Richard Wright’s Anagrammatical Allegory of Liturgical Reading, or Inhabiting the Black Messianic in “The Man Who Lived Underground”

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay reads Richard Wright’s speculative novella, “The Man Who Lived Underground” (1940/1996), as an anagrammatical allegory of liturgical reading. By anagrammatical, I invoke Christina Sharpe’s understanding of how Blackness singularly “exists as an index of violability and also potentiality” in its foreclosure from the World’s grammar of anti-Blackness. With allegory (of reading), I draw attention to both (1) how Wright recasts Plato’s allegory of the cave in modern America and, following Paul de Man, (2) how Wright’s text is an allegory of un/readability. Finally, with liturgy, I draw on Giorgio Agamben’s understanding of mystery as a performance that (re-)enacts the text. This leads me to theorize that Wright’s anagrammatical allegory of liturgical reading brings the reader into speculative attunement to the Black messianic, which is a radical mode of fidelity to the Black’s singular positionality in aspiring to the un-veiling [apo-kalyptein] of the katechontic anti-Black World – toward gratuitous messianic freedom.