Seeking Icons in the Distance

Vincent Van Gogh, The Red Vineyard, 1888

My dear friend J showed me a wonderful passage from Walker Percy's The Moviegoer (1961, National Book Award, 1962):

"Then it is that the idea of the search comes to me. I become absorbed and for a minute or so forget about the girl. What is the nature of the search? you ask. Really it is very simple... so simple that it is easily overlooked. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life... To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair."

I was immediately reminded of a poem of Rilke's from "Eingang:"

Whoever you are, go out into the evening,

leaving your room, of which you know each bit;

your house is the last before the infinite

whoever you are.

Which got me thinking, how do we as readers understand and contextualize this rendering of the search or the going out of the everydayness and known, into an object of veneration - turning the search itself into an almost religious way of being in the world?

"Modernism has never been theorized as a discourse that incorporates spiritual symbolism." So, Wendy Faris and Steven Walker set out to fill this lacuna in their essay, "Latent Icons: Compensatory Symbols of the Sacred in Modernist Literature and Painting." Allow me to unpack this weighty title. You see with the "death of God" in the modern period and the apparent demise of the religious in modern literature and art, many significant modernist writers and artists, according to Faris and Walker, expressed "the need for contact with the sacred through the creation of a new set of subliminally perceived iconic representations."

"The painting, The Red Vineyard is a particularly good example of this iconizing project. The figures in the painting are minimally articulated in comparison to the complexly worked field that surrounds them, a complexity and concentration that help raise the field itself to iconic status. The icon remains latent, however, because the canvas depicts the ostensibly sentimental subject of peasants working."

In the case of The Moviegoer we are presented with an author whose project depicts a thoroughly modern man on a spiritual quest, the iconized search mostly latent, behind a myriad of Binx Bolling's escapades.