Word: lancelot
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...exactly as much as they value themselves. They won't like it much, you say? The hell with them. They won't have anything to say about it. Not only are they not strong enough. They don't care enough. Guinevere didn't think twice about adultery. It was Lancelot, poor bastard, who went off and brooded in the woods...
...PROTOTYPE of the New Woman is Anna, Lancelot's next-cell neighbor, who was shocked into catatonia by brutal rape. Lancelot is able to uncoil her after six months in her reactionless fetal position by knocking in code on the wall, to which she finally responds. Stripping down communication to the most basic level is a favorite Percy theme. It is part of Lancelot's Romantic notion that Anna has transcended the violence that confronted her and thus is capable of becoming the New Woman...
Catastrophe pervades Percy's psychology. It takes an apocalyptic force to shake Lancelot out of a seven-year stupor in which his only pleasure in life was Raymond Chandler novels, and into a reevaluation of his quality of life (which moves him to such drastic action). Percy's characters often are alienated and then transformed by an experience which gives them a new perspective. He likes to describe this new ability to see the whole from a distance as a Martian perspective. Yet only after such an experience are Percy's characters capable of love, a principle solidified...
...PAPERS on these subjects are still known as novels and so Percy has set up his own experiment with one real and one artificial hurricane. The artificial hurricane is the weather created by a machine on 'Lancelot's estate for a movie in which his wife and the movie crew proclaim the "life-enhancing" power of sex between strangers stranded together during a hurricane. While the real hurricane is approaching, Lancelot learns of his wife's infidelities and has his black servant Elgin, an MIT student, secretly videotape her liaison with the director. As the hurricane hits, Lancelot ignites...
...Lancelot tells another hurricane story as an emblem of his apocalyptic intentions and in counterpoint to the movie and all it represents. A moment of brilliant clarity hit a middle-aged couple in the face of the hurricane: they realized and said out loud how bored they were with their lives and each other, made terrific love during the storm, and "took a good hard look at each other on a sunny Monday morning and got a divorce." Lancelot's and Percy's hurricanes are meant to sweep out the artificial hurricane of false elation and superficial radicalism that...