For now, a sketch.

Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer is a bildungsroman about the journey of Binx Bolling from pagan despair to Christian hope via a Socratic search. Percy marks the journey via a suggestive geography.

When the novel begins, Binx lives “in Gentilly, a middle class suburb of New Orleans” (6).^[1] He lives, that is, “gentile-ly,” in a non-descript gentile land, outside of the City of God.^[2]

His living quarters, which he rents from a woman named Mrs Schexnaydre, are on “Elysian Fields, the main thoroughfare of Faubourg Marigny” (9). The Elysian Fields are of mythological significance, being the place where the souls or shades of the blessed reside after their death.

Elysium is mentioned once in Homer. It occurs in Book 4 of the Odyssey, when Proteus, the Old Man of the Sea, says to Menelaos,

But for you, Menelaos, O fostered of Zeus, it is not the gods' will
that you shall die and go to your end in horse-pasturing Argos,
but the immortals will convoy you to the Elysian
Field, and the limits of the earth, where fair-haired Rhadamanthys 
is, and where there is made the easiest life for mortals,
for there is no snow, nor much winter there, nor is there ever
rain, but always the stream of the Ocean sends up breezes
of the West Wind blowing briskly for the refreshment of mortals.[3]
(Odyssey 4.561-68, trans. Richmond Lattimore)

Several centuries later, Vergil refers to Elysium three times in the Aeneid. First, in Book 5, the ghost of Anchises says to Aeneas that he must come to see him in the Underworld:

First, though, you must enter
The house of Dis below, cross deep Avernus,
And meet me--not in Tartarus' cruel prison:
Lovely Elysium is now my home,
Where guiltless souls convene.
(Aeneid 5.731-35, trans. Sarah Ruden, here and elsewhere in this essay)

It then occurs twice more in the book that narrates that descent. In 6.539-43, the Sibyl says to Aeneas,

Night rushes on, and tears take up the hours.
The road divides here. This branch on the right,
Which stretches to the walls of powerful Dis,
Will take us to Elysium. The left one 
Sends culprits to their due in Tartarus.

Finally, as Anchises describes the workings of the Underworld to Aeneas and different fates allotted to the just and the unjust, he says,

So souls are disciplined and pay the price
Of old wrongdoing. Some are splayed, exposed
To hollow winds; a flood submerges some,
Washing out wickedness; fire scorches some pure.
Each bears his own ghost; then a few are sent
To live in broad Elysium's happy fields...
(Aeneid 6. 739-44)

Though it is unnamed, it (or something very much like it) also must be the place to which Socrates refers when he discusses what happens after death in Plato’s Apology. There (Apology 40cff.), Socrates gives two possibilities: At death, one is either annihilated, or he travels to an abode of the dead where judgments are handed out by Minos, Rhadamanthys, Aiakos, and Triptolemos, and one can converse with the great poets heroes of old, such as Homer and Ajax.

Curiously, Plato’s Apology is suggested geographically near the end of The Moviegoer as well. As Binx is berated by his Aunt Emily for his dalliance with Kate, she holds a letter-opener shaped like a sword. At one moment, “[s]he raises the sword to Prytania Street.” For the reader with Plato on the brain, the direction of this sword-thrust will conjure up the Prytaneum, where civic heroes received free meals in ancient Athens. After he has been condemned, one of the punishments Socrates proposes for himself is that he be treated as just such a hero and therefore get his meals there.

And in fact, Aunt Emily plays a sort of pagan and philosophical role in The Moviegoer. As Binx notes, “My aunt likes to say she is an Episcopalian by emotion, a Greek by nature and a Buddhist by choice” (23). She has even tried to guide him as a Socrates figure:

What has been going on in your mind during all the years when we listened to music together, read the Crito,^[4] and spoke together–or was it only I who spoke–good Lord, I can’t remember–of goodness and truth and beauty and nobility?” (226)

She asks Binx whether he doesn’t “love these things.” He does not. When she next asks, in a manner reminiscent of Socrates on the “unexamined life” in Apology 38a, “What do you love? What do you live by?” Binx is silent.

And yet, one of the next things we see after this is a changed, converted Binx in the “Epilogue,” and I think it is due in no small part to the exhortations and questions of his vaguely pagan aunt. Though he claims that his “search has been abandoned” (228), the “Epilogue” must modify what the reader takes that to mean.

Granted, Binx’s conversion is only hinted at, in good Kierkegaardian indirect fashion. But it is there all the same. For one thing, he has moved into town (236), no longer a resident of Gentilly, no longer living “Gentile-ly.” For another, when his crippled stepbrother Lonnie has died, one of his siblings asks, “When Our Lord raises us up on the last day, will Lonnie still be in a wheelchair or will he be like us?” Binx replies, “He’ll be like you.” The blessed dead of the Elysian Fields with whom Socrates converses are forever disembodied–only shades of their former selves, however relatively happy they may be. But the dead in the “Epilogue” are not so; they will be raised up again with perfect bodies, to be flesh and blood forever. This–Binx believes.

And so Binx has found his way into the Christian fold, from the outlying Elysian Fields of the pagan Greco-Roman world to the heart of the New Jerusalem, in part through the Socratic services of his Aunt Emily, who has aided in his rebirth as something of a midwife (the role Socrates assigns himself in Plato’s Symposium), even as “the books of the Platonists” helped St. Augustine on his journey back into the Christian fold.

Socrates has often served this role in the past; and I think he does so–albeit in highly allusive fashion–for Binx Bolling as well.

There remains more to say, but I will leave it there for now.