Lewis Lawson
But neurobiology can be reconsidered as being a somewhat more tentative knowledge than its reputation claims. One of the leaders of the discipline, William H. Calvin, in his remarkable book The River That Flows Uphill (1986), acknowledges that what is not yet known is far more interesting than what is known: "We neurophysiologists can now even conceive mental images about the inner workings of the human brain itself--and even construct scenarios for how the brain makes up scenarios" (5). That, he says, is what the "scientific method" is all about, creating a scenario, a likely narrative for the scrutiny of others. At the same time, just a bit more "hardness" can be claimed for psychoanalysis. In Sincerity and Authenticity (1975) Lionel Trilling offers a description of psychoanalysis which many people would accept: psychoanalysis is a therapy "based upon narration, upon telling" (140). Indeed, many would argue the case much more strongly, by asserting that the purpose of psychoanalysis is to enable the individual analysand to create a likely narrative of his life, an act that will inevitably incorporate him into humanity by informing him of the universality of his experience. In Re-Visioning Psychology (1975), James Hillman argues that psychological discovery of "the process of seeing through" must contain the act of narratization: "Third, the present event, the phenomenon before us, is given a narrative. A tale is told of it in the metaphors of history, or physical causality, or logic. We tell ourselves something in the language of 'because'. The immediate is elaborated by fantasy, so that a metamorphosis occurs as the immediate becomes part of an account" (141).
Narrative, then, becomes the central concern of our thinking about both our brains and our minds, indeed it becomes the universal concern of life, even though its universality is still so ignored that the two fields to whom its centrality is so important are still regarded as being completely disparate. All of us are privileged to be spectators of the competition between the dual scenarios of neurobiology and psychoanalysis, the former having to do with the racial drives and the latter having to do with the individual desires. They are both thought to be primarily interested in what goes on in the head, and they should therefore have a very close connection with one another, but they seem destined, like the lines of linear perspective, to meet only at infinity. Many of us are privileged not to get too greatly distressed by either scenario, suffering neither physical tumor nor psychological trauma; there are those absolutists who profess faith in the primacy of one or the other, but most of us seem equally indifferent to both, for they remain distant and abstract concepts, even though our indifference exists in the same nearby place as the concepts, the head, in other words no place that we can visualize. Once in a while, though, an individual is privileged to exist between the two scenarios, which, it turns out, are not distant from one another at all, but close enough to grind against each other like millstones. Such a privileged person was Walker Percy (1916-1990).
A few aspects of Walker Percy's life before he committed himself to writing. He was born the first child of a wealthy family, in Birmingham, Alabama. When he was thirteen, his lawyer father killed himself with a shotgun, just as his father had done, twelve years before. Indeed, as recent study has revealed, suicide has been a frequent response to life among the male members of the Percy family over a long period of time (cf. Wyatt-Brown). When Percy was fifteen, his mother died in automobile wreck that she may have deliberately caused. Despite these losses, Percy--sustained by his adoptive father, his father's first cousin--graduated from the University of North Carolina at the age of twenty-one. Seemingly, his faith in "medical materialism" (James, 13) had not been shaken, for he then entered the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University. But at the same time he submitted himself to a psychoanalyst for an hour a day five days a week. After three years (the first two with Janet Rioch, the last with Gotthard Booth), he withdrew from analysis, without resolution.
Graduating from medical school in 1941, he began his internship at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. Within five months his adoptive father died of a stroke; three months later Percy had to suspend his internship because he had contracted tuberculosis in the pathology laboratory. During a three-year convalescence, he began to think of writing, about the gaps in the description of humankind provided by the reigning view of objective-empiricism. Given his history of family breakdown, parental breakdown, psychological breakdown, and psychosomatic breakdown--all of which are not finally disparate, but inextricably connected phenomena--is there any way that his life's subject could not be neurobiology and psychoanalysis, the twin narratives that contextualize life and so give it meaning?
When Percy began to construct his life as narrative, he saw himself as "the castaway." An early critic suggests that Karl Jaspers' "shipwrecked man" and Martin Heidegger's image of Geworfenheit contributed to Percy's choice of his iconic personal image (cf. Luschei, 39). But Jose Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses (1950) also deserves credit: "The man with the clear head is the man who...looks life in the face, realizes that everything is problematic, and feels himself lost...Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look around for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas, the ideas of the shipwrecked" (115-16). The great popularization of the image of "the castaway," as the excellentImages of Crisis: Literary Iconology, 1750 to the Present points out, is Robinson Crusoe (Landow, 1981, 16-18), to whom Percy refers or alludes in nearly everything that he wrote. The 1959 essay "The Message in the Bottle" contains the most significant employment of the image, beginning as it does with "Suppose a man is a castaway on an island," and ending with Percy's identification of Ortega's "question of salvation": "...what if a man receives the commission to bring news across the seas to the castaway and does so in perfect sobriety and with good faith and perseverance to the point of martyrdom? And what if the news the newsbearer bears is the very news the castaway had been waiting for, news of where he came from and who he is and what he must do? Well then, the castaway will, by the grace of God believe him" (Percy, Message in the Bottle, 119, 149). Such was Percy's need to put himself under narrative scrutiny.
In his chapter "The Divided Self, and the Process of Its Unification" (166-188), William James distinguishes between the "healthy-mind," who needs to be born only once, and the "sick soul," who needs to be twice-born. This is because "the world is a doubled-storied mystery" for the "sick soul," a lower story for the natural and a higher story for the spiritual (166). By "story" James means a floor of a building, and I accept his cheery pragmatic architectural model; but, seizing upon the pun, I will say that life as a narrative is also double-storied. Both Walker Percy's biography and his veiled autobiography in writing argue that, in his thirtieth year, recognizing his soul sickness, he took decisive actions to be reborn. First he married, as a renewed attempt toward psychoanalytical healthiness; then he became a Catholic, in defiance of the neurobiological scenario that his father and grandfather had accepted. As he began to write, he explored the consequences of both his decisions, using fiction primarily, but not exclusively, to explore the psychoanalytical mystery that was one story of his life and non-fiction primarily, but not exclusively, to explore the neurobiological mystery that was the other story of his life. The fiction tended toward (veiled) confession (not only of religious dilemmas), while the non-fiction tempted him toward (veiled) evangelization, so that he had to practice deception in both narratives. One obvious deception was to use the French secularists Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre as his immediate stylistic models for The Moviegoer (1961). Perhaps he balanced his conscience in his early metaphysical essays, for they depend on French Roman Catholics, Jacques Maritain, on symbolization, and Gabriel Marcel, on intersubjectivity.
In the 1950's Percy wrote at least two novels, The Charterhouse andThe Gramercy Winner, which have not been published, perhaps because they were not sufficiently confessional and because they were too openly evangelical. In his essay in Walker Percy: Novelist and Philosopher (1991), Gary M. Ciuba, as yet the only analyst of The Gramercy Winner, generally supports my supposition (13-23). Although Jay Tolson, Percy's first biographer, has an intuition that The Charterhouse exists, its whereabouts is unknown: I fear for its existence, for in response to my request to see it, Percy wrote once that he was taking it out to throw into the bayou that very day (WP Letter to LL 5/16/67). During the same years, Percy was successful in non-fiction, publishing the bulk of the essays that constitute The Message in the Bottle (1975). Each of those essays is successful as an independent whole, but it must be admitted that The Message in the Bottle depends upon two later essays "The Delta Factor," and "A Theory of Language," respectively the first and the last, to assert Percy's scenario of the origin of knowledge through hearing (which requires a predecessor Other). His scenario is, of course, an attempt to refute Descartes' scenario of the origin of knowledge through isolated mediation upon what it seen. By the time he published The Message in the Bottle he was ready to assert--in a rather veiled way--that the capacity to symbolize evolved perhaps a million years ago by a means not explained by non-theistic treatments of language. The eruption of language he designates "the Delta factor," which he positions somewhere between Alpha and Omega. The individual recapitulation of this evolutionary event he designates "the Helen Keller phenomenon," following the tradition established by Ernst Cassirer, Jacques Maritain, and Susanne Langer, of using Helen Keller's autobiographical account of her leap from the stimulus-response, dyadic world of the signal to the conceptual, triadic world of the symbol (cf. Lawson, "The Cross and the Delta: Walker Percy's Anthropology" in Walker Percy: Novelist and Philosopher, 3-12).
Granted that the use of Helen Keller's description is hallowed by tradition, that it is certainly vivid, and that it is accessible because of it popularization in the stage and movie productions of The Miracle Worker. But Keller's autobiography--or its dramatization--cannot emphasize the reality of the lengthiness, the intricacy, and the intimacy of the birth of consciousness through symbolization. In all those qualities the birth of conceptualization resembles the earlier, physical birth, and--as post-Freudian psychoanalysts are more and more demonstrating--requires the same predecessor Other present, the mother (or almost invariably somewhat inadequately, a surrogate). Although Percy was aware of a few of the analysts who were beginning to create a scenario that linked language development with object relations, he does not use the mother-child model for illustration, but borrows Charles Sanders Peirce's father-child model. It may be that Percy was still at this time too dependent upon Freud, who does not dwell upon the maternal relationship, because of his investment in his discovery of the Oedipal relationship. But there is also reason to think that Percy's inability to acknowledge the mother-child relationship resulted from the inadequacy of his own mother-child relationship.
In Madness and Modernity (1983) C. R. Badcock quotes Anna Freud's description of the basic psychoanalytical presupposition: "We take if for granted that the amount of insight possessed by an unanalyzed person is minimal, and that this is due to the protective barrier between the id and the ego, erected to shield the latter from any excessive awareness of mental discomfort, pain, anxiety, narcissistic hurt, etc." Then Badcock continues: "...the ego can obtain extensive indirect knowledge of its id--not to mention the unconscious part of its superego--by undergoing a competently carried out psychoanalysis, or, in rather rare cases, through the possession of poetic or artistic gifts or an unusual capacity for candid self-knowledge" (152). Since Percy had withdrawn from analysis, had been unwilling to complete his narrative there, he was in effect betting that he possessed a poetic gift or an unusual capacity for self-knowledge. Whether one or the other--probably both--he found it, the inspiration to create his narrative. He preferred to speak of his inspiration as his "knack," which he speculated, was the result of inheritance or of "a rotten childhood" (Percy, "Questions They Never Asked Me," 403-04). That is to say, his depression may have been neurobiologically or psychologically induced--probably both. The "knack," he confessed, had "theological, demonic, and sexual components." But he said no more, forcing us to look to the fiction, penetrating through the surface--distorted by repression--to the depths, the home of "the theological, demonic, and sexual components." What seems safe in saying, before we approach the fiction, is that his sense of displacement demanded that he narratize his experience. In The Origins of Love and Hate (1952), Ian D. Suttie thus expresses the same idea "...in all his social activities--Art, Science and Religion included--man is seeking a restoration of or substitute for that love of mother which was lost in infancy" (71).
Because of the limitations of space, I cannot trace out in detail Percy's life narrative through all six of his novels. Obviously each narrative surface is particularized by its social context of different characters, different settings, and different plots. But beneath the surface of the present moment, before the registering eye of a remarkably consistent first-person narrator (who is, at least through Lancelot, offering a narrative which is a reconstruction of the past), there is a stream of consistent significant imagery. I use the word significant in its original meaning: signifying, that is, acting as a symbol, a visible object that stands in place of an idea not visually present.
This protagonist (Binx Bolling [The Moviegoer], Will Barrett [The Last Gentleman and The Second Coming], Lance Lamar [Lancelot], and Tom More [Love in the Ruins and The Thanatos Syndrome]) is "born," comes to himself, awakens, finds himself in a world that is characterized only by spatial reference. The other dimension, time, is either objectified as a unit of commerce or abstractified as a unit of scientific measurement: thus the protagonist observes other people either busying themselves acquiring and consuming bottles of Perrier time or busying themselves capturing phenomena to put into boxes of Greenwich Mean Time, the materialists or the scientific idealists, respectively. Rejecting both such measurements, the protagonist remains mystified by the enduringness of time, which stretches from beginning to end. He does not yet understand or--if understanding--accept St. Augustine's assertion, in Book XI of The Confessions, that it is the human's awareness of the enduringness of time that establishes the human as a souled creature.
Paradoxically the protagonist arms himself with a signature visual instrument or object that will, presumably, link him, connect him, to ever receding exteriority, the expanding universe: the motion picture apparatus (The Moviegoer), the telescope (The Last Gentleman), the lapsometer (Love in the Ruins), the motion picture and the television apparatuses (Lancelot), the gun sight (The Second Coming), and the computer screen and the azimuth (The Thanatos Syndrome). His intention is to fix the bounds of the universe so that he can fix his point on the celestial graph paper. But the universe continues to expand, so he continues to shrink.
Yet the protagonist's apparent effort to go outward may hide an unrecognized intuition that the answer will be found by going inward. In Re-Visioning Psychology James Hillman offers a clue to the Percy protagonist's most pronounced recurrent activity:
To psychologize we need to "get closer" or even to "back off" for a different perspective; or to look at things from a new angle. Other motifs are: turning lights on or off, entering, descending, climbing up or fleeing to gain distance, translating, reading or speaking another tongue, eyes and optical instruments, being in another land or another period of history, becoming insane or sick or drunk--all of which are concrete images for shifting one's attitude to events, scenes, and persons. Watching images on a screen or making images with a camera also present modes of psychologizing. But best of all is glass. Glass in dreams, as windows, panes, mirrors, presents the paradox of a solid transparency; its very purpose is to present seeing through. Glass is the metaphor par excellence for psychic reality: it is itself not visible, appearing only to be its contents, and the contents of the psyche, by being placed within or behind glass, having been moved from palpable reality to metaphorical reality, out of life and into image. Only when the alchemist could put his soul substances in a glass vessel and keep them there did his psychologizing work effectively commence. Glass is the concrete image for seeing through (141-42).All of Percy's novels, then, are efforts at "psychologizing," "seeing through." Yet the first four must be read as failures of the protagonist to "see through," for the instruments in those novels reveal that the viewer cannot simply observe remote indifferent exteriority: whether seen or not the reflection of the viewer's eye on the glass of the eyepiece asserts that the presence of the viewer inevitably influences the world that is being viewed.
All the while, then, each of the first four novels shows the reader, if not the protagonist, that the ocular piece of a visual instrument is not a satisfactory literal model of human consciousness. Human vision is not merely a present event, unaffected by past or future; the brain may be the locus of the visual sensation, but the elusive mind, wherever it is, is the locus of mentation, the assignment of existential value to sensation, the incorporation of space-time events into the life narrative. The Percy protagonist visually records the environment's multitude of objects, but does not symbolize them, discover what they stand for. At least not consciously; unconsciously he does. We readers can see how the protagonist, who wants only to live in the present, is drawn back constantly to the past (both his personal past and his racial past). We see such images as parks (Central Park especially), globes, the yin-yang, breasts, caressing, thumb-sucking, eating, caves and Charles Foster Kane (alluded to in The Moviegoer) and Philip Marlowe (referred to in Lancelot), two of the cinema's most flagrant seekers of the original object. These images attempt to escape the id to surface in the ego, as they reveal the Percy protagonist's personal yearning for the restoration to the lost mother figure and his racial yearning for the restoration to the Garden of Eden. The Paradise-Apocalypse myth is never far distant from the theme of a Percy novel.
Only in The Second Coming and The Thanatos Syndrome is the optical instrument or object an indication of successful "seeing through." In The Second Coming Will Barrett has reached the point in his life that he sees the world by sighting it with his Luger, revealing a death wish that is neurobiologic in origin. Then he sees a young woman who lives in a greenhouse (such as the one in Eden Park, Cincinnati, in which he had worked as a youth), who will (as the personification of his lost mother object) restore his vigor: upon meeting him, she presents him with two golf balls that he had lost. Thus Percy can intimate that he has finally "seen through" to the condition of loss that had distressed him all of his life. Since the young woman's name is Allie Huger (alleluia, praise the Lord), she and Will appropriately make love under a stained glass window used as a patch for the greenhouse roof. If learning language from the original object occurs through divine agency, so too does sharing language with the one with whom one shares life/love, the richest experience of intersubjectivity (endnote 1). The mother-figure having been regained in The Second Coming, she becomes in The Thanatos Syndrome a Beatrice figure (there is also another figure blatantly named "Vergil"), who enables Tom More to "see through" a computer screen, in order to understand the hellish conspiracy concocted by two secular humanists, one a scientist and the other a physician, who would remove the capacity to conceptualize from the masses--and incidentally remove also the capacity for language. At the same time, a priest is finally able to get Tom More to understand full consciousness, which is cointentional. The very etymology of conscious, as Percy pointed out, is "knowing with" (Percy, "Symbol, Consciousness and Intersubjectivity," 274). Cartesian consciousness is therefore a derivative, deprived consciousness. Full consciousness requires "triangulation" (endnote 2): a speaker and a hearer, each using an azimuth, "the way," as it were, to locate an object stereoptically, so that it exists, "stands out" from exteriority. Appropriately, this narrative--a comedy in the sense that Dante's narrative is a comedy--concludes with Tom More the psychiatrist, having observed a priest using an azimuth, helping a patient to construct (reconstruct) her narrative.
Many readers of Walker Percy remark upon the intense effect that his fiction has upon them. Perhaps that effect results, at least in part, from two phenomena that I have been discussing. Perhaps he reawakens in us those dim, forgotten, repressed images of childhood terror and nostalgia, home-sickness, feelings paradoxical but all the same lodged in our memory. Since this memory is universal, we experience that presentation of solidarity that Conrad, in his Preface toThe Nigger of the "Narcissus," announces as the paramount responsibility of the artist (endnote 3). And perhaps knowing more than the Percy protagonist knows about his own situation, we identify intensely with him, yearning to help him and lamenting his failed opportunities to sense the symbolic significance of an ordinary object: a smudge of darkness on an insurance salesman's forehead (The Moviegoer), a Holsum bread truck passing in the night (The Last Gentleman), a big unidentified fish on a trotline (Love in the Ruins), a silent friend willing, Christlike, to listen to a murderer's ravings (Lancelot), a shy girl looking for a father to teach her to name things, who has the gumption to use a bread truck for her escape (The Second Coming), an eccentric old priest who believes that Satan is now the Great Depriver of language, hence ultimately of consciousness and community (The Thanatos Syndrome). We sympathize and we tremble, for we wonder if we have the grace to see the symbol that will reintegrate our life, making it into a narrative. One thing is for sure: we know that we are more likely to see the symbol because we have read Walker Percy's struggle to finish his narrative, thus to escape the fatal grasp of neurobiology and psychology.
1. It should be noted, however, that there is an awful consequence to the attainment of language. Language makes possible consciousness, which informs the child of his physical separation from the mother-object, informs the child of his alienation. The only transcendence of alienation is through love, love of the human--especially of the complementary Other, with whom one manifests love through sexuality--and love of the divine. Sexuality in Percy's work, then, is never the ultimate act (that is, biologically driven), but the penultimate act (psychologically driven) that prefigures a spiritual relationship. Physical love, blessed as a sacrament, is symbolic of spiritual love. We cannot know as the angels know, directly; as embodied creatures, we can only know through symbols.
2. Simone Vauthier was the first to perceive the significance of "triangulation" in Percy's thought, in "Narrative Triangle and Triple Alliance: A Look at The Moviegoer" (Johnson and Johnson, 71-93) and "Narrative Triangulation in The Last Gentleman" (Broughton, 69-95). For these essays, and other essays as well, Percy critics in general and I in particular owe a great debt of gratitude to Professor Vauthier.
3. Since I first offered this speculation I have found confirmation for it in the thought of Margaret Little, a British psychoanalyst who argues that the experience of "basic unity," "primary total undifferentiatedness" [of infant with mother] must be understood as the key to psychological development:
I am postulating that a universal idea exists, as normal and essential as is the oedipus complex (which cannot develop without it), an idea of absolute identity with the mother upon which survival depends. The presence of this idea is the foundation of mental health, development of the whole person, and the capacity for holistic thinking. It is to be found not only in the delusions of the mentally sick, where it takes the form of transference psychosis, but also in the sane and healthy.Little's idea of the aesthetic transaction is very similar to Susanne Langer's assertion that "the form which is created represents, symbolizes--not just the thousand and one subject matters of the various arts but rather the feelings, the felt life of the artist and so of the observer" (Percy, "Symbol as Need," 288), a key element of Percy's aesthetics. Since Percy's work represents and embodies the need for "regression in the service of the transcendent," it is particularly magnetic for any reader who unconsciously or consciously is aware of his own "universal idea" of "basic unity."The most obvious example is here, right now. You and I can only understand each other insofar as we possess an area of unity which is a psychic reality, to which temporarily we unconsciously regress. This is how empathy works. The finding of agreement, or concensus of opinion between individuals or in any group, depends upon it; in turn agreement strengthens unconscious belief in survival and so provides the necessary security for tolerating differences and disagreement elsewhere.
............................................................................................................................... Contact or communication between the artist and his public depends upon the presence of, and regression to, this unconscious delusion in both. To the artist his creation is his work, is his feeling, is himself; to the hearer or the viewer what is heard or seen is his feeling, is his response, is himself. So each physicality is the work of art, and is the other, in the area where they overlap (123-24).
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Ciuba, Gary M. "Walker Percy's Enchanted Mountain," in WALKER PERCY: NOVELIST AND PHILOSOPHER, eds. Jan Nordby Gretlund and Karl-Heinz Westarp, Jackson: UP Mississippi, 1991.
Hillman, James. RE-VISIONING PSYCHOLOGY. New York: Harper and Row, 1975.
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_________, "Questions They Never Asked Me," SIGNPOSTS IN A STRANGE LAND, ed. Patrick Samway, New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1991.
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_________, "Symbol as Need," in THE MESSAGE IN THE BOTTLE, New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1975.
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_________, "Narrative Triangulation in THE LAST GENTLEMAN," in THE ART OF WALKER PERCY: STRATAGEMS FOR BEING, ed. Panthea Reid Broughton, Baton Rouge: LSUP, 1979.
Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. THE HOUSE OF PERCY. New York: Oxford UP, 1994.
Editor's note--this essay first appeared in print as "Microbiology and Psychoanalysis in the Work of Walker Percy," RANAM [Recherches Anglaises et Nord-Américaines], 24 (1991), 1-8.