Re: "Ghost chapter" in The Moviegoer

John Gregory Brown (brown@alison.sbc.edu)
Sun, 13 Apr 1997 08:58:12 -0400

First, I should introduce myself: I'm a writer with two novels --
"Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery" and "The Wrecked, Blessed Body of
Shelton Lafleur" -- and I direct the creative writing program at Sweet
Briar College. I've long been an admirer of Percy's work, for the same
reasons, no doubt, as the folks who participate in these discussions.
The Moviegoer is my favorite of Percy's novels, although that probably
has as much to do with how and when I came across the book -- at the
Maple Street bookstore in New Orleans when I was in college at Tulane, a
scribbling, angst-filled adolescent wanting only to be a real writer (a
sentimental attachment, you might say, and thus a damning one).

Despite my love of the book, despite reading it a dozen or so times, I
too remain troubled by The Moviegoer's epilogue -- and thus the "ghost
chapter" which doesn't appear in the book. I'm troubled not in regards
to Percy's religious conviction as it shows itself in the novel, which
seems clear enough. As Binx says of his search in the epilogue, "I have
not the authority, as the great Danish philosopher declared, to speak of
such matters in any way other than the edifying." If faith indeed
involves a leap -- an inexplicable, irrational leap, a mysterious
conversion beyond explaining by science -- then it cannot be discussed
(and thus, perhaps, narrated) but merely accounted for. And the epilogue
stands then as the testimony of that conversion.

What I am troubled by, though, is that novels seem, by their very
nature, to call for the depiction of a change in a character's emotional
or physical or psychological circumstances. It is that depiction that
makes us believe the story, that allows us to believe. Thus, I find
myself more moved and more convinced by the doubt, the great question,
that Binx expresses at the end of Chapter Five, just before the
epilogue. That question about faith and grace, about the man receiving
ashes, those final words, "It is impossible to say," seem to me the
point in the novel where Binx is most real, most true, where he has
dropped the ironic voice and thus reveals himself most fully, where the
questions regarding his search have resolved themselves into this single
sentence.

I'm willing to be persuaded that the Epilogue does work dramatically,
but I haven't yet been convinced.

JGB