Wednesday, November 14, 2012

The Moviegoer by Walker Percy

This book deals with the challenges of living in a postmodern, movie-going world, where we're confronted with simulacra (for Binx Bolling, the protagonist, surroundings are certified by the movies he sees, instead of the other way around), where long-held truths and narratives of historical progress are meaningless, replaced by the experience of repetition--seeing the same thing after a period of time has passed, and where our identities are constructed by mass culture (in Binx's terminology: rotation). There's no easy answer here, as Binx enters on a search to transcend the everydayness (a search prompted by his wartime experiences). But the book does suggest that the South has something to teach the nation: while the 1960s may have brought this cultural dissatisfaction to the forefront, Southerners have seen these problems before: they were defeated in the Civil War--and even more importantly--certain Southern ideas about racial hierarchy and white supremacy had already been exposed as false: so white Southerners have already had to face the loss of a sense of absolute truth. A really wonderful book.

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