The Message in the Bottle and Lost in the Cosmos

by Walker Percy

  Metaphor has scandalized philosophers, including both scholastics and semioticists, because it seems to be wrong: It asserts an identity between two different things. And it is wrongest when it is most beautiful. It is those very figures of Shakespeare which eighteenth-century critics undertook to “correct” because they had so obviously gotten off the track logically and were sometimes even contradictory—it is just those figures which we now treasure most.

  This element of outlandishness has resulted in philosophers washing their hands of beauty and literary men being glad that they have, in other words, in a divorce of beauty and ontology, with unhappy consequences to both. The difficulty has been that inquiries into the nature of metaphor have tended to be either literary or philosophical with neither side having much use for the other. The subject is divided into its formal and material aspects, with philosophers trying to arrive at the nature of metaphor by abstracting from all metaphors, beautiful and commonplace, and with critics paying attention to the particular devices by which a poet brings off his effects. Beauty, the importance attached to beauty, marks the parting of the ways. The philosopher attends to the formal structure of metaphor, asking such general questions as, What is the relation between metaphor and myth? Is metaphor an analogy of proper or improper proportionality? and in considering his thesis is notably insensitive to its beauties. In fact, the examples he chooses to dissect are almost invariably models of tastelessness, such as smiling meadow, leg of a table, John is a fox. One can’t help wondering, incidentally, if Aristotle’s famous examples of “a cup as the shield of Ares” and “a cup as the shield of Dionysius” didn’t sound like typical philosophers’ metaphors to contemporary poets. Literary men, on the other hand, once having caught sight of the beauty of metaphor, once having experienced what Barfield called “that old authentic thrill which binds a man to his library for life,” are constrained to deal with beauty alone, with the particular devices which evoke the beautiful, and let the rest go. If the theorist is insensitive to the beauty of metaphor, the critic is insensitive to its ontology. To the question, why is this beautiful? the latter will usually give a material answer, pointing to this or that effect which the poet has made use of. He is unsympathetic—and understandably so—to attempts to get hold of art by some larger schema, such as a philosophy of being—feeling in his bones that when the cold hand of theory reaches for beauty, it will succeed in grabbing everything except the beautiful.

  Being neither critic nor philosopher, I feel free to venture into the no-man’s-land between the two and to deal with those very metaphors which scandalize the philosopher because they are “wrong” and scandalize the critic because they are accidental. Philosophers don’t think much of metaphor to begin with and critics can hardly have much use for folk metaphors, those cases where one stumbles into beauty without deserving it or working for it. Is it possible to get a line on metaphor, to figure out by a kind of lay empiricism what is going on in those poetic metaphors and folk metaphors where the wrongness most patently coincides with the beauty?

  When the Mississippi Negro calls the Seeburg record player a seabird, it is not enough to say that he is making a mistake. It is also not enough to say that he is making a colorful and poetic contribution to language. It is less than useless to say that in calling a machine a bird he is regressing into totemism, etc. And it is not even accurate to say that he knows what the thing is and then gives it a picturesque if farfetched name. In some fashion or other, he conceives the machine under the symbol seabird, a fashion, moreover, in regard to which we must be very wary in applying the words right or wrong, poetic or discursive, etc. Certainly the machine is not a seabird and no one imagines that it is, whatever the semanticists may say. Yet we may make a long cast and guess that in conceiving it as a seabird, the namer conceives it with richer overtones of meaning and, in some sense neither literal nor figurative, even as being more truly what it is than under its barbarous title Seeburg automatic coin record player. There is a danger at this point in my being misunderstood as trying to strike a blow for the poetic against the technical, feeling against science, and on the usual aesthetic grounds. But my intention is quite the reverse. I mean to call attention to the rather remarkable fact that in conceiving the machine under the “wrong” symbol seabird, we somehow know it better, conceive it in a more plenary fashion, have more immediate access to it, than under its descriptive title. The sooner we get rid of the old quarrel of artistic versus prosaic as constituting the grounds of our preference, the sooner we shall be able to understand what is going on. Given these old alternatives, I’ll take the prosaic any day—but what is going on here is of far greater moment.

  The moments and elements of this meaning-situation are more easily grasped in the example of the boy seeing the strange bird in Alabama. The first notable moment occurred when he saw the bird. What struck him at once was the extremely distinctive character of the bird’s flight—its very great speed, the effect of alternation of the wings, the sudden plummeting into the woods. This so distinctive and incommunicable something—the word which occurs to one is Hopkins’s “inscape”—the boy perceived perfectly. It is this very uniqueness which Hopkins specifies in inscape: “the unspeakable stress of pitch, distinctiveness, selving.”

  The next moment is, for our purposes, the most remarkable of all, because it can receive no explanation in the conventional sign theory of meaning. The boy, having perfectly perceived the flight of the hawk, now suffers a sort of disability, a tension, even a sense of imminence! He puts the peculiar question, What is that bird? and puts it importunately. He is really anxious to know. But to know what? What sort of answer does he hope to hear? What in fact is the meaning of his extraordinary question? Why does he want an answer at all? He has already apprehended the hawk in the vividest, most plenary way—a sight he will never forget as long as he lives. What more will he know by having the bird named? (No more, say the semioticists, and he deceives himself if he imagines that he does.)

  We have come already to the heart of the question, and a very large question it is. For the situation of the boy in Alabama is very much the same sort of thing as what Cassirer calls the “mythico-religious Urphenomenon.” Cassirer, following Usener and Spieth, emphasized the situation in which the primitive comes face to face with something which is both entirely new to him and strikingly distinctive, so distinctive that it might be said to have a presence—an oddly shaped termite mound, a particular body of water, a particular abandoned road. And it is in the two ways in which this tensional encounter is resolved that the Urphenomenon is said to beget metaphor and myth. The Tro or momentary god is born of the sense of unformulated presence of the thing; the metaphor arises from the symbolic act in which the emotional cry of the beholder becomes the vehicle by which the thing is conceived, the name of the thing. “In the vocables of speech and in primitive mythic configurations, the same inner process finds its consummation: they are both resolutions of an inner tension, the representation of subjective impulses and excitations in definite object forms and figures.”

  One recognizes the situation in one’s own experience, that is, the metaphorical part of it. Everyone has a blue-dollar hawk in his childhood, especially if he grew up in the South or West, where place names are so prone to poetic corruption. Chaisson Falls, named properly after its discoverer, becomes Chasin’ Falls. Scapegoat Mountain, named after some Indian tale, becomes Scrapegoat Mountain—mythic wheels within wheels. And wonderfully: Purgatoire River becomes Picketwire River. A boy grows up in the shadow of a great purple range called Music Mountain after some forgotten episode—perhaps the pioneers’ first hoedown after they came through the pass. But this is not how the boy conceives it. When the late afternoon sun strikes the great pile in a certain light, the ridges turn gold, the crevasses are cast into a thundering blue shadow, then it is that he imagines that the wind comes soughing down the gorges with a deep organ note. The name, mysterious to him, tends to validate some equally mysterious in
scape of the mountain.

  So far so good. But the question on which everything depends and which is too often assumed to be settled without ever having been asked is this: Given this situation and its two characteristics upon which all agree, the peculiar presence or distinctiveness of the object beheld and the peculiar need of the beholder—is this “need” and its satisfaction instrumental or ontological? That is to say, is it the function of metaphor merely to diminish tension, or is it a discoverer of being? Does it fit into the general scheme of need-satisfactions?—and here it doesn’t matter much whether we are talking about the ordinary pragmatic view or Cassirer’s symbolic form: both operate in an instrumental mode, one, that of biological adaption; the other, according to the necessities of the mythic consciousness. Neither provides for a real knowing, a truth-saying about what a being is. Or is it of such a nature that at least two sorts of realities must be allowed: one, the distinctive something beheld; two, the beholder (actually two beholders, one who gives the symbol and one who receives the symbol as meaningful, the Namer and the Hearer), whose special, if imperfect, gift it is to know and affirm this something for what it actually is? The question can’t be bracketed, for the two paths lead in opposite directions, and everything one says henceforth on the subject must be understood from one or the other perspective. In this primitive encounter which is at the basis of man’s cognitive orientation in the world, either we are trafficking in psychological satisfactions or we are dealing with that unique joy which marks man’s ordainment to being and the knowing of it.

  We come back to the “right” and “wrong” of blue-dollar hawk and blue darter hawk. Is it proper to ask if the boy’s delight at the “wrong” name is a psychological or an ontological delight? And if the wrong name is cognitive, how is it cognitive? At any rate, we know that the hawk is named for the boy and he has what he wants. His mind, which had really suffered a sort of hunger (an ontological hunger?), now has something to feast on. The bird is, he is told, a blue-dollar hawk. Two conditions, it will be noticed, must be met if the naming is to succeed. There must be an authority behind it—if the boy’s brother had made up the name on the spur of the moment, it wouldn’t have worked. Naming is more than a matter of a semantic “rule.” But apparently there must also be—and here is the scandal—an element of obscurity about the name. The boy can’t help but be disappointed by the logical modifier, blue darter hawk—he feels that although he has asked what the bird is, his father has only told him what it does. If we will prescind for a moment from premature judgments about the “prelogical” or magic character of the boy’s preference, and also forgo the next question, why is it called a blue-dollar hawk? which the boy may or may not have put but probably did not because he knew there was no logical answer the guide could give*—the function of the answer will become clearer. It is connected with the circumstance that the mysterious name, blue-dollar hawk, is both the “right” name—for it has been given in good faith by a Namer who should know and carries an ipso facto authority—and a “wrong” name—for it is not applicable as a logical modifier as blue darter is immediately and univocally applicable. Blue-dollar is not applicable as a modifier at all, for it refers to a something else besides the bird, a something which occupies the same ontological status as the bird. Blue darter tells us something about the bird, what it does, what its color is; blue-dollar tells, or the boy hopes it will tell, what the bird is. For this ontological pairing, or, if you prefer, “error” of identification of word and thing, is the only possible way in which the apprehended nature of the bird, its inscape, can be validated as being what it is. This inscape is, after all, otherwise ineffable. I can describe it, make crude approximations by such words as darting, oaring, speed, dive, but none of these will suffice to affirm this so distinctive something which I have seen. This is why, as Marcel has observed, when I ask what something is, I am more satisfied to be given a name even if the name means nothing to me (especially if?), than to be given a scientific classification. Shelley said that poetry pointed out the before unapprehended relations of things. Wouldn’t it be closer to the case to say that poetry validates that which has already been privately apprehended but has gone unformulated for both of us?

  Without getting over one’s head with the larger question of truth, one might still guess that it is extraordinarily rash of the positivist to limit truth to the logical approximation—to say that we cannot know what things are but only how they hang together. The copy theory gives no account of the what we are saying how about. As to the what: since we are not angels, it is true that we cannot know what it is intuitively and as it is in itself. The modern semioticist is scandalized by the metaphor Flesh is grass; but he is also scandalized by the naming sentence This is flesh. As Professor Veatch has pointed out, he is confusing an instrument of knowing with what is known. The word flesh is not this solid flesh, and this solid flesh is not grass. But unless we name it flesh we shall not know it at all, and unless we call flesh grass, we shall not know how it is with flesh. The semioticist leaves unexplained the act of knowing. He imagines naively that I know what this is and then give it a label, whereas the truth is, as Cassirer has shown so impressively, that I cannot know anything at all unless I symbolize it. We can only conceive being, sidle up to it by laying something else alongside. We approach the thing not directly but by pairing, by apposing symbol and thing. Is it not premature to say with the mythist that when the primitive calls the lightning serpentine he conceives it as a snake and is logically wrong? Both truth and error may be served here, error in so far as the lightning is held to participate magically in snakeness, truth in so far as the conception of snake may allow the privately apprehended inscape of the lightning to be formulated. I would have a horror of finding myself allied with those who in the name of instrumentality or inner warmth or whatnot would so attenuate and corrupt truth that it meant nothing. But an analysis of the symbol relation reveals aspects of truth which go far beyond the notion of structural similarity which the symbolic logicians speak of. Two other traits of the thing are discovered and affirmed: one, that it is; two, that it is something.

  Everything depends on this distinction between the thing privately apprehended and the thing apprehended and validated for you and me by naming. But is it proper to make such a distinction? Is there any difference, no difference, or the greatest possible difference, between that which I privately apprehend and that which I apprehend and you validate by naming in such a way that I am justified in hoping that you “mean” that very ineffable thing?

  For at the basis of the beautiful metaphor—which one begins to see as neither logically “right” nor “wrong” but analogous—at the basis of that heightened sensibility of the poetic experience, there is always the hope that this secret apprehension of my own, which I cannot call knowing because I do not even know that I know it, has a chance of being validated by what you have said.

  There must be a space between name and thing, for otherwise the private apprehension is straitened and oppressed. What is required is that the thing be both sanctioned and yet allowed freedom to be what it is. Heidegger said that the essence of truth is freedom. The essence of metaphorical truth and the almost impossible task of the poet is, it seems to me, to name unmistakably and yet to name by such a gentle analogy that the thing beheld by both of us may be truly formulated for what it is.

  Blackmur’s and Empson’s examples are better “mistakes” than mine. The street sign in Cambridge, Private Way Dangerous Passing, misunderstood, allowed the exciting possibility that it was one’s own secret forebodings about the little dead-end streets that was meant. But for all of Blackmur’s unsurpassed analysis of this mysterious property of language, I think it unfortunate that he has chosen to call it “gesture,” in view of the semioticist’s use of the word to denote a term in a stimulus-response sequence (i.e., Mead’s “conversation of gesture”)—because this is exactly what it is not. It is a figurational and symbolic import in that sense which is fa
rthest removed from gestural intercourse (such as the feint and parry of Mead’s two boxers). It is, in fact, only when the gesture, word, or thing is endowed with symbolic meaning, that is, united with a significance other than itself, that it takes on the properties which Blackmur attributes to it.

  In Empson’s examples, the beauty of the line depends on an actual misreading of what the poet wrote or on a corruption of the spelling. In the former case the poetic instincts of the reader are better than the poet’s. What is important is that the reader’s “mistake” has rescued the poet’s figure from the logical and univocal similarity which the poet despite his best efforts could not escape and placed it at a mysterious and efficacious distance. The remembering of Brooke’s unpassioned machine as impassioned machine is a good example of this. Another is a line of Nash which may or may not have been a mistake. What matters for our purpose is that it could have been.

  Beauty is but a flower

  Which wrinkles will devour.

  Brightness falls from the air.

  There is a cynical theory, Empson writes, that Nash wrote or meant hair:

  Brightness falls from the hair.

  which is appropriate to the context, adequate poetically, but less beautiful. Why? I refer to Professor Empson’s analysis and venture only one comment. It may be true, as he says, that the very Pre-Raphaelite vagueness of the line allows the discovery of something quite definite. In the presence of the lovely but obscure metaphor, I exist in the mode of hope, hope that the poet may mean such and such, and joy at any further evidence that he does. What Nash’s line may have stumbled upon (if it is a mistake) is a perfectly definite but fugitive something—an inscape familiar to one and yet an inscape in bondage because I have never formulated it and it has never been formulated for me. Could the poet be referring to that particular time and that particular phenomenon of clear summer evenings when the upper air holds the last trembling light of day: one final moment of a soft diffused brilliance, then everything falls into dusk?