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

Fermi’s assistant: “Dr. Fermi, the radiation count of the pile is two forty-two!”

Fermi: “Very good!”

The assistant is uttering an alarm, calling attention to danger to life and limb. The sentence calls for appropriate behavior: turn the pile off, let’s get out of here. Other such sentences, might be “Vesuvius is about to erupt,” or “The safety valve is stuck.”

Fermi, however, receives the sentence as having been uttered, not in the ordinary world of predicaments, but rather as a confirmatory report of a pointer reading.*

If one diagrammed each triadic event, Fermi’s coupling and his assistant’s coupling, one could depict the assistant speaking to Fermi within the world and calling his attention to an imminent threat from one sector of the world. Fermi’s reading of the sentence, however, would place both Fermi and the assistant outside this world in a transcending abstracted posture from which world events are read as data for theory.

Similarly:

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

Patient: “I’ve decided to break off the analysis.”

Therapist: “Tell me about it.”

Instead of replying, the patient rises, shakes hands, and leaves.

The therapist mistakes the placement of the patient vis-à-vis the world of the sentence I’ve decided to break off the analysis. He, the analyst, assumes that the patient has uttered one more sentence in the language game of analysis, i.e., a game where sentences are reports of data to be examined rather than announcements of actions to be taken. Whereas in truth the patient has shifted the world of discourse from the language game of analysis to the language of the everyday world, where, when one announces his departure, one departs.

2.14. A sentence can be mistaken in its normative mode, that is, by being received in a normative mode other than that in which it was uttered.

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

Patient (seeing the curtain at the window stir in the breeze): “There’s a rat behind the arras.”

Therapist: “Who’s the rat?”

Patient: “Polonius.”

Therapist: “Don’t forget that Hamlet mistook Polonius for the king.”

Patient (agitated): “You mean — it’s oedipal? Hm. No. Yes. It is!”

Note that it is impossible to characterize the sentence There’s a rat behind the arras by the conventional propositional norm of true-or-false. There is no rat behind the curtain. But neither patient nor analyst supposes that the sentence asserts anything about a rat. The sentence is rather, like so much of the talk in analysis, an allusive ambiguous assertion with more than one referent. It is, let us stipulate, (1) a playful allusion to the circumstance that both patient and analyst saw a performance of Hamlet the night before, (2) a reference to a dream, (3) a surfacing of unconscious oedipal feelings.

A mistake in the triadic sense can occur here if the therapist mistakes one of the parameters of the patient’s sentences, e.g., a normative parameter: suppose he had taken the sentence about the rat as a true-or-false proposition and gotten up to look for the rat. Or suppose he took the sentence as no more than an allusion to last night’s playgoing when in truth it may refer to far more serious matters.

Up to this point we have not diverged from the conventional analytical quest: the decoding of the patient’s sentence toward the end of identifying and resolving unconscious conflicts. One does not dispute the validity of this enterprise. But we have other fish to fry. We want to observe this conversation not through the analyst’s eyes, which see the patient as a psychic malfunction, but through a zoom camera which zooms back in order to see the encounter as it occurs, between two sentence couplers, in a world, in an office where a certain language game is played, next to a street where other language games are played.

Through such a zoomed-back camera, we fancy we can see things a bit differently. Thus, instead of seeing the patient through the analyst’s eyes as a dyadic creature whose distress may be traced to “repression” and “resistance” to the disclosure of unconscious contents, we see a certain sort of educated lay person who is very much aware of the language game being played here, very much aware of the analyst’s theories, very much aware of the difference between being in the world of the analyst’s office and being in the world of the street outside.

We suspect by the same token that the agitation manifested by the patient in the last sentence of the conversation may have a very different source than the dyadic distress ordinarily attributed to him. Conventionally the patient is supposed to resist the attribution to him of oedipal feelings. But is it not possible that in this case what was thought to be dyadic misery may turn out to be triadic delight? So that, far from being like one of Freud’s Victorian patients who “resisted” the disclosure of such unconscious contents, this patient may be a horse of an entirely different color, namely, late-twentieth-century man who likes nothing better than to exhibit the proper pathology, in this case the central pathology of the Master himself. “It’s oedipal!” exclaims the patient with every sign of delight.

Our business is to say what is right and what is wrong here. What is right is that Freud was right and that the patient does indeed do well to confront his oedipal feelings. What is wrong is a certain loss of sovereignty by the patient. We must trace out the connection between valid theory and falling prey to valid theory. For is it not true that the patient’s chief claim to humanity here rests on the honorable credentials of his pathology? “Hurray!” he is saying. “I am certified human after all! I have oedipal feelings!”

A Tertium Quid:

The Lady Novelist?

Tolstoy once said that a talented lady novelist could spend five minutes looking through the window of a barracks and know all she needed to know about soldiering.

If she can see so much in five minutes, how much more must the talented therapist see after, say, a hundred hours with his patient?

So here is the real question, or rather the main specter which haunts every inquiry into language as behavior. Granted the shortcomings of the two major methodological approaches to the talking patient — the analytic-psychical and the organismic-behavioristic — is not the sole remaining alternative the novelistic? Instead of “novelistic” we could say phenomenological, for the novelist must first and last be a good phenomenologist, and to most behavioral scientists phenomenologists are closer to novelists than to scientists. But is it not the case that when all is said and done and all theories aside, what happens is that the therapist gets to know his patient pretty well, understands him, intuits him, can talk with him and about him — and that behavioral theory can never say much about it?

Let us at least articulate our unhappiness. Unhappiness changes. We are no longer miserable about the old quarrel between classical behaviorism and classical psychoanalysis or about the more intricate quarrels and rapprochements of their followers. For it has become more and more evident that our main emotion when confronted by both Freud and Skinner, say, is not partisan feelings — for both are “right” in their way — but rather epistemological embarrassment. Both men put forward dyadic models, one for organisms interacting in an environment, the other for invisible “forces” interacting within a psyche. The question now is not which approach is right but how both can be right at the same time. To us now, Freud’s and Skinner’s models stand to each other like the two worlds on each side of Alice’s looking-glass. Both worlds are demonstrably right and useful in their way, but how do you get from one to the other?