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

Marquand’s formula might be summed up as suburban alienation recognized, plus the way out of the Return, plus a gentle disillusionment stoically borne. And this is in fact what happens. Tom Rath’s formula is: alienation recognized, the prevailing marketing orientation rejected, and a becoming one’s authentic self by devoting oneself to family and the P.T.A. — an admirable turn of events, but this is not what really happens. Behind this façade an altogether different (and desperately unauthentic) bid for authenticity is made. At least two concealed reverses can be disentangled from this skein of bad faith.

The first reverse: Overtly, the episode with Maria and the begetting of an illegitimate child is offered as a wartime lapse, bringing on a serious crisis in Rath’s life which must be faced and surmounted, with the help of Judge Bernstein* before the authentic life at home can be resumed.

Covertly and in fact, the wartime episode with Maria is offered as the one authentic moment, the high tide of Rath’s life. It is clear enough that the Roman idyll with Maria sans pajamas and culminating in the scene in the ruined villa (!) is regarded as the highest moment to which mortal Rousseauian man may attain. Postwar life with the family and community projects, far from being an advance into the good life as advertised, are unmistakably set forth as making the best of a sorry situation.

Charles Gray’s most authentic moment is the Return: repetition; Tom Rath’s is rotation, the coming upon the Real Thing among the ruins — a moment which needn’t have been disguised, since, for one thing, it has honorable literary forebears, as when Prince Andrei transcended everydayness and came to himself for the first time only when he lay wounded on the field of Borodino. This is a true existential reversal, the discovery of the pearl of great price at the very heart of the objective-empirical disaster. Yet even if Tom Rath’s rotation with Maria had been offered at its face value, it would not have rung true. For Tom’s adventure is not, in fact, a rotation but a desperate impersonation masquerading as rotation.

The second reverse: Overtly the adventure with Maria is offered as rotation, an untrammeled exploration of la solitude à deux amid the smoking ruins of the en soi.

Covertly and in fact, Tom Rath is taking refuge in the standard rotation of the soap opera, the acceptable rhythm of the Wellsian-Huxleyan-Nathanian romance of love among the ruins. His happiness with Maria as they lie in the ruined villa warmed by the burning piano, far from being a free exploration, is in reality a conforming to the most ritualistic of gestures: that which is thought to be proper and fitting for a sexual adventure. The motto of Tom’s happiness is “Now I am really living,” which does not mean now I am truly myself but rather, now at last I am doing the acceptable-thing-which-an-American-officer-in-Europe-is-supposed-to-do. He has at last achieved a successful impersonation, the role-taking of the American-at-war. It would have been more interesting if Rath’s adventure could have been explored as a repetition, a re-experiencing of what his father had done with the Mademoiselle from Armentières. As it is, finding himself in the situation of alienation, the familiar I estranged from the It, Tom Rath, instead of becoming a self, a free individual, solves the dilemma by a dismal impersonation, a fading into the furniture of the It.

Tom Rath’s dream is the sexual dream of the commuter, the longing for a Pepper Young rotation which can only come about through the agency of war or amnesia. The inhibition of the sexual longing of the commuter occurs far below the level of sin. It is not the scruple of sin which deters the commuter from sexual rotation but the implicit threat to his self-system of defenses against anxiety. What if he is turned down? What if he is premature in his performance? (What if Destry misses?) In Harry Stack Sullivan’s words, the mark of success in the culture is how much one can do to another’s genitals without risking one’s self-esteem unduly. But when the Bomb falls, the risk is at a minimum. When the vines sprout in Madison Avenue and Radio City lies greening like an Incan temple in the jungle, and when Maria develops amnesia, there is hardly any risk at all.

* In the character of Judge Bernstein, who is like Herman Wouk’s Barney Greenwald, and in the character of the sympathetic Negro sergeant, the author shows his true affiliation as a compulsive liberal novelist of the Merle Miller school, which lays down the strict condition that no Negro or Jew may be admitted to fiction unless he has been previously canonized.

A SERIOUS NOVEL about the destruction of the United States and the end of the world should perform the function of prophecy in reverse. The novelist writes about the coming end in order to warn about present ills and so avert the end. Not being called by God to be a prophet, he nevertheless pretends to a certain prescience. If he did not think he saw something other people didn’t see or at least didn’t pay much attention to, he would be wasting his time writing and they reading. This does not mean that he is wiser than they. Rather might it testify to a species of affliction which sets him apart and gives him an odd point of view. The wounded man has a better view of the battle than those still shooting. The novelist is less like a prophet than he is like the canary that coal miners used to take down into the shaft to test the air. When the canary gets unhappy, utters plaintive cries, and collapses, it may be time for the miners to surface and think things over.

But perhaps it is necessary first of all to define the sort of novel and the sort of novelist I have in mind. By a novel about “the end of the world,” I am not speaking of a Wellsian fantasy or a science-fiction film on the Late Show. Nor would such a novel presume to predict the imminent destruction of the world. It is not even interested in the present very real capacity for physical destruction: that each of the ninety-odd American nuclear submarines carries sixteen Polaris missiles, each of which in turn has the destructive capacity of all the bombs dropped in World War II. Of more concern to the novelist are other signs, which, if he reads them correctly, portend a different kind of danger.

It is here that the novelist is apt to diverge from the general population. It seems fair to say that most people are optimistic with qualifications — or rather that their pessimism has specific causes. If the students and Negroes and Communists would behave, things wouldn’t be so bad. The apprehension of many novelists, on the other hand, is a more radical business and cannot be laid to particular evils such as racism, Vietnam, inflation. The question which must arise is whether most people are crazy or most serious writers are crazy. Or to phrase the alternatives more precisely: Is the secular city in great trouble or is the novelist a decadent bourgeois left over from a past age who likes to titivate himself and his readers with periodic doom-crying?

The signs are ambiguous. The novelist and the general reader agree about the nuclear threat. But when the novelist begins behaving like a man teetering on the brink of the abyss here and now, or worse, like a man who is already over the brink and into the abyss, the reader often gets upset and even angry. One day an angry lady stopped me on the street and said she did not like a book I wrote but that if I lived up to the best in me I might write a good Christian novel like The Cardinal by Henry Morton Robinson or perhaps even The Foundling by Cardinal Spellman.

What about the novelist himself? Let me define the sort of novelist I have in mind. I locate him not on a scale of merit — he is not necessarily a good novelist — but in terms of goals. He is, the novelist we speak of, a writer who has an explicit and ultimate concern with the nature of man and the nature of reality where man finds himself. Instead of constructing a plot and creating a cast of characters from a world familiar to everybody, he is more apt to set forth with a stranger in a strange land where the signposts are enigmatic but which he sets out to explore nevertheless. One might apply to the novelist such adjectives as “philosophical,” “metaphysical,” “prophetic,” “eschatological,” and even “religious.” I use the word “religious” in its root sense as signifying a radical bond, as the writer sees it, which connects man with reality — or the failure of such a bond — and so confers meaning to his life — or the absence of meaning. Such a class might include writers as diverse as Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Camus, Sartre, Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor. Sartre, one might object, is an atheist. He is, but his atheism is “religious” in the sense intended here: that the novelist betrays a passionate conviction about man’s nature, the world, and man’s obligation in the world. By the same token I would exclude much of the English novel — without prejudice: I am quite willing to believe that Jane Austen and Samuel Richardson are better novelists than Sartre and O’Connor. The nineteenth-century Russian novelists were haunted by God; many of the French existentialists are haunted by his absence. The English novelist is not much interested one way or another. The English novel traditionally takes place in a society as everyone sees it and takes it for granted. If there are vicars and churches prominent in the society, there will be vicars and churches in the novel. If not, not. So much for vicars and churches.