"Are you listening?": Lancelot; Derrida, and aporetic reading.

Bergholtz, Benjamin

The hero of the postmodern novel is a man who has forgotten his bad memories and conquered his present ills and who finds himself in the victorious secular city. His only problem now is to keep from blowing his brains out.

Walker Percy, The Message in the Bottle (112)

LANCELOT LAMAR, THE PROTAGONIST OF WALKER PERCY'S LANCELOT, reflects what Percy takes to be the logical conclusion of living in a world bereft of belief--in progressive ideals, in community, in any transcendental signifier. As the epigraph suggests, this conclusion appears quite bleak. Without a villain to overcome or a source of guidance beyond himself, the hero of the postmodern novel Lancelot drowns in a sea of self-defeating nihilism, emotional apathy, and seemingly vacuous representations: "The world had gone crazy ... the movie folk were trafficking in illusions in a real world but the real world thought that its reality could only be found in the illusions" (152). While Lancelot clearly dramatizes the effects of mind-numbing representations on both Lance and his peers, its own self-reflexive representations function in ways both fascinating and contradictory, thereby highlighting structural aporias ingrained in the act of reading which seem to leave the reader, like our irresponsible hero, doomed to inaction. Although both Lance and Percy lament the loss of the "Real" and assert that our trust in the authority of illusions annuls feeling, some of the most poignant, perplexing, and potentially empowering moments of the novel come through our participation in these illusions. Collectively, these moments signify alternative ways of approaching the text outside of the either/or choice the novel's ending seems to demand: "There is no other way than yours or mine, true?" (257), Lance asks his only interlocutor, Percival. These alternatives, unexplored by Percy's critics, may offer hope to readers who would rather not accept either the fascism of Lance or the theology of Percival as the unequivocal answer to our postmodern malaise.

It might seem strange to construct an argument based on what readers "hope" a text "means." Among other things, it implies that I may be forcing a secular reading on a text which begs to be read through a theological lens. But therein lies the problem and the haunting power of Lancelot, from Lance's first words commanding both Percival and the reader to "Come into my cell" (3) through its ambiguous conclusion, the text implicates us in Lance's violent quest for interpretive justice. For Lance, the quest begins when he accidentally discovers that his daughter Siobhan's blood type does not match his own, leading to the conclusion that she must not be his daughter after all. This finding ignites a "worm of interest" (27), which ultimately turns horrific, as Lance's search to expose the moral depravity of his unfaithful wife, Margot, the exploitative moviemakers at Belle Isle, and the culture generally ends when he consummates the depravity he seeks to uncover, murdering Margot and several others in the process. Lance's search becomes our own the moment we enter his cell "in the nuthouse" (3). Without the aid of another voice, the reader alone must sift through an obviously distorted narrative to answer the questions Lance asks with unremitting urgency: "Am I wrong or have you reached a decision of sorts? No? You're waiting for me to finish?" (254). Thus, while the novel thematizes the possibility of interpretive violence through Lance's heinous actions, its refusal to prescribe our response does not ensure our escape from this violence. Instead, Percival's final and only words should also be our own: "yes," it is time to respond, to interpret, to decide, and to do so alone. Hence the feeling of aporia, the paradoxical non-road we must cross. Considering the thematic and formal attention the novel lends to the importance and danger of the interpretive decision, my contrapuntal argument is not, therefore, to insist upon a secular (and singular) reading of Percy's novel, but rather to suggest that we be open to the ramifications of a work which makes any reading both perilous and imperative.

Paying attention to Percy's metafictional techniques is obviously a key to recognizing these ramifications, as they demonstrate how Lancelot complicates, rather than complements, the linguistic and religious claims he develops in his nonfiction. I should note that I'm not the first critic to lend attention to the role metafiction plays in Lancelot. Examining the similarity between the moralist Percy and the protagonist Lance, Michael Kobre argues that "Percy--inadvertently perhaps--satirizes his description of himself" (76). The point that Lancelot's self-reflexivity may implicate Percy is an interesting one, but one I aim to turn on its head. If the work unintentionally satirizes the author, what might this reflexivity mean to readers already placed uncomfortably close to Percival through the novel's second-person narration? If, as Kobre asserts, Percy's novel consists of a "house of mirrors" (77), then the mirrors in this funhouse do more than reshape Percy's image--they reshape ours. These refracted self-images force readers to reconsider precarious relationships with the acts of reading and interpreting not just the novel but the world beyond it, facilitating the type of aporetic feelings which the writings of Jacques Derrida continually explore. As Derrida suggests throughout his oeuvre, though aporia remains a frightening position, it is also an affirmative and incredibly important one, and perhaps the only one through which readers can approach an ethical and responsible practice of reading. (1)

While a Derridean reading may seem iconoclastic in light of Percy's Catholicism, it actually follows through on what many of Percy's readers have already gestured toward. Clearly, there is much support for the claim offered by Gary Ciuba, and repeated throughout the scholarship on Lancelot, that the conclusion "makes it clear that the new apocalyptic order must be based on either Lancelot's or Percival's way" (111). At the same time, however, even the critics endorsing this conclusion acknowledge that the whole text is steeped in levels of ambiguity that implicitly problematize an either/or interpretation. (2) Examples abound: John Desmond notes that Lancelot--"Percy's most dangerous novel"--emphasizes "the near collapse of meaning," but he still concludes that Percy affirms the "possibility of 'new life' in the relation between Lance and his 'recovered' priest friend" (148); Jerome Christensen argues that Lancelot's rage "blunts the critic's diagnostic instrument" in a way that puts us in the same interpretive "predicament" as Lance (107). Nonetheless, he argues that the novel "demand[s] a conjecture," and concludes that the only reasonable conjecture must be based on "Not just love, but Christian love" (118).

While I agree that Lancelot, like every novel, demands that the reader make an interpretive decision, I don't see where the text establishes that this decision must be a Christian one. Criticism asserting that we must read Percy's story through a Christian lens demonstrates a certain anxiety or unease about interpreting the novel outside of the framework Percy constructs for it. The aforementioned critics seem to recognize, but ultimately reject, the ambiguity implicit in the novel's strange ending. The constraints of this approach reach their logical conclusion in the work of Stephen Yarbrough. He brings forth several strands of the text which suggest that reaching a conclusion is impossible, but he nonetheless determines that "A deconstructive reading"--such as the one he has just put forth--"is inappropriate for Lancelot because Lance seeks certainty, not uncertainty" (277). At one point in his argument, Yarbrough admits that Percy, like Percival the priest, "is silent until the very end of the story," a silence that would seem to mean Percy doesn't tell us how to read the book. Nonetheless, Yarbrough follows this admission in the very next sentence with the paradoxical assertion that, through his silence, "Percy is saying ... that we must have faith and wait in humility for the time when all things will be revealed" (290). Why the reader must seek the same certainty as Lance is not made clear, particularly given how dangerous his search for certainty becomes. Similarly, no argument is put forth explaining how exactly Percy is both silent and speaking at the same time. Both of these declarations highlight the logical jumps necessitated by a commitment to reconciling the novel's ambiguity with Percy's Catholicism.

An interpretation situating itself closer to the novel, I believe, must account for the fact that the text repeatedly and emphatically dramatizes the danger of either/or paradigms, and thus the necessity of shifting out of them. The danger of binary thinking is evident in Lance's dangerous dystopian vision: "There will be leaders and there will be followers.... There will be honorable men and there will be thieves.... The New Woman.... will be free to be a lady or a whore" (178-79). Thinking in terms of good and evil, heroes and villains, the vision of Lance or of Percival, and so on, is extremely problematic because it soothes over the situatedness, nuance, and singularity of each human being and of each decision. Reductive by definition, either/or thinking treats the uniqueness of every singularity as a set of definable elements capable of dichotomous grouping. In the context of Lancelot, it also absolves us of making future decisions, as Yarbrough concedes, by implying that we ought to simply "wait" for our fate to be "revealed" (290). This leads one to the questionable conclusion that acting (rather than waiting in humility) ruins Lance, when the opposite is closer to the truth: i.e., Lance's entire adult life has been characterized by inaction and reductive thinking. To avoid turning out like Lance, therefore, readers need to develop a conception of decision-making that is neither reductive nor passive.

While I believe Derrida offers just this conception, Percy's remarks in Lost in the Cosmos suggest he would disagree. Calling deconstruction the "whimsical stepchild" of his "semiotic foe" structuralism, Percy writes, "I do not feel obliged to speak of the deconstructionists" (87). He may not want to speak of them, but his dangerous novel suggests that we try, since it thematizes the same aporias the deconstructionists do. To understand this point, it is necessary to put deconstruction in its proper context. Based on his dismissive comments, Percy seems to lump deconstruction together with the other "causes" of our modern malaise--scientism, behaviorism, and an endless trust in pure reason, all of which he defines as factors contributing to the crisis in language and communication represented in Lancelot. To be fair to Percy, the version of deconstruction he knew in 1977 may have been the caricature put forth by some early readers of Derrida. He might have understood deconstruction as a critical "practice" or "tool," wielded by a privileged autonomous critic and used to dismantle all systems of meaning, resulting in meaningless relativism and nihilism. Derrida himself, however, stresses that deconstruction is not a practice but an event that does not await the deliberation of a sovereign subject: "Deconstruction takes place, it is an event ... Lt deconstructs it-self" ("Letter" 4). Deconstruction happens because, as Percy almost admits in The Message in the Bottle, we do not encounter the world "as it is" (72), but through a differential and arbitrary symbolic system. Because this symbolic system only makes sense through a series of oppositions and contexts which, by definition, have no absolute definition themselves, the meaning of any sign can never be univocal. This process extends ad infinitum, as Derrida asserts in Positions: "There are only, everywhere, differences and traces of traces" (26). Because we cannot approach any concept in itself, we can never be certain of our most stable institutions, laws, cultural practices, or beliefs, since their presumed stability is itself the fiction which their authority depends upon.

The suggestion that we cannot rely upon any stable authority is not, however, a move to nihilism or solipsism, as any serious analysis of Derrida makes clear. On the contrary, he remarks in "Force of Law" that the "privileged instability" (21) deconstruction refuses to rest upon means that experience is characterized by paradoxical pulls felt only as aporias, non-roads which nonetheless must be traversed every time one makes an interpretive decision. Aporia does not absolve one of responsibility or of the need to decide and to interpret justly, but rather "hyperbolically raises the stakes of exacting justice" (20). Derrida goes as far as suggesting that "there is no justice without this experience, however impossible it may be, of aporia" (16), because any decision that does not go through aporia isn't really a decision at all, but rather the "programmable application" (24) of a rule. Therefore, rather than a move to nihilism or irresponsibility, aporia can be considered the paradoxical circumstance by which ethics becomes possible: "the aporia is not simply paralysis, but the aporia or the non-way is the condition of walking.... This impossibility to find one's way is the condition of ethics" ("Hospitality" 73).

This may sound hyperbolic and radical, but Derrida stresses that aporias are structural problems of existing in the world. Because we are born with more responsibilities than we can ever account for, we cannot look to programmable rules to govern these decisions: "As soon as I enter into a relation with the other ... I know that I can respond only by sacrificing ethics, that is, by sacrificing whatever obliges me to also respond, in the same way, in the same instant, to all the others" (Gift 68). As a result, every decision prompts a moment of madness or undecidability that Derrida insists must be faced if we are ever to approach a just or responsible choice, hence his claim that not knowing our way is the condition of ethics. The feeling of aporia is necessarily "always full of anxiety" ("Force" 20), because this feeling simultaneously highlights both the call to respond responsibly and the realization that knowing just how to respond, how to interpret, remains an impossible task.

Lancelot seems to induce double or twin aporias: not only does the novel highlight the difficulty of interpreting and deciding, but it goes further and highlights the difficulty of feeling. An awareness of these twin aporias seems connected to the text's appropriation of metafictional techniques, as they seem to foster the "anxiety" Derrida asserts is felt in the "moment of deconstruction" ("Force" 20). This anxiety is facilitated throughout the novel, beginning with the aforementioned first lines, which create an uncomfortable feeling of closeness: "Come into my cell. Make yourself at home" (3). We soon learn that the "you" is Percival, but is it not also "you," the reader, stepping into the "cell" of Lance? In the same way the first lines of every novel tacitly nudge the reader to settle into the text, Lance invites "you" to impose yourself upon the world of the novel and to "Make yourself at home." But making this invitation explicit also registers as a sort of warning, if not a command, highlighting the role readers will play in the intersubjective interactions to follow--interactions in which, for a priori reasons, we cannot verbally participate. Lance also asks, "Have you noticed that the narrower the view the more you can see?" (3). This question, along with the invitation to sit down, introduces two interrelated themes that run throughout the text: the reader is simultaneously invited and exhorted to both "feel" and "see" the world through the process of reading. Both of these actions become incredibly difficult as the novel unfolds. Seeing requires trying to interpret what really "happened" based on the reflections of someone in "the nuthouse" (3) whose only interlocutor does not respond until the very end of the novel. Feeling might be even more difficult, as Lance so often reminds us: "Emotions? Were there ever any such things as emotions? If so, people have fewer emotions these days" (90).

In repeatedly harping on the lack of feeling engendered by our amoral consumer culture, Lance sounds a lot like another famous critic of postmodernity, Fredric Jameson. Like Lance, Jameson argues that postmodernism signals what he calls the "waning of affect": "As for expression and feelings or emotions, the liberation, in contemporary society, from the older anomie of the centered subject may also mean not merely liberation from anxiety but a liberation from every other kind of feeling as well" (15). Both Jameson and Lance suggest that a "flattening" of feeling comes alongside the "liberation" of postmodernity. Lance describes this as "a kind of triumphant mediocrity" (23) which leads to his dabbling in history and law, but feeling nothing from either of these tired pursuits. For Lance, this flattening seems to come from simply having nothing left to live for, nothing worth desiring, and consequently leads him to nihilism: "The mystery is: What is one to do with oneself?" (106). But, of course, Lance does have quite a lot to live for, not just politically--the civil rights reforms he claims to support did not bring racial equality, as his relationship with Elgin demonstrates--but personally, as a father to Lucy and Siobhan, as a husband to Margot, and as a human being to everyone else.

As does the opening, the reflexivity of Lance's lamentations puts readers in the uncomfortable position of reconsidering their relationship with the postmodern hero. While judging Lance's indifference is relatively easy, when he simultaneously forces us to consider our own engagement, making a judgment is not so simple. For example, as soon as he complains that the "only emotion people feel nowadays is interest or the lack of it" (21), he worries that Percival--our surrogate and the ostensible solution to this affective abyss--looks apathetic: "Yet not even my sad case seems to interest you. Are you listening?" (22). At this moment, we are confronted with the startling problem of seeing our own privileged image as displaced judge. By pointing to our potential indifference in the face of depravity, this metafictional question seems to shake us out of the comfortable and perhaps numbing position of authoritative judge of Lance's behavior, while begging a troubling question: if "you" don't even feel the "worm of interest" that constitutes the only feeling people retain "these days" (21), are "you" any better than Lance, the "moderate reader, moderate liberal, moderate drinker" (24), whose feeble moans about the postmodern world sound quite similar to those of so many privileged liberal readers (very possibly) like "you"? (3)

In suggesting that detachment might be a move toward irresponsibility, the text's metafictional qualities often draw our attention to the ethical ambiguities of aesthetic engagement, echoing some of the disturbing arguments Emmanuel Levinas makes in "Reality and Its Shadow." For Levinas, whose writings profoundly influenced Derrida, the value of art is always ambiguous. There is always the risk that, rather than move us to recognize our asymmetrical responsibilities to the not merely theoretical but real other, art allows us to "find an appeasement when, beyond the invitations to comprehend and act, we throw ourselves into the rhythm of a reality which solicits only its admission into a book or a painting" (12). Levinas argues that there is something "wicked and egoist and cowardly in artistic enjoyment," which can leave readers like survivors "feasting during a plague" (12). Lance also brings up the notion of "feasting" on the suffering of others, directing his critique implicitly at the reader. Just a few pages after questioning our interest level through Percival, he asks, "Have you ever watched onlookers at the scene of violence, an accident, a killing, a dead or dying body in the street? Their eyes shift to and fro ever so slightly, scanning, trying to take it all in. There is no end to the feast" (42). The text suggests that the onlookers--i.e., readers, "you"--may be as disturbed as Lance, the murderer; in "feasting" through passive engagement with the suffering he represents, readers can become like sadistic voyeurs deriving pleasure from other's pain. This means an engaged practice of reading can be just as ethically problematic as an apathetic one, since it can become difficult to determine where engagement differs from pleasure-seeking. Taken together, Lance's questions deliver two warnings to the reader, one against passive reading, the other against the wrong practice of active reading; the question of the right practice of reading, at least at this point, remains unanswered.

The text seems to underscore Percy's lamentation that postmodernity inevitably leads to the loss of the "Real" through the consumption of "inauthentic" representations, something he emphasizes in both his fiction and nonfiction. For example, he complains that it is "almost impossible to gaze directly at the Grand Canyon" because "the thing as it is, has been appropriated by the symbolic complex which has already been formed in the sightseer's mind" (Message 47). Similarly, Lance complains that the "world had gone crazy" because "the real world thought that its reality could only be found in the illusions" (152). Nearly every character in Lancelot reflects the assertions of Lance and Percy, and taken together they resemble a parade of grotesques mimicking an always-already ersatz Southern history. Elgin performs the docile slave despite his MIT pedigree. Margot recreates their home as a perfect Baudrillardian simulacrum, restoring "Belle Isle to a splendor it had never known" (117). Her acting is stilted to the point that it cannot be considered acting: "What she was doing was not acting ... but acting like an actress imitating someone-else. She was once removed from acting" (146). As Susan V. Donaldson notes, the movie starring Margot, directed by a Hemingway clone, is nothing more than a "preposterous film ... about a collection of various regional stereotypes" (68). Even Lance, who spends the entire novel echoing Percy's Jamesonian grievances--"Town folk ... acted as if they lived out their entire lives in a dim charade" (152)--envisions a future that looks remarkably similar to revisionist Southern history. His "Third Revolution" will be characterized by "gentlemen" who "know each other as gentlemen used to know each other" and live by "a stern code, a gentleness toward women and an intolerance of swinishness" (157). Each of these characters highlights the difficulty in actually getting away from the type of representations which make us passive consumers. (The inclusion of Lance-as-critic again subtly nudges readers to consider where they stand in this critique.) The ostensible lesson would be to discard trust in the authority of representations and become, as Percy puts it, a "sovereign wayfarer" (60) able to recover "the thing as it is" (47).

But herein lies Percy's greatest problem: can we recover the thing in itself? Percy approaches this problem in The Message in the Bottle, positing that the answer to the great question, "Why does man feel so sad in the twentieth century?" (3), lies somewhere in understanding "man's strange gift of language" (9). Percy's answers to this incredibly ambitious question are inconsistent and inconclusive, starting with the fact that his most steadfast argument would seem to take aim directly at the premise of his own "Delta Factor." If the "eager surrender of sovereignty by the layman" (54) leads to pervasive sadness, then perhaps this layman should be skeptical of the rather exhaustive abstraction informing Percy's argument:

   Mightn't one even begin to understand the manifold woes,
   predicaments, and estrangements of man--and the delights and
   savorings and homecomings--as nothing more nor less than the
   variables of the Delta phenomenon, just as responses,
   reinforcements, rewards, and such are the variables of
   stimulus-response phenomena? (41)

What Percy's analysis of the "Delta Factor" suggests, in other words, is that human communication is analogous ("just as") to the very behaviorism he castigates. Patricia Lewis Poteat makes this point conclusively and caustically in Walker Percy and the Old Modern Age, asserting that "Percy too attempts to use the conceptual tools of a crypto-Cartesian science to remedy the shortcomings of that very science" (86).

While Poteat highlights a central irony in the "Delta Factor" that Percy's anti-abstraction rhetoric might occlude, his theory isn't as illogical as Poteat implies--it's actually quite close to deconstruction. Like Derrida, Percy argues that humans grasp the world not through access to the "thing in itself" but through our access to metaphor. He notes that "I cannot know anything at all unless I symbolize it. We can only conceive being, sidle up to it by laying something else alongside. We approach the thing not directly but by pairing, by opposing symbol and thing" (Message 72). Percy doesn't admit it (one might argue that his religious commitments won't let him), but his assertion that "Metaphor is the true maker of language" (79) is nearly analogous to the basic premise of deconstruction--that the meaning of any given concept is "never absolutely determinable" (Derrida, Limited 3). If metaphor is the maker of language and there always remains "a space between name and thing" (Percy, Message 73), then it doesn't take long to reach Derrida's conclusion that no concept can be defined by pure presence but only through the spacing of differance.

To avoid the ramifications of this conclusion, Percy makes an argument seemingly contradicting his former claim that we cannot approach "being" as such. He claims in various contexts that there is the "rare man who manages to recover it, who knows that it has to be recovered" (46). "It" can be anything--Percy discusses the "dogfish, the tree, the seashell, the American Negro" (58), amongst others concepts. The "authentic" Grand Canyon, for example, is difficult for the viewer to approach, but Percy insists it is still approachable: "He can recover it in any number of ways, all sharing in common the stratagem of avoiding the approved confrontation of the tour of the Park Service" (48). The Park Service, like the "educational package" (63), represents the expert, the scientist, the one who represents and claims to know. But it also represents the limits of Percy's argument. While his lament that we so willfully give up our authority to the "experts" is well put, he is still eluding the more radical ramifications of what he admits elsewhere, namely, that even without the expert, the "sovereign wayfarer" still approaches the Grand Canyon through a differential symbolic structure of representations which means "the thing in itself" is always deferred. The recourse to "concrete" reality doesn't overcome this issue because, as Percy himself argues, even the concrete is interpreted through language, and language is understood only through metaphor, a differential process of re-presentation that means we can only approach --but never reach--the thing in itself.

Clearly then, despite his curt dismissal of deconstruction in Lost in the Cosmos, Percy's own theory of language is ambiguously close to being what one might call "Derridean." Lancelot seems to dramatize this ambiguity, leaving the reader with all sorts of interpretive possibilities. In various ways, the novel forces us to question whether we can possibly recover "the thing in itself" through a medium trafficking in representations as "phony" as those it condemns. Though Percy the essayist insists the answer to this is somehow "yes," perhaps Lance is at least partially correct when he states that "There was no 'secret' after all, no discovery ... nothing at all, not even any evil.... there is no answer. There is no question" (253). There is nothing at the end of existence, no a priori givens--we exist ex nihilo. But using this ex nihilo as Lance does, to cut oneself off from others and to recreate a picture of the future as oppressive as the past, means denying the responsibility which we inherit in being born. Lancelot, then, is certainly a "cautionary tale" ("Questions" 169), just as Percy proclaims it to be. But the novel's greatest caution isn't necessarily that the problems of representation and interpretation--the problems of how to see and live in the world--are easy to overcome. Rather, the caution may be that they are not, that we have only our actions, which cannot be severed from the interpretive ambiguities present in both language and living in the world.

The impossibilities of each interpretive decision are underscored when the self-reflexive text simultaneously implicates itself as a commodity and readers as consumers, and it is perhaps only through the resulting unease that we can approach a responsible reading practice, one that avoids the dangerous poles of indifference and fatuous pleasure. It seems that these moments--when the text forces a confrontation with the reading experience as a sort of pornographic voyeurism feasting on the suffering of others--induce deconstructive "anxiety." I choose the words "pornographic" and "voyeurism" deliberately. In an interview with the Paris Review, Percy argues that "pornography and literature stimulate different organs" ("Walker Percy"), but the scenes I speak of enact the creation and consumption of something like pornography in literature. This is particularly true in the disturbing chapter "FRIDAY AFTERNOON AT THE MOVIES: A DOUBLE FEATURE" (185). The presentation of this section as a movie script links the chapter with the simulated images of the other filmmakers at Belle Isle. Many of the "characters" who appear in the "artificial" film reappear here, and their roles aren't much different. In the former, Margot plays "Sarah," while her husband "Lipscomb," like Lance, "sits wringing his hands while the plantation goes to pot" (147). Though the "simulated intercourse," which has taken place "Fifteen or twenty times" (145), is clearly disturbing--particularly given that "Lipscomb," described as a "kind of Christ type," seems to be raping "Sarah" alongside copies of the great moralists "Thackeray and Dickens" (148)--the actual scenes of intercourse are even worse. Perhaps, however, it's inaccurate to use the word "actual" to describe the action Lance reports, given how far removed the reader remains from whatever took place. Since Lance interprets of a video made with a broken camera whose "sound was not much better than the video" (186), his mediating presence seems like a hyperbolic version of the mediating presence felt in the rest of the narrative:

MARGOT: I love you--oh s--(?)--oh sh--(?)

(I love you too. Oh so much. Or: I love you too. Oh shit, or sheet? Or she-it. Probably the last, two beats, two syllables, and knowing Margot.) (187)

This is more than an example of ambiguity occluding interpretive certainty within the text of Lancelot It's closer to the dramatization of "the problem" of interpretation generally, which Derrida suggests isn't just a problem but also the impetus for every act of reading, and for every decision. In "Living On: Border Lines," he notes that reading entails the experience of a singularity which is always divided, Unique but also general, capable of repetition: "A text lives only if it lives on, and it lives on only if it is at once translatable and untranslatable" (102). Building upon this paradox in an interview with Derek Attridge, Derrida asserts that "a duel of singularities, a duel of writing and reading" characterize the reader's relation with the text. From this engagement, every interpretation--including, for example, your interpretation of this essay--exists as a "countersignature," one that both confirms the signature of the author at the same time that it "leads it off elsewhere, so running the risk of betraying it" ("This Strange Institution" 69). Derrida stresses that this does not simply exemplify our relation with literature. In fact, the inverse is true: literature, which Derrida calls "the most interesting thing in the world, maybe more interesting than the world" (47), exemplifies the way humans engage with the trace of the other in "real life." Derrida writes that his "law" is to respond to "the text of the other ... I can only respond to it in a responsible way (and this goes for the law in general, ethics in particular) if I put in play, and in guarantee [engage], my singularity, by signing, with another signature" (66). This is what makes literature emblematic of the aporia of living responsibly; because each "case is other," and each decision requires an interpretation that amounts to a performative violence which may or may not be just, it "follows from this paradox that there is never a moment that we can say in the present that a decision is just" ("Force" 23).

In the present context, the challenge of responding responsibly to Lancelot epitomizes the aporia I face every time I face an interpretive decision. While the same might be said of every work of art, Lancelot stands apart in that it highlights its own untranslatability in uncommon ways, thematizing the undecidability of a just interpretation in the process. Consequently, any interpretation the reader offers as countersignature requires the sort of leap Lance himself makes when he attempts to represent the dialogue between Merlin and Margot. This leap is neither a small decision, since it amounts to a choice about how to interpret the world, nor is it one whose ethical consequences can be easily ignored, since the self-reflexive text continually draws the dilemmas of decision-making to the reader's attention. This is scary, of course, but it is not without value, something recent affect theorists like Sianne Ngai have drawn attention toward. Ngai argues in Ugly Feelings that texts similar to Percy's, which are inscribed with a meta-critique on their own construction and thus our trust in them, often facilitate "an unpleasurable feeling about the feeling" (10) which I see as analogous to the "anxiety" Derrida stresses we feel at the moment of deconstruction. By continually questioning our role in the encounter with the otherness of the text, Ngai asserts, works like Lancelot "obstruct[]" any single "aesthetic or critical response" (262). They refuse to let the reader settle into any single reading or feeling, thereby creating a sort of "open feeling" (284) which we might associate with the openness of recognizing both our lack of guidance and our unconditional responsibility.

Returning to the pornographic scene, it seems that both the disturbing actions and the clinical detachment with which Lance describes them might exacerbate feelings of anxiety and discomfort. In a novel that repeatedly asks "you" to act--"You are silent. Christ, you don't know yourself" (106)--the reader is made to feel her own inaction when forced to read Lance's meticulous descriptions of the menage a trois taking place between Dana, Raine, and Lucy. If the scene representing Dana's simulated sex with Margot was ironically disturbing, this scene is just disturbing--and sad. These seem to be the only emotions one can associate with reading something close to child pornography: "Lucy is lying lengthwise in the middle of the bed.... Lucy is like a patient. Certain operations are being performed on her. The other two figures handle her as efficiently as nurses" (192). Here Percy's style is reminiscent of Joyce's in the "Ithaca" episode of Ulysses. Joyce uses an absolutely emotionless question-and-answer format to inform the reader, among many other (mostly irrelevant) things, of Bloom's realization that another man has slept in his bed today: "What did his limbs, when gradually extended, encounter? New clean bedlinen, additional odours, the presence of a human form, female, hers, the imprint of a human form, male, not his" (731). Like Joyce, Percy uses minute details seemingly divorced from affect, yet he seems to take the reader to what Levinas calls the "hither side of being" (12), opening up a space in which the reader does not get lost in feeling with the characters but rather becomes acutely aware that these characters are allegorical representations whose presence insists on an absence. Because the attention it draws to its own fictiveness disrupts the authority of the illusion, the self-reflexive work of art might allow the reader to see "inwardness from the outside" (11) without the accompaniment of any comfortable affective response (such as catharsis) that might induce "the irresponsibility that charms as a lightness and grace" (12).

Levinas's point recalls Percy's assertion that we can only "sidle up" (Message 72) alongside being, but Levinas does not go as far as claiming that this sidling up amounts to approaching being "in itself." In the context of Lancelot, the novel's gestures toward the reader make it difficult to judge Lance for his irresponsibility and move on from the text. Instead, the questions he asks both Percival and himself extend to readers, leaving us once again with interpretive aporias: "What new sweet-horrid revelation did I expect to gain from witnessing what I already knew? Was it a kind of voyeurism?" (236). If these questions disrupt the reading experience, they might also ensure it too doesn't become another desensitizing representation--like the news Lance mindlessly watches each and every night--which results in "even the horrors of the age" translating into nothing more than "interest" (22). When considering the distance and detachment of Lance's tone as he watches his daughter's pornographic video in conjunction with the closeness fostered by his repeated appeals to the reader, it seems possible that this scene might move readers beyond recognizing the limitations of its own representations and toward acting despite these limitations.

This interpretation gains support from Ngai, who argues that "bourgeois art's reflexive preoccupation with its own 'powerlessness and superfluity in the empirical world' is precisely what makes it capable of theorizing social powerlessness" (2). What Ngai suggests, and I second, is that it's precisely the attention the text lends to its own powerlessness that makes it strangely powerful, as this attention thwarts readers' ability to achieve the type of catharsis, satisfaction, and closure that lets us "move on" from texts. What else can readers do but feel disturbed, unsettled, but also moved to act when watching Dana, who we've already seen simulate the rape of Margot, as he "kneels in a horizontal plane, takes Lucy's head in both hands, and guides it toward him" while the head of Raine "burrows into Lucy's stomach" (192)? Lance asks early in the text, "When was the last time you saw anybody horrified?" (22). By the end of his story, the answer should be "today."

But even this answer--this "should be"--is not guaranteed by the act of reading. Nothing is guaranteed, no feeling and no meaning, something the final chapter of the novel emphasizes. Once again, Lance highlights the problems the reader faces as silent interpreter, as he says to Percival, "Stop pacing up and down. I'm the prisoner, not you. Why the long face, the frowning preoccupation?" (249). At this point, Lance's imprecations may leave the reader feeling as imprisoned as Lance, and as guilty. Still, he does not let up: on one hand, he implies that knowledge and understanding, for him at least, may finally be possible ("At last I shall know what it [the enigmatic sign] says" [250]); on the other hand, he implies that this knowledge will not be nearly as easy for Percival, or for us. He notes that "You look at me strangely," leaving us to ponder how to answer his frightening question, "Is everyone cold now or is it only I?" (253). As these ambiguous questions mount, Lance again admonishes the reader for not being able to answer them--"Christ, you of all people should understand"--and follows this up by highlighting the urgency, the call of the decision that does not wait: "Am I wrong or have you reached a decision of sorts? No? You're waiting for me to finish?" (254).

It's fascinating that the book ends with Percival finally speaking--for himself and for the reader--and equally fascinating that the word repeated is the affirmation "yes." In the Catholic context, this "yes" cannot be divorced from the either/or question that it at least partially answers. Again, this reading is certainly valid and reasonable. But even Percy noted that he "had nothing so grand in mind as 'recommending to the nation'" ("Walker Percy" 69), and assuming the "yes" equals a recommendation of Catholicism seems rather limiting given the ambiguity analyzed here. In my Derridean reading, the "yes" is emblematic of the relation I as reader have to the other of the text. The "yes" signifies my singularity--the countersignature I must offer in interpreting the text. What remains so fascinating about Lancelot, and what leaves the text forever open, is that, like Ulysses, it ends with a series of repeated "yesses" rather than a series of prescriptive conclusions. These "yesses" leave the decision to construct meaning open; at the same time, they imply that readers bear a great responsibility in this construction, a responsibility which is both more frightening and more affirmative than hearing Percival simply give us all the answers. If he did, the moral would be easy to find, and the Christian reading would become the only possible reading. But if the novel gave us a moral without a space to respond, it wouldn't really be literature, as Joseph Kronick, discussing the "yes" in Derrida, explains: "literature demands a response, a 'yes' that affirms the status of the signature as a gift prior to any exchange" (145). The novel is a gift, but one that presupposes I will offer a countersignature, an affirmative response signified in my ability to say "yes."

In the context of this novel, the series of "yesses" constitutes both my freedom and my responsibility to respond to the text before me, to offer a performative interpretation which justifies itself in its own enactment. On this phenomenon, Derrida writes, "Yes, the condition of any signature and of any performative, addresses itself to some other which it does not constitute, and it can only begin by asking the other, in response to a request that has always already been made, to ask it to say yes " ("Ulysses Gramophone" 299). What Derrida means here is that the "yes" always presupposes another, second "yes," otherwise the first is invalidated. Lancelot ends aptly, then, not with one "yes" but with several, as the second and third repetitions suggest I as a reader cannot simply respond (once), but must continue to respond, decide, interpret, and act, again and again, to every other every time. The "yes" not only signifies that the text remains open, but also that my responsibility--a responsibility without limits--remains open.

That the "yesses" in Lancelot are. explicit is fitting, as they reflect the reflexivity of the rest of the text. In this context, we might juxtapose them with the series of "nos" implied in Lance's mistreatment and denial of the voices of others, an effect linked with any type of storytelling that insists on binary answers. By using metafiction in this manner, Lancelot both undermines and underscores the power of fiction. On one hand, the novel suggests that the fictions we hear from others and tell ourselves can move us to a passive solipsism renouncing responsibility, as Lance's pithy nihilism makes clear: "the passage of time is nothing but the encroachment of the horrible banality of the past on the pure future" (106). On the other hand, Lancelot suggests that moving from passivity to action is equally dangerous. Lance's greatest crime comes when his obsession with the scientific search for the "answer" means he appropriates--and in doing so annihilates--the other. He does not give the other the chance to respond, as his interactions with both Margot and Anna illustrate. At the moment of her death, Margot decries the fact that Lance never treated her as an individual human:

"I'm nothing--" she began. "What's the matter with me?"

"What?"

"That's what you never knew. With you I had to be either--or--but never a--uh--woman. It was good for a while." (245)

For Lance, a person is not an irreducibly unique human being, but a member of a predetermined category: either "a lady or a whore" (179), a master or a slave. While the action of the text emphasizes this fact, it also suggests Lance has not really changed, implying that the intersubjective encounter he undergoes with Percival might not move him to think and feel any differently. (Again, this has implications for the other of his conversation, "you.") This is clear at the end of the text, at the moment he attempts to force his version of reality onto Anna, who is "mortally offended" by his insistence that "we were qualified as the new Adam and Eve of the new world": "You goddamn men. Don't you know that there are more important things in this world? Next you'll be telling me that despite myself I liked it" (251).

At novel's end, then, Lancelot highlights both sides of the fundamental aporia of art: the risk of getting lost in a world of "illusions" and the even more dangerous risk of acting as Lance does. The text highlights what Derrida calls the "performative violence at the very heart of interpretive reading" ("Force" 37) through Lance's acts of murder--not just the physical murders he commits, but the figurative murder of the other through his self-centered actions. But by ending with a call to respond, the text reminds us that we must interpret, we must judge and decide, despite the novel's ambiguities and our lack of knowledge. We are obliged to decide despite the text's undecidability, an undecidability emblematic of the paradox by which all responsible decisions are a priori resigned. This is what makes literature both affirmative and haunting: affirmative, because it moves us to identification, empathy, and action; haunting, because it is characterized by an undecidablity which "remains caught, lodged, at least as a ghost--but an essential ghost--in every decision, in every event of decision" ("Force" 25). Lancelot haunts me by affirming my responsibility not just to the other of the text but to all the other others, all the ghosts of all the others who have come and who will come at the same time that it dismantles any trust I might have in it or any other representation. This conclusion is not merely "interesting"--the only feeling the novel insists the postmodern subject retains--but terrifying and affirmative, terrifying in the affirmation that "yes," "yes" I can respond, "yes" I must respond, "yes" I can do nothing but respond.

BENJAMIN BERGHOLTZ

Louisiana State University

Works Cited

Allen, William Rodney. Walker Percy: A Southern Wayfarer. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1986.

Christensen, Jerome C. "Lancelot: Sign for the Times." Southern Quarterly 18.3 (1980): 107-20. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 8 May 2013.

Ciuba, Gary M. "The Omega Factor: Apocalyptic Visions in Walker Percy's Lancelot." American Literature 57.1 (1985): 98-112. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 8 May 2013.

Derrida, Jacques. Aporias. Trans. Thomas Dutoit. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1993.

--. "Force of Law." Trans. Mary Quaintance. Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. Ed. Cornell Drucilla, Michael Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson. New York: Routledge, 1992. 3-67.

--. The Gift of Death and Literature in Secret. Trans. David Wills. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008.

--. Glas. Trans. John Leavey, Jr. and Richard Rand. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1990.

--. "Hospitality, Justice, and Responsibility: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida." Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Continental Philosophy. Ed. Mark Dooley and Richard Kearney. New York: Routledge, 1999. 65-83.

--. "Letter to a Japanese Friend." Derrida and Differance. Trans. David Wood and Andrew Benjamin. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1988. 1-5.

--. Limited Lnc. Trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1988.

--. "Living On: Border Lines." Trans. James Hulbert. Deconstruction and Criticism. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Seabury P, 1979. 75-176. --. Points. Trans. Elisabeth Weber. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995.

--. Positions. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981.

--. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994.

--. "'This Strange Institution Called Literature': An Interview with Jacques Derrida." Acts of Literature. New York: Routledge, 1992. 33-75.

--. "Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce." Acts of Literature. New York: Routledge, 1992. 253-309.

Desmond, John. Walker Percy's Search for Community. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2004.

Donaldson, Susan V. "Tradition in Amber: Walker Percy's Lancelot as Southern Metafiction." Walker Percy: Novelist and Philosopher. Ed. Jan Nordby Gretlund and Karl-Heinz Westarp. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1991. 65-73.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.

Joyce, James. Ulysses. 1922. New York: Modern Library, 1992.

Kobre, Michael. "The Teller and the Tale: Walker Percy's Lancelot as Metafiction." Critique 41.1 (1999): 71-78. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 8 May 2013.

Kronick, Joseph. Derrida and the Future of Literature. New York: State U of New York P, 1999.

Levinas, Emmanuel. "Reality and Its Shadow." Collected Philosophical Papers. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987. 1-13.

Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2005.

Percy, Walker. Lancelot. New York: Picador, 1977.

--. Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. New York: Picador, 1983.

--. The Message in the Bottle. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 1975.

--. "Questions They Never Asked Me So He Asked Them Himself." Conversations with Walker Percy. Ed Lewis A. Lawson and Victor A. Kramer. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1985. 158-81.

--. "Walker Percy: The Art of Fiction No. 97." Zoltan Abadi-Nagy. Paris Review 103 (1987): 50-81. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 8 May 2013.

Poteat, Patricia Lewis. Walker Percy and the Old Modern Age. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1985.

Powell, Tara. The Intellectual in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2012.

Yarborough, Stephen R. "Walker Percy's Lancelot and the Critic's Original Sin." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 30.2 (1988): 272-94. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 8 May 2013.

(1) See Aporias, Glas, Specters of Marx, The Gin of Death, "Hospitality," and "Force of Law."

(2) Though each critic obviously treats the novel differently, an endorsement of the either/or conclusion is evident in Desmond, Allen, Yarbrough, and Christensen.

(3) For an extended look at the strange closeness between Percy and his "cult" of readers and critics, see Tara Powell's chapter on Percy in The Intellectual in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature.