“The Most Ordinary Life Imaginable”: Cold War Culture in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer

Abstract

There is much to be said for giving up such grand ambitions and living most ordinary life imaginable, life without old longings; selling stocks and bonds and mutual funds; quitting work at five o'clock like everyone else. --Walker Percy, The Moviegoer In 1989 interview, just two years before his death from prostate cancer, Walker Percy addressed his reluctance to be identified as author, explaining you're described as southern writer, you might be thought of as someone who writes about picaresque local scene like Uncle Tom's Cabin, Gone With Wind, something like that (qtd in Lawson & Kramer More Conversations 223). Though most of his protagonists are southern by birth and New Orleans figures prominently in The Moviegoer (1961), role of region in Percy's fiction is far cry from Lanterns on Levee (1944), nostalgic memoirs of his cousin and adopted father, William Alexander Percy. Rather than writing to lament passing of an old southern order or because of some personal connection with region, Percy explains that, for him, southern settings simply provide means of writing about specific circumstances, about a particular fellow living in particular house and finding himself in particular concrete predicament (Culture Critics 2.47). Though Binx Bolling lives in New Orleans and muses over his aunt's views of southern society, Percy claims novel ultimately focuses on alienation of individual in modern age, existence of one particular subject in world transformed by science. In considering Binx's struggle with alienation, number of critics reflect on Percy's own interest in Kierkegaardian existentialism and attempt to decode way it is manifested in his fiction. Such criticism, however, works in something of vacuum, as it tends to consider Binx's recurrent melancholia and search he resolves to continue in first chapter of novel without exploring specific social or historical context of The Moviegoer. Throughout interviews collected by Lewis Lawson and Victor Kramer and in his own articles, Percy repeatedly emphasizes importance of particular in literature, arguing if fiction does explore larger social conditions or philosophical concepts, it should do so through experience of one individual and his specific circumstances. In short, novel should reflect the life of its (qtd in Lawson & Kramer Conversations 25). Despite Percy's insistence on primacy of each character's specific circumstances, and regardless of unique regional, national, and global milieu at time of The Moviegoer's publication, literary critics have not asked what life or time novel represents, or in what concrete circumstances Binx Boiling finds himself. Though novel does deal with alienation, there is also great deal of time and attention devoted to consumer culture and cultural products such as movies, television, and radio programs. Furthermore, much is made of Binx's life in 1950s New Orleans suburb of Gentilly and his attention to consumerism and media. Though Binx lives in New Orleans and his narration is filtered through particular geographical and cultural lens, his experience nonetheless represents national, social, and economic trends. When reader first meets Binx Bolling, he is living life quite typical of young postwar adults. In his 1995 analysis of South's modernization, Numan Bartley argues Binx Bolling's experience points up an increasingly individualized society as southerners joined rest of nation in modern-day alienation. By shedding values of an older South, New South had become place where credit cards defined an individual's identity. In Percy's fictional middle-class world, according to Bartley, a person lived without values, measured success by money, and alleviated boredom with periodic sexual conquests. …