Signposts in a Strange Land

by Walker Percy

  The cognitive exploratory dimension of art has always been present, but its discovering power is often masked in a stable society united by an ethos and belief held in common. When people already know who they are, their literature celebrates and affirms the already existing relationships and hierarchies of society. One thinks of Shakespeare’s affirmation of the monarchy, of what constitutes a good king and a bad king and the people’s relation to each.

  But what is the function of literature in a period like this, a time when one era has ended and the new era has not yet come into being; that is to say, has not yet articulated itself, does not even know its name?

  One important function of fiction in such a time, at least as I see it, is exploratory. If Fielding’s Tom Jones is a celebration of life in eighteenth-century England, the fiction of our time is more like Robinson Crusoe, who has been shipwrecked on a desert island—with important differences. This island is even stranger than Crusoe’s. For one thing, it is overpopulated; yet many of its inhabitants feel as lonely as Crusoe. For another thing, Crusoe saw himself as an intact member of European Christendom, and even a desert island as a tissue of meaningful signs. Such-and-such an animal track spelled danger. Such-and-such a fruit meant eat me. He knew what to do. But the castaway of the twentieth-century novel does not know who he is, where he came from, what to do, and the signs on his island are ambiguous. If he does encounter another human on the island, a man Friday, he has trouble communicating with him or her. Certainly, if two post-modern men met on an island today, like Crusoe and Friday, neither would dream of trying to convert the other—for conversion implies there is something to be converted from and converted to. Perhaps some sort of sexual encounter is possible, perhaps a joint scientific venture; certainly, murder is possible. But what else?

  Then what is the task of serious fiction in an age when both the Judeo-Christian consensus and rational humanism have broken down? I suggest that it is more than the documentation of the loneliness and the varieties of sexual encounters of so much modern fiction. I suggest that it is nothing less than an exploration of the options of such a man. That is, a man who not only is in Crusoe’s predicament, a castaway of sorts, but who is also acutely aware of his predicament. What did Crusoe do? He looked around. He explored the island. He scanned the horizon. He looked for signs from across the seas. He combed the beach—for what? Perhaps for bottles with messages in them. No doubt, he also launched bottles with messages in them. But what kind of messages? That is the question.

  The contemporary novelist, in other words, must be an epistemologist of sorts. He must know how to send messages and decipher them. The messages may come not in bottles but rather in the halting and muted dialogue between strangers, between lovers and friends. One speaks; the other tries to fathom his meaning—or indeed to determine if the message has any meaning.

  Compare recent fiction with the community taken for granted in the traditional novel; for example, the reception described at the beginning of War and Peace where Anna Pavlovna and her guests discuss the Napoleonic Wars. Conversation occurs, looks are exchanged, all perfectly understood in a community of shared meanings and assumptions about the nature of things. Even quarrels require sufficient common ground to be recognized as quarrels. People in Beckett’s novels and plays don’t quarrel.

  To change the island image, the community of discourse in the current novel might be likened to two prisoners who find themselves in adjoining cells as a consequence of some vague Kafka-like offense. Communication is possible by tapping against the intervening wall. Do they speak the same language? These quasi-conversations or nonconversations might be found in novels and plays from Kafka to Sartre to Beckett to Pinter to Joseph McElroy.

  If this view sounds gloomy, allow me to express a kind of perverse hope and preference. I don’t know whether this is a symptom of my own neurosis or whether it says something about the way things are. In a word, I’d rather be a prisoner in a cell tapping messages to a fellow prisoner in the twentieth century than be a guest at Anna Pavlovna’s reception in Moscow in 1805. The challenge now is both more critical and more exciting than the defeat of Napoleon. For the challenge now is nothing less than the exploration of a new world and the re-creation or rediscovery of language and meanings. The Psalmist said sing a new song. And, for a fact, the old ones are pretty well worn out.

  But to get back to my thesis, the diagnostic and cognitive role of modern fiction. When one age ends and the traditional cultural symbols no longer work, man is exposed in all his nakedness, which is uncomfortable for man but revealing for those of us who want to take a good look at him; which is to say, at ourselves. And I take it for granted that, by the very nature of things and how things are known, it lies within the province of art—literature in particular, and not the natural sciences—to undertake this exploration.

  It is at this point that modern fiction cannot help but approach a kind of anthropology, a view of man abstracted from this or that culture—for that is indeed where he finds himself today, shucked like an oyster and beheld in all his nakedness and, I might add, uniqueness. Chekhov, being both a scientist and a superb artist, knew this better than most: that, with the method of science, one beholds what is generally true about individuals, but art beholds what is uniquely true.

  It is no accident, moreover, that so much of modern fiction has converged with a movement of European philosophy and that the same name, the much overworked term, existentialist, has been applied to both. For both approaches—say, Kierkegaard’s in philosophy and Dostoevsky’s in fiction—share a view in common, that of man, not mankind, but a particular man who finds himself in some fashion isolated from the world and society around him, a society which in both the philosophy and the fiction is viewed as more or less absurd, if not moribund. This man, then, is viewed as alienated from his culture, not as an abstraction, not as specimen Homo sapiens alienatus pinned like a dogfish to a dissecting board, but rather as an individual set down in a time and a place and a predicament. The subject of the novel may be outside his culture, but his predicament is no less concrete and acute than that of Prince Andrei Bolkonsky in the Battle of Borodino. He may be sitting alone in a café listening to the conversation of the bourgeoisie in Bouville, or she may be spinning around the interstates or holed up with a stranger in a motel like a character in a Joan Didion novel.

  In any case, what is being explored and set forth in this kind of serious novel is not primarily the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie or the wasteland of New Orleans but the fundamental predicament of the character himself or herself. Accordingly, what is being explored or should be explored is not only the nature of the human predicament but the possibility or nonpossibility of a search for signs and meanings. Depending on the conviction of the writer, the signs may be found to be ambiguous or meaningless—or perhaps a faint message comes through, a tapping on the wall heard and deciphered and replied to.

  The point is that fiction of all things can be used as an instrument of exploration and discovery; in short, of sciencing. To illustrate what I mean, I would like to conclude by giving a single example of fiction as a cognitive instrument for exploring an unknown terrain. The example is taken from a novel I wrote, not because I think all that highly of it, but because it illustrates the method I have in mind.

  This is the story of a confused young man, a Southerner afflicted with recurring amnesia, a sense of disorientation, and assorted other complaints, who finds himself living at the YMCA in New York, where he has spent several years and all his money in intensive psychoanalysis. One day he decides he has had enough of the analysis, rises from the couch, and bids his analyst farewell. Now, instead of exploring his own psyche, he sets forth on an actual journey, returns to the South and his point of origin. It is there, he feels, that there is some dread secret to be discovered, something that happened, something he can’t quite remember because he can’t bear to remember.

  After a series of adventures, he finds himself at last standi
ng in front of his father’s house in a small Mississippi town, the house of his childhood. It is night. He watches the house from the darkness of the great oaks. It was there, he remembers, that his father used to walk up and down, listening to Brahms, reciting “Dover Beach,” his favorite poem, or talking about the decline of morals and manners in the modern world. He, the father, has just won a victory over the Ku Klux Klan, yet he seems even sadder than usual.

  Suddenly he, the son, remembers his father’s suicide, that on just such a night, in this very place, under these very oaks, after listening to Brahms and reciting “Dover Beach,” his father had bade him farewell, gone into the house, and shot himself.

  Then, was his father right in his despair? The son stood in the dark under the trees looking at the house and thought about it. Is there nothing, or is there something? Is there a sign? At this point he does what might seem to he an insignificant thing. He is standing under a huge water oak, the same place where his father used to stand. Like Kafka’s creature in its dark burrow, he can’t see much, but his hand remembers something. It remembers the iron hitching post next to the tree. It remembers that the bark of the tree had grown around the little iron horsehead atop the post. His hand explores.

  Again his hand went forth, knowing where it was, though he could not see, and touched the tiny iron horsehead of the hitching post, traced the cold metal down to the place where the oak had grown around it in an elephant lip. His fingertips touched the warm finny whispering bark.

  Wait. While his fingers explored the juncture of iron and bark, his eyes narrowed as if he caught a glimmer of light on the cold iron skull. Wait. I think he was wrong and that he was looking in the wrong place. No, not he but the times. The times were wrong and one looked in the wrong place. It wasn’t even his fault because that was the way he was and the way the times were, and there was no other place a man could look. It was the worst of times, a time of fake beauty and fake victory. Wait. He had missed it! It was not in the Brahms that one looked and not in the old and sad poetry but—he wrung out his ear—but here, under your nose, here in the very curiousness and drollness and extraness of the iron and bark that—he shook his head—that—

  He breaks off. He feels he’s on to something, a clue or sign, but it slips away from him.

  I chose this passage because of its resemblance to the famous scene in Sartre’s Nausea—in fact, it was written as a kind of counterstatement—where Roquentin is sitting in a park in Bouville and experiences a similar revelation as he gazes at the roots and bark of a chestnut tree. Sartre intended the scene to be a glimpse into the very nature of the being of things, and a very unpleasant revelation it is, described by Sartre by such adjectives as obscene, bloated, viscous, naked, de trop, and so on.

  Will Barrett, too, sees something in the bark, the same extraness as he calls it, gratuitousness, but for him it is an intimation, a clue to further discovery. And it is not something bad he sees but something good. In terms of traditional metaphysics, he has caught a glimpse of the goodness and gratuitousness of created being. He had that sense we all have occasionally of being on to something important.

  As it turned out, he missed it. That was as close as he ever came.

  The point is that, in a new age when things and people are devalued, when meanings break down, it lies within the province of the novelist to start the search afresh, like Robinson Crusoe on his island. Tree bark may seem a humble place to start. But one must start somewhere. The novelist or poet in the future might be able to go further, to discover, or rediscover, not only how it is with tree bark but how it is with man himself, who he is, and how it is between him and other men.

  1985

  Eudora Welty in Jackson

  WHAT IS MOST VALUABLE about Eudora Welty is not that she is one of the best living short-story writers. (It was startling that when I tried to think of anybody else as good, two women and one man came to mind, all three Southerners: Katherine Anne Porter, Caroline Gordon, and Peter Taylor.) Nor is it that she is a woman of letters in the old sense, versatile and many-voiced in her fiction and as distinguished in criticism. No, what is valuable is that she has done it in a place. That is to say, she has lived all her life in a place and written there and the writing bears more than an accidental relation to the place. Being a writer in a place is not the same as being a banker in a place. But it is not as different as it is generally put forward as being.

  It is of more than passing interest that Eudora Welty has always lived in Jackson and that the experience has been better than endurable. This must be the case, because if it hadn’t been, she’d have left. Although I do not know Eudora Welty, I like to imagine that she lives very tolerably in Jackson. At least, she said once that she was to be found “underfoot in Jackson.” What does such an association between a writer and a town portend? It portends more, I would hope, than such-and-such a trend or characteristic of “Southern literature.”

  For Eudora Welty to be alive and well in Jackson should be a matter of considerable interest to other American writers. The interest derives from the coming need of the fiction writer, the self-professed alien, to come to some terms with a community, to send out emissaries, to strike an entente. The question is: How can a writer live in a place without either succumbing to angelism and haunting it like a ghost or being “on,” playing himself or somebody else and watching to see how it comes out? The answer is that it is at least theoretically possible to live as one imagines Eudora Welty lives in Jackson, practice letters—differently from a banker banking but not altogether differently—and sustain a relation with one’s town and fellow townsmen which is as complex as you please, even ambivalent, but in the end life-giving. It is a secret relationship but not necessarily exploitative. One thinks of Kierkegaard living in Copenhagen and taking great pride in making an appearance on the street every hour, so that he would be thought an idler. But it is impossible to imagine Kierkegaard without Copenhagen. Town and writer sustain each other in secret ways. Deceits may be practiced. But one is in a bad way without the other.

  The time is coming when the American novelist will tire of his angelism—of which obsessive genital sexuality is the most urgent symptom, the reaching out for the flesh which has been shucked—will wonder how to get back into a body, live in a place, at a street address. Eudora Welty will be a valuable clue.

  1969

  Foreword to A Confederacy of Dunces

  PERHAPS THE BEST WAY to introduce this novel—which on my third reading of it astounds me even more than the first—is to tell of my first encounter with it. While I was teaching at Loyola in 1976 I began to get telephone calls from a lady unknown to me. What she proposed was preposterous. It was not that she had written a couple of chapters of a novel and wanted to get into my class. It was that her son, who was dead, had written an entire novel during the early sixties, a big novel, and she wanted me to read it. Why would I want to do that? I asked her. Because it is a great novel, she said.

  Over the years I have become very good at getting out of things I don’t want to do. And if ever there was something I didn’t want to do, this was surely it: to deal with the mother of a dead novelist and, worst of all, to have to read a manuscript that she said was great, and that, as it turned out, was a badly smeared, scarcely readable carbon.

  But the lady was persistent, and it somehow came to pass that she stood in my office, handing me the hefty manuscript. There was no getting out of it; only one hope remained—that I could read a few pages and that they would be bad enough for me, in good conscience, to read no farther. Usually I can do just that. Indeed, the first paragraph often suffices. My only fear was that this one might not be bad enough, or might be just good enough, so that I would have to keep reading.

  In this case, I read on. And on. First with the sinking feeling that it was not bad enough to quit, then with a prickle of interest, then a growing excitement, and finally an incredulity: surely it was not possible that it was so good. I shall resist the temptati
on to say what first made me gape, grin, laugh out loud, shake my head in wonderment. Better let the reader make the discovery on his own.

  Here, at any rate, is Ignatius Reilly, without progenitor in any literature I know of—slob extraordinary, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one—who is in violent revolt against the entire modern age, lying in his flannel nightshirt in a back bedroom on Constantinople Street in New Orleans, who between gigantic seizures of flatulence and eructations is filling dozens of Big Chief tablets with invective.

  His mother thinks he needs to go to work. He does, in a succession of jobs. Each job rapidly escalates into a lunatic adventure, a full-blown disaster; yet each has, like Don Quixote’s, its own eerie logic.

  His girlfriend, Myrna Minkoff of the Bronx, thinks he needs sex. What happens between Myrna and Ignatius is like no other boy-meets-girl story in my experience.

  By no means a lesser virtue of John Kennedy Toole’s novel is his rendering of the particularities of New Orleans, its back streets, its out-of-the-way neighborhoods, its odd speech, its ethnic whites—and one black in whom Toole has achieved the near-impossible, a superb comic character of immense wit and resourcefulness without the least trace of Rastus minstrelsy.

  But Toole’s greatest achievement is Ignatius Reilly himself, intellectual, ideologue, deadbeat, goof-off, glutton, who should repel the reader with his gargantuan bloats, his thunderous contempt and one-man war against everybody—Freud, homosexuals, heterosexuals, Protestants, and the assorted excesses of modern times. Imagine an Aquinas gone to pot, transported to New Orleans, from whence he makes a wild foray through the swamps to LSU at Baton Rouge, where his lumber jacket is stolen in the faculty men’s room where he is seated, overcome by mammoth gastrointestinal problems. His pyloric valve periodically closes in response to the lack of a “proper geometry and theology” in the modern world.