A Political Companion to Walker Percy

7. Walker Percy's Alternative to Scientism in The Thanatos Syndrome

7 Walker Percy’s Alternative to Scientism in The Thanatos Syndrome Micah Mattix Walker Percy’s The Thanatos Syndrome is often read, and rightly so, as a critique of scientism. Scientism is the belief that science alone can make truth statements about the world. For Percy, such a perspective always dehumanizes. Because man is viewed as matter, all personal and social ills are ascribed to chemical imbalances in the brain and call for pharmacological solutions. In the novel, the solution is doses of heavy sodium introduced into the water supply. Amazingly, the solution “works.” Crime and anxiety disappear and pleasure is maximized through increased promiscuity. The problem, of course, is that this solution “kills” the self. Those who have drunk the contaminated water lose the capacity to use triadic signs, which, for Percy, is what distinguishes humans from animals. While they have been “cured” of “the familiar anxieties, terrors, panics, phobias,” they have a “curious flatness of tone,” Percy writes, and speak in “two-word chimp utterances.”1 They no longer have the capacity for hermeneutical context, and they mate openly and indiscriminately. They have become primates. For Percy, the literal loss of the capacity of the characters to use triadic signs in the novel is a symbol for the widespread loss of the self in America in the late twentieth century. Like the doses of heavy sodium that “zap” self-awareness, America’s constant production of immediate dyadic pleasures—pleasures (like pornography and roller coasters) that produce a direct physiological response—reduces the population’s capacity to use triadic signs. Thus, at the end of the novel, when Tom More arrives in Dis- 146 Micah Mattix ney World with his recovering wife, he notices that the retired Canadians and Ohioans “are amiable, gregarious, helpful—and at something of a loss” (338–39). They look “somewhat zapped” (339). Like the oblivion produced by the doses of heavy sodium earlier in the novel, these immediate dyadic pleasures also dehumanize. Thus, the death syndrome that Percy diagnoses in the novel is found at all levels of American society. We live in a culture that, at a theoretical level, reduces man to matter, and in practice, kills our capacity for triadic signification—the source of our sense of self—as a “cure” for psychological suffering. Yet, what alternative is there? One possible critique of Percy is that his project is largely negative. Cleary he is a gifted diagnostician, but what good is it to know that one is dying if there is no cure? While it is true that Percy tends to focus on diagnosing the modern malaise, he does, in fact, offer a possible “cure,” however partial or unreliable . It is found in the recognition that we are more than mere material entities, which is something that human language, particularly of the sort found in novels, always necessarily affirms. To examine this alternative in The Thanatos Syndrome, however, we must first retrace his view of language and literature. Following Charles Sanders Peirce’s triadic theory of linguistic signs, Percy argues in “Is a Theory of Man Possible?” that the way humans use signs is qualitatively different from how other animals use them. Primates, such as chimpanzees, can learn to respond to words as stimuli. For example, it is possible to condition a chimpanzee to jump when the word “jump” is spoken by using a system of rewards. However, chimpanzees do not associate the word with the action. Like B. F. Skinner’s use of light as an associative stimulus in pigeons and Pavlov’s use of a bell as an associative stimulus in dogs, words, in this instance, are associative stimuli that produce a particular conditioned response in chimpanzees. This is what Peirce and Percy call a dyadic event.2 How humans respond to and use language is qualitatively different. Not only can humans respond to the word “jump” by jumping, but they also link the word and the action via a “coupler.” We link, furthermore, not discrete instances of jumping with the word “jump” but the characteristic of what we could call “jumpingness” with the word. Thus, the word “ball” signifies not individual balls, but the characteristic of a certain roundness.3 For Percy, this is why he distinguishes in “The Mystery of Language” between a Walker Percy’s Alternative to Scientism 147 sign—“something,” he writes, “that directs our attention to something else” (in this case, particular instances...