Signposts in a Strange Land

by Walker Percy

  Now, I think it fair to begin with the assumption, which seems fairly obvious, that, as the poet said, the center is not holding, that the consensus, while it might not have disappeared, is at least seriously called into question. The question which concerns us here, of course, is whether the deterioration of the consensus is so far advanced that the novel is no longer viable. Indeed, to judge from a good many contemporary novels, films, and plays, it often appears that the only consensus possible is a documentation of the fragmentation itself. The genre of meaningless has in fact become the chic property, not only of the café existentialist, but even of Hollywood. I would like to think that such is not the case. Rather do I believe that the vocation of the novelist is as valid as it ever was, but that it has become different, more difficult, more challenging—and more critical in its importance.

  Let me specify briefly what appears to be the nature of the change in the community in which we find ourselves and the correspondingly changed posture of the novelist.

  To state the matter as plainly as possible, I would echo a writer like Guardini who says simply that the modern world has ended, the world, that is, of the past two or three hundred years, which we think of as having been informed by the optimism of the scientific revolution, rational humanism, and that Western cultural entity which until this century it has been more or less accurate to describe as Christendom. I am not telling you anything you don’t already know when I say that the optimism of this age began to crumble with the onset of the catastrophes of the twentieth century. If one had to set a date of the beginning of the end of the modern world, 1914 would be as good as any, because it was then that Western man, the beneficiary of precisely this scientific revolution and Christian ethic, began with great skill and energy to destroy himself.

  Christendom began to crumble, perhaps most noticeably under the onslaught of a Christian, Søren Kierkegaard, in the last century. Again I am not telling you anything new when I suggest that the Christian notion of man as a wayfarer in search of his salvation no longer informs Western culture. In its place, what most of us seem to be seeking are such familiar goals as maturity, creativity, autonomy, rewarding interpersonal relations, and so forth.

  To speak of the decay of Christendom is to say nothing of the ultimate truth of Christianity, but only to call attention to a cultural phenomenon and the symbols with which it was conveyed. What concerns us here is that, from the perspective of the novelist, literary attempts to revive traditional expressions of Christendom are seldom undertaken anymore. Even when they were, it was often with the sense of a nostalgic revival of a way of life, or else undertaken with the skill of a great novelist in portraying a belief which he did not necessarily subscribe to. I am thinking in particular of the Southern Agrarians and of Faulkner’s Dilsey. But most contemporary novelists have moved on into a world of rootless and isolated consciousnesses for whom not even the memory and the nostalgia exist. As Lewis Simpson put it: “The covenant with memory and history has been abrogated in favor of the existential self.”

  But before speaking of the kind of novel which becomes possible in such an age, the “post-modern” or “post-Christian” as it is often called, I should like briefly to characterize the age itself, or one or two traits of it, from the point of view of the novelist. For the latter is, like his predecessors, seeking some remnant of a common ground where he can gain sufficient footing so that he can see and tell and where he hopes there will be others, other writers, other readers, who share, if not a consensus, a common belief of myth, at least a sense of predicament shared in common. Toward this end, it seems fair to describe the times not merely in conventional terms as a world which has been transformed by technology both for good and evil, the evil being, of course, the very real ugliness of much of the transformation and the very real depersonalization of many people living in such a world.

  What is not so self-evident yet of far greater import to the novelist is the more subtle yet more radical transformation of the very consciousness of Western man in an entirely unexpected way by the scientific and technological worldview. I am not talking about the mechanization and homogenization and dehumanization one hears about so often—though I would not quarrel with these descriptions. We are all familiar with an entire literature about the ennui of life in suburbia and the split-level nightmare. Yet this literature itself is generally even more boring than the life it portrays. Aside from the worth or lack of it in such novels, I cannot escape the suspicion of a degree of bad faith both in the novelist and in his characters, that, in short, for all their complaints, neither of them would dream of changing places with the nineteenth-century housewife or the low-paid nineteenth-century novelist.

  No, the real pathology lies elsewhere, not in the station wagon or the all-electric kitchen, which are, after all, very good things to have—but rather in the quality of the consciousness of the novelist and his characters. I can only characterize this consciousness by such terms as impoverishment and deprivation and by the paradoxical language of the so-called existentialists, terms like loss of community, loss of meaning, inauthenticity, and so on—paradoxical because such deprivations occur in the face of strenuous efforts toward better consumership, more communication, a multiplication of communities, finding “more meaningful relationships,” “creativity,” and so on.

  The deprivation I speak of is both more radical and more difficult to define. But I’ll try.

  Every age, we know, is informed by a particular belief or myth or worldview shared in common by the denizens of the age. Thirteenth-century Europe was certainly informed by Catholic Christianity, seventeenth-century New England by Puritan Christianity, present-day Thailand by Mahayana Buddhism. But we miss the point if we say that the Western world and the life of Western man has simply been transformed by scientific technology. This is true enough, but what has also happened is that the consciousness of Western man, the layman in particular, has been transformed by a curious misapprehension of the scientific method. One is tempted to use the theological term “idolatry.” This misapprehension, which is not the fault of science, but rather the inevitable consequence of the victory of the scientific worldview accompanied as it is by all the dazzling credentials of scientific progress. It, the misapprehension, takes the form, I believe, of a radical and paradoxical loss of sovereignty by the layman and of a radical impoverishment of human relations—paradoxical, I say, because it occurs in the very face of his technological mastery of the world and his richness as a consumer of the world’s goods.

  Like Nikolai Stepanovitch in “A Dreary Story,” the moment of our victory in science seems to be attended by a strange sense of loss and impoverishment. In certain areas, such a surrender of sovereignty is not disabling. When something goes wrong in our technological environment, if something needs fixing, whether it is one’s car or one’s intestinal tract, we have reason to believe that “they” can fix it, “they” being the appropriate specialist. Our expectations are not unreasonable. Very few of us have the time or inclination to master carburetor repair or the physiology of the GI tract. But what happens when one feels in the deepest sense possible that something has gone wrong with one’s very self? When one experiences the common complaint of the age, the loss of meaning, purposelessness, loss of identity, of values, and so on? Here again, I am the last person to suggest that psychiatrists do not have an important role; indeed, an increasingly important role. The problem I am speaking of is only too well known to psychiatrists. What I do suggest is that a radical loss of sovereignty has occurred when a person comes to believe that his very self is also the appropriate domain of “them”; that is, the appropriate experts of the self. A typical case of such a surrender of sovereignty is the patient who is delighted when he can present his psychiatrist or analyst with a symptom or dream which fits the prevailing theory—or when he performs well in an encounter group. The patient is, in effect, saying, “I may be sick but how happy I am when I can present my doctor with a sickness or a symptom o
r a dream which is recognized as a classical example of such-and-such a neurosis: I am an authentic neurotic!”

  But what has all this to do with the state of the novel? Strangely enough, it is this very misapprehension of the scientific method, its elevation to an all-encompassing world view, which breaks new ground for the novelist and indeed opens the possibility of a new and critical role for the novelist of the future.

  Let me oversimplify this misapprehension and state it as briefly as possible. What I am about to say is no secret to the scientist, is in fact a commonplace, but it is not generally known by laymen. The secret is simply this: the scientist, in practicing the scientific method, cannot utter a single word about an individual thing or creature insofar as it is an individual but only insofar as it resembles other individuals. This limitation holds true whether the individual is a molecule of NaCl or an amoeba or a human being. There is nothing new or startling about this and nothing a scientist would disagree with. We all remember taking science courses where one was confronted with a sample of sodium chloride or a specimen of a dogfish to dissect. Such studies reveal the properties shared by all sodium chloride and by all dogfish. We have no particular interest in this particular pinch of salt or this particular dogfish.

  But perhaps we are a bit startled when we are told that this same limitation applies to psychiatry. In the words of Harry Stack Sullivan, perhaps the greatest American psychiatrist: To the degree that I am a psychiatrist, to this same degree I am not interested in you as an individual but only in you and your symptoms insofar as they resemble other individuals and other symptoms.

  Again, what has this to do with the novel? Perhaps I can state the connection best by describing my own discovery. As a person educated in science, as an admirer of the elegance and truth of the scientific method, and at the same time as a medical student undergoing psychoanalysis with the intention of going into psychiatry, it dawned on me that no science or scientist, not even Freud, could address a single word to me as an individual but only as an example of such-and-such a Southern type or neurotic type or whatever. All very well and good, you say, but so what? But you see, there is a Catch-22 here. The catch is that each of us is, always and inescapably, an individual. Unlike a dogfish, we are stuck with ourselves and have somehow to live out the rest of the day being more or less ourselves. And to the degree that we allow ourselves to perceive ourselves as a type of, example of, instance of, such-and-such a class of Homo sapiens—even the most creative Homo sapiens imaginable—to this same degree do we come short of being ourselves.

  As to the novel, I can only speak in terms of the discovery which led me to take up novel-writing, a vocation for which I was otherwise singularly unqualified. For, of course, a novelist should be well educated in the humanities, in literature, and if he is a Southern novelist, I am told that he is supposed to be saturated by the Southern tradition of folklore, yarns, storytelling, family histories, and such. If you want to be another Faulkner, you have to spend a good deal of time hunkered down on courthouse lawns listening to old-timers talk about the way things were. I qualify under none of these canons, having been born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, in a new house on a new golf course. The only stories I ever heard were jokes in the locker room.

  What did at last dawn on me as a medical student and intern, a practitioner, I thought, of the scientific method, was that there was a huge gap in the scientific view of the world. This sector of the world about which science could not utter a single word was nothing less than this: what it is like to be an individual living in the United States in the twentieth century.

  This discovery had all the force of a revelation, at least for me, brought up, as perhaps most of us are, in the tradition of John Dewey and William James, the proposition of American pragmatism that science deals with truth and art deals with diversion, play, entertainment; anyhow, some form of emotional gratification.

  But what are we to make of a man who is committed in the most radical sense to the proposition that truth is attainable by science and that emotional gratification is attainable by interacting with one’s environment and at the highest level by the enjoyment of art? It seems that everything is settled for him. But something is wrong. He has settled everything except what it is to live as an individual. He still has to get through an ordinary Wednesday afternoon. Such a man is something like the young man Kierkegaard described who was given the task of keeping busy all day and finished the task at noon. What does this man do with the rest of the day? the rest of his life?

  But my question and my discovery was this: if there is such a gap in the scientific view of the world, e.g., what it is to be an individual living in the United States in 1985, and if the scientist cannot address himself to this reality, who can? My discovery, of course, was that the novelist can, and most particularly the novelist. Oddly enough, it was the reading of two nineteenth-century writers, Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky, who convinced me that only the writer, the existentialist philosopher, or the novelist can explore this gap with all the passion and seriousness and expectation of discovery of, say, an Einstein who had discovered that Newtonian physics no longer works.

  But before saying any more about the novel as a serious instrument for the exploration of reality, a cognitive instrument, let me take notice of what I take to be two traits of nineteenth-century life which are peculiarly open to novelistic treatment and are also the consequence of an all-encompassing scientific-technological worldview.

  One is the isolation, loneliness, and alienation of modern man as reflected in the protagonists of so many current novels, plays, and films. This alienation can be traced to a degree, I think, to this very surrender, albeit unconscious, of valid forms of human activity to scientists, technologists, and specialists.

  The other trait is the spectacular emphasis on explicit sexual behavior in novels and films.

  It is not difficult to show that one has a good deal to do with the other.

  The upshot of these two trends is often a novel or a film about a man or woman who, though isolated in the midst of two hundred million Americans and rendered, so to speak, incommunicado, embarks on a series of sexual encounters which at the end leave the individual much as we found him or her, still isolated, still surrounded, so to speak, by a cocoon of silence.

  This depiction of explicit sexuality is beset by all kinds of ambiguities. On the one hand, one can say fairly I think, and I for one believe, that there is such a thing as pornography and that there are a large number of bad writers and bad filmmakers who make a lot of money by writing novels and making movies designed to excite sexually the viewer and reader. I will say no more about pornography than that I think it has nothing to do with literature. And although I deplore pornography, the real difficulty is both more radical and has more serious consequences.

  The real pathology is not so much a moral decline, which is a symptom, not a primary phenomenon, but rather an ontological impoverishment; that is, a severe limitation or crippling of the very life of twentieth-century man. If this is the case and if this crippling and impoverishment manifests itself often in sexual behavior, the latter becomes the proper domain of the serious novelist.

  What has happened, I think, is that, with the ongoing impoverishment of human relations by a misapprehension of the scientific ethos which pervades the Western world, it inevitably came to pass that for many people, readers and writers, genital sexuality came to be seen as the only, the “real,” the basic form of human intercourse. It is a matter of what we come to see as real. By either reading or misreading Freud, we, the laymen and lay women, have come to believe that most forms of human relations and human achievement are surrogates of, sublimations of, and therefore at some time remove from the “real” relation and the “real” energy, which is genital and libidinal.

  Take a film like Last Tango in Paris—which I happen not to think a very good movie. But I do not think it pornographic, either. In this film two people who remain strangers throughout perfor
m a series of sexual operations on each other, mostly in dead silence, and in the end one kills the other. Two things happen, an impersonal sex and a dispassionate violence. Perhaps these are the only two things that can happen. A case might be made that, given a certain urban environment and an educated class of laymen alienated from each other and from themselves, only two real options remain, genital sex and violence, and perhaps the realest of all, death.

  Sex, violence, and death are real enough, but is anything else real? And if not, is the work of the novelist and filmmaker simply the documentation and cataloguing of this impoverishment of the real in contemporary life?

  I suggest an alternative for the novelist which is perhaps more radical, at least more venturesome and challenging than a mere documentation of isolation, depersonalized sex, and violence. If there is no such alternative, then we should have quit with Kafka, who limited human activity to a few moves to and fro in a dark burrow, an occasional encounter with another creature in the dark where one gropes, touches, feels, perhaps copulates, perhaps does not, then goes his own blind way. Or with Beckett, whose people, buried up to their necks in refuse, crack a few stale jokes to pass the time.

  What I suggest is that there lies at hand for the artist, especially the novelist, an instrument for exploring the darkness of Kafka’s burrow or Marlon Brando’s unfurnished apartment or Beckett’s wasteland, an instrument in every sense as scientific and as cognitive as, say, Galileo’s telescope or Wilson’s cloud chamber. Indeed, this may be the only instrument we have for exploring the great gap in our knowing, knowing ourselves and how it stands between ourselves and others.

  This instrument is, of course, art in general and literature in particular.