The Message in the Bottle and Lost in the Cosmos

by Walker Percy

  (a) An Archie Bunker type who lives in Queens

  (b) A mathematical physicist working as a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton

  (c) An Alabama Baptist

  (d) A New York novelist removed to a pre-revolutionary Connecticut farmhouse where he is living with his fifth wife

  (e) A Japanese Zen master recently removed from Kyoto to La Jolla

  (f) An American Zen postulant recently removed from Chicago to Kyoto

  (g) A Dublin Catholic

  (h) A Belfast Protestant

  (i) A housewife who watches five hours of soap opera a day

  (j) A housewife who attends a well-run consciousness-raising group

  (k) A member of the Tasaday tribe in the Philippines before its discovery by the white man

  (l) A Virginia Episcopalian

  (m) An Orthodox Jew

  (n) An unbelieving Ethical Culture Jew

  (o) A Southern poet who has sex with his students

  (p) A homosexual poet who calls himself a “flaming fag”

  (q) A homosexual accountant who practices in the closet

  (r) A four-year-old child

  (s) A seven-year-old child

  (t) A twelve-year-old child

  (u) An Atlanta junior executive who fancies he looks like Tom Selleck, dresses Western, and frequents singles bars

  (v) A housewife who becomes fed up, walks out, and commits herself totally to NOW

  (w) A housewife who sticks out a bad marriage

  (x) A New Rochelle commuter who quits the rat race, buys a ketch, and sails for the Leeward Islands

  (y) A New York woman novelist who writes dirty books but is quite conventional in her behavior

  (z) A Southern woman novelist who writes conventional novels of manners and who fornicates at every opportunity

  (aa) A Texan

  (bb) A KGB apparatchik

  (cc) A white planter in Mississippi

  (dd) A black sharecropper in Mississippi

  (ee) A Fourth Degree Knight of Columbus

  (ff) None of the above, for reason of the fact that, whatever the impoverishing and enriching forces, it is impossible so to categorize an individual self—except possibly (r), and (bb), but even there, one cannot be sure. As anyone knows, a person chosen from any of the above classes may turn out against all expectations to be either a total loss as a person or that most remarkable of phenomena, an intact human self

  (CHECK ONE OR MORE)

  *Semiotics might be defined broadly as the science which deals with signs and the use of them by creatures. Here it will be read more narrowly as the human use of signs. Other writers include animal communication by signals, a discipline which Sebeok calls zoo-semiotics. But even the narrow use may be too broad. There is this perennial danger which besets semiotics: what with man being preeminently the sign-using creature, and what with man using signs in everything that he does, semiotics runs the risk of being about everything and hence about nothing.

  At best a loose and inchoate discipline, semiotics is presently in such disarray that all sorts of people call themselves semioticists and come at the subject from six different directions. Accordingly, it seems advisable to define one’s terms—there is not even agreement about what the word sign means—and to identify one’s friends and foes.

  The friends in this case, or at least the writers to whom I am most indebted, are: Ernst Cassirer, for his vast study of the manifold ways in which man uses the symbol, in language, myth, and art, as his primary means of articulating reality; Charles S. Peirce, founder of the modern discipline of semiotics and the first to distinguish clearly between the “dyadic” behavior of stimulus-response sequences and the “triadic” character of symbol-use; Ferdinand de Saussure, another founding father of semiotics, for his fruitful analysis of

  the human sign as the union of the signifier (signifiant) and the signified (signifié); Hans Werner, who systematically explored the process in which the signified is articulated within the form of the signifier; Susanne K. Langer, who, from the posture of behavioral science, clearly set forth the qualitative difference between animal’s use of signals and man’s use of symbols.

  *I am grateful for the important distinction, clearer in the German language and perhaps for this reason first arrived at by German thinkers, between Well and Umwelt, or, roughly, world and environment, e.g., von Uexkull’s Unwelt as, roughly, the significant environment within which an organism lives, and Heidegger’s Welt, the “world” into which the Dasein or self finds itself “thrown”; also, Eccles’ “World 3,” the public domain of signs and language within which man—uniquely, according to Eccles—lives.

  The foes? If there are foes, it is not because they have not made valuable contributions in their own disciplines, but because in this particular context, that of a semiotic of the self, they are either of no use or else hostile by their own declaration.

  The first is the honorable tradition of American behaviorism, once so influential, and latterday behaviorist semioticists like Charles Morris—honorable because of their rigorous attempt as good scientists to deal only with observables and so to bypass the ancient pitfalls of mind, soul, consciousness, and self which have bogged down psychologists for centuries. I start from the same place, looking at signs and the creatures which use them.

  My difficulty with the behaviorists is that they rule out mind, self, and consciousness as inaccessible either on the doctrinal grounds that they do not exist or on methodological grounds that they are beyond the reach of behavioral science.

  It is not necessarily so. The value of Charles Peirce and social psychologists like George Mead is that they underwrite the reality of the self without getting trapped in the isolated autonomous consciousness of Descartes and Chomsky. They do this by showing that the self becomes itself only through a transaction of signs with other selves—and does so, moreover, without succumbing to the mindless mechanism of the behaviorists.

  The other semiotic foe is French structuralism—some of its proponents, at least—and its whimsical stepchild “deconstruction.” The structuralists, in high fashion—at least until recently—seek to apply the methods of structural linguistics to such diverse matters as literature, myth, fashion, even cooking. Whatever the virtues of structuralism as a method of linguistics, ethnology, and criticism, it is the self-proclaimed foe, on what seem to be ideological grounds, of the very concept of the human subject. Lévi-Strauss boasts of the dehumanization which his structuralism implies. Michel Foucault argues that with the coming of semiotics the concept of the self has vanished from our new view of reality.

  But this may not be the case.

  I do not feel obliged to speak of the deconstructionists.

  Finally, a terminological confusion needs to be straightened out. There is an almost intractable confusion about the terms sign and symbol. We may know what we mean when we say there is a difference between my dog’s understanding of the word ball—to go and look for it—and your understanding of the same utterance—you may say “Ball? What about it?”—but we need to agree on what words to use to express the difference. Some writers (e.g., Peirce and Langer) would call the former ball a sign and the latter ball a symbol. Others would call the former a signal, the latter a sign. Though I have followed Peirce’s usage in earlier writings, I propose here to use the word signal for the former and, following Saussure, the word sign for the latter, and to avoid symbol as much as possible. This usage seems advisable for two reasons. One is that symbol for most people seems to connote something emblematic like the flag or the cross and not the radical sense in which the common nouns of language are understood as symbols by Peirce, Cassirer, and Langer. The other reason is that the latter usage will be easier to reconcile with Saussure’s valuable dissection of the sign into its two elements, signifier (signifiant) and signified (signifié).

  *Helen Keller, The Story of My Life (New York: Airmont Publishing Co., 1965), p. 187.

  †New Direction
s in the Study of Language, ed. Eric H. Lenneberg (Cambridge: The M.I.T. Press, 1964), p. 131.

  *Philip E. L. Smith in Cro-Magnon Man, ed. by Tom Prideaux (New York: Time-Life Books, 1973), p. 7.

  *I will not try to decide here whether what the word apple conjures up in your mind, its signifié, is a percept or a concept, because it is somewhere in between, A percept refers to an individual apple. A concept is an abstraction from all apples, a definition of apple. But the signifié of apple is both and neither. What comes to mind when I hear apple, what in fact the word articulates within itself, is neither an individual apple nor a definition of apple but a quality of appleness, such as John Cheever intended in his title, World of Apples. Perhaps it should be called a “concrete concept” or an “abstract percept,” or what Gerard Manley Hopkins called inscape.

  Let us take note of a notorious philosophical farrago without attempting to resolve it: Why is it that when we look at an apple, we believe we are looking at an apple out there, and not at sensory impression, a picture, in our brain? This puzzle can hardly be addressed here, since it is nothing less than the main source of the troubles which have dogged solipsist philosophers from Descartes and Locke to the present day. My own conviction is that semiotics provides an escape from the solipsist prison by its stress on the social origins of language—you have to point to an apple and name it for me before I know there is such a thing—and the existence of a world of apples outside ourselves.

  *The semioticist most acutely aware of this devolution of the sign and its renewal through the “defamiliarization” of art is the Russian formalist, Victor Schklovsky.

  *Does ontogenesis shed any light here?

  The two-year-old comes bursting into the world of signs like a child on Christmas morning. There are goodies everywhere. For him, signifying the signified is like unwrapping a gift.

  What about a four-year-old? By now he should be a sovereign and native resident of his world, concelebrant with his family, at home in Eden. Listen to Gesell and his colleagues describe him: “The typical 4-year-old . .. tends to be rather a joy. His enthusiasm, his exuberance, his willingness to go more than halfway to meet others in a spirit of fun are all extremely refreshing ... He is basically highly positive, enthusiastic, appreciative. This makes him fun to be with, an engaging, amusing, ever-challenging friend. You have to be on your toes to keep up with spirited, fanciful FOUR, but at least you have an even chance of success ... With other children, things as a rule go rather well. FOURS enjoy each other; they appreciate the challenge that other children offer. This is an age at which children interest and admire each other most...” [Louise Bates Ames et al., The Gesell Institute’s Child from One to Six (New York: Harper and Row, 1979).]

  The four-year-old is a concelebrant of the world and even of his own peers.

  The seven-year-old? Something has happened in the interval.

  “More aware of and withdrawn into self... Seems to be in ‘another world'... Self-conscious about own body. Sensitive about exposing body. Does not like to be touched. Modest about toileting … Protects self by withdrawal. May be unwilling to expose knowledge, for fear of being laughed at or criticized . .. Apt to expect too much of self.” [Arnold Gesell and Frances ilg. The Child from Five to Ten (New York: Harper and Row, 1946).]

  *Here might be listed all the “existentialia” of Heidegger, the inauthentic ways in which the Dasein, or self, inserts itself into its world, e.g., Gerede, talk, gossip; Neugíer, curiosity.

  (13) The Transcending Self:

  How the Self Characteristically Places itself vis-à-vis the World, particularly through modes of Transcendence and Immanence

  SCENE: A CORN DANCE at the Taos Indian pueblo in the 1940s. There has been a long dry spell. The dancers invoke the kachinas (god-ancestors) of the West who will come at the winter solstice and leave at the summer solstice. The dancers supplicate the kachinas by a monotonous and rhythmic pounding of bare feet on the hard-packed earth.

  It is not a notable festival. There is not much masking or face and body-painting, nor any sign of the flamboyant buffalo and deer totemism of the hunting dances. The costumes are dark, drab kilts. The dance itself is perfunctory, more light-footed and syncopated than most Pueblo dances.

  But it is a magical place.

  Over there is the squat adobe church of San Francisco de Ranchos de Taos. But here in the vast open plaza there is also the sense of the mysteries conducted within the old Great Kiva, of which hardly a trace remains.

  The setting sun is already reddening the upper slopes of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Not far away, nestled in the pines of the same Blood-of-Christ Mountains is a small shrine commemorating D. H. Lawrence, with a monstrance purporting to contain his ashes. Atop the shrine is a queer-looking epicene eagle with breasts: Lawrence as Phoenix rising from the ashes.

  All manner of artists and writers, mystics, dropouts, and peyote-poppers live in the foothills. But a little farther north, at Los Alamos, an elite group of scientists is conducting an experiment which will fatefully alter the entire course of human history.

  It is as if all the forces of the Cosmos had intersected here. The old cosmological gods remained even after the new God came. The new God remains after the transcending spirit of science and art has come. Even the old Brahman self-god of the East has lately arrived.

  It is a haunted place, haunted by old gods and now by new people possessed by spirits all their own. Jungians from all over are drawn here as irresistibly as flies to pheromones, knowing that they can find in this enchanted sky-country the very incarnations of their archetypes and demons.

  CAST OF CHARACTERS: Among those present at the Corn Dance are a nuclear physicist, his assistant, an old Pueblo Indian dancer, a young Pueblo Indian dancer, an English novelist, a divorcée, a tourist from Moline, Illinois, a Catholic priest, a radio repairman, a Marxist technician.

  Some of the ten feel that they transcend the others. That is to say, he or she may feel that by virtue of a certain education, a certain wisdom, a certain talent, a certain gnosis, he stands in such a relation to the others that he can understand them and they can’t understand him.

  For example, the English novelist can perhaps be said to transcend the Illinois tourist, understand him and his camera—in fact, has written about him—in a sense in which the tourist does not understand the novelist.

  The physicist and his assistant, both of whom are amateur anthropologists, profess to have an understanding of both the Indian dancers and the Catholic priest which neither the priest nor the dancers profess to have of the physicist and his assistant.

  The young Indian dancer believes that he transcends the old Indian dancer because he, the young Indian, has put behind him myth and superstition for a world of science and progress.

  The old Indian dancer believes that he transcends the young dancer because he, the old Indian, has kept the cosmological myths by which the world, life, and time are integrated into a meaningful whole while the deranged Western society in Albuquerque goes to pieces.

  A similar symmetrical relation of transcendence exists between the physicist and the novelist. The physicist believes that science—i.e., psychology—can at least in principle explain what makes the novelist tick by taking account of his early repressions, his later sublimations, and so on. Whereas the novelist, famous for his sharp eye and his knack for sizing up people and rendering them with a few deft strokes, has already “placed” the American scientist just as he has placed the tourist and the Indians.

  There are three questions to keep in mind while reading the following summary of the various modes of transcendence and immanence of the ten characters.

  Question (I): Is there any sense in which it can be said truthfully that this or that member of the cast does in fact transcend some other member? Or are the ten no more or less than as described, a cast of characters, and therefore no judgment of transcending superiority or immanent inferiority can be objectively arrived at?

  Quest
ion (II): But in a play it is sometimes fair to say that one character is better or worse than another. There are, after all, good people and bad people. Can you say, then, that some of the ten are better or worse than the others? If so, are the best also the most transcendent?

  Question (III): Which character do you most nearly identify with? Which character would you rather be?

  (a) A nuclear physicist: a youngish scientist, hard at work on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. He is having, as Freeman Dyson put it, the best time of his life, embarked as he is on a top-secret project set down in a wilderness with an elite of an elite, the best scientific brains in the Western world, even though he knows he is making a weapon which will almost certainly kill thousands of human beings and may very well spell man’s ultimate self-destruction. Yet he is no narrowly educated scientist. His interests are far-ranging. He is by way of being an amateur ethnologist, a student of Oriental philosophy, and a member of a competent if unprofessional string quartet. He can speak as readily of Ramakrishna and Beethoven’s last quartets as he does of Planck and Fermi.

  As he watches the Corn Dance, he is engaged in an animated conversation with his assistant, a handsome blond girl. It is mostly a lecture, to which she gives her rapt attention. He compares the festivals and ceremonials of the different pueblos. Taos is rather ordinary. She ought to see the Corn Dance at Santo Domingo! On the feast day of the saint, the Catholic and tribal religions converge in a nice way characteristic of the tolerant pueblos. The statue of St. Dominic is taken from the church, paraded through the streets to the accompaniment of snare drums and gunshots, then stuck up on a cottonwood branch to enjoy the native ceremonial. In his low, earnest voice, he tells her of the pueblo equivalent of the Virgin Mary: “They call her the Spider Grandmother or Thought Woman, who created all things by thinking them into existence. Rather nice, don’t you think?”

  “Oh yes! Oh yes!” murmurs his assistant, leaning toward him.

  (b) His assistant, a tall striking blonde, a graduate student from Berkeley who shares the scientist’s every interest but one: she is deeply and frantically in love with him and therefore is both miserable for fear he may not love her and also ecstatically transcendent toward the crowd of tourists, feeling sorry for them not only because they have been transcended but also because they are not in love.