Signposts in a Strange Land

by Walker Percy

  Something Happened is the title of Heller’s novel. Something has happened all right. Actually, nothing much happens in the novel, but something must have happened before, something dreadful, but what is it? How did these good people get in such a fix? What happened? We are not sure, but whatever it was, it was not a single event in the usual sense of events in traditional novels, like the fatal wounding of Prince Andrei in War and Peace, or even a tragic historical event like America importing slaves from Africa. It is more like some aboriginal disaster, the Original Sin of the twentieth century. But where do we locate the disaster? What was the nature of the Fall? Has something dreadful happened to Bob Slocum or to the society in which he lives? or both?

  Fictional examples could be multiplied. Indeed, the twentieth-century novel might be set forth as one or another aspect of disenchantment ranging from the gentle disillusion of the Marquand character to the derisive wise-acre disgust of Bob Slocum, with stopovers at the restiveness of the Hemingway expatriate, the metaphysical anxiety of the European existentialists, the apathy of Camus’s Meursault, the rampaging gallows humor of a Portnoy.

  Someone has in fact characterized the change in direction of the great body of poetry and fiction for the past hundred years as the Great Literary Secession, meaning that poets and novelists have, for whatever reason, registered a massive dissent from the modern proposition that, with the advance of science and technology and education, life gets better, too.

  This issue, I would suppose, must sooner or later be confronted by anyone, scientist or artist or layman, interested in trying to figure out how things are and how to make life more tolerable both for oneself and for other people. Do we not indeed have the sense that the question grows daily more urgent? That there is a cumulative sense of crisis which allows us less and less room for temporizing? Something has happened, all right. But perhaps something worse is about to happen.

  Perhaps the issue can be clarified by making it both more concrete and more hypothetical. Given the unhappiness of Bob Slocum, let us assume the added circumstance, admittedly unlikely in this case, that Bob Slocum has submitted himself to science to diagnose and correct his pathology. Since he is unhappy, he goes like many Americans to the expert of unhappiness to find out what is wrong. He goes to a psychiatrist. Now what kind of therapeutic goals do we envision for him? How would we like to see him change? Or would he like to change? Suppose we imagine his future in terms of the conventional abstractions used to define such goals—namely, that he become more creative, autonomous, productive, and so forth, that he become more integrated in the life of his community. These goals seem worthy and unexceptionable, but do we not have a sense of misgiving when we picture such a Bob Slocum in the future, no longer unhappy and derisive, but, as they say nowadays, being “into” this or that, into ceramics or folk-dancing, or working for the political party of his choice? And if we secretly like him better the way he is, how do we articulate and justify a preference for his unhappiness?

  The possibility I want to raise is whether, from the novelist’s point of view, there may be at least two kinds of distresses to which people fall prey.

  One is a distress with which one can surely deal as straightforwardly as a surgeon dealing with abdominal pain. It, too, is pain pure and simple; that is, suffering without referent or redeeming qualities, anguish, sadness, conflict, terror which cripples and paralyzes. People hurt and come for relief to friends and experts who specialize in this kind of hurt, and friends and experts try to help them.

  Such distress, in short, can be understood as a malfunction of the psyche which can be addressed from the traditional posture of the medical sciences, that of an observer who recognizes a class of disorders to which he applies a class of techniques.

  But another kind of distress engages us, that is, us novelists. It is the ironic disaffection of Bob Slocum in Something Happened, the suicide of Quentin Compson in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, the loneliness of Ivan Karamazov, the anxiety of Roquentin in Sartre’s novel, the flatness and banality experienced by J. Alfred Prufrock, the bemusement of Joan Didion’s solitary heroine cruising the freeways of Los Angeles.

  As different as are these fictional disorders, they share certain features in common. They are manifested by characters who are not only not portrayed as sick people but who rather are put forward by their creators, the novelists and poets, precisely because they are held to possess certain insights into the way things are, insights not yet shared or perhaps only dimly shared by most of their fellow denizens of the Western world. Yet it is these latter who by virtue of their freedom from symptoms, it would seem, would be judged by all the traditional criteria of mental health to be better off, happier, and healthier than the dislocated fictional hero.

  It appears, indeed, that science and art are taking here directly opposed views, that what science regards as normal, art regards as somehow the failure or coming short of the self, and that what art regards as an appropriate response to the age we live in, science sees as antisocial or aberrant behavior.

  Insights, I suggest, are what the novelist has in mind, insights into the way things are. But what things? And where? Certainly we are talking about a pathology. Something has happened, all right, something has gone wrong, but what? Is it a psychic disorder which can be diagnosed from a scientific, therapeutic stance? Or is it something else? Is it the final passing of the age of faith? Are we talking about a post-Christian malaise, the sense of disorientation which presumably always comes whenever the symbols and beliefs of one age are no longer taken seriously by people in a new age?

  Clearly, we are talking about a species of alienation, the traditional subject matter of psychiatrists, the original alienists. But notice that the novelist is raising a Copernican issue and standing the question on its head. Who is alienated? And from what? And is one better off nowadays alienated or unalienated?

  Toward the end of identifying what the novelist is up to, I would like to go a bit deeper into this matter of literary alienation, deeper than Heller’s character, Bob Slocum, who, after all, might be put down as yet another projection of yet another novelist. American novelists in particular are by the very nature of their calling and their peculiar place or nonplace in the culture a perverse and dislocated lot. Bob Slocum, like Alexander Portnoy, can, after all, be read as a convenient satirical vehicle by means of which the novelist practices a kind of double-edged therapy, on the one hand flailing away at all those features of U.S. society he doesn’t like, and on the other hand exposing and, he hopes, exorcising his own personal demons. And has a good time doing both. Both novels are very funny, funny enough to give the reader leave not to be too seriously challenged and engaged.

  Other novels are not so easily disposed of. I’ll choose one, a classic of sorts, though not necessarily the best, toward the end of shedding some light on what I consider the peculiar diagnostic role of the novel in this century.

  I have in mind Sartre’s Nausea. It is germane to our purpose, I think, not because it somewhat self-consciously sets forward certain of Sartre’s philosophical theses, which do not directly concern us here, but as an onslaught on the “normal” or what is ordinarily taken for the normal. Unlike Sartre’s later political novels, it is interesting because the attack is phenomenological, not political, an examination, that is, of the way things are.

  What interests us about Roquentin, the protagonist of Nausea, in the present context is his conscious and deliberate alienation from those very aspects of French culture which by ordinary standards one would judge as eminently normal; for example, the apparently contented lives of the provincial bourgeoisie and the successful lives of the savants of the Academy of Science.

  Roquentin is a historian. He lives a quiet life in the provincial city of Bouville, a routine existence consisting of research in the local library, solitary walks, eavesdropping on conversations between strangers, a mechanical sexual relation with the patron of a café.

  “I live alone, enti
rely alone,” Roquentin tells us. “I never speak to anyone, never. I receive nothing, I give nothing.”

  Yet he observes objects and people in the minutest detail, a scrap of newspaper in the gutter, people sitting in cafés, people strolling in the street, people who seem to fit into the world, who talk and listen to each other and give every appearance of understanding themselves and the world.

  His favorite diversion is walking downtown on Sunday morning and watching whole families dressed in their Sunday best promenade and greet each other after Mass.

  … a gentleman holding his wife by the arm, has just whispered a few words into her ear and has started to smile. She immediately wipes all expression from her chalky, cream-colored face and blindly takes a few steps. There is no mistaking these signs: they are going to greet somebody. Indeed, after a moment the gentleman throws his hand up. When his fingers reach his felt hat, they hesitate a second before coming down deliberately on the crown. While he slowly raises his hat, bowing his head a little to help its removal, his wife gives a little start then forces a young smile on her face. A bowing shadow passes them: but their twin smiles do not disappear immediately; they stay on their lips a few instants by a sort of magnetism. The lady and gentleman have regained their impassibility by the time they pass me, but a certain air of gaiety still lingers around their mouths.

  Sartre’s point seems to be the paradox that although the bourgeoisie seem happy and all together, there is nevertheless something wrong with them. Their lives are a kind of masquerade, an impersonation; they are not themselves. Sartre calls it bad faith. Roquentin with all his dislocation appears to know something they don’t know—yet seems worse off for his knowledge, at first simply out of it, isolated, then at length overtaken by attacks of anxiety and nausea at what he takes to be a revelation of the true nature of things, a highly unpleasant glimpse into being itself.

  It is important to notice that Nausea is no ordinary freethinking rationalistic-skeptical assault on the Catholic bourgeoisie. For Roquentin (and Sartre) has as little use for the opposition, the other triumphant sector of French society, the anticlerical members of the academy, famous doctors, generals, and politicians. Roquentin is equally repelled by the rational believer and the rational unbeliever like Renan.

  Roquentin visits the Bouville museum where there are displayed a hundred and fifty portraits of the famous. He stops at the portrait of Dr. Parottin, member of the Academy of Science.

  Now I stood before him and he was smiling at me. What intelligence and affability in his smile! His plump body rested leisurely in the hollow of a great leather armchair. This unpretentious wise man put people at their ease immediately …

  It did not take long to guess the reason for his prestige: he was loved because he understood everything; you could tell him everything. He looked a little like Renan, all in all with more distinction.

  Now, what are we to make of Sartre’s and Roquentin’s alienation? Can we lay it to the literary acrobatics of French intellectuals, who ever since Descartes are well known for their ability to hit on a single philosophical thesis and use it for a yardstick to measure the whole world? Or shall we trace it to the social malaise of the French between two great wars?

  Or is Sartre saying something of value about the condition of Western man in the twentieth century, or perhaps about the human condition itself?

  Or is Sartre’s existentialism to be understood as only a way station in his transit from a bourgeois intellectual to a Marxist ideologue?

  If Sartre is correct, then things have indeed been turned upside down. For in his novel the apparently well are sick and the apparently sick are on to the truth. But is the truth an unpleasant business we would do well to avoid? Roquentin thinks he knows something other people don’t know, that he has made an unpleasant discovery which scarcely makes for happiness but allows him to live with an authenticity not attained by the happy bourgeoisie and the triumphant scientists. Anxiety, a sense of unreality, solitariness, loss of meaning, the very traits which we ordinarily think of as symptoms and signs of such-and-such a disorder are here set forth as appropriate responses to a revelation of the way things are and the way people really are.

  If this is the case and things are indeed turned upside down, there is nothing much that psychiatrists could do about it—or would want to. It is hardly feasible for therapists to treat people who don’t think they are sick, whether they are the happy bourgeoisie or the unhappy existentialist.

  What I have in mind, however, is the intermediate case, someone located, as perhaps most of us are, between the intact bourgeoisie and the triumphant scientists on the one hand and the alienated hero of the novel on the other—a character who, let us say, falls somewhere between Roquentin and his existential despair and Bob Slocum and his comic disgust.

  What, in short, are we to make of the widespread sense of malaise experienced by a great many people in these times and of the diametrically opposed views of this malaise taken by scientists and artists?

  I’m afraid I cannot give a clear-cut answer to the question: Who is crazy, novelists or scientists? Rather will I content myself with a more modest yet, I think, significant goal. It is to return to my original assumption, that art is cognitive, as cognitive and affirmable in its own way as science, and that in the case of the current novel what it cognizes, discerns, knows, and tells is of a unique order which cannot be grasped by the scientific method. It is an elementary axiom that the truth which science tells about things and events is a general truth. The scientist is only interested in a molecule of sodium chloride or a supernova or an amoeba or even a patient insofar as it resembles other molecules, other supernova, other amoebae, and even other patients sharing the same disorder. But the peculiar fate of the human being is that he is stuck with the consciousness of himself as a self, as a unique individual, or at least with the possibility of becoming such a self. The paradox of the triumph of science and technology is that to the degree that a person perceives himself as an example of, a specimen of, this or that type of social creature or biological genotype, to precisely this same degree does he come short of being himself. The great gap in human knowledge to which science cannot address itself by the very nature of the scientific method is, to paraphrase Kierkegaard, nothing less than this: What it is like to be an individual, to be born, live, and die in the twentieth century. If we assume, consciously or unconsciously, that science can answer such questions, we will never even be able to ask the questions, let alone answer them. Who then can address himself to the question? The individual person, of course, who, while accepting the truth and beauty of science, retains his sovereignty over himself. But someone else also speaks to the same issue: it is, of course, the artist who finds himself in league with the individual, with his need to have himself confirmed in his predicament. It is the artist who at his best reverses the alienating process by the very act of seeing it clearly for what it is and naming it, and who in this same act establishes a kind of community. It is a paradoxical community whose members are both alone yet not alone, who strive to become themselves and discover that there are others who, however tentatively, have undertaken the same quest.

  There is, I would think, a puzzle here for many American readers in the so-called novel of alienation. I know from experience that many young readers find themselves put off and perhaps with good reason by the somber view of life portrayed by so many novelists, both European and American, and I never argue with the reader who tells me that he is happy and that things are, after all, not so bad. But if the novelist is correct in his apparent dissent from the traditional American proposition and if it is true, as I suggest, that the contemporary novel at its best is cognitive and exploratory, in its own way as scientific as nuclear physics, perhaps some light can be shed on our confusion by taking note of the more familiar dilemmas of science in general and psychiatry in particular. We are all aware, I think, of the dangers of the passive consumership of technology, confronted as we are by the dazzlin
g credentials of science. A certain loss of personal sovereignty occurs when a person comes to believe that his happiness depends on his exposure to this or that psychology or this or that group encounter or technique.

  There is a similar danger attendant upon literature and art—what Kierkegaard might have called the perils of the aesthetic sphere. If it is true that the poet and novelist are in the vanguard in their foreboding that something has gone badly wrong and in their sketching out of the nature of the pathology, let the reader both rejoice and beware, rejoice that the good novelist has the skill to point out the specters which he, the reader, had been only dimly aware of, but beware in doing so of surrendering the slightest sovereignty over himself. If one happens to be a writer or a scientist and lucky enough occasionally to hit on the truth, or if one is a reader or a consumer and lucky enough to benefit from a great medical discovery or a novelistic breakthrough which excites him—well and good. Well and good, that is, as long as one never forgets that the living of one’s life is not to be found in books, either the reading of them or the writing of them.

  1977

  Novel Writing in an Apocalyptic Time

  AT FIRST I THOUGHT of giving these remarks some such title as “The Vocation of the Novelist” or “The Place of the Novelist in American Life.” But both of these sounded impossibly grandiose—entirely apart from the fact that I don’t know what the vocation of the novelist is or the place of the novelist in American life. In fact, I’m not even sure he has a place.