New Orleans, revisited

My recent reading spell has got me into a slightly reflective mood, which usually means eventually I end up thinking about Binx Bolling in the Moviegoer. Binx first appeared in 1961 (here's the review from Time magazine - "Like Sartre's Nausea, but without the nausea"), the year Harper Lee won a Pulitzer for To Kill A Mockingbird.

Lately I have also wondered about the enigmatic Kate, Binx's distant cousin and eventual love interest. This person has similar thoughts I guess:

Kate is locked into the same world, and recognizes Binx as a kindred spirit -- "You're like me, but worse. Much worse." Kate takes the opposite tack from Binx: instead of avoiding ennui by searching for chance events ("certifications") and delighting in observation, she creates her own crises to jar the world out of its rut of ennui -- "she unfailingly turns everything she touches to horror." She insists early on "have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real?"

As for Binx himself, I think that Percy modeled him on Soren Kierkegaard's imagined man of faith in Fear and Trembling, or what he liked to call his "knight of faith". Kiergegaard's description of meeting this wacky character is hysterical. If you click on the "description" link, skip the cheery part about Abraham killing Isaac and go straight to this part:

I candidly admit that in my practice I have not found any reliable example of the knight of faith, though I would not therefore deny that every second man may be such an example. I have been trying, however, for several years to get on the track of this, and all in vain. People commonly travel around the world to see rivers and mountains, new stars, birds of rare plumage, queerly deformed fishes, ridiculous breeds of men -- they abandon themselves to the bestial stupor which gapes at existence, and they think they have seen something. This does not interest me.

But if I knew where there was such a knight of faith, I would make a pilgrimage to him on foot, for this prodigy interests me absolutely. I would not let go of him for an instant, every moment I would watch to see how he managed to make the movements, I would regard myself as secured for life, and would divide my time between looking at him and practicing the exercises myself, and thus would spend all my time admiring him. As was said, I have not found any such person, but I can well think him.

Here he is. Acquaintance made, I am introduced to him. The moment I set eyes on him I instantly push him from me, I myself leap backwards, I clasp my hands and say half aloud, "Good Lord, is this the man? Is it really he? Why, he looks like a tax-collector!" However, it is the man after all. I draw closer to him, watching his least movements to see whether there might not be visible a little heterogeneous fractional telegraphic message from the infinite, a glance, a look, a gesture, a note of sadness, a smile, which betrayed the infinite in its heterogeneity with the finite. No! I examine his figure from tip to toe to see if there might not be a cranny through which the infinite was peeping. No! He is solid through and through. His tread? It is vigorous, belonging entirely to finiteness; no smartly dressed townsman who walks out to Fresberg on a Sunday afternoon treads the ground more firmly, he belongs entirely to the world, no Philistine more so. One can discover nothing of that aloof and superior nature whereby one recognizes the knight of the infinite [another Kierkegaard archetype]. He takes delight in everything, and whenever one sees him taking part in a particular pleasure, he does it with the persistence which is the mark of the earthly man whose soul is absorbed in such things. He tends to his work. So when one looks at him one might suppose that he was a clerk who had lost his soul in an intricate system of book-keeping, so precise is he. He takes a holiday on Sunday. He goes to church. No heavenly glance or any other token of the incommensurable betrays him; if one did not know him, it would be impossible to distinguish him from the rest of the congregation, for his healthy and vigorous hymn-singing proves at the most that he has a good chest. In the afternoon he walks to the forest. He takes delight in everything he sees, in the human swarm, in the new omnibuses, in the water of the Sound; when one meets him on the Beach Road one might suppose he was a shopkeeper taking his fling, that’s just the way he disports himself, for he is not a poet, and I have sought in vain to detect in him the poetic incommensurability.

Toward evening he walks home, his gait is as indefatigable as that of the postman. On his way he reflects that his wife has surely a special little warm dish prepared for him, e.g. a calf’s head roasted, garnished with vegetables. If he were to meet a man like-minded, he could continue as far as East Gate to discourse with him about that dish, with a passion befitting a hotel chef. As it happens, he hasn’t four pence to his name, and yet he fully and firmly believes that his wife has that dainty dish for him. If she had it, it would then be an invidious sight for superior people and an inspiring one for the plain man, to see him eat; for his appetite is greater than Esau’s. His wife hasn’t it -- strangely enough, it is quite the same to him.