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Homo Viator:
The Existential Implications of Walker Percy
by
Michael Dellert
In his essay, An Interview with Zoltan Abadi-Nagy, Walker Percy defines his Catholic existentialism as "a certain view of man, an anthropology, if you like; of man as wayfarer, in a rather conscious contrast to prevailing views of man as organism, as encultured creature, as consumer, Marxist, as subject to such-and-such a scientific or psychological understanding-- all of which he is, but not entirely." This certain view of man lies at the heart of Walker Percy’s philosophy and artistry. From his novels, such as Love in the Ruins and Thanatos Syndrome, to the existential Semiotic of Self which he outlines in Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, Walker Percy’s "anthropology" examines man as a creature alone in the universe, absurdly isolated from his fellow-man by the limitations and nature of language and understanding.
In Emile Benveniste’s semiotic text, Problems in General Linguistics, Benveniste insists that the individual finds his or her cultural identity only within discourse, by means of such pronouns as "I" and "you." The individual identifies with the first of these pronouns, and is defined in opposition to the second:
Language is... the possibility of subjectivity because it always contains the linguistic forms appropriate to the expression of subjectivity, and discourse provokes the emergence of subjectivity because it consists of discrete instances. In some way language puts forth "empty" forms which each speaker, in the exercise of discourse, appropriates to himself and which he relates to his "person," at the same time defining himself as I and you. The instance of discourse is thus constitutive of all the coordinates that define the subject and of which we have briefly pointed out only the most obvious [i.e. pronouns, verb forms, etc]. (227)
Subjectivity is here grasped in relational terms. Like the linguistic sign, the subject relies upon another term within the same paradigm-- here, the personal pronoun "you"-- for its meaning and value.
Likewise, Walker Percy’s semiotic theory of the Self defines the subject, called the Self by Percy, as relational, in that the subject, the Self, the sign-user, also relies upon other terms within its world for its value and meaning, but fails to find a satisfactory relationship with those other terms:
The fateful flaw of human semiotics is this: that of all the objects in the entire Cosmos which the sign-user can apprehend through the conjoining of signifier and signified (words uttered and things beheld), there is one which forever escapes his comprehension -- and that is the sign-user himself... The self of the sign-user can never be grasped, because, once the self locates itself at the dead center of its world, there is no signified to which a signifier can be joined to make a sign. The self has no sign of itself. No signifier applies. All signifiers apply equally. (Lost in the Cosmos, 107).
This fateful flaw, according to Percy, lies at the heart of the American consciousness, and is responsible for all manner of ills, depression, suicide, alcoholism, fetishism, etc. And it is this fateful flaw which Walker Percy, in his novels and essays has attempted to isolate and correct.
Take for example Thomas More, protagonist of two of Percy’s novels, Love in the Ruins and Thanatos Syndrome, whom Percy uses as a first person narrator to explore the complexities of the self in isolation, the self which has no sign for itself.
Thomas More describes himself, in Love in the Ruins:
I am a physician, a not very successful psychiatrist; an alcoholic, a shaky middle-aged man subject to depressions and elations and morning terrors, but a genius nevertheless who see into the hidden causes of things and erects simple hypotheses to account for the glut of everyday events; a bad Catholic; a widower and cuckold whose wife ran off with a heathen Englishman and died on the island of Cozumel, where she hoped to begin a new life and see things afresh. (10)
Thomas More (whom I will refer to hereafter, when speaking of his character in Love in the Ruins, as Tom, as opposed to his character in The Thanatos Syndrome, whom I will identify as More) suffers precisely from what Percy would describe as the essential problem of the twentieth century: (Self)-isolation. The world in which Tom lives exists (fictively) about twenty minutes into the future. "Now in those dread latter days of the old violent USA and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death dealing Western world, I came to myself in a grove of young pines and the question came to me: has it happened at last?" (1). A deconstruction of this opening paragraph is instructive. The essential problem in the latter days of the old USA is absence. Christ, Tom’s spiritual savior, is inherently a paradoxical figure, the presence of absence, the transcendental signifier which used to ground the linguistic and cultural systems of the Western world as the final arbiter of meaning, the signifier of signifiers. He is the Word made Flesh, a Self that knows itself and does not, a ghost, and the Western world is "Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted." The world has lost or forgotten its transcendental signifier and meaning and value have become decentered, including the meaning and value of the Self. The question becomes, what to do with the Self in the absence of a transcendental signifier. Percy’s answer lies in Lost in the Cosmos:
In a post-religioius technological society, these traditional resources of the self [transcendent signifiers] are no longer available, leaving in general only the two options: self conceived as immanent, the consumer of the techniques, goods and services of society; or as transcendent, a member of the transcending community of science and art. (113)
Thus, the Self must place itself, even if that placement is in choosing not to be placed. It can ground itself in language through membership in a transcending community, a community where the final arbiter of meaning is itself grounded. Such a community, adopting as it does an external referent by which to gauge its own progress (scientific/artistic discovery/innovation for its own sake), allows the Self to determine its value and meaning in relation to the transcendent ideological values of the community, which can be internalized to provide an anchor for re-centering the Self. Or else, it can become an Immanent Self, placing itself "as an immanent being in the world, existing in the mode of being often conceived on the model of organism-in-the-environment as a consequence of the powerful credentials of science and technology." (LITC, 113) In other words, a thoughtless consumer of the resources and luxuries which it can afford, largely unaware of the ideological events which shape its world and its perceptions.
Tom is a Transcendent Self in an Immanent world. And while, from the discussion thus far, it may seem as if a Transcendent Self in any world would be the thing to be, the reality is that once self-transcendence has been accomplished and the Self has been centered relative to an external community of signs, once it has placed itself in relation to the world, it must still return and deal with the ordinary intercourse of the world. This reentry of the Self from the transcendent community into the same old workaday world is where things get sticky. As Percy points out in Lost in the Cosmos, "The best film of the year ends at nine o’clock. What to do at ten?" (142) With the waning of transcendence and the return to the world-as-it-is, the transcendent self finds itself in need of the same basic resources as the immanent self, socially as well as physically. Tom, a mad genius capable of diagnosing the ills of the soul, worries that his discovery might not be well publicized before it causes the world’s destruction:
The vanity of scientists! My article, it is true, is an extremely important one, perhaps even epochal in its significance. With it, my little invention, in hand, any doctor can probe the very secrets of the soul, diagnose the maladies that poison the wellsprings of man’s hope. It could save the world or destroy it... But the question remains: which prospect is more unpleasant, the destruction of the world, or that the destruction may come before my achievement is made known? (LITR, 6)
Tom is like the astronomer in Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos, whose ex-wife accused him of "angelism-bestialism." He became so absorbed in his work that when he came home, he ate healthily, made frequent love to his wife, watched TV, read Mickey Spillane, and said not a word to wife or children (116). This idea of "angelism-bestialism" is the very syndrome which Tom once isolated, and which he is now prepared to correct. It is an extension of the Cartesian dualism, abstraction opposed to pragmatism, spirit opposed to body. It lies at the root of the problem, as both the existential dilemma and the fateful flaw of human semiotics.
We are told that existence precedes essence because essence is a product of language, subjectivity as centered in discourse. Discourse exists after the individual exists (children acquire language, and therefore subjectivity (essence), between the ages of two and four). But the linguistic system which makes discourse possible pre-exists the subject (Self). Therefore, while existence may generally precede essence, essence precedes the existence of the particular subject. In other words, essence, as a concept, pre-exists the Self, but essence as an ideological event (subjectivity in discourse) is concurrent with the Self, while an interstitial space exists between essence-as-concept and essence-as-event. The concept of essence is an absence, the event of essence is a presence, but the Self exists between one and the other, the presence of absence, the absence of presence, an irreducible dichotomy and unresolvable paradox. Because of the displacement of language without a transcendental signifier, essence becomes arbitrary and absurd. This interstitial space between the conception of the subject’s essence (e.g. cultural belief that all life comes from God) and the actual formulation of the subject’s essence (e.g. the two-year old’s acquisition of language and placement of Self in discourse and therefore in relation to culture beliefs) divides the Self from itself because the Self exists as an immanent organism, according to "natural" laws as defined by "the powerful credentials of science and technology," before the Self exists as an essential coordination of linguistic subjectivity, but not before the concept of Self (and therefore the possibility of Self) exists as an object of language.
In plain English, we are Others before we are Selves, but there is a liminal period between the two when we are both Other and Self. As Freud used to say, when we talk about the psyche we must remember that it is really the psyche talking about itself. If we speak of the psyche, or the Self, objectively, we are commiting angelism (abstraction from the real world, transcendence), and if we let the Self speak about itself, subjectively, we are commiting bestialism (adjustment to and consumption of the environment, immanence).
Tom can thus be placed within a Lacanian model of subjectivity, such as Kaja Silverman’s. Tom suffers from the second perceived loss of the Lacanian subject, which occurs between birth and the acquisition of language, a loss inflicted by the territorialization of the individual. (154-55)
"For a time after its birth, the child does not differentiate between itself and the mother upon whose nurture it relies, or the blanket whose warmth it enjoys, or the pillow whose softness supports its head. Its libidinal flow is directed toward the complete assimilation of everything which is experienced as pleasurable, and there are no recognized boundaries. At this point the infant has the status of... an ‘oceanic self.’
"However the partitioning of the subject begins almost immediately. The child’s body undergoes a process of differentiation, whereby erotogenic zones are inscribed and libideo is canalized (i.e. encouraged to follow certain established routes)." (Silverman, 155)
This loss, of the undifferentiated "oceanic self," is necessary if linguistic acquisition is going to be accomplished and socialization made possible, but it subordinates the undifferentiated drives of the "oceanic self" to a given culture’s mores and values by dividing the Self into zones where specific forms of contact with the external world are permitted. Infants cover themselves with food not because they lack a kinesthetic sense but because they lack a differentiation between the food and themselves, and between their mouths and their cheeks. Adults are more self-conscious about their eating habits because they have territorialized their bodies. Food belongs in one’s mouth, not on one’s forehead. However, once one has transcended this territorialization (or attempted to through the transcendent communities of art and science), the Self has difficulty returning to the territorialized state. When one has achieved the abstraction necessary for transcendence, reentry can only be accomplished through the satisfaction of the loss that drove one to abstraction in the first place. Angelism leads to bestialism.
What it also leads to is the isolation of the Self. Territorialization requires differentiation, which implies the concept of lack. This lacks that, and therefore is not that, but this. Undifferentiated, pre-linguistic consciousness, however, lacks nothing. Everything transcends itself. The Self is also the Other, this is also that. Differentiated consciousness (the Self with the linguistic subject assimilated into the symbolic order) divides Self from Other, and Self becomes defined by its lack of Other characteristics. The Self is what everything else (the Other) is not. Thus, for Tom to say "I am a not too successful psychiatrist," he must mean, "I am everything that is not Other-than-a-not-too-successful-psychiatrist." But there is still an unconscious, undifferentiated self (the organism whose body your Self inhabits, like a ghost possessing a mortal) which makes no distinction between its Self and its environment (the Other). And when that undifferentiated self says "I am a not too successful psychiatrist, an alcoholic, a shaky middle-aged man subject to depressions and elations and morning terrors, but a genius nevertheless," these are all true statements, because they properly signify the undifferentiated self, which exists outside of language as an object of the differentiated Self’s subjectivity, and therefore exists on a sliding scale of all possible significations. But if the Self can signify anything, then it can also signify nothing, and the Self becomes trapped in a hermeneutical circle. It can and can’t be anything simultaneously, and if that’s the case, then what is the Self?
"Did you suffer a catastrophe?" (LITC, 110) This is the question which Walker Percy would ask of any extraterrestrial intelligences he might happen to encounter (and by implication, it is the question we should ask of each other, or do we ask it already? "Hi, how are you?"), on the presumption that any creature which could be called intelligent would have to have made the symbolic breakthrough and acquired language, and would thereby be at risk for precisely the predicament language creates, the isolation of the Self.
Tom speculates on the catastrophe in Love in the Ruins. "Either I’m right and a catastrophe will occur, or it won’t and I’m crazy." (1) What is a catastrophe? From the Greek, katastrophe, to overturn; it is the final event of the dramatic action, especially of a tragedy; a momentous tragic event, ranging from extreme misfortune to utter overthrow or ruin; a violent or sudden change in a feature of the earth; utter failure: FIASCO. A catastrophe is a deconstruction, an effacement, the failure of linguistic systems to carry quantitative meaning, the failure of the linguistic signifier to properly signify the Self. But in Tom’s case, this would be a positive thing. It would prove that his theories have been correct and that he has successfully placed himself as a subject within discourse. If there is no catastrophe, then he is crazy. And what is insanity but an effacement of personality, of Self, of subjectivity as constituted by discourse? So either the entire system collapses and proves that Tom was right about its eventual collapse, or else it holds and Tom collapses. The result is the same either way, for the subject, the Self.
In his essay, Concerning Love in the Ruins, Percy says that there is "a split within the person, a split between the person’s self, a ghostly self which abstracts from the world and has identity crises, and the person’s body, which has needs." This split is the catastrophe which Thomas More is expecting, praying for, and dreading. It is the confirmation of himself as a Self, properly and significantly placed in the world, after a long Quest and many puzzling enigmas. "Toynbee, I believe, speaks of the Return, of the man who fails and goes away, is exiled, takes counsel with himself, hits on something, sees daylight-- and returns in triumph." (LITR, 21) Thomas More, like us all, is hoping that he has seen daylight, and not a will-o-wisp.
Bibliography
Benveniste, Emile. Problems in General Linguistics. Trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek. Coral Gables: Univ. Of Miami Press, 1971.
Percy, Walker. Lost in the Cosmos. New York: Washington Square Press, 1983
---. Love in the Ruins. Toronto: Ballantine Books, 1971.
--. The Thanatos Syndrome. New York: Ballantine Books, 1987.
Silverman, Kaja. The Subject of Semiotics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.