Signposts in a Strange Land

by Walker Percy

  Two exemplars of the two aesthetics come to mind:

  Imagine Clifton Webb, scarf at throat, sitting at Cap d’Antibes on a perfect day, the little wavelets of the Mediterranean sparkling in the sunlight, and he is savoring a 1959 Mouton Rothschild.

  Then imagine William Faulkner, having finished Absalom, Absalom!, drained, written out, pissed-off, feeling himself over the edge and out of it, nowhere, but he goes somewhere, his favorite hunting place in the Delta wilderness of the Big Sunflower River and, still feeling bad with his hunting cronies and maybe even a little phony, which he was, what with him trying to pretend that he was one of them, a farmer, hunkered down in the cold and rain after the hunt, after honorably passing up the does and seeing no bucks, shivering and snot-nosed, takes out a flat pint of any Bourbon at all and flatfoots about a third of it. He shivers again but not from the cold.

  Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust.

  1926: As a child watching my father in Birmingham, in the exurbs, living next to number-6 fairway of the New Country Club, him disdaining both the bathtub gin and white lightning of the time, aging his own Bourbon in a charcoal keg, on his hands and knees in the basement sucking on a siphon, a matter of gravity requiring cheek pressed against cement floor, the siphon getting going, the decanter ready, the first hot spurt into his mouth not spat out.

  1933: My uncle’s sun parlor in the Mississippi Delta and toddies on a Sunday afternoon, the prolonged and meditative tinkle of silver spoon against crystal to dissolve the sugar; talk, tinkle, talk; the talk mostly political: “Roosevelt is doing a good job; no, the son of a bitch is betraying his class.”

  1934: Drinking at a Delta dance, the boys in bi-swing jackets and tab collars, tough-talking and profane and also scared of the girls and therefore safe in the men’s room. Somebody passes around bootleg Bourbon in a Coke bottle. It’s awful. Tears start from eyes, faces turn red. “Hot damn, that’s good!”

  1935: Drinking at a football game in college. UNC versus Duke. One has a blind date. One is lucky. She is beautiful. Her clothes are the color of the fall leaves and her face turns up like a flower. But what to say to her, let alone what to do, and whether she is “nice” or “hot”—a distinction made in those days. But what to say? Take a drink, by now from a proper concave hip flask (a long way from the Delta Coke bottle) with a hinged top. Will she have a drink? No. But it’s all right. The taste of the Bourbon(Cream of Kentucky) and the smell of her fuse with the brilliant Carolina fall and the sounds of the crowd and the hit of the linemen in a single synesthesia.

  1941: Drinking mint juleps, famed Southern Bourbon drink, though in the Deep South not really drunk much. In fact, they are drunk so seldom that when, say, on Derby Day somebody gives a julep party, people drink them like cocktails, forgetting that a good julep holds at least five ounces of Bourbon. Men fall facedown unconscious, women wander in the woods disconsolate and amnesiac, full of thoughts of Kahlil Gibran and the limber lost.

  Would you believe the first mint julep I had I was sitting not on a columned porch but in the Boo Snooker bar of the New Yorker Hotel with a Bellevue nurse in 1941? The nurse, a nice upstate girl, head floor nurse, brisk, swift, good-looking; Bellevue nurses, the best in the world and this one the best of Bellevue, at least the best-looking. The julep, an atrocity, a heavy syrupy Bourbon and water in a small glass clotted with ice. But good!

  How could two women be more different than the beautiful languid Carolina girl and this swift handsome girl from Utica, best Dutch stock? One thing was sure. Each was to be courted, loved, drunk with, with Bourbon. I should have stuck with Bourbon. We changed to gin fizzes because the bartender said he came from New Orleans and could make good ones. He could and did. They were delicious. What I didn’t know was that they were made with raw egg albumen and I was allergic to it. Driving her home to Brooklyn and being in love! What a lovely fine strapping smart girl! And thinking of being invited into her apartment where she lived alone and of her offering to cook a little supper and of the many kisses and the sweet love that already existed between us and was bound to grow apace, when on the Brooklyn Bridge itself my upper lip began to swell and little sparks of light flew past the corner of my eye like St. Elmo’s fire. In the space of thirty seconds my lip stuck out a full three-quarter inch, like a shelf, like Mortimer Snerd. Not only was kissing out of the question but my eyes swelled shut. I made it across the bridge, pulled over to the curb, and fainted. Whereupon this noble nurse drove me back to Bellevue, gave me a shot, and put me to bed.

  Anybody who monkeys around with gin and egg white deserves what he gets. I should have stuck with Bourbon and have from that day to this.

  POSTSCRIPT: Reader, just in case you don’t want to knock it back straight and would rather monkey around with perfectly good Bourbon, here’s my favorite recipe, “Cud’n Walker’s Uncle Will’s Favorite Mint Julep Receipt.”

  You need excellent Bourbon whiskey; rye or Scotch will not do. Put half an inch of sugar in the bottom of the glass and merely dampen it with water. Next, very quickly—and here is the trick in the procedure—crush your ice, actually powder it, preferably in a towel with a wooden mallet, so quickly that it remains dry, and, slipping two sprigs of fresh mint against the inside of the glass, cram the ice in right to the brim, packing it with your hand. Finally, fill the glass, which apparently has no room left for anything else, with Bourbon, the older the better, and grate a bit of nutmeg on the top. The glass will frost immediately. Then settle back in your chair for half an hour of cumulative bliss.

  1975

  Two

  Science, Language, and Literature

  Is a Theory of Man Possible?

  THE ANSWER IS “YES,” I think so. But a more interesting question to me is whether the question makes any sense to you. I can’t help but wonder how you respond: Is a theory of man possible? Do you shrug and say to yourself: But I thought that was settled. Or do you tend to regard the question, as well as any answer, as hopelessly grandiose in our present state of knowledge? Or does the question stir memories of ancient and boring quarrels about the nature of man which you would as soon not rehash?

  The question suggests that a theory of man does not presently exist or at least that traditional theories of man have been seriously challenged. Yet I suspect that most of us, whether we consciously profess it or not, are already equipped with a theory of man. Indeed, it is hard to imagine how one can live one’s life and work with other people day in and day out unless one has already made certain assumptions about one’s own nature as well as other people’s. It may be as impossible for us not to have a theory of man as it is impossible for primitive man not to have a theory of the world and its origins.

  The next question is whether the theories we more or less unconsciously profess make any sense, or are of any help to us as students of behavior.

  Some of us, for example, would reflexly refer this question to certain traditional Greek and Judeo-Christian teachings about the nature of man which are implicit in Western civilization itself. Thus, if one is a professing Christian or Jew, or even if one is not, it still comes second-nature to us to think of man in such terms as body and soul, flesh and spirit, mind and matter, matter and form, the mental and the physical, and so on.

  By the same token, some of us may find it equally natural to think of man in quite different terms—terms which are nevertheless as much part and parcel of this same Western tradition, or at least the last two hundred years of it. I mean, of course, that for a person who has spent his entire intellectual life in the scientific tradition, with, say, twenty-six years of schooling culminating in a degree in medicine or psychology or sociology or med tech or nursing or whatever, it may be quite natural to think of man as you think of rats or chimpanzees, as an organism, a biological energy system, not qualitatively different from other such energy systems. True, it is generally recognized that the human species does seem to possess certain unique properties such as language, abstract thinking,
complex tool using, art, culture, and so on. Surely everyone would admit, even the most mechanistic behaviorist, that men write books about chimpanzees and dolphins but that chimpanzees and dolphins do not write books about men.

  Yet these differences may not shake one’s conviction that man is still an organism among organisms, responding to his environment just as other organisms do, and that these unusual traits are the consequences of evolutionary and genetic changes which have befallen man and which may appear different but are not qualitatively different from the behavior of other organisms—just as one thinks of a bird’s flight as a successful genetic adventure which has worked because, under the dispensation of the natural laws of evolution, it gives the organism a better chance of occupying this or that ecological niche in its environment.

  In the case of man, what is more natural than to think of man’s peculiar gifts of language, culture, and technology as but yet another evolutionary stratagem not only for adapting to an environment but also for conquering it? If we overlook some of man’s perverse traits, his peculiar penchant for making war against his own species, his discovery of suicide, and his vulnerability to psychosis and such, what more spectacular proof do we have of Darwin’s naturalistic theory than man’s conquest of the earth through a few mutations such as upright gait, opposition of thumb and fingers, language, and cognitive process?

  Does it not, in fact, offend one’s sense of the continuity of science if somebody suggests that man is truly unique—unique in a sense not allowed by the organismic view of man?

  What I wish to suggest to you is that these two traditional Western ways of thinking about man, the Greco-Judeo-Christian and the scientific-organismic, may presently do us a disservice as far as a workable behavioral theory is concerned. That is to say, they may very well conceal more than they reveal. For both traditions make some basic and unexamined assumptions about the nature of man and so give all the appearance of theory without being able to do what valuable theory does; namely, shed light and provide groundwork where questions can be asked and coherent answers looked for.

  Ignorance, if recognized, is often more fruitful than the appearance of knowledge. Thus, if I were to raise with you the question of the nature of the red spot on the planet Jupiter, you might be curious, because we don’t know what causes the red spot on Jupiter and we know we don’t know. But if one raises the question of the nature of man, about which we know even less than we know about the red spot on Jupiter, one is apt to encounter blank looks, shrugs. That is, until recent years, when things began to fall apart. At least, nowadays, people are becoming aware of the incoherence of the present theories.

  It is not difficult to demonstrate that there does not presently exist a coherent theory of man in the scientific sense—the sense in which we have a coherent theory about the behavior of rats and, more recently, a theory about what causes the red spot on Jupiter. I suspect that most of us hold to both traditions, man as body-mind and man as organism, without exactly knowing how he can be both—for if man is yet another organism in an environment, he is a very strange organism indeed, an organism which has the unusual capacity for making himself unhappy for no good reason, for existing as a lonely and fretful consciousness which never quite knows who he is or where he belongs.

  I hasten to add that I do not presume to call into question the value and truth of either the Judeo-Christian or the Darwinian-naturalistic concept of man. As a matter of fact, I happen to subscribe to the former theologically and to the latter scientifically, regarding it as an extremely useful and well-established theory and a valuable method of accounting for the immense variety of structure and function in the over two million earth species.

  What I am suggesting is that it is of little help to us scientifically to regard man as a composite of body, mind, and soul, and that it is a positive hindrance if we think this explains anything. And it is equally stifling to scientific curiosity if we imagine that we have explained anything at all, let alone man in all his perversity and uniqueness, if we take this or that laboratory hypothesis—say, learning theory as applied to organisms in a laboratory environment—and by verbal sleight-of-hand stick the label onto man. Then we find ourselves stuck with some all-too-familiar still-born monsters. We may say, for example, that organism A endowed with genetic constitution B and subjected to environmental stimulus C will respond with behavior D if it has been rewarded by reinforcing stimulus E. Now, we know from many arduous and painstaking experiments that this model is a useful way of thinking about the behavior of many organisms. The damage is done, however, and science is affronted and curiosity depressed when in the next breath one hears something like this: Human being A endowed with brain B responds with pleasure to experience C—say, viewing the Mona Lisa in the Louvre—with behavior D, the exclamation “Beautiful!” because human being A has learned through operant conditioning E that such an expression is met with approval and an increase in status among one’s peers.

  Or, if we do not have the modesty of Freud, it is all too easy to play psychological parlor games and to pretend to account for Dostoevsky’s The Gambler or Kafka’s The Castle as an expression of such-and-such libidinal energies.

  But the main error, it seems to me, of both the armchair behaviorist and the armchair psychologist is not the quick extrapolation from the simple hypothesis to complex human reality but rather the willingness of both to accept the age-old split of the human creature into this strange Janus monster comprising body and mind.

  The biologist and learning theorist can’t get hold of mind and usually don’t want to. The Freudian psychologist, on the other hand, has trouble getting out of the psyche—his own psyche and that of his patients.

  The question I am trying to raise with you is whether or not we have settled for a view of man which is grossly incoherent by any scientific canon. That is to say, I wonder if through a kind of despair or through sheer weariness we have not given up the attempt to put man back together again, if indeed he was ever whole, or whether man isn’t like Humpty Dumpty, who fell off the wall three hundred years ago, or rather was pushed by Descartes, who split man into body and mind—two disparate pieces which, incidentally, Descartes believed were connected through the pineal body. As a matter of fact, I’m not sure we’ve made a better connection between the two since.

  To bring matters closer to home and to our own interests and concerns, I would propose to you this little hospital as a kind of microcosm of this schism in Western consciousness which we accept as a matter of course. I am wondering whether, like the rest of us, in doing work here, treatment, teaching, research, you have not already proceeded on the tacit assumption that man is composed of body and mind, and that between the two there is only a nodding acquaintance.

  Indeed, this hospital strikes me as an excellent model both of the virtues of modern medical and psychotherapeutic practice and of the schism we have accepted, consisting as it does of two stories, an upstairs-downstairs world where somatic disorders are treated on the ground floor where medical theory is well grounded, and psychic dysfunctions are treated on the second story. I wonder if the planners of this arrangement didn’t unconsciously know what they were doing when they put the psychotherapist somewhat up in the air, so to speak? This is not to impugn either physicians or psychotherapists, but only to suggest that we laymen tend to think of the internist and surgeon as dealing with matters rather firmly grounded in the biological sciences, while we think of the psychotherapist as treating disorders which are no less real but which are notoriously hard to get hold of and even harder to connect up with the great body of the physical sciences.

  To get down to cases, wouldn’t it strike us all as inappropriate if a patient walked in with a case of hemorrhoids and had to get on the elevator and go upstairs for treatment—while a patient suffering from free-floating anxiety was sent down to the basement? It offends our sense of the order of things.

  This is only to assert what is surely a commonplace; namely, that the medi
cal and surgical disciplines attempt and often succeed in dealing with matter in interaction and so generally preserve a degree of continuity with the well-established laws of the chemical, physical, and biological sciences. Whereas in the case of the psychiatric and psychotherapeutic disciplines, through no fault of theirs, and however they choose to define themselves, nearly all of them address themselves—must address themselves—to mental or subjective realities. A standard textbook of psychotherapy published over ten years ago lists ten different schools of psychotherapy, running from Freud’s psychoanalysis to Sullivan’s theory of interpersonal relations—and this does not include the more recent and promising schools of transactional analysis and Gestalt therapy. As diverse as all these systems are, they share one trait in common: they all deal, by and large, with subjective, mental, or emotional entities, events and states which cannot be seen or measured but can only be reported by the patient. Even the stimulus-and-response therapy of Dollard and Miller stretches the term “response” to include what they call “subjectively observable responses”—in short, any mental state the patient chooses to report.

  It is also surely a commonplace to say that to many physicians and surgeons such a proliferation of theory suggests that the subject matter of psychiatry and psychotherapy is both more difficult and, in a real sense, harder to get hold of by the scientific method, and that a single “correct” theory has not yet been hit upon in the sense that, say, a single theory of the mechanics of ovulation or renal function is generally agreed to exist.