Issue Three

Walker Percy was over thirty years old before he began his career as a writer. He had been a physician, but, contracting tuberculosis at age twenty-six, he had to stop practicing medicine. During a long convalescence, he turned his attention to a serious study of philosophy and literature. Percy’s interests were wide: science and its limitations; human consciousness; popular culture; semiotics; religion; morality; and, existential philosophy. Many of these intellectual preoccupations find their way into Percy’s first novel, The Moviegoer. Published in 1961, when Percy was forty-six years old, the novel was the deserved winner of the National Book Award.

Opening with an epigraph by Kierkegaard, “… the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair,” the book is unabashedly a novel of ideas, and not the most cheery of ideas at that. Before you groan at this thought, know that Percy’s book is more readable, entertaining, and outright hilarious than most novels with no substance at all. The Moviegoer is like a Camus novel that is narrated by a hyper-intelligent and angst-ridden Jerry Seinfeld. Like Seinfeld, Binx Bolling, the protagonist, comically scrutinizes all the minutiae of social conventions, popular culture, and most everything else around him. Unlike Seinfeld, Binx is not content merely to analyze and then discard the detritus of modern life, but rather he uses it to point to the larger spiritual emptiness which lies behind it.

By most outward measures, Binx should be content: soon-to-be thirty, he is a member of a prominent New Orleans family; he is a successful stockbroker; and, he is easy-going, perceptive, and charismatic. Of his life, Binx observes, “I am a model … citizen and take pleasure in doing all that is expected of me. My wallet is full of identity cards, library cards, credit cards.”

Living in Gentilly, a quiet suburb of New Orleans, Binx passes the time by going to the movies with a string of his secretaries. His moviegoing is more than a simple diversion, for while most people “treasure” certain moments from their lives, Binx treasures moments from the movies.

Yet Binx’s serene existence becomes complicated when he remembers “the search.” The search had first occurred to him after he had been wounded in the Korean War. Lying injured on the ground, he watched, with utter fascination and wonder, a dung beetle crawl atop some leaves. At that moment, Binx knew that he was “onto something”— he had discovered the possibility of the search. For the first time since this incident, Binx has another such moment. Looking down at the wallet, pencils, and keys on his bureau, he is struck by how unfamiliar the pile looks through the contradictory reason that he can actually perceive it. “A man can look at this pile on his bureau for thirty years and never once see it,” he muses. Having seen the pile, Binx is once again onto the search and he knows that his mild life might not bear up to scrutiny.

Percy avoids any explicit definition of the search; indeed, throughout the book, he tries to suggest rather than spell-out its nature. But, to give a working definition, the search is basically a quest for meaning in the world. Two closely aligned enemies to the search are “everydayness” and “the malaise.” Everydayness occurs when one is so immersed and complacent in day-to-day existence that he becomes blind to his existence. The malaise is the resulting pain of everydayness, the pain that “the world is lost.” It is no accident that Binx first discovered the search when he was wounded in Korea, for such a life-and-death, non-everyday experience provided him with the eyes to see truly what was around him, and more, to grasp that what he saw was but an emblem of a greater mystery.

Having rediscovered his search, Binx is dismayed at the blindness and superficiality of life in Gentilly. While speaking to an old acquaintance, Eddie Lovell, on the street, Binx sees the world around him: “the cloud is turning blue and pressing down upon us. Now the street seems closeted; the bricks of the building glow with a yellow stored up light.” In contrast to Binx’s meditative awareness, Eddie “speaks plausibly and at length of one thing and another—business, his wife Nell, the old house they are redecorating.” Binx doesn’t really hear the particulars of what Eddie is saying; instead, he perceives the despair, unseen to Eddie, that underlies his trivial concerns. Indeed, such vapid conversations instill in Binx an “impression … that everyone is dead.” Instead of actual people talking, Binx sees “automatons who have no choice in what they are saying.”

As opposed to the emptiness of the living people, Binx sees a fullness and heightened reality in all things connected to the movies. He sees actor William Holden on the street and he notices that another passerby “can only contrast Holden’s resplendent reality with his own precarious and shadowy existence.” When this same passerby nonchalantly gives Holden a match for a cigarette, “he has won title to his own existence, as plenary now as Holden’s.” Binx notes the same phenomenon in terms of where people live. If a person lives in a place that has never been shown in a movie, he will most likely feel empty and disconnected. But, if the place does appear in a movie, it is “certified,” and the person will be one who lives “Somewhere and not Anywhere.” For Binx, it is a peculiar aspect of modern alienation that one’s existence is not real unless verified by the big screen.

Not many people around Binx can understand (or even discern) his distracted soul-searching and seeming lack of purpose. His aunt Emily, who raised him after his father died, wants him to go to medical school. Sensing his psychic unease, she offers her Stoic point of view: “I don’t know quite what we’re doing here on this insignificant cinder spinning away in a dark corner of the universe … But a man must go down fighting.” On the other side, his mother (who remarried after his father’s death) and her family attribute his restlessness to his loss of the Catholic faith. Binx can’t “make head or tail” of either side, and the tug-of-war between the stoic approach to the world and the irrationality of religion is at the heart of his dilemma.

The one person who does seem to understand Binx is his cousin Kate Cutrer. Since her fiancée died on the eve of her wedding, she has suffered from just about every nervous disorder imaginable. But, her offbeat and hypersensitive perceptions also link her to Binx. Remembering her fiancée’s death, she asks, “Have you ever noticed that only in times of illness or disaster or death are people real?” Such a sentiment is not far from one of Binx’s own. The difference between the two might be that Kate wears her neuroses on her sleeve, while Binx keeps his in the confines of his own mind.

Binx is a moviegoer not only for his affinity with the actual movies, but for his way of viewing the world. People continually tell him that he has “a flair for research.” Binx ardently denies the claim. He dismisses research for its narrow focus on scientific problems and its consequent neglect of the overall metaphysical mysteries of life. He is justified in his denial in the limited scope of scientific research. But, in the larger scope, Binx does have “a flair for research” because that is all he, in fact, does. His life is one big research. He watches the world around him as if he was a critic watching a movie, always detachedly analyzing every last detail, but failing to participate fully in it himself. While Binx is onto the right approach by keeping his eyes open to the world, he must make the second step of connecting himself to the world. He gets this chance after a trip to Chicago with his cousin Kate, a trip with plenty of short-term disasters, but a chance for long term resolution.

Amazingly, Percy’s high-minded philosophical concerns never interfere with his straightforward and fluid storytelling. He has created the perfect narrative voice in Binx, a voice that is intelligent without being pedantic, and ironic without being mean-spirited. Above all, Binx is funny. Of his partner in a research project, he observes, “It was all the same to him whether he catheterized a pig at four o’clock in the afternoon in New Orleans or at midnight in Transylvania.” Such humor abounds on every page of The Moviegoer and it is indicative of Percy’s style. He manages to be precise and profound at the same time that he seems off-the-cuff and whimsical. Such a bounce is quite a feat, considering that Percy’s goal is nothing less than to expose and perhaps to help alleviate modern alienation.

The Moviegoer
Copyright 1998
Vintage International (Reissue)
$12.00; paperback.