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

In the very age when crowds were largest and people flocked closest together, poets and artists were saying that men were lonely.

Why were poets and artists saying these things?

Was it because they were out of tune with the spirit of the modern age and so were complaining because the denizens of the age paid no attention to them?

Or was it that they were uttering the true feelings of the age, feelings however which could not be understood by the spirit of the age?

Nobody wants to hear about his unspeakable feelings. It is only when the feelings become speakable, that is, understandable by a new anthropology, that people can bear hearing about them.

It was easy not to take poets and artists seriously because they often behaved badly, seemed to enjoy their suffering and, though they made fun of the spirit of the age, science, and technology, were as willing as the next man to enjoy its benefits. Has anyone ever heard of a poet who refused penicillin when he got a streptococcus?

But most of all, the poets and artists who attacked the spirit of the age had nothing to offer in its stead. If the modern theory of man didn’t work, and they said it didn’t, what theory did?

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The end of the age came when it dawned on man that he could not understand himself by the spirit of the age, which was informed by the spirit of abstraction, and that accordingly the spirit of the age could not address one single word to him as an individual self but could address him only as he resembled other selves.

Man did not lose his self in the modern age but rather became incommunicado, being able neither to speak for himself nor to be spoken to.

A man is after all himself and no other, and not merely an example of a class of similar selves. If such a man is deprived of the means of being a self in a world made over by science for his use and enjoyment, he is like a ghost at a feast. He becomes invisible. That is why people in the modern age took photographs by the million: to prove despite their deepest suspicions to the contrary that they were not invisible.

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At the end of an age the theorists of the age will go to any length to stretch their theory to fit the events of the age in the name of science, even if it means that theory is stretched out of shape and is no longer scientific.

What theorists of the old modern age had to confront were the altogether unexpected disasters of the twentieth century: that after three hundred years of the scientific revolution and in the emergence of rational ethics in European Christendom, Western man in the twentieth century elected instead of an era of peace and freedom an orgy of wars, tortures, genocide, suicide, murder, and rapine unparalleled in history.

The old modern age ended in 1914. In 1916 one million Frenchmen and Germans were killed in a single battle.

Future ages will look back on the attempts to account for man’s perverse behavior in the twentieth century by the theory of the old modern age as one of the curiosities of the history of science.

First, given the consensus wisdom of the time, it was to be expected of man, understood as an organism in an environment with a roster of “needs,” that as the scientific revolution succeeded in transforming the environment for man’s use and increasing man’s knowledge and as culture evolved according to rational democratic and ethical principles, man should himself progress toward peace and happiness.

Next, when that did not happen, when men in fact seemed to prefer bad environments to good, a hurricane on Key Largo to an ordinary Wednesday afternoon in Short Hills, and even war to peace — war, the worst of all possible environments — the theorists of the age had only one recourse: to search for explanations either within the “organism” or within the “environment.” Accordingly, it did not strike anyone as peculiar when scientists sought an explanation for man’s perversity and upsidedownness in this or that atavism from man’s evolutionary past. Man blamed the beasts for his madness.

Next, it seemed natural to look for the source of man’s “aggressive” behavior in the aggression and “territoriality” of more primitive species, for example, the male stickleback, or in this or that putative ancestor of man, even though no stickleback or any other creature but man has been observed to wage war against itself (suicide) or against its own kind (war).

To the Martian, it seemed curious. If it was the case, as it appeared to be to him, that man exhibited two observable traits wherein he differed most clearly from the beasts, (1) that he had crossed the language barrier and spent most of his time symbol-mongering and (2) that man, alone among creatures, had a perverse penchant for upside-down feelings and behavior, feeling bad when he had expected to feel good, preferring war to peace, and in general being miserable at the time and in the place which he had every reason to expect to be the best of all possible worlds, it seemed to the Martian that earth scientists might do well to search for the explanation of trait 2 in trait 1, or at least to explore the connection between the two.

Instead he discovered that earth scientists were studying sticklebacks and male dominance in baboons and even hypothesizing a putative killer-ape, which perhaps had roamed the African prairies killing for pleasure and whose perverse behavior had somehow persisted in man.

The United States government, he discovered, spent millions funding the study of chimpanzees and other primates, crowding them into cage ghettos or isolating them in cage hermitages in the full expectation of shedding light on man’s hatefulness and man’s loneliness. Hundreds of papers were written on such subjects as “Sibling Rivalry in a Gibbon Colony” or “Electrically Induced Anxiety in the Macaque.”

Very good, said the Martian, the more knowledge the better. But why doesn’t the government spend a single dollar or you scientists write a single paper on such subjects as:

“Suicide in San Francisco, or the End of the Frontier: Correlations between Point of Origin, Level of Education, Time of Arrival, and Number of Rotations between New York and San Francisco of 150 Suicides Who Jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge,”

or “Sadness in Suburbia: Psychiatric Profiles of Twenty-five Housewives before and after Reading Betty Friedan,”

or “Scientific Transcendence and Sexual Imminence, or the Relationship of Lust to the Spirit of Abstraction: The Sexual Behavior of Twelve Scientists at Los Alamos in 1942–45, the Zenith of Transcendence of Twentieth-Century Physics Interrupted by Periodic Re-entry into the Organismic and Cultural Imminence of Santa Fe, Los Angeles, and New York; Sexual Intercourse as Prototype of Re-entry,”

or “The Aesthetic Reversal of Depression on Commuter Trains: Before-and-After Muscle-Tension Studies on Ten Depressed Commuters Reading a Book about Depressed Commuters on a Train,”

or “How Bad Is Bad News? A Survey of the Selective Predelicion of 250 New York City Subway Riders for News Stories Headlined ‘War,’ ‘Plane Crash,’ ‘Assassination,’ ‘Rape,’ ‘Murder,’ ‘Kidnapping,’”

or “Catastrophe as Catalyst in the Ontology of Joy, or Hurricane Parties on the Gulf Coast during Hurricane Camille: An In-depth Study of Eleven Victims Who Elected to Stay Compared with Eleven Random Control Subjects Who Elected to Leave”?

When the Martian made inquiries about such possible connections between man’s peculiar symbol-mongering and his even more peculiar behavior, he was given a copy of The Naked Ape.

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The truth is that man’s capacity for symbol-mongering in general and language in particular is so intimately part and parcel of his being human, of his perceiving and knowing, of his very consciousness itself, that it is all but impossible for him to focus on the magic prism through which he sees everything else.