I mentioned in my “Depression–The Full Monty” post that one way of triumphing over despair is by an act of kenosis, or self-emptying. As Soren Kierkegaard would say, of becoming “transparent under God.”

This is what Walker Percy means when he refers to writers like himself as ex-suicides. In a fascinating article entitled “Walker Percy and Suicide,” published in the journal “Modern Age,” John F. Desmond writes the following:

“[Percy] maintained that the writer…’starts with himself as nothing and makes something of the nothing with things at hand…a novelist these days has to be an ex-suicide.’ The writer as ex-suicide becomes a ‘nought’ before the challenge of the blank page, which opens him to the possibilities of finding an authentic ‘self’ by discovering a true voice and naming reality.

“For Kierkegaard, one form of despairing ‘suicide’ is silence before reality, which he termed ‘shut-up-ness’ (I like that!). Thus, Percy saw writing as a way to overcome despair by emptying the egoist self in order to create a bond of communion with the reader. For author and reader, literature that honestly names the truth of being can reverse–albeit temporarily–the death-in-life alienation and despair. Writer and reader become ‘ex-suicides’ in humility before the truth.”