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

It is the grossness of conventional distinctions which makes the case difficult. The other day I received a questionnaire from a sociologist who had evidently compiled a list of novelists. The first question was something like “Do you, as a novelist, feel alienated from the society around you?” I refused to answer the question on the grounds that any answer would be certain to be misunderstood. To have replied yes would embrace any one of several ambiguities. One “yes” might mean “Yes, I find the entire Western urban-technological complex repugnant, and so I have dropped out, turned on, and tuned in.” Another “yes” might mean “Yes, since I am a Christian and therefore must to some degree feel myself an alien and wayfarer in any society, so do I feel myself in this society, even though I believe that Western democratic society is man’s best hope on this earth.” Another “yes” might mean “Yes, being a John Bircher, I am convinced the country has gone mad.”

The novelist’s categories are not the same as the sociologist’s. So his response to the questionnaire is apt to be perverse: Instead of responding to the questions, he wonders about the questioner. Does the questionnaire imply that the sociologist is not himself alienated? Having achieved the transcending objective stance of science, has he also transcended the mortal condition? Or is it even possible that if the sociologist should reply to his own questionnaire, “No, I do not feel alienated”—that such an answer, though given in good faith, could nevertheless conceal the severest sort of alienation. One thinks of the alienation Søren Kierkegaard had in mind when he described the little Herr Professor who has fitted the entire world into a scientific system but does not realize that he himself is left out in the cold and cannot be accounted for as an individual.

If the scientist’s vocation is to clarify and simplify, it would seem that the novelist’s aim is to muddy and complicate. For he knows that even the most carefully contrived questionnaire cannot discover how it really stands with the sociologist or himself. What will be left out of even the most rigorous scientific formulation is nothing else than the individual himself. And since the novelist deals first and last with individuals and the scientist treats individuals only to discover their general properties, it is the novelist’s responsibility to be chary of categories and rather to focus upon the mystery, the paradox, the openness of an individual human existence. If he is any good, he knows better than to speak of the “businessman,” as if there were such a genus. It was useful for Sinclair Lewis to create George Babbitt, but it has served no good purpose for bad novelists to have created all businessmen in the image of George Babbitt.

Here is the sort of businessman the “religious” novelist is interested in, i.e., the novelist who is concerned with the radical questions of man’s identity and his relation to God or to God’s absence. He sketches out a character, a businessman-commuter who, let us say, is in some sense or other lost to himself. That is to say, he feels that something has gone badly wrong in the everyday round of business activity, in his office routine, in the routine life at home, in his Sunday-morning churchgoing, in his coaching of the Little League. Even though by all objective criteria all is well with him, he knows that all is not well with him. What happens next? Of course he can opt out. But thanks to Sinclair Lewis, we now know better than Sinclair Lewis. One is not content to have him opt out and take up the thong-sandaled life in Capri. Perhaps we do have better sense in some matters. Or perhaps it is only that Capri is too available. As a matter of fact it would be easier nowadays to write a satirical novel about some poor overaged hippie who did drop out and try to turn on. But the present-day novelist is more interested in catastrophe than he is in life among the flower people. Uncertain himself about what has gone wrong, he feels in his bones that the happy exurb stands both in danger of catastrophe and somehow in need of it. Like Thomas More and Saint Francis he is most cheerful with Brother Death in the neighborhood. Then what happens to his businessman? One day he is on his way home on the five-fifteen. He has a severe heart attack and is taken off the train at a commuters’ station he has seen a thousand times but never visited. When he regains consciousness, he finds himself in a strange hospital surrounded by strangers. As he tries to recall what has happened, he catches sight of his own hand on the counterpane. It is as if he had never seen it before: He is astounded by its complexity, its functional beauty. He turns it this way and that. What has happened? Certainly a kind of natural revelation, which reminds one of the experiences induced by the psychedelic drugs. (It is interesting to note that this kind of revelation, which can only be called a revelation of being, is viewed by the “religious” novelist as exhilarating or disgusting depending on his “religion.” Recall Sartre’s Roquentin catching sight of his own hand, which reminds him of a great fat slug with red hairs.) At any rate I cite this example to show the kind of character, the kind of predicament, the kind of event with which the novelist is nowadays more likely to concern himself than was Hemingway or Lewis. Is it not reasonable to say that, in some sense or other, the stricken commuter has “come to himself”? In what sense he has come to himself, how it transforms his relationship with his family, his business, his church, is of course the burden of the novel.

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In view of the triumphant and generally admirable democratic-technological transformation of society, what is the ground of the novelist’s radical disquiet? Can the charge be brought against him, as Harvey Cox has accused the existentialists, of being an anachronism, one of the remnant of nineteenth-century “cultivated personalities” who, finding no sympathetic hearing from either technician or consumer, finds it convenient to believe that the world is going to the dogs?

Might not the novelist follow the new theologian in his embrace of the exurb and the computer? Evidently the former does not think so. Offhand I cannot think of a single first-class novelist who has any use for the most “successful” American society, namely life in the prosperous upper-middle-class exurb, in the same sense that Jane Austen celebrated a comparable society. Rather is the novelist more apt to be a refugee from this very society.

The curious fact is that it is the new novelist who judges the world and not the new theologian. It is the novelist who, despite his well-advertised penchant for violence, his fetish of freedom, his sexual adventurism, pronounces anathemas upon the most permissive of societies, which in fact permits him everything.

How does the novelist judge the new theologian? One might expect that since one of the major burdens of the American novel since Mark Twain has been a rebellion against Christendom, the emancipated novelist might make common cause with the emancipated theologian. The truth is, or so it appears to me, that neither novelists nor anybody else is much interested in any theologians, and least of all in God-is-dead theologians. The strenuous efforts of the latter to baptize the computer remind one of the liberal clergyman of the last century who used to wait, hat in hand so to speak, outside the scientific laboratories to assure the scientist there was no conflict between science and religion. The latter could not have cared less.

Yet the contemporary novelist is as preoccupied with catastrophe as the orthodox theologian with sin and death.

Why?

Perhaps the novelist, not being a critic, can only reply in the context of his own world view. All issues are ultimately religious, said Toynbee. And so the “religion” of the novelist becomes relevant if he is writing a novel of ultimate concerns. It would not have mattered a great deal if Margaret Mitchell were a Methodist or an atheist. But it does matter what Sartre’s allegiance is, or Camus’s or Flannery O’Connor’s. For what his allegiance is is what he is writing about.