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

[John Pearson <jp AT jlarsp.com>]

Like Rhonda, I’m getting caught up after the hiatus. It’s maybe been 20 years since I read the novel and one thing I’m struck by again is how engrossing it is, even though in some sense nothing much happens plot-wise. Binx makes money, visits family, tried to woo girls, goes to movies. I do like the hints in the background about how all this is due in part to how the war affected Binx, the malaise—to borrow from a future Percy—of an ordinary Wednesday afternoon, after being in a war. In some ways I wonder if the search is trying to find a way to live with meaning and joy on that ordinary Wednesday afternoon. Perhaps what the war did to Binx makes that harder. (I think of my own father, who, unlike many or most of his WWII generation) liked to talk about his experience—because he never made it over to the war. After nine months training here to be a gunner in a B-24, his crew was about to get shipped out when his plane crashed in Idaho coming back from a training flight. Eight of the ten man crew died, and my dad was in an army hospital with a broken back and other injuries for another nine months. He was asleep in the plane when it crashed, and he never saw the horrors of battle and men dying, and somehow he escaped the malaise of everyday life). Binx' conversation with his mom about the war is a brilliant scene, I think. I wonder if part of his malaise and why he feels the need for the search is because he cannot relate to his family and the people back home who have not gone through what he went through in the war.

I appreciated Rhonda’s thoughts about Binx and Kate needing/wanting to be told what to do. I see that too, and also wonder how that butts up against the idea of a search. A search seems proactive, the opposite of waiting/wanting to be told what to do. 

It also seems that Binx treats most of the people in his life (Lonnie perhaps an exception) almost as if they are characters in a movie he is watching. He describes Sharon in movie character ways, and in the end, maybe because that is how he sees her, she is as unattainable as the characters on the screen. 

One of the main purposes of going to a movie is to escape from “real life” for 100 minutes or so. To be in a world where you don’t have to make decisions or search, you just let the plot play out before you because it is all predetermined and you are just a spectator. Are movies an escape from the despair of everyday life? An escape from the search, because what if you search and find nothing? How could you then go on? As much as Binx enjoys the escape to other worlds, other lives, in movies, and in fantasizing about women, his refusal to go to Chicago perhaps shows that he is afraid to do something, anything, that might lead to something, anything, that could break the despair. Easier to slip into the Tivoli for a Howard Hawks movie. 

It’s late for me and I best quit before I start rambling, if that ship has not already sailed. I just finished chapter three and I look forward to what others have to say and to keeping the great discussion going. (Reading Percy always helps me break out whatever malaise I may be in.)

John Pearson

Chicago

On Jul 27, 2024, at 1:20 PM, 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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