Signposts in a Strange Land

by Walker Percy

  Yet, though these two occasions seem to belong to different incarnations, perhaps they are not unrelated. Providence works in strange ways.

  Now, I’m not recommending that novelists of the future serve their apprenticeships in the Bellevue morgue, and I’m not saying that our culture is dying and all that remains is to cut out the organs and see at last what was wrong. And certainly I’m not saying that I have the answers in the way a Bellevue pathologist has the answers on a tray before him.

  Nor do I claim any such pretensions for The Moviegoer, for when all is said and done, a novel is only a story, and, unlike pathology, a story is supposed first, last, and always to give pleasure to the reader. If it fails of this, it fails of everything.

  But since it seems appropriate to say a word about The Moviegoer, it is perhaps not too farfetched to compare it in one respect with the science of pathology. Its posture is the posture of the pathologist with his suspicion that something is wrong. There is time for me to say only this: that the pathology in this case has to do with the loss of individuality and the loss of identity at the very time when words like the “dignity of the individual” and “self-realization” are being heard more frequently than ever. Yet the patient is not mortally ill. On the contrary, it speaks well for the national health that pathologists of one sort and another are tolerated and even encouraged.

  In short, the book attempts a modest restatement of the Judeo-Christian notion that man is more than an organism in an environment, more than an integrated personality, more even than a mature and creative individual, as the phrase goes. He is a wayfarer and a pilgrim.

  I doubt that I succeeded, but I thank you for what you have done.

  Concerning Love in the Ruins

  I WANT TO THANK the Publishers’ Publicity Association [of the 1971 NBA Award] for inviting me to talk. I am happy to be here, although, to tell you the truth, I don’t feel much like talking about this novel, which is to be published this spring by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This is the case probably because of a writer’s natural reluctance to say something about a book which presumably has already said what the writer wants to say, no more nor less. But this leaves me in the peculiar situation of talking about a book which you haven’t read and which I don’t feel like talking about.

  One trouble is, no matter what I say about the novel, it will be misleading. For example, if I describe it as a futuristic satire set in the United States somewhere around 1983, the statement would be accurate. Yet it would be misleading. Because, inevitably, you would connect it with Orwell’s 1984 or perhaps with Huxley’s Brave New World. Whereas the fact is, it is not in the least like either.

  Orwell and Huxley were writing political satire. They were concerned with certain totalitarian trends in society, Orwell with Big Brother Stalinism, Huxley with a scientifically manipulated anthill state. Their arguments were well taken, so much so that they rank as truisms now, and are accepted by everybody, even by some Soviet writers.

  What I was concerned with in this novel is something else altogether. What interested me is what can happen in a free society in which Orwell and Huxley have carried the day. Everybody agrees with Orwell and Huxley, yet something has gone wrong. For this novel deals, not with the takeover of a society by tyrants or computers or whatever, but rather with the increasing malaise and finally the falling apart of a society which remains, on the surface at least, democratic and pluralistic.

  One thing that happens is that words change their meanings. The good old words remain the same, but the meanings begin to slip. In 1983, you see, we will still be using words like “freedom,” the “dignity of the individual,” the “quality of life,” and so on. But the meanings will have slipped. Right now, in 1971, the meanings have already begun to slip, in my opinion. It is the job of the satirist, as I see it, to detect slips and then to exaggerate them so that they become noticeable.

  Let me hasten to say that I am not setting up as a prophet. A prophet aims to be right. A novelist prophesizes in order to be wrong. A novelist likes to think he can issue warnings and influence people. This is probably not the case.

  I thought of using as a motto for the novel Yeats’s line about the center not holding. For indeed, in the novel, the center does not hold. But even to say this is misleading. It suggests a political satire which attacks right and left and comes down on the side of moderate Republicans and Democrats. I had a different center in mind.

  Actually, the novel is only incidentally about politics. It is really about the pursuit of happiness. The locale is a subdivision called Paradise Estates. Everyone there has pursued happiness and generally succeeded in being happy. Yet something is wrong. As one character says, we were all happy but our hearts broke with happiness. Liberals begin to develop anxiety. Conservatives begin to contract high blood pressure and large bowel complaints.

  It is true that an almost total polarization does occur: between left and right, white and black, young and old; between Los Angeles and San Francisco, between Chicago and Cicero. But there is also a split within the person, a split between the person’s self, a ghostly self which abstracts from the world and has identity crises, and the person’s body, which has needs, in this case mostly sexual.

  So the novel is satirical, but I wish to assure you that in its satire it does not discriminate on grounds of race, creed, or national origin. What I mean is, there is a little something here to offend everybody: liberal, conservative; white, black; hawk, dove; Catholic, Protestant, Jew, heathen; the English, the Irish, Swedes, Ohioans, to mention only a few. Yet I trust it is not ill-humored, and that only those will be offended who deserve to be.

  Really, though, I was not concerned primarily with ideological polarization. What seemed more important to me are certain elements of self-hatred and self-destructiveness which have surfaced in American life, elements common to both left and right. This accounts for the apocalyptic themes of the book: love in the ruins, end of the world, a few people surviving, vines sprouting in the masonry, etc. For I sense a curious ambivalence in people’s attitude toward such things. The prospect of catastrophe has its attractions. I have the same ambivalence myself. For example, there is something attractive about the idea of Forty-second Street falling into ruins and being covered by Virginia creeper.

  So, when people talk about the greening of America, you have to remember that the greening can take place only where the masonry crumbles. I only wanted to call things by their right names. I mean to say, it is all very well for some young people and a few aging gurus to attack science and technology and to go live in the ruins, in love and peace, and to touch each other. On the other hand, it is not a small thing, either, to turn your back on two thousand years of rational thinking and hard work and science and art and the Judeo-Christian tradition. I am not arguing. Very well, one turns one’s back. I only wanted to explore some of the consequences. What happens in the novel is that the hero finds himself living in a ruined greening Howard Johnson motel with three girls. One of the girls is a Presbyterian.

  What I really wanted to do, I guess, was call a bluff. For it has often seemed to me that much of the violence and alienation of today can be traced to a secret and paradoxical conviction that America is immovable and indestructible. Hence the acts of desperation.

  Blowing up a building is, after all, a nutty thing to do. The fact is that America is not immovable and indestructible.

  Just now, of course, the violence has abated. We are experiencing what has been described as a period of eerie tranquillity. People seem to be thinking things over. In fact, if I had to describe this novel, I would call it an entertainment for Americans who are thinking things over in a period of eerie tranquillity.

  But the novel is not saying: Don’t rock the boat, cool it, be moderate, vote moderate Republican or Democrat. No, it rocks the boat. In fact, it swamps the boat. What I wanted to investigate was how the boat might actually go under at the very time everybody is talking about the dignity of the individual an
d the quality of life. I wanted also to investigate the best hope of the survivors.

  But rather than talk about the novel and mislead you, I prefer to close these remarks by mentioning two features of my own background which may account for the peculiarities, if not the virtues, of this novel.

  One is that my original vocation was medicine and that for this reason my literary concerns are perhaps more diagnostic and therapeutic than they otherwise would be. The fact is, I can’t resist the impulse to thump the patient and try to figure out what’s wrong with him. This medical habit has its literary dangers. It could make for moralizing, telling people what to do, and for heavy-handed satire. I hope it doesn’t.

  The other thing is the circumstance that I come from the Deep South. I mention this only to call your attention to a remarkable event that has occurred in the last year or two, which has the most far-reaching consequences, and which has gone all but unnoticed. It is the fact that for the first time in a hundred and fifty years the South is off the hook and once again free to help save the Union. It’s not that the South has got rid of its ancient stigma and is out of trouble. It’s rather that the rest of the country is now also stigmatized and is in even deeper trouble.

  So, if the novel has any messages, one might be this: Don’t give up, New York, California, Chicago, Philadelphia! Louisiana is with you. Georgia is on your side.

  The Coming Crisis in Psychiatry

  A NEW THEME IS being heard in American psychiatry. At the present time it is taken to be little more than another variation on the Freudian motif—as such, in fact, is it advertised by Erich Fromm (The Sane Society, 1955), who has given it the name “humanistic psychoanalysis.” The possibility I should like to explore is whether this new insight, if it is valid, does not require a radical recasting of the concept of man for the social sciences. What makes the matter worthy of attention is the fact that the issue has been raised, not by the old enemies of Sigmund Freud and his teachings, but within the profession. Someone has remarked that, great as has been the impact of Freud on psychiatry, it has been even greater in the fringe areas of the social sciences, in popular science, and in the arts. If you are looking for pure Freudian doctrine, you are more likely to hear it nowadays from the social worker in Des Moines or the sophomore psychology student than from the analyst, who is more apt to be eclectic. As in the history of so many seminal ideas, at the very moment it is conquering in the provinces, it is being called in question at its source and center.

  The issue is simply this: Is psychiatry a biological science in which man is treated as an organism with instinctive drives and needs not utterly or qualitatively different from those of other organisms? Or is psychiatry a humanistic discipline which must take account of man as possessing a unique destiny by which he is oriented in a wholly different direction?

  It is hardly necessary to add that the issue has arisen among psychiatrists—as indeed it is proper that it should arise—not because of any idea of making concessions to religious points of view, but from the necessity of accounting for the human “data.”

  There is, moreover, a note of urgency about the crisis which would not obtain, say, in a science like geology. The sciences of man do not operate in a vacuum.

  The question, then, is no longer whether the social sciences, given sufficient time (as they like to say), may succeed in applying the biological method to man, but whether the very attempt to do so has not in fact worsened man’s predicament in the world. The pursuit of physics does not change the physical world; it is all the same to most subatomic particles whether there is or is not a science of physics. But if Western man’s sense of homelessness and loss of community is in part due to the fact that he feels himself a stranger to the method and data of his sciences, and especially to himself construed as a datum, then the issue is no longer academic.

  It is increasingly noticeable that American psychiatry has almost nothing to say about the great themes that have engaged the existential critics of modern society from Søren Kierkegaard to Gabriel Marcel. The very men whose business is mental health have been silent about the sickness of modern man, his emotional impoverishment, his sense of homelessness in the midst of the very world which he, more than the men of any other time, has made over for his own happiness. Would anyone seriously contend that these themes are peculiar to postwar Europe and have no bearing on American life?

  The suspicion is beginning to arise that American psychiatry with its predominantly functional orientation—its root concepts of drives and counterdrives, field forces, cultural criteria—is silent because, given its basic concept of man, it is unable to take account of the predicament of modern man. Fromm speaks of a “pathology of normalcy,” maintaining that a man who meets every biological and cultural norm may nevertheless be desperately alienated from himself. This kind of suggestion cannot fail to be offensive to most American social scientists, for the simple reason that, however much they may wish to, they have no criterion for evaluating illness except as a deviation from a biological norm.

  Fromm’s diagnosis is startling, indeed. Though he attempts to associate his views with psychoanalytic theory and to smooth over the differences, it becomes clear that what he proposes is not merely a variation of but is in many ways the exact reverse of what would be forthcoming under the method of analysis. Who is mentally healthy? What about the man or woman who lives, say, in the Park Forest development near Chicago, who has a good sexual relation with his or her partner, who feels secure, who is socially adjusted, who has many acquaintances, who consumes all manner of goods and services, participates in “cultural activities,” enjoys “recreational facilities,” who is never lonely? Here is how one of them talks, according to Fromm:

  I never feel lonely, even when Jim’s away. You know friends are nearby, because at night you hear the neighbors through the walls.

  Marriages which might break up otherwise are saved, depressed moods are kept from becoming worse, by talking, talking, talking. “It’s wonderful,” says one young wife.

  You find yourself discussing all your problems with your neighbors—things that back in South Dakota we would have kept to ourselves.

  Who is mentally healthy? Surely these happy suburbanites, who have few symptoms, who succeed most of the time in escaping boredom and guilt and anxiety. No, says Fromm. These people are desperately alienated from themselves. They are in fact without selves. They experience themselves as things, as commodities, or as nothing. They are—though Fromm does not use these words—in the position of the man in the Gospel who would gain the whole world and lose his soul.

  What about the symptoms of guilt and anxiety when they do appear? In the traditional analytic view, of course, guilt and anxiety are just that—symptoms. That is to say, they are evidences of “dis-ease,” the resultant of a tensional imbalance in the unconscious. In Freud’s words, they are the outcome of an “interplay of forces,” instinctive forces versus repressive forces.

  It was perfectly natural that in the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries the biological method of medical science should have been taken over by the psychiatrist, and that a mental symptom should have been looked upon as evidence of a process which the patient knew nothing about and which the scientist has made it his business to learn something about. Certain chest pains are a symptom of a cardiac disorder which the sufferer has no way of identifying unless he has studied the subject. In a similar way, guilt and anxiety were regarded as overt signs of covert psychic disorder, signs whose meanings could be fathomed only by the use of special techniques, such as psychoanalysis.

  Not necessarily so, says Fromm. Though he does not rule out the unconscious origin of neuroses, he makes it clear that the guilt and anxiety of the alienated man of the Western world are wholly appropriate reactions: a sense of guilt for the man who feels his life running through his hands like sand; of anxiety for the man who confronts himself and discovers—nothing. This is the age of anxiety because it is the age of the loss of se
lf.

  Let us oversimplify for a moment and put the question as concretely as possible. What shall we make of two individuals, suburbanite A, who is tranquilized in his never-ending consumption of goods, services, entertainment, and human intercourse; suburbanite B, who feels himself an alien in Park Forest, who knows not who he is and is afraid? We have no choice under the biological method but to consider A “normal” and B “pathological.” To suggest that both are lost to themselves, and that the difference is that B knows it and A does not, is to imply a criterion of human existence which is quite foreign to the adaptive criteria of biology.

  The Freudian analyst, confronted with the symptoms of estrangement, anxiety, and guilt, has no choice but to proceed by formula: Now, let’s see if we can find out what has gone wrong and get rid of it. A man walks into a psychiatrist’s office suffering from acute “free-floating” anxiety. It turns out that his life is otherwise unremarkable, that he has satisfied every biological and cultural “need,” that he has nothing to fear. Any high-school student, in such a case, can tell you that his anxiety is a symptom of a disorder of the unconscious originating in infancy. Certainly, the student will aver, his anxiety has no basis in his present life.

  The suggestion now comes (from Fromm, and especially from the existentialists) that it may have everything to do with his present life. In the case of the anonymous consumer who is lost to himself, lost to the possibility of existing as an individual human being in a true community of other human beings, the anxiety may be quite the reverse of a symptom. It may be the call of the self to the self, in Kierkegaard’s words: the discovery of the possibility of freedom to become a self.