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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (63052)	10/21/2002 4:21:51 PM
From: Tom Clarke	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

I think you're on to something about Rachel, but Percy is reading more into the story. He also wrote, "For the fact is, the peculiar merit of this novel is traceable to virtues which are both subliterary and transliterary.. For one thing, it is science fiction - parts of it appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which I take to be a high-class sci-fi pulp - and its prose, while competent, is not distinguished...." "....Rather has the mystery to do with conflicting anthropologies; that is, views of man, the way man is. Everyone has an anthropology. There is no not having one. If a man says he does not, all he is saying is that his anthropology is implicit, a set of assumptions which he has not thought to call into question. One might even speak of a consensus anthropology which is implicit in the culture itself, part of the air we breathe. There is such a thing and it is something of a mishmash and does not necessarily make sense. It might be called the Western democratic-technological humanist view of man as higher organism invested in certain traditional trappings of a more or less nominal Judeo-Christianity. One still hears, and no one makes much objection to it, that "man is made in the image of God." Even more often, one hears such expressions as "the freedom and sacredness of the individual." This anthropology is familiar enough. It is in fact the standard intellectual baggage of most of us. Most of the time, it doesn't matter that this anthropology is a mishmash, disjecta membra. Do you really mean that God made man in His image? Well, hm, it is a manner of speaking. If He didn't and man is in fact an organism in an environment with certain needs and drives which he satisfies from the environment, then what do you mean by talking about "the freedom and sacredness of the individual"? What is so sacred about the life of one individual, especially if he is hungry, sick, suffering, useless? Well, hm, we are speaking of "values"; we mean that man has a sacred right and is free to choose his own life or, failing that, a creative death. And suppose he is competent to do so, may we choose it for him? Well-- So it goes. At the end of an age and the beginning of another, at a time when ages overlap, views of man also overlap and such mishmashes are commonplace. We get used to a double vision of man, like watching a ghost on TV. Or, put mathematically, different ages locate man by different coordinates. In a period of overlap, he might be located by more than one set of coordinates. Culture being what it is, even the most incoherent anthropology seems "natural," just because it is part of the air we breathe. The incoherence is revealed - and the reader experiences either incomprehension or eerie neck-pricklings - only when one set of coordinates is challenged by the other: Look, it is either this way or that way, but it can't be both ways. The anthropology in A Canticle for Liebowitz is both radical and overt. Accordingly, the reader is either uncomprehending, or vaguely discomfitted - or he experiences eerie neck-pricklings...." Sure wish I had gotten those neck-pricklings when I read the book. What do you suppose he's talking about?