The Moviegoer

John Bickerson Bolling—Binx—is the narrator and main character of The Moviegoer and the first of Percy’s spiritually “sick” protagonists. At age twenty-nine, he is a successful broker in a modern world where the church has been replaced by the brokerage house. Although financially secure, Binx feels uneasy; although adept at planning his client’s futures, he has trouble living his own life from day to day, fearful that he may at any moment succumb to that worst of all plagues, the malaise of everydayness. To counter its effects, Binx becomes a moviegoer, partly because films project a “heightened…resplendent reality,” albeit temporarily, and partly because films provide Binx with accepted role models: thus his impersonations of such canonized figures as Gregory Peck, Clark Gable, Dana Andrews, and Rory Calhoun (who also serves as his confidant). The impersonation can never fully satisfy the moviegoer, however, who must eventually face the fact that the reality of his own life can never attain the heightened illusion of the star’s gestural perfection. Moviegoing serves Binx in two additional ways: It enables him to view his world through the perspective of the films he has seen and, more important, to observe the world as if it were itself a film and he the passive audience.

Binx’s detachment is both a virtue and a vice. As the detached spectator, he observes those around him closely and accurately, thus exposing the roles they have unknowingly adopted. Appropriately, the novel’s temporal setting is the week before Mardi Gras, the period of rehearsals for New Orleans’ citywide impersonation. Instead of recognizing their situation as castaways, these others feel serenely at home in the world, whereas in fact they are, as Binx understands, dead. Neither virtuous nor sinful, they are merely “nice”; they speak, but in clichés; they ask questions, but neither expect nor desire answers. Binx, who fears becoming invisible—losing his identity—is right to keep his distance from these shadowy others. At the same time, however, he longs to be like them, to have his identity certified for him by such spurious means as films, identity cards, Consumer Reports, newspaper advice columns, and radio shows such as “This I Believe,” which broadcasts the meaningless affirmations of abstracted religionists to a half-believing, half-skeptical Binx.

If it is his ironic detachment that saves Binx from the unreflective life of mass humanity, then it is his search that most clearly characterizes his longing for authenticity and being. “To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something,” Binx says. “Not to be onto something is to be in despair.” Binx distinguishes two kinds of search. The “vertical” leads to abstraction: theories that explain the world but fail to explain what humankind is. (One alternative to such abstraction is the romanticism that killed Binx’s father and that the son wisely rejects.) The other is the “horizontal” or phenomenological search that Percy himself counsels in The Message in the Bottle. While Binx is indeed “onto something,” his search is different from Percy’s; it constitutes a “debased” form of the religious search because, as Percy explained, Binx, like Sartre, “has already ruled God out.” His search takes a purely aesthetic form. To ease “the pain of loss,” he pursues money and women, but the pursuit leads only to boredom and depression because the novelty of his possessions quickly wears off and everydayness inevitably returns to remind him of his inauthenticity and his position as a castaway.

Fortunately, Binx’s yearning has a deeper current. As a college student, he found himself “lost in the mystery of being alive at such a time and place”; upon his return from the Korean War, he began his eight-year “exile” in the New Orleans suburb of Gentilly, which, like Covington, is a nonplace; as a broker he has taken to reading Arabia Deserta, by the self-styled “God’s pilgrim,” Charles Montagu Doughty, concealed inside a Standard & Poor’s binder.

Binx’s search begins with the fact of his own “invincible apathy” and eventually leads, after many wrong turns, to authenticity and intersubjective relationships with his fourteen-year-old half brother, Lonnie Smith, and his twenty-five-year-old cousin, Kate Cutrer. There exists a complicity between Binx and the dying Lonnie, who faces life with true serenity because he understands it religiously. Like the other dying children in Percy’s novels, Lonnie represents the paradox of unmerited suffering in a world ruled by a supposedly benevolent God, a paradox Percy resolves by depicting their spiritual victory in a “world full of God’s grace where sorrow and death do not have the final word.” Binx attends to the “good news” that Lonnie embodies because, in part, Lonnie’s monotonous way of talking makes his words fresh and therefore meaningful, “like a code tapped through a wall.”

Kate, unlike Lonnie, lives in pure anxiety, swinging wildly between various extremes, especially the longing to be free and the desire “to be an anyone who is anywhere.” Although she lacks Binx’s degree of awareness as well as his ironic detachment and is more prone to impersonation than he, Kate, like Binx, is aware of her disease, which others can only understand in psychological terms. (Thus, the novel’s epigraph, taken from Kierkegaard: “the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair.”) Binx and Kate neatly complement each other: His childlike “simplemindedness” allows her to feel secure enough to speak honestly, while she correctly points out that in his search Binx may be overlooking something “obvious.” Her request that Binx be her God—by which she means he is to tell her what to do—is not at all absurd given Marcel’s brand of Christian existentialism. Significantly, her other suitors play the part of intersubjective God rather badly: One wants to send her to a high-priced psychoanalyst; the other promises an interminable vista of “niceness” and everydayness.

Binx’s leap from nominal Catholic existing in despair to sovereign wayfarer and authentic being occurs very late in the novel and is effected by what, in a parallel context, Percy calls “some dim dazzling trick of grace.” In fact, only a few pages from the end Binx laments that, having but one gift, “a good nose for merde,” the only course for him to follow is “to fall prey to desire.” There is even some justice to his Aunt Emily’s judgment of him: In crucial situations, Binx invariably chooses to “default,” to exit. Yet, in the final pages, it is clear that Binx will do so no longer. Neither, however, will he play the part his aunt has chosen for him—southern stoic. He will go to medical school, not because she wants him to but because now he knows what to do: to observe and to serve others.

Binx’s leap is reflected in the very texture of Percy’s prose. Until the epilogue, which takes place one year later, Binx has narrated his tale chiefly in what may be termed his detached, matter-of-fact, moviegoer style, against which the very few lyrical passages, used to underscore Binx’s wonder and the gracefulness of his world, stand in vivid contrast. In the epilogue, Binx drops the moviegoer style (and the references to films) entirely; instead, he speaks easily, authentically, authoritatively. The man who earlier had been cousin, half brother, and ironic impersonator, now is husband, brother, and sovereign wayfarer.

The Last Gentleman

Williston Bibb Barrett, or Billy Barrett, the protagonist of Percy’s second novel, The Last Gentleman, is a modern-day version of Dostoevski’s Prince Myshkin in The Idiot (1868). Although far less ironic than Binx Bolling, Barrett is far more disturbed, as his periodic fugue states and bouts of amnesia and déjà vu attest. Existing in a state of pure possibility, he is incapable of making any one decisive act or choice. He has tried and failed both to live the therapeutic life and to engineer his own destiny. Knowing something is missing in his life, Barrett seeks to recover reality and find his being in the “gap” between self and other. Specifically, these others are the members of the Vaught family, and his search is a spiritual odyssey, modeled on Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which takes him from New York to his native Ithaca, then on to Mississippi, and finally to Santa Fe (Holy Faith), New Mexico, and the Sangre de Cristo (Blood of Christ) mountains.

The search begins when Barrett accidentally discovers Kitty Vaught and her sister-in-law, Rita, in Central Park. Rita, a secular humanist and advocate of self-fulfillment, quickly realizes she will not be able either to control or to convert Barrett and tries unsuccessfully to get rid of him. Barrett, however, has already fallen in love with Kitty, a rather pale version of Kate Cutrer—less anxiety-ridden, more successful in her impersonations. Barrett’s love affair is both furthered and complicated by Kitty’s younger brother, Jamie, whose traveling companion he becomes. The fact that Jamie is dying establishes definite limits to the pure possibility of his and Barrett’s lives and causes Barrett to consider his search more profoundly when he meets another sister, Val, and brother, Sutter, the two “absentee experts” (as Barrett calls them) who force him to make his existential choice. Val, a convert to Catholicism and a nun, has dedicated herself to teaching mute children to speak and to believe the Catholic religion. (All people are like her children, she claims; they are waiting to be told what to do.) Whereas she is hopeful and apostolic, Sutter, a diagnostician and pathologist, is suicidal and ironically quixotic. He rejects her belief in the human as wayfarer, claiming “We are doomed to the transcendence of abstraction and I choose the only reentry into the world which remains to us”: cynicism, lewdness, and detachment.

Sutter’s mistake, as Barrett well understands, is the positing of extreme alternatives such as God or no God, transcendence or immanence. Moreover, Sutter’s concern for Jamie betrays his basically religious nature, and it is this, more than his medical expertise, that has led Barrett to look to him for answers. At Jamie’s baptism, it is Sutter who comprehends what is happening. Barrett, although he acts as interpreter between Jamie and the priest, misses the religious significance. He does understand that something has happened, however, and to discover what that something is he tracks down Sutter, who has decided to commit suicide. Barrett’s search for an answer is, as Percy noted, a search for a father, ultimately for the Father, God; his own father, Barrett finally realizes, had looked for his answer in all the wrong places—solitude, “old sad poetry,” and the music of Johannes Brahms. The son’s “wait” did not keep the father from killing himself, but it does save Sutter, who appears in the final tableau less as an oracle than as Barrett’s self-chosen—and therefore sovereign—responsibility.

Love in the Ruins

Subtitled The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World, Percy’s Love in the Ruins is a broad satire on the state of the modern world—in particular, its behaviorist assumptions and political absurdities. The novel may be flawed, as some reviewers have contended, by the author’s insistent and at times rather heavy-handed social criticism; there is, however, a comic vitality in this novel that seems to offset such reservations about it as literary art. This comic vitality, quite unlike the irony and understatement that characterize Percy’s earlier novels, is appropriate to a work that has the topics of community and reconciliation as two of its major concerns. As Percy explained in his essay “Notes for a Novel about the End of the World,” the apocalyptic novelist serves two purposes: As prophet, or canary in the coal mine, he cries out in order to avert disaster; and as coupling agent, he connects humankind with reality. It is by means of the coupling process that disaster is averted, as Percy quietly suggests in the novel’s closing image of a couple “twined about each other as the ivy twineth,” in which what has been a sign of ruin (the ivy) is transformed into a symbol of intersubjective love.

The story, which is spoken into a pocket tape recorder by the hero, Tom More, as he keeps watch for snipers, follows a five-part structure (July Fourth, First, Second, Third, Fourth) that progressively becomes more chaotic until, in the epilogue (“Five Years Later”), peace and order are restored. The time of the novel is a not too distant future that bears a clear, if comically exaggerated, resemblance to the American 1960’s: The fifteen-year war in Ecuador continues, racial tensions and Bantu uprisings are increasing, and the Catholic Church has split into three factions. In short, “the center did not hold.” The physical setting is just as perverse as the social-political: Paradise Estates, home of the well-to-do and the spiritually impoverished; Fedville, a sprawling compound that includes a Masters and Johnson Love Clinic, where former priest Kev Kevin reads Commonweal and presides over the vaginal console; Honey Island Swamp, a counterculture retreat; and the golf course, where a banner proclaims “Jesus Christ, the Greatest Pro of Them All.”

Percy’s hero is as troubled as his society but in a different way. Forty-five years old and a collateral descendant of Sir/Saint Thomas, he is at once a doctor and a mental patient, a diagnostician but also a metaphysician in a world of behaviorists ready and willing to condition away any remaining feelings of guilt he may have. He is of the type that Kierkegaard termed aesthetic damnation, as he loves, in descending order of importance, women, music, science, God, and, “hardly at all,” his fellow human. He has lost that thread in the world labyrinth that, until the death of his daughter, Samantha, made the world seem sensible and holy. His faith gone, Tom More has his own messianic ambition, a plan to “save” America with More’s Qualitative Quantitative Ontological Lapsometer. His invention—“the stethoscope of the spirit…the first caliper of the soul”—is designed to measure the gap between the outer, social self and true, inner being; he hopes to modify the lapsometer so that it can cure as well as diagnose humankind’s fall from being, to put together what Descartes tore apart. Like Percy and, to a degree, like Sutter Vaught, More is troubled by the modern world’s indifference to being and people’s willingness to define themselves in half measures: the angel that, falling prey to abstraction, is unable to “reenter the lovely ordinary world,” or the beast that adapts to its environment and so becomes the organism behaviorists say the human is.

Art Immelmann (Mephistopheles to More’s Faust) tempts him with spurious “good news”: a multimillion dollar development grant and the Nobel Prize. The price is, of course, More’s soul—his being, his sense of personal responsibility. More resists the devil and so escapes aesthetic damnation; by not committing the unpardonable sin (refusing God’s grace), he puts an end to the “feasting on death” that has preoccupied him since the onset of his daughter’s illness and begins to live in the “lovely ordinary world” once again. Instead of an apocalypse, the novel ends with a new beginning, a Christmas morning. Reborn, Tom More no longer loves abstractly or bestially; he has married his former nurse, Ellen Oglethorpe, a Georgia Presbyterian, whose belief takes the form of charity. Equally important, More now knows what it is he wants: not prizes or women, but

Lancelot

Percy’s fourth novel, Lancelot, is by far his most troubling. Structurally, it follows the odd dialogue form of Camus’s The Fall (1956); until the last two pages, only the voice of the protagonist is heard, addressing a “you” whose responses are not given. More disturbing is that, as Joyce Carol Oates has pointed out, the views of the main character, a self-righteous and unrepentant murderer, are strikingly similar to those of the author. Readers must recognize, as Percy surely does, the nature of the protagonist’s grotesque mistake—the sources from which it derives and the ends to which it leads.

Lancelot Andrewes Lamar speaks his Poe-like tale from the Center for Aberrant Behavior in New Orleans, where he has been confined for one year. Although in the course of his apologia/confession Lance identifies his wife Margot’s infidelity as the immediate cause of his murdering her and the members of the film company with whom she was involved, the actual causes go much further back and have less to do with Margot than with his own wasted life and his position as the last in a fallen line of southern aristocrats. As a Lamar, Lance has inherited not only the family homestead, Belle Isle, but also a way of judging humankind in absolute terms. His first wife, Lucy, was (or so Lance remembers her) an angel, whereas Margot, who for a time he turned into a goddess, became beast or devil.

Dividing his life into two parts—before he discovered his wife’s adultery and after—he proclaims that the past is “absolutely dead” and the future will be “absolutely new.” This penchant for absolutes suggests Lance’s inability or unwillingness to confront the ambiguity and mystery of human existence and is related to the way the Lamars view human life in terms of individual, historically significant events. Thus, Lance’s life is reduced to his 110-yard touchdown run against Alabama and his destruction of Belle Isle and everyone in it. Lance does understand that performing such feats is actually less difficult than living an ordinary life, but when he turns Margot’s infidelity into a quest for the “unholy grail,” he in effect sidesteps the ordinary life that is far “more complicated and ambiguous” than either the historical events venerated by the Lamars or the clichéd films of Margot and her friends.

Like their film, Lance’s quest is superficial and derivative (it is cast in the mold of the Raymond Chandler detective novels he has been reading). Moreover, it leads Lance, as Cleanth Brooks has demonstrated, to commit a modern version of the Gnostic heresy. Claiming that the original sin was something God did to humans and judging Christianity as much a failure as southern stoicism, Lance determines to destroy the present age, which he cannot tolerate, and start over in a new Eden with his new Eve, a fellow patient named Anna who, he believes, as the victim of a brutal gang rape, has been restored to innocence. Lance is wrong about Anna, however; she never lost her innocence. He also is wrong about Christianity, if one distinguishes, as Kierkegaard did, between Christianity (as embodied in Percival, Lance’s listener to whom the novel is spoken) and Christendom, which Lance is right to reject as a viable alternative to his intolerable age.

Lance’s confession, as well as his predicament, brings his friend Percival’s spiritual ambivalence into sharp focus; Percival, the Prince Hal of their early manhood who has since been ordained Father John, is torn between two roles—priest and psychiatrist—and two approaches to human existence—the religious and the behavioral. It is Percival’s fellow psychiatrists who certify Lance as sane, even though both Lance and Percival know there is still something wrong, something missing. As a psychiatrist, Percival cannot help Lance, whose problem is ontological and spiritual rather than psychological, and whose self-righteous ranting masks his deeper uncertainty and longing. When, at the very end of the novel, Lance asks, “Is there anything I can do for you before I leave?” Percival’s “Yes” identifies him as the apostolic Father John, the bearer of the good news for which Lance has been waiting. Against such grand gestures as blowing up Belle Isle, Percy offers the power of a small, ordinary word freshly heard.

The Second Coming

The Second Coming was, as Percy noted, his “first unalienated novel.” Instead of the ambiguity that characterizes the endings of his earlier novels, here the author celebrates the unequivocal victory of love over death. While such a conclusion did not please all reviewers, many of whom found it unconvincing or even sentimental, it is consistent with Percy’s religious vision and his flexible aesthetic with its various tones and broad range of narrative structures: the novelist’s version of God’s plenty.

The novel picks up the life of Will Barrett some twenty years after The Last Gentleman. At the age of forty-three, Will is a retired lawyer, a wealthy widower living in Linwood, North Carolina, and a recent recipient of the Rotary’s man-of-the-year award; yet, he is still a sick man, subject to dizzy spells and tricks of memory. What troubles Will is not the loss of his wife, Marion, but the sudden realization that he has wasted his life and been “only technically alive.” At the brink of the abyss, he sees himself as a total stranger; only two percent of himself, he sets out to find the missing ninety-eight percent. His search takes him in a number of directions. One is back to his father, or more specifically to the only “event” in his life. This is a hunting accident that he comes to realize was no accident at all but instead the father’s attempt to kill his son and then himself and so free them both from lives not worth living.

Like his father, Will rejects the “death in life” that characterizes modern believers as well as unbelievers; Will also rejects his father’s solution, suicide, because it proves nothing. Instead, he devises the “ultimate scientific experiment” that will, he believes, provide conclusive proof of either God’s existence or His nonexistence/noninvolvement. As the narrator points out, Will is mad; moreover, his plan (to starve himself and so force God either to save or abandon him) is badly flawed in two important ways. The language Will uses to define his experiment (actually more a “covenant”) betrays his egotism as well as his legalistic frame of reference; to his “huge” bequest (his life), he attaches a “huge” condition (God’s appearing to him). Not until much later in the novel does he learn “the economy of giving and getting” and the superiority of ordinary existence to his own ultimate experiments or his father’s extraordinary “events.”

In addition, Will is looking for God in the wrong place. While waiting in the cave for “a clear yes [or] no,” he misses the unambiguous beauty of Indian summer; and while he assails God’s “unavailability,” his own “fade outs,” such as the cave experiment, preclude the very intersubjective relationships through which God manifests Himself to humankind. The sign he does receive, a toothache, is “a muddy maybe” that cuts short the experiment and sends Will howling in pain out of the wilderness of self and into a world that, while not physically new, can be seen in an original way.

The person who changes Will’s angle of vision is Allison Huger (Kitty Vaught’s daughter), who has just escaped her own cave, a mental hospital, and begun a new life in an abandoned greenhouse. She resembles Will in that she feels uncomfortable around other people, as well she should, for the Allison they see is the mentally disturbed organism for whom they can imagine nothing better than “the best-structured environment money can buy.” Although she wants to live an entirely self-reliant life, each afternoon about four o’clock she experiences a sense of loss or emptiness. What she feels is identical to one of the symptoms of Will’s disease (Hausmann’s syndrome), which the doctors call “inappropriate longing.” There is a pill to control Will’s disease, but there is only one way to satisfy the longing, and that is by loving Allison, by finding his being in her just as she finds hers in him. As Allison explains in her characteristically melodic way, “Our lapses are not due to synapses.” Percy’s love story is not, therefore, simply romantic; rather, it is religious in the Christian existential sense. Their love is, to quote Allison again, “be-all” but not “end-all.” When, in the novel’s concluding scene, Will confronts Father Weatherbee, an old priest, Will’s

Here, as in the four earlier novels, one finds what Sartre called humanity’s useless passion, but for Percy this passionate longing is not useless at all because the world is not absurd. Percy’s search is not one of Sartre’s purely arbitrary projects; rather it is a thoroughly modern and, for many readers, an entirely convincing rendition of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678, 1684) in an age mired in the slough of behaviorism and unbelief.

The Thanatos Syndrome

The Thanatos Syndrome, Percy’s sixth and last novel, ends a bit differently, which is to say less insistently. Narrator-protagonist Dr. Tom More’s “well well well” befits the smaller scale of his latter-day desires, yet this fit proves ironic, given the novel’s overgrand, at times messianic ambitions (of the kind More himself had in Love in the Ruins). Similarities between the two novels are obvious (they share a number of the same characters and the same futurist-fantasy approach), but both the strengths and the weaknesses of The Thanatos Syndrome owe far more to Lost in the Cosmos than to Love in the Ruins: the satirizing of contemporary absurdities (inauthenticity in some of its craziest manifestations) and, unfortunately, the hardening of that spiritual need, which characterizes Will Barrett and Binx Bolling, into religious dogma. What was a translation of Christian belief into psychological, cultural, and semiotic terms inthe earlier novels has begun to sound here like a propounding of conservative Catholic teachings, which undermines a novel that otherwise effectively mixes Sir Thomas More’s 1516 Utopia, medieval romance, Fyodor Dostoevski, and Robin Cook.

The novel picks up the life and times of Tom More in the mid-1990’s, a short while after his release from federal prison, where he has served a two-year term for illegally selling drugs. A brilliant diagnostician, More describes himself as “a psyche-iatrist, an old-fashioned physician of the soul” who believes that it is better, psychologically and spiritually speaking, to be sick (anxious, even terrified) than well, for disease is the natural state of the prelapsarian human being. Many of the people around him are, he realizes, anything but anxious. They are, instead, content: without inhibitions, without anxiety, without anything more than rudimentary language skills, and, most important, without a sense of self. With the help of his epidemiologist cousin Lucy Lipscomb, More discovers Blue Boy, a clandestinely funded pilot project that involves introducing heavy sodium into the local water supply in order to stem the tide of social deterioration (crime, teenage pregnancy, even acquired immunodeficiency syndrome).

The ironically “graceful” Bob Comeaux (née Robert D’Angelo Como), who calls Blue Boy “our Manhattan Project,” is the director of Blue Boy and indeed of the entire “Fedville” complex (including an Equalitarian Center with facilities for “pedeuthanasia” and “gereuthanasia” and a propensity for obfuscating acronyms). He tries to cajole, seduce, bribe, and threaten More into complicity, all to no avail. Although he remains a lapsed Catholic throughout, the doctor nevertheless sides with the enigmatic, certainly depressed, previously alcoholic, perhaps mad Father Simon (as in Simeon Stylites and Simon Peter) Smith. Father Simon spends all of his time in a fire tower silently triangulating the positions of forest fires, atoning for his sins, and, on one notable occasion, claiming that all tenderness inevitably leads to the gas chamber (or to the Equalitarian Center, which may be the same thing in a different, more socially acceptable, guise). Comeaux would make everyone happy, at the cost of his or her freedom as well as awareness of him- or herself as a distinctly human being: a creature caught in the malaise, lost in the cosmos, in need of something other than heavy sodium or self-help.

As in Saul Bellow’s The Dean’s December (1982), The Thanatos Syndrome expresses More’s faith (in there being “more” than Comeaux allows) in the form of a doubt concerning the modern belief that the causes and cures of humankind’s problems are invariably physical. To the extent that The Thanatos Syndrome articulates this doubt, it, like Percy’s other novels, succeeds extraordinarily well. To the extent that it propounds Catholic dogma in response to a host of topical issues (abortion, quality of life, sexual freedom, child abuse, bio- and behavioral engineering, among others), it fails according to the very terms that Percy himself adopted at the time of his conversion, turning the triadic mystery of Søren Kierkegaard’s apostle into dyadic pronouncement, sign into signal, and spiritual predicament into position paper.