The Need for the Disabled Body in the Moviegoer
Date
2016-04-11
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Publisher
LSU Press
Abstract
The instinct in The Moviegoer is to see Binx Bolling's conversion from aloof, escapist voyeur to one who accepts responsibility as a conversion caused by the intellect: a change based solely on his contemplations, judgments, and mental responses. Such a view of Binx’s conversion is ironically parallel to his previous love of the movies: it is an incomplete human experience, as it minimizes the role of the body in a person’s experience. To ignore the body’s role, however, is to ignore the primary catalyst of ethical and religious change. Within the novel, for any personal change to occur, the body must be in some way “compromised”; only when one is aware of the body, that is to say of the disabled body, can a person recognize their need for “the search” and achieve conversion.
This chapter includes several different characters whose own evolution—or lack thereof—toward religious change is managed by the “wellness” of their own bodies. Lonnie’s presence in the book is largely defined by his disabled body—his personal radio, his trip to the movies with Binx, and his eventual death are all constructed around his compromised body: his desire to participate in fasting is born out of his physical conditions, as well as the reactions of others to that fasting; his desire to see movies is understood based on the limited movement and opportunity based on his body; and finally, his desire and eventual conquest of his “habitual disposition” is wholly defined by the awareness of his hastening death. Binx’s progress in many ways reflects Lonnie’s, as does the change in his own body. He is wounded during the Korean war, and it is only at this moment of a compromised body that Binx recognizes the need for “the search.” His movement away from “the search” coincides with his success in New Orleans; in the midst of physical luxury (which is to say, his lowered awareness of the possibility of the disabled body) his desire for truth diminishes. His eventual conversion coincides with his own full recognition of another compromised body—not his own, but Kate’s.
Other characters in the novel attempt to deny the intrinsic importance of the body by denying its existence when wounded. Aunt Kate tells a young Binx to act like a soldier in the face of death, and Uncle Jules refuses to recognize that anything is wrong despite his daughter’s flirtation with suicide. This is not to say these characters deny the body—such attempts are impossible. Instead, they encourage a constant view of the healthy body; it is perhaps not coincidental that Aunt Kate wants Binx to go to medical school, which is to say, to take up a vocation which wants to improve the sick body.
The compromised body is an essential component to religious conversion in The Moviegoer. In The Moviegoer, one must accept the body as a whole—when healthy (e.g. in the quasi-religious moment of sucking the wounded thumb of Kate, or the “physicalness” of fasting and Ash Wednesday) or unhealthy (e.g. the constant specter of death to the wounded Binx and disabled Lonnie). To deny it in the weaker state, as others attempt to deny the fasting of Lonnie, is to intellectualize all parts of humanity, which in Percy’s novel is to reject the wholeness of the person and therefore the possibility of true religious change.
Description
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Book chapter
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Keywords
Walker Percy, The Moviegoer, Semiotics, Literary Criticism
Citation
Cline, Brent Walter, and Robert Bolton. "The Need for the Disabled Body in the Moviegoer." In Walker Percy's The Moviegoer at Fifty: New Takes on an Iconic American Novel, edited by Jennifer Levasseur and Mary A. McCay, 135-146. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016.