The Mysterious Stranger: A Religious Allegory for a Post-Christian Age

Abstract

Allegory in its basic form posits a dynamic relationship between explicit and implicit elements. If allegory is a negotiation between an explicit text and an implicit text with the locus of meaning generated in the relation between the two (or a relationship that has been reclaimed as culturally and politically determined in the work of Benjamin, Jameson, and de Man), then a post-Christian allegoresis negotiates between the explicit text and the void left by the “disappeared text,” a text negated by endless internal negotiations. This article will not claim that Mark Twain composed The Mysterious Stranger as an allegory; rather, it will determine an allegoresis model acknowledging an inherent destabilization of the text. While this negotiation is necessary because text veils what it cannot state directly, a postmodern allegoresis suggests that the implicit text of The Mysterious Stranger has become inexpressible not because the themes are necessarily unspeakable but have become meaningless.

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“…For Lewis (1958), "allegory, in some sense, belongs not to medieval man but to man, or even to mind, in general" (p. 44). Though much more rampant in political appreciations, allegory has also been adopted to address many functional purposes like religion Dimitriu, 2014;Khan, 2017;Knapp, 2014;Phair, 2010;Scalia, 2016;Shohat, 2006) to satire, raise rhetoric, promote, and suppress ideological systems (Hile, 2017;Milford & Rowland, 2012;Virtue, 2013;Xu, 2018); for "legal ownership and use" as contained in Chaucer's Melibee (Taylor, 2009); Crime fictions and other moral suasions (Rolls et al, 2016); culture, gender, race, and ethnicity (Achinger, 2013;Gilfedder, 2016;Kaarst-Brown, 2017;R. C. Smith, 1949); and not in the least for pure appreciation of literary values, language, and cognitive figuration (Harris & Tolmie, 2011;Monelle, 1997;Rolls et al, 2016).…”