Meditations on the Malaise

“Often you see paralysis and stagnation and drift. You don’t like it, and neither do I.”

—Jimmy Carter, “Address to the Nation on Energy and National Goals”

Writing in the second half of the twentieth century, Walker Percy saw that even amidst external peace and prosperity the Western soul was haunted by anxiety and depression. In his first and most famous novel, The Moviegoer, Percy names this modern disease “the malaise.” The novel follows Binx Bolling, a scion of a well-to-do New Orleans family who tries—and fails—to content himself with a bourgeois existence of money making and philandering. He works as a stockbroker, dates his secretaries, and patronizes the local cinema. Yet Binx has a neurotic streak that keeps him at an ironic distance from his ordinary life and makes him a philosopher in spite of himself. His habitual “moviegoing” is, even consciously, an enactment of the distance between himself and his own daily life. He is a spectator trapped inside his own head, watching his bodily life like a projection on a screen, shrouded in a fog of malaise.

Binx’s neuroticism and irony are what make him conscious of the malaise and able to articulate its character: “What is the malaise? you ask. The malaise is the pain of loss. The world is lost to you, the world and the people in it, and there remains only you and the world and you no more able to be in the world than Banquo’s ghost.” He is present, yet absent, alive, yet not alive, cut off from himself. Binx’s feeling of unreality is echoed by the novel’s other leading character, his cousin Kate Cutrer. Suffering from anxiety, depression, and bouts of mania, Kate too sees her daily life as ghostly and inauthentic. She finds any break from this “dim” existence—even a disaster, like the car wreck that kills her fiancé—a great relief:

Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real? I remember at the time of the wreck—people were so kind and helpful and solid. Everyone pretended that our lives until that moment had been every bit as real as the moment itself and that the future must be real too, when truth was that our reality had been purchased only by Lyell’s death.

Kate describes the chaos in the wake of the accident as the happiest moment of her life. While that sentiment may seem morbid, Percy means to underscore how strongly the human soul longs to break free from the malaise. 

To better understand the nature of the malaise, we must look beyond The Moviegoer to Percy’s later works. Percy first names Descartes in Love in the Ruins, referring to “the dread chasm that has rent the soul of Western man ever since the famous philosopher Descartes ripped body loose from mind and turned the very soul into a ghost that haunts its own house.” In his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes undertook the project of establishing certain knowledge through subjecting all his beliefs to methodic doubt. He argued that our experiences of the physical world and of embodiment, because they are mediated through the senses, are ultimately untrustworthy. He famously concluded that the only absolutely certain knowledge was “I think, therefore, I am.” That is, while any belief he entertained might be subject to doubt, the simple fact of his entertaining beliefs in his mind could not be doubted. Descartes, or his mind at any rate, could be said to exist as a thinking thing.

As Percy saw it, Descartes’s new anthropology established a dichotomy of mind and body with the mind as the true seat of human personality and the body as just another object of observation by the immaterial mind. This closely mirrors the image of ghostliness and detachment that Binx describes as “the malaise.” It puts the human being in the position of not truly identifying with his body or his bodily life, yet being inextricably linked to it. What the human person ultimately wants is to feel reintegrated as a whole and healthy union of mind and body, but this desire is continually frustrated as long as one views the world through a Cartesian lens. And this divide within the self affects people all along the spectrum of belief to unbelief, righteousness to depravity. It is a problem of all moderns, Christian or secular.

As Binx and Kate attest, it is profoundly uncomfortable to be alienated from oneself. In fact, as Binx sees it, the characteristic features of the modern world, from the proliferation of entertainment to the prestige of science, are all defenses against the malaise. Binx describes two overarching strategies that modern subjects use to disguise or distract themselves from the malaise. Each can be thought of as choosing one horn of the dilemma between the person as body (immanence, bestialism) and the person as mind (transcendence, angelism). Neither of these strategies is ultimately successful, but their failures cast additional light on the problem they are meant to address.

The first path, the path of immanence, Binx refers to as being “sunk in everydayness.” Those who are sunk in everydayness are blind to the question of the meaning of life. They are thoroughly distracted by work, consumption, and entertainment. They learn to see themselves “on the model of organism-in-an-environment,” as bundles of drives awaiting satisfaction; they learn to understand their chief purpose in life as getting their needs (and perhaps the needs of others) met. The embrace of immanence and descent into bestiality has nothing to do with the alternatives between wealth and poverty, or highbrow and lowbrow aesthetics. As Percy writes in Lost in the Cosmos, “the compliant role-player and consumer and holder of a meaningless job… an Archie Bunker beer-drinking TV-watcher” and the person “who is savvy to all the techniques of society and appropriates them according to his or her discriminating tastes… creative cooking, moving out to the country, moving back to the central city”: both of these types are equally sunk in everydayness.

Binx has come to see the prospect of living sunk in everydayness with dread, and at the beginning of the novel, he advocates the path of transcendence, which he calls “the search.” He says, “The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life…. To become aware of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.” To be sunk in everydayness is to have forfeited one’s humanity, reducing oneself to a mere body or, as Binx says at one point, “an automaton.” Indeed, the total descent into immanence resembles death: “For some time now the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead.” This is why he and Kate thrive amidst disaster, because it breaks the grip of everydayness and makes the search possible: “Everydayness is the enemy. No search is possible. Perhaps there was a time when everydayness was not too strong and one could break its grip by brute strength. Now nothing breaks it—but disaster. Only once in my life was the grip of everydayness broken: when I lay bleeding in a ditch.”

The search, however, has its own problems. Percy compares transcendence to launching the self into orbit around the world of the everyday. From this distance, the searcher is engaged in generalizing about the world below. Binx explains, “as you get deeper into the search, you unify. You understand more and more specimens by fewer and fewer formulae.” But just as one sunk in everydayness risks losing his humanity by reducing himself to a mere organism, the searcher risks losing his humanity by jettisoning everything that makes him a particular and concrete individual. As Kate points out to Binx, “it doesn’t matter where you are or who you are… And the danger is of becoming no one nowhere.” This godlike distance is ultimately unsustainable, and more often than not the pendulum swings from the extreme of mental exaltation to the opposite extreme of physical indulgence: “even the best scientist and artist must reenter the world he has transcended and there’s the rub: the spectacular miseries of reentry… It is difficult for gods to walk the earth without taking the form of beasts.”

So while the search may be preferable to being sunk in everydayness, while it may be the first step on the road to redemption, it cannot cure the malaise; it does not restore the human person to wholeness of body and mind. At best, the search allows the malaise to be discerned and described. Percy’s ultimate objective is to find a way beyond the search and beyond the dilemma of immanence and transcendence toward a renewed integral humanism.