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Lancelot

por Walker Percy

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9921120,822 (3.59)37
"A modern knight-errant on a quest after evil; grotesque, convincing and chilling." --The New York Times Book Review Fed up with the excesses of the 1970s, Lancelot Andrews Lamar, a liberal lawyer and distinguished member of the New Orleans gentry, is determined to stop the modern world's ethical collapse. His quest begins with his wife--an actress who he suspects has been cheating on him for years. Though he initially plans only to gather proof of her infidelity, Lancelot quickly descends into a fog of obsession. And as he crosses the line from sanity into madness, he will try once and for all to purify the world or destroy it in the attempt.   Mesmerizing and unforgettable, Lancelot is a masterful story of one man's collision with the follies of modern culture, and a thought-provoking look at the nature of good and evil.… (más)
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Following the example of Camus' novel, The Fall, Walker Percy styled his fourth novel as a confessional with Lancelot Andrewes Lamar, a disenchanted liberal lawyer, as the titular confessor. Lancelot is packed with philosophical and theological questions, questions debated in his essay collection Message in the Bottle (1975). Lancelot, like Percy's previous protagonists, has lost himself to everydayness, sex, consumerism, newspapers, and television. He is jolted out of his alienation only by catastrophe: his wife has been unfaithful—his daughter is not his. Percy, a Christian novelist, uses violence, shock, and the bizarre as a catalyst to promote a self-directed search. Lancelot, like the characters in Percy’s earlier novels, undertakes the search only after catastrophe occurs.

Through a series of fragmented flashbacks, Lancelot, failed lawyer, ex-grid star, Rhodes scholar, and madman, travels through his memory in an attempt to discover what went wrong. He relives the past, while rambling in a monologue to a silent priest who acts as a sounding board.

The search begins, as in Percy’s earlier novels, by confronting the haunted past, because only by understanding the past can Lance contemplate the future. In doing so he must, as Percy has suggested in his philosophical essays, “stand in front of the house of his childhood in order to recover himself.” Once there Lance discovers his father was a crook. He must then not only become aware of sin, of evil, but he must also see it and experience it. What he sees is his wife committing adultery, his daughter participating in an orgy, and his son admitting his homosexuality. The issue is twofold: first Lancelot must see his wife’s unfaithfulness; then in his quest for sin, he must experience evil—he must kill. While searching for evil, he discovers that “sexual sin was the unholy grail I sought.” Because his wife’s unfaithfulness jolts him out of his ordinary existence, he questions whether “good can come from evil,” and he undertakes a search “not for God but for evil.” “Dishonor,” Lancelot learns in this first-person narration, “is sweeter and more mysterious than honor. It holds a secret,” and he is determined to discover the secret.

So, the protagonist experiences evil and discovers despair. But for Percy, as with Kierkegaard, despair is a stage toward hope. Lancelot despairs of the modern world, “The great whoredom and fagdom of America.” But he visualizes a new life, a new order of things; “there will be a tight-lipped courtesy between men. And chivalry toward women. Women must be saved from the whoredom they have chosen.” His new life, as he visualizes it, involves a retreat to “a cabin and a barn and fifty acres in the Blue Ridge not far from Lexington, Virginia.” Joining him, he assumes, will be Anna, a victim of gang rape, who along with Lance is a patient in the institute. Lance links his future to Anna’s.

Percy, termed a stylist by many, has progressed in his style; the monologue device spans the novel. Yet he takes this novel one step further than Love in the Ruins, where the main character awaits the end of the world. Here Lancelot ends the modern world for himself and plans to start a new one. Again, as in his earlier novels, Percy reverses the traditional ways of making do in the modern world. Average happiness is conceived as despair, sin is better than indifference, forgetting better than remembering, wonder better than certainty, tragedy better than an ordinary day, and madness better than sanity.

The new novel, with Lancelot rambling to a priest in confessional fashion, breaks from Percy’s previous style. The monologue, which pretends to be a dialogue is broken at the novel’s conclusion when the priest answers “yes” to Lance’s newfound understanding and ability to change, to heal his broken self, as Percy has all his characters do at the conclusions of his novels. Percy, a Catholic, always incorporates religion into his novels, and Percival, the priest-psychiatrist, echoes Father Rinaldo Smith and Kev Kevin of Love in the Ruins.

The protagonists in Percy’s four novels all seek alternatives to their present alienated existence, alternatives which will enable them to function in a fragmented and empirically oriented society. Consequently, the fragmented self exemplified by Binx of The Moviegoer, Will of The Last Gentleman, Dr. More of Love in the Ruins, and Lance in this novel is reunified in varying degrees by the novels’ ends. Other similarities also exist between Lancelot and Percy’s previous novels. Binx is a moviegoer in that novel; Lancelot is a television watcher, while Margot is an actress with a company filming a movie in Belle Isle. Lancelot realizes, as Binx eventually did, “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 illusions.” Percy also repeats his intrigue with catastrophe as a means of “rendering the broken self whole” in Lancelot. Binx in The Moviegoer, Sutter Vaught in The Last Gentleman, and Dr. More in Love in the Ruins realize that “only in times of illness or disaster or death are people real.”

Although Percy continues to pose philosophical questions in Lancelot—can good come out of evil, does tragedy heighten reality, how is one to live in the modern world—he has not progressed in developing new characters and ideas. They all echo and re-echo his last three novels as well as his philosophical essays. Lancelot continues a progression in Percy’s writing, for Lance, like the other protagonists, undertakes a search—in this case, a search for evil. He begins a new world for himself by personally and symbolically trying to destroy the modern world, by understanding evil through his participation in it.

The fragmented digressions of Lance’s mind are the vehicle Percy uses to convey his philosophy. I found myself getting bogged down in the author’s philosophical gymnastics over questions of the significance of the past, the question of good and evil, and the alienation and fragmentation of modern man. This made the novel seem a bit more tedious than its predecessors. This may be because he moved beyond his earlier approach to life as a journey and portrayed this narrative in confessional form. His use of this form seemed insufficient and led to a feeling that the protagonist, Lancelot Lamar was ranting at times. ( )
  jwhenderson | Sep 2, 2021 |
Who is sane and who is crazy in this novel of Southern Gothic horrors of alcohol, sex, lust, jealousy, a hurricane and madness. And who better to tell this story than a true son of the South like Walker Percy, who spins a page-turning story with a twist at the end. ( )
  etxgardener | Dec 31, 2020 |
What a great book, and completely relevant. ( )
  billt568 | Aug 25, 2020 |
I was first introduced to Walker Percy at much too young an age, as I look back on it now. After hearing Charles Colson recommend "The Thanatos Syndrome" as a great "summer read," I happened to run across the book at my local library, so I decided to give it a go. I was probably not more than 15 at the time. Also, I was a homeschooled, church kid. Those of you who've read "Thanatos" can probably imagine, then, what a shock that book was. I had no idea, at the time, that Percy was a Catholic writer or that the driving theme of his work is the distressed ennui of "modern" humanity. Without any "context," I found the book immensely perplexing and deeply disturbing. However, I also remember feeling/thinking in some half-formed way that what I was reading was 1) deeply "real" in the sense of true-to-life-in-the-modern-world and 2) was critically important, though I couldn't have articulated how.
Now, I suppose in the name of fairness, I should note that after finishing "Thanatos," I didn't pick up another Percy book. Perhaps the reason is that I read fiction for relaxation and, if you pay close attention to Walker Percy, there's not much "relaxing" about his insight into the amoral morass of modern society.
However, picking up "Lancelot," I felt very much like I was returning to the same world as "Thanatos," a world where the oft-celebrated hyper-sexualization of society has, instead of liberating us, has driven us to the brink of self-destructive insanity. Lancelot Andrewes Lamar's self-styled "confession" betrays the absolute cognitive failure that has accompanied modernity's rejection of moral authority, typified in this fictitious member of that decaying Louisiana gentry class Percy depicts so well…educated, wealthy, and slowly coming unhinged. That the book is narrated in first-person puts the reader in the very uncomfortable position of being Lance's confessor.
All that I can say is that Lance is a beguiling figure who draws you in. He's been under treatment for an entire year, after all, and is, by all accounts, cured and psychically whole. This final recitation of his family trauma clearly is meant to mark his final healing. However, ever-so-slowly, cracks begin to appear in the façade of Lancelot's sanity. By the end of the story, it appears that he is victim of that most dangerous of all delusions, a rationalized one and, furthermore, by our own sympathy with his story, we, the readers, are implicated in the perversity of his thinking.
There are few writers that I've found who can depict the moral bankruptcy of modernity with as much power as Walker Percy. He has this subtle way of turning the reader's eye inward, moving us gently toward self-reflection rather than judgment. There's been a nearly 25-year-long hiatus in my journey with Walker Percy, but I have a sense that, over the years, I've grown into his works and can see now, with frightening clarity, the monsters that lurk in the shadows of our best selves and societies.
Readers of Walker Percy, beware! Here is a man of deep moral insight and conviction who cuts straight to diseased heart of all that is wicked in our world. And he doesn't have to be "preachy"; he just lets us speak for ourselves and our own words betray our hearts… ( )
  Jared_Runck | Jan 12, 2019 |
“I cannot tolerate this age. And I will not.” — Walker Percy, “Lancelot”

People who do terrible things always blame somebody else, usually their victims. Just read the accounts of recent atrocities, or much older ones. So it is with Lancelot Lamar, a prisoner in a mental facility in Walker Percy's 1977 novel “Lancelot.” He has done something terrible, though we do not find out what it is until late in the story.

The novel is a stream-of-consciousness monologue that, as Lancelot is talking to an old friend who has become a priest, is part reminiscence and part confession. Like a typical mental patient, he can't stay on subject, so his narrative twists and turns over a broad area, making the novel a difficult read that readers may or may not find worth the effort.

Lancelot tells how he discovered that his wife has been unfaithful. His daughter has a blood type she couldn't possibly have if he were her father. Margot, a woman whom he once could not breathe without (as he says repeatedly), is now an actress in a film being shot partly on the Lamar estate in New Orleans. The film features a hurricane, and coincidentally a real hurricane is now bearing down on the city. He sets up cameras in various bedrooms to determine exactly who is sleeping with whom. Then he takes action.

The name Lancelot is not the only allusion to King Arthur, Camelot and all that. "Guinevere didn't think twice about adultery," he says at one point. He makes frequent mention of the Holy Grail and his own quest for an “unholy grail.”

The story has an upbeat ending, or at least Lancelot thinks that it does. But isn’t he crazy? ( )
  hardlyhardy | Nov 2, 2018 |
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"A modern knight-errant on a quest after evil; grotesque, convincing and chilling." --The New York Times Book Review Fed up with the excesses of the 1970s, Lancelot Andrews Lamar, a liberal lawyer and distinguished member of the New Orleans gentry, is determined to stop the modern world's ethical collapse. His quest begins with his wife--an actress who he suspects has been cheating on him for years. Though he initially plans only to gather proof of her infidelity, Lancelot quickly descends into a fog of obsession. And as he crosses the line from sanity into madness, he will try once and for all to purify the world or destroy it in the attempt.   Mesmerizing and unforgettable, Lancelot is a masterful story of one man's collision with the follies of modern culture, and a thought-provoking look at the nature of good and evil.

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