‘The Moviegoer’: Apathy in Soft Focus
A review of ‘The Moviegoer’, by Walker Percy; Alfred A. Knopf, 1961.
Binx Bolling, age twenty-nine, is a stockbroker in New Orleans, which in this case means he spends his days pretending to work, his nights watching films, and the intervals between bedding his secretaries. We are told he is bored. How modern. We might say he is ‘desiring desires,’ as Tolstoy did; though even that feels a touch too romantic. Detached is the better word: detached from his work, from his lovers, from his family, from his own thoughts. Life passes before him like a film viewed through a clouded lens: dim, shapeless, and of no great consequence.
He is not unaware of this void — no, Binx is quite certain something is missing. He just does not know what. In that sense he is like one of Eliot’s gloomy clerks trudging over London Bridge, not yet dead but already embalmed in spiritual apathy. Binx is the sort of man who thinks too much about nothing and too little about everything. We suspect he once tried caring and found it wanting.
He is not unaware of this void – no, Binx is quite certain something is missing.
Then, in a moment of literary convenience, Mardi Gras intervenes. The city erupts in its annual display of drunken chaos, and this somehow awakens something in him: he feels a twitch, a tug. He calls it ‘the search’; but what exactly is he searching for? God, perhaps. Meaning, certainly. Or at least something more compelling than his secretary’s perfume and the movement of the stock market. He sets off on a sort of pilgrimage, though without map, creed, or compass. He drifts through New Orleans, roams round Chicago, lingers on the Gulf Coast. He watches, listens, thinks. It is a kind of inversion of the American idea of adventure, consisting almost wholly of languid, semi-ironic introspection.
There is no clear arc to this journey. Binx ambles. He observes. He meets people — strangers, relatives, lovers — and finds them, if not exactly profound, at least human. Which is progress, of a kind. Slowly, imperceptibly, he begins to engage with a world he has long held at arm’s length. Like a prince returning from exile, he edges toward something that might just resemble involvement in the experience of life.
Binx ambles. He observes. He meets people — strangers, relatives, lovers — and finds them, if not exactly profound, at least human.
The novel’s core question, as you will have deduced, is meaning — its absence, its pursuit, and its vexing habit of slipping through our fingers just when we feel closest to grasping it. The Moviegoer is an existential story with American trimmings. Kierkegaard haunts its pages; but so too does the shadow of a country splitting at the seams: a South that has lost both its gods and its pride, a society swaddled in comforts and yet adrift in discontent. Percy’s choice of setting is no accident. The American South resembles a faded belle sipping gin on the porch, unsure who she is or what she is doing.
But our Walker’s point is not particular to the South. Binx could just as easily haunt Berlin or Paris or any of those glittering carcasses of modernity. He is young, clever, solvent. He has all the freedoms a man could want — except the one that matters, which is the freedom to feel at home in the world. Percy’s insight is that real freedom has nothing to do with the extent to which we can impose ourselves on the world and everything to do with how we feel. Unfortunately, feeling is not something at which Binx excels.
The literary problem Percy sets for himself is a familiar one: how to make a world interesting when seen through the eyes of a man who finds it dull. We are put in mind of Camus’s Meursault, that blank mirror of postwar nausea. But Percy is less severe. He wants Binx to amuse us, and for the most part, he does. His internal monologue is dry, droll, gently barbed. There is a faint trace of mischief in his self-loathing; he is like a cat who disdains her master but purrs nonetheless. It isn’t all bad.
The literary problem Percy sets for himself is a familiar one: how to make a dull world interesting when seen through the eyes of a man who finds it dull.
Here lies the book’s oddity. Binx’s New Orleans is described with too much charm and too much colour, to persuade us that he is truly as numb as he claims. Percy’s own prose betrays his character at times. But this tension is forgivable, even welcome; for it gives the book a texture that pure detachment would lack. Binx may be aimless, but he is not without humour. He is, rather unexpectedly, good company.
It is worth noting that this is not a bildungsroman: it is no coming-of-age story: Binx is not being turned into anything. If he is changed at all, it is by degree, not kind. He does not ‘grow’ in the way one is meant to in novels, nor does he redeem himself. Instead, he shifts, but subtly, like a man moving in his seat in a theatre where the play no longer bores him, yet doesn’t quite thrill. He goes from apathy to something like curiosity, which, it seems, is as close to salvation as one can reasonably expect.
It is worth noting that this is not a bildungsroman: it is no coming-of-age story.
Binx, at least on paper, should be hard to like. He is a rich stockbroker with a habit of seducing his underlings: he is not the typical hero of a spiritual quest. And yet he comes out of the thing, somehow, as a figure of sympathy. This is perhaps because his wounds are not his alone. His personal griefs mirror those of many, or any in a society not just dealing with a very bad post-war hangover but with the loss of belief. John Vervaeke reminds us that we are living through (well, assuming we come out on the other side unscathed) a ‘meaning crisis’. Percy does not ask us to like Binx, but he does ask us to see in him a question perhaps we all face from time to time: how do we live in a world that feels no longer made for living? My own view: wine helps.
In the end, The Moviegoer is not nearly as bleak as it could be. It is, like its hero, unsure of where it is going but aware that standing still is not an option. The search, such as it is, continues. Not with trumpets, but also not with tears. It just – carries on. And though writing such a thing on a dustjacket would more or less sound the death knell for the book it contains, this, The Moviegoer, is a very, very good book.
