On Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer

by Liam Keane • February 19, 2015

This life is too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then to be asked what you make of it and have to answer “Scientific humanism.” That won’t do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight, i.e., God. In fact I demand it. I refuse to settle for anything less. I don’t see why anyone should settle for less than Jacob, who actually grabbed aholt of God and would not let go until God identified himself and blessed him.

Before reading this book know this: The Moviegoer is possibly the most Christian novel ever written.

Walker Percy was Catholic, not merely by inheritance (as is the case with his narrator here, the pitiful, tortured anti-hero Binx Bolling) but by choice, entering the Church as an adult and taking monastic vows as a Benedictine oblate. As he told the Paris Review, the worldview and anthropology that Percy imbued all of his work with was one of Man as Wayfarer, a view of man he adopted from Scripture, especially Job 5:7“but man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward.” Job 5:7 (ESV), and from Gabriel Marcel’s Homo Viator.

Percy is strongly, enthusiastically Catholic and his grounding in faith provides him a joyful confidence. However, Percy especially focused on a lowercase catholicism, the universalism of an inner personal faith, as Joseph R. Wood writes in his insightful article on the author:

[Percy’s] belief in the inner shaping power of faith, as opposed to the institutional apparatus of the church in the world, is present throughout his work. Indeed, while Percy kept his Catholicism implicit in his novels, he put his “small c” catholicism at the center of his stories. He is concerned with the universal, the questions that every man and woman struggle with, or struggle to avoid.

Percy has deep empathy for those who have not yet found the joyful and restorative relationship of Christianity, and concerns himself with their suffering. They are the subjects of this novel (almost all the central characters are non-Christians).

The Moviegoer will only be fully appreciated by keeping this lens in the forefront. Percy strives to make this plain to all by repeatedly hitting the reader on the head with the sheer hyperbole of many of Binx’s inane, pitiable, self-centered musings and with the cluelessness of his aunt’s vague spiritual platitudes. Indeed, throughout the novel, almost every character is seen to be bumbling through a difficult struggle, clumsily attempting to come to terms with existence. All suffering that humans experience is merely a symptom of a lack of total trust in God…a broken relationship with God. Percy sees the modern condition as a willful nonbelief that there is something beyond our daily material existence, an unwillingness to accept that the possibility of hope even exists. To further emphasize his position, Percy begins the novel with an epigraph by Christian Existentialist Søren Kierkegaard, “the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair.”in Kierkegaard’s 1849 The Sickness Unto Death Binx is indicted by this almost paradoxical observation—he is unaware that his life is the life of a man in despair, that the curiosity-teasing flashes of depth and meaning he keeps encountering are tugs from a God who is looking for him and wants him to respond.

Binx refers repeatedly to a concept he calls The Search—which means roughly: to simply consider his own situation, his existential condition. The Search is discomforting, and so, like so many people, although it is intriguing and will occasionally re-confront him, Binx tends to shy away from it, by either suppressing it with escapist dalliances, consuming and pondering distracting aesthetics (the eponymous movies, as well as literature and art), or by simply making himself occupied by daily routine and minor concerns.

❖

Walker Percy was incredibly insightful, exhibiting screamingly intelligent and stunningly uncanny observations on the human condition throughout The Moviegoer. Earlier in his life, Percy surely himself encountered the intriguing allure of The Search but, as his familiarity and indeed mastery of Existentialism attests, he went all the way.

Percy confronted his Existential condition and concluded that a loving God created the universe after all, and that this God loved his creation and wanted to be in relationship with them. The Search, that Existential nagging many humans experience throughout their life, the strange discomforting fear that there is something else going on here, something more to understand and to respond to and cooperate with, troubles Binx. He believes himself to be unique in this discomfort, viewing the happiness of the Christian too mainstream and thus surely both unexamined and false. He is however generally content to ignore The Search. God is reaching out to him and he is ignoring the signs, running away in fear to hide his nakedness.

❖

There are a number of responses to this book and to its author’s beliefs. For Percy’s fellow-Christians, the story is a reminder of the suffering of those who have not accepted God’s offer of relationship, a calling to feel empathy and love for them. Catholic theology is especially concerned with the meaning of suffering and with the idea that God’s incarnation as Jesus demonstrates a profound co-suffering—God was willing to experience the highest-level of suffering (separation from the Father) and this brings meaning to our own pains. And as Christians proclaim, it is with this costly incarnation that the God that seeks whosoever would respond, with a grace that perennially waits for us to confront our destruction and in this to discover the power of the Resurrection and the Life, offers to make us alive by restoring us to relationship with Him“And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.” Ezekiel 36:26 (ESV), by mere acceptance of a free gift. Percy’s work calls those readers who have accepted Christ to remember the wanderings of those who have not by ‘putting them in the shoes’ of someone who is ignoring this grace and trying to lead their own life.

For those non-Christians who are open to the idea of God, or who have a suspicion that there may be something going on here, that life may have meaning and purpose after all, Binx’s momentary flashes of curiosity may be especially appealing. Perhaps they are frustrated Binx hesitates to explore and pursue them further. The frequent presence of the author’s scathingly empathetic concern for the non-Christian may be convicting. It remains to be seen what they will do, whether they will choose to seek God at any cost to themselves or whether that cost is too high and they will choose escapes and distractions to avoid The Search.

Others may be especially not interested in the idea of God. For them The Search may be a stupid inconvenience from a bygone era, an invented superstitious fear no longer in effect and now safe to ignore. They may agree every time Binx puts it down with women or meandering occupation, and celebrate when he actively chooses to keep himself in ennui and Kierkegaardian despair because it is easier and what he knows. Some, as a few reviews here quite worryingly betray, will respond in a horrifyingly ironic way, understanding books like The Moviegoer as mere aesthetic distractions to be consumed, liked or disliked, checked off or rated and then ignored, in the same way Binx consumes movies, poetry, literature, friends, and women—as mere entertainment.

⧉