Percy, Walker. "The Delta Factor" in The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, And What One Has To Do With the Other. New York: Picador.
Percy says the old modern age ended in 1914.
The Martian concluded two things: (1) that man "had crossed the language barrier and spent most of his time symbolmongering and;" and (2) that man had a tendency for "upside-down feelings and behavior, feeling bad when he expected to feel good, preferring war to peace, and in general being miserable at the time and in the place which he had every reason to expect to be the best of all possible worlds, it seemed to the Martian that earth scientists might do well to search for the explanation of trait 2 in trait 1, or at least to explore the connection between the two" (28).
Percy thinks that "man's capacity for symbol mongering in general and language in particular" is deeply connected to their being human, "of his perceiving and knowing," of consciousness, that it is difficult to study what man sees through to know everything else (29).
To see it, one had to be a Martian or a person on earth, "sufficiently detached, marooned, bemused, wounded, and lucky enough" to become a Martian for a brief time to "catch a glimpse of it" (29).
Percy describes how he had his awakening experience: "The day I was thinking about Helen Keller and became a Martian for five seconds, making a breakthrough like Helen's, the difference being that her breakthrough was something she did and my breakthrough was a sudden understanding of what she did" (30).
He, on a typical day in the summer was sitting at his desk thinking about a day in Helen's life. He explains: he was trying to understand what happens "when a child hears a word, a sound uttered by someone else, and understands that it is the name of something he sees" (30). Percy tried to draw the process with diagrams. He thought for a long time that a few short paragraphs of Helen's story contained the mystery of language, and if one could understand this secret mystery one could understand what it meant to be a symbol-mongerer.
He was unsatisfied by the literature on the subject. The behaviorists wanted to explain the mystery as a "stimulus-response event" (30). For example, they wanted to explain it like Pavlov's dog salivating when he heard the bell. He thought it was a simple, but "valuable model" (31). He says it works in certain circumstances. For example, when a person cries for help and someone comes to help him. The problem was how could it be used to explain people gathered around a fire telling stories. He would try to diagram what occurred, but it was problematic. Percy explains, "Something in fact usually went wrong with the behaviorist S-R model whenever it was applied to a characteristically symbolic transaction, telling a story, looking at a painting and understanding it, a father pointing at a ball and naming it for his child, a poet hitting on a superb metaphor and the reader 'getting' it with the old authentic thrill Barfield speaks of" (32). The behaviorist was forced to stretched his theory all out of proportion to fit the event. In other words, it did not fit the event. It just did not work for symbolic transactions. Percy inquires with questions: "how does it happen that you can talk and I can understand you? Or, how does it happen that you can write a book and I can read it? Or, if the world is really unknowable, why do scientists act as if there were something out there to be known and as if they could even get at the truth of the way things are?" (33).
He was sitting at his desk in Louisiana thinking about these things. Then he began to think about what happened to Helen Keller at the well one summer morning in 1887. Before the event, Helen had responded like "any good animal" (34). When she wanted something she would sign it into her teacher's hand. Miss Sulivan took Helen for a walk to the well. Percy quotes from Helen's story:
We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand, she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motion of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten--a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that 'w-a-t-e-r' meant that wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away.
I left the well-house eager to learn. Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house every object which I touched seem to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with the strange, new sight that had come to me. On entering the door I remembered the doll I had broken. [She had earlier destroyed the doll in a fit of temper.] I felt my way to the hearth and picked up the pieces. I tried vainly to put them together. Then my eyes filled with tears; for I realized what I had done, and for the first time felt repentance and sorrow.
I learned a great many new words that day. I do not remember what they all were; but I do know that mother, father, sister, teacher were among them--words that were to make the world blossom for me, like Aaron's rod with flowers. It would have been difficult to find a happier child than I was as I lay in my crib at the close of that eventful day and lived over the joys it had brought me, and for the first time longed for a new day to come.
Percy notes that something mysterious happened at this well-house. Helen had gone from being like any other animal in an environment to being a languaged creature: a "strange name-giving and sentence uttering creature who begins by naming" typical objects like shoes, boats, and ink, and then "tells jokes, curses, reads the paper. . . or becomes Hegel and composes an entire system of philosophy" (35). Percy reasoned that if he could figure out what happened at that well-house, he would be able to know about the "phenomenon of language and about man himself" (36).
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