In ‘The Moviegoer’, One Man Searches for Meaning
‘The Moviegoer’, by Walker Percy, reviewed.
Binx Bollings is a 29-year-old stockbroker from New Orleans who day-dreams, sleeps with his secretaries, and watches films. He is bored, in other words: ‘desiring desires’, as Tolstoy put it. But a more accurate word might be detached. He is detached from his work, his latest squeeze, and the marital troubles of his friend and cousin, Kate. Binx knows this. He knows something in his life is missing. He is like T.S. Eliot’s commuters, whose ‘mental emptiness deepens … Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about.’ But he does not know how to fix it.
A trip to Mardi Gras changes this. It sparks what he calls ‘the search’ for God — that is, for true and authentic living. Without any real idea of what he is doing or where he is going, he wanders around New Orleans and travels to Chicago and the Gulf Coast. He starts to engage with what is around him, reflecting on those he meets on the road.
Without any real idea of what he is doing or where he is going, he wanders around New Orleans and travels to Chicago and the Gulf Coast.
So the question at the heart of The Moviegoer connects to meaning. It is an existential novel, evoking Kierkegaard, which, through the vehicle of its main character, grapples with a problem that afflicts many of us today: the problem of purpose. Percy’s setting is an American South hollowed out by rising atheism and embittered by war. But he may just as well have set his story in Berlin or London or New York today. Binx is free in a sense: young, intelligent, successful. But Percy sees that freedom is a matter of how we feel, not what we can do. And that feeling springs from a sense that we are at home in the world, that we are bonded to it.
Binx is free in a sense: young, intelligent, successful. But Percy sees that freedom is a matter of how we feel, not what we can do.
The technical problem posed by a book like The Moviegoer is a familiar one. How to make the world interesting to the reader when it is so uninteresting to the character through whose eyes we see it? Percy does not quite manage to be consistent; his descriptions of life in New Orleans and elsewhere are too interesting to seem as though they were dreamed up in the mind of someone so detached from his environment. The heart of the book, in respect of style, is Binx’s interior monologue. He muses and reflects and contemplates. And he is funny. He is very good company on the page.
The Moviegoer is not a bildungsroman but a story that is far more philosophical and spiritual. Stockbrokers with large inheritances and a habit of sleeping with their secretaries do not tend to be depicted as likeable characters, but Binx is very sympathetic. His personal losses have converged with wider, societal losses, such as the decline of traditional Southern values and the fading of national optimism in the wake of war. And his ‘search’ is not the privileged activity of someone will nothing useful to do, but something that perhaps we all have to undertake if we are to be at home in the world.
