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

I make no apologies for being an amateur in such matters, since the one thing that has been clear to me from the beginning is that language is too important to be left to linguisticians. Indeed everything is too important to be left to the specialist of that thing, and the layman is already too deprived by the surrendering of such sovereignty.

If justification is needed, I plead the justification of the visitor from Mars: it is necessary in this case to be to a degree an outsider in order to see these particular woods for the trees.

One must be a Martian or a survivor poking among the ruins to see how extremely odd the people were who lived there.

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I don’t even know what to call it, the object of this mild twenty-year obsession. If I say “language,” that would be both accurate and misleading — misleading because it makes you think of words and different human languages rather than the people who utter them and the actual event in which language is uttered. So the book is not about language but about the creatures who use it and what happens when they do. Since no other creature but man uses language, it is really an anthropology, a study of man doing the uniquely human thing.

The proper study of man is man, said Pope. But that’s a large order, especially nowadays, when there is no such thing as a study of man but two hundred specialties which study this or that aspect of man. Ethnologists and anthropologists study man’s culture and evolution. Linguists study languages. Psychologists study stimuli and responses. Ethologists study those drives and instincts man shares with other creatures. Theologians study God and man’s relation to God. But only a Martian can see man as he is, because man is too close to himself and his vision too fragmented. As a nonpsychologist, a nonanthropologist, a nontheologian, a nonethologist — as in fact nothing more than a novelist — I qualify through my ignorance as a terrestrial Martian. Since I am only a novelist, a somewhat estranged and detached person whose business it is to see things and people as if he had never seen them before, it is possible for me not only to observe people as data but to observe scientists observing people as data — in short to take a Martian view.

Imagine how it must appear to the Martian making his first visit to earth. Let us suppose that he too is an intelligent being, whose intelligence has, however, evolved without the mediation of language but rather, say, through the development of ESP. So he is something like the angels who, according to Saint Thomas, can see things directly in their essences and communicate thought without language. What is the first thing he notices about earthlings? That they are forever making mouthy little sounds, clicks, hisses, howls, hoots, explosions, squeaks, some of which name things in the world and are uttered in short sequences that say something about these things and events in the world.

This behavior seems a good deal stranger to the Martian than it does to us. This is the case because language is the very mirror by which we see and know the world and it is very difficult to see the mirror itself, to see how curiously wrought it is.

In order to see the mirror of language, it is necessary to turn it around so that it no longer reflects, distorts, transforms. Say the word glass. It is almost impossible to hear the sounds for themselves because they have already been transformed: they sound like glass. The word glass sounds brittle, shiny, transparent.

Now try this. Repeat the word aloud fifty times. What happens? Somewhere along the way the word loses its magic transformation and, like Cinderella’s other slipper at midnight, becomes the ugly little vocable it really is: a small explosion of the back of the tongue against the palate, the rush of air around the sides of the tongue, a bleat ending in the hissing of breath between the teeth and tip of tongue.

A very odd business.

The Martian is surprised by what he sees and hears. In order to prepare himself for the journey to earth, he has read many scientific books and journals brought to Mars by astronauts. These works, in biology, psychology, physiology, have led him to believe that man is not much different from other earth creatures, certainly not qualitatively different. He has the same kind of anatomical equipment — nerve, bone, and blood — exhibits the same chemical reactions, the same transactions across his bodily membranes, the same capacity to respond to stimuli, adapt to environments, and so on. Imagine the Martian’s astonishment after landing when he observes that earthlings talk all the time or otherwise traffic in symbols: gossip, tell jokes, argue, make reports, deliver lectures, listen to lectures, take notes, write books, read books, paint pictures, look at pictures, stage plays, attend plays, tell stories, listen to stories, cover blackboards with math symbols — and even at night dream dreams that are a very tissue of symbols.

Earthlings in short seem to spend most of their time trafficking in one kind of symbol or another, while the other creatures of earth — more than two million species— say not a word.

When he asks his hosts (in ESP) about this strange behavior, he gets a curious answer from earth scientists. Mostly they seem anxious to convince him how much they are like other creatures rather than different. “Ever since Darwin,” say the scientists, “we have known that man is not qualitatively different from other animals. In fact the whole burden of earth science is to discover similarities, not differences, to establish continuities, not gaps.”

“Yes,” replies the Martian, “but you talk all the time; you’re talking now.”

The earth scientists insist that man is an animal like other animals, that in fact the government is spending millions of dollars investigating the behavior of monkeys and apes in order to learn more about man, that ethologists, trying to account for man’s madness, spend much of their time investigating aggressive and territory-protecting behavior among other animals, even a small fish such as the stickleback.

“Yes, but you’re still talking,” says the Martian. “Why don’t you investigate that?”

They refer him to linguists and psychologists, who tell him a great deal about the structure of languages, grammar, phonemes, and morphemes; about the relation of one language to another, the historical changes in a language, the acoustics of language, the physics and physiology of speech; about the rules by which one sentence can be transformed into another; about information theory; about stimulus-response theory; about learning theory, according to which a person learns a language in a way not really different from the way a rat learns to thread a maze or a pigeon learns to do a figure eight.

“But wait,” says the Martian. “What about the actual event of language? The central phenomenon? What happens when people talk, when one person names something or says a sentence about something and another person understands him?”

At this point he is apt to encounter a certain evasiveness, even an irritability. From the theoretical linguist he may get (as, in fact, I did) this sort of answer: “Well, I’m not interested in that. What interests me is the formal structure of language — for example, the rules by which new sentences are generated.”

The psychologist might reply, “Well, our knowledge of the brain is not sufficient to outline the exact neural pathways, but of course we believe that language behavior is not qualitatively different from the learned responses of other animals. Read Skinner’s Verbal Behavior. ”

“Excuse me,” says the Martian, “but I am not asking you to identify all the neural pathways and brain structures involved. I want to know only what sort of thing happens. Could you draw me a picture or describe a crude explanatory model — something like what your famous Dr. Harvey did when he speculated that perhaps the heart is like a unidirectional pump that sends the blood around in a circle?”