An Existential Reading of Charles Wright's The Messenger

Abstract

Twenty-five years before Farrar, Straus & Company published Charles Wright's The Messenger in 1963, Librairie Gallimard of France published Jean-Paul Sartre's novel, Nausea in 1938, and, two years before publication of Wright's The Messenger, Knopf published Walker Percy's The Moviegoer in 1961. In 2001, Sartre's and Percy's novels, unlike Wright's The Messenger, are represented as seminal works of existential On back cover of New Direction paperback edition of Nausea, publisher writes: La Nausee ... is [Sartre's] finest and most significant. is unquestionably a key novel on Twentieth Century and a landmark in Existential fiction. In Introduction to Nausea, Hayden Carruth gives a summary of principal themes of existentialism and provides an existential reading of novel. Sartre's novel is defined as an extension of existential philosophy, as a metaphysical tract, as a dramatic enactment of an existential definition of human condition. Likewise, Percy's The Moviegoer is also represented and received as a work of existential The epigraph at beginning of novel is a quote from noted Christian existentialist Soren Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death: the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being in despair. In his acceptance speech for National Book Award for The Moviegoer, collected in Signposts In A Strange Land, Percy speculates: It is perhaps not too farfetched to compare it [The Moviegoer] in one respect with science of pathology.... that pathology in this case has to do with of and of at very time when words like `dignity of individual' and `self-realization' are being heard more frequently than (246). Phrases such as loss of individuality and loss of identity are two key features of existentialism as defined by Martin Heidegger. Discussing The Moviergoer in his review of Percy's The Thanatos Syndrome, Sven Birkerts asserts: His novel, The Moviegoer, was a Kierkegaardian meditation on attainment of authentic selfhood. Its thrust was philosophical, not psychological (190). Like Sartre's Nausea, Percy's The Moviegoer is also represented as an extension of an existential philosophy, as a dramatic enactment of Kierkegaard's Christian existentialism. Wright's The Messenger is also an existential novel, yet it was not received and has never been represented or defined as an existential novel. The history of critical reaction to and reception of The Messenger is complicated and varied. But, it is accurate to say that text has been represented, interpreted, and defined by publisher and mainstream American and African American reviewers and critics alike, not as an existential metaphysical tract, or as a dramatic enactment of an existential definition of human condition in twentieth century, but primarily as a vehicle of sociological, political, racial, and cultural commentary or protest. This reduction of The Messenger to racial and social commentary situates it, and existential African American experience it textualizes, within a white/black binary of signification that defines white as normative and superior and represents African American as inferior, as Same, as devalued Other, or as victim of racial oppression. Within this white/black binary, which constructs social reality in United States, skin color or African ancestry is made to represent a set of denigrated experiences, and these experiences are applied to everyone who ever had an African ancestor. When The Messenger fails to reproduce white/black binary, it is ignored and repressed. is assumed to have no aesthetic value. But, The Messenger's otherness, its existentialism, which is ignored and/or repressed by publisher and its critics and reviewers, is what is most challenging and subversive to white/black binary. …