An Existential Reading of Charles Wright’s The Messenger

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 the 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 fiction. On the back cover of the New Direction paperback edition of Nausea, the publisher writes: "La Nausee ... is [Sartre's] finest and most significant. It is unquestionably a key novel on the Twentieth Century and a landmark in Existential fiction." In the "Introduction" to Nausea, Hayden Carruth gives a summary of the principal themes of existentialism and provides an existential reading of the 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 the human condition. Likewise, Percy's The Moviegoer is also represented and received as a work of existential fiction. The epigraph at the beginning of the novel is a quote from the 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 the 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 the science of pathology.... that the pathology in this case has to do with the loss of individuality and the loss of identity at the very time when words like the `dignity of the individual' and `self-realization' are being heard more frequently than ever" (246). Phrases such as the "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 the 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 the critical reaction to and reception of The Messenger is complicated and varied. But, it is accurate to say that the text has been represented, interpreted, and defined by the 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 the human condition in the 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 the existential African American experience it textualizes, within a white/black binary of signification that defines white as normative and superior and represents the 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 the 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 the white/black binary, it is ignored and repressed. It is assumed to have no aesthetic value. But, The Messenger's otherness, its existentialism, which is ignored and/or repressed by the publisher and its critics and reviewers, is what is most challenging and subversive to the white/black binary. …