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

Perhaps these are mistakes and perhaps it is true enough to say that a bass mistakes an artificial lure for a minnow.

Rather than argue the semantics of the word mistake, let us simply define the word for our present purposes. We shall understand the word in its root sense of taking amiss. More specifically, a mistake is the coupling of a sentence by its receiver in some fashion other than its coupling by its utterer. I wish, in short, to set apart triadic mistakes, the taking amiss by one person of another person’s utterances.

2.1. A sentence may be mistaken by mistaking any one of the parameters of the sentence. A parameter of a sentence utterance is a variable which is constant for a particular discourse but may vary from one discourse to another.

Some of the parameters of sentence utterances are: the mode of coupling of its elements, the community of discourse, the medium of communication, the world to which the sentence refers, the placement of utterer and receiver of the sentence vis-à-vis its world, the normative mode (true-false, stale-fresh, appropriate-inappropriate, crazy-sane, etc.).

2.11. The receiver of a sentence can mistake it by miscoupling its elements, that is, by coupling the wrong elements or by coupling the right elements in the wrong mode or parameter.

Wrong elements:

Wittgenstein’s Worker A: “Five slabs!” (meaning, send up five slabs).

Wittgenstein’s Worker B (a new man who, unaccustomed to A’s orders, supposes that A is taking inventory and is reporting that he has five slabs): “Very good! I’ll check them off!”

Wrong parameter:

NASA scientist on Wallops Island to native islander: “Look, the sky is violet!”

Islander, receiving the sentence as an ordinary world-news item, whereas in truth the scientist is making an observation which confirms the success of an experiment — the discharge by rocket of strontium chloride into the upper atmosphere: “Yes, it’s a lovely sunset.”

2.111. The receiver of a naming sentence can receive the name correctly and look at the same object the namer looks at yet nevertheless mistake the sentence by making the wrong world-slice (abstraction) of the class of objects named.

Father (pointing to a half dollar with an eagle on it): “That’s a half dollar,”

Child (later, pointing to chicken): “Half dollar!”

2.112. There is an interface between scientist and layman such that a sentence uttered by the former is subject to characteristic miscouplings by the latter.

Professor of medicine on grand rounds approaching the bed of a patient and picking up the chart: “Hm, a case of sarcoidosis.”

The sentence — [ This is ] a case of sarcoidosis —is coupled one way by its utterer, another way by a medical student who hears it, and yet another way by the patient himself. A proposition asserting class membership, logically speaking, the sentence is so understood by the three persons. Yet, triadically speaking, each understands it differently.

Professor’s coupling: This is a case of sarcoidosis. Which is to say, this patient is a man who has something wrong with him, a disorder of unknown etiology and uncertain course but with sufficient signs and symptoms and pathology in common with other such cases to warrant the class name sarcoidosis, a name however which serves as nothing better than a shorthand method of speaking of an ill-defined illness.

Medical student’s coupling: This is a case of sarcoidosis. Which is to say, the patient is assigned to the disease-class sarcoidosis Platonically. The patient is understood to participate in a higher reality than himself, namely, his disease. Later the student will refer to the patient by some such sentence as “I have a case of sarcoidosis on the third floor.”

Patient’s coupling: This is a case of sarcoidosis. I have been invaded by an entity, a specter named sarcoidosis.

2.1121. The lay-science interface often leads to a reversal of roles wherein the scientist-therapist “laicizes” his sentences, while the layman-patient “scientizes” his, with characteristic miscouplings attendant upon both.

Patient: “I’ve been looking forward to our beating — er, meeting today.”

Therapist: “You were thinking of beating me?”

Patient: “Well, I have been reacting negatively lately.”

Therapist: “I wonder who is beating up on who.*

Freud of course would have been concerned with the slip and the intrapsychic mechanism which produced it. In Peircean terms he was interested in the dyadics which irrupted into triadic behavior. But what increasingly interests us is how patient and therapist talk about the slip and how one understands or misunderstands the other.

Perhaps no one trait of patient-psychiatrist talk is more commonplace than this lay-science reversal, the patient Platonizing his sentences by a Good Housekeeping psychological jargon (“reacting negatively”), the therapist vulgarizing his (“who is beating up on who”) in the reverse expectation that the real is to be found in the common tongue. In a kind of minuet, patient and therapist change places. The question is, How does the switch work? What kind of a scientist does the layman become by his Platonizing? Does the common tongue bring the real closer for the therapist?

Freud was thinking about unresolved and disabling conflicts within the psyche. But what is beginning to dawn on us is that the very technique designed to probe and resolve such conflicts may in itself loom so large for the patient, be offered with such dazzling credentials, that he may fall prey to a technique and be further impoverished. In speaking of the earlier transaction, the Freudian slip, one is accustomed to using a traditional dyadic language: conflict, intrapsychic dynamism, repression, cathexis, resolution, etc. In the later transaction across the lay-science interface one finds oneself using such expressions as: falling prey to, impoverishment, loss of sovereignty, inauthentic, etc.

2.12. The receiver of a sentence can mistake it by mistaking the world to which it refers.

Thus it is not enough for the receiver to “know what the sentence means,” in the sense that a professor can write a sentence on the blackboard and every student can explain its syntax and semantics, that it is a declarative sentence, etc. One must also know whether it is a report, a story, an account of a dream, a joke, a quotation.

Salesman to boss: “There was this traveling salesman who met a farmer’s daughter—”

Boss: receives sentence as the beginning of a joke whereas in truth it is a report, the salesman’s seriocomic explanation of how he happened to lose an account.

By its very nature classical psychoanalysis with its encouragement of the analysand to “say what comes to mind” is peculiarly susceptible to sudden and uncued shifts of contexts and attendant misunderstandings. Miscouplings of sentences are more apt to occur here because parameters are more apt to become variables. The patient can shift “worlds” and communities at his pleasure. Indeed he is obliged to.

Therapist (after a long silence): “What comes to mind?”

Patient: “The center does not hold.”

Is the patient misquoting Yeats, describing his mental health, talking about the state of the union, or doing all three? Is the sentence uttered seriously or in a playful allusive way? It is the analyst’s business to know — that is, to catch on to the world mode of the sentence.

2.13. The receiver of a sentence can mistake it by mistaking the placement of the utterer vis-à-vis the world of the sentence.

Scene: a room under the University of Chicago stadium in 1943, during the early days of the Manhattan Project.