Shattered Masculinity and Violence in Walker Percy's Lancelot: Apocalypse Now
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although it is not one of Walker Percy’s most popular novel, Lancelot is certainly one of his most complicated. Critics like Vaulthier and Hebert have discussed the masculinity of protagonist Lancelot Lamar in depth, building on theories linking Lamar’s shattered masculinity with male homosocial behavior, particularly homosocial relationships between Lamar and Merlin and Lamar and Percival. Critical discussions leave out, however, an exploration of the violence that pervades the entire text. This is problematic because Lamar’s dissatisfaction with the homosocial roles in the triangulated relationships created by his wife’s affair is what sparks his obsession with violence as a cleansing act. His wife’s lover is not manly enough for Lamar, shattering Lamar’s sense of masculinity and enraging him. As the narrative progresses, it becomes filled with his vision for the future—a world brought on by apocalypse where the women are sexually pure and the men are “pure in heart.” Lamar clearly regards violence as the only way to restore the patriarchal order that his experience of triangulated relationships has thwarted.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".