Alienation and the Word

...Of the Grand Canyon one can hear people remark: "It doesn't look at all like the postcards showed...

...Moreover, he avoids the self-promotion that afflicts writers like Norman Mailer when they turn to nonliterary realms...

...That is, our alienation is necessarily tied to our capacity for language, to our humanity...

...Percy, of course, does not deny that human beings do at times communicate in the manner the behaviorists describe...

...Certainly, whatever is being communicated cannot be determined by studying the structure of the sentences according to Chomsky's ideas...

...At the center of Percy's discussion is Helen Keller's awakening to human language, the moment when she learned that her nurse's spelling out w-a-t-e-r on her hand did more than signal the presence of stuff for drinking or washing, that it named something...

...All we can do is recognize our alienation, for "the worst of all despairs is to imagine one is at home when one is really homeless...

...and once it dawned on her that objects had names, Helen wanted to name everything...

...He declares that our world is so predefined for us by others that we must have a new experience authenticated by the appropriate expert before we are willing to consider it significant...

...Reviewed by Richard H. King Assistant Professor of History and Philosophy, Federal City College...

...Still, the unique feature of human language, he insists, is that when a person hears the word "fire," he usually asks, "What about it...

...Consequently, the self never appears in most scientific treatments of human behavior, rendering the work radically incomplete...

...But what, in the end, is the connection between man's capacity to name, and the fact that he is often, against all reason, unhappy...

...Our human condition, Percy continues, is that of castaways on an island...

...Knowledge, Percy says, must conform to empirical reality or be deducible from general laws or principles...

...In "The Man on the Train," Percy details a variety of means for coping with this predicament through literature...

...I was disappointed...

...The social scientists, by defining man as the animal that acts to satisfy his wants, cannot explain why they themselves are engaged in their studies...

...Short of suicide, Percy remarks, we all desire some apocalypse, some profound intervention that will disrupt the dailiness and relieve the boredom threatening to choke us...

...Thus alienation may be cancelled by "reversal...

...it tells us everything about human communication except what makes it peculiarly human...

...Percy finds our alienation from experience reflected not only in today's society, which operates on the assumption that happiness comes from fulfilling bodily needs, but in the very disciplines that should be shedding light on this contemporary mood...

...While Percy's answer is far from clear, he seems to be saying that because we can symbolize-because we can conceive of things being other than they are-we are never at one with ourselves, like animals...

...A mere recounting of these methods, however, cannot do justice to Percy's wry and insightful essay...

...His only problem now is to keep from blowing his brains out...

...With this established, he goes on to assert that linguistics should not be concerned primarily with the study of syntax generated by deep mental structures, as Noam Chomsky wants...

...Even to ask, as modern philosophers do, whether there can be private languages is to miss the essence of human communication...

...Or it may be provided by a work representing "repetition," where a fictional character takes us to some thing or some place experienced before...

...Not the Cartesian "I think, therefore I am," but "we name in a common world" best formulates our primordial situation...

...Rather, it should focus upon that human occasion when sound, meaning and object come together...

...It is nothing less than an esthetic for the alienated consciousness...

...Yet this model, Percy observes, cannot distinguish speech from animal language codes...

...While reading Kafka, say, we feel exhilarated, even hopeful (whereas we succumb to our malaise when we read of the joys of being an integrated and loving person...

...Percy's entire argument can be read as a secular version of the "Word become flesh," and, indeed, Percy is a committed Christian...

...The central pieces in The Message in the Bottle deal with language, and give Percy the opportunity to take direct aim at the behavioral scientists' notion of linguistics...

...In short, The Message in the Bottle is presented in the form of negative news, whose purpose, it appears, is to prepare us to regain the sovereignty of insight that is the necessary preparation for receiving the Word, the final positive news...

...If, for instance, a patient announces he is going to commit suicide, the analyst does not necessarily take him at his word: The patient may be pleading for mothering, or indicating that the doctor's hopes for a quick cure are overly sanguine...

...author, "The Party of Eros'' American novelists have on the whole been inept at handling general ideas, but in this collection of essays on linguistics, psychiatry and existentialism written over the past two decades, Walker Percy shows himself to be as comfortable with philosophical discourse as he is with the creation of character and plot...

...Employing a stimulus-response schema, the behaviorists argue that when one hears the word "fire," for example, one reacts appropriately-by warming one's hands, dousing the blaze, leaving the building, or cooking a steak...

...Instead, Percy's approach to this topic inclines toward much of the work being done currently in psychoanalytic theory-such as Erving Goffman's notions of "framing" and Gregory Bateson's contexts of discourse...

...And once "they" have instructed us in the ways we should respond to something, we are robbed of fresh access to it...

...In addition, for Percy, the learning and giving of names presupposes a shared existence with others...

...In the case of news, we are called upon to respond without bringing to bear the standard criteria of verification...

...The word refers not only to a possible action, object or event, but also to an abstraction, a concept...

...As a novelist rather than a behaviorial scientist, Percy sees his task as understanding postmodern man, "who has forgotten his bad memories and conquered his present ills and who finds himself in the victorious secular city...

...Consequently, Percy insists, mere survival needs are not a sufficient description of language...

...Speech is basically a social action...

...For man is a symbol-creating being as well as a responder to signs...

...For him the strict meanings of words and syntax are less important in the psychiatric setting than what is sometimes called the "pragmatics" of communication...

...Percy uses his theory of language to illuminate the therapeutic session...

...What then...

...Or escape may be found in a book based upon "rotation," the principle of novelty, the expectation of something new...

...If one is on a sinking ship and hears the message, "Come this way and you will be saved,' one doesn't wait around in order to test it for possible errors or faults...

...But "what if the Bomb should not fall...

...This leads him to the basic issues of his book: Why are we unhappy, what does it mean to use language, and what is the connection, if any, between these two questions...

...Nonetheless, apologetics is foreign to him, and only in the title essay, where he distinguishes between knowledge and news, does he hint at the Christian nature of his thinking...

...Trained in existentialism and phenomenology, Percy begins by examining what he calls our loss of "sovereignty'' over our lives...

...Percy's explorations derive from a sense of wonder about his immediate situation (a feeling crucial to genuine thought and missing from most academic philosophy...