
          On Guard Against Good Intentions.
          By Littleton, GeorgeGeorge Littleton
          Vol. 9, No. 5, 1987, pp. 37-38
          
          The Thanatos
Syndrome by Walker Percy. (New York: Farrar, Straus, and
Giroux, 1987. 372 pp. $17.95.)
          In Walker Percy's latest novel, The Thanatos
Syndrome, Dr. Thomas More, a psychiatrist recently paroled
from federal prison, uncovers a nefarious scheme to "improve the
quality of life" for the unsuspecting denizens of Feliciana Parish in
southeast Louisiana. Such improvement is realized through the addition
of the heavy sodium ion into the region's water supply. Dr. More
becomes suspicious when his female patients present themselves
rearward during analysis, and the hospital's black janitor, a hunting
companion for forty years, addresses his friend with "standard,
U.S. politeness, like a drive-up customer at Big Mac's."
          In typical Percy fashion, this limited plot is carried along by the
author's wry and perceptive analysis of modern America and revealed
through his well-wrought but tiny band of characters. Opposing
philosophies are offered by the Qualitarian scientists from Fedville,
who tamper with the water supply to gather statistical data to support
their convictions, and Father Simon Rinaldo Smith, an alcoholic
Catholic priest who, isolated in a fire tower above his hospice for
society's rejects, prattles on about his visit to Germany in the late
1930s. Providing the logical and philosophical link between these
elements is Dr. Tom, the novel's detached but keenly observant
protagonist.
          The story opens when Dr. Tom, fresh out of Fort Pelham Federal
Detention Center, notices a variety of unusual occurrences, including
the simian sexual behavior of his female patients and their
willingness (and ability) to answer questions completely out of
context. For instance, Dr. Tom might suddently inquire as
to the exact location of Evansville, Indiana. His patients roll up
their eyes, as though reading a computer printout, and provide
latitudes and distances from major urban centers. Not knowing whether
it is he or his patients who have changed during his detention, he
seeks the help of his cousin, Dr. Lucy Lipscomb, epidemiologist,
soybean farmer, and computer expert.
          Together, they not only discover that sodium is in the water
supply, but that it is being put there covertly by a select group of
transcendent Qualitarians who plan to reveal their "numbers" just
prior to the upcoming national elections. The Qualitarians, led by
Drs. Bob Comeaux and John Van Dorn, will show that their project has
undeniably improved the quality of life in Feliciana, and that any
candidate who opposes their project opposes improved life for all
Americans.
          In the novel's vaguely futuristic setting, the Qualitarians are
they who believe in death with dignity. They believe it is better to
terminate, through pedeuthanasia and gereuthanasia, a life that is a
life without quality. They rhetorically ask Dr. Tom if he would
condemn a little child to a life without love, or have someone
needlessly suffer with AIDS.
          When confronted with their colleague's discovery of the sodium
project, Comeaux and Van Dorn smugly defend their plot and invite
Dr. Tom to "join the team." The heavy sodium ion affects certain
neurological and psychological traits through cortical suppression,
they explain. Results of the project include drastic reductions in
crime, child abuse, and homosexuality. Math scores improve 100 percent
in schools within the test area, and students have total recall of
imports, exports, and geographical relations. Black youths from the
Baton Rouge housing projects apprentice themselves at gas stations and
factories, and inmates et the Angola State Prison Farm sing spirituals
in the fields and refuse to return to the cities upon release. Teenage
pregnancies are eliminated by changing the female cycle from menstrual
to estrus. How, ask the Qualitarians, can such results be argued
with?
          Dr. Tom, always the devil's advocate, mentions civil rights, secret
assaults on people's psyches, and their speech and language function
being reduced to two-word utter-

ances and the inability to write a
complete sentence. Furthermore, the Qualitarians do not partake of the
ion themselves, and there is the secondary discovery that Van Dorn is
running a child pornography ring at his boarding school as part of
what he calls the "sexual liberation of the Western world."
          Meanwhile, Father Smith refuses to leave the fire tower. Fixated by
the memory of a trip to pre-war Germany, Father Smith recounts, in a
twenty-page intermezzo called "Father Smith's Confession," how he
spent time among the country's most eminent psychiatrists, and how
they argued over a book entitled The Release of the Destruction of
Life Devoid of Value.
          Although he was not particularly taken with the psychiatrists, who
as a group were great humanitarians and lovers of children, he
recalled their debate over the relative importance of love of self and
love of country. He also recalled them scoffing at Hitler's radio
ravings over the presence of the "alien" within the pure organism of
"Das Volk."
          The true object of Simon's fascination was his cousin Helmut, a
Brownshirt who aspired to become a full-fledged SS and join the ranks
of the German army and fight for the Fatherland in the imminent
war. Helmut's devotion to his cause and country inspired Simon in ways
he had never known. Father Smith confesses to Dr. Tom that, had he
been a young German at the time, he would have followed his cousin
Helmut into the Hitler Jugend. Interestingly, he said, Helmut had
little interest in the Jews, saying only that they had volunteered for
the Jugend and had been turned down.
          Father Smith's next visit to Germany was as an American soldier
liberating a children's hospital. Its director had been one of the
psychiatrists he had known from his earlier visit. A nurse there
showed Father Smith a special room where the doctor regularly
exterminated children with experimental gases.
          Preparing to leave the fire tower, Dr. Tom asks Simon why he became
a priest. Simply, says Simon, because one must choose life or
death.
          The book ends when Dr. Tom returns to the boarding school to rescue
his children from the pederasts. In the novel's funniest scene, the
staff of Belle Ame are forced to drink molar concentrations of heavy
sodium, whereupon Mrs. Cheney presents rearward to Coach, causing
Dr. V. D. to thump his chest, bare his teeth, and attack. Their
apelike aggression is mollified with a bag of Snickers until the
police arrive to arrest the whole gang and shut off the sodium
shunt. The crime rate rises, math scores plummet, and Felicianians
engage in their conversation of old, as strange now as ever.
          The Thanatos Syndrome is an eminently readable, very
funny detective-adventure story peopled by a familiar crew we have all
loved and despised. It is also a novelistic prophesy about the fate of
modern America. Although the nature of this prophesy is
ambiguous--after all, reduced crime and disease control are lofty
achievements--we are partially tipped off by the book's title. Dr. Tom
calls the resulting behavior of the sodium recipients a syndrome. The
drive towards Thanatos is the drive toward self-destruction. But it is
not the unwitting sodium recipients who are self-destructive; they
remain intact, carefree as the animals they have come to resemble. It
is instead the scientists, the transcendent, magnificent demigods of
our age, who have decided to improve the quality of life for those
below them, and in so doing lead our society towards death.
          An important parallel develops between the Qualitarians planning an
improved society high in their Fedville offices, and Father Smith's
consideration, high in his fire-tower, of the transformation of
Helmut's personality. The divergent issue is that Father Smith
realizes the best intentions can turn imperceptibly to horror and
cruelty. One day the boys in Brown are filled with love of country,
the next they are manning the crematoriums. Thinking of the Fedville
crowd, Father Smith remarks that compassion is the first step toward
the gas chamber.
          In an early essay entitled "Notes for a Novel About the End of the
World," Percy acknowledged that his Catholic world view is "informed
by a certain belief about man's nature and destiny that cannot fail to
be central to any novel I write." A certain dose of this view is
present here, especially in a general reverence for life and a
consideration of man's free will unfettered by science, heavy sodium
ions and the like. But the import of this novel's prophesy is more
than a rehash of familiar principles.
          The importance of the individual, already diminished by the
enormous killing potential of modern weapons, is degraded even more as
the aura of technology mixes with the aura of power. The purveyors of
such power become transcendent over the world and truly believe they
know what is best for those below them. In The Thanatos Syndrome,
Fedville administers a "shotgun prophylaxis" to cure society's ills,
forgetting that what is best for one is not necessarily best for
another. Thus, we as individuals must be on guard against those who
would become extremists in pursuit of their good intentions. So too
must the powerful remain sensitive to what it means to be human. We
may be screwed-up, Percy seems to be saying, but it's better than
being dead.
          
            George Littleton is a writer on the staff of the Alabama
Commission on Higher Education in Montgomery.
          
        