어떤 난파자의 고백록:『영화광』에서 보는 종교적 구도(求道)의 서사

Abstract

Walker Percy once described a religious novelist as one who is “concerned with the radical questions of man's identity and his relation to God or to God's absence.” Claiming that Percy himself is such a religious novelist, this paper focuses on exploring his first novel, The Moviegoer, as a narrative of religious search. The Moviegoer is a first-person confessional narrative of a man named Binx Bolling, a scion of Southern aristocratic family, now cut adrift and lost in his existence in mid-twentieth century New Orleans. He perceives himself as a castaway who must engage himself in a search to overcome his sense of loss and the impending reality of death. His predicament partly derives from his inability to understand his father's life and death, and also partly from his lacking a supportive relationship with his mother. As a castaway, he is looking for news that will save him from the “malaise” of “everydayness.” In desperation, he engages in 'vertical' and 'horizontal' searches, and his frequent moviegoing is a means to recover meaning in his existence. Binx's abode in the basement room in the New Orleans apartment recalls parallels in several modern novels, such as the abode of the African-American narrator of Invisible Man. Binx's posture as a seeker is distinct from that of the disillusioned hideaway narrator of Ellison's novel, but Binx finds it impossible to name the object of his search in the post-Christian, postmodern world. The mid-20th century Catholics draw Binx's attention in their “dumb unseriousness” in religious practice; however, he also regards their devotion to God and to religion, as exemplified by some believers like his half-brother who take their faith seriously. At the end of his ironic confessions, Binx claims that his vocation is “to listen to people, see how they stick themselves into the world, hand them along . . . in their dark journey and be handed along. . .” Even when he makes commitments to be married and to undertake medical training, he keeps asking questions, declaring that it is impossible to say anything definite concerning his search. The search in The Moviegoer is typically one that is experienced by people who have their basic needs already provided. This is different from the struggle of the poor, oppressed, and marginalized of the world. In a sense, Binx's predicament typifies the kind of search that the people of the third world will have to face even when their struggle to obtain freedom and to have the basic necessities of life is accomplished. As humans are ever on the way, what will sustain life after all? This is the fundamental question Percy poses and explores in The Moviegoer.