By Stuart Mitchner

Ten years ago this week, August 29, Katrina savaged New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Just under two thousand people died, with damages estimated at over a hundred billion dollars. Spike Lee in When The Levees Broke, David Simon in HBO’s Treme, and Dave Eggers in his book Zeitoun are among the artists who have done justice to the magnitude of the event and its troubled aftermath. You could say Walker Percy did justice to it before it happened.

The Moviegoer, Percy’s first and best-known novel, was published in 1961, four and a half decades before Katrina. Since New Orleans is geographically susceptible to devastating acts of nature, the fact that Percy intuits the possibility of a Katrina  might seem a given, but what sets his book apart is its fortuitous all but prophetic awareness of something that did not take place until 15 years after his death. It’s as if the book had been created in the shadow of imminent catastrophe by a philosopher/novelist exploring the aesthetics of adversity while posing questions such as why the same man who feels bad in a good environment is “apt to feel good in a very bad environment, say an old hotel on Key Largo during a hurricane.”

Percy’s Questions

The Moviegoer is the only work of literature to my knowledge where the jacket copy begins on the cover with an assignment question reminiscent of the ones in high school English textbooks. “Why is the hero of this novel a moviegoer?” While this unusual tactic suggests a certain defensiveness on the part of its publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, as if movies (“even silly movies”) were unworthy of serious fiction, the asking of questions is characteristic of Percy. The essay that begins his collection, The Message in the Bottle (1975), asks questions that are also implicit in the narrative consciousness of The Moviegoer, like the one about the hurricane. An article by Walter Isaacson in a recent New York Times Book Review (“Walker Percy’s Theory of Hurricanes”) references the same essay while providing quotes from Percy’s novels The Last Gentleman and Lancelot about how “people felt better in hurricanes” and how unhappy married couples who were “bored with life” and “generally miserable” could find happiness together “during hurricanes.” If Percy had been watching When The Levees Broke with me the other night, he might have tweaked the terms in respect of the appalling reality of Katrina and the prolonged agony of the after effects. In fact, Isaacson makes a point of mentioning what Percy admitted about the couple in Lancelot: “After the hurricane they took a good hard look at each other on a sunny Monday morning and got a divorce.”

Overcoming “Everydayness”

The subtitle of The Message in the Bottle — How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has To Do with the Other — has a certain resonance in the context of man, language, New Orleans, and William Faulkner, who lived for a time at 824 Orleans Alley in the French Quarter (since changed to Pirates Alley for the tourist trade). In his early novel Mosquitoes (1927), the Quarter is compared to “an aging yet still beautiful courtesan in a smokefilled room, avid yet weary too of ardent ways.” Eight years later in Pylon (1935), the levees have fallen under the full force of Faulkner’s middle-period prose. Instead of the conventional, all too obvious analogy of the courtesan, he gives us a ride through the Quarter that might be prefaced “Abandon all hope of everyday reality, ye who enter here” where “the clash and clang of light and bell trolley and automobile crashed and glared across the intersection, rushing in a light curbchannelled spindrift of tortured and draggled serpentine and trodden confetti pending the dawn’s whitewings — spent tinseldung of Momus’s Nilebarge clatterfalque.”

Stagger out of that juggernaut to a standing position on solid ground and you know the potency of the brew served in the colorful bars of the French Quarter. Take it word by word and you can imagine yourself being jostled in a Mardi Gras crowd pushing and shoving for a clear view of that Nilebarge clatterfalque, a Faulkner float as only he could devise it.

Although Faulkner’s queerly heightened prose is at the other end of the spectrum from Walker Percy’s more measured style, both writers take literary arms against what Jack “Binx” Bolling, the 30-year-old stockbroker narrator of The Moviegoer, calls the “everydayness” of life. In case you think a book so-titled is going to be an upbeat narrative with elements of Hollywood fantasy, Percy’s epigraph is a quote from Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death: “… the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair.” Besides alerting the reader to the dark course Percy has set for himself, the epigraph prefaces a narrative that reflects the endgame consciousness articulated by Percy’s alter ego, the narrator, who tells us in the opening paragraph that he finds the prospect of hearing “bad news” about the condition of his attractive, wayward, emotionally disturbed, substance-abusing 25-year-old stepcousin Kate not “altogether unpleasant.”

After recounting another not “altogether unpleasant” childhood memory of his older brother’s death from pneumonia, Binx describes seeing a movie in a new suburb “out by Lake Pontchartrain.” The theater is “a pink stucco cube, sitting out in a field all by itself.” By now we know how happy it makes the narrator to hear the “strong wind” that “whipped the waves against the sea wall,” a “racket” that could be heard “even inside” the theater, which is showing a movie about a man who lost his memory. Coming out of the movie, Binx felt “very good”: “Overhead was the blackest sky I ever saw; a black wind pushed the lake toward us. The waves jumped over the seawall and spattered the street.”

Typically, this presage of flooding goes with Binx’s idea of a “fine night.” Referring to the permanent message on the front of the marquee of his neighborhood theater (“Where Happiness Costs So Little”), he says, “I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie.” While other people “treasure memorable moments in their lives,” what he remembers is “the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.”

Unlike most of the movies mentioned in the narrative, the one about the man who loses his memory is an invention of the author’s. Untitled, without actors, its anonymity serves Percy’s purpose when Binx echoes Kierkegaard, speaking of the “search” that “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.” The trouble with the nameless movie about the amnesiac is that in it he finds happiness, “settles down with a vengeance,” and is soon “so sunk in everydayness that he might just as well be dead.”

Following William Holden

Aware that William Holden, a real movie star, is in town shooting a film on location in the Place d’Armes, when Binx spots the actor walking through The French Quarter, he follows along behind. Most tourists are so intent on browsing shops or snapping pictures of balconies that they don’t notice the celebrity moving among them, except for one young couple, newlyweds from out of town who are clearly “not really happy,” the boy because he’s afraid their honeymoon is “too conventional,” the girl because “she doesn’t know why he’s unhappy.” When they recognize Holden, the boy “perks up” — until he registers the contrast between the star’s “resplendent reality” and his own “shadowy and precarious existence.” But after he gives Holden a light for his cigarette, they walk along together, talk briefly, then Holden “moves on ahead,” leaving the couple changed for the better: “The boy has won title to his own existence …. All at once the world is open to him,” as is his wife, who feels now “that what was wrong” has been “righted.”

Watching Holden “shedding light as he goes” as others begin to recognize him, an “aura of heightened reality moving with him,” Binx explains that his attraction to movie stars has to do with that “peculiar reality” which “astounds” him. While witnessing a relatively unastounding parade on Canal Street, he hears “a far-off rumble, the first thunderstorm of the year,” and describes another moment that seems encompassed by a time sense large enough to be haunted by storms to come: “The street looks tremendous. People on the far side seem tiny and archaic, dwarfed by the great sky and the windy clouds like pedestrians in old prints.” Binx imagines that “a fog of uneasiness, a thin gas of malaise” has “settled on the street …. Ah William Holden, we already need you again. Already the fabric is wearing thin without you.”

Kate the Cause

On his next visit to a movie theatre Binx is accompanied by his tempestuous, forever-embattled Kate, “who understands his moviegoing in her own antic fashion.” In truth, Kate is the star of the story, Binx’s cause and his fate, and the medium through which Percy most explicitly states his theory about hurricanes and happiness, for it’s Kate who is cheered by the knowledge that suicide is always an option, who considers the hyperintense reality of the accident that killed her parents and that she survived the high point of her life, who tells Binx “I feel fine when I’m sick” and asks him “Have you ever noticed that only in times of illness or disaster or death are people real?”

While the Kate/Katrina similarity is, as they say, “purely coincidental,” the fiction Percy has created resonates with the possibility that his stormy, storm-tossed Kate, living in a chronic state of relapse or recovery, may be no less real to readers half a century later. After the film she and Binx see — Panic in the Streets, a real movie shot on location in New Orleans — Kate looks around the neighborhood and says, again speaking for Percy, “Yes it’s certified now,” referring to the “phenomenon of moviegoing” called certification, wherein a person who has been living somewhere “sadly” with an “emptiness inside him” sees a movie “which shows his very neighborhood” and finds, for a time, that he’s living “Somewhere and not Anywhere.”

In The Moviegoer, Walker Percy manifests the Somewhere of New Orleans that will endure in fiction, film, art, and life.