Signposts in a Strange Land

by Walker Percy

  An organism is oriented to the world according to its organismic needs, but a person is oriented to the world in the mode of truth-untruth. It is a mistake to speak of truth-untruth in connection with an organism and a sign. A duck may make an error about a sign and mistake a hunter’s call for a duck’s call. Yet, even if he is killed, until the moment of his death, he never ceases to be what he always was, an organism responding to a sign according to a conditioned brain pattern. But for a person the selfsame symbol which discloses being may be the means by which being is concealed and lost. The symbol “sparrow” is, at first, the means by which a creature is known and affirmed and by which you and I become its co-celebrants. Later, however, the same symbol may serve to conceal the creature until it finally becomes invisible. A sparrow becomes invisible in ordinary life because it disappears into its symbol. If one sees a movement in a tree and recognizes it and says it is “only a sparrow,” one is disposing of the creature through its symbolic formulation. The sparrow is no longer available to me. Being is elusive; it tends to escape, leaving only a simulacrum of symbol. Only under the condition of ordeal may I recover the sparrow. If I am lying wounded or in exile or in prison and a sparrow builds his nest at my window, then I may see the sparrow. This is why new names must be found for being, as Heidegger thinks, or the old ones given new meaning, as Marcel thinks.

  The fear of an organism is appropriate; it is no more nor is it less than is warranted by the sign which arouses fear. The measure of the fear and the visceral and muscular response to the fear are specifically determined by the character of the threat. But the anxiety which follows upon symbolization is ambiguous. The same anxiety may be destructive biologically—for it serves no biological function: one is afraid of nothing—and at the same time a summons to an authentic existence. It is for this reason that a physician and a metaphysician take opposite views of anxiety—Freud looking upon anxiety as a symptom of a disorder to be gotten rid of, Kierkegaard looking upon it as the discovery of the possibility of becoming a self.

  Anxiety may simply occur when something is encountered which can neither be ignored nor named. Anxiety may, thus, vary all the way from a slight uneasiness to terror in the face of the uncanny. A strange bird may cause a slight unrest until it is named; but the appearance of a three-masted trading schooner in place of the usual two-masted one may provoke terror among Melanesian islanders. In the everyday world, one is under the strongest compulsion to construe things one way or another—even things which are in fact unknown tend to be construed as things which are already known. Once Helen Keller knew what water was, she had to know what everything else was. After this total construction of one’s world, it is only when something is radically different and resists interpretation in terms of the familiar symbols that one experiences the “uncanny”—that which is not yet known or symbolized.

  By the same token, anxiety may also occur when one discovers that, of all the things in the world, oneself is the only being that cannot be symbolized. Everything else in the world tends to become ever more densely formulated by its name: this is a chair, that is a ball, you are Robert, we have democracy and freedom. But I myself escape every such attempt at formulation. A person who looks at a group picture looks for himself first: everyone else in the picture looks more or less as he knew they would—they are what they are; but he does not know what he is, and so he looks to see; and when he finds himself, he always experiences a slight pang: so that is who I am! But this formulation is ephemeral, and he will do the same thing with the next group picture. The being of the namer slips through the fingers of naming. If he tries to construe himself in the same mode by which he construes the rest of the world, he must necessarily construe himself as nothing, as Sartre’s characters do. But this is not to say that I am nothing; this is only to say that I am that which I cannot name. I am rather a person, a namer and a hearer of names. Nor are you formulable under the auspices of a symbol. If I do conceive you as a something in the world rather than as a co-celebrant of the world, I fall from the I-thou to the I-it. Yet I am not able to dispose of you as finally as I dispose of shoes and ships and sealing wax. There remains your stare, which may not be symbolized. If I am determined to dispose of you by formulation, I had better not look at you.

  Even in its most primitive form, naming is a kind of judgment. It is also a kind of primitive abstraction. It is an affirming of a thing to be one of a sort of things. But this sort is not usually what is meant by a concept. It is far less abstract—I take it to be roughly equivalent to Lotze’s “first universal.” This primitive abstraction contains the Anlage both of scientific abstraction and of poetical naming. When a tribesman utters a single word which means the-sun-shining-through-a-hole-in-the-clouds-in-a-certain-way, he is combining the offices of poet and scientist. His fellow tribesmen know what he means. We have no word for it because we have long since analyzed the situation into its component elements. But we need to have a word for it, and it is the office of the poet to give us a word. If he is a good poet and names something which we secretly and privately know but have not named, we rejoice at the naming and say, “Yes! I know what you mean!” Once again we are co-celebrants of being. This joy is as cognitive and as ontological as the joy of a hypothesis. It is a perversion of art to look upon science as the true naming and knowing and upon art as a traffic in emotions. Both science and art discover being, and neither may patronize the other.

  Daffodils,

  That come before the swallow dares, and take

  The winds of March with beauty.

  This is a naming and a knowing and a truth-saying at least as important as a botanical classification.

  If we must speak of a “need” in connection with human behavior, let us speak of it as Heidegger does: “The need is: to preserve the truth of Being no matter what may happen to man and everything that ‘is.’ Freed from all constraint, because born of the abyss of freedom, this sacrifice is the expense of our human being for the preservation of the truth of Being in respect of what-is. In sacrifice there is expressed that hidden thanking which alone does homage to the grace wherewith Being has endowed the nature of man, in order that he may take over in his relationship to being the guardianship of Being” (Martin Heidegger, Existence and Being).

  1960

  The State of the Novel: Dying Art or New Science?

  THE NOVEL IS REGULARLY said to be dying—and now it is said with perhaps more justification than at any other time. In fact, it is difficult now even to speak of the novel as a generic art form. If one uses as a criterion the familiar features of the traditional novel—plot, scene, characterization, action, denouement, development of character, and so on—it is hard to find a worthy example of the ancient art. Anything can and does pass for a novel now. A novel is what you call something that won’t sell if you call it poems or short stories. Autobiography is novel. History is novel. Sociology is novel. Tirade is novel. I am not complaining. For the undeniable fact is that nonnovels which pass as novels now are usually better than novels which look like novels. Love Story and Oliver’s Story, which look like novels—have characters, good people, bad people, love, action, and so forth—are not very good. In fact, the less said about them, the better. Céline’s novel Castle to Castle, which has no nice people at all and resembles a novel less than it does a cobra striking repeatedly, one venomous assault after another, is memorable and somehow astringent. After reading it, one feels revolted perhaps but also purged. After reading Love Story and such memorable lines as “Love means never having to say you’re sorry,” the reader needs a purge. He certainly doesn’t need an emetic. Maybe there are times when an honest hatred serves us better than love corrupted by sentimentality, meretriciousness, sententiousness, cuteness. Beckett’s novels, where nothing much happens, people say very little, and what they say is usually misunderstood, are more honest, bracing, less depressing than eventful good-story Harold Robbins novels. In Joseph Heller’s Something Happened, nothing happens, yet it i
s somehow more eventful than a Jacqueline Susann novel where everything happens. The last great conventional novel may have been War and Peace or perhaps Middlemarch. Gone with the Wind bears a certain resemblance to a great novel but what it really is is very good soap opera.

  Here I am making a couple of assumptions which I shall not bother to defend, since they seem to me self-evident. One is that if we take the novel seriously, it follows that it is an art form just as a poem or a painting or a symphony is an art form. And if this is the case, it follows that while it is true that a novel should have an action, it does not suffice for it to be a “good story.” That is to say, it is a good thing to tell a good story or to hear a good story, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that a good story is good art. Good art tells some home truths about the way things are, the way we are, about the movement or lack of movement of the human heart. In great ages, when people understood each other and held a belief in common, great stories like the Iliad or War and Peace were also great art, because they affirmed the unspoken values which a people held in common and made it possible for a people to recognize themselves and to know who they are. But there are other times when people don’t know who they are or where they are going. At such times storytelling can become a form of diversion, perhaps even a waste of time—like the prisoners facing execution Pascal talks about who spend their time crapshooting instead of trying to figure out how they got in such a fix and what is going to happen to them.

  So my main assumption is that art is cognitive; that is, it discovers and knows and tells, tells the reader how things are, how we are, in a way that the reader can confirm with as much certitude as a scientist taking a pointer-reading.

  A corollary to the proposition that art in general and the novel in particular are cognitive is that the stance of the novelist in the late twentieth century is also diagnostic. The implication is that something has gone wrong, which it certainly has, and that the usual experts cannot tell us what it is—and indeed that they may be part of the problem.

  Something, it appears, has gone wrong with the Western world, and gone wrong in a sense far more radical than, say, the evils of industrial England which engaged Dickens. It did not take a diagnostician to locate the evils of the sweatshops of the nineteenth-century Midlands. But now it seems that whatever has gone wrong strikes to the heart and core of meaning itself, the very ways people see and understand themselves. What is called into question in novels now is the very enterprise of human life itself. Instead of writing about this or that social evil from a posture of consensus from which we agree to deplore social evils, it is now the consensus itself and the posture which are called into question. This state of affairs creates problems for the novelist. For in order to create a literature, whether of celebration or dissent, a certain shared universe of discourse is required. It is now these very shared assumptions which are called into question. Forty years ago Steinbeck had an easy job writing about the Okies and the dust bowl. It is a different matter now when the novelist confronts third-generation Okies in California who have won, who seem to have everything they want—and yet who seem ready any minute to slide physically and spiritually into the Pacific Ocean.

  So the novelist today is less like the Tolstoy or Fielding or Jane Austen who set forth and celebrated a still intact society, than he is like a somewhat bemused psychiatrist gazing at a patient who in one sense lives in the best of all possible worlds and yet is suffering from a depression and anxiety which he doesn’t understand.

  There are similarities, I think, between these two branches of art and science; that is, novel-writing and psychiatry. There is also an intriguing difference between the points of view of the two professions. The issue between science and art is of perennial interest to me, since I started off in science in college, in medicine, was headed for psychiatry, and ended up writing novels—and so I hope it will also have general interest as an example of culture-crossing and perhaps as an occasion also of shedding some light on what the two cultures of art and science have to do with each other.

  It is all the more intriguing in this case because at first sight it would appear that the two points of view are directly opposed. If the novelist is right, the psychiatrist is deceiving himself. If the psychiatrist is right, the novelist is crazy.

  If the latter is the case, then novelists stand in need of psychiatrists—as in fact they often do. But it may also be the case that psychiatrists and other nonnovelists stand in need of novelists and that it is the novelist who is peculiarly equipped to locate such elusive phenomena and answer such odd questions as: What is pathological and what is “normal” in the last quarter of the twentieth century?

  More often than not, however, novelists and psychiatrists find themselves either talking at cross-purposes or upstaging each other from carefully prepared vantage points. Some psychologists and psychiatrists profess to understand such things as creativity which I do not understand. Novelists, on the other hand, often find psychiatrists easy prey in their novels. The long-term goals which psychology erects, such large abstractions as emotional maturity, meaningful intersubjective relations, and so on, do invite a certain satirical treatment.

  This is all in good fun. But what is important to notice is that the hero or anti-hero of the contemporary novel hardly qualifies under any of these conventional mental-health canons—emotional maturity, autonomy, and so forth. Indeed, he, and more recently she, is more often than not a solitary, disenchanted person who is radically estranged from his or her society, who has generally rejected the goals of his family and his peers, and whose encounters with other people, friendships and love affairs, are regularly attended by misunderstandings, misperceptions, breakdowns in communication, aggressions, and withdrawals, all occurring in a general climate of deflated meaning. People in novels meet, talk, make love, and go their separate ways without noticeable joy or sorrow. Indeed, the main emotion one encounters in contemporary fiction is a sense of unreality, a grayness and flatness, a diminished sense of significance. Relations between people take the form of silences, misunderstandings, impersonal sexual encounters.

  If someone were to propose to the hero of modern fiction that he undergo psychotherapy to make his life more meaningful and to improve his interpersonal relations, one can imagine his response.

  Now, of course, the issue can be settled very quickly in favor of psychology if we make the obvious inference—that the hero of the contemporary novel is the way he is because that’s the way the novelist is, a difficult, unhappy, cut-off sort of person. Might it not indeed be the case that the novelist writes novels precisely because of his somber view of the world and his own difficulties with people? Like the poet in Allen Tate’s definition, is he not a shaky man who steadies and affirms himself by the creative process?

  To a degree, this diagnosis is probably correct. We are dealing here with several half-truths. Most novelists and those poets who have not yet suicided would probably agree—with an important reservation. The poet may admit to being a wounded man, yet point out that the wounded man often has the best view of the battle. The novelist or poet may in his own perverse way be a modern version of the Old Testament prophet who, like Hosea, may have a bad home life, yet who, nevertheless and despite himself, finds himself stuck with the unpleasant assignment of pointing out to his fellow citizens that something is wrong, that they are on the wrong track.

  What I am suggesting is that art and science, in this case the novel and psychology, have different ways of approaching the truth and different truths to tell. Contradictions appear only when one discipline invades the territory of another.

  But let me get down to cases. Perhaps one example from current fiction will suffice to convey the special flavor of a commonly encountered fictional view of the dislocation of modern American life.

  In the novel Something Happened, Joseph Heller writes about Bob Slocum and his family. Slocum is a successful middle-aged executive who works in New York and lives in Connecticut. He is the
current version of the John Marquand character a generation ago who suffered a kind of gentle disenchantment with life. But things seem to have gotten worse since. None of the Slocums is noticeably neurotic. On the contrary, they are a gifted, attractive, and intelligent lot, the best of an affluent, upwardly-mobile, upper-middle-class Northeast exurban society. But Bob Slocum is unhappy, his wife is unhappy, his son is unhappy, his daughter is unhappy. Everyone is afraid of at least one other person. When the family assembles at mealtime, the traditional social celebration of all past civilizations, the occasion is a disaster of misunderstandings, sarcasms, put-downs, and uproar. “Can’t we get through one meal in peace?” somebody asks. No, they can’t.

  Bob’s wife drinks. Bob chases office girls and prostitutes without enthusiasm. Yet he succeeds in his profession. Like Marquand’s hero, he gets his promotion, buys a new house in Connecticut. This is how he feels about the new house:

  All of us live now—we are well off—in luxury … in a gorgeous two-story wood colonial house with white shutters on a choice country acre in Connecticut off a winding picturesque asphalt road called Peapod Lane—and I hate it. There are rose bushes, zinnias and chrysanthemums rooted about, and I hate them too. I have sycamores and chestnut trees in my glade and my glen, and pots of glue in my garage. I have an electric drill with sixteen attachments which I never use. Grass grows under my feet in back and in front, and flowers come into bloom when they’re supposed to … Families with horses for pets do live nearby, and I hate them too, the families and the horses … I hate my neighbor and he hates me.