Signposts in a Strange Land

by Walker Percy

  Why not?—if that is what is wanted by the majority, the polled opinion, the polity of the time.

  Sincerely yours, Walker Percy

  [Postscript: This letter did not appear in the Times. Nor was it acknowledged. On February 15, Dr. Percy wrote again.]

  I am sorry that you have evidently not seen fit to publish my letter of January 22 in your Letters-to-Editor section.

  I should have thought that you would want to publish it, since it addresses what is a very controversial issue these days—even though the letter may run counter to your editorial policy. You are not known for suppressing dissent.

  In the unlikely circumstance that you somehow did not receive the letter, I would be glad to furnish you with a copy.

  The purpose of this letter is to establish for the record that you did in fact receive the first letter. For, if I do not receive an answer to this letter, it is fair to assume that you did.

  [Dr. Percy received no reply.]

  Another Message in the Bottle

  I FEEL A LITTLE wary about talking to teachers. This has to do with my lifetime respect for and fear of teachers, but also with a more recent and hard-won respect for your profession. Hard-won, I say, because I tried it myself a couple of times in recent years—not full-time like you, but in a small way, teaching a couple of classes in such subjects as creative writing and the contemporary novel. What I learned was that it is very hard work, much harder than I’m used to. Writing novels is much easier. I did learn something from the experience. It was that I couldn’t teach and write at the same time. For me, at least, the two activities seen to draw from the same source of energy. Which is to say that I never cease to admire and be amazed at those of you who somehow manage to do both. And especially those of you who, like my daughter, teach full-time at a parochial school, run a household, and a family, and still manage to travel to New Orleans at night to take graduate courses. Myself, I’d rather make up a story.

  There is another advantage to my profession, and that is that you are your own boss. You are free to write or say anything you please and the worst thing that can happen to you is that people won’t buy your books. And since writers are, accordingly, an independent, even smart-aleck lot, and since I am no exception, and since in the past I have written not only novels but also nonfiction books and articles about other people’s specialties when I do not always know what I’m talking about, like philosophy, theology, semiotics, politics—I don’t mind at all giving you my own theory of education.

  I proposed it once before, with a noticeable lack of response from educators. But I’ll tell you, anyhow. It comes from semiotics, or a theory of signs. In the human use of signs, which includes words and sentences of course, the theory goes that words which may in the beginning convey information with a sense of excitement—like Helen Keller first learning the word “water” spelled into her hand by her teacher Miss Sullivan—that these same words can become overused to the point of exhaustion, so that, instead of transmitting information, they block it. Instead of being attended by the excitement of discovery as in the so-called Helen Keller phenomenon, they are attended by boredom. This reverse phenomenon—which the German philosopher Heidegger has given the name Alltäglichkeit, or everydayness, and which I have called the ordinary-Wednesday-two-o’clock-in-the-afternoon phenomenon, which I would suppose you are familiar with—this phenomenon, by whatever name you call it, can, of course, be extended to most human activities, including one’s job, which, humans being what they are, nearly always involves the use of signs, words, sentences, memos, computer symbols, telephone conversations, whatever. These activities, repeated day after day, tend to get worn out. And the sign-user gets worn out. This is true of writing and most professions, and I’m sure of teaching as well. Isn’t it? You teach math the same time every day to the same students year after year and you get into a math rut. Or an English rut or a biology rut, it doesn’t matter. Whether one is teacher or student, one gets fed up with teaching and being taught the same Shakespearean sonnets at eleven o’clock of a Tuesday—or looking at the same frog or dogfish laid out on the dissecting board in biology class.

  Accordingly, this is what I proposed. It was meant for the college level, but it applies equally well at the secondary-school level. I pass it along to you free of charge as sound semiotic theory for revolutionizing education. I proposed that in an English literature class, the teacher, after going over a Shakespeare sonnet or a Longfellow lyric and observing the familiar symptoms of Alltäglichkeit, everydayness, both in oneself and in the class—the drooping of eyelids, the gaze out the window, the teacher saying the right words but thinking about her plans for the evening or his salary—I propose that this English teacher pass out frogs or dogfish to the English class, put the dissecting board right on top of the poem—then comes the initial shock—then I can promise you that you’ll get their attention. Then you say something like: “Well, what have we got here! A sonnet? No. A frog? Right. Now we’ve got thirty minutes left. Why don’t we just poke around and see what we can see—girls can use their bobby pins, boys their Swiss Army knives—just look at that little emerald-green sac right here under the liver, that’s the gall bladder, you know.” Some will start poking around with real curiosity.

  While in biology class, where the little corpses of frogs and dogfish have gotten pretty tattered and smelly over the weeks, what the biology teacher does is stand by the open window and look at the first April green and the first warm sunshine of the year. You open your book and say something like: “Okay, we’ve got a few minutes. Forget the dogfish. Just listen to this,” and you read

  Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

  Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

  Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

  And summer’s lease hath all too short a date …

  Now the point is that if you love this poem and if you’re tired of dogfish, and if all of you have run into Wednesday-afternoon exhaustion of signs—a well-known semiotic phenomenon—they’ll get it! They’ll get both your excitement and the beauty of the poem.

  I call this method “education by noncontextual shock.” In this case, the message in the bottle is this: Yes, it is true, we are cast away on an island and pretty fed up with the island routine, the familiar signs, reading the few books we have, dissecting the few fish we’ve caught—when all of a sudden there’s a bottle washed up on the beach and in it is a message, which begins: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” Technically, this is called the defeat of the devolution or exhaustion of the sign by a shift of context—which sounds complicated but which is actually so simple that every child—and especially Helen Keller—knows all about it. Because all you have to do to awaken the wonder of a child—or Helen Keller, or a great scientist like Einstein—is to stop him/her and say, “Wait, let me show you something, take a look at this”—etc.

  Now, I am willing to admit that you may have certain problems with the curriculum and the school board in putting my dogfish-sonnet theory into practice—and I know of only a couple of places it’s been tried—but feel free.

  Very well, so this is probably impractical pedagogy. The point is, of course, that something magical can happen between teacher and student, as you know better than I. I’m sure it’s like writing: once in a while something good happens and makes it all worthwhile. Even if you’re not a teacher, you can look back and remember such magic moments when you were a student. Strangely enough it is high-school teachers, not college or medical-school professors, whom I remember best. Maybe that is the age, secondary school or even primary, when you’re most apt to be turned on, feel the spark jump, as it did between Helen Keller and Miss Sullivan. I remember taking plane geometry from Miss Shell in high school. Now, plane geometry does not exactly sound like the world’s most exciting experience. But I’m telling you it was like a revelation when Miss Shell, who was about so high, drew a right-angle triangle on the blackboard and proved geometrically
step by beautiful logical step that—let me think, it’s been a while—the square of the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares of the other two sides—isn’t that it?

  And then there is the biology teacher whose name I can’t remember, who was also the football coach, I think. But coach or not, he got over, to the class, or at least to me, the amazing idea that the organism—whether it was a frog or dogfish or the amoeba we looked at through the microscope—has this extraordinary property such that, no matter what happens on the outside, no matter how violent the changes in its environment, it has this extraordinarily complex mechanism by which it keeps its internal environment the same, in an almost perfectly steady state. Astounding! Or, as the kids would say, “Neat.”

  This brings me to my second message in a bottle—and surely the more important. Imagine a class of students and a teacher shipwrecked on an island—an island once populated, with buildings, schools, libraries intact, but now depopulated, perhaps by the neutron bomb. These castaways are the last survivors. Suppose, before the bomb, I had the privilege of launching one bottle with one message in it which would be certain to wash up on the beach of the island and be discovered by the castaways. What message would I send you? Let me say first that I agree with the great philosopher Kierkegaard about such messages. He said that, of course, the most important message would be the good news of our salvation to those who had not heard it but that he, not being an apostle, did not have the authority to deliver the good news. Neither do I. And we can further stipulate that the shipwrecked class we are talking about is the sophomore class of St. Scholastica Academy, so presumably they may already have heard the good news.

  So what would my message in the bottle be? It would be very simple. One word, in fact. Read! Read: this word is really intended for the students, because it is a secret the teacher probably already knows. The message would be expanded to say something like this: “If you do not learn to read, that is, read with pleasure, that is, make the breakthrough into the delight of reading—you are going to miss out.” And I don’t mean you are going to miss out on books or being bookish. No, I mean that, no matter what you go into—law, medicine, computer science, housewifing, house-husbanding, engineering, whatever—you are going to miss out, you are not going to be first-class unless you’ve made this breakthrough. You are going to miss out, not only on your profession, but on the great treasure of your heritage, which is nothing less than Western civilization.

  This is no secret, of course; it is, in fact, a commonplace. But the reason I mention it is that I see so many kids growing up, strung out on seven hours of TV a day, who not only can’t read but look on reading as some sort of boring assignment, a dreary chore. “Please,” they’ll say, “can I get back to Thundercats or Scooby Doo?”

  That’s my message. If you don’t make the breakthrough into reading, you’re not going to make the breakthrough into anything else. And no sooner do I stick it, the message, in the bottle and launch it in the ocean than I know right away what the hang-up is going to be when a student finds it on the island and reads it. “Oh boy, I’ve heard that before. He’s talking about literature. Great Books and all that. Yeah yeah, I know all about that. Sure they’re great, but frankly there is no way I am going to sit down and read Homer or Macbeth. And frankly,” the student goes on to say, “I don’t believe the teacher will, either.”

  Of course, he’s right. I misspent my youth reading over a hundred Tom Swift and, at least, two hundred Rover Boy books. They were not exactly great books. The Rover Boys were all great guys. The bad guy was Dan Baxter. I can only remember one passage from the million or so words. It went like this:

  “‘Throw down these rocks, Dan Baxter!’ It was Tom, the fun-loving Rover boy.”

  Not exactly great literature.

  The point, of course, is reading with pleasure. Later you can get to the great stuff, which, surprisingly enough, is even better and more fun than the Rover Boys.

  Here again, it usually takes a teacher, somebody to turn you on—unless you happen to be some sort of reclusive genius like Marcel Proust, who apparently read everything without anyone’s assistance. Or William Faulkner, also self-educated.

  In my case, it was my father who read aloud to me. Reading aloud to a child—there is much to be said for it.

  It is strange how vividly one remembers certain scenes from childhood. What I am thinking of is the experience of being read aloud to. Reading aloud. I am not sure we sufficiently understand or appreciate this experience both as a unique sort of communication between two people and as a shared flight of the imagination—two imaginations.

  What I remember in every concrete detail was my father reading aloud to me Kipling’s Jungle Book and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. I was perhaps eight or nine. Yet I not only can remember exactly where we were, he sitting in a red-leather brass-studded chair by the fire, I standing alongside in my pajamas. One scene I remember particularly vividly. In Treasure Island, Jim Hawkins falls into a big apple barrel and takes a nap. He is awakened by a conversation a few inches away. Long John Silver is planning a mutiny. The boy listens in horror. Then John Silver reaches in for an apple …

  What happens here is that the flight of the imagination, the mind’s own conjuring up of the boy, of oneself as Jim Hawkins, shrinks away from Long John Silver’s hand as the hand reaches into the dark apple barrel—that this re-creation of the imagination is a thousand times more vivid, more real, more present, than the war of the Gobots on the TV screen.

  But more than that. Reading, first the reading aloud, then later simply reading, is not, as one might think, a private, reclusive sort of behavior, but a social transaction, if—and it’s a big IF, if the literature is good. If the book is good and even if one is reading to oneself, what is happening is a very special sort of social event, a communication between writer and reader, involving what I call a “tetrad”; that is, not only two persons but an exchange of symbols between them and an exchange of referents—that is, what the symbols are about, what they conjure up.

  There are two sorts of such out-of-body experiences in reading—which I am sure you are familiar with. One is ordinary good entertainment—call it inscape, if you will—in which you identify with a character and experience vicariously his or her adventures—like me as Jim Hawkins in the apple barrel. Such adventures can be literature of a very high order, such as Don Quixote or Huckleberry Finn, or low, such as Perry Mason detective novels, which are harmless enough, or Rambo movies, or any TV soap opera, which are less harmless.

  The other literary experience is of the highest order—and I don’t mean highest in the somewhat off-putting honorific sense of capital L, as in Literature of the Great Books—though they may be that, too—but highest in the amount of pleasure they give. This holds as equally true for drama and poetry as it does for fiction. What happens in each is that the reader is affirmed in his deepest and most inward experience. Another way of saying this is that that which seems most individual about oneself, the quirky unspoken part of one’s experience, even the unspeakable, is suddenly illumined as part of the universal human experience. The exciting paradox of literature is that it is in one’s own unique individuality that one is most human.

  The best thing that can happen to a writer is to get a letter from a reader—usually a woman: women, let’s admit it, are better readers; that is, more sensitive and observant than men. The letter is often about a section of a novel that one as a writer had the most doubts about, let’s say because it seemed difficult, obscure, even idiosyncratic. But the reader says: “Yes! That’s how it is! I didn’t know anyone had ever felt that way!” and so on.

  Of course, for my money, the story’s the thing—narrativity, if we want to use the fancier word of the critics. This makes me old-fashioned in the view of some critics and some practitioners of the so-called anti-novel who’d rather put anything in a novel than a story of something happening to someone. This is not to say that they don’t have a point,
if they are mounting a conscious revolt against the mindless sequence of happenings which make up most so-called novels. They may also have a point if they are saying that much of what happens in modern life is so senseless that the only way to write about it is to write the Novel of the Absurd in which either nothing happens or the events which do happen don’t make much sense or have much connection with each other. In these times, one must grant a degree of validity to this aesthetic of the anti-novel.

  Another way of saying this is that both the reader is in a bad way and the novel is in a bad way if the reader’s life is so meaningless that he or she has to confer a spurious meaning on his life by reading a novel by, say, somebody like Jackie Collins or Sidney Sheldon, which diverts him or her by a sequence of lively but meaningless events. This sort of reading may be better than drinking Bourbon or taking cocaine, but there are certain similarities: for example, one feels worse not better when it’s over.

  No, the novel is at its best when the story bears some relation of truth to one’s own story, or, as one critic put it, true narrativity is nothing less than the movement of one’s very self. T. S. Eliot had a fancy word for it: the objective correlative. By which he meant that, believe it or not, the adventures of Ulysses three thousand years ago, the fighting, the loving, the leaving, the journey, the arrival, are recognizable as the journey of one’s most inward self. Same is true of the modern Ulysses of James Joyce. Or of Huckleberry Finn, floating down the Mississippi, with a new adventure around the bend. Or of Quentin Compson’s unhappy adventures in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Or of Haze Motes’s weird crusade in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood. And it is not true of Jackie Collins or Sidney Sheldon or Dynasty or Days of Our Lives, which, if one is depressed, may offer an escape from the depression for thirty minutes, then leaves one more depressed than ever. This is not to put down Days of Our Lives, which I have watched off and on for thirty years with the sound off, but as a kind of conscious exercise in mild depravity, something like keeping a case of athlete’s foot for thirty years in order to enjoy the scratching. I’m the first to admit there’s something to be said for the pleasures of scratching an itch.