Signposts in a Strange Land

by Walker Percy

  If I were asked whose work I feel to be closest to yours—the whole terrain of contemporary American fiction considered—I would choose Saul Bellow.

  Why?

  Because of the philosophical bent, because both of you are satirical moralists, because Bellow’s is also a quest informed by an awareness that man can do something about alienation, and because philosophical abstraction and concrete social commentary are equally balanced.

  I take that kindly. I admire Barth, Pynchon, Heller, Vonnegut—you could also throw in Updike, Cheever, and Malamud—but perhaps Bellow most of all. He bears the same relationship to the streets of Chicago and upper Broadway—has inserted himself into them—the way I have in the Gentilly district of New Orleans or a country town in West Feliciana Parish in Louisiana.

  What exactly moves you to write? An idea? An image? A character? A landscape? A memory? Something that happened to you or to someone else? You have said about The Moviegoer that you “liked the idea of putting a young man down in a faceless suburb.”

  The spark might have come from Sartre’s Roquentin in Nausea sitting in that library watching the Self-taught Man or sitting in that café watching the waiter. Why not have a younger, less perverse Roquentin, a Southerner of a certain sort, and put him down in a movie house in Gentilly, a middle-class district of New Orleans, not unlike Sartre’s Bouville.

  If every writer writes from his own predicament, could you give a few hints as to how The Moviegoer illustrates this point?

  After the war, not doing medicine, writing and publishing articles in psychiatric, philosophical, and political journals, I was living in New Orleans and going to the movies. You can’t make a living writing articles for The Journal of Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. The thought crossed my mind: why not do what French philosophers often do and Americans almost never—novelize philosophy, incarnate ideas in a person and a place, which latter is, after all, a noble Southern tradition in fiction.

  Did you model any characters on your brothers, wife, children, grandchildren?

  Not in any way anyone would recognize.

  In connection with Message in the Bottle, a collection of essays that had been published over two and a half decades, what attracted you to linguistics and semiotics, to the theories of language, meaning, signs, and symbols?

  That’s a big question, too big to answer in more than a couple of sentences. It has to do with the first piece of writing I ever got published. I was sitting around Saranac Lake getting over a light case of tuberculosis. There was nothing to do but read. I got hold of Susanne Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key, in which she focuses on man’s unique symbol-mongering behavior. This was an eye-opener to me, a good physician-scientist brought up in the respectable behaviorist tradition of UNC and Columbia. I was so excited I wrote a review and sent it to Thought quarterly. It was accepted! I was paid by twenty-five reprints. That was enough. What was important was seeing my scribble in print!

  Can you recollect what was involved in your getting started with The Last Gentleman?

  I wanted to create someone not quite as flat as Binx in The Moviegoer, more disturbed, more passionate, more in love, and, above all, on the move. He is in pilgrimage without quite knowing it—doing a Kierkegaardian repetition; that is, going back to his past to find himself, then from home and self to the West following the summons of a queer sort of apostle, mad Dr. Sutter. “Going West” is U.S. colloquial for dying.

  Love in the Ruins?

  Love in the Ruins was a picnic, with everything in it but the kitchen sink. It was written during the Time of Troubles in the sixties, with all manner of polarization in the country, black versus white, North versus South, hippie versus square, liberal versus conservative, McCarthyism versus Commies, etc.—the whole seasoned with a Southern flavor and featuring sci-fi, futurism, and Dr. More, a whimsical descendent of the saint. After the solemnities of The Moviegoer and The Last Gentleman, why not enjoy myself? I did. Now I have seen fit to resurrect Dr. More in the novel I just finished, The Thanatos Syndrome. He is in trouble as usual and I am enjoying it.

  Lancelot?

  Lancelot might have come from an upside-down theological notion, not about God but about sin, more specifically the falling into disrepute of the word “sin.” So it seemed entirely fitting that Lancelot, a proper Southern gent raised in a long tradition of knightly virtues, chiefly by way of Walter Scott, the most widely read novelist in the South for a hundred years, should have undertaken his own sort of quest for his own peculiar Grail, i.e., sin, which quest is, after all, a sort of search for God. Lancelot wouldn’t be caught dead looking for God, but he is endlessly intrigued by the search for evil. Is there such a thing—malevolence over and beyond psychological and sociological categories? The miscarriage of his search issues, quite logically I think, in his own peculiar brand of fascism, which is far more attractive and seductive, I think, than Huey Long’s.

  Let me ask about The Second Coming, too, since although it developed into a sequel to The Last Gentleman, originally it was not conceived as a sequel.

  The Second Coming was a sure-enough love story—a genre I would ordinarily steer clear of. What made it possible was the, to me, appealing notion of the encounter of Allie and Will, like the crossing of two lines on a graph, one going up, the other down: the man who has “succeeded” in life, made it, has the best of worlds, and yet falls down in sand traps on the golf course, gazes at clouds and is haunted by memory, is in fact in despair; the girl, a total “failure,” a schizophrenic who has flunked life, as she puts it, yet who, despite all, sees the world afresh and full of hope. It was the paradox of it that interested me. What happens when he meets her? What is the effect on his ghost-like consciousness of her strange yet prescient, schizophrenic speech?

  Nonfiction. Lost in the Cosmos?

  Lost in the Cosmos was a sly, perhaps even devious, attempt to approach a semiotics of the self. Circumspection was necessary here, because semioticists have no use for the self, and votaries of the self—poets, humanists, novel readers, etc.—have no use for semiotics. It was a quite ambitious attempt actually, not necessarily successful, to derive the self, a very nebulous entity indeed, through semiotics, specifically the emergence of self as a consequence of the child’s entry into the symbol-mongering world of men—and, even more specifically, through the acquisition of language. What was underhanded about the book was the insertion of a forty-page “primer of semiotics” in the middle of the book, with a note of reassurance to the reader that he could skip it if he wanted to. Of course I was hoping he, or more likely she, would be sufficiently intrigued to take the dare and read it, since it is of course the keystone of the book. Having derived the self semiotically, then the fun came from deriving the various options of the self semiotically—the various “reentries” of the self from the orbits most people find themselves in. Such options are ordinarily regarded as the territory of the novelist, the queer things his characters do. The fun was like the fun of Mendeleev, who devised his periodic table of elements and then looked to see if all the elements were there. Technically speaking, it was a modest attempt to give the “existentialia” of Heidegger some semiotic grounding—this, of course, in the ancient tradition of Anglo-Saxon empiricism administering therapy to the European tendency to neurotic introspection. It was also fun to administer a dose of semiotics to Phil Donahue and Carl Sagan, splendid fellows both, but who’s perfect?

  Which of your novels do you expect to weather time best, and why?

  I’ve no idea.

  Would you rewrite any of your works from any aspect at any point if you could?

  No, I hardly think about them. Sometimes in the middle of the night, however, something will occur to me which I would use in a revision. For example, in the chapter called “Metaphor as Mistake” in The Message in the Bottle I wish I had used this example. In Charity Hospital in New Orleans, which serves mainly poor blacks, the surgical condition fibroids of the uterus, an accurate if somewhat p
rosaic definition, is known to many patients more creatively as “fireballs of the Eucharist.”

  Is it correct to say that your oeuvre forms an organic whole and that there is a consistent logic that takes you from one work to the next as you explore reality step by step?

  Yes, I hope so—though the organic quality, if there is any, occurred more by happenstance than by design. The “fruits of the search” are there—to the extent they are allowed in the modest enterprise of the novel. That is to say, the novelist has no business setting up as the Answer Man. Or, as Binx says in the epilogue of The Moviegoer: “As for my search, I have not the inclination to say much on the subject. For one thing, I have not the authority, as the great Danish philosopher declared, to speak of such matters …”

  But the novelist is entitled to a degree of artifice and cunning, as Joyce said; or the “indirect method,” as Kierkegaard said; or the comic-bizarre for shock therapy, as Flannery O’Connor did. For example, a hint of the resolution of Binx’s search is given in a single four-word sentence on page 240 [“He’ll be like you”]. The reader should know by now that Binx, for all his faults, never bullshits, especially not with children. In Lancelot the resolution of the conflict between Lancelot and Percival is given by a single word, the last word in the book. Which holds out hope for Lancelot.

  Hope in what sense? Isn’t he beyond reach for Percival anyway?

  No, Lancelot is not beyond the reach of Percival and, accordingly, Lancelot is not beyond hope. The entire novel is Lancelot’s spiel to Percival. Percival does not in the novel reply in kind. At the end Lancelot asks him if he has anything to say. Percival merely says yes. Lancelot, presumably, will listen. It is precisely my perception of the aesthetic limitations of the novel form that this is all Percival can say. But the novelist is allowed to nourish the secret hope that the reader may remember that in the legend it was only Percival and Lancelot, of all the knights, who saw the Grail.

  I guess Lancelot was meant as your bicentenary novel. But the two radical points of view, Lancelot’s “pagan Greco-Roman Nazi and so on tradition” and Percival’s orthodox Christianity, are unacceptable for most people, as you once explained. So, another guess, what you could teach America in Lancelot was what was wrong, and what you could work out in The Second Coming was what you could recommend to the nation.

  If you say so, though I had nothing so grand in mind as “recommending to the nation.” I never lose sight of the lowly vocation of the novelist. He is mainly out to give pleasure to a reader—one would hope, aesthetic pleasure. He operates in the aesthetic sphere, not the religious or even the ethical. That is to say, he is in the business, like all other artists, of making, not doing, certainly not lecturing to the nation. He hopes to make well and so sell what he makes.

  Isn’t it safe to say, though, that Lancelot and The Second Coming are twin novels in the sense that while Lance embarks on a quest to meet the devil, Barrett’s quest is to meet God? The latter’s physical journey downward seems to be an ironic counterpoint to his yearning, which is upward. Barrett’s route leads him—through his fall into the greenhouse—to a different reality: perhaps the correction of direction you recommend to the South and to America. Is this stretching things too far?

  Yes, indeed. Will Barrett falls out of the cave into Allie’s arms, i.e., out of his nutty Gnostic quest into sacramental reality. I liked the idea of falling out of a cave. I permitted myself a veiled optimism here, that one can in fact fall out of a cave; i.e., despair and depression, when aware of themselves as such, can be closest to life. From cave to greenhouse, courtesy of Søren Kierkegaard and Dr. Jung. Same reservation, however, about a “message to the South.” The South is by and large in no mood for messages from Walker Percy, being, for one thing, too busy watching Dallas, Love Boat, and the NFL on the tube. Or Jimmy Swaggart.

  Do the times have anything to do with your reaching this breakthrough to eros, affirmation, and celebration in 1980 and not before? In other words, could The Second Coming have been written in the fifties or sixties? Or was your own age and life experience needed to reach this stage?

  Yes, no, yes. Also artistic development. Also luck—as I said before. You’re sitting at your typewriter, nine in the morning, a bad time, or four in the afternoon, a worse time. Sunk as usual. In the cave. What’s going to happen to these poor people? They’re on their own. I’ll be damned if I’m going to impose a solution on them, a chic, unhappy existential ending or an upbeat Fannie Hurst ending. What does this poor guy do? He falls out of the cave, what else?

  Can we look at much of what goes on in innovative fiction, when it is not self-indulgent and cynical, in light of what you call “defamiliarization” in Lost in the Cosmos? That is, the artist tries to “wrench signifier out of context and exhibit it in all its queerness and splendor”?

  Absolutely, but I would apply the principle even more broadly; indeed, to much that is beautiful in poetry. Take Shakespeare’s lovely lines: “Daffodils /That come before the swallow dares, and take /The winds of March with beauty.” Surely the wrenching-out of context and hence defamiliarization of such ordinary words as “daffodils,” “swallow,” “dare,” “March,” and even the curious use of “take,” has something to do with the beauty. Obviously, Empson’s theory of ambiguity in poetry is closely akin.

  It is clear that once we are dealing with a “post-religious technological society,” transcendence is possible for the self by science or art but not by religion. Where does this leave the heroes of your novels with their metaphysical yearnings—Binx, Barrett, More, Lance?

  I would have to question your premise; i.e., the death of religion. The word itself, “religion,” is all but moribund, true, smelling of dust and wax—though, of course, in its denotative sense it is accurate enough. I have referred to the age as “post-Christian” but it does not follow from this that there are not Christians or that they are wrong. Possibly the age is wrong. Catholics—who are the only Christians I can speak for—still believe that God entered history as a man, founded a Church, and will come again. This is not the best of times for the Catholic Church, but it has seen and survived worse. I see the religious “transcendence” you speak of as curiously paradoxical. Thus, it is only by a movement, “transcendence,” toward God that these characters, Binx et al., become themselves, not abstracted like scientists but fully incarnate beings in the world. Kierkegaard put it more succinctly: the self becomes itself only when it becomes itself transparently before God.

  The second half of the question still applies: Is it possible to describe Binx and the others in terms of your semiotic typology of the self?

  I would think, in terms of the semiotic typology of self described in The Message in the Bottle. The semiotic receptor or “self” described here is perceived as being—unlike the “responding organism” of Skinner or Morris or Ogden and Richards—attuned to the reception of sentences, asserted subject-predicate pairings, namings, etc. There is adumbrated here a classification of sentences—not grammatically but existentially; that is, how the semiotic self construes the sentences in relation to his “world”(Welt, not Umwelt), the latter itself a semiotic construction. Thus:

  1. Sentences conveying “island news”: There is fresh water in the next cove; the price of eggs is fifty cents a dozen; Nicaragua has invaded El Salvador; my head hurts; etc.

  2. Sentences conveying truths sub specie aeternitatis (i.e., valid on any island anywhere): 2 plus 2 equals 4; E = MC2 (mathematical sentences); to thine own self be true, etc. (poetic sentences); wolves are carnivorous (scientific sentences, true of all known wolves anywhere).

  3. Sentences announcing news from across the seas: The French fleet is on its way to Saint Helena to rescue you (a sentence of possible significance to Napoleon). Or: A certain event occurred in history, in the Middle East some two thousand years ago, which is of utmost importance to every living human. Presumably it was just some such sentence, however indirectly, obscurely, distortedly uttered, which might have
been uttered or was about to be uttered to Binx Boiling, Will Barrett, at the end of these novels—by such unlikely souls as Sutter. Notice, too, that it is only this last sort of sentence, the good news from across the seas, which requires the credential of the news bearer. Or, as Kierkegaard phrased the sentence: Only I, an apostle (that is, messenger), have the authority to bring you this piece of news. It is true and I make you eternally responsible for whether or not you believe it. Certainly it is not the business of the novelist to utter sentences of class 3, but only a certain sort of class 2 sentence. Also, mutatis mutandis, it is Dr. Thomas More who, in The Thanatos Syndrome, hears the class 3 sentence as a nonsentence, devalued, ossified, not so much nonsense as part merely of a religious decor, like the whiff of incense or a plastic Jesus on the dashboard, or a bumper sticker common here in Louisiana: JESUS SAVES.

  Is it possible that the idea central to your semiotic theory of the self—namely, that the self has no sign of itself—has something to do with Jung’s idea in his Modern Man in Search of a Soul, where he speaks about the difficulty man has expressing the inexpressible in his language?

  Actually, I would suppose that my notions about the “semiotic origins” of the self are more closely related, at least in my own mind, to the existentialist philosophers, Heidegger and Marcel and Jaspers, and to the existentialist school of psychiatrists. Some years ago I published a paper which sought to do precisely that: derive many of the so-called existentialia—anxiety, notion of a “world”—from this very structure of man’s peculiar triadic relation to his environment: interpreter-symbol-referent.

  The Jungian idea in The Thanatos Syndrome is mentioned in the book—that anxiety and depression might be trying to tell the patient something he does not understand. Doesn’t this contradict the “semiotic-predicament-of-the-self” theory in Cosmos; i.e., its unspeakableness in a world of signs?