Signposts in a Strange Land

by Walker Percy

  But there’s something else afoot in Melville’s case. It has to do with what the structuralists call intertextuality. Now, there is a lot of real goofiness in structuralist criticism. One can imagine a structuralist critique of Moby-Dick in the style of Lévi-Strauss: a table of binary opposites listing right whales in one column and wrong whales in another, and the right whales are the sperm whales and the wrong whales are wrongly called right whales. One could “deconstruct” Melville, too, discounting his authorial intention and putting forward the thesis that Moby-Dick is really about a homosexual relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg. It has been done, in fact, and it may or may not be true; but it’s not really important because that’s not what excited Melville and it’s not what excites the reader.

  But there is something interesting about the idea of Hawthorne as an intertext for Melville, or Melville as a countertext for Hawthorne, which is another way of saying that it is impossible to imagine Melville writing Moby-Dick without the somber figure of Hawthorne at his shoulder. The structuralists are right about intertextuality. But I believe it can be stated in ordinary language—without the jargon. There’s a strange paradox about writing novels. It is simply this: there’s no occupation in the universe that is lonelier and that at the same time depends more radically on a community, a commonwealth of other writers.

  I needn’t mention the half-dozen extraordinary writers and thinkers confined to a couple of small towns in Massachusetts. But there’s a difference between the mediated loneliness of a writer like Melville, for whom Hawthorne stood close by (whether actually present or not), and the absolute loneliness of a Southern writer of the 1840s or 1850s. For all I know, there were dozens of potential Hawthornes and Melvilles and Thoreaus in the Virginias and Carolinas of the 1840s. But there’s no such thing as a sovereign and underived text, except possibly for Faulkner, who came from God knows where.

  Perhaps the South at that time was too big, too well off, the writers too scattered, too politicized, too full of hubris. Who needed to write? I like to imagine that what happened to literature in the South in the 1920s and 1930s was the same sort of thing that happened to New England a hundred years before. It’s just that the post-Christianity and alienation of the Massachusetts writer took a hundred years to reach Mississippi.

  Try to imagine Melville today writing in New York about his obsession with the natural depravity of man and blaming God for it. He would be referred to an analyst. It is hard to say who would be more certifiable at Yale or Harvard now—Melville, who believed in the depravity of man and blamed God for it, or Dostoevsky, who believed in the depravity of man and looked to God to save him from it.

  The common denominator, I think, between Southern writing of this century and Northeastern writing of the last is a certain relation of the writer to a shared body of belief. I don’t mean that a writer has to be informed by a belief like Dante’s. But surely there’s a certain dialectical relation to a shared belief that helps a writer, even if the relation is unbelief, as in the case of Euripides, who had no use for the gods and didn’t lose any sleep over it, or Melville, who had no use for God but could never get over it.

  The vocabulary remains intact; there is a common universe of discourse. It is shared by believer and scoffer, even when the scoffer is like Melville or Joyce and cannot relax in his unbelief. Take these factors, a shared belief or a shared warfare against belief, a major talent like Melville’s, a community of one’s peers, and a common universe of discourse, and you’ve got the makings of a major literature.

  Moby-Dick was not only dedicated to Hawthorne, it was written at him. Written to the reader, yes, but always past Hawthorne, with an eye cocked for Hawthorne’s approval at the very least. At the most, it was written to amaze Hawthorne, out-Hawthorne Hawthorne. Not only Man is depraved, but God, too. We know what Melville thought of Hawthorne. He ranked him with Shakespeare, but in a peculiar sense. By Melville’s own admission, it was Hawthorne’s great power of blackness that appealed to his Calvinist sense of innate depravity and Original Sin. We know how Melville felt after he wrote Moby-Dick, and he gave the book to Hawthorne. He said he had written a wicked book, broiled in hellfire, and that he felt fine, as spotless as a lamb, happy, content. Here he used an expression, a strange expression—he referred to the “ineffable sociabilities” he felt in himself.

  Surely this is the key to the paradox—the ineffable sociability in writing. Intertextuality, if you please. As lonely as is the craft of writing, it is the most social of vocations. No matter what the writer may say, the work is always written to someone, for someone, against someone. The happiness comes from the ineffable sociabilities, when they succeed, when the writing works and somebody knows it.

  But this still doesn’t explain where Moby-Dick came from, and why Southern writers to this day are knocked out by it in a way they are not knocked out by Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, or even Hawthorne, and in a way Northern writers may not be. The Northern intellectual generally finds Moby-Dick comprehensible to the degree he can attach this or that symbol to it—hence the vague descriptions one is always reading about Moby-Dick being an allegory about evil.

  Now, allegories are dull affairs. I’ve never read a readable one. And Moby-Dick is not dull. Melville had other fish to fry—if you will forgive the expression.

  I like to imagine that Moby-Dick came to pass in the following way. Like many great works of literature, it was a consequence, not merely of great gifts, but also of great good luck. Perhaps one could even speak of providence or grace. But here is where the luck comes in. One sets out to make up a story, spin a yarn, probably for money. After all, that’s how one makes one’s living. Perhaps one has fought in a war, bummed around Europe, had six wives, signed up on a whaler out of Nantucket, jumped ship in the South Seas, lived with cannibals. One has become famous, writing about it. One has become a sort of Louis L’Amour of the South Seas, and gets in a few licks at the missionaries for good measure. So, what to do, the writer? You start another whaling yarn. Why not? But then something untoward, extraordinary happens. As the narrative unfolds, one becomes aware that in its very telling something else is being told, a ghostly narrative of great import told by a ghostly self, perhaps one’s own shadow self.

  This is not to say that at the beginning one might not have had some species of allegory in mind, especially when one has named the chief characters Ishmael and Ahab—the one after a biblical character kicked out into the desert with God’s permission, the other after a bad king God had assured would end by having his blood licked by dogs. An allegory is a dreary business. What is not dreary is a narrative that unfolds not merely itself but oneself and others’ selves. There’s no straining for a symbol of truth. The narrative is the thing.

  That is why Moby-Dick is so good and The Confidence-Man is so boring. The happiness of Melville in Moby-Dick is the happiness of the artist discovering, breaking through into the freedom of his art. Through no particular virtue of his own, he hit on a mother lode. The novel—the freedom of its form often paralyzing to the novelist—suddenly finds itself being shaped by a larger unity which cannot be violated. Everything works. One kills six birds with every stone. One can even write a treatise on cetology, which comes off as a kind of theology.

  Objective correlatives are easy pickings, lying around like Sutter’s gold nuggets. One describes as simple a thing as a wooden crutch, a wire-shaped piece of wood which holds a harpoon, and it turns into a theory of literature. One describes the try-pots, the hellish fire, and the heat amidships of the Pequod at full sail through the night, and it becomes one’s very soul, both damned and freed.

  The freedom and happiness of the artist is attested by his playfulness, his tricks, his malice, his underhandedness, his naughtiness, his hoodwinking the reader. So happy is the metaphorical distance between the novelist and his narrative that he’s free to cover his tracks at will. Not only do I not have to strive to mean such-and-such, he seems to say, but I deny that I mean it. I might
mean the opposite, because with the Pequod under full sail through the night with its try-pots blazing I don’t have to worry about a thing. The great whale is as sportive as the Pequod; nothing can stop the one but the other. No wonder Melville told Hawthorne: I would sit down and dine with you and all the gods in old Rome’s pantheon.

  To the Southerner, then, here’s the luck of Melville: that the novelist’s terrible loneliness has somehow stumbled into the ineffable sociability Melville spoke of. Melville impresses Southern writers for the same reason Dostoevsky impresses Southerners. Neither was afraid to deal with ultimate questions. It may be that the South, which has been called a Christ-haunted place, is something like New England a hundred years ago.

  Melville is Dostoevsky turned inside out. Both men saw the depravity of man. One saw it as the occasion of his salvation; the other blamed it on God. Melville is perhaps the lesser writer, not because one might disagree with his theology and philosophy, but because in the end both are perhaps incoherent.

  Dostoevsky would never have put up with the Rousseauean nonsense that Melville swallowed hook, line, and sinker. In the end, Melville ends up with the eminently readable science fiction of Billy Budd, a queer mishmash of Schopenhauer and Rousseau. One hears that Billy Budd is about innocence and evil. It’s both a lot better and a lot worse than that. The evil is the last vestige of Melville’s Calvinism—man’s depravity.

  In Melville, the only believable part of Judeo-Christianity (as Schopenhauer put it)—the innocence—comes not from human nature but from outer space. Billy Budd is man before the Fall, man exempted from the Fall, a creature dragged in from some loony planet invented by Melville and Rousseau, who neither understands evil nor needs salvation from it. Dostoevsky would have laughed out loud. Billy Budd, in Dostoevsky’s hands, would have turned out to be a child molester.

  And therefore a good deal more believable. But Melville was not afraid to address such matters, and that’s why he means so much to us.

  1983

  Diagnosing the Modern Malaise

  FROM THE FIRST, I was emboldened to accept an invitation to speak here at Cornell during the Chekhov festival, not because I am a Chekhov scholar, but because of my admiration for him and a strong fellow feeling which has something to do with certain superficial resemblances between us. He was a physician and a writer of fiction. I was a physician and am a writer of fiction. We both had pulmonary tuberculosis. It also cheered me to learn from the Ukrainian writer Potapenko that Chekhov, like me, was not at all keen on doctoring and was always glad of an excuse to get away from it. He did a bad job with his own illness, never took it seriously even when he was dying of it.

  There the resemblances seem to stop. Chekhov never wrote a novel. I never wrote a short story or play and don’t intend to. One reason is that, after reading a Chekhov play or short story, one tends to be intimidated.

  But as I thought about it and began to read further into Chekhov, it occurred to me that there were other concerns which I shared with him, concerns which it seems appropriate to speak of now because they are of even greater moment to us than in the nineteenth century.

  Again I find myself coming back to his medical training. And, accordingly, I hope it won’t sound presumptuous to say that his great genius, it seems to me, brought a certain set of mind from medicine to literature which served well in his case and in my case has been indispensable. I refer to the diagnostic stance which comes so naturally to the physician—diagnostic at the outset, and in the end, one hopes, therapeutic.

  Part of the natural equipment of the doctor is a nose for pathology. Something is wrong. What is it? What is the nature of the illness? Where is the lesion? Is it acute or chronic, treatable or fatal? Can we understand it? Does the disease have a name or is it something new?

  Accordingly, I shall use as my point of departure, not the conventional view of Chekhov as a masterful portrayer of life as it is, of people with all their faults and foibles, without judgment or ideology. I think rather of a less well-known Chekhov, Chekhov the literary clinician, the pathologist of the strange spiritual malady of the modern age; the Chekhov, in short, of those remarkable stories “A Dreary Story” and “Ward Number Six.” What is wrong with Nikolai Stepanovitch in “A Dreary Story”? An eminently successful physician, scientist, professor, he has accomplished all he set out to accomplish. He placed his faith in Science and Science served him well. All academic honors are his and he is acclaimed throughout Russia. But what happens? Instead of enjoying his triumph, it turns to ashes in his mouth. The story ends with him alone in a hotel room in Kharkov, unable to love anyone, himself included, unable to see the slightest value or meaning in life.

  Although Chekhov would, if he were here, be outraged or pretend to be outraged at the suggestion that his story might be about anything so grandiose as the spiritual plight of Western man or the loss of meaning in the modern world—for he had a healthy contempt for didactic writing and an almost fanatic vocation to show people the way they are. Yet how like the contemporary anti-hero of the so-called existentialist novel is Nikolai Stepanovitch—who, if he were translated into the here-and-now, would be a Nobel Prize laureate at Cornell who chucks it all and finds himself alone and bemused in a Holiday Inn in Dallas.

  In his story “Ward Number Six,” the psychiatrist finds himself a patient in a mental hospital. This switch pleases me particularly. In fact, I have carried the paradox one step further in a recent novel and raised it to a general principle that the so-called normal world is so crazy that only a patient in a mental hospital can recover a degree of perspective and stability.

  At any rate, what interests me in this connection is the extraordinary apposition in Chekhov of a scrupulous respect for life and reality in the concrete, a distaste for ideology, a refusal to bend fact to thesis, this on the one hand, and, on the other, his recurring diagnostic approach to the ills of the modern world—which, after all, entails a certain degree of abstraction and generalizing and sciencing. In his story “A Case History,” Korolyov, who seems to be Chekhov’s mouthpiece, judges social problems from the point of view of the doctor accustomed to making accurate diagnoses of chronic ailments.

  The point is that now, almost a hundred years later, I would propose to you that this literary-diagnostic method which Chekhov used sporadically is even more appropriate to the fictional enterprise of the late twentieth century, more appropriate than in other times, say Shakespeare’s England or even Chekhov’s Russia. In other times, the sense of wholeness and well-being of society, or at least much of educated society, outweighed the suspicion that something had gone very wrong, indeed. To the degree that a society has been overtaken by a sense of malaise rather than exuberance, by fragmentation rather than wholeness, the vocation of the artist, whether novelist, poet, playwright, filmmaker, can perhaps be said to come that much closer to that of the diagnostician rather than the artist’s celebration of life in a triumphant age.

  Something is indeed wrong, and one of the tasks of the serious novelist is, if not to isolate the bacillus under the microscope, at least to give the sickness a name, to render the unspeakable speakable. Not to overwork the comparison, the artist’s work in such times is surely not that of the pathologist whose subject matter is a corpse and whose question is not “What is wrong?” but “What did the patient die of?” For I take it as going without saying that the entire enterprise of literature is like that of a physician undertaken in hope. Otherwise, why would we be here? Why bother to read, write, teach, study, if the patient is already dead?—for, in this case, the patient is the culture itself.

  Such terms as diagnosis and pathology are of course used analogically here, but I am using the word “science” deliberately and unequivocally in its original and broad sense of discovery and knowing rather than its current and narrow sense of the isolation of secondary causes in natural phenomena. For, if I believe anything, it is that the primary business of literature and art is cognitive, a kind of finding out and knowin
g and telling, both in good times and bad, a celebration of the way things are when they are right, and a diagnostic enterprise when they are wrong. The pleasures of literature, the emotional gratification of reader and writer, follow upon and are secondary to the knowing.

  Accordingly, if there has been any one thing I have wanted to leave with students, it is my conviction of the high seriousness, indeed the critical importance, of the profession of letters in this age, whether teaching, writing, scholarship, criticism, or, indeed, reading. In fact, as I shall presently suggest, the cognitive role of literature at the present time, its success or failure, may be more critical than the combined efforts of NASA, Cal Tech, and MIT.

  The strategy of the novel in the late twentieth century is surely different from the fiction of the past two hundred years. Literature in earlier times might be understood as an attempt to dramatize conflicts and resolutions, articulate and confirm values in a society where there already existed a consensus about the meaning of life and the world and man’s place in it. Given such a consensus, a corpus of meanings held in common, it was possible for a novelist or playwright or poet to create a fictive world within which the behavior of the characters could be understood, approved, disapproved, and the reader accordingly entertained, edified, and, in the case of great literature, his very self and his world confirmed and illumined by the work of the novelist.

  In short, any literature requires as the very condition of its life a certain consensus, an already existing intersubjective community within which both novelists and readers can traffic in words and symbols, myths and beliefs, which mean approximately the same thing for both writer and reader.