The Message in the Bottle and Lost in the Cosmos

by Walker Percy

  But Empson’s most entertaining mistake is

  Queenlily June with a rose in her hair

  Moves to her prime with a languorous air.

  For what saves the verse from mediocrity is the misreading of queenlily as Queen Lily, where the poet had intended the rather dreary adverb of queenly! Again I defer to Professor Empson’s material analysis of what gives the misread line its peculiar charm. The question I would raise, in regard to this and many other examples in Seven Types of Ambiguity, has to do with Empson’s main thesis. This thesis is, of course, that beauty derives from ambiguity—in this particular case, the felt possibility and interaction of the two readings of queenlily. But I submit that in this and other examples, as I read it and apparently as Empson read it, the intended adverbial reading is completely overlooked! The line is read with Queenlily and is charming; it only belatedly occurs to one, if it occurs at all, that the poet meant the adverb—and I feel certain Empson is not maintaining that I was aware of the adverb all along but “unconsciously.” What one wonders, in this and in many other of Empson’s quotations, is whether it is the ambiguity which is the operative factor, or whether the beauty does not derive exclusively from the obscure term of the ambiguity, the logically “wrong” but possibly analogous symbol.

  In all those cases where the poet strains at the limits of the logical and the univocal, and when as a result his figure retains a residue of the logical and so has two readings—the univocal and the analogous—is it not in the latter that he has struck gold? We must be careful not to confuse ambiguity, which means equivocity, with true analogy, simply because both are looked upon as more or less vague. It is always possible, of course, to do what Empson does so well with his obscure metaphors, that is, to cast about for all the different interpretations the line will allow. But does the beauty of the line reside in its susceptibility to two or more possible readings or in the possibility of a single figurational meaning, which is the less analyzable as it is the more beautiful?

  I can’t help thinking, incidentally, that this hunt for the striking catachrestic metaphor in a poet of another time, such as Chaucer or Shakespeare, is a very treacherous game. For both the old poet and his modern reader are at the mercy of time’s trick of canceling the poet’s own hard-won figures and setting up new ones of its own. A word, by the very fact of its having been lost to common usage or by its having undergone a change in meaning, is apt to acquire thereby an unmerited potency.

  One is aware of skirting the abyss as soon as one begins to repose virtue in the obscure. Once we eliminate the logical approximation, the univocal figure, as unpoetic and uncreative of meaning—is it not then simply an affair of trotting out words and images more or less at random in the hope of arriving at an obscure, hence efficacious, analogy? and the more haphazard the better, since mindfulness, we seem to be saying, is of its very nature self-defeating? Such in fact is the credo of the surrealists: “To compare two objects, as remote from one another in character as possible, or by any other method put them together in a sudden and striking fashion, this remains the highest task to which poetry can aspire.”* There is something to this. If, as so many modern poets appear to do, one simply shuffles words together, words plucked from as diversified contexts as possible, one will get some splendid effects. Words are potent agents and the sparks are bound to fly. But it is a losing game. For there is missing that essential element of the meaning situation, the authority and intention of the Namer. Where the Namer means nothing or does not know what he means or the Hearer does not think he knows what he means, the Hearer can hardly participate in a cointention. Intersubjectivity fails. Once the good faith of the Namer is so much as called into question, the jig is up. There is no celebration or hope of celebration of a thing beheld in common. One is only trafficking in the stored-up energies of words, hard won by meaningful usage. It is a pastime, this rolling out the pretty marbles of word-things to see one catch and reflect the fire of another, a pleasant enough game but one which must eventually go stale.

  It is the cognitive dimension of metaphor which is usually overlooked, because cognition is apt to be identified with conceptual and discursive knowing. Likeness and difference are canons of discursive thought, but analogy, the mode of poetic knowing, is also cognitive. Failure to recognize the discovering power of analogy can only eventuate in a noncognitive psychologistic theory of metaphor. There is no knowing, there is no Namer and Hearer, there is no world beheld in common; there is only an interior “transaction of contexts” in which psychological processes interact to the reader’s titillation.

  The peculiar consequences of judging poetic metaphor by discursive categories are especially evident in Professor Richards’s method. Lord Kames had criticized the metaphor “steep’d” in Othello’s speech

  Had it pleas’d heaven

  To try me with affliction, had he rain’d

  All kinds of sores, and shames, on my bare head,

  Steep’d me in poverty to the very lips,

  by saying that “the resemblance is too faint to be agreeable—Poverty must here be conceived to be a fluid which it resembles not in any manner.” Richards goes further: “It is not a case of lack of resemblances but too much diversity, too much sheer oppositeness. For Poverty, the Tenor, is a state of deprivation, of desiccation; but the vehicle—the sea or vat in which Othello is to be steep’d—gives an instance of superfluity…” True, disparity as well as resemblance works in metaphor, but Richards says of this instance of disparity: “I do not myself find any defence of the word except this, which seems indeed quite sufficient—as dramatic necessities commonly are—that Othello is himself horribly disordered, that the utterance is part of the ‘storm of horrour and outrage.’” Thus, Professor Richards gives “steep’d” a passing mark, but only because Othello is crazy. He may be right: The figure is extravagant, in a sense “wrong,” yet to me defensible even without a plea of insanity. The only point I wish to make is that there is another cognitive ground on which it can be judged besides that of logical rightness and wrongness, univocal likeness and unlikeness. Judged accordingly, it must always be found wanting—an eighteenth-century critic would have corrected it. But do the alternatives lie between logical sense and nonsense? Or does such a view overlook a third way, the relation of analogy and its cognitive dimension? In the mode of analogy, “steep’d” is not only acceptable, it is striking; “steep’d” may be wrong univocally but right analogically. True, poverty is, logically speaking, a deprivation; but in its figuration it is a veritable something, very much a milieu with a smell and taste all its own, in which one is all too easily steep’d. Poverty is defined as a lack but is conceived as a something. What is univocally unlike in every detail may exhibit a figurative proportionality which is more generative of meaning than the cleverest simile.

  An unvarying element in the situation is a pointing at by context. There must occur a preliminary meeting of minds and a mutually intended subject before anything can be said at all. The context may vary all the way from a literal pointing-by-finger and naming in the aboriginal naming act, to the pointing context of the poem which specifies the area where the metaphor is to be applied. There is a reciprocal relationship between the selectivity of the pointing and the univocity of the metaphor: The clearer the context and the more unmistakable the pointing, the greater latitude allowed the analogy of the metaphor. The aboriginal naming act is, in this sense, the most obscure and the most creative of metaphors; no modern poem was ever as obscure as Miss Sullivan’s naming water water for Helen Keller. A perfectly definite something is pointed at and given a name, a sound or a gesture to which it bears only the most tenuous analogical similarities.*

  Given the situation of naming and hearing, there can only be one of three issues to an act of pointing at and naming. What is said will either be old, that is, something we already know and know quite overtly; or something new, and if it is utterly new, I can only experience bafflement; or new-old, that is, something that
I had privately experienced but which was not available to me because it had never been formulated and rendered intersubjective. Metaphor is the true maker of language.

  The creative relationship of inscape, the distinctive reality as it is apprehended, and the distanced metaphor is illustrated by Hopins’s nature metaphors. His favorite pursuit in the nature journals is the application of striking (sometimes strained) like-yet-unlike metaphors to nature inscapes. There are some pleasing effects. A bolt of lightning is

  a straight stroke, broad like a stroke with chalk and liquid, as if the blade of an oar just stripped open a ribbon scar in smooth water and it caught the light.

  We are aware that the effect is achieved by applying the notions of water and scars to lightning, the most unwaterlike or unscarlike thing imaginable. But are these metaphors merely pleasing or shocking or do they discover?—discover an aspect of the thing which had gone unformulated before?

  Clouds are called variously bars, rafters, prisms, mealy, scarves, curds, rocky, a river (of dull white cloud), rags, veils, tatters, bosses.

  The sea is

  paved with wind…bushes of foam

  Chips of foam blew off and gadded about without weight in the air.

  Straps of glassy spray.

  In these metaphors both the likeness and unlikeness are striking and easily discernible. One has the impression, moreover, that their discovering power has something to do with their unlikeness, the considerable space between tenor and vehicle. Hard things like rocks, bosses, chips, glass, are notably unlike clouds and water; yet one reads

  Chips of foam blew off and gadded about

  with a sure sense of validation.

  If we deviate in either direction, toward a more univocal or accustomed likeness or toward a more mysterious unlikeness, we feel at once the effect of what Richards calls the tension of the bow, both the slackening and tightening of it. When one reads fleecy clouds or woolly clouds, the effect is slack indeed. Vehicle and tenor are totally interarticulated: clouds are ordinarily conceived as being fleecy; fleecy is what clouds are (just as checkered is what a career is). You have told me nothing. Fleecy cloud, leg of a table, are tautologies, a regurgitation of something long since digested. But

  A straight river of dull white cloud

  is lively. One feels both knowledgeable and pleased. But

  A white shire of cloud

  is both more interesting and more obscure. The string of the bow is definitely tightened. The mind is off on its favorite project, a casting about for analogies and connections. Trusting in the good faith of the Namer, I begin to wonder if he means thus and so—this paricular sort of cloud. The only “shire” I know is a geographical area and what I more or less visualize is a towering cumulus of an irregular shire-shape.

  Two levels of analogy-making can be distinguished here. There is the level of metaphor proper, the saying about one thing that it is something else: one casts about to see how a cloud can be a shire, and in hitting on an analogy, one validates an inscape of cloud. But there is the more primitive level of naming, of applying a sound to a thing, and of the certification of some sounds as being analogous to the thing without being like it (as in the mysterious analogy between plu and flowing, sta and standing). Thus shire may be applicable to a certain kind of cloud purely as a sound and without a symbolized meaning of its own. For as it happens, concrete nouns beginning with sh often refer to objects belonging to a class of segmented or sectioned or roughly oblong flattened objects, a “geographical” class: shape, sheath, shard, sheet, shelf, shield, shire, shoal, shovel, shroud, etc. One speculates that the vocable sh—is susceptible of this particular spatial configuration. (I easily imagine that the sound sh has a flatness or parallelness about it.) This relation is very close to the psychological phenomenon of synesthesia, the transsensory analogy in which certain sounds, for example, are characteristically related to certain sounds—blue to color blue (could blue ever be called yellow?).

  To summarize: The examples given of an accidental blundering into authentic poetic experience both in folk mistakes and in mistaken readings of poetry are explored for what light they may shed on the function of metaphor in man’s fundamental symbolic orientation in the world. This “wrongness” of metaphor is seen to be not a vagary of poets but a special case of that mysterious “error” which is the very condition of our knowing anything at all. This “error,” the act of symbolization, is itself the instrument of knowing and is an error only if we do not appreciate its intentional character. If we do not take note of it, or if we try to exorcise it as a primitive residue, we shall find ourselves on the horns of the same dilemma which has plagued philosophers since the eighteenth century. The semanticists, on the one horn, imply that we know as the angels know, directly and without mediation (although saying in the next breath that we have no true knowledge of reality); all that remains is to name what we know and this we do by a semantic “rule”; but they do not and cannot say how we know. The behaviorists, on the other, imply that we do not know at all but only respond and that even art is a mode of sign-response; but they do not say how they know this. But we do know, not as the angels know and not as dogs know but as men, who must know one thing through the mirror of another.

  * Or if the guide did give an answer, it would be its very farfetchedness which would satisfy: “They calls him that because of the way he balls hisself up and rolls—”

  * André Breton, quoted by Richards in The Philosophy of Rhetoric.

  * The old debate, started in the Cratylus, goes on as lively as ever; what is the relation between the name and the thing, between the word green and the color green, between slice and slice, tree and tree? Most linguists would probably say there is no relation, that the name is purely an arbitrary convention (except in a few cases like boom), that any seeming resemblance is false onomatopoeia (no matter how much you might imagine that slice resembles and hence expresses the act of slicing, it really does not).

  But here again, do likeness and unlikeness exhaust the possibilities?

  Apparently not. Curtius remarks that “despite all change, a conservative instinct is discernible in language. All the peoples of our family from the Ganges to the Atlantic designate the notion of standing by the phonetic group sta++; in all of them the notion of flowing is linked with the group plu, with only slight modifications. This cannot be an accident. Assuredly the same notion has remained associated with the same sounds through all the millennia, because the peoples felt a certain inner connection between the two, i.e., because of an instinct to express this notion by these particular sounds. The assertion that the oldest words presuppose some relation between sounds and the representations they designate has often been ridiculed. It is difficult, however, to explain the origin of language without such assumptions.”

  It is this “inner connection” which concerns us. The sounds plu and sta, which could hardly be more different from the acts of flowing and standing, must nevertheless exhibit some mysterious connection which the mind fastens upon, a connection which, since it is not a kind of univocal likeness, must be a kind of analogy.

  4

  THE MAN ON THE TRAIN

  THERE IS NO such thing, strictly speaking, as a literature of alienation. In the re-presenting of alienation the category is reversed and becomes something entirely different. There is a great deal of difference between an alienated commuter riding a train and this same commuter reading a book about an alienated commuter riding a train. (On the other hand, Huck Finn’s drifting down the river is somewhat the same as a reader’s reading about Huck Finn drifting down the river.) The nonreading commuter exists in true alienation, which is unspeakable; the reading commuter rejoices in the speakability of his alienation and in the new triple alliance of himself, the alienated character, and the author. His mood is affirmatory and glad: Yes! that is how it is!—which is an aesthetic reversal of alienation. It is related that when Kafka read his work aloud to his friends, they would all roar with laughter
until tears came to their eyes. Neither Kafka nor his reader is alienated in the movement of art, for each achieves a reversal through its re-presenting. To picture a truly alienated man, picture a Kafka to whom it had never occurred to write a word. The only literature of alienation is an alienated literature, that is, a bad art, which is no art at all. An Erle Stanley Gardner novel is a true exercise in alienation. A man who finishes his twentieth Perry Mason is that much nearer total despair than when he started.

  I hasten to define what I mean by alienation, which has become almost as loose an epithet as existentialism (if you do not agree with me, it is probably because you are alienated). I mean that whereas one commuter may sit on the train and feel himself quite at home, seeing the passing scene as a series of meaningful projects full of signs which he reads without difficulty, another commuter, although he has no empirical reason for being so, although he has satisfied the same empirical needs as commuter A, is alienated. To say the least, he is bored; to say the most, he is in pure anxiety; he is horrified at his surroundings—he might as well be passing through a lunar landscape and the signs he sees are absurd or at least ambiguous. (It will not be necessary at this point to consider the further possibility that commuter A’s tranquillity is no guarantee against alienation, that in fact he may be more desperately lost to himself than B in the sense of being anonymous, the “one” of “one says.”)