This appeared in Spectrum Weekly (Little Rock), May 22, 1991. Percy died on May 10, 1990, from prostate cancer or its complications. I only got around to reading The Moviegoer in 1990, after I borrowed it from a friend in Austin. If I recall correctly, I'd barely finished reading it when Percy died.
Walker Percy, the Southern writer who died last May at the
age of 74, was interested in what he once called "the dislocation of man
in the modern age.” But unlike some
other writers and philosophers—Thoreau comes most vividly to mind—Percy did not
draw any sharp conclusions on that subject.
Whereas Thoreau concluded most people "lead lives of
quiet desperation," a protagonist in a Percy novel is more likely to move
about in an open-ended wandering, wondering if a little quiet desperation isn't
better than the alternative.
Percy's first and last novels consider that alternative—something
the protagonist in the first novel sees as sort of a living death and something
the last novel examines as a way to head off the existential search for meaning
before it's begun.
Percy’s first novel, The
Moviegoer, won the National Book Award for fiction when it was published in
1961. In a way, however, it later served as the model for The Thanatos Syndrome, Percy's last and best novel, published in
1987. As a model, The Moviegoer
offered new insights, new angles from which to view [freud, said the OCR!]
familiar subjects, including one of the primary ways Americans identify with
the world at large —by going to the movies.
Percy himself spent a good deal of time going to the movie houses
of upper Manhattan in the late 1930s, when he was earning his psychiatry M.D. from
Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons. However, while interning at Bellevue Hospital,
Percy contracted tuberculosis, and thus spent the next few years convalescing
in sanatoriums, where he read the Russian novelists, French existentialists
such as Sartre, and the 19th century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard
Percy had spent his childhood in Alabama and in Greenville,
Mississippi, and after surviving his bout with tuberculosis, he returned to the
South in 1943, to live near New Orleans.
In the mid 1950s he began work on The
Moviegoer.
The book takes place in New Orleans, where John Bickerson
Bolling, the thoughtful and observant 29-year old narrator, has become happily
entrenched in the American way of life: selling
stocks and bonds, watching television, dating his secretaries, and going to the
movies, "Where Happiness Costs So Little," as the permanent lettering
on the marquee at his neighborhood theater notes.
Bolling is "a model tenant and a model citizen,"
with "a wallet full of identity, cards, library cards, credit cards . . .
certifying, so to speak, one’s right to exist.
But underneath his bon vivant
lifestyle, and that of his contemporaries, he senses a problem. “For some time now,” Bolling confides to the
reader, “the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead.” It is during ordinary conversations that he
senses this phenomenon. “As I listen to
Eddie speak plausibly and at length of one thing or another—business, his wife
Nell, the old house they are redecorating—the fabric pulls together into one
bright texture of investments, family projects, lovely old houses, little theater
readings and such.
"But the fabric unravels as rapidly as it is woven, and
"it seems that the conversation is spoken by automatons who have no choice
in what they say. Everyone seems to talk
like a politician. I hear myself or someone else saying things like: 'In my opinion
the Russian people are a great people but ...' or 'Yes, what you say about the
hypocrisy of the North is unquestionably true. However ...' and Ithink to
myself: this is death."
Bolling escapes death by going to the movies. "Other people; so I have read, treasure
memorable moments in their lives… What I
remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was
falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach
and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man."
Percy is partly poking fun at himseif and his New York movie-golng
period. But he is also taking a deep
satirical look into the relationship that has developed between people and
movies. In that respect, The Moviegoer is
more relevant today than it was 30 years ago. More than ever, movies are a part of or
possibly a substitute for something Percy also identified in the book. He called it “the search.”
Bolling first thought of pursuing the search when he was
wounded during the Korean War. "I came to myself under a chindolea bosh,"
he remembers. "My shoulder didn't hurt but it was pressed hard against the
ground, as if somebody sat on me. Six inches from my nose a dung beetle was
scratching around under the leaves. As I
watched, there awoke in me an immense curiosity. I was onto something. I vowed
that if I ever got out of this fix, I would pursue the search. Naturally, as
soon as I recovered and got home I forgot all about it.”
But the idea of the search unexpectedly returns to him. One
morning he notices that his wallet, watch, pen and keys look unfamiliar. What
was unfamiliar about them he says, "was that I could see them. They might have belonged to someone else. A man can look at this little pile on his
bureau for thirty years and never once see it. It is as invisible as his own hand.
Once I saw it, however, the search became possible."
The search in one form or another remained one of the
central themes in Percy 's later novels. It is “what anyone would undertake if
he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life,” Bolling explains 'To
become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to
be onto something is to be in despair.”
Yet how does one tell if one is onto something or in
despair, and does desperation become invisible to the person experiencing
it? Percy uses a quotation from
Kierkegaard at the beginning of The
Moviegoer to identify that state of being out of touch with one’s own
emotions as true despair: “The specific
character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair."
Throughout all this Percy allows for the possibility that it
is just his point of view, or Bolling's point of view, that makes some people
seem to be truly in despair. “Have 98%
of Americans already found what I seek or are they so sunk in everydayness that
not even the possibility of a search has occurred to them?" he wonders.
In The Moviegoer
the search remains an abstraction. In The Thanatos
Syndrome the search crystallizes into something specific and
meaningful—namely the protagonist’s search for the cause of the syndrome. Echoing a phrase from The Moviegoer, and also written in first person, the The Thanatos Syndrome opens with this
line: "For some time now I have
noticed that something strange is occurring in our region."
The region is southeast Louisiana, near Baton Rouge, and the
narrator is Dr. Tom More, a thoughtful, observant, and unfettered psychiatrist
who is trying to figure out what the problem is with some of his patients and
old friends—and also with his wife. Thanatos is a Greek word for death, hence
the repetition of the moviegoer's observation, but as less of a metaphor.
More describes the syndrome as the abatement of such things
as anxiety, depression, stress, insomnia, suicidal tendencies and chemical
dependence. "Think of it as a regression from a stressful human existence
to a peaceable animal existence."
What has caused it? Nothing less than a plot to create a
utopia of happy automatons by treating the water supply with an uncommon
isotope of sodium. Statistics show an 85
percent decrease in violent crime, largely due to a drop in drug abuse, a 76
percent decrease in reported cases of AIDS, an 85 percent decrease in teenage
pregnancy, a 95 percent decrease in teenage suicide, and to top all that off,
notes one of the perpetrators, "L SU has not lost a football game in three
years."
The thanatos syndrome, it seems, is simply life without the possibility of the search, but with a
good dose of metaphysical anesthetic thrown in to prevent despair. Maybe it is also Percy’s last statement about
the dislocation of men and women in the modern age. He seems to be asking us a question about
ourselves as individuals: What are we
willing to give up to have safe, secure and also socially impressive lives?
He left us with a partial answer: Don’t give up the search.
