Friends of Barfield

Walker Percy (1916-1990)

Louisiana-born novelist and essayist, originally trained as a medical doctor (a brain surgeon), author of such works of fiction as The Moviegoer (1961), The Last Gentleman (1967), Love in the Ruins (1971), and The Thanatos Syndrome (1987), and of the non-fiction works The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man, How Queer Language is, and What One Has to Do with the Other (1975), Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (1983), and Signposts in a Strange Land (1991).

In two essays in Message in the Bottle, Percy refers to Barfield. in "The Delta Factor," Percy writes (32):

Something in fact usually went wrong with the behaviorist S-R [stimulus-response] model whenever it was applied to a characteristically symbolic transaction, telling a story and listening  to 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 that old authentic thrill Barfield speaks of.

And in "Symbol As Need" (292) we find:

The failure of behaviorism to give an adequate account of meaning has been pointed out before (Urban, Barfield).

(Thanks to Tracy Altman [tracysaltman@earthlink.net] for pointing this out.)