuous for Percy, too emptied out for him of culture and history. Solitude in a city fully aware of itself, in a city that is a place, however, is as difficult to foster in the urban environment as it is easy to find in the desert." With a mindset that would resonate with that of Binx Bolling from The Moviegoer, Thomas Merton writes in New Seeds of Contemplation that "there is no more dangerous solitude than that of a man who is lost in a crowd, who does not know he is alone and who does not function as a person in a community either" (54). Covington is the perfect non-place for Percy because it allowed him to pursue a both/and life (in the South but not of it) instead of an either/or existence in which one must escape history or be drowned by it. This theoretical framework of the sustaining non-place, which defines the artist as an observer/seeker on the margins, not only offered Percy creative stability but informed the lives of his fictional characters as well. We might read Covington as Percy's perfect non-place as being both his source of artistic shelter as well as his locational muse: the non-place sustains as it inspires.

<12> Percy's most famous protagonist, Binx Bolling is an early representative mouthpiece of Percy's spatial theories. Binx plays out his search for existential meaning, a fictionalized working out of Percy's theories on place, under the auspices of what Binx calls his Little Way, a simply anonymous life that mirrors the life Percy celebrates in "Why I Live Where I Live." "It is not a bad thing to settle for the Little Way," Binx remarks halfway through the novel, "not the big search for the big happiness but the sad little happiness of drinks and kisses, a good little car and a warm deep thigh" ( The Moviegoer 135). Binx lives on the outskirts of downtown New Orleans and the French Quarter. He is content at first to live his life as an observer from afar: watching movies, interacting with people from an emotional distance. He finds solace in his Little Way on the margins by making money and courting women. The Little Way is most likely a reference to St. Therese of Lisieux, or the Little Flower, who is famous for desiring to live a simple unknown life. That Binx's half-sister, with whom he is not particularly close, is named Theresa is no accidental moniker. Such names demonstrate how Percy saturates Binx's search in inherited religious terms that Binx either rejects or inverts.

<13> Binx is the most complex of Percy's protagonists because he is at once aware of his desire to live more deeply even as he seeks the comforts of a shallow unattached life. His gradually awakening desire for a deeper life beyond the solace offered by his counterfeit Little Way provides the fuel for the existential search that begins with the book.

<14> While Binx consciously pursues the carnal happiness found in a "good little car and a warm deep thigh," an observation he relates after a tryst to the coast with his secretary, he is becoming aware of the futility of such an existence. He is vehement in his rejection of religion but also does not desire to become sunk in the everydayness of twentieth century existence. Binx is aware of his pursuit of the flesh as an empty endeavor but expresses reluctance in finding hope or answers in any one creed or object. In his eventual choice of his cousin Kate as a mate over his voluptuous secretary Linda, Binx chooses the search over resignation to pleasing the body as the panacea to an ailing spirit. Binx would rather be a pilgrim-or in Percy's own terms, a wayfarer-aware of the search than settling for becoming sunk in everydayness.

<15> Binx's perceptions on place are not symptoms of being sunk in everydayness. They are evidence first of his having already marginalized himself from society to the status of observer. Yet he is aware of his need for grounding. Before entering a theater and watching a movie, Binx must "learn something" about the theater's history or its employees.

If I did not talk to the theater owner or the ticket seller, I should be lost, cut loose metaphysically speaking. I should be seeing copy of a film which might be shown anywhere and at any time. There is a danger of slipping clean out of space and time. It is possible to become a ghost and not know whether one is in downtown Loews in Denver or suburban Bijou in Jacksonville. so it was with me. (75)

His desire to not simply slip "clean out of space" demonstrates Binx's intuition of the need for human community. Yet his strategic enactment of such community forming gestures reveals Binx's inability to fully embody, as in a non-self-conscious state, the precepts he espouses. This of course partly stems from his stance toward religion-he claims that God is not religious (The Moviegoer 197). Though Binx cannot embrace the religion of his familial roots-Catholicism and Presbyterianism, respectively-he does treat religion-as seen in his relationship with his hyper religious half-brother, Lonnie-as a mysteriously vital source of meaning. Binx thus finds himself betwixt the flesh's pleasures for which he feels less guilty about than aware of its shallowness, and the blind acceptance of religious faith, which while it offers a potentially sustaining narrative meaning, is a source of Truth toward Binx is deeply skeptical. Binx ultimately chooses the unattached pilgrim's search rather than become a member of any one faction, be it fleshly or spiritual.

<16> Caught in this Cartesian split existence, Binx articulates Percy's theory of place through the theorizing of everydayness and in the claim that cities possess a genie soul. Binx intimates that everydayness is a state of unawareness of the conditions and forces acting upon one's existence. Being sunk in everydayness leads one to not being aware that the examined life-regardless whether it's worth living-is not even remotely on 98% of American citizens' existential radar screen. Binx alights cautiously for he knows he has used up his old places and that his newly awakened search is now placing his "Little Way" in Gentilly under the introspective microscope. Of the place where he grew up, Binx says, "my old place is used up (places get used up by rotary and repetitive use) and when I awake, I awake in the grip of everydayness" (The Moviegoer 145). Binx concludes his definition of everydayness by categorizing the condition as a kind of entrenched existential ailment, the relief from which he experienced only once, in the Korean War: "Everydayness is the enemy. No search is possible. Perhaps there was a time when everydayness was not too strong and one could break its grip by brute strength. Now nothing breaks it-but disaster. Only once in my life was the grip of everydayness broken: when I lay bleeding in a ditch" (145)

<17> Part of Percy's purpose vis-à-vis Binx is to illustrate the interior workings of a mind suddenly discovering how his happily detached life has been a posturing of opting out of the Cartesian conundrum. Binx is gradually realizing that his Little Way of a good car and a warm thigh is nothing but a pleasant distraction from the pursuit of life's deeper meaning.

<18> The Moviegoer is Percy's least-proscriptive novel because its narrative focuses more on one man's awakening to the search than the abstract concepts or material objects that might provide existential solace. Where Binx does not find solace reveals the main point of Percy's diagnostic rather than proscriptive novelistic aim. On the prospect of traveling to Chicago, Binx refers to that city as "a great beast lying in wait." Binx relates further that it is his

fortune and misfortune to know how the spirit-presence of a strange place can enrich a man or rob a man but never leave him alone, how if a man travels lightly to a hundred strange cities and cares nothing for the risk he takes, he may find himself No on and Nowhere. Great day in the morning. What will it mean to go moseying down Michigan Avenue in the neighborhood of five million strangers, each shooting out his own personal rays? How can I deal with five million personal rays? (The Moviegoer 99)

This is Sartrean angst urbanized in the American midwest, and it is important to note Binx's worry of a person's possibly becoming "No one and nowhere," terms that Percy employs in his Covington essay. For Binx, Chicago represents an idea that obliterates individuality in its subsumption, or flattening, of the self into one among many strangers. It is not that Chicago is particularly ghostly but that the large city is not Binx's proximate ghostly place. Even in New Orleans, Binx must ground himself in the story of his most proximate places: the movie theaters he regularly visits. Chicago to Binx is an overwhelming Place that could easily render him without a released self. Binx's "secret existence among the happy shades of Elysian Fields" is actually a carnal inversion of St. Therese of Lisieux's spiritually-rooted anonymity (The Moviegoer 99). Such a life is possible only insofar as Binx can remain an observer-a moviegoer-of his rooted Southern existence.

<19> When Binx finally arrives in Chicago, his fears of place come to fruition. Binx longs for grounding and expresses a comical idea for an existential tour both:

if only somebody could tell me who built the damn station, the circumstances of the building, details of the wrangling between city officials and the railroad, so that I would not fall victim to it, the station, the very first crack off the bat. Every place of arrival should have a booth set up and manned by an ordinary person whose task it is to greet strangers and give them a little trophy of local space-time stuff-tell them of his difficulties in high school and put a pinch of soil in their pockets-in order to insure that the stranger shall not become an Anyone. (The Moviegoer 201-02)

Binx's positions Chicago as a vacuous place full of five-million strangers against the known haunted places of the American South. "Nobody but a Southerner," Binx argues, "knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North" (202). Where Chicago possesses a genie soul with a singularly-oppressive, industrially-fabricated spirit, the South's cities are "places populated with ghosts more real than people." To Binx, the Southerner knows all "about the genie-souls and living in haunted places like Shiloh and the Wilderness and Vicksburg and Atlanta where the ghosts of heroes walk abroad by day and are more real than people" (202).

<20> Percy expresses this same opinion in his Covington essay when he writes that while he "prefers to live in the South," he does so on "his own terms…It takes some doing to insert oneself in such a way as not to succumb to the ghosts of the Old South or the happy hustlers of the new Sunbelt South" ("Why I Live Where I Live" 4). Though Binx is not as far along in his search as Percy his creator, Binx serves as his author's canary in the coal mine of the twentieth century. Binx's observation on place and cities, and his flight back to the pleasantly haunted South in Gentilly indeed mirrors Percy's choice to live in the pleasant non-place of Covington, LA. Instead of placing Binx in a kind of Promised Land, however, Percy leaves his character with the itch of the search, which has "spoiled the pleasure of [his] tidy and ingenious life in Gentilly" (The Moviegoer 191).

<21> Binx and Percy also share a desire to reside in a safe place in which to search as well as ride out their existential storm. Here Bachelard is helpful in applying the phenomenology of inhabited spaces to Binx's and Percy's plight. Of the various spaces Bachelard psychoanalyzes in The Poetics of Space, he deals generally with what he calls the house and the universe. Specifically, he illustrates the way certain writers pit nature against houses. For Baudelaire, a writer who Bachelard calls "a great dreamer of curtains," houses offer protection against the harsh cold of winter" (39). Dreamers, Bachelard says, love a severe winter. Dreamer, or searchers in the mode of Binx and Percy, like a good storm or war injury to wake one from their spiritual apathy." At the beginning of The Moviegoer, Binx remarks on being shot and lying in a ditch in the Korean War. For Binx, "what [was] generally to be the best times are for me the worst times, and that worst times was one of the best" (The Moviegoer 10). A "disaster" such as being shot is actually the agent, such as a thunderstorm or heavy snow storm, that breaks the everydayness and wakes individuals from existential torpor.

<22> For Binx, the South is an inhabited space, and Gentilly is to Binx what Covington is for Percy-a house that shelters the dreaming, or process of awakening, that shapes the mode of existential search. Bachelard ultimately postures a house as a form of defense against the forces of the universe, an analogy that mirrors Percy's and Binx's commitment to the sustaining fruits of a Little Way. Here Bachelard expounds on the ways a house, set against the threat of a storm, also functions as the bastion against the chaos of living in a contingent universe:

And so faced with the bestial hostility of the storm and the hurricane, the house's virtues of protection and resistance are transposed into human values. The house acquires the physical and moral energy of a human body. It braces itself to receive the downpour, it girds its loins. When forced to do so, it bends with the blast, confident that it will right itself again in time, while continuing to deny any temporary defeats. Such a house as this invites mankind to heroism of cosmic proportions. It is an instrument with which to confront the cosmos. (Bachelard 46)

By appreciating how Binx finds comfort in his familiar haunted Southern places, we can claim that his inhabited life in Gentilly possesses the same generative benefits as Bachelard's house, which once "experienced is not an inert box." Bachelard's claim that "inhabited space transcends geometrical space" resonates with Binx's desire to ground himself in a known place (Bachelard 47).

<23> Still Binx and Percy both are aware of the need for keeping one's distance from one's chosen place-i.e. not becoming stuck or sunk in everydayness. Binx's response is to engage in the search toward meaning, even if the object is ambiguous. Part of his search entails him reflecting on his identity in response to external clues he observes in the world, and one such clue is his acute awareness of Jews. Binx senses there is import in his awareness but is not sure what the clue portends. Reflecting on one of his theosophist relative's claim that Binx is a reincarnated Jew, Binx remarks: "Perhaps that is it. Anyhow it is true that I am Jewish by instinct. We share the shame exile. The fact is however I am more Jewish than the Jews I know. They are more at home than I am. I accept my exile" (The Moviegoer 89). According to Binx, "when a man awakens to the possibility of a search and when such a man passes a Jew in the street for the first time, he is like Robinson Crusoe seeing the footprint on the beach" (89). For Crusoe, the footprint provides concrete evidence that he is not alone. For Binx, the Jew on the street is evidence that a member of God's chosen tribe still remains. This brief mentioning of the Jews alongside Dafoe's stranded hero represents Percy's attempt to position Binx in a newly articulated space with respect to the historically symbol-laden people. That Binx feels at home in his exile demonstrates how Percy's theory of place serves as a creative survival strategy for a character like Binx caught between the Cartesian divide.

<24> Bachelard also employs Crusoe when describing the ways artists attempt to reinvigorate the muse of their creative pursuit. After quoting Van Gogh's brother, in which the brother admonished Van Gogh to retain something of the original character of a Robinson Crusoe, Bachelard claims that when a "dreamer can reconstruct the world from an object that he transforms magically through his care of it, we become convinced that everything in the life of a poet is germinal" (69-70). Borrowing from Bachelard's language, we can view Binx's penchant to Kierkegaardian feats of repetition and rotation (visiting the same theater again, experiencing a blow to his war-injured shoulder), and Percy's theorizing of Covington as a pleasant non-place, as attempts to magically transform through artistic theoretical care their chosen places of residence. Binx ultimately is unable to incorporate the tug of his physical desire into his Godless framework. He is astute however to note that his only hope is to remain on the search from within his ghost haunted suburb and city.

<25> Percy appears to have succeeded in his search, by his own lights, because unlike Binx, he has articulated a space (Covington, Louisiana) that is not haunted by the South's ghosts but is proximate to the sustaining particulars of a Southern city. For both Binx and Percy, place is a space in which to ride out the storm of history and the insane present. A city is a house that inspires in its anonymity even as it shelters with its familiarity.

<26> New Orleans, San Francisco, New York City, Chicago, Paris are cities saturated by history and, insofar as cities possess sentience, are fully self-aware of their singular identity. A writer living in one of these cities would have to take care not to let the city define him or her according to the pre-conceived notions attached. Recall Percy's Vieux Carree Syndrome. Elsewhere in New Seeds Thomas Merton defines solitude as a type of kenosis, a self-emptying, that has its correlation in Percy's idea of the ex-suicide. Merton writes: "the man who has found solitude is empty, as if he had been emptied by death. He has advanced beyond all horizons. There are no directions left in which he can travel. This is a country whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. You do not find it by traveling but by standing still" (81).

<27> Times change of course. And late in his life, Percy jokes that he can hear the grass growing outside his Covington home. He confesses that he is tired of cutting his grass, a symbol perhaps of suburban servitude. And so New Orleans finally sounds nice to him. Place for Percy is not an end but a means to achieving a perspective: that the human condition is an unrooted experience. Home for Percy is a mindset that frames wherever he happens to be. Covington is the non-place for him for a time." He was aware that his in his Covington existence he could become mis-placed. New Orleans then would become a non-place, if the tourists ruined it, which would be for Percy a delightful outcome.

<28> The non-place is the place for Percy because it is a place where he could imagine, dream, diagnose, and forecast unencumbered, left alone, in a cottage near the post-lapsarian garden of New Orleans. A non-place like Covington allows Percy anonymity and proximity. The former: to speak freely; the second: the audience to whom he can freely speak. For someone aware of the doldrums of an ordinary Wednesday afternoon, when a few inches of bourbon offer temporary escape, one does not look to place as the source of inspiration (i.e., an end in itself) but rather as a conduit through which to filter the message. It is within the locus of his "pleasant backwater" life, composed of an intentionally distanced but still involved relationship to his community, that Percy was able now and then to drive "across the lake to New Orleans, still an entrancing city, eat trout amandine at Galatoires, drive home to my pleasant, uninteresting place, try to figure out how the world got into such a fix, take a drink, and listen to the frogs tune up" ("Why I Live Where I Live "9).

<29> In both his fiction and non-fiction, Percy applied his schematic of place to the Cartesian conundrum. He believed a individuals must take care to not become entrapped or lost in the deserts of theory (an intellectually abstracted life spent in the mind) and consumption (a carnal life in which experiences fill the void). Kierkegaard defined three main stages of life that people experience: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. Percy embraced instead a kind surrendering to the despair, or ache, of being by becoming a pilgrim-citizen of a pleasant non-place. His choice of Covington represents a willfully marginal existence that allows him the perspective of proximate observer. That his fictional characters share the same marginal positioning in their fictive worlds illustrates how Percy's choice to live in Covington influenced the way he imaginatively plotted his characters' search for meaning as taking place on the margins. Here, Frank Kermode, in The Sense of an Ending, articulates why western civilization has played with plots throughout history: "It is our insatiable interest in the future (towards which we are biologically orientated) that makes it necessary for us to relate to the past, and to the moment in the middle, by plots; by which I mean not only concordant imaginary incidents, but all the other, perhaps subtler, concords that can be arranged in a narrative" (52).

<30> When we view Binx Bolling as a figure who constructs his own spatial experiences, regardless of whether he's satisfied with his results, we see him engaging in spatial theorizing as an existential sustaining enterprise. "It is not that we are connoisseurs of chaos," writes Kermode, "but that we are surrounded by it, and equipped for co-existence with it only by our fictive powers" (64). Just as borders are imaginary lines projected from maps onto geographical reality, theories of cities as non-places or haunted spaces represent fictional frameworks overlaid onto a chaotic reality. And by situating oneself on the margins of imagined spatial constructs, a character like Binx Bolling and a writer like Walker Percy create environments in which they are "sufficiently detached, marooned, bemused," like a Robinson Crusoe, in order to "catch a glimpse" of the meaning of life.

<31> Percy's choice to live in Covington ultimately represents a kind of personal death, a renunciation of his former life in Alabama and Mississippi, where his reluctance as a college student to accompany Shelby Foote to meet William Faulkner foreshawdowed his reluctance to embrace the living ghosts of his home region. For Percy, people are places too, and Faulkner was an iconic a place as any famous city. And so Percy sought solitude on his own terms. Covington provides Percy a shelter of retreat, an artistic hermitage, in a sleeper suburb just down the road from America's ghost town of history. In its proximity to New Orleans, Percy maintained contact with a place entrenched in the past. In its separateness, Covington afforded him a life of anonymous retreat. But, to use an analogy that underscores the difference between religious intent and vocational function, this movement is not so much a retreat from the world as it is an monastic effort to pray for the world through writing.

<32> The writer and fellow-doctor Robert Coles, with whom Percy developed a close friendship, writes that the Percys purposefully eschewed a life in New Orleans, a city which, though only twenty-five miles away, was

a little too much for them-too charming, attractive, tempting. They wanted quiet rather than diversion-and maybe, to draw on Kierkegaard's way of putting things, they wanted a certain freedom from the "aesthetic stage" in order to pursue life "on the plane of the ethical." […] Even in Covington they sought seclusion, though by no means were they hermits. They went to church regularly, sometimes on weekdays as well as Sunday." (Coles 73)

Though Percy was social in his life in Covington-he dined at local sea food diners and spoke at regional schools and colleges-we deepen our understanding of his literary vocation by seeing him, if not as a societal recluse, then as an artistic hermit. And in speaking of a hermit's hut, Bachelard claims that such a space "possesses the felicity of intense poverty; as destitution increases it gives us access to absolute refuge" (32).

<33> By interpreting Percy's choice to live in Covington as a manifestation of his artistic need to live adjacent to an exotic place (the ghost haunted garden of history that is New Orleans) but remain free of such a place's attachments and expectations, we can view Percy's life in Covington as a willful contradiction of place in which his imagination comes alive." In a non-place like Covington, he creates a solitude from which he observes the dislocated South and the dislocated 20th century modern human being. There he embraced his Catholic faith, and like Thomas Merton, went into his own desert "not to escape other men but in order to find them in God" (Merton 53). Covington then is Percy's desert of solitude where, happily for him, everyone ignores the cranky old writer.

<34> Of his life in Covington, Percy writes in "The Questions They Never Asked Me" that though he had lived in Covington for thirty years, he was less well known than the Budweiser distributor. The only famous person in town was a linebacker for the Rams and Percy liked it that way. Percy reveled in the freedom of being thought an idler, as opposed to a writer in Sartre's France for whom expectations could enliven or suffocate. One day near the end of Percy's life a fellow Covington citizen asked Percy:

"What do you, Doc?"

"Well, I write books."

"I know that, Doc, but what do you really do?"

"Nothing."

He nodded. He was pleased and I was pleased. (401)

Works Cited

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press,1994.

Coles, Robert. Walker Percy: An American Search. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1978.

Kermode, Frank. The Sense of An Ending. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000.

Merton, Thomas. New Seeds of Contemplation. New York: New Directions, 1972.

Percy, Walker. The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy. Edited by Jay Tolson. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997.

---. The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other. New York: Picador, 1975.

---. The Moviegoer. New York: Vintage, 1989.

---. "The Questions They Never Asked Me." Signposts in a Strange Land. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1991.

---. "Why I Live Where I Live." Signposts in a Strange Land. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1991.

Tally, Robert T. Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel: A Postmodern Iconography. New York: Continuum, 2011.

---. Spatiality. London: Routledge, 2013.

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