Walker Percy (Photograph courtesy Christopher R. Harris, who owns the copyright)
Image and Existence: A Study in Indicating, Walker Percy, Mercer, 2019. 271 internet pages.
A few a long time prior to he died, Walker Percy remarked that a single of the pleasures of “reading” a bibliography of his perform was “recollecting the semiotic sections of The Message in the Bottle and Missing in the Cosmos—chapters usually disliked by most visitors.” Why did he take pleasure in remembering these? For the reason that, he writes, they confirmed “that most of the recent theorists of language—structuralists, transformationalists, behaviorists, and so on.—are up shit creek and can’t get out devoid of crawling above 8-12 months-previous Helen Keller in North Alabama.” 
Percy aficionados will know what he is receiving at, but if it’s been awhile due to the fact you have read Percy, here’s a primer: He argues in these parts that even though linguists have spelled out all kinds of points about language—how symptoms operate in a process and how phrases are acquired to generate specified events—they have unsuccessful to describe the most crucial matter about it: that means. When you say the term “water,” for example, you are not just working with arbitrary sounds to trigger a glass of the things be placed on a desk for you to drink. You are also referring to the factor alone, and we have forgotten, Percy argues, how astonishing this is. Helen Keller, in her autobiography, which Percy prices, recalls how she discovered the word “water” one day when her instructor put her hand beneath a spout:
As the great stream gushed about a single hand, she spelled into the other the phrase water, initial slowly then promptly. I stood continue to, my entire attention preset upon the movement of her fingers. Out of the blue I felt a misty consciousness as of anything forgotten—a thrill of returning believed, and in some way the mystery of language was exposed to me. I realized then that “w-a-t-e-r” meant the great interesting a little something that was flowing over my hand. That dwelling phrase awakened my soul, gave it mild, hope, joy set it totally free!
What “happened within Helen’s head?” Percy asks. It is tough to say, but the more substantial issue, Percy argues, is that theorists of language aren’t even asking the query.
As significantly as I can convey to, they even now aren’t, and if Percy loved recalling how these parts exposed the weaknesses of fashionable theories of language, he’d be thrilled with the publication of his guide Image and Existence: A Study in Meaning for the initial time in its entirety, from which those people parts ended up taken. Percy wrote Image and Existence although he was creating his 1st novel, The Moviegoer, but he was unable to uncover a publisher. He returned to the reserve all through his life and finally donated two drafts of it to the College of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1983. The Percy Estate donated two much more soon after Percy’s death—in 1994 and 2007—and there they sat until finally now. In excess of fifty percent of the do the job has in no way been posted.
All of Percy’s novels are about the partnership involving language and the self in 1 way or another, and Image and Existence, as it turns out, is Percy’s most complete account of this relationship, laid out in his normally no-nonsense, once in a while breezy, sly prose. As Percy argues somewhere else but most plainly in Symbol and Existence, the act of naming matters, as amazing as it is and as a great deal independence as it looks to offer at very first, also reveals us that the a person point we can’t title is ourselves. The scientific approach is a highly effective instrument for naming points, but the a person issue it just cannot identify is the scientist. It could be capable to explain how the scientist’s body will work and how his entire body is similar to or dissimilar from other bodies, but it just cannot name that discrete issue known as self. What’s even worse is that the improved we turn into at naming items, the extra evident our namelessness results in being, and so modern-day male, by now a ghost in a device, becomes at any time extra insubstantial as he names with higher precision the mechanics of his existence.
The other bizarre issue about language is that although it offers factors an preliminary id, it also obscures that id around time. When Helen Keller uncovered the phrase for “water” in the example earlier mentioned she turned informed of a distinctness the stuff hadn’t possessed for her until eventually that second (not that it was with out any distinctness ahead of). The problem is that the repeated use of the term swallows the thingness of water so that it is practically missing. Language, Percy writes, “operates not only as a suggests of being aware of but also as a means of concealment.” Objects can grow to be “encrusted by a symbolic simulacrum”—a simulacrum that can only be broken (quickly) by incident or art.
Percy’s early novels are peopled with wanderers who consider to do just that. In The Moviegoer, for illustration, Binx Bolling is “adrift,” struck by a experience of “malaise”—a sense that he is out of place in the environment and the planet is more and more dropped to him. So he seeks out “rotations.” These are encounters of the world (or what Binx calls “the new”) “beyond the expectation of the experience of the new”: “For instance, getting one’s first vacation to Taxco would not be a rotation, or no extra than a very ordinary rotation but obtaining lost on the way and getting a hidden valley would be.” This is since it would lead to an encounter of the “hidden valley” that would be new in a way it would not usually be because of its sudden discovery, wholly unexpected, briefly breaking by means of the everydayness of life.
In The Last Gentleman, Will Barrett, a Southerner dwelling in New York, utilizes a telescope briefly to separate folks and birds from their every day contexts and so see them momentarily anew. The trouble is that while the telescope “recovers” these objects by generating every “grain and crack and excrescence” obvious, these specifics eventually deliver a variety of paranoia: “Every day the sky grew a lot more paltry and just about every day the ravening particles grew bolder…. Sitting down in the park just one day, he heard a substantial-pitched keening sound instantly more than his head. He glance up by means of his eyebrows but the white sky was empty.”
But in later novels, Percy offers us with one more solution—at when much more prosperous and horrifying: come to be element of the machine by numbing one’s sense of self by means of technological innovation (Adore in the Ruins) or medicines (Thanatos Syndrome). In small, give into death and one miracles if this isn’t specifically what is taking place across The usa, as news of people and towns ravished by opioids grabs headlines. Percy rightly saw that when confronted with a deepening perception of loneliness and despair, dying can look like a reward.
One issue that might surprise even Percy students is the diploma to which Percy hopes in Symbol and Existence that a “radical science of man”—one that is dedicated to describing phenomena like naming and understanding “dynamically” without the need of minimizing them to brain synapses—might help you save modern man from his predicament. It would be a science, even, that would explain the pleasure of naming, “a joy, which, contrary to all earlier pleasure, is unrelated to the financial system of biological requires and satisfactions.” This is why, Percy writes, he is not calling for significantly less scientific rigor when it will come to making perception of language, but extra.
Novels, having said that, have a rigor of their possess, and even though Symbol and Existence is evidently the item of an first intellect, what superior medium than the novel to seize the predicament of fashionable person, the magic of imagined, and the joy and chance of naming the earth?
Micah Mattix is the literary editor of The American Conservative.
