The Kekulé Problem by Cormac McCarthy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Acquiring Linguistic Immunity

The psychologist Carl Jung held that the unconscious is indistinguishable from reality. Although he is approaching the issue from an entirely different direction, Cormac McCarthy agrees. The unconscious shares something essential with what we casually call reality. It is beyond language, beyond our ability to express.

Every animal has an unconscious. It’s their internal operating system. “If they didn’t have an unconscious, they’d be plants.” The unconscious is much more primitive in evolutionary terms than what we call the consciousness we experience. That doesn’t make it less intelligent no matter how intelligence is measured. But it has a hard time with language: “...the fact that the unconscious prefers avoiding verbal instructions pretty much altogether—even where they would appear to be quite useful—suggests rather strongly that it doesnt much like language and even that it doesnt trust it.”

“Why is the unconscious so loathe to speak to us? Why the images, metaphors, pictures? Why the dreams, for that matter.” Is is a question Freud didn’t ask and therefore implied an evolutionary inferiority of the unconscious. McCarthy suggests that language is a non-biological and consequently non-evolutionary, infection that found a comfortable and unoccupied niche in the human brain. Like a Coronavirus, it spread rapidly throughout the entire species. “Almost instantaneously,” he says, proliferating out of Southwestern Africa until we all had contracted the disease:

“The sort of isolation that gave us tall and short and light and dark and other variations in our species was no protection against the advance of language. It crossed mountains and oceans as if they werent there. Did it meet some need? No. The other five thousand plus mammals among us do fine without it. But useful? Oh yes. We might further point out that when it arrived it had no place to go. The brain was not expecting it and had made no plans for its arrival. It simply invaded those areas of the brain that were the least dedicated... language had acted very much like a parasitic invasion.”

This upsets the unconscious which still controls almost all of what we do, including thinking. McCarthy is clear about this: “... the actual process of thinking—in any discipline—is largely an unconscious affair. Language can be used to sum up some point at which one has arrived—a sort of milepost—so as to gain a fresh starting point. But if you believe that you actually use language in the solving of problems I wish that you would write to me and tell me how you go about it.” Of what use therefore is this free-rider of language in human development?

The unconscious is a “process here to which we have no access.” It is a mystery opaque to total blackness. There is no doubt that it exists. And it does most things adequately. But what it doesn’t do at all very well is tell stories. “At some point the mind must grammaticize facts and convert them to narratives. The facts of the world do not for the most part come in narrative form. We have to do that.” This is what gives language, and its mate consciousness, an edge. Consciousness can tell stories about the unconscious but not vice versa. This provides a tremendous social boost to the species. But this also seems to cause a bit of intra-personal resentment as the non-linguistic parts of ourselves are ignored. In short, language seems to be the direct source of our neuroses. So much for Freud’s ‘talking cure.’

So the unconscious pokes and prods with vague insights, dreams, and intuitions. McCarthy, I think rightly, judges that “Itʼs hard to escape the conclusion that the unconscious is laboring under a moral compulsion to educate us.” It is more or less constantly trying to correct the excesses committed through language. This is not the unconscious as Freud’s ‘dark side.’ The unconscious is the elder, and wiser, statesman who knows what’s good for us. And it’s not about to fight on unfavourable ground. “The unconscious is just not used to giving verbal instructions and is not happy doing so. Habits of two million years duration are hard to break.” So the unconscious sits and waits for us to run out of words, until we respect it enough to pay attention.

Jung likened our conscious selves to corks floating on an enormous ocean of unconsciousness. Allowing that unconscious to be transformed into language without compromising its integrity was his lifetime’s work. He also believed that the unconscious is what connected us to one another, to the past and in the future, something language only pretends to do. It seems to me that McCarthy is suggesting a renewal of this idea, and I can’t disagree.

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