Walker Percy's Lancelot

Recently, I read Walker Percy's Lancelot (1977) for the first time. While reading it, I could not help thinking about Ernest Gaines and his work. The reason for this, partly, has to do with the setting of Percy's novel. Taking place in Southern Louisiana, Percy invokes places like Belle Isle, New Orleans, Felciana Parish, and False River. Along with the references to places that appear in Gaines' novels, I continually thought about the perspectives of the two authors. Gaines writes from the point of view of a Southern African American man and about the African American community he grew up in, visited after he went to California, and resides within now. In contrast to the rural setting in South Louisiana that Gaines writes about, Percy views the world from the point of view of a upper-class, Catholic, white male.

The main item that stood out to me in relation to these differing perspectives comes from the ways that Percy presents African Americans in the novel. Lancelot Lamar comes from an upper-class Southern family on the downside of its prominence. He still maintains African American servants, and they play a role in his life and his attempts to catch his wife cheating on him with a movie director. At one point, Lamar enlists Elgin to record his wife at night. Of Elgin, Lamar says,

An odd thought: I remember thinking at the time that nothing really changes, not even Elgin going from pickaninny to M.I.T. smart boy. For you see, even in doing that and not in casting about for a technical solution, he was still in a sense "my nigger"; and my watching him, waiting for him, was piece and part of the old way we had of ascribing wondrous powers to "them," if they were "ours."

Lancelot deals with the deterioration of society, and specifically a Southern society. In this context, Percy's representation of Elgin makes sense. However, what is worth thinking about is how Percy's representations of African Americans differs from a writer such as Gaines. Both write about Louisiana and the South, so even though Gaines stated in 1986 that he hadn't really read Percy, they are still in conversation with one another.

For information of race in Percy's The Moviegoer, see:

MacKethan, Lucinda H. "Redeeming Blackness: Urban Allegories Of O'Connor, Percy, and Toole."
Studies in The Literary Imagination 27.2 (1994): 29-39. Print.