I'm trying to account for my growing rage at Catholics. It's rather funny, because not too long ago I felt political Catholicism was the path to national regeneration. I suppose I do still feel something like that. At least in the sense that I see Catholic summer camps as a useful model to build on. But one could say that about any religion. It is a dreadful thing to recognize that it is others' happiness that stokes fury in oneself. But having come to the conclusion of a great work written by a great Catholic author, I must allow myself a moment of reflection.
I'll admit, Lancelot kept me guessing the whole way through, and while others seem willing to afford the character a more generous interpretation, as one the author means us to reject, I am too familiar with the scathing screeds he brings forth, too familiar with that train of thought, to dismiss it so casually. The truth is that he is a jumbled mass of confusion, but only because at base he is a confused protagonist, and maybe the confusion has - truly - been transferred from pen to paper, from the heart to the ink. Lancelot's "big secret of life", for instance, rings both true and false to me. He sees it that all women at heart, their function, their own (un)conscious purpose, is to have sex. But Percy ups the ante. They do not merely want to have sex. They want to be assaulted. They want to be raped. And conversely, it is man's job to rape. To assault. It rings true because the dominant impulse in man really is sex and power - two corollaries that are inextricably bound up in each other - while it rings false because it disregards the distinction between persuasion and force. For Lancelot, the two collapse into one another. Perhaps this is just an example of extreme hyperbole and what he really means to convey is simply that women consent to being raped. That sex, necessarily involving a dominant and submissive party, is essentially rape, regardless of what the involved parties think. But Percy appears to hint that this isn't right, and that Lancelot's view of the world really is wrong, when first his promiscuous wife Margot and the women he plans to steal away with, Anna, both reject sex as a necessity, chastise men for fixating on it, and in Anna's case admonishes Lancelot for intimating that she enjoyed her own sexual assault.
So there is a mixture of truth and lies here, the kind that makes it difficult to discern where truth ends and lies begin. The root of the problem in my mind is that Lancelot is suffering not from merely having gone insane (although he may well be. it is often the irrational who see things more clearly than the rational) but from realizing that he has all along been a purveyor of inconclusive experiences, much in the same way that Joseph Conrad's Marlowe found himself horror-stricken at the sight of Kurtz in the jungle, and at truths half-glimpsed in the hollowness of his heart - instantiations of greater uncertainties. That's enough to drive anyone to madness. It may well take me there. It certainly hollowed out Lancelot. And at the end this hollowness is given voice by what I take to be the real terrible secret:
What? You remind me that I said in the beginning that there was something I wanted to ask you. Ah yes. Well, it doesn't seem important, no. Because there is no answer to the question. The question? Very well The question is: Why did I discover nothing at the heart of evil? There was no "secret" after all, no discovery, no flickering of interest, not even any evil. There was no sense of coming close to the "answer" as there had been when I discovered the stolen money in my father's sock drawer. As I held that wretched Jacoby by the throat, I felt nothing except the itch of the fiberglass particles under my collar. So I have nothing to ask you after all because there is no answer. There is no question. There is no unholy grail just as there was no Holy Grail.
Lancelot effectively concedes defeat. He tried and failed to find absolute evil, and with it vanished any possibility of grasping anything close to the infinite, or God. It is funny that he mentions Jacoby, for just before Lancelot cuts his throat Jacoby nearly reveals what it is he "really wants" and notes that he suspects it is the same for Lance. Margot explodes before she can reveal whether she really thinks there's any hope of salvaging them. Lance's Percival-priest has something he wants to say to Lance as the two finally come to grips with where they stand, but the book concludes with a simple Yes and nothing more. And why not? All has been revealed. Percival played Lancelot's little game, humored him, let himself get strung along, perhaps even discerned nuggets of truth in his ranting and raving. And at the end perhaps Lancelot has established not his much vaunted new reconciliation between man and woman but between man and man, between confessor and confession, between two opposing ideas. Percival knows where he stands and he intends to tell Lancelot all about the Holy Grail.
So is Lancelot right? Does Percy sympathize - empathize, even - with his protagonist? Yes and no. Epoche strikes again. I daresay it is much easier to throw one's hands in the air, shrug the shoulders, and follow Pyrrho into acceptance. Hah, how's that for psychiatric language?
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