In May 2011, the Richmond Times-Dispatch published the Sunday Commentary piece below about Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, which consistently has been one of my favorite novels. The piece didn’t make it into the internet archive, so I’m reprinting it here. I thought the book was relevant in 2011, but the assault on the individual keeps getting stronger.
The Individual: Engaged but Engulfed
(Published in the Richmond Times-Dispatch May 15, 2011)
This year marks the 50th anniversary of Walker Percy’s “The Moviegoer.” The novel is a southern literary classic that speaks to the alienation of the modern age. As Percy said in his National Book Award acceptance speech, the novel’s “posture is the posture of the pathologist with his suspicion that something is wrong...the pathology in this case has to do with the loss of individuality and the loss of identity.”
I think Percy was ultimately optimistic, or at least he believed in the possibility of salvation and grace, but his concerns about humanity’s shortcomings were remarkably prescient, and one wonders what he would make of life in the 21st century.
Percy (1916-1990) grew up in Alabama and Mississippi, where he befriended the writer-to-be Shelby Foote. After attending the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Percy studied medicine at Columbia University. During his residency at Bellevue Hospital, he contracted tuberculosis, so while his peers were fighting in World War II, he spent two year in a sanitarium, studying Existential literature, among other things. After he recovered, he spent the bulk of his writing life in Covington, La. His six novels and several essay collections take on themes of existence, language, Catholicism and life in the South.
Most of these themes show up in “The Moviegoer.” The novel follows Binx Bolling, a 29-year-old stockbroker living in the suburbs of New Orleans and trying to avoid the “malaise” of the “everyday.” To distract himself, he goes to movies, dallies about with his secretaries, drives his MG out to the beach, and generally tries to stay disengaged from the messiness of life. He subscribes to Consumer Reports, he tells us: “and as a consequence I own a first-class television set, an all but silent air conditioner and a very long lasting deodorant. My armpits never stink.”
But as he approaches his 30th birthday, and when his aunt calls him into town to help with a mentally unstable cousin, Binx suddenly finds that clean armpits and a fresh secretary are no longer enough to stave off the malaise. He embarks on what he terms his “search,” his quest for authenticity and meaning.
Binx is a likeable character and “The Moviegoer” is a fine novel that deserves a place on the shelf next to Peter Taylor’s southern novels-of-manners, or Richard Ford’s novels of likeable everymen, or Don DeLillo’s intelligent and biting satires. But it is Percy’s unique concerns as a novelist that make him especially relevant today.
Percy was very influenced by the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. Often considered the father of Existentialism, Kierkegaard was a deeply religious thinker, and his view of humanity was that we were created by God as humans, subject to the biological constraints of a species, but we are also endowed with the freedom to develop as individuals. Kierkegaard believed everyone had a spiritual purpose in life, and that the Self was defined through a process of development.
“The Moviegoer” dramatizes Kierkegaard’s notion that there are spheres of existence that a Self moves through. At the beginning of the novel, Binx is living in the “aesthetic sphere.” He is concerned with sensory pleasures, with distractions of the here-and-now represented by consumer materialism — good deodorant and a sporty car.
But by remaining in the aesthetic sphere, Binx is actually in a state of constant despair because, in Kierkegaard’s terms, his Self is stagnant, his spiritual purpose is unrealized. Binx sees glimpses of this despair and mistakes it for a simple everyday malaise — in other words, boredom.
His life is uncomplicated but ultimately unfulfilling because he hasn’t committed to any higher purpose. Over the course of the novel, he reckons with his state of despair, and by taking up a spiritual search he enters what Kierkegaard calls the “religious sphere,” the realm where the Self tries to reconcile with God by fulfilling its spiritual purpose.
Both Percy and Kierkegaard are firm believers in the individual spirit. Fulfillment stems from breaking out of the mold of the ordinary and pursuing something on your own terms. It is this belief in individuality that I believe Percy was so prophetic. “The Moviegoer” is a stunning novel to read in 2011, not because it portrays the somewhat humorous existence of a stockbroker in New Orleans, but because I believe in today’s America the individual is under assault.
We have more entertainment and consumer options than in Binx’s day — in addition to movies and effective deodorant, we have blogs, social media, cable TV and the 24-hour news cycle, video games, political histrionics, email surveys, retail VIP memberships, e-readers and a variety of marketing games to keep us “engaged,” to borrow the language of marketers.
But engaged with what? The marketer might say he’s trying to keep the consumer engaged with this product rather than a competing product, but I think Kierkegaard — and by extension Walker Percy — would say our engagement with these distractions keeps us from engaging with ourselves. In other words, we’re living disengaged lives.
Our world has become increasingly social and increasingly collaborative, and in the process the role of the individual has changed. Rather than asking age-old philosophic questions about the nature of Being — such as whether essence precedes existence or vice versa — more and more the Self is defined by what you choose to “like” on Facebook.
Over the next few years, there’s going to be a convergence between our digital and physical identities. You can already see it in the way we’re becoming more or less constantly plugged in with smartphones. My question is, as these worlds converge, will we view “The Moviegoer” as an important roadmap for the individual to find his or her spiritual purpose? Or will the social hive view it as the relic of an older age when humanity believed the individual significant?