Percy-L: Literary, Religious, Scientific, and Philosophical Discussion of Walker Percy

[hughesl6363 AT aol.com]

Love this “slow reading,” allowing me to enjoy “The Moviegoer” in old and new ways: a “repetition within a rotation,” as Binx said in Chapter Three.

In my younger years, my first encounter with this section was pleasant and disappointing. I was all geared up for Binx to get alone with Sharon at the fishing camp when he runs into that ultra-domestic scene with kids and relatives. I should have expected it…Percy is full of surprises, and can’t resist interrupting a serious, even a tragic scene, with comedy. His humor is one thing I love most about the man and his work.

I came to appreciate the book more after studying some of the scholarship and especially Percy’s nonfiction, which brought to light connections with other novelists and philosophers (particularly Kierkegaard).

Mr. Gollier helped me to think about Percy’s craftsmanship, which is a bonus of reading slowly, as he pointed out those “contrasts,” illuminating the book’s themes, but also its structure. I recall reading in the correspondence with Shelby Foote that Percy’s good friend carefully outlined his fictional work, while Percy tended to write in a less-structured approach. Discovering features like contrasting elements suggest to me that there is more conscious structural planning behind “The Moviegoer,” contrary to some scholarly opinion that Binx’s essay-like narration proceeds as free association.

I’m not sure about Percy’s relationship to Lonnie’s attitude toward death, as Mr. Gollier asked. I believe he was more devout than Binx, or his “bad Catholic” in “Love in the Ruins.” The account of his own death by Shelby Foote in Jay Tolson’s biography might shed some light on the subject.

As to Percy’s craft, I have particularly admired, especially during the Percy Project “read,” the transporting power of his description. In this chapter, he takes us “spinning along the Gulf Coast.” Binx leaves the suburban environment of Gentilly in that magical MG that cuts through the malaise “out in the thick summer air between sky and earth” (p. 122). “The heavy fragrant air pushes against us…and all of a sudden there is the Gulf, flat and sparkling away to the south” (p. 124).

Later, he describes the swamp that night in the solitude of the fishing camp: “The swamp exhales beneath me and across the bayou a night bittern pumps away like a diesel” (p. 146).

Besides painting vivid pictures, the scenes of nature are more than physical reality: the first is an escape from the malaise, while the second binds Binx in the grip of everydayness. Percy’s (and Binx’s) relationship with the external world always involves more than meets the eye. In this “first” novel, it’s a key to “the search.”


Later, when he is joined on the pier with his mother, the description closes in on detail, reminiscent of Hemingway.

“Mother undoes the bundle, takes out a scout knife and pries loose the frozen shrimp. She chops off neat pink cubes, slides them along the rail with her blade…” (p. 148). The physical scene is filled with the same attention to detail found at Nick Adams’ Big Two-Hearted River. Percy likely had Hemingway in mind when he contrasted his hero to Jake Barnes and his life-changing war wound in “The Sun Also Rises”; Binx had “a decent wound,” but it wasn’t so severe: “Afterall it could have been in the buttocks or genitals--or the nose” (p. 126).

I hope you won’t mind my relating what effect Percy and his view of reality has had on me personally.

In my own experience, the late ‘60s was a time the material world became suspect. My friends and I were more in tune with Wordsworth’s view that by “getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.” One of my closest friends during the social “revolution” went off to a commune in Summertown, Tenn., forsaking all the toys, motorcycles and leathergoods that we had always valued.

I was seriously tempted to follow him, but in the early ‘70s, circumstances drew me back to “reality” and finding Walker Percy in grad school introduced me to a compelling thinker who penned the truly revolutionary words “Monsignor Schleifkopf—God bless him for his love of manufactured things, their gear and tackle and trim….” Here was an embrace of the material world, with a nod to Gerard Manley Hopkins, and its spiritual significance.

Almost everyone who encounters Percy has a personal reaction to him, and there are endless theories about his work, so I humbly disagree with Mr. Golliers’ idea that Binx is joking with Lonnie about “Fort Dobbs.” I don’t think he would lampoon the movie, especially considering his opinion that “movies are onto the search,” though he admits “they screw it up” (p. 13). I don’t believe moviegoing is a thing Binx takes lightly.

I’ve found Percy has an appreciation of things in the world that are scorned as trivial or banal, finding in them something profound. Given his sense of humor, it’s easy to miss that.

I only met him (very briefly) once. In May of ’89, he delivered the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, and I slipped into the long reception line following the talk. He patiently and cordially greeted the hundreds of well-wishers, and he was even kind to me, who had the audacity to ask if we might have dinner when I got back to New Orleans in the near future. He said he’d be happy to share a meal, but he seemingly warned me that his favorite restaurant was the Waffle House.

Naturally, I thought he was kidding and sadly, I wasn’t able to find out for myself, as he died only a year later. But that October, “Conde Nast Traveler” printed articles of prominent writers who were asked to contribute thoughts on Southern subjects chosen by the editors. They assigned Percy to write about restaurants because of his proximity to New Orleans, with its famous eateries. Probably to their dismay, Percy chose not to describe Galatoire’s or Antoine’s at length.

Instead, he sang the praises of a dinner at the Covington Waffle House.

On Saturday, July 27, 2024 at 02:23:24 PM EDT, Henry P. Mills III <wppdirector AT gmail.com> wrote:

I am forwarding the below opening comments for Chapter Three prepared by Tom Gollier on through to the Reading Group. His comments initially went to the wrong email address. The address to use for submissions to the listserv is: <percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org>. Thanks for your contribution, Tom!

Henry Mills

Percy-L Listserv Manager

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From: Thomas Gollier <tgollier AT gmail.com>
To: Percy List
Subject: The Moviegoer - Chapter Three
Date: Sat, 27 Jul 2024 05:25:44

Hello Everyone,

As an introduction to Chapter 3, I would note several contrasts:

   - 'Malaise', a loss of interest in the world, versus 'Everydayness', a loss of

      self in the world.
   
   - Binx connecting with Sharon, something of a dalliance, and his coming

     together with Lonnie, an enduring connection.

   - The Smith family together in the fishing camp versus in their "home in Biloxi

      … that narrow old house [of] dreariness."

   - Binx's ongoing search in light of his mother's description of his father's own 

     search for "something."

that all seem significant, if not integral, to the novel.

What I find most revealing, however, is the episode of Binx and Lonnie going to see the movie 'Fort Dobbs' with Sharon.  Binx early on says "the movies are onto it."  This is a joke, right?  The movies — 'Fort Dobbs'? — are onto it?  But in this episode, we see Binx and Lonnie, who are both moviegoers, both "get" the joke.

    Lonnie happy (he looks around at me with the liveliest sense of the 

    secret  between us; the secret is that Sharon is not and never will be

    onto the little touches we see in the movie and, in the seeing, know 

    that the other sees — as when Clint Walker tells the saddle tramp in

    the softiest easiest old Virginian voice: "Mister, I don't believe I'd do

    that if I was you."

They both get it, they each know the other gets it. They are both onto the kernel of truth at the center of this and any good joke.  Amid all the images of being-this-or-that on the screen, Clint Walker brings it down to the singular moment of their existence, to their being-or-not.  This actualization of them as existing subjects in the objective midst of all the moving images would seem to be just what the movies are onto. And, Binx and Lonnie, coming together on this "secret' between themselves, comes to include Sharon as well.

    But 'Fort Dobbs' is as good as can be. My heart sings like Octavian and
    there is great happiness between me and Lonnie and this noble girl and

    they both know it and have the sense to say nothing.

Anyway, I think there's a lot going on in this chapter with regard to the search, and how it's working out for Binx.

As for a question regarding this chapter, I'm wondering how Lonnie's integration of his disability and suffering into his religious faith relates to Percy's own embrace of Catholicism. I've always found the latter a bit perplexing.

Thanks,

Tom Gollier

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