Tuesday, March 4, 2014

The Sign of the Four

I'll admit that, because it's been about two years since I last read The Moviegoer and it didn't really leave an impression, I went into this week having no idea what to expect from Walker Percy. Whatever it was I thought I might find in his writings (Catholic existentialism, Southern Gothic sensibilities, etc) I certainly didn't expect to see the echoes of Structuralism, and yet there it is, plain as day, in his epic self-help satire Lost in the Cosmos. For the uninitiated, Structuralism is an early 1900's theory of linguistics which suggests that all of human culture can be understood in the terms of the relationships that people form concerning themselves, the world, and abstract concepts. According to Simon Blackburn, it deals with the notion that "phenomena of human life are not intelligible except through their interrelations. These relations constitute a structure, and behind local variations in the surface phenomena there are constant laws of abstract culture". In other words, when reading a novel or studying a people group, it's not the individuals themselves that are significant to the Structuralist but in the interactions that they share; instead of the bricks in the wall it is the fidelity and quality of the mortar which matters most.

Percy makes no bones about his (perhaps begrudging?) respect for this theory, as pages 85-126 of LitC deal expressly with the science of semiotics, which is directly related to and a consequence of Structuralism. He name-checks two of Structuralism's greatest proponents: Ferdinand de Saussure and Claude Levi-Strauss. He argues that any given conversation between two people (B & D) involves the use of a signifier and a referent (A & C). The referent would be the element or concept that is being referred to (water, violence) and the signifier would be the word or gesture used to express said element (simile & metaphor, mimed gunshot, the word itself) The signifier is the sign, the origin of this theory, and when you put all of these together you have two combined tryadic events which serves to constitute the basis for all human interaction with the world (but not himself). It's almost like Plato's theory of the forms reincarnated, where you have an original "perfect" form and a temporal reference to the form. What's really crazy about semiotics is how every time you try to disprove it or lessen its significance, it only becomes increasingly more apparent just how vital signs and referents are to our very existence. Everything we do, say, and think requires signs and words, lending credence to the Sapir-Worf Hypothesis that language precedes thought and the spiritual notion that God's gift to Adam was not intelligence but language. Fortunately, Percy stays on topic by using this summary of semiotics to loop back to the absurdity self perception, but even after this informative mini lecture I can't help but feel like he's laughing at me, as if this whole section was some great ironic joke tinged with equal parts sarcasm and sincerity. Come to think of it, that's a pretty supple summary of the tone of the entire book, so I think I'll just leave it on that note.

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