 First edition cover |
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| Author | Walker Percy |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Thriller novel |
| Publisher | Farrar Straus & Giroux (HB) & Palandin (PB) |
| Publication date | 1 April 1987 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 372 pp (hardback edition) & 384 pp (paperback edition) |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-374-27354-5 (hardback edition) & ISBN 0-586-08726-5 (paperback edition) |
| Preceded by | Love in the Ruins |
The Thanatos Syndrome (1987) was Walker Percy's last novel before his death. It is a sequel to Love in the Ruins. It tells the story of a former psychiatrist who suspects that something or someone is making everyone in the town crazy. In 1989, Percy stated that, in The Thanatos Syndrome:
"I tried to show how, while truth should prevail, it is a disaster when only one kind of truth prevails at the expense of another. If only one kind of truth prevails -- the abstract and technical truth of science -- then nothing stands in the way of a demeaning of and a destruction of human life for what appear to be reasonable short-term goals." [1]
Critic Allen Pridgen -- in his book, Walker Percy's Sacramental Landscapes (2000) -- describes the "disconnectedness" (TS 8)that the protagonist, Dr. Tom More, begins to notice in The Thanatos Syndrome:
"Perhaps the single most important idea in Percy's epistemology, expressed again and again in his essays and interviews (especially MB, 282), is his conviction that this kind of impoverishment in the power to name experience causes a subsequent impoverishment of consciousness and being since it is only through language transactions with others that the self locates who and where it is."
Pridgen points out that it is not just the victims of the chemical additive in the drinking water who are being "impoverished":
"....but also the scientists who victimize and study them. They, including Tom, are enclosed in a lifeless, self-constructed interior world of scientific abstractions that numb them to the realities of the phenomenal world and the flesh-and-blood people in it. All, Percy maintains, are casualties, of a 'century of death'(MCON,120-21), an 'age of thanatos'(TS, 86)."
Commentary on abortion and Nazism
Percy was highly critical of legalized abortion and saw tolerance of such practices as symptomatic of a society that has lost its moral compass. This theme appears in several of his nonfiction writings where he often noted the technological sophistication of German society in the years before World War II, amid a moral vacuum that first allowed, then encouraged and finally forced abortions and euthanasia. This cultural slippery slope, Percy reasoned, led directly from abortion to killing of mentally or physically unfit persons, and finally to the Holocaust. It was within this framework that he posited the fictional history of the novel. Instead of a Roe v. Wade decision attempting to define an age of fetal viability with reference to abortion, the U.S. Supreme Court has issued a similarly named decision that decrees an age of sentience for children. Before that date, infanticide is found to be perfectly reasonable. The novel then focuses largely on efforts to uncover the activities of scientists who are supposedly improving the behavior of children and inmates with their experiments. But in fact the scientists have sinister purposes to create their own warped utopia without the consent of those being chemically altered to live in it. One side effect of the mind-control is a sexual playfulness that renders children particularly susceptible to the overtures of several of the lead scientists who turn out to be pedophiles. Walker also suggests that demonic activity is somehow involved, referencing Azazel. Walker believes that scientists who dare to sacrifice humanity on the altar of expediency and eugenics ultimately invoke evil, suffering and death.
