Recent reading, volume 1.

Over the holidays, I read Walker Percy's The Moviegoer. I'd been recommended this book probably fifteen years ago, but I'd never gotten around to reading it; there are, after all, more books out there one should read than there are books that one can read, given the lifespan of most humans. Well, I finally read it. And I'm not sure I like it.

It's set in New Orleans, sometime in the late 1950's I would imagine, and the main character is a mutual fund salesman or financial adviser, however you want to put it. His occupation, though, barely figures in the story, except as an explanation to his moderate wealth, and even then it's a magical explanation: he has "feelings" about certain stocks or funds and those feelings pay off. It is, I'm certain, the way many people relate to the stock market, since so much of the value of the stock certificate is based not on actual worth but on perceived worth: it is only in the extreme situations such as failing to meet payroll or major criminal investigations that the curtain is pulled back long enough to reveal the actual worth of a "hot" stock. But that's not really central to The Moviegoer.

And neither are actual movies, although the narrator's own eccentricity does have much to do with his attachment to moviehouses. In fact, for the narrator, it's not so much the movie as it is the moviehouse that matters, and it's the history, no matter how banal, of that particular moviehouse in which he's watching a film that matters, because the book is not so much about New Orleans, or movies, or stockbrokers as it is about the great existentialist fear of the midtwentiethcentury that the individual was nothing but a cog in a machine. There are at least two ways of looking at this fear.

For theorists like Adorno and the Frankfurt School, the culture industry was producing a levelled, homogenized culture that removed personal agency and dulled critical thinking. That's a leftist critique that sees the rise of the culture industry as a logical extension of capitalism's need to expand into every facet -- every market if you will -- of human existence. Another way to look at the problem is through an existentialist view that humans need to make their own meaning and that the lives we are given in the world are not that meaningful until we make them our own. It's a very romantic notion and a compelling one as well. However, to my mind it often fails to take into account the systemic pressures that compel one to chuck the existentialist dream for a steady 9 to 5 with benefits.

The Moviegoer's protagonist, Binx Bolling, is full of the fear that he will become an "anyone anywhere" and lose his specificity. His female cousin Kate shares the same fear, only she holds her life together somewhat less well. And since this is a southern novel, the two are in some sort of ambivalent, vaguely incestuous, semi-playful, semi-serious love affair. The book is very well written, but heaven help me I simply didn't care a whole lot about Binx's obsession and "The Search." It would be very interesting, though, to teach this book alongside a few others in 20th century American lit course: Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt, Miller's Death of a Salesman, for instance, to talk about the soul-deadening effects of consumerism or capitalism. If you could stomach some truly bad writing, you could throw Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead in there as well to demonstrate the fantasy of the individual that's endemic to capitalism, a system that has perfected the assembly line and "the science of management" to knock as much individuality out of anyone as possible. Not that Rand or her cult of disciples would like that interpretation.

What does any of all this have to do with New Orleans? I don't know. I'll try to figure that out today.