The Message in the Bottle and Lost in the Cosmos

by Walker Percy

  or “Catastrophe as Catalyst in the Ontology of Joy, or Hurricane Parties on the Gulf Coast during Hurricane Camille: An In-depth Study of Eleven Victims Who Elected to Stay Compared with Eleven Random Control Subjects Who Elected to Leave”?

  When the Martian made inquiries about such possible connections between man’s peculiar symbol-mongering and his even more peculiar behavior, he was given a copy of The Naked Ape.

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  The truth is that man’s capacity for symbol-mongering in general and language in particular is so intimately part and parcel of his being human, of his perceiving and knowing, of his very consciousness itself, that it is all but impossible for him to focus on the magic prism through which he sees everything else.

  In order to see it, one must be either a Martian, or, if an earthling, sufficiently detached, marooned, bemused, wounded, crazy, one-eyed, and lucky enough to become a Martian for a second and catch a glimpse of it.

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  The day I was thinking about Helen Keller and became a Martian for five seconds, making a breakthrough like Helen’s, the difference being that her breakthrough was something she did and my breakthrough was a sudden understanding of what she did.

  One ordinary summer day I was sitting at my desk in Louisiana and thinking about a day in the life of Helen Keller in Tuscumbia, Alabama, in 1887. I had been trying to figure out what happens when a child hears a word, a sound uttered by someone else, and understands that it is the name of something he sees. Toward this end I had filled a page with diagrams showing little arrows leaving the speaker’s mouth, entering the ear of the hearer, coursing along neurons and synapses; other arrows showing light waves coming from the tree or ball the child was looking at; the two trains of arrows meeting one way or another in the brain.

  For a long time the conviction had been growing upon me that three short paragraphs in Helen Keller’s The Story of My Life veiled a mystery, a profound secret, and that, if one could fathom it, one could also understand a great deal of what it meant to be Homo loquens, Homo symbolificus, man the speaking animal, man the symbol-monger.

  The literature on the subject was by and large unsatisfactory. It still is. If the Martian wanted to go to the library and look it up or enroll in the university and take a course in it, he’d be out of luck. I too discovered that if you tried to look up language, you could find out everything under the sun about it except—the phenomenon itself. What I found was two kinds of thinking on the subject with a narrow but impenetrable terra incognita in between.

  There were the behaviorists, who seemed anxious above all to explain language as a stimulus-response event, drawing arrows in and out and around dogs’ brains and human brains. A man receiving a symbol could not, it seemed, be altogether different from a pigeon “understanding” a green light which “meant” food-pellet-over-there. The classic case, of course, was Pavlov’s dog learning to respond to a buzzer by salivating. Other kinds of animal responses may be a little different—Skinner’s pigeons, for example—but the model was the same. The same arrows worked for both.

  The explanatory model of the behaviorists was all a model should be; it was simple, elegant, and fruitful. It stood, moreover, in a direct line of continuity with chemistry and physics. The happenings in a speaker’s mouth, in the air, in the ear of the listener, along the nerves, could all be understood, at least in principle, as chemical and physical transactions occurring between molecules or electrons. You could draw a picture of it, showing things and spaces and arrows flying between them.

  It was a valuable model. Beautiful and simple as it was, one did not abandon it lightly—especially not for fuzzy philosophical notions like “thoughts” and “minds” and “ideas.”

  The behaviorists knew what they were talking about. The picture they drew of an organism responding to a learned signal had all the virtues of a good explanatory model. It explained, satisfied, and stimulated.

  One wanted very much to apply the model, or a variant of it, to human behavior. And indeed one could—if one picked the right kind of behavior. The anthropologist Malinowski, who also liked the model, picked a good example. A party of Trobriand Islanders are out fishing. One man sights a school and calls out, “Mackerel here!” The other fishermen converge on the spot and ready their spears.

  The model works in this case. Fisherman B responds to the cry of fisherman A, as he has learned by past experience and past rewards to respond: he paddles over and readies his spear. Perhaps if the cry had been “Shark here!” the response would have been to paddle in the opposite direction.

  Yes, Trobriand fishing fitted the model. But I couldn’t help wondering at the time what Malinowski and the behaviorists would make of the behavior of the fishermen after they returned to the island, when they had a feast and later sat around the fire and told stories. Try to draw a picture with arrows of a storyteller spinning a long tale about long-past or imaginary events and forty islanders listening to him and taking it all in.

  Something was wrong. Something in fact usually went wrong with the behaviorist S-R model whenever it was applied to a characteristically symbolic transaction, telling a story and listening to a story, looking at a painting and understanding it, a father pointing at a ball and naming it for his child, a poet hitting on a superb metaphor and the reader “getting” it with that old authentic thrill Barfield speaks of. In order to be fitted to such events, the S-R model had to be distorted, yanked, stretched, added onto, and in general rendered unrecognizable. The behaviorists in fact seemed more anxious to fit the model to the phenomenon than to take a good look at the phenomenon.

  When a model ceases to illumine and order or even to fit the case, and when the time comes that you’re spending more time tinkering with the model to make it work than taking a good hard look at the happening, it’s time to look for another model.

  Clearly something is wrong with the behaviorist model when it is applied to symbolic phenomena. To be blunt about it, it doesn’t work. No matter how much it is tinkered with, no matter how many little s’s and r’s, “intervening variables,” are added, it still doesn’t work. Not only does it fail to account for a particular symbolic transaction, it has been conspicuous by its uselessness in the face of those very features of language that set it apart from animal behavior: (1) the productivity of language, the fact that a child, after two or three years’ exposure to a language and without anyone taking much trouble about it, can utter and understand an unlimited number of new sentences in the language; (2) an explanation of names; (3) an account of sentences.

  The other great tradition by which man has sought to understand his own peculiar traffic in words and symbols runs from Plato through Kant to Ernst Cassirer. Here the starting point is not the “real” objective world out there with its sticks and stones, plants and bugs, amoebae shrinking, dogs salivating, Trobriand Islanders fishing—all these items and many more out there, and out there too perhaps the oddest lot of all, a group of scientists looking at these happenings and trying to explain them to each other. No, the emphasis is rather on the mind, the idea, the word, the self-generated symbol, the interior picture, the transcendental form which we make and by which we not only understand the world but construe it, even constitute it. To make a long story much too short, and so to make as quick as possible an end to the longest and most boring argument in philosophy, it is not really the world which is known but the idea or symbol which becomes the all-construing form, while that which it symbolizes, the great wide world, gradually vanishes into Kant’s unknowable noumenon.

  At any rate Cassirer did indeed give the symbol the full weight and primacy I thought it deserved, but in so doing he seemed to have fallen victim to the old interior itch of German philosophers and let the world slip away.

  How to account in this tradition for the unending sweat and toil and mistakes and wrong guesses and quarrels and finally triumphs of scientists who go to so much trouble to get at the truth, or at least the hows and whys, of what is going on o
ut there?

  American behaviorists kept solid hold on the world of things and creatures, yet couldn’t fit the symbol into it.

  German idealists kept the word as internal form, logos, and let the world get away. From Kant to Cassirer, man became ever more securely locked up inside his own head. Even outside happenings seemed to be ordered by the interior forms of the mind. All questions could be given inside answers—except the kind of awkward questions children ask: Yes, but how does it happen that you can talk and I can understand you? Or, how does it happen that you can write a book and I can read it? Or, if the world is really unknowable, why do scientists act as if there were something out there to be known and as if they could even get at the truth of the way things are?

  Accordingly, I was sitting at my desk in Louisiana on a summer day in the 1950’s wondering whether this split in human knowing was not in the very nature of things and whether, also, that peculiar and most human of all phenomenon, language, did not fall between the two, and was not somehow unapproachable from either, a forbidden island, a terra incognita.

  My instincts, I confess, were on the side of the scientists in general and in particular on the side of the hardheaded empiricism of American behavioral scientists. The entire spectacular history of modern science seemed to bear out their unspoken assumption that there was indeed something to be known out there and it was worth the effort to try to find out what it was.

  Yet the natural scientists, with all their understanding of interactions, energy exchanges, stimuli, and responses, could not seem to utter a single word about what men did and what they themselves were doing: observing and recording, telling and listening, uttering sentences and hearing sentences, writing papers and reading papers, delivering lectures, listening to the six o’clock news, writing a letter to one’s daughter in college.

  Was it possible, I wondered, to preserve the objective stance of the psychologist, which always seemed so right and valuable to me, which assumes there are real things and events happening, and to make some sense out of what happens when people talk and other people listen and understand or misunderstand? Maybe it wasn’t possible, to judge from the spectacular default of the behaviorists when confronted by language as behavior. Not since Noam Chomsky wrote his famous review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior has it been possible to take seriously the application to language of the old stimulus-response theory, however refined and modified it might be.

  Sitting there in Louisiana, I was thinking about these things. Then I began thinking about what happened between Helen Keller and Miss Sullivan in Tuscumbia, Alabama, on another summer morning in 1887. You recall the story. The heart of it is in three short paragraphs. Earlier, Helen had learned to respond like any other good animal: When she wanted a piece of cake, she spelled the word in Miss Sullivan’s hand and Miss Sullivan fetched her the cake (like the chimp Washoe, who gives hand signals: tickle, banana, etc.). Then Miss Sullivan took her for a walk.

  We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand, she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motion of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that “w-a-t-e-r” meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away.

  I left the well-house eager to learn. Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with the strange, new sight that had come to me. On entering the door I remembered the doll I had broken. [She had earlier destroyed the doll in a fit of temper.] I felt my way to the hearth and picked up the pieces. I tried vainly to put them together. Then my eyes filled with tears; for I realized what I had done, and for the first time I felt repentance and sorrow.

  I learned a great many new words that day. I do not remember what they all were; but I do know that mother, father, sister, teacher were among them—words that were to make the world blossom for me, “like Aaron’s rod with flowers.” It would have been difficult to find a happier child than I was as I lay in my crib at the close of that eventful day and lived over the joys it had brought me, and for the first time longed for a new day to come.

  If there was a bifurcation in our knowledge of ourselves and our peculiar and most characteristically human activity, with a terra incognita in between concealing the mystery, surely I was straddling it and looking straight down at it. Here in the well-house in Tusumbia in a small space and a short time, something extremely important and mysterious had happened. Eight-year-old Helen made her breakthrough from the good responding animal which behavorists study so successfully to the strange name-giving and sentence-uttering creature who begins by naming shoes and ships and sealing wax, and later tells jokes, curses, reads the paper, writes La sua volontade e nostra pace, or becomes a Hegel and composes an entire system of philosophy.

  For a long time I had believed and I still believe that if one had an inkling of what happened in the well-house in Alabama in the space of a few minutes, one would know more about the phenomenon of language and about man himself than is contained in all the works of behaviorists, linguists, and German philosophers.

  What did happen?

  Once again, as I had done many times before and as my hardheaded professor had taught me, I began drawing diagrams, behaviorist models, showing the usual arrows. After all the arrows were there: Miss Sullivan traced certain sensory patterns in Helen’s hand, which were then coded by the touch receptors in the skin and transmitted by afferent nerves to the sensory cortex, the gray matter of the brain. And, at least in the incident with the cake, once Helen received a “word” which she had learned to associate with a certain pleasant consequence, other arrows could be drawn showing that Helen’s attention and behavior were directed to the fetching and eating of the cake. Then did something of the sort happen in the well-house? Begin then with this diagram:

  Now I had something very close to Ogden and Richards’s triangle. The arrows showed “real causal” relations between the word water spelled in Helen’s hand and Helen’s brain, and between the brain event which issues in Helen’s attention being directed toward the “referent,” the water flowing over her other hand.

  What about the relation between the word water and the water itself? There is no “real causal” relation but only the relation of naming which Miss Sullivan teaches Helen to “impute” between the two. So, if we want to follow Ogden and Richards, we can draw a dotted line between the word water and the water and call it an “unreal imputed relation.”

  But wait. Something was very wrong. For one thing, I felt like handing a piece of chalk to Professors Ogden and Richards, inviting them to the blackboard, and making a polite request: Would you mind drawing me a picture of an “unreal imputed relation”? What does the dotted line mean?

  For another thing, it wasn’t the case that Helen had received the word water, which had then directed her attention or behavior toward the water. That wasn’t what happened. What happened was that she received both, both the sensory message from the hand Miss Sullivan was spelling in and that from the other hand, which the water was flowing over. The direction of one arrow should be reversed, as in Figure 2.

  Then what happened inside Helen’s head? Clearly, even if I were a neuroanatomist I would hardly be in a position to say, because for one thing not even a neuroanatomist can look. But I was asking myself, rather, what sort of thing happened? The old model had broken down. I needed a new one, however crude. After all, modern medicine began with Harvey making the crudest sort of g
uess about the heart and the blood: Maybe the latter works like a unidirectional pump and the blood goes round and round.

  Accordingly, I kept thinking about Helen’s breakthrough and drew dozens of diagrams, triangles, arrows, dotted lines, nerve nets linking portions of the sensory cortex.

  Unquestionably Helen’s breakthrough was critical and went to the very heart of the terra incognita. Before, Helen had behaved like a good responding organism. Afterward, she acted like a rejoicing symbol-mongering human. Before, she was little more than an animal. Afterward, she became wholly human. Within the few minutes of the breakthrough and the several hours of exploiting it Helen had concentrated the months of the naming phase that most children go through somewhere around their second birthday.

  It was like holding a test tube of pure uranium which had been smelted from thousands of tons of ore-bearing rock. I was looking straight at it, but what to make of it?

  Not only that, not only did Helen’s experience distill the essence of the two-year-old’s language learning, but also—and this was enough to quicken your pulse and keep you drawing diagrams by the hour—if the biologist’s motto were true and ontogeny does recapitulate phylogeny, then Helen’s breakthrough must bear some relation to the breakthrough of the species itself, at that faraway time when our ancestor, having harnessed fire, for the first time found himself seated by the flickering embers, looking into the eyes of his comrades and thinking (not really thinking, of course) about the vivid events of the day’s hunt and “knowing” that the others must be “thinking” about the same thing: One of them tries to recapture it, to savor it, and so repeats the crude hunting cry meaning Bison here!; another, hearing it, knows somehow that the one doesn’t mean get up and hunt now or do this or do anything, but means something else, means Remember him, remember the bison, and as the other waits and sees it, sees the bison, savors the seeing it, something happens, a spark jumps…