Rewriting

Polytropic Identities

in the Postmodern African American Novel

Chapter III

“A Cultural Mongrel”

Transatlantic Mediations in Charles Johnson’s

Middle Passage

Fictional Self-Reconstruction: “Our Futures Blended”

Since for Rutherford writing means placing himself into the role of the Other, his log entails transmitting to a racially mixed audience the chronicle of suffering he has witnessed. Dispossessed of everything, he takes into possession the story of the Middle Passage and, through a process of catharsis, he offers us a fictional self-reconstruction. Physically and psychologically wounded, in a Job-like condition, Rutherford’s rescue on board of Juno marks his spiritual renewal. His sole possession salvaged after the shipwreck—the log—serves “as a means to free [himself] from the voices in [his] head,” of liberating himself from the unspeakable events (189).

At a metafictional level, Rutherford is conscious of his authorial role of giving shape to his textual universe, making us aware once more of his simultaneous authorial act of creation and criticism:

…Nothing in my sight could sustain itself without me, how I was responsible for all of it, the beauty and ugliness; and I thought of how the mate was righter than he knew, and of Blake, a poet Master Chandler had me read, his beguiling, Berkeleyesque words, ‘I see the windmill before me; I blink my eye, it goes away,’ and so did the cabin, and so did the world (181).

Read in the empiricist tradition, Blake’s poem presently invoked points to the visual quality of Rutherford’s narration, to the relationship between senses, reality, and writing. Once his vision is gone, the fictional existence of his characters simply dissolves. Johnson consequently draws attention to his postmodern novel, where “the uncertainly about the validity of its representations” coexists with “an extreme self-consciousness about language, form, and the act of writing” (Waugh 1993, 40).

While the voyage changes his seeing and he turns into a postmodern, “cultural mongrel,” Rutherford learns to appropriate the Other’s worldview, to bargain for the Other’s survival. Rutherford’s polytropic character consequently evolves in the novel: from a New Orleans petty thief who embarks by accident on a tight-packer, he gradually metamorphoses into a passionate scrivener who strives to present impartially the history of his voyage, and finally into a benevolent hero who provides for the orphan African children.³⁸ Johnson thus rescues his character from his initial fragmented state, from his dangling parasitical nature, and endows his actions with an altruistic message. As Christian Moraru notes, “Rutherford’s heterogeneous self pulls itself together and recuperates its own agency and ethos as it discovers the bonds between the enslaved blacks and itself” (2001, 110).

Finally, Rutherford’s fictional self-reconstruction would not have been possible without the reappearance of his female counterpart. The deus ex machina reunion of the two protagonists highlights through a fine lens their inner and outer transformations. While Isadora is presented at the beginning in caricaturesque lines, as a fat teacher anxious to “save” Rutherford by enticing him with her dreams of marital happiness, she evolves into a seductive heroine, Papa’s fiancée, “courted by a [black] man who owns half of the city” (196).³⁹ The end of story presents a beautified version of Isadora, a parodic Penelope who stalls her marriage to Papa by knitting sweaters for her cats, and who is finally saved by her Rutherford/Odysseus.

In the novel’s cyclical movement and prismatic game of mirrors, Isadora’s unwritten log is “embedded in Calhoun’s” (Muther 1996, 654). As she emerges in flashes into his narrative, she reminds us of Rutherford’s inner change by juxtaposing his former image upon his present one. The final scene is relevant: whereas the old Rutherford would have answered her lures, the present one avoids both sexual contact and a romanticized happy ending: “I wanted our futures blended, not our limbs, our histories perfectly twined for all time, not our flesh” (208). The traumatic memory of the Middle Passage acts as a “rip of insufficiency and incompleteness” that separates the heroes in spite of their reunited destinies. Their brotherly embrace simultaneously affirms and denies the possibility of their sexual union, and leaves the novel open-ended.

This problematic ending of Middle Passage is meant to remind us of the possibility of transgressing borders. By placing a narrator-mediator in the middle of a racial conflict, the author allows both the black and the white characters to present their views through an endless process of textual refraction. In his Transatlantic scenario, races are taken out of their psycho-geographical frame and interact so that the borders between them become porous. Through the eyes of his hero—a cultural mongrel—Johnson searches for an alternative to the rigid identities of the color line.

NOTES