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. Finally, The Messenger's existentialism offers a counter-tradition that allows for a refiguring of the African American as a non-victim, as a subject that is different but equal.

Like Sartre's Nausea and Percy's The Moviegoer, Wright's The Messenger, in print in 1993 for the first time in fifteen years (but currently again out of print), is considered a classic by the publisher, and by some American and African American critics and writers. But it is represented as an African American classic, where race and racism are the only concerns. The most significant quotes on its first hardback (Farrar, Strauss in 1963) and more recent paperback editions (Fawcett in 1965 and Harper Perennial in 1993) represent it as sociology or protest literature. On the front and back covers of the 1963 hardback edition and the 1965 Fawcett paperback edition of The Messenger, the publisher presents blurbs by James Baldwin: "Reads with an urgency which is all the more painful for being, in the main, so quiet and taut. It seems sometimes to be scarcely a book at all, but a happening. This is New York; this is the way we live here now" (emphasis added). Also on the back cover of these same editions, Kay Boyle writes:

   For some time now, a new and ruthlessly honest literature has been emerging
   from the lonely horror of the junkies and homosexual world of New York.
   Wright's The Messenger is the most recent and in many ways the most moving
   of these statements from our contemporary lower depths. These depths are
   not to be ignored. Wright's book ... is important as fresh, unencumbered
   writing and important as social comment as well. (emphasis added)

In addition, on the first page of The Messenger, the publisher provides a blurb from the the Associated Press: "Wright ... distills a bitter social protest in a minimum of taut words ... told with slashing effectiveness" (emphasis added). On the back cover of Absolutely Nothing To Get Alarmed About: The Complete Novels of Charles Wright, published in 1993, the publisher writes: "By turns brutally funny and starkly real, these three classic American novels create a memorable portrait of a young, working class, black intellectual--a man caught between the bohemian elite of Greenwich Village and the dregs of male prostitution and drug abuse." In these blurbs, the entire focus on representing The Messenger is one of sociology and social protest. Unlike the responses to Sartre's Nausea and Percy's The Moviegoer, the issue of existentialism is never mentioned.

First, I want to draw brief sketches of Sartre's Nausea and Percy's The Moviegoer, making salient their existential features. Second, I want to do an existential reading of Wright's The Messenger. Third and finally, I want to discuss the reception of The Messenger, examining why it is defined as social commentary or protest literature rather than an existential novel. But, first, the brief sketches.

Nausea is the diary of Antoine Roquentin, a bachelor of thirty years of age who has an independent income and who, after extensive travels in North Africa and the Far East and Central Europe, retires in the year 1932 to the little town of Bouville-sin-Mar to write a biography of an obscure eighteenth-century nobleman, the Marquis de Rollebon. Although he is a man who has travelled widely, Roquentin no longer believes in the possibility of what men call "adventures." He now believes that immediate experience is utterly meaningless. And the novel is largely devoted to an analysis of the essentially nauseous sensation that is provoked in us by our encounter with the absurd world. As he faces the world, Roquentin is overcome with nausea and disgust--simply because things do so stubbornly persist in being there; and the sheer thereness of things such as the pebble wounds him deeply because it seems in no way to be related to his own existence, and seems, therefore, to oppose his own human reality.

As Roquentin moves around Bouville, everywhere the scene of life appears to be nothing but a spectable of absurdity. The middle class holds to its niche in society, refusing to ask questions about being and existence. The world to which he is condemned appears to be without stability or permanence; and since he finds no evidence of things being governed by any real necessity, he has a sense of it being possible for them to be very nearly anything at all. In short, there is nothing in the world that appears to have any preordained order or form: the world as a whole seems to be characterized by the complete absence of any kind of necessity. Roquentin discovers that the complete absence of necessity in the world means that things are uncertain.

In the end, Roquentin comes to realize that nausea is the result of the refusal to accept things as autonomous objects that exist outside of rational man who sees himself as the center and who cannot imagine nothingness. Rollebon represents the only justification for his existence. But Roquentin stops writing his book on Rollebon because he realizes that if he cannot hold to his own past how can he hold to the past of someone else. The actual process of living through an experience is quite without any sort of real meaning at all. It is only when we are able to view past experience retrospectively that we can proceed to make it a part of some kind of conceptual order. Roquentin realizes that he has never had adventures. Therefore, he abandons his project. Ultimately, Roquentin comes to understand existence is necessitated by our essences and that the present is all that exists.

When Percy's The Moviegoer opens, Binx Bolling is alone and on the search. He has spent the last four years living in Gentilly, a middle-class suburb of New Orleans, working for his Uncle's brokerage firm, dating girls, and trying to be a model citizen. He is also trying desperately to escape the search. "And there I have lived ever since, solitary and in wonder, wondering day and night, never a moment without wonder" (39). But, as the novel opens, a dream about the Korean War puts him back on the search.

To be on the search is to not be in despair. To be on the search is to have "immense curiosity" and heightened awareness of the world around him, to feel like a man on a strange island, a castaway. When one is a castaway, he seeks "clues" to the mystery of his existence. When Binx is on the search he is outside of all of society's rituals and metanarratives. He is outside the litigating absolution of the aristocratic southern tradition represented by his Aunt Emily because this tradition, this construct, denies him the mystery of his existence. Binx is drawn to others who are exiles and who mirror his alienated, fragmented situation such as the Amazon woman, his father, and Jews, but he is unable to find troth and meaning in an absurd world. Binx, at twenty-nine years of age and just before his thirtieth birthday, concludes that "in the thirty-first year of [his] dark pilgrimage on this earth," he knows "less than [he] knew before, having learned only to recognize merde when [he sees] it" (180). In The Moviegoer's "Epilogue," Percy provides Binx with a religious experience that allows him to be in the world, but not of it. It allows him to be socially responsible.

For the purpose of this article and the existential reading of The Messenger, I must offer a short and terribly reductive definition of French existentialism. The non-Christian version of existentialism is attributable to Martin Heidegger and Jean Paul-Sartre. In "Existentialism and Humanism," which borrows heavily from Martin Heidegger, Sartre posits the idea that man is alone in a godless, absurd universe. Man is thrust into the world with no meaning from an identifiable source. In this atheistic philosophy of Sartre, man has no reality if he unthinkingly follows social laws or conventions:

   Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in
   consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either
   within or outside himself.... For if indeed existence precedes essence, one
   will never be able to explain one's action by reference to a given and
   specific human nature; in other words, ... man is free, man is freedom....
   Thus we have neither behind us, nor before us in a luminous realm of
   values, any means of justification or excuse. We are left alone, without
   excuse. That is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free.
   Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at
   liberty, and from the moment that he is thrown into this world he is
   responsible for everything he does. (353)

In this Sartrean existential philosophy, there are no hopes, dreams, expectations, or progress, and no reality except in action. Suffering, anguish, and despair comprise man's loneliness. Suffering is a prerequisite for establishing the self; it is a way out of the nothingness of existence. Man may become what he wishes by the exercise of free will, for man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. In addition, Sartrean existentialists are concerned with man's being; they have the feeling that reason is insufficient to understand the mysteries of the universe. The awareness that anguish is a universal phenomenon and the idea that morality has validity only when there is positive participation are prominent characteristics of Sartrean existentialism.

Bearing in mind the tenets of Sartrean existentialism, and bearing in mind the plot summaries of Sartre's Nausea and Percy's The Moviegoer, I want to present an existential reading and to draw a portrait of the main character of Wright's The Messenger. The Messenger is written in the episodic-journal format--common to existential novels such as Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and Sartre's Nausea--with a first-person narrator. Wright's protagonist, Charles Stevenson, is a typical existential, Sartrean hero. He is thrust into the world with no meaning from an identifiable source. He finds himself alone in a godless, absurd universe in New York City. He has "neither behind [him], nor before [him] in a luminous realm of values, any means of justification or excuse" (Sartre, "Existentialism" 353). Therefore, he searches for the why of his existence. For most of the novel, he does not know that he is condemned to be free, that he is to take responsibility for everything he does, and that he may become what he wishes by the exercise of free will.

At the opening of the novel when we encounter Charles Stevenson, he, like Percy's Binx, is twenty-nine years old and he, "who [has] always been alone" and has "developed what others" define as "arrogance for [his] protection," still has not figured out the meaning of life (10). Therefore, in New York, he continues to search and ask questions. Living in his about-to-be-demolished five-story walk-up "old midtown brownstone" (21) and constantly being visited by a parade of marginal figures--prostitutes, homosexuals, drag queens, an "aging, ageless coquette ... dancing through an army of Puerto Rican gigolos" (17), gypsy kids who are con artists, con women and con men--who are just as lost and lonely as he, Charles drifts in an absurd world. It is a world where people are searching for truth, holding on to social conventions, or are devising their own truths.

From flashbacks we learn that Charles's early searches for meaning and truth cause him to act, to seek answers. They cause him to travel to nearby and distant cities in Kansas, take him through many experiences, many of them sexual. He reads "everything that [he] could lay [his] hand on" (49) in hope of finding meaning, but to no avail. At the age of eight, he left home for the first time. He was headed thirty miles to the next town to visit his great-grandmother. But after walking three miles, a family friend spots him and returns him home. At fourteen years of age he hitch-hiked to Kansas City and St. Louis every weekend. "It alarmed Grandma, but I had to move. What would a fourteen-year-old boy do alone in a city? Well, I walked and walked, met all types of people. I went to movies, museums, the library" (47). These trips also brought him sexual encounters with older men who lured him to their apartments. After a while he grew tired of Sedalia, St. Louis, and Kansas City. The "undiscovered world beckoned and one Sunday night, three months before graduation" from high school, he headed for California, where he "began to move through the subterranean junkie world where there is no day or night but an endless golden dusk if you are `on'" (50). After he gets a girl, Maria, pregnant, Ruby, his cousin, comes to California for him and he returns home where he "work[s] on and off, hitchhiking back to Kansas City on weekends" (51). At eighteen, he had his first slice of life and wants more. During these early years, Charles was searching for meaning.

As an adult he continues to search. He joined the army for adventure and experience. He looked "forward to the United States Army and Korea with glee; it was to be another adventure, another experience, and when [he] received [his] draft notice shortly after [his] nineteenth birthday, it was like Christmas. [He] looked forward to fighting, perhaps even to dying" (101). He took basic training with an "exuberant spirit" (98). He was excited by the skirmishes of the war, the "steep, dusty hills of Korea, tiding in a two-ton truck, and suddenly hearing from far off the explosion of a bomb" (100). But when the action was over, military life for him became "routine, petty. [He] grew bored and difficult" (100). After the war, Charles returns home "with thousands of GIs for whom Korea had been pretty meaningless. It was if they had never left this country" (101). These sojourns and experiences leave him feeling unsatisfied. Discussing the significance of adventure and experience to the existentialist, Sartre's Antoine Roquentin in Nausea writes:

   I have never had adventures. Things have happened to me, events, incidents,
   anything you like. But no adventures. It isn't a question of words; I am
   beginning to understand. There is something to which I clung more than all
   the rest--without completely realizing it.... I had imagined that at
   certain times my life could take on a rare and precious quality.... I look
   back and tell myself ... I have known great moments, I have had
   adventures.... I have suddenly learned ... that I have been lying to
   myself. (37)

Like Antoine, Charles wants adventure; he wants to know "great moments." He wants his life to take on "a rare and precious quality." But it does not.

Charles Stevenson is what Julia Kristeva calls a "foreigner."

   Indifference is the foreigner's shield. Insensitive, aloof, he seems, deep
   down, beyond the reach of attacks and rejections that he nevertheless
   experiences with the vulnerability of a Medusa. This is because his being
   kept apart corresponds to his remaining aloof.... Not belonging to any
   place, any time, any love. A lost origin, the impossibility to take root, a
   rummaging memory, the present in abeyance. The space of the foreigner is a
   moving train, a plane in flight, the very transition that precludes
   stopping. As to landmarks, there are none. His time? The time of a
   resurrection that remembers death and what happened before, but misses the
   glory of being beyond: merely the feeling of a reprieve, of having gotten
   away. (269)

Because he has "always been a travelling lad" (21), after two years in the army and about a year in St. Louis, Missouri, Charles Stevenson comes to New York City. In New York City, Charles works as a messenger for a service in Rockefeller Center, a job he does not take seriously. In addition to allowing him to travel throughout the city, the job permits him to meet "with all kinds of people" (69). But he spends much of his time reading, searching for the meaning of life, and listening to jazz. When he does not have money or is laid off from his job, he occasionally scores as a hustler.

Although Charles is a working-class intellectual who lives among the parade of marginal figures or outcasts, he, even if he might think that he is better, does not otherize them. He represents them not as objects but as human subjects. First, he connects with them because, like him, they are fellow travellers. They, too, are lost and lonely. Second, Charles deals with and accepts these outcast individuals where they are. Charles is understanding and compassionate with Mrs. Lee, the aging, ageless coquette, who dances through an army of Puerto Rican gigolos. When she visits, he tells her what she has "come to hear" (17). Although he is not interested, he tries to show interest in Maxine's, the honey-colored seven-year-old's, abstract drawing. She loves him because she knows that he is "for real." He plays with her and offers her gifts. Charles considers Claudia, the fabulous Negro drag queen, a friend. He thinks she is "nothing much to speak of as a man, but he makes a winging broad" (36). He is the play father to Lena, a prostitute and a professional thief. She can trust him. When she gets busted, he attends her trial. Charles does not cover over the outcasts and require that they become the Same, that they embrace his beliefs and values. He deals with them on their own terms. But, unlike most of these outcasts or marginal figures, Charles is an existential hero; he is aware of his loneliness. He knows that he is a traveller.

Charles's awareness of this loneliness puts him in possession of himself. It prevents him from seeking freedom through social conventions and laws, from establishing a comfortable niche in conventional society. "Man has no reality if he thinkingly follows social laws or conventions" (Sartre, "Existentialism" 354). He refuses to participate, or is incapable of participating, in the rituals which attend the systems of society, but he still thinks that there is an answer, one certain "kick" or narrative, that will put his fragmented, alienated world together and unite him into a whole being. Early in the novel in his apartment in New York City, he assesses his existential predicament:

   Here in this semi-dark room, I became frightened. Am I in America? The
   objects, chairs, tables, sofas are not specifically American. They, this
   room, have no recognizable country. I have always liked to believe that I
   am not too far removed from the heart of America.... Yet I'm drowning in
   this green cornfield.... This country has split open my head with a golden
   eagle's beak. Regardless of how I try, the parts won't come together. (4)

Charles no longer feels himself "to be a whole, but rather a series of diverse zones, subject to differing constraints, frequently of an irreconcilable sort" (Godzich ix). Charles becomes "frightened" because the reason and logic of language which order the world and his notion of the unified self clash with the absurdity of the world. The "objects, chairs, tables, [and] sofas" stubbornly persist in being there, having their own existence. These objects seem in no way to be related to his own existence and seem, therefore, to oppose his own human reality. At this moment, he is overcome by a sense of how the names/signifiers and the concepts/signifieds that we apply to things have become arbitrary. There is nothing in the world that appears to have any pre-ordained order or form. Here, Charles is experiencing the failure of reason or man-made rational structures.

Initially, for Charles, New York City held excitement. It had a sense of adventure: "there was something that held me powerless. The pace, the variety, the anonymity, the sense of walking on glittering glass eggs, walking in a city like a big-time prostitute with her legs cocked open. A challenging, wondrous city, fit for a wide-eyed country boy" (106), but after five years in New York City, he wonders what he is "doing in this city" (21). He still has not found Meaning and Truth. He still cannot connect the fragments of his life. He has "a rummaging memory" (Kristeva 269). Therefore, he goes "back through the bowels of his memory" (22), to his past, in hope of finding meaning, "a lost origin" (Kristeva 269). He recounts the death of his mother and the absence of his father. He recalls the "fun" of living with his grandfather and grandmother. But after Charles goes "back through the bowels of memory, back to Missouri" (22) trying to "connect the fragments of [his] life" (21), looking for "beginnings, his past" (21), he realizes that the question of the "Great Why of Everything" (24) had not formed when he was fourteen years old. But, more importantly, although Charles does not find meaning and truth in his past, this rummage informs him that he "began to be aware of something at this time, something perhaps [he] had been born with, and which was never to leave [him]. Loneliness. And this consciousness is here with him now" in New York (26).

Earlier, in a flashback to November, 1958, a year and three months after he arrives in New York, a dream about his grandmother haunted him for days and his grandmother's most recent letters had not been cheerful. Therefore, he decides to go home. The frame for the recounting of this trip home and his grandmother's eventual death comes as Charles tries to survive the "hot days and nights" (110) of a New York August. He recalls his grandfather's lament, "This world is not my home" (110), and he realizes that he has "nothing to look forward to but [his] own death, which [he does] not fear. But this, this doomed air of the present; what will happen to me before I die? What could possibly happen after all that has happened"? (110). When he arrives home to Missouri, he realizes that in coming home he "was on the run, and fatigued, played out. And now [he] want[s] to turn around and flee the town" (112). He realizes that he "had loved in another time when this town had been [his] world" (112). But on this trip home, just before his grandmother's death, he realizes that he "had lost whatever [he] had had in those days, a shy lonely boy, veteran of a small war at twenty-one, who had made the bohemian pilgrimage without finding a roosting place" (112). The past fails to provide him with meaning.

On this retold trip, Charles encounters a grandmother who is growing old and frail, and he rejoices in the "connection" between them. "We were not only connected by blood; we were friends. Whatever had happened to us, whatever thoughts crossed our minds that early November morning could not destroy the love we bore each other" (113). Charles settles in with his grandmother and for a while he is at peace.

   I read a lot that winter, going to the library three times a week. I tried
   to avoid the kids I had grown up with. They all worked eight-to-five shifts
   and were carving out their future in this small-town Negro world. And in
   this quiet world for the first time in years, I relaxed; I drank very
   little and did not feel the need for sex. Gone was the fevered air of New
   York, gone the hipped-up, Freudian complications. (115)

As his grandmother, "now permanently bedridden" (115), slowly moves into a second childhood before she dies, Charles awaits her end, "sitting in the rocking chair with a black coffee and a cigarette, rocking peacefully" (116).

But after the death of his grandmother, Charles realizes that "there was nothing to keep [him] in Missouri" (21). Therefore, he returns to New York where he finds himself in a "cluttered, yellowing room on West Forty-ninth Street, in the heart of Manhattan. Here, there, again, and always, the Why of my life, the meanings. Terrible depression as I sit here watching darkness settle in the comers of this room" (116-17). He is still "aware of the loss of something" (117), and he feels the "suffocation of this small room" (117). He is still plagued with the question of "where did it all begin?" (117).

Charles also recognizes those who are the living dead, and he does not want to become one of them. "Death was [his] father, standing around looking lost, although he didn't live with [them] anymore" (22). The man, Alfonzo, in the New Jersey couple who gives him a ride, had resigned himself to life in death. "I thought of the expression on the man's face. It was like something terrible had happened to him once long ago that had destroyed his sense of being a man, but it didn't matter much anymore. Whatever it was, resignation has settled in the creases of the pale, puffy face and under the tear-filled, forlorn eyes" (35).

Charles also encounters and recognizes fellow travellers. Walking through New York City during an early Sunday morning, Charles notices the streets "saddled with a numb, self-centered despair" (26). He witnesses the "lonely people every where.... The shameful, envious, eyes--lowered glances at passing couples. You recognize other solitary fellow travellers. Both of you go separate ways, moving with the knowledge of Sunday papers, endless cigarettes ... and the feeling of having missed out on Saturday night's jackpot prize" (26), or the answer to the ultimate question of existence. He also encounters and recognizes people such as Alice and Maxine who accept life as it is, who "got such a bang out of just living" (75), and the messengers he works with, who "are still very much alive despite their various ailments" (6). He likes some of the people in the "small town" (115) in Missouri because they face their problems "by looking them square in the eye, accepting them as they accepted changes in the weather" (115).

In The Messenger, Charles is an intellectual in exile. Said writes' "Exile for the intellectual ... is restlessness, movement, constantly being unsettled, and unsettling others. You cannot go back to some earlier and perhaps more stable condition of being at home; and, alas, you can never fully arrive, be at one with your new home or situation" (53). For Charles, exile is an experience of "constantly being unsettled." He "cannot go back to some earlier and perhaps more stable condition of being at home." He "can never fully arrive, be at one with" his "new home" in New York or his existential "situation." Exile is the experience of crossing boundaries and charting new territories in defiance of the white/black binary, social conventions and laws, or the standard categories of race, class, and sex.

As an exile, Charles becomes a being who has lost his country without thereby acquiring another, who lives in a double exteriority. He has experienced both American and African American cultures from within, and he is neither traditionally/conventionally Black, Indian, nor white. He admits to his mixed heritage: "I am the result of generations of bastard Anglo-Saxon, African, Black Creek, and Choctaw Indian blood" (88). He bends and challenges sexual categories by having sexual relations with both men and women: "I'm rather free sexually" (79). He does not empower only one form of sexuality. And he does not get caught up in the greatest problem of the American male, proving his masculinity. He doesn't have "to lift weights, wear heels with clicks, to assert [his] maleness" (79). He does not have to dominate. In addition, he defies class categories. He is a working-class intellectual/writer who does not embrace material possessions and the protestant work ethic, and who lives among the underclass. He listens to the blues and jazz and reads Hemingway and Laurence Durrell. We can say that Charles wants equality without its compelling him to accept identity, that he also wants difference without its degenerating into the superiority/inferiority opposition. Furthermore, we can also discern how Charles, to use the words of Barbara Hermstein Smith, "is a member of many shifting communities, each of which establishes, for each of its members, multiple social identities, multiple principles of identification with other people" (168).

In addition, there are with the exile what Edward W. Said calls "pleasures of exile, those different arrangements of living and eccentric angles of vision that [the exile] can sometimes afford, which enliven the intellectual's vocation, without perhaps alleviating every last anxiety or feeling of bitter solitude" (59). This means that although he lives in poverty, he gets a pleasure out of his "different arrangements of living," of having the options to become middle class but refusing it for some higher reason, which he thinks has much more value than a sterile middle-class life. Also, as an exile or what Kristeva calls a "foreigner," Charles

   feels strengthened by the distance that detaches him from the others as it
   does from himself and gives him the lofty sense not so much of holding the
   truth but of making it and himself relative while others fall victim to the
   ruts of monovalency. For they are perhaps owners of things," but he "tends
   to think he is the only one to have biography, that is, a life made up of
   ordeals--neither catastrophes nor adventures ..., but simply a life in
   which acts constitute events because they imply choice, surprises, breaks,
   adaptations, or cunning, but neither routine nor rest. (Kristeva 269)

In Charles's eyes those who are not exilers/foreigners/sufferers/ fellow travellers "have no life at all: barely do they exist, haughty or mediocre, but out of the running and thus almost already cadaverized" (268-69).

Although Charles is searching for truth, his awareness, his exile, and his foreignness, as I mentioned earlier, put him outside the various supernarratives and metanarratives which give meaning to and regulate the behavior of "civilized" man. First, he is beyond the litigating absolution of the Church. At the death of his mother, his grandmother tells him the Christian meaning of death: that death is "a long, long sleep and you did not wake until you got to heaven" (22), but Charles, after looking up at the sky and not getting a confirmation, "did not believe that that was true" (22). Also, when he is preparing to go to Korea and his grandmother prays and then turns to him and informs him that it is his turn to pray, he "turn[s] [his] head and stare[s] out at the dark night. There [is] nothing out there. Darkness" (102). Therefore, he says nothing. When she reminds him again that it is his turn to pray, Charles "bow[s] [his] head again and open[s] [his] mouth. The words would not come. [He] look[s] up at the porch ceiling. It seem[s] as if the ceiling [is] between [him] and God" (102-03). Ultimately, Charles believes that his grandmother, and her religion, is an agent of false solace. She thinks that "if you believe, it will be all right" (103). But Charles Stevenson and existentialism know that "the sin is believing, hoping," and he is "too tired, too afraid ... to commit this sin" (29).

Second, his awareness, foreignness, and exile put him outside the narrative of work, the labor movement at his job. On May Day and in the midst of the "loyalty and Communist Front celebrations" (6), Charles defines the day as "just another day for this worker" (6). When the "other messengers, especially the elderly men ... who take their messenger jobs seriously, talk labor" (6), he is "silent" (6). During the stock market crash of 1962, everyone is in a panic. "Everyone is tensely excited" (30). Brokers are "picking their noses" (31). An elevator operator loses four hundred dollars in the drop. A vice-president has "moments when his nerves give and he overplays his role" (31). But all Charles wants to do is to "deliver the stuff and go home. The sudden change of fortune has no effect on [him]" (30). He doesn't give a "Goddam dollar" (33) for helping to bring "this historic day [stock crash] to a close" (33). Charles's awareness, foreignness, and exile, also put him beyond/outside other social rituals and conventions. He is outside the "sophisticated scum of New York" (16). He feels strangled "by those millions of feet making it toward Mr. Greenbacks and what it takes to be a `smaht' New Yorker" (16). He also feels marginal to young African American intellectuals. When he meets them at "liberal white parties and chic black parties" (87), the young Negro intellectuals turn "out in Ivy League garb, usually with a pipe and mustache. Perfect gentlemen: sophisticated Uncle Toms. I certainly don't go for most Negro girls who have gone to a good college. They are usually phony intellectuals" (87).

Finally, Charles Stevenson's awareness, foreignness, and exile put him outside the narrative of middle-class life and respectability. This marginality is shown in two instances. In the first instance, he looks out of his window at a Tiepolo sky above the towering buildings and observes the office workers. "They have found their niche in this world and they are going to make damned sure that you know it and that you will not attempt anything foolish that threatens to destroy their world" (42). Charles thinks that they are "bourgeois right down to their underwear" (42). He watches "the paralysis of mummified Americans waiting for their cars to take them back to suburbia" (43). Although he witnesses some of his people down there participating in the middle-class American dream, he realizes that he does "not belong down there" (42-43). In the second instance, he sits in his fifth-floor window and watches "the young Americans out on the town, healthy, laughing, contented as mother hens. Their faces indistinguishable as blades of grass. Look how happy they are! They are united and one" (58). Although he fantasizes about becoming one of them, despite the fact that he is black and that he thinks that he is "as American as apple pie," he concludes that he "cannot, simply cannot, don a mask and suck the c--of that sweet, secure bitch, middle-class American life" (58).

There is the one time he decides to search for a job to achieve middle-class respectability, but it proves a failure. Earlier, he had dreamed of "quitting the messenger service, get[ing] a better job, sav[ing] money, put[ting] a down payment on a house, and marry[ing] Shirley" (10). He plays "hookey from the messenger service," shaves "very close that morning," glues on his "average, boyish American smile," puts on his "white" face and applies for "the fifty-seven-dollar-a-week midtown mailroom flunky job" and a "brokerage house trainee" (59) job. Due to lack of experience, he does not get the mailroom job. But before reporting to personnel at the brokerage house, he observes whom he will be working with and gives up half way through the interview. "If I worked with these slobs, I would be stoned from nine to five, I thought. The average jerk, going along like a cog, questioning nothing, seeking nothing. I've heard tell that these young men are the beefsteak on tomorrow's menu" (59).

Charles's awareness, foreignness, and exile put him outside these narratives and social conventions because the absurdity of these constructs and their ceremonies would diminish him as a man, as an agent of free will. Charles's stance is an existential one, and he is "outside" the absurdities of systems designed to oppress and suppress the last control of the individual under the burden of history and futility, that is, the command of his own naked free will. These constructs will not allow him to accept the mysteries in the world, to ask "the Great Why of everything" (25). Finally, Charles stubbornly resists any metanarrative based on a wishful need to infuse a random and absurd universe with meaning. Charles Stevenson's awareness, exile, foreignness, and "eccentric angles of vision" that put him outside these social conventions and rituals marginalize him from society. They "do not alleviate every last anxiety or feeling of bitter solitude." But they are "pleasures of exile" and they do "enliven [his] intellectual's vocation." His "discomforts," to again use Kristeva's description of the foreigner, "change into a base of resistance, a citadel of life" (Kristeva 270).

As with Roquentin in Nausea and Binx in The Moviegoer, near the end of The Messenger, Charles does some "stocktaking." At twenty-nine years of age, he realizes that he is

   a fairly young man with a tired boyish face, saddled with the knowledge of
   years and nothing gained, lacking a bird dog's sense of direction most of
   the time, without point or goal. `I am the future,' I once wrote in a
   passionate schoolboy essay. Now ... I am not expecting much from this
   world. Fitzgerald and his green light! I remember his rich, mad dream:
   `Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.' But where will
   this black boy run? To whom shall he stretch out his arms? ... At the
   moment, I need not think of tomorrow. I've come to a decision. I am getting
   my possessions in order. Tonight there will be an auction in my pad.
   Everything will be sold, got rid of. And then I'll go away. (127)

Even with this stocktaking, he cannot find meaning.

Finally, at the end of The Messenger, Charles has an incredible existential revelation and breakthrough. Throughout the novel, drinking (along with listening to jazz, having sex, and reading) has been one of the ways Charles copes with existence, with the pain, suffering, despair, and frustration of life. "Alcohol is merely a brace for my spine, the fine oil for my reflex" (8-9). He thinks drinking and jazz go hand in hand. "A wonderful tranquilizer. Problems do not get less, but [he] can see them more clearly" (124). As his friends come to his apartment to bid him farewell, Charles has been drinking all day, but it has "done absolutely nothing for [his] head" (130). But he does see himself more clearly. "There was horror in the knowledge that nothing was going to happen to [him], that [he] was stoned on that frightening, cold level where everything is crystal clear. It was like looking at yourself too closely in a magnifying mirror" (130). He becomes existentially aware.

Observing his friends at the party, he recognizes that the party has turned into a microcosm of the world. He realizes that his drunken friends, like the people in conventional society, are searching fruitlessly for the "crazy kick," the metanarrative that will "still the fear, confusion, [frustration] and the pain of being alive on this early August morning" (131). But Charles has come to accept pain and suffering as being a part of life. He now knows that there is "no such thing as peace of mind and goodness" (109). This knowledge becomes a prerequisite for establishing the self. It is the way out of the nothingness of existence. This revelatory moment allows Charles to analyze his own culture and the world. And he realizes that everyone has acquiesced: Shirley to middle-class respectability, Bruce to the Episcopalian church, Mitch to morality, Claudia to the notion of "a fabulous Negro drag queen" (36), Jim to a desire to "save the world" (126), and Mrs. Lee to a "succession of lovers" (17). They have acquiesced to systems of unexamined/naturalized codes--and unexamined or naturalized codes are self-deceptions. "Self-deception," writes Sartre in "Self-Deception," "seeks by means of `not-being-what-one-is' to escape from the in-itself which I am not in the mode of being what one is not" (328). In the end, all the systems seem absurd to Charles.

Of course, Charles has already reached the conclusion or has already decided that there are no metanarratives that can allay life's obstacles. Therefore, he has no need to "find a roosting place" (112). During most of The Messenger, Charles Stevenson does not "understand" the nature of his search, his exile, his loneliness, in the absurdity that is his life, his actions. The societal results of his action do not equate. "I was searching for something I would tell Ruby. What? she would ask. I don't know, I would say. But I'll know when I find it" (51). It is only at the end of the book that Charles synthesizes and reconciles, by his own standards, his actions with his motives. He attains freedom through scorning the absurd world, through an understanding that his existence is valid although absurd, through the realization that the world is wrought with suffering and pain, that man is nothing but what he makes of himself.

In this moment, Charles realizes that he cannot explain his "actions by reference to a given specific and human nature," that he is free, that he has neither behind him, nor before him "in a luminous realm of values, any means of justification or excuse" (Sartre, "Existensialism" 353). He is "left alone, without excuse" (Sartre, "Existensialism"353). Therefore, when Charles recognizes that existence precedes essence, that he simply exists, that he is his "own problem," he is "condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment that he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does" (Sartre, "Existensialism" 353). It is this realization, this awareness, this freedom that allow him to assert his independence and accept the "fears, confusion, and the pain of being alive" (131).

Although the power of Wright's The Messenger is its existential philosophical countertradition, The Messenger does not ignore the presence of racial oppression in its portrait of Charles Stevenson. Interestingly, racial oppression exists in the world of the text, but Charles does not define himself as a victim of racial oppression. In the sexual encounters with the men in the midwest and in New York City--with Peter, the crew-cut soldier, who watches him at the Step Down Bar and who invites him for some bizarre racial sex, with the couple in New Jersey where the husband offers his wife to him, and with Mr. Bennett, whom he meets in the park, who uses his "large collection of books" (8) to lure him to his apartment--Charles is represented as a sexual, racial Other. As Other, he comes to symbolize a racialized, sexual exotica, the object of sexual arousal and fantasy. Also, he is represented as the Other when he is walking "through the concourse of the RCA building, sneezing and reading Lawrence Durrell, dead drunk from the explosion of his words," and encounters Steven Rockefeller "who doesn't ... think poor people read" (7).

In his hometown and in New York, Charles also experiences racism. There is the racism involved in the confrontation with the small town Missouri cop who stops him because he is in a white neighborhood, in his friend's son calling him a "nigger," in the six-year-old playmate who never came to his birthday party despite the fact that he went to hers, and in members of the dominant white society who define him in stereotypical terms. He experiences racism with Penelope Browne whom he played with as brother and sister until they "arrived at the acute age of twelve. Afterward, very polite and formal" (84). He experiences racism with Bobby who always greeted him with "Neigaaar" (84). He experiences racial segregation when, "at the local movie, he had to sit in the balcony on hard wooden seats. Downstairs, the seats were upholstered with maroon leatherette" (84). The first time Charles spent a weekend exclusively with white people, he was fourteen years old. When he arrives late for dinner, he hears his fifteen-year-old host's uncle, a Missouri state senator, say, "Maybe he won't come down because we ain't got no watermelon" (84). Finally, at sixteen, Charles takes a job as a pinboy at Harry O'Malley's Fair Lanes Bowling Alley. In his presence, he hears a white friend of his boss, Harry O'Malley, say to Harry, "Hey, Harry, see you have a coon back there" (85). Racism permeates Charles's life. But, for Charles, this racism becomes one of many obstacles to be overcome: "Wounds [of racism] of my Missouri childhood were no worse than a sudden, sharp pain" (84). Charles chooses to overcome his obstacles, rather than be defined as a victim by one of them, racial oppression.

Using the examples of Sartre's Nausea and Percy's The Moviegoer as existential novels, Wright's The Messenger is an existential novel. Certainly Charles Stevenson, Antoine Roquentin, and Binx Bolling are all existential characters. Sartre's Roquentin and Percy's Binx are ciphers, existential constructs, definitive Others, characters whose existences precede and define their essences. The same can be said of Charles Stevenson. In fact, almost everything that applies to Antoine Roquentin and Binx Bolling, except for the Kierkegaardian religous resolution in the "Epilogue" of The Moviegoer, can also apply to Charles Stevenson. All three find themselves "alone in a godless universe" (Sartre, "Existentialism" 354). They are searching for a truth that will bring unity and meaning to their fragmented worlds. Despite their vigorous search for meaning during their years on earth, all have learned that nothing has been learned from their stay in the world and all must take responsibility for their existence. The awareness of their existence is constantly putting them outside all social laws and conventions. They also understand that "reason is insufficient to understand the mysterious of the universe, ... that anguish is a universal phenomena.... and that morality has validity only when there is positive participation" (Sartre, "Existentialism" 353). All three characters resist any false paradigms that will preclude the asking of large questions about being and existence. Finally, Antoine, Binx, and Charles accept the world's absurdity and realize that only through the use of free will can they achieve freedom.

Yet Nausea and The Moviegoer are represented as seminal works of existential fiction, and The Messenger is represented as social commentary or as a vehicle for racial protest. Percy's The Moviegoer, published in 1961, is set in the pre-civil rights South, where legal and de facto segregation was very much a part of the social landscape and where African Americans were denied their basic human and civil rights. The Moviegoer does allude distantly to these social issues, but these issues are not the publisher's, reviewers,' and critics' focus in their interpretations, representations, and reactions to the book. Reviewers and critics are concerned with The Moviegoer as a dramatic enactment of the existential definition of the human condition. Percy in The Moviegoer has not been criticized for misrepresenting the South. Nor has The Moviegoer been appropriated to generate or re-affirm a white southern tradition, thereby negating or repressing its existential core. Sartre in Nausea has not been held accountable for misrepresenting the social and economic crises in France or the treatment of Jews in France in the 1930s.

Taken together, added up, the above facts, existential reading, plot summaries, and quotes point to an extreme irony. A text which is instinctively, intuitively, philosophically, and discursively existential in its concern, nature, and telling is read and interpreted and examined from a different position and with a different set of agendas than existential texts written by white, western male writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Walker Percy. What does the reception of The Messenger tell us about the agenda that has defined and represented it? Exactly how has The Messenger been received?

The Messenger was ignored by African American reviewers when it was published in 1963. It was reviewed and represented exclusively by "mainstream" white American reviewers. To some of these white reviewers, the book's worth, artistic and otherwise, hinges principally on its depiction of the effects of racial oppression on the African American or on the place of the African American in society. This means that, according to these white reviewers, what is considered worthy about African American life and African American literature is their representation of the African American as the victim of racial oppression, where color is made to represent a set of denigrated experiences. All other aspects, specificities, and dimensions of African American life and existence are considered irrelevant or non-existent. Of course, portraying the African American as a victim is the most subtle and effective way of disempowering him, of colonizing his image, and of empowering "mainstream" white America. To be represented as a victim of racial oppression is to be defined exclusively and negatively by somebody else's discourse.

The representation of the African American as victim of racial oppression by "mainstream" white American reviewers is quite evident. These reviewers use The Messenger as a vehicle for racial commentary. They define African America's relationship to white America as a be-all and end-all. Everything hinges on the white/black encounter. Reviewing The Messenger in The Nation, Robert Kiely chooses to define the protagonist's problem racially:

   Mr Wright's hero is a Negro, and one of the reasons he lives on the fringes
   of the `normal' world is that he is forced to do so.... The narrator's
   account of his relationship with his pious grandmother, the humiliation
   suffered at the hands of Southern police and Army superiors, his pathetic
   attempts to join the middle class, give point and poignancy to his later
   dissipation. (550)

What is minimized and repressed in Kiely's review are the larger metaphysical questions about being and existence that Charles Stevenson is asking and that are at the core of the book. Furthermore, Wright in The Messenger makes it very clear that race is not the main reason why Charles lives on the "fringes" of the "normal" world. He shows other African Americans joining the middle class and the quest for the American dream.

Geoffrey A. Wolff, in reviewing Wright's The Wig in Book Week, writes about The Messenger: "His first novel, The Messenger, worked another side of the street. There the anger, expressed through a raw autobiographical account of his youth with drugs, queers, whores, and Southern police, held some promise. At least it looked as if the author [Wright] needed to write it" (17). Thomas Curley, in Commonweal, overtly represses and ignores all aspects of The Messenger and the life of Charles Stevenson that do not deal with two minor black female characters:

   we have two excellent characterizations, those of Ruby Stonewall, the
   narrator's cousin, and his grandmother. These two women do not merely give
   substance to a book that is otherwise rather weightless; they also serve to
   define a place, a small Missouri town which, although the scenes there are
   few contrasts well with the banal images of New York. (566)

Curley ignores The Messenger's existentialism because it does not have an "intercourse with temporal reality" for African Americans; it does not leave a "mark upon our memories." To Richard Kluger, in the Herald Tribune, the only value in The Messenger is the racial confrontation between the hometown cop and Charles Stevenson, and he is disappointed that Wright's portrait of racism is not more plentiful, graphic, bitter, and angrier.

   And the few incidents the author begins to involve us in--when the hometown
   cop makes him jog around the station house for an hour just for walking
   home through a white neighborhood or when the infant son of a white couple
   supposed to be friendly calls him `nigger'--are reported so clumsily and
   fleetingly that we do not feel the impact. (7)

Writing in The New Yorker, Whitney Balliett focuses on "one horrifying [racial] scene" that helps to "make him what he is" and helps "to make the book the achievement it is" (208).

Other "mainstream" white reviewers represent The Messenger as sociological commentary, as mostly a slice of life, and not as a work of art having artistic merits. To them, its worth hinges on its portrayal of the seamy side of the other urban street. Writing in The Critic, Doris Grumbach declares, "Now here is a first novel whose burden of obscenity and lurid situation is so heavy that one is hard put to find any literary, artistic, or aesthetic justification" (83). The reviewer in Atlantic also defines The Messenger sociologically. "It is about the urban underworld ... the bustle, the sights, sounds, smells of the streets of New York" (121). In Library Journal, Milton Byam writes: "In its plotless though apparently autobiographical meandering it is concerned with homosexuality, alcoholism, narcotics addiction, and incidentally, Negro-white relationships" (2730). Katherine Gauss Jackson, writing in Harpers, argues that The Messenger inhabits "the desperate shadowy world of New York: lonely misfits who are friends of `the messenger,' the narrator" (115).

In addition, most "mainstream" white reviewers criticize The Messenger for not being a novel. The reviewer for Atlantic represents the book as "a series of vignettes" (121). Curley thinks that Wright in The Messenger "really missed any development ... of a Story ... at all, and [he is] glad to report that he [Wright] didn't quite make it" (567). Milton Byam argues that "it is plotless" (2730). Katherine Jackson writes that "the book, like the lives, is made up of episodes and thus as a novel isn't quite successful" (116). All of these mainstream responses to The Messenger define it sociologically. None of them mentions existentialism.

The Messenger seems to exist in the fissure between what Godzich calls "the conception of the subject as the organizer and sense-maker of lived experience," on the one hand, and "the challenge posed to forms of Western thought by the liberation movements of the past forty years" (viii), on the other. The alienation and fragmentation of an African American self that Charles Wright depicts in The Messenger and that, to again quote Godzich, constitutes "the psychological ground of French existenialism," seem to apply not only to Charles Stevenson, but also to Wright's book itself, or rather to the reactions to Wright's book. The book, rather than the character Charles Stevenson as Wright has rendered him, has been shattered into seemingly diverse zones where it is "subject to differing constraints, frequently of an irreconcilable sort" (Godzich ix).

When The Messenger entered the domain of African American and American critical practices, it continued to be repressed or misrepresented. First, existential writers and critics such as Walker Percy, Ralph Ellison, Tony Tanner, and others simply ignored The Messenger or were blinded by the racial and sociological interpretations imposed on the book. Second, the poststructural and contemporary criticism of Robert Stepto, Houston A. Baker, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Shirley Ann Williams, Phyllis Rauch Klotman, Charles Johnson, Michael G. Cooke, Barbara Christian, Hortense Spillers, Hazel Carby, Michael Awkward, Valerie Smith, and others excludes any discussion/interpretation/representation of the book.

Third, for African American critics such as Addison Gayle and Bernard W. Bell, who belong to the "liberation movements of the past forty years" but whose critical practices do not pose a fundamental "challenge to the forms of Western thought" (Godzich viii), the book's worth hinges almost exclusively on its representation of the African American as defined by cultural nationalist ideology or the embodiment of an African American tradition. Both Gayle and Bell ignore what Godzich calls the (African American) "fragmented subject" and the "historical forces" that produced it. Gayle defines The Messenger as being a part of a "surrealistic" movement in African American letters, a movement which does not abandon "the racial artefacts." For Gayle, Wright uses The Messenger "to war against symbols, images and metaphors of Blacks handed down from the Euro-American past" (302). Bell represents Charles Wright and The Messenger as being a part of "the profound ironies and blues-like absurdities of the 1960s and 1970s." Wright is, Bell continues, one of those

   contemporary black novelists [who] employs distinctive combinations of
   fabulation and satire to spread the news of their tragicomic visions of our
   time. They have not completely lost faith in the power of satire and
   laughter as therapy for the ills of the world, but more like [George]
   Schuyler, and [Wallace] Thurman and [Rudolph] Fisher, they are much more
   irreverent and scornful of the hypocrisy of Western civilization, Christian
   orthodoxy, American principles, and black togetherness. (320)

Keith E. Byerman interprets The Messenger in still another critical tradition. Byerman defines the text as belonging to the tradition of Ishmael Reed and early Amiri Baraka that has "redefined what is possible in black fiction. Following the lead of Ellison, they tend to emphasize the telling more than the tale and have thereby added a new dimension to black writing" (238). Gayle, Bell, and Byerman define Charles Wright and The Messenger in terms of three different African American traditions, but they ignore the existential philosophy that is at the core of the book, further shattering the book into more diverse and seemingly irreconcilable zones.

Even among the book's champions, it seems, the problem of Charles Wright as social scientist or protector of "racial artefacts" versus Charles Wright as poetic artist bifurcates any cohesive evaluation. Noel Schraufragel acknowledges "the influence of such French writers as Sartre and Camus" on Charles Wright and The Messenger. Schraufragel admits that Charles Stevenson is portrayed as an existential hero who "merely drifts along in a world that seems devoid of meaning" (122). Yet, despite this admission, Schraufragel ultimately defines The Messenger not as a dramatic enactment of an existential definition of the human condition, but as racial accommodationist fiction:

   This nonprotest or accommodationist fiction concentrates basically on the
   adjustment an individual makes to function in accordance with the standards
   of white society. This adjustment includes a resignation to the existence
   of racism and the search for a meaningful identity that will serve as a
   compensatory stratagem. The individual accommodates himself to the
   conventions of the dominant culture in order to survive, or because there
   seems to be no plausible alternative, but at the same time he hopes for a
   positive change in his life. (121)

This reading of The Messenger by Schraufragel is problematic. Schraufragel praises The Messenger for its lesser achievements: that it has the influence of Sartre and Camus; its preeminent ambition, that it is an existential novel, is subordinated or ignored. In short, an existential evaluation of the book will not conclude that Charles "accommodates himself to the conventions of the dominant culture in order to survive." Rather, it will conclude that Charles comes to understand that he does not need a metanarrative or social conventions to give his life structure and meaning, that he has to take responsibility for his own existence.

Likewise, Jerome Klinkowitz, in "The New Black Writer and the Old Black Art," argues that The Messenger shatters "the old conventions" and presents "the usual `search for meaning' theme in a radical new form: imaginative literature, and ultimately fantasy. His [Wright's] impetus for The Messenger ... is the black experience, but only as environment can provide the stimulus to any artist" (123). Klinkowitz does not define The Messenger as the dramatic enactment of an existential philosophy as his statement about "search for meaning" indicates. Rather, he concludes that Charles is seeking "imaginative space, a better world to make than simply the banal American quest" (126). Klinkowitz's conclusion suggests that Charles is rejecting one narrative in hope of finding another, but an existential reading of the novel and a close examination of the closing scenes in the novel show that Charles is rejecting all narratives.

Finally, David Littlejohn briefly defines The Messenger as an existential text. He writes: "The Messenger ... is set more in James Baldwin's New York, that big brittle loveless town of queens and queers and neurotic lonely nights.... What we have is a pure, calm existentially true bit of self-awareness by a very genuine, very sad, very lonely human being. It is a small book ... but the author's sad honesty is touching and rare" (149). Littlejohn, however, does not develop an existential reading of The Messenger. Wright's The Messenger is an existential novel. But its reviewers and critics, as I have indicated above, never fully explain and understand the existential aspect of Charles Stevenson and the novel. The book has been criticized repeatedly by mainstream white reviewers because it fails to deal more extensively with the victimization of the African American by racial oppression. The book is used by American and African American critics to generate or reaffirm African American traditions. And in being represented almost exclusively as racial and social commentary and in reaffirming African American traditions, The Messenger's existential elements get short shrift where they are mentioned at all. Charles Wright and Charles Stevenson and the project of The Messenger have yet to be redeemed from a circumscribed and limiting heterological site and then to be placed in another heterological site which has much greater resonance and speaks with more impact to an existential philosophy of the human condition.

Why are existential texts defined by different sets of agendas? We may look to de Certeau for an explanation. The condition of Other-ness that de Certeau seems most preoccupied with in Heterologies applies to Wright's The Messenger and to Charles Stevenson to an unexampled and almost oppressive degree. "The disciplinary outlook," argues Godzich, further characterizing de Certeau,

   permits each discipline to function as if the problem of fragmentation did
   not arise since the concepts that it mobilizes the operations it performs
   are adequate ... to its object.... This may well account for the blindness
   of the disciplinary perspective to the problem of fragmentation: it is
   constitutive of that perspective. (ix)

Certainly Charles Stevenson embodies Godzich's/de Certeau's "conception of the subject as the organizer and sense-maker of lived experience" (viii). He also represents that "sense of fragmentation" that Godzich/de Certeau argues is "widespread in our culture" (viii). But the disciplines of American and African American critical practices are blind to the problem of fragmentation of the self, particularly the modern, otherized African American self. However, American critical practices are not completely blind to the fragmentation of the modern European and American [white] self. They acknowledge in Nausea and The Moviegoer the "sense of fragmentation" that is "widespread in our culture." In short, to be blunt and no doubt too simplistic, the spirit of existential philosophical countertradition which is "widespread in our culture" and which animates and informs The Messenger puts it outside all the critical and aesthetic expectations and preconceptions of its various interpreters, especially since its various interpreters can only define and represent it racially or according to racial oppression.

In representing and interpreting The Messenger in strictly racial terms or as the product of racial oppression, is it not possible that the reviewers and critics are asking the wrong questions about it, demanding too much of it while overlooking and repressing its philosophical and discursive nature? In reading The Messenger against narratives of racism, racial oppression, and established African American traditions, critics and reviewers ignore not only other "western" or modern dimensions to African American life and African American literature, but the book's power. The power of The Messenger is Charles Wright's ability to articulate the relevant rituals of black and white cultures and present Charles Stevenson's response to them. These cultural and social rituals/constructs include middle class respectability, or sanctity, job, home, marriage, Christianity, Communist Front, and finding a bourgeois niche in society. Charles Stevenson's response to these cultural and social contructs speaks of the absence of the preoccupation of rational drive, individualism, curiosity, revolutionary will, self-consciousness, "searching for something," "seeking answers," and "questioning everything," or of the contorted versions of the absent preoccupations that Charles encounters in Claudia, Jim, Shirley, Bruce, Peter, Al, and the middle class.

Also, in reading The Messenger against racism or racial oppression exclusively, its other-ness, its existential philosophical countertradition, is "interpreted," to again use the words of Godzich, "as the realm of the dead, for it is ideologically inconceivable that there should exist an otherness of the same ontological status as the same, without there being immediately mounted an effort at its appropriation" (xiii). In a world, or a critical practice, where African American literature and the African American are defined in a white/black binary of signification as Other, as victim of racial oppression, and, therefore, as less and inferior, it becomes impossible to view them as an otherness of the same ontological status as the dominant white society, as different but equal. It becomes impossible to represent them according to their other class identities and dimensions. "Ontology," writes Franz Fanon, "does not permit us to understand the being of the black man. For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man .... The black [man] has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man" (110).

In The Messenger, Charles Wright does represent the African American according to his other class identities and dimensions. Wright reconfigures and reproduces in The Messenger a different organization of African American life and experience that challenges and subverts the fixed image of the African African in the white/black binary of signification as being inferior, as being a victim of racial oppression. He produces an existential site/location for defining African American life. In making racism one of many obstacles Charles encounters, Wright repositions racism to expose its brutal history but not to have it serve as the defining element/character of Charles's identity or being. Charles is more than the representation of a set of denigrating experiences. He is also a modem, fragmented subject of diverse and varied experiences who is asking questions about existence and being. These experiences of Charles constitute a whole series of sites of individuation, identity, social definition, and politics that cannot be comprehended by the white/black regime. In this instance, Charles Wright in The Messenger produces a viable model, which speaks to the fragmentation of the modern African American. In this sense, Wright makes speak and gives legitimacy to the African American as Other, thereby making the Other a possible site of ontological resistance/insurgency in the white/black binary or regime of power/knowledge. Being existential means defining one's existence and being outside of societal conventions and rituals of society.

When The Messenger, then, is seen in the context of the existential charter, when it is placed in a heterological site which speaks with more impact to an existential philosophy of the human condition, many, if not all of its perceived weaknesses are explained. Thomas Curley is elaborately praiseful of "two excellent characterizations" in The Messenger, but, feels, like Richard Kluger and Whitney Balliett, who also praise the book for its portrayal of horrifying racial scenes, that the book contains no imagination in the New York scenes. He writes: "Had Mr. Wright confined his scenes to New York, the reader might just as profitably have gone to the movies" (566). Richard Kluger writes: "The Messenger fails ... because Mr Wright gives us no reason to care about the title character or any of the others. Charles is shiftless, joyless and self-pitying" (7).

Curley and Kluger are identifying the discrepancy between what they define as the moral/sociological and the artistic schemes of the book. The New York scenes have no meaning in a racial/sociological interpretation of the text. They tell us nothing about racism or racial progress. They tell us nothing about the white/black encounter, which has been defined as the cornerstone of race relations in the United States. But this discrepancy does not exist once we understand that Charles's problem is not one of race but one of being, that his morality is outside, other than, a programmatic morality of racial victimization. Once we understand that Wright's depiction of the absurdity of existence is both grounded in reality, but also artistically a metaphorical model of man's cosmological environment, "alone in a godless universe ... suffering anguish and despair in his loneliness" (Sartre, "Existentialism" 353), we can most fully understand Charles and the absurd scenes in New York City.

In addition, if we define/represent The Messenger as an existential text, we can explain the criticism levelled at its episodic-journal-format structure by Katherine Jackson and Thomas Curley, and the text, to use the words of Thomas Curley, just might "make it" as an existential novel. Like Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and Sartre's Nausea, and in the existential pattern, the text is composed of a series of scenes designed to reveal the absurd aspects of life in the crowded city. As with Roquentin in Nausea, these scenes are presented as journal entries, as if Charles is recording the incidents as they actually happen. Each entry builds until there is some kind of revelation on the part of the protagonist. Again, like Sartre in Nausea, Wright's main purpose in The Messenger is not to weave about Charles a realistic narrative, but rather to explore the absolute revulsion he experiences as he confronts the world's absurdity.

Further, if we take into consideration the existential variants of free will and moral validation, we may understand that Wright's critique and exposure of all "kicks" (131), or metanarratives, including racial ones, become his way of rendering them false trials. Charles Stevenson has found his redemption by coming to the realization that crazy kicks do not "still the fears, confusion and the pain of being alive" (131). Whether his realization is misguided, repulsive, harmful to the cause of the African American liberation, to black survival or black unity or to whites' need to define him as a victim or a devalued Other, is irrelevant to an existential reading of The Messenger. An existential reading will interpret all of these causes and movements as "crazy kicks" or "false trials," designed to prevent [the African American] man from admitting that life is absurd, that it is full of pain and suffering and confusion, that he must take responsibility for his own existence, and that there is no better tomorrow. Like Sartre and Camus, Charles Wright understands that the "authentic" existential hero, or anti-hero, must be presented in a state of unconditional sin, a sin with no socially or culturally or politically mitigating circumstances. It is to Wright's credit as artist and thinker that he chooses to ground Charles in circumstances which would lead him so convincingly to a state of Other-ness.

Until the existential nature of Charles Stevenson is understood, until his character is solved in terms I believe Wright intended, and until we understand how codified American and African American critical practices, as regimes of power and knowledge, repress and misrepresent Charles Stevenson and the project of The Messenger, along with other existential texts by African Americans such as Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), Richard Wright's The Outsider (1953) and Native Son (1940), Cyrus Colter's The Beach Umbrella (1970) and Hippodrome (1973), John Edgar Wideman's A Glance Away (1967) and Hurry Home (1970), Henry Van Dyke's Blood of Strawberries (1968), William Demby's Beetle-creek (1967), Robert Boles' The People One Knows (1964) and Curling (1968), and Bill Gunn's All The Rest Have Died (1964), The Messenger will continue to be, if not misunderstood or repressed, at least not fully celebrated for all that it offers.

Works Cited

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Byerman, Keith E. Fingers The Jagged Grain: Tradition and Form in Recent Black Fiction. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1986.

Curley, Thomas. "City Sickness." Commonweal 20 September 1963: 566-67.

de Certeau, Michel. Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.

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W. Lawrence Itogue, Professor of English at the University of Houston, is the author of Discourse and the Other: the Production of the Afro-American Text (Duke UP 1986), Race, Modernity, Postmodernity: A Look at the History and the Literatures of People of Color Since the 1960s (SUNY Press, 1996), and the forthcoming The African American Male, Writing, and Difference: A Polycentric Approach to African American Literature, Criticism, and History (SUNY Press, 2002).