Once more on The Moviegoer:

After Binx’s climactic conversation with Aunt Emily discussed in the previous post, and right before the indirect narration–or, perhaps better, the direct non-narration–of his conversion,^[1] we read this:

It is a gloomy day. Gentilly is swept fitfully by desire and by an east wind from the burning swamps at Chef Menteur. (227)^[2]

Why “an east wind” as opposed to some other wind? I suspect the reason is biblical.

An “east wind” blows several times in the Bible, and it is very frequently bad: Compare Genesis 41:6, 23, and 27; Exodus 10:13; Job 27:21; Psalm 48:7; Jeremiah 18:17; Ezekiel 17:10; Hosea 13:15; Jonah 4:8.

But a couple of times it’s valence is more redemptive. One of those occurrences is in Psalm 78:25-27, of the manna and quail in the wilderness:

Man did eat angels’ food: he sent them meat to the full.

He caused an east wind to blow in the heaven: and by his power he brought in the south wind.

He rained flesh also upon them as dust, and feathered fowls like as the sand of the sea…^[3]

But the people rebel despite God’s good gifts, as the Psalmist immediately adds:

So they did eat, and were well filled: for he gave them their own desire;

They were not estranged from their lust.

Percy had already said that Gentilly was, like the Israelites in the desert, “swept fitfully by desire.” But he says it again on the next page about himself:

[O]n this my thirtieth birthday, I know nothing and there is nothing to do but fall prey to desire.

This intertext for Percy’s east wind, then, might be seen as ambivalent at best.

But there is another that I would suggest, viz., Exodus 14:21. As the Hebrews escape from Pharaoh and his Egyptian army and cross the Red Sea, we read:

And Moses stretched out his hand over the sea; and the Lord caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided.

It is at this precise moment that God’s people cross from slavery to freedom, from death to life and salvation. Like the Israelites on the shore of the sea, Binx at his moment of crisis “sit[s] on the ocean wave” in a school playground as he waits for Kate, “in the thirty-first year of [his] dark pilgrimage on this earth” (228). And like the Egyptians, he is about to leave Gentilly–“gentile-land”–for good and all.