Walker Percy: The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other

Why did French and German veterans of Verdun, a catastrophic battle in which one million men were killed, keep returning to Verdun for years after the war, sit quietly in a café at Lemmes on the Sacred Way, speaking softly of those terrible times, and even camp out for a week in the shell hole or trench where they spent the worst days of their lives?

Why is the good life which men have achieved in the twentieth century so bad that only news of world catastrophes, assassinations, plane crashes, mass murders, can divert one from the sadness of ordinary mornings?

Why do young people look so sad, the very young who, seeing how sad their elders are, have sought a new life of joy and freedom with each other and in the green fields and forests, but who instead of finding joy look even sadder than their elders?

2

What does a man do when he finds himself living after an age has ended and he can no longer understand himself because the theories of man of the former age no longer work and the theories of the new age are not yet known, for not even the name of the new age is known, and so everything is upside down, people feeling bad when they should feel good, good when they should feel bad? What a man does is start afresh as if he were newly come into a new world, which in fact it is; start with what he knows for sure, look at the birds and beasts, and like a visitor from Mars newly landed on earth notice what is different about man.

If beasts can be understood as organisms living in environments which are good or bad and to which the beast responds accordingly as it has evolved to respond, how is man to be understood if he feels bad in the best environment?

Where does one start with a theory of man if the theory of man as an organism in an environment doesn’t work and all the attributes of man which were accepted in the old modern age are now called into question: his soul, mind, freedom, will, Godlikeness?

There is only one place to start: the place where man’s singularity is there for all to see and cannot be called into question, even in a new age in which everything else is in dispute.

That singularity is language.

Why is it that men speak and animals don’t?

What does it entail to be a speaking creature, that is, a creature who names things and utters sentences about things which other similar creatures understand and misunderstand?

Why is it that every normal man on earth speaks, that is, can utter an unlimited number of sentences in a complex language, and that not one single beast has ever uttered a word?

Why are there not some “higher” animals which have acquired a primitive language?

Why are there not some “lower” men who speak a crude, primitive language?

Why is there no such thing as a primitive language?

Why is there such a gap between nonspeaking animals and speaking man, when there is no other such gap in nature?

How can a child learn to speak a language in three years without anyone taking trouble about it, that is, utter and understand an unlimited number of sentences, while a great deal of time and trouble is required to teach a chimpanzee a few hand signals?

Why is it that scientists, who know a great deal about the world, know less about language than about the back side of the moon, even though language is the one observable behavior which most clearly sets man apart from the beasts and the one activity in which all men, scientists included, engage more than in any other?

Why is it that scientists know a good deal about what it is to be an organism in an environment but very little about what it is to be a creature who names things and utters and understands sentences about things?

Why is it that scientists have a theory about everything under the sun but do not have a theory of man?

Is it possible that a theory of man is nothing more nor less than a theory of the speaking creature?

Is it possible that the questions about man’s peculiar upside-down and perverse behavior, which he doesn’t understand, have something to do with his strange gift of speech, which he also doesn’t understand? Is it possible that man’s peculiar predicament, his unhappiness in the twentieth century, his upside-down behavior, disliking things which according to his theory he ought to like, liking things which according to his theory he ought not to like, has come to pass because the old modern age has ended and man has not the beginning of an understanding of himself in the new age because the old theories don’t work any more, because they showed man as monster, as centaur organism-plus-soul, as one not different from beasts yet somehow nevertheless possessing “freedom” and “dignity” and “individuality” and “mind” and such — and that such theories, monstrous as they are, worked for a while in the old modern age because there was still enough left of belief in Judeo-Christianity to make such talk of “sacredness of the individual” sound good even while such individuals were being slaughtered by the millions, and because science was still young and exuberant and no one noticed or cared about the contradiction in scientists’ understanding other men as organisms-beasts and putting them into the world of things to understand and so putting themselves above the world and other men?

But time ran out and the old modern world ended and the old monster theory no longer works. Man knows he is something more than an organism in an environment, because for one thing he acts like anything but an organism in an environment. Yet he no longer has the means of understanding the traditional Judeo-Christian teaching that the “something more” is a soul somehow locked in the organism like a ghost in a machine. What is he then? He has not the faintest idea. Entered as he is into a new age, he is like a child who sees everything in his new world, names everything, knows everything except himself.

When man doesn’t know whether he is an organism or a soul or both, and if both how he can be both, it is good to start with what he does know.

This book is about two things, man’s strange behavior and man’s strange gift of language, and about how understanding the latter might help in understanding the former.

I have made the assumption that the proper study of man is man and that there does not presently exist a theory of man. Accordingly, the book is an attempt to sketch the beginnings of a theory of man for a new age, the sort of crude guess a visitor from Mars might make if he landed on earth and spent a year observing man and the beasts.

It is the meager fruit of twenty years’ off-and-on thinking about the subject, of coming at it from one direction, followed by failure and depression and giving up, followed by making up novels to raise my spirits, followed by a new try from a different direction or from an old direction but at a different level, followed by failure, followed by making up another novel, and so on.

As it stands, it is nothing more than a few trails blazed through a dark wood, most dead-ended. I should consider it worthwhile even if it established no more than that there is such a wood — for not even that much is known now — and that it is very dark indeed.

Most readers will not want to read all chapters. It is hard, for example, to imagine anyone at all at the present time who would want to read the last. Only after writing it did it occur to me that it had, for the moment at least, no readership whatever. Nobody will be interested in it except psycholinguists and transformational grammarians, and the latter won’t like it. The only comfort I can take is that this particular excursion into what many readers will take to be the esoteries of language is no ordinary blind alley. Unless I am very much mistaken, it lies across the impasse which must be broken through before the new man in the new age can begin to understand himself.