The Message in the Bottle and Lost in the Cosmos

by Walker Percy

  How does the novelist judge the new theologian? One might expect that since one of the major burdens of the American novel since Mark Twain has been a rebellion against Christendom, the emancipated novelist might make common cause with the emancipated theologian. The truth is, or so it appears to me, that neither novelists nor anybody else is much interested in any theologians, and least of all in God-is-dead theologians. The strenuous efforts of the latter to baptize the computer remind one of the liberal clergyman of the last century who used to wait, hat in hand so to speak, outside the scientific laboratories to assure the scientist there was no conflict between science and religion. The latter could not have cared less.

  Yet the contemporary novelist is as preoccupied with catastrophe as the orthodox theologian with sin and death.

  Why?

  Perhaps the novelist, not being a critic, can only reply in the context of his own world view. All issues are ultimately religious, said Toynbee. And so the “religion” of the novelist becomes relevant if he is writing a novel of ultimate concerns. It would not have mattered a great deal if Margaret Mitchell were a Methodist or an atheist. But it does matter what Sartre’s allegiance is, or Camus’s or Flannery O’Connor’s. For what his allegiance is is what he is writing about.

  As it happens, I speak in a Christian context. That is to say, I do not conceive it my vocation to preach the Christian faith in a novel, but as it happens, my world view is informed by a certain belief about man’s nature and destiny which cannot fail to be central to any novel I write.

  Being a Christian novelist nowadays has certain advantages and disadvantages. Since novels deal with people and people live in time and get into predicaments, it is probably an advantage to subscribe to a world view which is incarnational, historical, and predicamental, rather than, say, Buddhism, which tends to devalue individual persons, things, and happenings. What with the present dislocation of man, it is probably an advantage to see man as by his very nature an exile and wanderer rather than as a behaviorist sees him: as an organism in an environment. Despite Camus’s explicit disavowal of Christianity, his Stranger has blood ties with the wayfarer of Saint Thomas Aquinas and Gabriel Marcel. And if it is true that we are living in eschatological times, times of enormous danger and commensurate hope, of possible end and possible renewal, the prophetic-eschatological character of Christianity is no doubt peculiarly apposite.

  It is also true, as we shall presently see, that the Christian novelist suffers special disabilities.

  But to return to the question: What does he see in the world which arouses in him the deepest forebodings and at the same time kindles excitement and hope?

  What he sees first in the Western world is the massive failure of Christendom itself. But it is a peculiar failure and he is apt to see it quite differently from the scientific humanist, for example, who may quite frankly regard orthodox Christianity as an absurd anachronism. The novelist, to tell the truth, is much more interested in the person of the scientific humanist than in science and religion.

  Nor does he set much store by the usual complaint of Christians that the enemies are materialism and atheism and Communism. It is at least an open question whether the world which would follow a total victory of the most vociferous of the anti-Communists would be an improvement over the present world with all its troubles.

  No, what the novelist sees, or rather senses, is a certain quality of the postmodern consciousness as he finds it and as he incarnates it in his own characters. What he finds—in himself and in other people—is a new breed of person in whom the potential for catastrophe—and hope—has suddenly escalated. Everyone knows about the awesome new weapons. But what is less apparent is a comparable realignment of energies within the human psyche. The psychical forces presently released in the postmodern consciousness open unlimited possibilities for both destruction and liberation, for an absolute loneliness or a rediscovery of community and reconciliation.

  The subject of the postmodern novel is a man who has very nearly come to the end of the line. How very odd it is, when one comes to think of it, that the very moment he arrives at the threshold of his new city, with all its hard-won relief from the sufferings of the past, happens to be the same moment that he runs out of meaning! It is as if he surrenders his ticket, arrives at his destination, and gets off his train—and then must also surrender his passport and become a homeless person! The American novel in past years has treated such themes as persons whose lives are blighted by social evils, or reformers who attack these evils, or perhaps the dislocation of expatriate Americans, or of Southerners living in a region haunted by memories. But the hero of the postmodern novel is a man who has forgotten his bad memories and conquered his present ills and who finds himself in the victorious secular city. His only problem now is to keep from blowing his brains out.

  Death-of-God theologians are no doubt speaking the truth when they call attention to the increasing irrelevance of traditional religion. Orthodox theologians claim with equal justification, though with considerably more dreariness, that there is no conflict between Christian doctrine and the scientific method. But to the novelist it looks as if such polemics may be overlooking the tertium quid within which all such confrontations take place, the individual consciousness of postmodern man.

  The wrong questions are being asked. The proper question is not whether God has died or been superseded by the urban-political complex. The question is not whether the Good News is no longer relevant, but rather whether it is possible that man is presently undergoing a tempestuous restructuring of his consciousness which does not presently allow him to take account of the Good News. For what has happened is not merely the technological transformation of the world but something psychologically even more portentous. It is the absorption by the layman not of the scientific method but rather of the magical aura of science, whose credentials he accepts for all sectors of reality. Thus in the lay culture of a scientific society nothing is easier than to fall prey to a kind of seduction which sunders one’s very self from itself into an all-transcending “objective” consciousness and a consumer-self with a list of “needs” to be satisfied. It is this monstrous bifurcation of man into angelic and bestial components against which old theologies must be weighed before new theologies are erected. Such a man could not take account of God, the devil, and the angels if they were standing before him, because he has already peopled the universe with his own hierarchies. When the novelist writes of a man “coming to himself through some such catalyst as catastrophe or ordeal, he may be offering obscure testimony to a gross disorder of consciousness and to the need of recovering oneself as neither angel nor organism but as a wayfaring creature somewhere between.

  And so the ultimate question is what is the term or historical outcome of this ongoing schism of the consciousness. Which will be more relevant to the “lost” man of tomorrow who knows he is lost: the new theology of politics or the renewed old theology of Good News? What is most noticeable about the new theology, despite the somber strains of the funeral march, is the triviality of the postmortem proposals. After the polemics, when the old structures are flattened and the debris cleared away, what is served up is small potatoes indeed. What does the Christian do with his God dead and His name erased? It is proposed that he give more time to the political party of his choice or perhaps make a greater effort to be civil to salesladies and shoe clerks. To the “religious” novelist, whether it be Sartre or O’Connor, the positive proposals of the new theology must sound like a set of resolutions passed at the P.T.A.

  The man who writes a serious novel about the end of the world—i.e., the passing of one age and the beginning of another—must reckon not merely like H. G. Wells with changes in the environment but also with changes in man’s consciousness which may be quite as radical. Will this consciousness be more or less religious? The notion of man graduating from the religious stage to the political is after all an unexamined assumption. It might in fact turn out that the modern era,
which is perhaps three hundred years old and has already ended, will be known as the Secular Era, which came to an end with the catastrophes of the twentieth century.

  The contrast between the world views of denizens of the old modern world and of the postmodern world might be sketched novelistically.

  Imagine two scientists of the old modern world, perhaps a pair of physicists at Los Alamos in the 1940’s. They leave the laboratory one Sunday morning after working all night and walk past a church on their way home. The door is open, and as they pass, they hear a few words of the gospel preached. “Come, follow me,” or something of the sort. How do they respond to the summons? What do they say to each other? What can they do or say? Given the exhilarating climate of the transcending objectivity and comradeship which must have existed at the high tide of physics in the early twentieth century, it is hard to imagine a proposition which would have sounded more irrelevant than this standard sermon preached, one allows, with all the characteristic dreariness and low spirits of Christendom at the same time in history. If indeed the scientists said anything, what they said would not even amount to a rejection of the summons—Come!—a summons which is only relevant to a man in a certain predicament. Can one imagine these scientists conceiving themselves in a predicament other than a Schadenfreude about creating the ultimate weapon? Rather would the words heard at the open door be received as a sample of a certain artifact of culture. Scientist A might say to Scientist B, “Did you know there is a local cult of Penitentes not five miles from here who carry whips and chains in a pre-Lenten procession?” Nor can one blame them for attending such a spectacle in the same spirit with which they attend the corn dance at Tesuque. The fact is that some of the Los Alamos physicists became quite good amateur ethnologists.

  Imagine now a third scientist, perhaps a technician, fifty years later. Let us suppose that the world has not even blown up—it is after all too easy to set the stage so that the gospel is preached to a few ragamuffins in the ruins. Rather has it happened that the high culture of twentieth-century physics has long since subsided to a routine mop-up of particle physics—something like a present-day botanist who goes to Antarctica in the hopes of discovering an overlooked lichen. The technician, employed in the Santa Fe-Taos Senior Citizens Compound, is doing routine radiation counts on synthetic cow’s milk. But let us suppose that the schism and isolation of the individual consciousness has also gone on apace so that mankind is presently divided into two classes: the consumer long since anesthetized and lost to himself in the rounds of consumership, and the stranded objectivized consciousness, a ghost of a man who wanders the earth like Ishmael. Unlike the consumer he knows his predicament. He is the despairing man Kierkegaard spoke of, for whom there is hope because he is aware of his despair. He is a caricature of the contemporary Cartesian man who has objectified the world and his body and sets himself over against both like the angel at the gates of Paradise. All creaturely relations crumble at his touch. He has but to utter a word—achieving intersubjectivity, interpersonal relations, meaningful behavior—and that which the word signifies vanishes.

  Such a man leaves his laboratory on a workaday Wednesday feeling more disembodied than usual and passes the same church, which is now in ruins, ruined both by the dreariness of the old Christendom and by the nutty reforms of the new theologians. From the ruins a stranger emerges and accosts him. The stranger is himself a weary, flawed man, a wayfarer. He is a priest, say, someone like the whisky priest in Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, who has been sent as yet another replacement into hostile territory. The stranger speaks to the technician. “You look unwell, friend.” “Yes,” replies the technician, frowning. “But I will be all right as soon as I get home and take my drug, which is the best of the consciousness-expanding community-simulating self-integrating drugs.” “Come,” says the priest, “and I’ll give you a drug which will integrate your self once and for all.” “What kind of a drug is that?” “Take this drug and you will need no more drugs.” Etc.

  How the technician responds is beside the point. The point concerns modes of communication. It is possible that a different kind of communication-event occurs in the door of the church than occurred fifty years earlier.

  4

  The American Christian novelist faces a peculiar dilemma today. (I speak, of course, of a dilemma of the times and not of his own personal malaise, neuroses, failures, to which he is at least as subject as his good heathen colleagues, sometimes I think more so.) His dilemma is that though he professes a belief which he holds saves himself and the world and nourishes his art besides, it is also true that Christendom seems in some sense to have failed. Its vocabulary is worn out. This twin failure raises problems for a man who is a Christian and whose trade is with words. The old words of grace are worn smooth as poker chips and a certain devaluation has occurred, like a poker chip after it is cashed in. Even if one talks only of Christendom, leaving the heathens out of it, of Christendom where everybody is a believer, it almost seems that when everybody believes in God, it is as if everybody started the game with one poker chip, which is the same as starting with none.

  The Christian novelist nowadays is like a man who has found a treasure hidden in the attic of an old house, but he is writing for people who have moved out to the suburbs and who are bloody sick of the old house and everything in it.

  The Christian novelist is like a starving Confederate soldier who finds a hundred-dollar bill on the streets of Atlanta, only to discover that everyone is a millionaire and the grocers won’t take the money.

  The Christian novelist is like a man who goes to a wild lonely place to discover the truth within himself and there after much ordeal and suffering meets an apostle who has the authority to tell him a great piece of news and so tells him the news with authority. He, the novelist, believes the news and runs back to the city to tell his countrymen, only to discover that the news has already been broadcast, that this news is in fact the weariest canned spot announcement on radio-TV, more commonplace than the Exxon commercial, that in fact he might just as well be shouting Exxon! Exxon! for all anyone pays any attention to him.

  The Christian novelist is like a man who finds a treasure buried in a field and sells all he has to buy the field, only to discover that everyone else has the same treasure in his field and that in any case real estate values have gone so high that all field-owners have forgotten the treasure and plan to subdivide.

  There is besides the devaluation of its vocabulary the egregious moral failure of Christendom. It is significant that the failure of Christendom in the United States has not occurred in the sector of theology or metaphysics, with which the existentialists and new theologians are also concerned and toward which Americans have always been indifferent, but rather in the sector of everyday morality, which has acutely concerned Americans since the Puritans. Americans take pride in doing right. It is not chauvinistic to suppose that perhaps they have done righter than any other great power in history. But in the one place, the place which hurts the most and where charity was most needed, they have not done right. White Americans have sinned against the Negro from the beginning and continue to do so, initially with cruelty and presently with an indifference which may be even more destructive. And it is the churches which, far from fighting the good fight against man’s native inhumanity to man, have sanctified and perpetuated this indifference.

  To the eschatological novelist it even begins to look as if this single failing may be the tragic flaw in the noblest of political organisms. At least he conceives it as his duty to tell his countrymen how they can die of it, so that they will not.

  What is the task of the Christian novelist who mirrors in himself the society he sees around him—who otherwise would not be a novelist—whose only difference from his countrymen is that he has the vocation to be a novelist? How does he set about writing, having cast his lot with a discredited Christendom and having inherited a defunct vocabulary?

  He does the only thing he can
do. Like Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, he calls on every ounce of cunning, craft, and guile he can muster from the darker regions of his soul. The fictional use of violence, shock, comedy, insult, the bizarre, are the everyday tools of his trade. How could it be otherwise? How can one possibly write of baptism as an event of immense significance when baptism is already accepted but accepted by and large as a minor tribal rite somewhat secondary in importance to taking the kids to see Santa at the department store? Flannery O’Connor conveyed baptism through its exaggeration, in one novel as a violent death by drowning. In answer to a question about why she created such bizarre characters, she replied that for the near-blind you have to draw very large, simple caricatures.

  So too may it be useful to write a novel about the end of the world. Perhaps it is only through the conjuring up of catastrophe, the destruction of all Exxon signs, and the sprouting of vines in the church pews, that the novelist can make vicarious use of catastrophe in order that he and his reader may come to themselves.

  Whether or not the catastrophe actually befalls us, or is deserved—whether reconciliation and renewal may yet take place—is not for the novelist to say.

  6

  THE MESSAGE IN THE BOTTLE

  The act of faith consists essentially in knowledge and there we find its formal or specific perfection.

  —Thomas Aquinas, De Veritate

  Faith is not a form of knowledge; for all knowledge is either knowledge of the eternal, excluding the temporal and the historical as indifferent, or it is pure historical knowledge. No knowledge can have for its object the absurdity that the eternal is the historical.

  —Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments

  SUPPOSE A MAN IS a castaway on an island. He is, moreover, a special sort of castaway. He has lost his memory in the shipwreck and has no recollection of where he came from or who he is. All he knows is that one day he finds himself cast up on the beach. But it is a pleasant place and he soon discovers that the island is inhabited. Indeed it turns out that the islanders have a remarkable culture with highly developed social institutions, a good university, first-class science, a flourishing industry and art. The castaway is warmly received. Being a resourceful fellow, he makes the best of the situation, gets a job, builds a house, takes a wife, raises a family, goes to night school, and enjoys the local arts of cinema, music, and literature. He becomes, as the phrase goes, a useful member of the community.