Signposts in a Strange Land

by Walker Percy

  If the first great intellectual discovery of my life was the beauty of the scientific method, surely the second was the discovery of the singular predicament of man in the very world which has been transformed by this science. An extraordinary paradox became clear: that the more science progressed, and even as it benefited man, the less it said about what it is like to be a man living in the world. Every advance in science seemed to take us further from the concrete here-and-now in which we live. Did my eyes deceive me, or was there not a huge gap in the scientific view of the world (scientific in the root sense of the word “knowing”)? If so, it was an oversight which everyone pretended not to notice or maybe didn’t want to notice.

  After twelve years of a scientific education, I felt somewhat like the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard when he finished reading Hegel. Hegel, said Kierkegaard, explained everything under the sun, except one small detail: what it means to be a man living in the world who must die.

  The long and short of it was that I decided to give up medicine and take up writing. In the next two years I wrote two novels which were returned with rejection slips or with pained notes which began, “Despite some occasional splendid passages, I am sorry to have to inform you—” etc. These were the years of the “splendid passages.” My resources were dwindling; my health was uncertain; I sold a few articles for small sums—I even wrote a book about the philosophy of language which the publisher didn’t even bother to return and I didn’t ask for. As far as my novel-writing went, it began to seem that I should have stuck to pathology. But at least, I told myself, I could write “an occasional splendid passage.”

  Anyhow, I wrote a third novel, The Moviegoer, in something over a year. It was accepted by the first publisher to see it and won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1962. It sold fairly well in the hardcover edition and somewhere around half a million copies in paperback.

  The moral here, I suppose, is that if a book is any good, it can find a publisher and an audience. At least I can testify to this in my own experience; a writer does not have to compromise himself or his talent to be published.

  As far as the actual writing of The Moviegoer is concerned, and setting aside the matter of its merit, the question has been put to me: What happened? How did it happen that you can write two bad novels and then a third which is a great deal better? This is an interesting question, one which, however, I do not pretend to be able to answer. I can only report that something did happen and it happened all of a sudden. Other writers have reported a similar experience. It is not like learning a skill or a game at which, with practice, one gradually improves. One works hard all right, but what comes, comes all of a sudden and as a breakthrough. One hits on something. What happens is a period of unsuccessful effort during which one works very hard—and fails. There follows a period of discouragement. Then there comes a paradoxical moment of collapse-and-renewal in which one somehow breaks with the past and starts afresh. All past efforts are thrown into the wastebasket; all advice forgotten. The slate is wiped clean. It is almost as if the discouragement were necessary, that one has first to encounter despair before one is entitled to hope. Then a time comes when one takes a pencil and a fresh sheet of paper and begins. Begins, really for the first time.

  One begins to write, not as one thinks he is supposed to write, and not even to write like the great models one admires, but rather to write as if he were the first man on earth ever to set pencil to paper.

  To return to a scientific analogy: what comes to my mind when I think of a writer sitting down to create something new, however modest that creation, is not the picture of a man setting out to entertain or instruct or edify a reader. It is the picture, rather, of a scientist who has come to the dead end of a traditional hypothesis which no longer accounts for the data at hand. It is my belief that anyone writing serious fiction today is somewhat like the physicists around 1900 after the Michelson-Morley experiment and quantum data had overthrown Newtonian physics. That is to say, in modern literature it is man himself who is called into question and who must be defended, and it is the very nature of man which must be rediscovered and reexpressed in fresh language of a new poetry and fiction and theater.

  John Barth said recently that now in the last third of the twentieth century it was no longer permissible to write nineteenth-century novels. I agree. When I sat down to write The Moviegoer, I was very much aware of discarding the conventional notions of a plot and a set of characters, discarded because the traditional concept of plot-and-character itself reflects a view of reality which has been called into question. Rather would I begin with a man who finds himself in a world, a very concrete man who is located in a very concrete place and time. Such a man might be represented as coming to himself in somewhat the same sense as Robinson Crusoe came to himself on his island after his shipwreck, with the same wonder and curiosity.

  1966

  Physician as Novelist

  OR WHY THE BEST Training for a Novelist in These Last Years of the Twentieth Century Is an Internship at Bellevue or Cook County Hospital, and How This Training Best Prepares Him for Diagnosing T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. But let us speak of vocations. What one ends up doing with one’s life is surely one of God’s mysteries. And a good deal of luck, good luck and bad luck, is involved as well as, I firmly believe, God’s providence. Who among us is doing what he, she, dreamed of doing when he, she, was eight, twelve, sixteen? Perhaps it is just as well we are not. At twelve I wanted to fly the Pacific because Lindbergh had flown the Atlantic.

  I’d like to share with you some of the misfortunes, peculiar turns of fate, and finally the piece of luck or Divine Providence, as the case may be, by which I turned out doing what I am doing, something which had never occurred to me to do, not once in my wildest dreams, but which I like doing, not because I do it all that well but because I am incompetent doing anything else. Growing up, I was a reluctant attendant at Sunday school and a secret devotee of science, or what I took to be science. My favorite writer in my teens was H. G. Wells, who believed that all events in the cosmos, even human history, can be explained by natural science, and a rather crude science at that.

  Actually, it is not a bad way to grow up in the twentieth century, an age that will certainly be known—if we survive—not only for its tragedies, millions dead from its great wars and the Holocaust, but for its spectacular scientific advances, from the study of subatomic particles to the exploration into the far reaches of the cosmos. The best of our time is marked by the truth and beauty of science as surely as the cathedral at Chartres is the high-water mark of the thirteenth century.

  But what I wish to propose to you is this: that for a certain type of educated denizen of this age it is only through, first, the love of the scientific method and, second, its elevation and exhaustion as the ultimate method of knowing that he becomes open to other forms of knowing—sciencing in the root sense of the word—and accordingly, at least I think so, to a new kind of revival of Western humanism and the Judeo-Christian tradition—again, if we survive. A large order. And of course I am not suggesting that one cannot be raised a believing Presbyterian, Jew, or Catholic, or as an unbelieving humanist or simply as a passive consumer, and live happily ever after in one’s faith or nonfaith without a second thought about the prevailing scientism of the age.

  No, I am speaking of a rather more typical denizen of the age who believes, as part of the very air he breathes, that natural science has the truth, all the truth, and that the rest—religion, humanism, art—is icing on the cognitive cake; attractive icing, yes, but icing nonetheless, which is to say, noncognitive icing, emotional icing. Notice that I distinguish here between scientism as an all-pervading ideology and the scientific method as a valid means of investigating the mechanisms of phenomena. But please allow me, after the fashion of physicians, to relate a short history.

  Here is a young man, a disciple and devotee of science, whose education has been thoroughly scientific, who settles on medicine as his voc
ation and chooses a medical school famous for its scientific approach to medicine as the study of the mechanism of disease.

  Then, early on, his career is cut short by a serious, disabling, but nonfatal illness. What to do? In the end he returns to the South and changes professions, decides to become a writer—in the South at least, still an honorable profession. But how to go about it? The long and short of it: he writes two novels, one a bad imitation of Thomas Mann, the other a worse imitation of Thomas Wolfe—which is very bad indeed. But no luck. Some kind words from publishers, but no deal.

  What to do now? To cut it even shorter: after much casting about and considerable depression if not despair, the thought finally occurred to this fellow—by luck or by providence—why not forget about other writers, however distinguished, and go your own way? What was there to lose? Wasn’t this what Newton, Darwin, and Freud had done in science?

  And so it came to pass that he wrote a short novel in which he created a character, an amiable but slightly bemused young man of a certain upper-class Southern background, and set him down in Gentilly, a middle-class district of New Orleans, in order to see what would happen to him. For he has given up on the usual verities—home, family, church, country—and instead elects a solitary existence of selling stocks and bonds to the local burghers, hiring a succession of lovely secretaries, and—going to the movies. He enjoys bad movies.

  What happens to him is that in the very anxiety of his despair, cool as it is—indeed, as the very consequence of his despair—it occurs to him that a search is possible, a search altogether different from the scientific explorations mounted by scientists or by the most perceptive of psychoanalysts. So the novel, almost by accident, became a narrative of the search, the quest. And so the novel, again almost by accident—or was it accident?—landed squarely in the oldest tradition of Western letters: the pilgrim’s search outside himself, rather than the guru’s search within. All this happened to the novelist and his character without the slightest consciousness of a debt to St. Augustine or Dante. Indeed, the character creates within himself and within the confines of a single weekend in New Orleans a microcosm of the spiritual history of the West, from the Roman patrician reading his Greek philosophers to the thirteenth-century pilgrim who leaves home and takes to the road.

  But, as a physician, perhaps I can give a more respectable analysis of this case history, after the fashion of professors in the amphitheater discussing a case after the patient has been wheeled out.

  My point is that the stance of the physician is appropriate here. For his stance is that of the diagnostician. A diagnostician is a person who stands toward another person in the relation of one who knows that something has gone wrong with the other. He, the physician-novelist, has a nose for pathology.

  In his case, that of the physician-novelist, the pathology he discovers in his characters has afflicted the very society that surrounds him. It might be called scientism or, perhaps more accurately, what Whitehead called the “misplaced concrete.” What he, Whitehead, had in mind was not the truth and beauty of the scientific method, but a certain abstractedness and disorientation that follows upon the elevation of science to an all-enveloping ideology. One looks at an amoeba and sees it as an example of, a specimen of, a biological class. Very good. One looks at a fellow human being and sees him, her, as a typical example of a certain sort of outgoing Midwesterner, or perhaps a recognizable specimen of a sardonic, backward-looking Southerner. Not so good. For what one is missing is precisely that which makes this specimen human, his uniqueness.

  So what I have in mind here is the imperial decree of scientism (not of science) to discredit other ways of knowing.

  In a word, a respectable epistemological word, what he, the novelist’s character, discovers in his search is that there are other ways of knowing not only quite as valid as scientific propositions but of far more critical significance in one’s personal life.

  Thus, while he had admitted all along the universal validity of such sentences as “The square of the hypotenuse equals the sum of the square of the other two sides,” or, “Water boils at one hundred degrees centigrade at sea level,” now all at once he, the novelist’s character, the pilgrim-searcher, is able to take note of other kinds of sentences that he had ignored before. Perhaps in his wanderings he encounters another person. The stranger has an unusual air about him. He is on to something. But he is not a guru who conveys to him some universal truths about the self and the cosmos. No; he, the stranger, is a news-bearer, and, of all things, news of an event in history. News? History? Hardly the stuff of empirically verifiable scientific sentences.

  The stranger is not importunate. He is serious but almost offhand in his manner, smiling. “I have something to tell you,” he says to the pilgrim. “A piece of news. It is of great importance to you. Whether or not you choose to believe me is your affair.”

  Perhaps the pilgrim does not believe the stranger, as well he might not. Let me note here what is extremely important and the source of much confusion. The physician-novelist is not himself a news-bearer, and he is not in the business of writing edifying tales. He has other fish to fry. It is enough for him to have discovered and put his finger on the peculiar lesion of the age. Perhaps by this very act the abscess is lanced, the ear drained so that the patient, whatever else he might do, can at least hear. Nevertheless the physician, insofar as he is a novelist, is in the business of diagnosis, not therapy.

  Like all artists, he is interested, not in edifying, but in discovering and pointing out and naming certain sectors of reality, both within oneself and outside oneself, which had gone unnoticed. Whereupon he, the novelist’s character, is free, as only a man can be free, to act accordingly.

  But—and I can hear the question despite my disavowals—what are you suggesting? Are you suggesting that one must be a believing Jew or Christian to write good novels? Certainly not—though one is tempted to make the case and indeed present the evidence that the Jewish novelist, secular or religious, has a certain advantage, what with his unique placement in a strictly linear time and history. By a “certain view of reality” I am speaking of the linearity of history, the density of things and events, the mystery and uniqueness of persons, a view that seems natural to us but is in fact the cultural heritage of Judeo-Christianity. Which is to say that I haven’t read any good Buddhist novels lately. It is to say also that B. F. Skinner, who believed that all life is a matter of stimuli and responses, could not possibly write a good novel—though I believe in fact that he did try. It is to say that the novels of H. G. Wells could not possibly be otherwise than as bad as they are. And I have never read a Marxist novel without being overwhelmed by the thesis.

  Finally, it also helps the novelist to have interned at Bellevue or at Cook County Hospital. For one develops a nose for pathology. And it is only when one sees that something is wrong that one can diagnose it, point it out and name it, toward the end that the patient might at least have hope, and even in the end get well.

  1989

  Herman Melville

  WHAT DOES A PRESENT-DAY Southern writer make of Melville? Strangely enough, what first comes to mind is not the greatness of Moby-Dick or the strange, flawed originality of Billy Budd, but rather a certain chagrin and a sort of melancholy wonder.

  What did it feel like, one wonders, to have written Moby-Dick, an experience which Melville called being broiled in hellfire, and which was surely a triumphant taking-on of hell and coming through? It was surely akin to the sense of triumph Dante felt emerging from his own inferno. But to write Moby-Dick, publish it, sell a few hundred copies, see it drop dead and go out of print, disappear apparently forever, and then to spend the last twenty years of one’s life as a customs inspector on the New York docks, so obscure and forgotten that a British critic visiting America couldn’t even find you—what did it feel like? And then, at the end, to write Billy Budd—again, as far as Melville was concerned, stillborn, unpublished, unread. What did that feel like? Was there
a certain species of satisfaction in living the most ordinary life imaginable? Was it an exercise in obscurity like that of Bartleby the scrivener, riffling through the valises of rich folk returning from the Grand Tour, and then going home to humble quarters?

  And where did Melville come from? A lapsed Calvinist from a middle-class New York family. My grandmother in Georgia might have said of the Melvilles, had she known them and been asked about them: “The Melvilles? Well, of course, you know, they were in trade.” That meant that they didn’t belong to the upper class of the professions—the doctors, lawyers, plantation owners, and people of leisure. It was the latter, presumably, who had the time and the wherewithal to write, read, cultivate the arts, and so forth. They had the libraries; and they often went to Europe for their education. But I confess to a certain chagrin. Why? Because there was not a single Melville—or anything close—in the entire antebellum South, from the Virginia Tidewater to the New Orleans Vieux Carré and the River Road. A huge country, with an extensive leisure class, close European connections, and plenty of Calvinists, lapsed and unlapsed. And plenty of people in trade. Why no Melville? The conventional wisdom has a ready answer: the slavery did you in.

  Well, yes and no. The Greeks—Aeschylus and Sophocles, for instance—had slaves: it didn’t do them in. But the South got stuck with slavery because it was profitable. While the Melvilles were in the dry-goods business and didn’t stand to make a nickel on slaves, Southern writers, political and otherwise, were feeling guilty because they spent most of their time defending slavery. Now, defending slavery is a strange occupation and it takes a lot of energy. It’s impossible to imagine, for example, a South Carolina writer in the 1850s thinking about whales, Rousseau, and Original Sin.

  On the other hand, defending cannibals and making a case for an earthly paradise in the valley of the Typee is also a strange occupation for a writer. And being obsessed with the innocence of natural man is surely as pernicious an activity as defending slavery. But these flowerings of genius are mysterious affairs, and I’m not sure that even the critics know the answers. One might also ask: Where were the New England writers in the 1920s and 1930s, when the Nashville poets and the Mississippi novelists were getting on their way?