Signposts in a Strange Land

by Walker Percy

  I don’t think so. The concept of an unsignified self stranded in a world of solid signs (trees, apples, Alabama, Ralphs, Zoltáns) is very useful in thinking about the various psychiatric ways patients “fall” into inauthenticity, the way frantic selves grope for any mask at hand to disguise their nakedness. Sartre’s various descriptions of bad faith in role-playing are marvelous phenomenological renderings of this quest of the self for some, any, kind of habiliment. This being the case, perhaps the patient’s “symptoms”—anxiety, depression, and whatnot—may be read as a sort of warning or summons of the self to itself, of the “authentic” self to the “fallen” or inauthentic self. Heidegger speaks of the “fall” of the self into the “world.” I am thinking of the first character you encounter in The Thanatos Syndrome through the eyes of Dr. More: the woman who lives at the country club and thinks she has everything and yet is in the middle of a panic attack. She is also the last person you encounter in the book—after being “relieved” of her symptoms by the strange goings-on in the book. So here she is, at the end, confronting her anxiety. She is about to listen to herself tell herself something. The next-to-the-last sentence in the novel is: “She opens her mouth to speak.” Jung, of course, would have understood this patient as this or that element of the self speaking to itself, perhaps anima-self to animus-self. Perhaps he is right, but I find it more congenial and less occult to speak in terms of observables and semiotic elements. Perhaps it is the Anglo-Saxon empiricist in me.

  One way to sum up The Thanatos Syndrome—without giving away the plot—is to call it an ecological novel. What made you turn to the ecological theme?

  I wasn’t particularly aware of the ecological theme. It is true that the Louisiana of the novel is an ecological mess—as indeed it is now—but this I took to be significant only insofar as it shows the peculiar indifference of the strange new breed of Louisianians in the novel. After all, chimp-like creatures do not generally form environmental-protection societies.

  Novels like Cheever’s Oh! What a Paradise It Seems, Gardner’s Mickelsson’s Ghosts, and Don DeLillo’s White Noise are about the contamination of the environment. Were you influenced by those novels or by any others with similar topics?

  Not really. If you want to locate a contemporary influence, it would be something like a cross between Bellow and Vonnegut—aiming at Bellow’s depth in his central characters and Vonnegut’s outrageousness and satirical use of sci-fi.

  Did you make up the “pre-frontal cortical deficit,” the Tauber test, and other things, the way you invented Hausmann’s Syndrome for inappropriate longing in The Second Coming?

  No, they’re not made up. There is just enough present-day evidence to make my “syndrome” plausible, or at least credible. One advantage of futuristic novel-writing is that it relieves one of restriction to the current state of the art of brain function. Another way of saying this is that, fortunately, the present knowledge of cortical function is so primitive that it gives the novelist considerable carte blanche.

  What about in The Thanatos Syndrome—is the pharmacological effect of Na24 on the cortex known?

  Not that I know of, but perhaps some shrink will write me, as one did about Hausmann’s Syndrome, and report that, sure enough, administration of Na24 to patients in the Veteran’s Hospital in Seattle has been shown to reduce anxiety and improve sexual performance in both quantity and quality and variety (for example, presenting rearward).

  What led you to the idea of cortex manipulation?

  Well, of course, the cortex is the neurological seat of the primate’s, and man’s, “higher functions.” But I was particularly intrigued by the work of neurologists like John Eccles who locate the “self” in the language areas of the cortex—which squares very well with the semiotic origins of the self in the origins of language—as that which gives names, utters sentences. It seems, despite the most intensive training, chimps do neither.

  The idea of man regressing to a pre-lingual stage must be a satiric device to get at what you experience in human communicative behavior today?

  Well, I might have had at the edge of my mind some literary critics, philosophers, and semioticians who seem hell-bent on denying the very qualities of language and literature which have been held in such high esteem in the past: namely, that it is possible to know something about the world, that the world actually exists, that one person can actually say or write about the world and that other people can understand him. That, in a word, communication is possible. Some poets and critics outdo me in regression. I was content to regress some characters to a rather endearing pongid-primate level. But one poet I read about claimed that the poet’s truest self could only be arrived at if he regressed himself clear back to the inorganic level; namely, a stone.

  When at the end of the book you hint that earlier poets wrote two-word sentences, uttered howls, or routinely exposed themselves during their readings, I thought you meant the counterculture.

  I was thinking of Ginsberg and company—and some of his imitators who can be found in our genteel Southern universities. I do not imply that Ginsberg had been intoxicated by Na24, but only that such poets might suffer cortical deficits of a more obscure sort. The fact that American writers-in-residence and poets-in-residence often behave worse than football players does not necessarily imply that they are more stoned than the latter. There is more than one way to assault the cortex.

  You have said literature can be a living social force, that the segregationists could feel the impact of a satirical line about Valley Forge Academy in Love in the Ruins. Do you expect The Thanatos Syndrome to be effective in that way?

  I would hope that it would have some small influence in the great debate on the sanctity of life in the face of technology. For one thing, I would hope to raise the level of the debate above the crude polemics of the current pro-abortion /pro-life wrangle. When people and issues get completely polarized, somebody needs to take a step back, take a deep breath, take a new look.

  Aren’t there more immediate ways besides writing satirical fiction? Have you ever been engaged in political activity?

  Only in a small way in the sixties. For a while I had the honor of being labeled a nigger-lover and a bleeding heart. One small bomb threat from the Klan and one interesting night in the attic with my family and a shotgun, feeling both pleased and ridiculous and beset with ambiguities—for I knew some of the Klan people and they are not bad fellows, no worse probably than bleeding-heart liberals.

  Is there any concrete issue that engages your attention most in connection with what is going on in America at the moment?

  Probably the fear of seeing America, with all its great strength and beauty and freedom—“Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A.,” and so on—gradually subside into decay through default and be defeated, not by the Communist movement, demonstrably a bankrupt system, but from within by weariness, boredom, cynicism, greed, and in the end helplessness before its great problems. Probably the greatest is the rise of a black underclass. Maybe Faulkner was right. Slavery was America’s Original Sin and the one thing that can defeat us. I trust not.

  In connection with what is going on in the world?

  Ditto: the West losing by spiritual acedia. A Judaic view is not inappropriate here: Communism may be God’s punishment for the sins of the West. Dostoevsky thought so.

  You have often spoken about the postpartum depression you are in when you finish a novel. To put the question in Lost-in-the-Cosmos terms: Now that you have finished another novel, which reentry option is open to you?

  Thanks for taking reentries seriously. Probably reentry 3—travel (geographical—I’m going to Maine, where I’ve never been). Plus reentry 2, anaesthesia—a slight dose of Bourbon.

  In 1981 you spoke about a novel you were writing about two amnesiacs traveling on a Greyhound bus. You also said that you had been at that novel for two years. Thanatos is obviously not that novel. Did you give up on that one?

  I
can’t remember.

  Do you have any plans for future works?

  It is in my mind to write a short work on semiotics, showing how the current discipline has been screwed up by followers of Charles Peirce and Saussure, the founders of modern semiotics. The extraordinary insight of Peirce into the “triadic” nature of meaning for humans and of Saussure into the nature of the sign—as a union of the signifier and the signified—has been largely perverted by the current European tradition of structuralism and deconstructionism and the American version of “dyadic” psychology; that is, various versions of behaviorism, so-called cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, and so on. It would be nice if someone pursued Peirce’s and Saussure’s breakthroughs. On the other hand, I may not have the time or the energy.

  Are there hopes that you would like the eighth decade of your life to fulfill?

  I was thinking of getting a word processor.

  The minimum a seventy-year-old man deserves is a birthday present. Since the person in question happens to be a writer, and since he has shown in a self-interview that he is the best man to answer the questions, the birthday present is that he can ask the last question.

  Question: Since you are a satirical novelist and since the main source of the satirist’s energy is anger about something amiss or wrong about the world, what is the main target of your anger in The Thanatos Syndrome?

  Answer: It is the widespread and ongoing devaluation of human life in the Western world—under various sentimental disguises: “quality of life,” “pointless suffering,” “termination of life without meaning,” etc. I trace it to a certain mind-set in the biological and social sciences which is extraordinarily influential among educated folk—so much so that it has almost achieved the status of a quasi-religious orthodoxy. If I had to give it a name, it would be something like the “Holy Office of the Secular Inquisition.” It is not to be confused with “secular humanism,” because, for one thing, it is anti-human. Although it drapes itself in the mantle of the scientific method and free scientific inquiry, it is neither free nor scientific. Indeed, it relies on certain hidden dogma where dogma has no place. I can think of two holy commandments which the Secular Inquisition lays down for all scientists and believers. The first:In your investigations and theories, thou shalt not find anything unique about the human animal even if the evidence points to such uniqueness. Example: Despite heroic attempts to teach sign language to other animals, the evidence is that even the cleverest chimpanzee has never spontaneously named a single object or uttered a single sentence. Yet dogma requires that, despite traditional belief in the soul or the mind, and the work of more recent workers like Peirce and Langer in man’s unique symbolizing capacity, Homosapiens sapiens be declared to be not qualitatively different from other animals. Another dogma: Thou shalt not suggest that there is a unique and fatal flaw in Homo sapiens sapiens or indeed any perverse trait that cannot be laid to the influence of Western civilization. Examples:1. An entire generation came under the influence of Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa and its message: that the Samoans were an innocent, happy, and Edenic people until they were corrupted by missionaries and technology. That this turned out not to be true, that indeed the Samoans appear to have been at least as neurotic as New Yorkers has not changed the myth or the mind-set. 2. The gentle Tasaday people of the Philippines, an isolated Stone Age tribe, were also described as innocents, peace-loving, and benevolent. When asked to describe evil, they replied: “We cannot think of anything that is not good.” That the Tasaday story has turned out to be a hoax is like an erratum corrected in a footnote and as inconsequential. 3. The ancient Mayans are still perceived as not only the builders of a high culture, practitioners of the arts and sciences, but a gentle folk—this despite the fact that recent deciphering of Mayan hieroglyphs have disclosed the Mayans to have been a cruel, warlike people capable of tortures even more vicious than the Aztecs. Scholars, after ignoring the findings, have admitted that the “new image” of the Mayans is perhaps “less romantic” than we had supposed. Conclusion: It is easy to criticize the absurdities of fundamentalist beliefs like “scientific creationism”—that the world and its creatures were created six thousand years ago. But it is also necessary to criticize other dogmas parading as science and the bad faith of some scientists who have their own dogmatic agendas to promote under the guise of “free scientific inquiry.” Scientific inquiry should, in fact, be free. The warning: If it is not, if it is subject to this or that ideology, then do not be surprised if the history of the Weimar doctors is repeated. Weimar leads to Auschwitz. The nihilism of some scientists in the name of ideology or sentimentality and the consequent devaluation of individual human life lead straight to the gas chamber.

  1987

  Questions They Never Asked Me

  WILL YOU CONSENT TO an interview?

  No.

  Why not?

  Interviewers always ask the same questions, such as: What time of day do you write? Do you type or write longhand? What do you think of the South? What do you think of the New South? What do you think of Southern writers? Who are your favorite writers? What do you think of Jimmy Carter?

  You’re not interested in the South?

  I’m sick and tired of talking about the South and hearing about the South.

  Do you regard yourself as a Southern writer?

  That is a strange question, even a little mad. Sometimes I think that the South brings out the latent madness in people. It even makes me feel nutty to hear such a question.

  What’s mad about such a question?

  Would you ask John Cheever if he regarded himself as a Northeastern writer?

  What do you think of Southern writers?

  I’m fed up with the subject of Southern writing. Northern writing, too, for that matter. I’m also fed up with questions about the state of the novel, alienation, the place of the artist in American society, race relations, the Old South.

  What about the New South?

  Of all the things I’m fed up with, I think I’m fed up most with hearing about the New South.

  Why is that?

  One of the first things I can remember in my life was hearing about the New South. I was three years old, in Alabama. Not a year has passed since that I haven’t heard about a New South. I would dearly love never to hear the New South mentioned again. In fact, my definition of a New South would be a South in which it never occurred to anybody to mention the New South. One glimmer of hope is that this may be happening.

  But people have a great curiosity about the South now that Jimmy Carter is President.

  I doubt that. If there is anything more boring than the questions asked about the South, it is the answers Southerners give. If I hear one more Northerner ask about good ol’ boys and one more Southerner give an answer, I’m moving to Manaus, Brazil, to join the South Carolinians who emigrated after Appomattox and whose descendants now speak no English and have such names as Senhor Carlos Calhoun. There are no good ol’ boys in Manaus.

  In the past you have expressed admiration for such living writers as Bellow, Updike, Didion, Mailer, Cheever, Foote, Barthelme, Gass, Heller. Do you still subscribe to such a list?

  No.

  Why not?

  I can’t stand lists of writers. Compiling such a list means leaving somebody out. When serious writers make a list, they’re afraid of leaving somebody out. When critics and poor writers do it, they usually mean to leave somebody out. It seems a poor practice in either case.

  Do you have any favorite dead writers?

  None that I care to talk about. Please don’t ask me about Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard.

  How about yourself? Would you comment on your own writing?

  No.

  Why not?

  I can’t stand to think about it.

  Could you say something about the vocation of writing in general?

  No.

  Nothing?

  All I can think to say about it is that it is a very obscu
re activity in which there is usually a considerable element of malice. Like frogging.

  Frogging?

  Yes. Frogging is raising a charley horse on somebody’s arm by a skillful blow with a knuckle in exactly the right spot.

  What are your hobbies?

  I don’t have any.

  What magazines do you read?

  None.

  What are your plans for summer reading?

  I don’t have any.

  Do you keep a journal?

  No.

  But don’t writers often keep journals?

  So I understand. But I could never think what to put in a journal. I used to read writers’ journals and was both astonished and depressed by the copiousness of a single day’s entry: thoughts, observations, reflections, descriptions, snatches of plots, bits of poetry, sketches, aphorisms. The one time I kept a journal I made two short entries in three weeks. One entry went so: Four p.m. Thursday afternoon—The only thing notable is that nothing is notable. I wonder if any writer has ever recorded the observation that most time passes and most events occur without notable significance. I am sitting here looking out the window at a tree and wondering why it is that though it is a splendid tree, it is of not much account. It is no good to me. Is it the nature of the human condition or the nature of the age that things of value are devalued? I venture to say that most people most of the time experience the same four-o’clock-in-the-afternoon devaluation. But I have noticed an interesting thing. If such a person, a person like me feeling lapsed at four o’clock in the afternoon, should begin reading a novel about a person feeling lapsed at four o’clock in the afternoon, a strange thing happens. Things increase in value. Possibilities open. This may be the main function of art in this peculiar age: to reverse the devaluation. What the artist or writer does is not depict a beautiful tree—this only depresses you more than ever—no, he depicts the commonplaceness of an everyday tree. Depicting the commonplace allows the reader to penetrate the commonplace. The only other ways the husk of the commonplace can be penetrated is through the occurrence of natural disasters or the imminence of one’s own death. These measures are not readily available on ordinary afternoons.