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.
As mentioned earlier, Percy was attempting to diagram what happened to Helen Keller at the well-house. In his diagram, he has Helen, water (word), and water (the liquid). He concluded that what happened to Helen was not a stimulus-response event. Helen received "both the sensory message from the hand Miss Sullivan was spelling in and that from the other hand, which the water was flowing over" (37). Percy wonders after this happened, then, "What happened in Helen's head?" (37). He believed that Helen's breakthrough had great significance. Before her breakthrough, she had acted like "a good responding organism" (38). After her breakthrough, she acted "like a rejoicing symbol-mongering human" (38). Before she was simply like other animals responding to an environment. After, she had become completely "human."
What was Percy's breakthrough? His breakthrough was determining that Helen's experience was a triadic event, not a dyadic event. He calls this event the Delta Factor. There were three elements involved in this triadic event: Helen, water, and the word water. Percy writes, "The Delta phenomenon lies at the heart of every event that has ever occurred in which a sentence is understood, a name is given or received, a painting printed or viewed" (40).
Percy wonders if by using this Delta phenomenon, one could come up with a theory of man. Would it help to understand man as the languaged animal. Could it explain "the manifold woes, predicaments, and estrangements of man" (41). Remember, Percy believed that a Theory of man had to account for the alienation of man. He knew that the "conventional wisdom was a mishmash: man set forth as 'organism in an environment' but man also . . . set forth as repository of democratic and Judeo-Christian 'values.' (41) In other words, the modern theory of man is incoherent.
Percy's breakthrough would hold his attention for a very long time.
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