Walker Percy: Delta Factor and Beyond
The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man
Is, How Queer
Language Is, and What One Has to Do with
the Other. New York:
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1975.
The singularity of language : a project to articulate a theory of humanity for an age which questions Mind, Soul, Will, Freedom, and Action.
his working assumptions:
The assumption will be made then that an explanatory theory of language does not presently exist: that behaviorism does indeed provide an explanatory model but that it is wrong; that structural linguistics and transformational grammar are not explanatory theories. (Bottle 320)
man is too close to himself and his vision too fragmented p. 11
language is the very mirror by which we see and know the world p. 12
current theories of man are incoherent p. 18
Percy's understanding of twentieth century assumptions:
p. 20
1. Man can be understood as an organism in an environment,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. p. 29
a sociological unit, an encultured creature, a psychological
dynamism endowed genetically like other organisms with
needs and drives, who through evolution has developed
strategies for learning and surviving by means of certain
adaptive transactions with the environment.2. Man is also understood to be somehow endowed with certain
other unique properties which he does not share with other
organisms -- with certain inalienable rights, reason, freedom,
and an intrinsic dignity -- and as a consequence the highest
value to which a democratic society can be committed is the
respect of the sacredness and worth of the individual.
compare Kenneth Burke: Language as Symbolic Action and its working assumptions
Into the Mirror: Defining the Delta Factor
Walker Percy: "trying to penetrate the act of naming [i.e. language] is like trying to see a mirror while standing in front of it. Since symbolization is the very condition of our knowing anything, trying to get hold of it is like trying to get hold of the means by which we get hold of everything else." "Naming and Being" in Signposts in a Strangeland (1991)
Percy identifies a circularity. I cannot know the mirror apart from observation, and my observations of the mirror are necessarily colored and deformed by my own image. Such deformation constrains the case of all naming, all language. When I know the world, I necessarily know it as part of it. My presence in the world alters all knowing and all naming. Language cannot, therefore, know or name the world directly as it always arises from the activity of the one in the "mirror." In defining language as symbolic action, both Burke and Percy accept human limitation. Language constrains us; we constrain language. At no time do we know the world without the interference of the figure in the mirror.
Percy describes the mechanism of the universe as dyadic. This is to
say that in cause-and-effect :
A --> B, one member of a pair or dyad acts on the other member of the
pair. For example, in spacetime, particle combinations, energy exchanges,
gravity attractions, field forces, and all other material action may be
understood as dyadic, cause-and-effect occurrences. The entire cosmos
(both inorganic and organic) functions as one huge dyadic system comprised
of smaller dyadic systems, all of which operate according to the cause-effect
formula.
Symbolic action in language defies this dyadic schematization. No cause/effect dyad exists between the mirror and language. The figure in the mirror always stands between the mirror and language. What Percy sees in this grouping of mirror, figure in the mirror, and language is a triangulation or triad. Unlike the material cosmos, language fails to reduce to the level of a dyadic relationship and must be understood as a triad.
figure in the mirror
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language mirror
Take for instance the remarkable mirror scene in Act 4, scene 1, Richard II:
Richard:This interplay of mirror, king, and reading or interpretation could not occur if language stood in a dyadic relationship with the things of the world. In a purely dyadic universe, the "language event" stands as a triadic singularly amid the milions of dyadic events occuring every second. This triad which is language and the world and human being asserts a qualitative uniqueness setting it apart from all other activity in the known universe. This Triad, Percy calls the Delta Factor.
They shall be satisfied: I'll read enough,
When I do see the very book indeed
Where all my sins are writ, and that's myself.Re-enter Attendant, with a mirror
Give me the glass, and therein will I read.
No deeper wrinkles yet? hath sorrow struck
So many blows upon this face of mine,
And made no deeper wounds? O flattering glass,
Like to my followers in prosperity,
Thou dost beguile me! Was this face the face
That every day under his household roof
Did keep ten thousand men? was this the face
That, like the sun, did make beholders wink?
Was this the face that faced so many follies,
And was at last out-faced by Bolingbroke?
A brittle glory shineth in this face:
As brittle as the glory is the face;Dashes the glass against the ground
For there it is, crack'd in a hundred shivers.
Mark, silent king, the moral of this sport,
How soon my sorrow hath destroy'd my face.
That Broken Mirror: Richard Reading the World
In Percy's words, "the act of consciousness is the intending of the
object as being what it is for both
of us under the auspices of the symbol [or sign]"; there is no necessary
"real-world" relationship between the sign and its referent. Association
between the two is purely conventional. All symbolic action may be
understood to operate by the tacit contract of intentionality. Were it
not for this tacit contract, Richard's grand play with the mirror would
simply appear as meaningless foolery. Given the contract of symbolic
action, Richard initiates a chilling inquisition aimed at both himself
and Bolingbroke. (see Bottle: "Symbol, Consciousness,
Intersubjectivity", p 274)
The simple stimulus-respnse dyad defines a transaction which may be no more complex than a simple request for a mirror for cosmetic purposes. Talk about language blurs because the same medium we use for dyadic transaction serves for symbolic action. We are like house painters attempting to use the terms of our craft to describe Cezanne or Monet before a canvas. Unlike Cezanne or Monet, however, who are unusal members of the class of painters, we are all members of the class of symbolic actors. Indeed, this universal human membership in the class of symbolic actors defines what humanity is for Percy.
Richard's symbolic action transforms the mirror from the simple object of a dyadic transaction, allowing him to name it with terrifying clarity: "flattering glass."
Give me the glass, and therein will I read.Had Bolinbroke refused the contract of meaning, this action would have evaporated into the ether. When we fail to accept the contract of an infant's "gibber gabber," we deny a community of symbolic action. When we enter a community of articulation, we shift from dyadic transactions to triadic transformations. Meaning among human beings is a triadic transformation.
No deeper wrinkles yet? hath sorrow struck
So many blows upon this face of mine,
And made no deeper wounds? O flattering glass . . .
Percy: "S--R theory, however . . . fails to address itself, let alone explain, those very features of language behavior which set it apart from other forms of animal communication . . . " (Bottle 303)
As Percy phrases it, "in its essence the making and the receiving of the naming act consist in a coupling, an apposition of two real entities, the uttered name and the object. It is this pairing which is unique and unprecedented . . . " (Bottle 261)
"a being is affirmed as being what it is through its denotation by symbol...by
laying something else alongside [it]: the symbol." (Bottle 261)
Wording Worlds or the Contract of Creation
. . . the real world is not the world that's there; it's the fictional
world of our
creation that's real . . .
Northrop Frye (Shenandoah, Fall 1994)
Dyadic exchanges allow human beings to exist in their environment; triadic transformations allow them to act within the world. World and envrionment do not necessarily stand in one-to-one correspondence with each other. Language's symbolic action calls world into being. Symbolic action establishes planes or fields of action between and among individuals apart from simple environmental exchanges. Richard establishes a symbolic field or iconic panoply between himself and Bolingbroke which surely stands apart from simple environment. In this iconic field, mirror is not quite mirror and flattery is not simple verbal exchange. To read this iconic panoply, Richard must shift from environment to the fictional world he is creating.
Richard draws Bolingbroke onto an iconic field establishing a contract of intersubjectivity. In Percy's terms, then, Richard and Bolingborke "are no longer oriented solely pragmatically toward their environment but ontologically as its co-knowers and co-celebrants." (Bottle 272) S--R exchanges in an evironment do not create world; they simply respond to the demands of stimulus. Triadic transformations delineate ontological fields of action between and among persons.
Percy: "greatest difference between the environment (Umwelt) of a sign[al]-using organism and the world (Welt) of the speaking organism is that there are gaps in the former but none in the latter. The nonspeaking organism only notices what is relevant biologically; the speaking organism disposes of the entire horizon symbolically." (Bottle 203)
The "world" of human symbolic action is that space or field unique to
human beings
where understanding and consciousness are experienced.
Richard
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language mirror
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iconic panoply
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Bolingbroke