A Political Companion to Walker Percy

3. Walker Percy's Critique of the Pursuit of Happiness in The Moviegoer, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, and The Thanatos Syndrome

3 Walker Percy’s Critique of the Pursuit of Happiness in The Moviegoer, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, and The Thanatos Syndrome Elizabeth Amato Americans have exercised magnificently the right to pursue happiness. Americans enjoy, on the whole, comfortable lives and unprecedented political and personal freedom, but, as happiness studies show, not much happier lives. While happiness studies indicate that happiness levels remain flat, happiness researchers are optimistic that their research on the causes and correlates of well-being can be used as the basis of domestic and international policy to increase human happiness.1 Although many of these researchers have been highly critical of how most people identify the pursuit of wealth as nearly identical to the pursuit of happiness, they do not question the validity of the pursuit of happiness per se; they merely suggest that the pursuit of happiness be carried on by more effective means. In contrast, Walker Percy observes that the pursuit of happiness causes us to flee unhappiness rather than look into what our lingering discontent may indicate about ourselves. Our unhappiness, according to Percy, can either lead us to search for more sophisticated diversions or, as he hopes, guide us to understand ourselves as lost beings in need of each other. Instead of treating unhappiness like a problem to be solved, Walker Percy explains that we must consider what our unhappiness reveals about ourselves. Unhappiness proves to be a fortunate starting point for self- 48 Elizabeth Amato reflective inquiry into why the self is unhappy—or the search, as Percy calls it. As Percy shows, the individual’s search to understand the discontent of being a self points him toward recognizing others as fellow searchers with whom he can share his search and thus experience, if not happiness itself, then at least the beginnings of it. Our search is not meant to be unpleasant or lonely. It depends on our recognition of others as fellow searchers with whom the search can be shared. As will be shown in The Moviegoer, Lost in the Cosmos, and The Thanatos Syndrome, Percy repeatedly shows his characters rejecting the pursuit of happiness, embarking on a search, and discovering their need for others. Percy’s critique of the failure of the pursuit of happiness to satisfy the needs of the human person as a social being remains constant through his novels. The Moviegoer plainly illustrates how the diversions of the pursuit of happiness only fill time without fulfilling the individual and isolate the individual from others. In Lost in the Cosmos and The Thanatos Syndrome, Percy focuses on how the pursuit of happiness risks leading us away from political life toward rule by experts and destruction of the self in the name of increasing well-being. The Moviegoer In The Moviegoer, Percy presents the search as an alternative to the pursuit of happiness, which he identifies as the way of life sponsored by liberalism. The Moviegoer is the story of a young man, John Bickerson “Binx” Bolling, who is called upon by his formidable Aunt Emily to decide what to do with his life. At nearly thirty years old, Binx has had an undistinguished career as a failed researcher, a veteran of the Korean War, and currently as a prosperous but banal stockbroker. Aunt Emily, however, aspires for her nephew to reject the mean, low way of American bourgeois life, to pursue greatness and nobility, and to accept his duty to make a meaningful contribution to humanity, such as a career in medicine.2 Binx does not feel under any such obligation. Instead of great ambitions, Binx carefully cultivates the “ordinary life” or, as he also calls it, his “Little Way” (9, 99).3 Binx claims that he is “a model tenant and a model citizen and takes pleasure in doing all that is expected of [him]” as a typical American everyman (6). In addition to honoring customarily American concerns for security and comfort, Binx whiles away his time seducing his secretaries and going to the movies. Walker Percy’s Critique of the Pursuit of Happiness 49 Too reflective and self-conscious of his role-playing as the anonymous everyman, Binx knows that his dreary happiness is “the worst kind of self-deception” (18). The search, an alternative to Emily’s plan and Binx’s “ordinary life,” is heralded by “clues.” These “clues,” like the contents of his pockets which, although familiar...