The Litter of Summers Past: The Moviegoer's Philosophy of History

For The Moviegoer’s Binx Bolling, history seems at times to be nothing more than the ‘adulteration of events that clog time like peanuts in brittle’. At others, personal histories seem to shape people's constitutions. Bolling has abandoned his ‘vertical search’ of combing through history to fin...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inLiterature and history Vol. 27; no. 1; pp. 62 - 80
Main Author Aiello, Thomas
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published London, England SAGE Publications 01.05.2018
Subjects
history
alienation
Walker Percy
Moviegoer
Kierkegaard
Hegel
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Summary:For The Moviegoer’s Binx Bolling, history seems at times to be nothing more than the ‘adulteration of events that clog time like peanuts in brittle’. At others, personal histories seem to shape people's constitutions. Bolling has abandoned his ‘vertical search’ of combing through history to find meaning in favour of a ‘horizontal search’ that treats such endeavours as ancillary. At the same time he only understands others by seeing them as the product of their historical dialectics. This complex use of history as both a vehicle of understanding and a veil that confuses more than it clarifies serves as one of the principal sources of Bolling's stasis throughout the novel.
ISSN:0306-1973
2050-4594
DOI:10.1177/0306197318755677