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 order to see it, one must be either a Martian, or, if an earthling, sufficiently detached, marooned, bemused, wounded, crazy, one-eyed, and lucky enough to become a Martian for a second and catch a glimpse of it.

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The day I was thinking about Helen Keller and became a Martian for five seconds, making a breakthrough like Helen’s, the difference being that her breakthrough was something she did and my breakthrough was a sudden understanding of what she did.

One ordinary summer day I was sitting at my desk in Louisiana and thinking about a day in the life of Helen Keller in Tuscumbia, Alabama, in 1887. I had been trying to figure out what happens when a child hears a word, a sound uttered by someone else, and understands that it is the name of something he sees. Toward this end I had filled a page with diagrams showing little arrows leaving the speaker’s mouth, entering the ear of the hearer, coursing along neurons and synapses; other arrows showing light waves coming from the tree or ball the child was looking at; the two trains of arrows meeting one way or another in the brain.

For a long time the conviction had been growing upon me that three short paragraphs in Helen Keller’s The Story of My Life veiled a mystery, a profound secret, and that, if one could fathom it, one could also understand a great deal of what it meant to be Homo loquens, Homo symbolificus, man the speaking animal, man the symbol-monger.

The literature on the subject was by and large unsatisfactory. It still is. If the Martian wanted to go to the library and look it up or enroll in the university and take a course in it, he’d be out of luck. I too discovered that if you tried to look up language, you could find out everything under the sun about it except — the phenomenon itself. What I found was two kinds of thinking on the subject with a narrow but impenetrable terra incognita in between.

There were the behaviorists, who seemed anxious above all to explain language as a stimulus-response event, drawing arrows in and out and around dogs’ brains and human brains. A man receiving a symbol could not, it seemed, be altogether different from a pigeon “understanding” a green light which “meant” food-pellet-over-there. The classic case, of course, was Pavlov’s dog learning to respond to a buzzer by salivating. Other kinds of animal responses may be a little different — Skinner’s pigeons, for example — but the model was the same. The same arrows worked for both.

The explanatory model of the behaviorists was all a model should be; it was simple, elegant, and fruitful. It stood, moreover, in a direct line of continuity with chemistry and physics. The happenings in a speaker’s mouth, in the air, in the ear of the listener, along the nerves, could all be understood, at least in principle, as chemical and physical transactions occurring between molecules or electrons. You could draw a picture of it, showing things and spaces and arrows flying between them.

It was a valuable model. Beautiful and simple as it was, one did not abandon it lightly — especially not for fuzzy philosophical notions like “thoughts” and “minds” and “ideas.”

The behaviorists knew what they were talking about. The picture they drew of an organism responding to a learned signal had all the virtues of a good explanatory model. It explained, satisfied, and stimulated.

One wanted very much to apply the model, or a variant of it, to human behavior. And indeed one could — if one picked the right kind of behavior. The anthropologist Malinowski, who also liked the model, picked a good example. A party of Trobriand Islanders are out fishing. One man sights a school and calls out, “Mackerel here!” The other fishermen converge on the spot and ready their spears.

The model works in this case. Fisherman B responds to the cry of fisherman A, as he has learned by past experience and past rewards to respond: he paddles over and readies his spear. Perhaps if the cry had been “Shark here!” the response would have been to paddle in the opposite direction.

Yes, Trobriand fishing fitted the model. But I couldn’t help wondering at the time what Malinowski and the behaviorists would make of the behavior of the fishermen after they returned to the island, when they had a feast and later sat around the fire and told stories. Try to draw a picture with arrows of a storyteller spinning a long tale about long-past or imaginary events and forty islanders listening to him and taking it all in.

Something was wrong. Something in fact usually went wrong with the behaviorist S-R model whenever it was applied to a characteristically symbolic transaction, telling a story and listening to a story, looking at a painting and understanding it, a father pointing at a ball and naming it for his child, a poet hitting on a superb metaphor and the reader “getting” it with that old authentic thrill Barfield speaks of. In order to be fitted to such events, the S-R model had to be distorted, yanked, stretched, added onto, and in general rendered unrecognizable. The behaviorists in fact seemed more anxious to fit the model to the phenomenon than to take a good look at the phenomenon.

When a model ceases to illumine and order or even to fit the case, and when the time comes that you’re spending more time tinkering with the model to make it work than taking a good hard look at the happening, it’s time to look for another model.

Clearly something is wrong with the behaviorist model when it is applied to symbolic phenomena. To be blunt about it, it doesn’t work. No matter how much it is tinkered with, no matter how many little s’ s and r’ s, “ intervening variables,” are added, it still doesn’t work. Not only does it fail to account for a particular symbolic transaction, it has been conspicuous by its uselessness in the face of those very features of language that set it apart from animal behavior: (1) the productivity of language, the fact that a child, after two or three years’ exposure to a language and without anyone taking much trouble about it, can utter and understand an unlimited number of new sentences in the language; (2) an explanation of names; (3) an account of sentences.

The other great tradition by which man has sought to understand his own peculiar traffic in words and symbols runs from Plato through Kant to Ernst Cassirer. Here the starting point is not the “real” objective world out there with its sticks and stones, plants and bugs, amoebae shrinking, dogs salivating, Trobriand Islanders fishing — all these items and many more out there, and out there too perhaps the oddest lot of all, a group of scientists looking at these happenings and trying to explain them to each other. No, the emphasis is rather on the mind, the idea, the word, the self-generated symbol, the interior picture, the transcendental form which we make and by which we not only understand the world but construe it, even constitute it. To make a long story much too short, and so to make as quick as possible an end to the longest and most boring argument in philosophy, it is not really the world which is known but the idea or symbol which becomes the all-construing form, while that which it symbolizes, the great wide world, gradually vanishes into Kant’s unknowable noumenon.

At any rate Cassirer did indeed give the symbol the full weight and primacy I thought it deserved, but in so doing he seemed to have fallen victim to the old interior itch of German philosophers and let the world slip away.

How to account in this tradition for the unending sweat and toil and mistakes and wrong guesses and quarrels and finally triumphs of scientists who go to so much trouble to get at the truth, or at least the hows and whys, of what is going on out there?