9 IV 2008
In Walker Percy’s Moviegoer, the protagonist, Binx Bolling, goes through a process which he calls “the search” as a means out from a state of alienation from his surroundings and the prevalent culture. The content of the “search” has heavy existentialist themes: it is meant to bring a totalizing notion of existence against mere categories that define one to be either religious or irreligious. At one point Bolling protests in annoyance that statistics show 98% of all people in his time and place believe in god while only 2% are atheists or agnostics, leaving no place for those who are “searching”—this is a criticism against the social practice of reducing personal beliefs of great personal significance to a mere quantifiable, “objective” number that bears no connection to the individual (14). The society functions well in its institutions and its norms (i.e. White, elitist southern culture); hence the subject, in order to escape from this indifference, goes through the “search” to find authenticity. In this novel Bolling’s aunt serves as an example of social force that attempts to define and shape Bolling’s character—she wants him to go back to school and become a doctor just like his father, as Bolling is good with reading and analyzing books. But Bolling eventually rebel against this position: he states that he only means to read because his aunt has shaped him to do so rather than from his individual will.
The search, then, is meant for a change—“the search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life” (13). It has a totalizing effect—as Bolling states, “as you get deeper into the search, you unify…you understand more and more specimens by fewer and fewer formulae” (82). But does this search really bring about authenticity? Or does it “end in despair” like the movies which Bolling see as an attempt for such search? It is not convincing that the search can be any successful; instead, it only seems to bring a sense of liberation in close connection to death. Kate is suicidal, and Lonnie, the other person undergoing the search, dies at a mere age of 15. Perhaps the search does not bring a sense of liberation; Bolling states during the occasion of his thirtieth birthday the result of this search:
Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less than I ever knew before, having learned only to recognize merde when I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for every species of shit that flies—my only talent—smelling merde from every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle, and one hundred percent of people are humanists and ninety-eight percent believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead; and the malaise has settled alike a fall-out and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall—on this my thirtieth birthday, I know nothing and there is nothing to do but fall prey to desire…nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian Fields like a mistral. My search has been abandoned (228).
In effect, then, Bolling’s search, too, ended in an impasse; facing a fragile Kate and a demanding aunt, he gives in; he ends Kate’s search, too, by bringing her away from constant thoughts of suicide. He stops going to the movie by himself and becomes, so to speak, a normal person that conforms. Yet I must question: does he become better off after such search only to realize the despair of conformity? I am rather doubtful that the search is any more fruitful than other types of contemplation, religious or not. It only reminds one of the malaise, the sickness, and the death-instinct of life—yet one cannot truly face such notions all the time. So with the search, one is forced to face a gloomy reality at once cannot accept so; in the end he is stuck in an impasse of despair—perhaps with more knowledge, but only knowledge of one’s inability and despair.
