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Walker Percy. Symbol and Existence: A Study in Meaning: Explorations of Human Nature. Edited by Kenneth Laine Ketner, Karey Lea Perkins, Rhonda Renee McDonnell, and Scott Ross Cunningham. Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 2019. xviii + 271 pp. $29.00 cloth.
The truer the symbol, the deeper it leads you, the more meaning it opens up. (MM 72)
Flannery O'Connor brought more wisdom to understanding symbols than did many of her literal-minded or self-confidently smart characters. When the foolish Enoch Emory in Wise Blood buries his clothes before putting on the gorilla costume, the narrator explains that it "was not a symbol to him of burying his former self; he only knew he wouldn't need them any more" (CW 111). And a seemingly superior Julian in "Everything That Rises Must Converge" smiles when the seating on a bus makes it seem as if his proud White mother and a proud Black mother with a child have exchanged sons: "Though his mother would not realize the symbolic significance of this, she would feel it" (495-96). O'Connor knew that symbols were not matters of the intellect but "details that, while having their essential place in the literal level of the story, operate in depth as well as on the surface, increasing the story in every direction." She rejected the practice of reading literature as if it were an algebraic exercise in finding the symbol and solving for its "x" value (MM 71). In post-war America, such a problem-and-solution approach might have been the legacy of popularizers of Freud who found symbols in the condensed texts of dreams and of formalist critics who focused on symbols as part of the technical workings of literary texts. O'Connor dismissed those who ". . . try to make everything a symbol. It kills me" (10 Feb. 1962, HB 465). Far more selective and evocative in her approach to symbols, she viewed them much as did Paul Tillich, whose Dynamics of Faith argued that symbols disclose levels of reality and ultimacy that would otherwise be inaccessible (Harper and Row, 1957, 42).
Whereas O'Connor understood the symbol as a literary device that opened the text toward mystery, Walker Percy approached symbolization through his very different interests in anthropology and semiotics. His starting point was...