On writing The Moviegoer: [It] is not the picture of a man setting out to entertain or instruct or edify a reader. It is the picture, rather, of a scientist who has come to the dead end of a traditional hypothesis which no longer accounts for the data at hand. (MB 190)
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Since true prophets… are in short supply, the novelist may perform a semi-prophetic function. Like the prophet, his news is generally bad. (MB 104)
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For as everyone knows, the polls report that 98% of Americans believe in God and the remaining 2% are atheists and agnostics – which leaves not a single percentage point for a seeker (MG 14).
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Percy’s first novel sets him on the themes and characterizations that he would continue his entire literary career. His protagonist, Binx Bolling, a wayfarer, a pilgrim, and a seeker, is searching for something “more.” In The Moviegoer, Percy shows a protagonist subtly guided on his search by signs and clues of the transcendent, as in all his other novels; however, Percy’s symbolic use of numbers and geometric diagrams would not emerge until his fourth novel.
As the novel opens, Mardi Gras is about to begin, and John Binkerson ("Binx") Bolling is about to turn 30. Dismayed with the everydayness of life, Binx assuages himself with distractions: money, sex, movies. From a successful New Orleans family and successful in his career as a stockbroker and his passing romantic dalliances with pretty girls, he is starting to develop the vague feeling that these external successes are not enough. He searches for mystery and something more fulfilling than his previous empty pursuits. He encounters friends and acquaintances who feel they have the answer to a happy, fulfilled life, but Binx rejects their philosophies. His frequent visits with his Aunt Emily provide fertile discussion of stoic Southern values which Binx no longer finds fulfilling either. Aunt Emily
earlier. Kate’s deeper existential side seems to be just what Binx needs for his searching and the two grow close as Binx finds he is learning love and commitment. Assisting his lesson is the trip they take to visit his Catholic remarried mother and his six half-siblings, including sickly and dying Lonnie, whose faith impresses the seeker in Binx. At the climax of the novel, Binx seeks out Kate and when she doesn’t show and a pretty girl offers a date, he turns it down – no longer transient and superficial, he has found himself and the something “more” he has been seeking. It’s Kate he wants, as well as commitment, community, and love. The novel ends with the Catholic mystery of the ashes of the sacrament of penance, with Lonnie dying and the sacrament of last rites, and with the sacrament of marriage. Binx commits not only to marry and care for Kate, but to care for his extended family as well. He also decides to leave the money business and go to medical school.
EXISTENTIAL ALIENATION
Percy’s thesis is that man is “more than an organism in an environment, more than an integrated personality, more even than a mature and creative individual, as the phrase goes. He is a wayfarer and a pilgrim,” a theme demonstrated throughout his novels (SSL 246). The outward, physical, dyadic world is far less than the whole – or even the primary purpose – of any Percyan character. Binx Bolling is a twentieth century postmodern man, dealing with spiritual alienation and dissatisfaction in materialist culture that offers nothing outside itself – as other mid-century writers have portrayed.
He is the “Unknown Citizen” Auden draws, and the “Invisible Man” that Ellison creates – anonymous, unattached, alone. They are at peace, outwardly, with society and with life, yet inwardly, something is unfulfilled… something not quite right: “…people with interesting hobbies suffer the most noxious of despairs since they are tranquillized by their despair” (MG 86). Binx lives the good life, but is still, himself, on the brink of despair – only his self chosen “search” keeps him from it, and his occasional distractions: women, earning money, movies, cars. “Whenever I drive a car, I have the feeling I have become invisible” (MG 11). Binx says:
Life in Gentilly is very peaceful. I manage a small branch office of my uncle’s brokerage firm. My home is the basement apartment of a raised bungalow belonging to Mrs. Schexnaydre, the widow of a fireman. I am a model tenant and 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… It is a pleasure to carry out the duties of a citizen… I subscribe to Consumer Reports and as a
consequence I own a first –class television set, an all but silent air-conditioner, and a very long lasting deodorant…. I pay attention to all spot announcements on the radio about mental health, the seven signs of cancer, and safe driving… (MG 6-7)
Like the anonymous “Unknown Citizen,” identified by Auden only as JS/07 M 378, Binx is known more by his identity cards than his name or his inner self, the essence of who he is. He is the “model citizen” as the unknown citizen is. He and Auden’s citizen both own the right possessions, albeit
different ones for their times; they both take care of their health (both mental and physical) as per social dictates. He takes pride in his conformity, and his certifications by society (“birth certificate, college diploma, honorable discharge, G.I. insurance,…” (MG 6)). The details parallel Auden’s poem, and Percy uses the word “citizen” twice in this paragraph, reinforcing the comparison. Binx is the unknown citizen – but is he free? Is he happy? The question is absurd – or at least it is in the modern world. The fact is, he is not happy because he is not a dyadic creature:
Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less than I ever knew before, having learned only to recognize merde when I see it,… living in fact in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied,
everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle, and one hundred percent of people are humanists and ninety-eight percent believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead; …
Nothing remains but desire… My search has been abandoned;… I have to find a girl. (MG 228)
He is triadic, though Percy is not yet at the point of using triadic symbolism to represent this. Above all, Binx is a seeker for something more than what is offered in his environment. Like Dante wandering in the dark wood, Binx often “comes to himself” – comes out of the distractions of the dark wood of this-world, and sees where he is for what it is. “I remember what I came for” (MG 44), Binx says often. “I came to myself under a chindolea bush. Everything is upside down for me as I shall explain later” (MG 10). It is then that, for the first time, the possibility of the search occurs to him. “The
search is what anyone would take if he were into sunk in the everydayness of his own life…. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair” (MG 13).
The search is for the satisfaction of another need than biological; the new need is the ontological need of “knowing” an “Other” – of encountering Being. The symbolic, triadic nature of humans is a manifestation of this need. Percy’s “everydayness” is the physical world of sign. Animals don’t search for anything other than their next meal, and while many humans choose only to live at this level too, and while modern society even encourages that, Percy believes true human nature needs more. Humans, who use symbols, need God, who is in the realm of meaning and symbol, who is accessed through symbol.
Binx’s discomfort, not being at-home-in-this-world, is reflected in his life. His apartment is “as impersonal as a motel room” (MG 68). He doesn’t accumulate possessions; he remains anonymous in the world, simply earning money and enjoying the pleasure. His heartfelt connection to others in community doesn’t exist. It is a life of loneliness and occasional distractions, such as the girl Sharon or earning money. The magazine of people stories his landlady gives him is the closest thing to connection he experiences. Lonely old Mrs. Schexnaydre, the landlady, has three dogs…
…each for the reason that it had been reputed to harbor a special dislike for Negroes. I have no particular objection to this trait in a dog – for all I know, Mrs. Schexnaydre’s fears may be quite justified. However, these are miserable curs and to make matters worse, they also dislike me. One I especially despise, an orange-colored brute with a spitz face and a plume of a tail which curves over his back exposing a large convoluted anus. I have come to call him old Rosebud. (MG 76-77)
Percy’s themes of alienation and loneliness, search and meaning, manifest in this passage. Mrs. S. is alone and lonely, disconnected from community. Her fear of Negroes represents the lack of
oneness in society – divisions not just on a personal level, but on a social level. Binx is detached from it all. He has not reached Kierkegaard’s ethical stage yet, so the “rightness” or “wrongness” of Mrs. S’s prejudices matter not at all to him, only how it might affect him. The three dogs are Cerebus, the ugly
brutish three headed dog guarding the gates of hell: Mrs. Schexnaydre’s world, in which Binx lives, is a hell in its aloneness and division. Again, Percy is not using triadic symbolism yet. This three is not the semiotic three, or even the divine three; it is evil, hell.
The allusion to Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane’s “Rosebud” is significant. The movie centers around the search for the meaning of the name “Rosebud” which the movie’s dying protagonist utters at the very beginning of the movie – the movie’s first spoken word and the protagonist’s last dying word. The movie’s search echoes that Binx is on a search for the ontological connection. “Rosebud” was the meaning of the Welles’s protagonist’s life; in the movie, it was the sled given to him by his parents that he was separated from when he was a boy – symbolic of when he was taken from the love of his family to be raised by the bank – a lonely and alienated arrangement, though financially lucrative.
This, then, is the life and fate of modern man. The danger is of becoming “no one nowhere” (MG 83). Kate says to Binx, “What if there is nothing. That is what I’ve been afraid of until now – being found out to be concealing nothing” (MG 115). The void is terrifying. Death is a void; death is
terrifying. It is nothingness. Naming, self, community, ensures something. But the community is also related to an actuality, a reality, outside that. In other words, the community can’t agree upon something that doesn’t really exist. But it must agree on something. It ensures that we do not live in a void, that we live in an agreed-upon community of symbols, a tetradic community that creates a world. To not live in this agreed-upon world is to be isolated, and to wonder if one’s world actually exists – if it actually is real. Kate continues:
“Couldn’t a person be miserable because he got one thing wrong and never learned otherwise – because the thing he got wrong was of such a nature that he could not be told because the telling itself got it wrong – just as if you had landed on Mars and therefore had no way of knowing that a Martian is mortally offended by a question and so every time you asked what was wrong, it only grew worse for you.” (MG 113).
Neither Binx nor Kate feel at home in their worlds. Something is missing. They are seekers. THE SEARCH
Binx may be on a search, but would rather not think so. His distant buddies (“the last time I had friends was eight years ago,” MG 41) are content with their distractions from the search, but Binx, try as he may to be content, is not: “We were pretty good drinkers and talkers and we could spiel about women and poetry and Eastern religion in pretty good style... In fact this was what I was sure I wanted to do. But in no time at all I became depressed” (MG 41). Binx feels they are saying, “’How about this, Binx? This is really it, isn’t it, boy?’” (MG 41), yet this only spirals him into a “deep melancholy” (MG 41).
Their distractions are not the “it” that Binx is searching for; rather, he is enticed and gladdened and fascinated by “wonder.” He says of his friends’ activities: “It doesn’t distract me from the
wonder…. Not for five minutes will I be distracted from the wonder” (MG 42). It is also mystery – mystery beyond the everydayness – he seeks. Kate’s derriere is a kind of mystery; it is “ample and mysterious,” he says. Though obviously not the real wonder, the real mystery, it is a “clue” to mystery beyond the everydayness, just like the contents of his pockets are “both unfamiliar and at the same time full of little clues” (MG 11). Their unfamiliarity means he is seeing things with fresh eyes – which are now opened to see something more, to see the transcendent.
Even in Kierkegaard’s aesthetic stage, these mundane objects can be clues that there may be a transcendent. The sign/symbol permeates as light shining in the darkness – or maybe just faintly glimmering, but light-emanating nonetheless. The difference is, in the aesthetic stage, the light is fleeting and transitory – and distorted by the lens through which it is viewed – and easily lost and
disappears. St. Paul said, “Now I see through a glass darkly…” and then, in the afterlife, he will see more clearly, “face-to-face.” In Plato’s Parable of the Cave, the prisoners view the shadows as real, though they are not- they are merely shadows of real people and things. Yet the shadows, though not reality in its entirety, still give glimmers as to what really exists. These shadows don’t point to the transcendent, but they do hint that there is something more.
Success can satisfy briefly. Binx, exulting and communing with Sharon on their success, saying: “Our name is Increase” (MG 94), conveys a shadow of the real symbol, and a reflection of the joy, though muted and transient. “It is a great joy to be with Sharon and to make money” (MG 95). Binx’s car becomes a symbol of not only his own success, but a hint of this something beyond, something other-worldly, that can lift him out of everydayness. It is a religious icon, carrying the transcendent within it, at least within Binx’s head (where all symbol occurs anyway). The new automobile is “endowed…with certain magic properties by virtue of the mystery and remotion of its manufacture” (MB 284). Percy calls this an “idolatrous desire” – to have the car not for its function of transportation, but rather to “have the car itself” and therefore transform one’s life from nothingness to somethingness (MB 284). It is a means of identity, totemism: “The car itself is all-important, I have discovered” (MG 123). While his old Dodge was
a regular incubator of malaise… , The MG jumps away from the stop sign like a young colt. I feel fine. Yes she [Sharon] is onto the magic of this little car. We are earthbound as a worm, yet we rush along at a tremendous clip between earth and sky. (Like Odysseus on the horizon…) … we flash past and all of a sudden there is the Gulf, flat and sparkling away to the south. (MG 124) The car has become the carrier of magic and mystery, a clue to the transcendent. Like the Word, the divine name, the divine is contained within the earthly signifier.16 The car is a symbol, however earthbound and ultimately inadequate a signifier it is, for Binx. Yet the fact that he signifies at all is evidence of his search for the signified, despite the mistaken and “idolatrous” path. He is a human seeking the divine encounter.
Certain clues – Kate’s derriere, the coins in Binx’s pocket, his car – are signs of his search for the transcendent despite their inefficacy at leading him to the transcendent. The war also provides a distraction from “death” and the void of everydayness, ironically. Emily says, “How simple it would be to fight. What a pleasant thing it must be to be among people who are afraid for the first time when you yourself for the first time in your life have a proper flesh-and-blood enemy to be afraid of. What a
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lark! Isn’t that the secret of heroes?” (MG 58). A cause gives an elusive, though concrete and non- transcendent, meaning and purpose to life. Binx explains his scar to Sharon: He got it in the war: “Farewell forever, malaise” (MG 127). For Binx, the war is not a Kierkegaardian stage two “cause” – for a purpose or contribution to society – but an aesthetic cause, bringing him closer to the delights of Sharon. Yet, within it is the shadow of eternal victory – denial of death – not transcendent yet, but still a glimmer of such. Having a real, concrete obstacle or battle to fight is a cure to the abstract, elusive enemy of existential angst. A cause lifts us out of the everyday banality of life.
Eddie Lovell, the salesman, is caught in the everydayness and conformity of life, and quite happy with it. He asks no questions, is not on any search, has no need for mystery or for searching: “Now he jingles the coins deep in his pocket. No mystery here! – he is as cogent as a bird dog quartering in a