The concept of this “malgré lui” that Flannery O’Conner in her author’s note is interesting in its implications. Here we have Haze, a character who is trying (and failing, ironically) to rationalize something irrational out of existence. He wants not to believe for reasons probably connected to his traumatizing background under the constant lash of a hard and unforgiving interpretation of Christianity, in which he learned to associate pain and therefore fear with Jesus, Jesus’s blood, and the idea of redemption. In the war, separated from that religious intensity that had loomed before him as a child, and surrounded by “friends” who insisted, in a way, that he had nothing truly to fear, he took the bait. And so he insists on his “Church Without Jesus Christ” and walks the streets of Taulkingham, enters the buses, the trains, ready to preach this new church.

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This reliance on the medium of preaching as an occupation is the first sign that something is not quite consistent; after all, he has renounced all accepted forms of Christianity (if there are any), and yet he still must preach something, he still must uphold a dogma, call out the name of a church, even if it is one that opposes essentially everything that the name “Christianity” implies. Earlier, his chosen occupation–to be a preacher–might have been dismissed as a settling into the rut etched out into his family history by his grandfather, and perhaps his father. But this is clearly not the case: now, his family dead and faith shaken, he has every reason to leave his past behind, but for some reason he cannot. No matter how he attempts to recreate his appearance–buying different hats, for example–he finds that he is not entirely a free agent: he is confined in an identity–as a preacher–that warps everything from the hats he chooses to the way he speaks and the look in his eyes when people interact with him. Even loudly proclaiming his disbelief, his nihilism towards the universe, he is a preacher–that is his identity and it was never, it seems, something that he chose. He is a preacher malgré lui.

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But Haze deceives himself in many ways. The very logic that he uses to explain his rejection of the Christian version of Christ proves that he really does believe: in Haze’s view, he does not believe in sin, therefore he cannot sin, therefore he is clean. Yet if he does not believe in sin, then being “clean” should have no meaning to him. Choosing to not believe in something for fear of it is an absurd concept: the existences of fear in the first place means that the object of fear is real, at least to that person. Haze has tried to choose the religion–atheism, essentially–that seemed most convenient, the religion that allowed him to escape the pain and fear of pain that he had associated all his life with Christianity. But we cannot choose our beliefs; in that respect, our beliefs are chosen for us by either or environment and an innate cognitive disposition or, as Flannery O’Conner may see it, some other divine force, a force that calls into question the notion of free will. After all, Haze is not the only character who finds his life not going the way he might have determined; Enoch also experiences moments in which he does things he has not intended to do, as if his will is not his own. It has not yet occurred to Haze, who is far less honest with himself and his thoughts, but it has occurred on multiple occasions of Enoch that something is planned for him, that he is marked for some higher purpose even though he himself, so close to the ground, cannot yet understand or foresee each move. Yet here is a distinction between Haze and Enoch: Haze, drawing away from pain, seemingly does all he can to resist the current that he knows is there, and Enoch, who perceives this current as well, goes willingly and even enthusiastically along despite his certainty that there will be pain.

I suppose one of the more salient features of the novel The Moviegoer is the tension in Binx’s psyche which is created by his desire for two ways of life that naturally oppose one another: the first of the search–of the deepest introspection, of an acute awareness of the self–a search that is never quite articulated, but which we can presume is a search for something fundamentally ineffable: the nature of being, the nature of the self, one’s true self (these last two being related to Søren Kierkegaard’s concept of the “true task and endeavor of life”), and so on — it never becomes immediately clear, no to me at least, what the search is searching for . Whatever the search’s specific nature, it is not something that can be found in books (that is, Binx tells us, the lesser vertical search, the search for knowledge and ideas great and abstract, that allow one to rise up out of the self, above the self, scientific knowledge which explains almost everything except the self).  The second is everydayness–daily pleasures and distractions that arrive from outside and occupy the searching mind. Now, another feature that interests me, and which may shed a little more light on the specific nature of the search, is that a second very prominent source of tension exists in the novel: the conflict between authenticity and role-playing. Authenticity is very rare; it is a product of emotion and not thought, a natural, instinctive response, a product of spontaneity or a momentary passion. Role-playing, far more common, is almost entirely thought: it is planned, habitual, affected, and secure. It naturally follows, therefore, that role-playing is often the companion of everydayness, and that authenticity, that which lays bare the self beneath the layers of affectation, politeness, propriety, fear, is somehow related to the search. This certainly seems to make sense. For if one grows accustomed to burying oneself under layers of daily disguise (and one always does), then surely it becomes too easy to lose that self? To achieve authenticity is to penetrate those layers and reach the self–that which Kierkegaard, whose philosophy evidently inspired many aspects of this novel, regarded as the ultimate goal of one’s life. It appears, then, that authenticity is, if not one of the goals of the search, then medium by which the search is conducted. The assumption of a secure, stable role that smooths the jerky and uneven line of authentic reactions is necessary in order to live in stable and predictable everydayness. To live authentically is, in one respect, to not live by the norms of society, to not follow the social contract of politeness: authenticity shatters everydayness. Everydayness is the enemy of the search. However they actually fit together is quite confusing; I can only myself guess.

There is another point that I think the novel makes about the search, and that is it can’t be shared, not even by two people (that is, Binx and Kate) who are experiencing roughly the same thing. The deepest thoughts and impressions can never be shared, not even with someone who has similar deep thoughts and impressions, either because language is flawed and cannot express that which is not generally considered fit for public consumption, or because each of us simply experiences those deepest thoughts and impressions in completely unique ways. In any case, this is yet another indicator (this and authenticity) that the search, deeply introspective as it is, is very closely related to that “true self” to which Kierkegaard referred. Yet how precisely these different features fit into to the search is frustratingly impossible to say without inventing something entirely — the novel provides little basis for more than speculation on this matter. But then, it would seem rather fitting if the peculiar workings of this novel and the mind of Binx were never meant to be understood, were meant to be as baffling as they are to us. The deepest workings of the mind can never be shared with another person; what makes perfect sense in the intricate labyrinths of the mind is distorted, simplified, discolored by the mechanical confines of the language into which it is being crammed. After all, the idea of Walker Percy writing a book knowing that he would be the only man in the world to fully understand its meaning does not sound to strange: it could describe any writer anytime, anywhere.

I have now reached page 116 and I have only a vague conception of what is going on in this novel, beneath the surface that is. One truly frustrating, and indeed exhausting, aspect of the novel is that there are very few ideas that aren’t contradicted twenty or so pages after they are first stated. Binx is making nothing easy for us: the brain searches in vain for patterns, comes up with one, and then a page later it is sorrily discredited by a reminder of some absurdly opposite viewpoint that was expressed (and quickly forgotten, given the sheer density of material in this novel) earlier on. For example, Binx at one point decides that “everyone is dead”. Why is everyone dead? Well, he doesn’t tell us explicitly–he almost never tells us anything explicitly–but it’s not hard to come to the conclusion that the daily living death to which he refers is the fatal consequence of insincerity; it is a kind of “death of the soul” that goes along with the instinctual affectations that people put on in their daily conversations. He finds these people and their charming little customs and falsely cheerful ways deplorable because they play a role, and in doing so day after day they bury themselves — the true self — under the falseness of that role. Yet Binx himself plays many roles, some — Clark Gable, Gregory Peck — even highly recognizable as fictional roles, and he consistently seeks out a far more deplorable phoniness than that of his acquaintances — TV and movies. He goes as far as to describe the aura surrounding the movies as more real than any place the movies have not touched — and this is the same man who could not even look at Nell (who has been “reexamining her values”) without feeling embarrassed (for her, presumably). It’s baffling. Similarly, Binx’s expresses his fear that once inside one of these movies he could be Anyone from Anywhere if he hasn’t talked with someone who works at the theatre first and therefore established it as somewhere unique. Yet he also tells us that he has been careful to keep the place where he lives free of any kind of personal flavor, and he likes Gentilly precisely because it is one of those suburbs that could be Anywhere, in contrast to the colorful character of more known parts of New Orleans. Again, again, and again we are hit with contradictions, and the only conclusion I can come to is that Percy did not intend this novel to be analyzed like a novel from the last few centuries. This novel is meant (I theorize) to reflect not general truths about humanity, but the complex chaotic and nonsensical mass that is the human mind itself. (Well, perhaps that’s been done before. But here is a new level of incomprehensible).

In Hamlet, Shakespeare plays with two, maybe three, levels of reality: the reality of the playwright, the reality of Hamlet’s story, and the reality of the play performed within the play Hamlet. And in this, we are fairly certain of where everyone stands and which direction is up and which reality is really real; the play within-the-play resembles the play Hamlet, which is actually its own little bubble of reality inside Bill’s imagination, but though it may mirror life, to to speak, it only does so upon Hamlet’s request. All is reasonably well. Tom Stoppard, however, as he does with many original Shakespearian themes and literary devices, takes up this idea of multiple levels of reality, along with the corresponding Shakespearian ideas that “all the world’s a stage” and “hold a mirror up to nature”, and he has his way with it indeed.

One particularly interesting way that Stoppard warps the minds of his audience is by inverting the original play-within-a-play structure. In Hamlet, the play performed by the players is safely confined in its own sub-real status as this inner play–the situation is quite tame. In Rosancrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Stoppard also has the players perform a play inside the Hamlet universe. But as the players are rehearsing the supposed Murder of Gonzago, something uncomfortable happens: those lines between the two pre-established planes of reality begin to blur. Rosancrantz and Guildenstern see their stories played out to their (mortal) ends long before they or anyone else could have any conception that this–death by execution at the conclusion of their deceitful association with the nephew of the king–would happen to them. And yet, as we have already established (in another blog post, I mean), their fates are written in stone. Or rather, ink. Bill’s ink, to be even more precise. The fact that the player refers to this casual foretelling of their deaths (and the ending of Hamlet) as “a slaughterhouse–eight corpses all told”, as if it were a classic, one they had performed hundreds of time before, contains a very interesting implication: that in Stoppard’s play, Hamlet is in fact the inner play, that the players exist on a higher plane of reality than any of the characters in Shakespeare’s original. This is why the player seems so omniscient: he is more real (how ironic, given that he is an actor) than Ros and Guil or even Hamlet himself.

On the other hand, the Shakespearian model still holds — the players perform a play (The Murder of Gonzago) while in a play (Hamlet) themselves. Taking a step back, it seems that all Tom Stoppard has done is add a single dimension. Yet the effect of these two opposing play-within-play structures, each inversions of the other, is something like placing a mirror (Shakespeare’s metaphor for a play–how convenient!) opposite another mirror: what we are left to deal with are essentially infinite levels of reality tumbling off infinitely in either direction. And this is precisely why wrapping the mind around all those interplaying, overlaying, reflecting levels of reality in this play can cause a bit of a headache.

There is a considerable amount of delving into the nature of death in this play–and appropriately too, given the name Rosancrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and the corresponding  fates of our two friends, as well as every other person who has ever been alive and ever will. (I feel tempted at this point to diverge into an exploration of the multiple levels of reality operating in this play, particularly with regards to Stoppard’s relentless exploitation of the age-old “all the world’s a stage” metaphor, because I think it would probably make sense with this particular topic, but I know that any expansion in that direction on my part could potentially never actually return to the topic at hand, so I will stay on topic: death it is). Anyway, the player at one point makes an interesting comment that Guildenstern reacts to rather emotionally, not understanding perhaps what the other was implying. Of the staged deaths that they frequently portray, the player says, “On the contrary, it’s the only kind they [the audience] do believe.” At first, this seems an absurd contradiction without meaning, yet the example that the player provides clarifies his meaning to a recognizable truth: “I had an actor once who was condemned to hang for stealing sheep…so I got permission to have him hanged in the middle of a play…he just wasn’t convincing [to the audience]…he did nothing but cry all the time…” He is not suggesting, as Guildenstern seems to assume, that actors can portray death realistically, but rather the complete opposite: that staged deaths, because they are so unrealistic, are often more convincing than real death. And why is that? There is something very real, very true about the player’s words: we expect something more of death. We expect it to be something noble, grand, dramatic, full of gushing arterial blood and flailing limbs and in some cases heroic last-minute speeches that drag on far beyond the point where one would normally be expected to have died. Or, if that view has fallen a little out of fashion nowadays, there is still some kind of building intensity, a momentous accumulation of tension, that must snap at the moment of death and produce some sort of startling effect (a whispered confession, at least one flailing limb)–so that we notice. Because if death comes, and no one notices…If death is nothing more than a passing from something into no longer something, or as Guil puts it, “now you see him, now you don’t..here one minute and gone the next and never coming back–an exit, unobtrusive and unannounced..”, then something is off. Something is horribly off. Life is rich and multifoliate and folded into all sorts of dynamic expressions multi-dimensional in themselves: the emotional, the mental or cognitive, the physical, the allegedly spiritual…If something, time we suppose, can whisk all that sound and color a way with nothing more than a tick of the second hand (no strenuous effort to extricate the life force from the body, no great wailing torment that parting of invisible momentum from stagnant flesh, no sound at all except the absence of sound), then what are we? What are we worth? What is life worth? It seems only logical, this concept of the melodramatic death; and more than logical, it is comforting. For all the dreadful implications caught up in that single fact that you must die, the idea that your death will be something of a flash, a spasm of life flung unwillingly from the world, is at least some consolation. You know. That for all that struggling crescendo that life is, death, the resolution of all that your life has led up to, is, after all, something to write home about. A man standing there crying, about to be hanged, then dropping limply–that’s not death, to an audience used to theatre, to a human audience fancying itself existing on some greater plane of being than the common potted plant, which also dies a disappointingly drab death. Yet it is. And maybe this is the tragedy of Rosancrantz and Guilenstern: not that they will die no matter what they do, and not even that they don’t realize that they aren’t real (though maybe that too), but that their deaths are not even significant enough to even be featured in their own play.