{"id":61451,"date":"2013-10-21T15:46:11","date_gmt":"2013-10-21T19:46:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=61451"},"modified":"2013-10-21T15:46:11","modified_gmt":"2013-10-21T19:46:11","slug":"signpost-in-a-strange-land","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/10\/21\/signpost-in-a-strange-land\/","title":{"rendered":"Signpost in a Strange Land"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"canal_1950slarge\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I\u2019m worried about America. I\u2019m worried about its bankrupt cities, its abandoned factories, and its intractable wars. I\u2019m worried that the country faces \u201ca crisis of confidence,\u201d as Jimmy Carter declared in his famous \u201cMalaise\u201d speech, back in 1979. The recent shutdown of the federal government is just the latest indication that America has lost its \u201cunity of purpose,\u201d giving rise to \u201cgrowing doubt about the meaning of [its citizens\u2019] lives.\u201d I love America\u2014how can you not love the country that gave us jazz and barbecue and The Godfather Part II<\/i>?\u2014so I take no pleasure from these fatalistic musings. Instead, I find myself looking for comfort, and a sense of perspective, in a novel written half a century ago by another soul-searching Southerner. If Jimmy Carter gave America the \u201cMalaise\u201d speech, then Walker Percy wrote the book on it.<\/p>\n

Published in 1961, The Moviegoer<\/i> was Percy\u2019s first and most widely praised novel, the highlight of a remarkable life in American letters that ended in 1990. His protagonist is a stockbroker in late-fifties New Orleans, a young man pursuing an interest in the movies and affairs with his secretaries, quietly dedicating himself to family and finance. But soon Binx Bolling finds himself on a \u201csearch\u201d for a more authentic life, something that will measure and mark his existence against the passage of time. \u201cThe search,\u201d he explains, \u201cis what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.\u201d Over the course of a fateful Mardi Gras weekend, Binx comes face to face with the same specter that haunts the rubble of postcrash America: \u201cthe cold and fishy eye of the malaise.\u201d <\/p>\n

Binx Bolling is at first glance an unusual poster boy for the current depression, an era in which the quest for self-realization might seem an unaffordable luxury. But the search for meaning has never ebbed and flowed according to the fluctuations of the stock market. Millions of Americans led interior, profoundly solitary lives during the bubble years that started the twenty-first century, and they now confront even more acute feelings of dislocation. Binx is a soulful and profane standard-bearer for that disillusionment, \u201csmelling merde from every quarter\u201d of American life. He fails in his half-hearted love affairs. He confounds his family with his disregard for rectitude and tradition. Alienated from both the Old South and the New America, Binx staggers towards the same sobering realization that dogged Jimmy Carter in the summer of 1979. \u201dWe\u2019ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning,\u201d Carter preached in his speech. \u201cWe\u2019ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.\u201d<\/p>\n

Binx seeks to fill this void by immersing himself in the the quintessential art form of his era. \u201cIn the darkness at the movies,\u201d Pauline Kael once wrote, \u201cwhere nothing is asked of us and we are left alone, the liberation from duty and constraint allows us to develop our own aesthetic responses.\u201d Binx\u2019s pilgrimages to suburban movie palaces are both an escape from everydayness and a heightened experience of the world around him, an opportunity to \u201cdiscover \u2026 place and time, taste \u2026 it like okra.\u201d During a screening of Panic in the Streets<\/i> in the very New Orleans neighborhood where the movie was filmed, he finds he can \u201clive, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere.\u201d This is movie-going as an existential affirmation, a bold gambit to stave off the encroaching anonymity of twentieth-century life.<\/p>\n

Binx\u2019s thirst for escapism and identity lends a certain poignancy to our culture\u2019s recent obsession with the post-war boom times depicted in The Moviegoer. <\/i>We\u2019ve been enthralled by the sleek aesthetic spectacle of AMC\u2019s Mad Men<\/i>, nostalgic for the Technicolor glamour of sixties fashion, finance and femininity. Like Don Draper, Mad Men<\/i>\u2019s resident symbol of midcentury machismo, Binx Bolling is both a paragon of postwar respectability\u2014a successful businessman who feels \u201cthe same cheerful and expanding benevolence\u201d every time \u201cAmerican Motors jumps two dollars\u201d\u2014and a man deeply ambivalent about life in a gray flannel suit. (Draper has also been known to take refuge in an afternoon matinee.) But where Mad Men<\/i> peddles a fundamentally comforting vision of the early sixties, slyly nodding at the decades of social progress that separate us from its characters, Binx is unrelenting in his skepticism toward his \u201ccentury of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied [and] everyone becomes an anyone.\u201d This contrast isn\u2019t simply a matter of historical perspective; it\u2019s a reflection of Percy\u2019s profound dismay at the emotional and spiritual strictures of life in a global supply chain. As Percy remarked on accepting the National Book Award in 1962, The Moviegoer<\/i> is a lament for \u201cthe loss of individuality and the loss of identity at the very time when words like the \u2018dignity of the individual\u2019 and \u2018self-realization\u2019 are being heard more frequently than ever.\u201d<\/p>\n

That Percy sounds this plaintive cry without hitting the note of shrill sanctimony that doomed Jimmy Carter is a tribute to his gifts as a stylist and a storyteller. Binx\u2019s search unfolds against a rich backdrop of New Orleans dusk and bayou dawn, a riot of color and texture. Delightful comic set pieces punctuate the narrative, forming an exuberant counterpoint to Percy\u2019s sobering meditations on mortality. When an encounter with a family friend sets Binx\u2019s malaise radar on red alert, his vision of the woman\u2019s desolate existence\u2014\u201cwhy does she talk as if she were dead? Another forty years to go and dead dead dead\u201d\u2014is leavened by a madcap account of the \u201crumble in [his] descending bowel, heralding a tremendous defecation.\u201d She \u201cgoes on talking and there is nothing to do but shift around as best one can, take care not to fart.\u201d Nothing like a gust of flatulence to blow one back from the abyss.<\/p>\n

Percy would surely greet reports forecasting the end of the current depression with a similar eruption of mirth and melancholy. \u201cWhenever there is a chance of gain there is also a chance of loss,\u201d Binx declares in the frenzied aftermath of a car crash. \u201cWhenever one courts great happiness, one also risks malaise.\u201d There\u2019s something strangely comforting about Binx\u2019s equanimity, his stoicism in the face of forces beyond his control. Like Binx and his Mad Men<\/i> contemporaries, unaware of the assassinations and race riots and terrifying hairstyles lurking just around the corner, we have no idea what will emerge out of the seismic changes convulsing our national governments and our global economy. Consider The Moviegoer<\/i> a signpost in these strange times, a beacon lit by the eternal flames of Percy\u2019s imagination: the alienation and despair that persist in times of plenty and paucity alike; the power of language and humor to still these tremors and give them meaning. The malaise will endure, he warns us. The search will continue.<\/p>\n

Will Di Novi is a writer based in Toronto. He has written for the<\/em> Atlantic, <\/em>Salon, <\/em>The New Republic, <\/em>The Nation, and the Rumpus.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m worried about America. I\u2019m worried about its bankrupt cities, its abandoned factories, and its intractable wars. I\u2019m worried that the country faces \u201ca crisis of confidence,\u201d as Jimmy Carter declared in his famous \u201cMalaise\u201d speech, back in 1979. The recent shutdown of the federal government is just the latest indication that America has lost […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":610,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[12049,676,8779,2620],"class_list":["post-61451","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-jimmy-carter","tag-mad-men","tag-the-moviegoer","tag-walker-percy"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nSignpost in a Strange Land by Will Di Novi<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"October 21, 2013 \u2013 I\u2019m worried about America. 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