Walker Percy's The Moviegoer at Fifty

New Takes on an Iconic American Novel

Jennifer Levasseur, Mary A. McCay, Jennifer Levasseur, Mary A. McCay

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780807162750
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

More than fifty years after its publication, Walker Percy's National Book Award Winner, The Moviegoer, still confronts, comforts, and enlightens generations of readers. This collection of twelve new essays, edited and introduced by Jennifer Levasseur and Mary A. McCay, emphasize the evolving significance of this seminal, New Orleans novel. Authors' consider the text with diverse perspectives, drawing from philosophy, theology, disability theory, contemporary music and literature, social media, and film studies.
Jay Tolson opens the volume with reflections on rereading the novel on a Kindle decades after writing his important biography of Percy. H. Collin Messer, Montserrat Gins, Jessica Hooten Wilson, and Brian Jobe follow with illuminating essays analyzing Percy's influences, from St. Augustine and Cervantes to Heidegger and Dostoevsky. Jonathan Potter and Read Mercer Schuchardt, Mary A. McCay, Matthew Luter, and Dorian Speed delve into the novel's significance to cinema, including an exhaustive guide to its film references, a meditation on Binx Bolling as a director of his existence, and the semiotics of celebrity. Brent Walter Cline and Robert Bolton, Michael Kobre, and L. Lamar Nisly present a roadmap for Bolling's inward journey, exploring a variety of elements from the role of the broken body to the spiritual connection to Bruce Springsteen lyrics.
Walker Percy's The Moviegoer at Fifty is the first critical work devoted solely to the author's debut novel. Coinciding with the centenary of Percy's birth, this collection invites both new and veteran readers to enjoy The Moviegoer with fresh perspectives that underscore its lasting relevance.

Part I

VOICES OF
INFLUENCE

THE UNQUIET HEART

St. Augustine’s Influence on Walker Percy

H. Collin Messer

In an unpublished essay written sometime in the late 1950s, Walker Percy staked out his unsparing assessment of contemporary American life using a distinctly European frame of reference:

Something is dreadfully wrong with the world of the emotionally mature, integrated man. What it is becomes clear in the writings of Heidegger and Marcel. The modern world, not merely the slums of Paris but the pleasant American suburb, is implicated in a special sort of tragedy. This tragedy is not the catastrophic wars of the 20th century—though God knows these are tragic enough. These particular events are only symptoms of the tragedy; indeed they might even be said to be desperate attempts to escape it. The tragedy has rather to do with the fundamental banality, the loss of meaning, of modern life—what Heidegger calls the “every-day-ness” and the homelessness of life in the modern world, a world which Marcel refers to as a broken world. (“Which Way Existentialism” 7)

In its banality and despair, Percy argues, modern life is no life. In fact, it is here that Percy first uses that evocative phrase “death in life” that so powerfully captures the malaise, the noxious particles, the ennui that beset his characters and at times Percy himself. In its pervasive sense of restlessness, as well as its profound skepticism regarding life in the City of Man, this fragment reflects just the earliest instance of a clear Augustinian frame of mind that has yet to be elucidated in Percy’s work. I contend that Percy’s embrace of Augustinian anthropology and phenomenology, as well as his emulation of St. Augustine’s confessional mode, illuminate some of Percy’s most important philosophical ideas and literary aims, and offer a robust foundation for his Christian existentialism.

Certainly, one fruitful approach to reading Percy over the years has been to link him with the existentialists. He invites such a connection in The Moviegoer via his choice of a memorable Kierkegaardian epigraph from The Sickness unto Death: “. . . the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair.” The existentialists’ insistence on a certain phenomenology—that of an individual human being indwelling a particular predicament—is foundational to the novel. Moreover, existential alienation viscerally pervades Binx Bolling’s narrative, not least in his wry observations about the apparent absurdity, sadness, and death-dealing diversions of the world, including his own “Little Way” in Gentilly, the suburban New Orleans neighborhood where he lives.

Despite Percy’s clear existentialist commitments, however, only passing attention has been paid to his debt to St. Augustine, the fourth-century philosopher and theologian to whom much of modern existentialism is somewhat remarkably beholden. Augustine’s writings, particularly Confessions (401), cast a long shadow over Percy’s thought, and I’m increasingly certain that this influence goes beyond Augustine’s already formidable impact on the Western literary tradition generally. Notably, Jay Tolson discovered in Percy’s unpublished works a sketch or short story entitled “Confessions of a Movie-goer (from the Diary of the Last Romantic),” but this allusion—while significant in its own right—merely hints at deeper influence and even kinship (109, 262). A number of Percy readers whom I appreciate and admire have mentioned Augustine as an important Percy forebear. However, in even the best scholarship, Percy’s debt to Augustine is often merely assumed or alluded to in the course of other excursions. Lewis Lawson, Marion Montgomery, and John Desmond, while their appreciation for Augustine’s relevance and stature is abundantly clear, generally have other fish to fry in the course of following Percy.

Nevertheless, in many essays and interviews over the years, Percy often invited comparison with St. Augustine. The bishop is frequently mentioned among the writers whom Percy remembers reading as a catechumen in the early 1940s. In a 1962 interview with the Charlotte Observer, Percy forthrightly acknowledges an Augustinian line of thought—even a literary line of descent—leading back to Augustine: “The following writers have meant most to me and in this order: Dostoievski, Kierkegaard, St. Augustine, Lawrence, Joyce, Gerard Hopkins, Marcel” (Interview, Doar 5). In “Physician as Novelist,” one of Percy’s last essays, he describes this debt more in terms of happenstance, as he recalls the development (in the course of writing The Moviegoer) of his own understanding of Binx Bolling’s predicament: “What happens to [Binx] is that in the very anxiety of his despair, cool as it is—indeed, as the very consequence of his despair—it occurs to him that a search is possible, a search altogether different from the scientific explorations mounted by scientists or by the most perceptive of psychoanalysts. So the novel, almost by accident, became a narrative of the search, the quest. And so the novel, again almost by accident—or was it accident?—landed squarely in the oldest tradition of Western letters: the pilgrim’s search outside himself, rather than the guru’s search within. All this happened to the novelist and his character without the slightest consciousness of a debt to St. Augustine or Dante” (Signposts 193).

This allusion to pilgrimage in The Moviegoer is clearly Augustinian, as are some of Binx’s most vexing struggles with what he calls “flesh poor flesh.” More than once Percy would suggest that, much like the young Augustine in Confessions, his characters’ quest for true selfhood and existential peace would necessarily involve a frank confrontation with their embodied existence, and principally their sexuality. Writing to Shelby Foote in 1970 about his just-finished draft of Love in the Ruins, Percy irreverently quipped, “What is it about? Screwing and God (which all Catholic novels since Augustine have been about)—to use Catholic somewhat loosely” (Foote and Percy 147).

Not only does the pilgrimage of Augustine thematically and episodically presage that of Binx, but also The Moviegoer shares with Confessions a certain restlessness and even sadness. Peter Brown (author of the definitive English-language biography of Augustine) describes Augustine’s memoir as something remarkable and unique for its time: “It is often said that the Confessions is not an ‘autobiography’ in the modern sense. This is true, but not particularly helpful. Because, for a Late Roman man, it is precisely this intense, autobiographical vein in the Confessions, that sets it apart from the intellectual tradition to which Augustine belonged.” Augustine’s story, Brown asserts, is communicated via “a new, classic language of the unquiet heart” (169). In Book I, Augustine is mystified and distressed by the alienation endemic to his very existence: “What, Lord, do I wish to say except that I do not know whence I came to be in this mortal life or, as I may call it, this living death” (Chadwick 6).¹ In this disquiet, or “shakiness” (to borrow one of Percy’s favorite terms), Augustine figures a type of pilgrim who becomes a recognizable headliner in Percy’s novels, starting with The Moviegoer. As we will observe, Augustine and Binx are painfully aware of grave troubles and contradictions that beset their respective worlds; both bemoan deep fractures within themselves.

Especially in Confessions, Augustine understands himself to be profoundly divided, at odds not only with God but with his own self as well. In the first four books of Confessions, the prevailing image is not merely some abstract doctrinal notion of “original sin” but rather that of a young man who feigns omnipotence but winds up scattershot, frenzied, and debased.² At the end of Book II, for instance, Augustine recalls that “I slid away from you and wandered away, my God; far from your steadfastness . . . I became to myself a wasteland” (Chadwick 74). Later he reflects, “I was at odds with myself and fragmenting myself” (Boulding 202). My favorite passage, though, comes from the beginning of Book II: “I will try now to give a coherent account of my disintegrated self, for when I turned away from you, the one God and pursued a multitude of things, I went to pieces” (62). (Perhaps we can now better understand Patsy Cline’s remarkable power to move us!)

By God’s grace, this anthropological crisis necessitates a phenomenological trope of pilgrimage in Confessions. At the outset of Book I, Augustine famously writes of his (and our) essential restlessness: “You stir us so that praising you may bring us joy, because you have made us and drawn us to yourself, and our heart is unquiet until it rests in you” (Boulding 39). His subsequent prodigal’s journey from Carthage to Milan—as recounted in Books II–VI—certainly dramatizes his pervasive sense of homesickness and despair. Later, in Book VII, Augustine has arrived at some wisdom regarding the phenomenological features of his journey, and he grasps that his pilgrimage must be understood and experienced in a way that not only requires intellectual assent, but also takes into account his affective and embodied experience: “I learned to discern the difference between presumption and confession, between those who see what the goal is but not how to get there and those who see the way which leads to the home of bliss, not merely as an end to be perceived but as a realm to live in” (Chadwick 130). The image here is both arresting and beautiful as Augustine prefigures Gabriel Marcel’s homo viator. Augustine would often return to this trope. In a sermon preached in AD 418, he described the contours of our wayfaring in terms of wandering and worship: “During this time of our exile and our wandering, we say ‘alleluia’ to cheer us on our way. At present ‘alleluia’ is for us a traveler’s song; but by a toilsome road we are wending our way towards home and rest” (Sermons 156). Both passages are hopeful inasmuch as they look ahead toward a true homeland, but still a bit unsettling if one considers that Augustine is yet a pilgrim. Even after Augustine’s conversion, in Peter Brown’s words, his Confessions is “not the affirmation of a cured man: it is the self-portrait of a convalescent” (177), a description that perhaps captures Augustine’s ongoing appeal and relevance to those of us who often keenly feel our own displacement in the (post)modern world.

With this foregrounding in Augustinian anthropology (the self as alienated prodigal) and phenomenology (the self as embodied pilgrim), my aim is to explicate the confessional kinship between the bishop and the novelist by exploring not only the problems that beset the misapprehension of human embodiment, but also the perils and possibilities discoverable in the remarkable human practice of communication, whether as idle deflection or as authentic confession.

“Flesh Poor Flesh”

The redemptive movement in Confessions is from multiplicity to unity, from the solipsistic self to others. Nearly a thousand years before Descartes “ripped body loose from mind and turned the very soul into a ghost that haunts its own house” (to quote Percy’s Tom More, Love in the Ruins 191), Augustine foresaw the problems besetting a self riven from itself. His legendary restlessness is at the root of his alienation from himself, from other people, and certainly from God. Augustine’s restlessness is also a constituent element of his existentialism. As James O’Donnell and other readers have understood, what haunts Augustine throughout most of Confessions is the larger sense of being somewhat dis-integrated: untethered and set adrift. In spite of worldly success, the center is not holding for him, and for the greater part of Confessions, he seems inadequate to the task of restoring it.

Early in Book II, he introduces the all-important trope of his sinner’s exile, while at the same time alluding to his infamous struggle with lust, or cupiditas. O’Donnell offers an insightful gloss on the curious turn that Book II takes: “When he wants to penetrate the depths of his own iniquity, he chose to describe the theft of a few pears from a neighbor’s tree (2.4–9). This narrative is placed in his sixteenth year, an idle time spent at home, his education interrupted by penury, his energies at the disposal of his fancies. An unflattering portrayal of his father’s reaction to his new maturity shows that it was a time when the powers of the flesh were beginning to flourish. Then suddenly we have him and a few friends snatching pears. To ask whether the theft is meant to represent symbolically the sexual indiscretions of youth is literal-minded, but some broad analogy at least is probably implied” (“Confessions”).

A major theme in all that follows in Confessions, Augustine’s cupiditas anticipates the dilemma that Percy would later describe in his essay “Diagnosing the Modern Malaise” as a “symptom” of a much graver problem. Addressing the broken sexuality of his day and its place in his novels, Percy insists that the sickness of Eros points to “an ontological impoverishment; that is, a severe limitation or crippling of the very life of twentieth-century man” (Signposts 214). For both Augustine and Percy, then, the spirit of their respective ages is beset with a sadly diminished understanding of human being, particularly human sexuality.

In Augustine’s day, this impoverishment of the human is most forcefully expressed in the doctrine of the Manichees. The separation between body and spirit suggested by these early Gnostics convinced young Augustine of his self-division and then sought to persuade him that he bore no responsibility for his sexuality or for his individual predicament generally: “I liked to excuse myself and to accuse some unidentifiable power which was with me and yet not I. But the whole was myself and what divided me against myself was my impiety. That was a sin the more incurable for the fact that I did not think myself a sinner. My execrable wickedness preferred the disastrous doctrine that in me you, almighty God, suffer defeat rather than that, to be saved, I needed to surrender to you” (Chadwick 84).

If we read carefully here we note that the “shakiness” of the divided self is a given. What would most horrify Augustine in his later years, and Kierkegaard and Percy after that, is the alibi implied. Such dualism pre-sents a crippling sense of denial regarding the importance of our actions and our responsibility for them. Moreover, to deny our embodiment or to believe that our embodied actions have no real significance is to eschew our concrete, historical predicament. Never under these conditions does the prodigal have a chance of becoming a pilgrim. Instead he remains stuck within the vagaries of the self—the hapless terrain of the guru. Augustine’s Manichean phase was long and costly, leaving him with wounds from which he perhaps never fully recovered.³

Percy casts his critique of Cartesian dualism and the vexing problems of embodiment in language that is clearly reminiscent of Confessions (with the aid of Kierkegaard’s spheres of existence). Binx’s aesthetically inspired “search,” whether horizontal or vertical, chiefly diverts him from facing himself. His consumer citizenship, his office romances, his stock brokerage—all of these fail to provide him with a means of adequately making his way in the world. Although some of Percy’s later characters (Will Barrett and Tom More in particular) are given to more striking dualistic flights of angelism and bestialism, Binx’s proclivity toward the “aesthetic” most often revolves around sex. John Desmond describes “sexual desire” as Binx’s “constant nemesis” (Walker Percy’s Search 69) and, similar to Augustine, it is always a sign and symptom of a deeper problem. Indeed, life is most painfully inauthentic to Binx in moments when the romantic or the sexual fails him, and his aesthetic mode is subsequently invaded by the malaise.

Nowhere is this made clearer in The Moviegoer than in the failed sexual encounter between Binx and Kate on the train to Chicago. This hapless love scene—which would be comical if the stakes weren’t so high for Kate—masterfully dramatizes the perils of Manichean/Cartesian dualism. Binx should perhaps know better as the train pulls out of New Orleans, but he actually admits to enjoying what he describes as the “peculiar gnosis” (184) of trains—that is, I think, their inherent nowhere-ness, their moment-by-moment movement from non-place to non-place, sealed off from the world. Binx describes the scene, riding “at a witch’s level above the gravelly roofs” (185) of suburban New Orleans and, later, “high in the air, squarely above a city street” (195) in Jackson. However, the further they go, the worse Kate feels, grim and cut adrift. In her desperation for some sense of rootedness and comfort, she propositions Binx. In his lament to Rory Calhoun afterwards, Binx confesses their failure: “We did very badly and almost did not do at all. Flesh poor flesh failed us. The burden was too great and flesh poor flesh, neither hallowed by sacrament nor despised by spirit (for despising is not the worst fate to overtake the flesh), but until this moment seen through and canceled, rendered null by the cold and fishy eye of the malaise—flesh poor flesh now at this moment summoned all at once to be all and everything, end all and be all, the last and only hope—quails and fails” (200).

Augustine, in the throes of Manichean heresy, is tempted to believe that his body doesn’t matter at all, or that at the very least he’s not responsible for it. Here, Percy dramatizes the other side of the same dualistic coin, ...