Searching for Medicine in Walker Percy’s <em xmlns:m="http://www.w3.org/1
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Moviegoer
Woods Nash
Literature and Medicine, Volume 31, Number 1, Spring 2013, pp. 114-141
(Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
For additional information about this article
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/lm/summary/v031/31.1.nash.html
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114
Searching for Medicine in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer
Searching for Medicine
in Walker Percy’s The
Moviegoer
Woods Nash
Two decades before the publication of his first novel, The Moviegoer
(1961), Walker Percy completed medical school at Columbia University
and began residency in pathology at Bellevue Hospital in New York
City. Within six months, he contracted tuberculosis and took to bed as
a patient. Years later, Percy claimed that, at the time, he had been “the
happiest man ever” to have TB “because it enabled me to get out of
Bellevue and quit medicine.”1 In the short term, however, Percy could
not leave the medical world. For more than three years, he oscillated
between convalescence and remission, all the while reading novels and
philosophy, and deciding, eventually, to try his hand at writing. By
the end of 1946, he had turned thirty, married, and set himself fully
to the task of learning to craft fiction.2 Fifteen years later, when The
Moviegoer won the National Book Award, Percy’s long experiment had
paid off. Alongside his first book, each of his five subsequent novels
remains in print.
Critics have often observed that Percy’s “medical background
is apparent in his writing.”3 From Jamie’s terminal illness and Dr.
Vaught’s prurient pursuits in The Last Gentleman (1966) to Dr. Tom
More’s strange psychiatric and public health observations in The Thanatos
Syndrome (1987), Percy’s novels are richly informed by his experiences
as medical student, physician, and patient. In this light, The Moviegoer
looks like the exception. It is the story of Binx Bolling, a New Orleans
stockbroker and bachelor who, suddenly roused from his somnolent
existence, has undertaken a vague, “horizontal search.”4 “What is the
nature of the search?” Binx asks, and he answers: “The search is what
anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of
his own life” (13). This is the Wednesday before Mardi Gras, and the
remainder of the story—apart from its epilogue—spans just a week,
Literature and Medicine 31, no. 1 (Spring 2013) 114–141
© 2013 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
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culminating on Ash Wednesday, Binx’s thirtieth birthday. Early in the
novel, Binx promises his Aunt Emily that, on his birthday, he will tell
her—as she puts it—“what he wants to do with his life” (55).
Unfortunately for Binx, he has no idea. Over the next six days,
he frequents movie theaters, plots to seduce his secretary, and confides
in Kate Cutrer, Emily’s step-daughter and Binx’s cousin by marriage.
Kate is deeply troubled. Drinking heavily and popping sedatives, she
begins therapy, but her psychiatrist is little help. If there is any medical
theme in the novel, it would seem to be here: What is ailing Kate,
and how might she get well? But Binx, too, is sick—sick unto death
with the humdrum “malaise” of his life—and, in recognition of their
mutual need, he proposes marriage to Kate.5 She eventually accepts,
and Binx, apparently following his aunt’s advice, says that he is willing to go to medical school. In the epilogue, we learn that Binx has
completed a year of medical training, no longer seems interested in
movies, and is consistent in caring for Kate, giving her courage to
face each day’s simple tasks.
Commentators often orient their readings of The Moviegoer around
the nature of Binx’s search, which he characterizes as “horizontal”
because it has something to do with the significance of encountering
the local people and places that share his plane of existence: “What
is important is what I shall find when I leave my room and wander
in the neighborhood,” he tells us (70). Taking their cue from some
early reviews and a seminal article by Lewis A. Lawson, some critics
have wrangled over the extent to which Binx’s search “progresses”
along Kierkegaard’s life stages—aesthetic, ethical, and religious.6 The
aesthetic stage is characterized by immersion in pleasing diversions
(like moviegoing and fishing). The ethical involves “discerning one’s
concrete existence” and, perhaps, one’s “responsibility to laws and
rules.”7 And the religious stage involves the subordination of the
ethical in complete submission to God.8 In the epilogue, Binx offers
something of an anti-report on the state of his search: “As for my
search, I have not the inclination to say much on the subject. For
one thing, I have not the authority, as the great Danish philosopher
declared, to speak of such matters in any way other than the edifying.
. . . Further: I am a member of my mother’s family after all and so
naturally shy away from the subject of religion” (237). While Lawson
argued that this passage offers “several clues” that Binx “has leaped
from the aesthetic to the ethical sphere of existence,” others—perhaps
following Percy’s declared intention—have read the novel’s ending as
suggesting that Binx becomes a Christian.9
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Searching for Medicine in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer
It might well be that Binx is moving along the Kierkegaardian
path to God, but I want to turn in a new direction: whatever else Binx
might be after, his search leads him to become a doctor. He does not
know what he is searching for, as he readily confesses, but we can
understand his search as leading him to a life in medical practice (14).10
Throughout the novel, Binx wields a sophisticated medical vocabulary. Like a physician, he finds it natural to characterize others
anatomically. Such descriptions are often accompanied by an evaluation
of health or a tentative diagnosis. These habits of assessment foreshadow
the culmination of Binx’s search in medical practice. There are other
clues: Binx wants to please his aunt (who encourages him to practice
medicine); he longs to understand his deceased father (a surgeon);
he yearns for a kind of “certification” that might be achieved as a
physician, forging bonds that are suggestive of doctor-patient relationships; and he looks forward to disasters, like illness and death, that
can defeat “everydayness” or “the malaise.” I argue that, by becoming
a doctor, Binx will interweave these diverse threads of his horizontal
search, and he will reclaim the limited success of the “vertical search”
that he undertook years earlier—a search that involved his detached
and anonymous pursuit of all knowledge through science (70). It is
in the medical profession that Binx will achieve a personal synthesis.
In this way, our attending to Binx’s decision to practice medicine—an
event that many critics have treated as arbitrary or unremarkable11—can
deeply enrich our understanding of the novel. The Moviegoer, like Percy’s
other novels, can be seen as thoroughly invested with medical themes.
Martha Montello has proposed that, “diagnostic and therapeutic,
the entire enterprise of Percy’s fiction was undertaken in hope, not
only for himself but also for the [medical] profession he loved.”12 That
is a grand contention, and my reading of The Moviegoer supports it in
this way: By following his search to medical school, Binx is following
his inkling that, as a doctor, he might permanently escape a despair
so deep that “it is unaware of being despair.”13 Binx’s vehicle for that
escape is what I call “reciprocal certification,” the mutual, existential
commitment that Binx achieves with Kate and, I expect, he might also
achieve with some of his patients. By presenting this new model for
the physician-patient relationship, I will show, Percy’s novel offers a
profound commentary on one of the heights to which the medical
profession might aspire.
Binx expects a lot from doctoring. That is why Percy—who
gave up medicine, but never gave up on it—would send his debut
protagonist into the turbulent world of medical practice.14
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Habits of Assessment: Binx’s Medical
Vocabulary and Diagnostic Disposition
The novel opens with a summons. From his Aunt Emily, Binx
receives a note inviting him to lunch at her well-appointed home in
the Garden District. Emily is sixty-five years old and Binx’s great aunt
on his father’s side. Years earlier, she married a widower, Jules Cutrer,
and became step-mother to his daughter, Kate. Jules is a partner in
the brokerage firm for which Binx works. Emily also cared for Binx
and funded his education after his father was killed in the Second
World War and his mother, a nurse, moved to Biloxi.
As Binx prepares to join Emily, Jules, and Kate for lunch, he
pays attention, he tells us, to “all spot announcements on the radio
about mental health” and “the seven signs of cancer” (7).15 Apparently
attuned to developments in healthcare, Binx also has a scientific background. When Emily asks Binx to consider medical school, he recalls
a summer college research project. “I got interested in the role of the
acid-base balance in the formation of renal calculi,” he tells us; “it’s
quite an interesting problem. I had a hunch you might get pigs to
form oxalate stones by manipulating the pH of the blood, and maybe
even to dissolve them” (51). In context, Binx is explaining that he
does not think he has a “flair for research.” Perhaps he is right, but,
after nine years, he still speaks fluently in the technical language of
lab science—of “acid-base balance” and “pH,” of “renal calculi” and
“oxalate” instead of the quotidian “kidney stones.” Even though Binx
confesses to abandoning the research, his diction shows that he still
harbors a fondness for the biomedical, and he still finds the problem
interesting. His observation and assessment of those around him suggest that he is even more interested in biology as it is expressed in
persons. He describes others in the language of the clinician.
At Emily’s house, he has a conversation with an old fraternity
brother, Walter Wade, who is presently engaged to Kate. “Walter,”
Binx narrates, “is a sickly-looking fellow” who “is actually quite
healthy” despite his “hollow temple” and “gray sharklike skin” (33).
Binx’s concise, anatomical characterization of Walter is typical of many
more to come—a quick physical assessment that is paired with either
a preliminary diagnosis or, as in this case, a subtly positive bill of
health. Clearly, Binx has medicine on his mind and keeps its peculiar
terminology ready-to-hand. As we will see, his nimble and consistent
use of that vocabulary indicates that it is his own—it should not
be dismissed as merely an accidental offshoot of the essence of his
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physician-creator.16 Furthermore, because Binx is narrating in the novel’s
present, his use of medical language cannot be explained as a product
of his later medical training. He is already thinking like a doctor.
Kate, a beautiful and brooding twenty-five-year-old, is the subject
of many of Binx’s health-related observations, and the first of those
occurs during lunch. He casts Kate’s ill health as the medical foil for
Walter’s apparent well-being: “Kate frowns at her hands in her lap.
Today Kate has her brown-eyed look. Sometimes her irises turn to discs”
(31). Binx places this observation in the context of the patient’s history,
explaining that, when Kate was ten years old and he was fifteen, he
had tried to speak with her in his “aunt’s Socratic manner” about her
unwillingness to socialize, but, as he spoke, “Kate only watched me
with the same brown-eyed look, irises gone to discs” (32). Even this
early, it is clear that Binx recognizes that look as a symptom, for he
goes on to note that “Kate eats mechanically, gazing about the room
vacantly like someone at the automat” and that her “head lowers
until her brown shingled hair falls along her cheek” (32–33). He has
correctly anticipated that something is amiss with Kate, for soon she
“utters a clicking sound in her teeth and abruptly leaves the room”
(34). Binx has also noticed his aunt look at Kate, but she “misses the
storm warnings” (33). That observation is evidence that Binx possesses
an important skill when encountering a sick person in the presence
of her loved ones—he picks up on what those loved ones both see
and fail to notice. In clinical situations, a doctor’s attempts to navigate conversations can be arduous. Fortunately, this physician-to-be is
already learning to adapt to “the dry litigious way of speaking of
closely knit families in times of trouble” (110–11). When Kate leaves
the room, Walter follows. When he returns, Binx is “prepared to reassure him about Kate” (34).
Binx describes many others foremost in terms of their anatomy.
He often seems to be searching for symptoms. He observes of his
secretary, Sharon Kincaid—with whom he is sexually infatuated—that
“she is a good-sized girl, at least five feet six and a hundred and
thirty five pounds,” “her face is a little too short and pert, . . . and
her eyes a little too yellow” (65). He notices that, when Sharon raises
her arm, the “soft round muscle goes slack of its own weight” (67).
He also notices “the Slavic prominence under the notch of her eye
and the quick tender incurve” that is a “crowding of the cheekbone
into the eye socket” (67), and he observes the anatomy of her legs:
“An amber droplet of Coca-Cola meanders along her thigh, touches
a blond hair, distributes itself around the tiny fossa” (95). Swooning
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and lust-ridden though he is, Binx remains clear-headed enough to
notice her posture in anatomical terms, too. She stands “leg locked,
pelvis aslant, thumb and forefinger propped along the iliac crest” (131).
This clinical perspective characterizes the way Binx observes
strangers, too. A man on the train to Chicago is “in ruddy good
health” and “muffles a hearty belch” while “the blood of his portal
vein bears away a golden harvest of nutrient globules” (188). Binx
notices that the man breathes “powerfully through the stiff hairs of his
nose” (189). Also on the train, Binx has a “waking wide-eyed” dream
of the authors of Technique in Marriage hard at work in their sexual
researches, “their heavy old freckled limbs twined about each other,
hands probing skillfully for sensitive zones, pigmented areolas, outof-the-way mucous glands, dormant vascular nexuses” (190). And on
the return trip aboard a bus, he speaks with a salesman who “wears
black shoes and white socks for his athlete’s foot and now and then
sends down a finger to appease the itching” (217).17
Furthermore, despite his detached disposition as a moviegoerspectator and his repeated references to himself as a “ghost,” Binx
often turns his medical lens upon his own body.18 Regarding his
medical history, he tells us that, as a soldier in Korea, he received a
wound that was “decent except that the fragment nicked the apex of
my pleura and got me a collapsed lung and a big roaring empyema.
No permanent damage, however, except a frightening-looking scar in
the hollow of my neck and in certain weather a tender joint” (126).
Binx also reveals that he used to be prone to depressions “during
which I lie rigid as a stick for hours staring straight up at the plaster
medallion in the ceiling of my bedroom” (6). Similarly, we later find
him lying “rigid as a stick under the cot, locked in a death grip with
everydayness,” as he puts it (146).
But Binx’s most overt health assessment is reserved for his father.
When Binx was a child, he says, his father
suffered from insomnia. . . . In those days it was thought that
sleeping porches were healthful, so my father stuck one onto the
house . . . . Here [my brother] and I slept on even the coldest
nights. My father had trouble sleeping and moved out with us.
He tossed like a wounded animal, or slept fitfully, his breath whistling musically through the stiff hairs of his nose—and went back
inside before morning, leaving his bed tortured and sour, a smell
which I believed to be caused by a nasal ailment known then as
“catarrh.” (85)
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From these observations, Binx goes on to speculate about etiology,
positing that his father “made a mistake. He was trying to sleep.
He thought he had to sleep a certain number of hours every night,
breathe fresh air, eat a certain number of calories, evacuate his bowels
regularly and have a stimulating hobby” (86). Taking issue with that
standard medical advice, Binx even hints at an alternative course of
therapy, one that involves trying “to fathom . . . mystery”:
As for hobbies, people with stimulating hobbies suffer from the
most noxious of despairs since they are tranquilized in their despair.
. . . Instead of trying to sleep I try to fathom the mystery of this
suburb at dawn. Why do these splendid houses look so defeated at
this hour of the day. . . . What spirit takes possession of them? My
poor father. I can see him . . . dragging his Saskatchewan sleeping
bag like the corpse of his dead hope. (86)
In these comments on his father, Binx does not merely demonstrate
his medical vocabulary. He also reveals his desire both to understand
and to distance himself from his father—a desire that, as we will see,
plays a crucial role in Binx’s search.
Reciprocal Certification:
Defeating the Malaise and Putting Science in Its Place
Binx identifies what he calls “the malaise” (or “everydayness”)
as the antagonist of his horizontal search: “Everydayness is the enemy.
No search is possible. Perhaps there was a time when everydayness
was not too strong and one could break its grip by brute strength.
Now nothing breaks it—but disaster. Only once in my life was the
grip of everydayness broken: when I lay bleeding in a ditch” (145).
That “disaster” during which Binx “lay bleeding in a ditch” occurred
when, as a soldier in Korea, he was shot. When that bullet paradoxically shattered the malaise, the horizontal search first occurred to him:
Everything is upside down for me. . . . What are generally considered to be the best times are for me the worst times, and that
worst of times was one of the best. My shoulder didn’t hurt but
it was pressed hard against the ground . . . . [T]here awoke in me
an immense curiosity. I was onto something. I vowed that if I ever
got out of this fix, I would pursue the search. Naturally, as soon
as I recovered and got home, I forgot all about it. (11)
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Taken together, these two passages make it clear that, for Binx, it is
disasters that, by defeating the malaise, make a horizontal search possible.
But how, exactly, could a disaster like being shot offer the wounded
person a victory over the malaise? To answer that question, we need a
clearer conception of the malaise. Fortunately, Binx comes to our aid:
“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). When the malaise-ridden, ghost-like Binx
was shot, he was suddenly forced back into his flesh—forced to feel
and to acknowledge that part of him—and, in that way, restored to “the
world” that had been “lost” to him. Disaster returned Binx—though
temporarily, he admits—to his own embodiment and to the physical
world of which he is a part.
Few critics have noticed the close relationship between the malaise and Binx’s former, vertical search.19 As we have just seen, “the
world is lost” to the ghost-like malaisian. Similarly, Binx characterizes
the vertical search as divorcing a person from the world in a scientific
pursuit of knowledge. That divorce occurs vertically as a person is
lifted from the earth, so to speak, and attains the vantage of a God’seye-view—a perspective from which one can “unify” observations and
thereby “understand more and more specimens by fewer and fewer
formulae” (82). During the “years” in which he conducted his vertical
search, Binx tells us, he “stood outside the universe and sought to
understand it,” living “as an Anyone . . . Anywhere” (70). For Binx,
to live as an Anyone Anywhere is to adopt the posture of a “pure”
scientist.20 The summer of his undergraduate research with pigs, Binx
had a lab partner, Harry Stern, who was just such a scientist:
[he] was absolutely unaffected by the singularities of time and place. His
abode was anywhere. It was all the same to him whether he catheterized a pig at four o’clock in the afternoon in New Orleans or at
midnight in Transylvania. He was actually like one of those scientists
in the movies who don’t care about anything but the problem in
their heads. . . . Yet I do not envy him. I would not change places
with him if he discovered the cause and cure of cancer. For he is
no more aware of the mystery which surrounds him than a fish is
aware of the water it swims in. (52)21
So, just as the malaise threatens to make Binx a ghost who is divorced
from the material world, the vertical search rendered him, like Harry,
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no more than a scientific Anyone Anywhere (“outside the universe,”
without “time and place”). And just as Binx resolves to vanquish
the malaise—“I vow: I’m a son of a bitch if I’ll be defeated by the
everydayness” (145)—he abandoned his vertical search long ago. He
discovered that, in the end, that search was insufficient, failing to put
him in touch with ambient “mystery” and leading to the “difficulty”
that, “though the universe had been disposed of, I myself was left
over. There I lay in my hotel room with my search over yet still
obliged to draw one breath and then the next” (70).
Binx’s experience of the failure of the vertical search, which
rendered him “left over,” is suggestive of an idea that, for Percy, was
not confined to his first novel. In his essays, Percy often commented
on the existential inadequacy of science: “the more science progressed,
and even as it benefitted man, the less it said about what it is like
to be a man living in the world. Every advance in science seemed to
take us further from the concrete here-and-now in which we live.”22
In other words, following Kierkegaard, Percy observed that “science
teaches nothing” about living and dying as an individual but can only
speak of a person as a member of a class or category of individuals
among whom there are shared, general resemblances.23 Yet, might there
be a way to practice medicine that could both defeat the malaise and
remedy the inadequacy that Binx found in a strictly scientific stance
and mode of understanding? The novel suggests that there is, and it
is connected to certification—a concept that the text places in opposition to both the malaise and the vertical search. Based on the text’s
use of the term, I understand “certification” as an experience of public
or interpersonal recognition that confers the status of Someone Somewhere on the one who is recognized, which validates one’s existence,
at least temporarily. In the story, the term appears most explicitly in
relationship to moviegoing.
Binx regards himself as a solitary moviegoer.24 However, during
the week of action that the novel spans, at least one person accompanies Binx to each of the movies that he sees. For example, in the
evening on the first day of the novel, Binx and Kate see Panic in the
Streets in a theater on Tchoupitoulas Street. The movie was filmed in
New Orleans, Binx tells us, and includes “a scene which shows the
very neighborhood of the theater” (63). After the movie, Kate glances
around that neighborhood and says, “Yes, it is certified now,” and
Binx explains:
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She refers to a phenomenon of moviegoing which I have called
certification. Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a
neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely
he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will
expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees
a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible
for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere
and not Anywhere. (63)
With this scene in mind, Carl Elliott has commented that “the neighborhood, simply by virtue of having appeared in the movie, has
taken on a heightened reality. Its value has increased. The movie has
certified it, and as a result, the people who inhabit the neighborhood
are certified as well.”25 Thanks to the public recognition that the
big screen confers, both the neighborhood and its residents receive
a short-lived injection of significance. Along with the movie, they,
too, are admired—in their imaginations, at least. Each resident, Binx
says, is transformed into “a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere”—language that opposes certification to both the malaise and the
vertical search. To establish that Binx’s horizontal search involves his
desire for certification, it is important to note how the passage quoted
above continues. Following Kate’s remark that the neighborhood “is
certified now” and Binx’s description of certification, he immediately
returns to Kate: “She sounds better but she is not. She is trapping
herself, this time by being my buddy, best of all buddies and most
privy to my little researches. In spite of everything she finds herself,
even now, playing out the role. In her long nightmare, this our old
friendship now itself falls victim to the grisly transmogrification by
which she unfailingly turns everything she touches to horror” (63).26 In
this passage, Binx implies that Kate, by saying that the neighborhood
is now certified, is drawing attention to the fact that she is “privy”
to his “little researches.” As we soon learn, Binx means that he has
confided in Kate about his vertical and horizontal searches.27 He is
suggesting that, as Kate speaks of certification, she is also speaking of
those searches. But what is the relationship between certification and
those searches? My answer, once again, is that Binx’s horizontal search
involves a desire for a kind of certification that, if achieved, might
enable him to avoid the ghastly anonymity that accompanies both the
vertical search and the malaise. As both interpersonal and enduring,
such certification would also be distinct from all forms of official and
impersonal validation—the superficial recognition that Binx associates
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with, for example, “identity cards, library cards, credit cards,” and
other licenses that have the power of “certifying, so to speak, one’s
right to exist” (6–7).28 However, to argue for that claim, I must show
that it makes sense to speak of certification that is “interpersonal.”
To see that, consider the scene in which the movie actor William
Holden—who “is in New Orleans shooting a few scenes in the Place
d’Armes” (12)—makes a stunning, flesh-and-blood appearance on the
streets of the French Quarter.
Just after Binx spots Holden coming out of Pirate’s Alley half a
block ahead of him, Binx sees a “boy” of “twenty” or “twenty-one”
who, after glimpsing Holden, “perks up for a second, but seeing
Holden doesn’t really help him.” Binx continues: “On the contrary. He
can only contrast Holden’s resplendent reality with his own shadowy
and precarious existence. Obviously he is more miserable than ever”
(15–16). Note the parallel between this boy’s response to Holden and
Kate’s response to the certified neighborhood: Just as the boy does
not (yet) share Holden’s “resplendent reality,” Kate does not live in
the neighborhood and is not certified along with it. That is why Kate,
after observing the certified streets, “sounds better but she is not.”
However, unlike Kate, the boy is certified by Holden, for the star seeks
a light for his cigarette, and “the boy holds out a light, nods briefly
to Holden’s thanks, then passes on without a flicker of recognition.”
Binx rejoices: “The boy has done it! He has won title to his own existence, as plenary an existence now as Holden’s. . . . He is a citizen
like Holden; two men of the world they are” (16). For this boy, the
“antidote to [Holden’s] performance is more performance.”29 Through
a deft sequence of cool and calculated gestures, the boy enters the
certifying glow of Holden’s Hollywood world. At least for a few moments, he casts off “his own shadowy and precarious existence” and
dwells within Holden’s “resplendent reality.” He has been fashioned,
“for a time at least,” into Someone who is Somewhere. In short, this
scene indicates that certification can be bestowed on a life not only by
a movie but also through an encounter with another person—in this
case, with a movie star, for the stars possess the “heightened reality”
that the big screen can confer: “Holden has turned down Toulouse
shedding light as he goes. An aura of heightened reality moves with
him and all who fall within it feel it” (16). By chumming with Holden
on the street, the boy partakes of the public admiration that Holden
receives and, in that way, is certified. He has become Someone (Holden’s
buddy) who is Somewhere (with Holden in his Hollywood world).
Unlike the boy and his smooth performance, Kate is, Binx observes, a faltering actress who is “playing out the role” of his “buddy,
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best of all buddies” (63). Kate is sick, he tells us. She is suffering a
“long nightmare” (63). At times, however, she refuses to acknowledge
her illness, claiming to be “fine” or even “wonderful” (57, 81, 115).
But unlike Kate’s doctors—who are, she says, “charmed” with her
(81)—Binx is unconvinced by her performance. As long as their relationship hangs on their poor acting skills, any lasting certification will
continue to elude them. It is only by their mutually acknowledging
Kate’s sickness, admitting their need for one another, and resolving to
be together that Kate and Binx will achieve certification—an interpersonal certification that is like that of the boy with Holden, yet more
enduring and void of performance. Through mutual recognition—not
a wider, public admiration—Binx and Kate will confer on one another
the status of Someone who is Somewhere. That is, each will become
someone who is for and located with the other. To denote this particular kind of bond, I will use the phrase reciprocal certification. Its
emergence in the relationship between Kate and Binx can be traced
in several passages.
After seeing a western on Thursday night, Binx and Kate talk
outside the theater. Raising the subject of her strange experiences years
ago surrounding the death of her fiancé, Lyell, Kate asks: “Have you
noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people
real? I remember at the time of the wreck—people were so kind and
helpful and solid. . . . [O]ur reality had been purchased only by Lyell’s
death. In another hour or so we had all faded out again and gone
our dim ways” (81). Here, as Kate speaks of the reality or solidity
that people seem to gain in times “of illness or disaster or death,”
she is—unintentionally, perhaps—speaking once more of certification.
This solid reality is analogous to the “heightened reality” of the boy
who is publicly admired alongside Holden. After Lyell’s death, Kate
and the others saw and assisted one another anew, becoming—though
only briefly—for and with one another. That claim is supported by
Gary M. Ciuba’s commentary on this passage. Ciuba observes that
Kate’s language compares the experience of the “spectators” at Lyell’s
death—which included Kate—to the fleeting certification that moviegoers can experience. The car accident, Ciuba wrote,
gave Kate a sense of actuality that seemed heightened. . . . Lyell earned
an hour of more intense life for the spectators at the movie of his
death. By shocking them out of their normal apathy, the disaster
allowed sympathetic viewers to become involved with the lives of
others, and in so doing they gained a sense of . . . communion.
. . . But the audience soon faded out, dissolving like cinematic images into their once again ephemeral lives.30
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Like Kate, Binx longs for disasters that would, as Ciuba puts
it, allow him “to become involved with the lives of others.” The
novel abounds with evidence for that claim.31 For example, early in
the story Binx spies an attractive woman sitting near him on the bus
and muses: “If it were a movie, I would have only to wait. The bus
would get lost or the city would be bombed and she and I would
tend the wounded. As it is, I may as well stop thinking about her”
(13). Another example occurs on Saturday when Binx and Sharon are
driving to the gulf for a swim: “Early afternoon finds us spinning along
the Gulf Coast. . . . As luck would have it . . . we are involved in
an accident. Fortunately it is not serious. When I say as luck would
have it, I mean good luck. Yet how . . . can even a minor accident
be considered good luck? Because it provides a means of winning
out over the malaise, if one has the sense to take advantage of it”
(120). Binx injures his shoulder in the accident, and, after Sharon tends
to him, he silently celebrates, bidding the malaise “farewell forever”
(127). Here, once again, the text seems to suggest that an experience
of physical trauma can defeat the malaise. Unfortunately, the car accident’s anti-malaise effect soon wears off.32 But for Binx and Kate,
things will be different. Binx shares Kate’s yearning for both disaster
and the social connectedness that might follow. This is important because they will survive a “catastrophe” that will bring them together
and because it prefigures his decision to become a doctor—a profession
in which he might achieve communion with his patients by sharing
their disastrous illnesses.
Just as the kind of certification that is conferred by the big
screen—its gift of living, “for a time at least, as a person who is
Somewhere and not Anywhere”—might not endure very long, interpersonal certification might not last (63).33 As Kate says, “in another
hour or so we had all faded out again and gone our dim ways” (81).
In contrast, Binx is after certification that will last. After he and Kate
see the western, Binx reflects that, in the theater, he experienced “a
secret sense of wonder about the enduring, about all the nights . . .
when the seats endured alone in the empty theater. The enduring is
something that must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it
off” (80). He desires to savor whole segments of time, he tells us, but
they elude him. He cannot make them endure.
In his quest for a lasting bond, Binx is not always aided by Kate.
By refusing to join Binx in his recognition of her sickness, Kate resists
sharing her experience of illness with him. In that way, she is denying
Binx the more enduring certification that he desires, which, as we will
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see, he could realize by being with and for her in her illness. Her
temporary refusal is evident in their conversation on Tulane’s campus
about Binx’s vertical and horizontal searches. His horizontal search has
led him, he says elsewhere, to “wander seriously” (70). However, he
notices that, when he speaks with Kate about his horizontal search,
she fails to realize its life-or-death seriousness, so he takes “care to
be no more serious than she” (82–83). They are failing to connect.
But Kate does not always lack seriousness. Early in the novel,
Binx says of her: “I can see why she is so serious: truthfully it seems
that if she can just hit upon the right place, a shuttered place of brick
and vine and flowing water, her very life can be lived” (57). Torn
between her search for “the right place” and—as Binx later observes—
her inability “to be an anyone who is anywhere,” Kate is adrift (190).
What she needs, Binx sees, is what he needs—to be certified by being
assigned a place, rendering her Somewhere. Binx acts on that knowledge late one night when Kate wanders over to his apartment. As
they sit outside, he can see that “she is nowhere; she is in the realm
of her idea” and that “she will not feel wonderful long” (113, 115).34
To recover her from the dizzying heights of her fleeting elation, Binx
proposes an alternative “idea”—marriage. “What do you think of this
for an idea?” he asks, and goes on to tell her about his plan to open
a “service station” in the lot across the street, perhaps even to run it
by himself, and assures her that she “could come sit with me at night,
if you liked” (115–116). For Kate, marriage with Binx would certify
her by giving her a concrete place with him (Somewhere) and making
her Someone special through their shared recognition of her illness.
For now, Kate cannot respond to Binx’s proposal, but the passage
contains two signs of progress. First, Kate wants to stop performing.
She tells Binx that, earlier that day, she announced to Dr. Mink, her
psychiatrist, that she would no longer strain every nerve to live up
to his model of a “joyous and creative person” (115). Second, from
her anonymous existence “anywhere,” Kate does, at least, return to
“herself.” “‘Ooooh,’ Kate groans, Kate herself now. ‘I’m so afraid’”; she
depends on Binx to guide her and to remind her that “everything is
going to be all right” (116).35
At crucial times, Binx, in turn, depends on Kate. On Tuesday,
when they arrive in Chicago for his business convention, he immediately
discovers that his “misgivings about Chicago were justified” (201). He
had been terrified of walking along “Michigan Avenue in the neighborhood of five million strangers, each shooting out his own personal ray”
(99). But Kate, Binx tells us, “looks after me. She is strangely at home
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in the city, wholly impervious to the five million personal rays” (201).
She “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). Lost among strangers in the anonymous cityscape,
Binx clings to Kate for a home, foreshadowing his later commitment
to her and his dependence on her to certify him.
It is in Chicago that Binx and Kate suffer and survive the “catastrophe” that brings them together, rendering them real or solid to
one another (201). That catastrophe is their—and especially Binx’s—
moral failure in Emily’s eyes: At a time when Kate was especially
vulnerable, Binx forgot to tell Emily that Kate was joining him on his
Chicago trip. As Ciuba comments, “When the disaster finally arrives,
it hardly seems to have happened. Although Binx often longs for
the Bomb to clear away the ruins caused by everydayness, nothing
so spectacular culminates his hapless journey. Instead, the moviegoer
simply performs a nonact, a mysterious failure that he is unable to
justify. On the phone Binx cannot explain why he did not tell Emily about Kate’s trip to Chicago, yet his world has ended with that
breach of her code.”36 After they return to New Orleans and Binx is
both rebuked and temporarily rejected by Emily, he waits for Kate at
a playground, worried that she will not show, that she has come to
share Emily’s rejection of him. But Kate appears, and “the playground
looks like it alone had survived the end of the world” (231). Kate,
Binx says, is sitting in her car “like a bomber pilot . . . and she could
be I myself, sooty eyed and nowhere (231).”37 The catastrophe has come,
and they have survived. Unless they unite, however, each will remain
uncertified and prone to becoming an Anyone Anywhere, as suggested
above by the word “nowhere.”
Kate’s arrival signals her acceptance of Binx’s marriage proposal
and the beginning of their reciprocal commitment. He joins Kate in her
car, and she confesses that, though she wants to marry him, she is still
afraid and does not know whether she can “succeed”: “I am frightened
when I am alone and I am frightened when I am with people. The
only time I’m not frightened is when I’m with you. You’ll have to
be with me a great deal” (233–34).38 Binx promises that he will, and
Kate promises to stop performing and to acknowledge her illness: “I
will be under treatment a long time,” she says, “And I’m not sure I’ll
ever change. Really change” (234). After Binx reassures her that she
might change, she asks him to help her get better, proposes a specific
plan, and he replies, “Yes, I’ll do that” (234). Citing Percy’s suggestion
that “an intersubjective discovery of alienation is already its opposite,”
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Mary Deems Howland explains that such a reversal of alienation might
occur because “anything that can be named and shared with another
person is less fearsome than the original, unnamed anxiety.”39 The reciprocal certification that Binx and Kate experience involves the mutual
naming and sharing of her suffering. For example, in the epilogue,
after almost a year of marriage with Binx, Kate names her anxiety in
carrying out a simple errand for him. She needs assurance, she tells
him, that, as she goes to the bank, he will be thinking about her in
a very specific way, and Binx says that he will. Binx promises to be
with and for Kate, certifying her as someone for whom he cares and
who has a place with him. Kate, in turn, certifies Binx by recognizing
him as someone who knows her intimately, who will try to help her
get better by telling her “the simplest things” to do, and whose place
is to share her experience of illness (234).
Reciprocal Certification: Modeling the Physician-Patient Relationship
In an often-anthologized article, James F. Childress and Mark Siegler
survey five models of the physician-patient relationship: paternalism,
partnership, contract, friendship, and negotiations.40 They argue that,
for the complicated world of medical practice, each of those models is,
to some extent, both descriptively accurate and prescriptively acceptable. Because “there is no single physician-patient relationship,” they
write, “it is probable that no single metaphor can adequately describe
or direct the whole range of relationships in health care, such as open
heart surgery, clinical research, and psychoanalysis.”41 Childress and
Siegler’s model of negotiations is especially applicable to Binx’s preprofessional ways of relating to others.
The negotiations model emphasizes discussions between “concerned
parties” that occur over time, “does not necessarily presuppose a conflict of interests between the parties,” and stresses the need to reach
an agreement that is “mutually acceptable.”42 In his relationships with
both Kate and his half-brother, Lonnie Smith, Binx proves to be adept
at health-oriented negotiations. At Emily’s house on the first day of the
novel, Kate resists confiding in Binx. When he asks her, “Is it bad this
time?” she replies, “Not as bad” (57). Soon, however, she confesses, “I
didn’t tell you the truth. It’s bad” (61). Binx then asks whether she
wants to go outside or get in touch with her psychiatrist, and Kate
replies, “No. The other” (61). As Binx explains, Kate is asking for a
respite or break from the pressure of living: “The ‘other’ is a way we
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found of getting through it before. It has to do with her becoming
something of a small boy and my not paying much attention to her.
. . . She is not so bad. I have seen her worse” (61). By negotiating her
predicament in this way—a way that, perhaps unfortunately, caters a
bit to their tendency to play-act—Binx and Kate arrive at a mutually
acceptable way to give Kate temporary relief.
Charles B. Rodning proposes two important skills for negotiators
in a healthcare context: the ability to take “an open-ended approach
characterized by ‘inventing options’ and an ‘ability to perceive the
situation as the other party perceives it.’”43 When Binx engages Lonnie in negotiations related to his fragile health, he displays both skills.
At fourteen, Lonnie is wheelchair-bound and underweight, and Binx
questions his decision to fast: “You’ve had pneumonia twice in the
last year,” Binx reminds him. “It would not be good for you” (163).
Lonnie has a specific, religious motivation for fasting: he wants “to
conquer an habitual disposition” to envy Duval, his deceased brother
(163). Binx replies from within Lonnie’s worldview to suggest that,
in this case, perhaps Lonnie’s envying Duval is not a sin, for Duval
is worthy of envy in that he now “sees God face to face and you
don’t” (163). Then Binx narrates: “Lonnie grins at me with the liveliest sense of our complicity. . . . He knows that I have entered the
argument as a game played by his rules . . . but he does not mind”
(163). Continuing to play by Lonnie’s rules, Binx goes on to invent
options, as Rodning put it, presenting Lonnie with an alternative to
fasting: “Instead I would concentrate on the Eucharist. It seems a more
positive thing to do” (164). Lonnie seems inclined to agree.
Binx’s negotiations with Kate and Lonnie might indicate that, as
a physician, he will be willing to see each patient individually and not
merely under the categorical gaze that the vertical search encourages.
As we have seen, that scientific search taught Binx to “understand more
and more specimens by fewer and fewer formulae” (82). Operating only
under its aegis, Dr. Binx Bolling would be inclined to regard patient
P simply as diagnosis D, and, knowing that treatment T has proved
most effective for Ps with D, Binx would probably recommend T for P.
In this case, P is seen mostly as an Anyone (i.e., as any person with
D) and is treated as if P were Anywhere, at any time (e.g., “at four
o’clock . . . in New Orleans,” “at midnight in Transylvania”). And in
so treating P, Binx would render himself an Any-physician Anywhere—a
generic doctor, removed from any specific place and time, who invests
the encounter with nothing of himself (e.g., his knowledge of, and
concern for, this particular patient). But that is not how Binx interacts
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with Kate and Lonnie. Although he is guided by general conceptions
of “illness” and “health” (e.g., he believes that fasting probably would
not be good for anyone who has had Lonnie’s recent illnesses), Binx
goes beyond such generalizations, devising health promotion plans
and courses of treatment that depend on seeing and interacting with
each patient uniquely (e.g., Lonnie’s concentrating on the Eucharist,
his and Kate’s proceeding with “the other”). A question that Binx
mulls over on his outing with Sharon suggests that he is already
disposed to think of patient interactions in this sort of individualized
way: “What if the malaise was different with every girl and needed
a different cure?” (122). Practicing medicine in a way that brings him
face-to-face with each patient, Binx may affirm what is good about his
vertical search while avoiding the assumption that science alone can
teach a person how to live and how to die. He is, after all, good at
science, but, as we have seen, he has had a profound encounter with
science’s existential limits. So, as a doctor who balances his scientific
bent with his insight that therapy might be ineffective if it is merely
generic, Binx might recapture a mostly-discarded part of his past (the
vertical search) and graft it into his new life in medicine.44
Reciprocal certification might, then, serve as a new model for the
physician-patient relationship. After they resolve to marry, Kate asks
Binx what he plans to do. “There is only one thing I can do,” he
thinks: “listen to people, see how they stick themselves into the world,
hand them along a ways in their dark journey and be handed along,
and for good and selfish reasons. It only remains to decide whether
this vocation is best pursued in a service station or—” (233). Kate
interrupts these thoughts, asking Binx whether he will go to medical
school, and he replies that he is willing to—indicating that, for him,
a phrase like “as a doctor” would appropriately complete the train of
thought that ended “in a service station or—”.
Binx might, we imagine, have opportunities to achieve reciprocal
certification with patients. Indeed, Binx’s bond with Kate provides a
model for how he might relate to patients.45 Just as patients might
lean on Binx to share their illnesses and sufferings and become solid
for them by listening to them, treating them, and handing them along
a ways, Binx, in turn, might depend on them to render him Someone
(one who cares and uses his knowledge and skills for them) who is
Somewhere (with them in their illnesses).
In that way, Binx the physician would also depend on patients
to help him defeat the malaise. How so? Again, the “world is lost”
to the malaisian who is divorced from his fleshly existence. Yet, an
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experience of physical trauma can restore him to his embodiment and
to the material world in which he is enmeshed. Such a “disaster,” Binx
and Kate agree, conquers the malaise. By suffering with his patients
and, in that way, recalling his own body, a reciprocal physician enters
a prolonged experience of physical trauma. But, even while difficult,
that experience might also be sustaining. Divorced from his flesh,
the vertical searcher, Binx tells us, seeks an Archimedean fulcrum, or
“secret leverage point,” beyond space and time—a non-place to posit
his disembodied intellect (82). In contrast, the horizontal searcher can
depend on the metaphorical “base” of another person to help him
bear his body’s weight (74). Oriented by and around his patient, a
reciprocal physician might find himself supported, in turn, by precisely
such a “base.” So, even as Dr. Binx Bolling certifies his patients, he
might be certified by them, reclaim some of his vertical search, and
defeat the malaise. As he hands others along, he needs them, he says,
to hand him along, too.
Like the negotiations model of the physician-patient relationship, I
suspect that reciprocal certification is, to some extent, both descriptively
accurate and prescriptively acceptable for the real world of medical
practice. Because such certification occurs through an enduring bond,
this model seems best-suited to the long-term relationships that primary
care physicians, psychiatrists, and oncologists (as well as other types
of health professionals) tend to have with their patients. But whether
this model could be realized in a particular doctor-patient relationship
also depends on the extent to which a particular patient needs or even
wants her physician to share her experience of illness. While Kate,
for example, seems to depend heavily on Binx, Lonnie enjoys their
friendship but seems not to need Binx as much, for Lonnie has the
“gift of believing” that his sufferings serve a religious purpose (137).
It is beyond the scope of this essay to provide a full defense of
reciprocal certification as either descriptively or prescriptively adequate.
I do observe, though, that this model is (a) suggested by the text, (b)
unique, and, (c) to some extent, a realistic goal. This model strikes me
as unique in that, to my knowledge, no other model of the doctorpatient relationship emphasizes ways (other than monetary) in which
physicians depend on patients. Instead, models of that relationship
usually emphasize either what a doctor can do for the patient (i.e.,
beneficence) or what both parties are allowed to do (i.e., autonomy).46
In that way, those models tend to ignore the question of what patients can do for their doctors.47 So, while there might be a variety
of ways in which reciprocal certification overlaps with other models,
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I suspect that it could not be subsumed under another model, for
its portrayal of a physician as appropriately dependent on a patient
seems to set it apart.
Furthermore, reciprocal certification is, to some extent, realistic.
Childress and Siegler observe that, “whether medicine is now only a
series of encounters between strangers rather than intimates, medicine
is increasingly regarded by patients and doctors, and by analysts of
the profession . . . as if it were a practice among strangers rather than
intimates.”48 Reciprocal certification is achieved in the intimate relationship between Binx and Kate and seems well-suited to the close and
long-term bonds that some areas of medicine can foster. But could
such certification be achieved in a medical relationship that begins
as a stranger-stranger interaction? The novel suggests that it could.
In Chicago, Binx is out of sorts: among five million Chicagoans, he
fears remaining a stranger, becoming an Anyone Anywhere. But he
offers a solution: “Every place of arrival should have a booth set up
and manned by an ordinary person whose task it is to greet strangers
and give them a little trophy of local space-time stuff . . . in order
to insure that the stranger shall not become an Anyone” (201–02).
Binx’s language in this passage (e.g., “local space-time stuff,” “shall
not become an Anyone”) suggests that he is speaking of a kind of
interpersonal certification—in this case, one that occurs in an encounter
between “an ordinary person” and “strangers.” In the epilogue, now
in medical school, Binx regards himself as “a very ordinary fellow”—a
person well-disposed, perhaps, to certify a patient-stranger (237). So, if
the text is correct that such certification could begin with a strangerstranger interaction, it might be achievable even within the initially
anonymous structures of much of modern healthcare.
As a model of the physician-patient relationship, there is much
about reciprocal certification that remains to be articulated. For example,
I noted that the reciprocal certification that Binx and Kate experience
involves the mutual naming and sharing of her suffering. But what,
exactly, is such a “mutual naming”? Montello proposes that, for Percy’s
“suffering protagonist, hope lies in the words spoken between people
who matter to each other.”49 Similarly, Robert Coles claims that Percy’s
stories offer “the obvious, if often hard-to-secure, ‘treatment plan,’ the
I-Thou of ‘existentialism,’ the commitment of one person to another.”50
These ideas might suggest that, within reciprocal certification, both
patient and physician are treated through words and other deeds that,
above all else, give them hope.
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Medical Practice as Binx’s Patrimony
Many commentators on Binx’s search have overlooked its link
to his deceased father.51 But any interpretation of his search must account for that connection, for there is a passage in which he makes
it explicit, claiming that “any doings of my father, even his signature,
is in the nature of a clue in my search” (71). Yet, Binx does not tell
us how, exactly, understanding his father’s “doings” would aid him in
his search, and he even confesses that he “can’t seem to remember”
his father (56). In this final section, I follow Lawson’s suggestion that,
by entering medical school, Binx will “pick up his father’s life where
his father discarded it.”52 His search leads him to medicine in part
because he wants to understand both why his father abandoned medical practice and how he, Binx, might avoid his father’s self-destructive
fate. Binx claims that, in his romantic death, his father found a way
“to please them and please himself,” both to win the admiration of his
family and to do what he wanted (157). In becoming a doctor, Binx
might accomplish a similar feat. He will please his Aunt Emily—who
prompts him to go to medical school—but he might also please himself
by being certified, reaffirming part of his vertical search, defeating the
malaise, and coming to understand his vanished father while, unlike
him, avoiding an early demise.
At the beginning of the novel, Binx describes a photograph at
which he never tires of looking and which, for ten years, he has
been trying to understand. It is a picture of his father, a surgeon
who withdrew from his practice and lay in bed until World War II
began, when he enlisted in the RCAF and soon died “in the wine
dark sea” near Crete (25). Binx observes that, in the photo, his father’s eyes are “ironical” (24–25). Binx is confident that “English
romanticism . . . and 1930 science” killed his father (88). Under the
spell of that romanticism, a person longs for “each experience to be
a Perfect Moment, a rare event” that fulfills its “Possibility to stir
emotion.”53 Dying gallantly for old England—“the culmination of that
western tradition which originated in the land bounded by Homer’s
‘wine dark sea’”54—Binx’s father would have regarded his death as
precisely such a “Perfect Moment.” And “1930 science” stands for the
unshakeable faith that, sooner or later, some scientific discovery—or
set of discoveries—will provide the key to understanding the entire
universe, including ourselves.55 Binx speaks deploringly of “English
romanticism . . . and 1930 science” (87–88), but, as his search follows
his father’s tracks, how will he avoid falling prey to them? By ac-
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cepting the limitations of his vertical search, Binx has already shunned
his father’s scientism. By marrying the tumultuous Kate and suffering
with his patients, thereby embracing many imperfect moments, he will
avoid his father’s romanticism.
Recommending that Binx enter medical school, Emily says, “You
know you’ve always had it in the back of your mind” (52). Whether
or not she is correct, we know there was a time when Binx considered
becoming a doctor: “I am a stock and bond broker. It is true that
my family was somewhat disappointed in my choice of a profession.
Once I thought of going into law or medicine or even pure science. I
even dreamed of doing something great. But there is much to be said
for giving up such grand ambitions and living the most ordinary life
imaginable, a life without the old longings” (9). Binx is non-committal
about Emily’s medical school proposal. To her question, “Don’t you
feel obliged to use your brain and to make a contribution?” he simply replies, “No’m” (53). He resists her certainty: “It seems so plain
when I see it through her eyes. My duty in life is simple. I go to
medical school. I live a long useful life serving my fellowman [sic].
What is wrong with this? All I have to do is remember it” (54). But
Binx is indicating that he does not embrace his aunt’s take on his
“duty.” He has already warned us of the transformative power that
Emily wields over others: “All the stray bits and pieces of the past,
all that is feckless and gray about people, she pulls together into an
unmistakable visage of the heroic or the craven, the noble or the ignoble. So strong is she that sometimes the person and the past are in
fact transfigured by her” (49). It might be easy to conclude that the
decision to go to medical school is simply Binx’s attempt to regain
Emily’s approval after the Chicago disaster. When Kate asks him, “Are
you going to medical school?” his reply seems to lack conviction: “If
[Emily] wants me to” (233).
To conclude that Binx goes to medical school merely to please Emily
is too simplistic. By the end of the novel, he has been transformed: in
sharp contrast with the rest of the novel, the epilogue contains not a
single reference to movies or moviegoing.56 That is significant because
Binx’s moviegoing was closely tied to his scientifically-oriented vertical search, which invited him to adopt a transcendent perspective—to
“look at the world” at a remove, as Lawson wrote, “as if it were a
movie.”57 Little wonder, then, that, as Binx follows his horizontal search
to a commitment to others in medical practice, he mostly renounces
the detachment that was symptomatic of both his vertical search and
his moviegoing.58 Furthermore, while it is far from clear that Binx has
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come to accept Emily’s idea of his “duty in life,” he does, in fact, want
to help others. That is evident from the passage quoted earlier—the
one that immediately precedes his reply to Kate: “If [Emily] wants me
to.” There, Binx is pondering his desire to “listen to people, see how
they stick themselves into the world, hand them along a ways in their
dark journey and be handed along, and for good and selfish reasons”
(233).59 Because Binx has already hinted at his desire to help others
by listening to them, that desire offers us another plausible way—in
addition to pleasing Emily—to understand what, for Binx, would count
as a “good” reason to go to medical school.60
But what are Binx’s “selfish reasons” for becoming a doctor? He
wants certification, to vanquish the malaise, and to reaffirm his vertical search in a very limited way. Other reasons have to do with his
father. When Binx and Sharon visit the Smiths’ fishing cabin, he asks
his mother about his father: “What was wrong with him?” She replies
obliquely that “he was overwrought” by “his psychological make-up,”
but she hints at the nature of that “psychological make-up” when she
describes his long and ponderous walks, his insomnia, his need for
the diversion of books, and his periods of immobility—of lying in bed
and staring at the ceiling (151–56). Substituting moviegoing for reading, that collection of symptoms must sound eerily familiar to Binx,
who suffers from each of them.61 Perhaps Binx understands his father
better than he realizes.62
Although similarities exist, including Binx’s decision to enter
his father’s profession, Binx has reason to believe that he, unlike his
father, will not abandon medicine. Because he was gripped by the
romantic spirit, his father, Binx recognizes, “wasn’t really cut out to
be an ordinary doctor” (154). Few and far between are the Perfect
Moments in a regular doctor’s routines. But “an ordinary doctor” is
exactly what Binx is willing to be. After a year of medical school,
Binx thinks of himself not as “one of [Emily’s] heroes” but as “a very
ordinary fellow” (237). There, in the epilogue, we find Binx speaking
with the dying Lonnie at his hospital bedside and reassuring Kate that
she can complete a simple errand. Those are unromantic moments, but
Binx accepts them. As he follows his father into medical practice, he
is likely to have many other such moments, all the while gaining a
better understanding of his father, who, given his heroic bent, probably
had an antipathy for the travails and failures of patient care.
Binx’s father’s aspirations to heroism led him to leave ordinary
medicine and to enlist as a flight surgeon soon after the outbreak
of war. And Binx sees that, in doing so, “he had found a way to
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137
do both: to please them and please himself. To leave. To do what
he wanted to do and save old England doing it. And perhaps even
carry off the grandest coup of all: to die. To win the big prize for
them and for himself (but not even he dreamed he would succeed
not only in dying but in dying in Crete in the wine dark sea)” (157).
Like his father, Binx wants “to please them and please himself.” Yet,
given all of the ways in which doctoring might please Binx, his search
leads him to seek to avoid his father’s self-destructive fate precisely
where his father could not—in an ordinary life in medicine. In that
way, an affinity for irony seems to be a further aspect of his father’s
“psychological make-up” that Binx has inherited.
Conclusion
Binx’s horizontal search can be understood in relationship to his
decision to become a doctor: Whatever else Binx might be searching
for, he is searching for a life in medical practice. When the reciprocal
certification between Kate and Binx is seen in relation to his decision
to become a doctor, The Moviegoer might be understood as offering
a particular model of the physician-patient relationship. All of this
raises many questions—both for Percy studies and for further reflection on medicine. For example, to what extent might this model of
the doctor-patient relationship be relevant to, and appropriate within,
contemporary medical practice? Furthermore, how well might Percy’s
other fictional physicians approximate reciprocal certification in their
patient interactions? Finally, if reciprocal certification represents an ideal
to which a doctor might sometimes aspire, might other medical ideals
be found in either The Moviegoer or Percy’s other works?
NOTES
1. Tolson, Pilgrim in the Ruins, 163.
2. Ibid., 184–96.
3. Lacy, “Fifty Years After,” 52.
4. Percy, The Moviegoer, 70. Subsequent page references to the novel will be
included in the text.
5. Lawson, “Walker Percy’s Physicians and Patients,” 236.
6. Lawson, “Walker Percy’s Indirect Communications,” 4–40. Hobbs, for one,
followed Lawson by arguing that Percy presented the central conflict of each of his
first four novels “in terms of the protagonist’s struggle to rise above the aesthetic
to the ethical and to pass through the ethical to the religious” (“Stages,” 37).
7. Hobbs, “Stages,” 38.
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Searching for Medicine in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer
8. Ibid., 38–39.
9. Lawson, “Indirect Communications,” 22–23. On Percy’s wish that readers
see Binx as a Christian convert, see Tolson, Pilgrim in the Ruins, 300. Quinlan’s
reading leans heavily on Percy’s wish: Quinlan, Last Catholic Novelist, 88–99. Both
Hobbs and Webb argue that Binx becomes a Christian: Hobbs, 47–49; Webb, “Father
Abraham,” 14–23. For a refutation of the claim that Binx becomes a Christian, see
Haddox, Fears and Fascinations, 153–56.
10. “Truthfully,” Binx says, “it is the fear of exposing my own ignorance
which constrains me from mentioning the object of my search” (14).
11. Robert Lacy, for one, did not mention Binx’s decision to go to medical
school (Lacy, “Fifty Years After,” 49–54). Furthermore, of the thirteen essays that
comprise The Last Physician: Walker Percy and the Moral Life of Medicine, only two
include very brief references to Binx’s intention to become a doctor. However,
neither of those authors discussed Binx’s decision as significant to understanding
the novel: Lantos, “Why Doctors Make Good Protagonists,” 40; Martinez, “Walker
Percy and Medicine,” 94.
12. Montello, “Eye to Ear,” 56–57.
13. The Moviegoer’s epigraph is from Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death:
“the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair.”
14. To Robert Coles, Percy once remarked, “Once a doctor, always a doctor,”
and, when Coles questioned this, Percy rallied to defend “his chosen profession.”
Coles, “Dr. Percy’s Hold on Medicine,” 15.
15. Credit is due to my student, Jess Bezdziecki, for calling my attention to this.
16. This point is also confirmed by the fact that no similar affinity for medical
lingo is to be found in the vocabulary of Will Barrett, the non-physician protagonist
of Percy’s second novel, The Last Gentleman.
17. My emphasis.
18. For example, see Percy, The Moviegoer, 86. On Binx’s detachment, Howland
comments that, “for most of the novel, Binx clings to his objective-transcendent
viewpoint. He assumes that he can look at his life from the outside, as if he were
Descartes’s disembodied cogito, cut off from the world it would know” (Howland,
Gift of the Other, 26). For an extended consideration of Binx as a Cartesian spectator,
and for his references to himself and to moviegoing as ghost-like, see Nash, “The
Moviegoer’s Cartesian Theater,” 153–60.
19. For a significant exception, see Tharpe, Walker Percy, 50–51.
20. “Once I thought of going into . . . pure science,” Binx says (Percy, The
Moviegoer, 9).
21. My emphasis.
22. Percy, “From Facts to Fiction,” 188.
23. Percy, “The Fateful Rift,” 271.
24. Here, Binx implies that he understands himself as a solitary moviegoer:
“Another evidence of my Jewishness: the other day a sociologist reported that a significantly large percentage of solitary moviegoers are Jews” (Percy, The Moviegoer, 89).
25. Elliott, Better than Well, 87.
26. My emphasis.
27. The next night, after seeing another movie, Binx and Kate walk through
the Tulane campus, and Kate asks whether their stopping outside the biology lab
where Binx “spent every afternoon for four years” is “part of the search”—alluding, apparently, to Binx’s horizontal search. Kate goes on to mention the “vertical
search” (Percy, The Moviegoer, 81–82). Ibid., 81–82.
28. My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for bringing this to my attention.
29. Elliott, Better than Well, 91.
30. Ciuba, Books of Revelations, 80. My emphasis.
31. Ciuba discusses Binx’s need for “catastrophe above all else” (Ciuba, Books
of Revelations, 58).
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139
32. Binx says that the malaise returns early Sunday morning and again
Sunday afternoon (Percy, The Moviegoer, 145–46 and 166).
33. My emphasis.
34. My emphasis.
35. My emphasis.
36. Ciuba, Books of Revelations, 86.
37. My emphasis.
38. Here, Kate echoes an earlier comment to Binx: “I am all right . . . .
never too bad with you” (The Moviegoer, 192).
39. Howland, Gift of the Other, 162. Howland also commented that, with their
shared experience of disaster, Binx and Kate have a “secret of loss, of shared deprivation, [which] falls into the category of the deep secret, which [Gabriel Marcel]
describes as ‘a really incommunicable experience—generally a painful one—about
which the initiated feel that others, who did not share it in the flesh, have no right
to speak’” (Howland, Gift of the Other, 35).
40. Childress and Siegler, “Metaphors and Models,” 76–84. Childress and
Siegler actually discuss six models. However, with regard to the physician-astechnician model, they conclude that “this model does not appear to be possible
or even desirable” (“Metaphors and Models,” 79).
41. Ibid., 77.
42. Ibid., 81.
43. Rodning, “Patient-Physician Relationships,” 216.
44. Desmond briefly made the observation for which I have argued at length:
“By the end of the novel, Binx has begun to learn to combine the vertical and
horizontal searches.” (Desmond, Crossroads, 29).
45. For what appears to be a similar use of the term “recognition” in the
context of the physician-patient relationship, see Berger, A Fortunate Man, 74.
46. For example, see Pellegrino and Thomasma, Virtues in Medical Practice.
47. Dr. Tom More seems to be onto the question of what patients can do
for him: “A note for physicians: if you listen carefully to what patients say, they
will often tell you . . . what is wrong with you” (Percy, Love in the Ruins, 39).
48. Childress and Siegler, “Metaphors and Models,” 80.
49. Montello, 55.
50. Coles, “Dr. Percy’s Hold on Medicine,” 13–14.
51. Lawson, Desmond, and Ciuba are important exceptions: Lawson, “English
romanticism . . . and 1930 science,” in Following Percy, 123–134; Desmond, 24–26;
Ciuba, Books of Revelations, 68–69. By showing that Binx’s search leads him to follow his father into medical practice, my argument opposes Wyatt-Brown’s claim
that “the novel never connects the loss of a father to Binx’s state of mind” (122).
52. Lawson, “English Romanticism,” in Following Percy, 134.
53. Ibid., 125.
54. Ibid., 127.
55. For a similar reading, see Ibid., in Following Percy, 125–26.
56. Nash, 158.
57. Lawson, “Cinema as Cave,” 92.
58. For more on the connection between Binx’s vertical search and his moviegoing, see Nash, 153–60. There, I also discuss the likelihood that, both in medical
training and as a doctor, Binx will be tempted to revert to the detached posture
that is characteristic of the vertical search.
59. My emphasis.
60. For example, see Binx’s relationship with his landlady. Knowing that she
is “quite lonely,” Binx invites her to see movies with him, and he listens to her
“talk about her years at MacDonough No. 6 school, the happiest period of her
life” (The Moviegoer, 76).
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61. On Binx’s walks, see The Moviegoer, 70. For insomnia, see The Moviegoer,
86 and 144–46. On his supine rigidity, see The Moviegoer, 145–46.
62. Binx later claims to have “inherited no more from my father than a good
nose for merde, for every species of shit that flies” (228).
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