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Becky Tewes
Independent Study
Professor Schwartz
January 17, 2007
Loss, Repetition, and Emotional Disconnection in The Moviegoer
“‘More than anything I wanted to pass on to you the one heritage of the men of our family, a certain quality of spirit, a gaiety, a sense of duty, a nobility worn lightly, a sweetness, a gentleness with women—the only good things the South ever had and the only things that really matter in this life. Ah well. Still you can tell me one thing. I know you’re not a bad boy—I wish you were. But how did it happen that none of this ever meant anything to you? Clearly it did not. Would you please tell me? I am genuinely curious’” (224).
“What is the malaise? you ask. The malaise is the pain of loss. The world is lost to you, the world and the people in it, and there remains only you and the world and you no more able to be in the world than Banquo’s ghost” (120).
In The Moviegoer narrator, John Binkerson Bolling (known also as Binx or Jack), exhibits a peculiar, irrefutable distance in his relationships with women. In the following study I will attempt to locate the source of his detachment and demonstrate his efforts to resolve it and cure himself once and for all. Symptoms of his detachment are immediately recognizable in the opening of his narrative and traceable to the near epilogue. He displays an emotional detachment in his relationships with women, sometimes to the point of denying outright that he feels any emotion at all. Additionally, Jack can frequently be found resorting to role-play of specific actors whose personae he wishes to convey as a means of winning people over; yet this odd behavior simply adds to the distance between himself and others. Jack’s lack of authenticity in relationships is a consequence of a particular traumatic childhood experience that is replayed in his relationships with women, with his Aunt Emily, and in the memory of his relationship with his father. As a means of self-healing Jack returns repeatedly to the painful aspects of his past and these losses with the intention of understanding what went wrong and with the hope of regaining some of what he lost in the process. The biggest roadblock to Jack’s success is shrugging off the over-bearing expectations of his Aunt Emily. Jack opens his narrative with a description of his relationship with his Aunt Emily, which, sure enough, lacks an element of authenticity. He tells that she has sent him a note to meet with him for what he presumes is “one of her serious talks,” admitting one such talk “is enough to scare the wits out of anyone” while readily maintaining “I do not find the prospect altogether unpleasant” (emphasis mine), (3). Jack seems to suggest the difference between his relationship with his aunt and that of anyone else with her can be attributed to his capacity to endure her speeches while remaining emotionally disengaged. Yet while attempting to articulate his immunity to Emily’s frightful speeches, he inadvertently demonstrates how truly frightening her serious talks can be when he tells, I remember when my older brother Scott died of pneumonia. I was eight years old. My aunt had charge of me and she took me for a walk behind the hospital. [. . .] “Jack,” she said, squeezing me tight and smiling at the Negro shacks, “you and I have always been good buddies, haven’t we?” “Yes ma’am.” My heart gave a big pump and the back of my neck prickled like a dog’s. “I’ve got bad news for you, son.” She squeezed me tighter than ever. “Scotty is dead. Now it’s all up to you. It’s going to be difficult for you but I know you’re going to act like a soldier.” This was true. I could easily act like a soldier. Was that all I had to do? (3,4)
That young Jack’s solution to the horrific news his aunt unimaginably blurts out to him is simply to act like a soldier demonstrates the lasting and devastating impact these serious talks had on him: coincident with his tendency to deny or repress her stern frankness in an attempt to meet her unforgiving expectations is his corresponding, unrelenting propensity to detach emotionally from the events in his life and view himself as a character in a movie. It is not surprising then that Jack’s recollection of Emily’s talk with him about Scott’s death “reminds me of a movie,” which he then proceeds to describe. Jack tells, the “movie was about a man who lost his memory in an accident and as a result lost everything: his family, his friends, his money. He found himself a stranger in a strange city.” The loss of his identity is so complete that he must go “through the newspaper files in search of some clue to his identity” (4, 5). That Jack parallels his life to one who has lost everything including his identity underscores the overwhelming nature of his sense of loss. To be sure, the loss that Scott’s death creates is compounded by Emily’s enormous expectation that he somehow fulfill his brother’s potential along with his own (“Now it’s all up to you”). She has chosen for him how he will react to Scott’s death (“like a soldier”), leaving him no emotional space to make this important decision privately, or to make no conscious decision at all. Jack, then, has not only lost a brother, but has lost the freedom to live as may have wished. And while at age eight it is difficult for Jack to comprehend exactly what was taken from him (“I could easily act like a soldier. Was that all I had to do?”), looking back on it as an adult, he seems to comprehend its enormity. The problem, however, is that just as swiftly as he acknowledges all of the actor’s losses in the movie (losses he parallels to his own), he denies that any significant loss exists: It was supposed to be a tragedy, his losing all this, and he seemed to suffer a great deal. On the other hand, things were not so bad after all. In no time he found a very picturesque place to live, a houseboat on the river, and a very handsome girl, the local librarian (4,5).
Correspondingly, he makes the same emotional maneuver in his own life--creating allowances for his own personal losses by focusing on his subsequent gains -- such as playing up his unique relationship with his aunt and downplaying the cost he had to pay to gain her affection. While one might ordinarily draw strength from this sort of positive-mindedness, the endurance potential of Jack’s imagined gains are no match for his losses. Happiness for Jack seems easily enough attained at the movie theater. In fact, the theater marquee, which reads “Where Happiness Costs So Little,” aptly iterates Jack’s emotional and financial thrift. He admits, “The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. 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” (7). Yet because it is obtained superficially, Jack’s happiness strains to carry him through his losses. That Jack prefers to obtain his satisfaction vicariously reveals a peculiar lack of confidence in his ability to make himself and others happy. He tells that other people’s experiences like “the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books,” overshadows his own: “I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember,” he reveals (7). The trouble is that Jack compares himself to fictional characters whose romanticized experiences lack the simple ordinariness that characterizes his own life experience. Consequently, his happiness suffers. He justifies never truly finding happiness by explaining, “Whenever one courts great happiness, one also risks malaise” (121). Yet in describing his relationship with his secretary Linda, Jack tells that coming to the theater brings him great pleasure and standing outside there now, “I felt very good.” However, he reveals, “Linda stood by unhappily. She was unhappy for the same reasons I was happy” (5). While one might find that essentially problematic, Jack reflects that he is able to find happiness in her happiness, and during these times (when she is happy) he truly feels loved. He describes what he imagines are signs of her affection which she demonstrates when he brings her to her favorite restaurant for dinner: Her eyes glow, her lips become moist, and when we dance she brushes her fine long legs against mine. She actually loves me at these times—and not as a reward for being taken to the Blue Room. She loves me because she feels exalted in this romantic place and not in a movie out in the sticks (5).
But her glum expression at the movie theater and his confession that taking her to her favorite restaurant is something he is “obliged to do from time to time” is evidence of their mutual unwillingness to allow each other more than infrequent bouts of personal bliss. While Jack maintains they are in love, he reveals his affection with undeniable restraint, and is hasty to deem their love insignificant when he realizes it is over: glibly he reveals, “All this is history. Linda and I have parted company. I have a new secretary, a girl named Sharon Kincaid” (5). Jack would have us believe that losing Linda is not tragic because she has been replaced. The ease with which Jack replaces Linda is disconcerting, however, and reflects his lack of authenticity in love. He admits, “Naturally I would like to say that I had made conquests of these splendid girls, my secretaries, casting them off one after the other like old gloves, but it would not be strictly true” (8). The truth is Jack may not be the one who does the “casting” and, in an effort to protect himself, builds into each of his romantic relationships a position of power by hiring girls for both roles: secretary and girlfriend. The emotional authority he wields over them may be imagined however, as evinced by his concern that his affection for his secretaries could be bad for business: If ever my business should suffer because of my admiration for Sharon, then my admiration for Sharon would suffer too. Never, never will I understand men who throw over everything for some woman. The trick, the joy of it, is to prosper on all fronts, enlist money in the service of love and love in the service of money. As long as I am getting rich, I feel that all is well. It is my Presbyterian blood (102).
Jack’s concern with finding the perfect balance between love and money underscores his insecurity in love; material wealth provides him with an excuse to avoid affection and distracts him from the discomfort his vulnerability creates. He tells, “It is good to have both Mr. Herbert and Sharon on my mind. To be thinking of only one of them would make me nervous” (105). In fact, Jack tells of being relieved when his romantic relationships are over, and claims that the “best phase” of his love affairs are just prior to their end: The air in the office would begin to grow thick with silent reproaches. I would become impossible to exchange a single word or glance that was not freighted with a thousand hidden meanings. Telephone conversations made up mostly of long silences during which I would rack my brain for something to say while on the other end you could hear little else but breathing and sighs. When these long telephone silences come, it is a sure sign that love is over. No, they were not conquests. For in the end my Lindas and I were so sick of each other that we were delighted to say goodbye (9).
While such emotional tension would likely exasperate one like Jack who does not want to be distracted by his affection, his need for emotional distance is so emphatic that the nearing end of a romantic relationship is rather a hopeful and relieving sign, however awkward it may be for him. Surely Jack exaggerates being “delighted” about the end of his romantic relationships. Yet by disengaging from his emotions just prior to his girlfriend breaking up, he successfully fulfills his Aunt Emily’s early instructions to behave like a soldier in response to loss, and is subsequently free to focus on his “one sole discernable talent: the trick of making money” (30). In this way Jack’s loss and corresponding detachment seem to enhance his feelings of personal success. Yet Jack’s emotional detachment is both a reaction to his losses and a cause for further loss. After all, he has lost at love in part because he is reluctant to express it: I am in love with Sharon Kincaid. She knows nothing of this, I think. I have not asked her for a date nor even been specially friendly. On the contrary: I have been aloof and correct as a Nazi officer in occupied Paris (67).
Jack’s restraint costs him greatly however, as he describes the ache of his desire to be intimate with Sharon: An amber droplet of Coca-Cola meanders along her thigh, touches a blond hair, distributes itself around the tiny fossa. “Aaauugh,” I groan aloud. “What’s the matter?” “It is a stitch in the side.” It is a sword in the heart (95).
Perhaps he is hopeful that affecting such reserve will somehow endear him closer to her—he imagines keeping a “Gregory Peckish sort of distance” (68)—just like acting like a soldier endears him to Emily. While Jack eventually reveals to Sharon his harbored affection, it seems it is too late in their relationship, as shortly thereafter she is engaged to another man. The reward of Jack’s emotional distance in his relationship with Sharon nets him only his aunt’s affection, then—a disparate tradeoff indeed. But, he explains, she “takes a great deal of trouble with me.” It is perhaps because “I wish I were able to please her better” that he is at all disingenuous (76). That the end marks the “best phase” of Jack’s romantic relationships clearly articulates his need for emotional space; yet further, it illustrates his compulsion to repeat the experience of loss. His explanation for repetition is conveyed in the following rhetorical question he raises and then answers for himself: What is a repetition? A repetition is the re-enactment of past experience toward the end of isolating the time segment which has elapsed in order that it, the elapsed time, can be savored of itself without the usual adulteration of events that clog time like peanuts in brittle (79).
Jack’s definition of repetition suggests the re-experience of loss is his attempt to re-examine previous losses. His concern with and desire to eliminate “the usual adulteration of events” that follow early losses suggests re-enacting loss provides him with the opportunity to deal with it differently; perhaps instead of acting like a soldier he may simply wish to grieve, for example. Additionally, his return to a time prior to the loss of his brother when his view of loss was yet “unadulterated” by Emily’s stern expectations provides him with an opportunity to “savor” the truth and innocence of his youth and years he shared with his brother (an emotive venture that is proscribed today), enabling him easily should he choose this time to deflect the constraining expectations of his aunt. His difficulty fulfilling Emily’s expectations from the time of Scott’s death is a source of returning frustration, and is what prevents him from dealing with his losses with a pure, authentic heart. Jack’s desire to please his aunt supercedes his desire for authenticity. She sets specific goals for him that he does not aspire to follow, and his failure to attain them, despite his true lack of interest in them, creates a cycle of self-doubt. He counters her insistence, for example, that he possesses a “scientific calling,” and a “love of books and music” when he tells her, “You discovered them for me. It was always through you that--.” But he realizes he will not convince her of his disinterest in them, and wishing to escape tells: “All at once I am sleepy. It requires effort to put one foot in front of the other” (54). The effort he makes to simply move his feet along with hers underscores the burdensomeness of Emily’s demands as well as his loyalty to meet them. While Jack returns to his losses in the hope of reacting to them honestly, his effort is stifled by the stronger need to fulfill his aunt’s wishes: “It seems so plain when I see it through her eyes. My duty in life is simple. I go to medical school. [. . .] What’s wrong with this? All I have to do is remember it” (54). Yet Jack’s uneasiness with his aunt’s expectations is undeniable, and is perhaps most acutely demonstrated in the physical expression of his repulsion by them. Jack describes Emily’s tactic of establishing their tight familial bond just prior to dropping an emotional bomb, such as the time she tells him of his brother’s dying: “We walked slowly in step. ‘Jack,’ she said, squeezing me tight and smiling at the Negro shacks, ‘you and I have always been good buddies, haven’t we?’ ‘Yes ma’am.’ My heart gave a big pump and the back of my neck prickled like a dog’s. She squeezed me tighter than ever. Scotty is dead.” Jack expresses a similar physical reaction during which “my neck prickles like a bull terrier” when she primes him for a talk about his plans for his future (4, 51). That it is “a dreadful-but-not-unpleasant eschatological prickling” points to Jack’s submission to her demands despite his displeasure with them (50). It is no surprise then that Jack, having given up so much of himself to gain his aunt’s approval, is continuously searching for something he has either lost or never fully realized. While he alludes to the possibility that he is looking for God (“What do you seek—God? You ask with a smile. I hesitate to answer, since all other Americans have settled the matter for themselves and to give such an answer would amount to setting myself a goal which everyone else has reached”; 13), it seems finding meaning beyond the “everydayness of his own life” is what Jack may truly be after. He explains, The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. [. . .] To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair (13).
Significantly Jack’s logic regarding the search pre-supposes his extraordinariness: a search is only attainable if one is not sunk in the everyday. One may wonder—is he trying to outwit himself? Indeed his need “to be onto something” articulates his anxiety about being an ordinary man; being onto something anticipates the revelation of something potent, whereas simply being Jack may seem naggingly ineffective. In fact, he tells that his aunt “calls me an ingrate, a limb of Satan, the last and the sorriest scion of a noble stock. What makes it funny is that this is true” (26). That he believes her seems reason enough for his “despair.” But Jack reveals his own disdainful view of ordinary men, which is evinced in his description of movie stars like William Holden: “It is their peculiar reality which astounds me.” The ordinary man, he maintains, “can only contrast Holden’s resplendent reality with his own shadowy and precarious existence” (16). Jack’s anxiety seems rooted in Emily’s insistence that he comes from “noble stock” and his contradicting notion that he is incapable of adequately representing it. As a result Jack emulates what he perceives are the noble qualities in movie stars like Dana Andrews and William Holden, for example, to make up for what he imagines are his inadequacies. The affect is an obsessive self-consciousness in which Jack observes himself from the imagined perspective of others—becoming in effect his own voyeur—resulting in a relentless mimicry of emotions and behaviors void of authenticity, and a feigned attempt to convince others that this is satisfactory. For example, trying to impress Sharon at the office, Jack tells: From now on everything I do must exhibit a certain value in her eyes, a value, moreover, which she must begin to recognize. Thus we send out for sandwiches and drink coffee as we work. Already the silences between us have changed in character, become easier. It is possible to stand at the window, loosen my collar and rub the back of my neck like Dana Andrews. And to become irritable with her: “No no no no, Kincaid, that’s not what I meant to say. Take five.” I go to the cooler, take two aspirins, crumple the paper cup (105).
Jack’s sense of personal loss is surely enormous, as demonstrated in his description of the sensation of disappearing when he gets behind the wheel of a car: “Whenever I drive a car, I have the feeling I have become invisible. People on the street cannot see you; they only watch your rear fender until it is out of the way” (11). While surely this sensation may be partly attributed to the degree of enclosure the vehicle provides, prohibiting Jack’s easy recognition, clearly he is anxious about his ability to project an adequate image of himself beyond his car. His usual attention to the minute details he imagines ingratiates him into the hearts and minds of others, he may suspect, does little to impress the passer-bys, as their focus is on his fender. Should he feel the need to pose or affect a particular attitude such as Dana Andrew’s short temper, for example, it is lost to those he passes. Additionally, that he cannot distance others from his true identity with his typical affectation may contribute to his peculiar “malaise,” of which his car was “a regular incubator.”1 What is the malaise? you ask. The malaise is the pain of loss. The world is lost to you, the world and the people in it, and there remains only you and the world and you no more able to be in the world than Banquo’s ghost (120).
Jack’s anxiety may derive then from the perception that he is losing part of himself, as if it were himself and not his image that he fails to sustain. That he interchanges the two (image and self) suggests he is taking much too seriously the roles that he plays. However, in a surprisingly reflective moment of seeming self-reproach, Jack points to his shallowness as a troubling lack of substance by suggesting he is more of ghost than a man. Jack tells of his difficulty maintaining a consistent and authentic self-image, claiming he is “no more able to be in the world” than the remnant, uncertain energy of one who is deceased, as if he had little or no prerogative on earth. Could the negative messages he receives from Emily be the cause of this? After all, she “calls me [. . .] the limb of Satan, the last and the sorriest scion of a noble stock” (26). Furthermore, comparing himself to Banquo’s ghost in particular, Jack articulates his loss as a lack of inherited nobility2, and his hope perhaps that his own children will inherit what he has failed to become. Perhaps defeated by his losses or his simple ordinariness, Jack’s self-image is too weak to hoist against what he may imagine are the world’s, or specifically his aunt’s unrelenting demands. This may help to explain why he spends much of his adulthood attempting to validate his identity—in effect, accumulating proof of his “right to exist.” I am a model tenant and a model citizen and take pleasure in doing all that is expected of me. My wallet is full of identity cards, library cards, credit cards. [. . .] It is a pleasure to carry out the duties of a citizen and receive in return a receipt or a neat styrene card with one’s name on it certifying, so to speak, one’s right to exist (6,7).
Surely Jack’s fear of vanishing is tied to Emily’s own anxiety about the loss of integrity in the current generation of men: “‘The world I knew has come crashing down around my ears. The things we hold dear are reviled and spat upon. [. . .] It’s an interesting age you will live in—though I can’t say I’m sorry to miss it.’” His desire to uphold her standards (in the face of her skepticism and his own self doubt) contradicts his need to reclaim an authentic self—a conundrum that compounds his sense of loss and which he articulates as the sensation of vanishing. (“For her too the fabric is dissolving, but for her even the dissolving makes sense”; 54). Yet much of Jack’s self-doubt can be attributed to his father’s early death, which came not long after his brother Scott died. Because Jack was still young when his father died, he never came to know him. Yet his desire to understand him is clearly evinced by the number of years he has tried to find clues to his nature from an old family photo: One picture I never tire looking at. For ten years I have looked at it on this mantelpiece and tried to understand it. Now I take it down and hold it against the light form the darkening sky. Here are two brothers, Dr. Wills and Judge Anse with their arms about each other’s shoulders, and my father in front, the three standing on a mountain trail against a dark forest. It is Schwarzwald. A few years after the first war they had gotten together for once and made the grand tour…. My father is wearing some kind of fraternity blazer and a hard katy straw. He looks different from the brothers. Alex too is much younger, yet he is still one of them. But not my father. It is hard to say why. The elder Bollings—and Alex—are serene in their identities. Each one coincides with himself, just as the larch trees in the photograph coincide with themselves: Judge Anse with his drooping mustache and thin cold cheeks, the hard-eyed one who is still remembered for having publicly described a Louisiana governor as a peckerwood son of a bitch; Dr. Wills, the lion-headed one, the rumpled country genius who developed a gut anastomosis still in use; and Alex, serene in his dream of youth and of his hero’s death to come. But my father is not one of them. His feet are planted wide apart, arms locked around an alpenstock behind him; the katy is pushed back releasing a forelock. His eyes are alight with an expression I can’t identify; it is not far from what his elders might have called smart-alecky. He is something of a dude with his round head and tricky tab collar. Yet he is, by every right, one of them…Again I search the eyes, each eye a stipple or two in a blurred oval. Beyond a doubt they are ironical (25).
Jack observes that his father differs from the rest of the men in this family picture by his ironic expression and apparent lack of greatness. He is no judge, no hero, and although he is an accomplished doctor, his legacy is not legendary (unlike Judge Anse who “is still remembered for having publicly described a Louisiana governor as a peckerwood son of a bitch,” Dr. Wills who “developed a gut anastomosis still in use,” and Alex who died a war hero). Additionally, Jack’s father does not look like any one of them; rather he appears more as an uncertain, smart aleck youth whose ironical expression convinces Jack “beyond a doubt” that he “is not one of them. […] Yet he is, by every right, one of them.” That he was killed before his prowess could be tested in the war—with a romantic English novel in his pocket (an interest it would seem no other man in his family shared) seems to add to his mystery. Jack’s supposition that he and his father are similar in their differences from the rest of the family, despite his aunt’s insistence otherwise (“‘He had a mind like a steel trap, an analytical mind like yours.’ She always says this, though I have never analyzed anything”; 56), causes Jack to pause at the mystery of what he has lost in his father. Jack’s failure to ascertain the truth among the differences between Emily’s recollection of his father and his own impression of him, he is further alienated from his father whom he clearly wishes to comprehend (13). Heartbreakingly, he tells, “I just can’t seem to remember him” (56). Consequently, he reveals, “Any doings of my father, even his signature, is in the nature of a clue in my search” (71). Jack’s failure to inherit what his aunt describes as his family’s nobility reifies a sense of loss particular to the South. Indeed in the picture that Jack contemplates, all of those he perceives as embodying a sense of nobility “are serene in their identities” as soldiers of the first World War, especially Alex whose hero’s death in Argonne “was held to be fitting since the original Alex Bolling was killed in Roderdaux Wheat in the Hood breakthrough at Gaines Mill in 1862.” Jack’s failure to inherit the family’s sense of nobility would perhaps not be as crushing if he were indeed convinced “beyond a doubt” that like him, his father was an ordinary man. When Jack later visits his mother and talks with her about his dad, she tells Jack that he suffered from a condition of being “overwrought,” and describes his enlistment in the army as a kind of epiphany that occurred during a deep depression—something like the death plans of one who is suicidal. In fact, William Rodney Allen in “Walker Percy’s Allusions to All the King’s Men,” describes Jack’s father as a “despairing father,” and calls his death a suicide (Allen 6). Jack’s father’s death seems the consummation of a failed life; even his success as a doctor is overshadowed by Jack’s mother’s claim that his psychological makeup prohibited any prolonged success: “‘You mean he wasn’t really cut out to be an ordinary doctor, he really should have been in research,’” Jack asks. “‘That’s right,’” she tells him (154). Further estranging Jack from his father is a gnawing sense of shame for being neither willing nor able to replace the role his brother Scott fulfilled in his father’s life. He explains that his father had taken him to a museum in Chicago after Scott died and during their visit Jack feels he let his father down: Feeling my father’s eye on me, I turned and saw what he required of me—very special father and son we were that summer, he staking his everything this time on a perfect comradeship—and I, seeing in his eyes the terrible request, requiring from me his very life; I, through a child’s cool perversity or some atavistic recoil from an intimacy too intimate, turned him down, turned a way, refused him what I knew I could not give (204).
Jack’s later fear of returning to Chicago as an adult recalls his anxiety about failing to connect with his father when he needed Jack. He anticipates that in recapturing his past he will also recapture his shame, rendering him unable to recover the innocence of his youthful past and the positive aspect of his relationship with his father. Jack’s dread of this impending failure causes him to panic: “Oh son of a bitch but I am in a sweat,” and he again submits to the sensation of vanishing. Kate, Jack tells, who is typically teetering on depression, “takes charge with many a cluck and much fuss, as if she had caught sight in me of a howling void and meant to conceal it from the world” (202). Jack’s desire to reencounter his loss and overcome it authentically is undermined by his fear of failure. Jack articulates his fear as a dread of the “genie soul of the place” (Chicago) which “you must meet and master or be met and mastered” (202). The threat of the genie soul is intense for jack: he describes it interchangeably as a buzzard and a ghost that is “perched on his shoulder” as soon as he steps off the train—the ghost, perhaps, Jack’s alter ego, whose sense of self is vanishing as a symptom of his loss, and the buzzard, a reification of the predatory nature of his loss. Anticipating how he might react to it, Jack recalls the “one genie-soul and only one [that] ever proved too strong for me: San Francisco”—due to the sadness of the place (which he maintains was due to “coming to the end of America” 202). Perhaps imagining that he may be overtaken by the sadness of Chicago (or, more specifically, that part of his past experienced in Chicago), Jack reflects on “the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North” (202). That Jack describes this sadness as something “nobody but a southerner knows” suggests the residue of Southern loss reifies his own personal history of loss and intensifies his consequential dread at the thought of reencountering it. While Jack describes the genie-soul as a universal symptom of the North, he differentiates his own disparate symptom as a fear of returning to the sadness and loss of his particular childhood. Jack’s fear of confronting the genie-soul of Chicago is imbedded in the memory of letting down his father and is further compounded by his fear of losing himself in the process. Nonetheless, Jack’s connection with his father, which he attempts to make through a history of losses, is potentially strengthened by this common ground (and by his father’s own significant losses—namely Scott and then shortly thereafter his happiness). In “Vision and the Journey to Selfhood in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer” Barbara Filippidis argues that upon returning to Chicago Jack’s fear is “of losing his sense of self and being overwhelmed by the density of the external world”—an argument she draws from Jack’s reference to “the wind [which] blows in steady from the lake and claims the space for its own,” requiring “people to live inside and underground.” Yet Jack is not concerned so much with the density of the external world as he is with finding a space with which he can confidently connect, with being able to reclaim his authentic self through the re-encounter with memories of his father; as it is his fear of Chicago is a “howling void” that threatens to “master” Jack. Jack tells, “Here [in Chicago] the Lake is the North itself: a perilous place from which the spirit winds come pouring forth all roused up and crying out alarm.” Jack shares the “wrenching [. . .] sadness” of the North and arrives daunted, yet hoping to overcome it. Jack arrives in Chicago with a fear of loss too great to allow the freedom of role-play (he is unable to act). Additionally, his companion Kate, who sees through Jack’s affectations when he is free to act3 requires of him an essential strength to balance her manic depression. As a result, when Jack is with Kate he is truer to himself than he is with his other “girls.” Yet arriving now in Chicago and struck with fear, he requires of Kate the kind of strength he typically provides her. Kate’s willingness to stand in for him when he steps off the train and is “overcome by the genie soul of the place” balances his sense of loss, and perhaps provides him with a degree of redemption for not having stood in for his brother when his father needed him to. (Doubtless it would be a stretch to suggest that Kate is an all-redeeming Christ figure; her humility is nonetheless cleansing and it, along with her faithless stepmother and a host of narcotics, veils a peculiar inner strength that only Jack seems to realize.) Despite Jack’s nearly failing while making love to Kate on the train and failing again when stepping off of it, Kate remains true to Jack and her loyalty allows him to accept that “we’re human after all.” While Filippidis sees Jack’s near failure making love to Kate as a regrettable loss for Jack, focusing on the dichotomous relationship between their love making scene and that of movie stars’ own lovemaking models, that Jack’s relationship with Kate becomes more meaningful as a consequence of his general impotence (as noted by her strength and willingness to provide it, and his own realization that he is human rather than a romanticized fiction) suggests his near failure is rather an immeasurable gain. That he was finally able to “sin” is a remarkable feat, as “there is very little sin in the depth of malaise. The highest moment in a malaisians’ life can be that moment when he manages to sin like a proper human” despite his nearly failing. Though “we did badly and almost did not do at all,” the fact is they did, and the relief of his sexual potency, however miniscule, is freeing. “[W]e’re sinning! We’re succeeding! We’re human after all!” (200-201). Essential to Jack’s independence from and growth beyond the role of obedient nephew is his realization that he is still lovable despite his faults and celebratorily human because of them—an essential truth that Kate helps teach him and which gives him the confidence to tell Emily the truth when she asks: What has been going on in your mind during all the years when we listened to music together, read the Crito, and spoke together—or was it I who spoke—good Lord, I can’t remember—of goodness and truth and beauty and nobility? [. . .] Don’t you love these things? Don’t you live by them? (226)
Bravely, finally, he tells her, “‘No.’” Jack seems happier and more effective when he is true to himself and correspondingly free to be true to others. Shortly after his refusal to continue playing up to his aunt and attempting to fulfill her expectations, he describes that she gradually comes to accept him. He tells, My aunt has become fond of me. As soon as she accepted what she herself had been saying all those years, that the Bolling family had gone to seed and that I was not one of her heroes but a very ordinary fellow, we got along very well. Both women find me comical and laugh a good deal at my expense (237).
Emily’s “Southern stoicism” has no patience for Jack’s ambiguity but it is his ambiguity that allows him to forgive her of her severity and scathing criticism of him. Unlike his aunt, Jack doesn’t fit people into what Filippidis describes as “absolute categories” of “the heroic or craven [. . .] noble or ignoble” and as a result sees beyond her negativity (Filippidis 11; MG 49). Additionally, his acceptance of the ambiguous allows Jack to believe in Kate and not think of her in terms of her limitations. Jack leans on Kate and requires of her a particular strength that she is ultimately able to exhibit, without his demanding it as Emily does. While Jack’s role-playing with Emily alienates her from Jack’s true identity, it clearly provides Jack with what he imagines is an acceptable identity to which she can relate. In “The Moviegoer as Psychotext,” Robert Keeble argues that Jack’s “fantasy role-playing [is] an inward form of escape from intolerable circumstances,” 4 such as Emily’s intolerable criticism and expectations of him (Keeble 139). Inversely, however, role-play connects Jack, however falsely, with people whose acceptance he requires, such as Emily’s. Hence, just as it serves as an escape from intolerable circumstances, role-play serves as a means of making Jack’s intolerable circumstances tolerable once again. Surely this trick is not unlike Emily’s own knack for “transfiguring everyone;” and indeed his malleable identity complements her knack. In his book, Walker Percy, Jac Tharpe observes that in The Moviegoer, Percy presents a dialectic between the stoic view, a basically pessimistic emphasis on a moral code without a belief in God, as practiced by the nobility of the South and by others who depend more upon man than on God; and on the other hand, traditional Roman Catholic ease with both morality and religion. And he adds a third theme: “the protagonist is in an existentialist predicament, alienated from both cultures” (48).
While Jack is doubtlessly “alienated,” clearly he adopts both perspectives. And although it is difficult if not impossible determine to what degree he combines each, in the end he chooses to pursue his aunt’s dreams for his “vocation.” Yet his dialogue with his half brothers and sisters in the car after Lonnie dies reflects Lonnie’s Roman Catholic perspective on the value of each individual soul, as implied by his belief in everlasting life: “‘When Our Lord raises us up on the last day, will Lonnie still be in a wheelchair or will he be like us?’ one of his step siblings asks. Jack replies, “‘He’ll be like you’” (240). That Jack shares this perspective is perhaps indicative of a gradual rejection of “Emily’s philosophy about human valuelessness” (Tharpe 48). Furthermore, while we do not know how much of Jack’s decision to go to medical school was motivated by the pressure to carry on a family legacy, his realization on the train to Chicago that “a youthful romantic […] will never know what to do with himself, like [Jack’s] father,” suggests he weighs the value of a meaningful existence carefully (Tharpe 49). While his father’s losses will be forever unrecoverable, Jack still has time to recover some of his own, and he can choose, despite the similarities he shares with his father, to create a meaningful existence by going to medical school and marrying Kate—with the hope, perhaps, of overcoming most of his losses. That his way of finding meaning also pleases Emily is surely another immeasurable gain (as was his nearly failing with Kate). Jack’s concern with maintaining an effective relationship with his aunt is consistent with his concern with connecting with people in the various locales he visits. Keeble points out that Jack’s need to connect with the movie theater manager and the ticket seller is so implicit that “if he declined to communicate with these people he would be ‘lost, cut loose metaphysically speaking,’ in danger of ‘slipping clean out of space and time.’” Yet Keeble argues that “Binx’s concern about involving himself with others points to his awareness that his actual identity—John Bickerson Bolling, stockbroker—must be maintained (Keeble 141),” which surely cannot be the case, given the many different forms his identity takes. Jack’s need to connect with individuals of different locales may have more to do with his desire to create a stable relationship to which he can safely return—just as he returns to his early relationships with his father and Emily. The difference between his intimate past and the past he creates with the movie theater personnel is that Jack’s return to the theater locales is comfortably uneventful and false, and as a result is a safe haven to which to return (just like his relationships with his “girls,” as one is a repetition of another). On the other hand, his relationships with his father and with Emily each contains a history of authenticity and pain, his return to which reflects his desire for comfort and stability. Jack continuously revisits his past to work through the losses these relationships have created, until they are stable and comfortable once again.
Notes 1 A conundrum which is seemingly derived from the contradiction between the car’s utter perfection--“It was a comfortable, conservative and economical two-door sedan, just the thing it seemed to me, for a young Gentilly businessman”--and his own imagined inability to match up: Though it was comfortable enough, though it ran like a clock, though [Marcia and I] went spinning along in perfect comfort and with a perfect view of the scenery like the American couple in the Dodge ad, the malaise quickly became suffocating. We sat in gelid amiability. Our cheeks ached from smiling. Either would have died for the other. In despair I put my hand under her dress, but even such a homely little gesture as that was received with the same fearful politeness. I longed to stop the car and bang my head against the curb (121).
2In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Banquo, who could not be king, beget a line of descendants who would be. 3Kate tells Jack, “She thinks you’re one of her kind. [. . . ] But you don’t fool me” (42). 4Keeble maintains that Jack’s “intolerable circumstance” derives from the trauma he experienced at war. Bibliography Allen, William Rodney. “Walker Percy’s Allusions to All the King’s Men.” Notes on Mississippi Writers 15 (1983): 5-10. Bone, Martyn. “The Postsouthern ‘Sense of Place’ in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer and Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter.” Critical Survey 12 (2000): 64-81. Filippidis, Barbara. “Vision and the Journey to Selfhood in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer.” Renascence: Essays on Value in Literature 32 (1980)” 10-23. Keeble, Robert. “The Moviegoer as Psychotext.” The Southern Quarterly 37, 2 (Winter, 1999): 137-150. Percy, Walker. The Moviegoer. Vintage International: New York, 1960. Pindell, Richard. “Basking in the Eye of the Storm: The Esthetics of Loss in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer.” Boundary 2, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Autumn, 1975): 219-230. Tharpe, Jac. Walker Percy. Twayne Publishers: Boston, 1983. |
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