1. ~. ,_ ~. ... ,.."",
Here, Benjy is unable to distinguish between presence and absence, between the door
Binx Bolling and the Compson Brothers:
Navigating Kierkegaardian Spheres of Existence
Bethany Perkins
Cape Fear Community College
In a 19841nterview, Walker Percy refers to The Moviegoer's Binx Bolling as a "Quentin
Compson who didn't commit suicide.") However, despite this admission, critical attention
has focused on Percy's later characters as Quentin figures.2 I believe that the comparison
between Binx and Quentin has been largely overlooked because we have been directed,
by Percy, to look only to Faulkner's oldest Compson brother for connections, when, in
fact, in order to fully understand the legacy of the South's historical past, the collective
sense ofloss inherent in that past, and Percy's attempts to conquer it, we must look to all
three Compson brothers. For Binx to function in the present and eschew a Faulknerian
sense ofthe past, he must attempt to overcome the collective experiences, and collective
loss, that Benjy, Jason, and Quentin endure. An essential comparative tool for examining
Binx and the three brothers is the tripartite Kierkegaardian matrix of the aesthetic, ethical,
and religious spheres outlined in Either/Or. 3In The Sound and the Fury, what I will call
pre-aesthetic characteristics manifest in Benjy. Jason exemplifies the aesthetic sphere,
and Quentin reveals ethical characteristics. Although there is no direct evidence to suggest
that Faulkner was familiar with Kierkegaard, the overlay of a Kierkegaardian perspective
as it relates to the characters' lives establishes additional points of contact between Faulkner
and Percy and their attempts to understand the human condition. In The Moviegoer,
Binx, as an amalgam of all three Compson brothers, must make his way through each
mode of existence to the religious stage in order to escape despair. This journey is not a
linear progression but a cyclical process experienced through repetition and rotation,
ultimately leading to a Kierkegaardian leap offaith and salvation. Percy has commented
on the direct influence ofKierkegaard and the existentialists on his work, and, as George
C. Bedell points out, "both Kierkegaard and Faulkner have much to tell one another
about the various ways people live out their lives in varying degrees of hope or despair"
(3-4). Furthermore, the juxtaposition of Percy and Faulkner's characters with respect to
Kierkegaard's modes provides a vital comparative link in understanding Percy's attempt
to overcome Faulkner's legacy, specifically with regard to man's decline or success in a
modem world.
Binx Bolling has much in common with not only Quentin Compson but his brothers
as well. The Sound and the Fury opens on Benjy's thirty-third birthday, while The
Moviegoer ends with Binx's thirtieth birthday and both fall on or near Christian holidays.
Both men watch schoolchildren through a fence, have similar first names, and go by
different names at different times in their lives. Although such comparisons may appear
inconsequential, they resonate with Faulknerian idiosyncrasies, particularly those found
in Benjy. Additionally, the two characters exhibit a significant connection through a
nexus of dreams and an alternative plane of consciousness. With the mind of a three year
old, Benjy's senses commingle as he vacillates between waking and sleep:
Father went to the door and looked at us again. Then the dark came back, and he
stood black in the door, and then the door turned black again. Caddy held me and
I could hear us all, and the darkness, and something I,could smell. And then I could
see the windows, where the trees were buzzing. Then the dark began to go in
smooth, bright shapes, like it always does, even when Caddy says I have been
asleep. (48)
25 . POSTSCRIPT
....
open and the door shut. Sight, sound, and smell are indistinguishable from one another
in this dreamlike state as are sleeping and waking. Benjy's acknowledgment that his
sister must tell him when he is asleep reinforces his inability to distinguish between the
imaginary and the real, the dream world and the physical world.
The waking dreams Binx experiences mirror Benjy's flexible perceptions of sleeping
and waking. Binx's train ride, which Janet Hobbs has argued is "a joint testing not of
religious but aesthetic and ethical choices" (45), takes on an unreal quality filled with
bright, moving shapes, "odd trapezoids" (185), incorporating the pre-aesthetic as well.
Binx's perception oftime alters to indicate that "the last ten years of my life take on the
shadowy aspect ofa sojourn between train rides" (184). The city takes on an optically
skewed, fantastical perspective. Here, Binx's perception of his surroundings is corrupted
through the lens of pre-aesthetic disassociation from the self. Binx describes his dreams,
as "the sort of fitful twilight where waking dreams are dreamed and sleep never comes"
(188). More importantly,Binx reveals, "Staying awake is a kind of sickness and sleep is
forever guarded against by a dizzy dutiful alertness. Wakingwide-eyed dreams come as
fitfully as swampfire"(188). His "waking wide-eyed dreams" blur the boundary between
the conscious and unconscious, sleeping and waking. He continues, saying "Again this
morning the dream returned, not quite a dream but a simulacrum of a dream, and again
the queasy-quince smell of 1951 and the Orient" (189). Not quite a real dream, Binx
must refer to his experience only as a representation of a dream, indicating his confusion
between the actual and imagined. If dreams are a product of the imagination, then the
imaginingo/imagination, that is, the simulacrumof a dream, is that much further removed
from reality. Each of these references goes to show a lack of clear boundaries between
Binx's dream-like state and reality. Lastly, in a pure Faulknerian moment, Percyjumbles
Binx's reality: "It is a color, a very bad color that needs tending to. Then a pain. But
there is no use: It is a sound and it is out there in the world and nothing can be done about
it. Awake" (146-147). Here, Binx's sensitivity to the sensory world during these waking
dreams corresponds to Benjy's preoccupation with color, shape, and smell; thus, both
men are caught in the shadowy fluctuations between consciousness and the dream.
The (un)consciousness exhibited by Benjy, what I have termed the pre-aesthetic stage,
exists outside Kierkegaard's paradigm of the self. As a pre-aesthetic, Benjy cannot fully
conceive of himself as part of his surroundings. Like the aesthetic, he lives in the realm
of immediacy. However, he differs in that he has no concept of the self; for example, like
a child, Benjy cannot tell that people are still physically present when they are hidden
from view, nor can he distinguish between what is real and what is imagined or dreamed.
The same pattern recurs in Binx's Benjy-like dreams as he travels between sleeping and
waking, inhabiting a pre-aesthetic stage where reality is nebulous and indistinct.
Nevertheless, because he is self-aware to a greater degree than Benjy, Binx fluctuates
between the aesthetic and the ethical, vacillating in cycles of repetition and rotation in an
attempt to reach the religious.
Benjy is not the only Compson brother with whom Binx shares similarities. Binx
shares Kierkegaard's aesthetic sphere with Jason Compson. The two are employed in a
similar capacity; Jason dabbles in the cotton market while Binx trades commodities and
both practice their art with questionable tactics. Binx describes his sole discernible
talent as, "the trick of making money" (30). Binx's analysis of his life, "I spend my entire
time working, making money, going to movies and seeking the company of women"
(41), could aptly be applied to Jason's as well. Jason keeps company with "a big plain
friendly brazen-haired pleasantfaced woman" with whom he is "seen at the picture show
[my emphasis] on Saturday night" (213). The text implies the woman is a prostitute and
BETHANY PERKINS. 26
 ,",~ '~~'~M~_V.'_."'-"'~ <.. ~~. '....
Jason pays her for her services, much as Binx pays his secretaries for theirs. These
relationships are all fairly casual, the primary relationships for both men being with female
family members. Finally, Binx's relationship with his family servant Mercer mirrors
Jason's with Dilsey. Binx believes "I wait on Mercer, not he on me" (22), indicating his
dissatisfaction with such an arrangement. Similarly, Jason says of Dilsey "That's the
trouble with nigger servants. . . Think they run the whole family" (130). Here, both men
clearly feel racially and socio-economically superior to their African-American servants.
Thetextual similarities between Binx and Jason mirror their mutual experience of the
aesthetic. As Bedell asserts, "At bottom, Jason was an aesthete. . . For him, time could
be spent like money because it was interchangeable with money, which was
interchangeable with people, who were interchangeable with time" (195). If, indeed,
people are quantifiable objects then they are exempt ftom humane treatment. Jason's
equation of personal worth with money leaves him unable to connect with family members
or with women. His reductive view of human beings diminishes them to mere numbers.
As Mary Deems Howland explains, "Binx becomes a poseur, one who assumes roles in
order to engage another person but who never approaches the 'other' as a presence" (28);
thus, Jason views others as quantities not presences. Caddie is viewed simply in terms of
the job her failed marriage has cost him; Quentin's suicide troubles him only in that it has
wasted his Harvard tuition; Miss Quentin enrages him with the money she costs in upkeep
and seven thousand dollars she "steals" ftom him, and his relationship with Lorraine is
referred to primarily with regard to the forty dollars he gives her. Jason also says "money
has no value; it's just the way you spend it" (122), indicating that immediate gratification
serves as money's primary function. This sort of immediacy situates Jason firmly within
the aesthetic sphere.
Binx experiences the aesthetic realm as well. As William Rodney Allen explains,
"Kierkegaard likens man's three possible planes of existence ... to the sections of a
house: the aesthetic man, lost in sensual diversions, inhabits the basement" (24);
interestingly, Binx lives in a basement apartment and frequently talks with Kate in the
basement of his aunt's house. Percy has said that Binx is initially "happy in what
Kierkegaard called the aesthetic mode" (25);4 however, his moviegoing and romps with
his secretaries do little to alleviate the malaise that has settled over his life, leaving him
mired in despair. Binx indicates, "The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad
movie" (7), but later admits "The movies are onto the search but they always screw it up.
The search always ends in despair." The hero "takes up with the local librarian, sets
about proving to the local children what a nice fellow he is, and settles down with a
vengeance. In two weeks time he is so sunk in everydayness that he might just as well be
dead" (13). In a similar scene, after swimming with his secretary, Binx reveals, "The
remarkable discovery forces itself upon me that I do not love her so wildly as I did last
night. But at least there is no malaise" (135). The aesthetic, in these cases moviegoing
and love affairs, is only a partial solution, but Binx manages to extricate himself from the
aesthetic through the vehicle of the search, an action which ultimately leads to fulfillment
through the religious. Jason, however, obsessed with material possessions and professional
achievements, is unable to break free from the quagmire of everydayness and thus fails in
the search for transcendence.
Obviously Percy had Quentin Compson in mind when he created a character who
would overcome the legacy of the Old South and although the outcome of their fates is
quite different, the two are similar in many respects. Both Binx and Quentin are
preoccupied with time. Both struggle with tradition. Both are college educated. Both
attempt incestuous or quasi-incestuous relationships with their sisters, although in Binx
and Kate's case they are not related by blood. Quentin's parents are inaccessible due to
27. POSTSCRIPT
~"iJ~'- -'-'-
alcoholism and mental instability while Binx's parents have been killed. Non-linear time
is an issue for both-through rotation and repetition for Binx, and through the..streamc;>f
consciousness in Quentin's section of The Sound and the Fury. Binx's sexually charg~d
horseplay with a girl at the beach is reminiscent of.Quentin's fight with Caddy in the
branch. Moreover, references to Macbeth are in Faulkner's title, "the sound and the
fury," and Percy's reference to "Banquo'sghost" (120). Lastly, the sale ofpatt:imQni~1
land for the benefit of the son is common to both stories. Each of these examples serves
to establish a general connection between the characterization of Quentin and Binx as
Southern men caught in a changing world of which they must attempt to make sense.
Kierkegaard characterizes the ethical stage by attention to duty and ethics. The duty
bound individualis, for Quentin,indistinguishablefromthe Southerngentleman. Quentin's
inability to function in a modem world, to surrender the codes and morality of the Old
South, tie him inextricably to the codes of the ethical world. Quentin's archaic devotion
to the reputation of his family's womenfolk leads him to two fights. His response to a
violation of his code is to respond with ritualized violence, a distinctly masculinist and
aristocraticreply. Similarly,the land that should have been Quentin's heritage,an important
notion in the traditional Southern social framework, is sold and turned into a golf course,
further distancing him from the idea of Southern masculinity and respectability. Hobbs
describes the ethical stage as encompassing "laws and rules" and notes that "Percy is
primarily interested in that aspect of the ethical stage which concerns individual reality.
He insists with Kierkegaard that "The sole ethical interest is the interest in one's own
reality" (38). It is precisely because Quentin is hyper-aware of his own reality that he
believes his only recourse is suicide.
Binx Bolling also inhabits the ethical sphere in which Quentin is arrested. Binx
fluctuates between sensual pursuits and attempts to live up to his Aunt's ethical
expectations. Percy has said "In the end Binx jumps from the aesthetic clear across the
ethical to the religious. He has no ethical sphere at all" (43).sHowever, I disagree with
Percy's assessment of Binx's character; I argue that Binx attempts to enter the world of
ethical responsibility that his Aunt sets out and that this attention to duty, especially in
terms of the obligation he feels to the search, is one of the most significant connections
he shareswith Quentin Compson. Hobbs agrees that Binx enters the ethical stage through
the "'deliverance from alienation' known as repetition and rotation" that are part of the
larger search. Binx declares "Everydayness is the enemy. No search is possible" (144),
indicating that only when he engages in the search can he move from the aesthetic to the
ethical sphere. Repetition and rotation interrupt everydayness and provide Binx's entry
to the ethical sphere, thus he seeks them on a regular basis through moviegoing, a trip to
Chicago, and relationship with Kate. Furthermore, Binx is tied to a moral code by the
same sense of duty as Quentin. Binx is told to "act like a soldier" (11) after the death of
his brother, and responds by saying, "I could easily act like a soldier. Was that all I had
to do?" (4). Binx also takes responsibility for Kate in order to keep her from pills and
alcohol. At hisAunt's request,Binx practicesQuentin-esqueSouthernmanners. Moreover,
Binx's search itself is an obligation. He refers to his search as a type of "duty" and makes
a list of starting points to guide him, and although he promptly forgets his promise to
himself the next morning, for those moments he is actively contemplating the search, he
is occupied in an ethical exploration of his own reality and thus is part ofKierkegaard's
ethical sphere.
Critics, as well as Percy himself, have agreed that Binx manages to navigate his way
to Kierkegaard's religious mode and in this regard Binx has more in common with
Faulkner's Dilsey than the Compson brothers. As Binx searches for a way to exist, he
contemplates the old chairs at the movie house in Gentilly; saying of their longevity,
BETHANY PERKINS. 28
 ~ -, ','. ,;' ,.' ~-.v ~ :L>__~ , ~.' '---<...L
"The enduring is something which must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it
off' (80). Similarly, the appendix to The.Sound and the Fury simply says of Dilsey,
"They endured" (215). Dilsey, arguably the most successful character in The Sound and
the Fury, has already completed the search in which Binx is engaged. As Bedell notes,
"There is no doubt but that Dilsey dwells within Kierkegaard's religious category" (251-
52). Her section falls on Easter, she attends her church's service dressed in regal purple,
and tears flow down her cheeks as she watches the preacher and then walks home quoting
from the bible. Already a part ofKierkegaard's religious sphere, Christ has risen for her.
At the end of The Moviegoer Binx begins his search in earnest on Ash Wednesday,
watching a negro "his forehead an ambiguous sienna color and pied: it is impossible to
be sure he has received ashes" (235). Here, he begins to contemplate for the first time,
the true existence of God for, as Allen explains, "Binx is ready for his leap into a higher
way of life, just as surely as Ash Wednesday follows Fat Tuesday" (41). The epilogue
shows Binx as he has "ended my thirtieth year to heaven," is now married to Kate, and no
longer has "the inclination to say much on the subject" of his search (236). His disorienting
dreams have gone and he has left his job to go to medical school, putting the finite,
aesthetic world firmly behind him. Binx has endured through to the following May,
presumably going through his own Lent and experiencing his own Dilsey-like Easter, for
through the epilogue we learn he has taken a religious leap of faith. He tells his half-
brothers and sisters that their sibling, Lonnie, has gone to God, acknowledging the
existence of a religious realm in which Lonnie's wheelchair will no longer be needed.
Binx has managed to navigate successfully through the pre-aesthetic, aesthetic, and ethical
spheres to arrive at the end of his search for religious salvation through a Kierkegaardian
leap of faith, an achievement which none of the Compson brothers can manage.
The quests of both Binx and Quentin play significant roles in Percy and Faulkner's
attempts to come to grips with the place of the modem man in the South. John T. Matthews
has argued that many of Faulkner's central moments in his narratives "function more as
absences in the stories that surround them" (373). The sense ofloss that permeates The
Sound and the Fury is linked to the central figure of Caddy and the grief the brothers feel
at losing her. Further, this sense ofloss is indicative of the condition of the postbellum
South, and, Southern writers-particularly Faulkner-have investigated this concept at
length. As a Southern writer, Faulkner centers many of his narratives around the idea of
Southern culture's decline after the Civil War. The Compson family's once prosperous
farm is now a golf course, the family home is ultimately sold and divided into apartments.
Similarly, Absalom Absalom chronicles Thomas Sutpen's failed attempts to recreate the
antebellum dream. It is this legacy of the past's influence on the present that Percy
attempts to overcome. Lewis A. Lawson points out that Percy once told an interviewer,
"Faulkner and all the rest of them were always going on about this tragic sense of history,
and we're supposed to sit on our porches talking about it all the time. I never did that.
My South was always the New South. My first memories are of the country club, of
people playing golf'(14-15).6 For Faulkner, the destruction of Benjy's pasture and its
transformation into a golf course is emblematic of the fall of the Old South; but for Percy,
the image of the golf course is quite clearly a positive image of the New South. The
tradition and history that haunt Quentin must be overpowered ifBinx is to survive in a
modem world, and Binx is ultimately able to overcome the loss that plagues the Compson
brothers.
In "From Suicide to Ex-Suicide: Notes on the Southel1l Writer as Hero in the Age of
Despair" John F. Desmond has argued that what defines Percy's interest in Quentin
Compson is the theme of suicide that it is a defining point "both for understanding his
29. POSTSCRIPT
~ ---'-_ ~-_,"~'-~'"
relationship to Faulkner and for gauging how Percy's fiction represents an advancement
in the development of the Southern fictional hero, from suicidal despairer to creature of
hope" (90). For Desmond, the transition from suicide to ex-suicide is tied to issues of
language and sexuality. As he puts it, "Percy's interest in a 'Quentin Compson who
didn't commit suicide' and in 'keeping Quentin Compson alive' was central to his self-
definition as a Southern writer... It meant coming to terms specifically with the two
primary elements in Quentin's suicidal despair-language and sexuality" (96-97). For
Binx, when he is caught in the pre-religious stages, language is incapable of articulating
the exact nature of his search. Able to defme repetition and rotation, Binx finds himself
at a loss to explain what the search encompasses except to say it is the attempt to escape
"everydayness." In the epilogue we see that Binx does not have much to say (236) on the
subject of his search. Having already found what he is looking for, he does not need to
tell what it was, thus, he has overcome the inadequacy of language that Desmond argues
leads, in part, to Quentin Compson's suicide.
Desmond's focus on sexuality as part of Quentin's despair is perhaps even more
clearly demonstrated in Binx's ability to move from a Quentin-like suicide to successful
ex-suicide. In fact, the loss all three Compson brothers feel is centered on their ties to
Caddy's sexuality, as well as their impotence in relation to it. Benjy senses Caddy's loss
of virginity and becomes upset that she no longer smells like trees. He is then castrated
for attempting to replace her as others assume the reason he chases the schoolgirls is
sexual. Quentin cannot convince anyone that he and Caddy have committed incest, and
is thus unable to preserve her reputation in the manner is which he sees fit. Jason is
unable to control the sexuality of either Caddy or Miss Quentin and is emasculatedby his
mother and Dilsey's unwillingness to let him run the household. Each of these incidents
serves to indicate the loss each brother connects to the absence of their sister and the way
in which their sexuality is compromised by it. At first, Binx is similar to the Compson
brothers in that he is sexual dysfunctional in his inability to make love to Kate, explaining
of their first attempt at sex, "We did very badly and almost did not do at all. Flesh poor
flesh failed us" (200). However, he ultimately marries her, fixing her as a presence
rather than an absence in his life. Percy carefully constructs an alternative ending to
Faulkner's dilemma whereby brother can marry sister because they are not related by
blood. Binx's "possession" of Kate is indicative of his ability to embrace the religious
sphere and transcend the legacy of postbellum loss that permeates Faulkner's narratives.
So where does the idea of Binx as a conflation of the Compson brothers get us?
Perhaps the answer comes through Binx's repudiation of the ideas of his father's family,
who think "the world makes sense without God and that anyone but an idiot knows what
the goodlife is and anyonebut a scoundrelcan lead it" (146). Their paradigmautomatically
eliminates Benjy (the pre-aesthetic/ idiot) and Jason (the aesthetic/ scoundrel) as
appropriate models for understanding the world, so we are left with Quentin (the ethical
in a Godless world) as the only alternative. But if the world is to truly make sense
without God, then Quentin would still be alive, would endure, rather than commit suicide.
Havingreached the ethical stage he is the Compson brother closest to fulfillment, but his
leap is of the wrong type-a leap of despair-taking him off a bridge into the river.
Thus, it is a new Quentin, as seen through Binx, who must make a different leap--a leap
offaith-from the ethical to the religious much as Dilsey does; he is a Quentin Compson
who must be kept alive. Thus, through the comparison of Binx withthe Compson brothers,
the overlay of a Kierkegaardian perspective provides an effective comparative tool in
establishing new points of contact between Faulkner and Percy and their attempts to
understand the human condition.
BETHANY PERKINS. 30
 . . . '-' ~ ~
Notes
I Jo Gullege's"TheReentryOption:An InterviewwithWalkerPercy."Southern
Review 20 (1984): 107.
2 Susan V. Donaldson's "Keeping Quentin Compson Alive: The Last Gentleman,
The Second Coming, and the Problems of Masculinity," Walker Percy s Feminine
Characters, Eds. LewisA. Lawson and ElzbietaH. Oleksy,New York: Whitson, 1995.
62-77, identifies parallelsbetween Lance Lamar (Lancelot) and QuentinCompson. John
F. Desmond's "From Suicide to Ex-Suicide: Notes on Southern Writer as Hero in the
Age of Despair, Southern Literary Journal, 25.1 (1992): 89-105, identifies significant
parallels between Lance Lamar and Will Barrett (The Last Gentleman and The Second
Coming) and Quentin Compson. However, neither points to Binx Boling as a Quentin
Compson figure.
3 Seren Kierkegaard defines three stages of life, or "existence spheres," as the
aesthetic, ethical, and religious. In Either/Or he writes a detailed analysis of the first
two, explaining that the aesthetic individual is of two types, the Hedonist, in search of
immediatepleasure but unable to commit to ethical responsibilities, or the intellectual,
concerned with abstract/objectified philo.sophicalconcerns. The ethical individual is
onecommittedto decision-makingand duty,therebyachievingawareness. In TheSickness
Unto Death, Kierkegaard writes that the religious stage encompasses commitment to
God and thus is the highest of the three modes, allowing for salvation and escape nom
despair.
4 Allen quotes Ashley Brown's "An Interview with Walker Percy," Shenandoah 18
(1967).
5 Allen cites John Carr's "An Interviewwith WalkerPercy,"GeorgiaReview25
(1971): 330.
6 Lawson cites James Atlas' "Interview with WalkerPercy." Conversations with
Walker Percy. Eds. Lewis A. Lawson and Victor A. Kramer. Jackson: UP of Mississippi,
1985. 186.
31. POSTSCRIPT
'"-;...~"".,*,' "." ".' ,.so,.,
..WorksCited; ,,'
Allen, William Rodney. WalkerPercY: A Southern Wayfarer.Jackson: UP of
Mississippi, 1986.
Bedell, George C. Kierkegaard and Faulkner: Modalities of Existence. Baton Rouge:
LSUP, 1972.
Desmond, John F. "From Suicide to Ex-Suicide: Notes on the Southern Writer as Hero in
the Age of Despair." Southern Literary Journal. 25.1 (1992): 89-105.
Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. New York: Norton, 1994.
Hobbs, Janet. "Binx Bolling and the Stages on Life's Way." The Art of WalkerPercy:
Stratagemsfor Being. Ed. Panthea Reid Broughton. Baton Rouge: LSUP, 1979.37-
49.
Howland, Mary Deems. The Gift of the Other: Gabriel Marcels Concept of
Intersubjectivity in WalkerPercys Novels. Pittsburgh: Duquesne, 1990.
Lawson, Lewis A. Still Following Percy. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1996.
Matthews, John T. "The Discovery of Loss in The Sound and the Fury." TheSound and
the Fury. Ed. David Minter. New York: Norton, 1994.370-393.
Percy, Walker. The Moviegoer. New York: Random House, 1960.
BETHANY PERKINS. 32