Signposts in a Strange Land.

THIS posthumous collection of essays and occasional writings proves to this reader what he has long suspected: Walker Percy was one of the most intellectual of our writers and one of the sanest of our intellectuals. Edited by Patrick H. Samway, S.J., the book presents the views of the Louisiana novelist and thinker on everything from the uniqueness of man to the "steadfastness" of the Catholic Church. In between there are pungent insights into the novel as cognitive art, standards in literature, the heritage of the South, Bourbon whisky, and the "high seriousness" of the profession of letters. The range of Percy's interests is covered in three generous sections entitled "Life in the South," "Science, Language, and Literature," and "Morality and Religion." A concluding section reprints an interview with Walker Percy from the famed Paris Review series and "a self-interview" first published in Esquire in 1977.

The section on the South evokes much of the best and the worst of the region. Although an early opponent of racial oppression, Percy, from his first essays to his last, published writings that depicted a South that was, at least in his view, more attractive than repellent. For Percy there was a southern heritage worth preserving. The essence of that heritage "has to do with the conservative tradition of a predominantly agrarian society, a tradition which at its best enshrined the humane aspects of living for rich and poor, black and white. It gave first place to a stable family life, sensitivity and good manners between men, chivalry toward women, an honor code, and individual integrity."

Minus a certain flamboyance, the passage just quoted might remind us of "the old verities and truths of the heart" of Percy's fellow southerner, William Faulkner. But if his values are similar in sime ways. Percy's mode as novelist and thinker differs greatly from those of his southern forerunners. Through the six novels--The Moviegoer, The Last Gentlemen, Love in the Ruins, Lancelot, The Second Coming, The Thanatos Syndrome--the scene is the urban South rather than Faulkner's rural backwaters and Percy's protagonists--Binx Bolling, Will Barrett, Lancelott, Thomas More--are all sophisticated searchers for truth rather than Faulkner's primitives.

In fact, one of the virtues of Percy's fiction is that it takes us forward into the modern South in a way that even writers who followed Faulkner in time like Flannery O'Connor and Madison Jones do not. By now it is a critical commonplace to say Percy's fiction reveals more influence from Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Gabriel Marcel than fron Faulkner, Warren, and Welty. His heroes are existential detectives trying to grasp the clues in a confusing contemporary world that will still give that world meaning.

In "New Orleans Mon Amour," reprinted in Signposts in a Strange Land from a 1968 issue of Harper's, Percy characterizes New York City as "a vacuum" and, at the other extreme, Mobile, Alabama, as "a pressure cooker." There is, according to Percy, too little human relatioship in the one, too much in the other. One is reminded of Emile Durkheim's types of suicides: "egoistic suicide" resulting from isolation from society and "altruistic suicide" resulting from too close an integration into the group. By living in a suburb of New Orleans called Covington, Walker Percy avoided both the vacuum and the pressure cooker.

He also seems to have avoided both egoism and oppression. Two decades ago Alfred Kazin published an article about Percy, the man and work, in which he included this rather uncharacteristic description of a modern writer: "He seems a most domesticated creature, intensely devoted to his family, but also at home with himself."

Yet Percy's vision is anything but smug. The world is a baffing and perilous place. All the novels depict this. Several essays in Signposts in a Strange Land make this vision explicit. "The present age is demented. It is possessed by a sense of dislocation, a loss of personal identity, an alternating sentimentally and rage which, in an individual patient, could be characterized as dementia," Percy wrote in 1990, the year he died.

Walker Percy nevertheless found some sources of hope and stability in our ravaged time, some "signposts" of sanity he would frequently expound for the edification of his readers.

First, there is the uniqueness of the human being based on his use of language. Percy finds this human uniqeness in the ability to "name" things and thereby give them a value beyond the strictly utilitarian. Only human beings can do this, Percy contends. For other species words like "ball" or "cookie" are merely instigators to action. For us words open up a world of meaning.

Second, Percy places a high value on the cognitive element in literature. Percy rejects utterly the dicta of the logical positivists. For him, "Art is cognitive; that is, it discovers and knows and tells, tells the reader how things are, how we are, in a way that the reader can confirm with as much certitude as a scientist taking a pointer-reading." One is reminded of Goethe's "exact concrete imagination" as a means to truth.

Percy has encouraging words for anyone involved in literary endeavors at any level. He celebrates "the high seriousness, indeed the critical importance, of the profession of letters in this age, whether teaching, writing, scholarship, criticism, or, indeed, reading. In fact...the cognitive role of literature at the present time, its success or failure, may be more critical than the combine efforts of NASA, Cal Tech, and MIT."

Although we might regard Percy a cultural conservative in some ways, he does not, at least in the essays collected in Singposts, bewail the changes in the Catholic Church following Vatican II. Instead, as a third sign of hope in the modern age, Percy praises the "steadfasness of the Church" and repeatedly points to that doctrinal consistency as a source of personal and societal sanity:

By remaining faithful to its original commission, by serving its people with love, especially the poor, the lonely, and the dispossessed, and by not surrndering its doctrinal steadfastness, sometimes even the very contradiction of culture by which it serves as a sign, surely the church serves culture best.

Percy is not especially ecumenical. He seems to reflect, at times, an earlier, more agressive attitude. "The crisis of the Church and the crisis of our youth often manifests itself," he writes, "in young Catholics rebelling against what they perceive as the dryness and ritual prayers of the Church and turning to the emotinal appeal of the new evangelicals. Catholics have a lesson to learn here, I am sure, but I give myself permission to indulge my own prejudice...and to say that the young person who turns his back on the apostolic Catholic faith with its two-thousand-year-old synthesis of faith and knowledge, art and science, with the sacramental presence of God Himself on the altar, to take up with some guru or Bible-thumper who has no use for sacrament or reason, this young person has in fact sold his birthright for a mess of pottage--or, as some wag put it, a pot of message."

The possibilities of language, the cognitive value of literature, the steadfastness of the Church--add these to the heritage of the South and we see that Percy could still find several sources of hope in the modern labyrinth of anomie and oppression.

Despite its bleak descriptions of the present age, Signposts is thus a basically hopeful book. The spiritual survivor of the age must be vigilant, "open to signs," "a stranger in a strange land where the signposts are enigmatic but which he sets out to explore nevertheless." Percy's essential view of man is that of "a wayfarer and a pilgrim."

But that view, he asserts, is the best possible view for the novelist. "Judeao-Christianity is about pilgrims who have something wrong with them and are embarked on a search to find a way out. This is also what novels are about."

All the other major views of our age--Marxism, behaviourism, Freudianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, humanism--fail to provide the novelist with this inspiriting view of a being graced with choice and freed by grace.

Mr. Hill is chairman of the Humanities Department at Georgia Military College.