Excerpts from an Interview with Percy

These are a few of my favorite responses by Percy from his interview with Linda Whitney Hobson in 1985.

Q: Why especially [the peculiar predicament of the late twentieth-century man] in the South?
A: Well, in writing The Second Coming, I found the South, and particularly North Carolina, a valuable setting because of the peculiar confluence of two things that have happened in the South in the past ten or twenty years: number one, what's been called the power shift--the shift of power and money to the South. For the first time since the Civil War, the South is getting rich. And the other thing is the tremendous re-Christianization of the South--high-powered evangelical Christianity. Thus, it's of value to me to take a man like Will Barrett and set him down in the South: he finds himself in what the psychiatrists call a "double bind"--a no-win situation. From the beginning, and all through his life he has experienced a loss of sovereignty which has occurred in the lives of most of us as well, even though we appear to be freer, to have more, to be more individualistic, to have access to more than any people on earth. Despite this, a loss of sovereignty has occurred so that we are more subject to invisible authority--scientists and so forth. We now think of what one should do in a certain situation, not what I should do. Will Barrett is a man who, whatever his faults, has reclaimed sovereignty; he demands to know what it's all about--and he always has.

Q: As long as we're discussing dramatic conflict, let's discuss the conflict between you and classical psychiatry. The relationship between Will and Allie in The Second Coming seems to belie what psychologists and psychiatrists counsel people to do these days. They tell people to sit down and come to know and approve of themselves by themselves, and there's a fallacy in that kind of solitary pep talk.
A: Yes. You have to define that self through ordeal, which the psychologists don't tell people. And God knows, it takes an awful lot of ordeal--Will has to almost shoot himself and Allie has to go crazy--and what I'm saying is that it takes an awful lot these days to come to a sense of self. It doesn't do any good to be told how to live, and it doesn't do any good to tell yourself how to live. You have to learn it yourself, through ordeal. And the language fails, unless you do it by ordeal.