Percy's devil [Immelmann] is a modern avatar of the Faust and Don Juan myths so prominently alluded to in Love in the Ruins, but the details of Immelmann's appearance and method also owe much to the devil in Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, a book which helped lead Percy into a systematic study of Existentialism. The ideas and terms that Percy borrows from Existential novelists like Dostoyevsky and Sartre and from the philosophers Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Marcel give his fiction an interesting allusiveness and, at times, a real philosophical depth…. While Love in the Ruins is the work of a ranging intellect and observant eye, I think it is the least successful of Percy's four novels. Its weakness is a disturbing incongruity between intelligence and imagination…. I call this essay "Walker Percy's Devil" because Art Immelmann represents both Percy's philosophical allusiveness and the aesthetic inconsistency of the novel. Immelmann's temptation of [the protagonist] Tom More is the internal analogue of Percy's temptation by an old-fashioned art. Briefly put, Walker Percy's devil is Existential material in an un-Existential novel.
The primary terms in which Percy presents Tom More's psychological condition are angelism-bestialism—terms derived from Maritain's The Dream of Descartes. Tom More has both a Faustian abstractive pride and a Don Juanian absorption in carnality, and his fall issues from both. Immelmann promises a hedonistic life and encourages More to "'Develop your genius.'" While the latter can be read as a call to scientific pride, it is also more specifically an allusion to a Kierkegaardian essay, "Of the Difference Between a Genius and an Apostle," that Percy has said "was more responsible than anything else for my becoming a Catholic."… The Apostle, says Kierkegaard, has his authority from God; his message remains news because of its transcendent nature and authority…. For Kierkegaard the genius was born, not made, but anyone could make himself a Christian by exercising his freedom. Although the term "apostle" goes back to the beginnings of Christianity, Kierkegaard's emphasis on subjectivity and freedom gives the term an Existential quality.
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