Corina Crisu - Polytropic Identities in the Postmodern African American Novel - Chapter III

Corina Crisu

Rewriting

Polytropic Identities

in the Postmodern African American Novel

Chapter III

“A Cultural Mongrel”

Transatlantic Mediations in Charles Johnson’s

Middle Passage

Pretexts: “Decalcifying Perception”

The essential role of (re)writing in assessing identity is revealed by Charles Johnson’s fiction—Faith and the Good Thing (1974), Oxherding Tale (1982), The Sorcerer Apprentice (1986), Middle Passage (1990), Dreamer (1998), Soulcatcher and Other Stories (2001).¹ These texts point to his basic assumption of reconsidering the binary oppositions through which African Americans have often been defined: self versus other, mind versus body, African versus American, and black versus white. Johnson repeatedly states his goal of decalcifying writers’ and readers’ perception and pleads for a “deeper clarification of what we think we already know” (1988, ix). From this perspective, he criticizes the African American fiction that concentrates too much on a “deadly sameness of sensibility” (1988, 121), and in exchange he proposes a “four dimensional view” on black experience (1984, 2). In order to accomplish his kaleidoscopic literary perspective, he makes use of intertextual techniques, which draw upon both the Western and the African literary tradition, with special reference to Homer, Defoe, Swift, Equiano, Douglass, Melville, and Conrad. At the same time, philosophical mastertexts by Plato, Descartes, Hegel, and Husserl are rethought bearing in mind more recent philosophers Fanon, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, and Levinas.

Strange as it may seem, the more the literary tradition is evoked, the more it is revoked, undermined, and deconstructed. In accordance with Husserl’s phenomenological concept of epoche, Johnson stresses the need to suspend or bracket all known assumptions in order to achieve new imaginative perspectives.² For him, the main point is not to get mentally “locked within the Natural Attitude” and “fix[ed] upon certain ‘meanings’” (Johnson 1993 a, 603). In an act of creative subversion and reversion, his text does not reflect an “uncritical mimesis,” but new ways of disrupting the intrinsic racism of the previous views upon identity (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 29, in Moraru 2001, 104).

In the present chapter, my analysis of Johnson’s Middle Passage foregrounds the role of intertextuality in reconfiguring the black character in the context of the Transatlantic slave history. Thus, the first three sections demonstrate how the novel’s multiple significance connects the fictional work of black and white authors, which become pretexts for expanding the reader’s perspective on identity. Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789), Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno” (1856), and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902) represent key intertexts used in order to create new versions of black identity—“the greatest of all fictions” (Johnson 1990, 171).³ More than pure reflections, Middle Passage implies various textual refractions,⁴ i. e. various methods of deviating from the former literary meanings and playing them against new ways of understanding. Johnson uses parody, irony, contrast, and paradox, in a deconstructive game in which Equiano’s, Conrad’s, and Melville’s texts are reinterpreted. Since cultural refraction implies a multi-faceted process, Middle Passage sheds a new light upon both the African and the Western tradition, which are approached from untrodden paths.⁵

The last two sections stress the innovative ways in which Johnson departs from former views on identity. One of my main points concerns the way Johnson brings into focus the traumatic events of the Middle Passage, told from the double perspective of the African and American characters, by placing an African American narrator into a mediating position. In a never-ending cross-cultural exchange, the writer’s versions of identity have the same fluid, unfixed quality as his text. In Johnson’s Heraclitean perspective, the human self does not appear as a noun, but as a verb, “a process but not a product” (Interview 1993 b, 162). Always mobile, never a given, black identity is characterized by continuous transformation.

The main character in Middle Passage—Rutherford Calhoun—is the perfect illustration for a polytropic identity, of a porous, versatile, flexible nature. Indeed, Johnson himself initially thought of titling his novel Rutherford’s Travels. His book presents a postmodern Odysseus, an African American trickster, who becomes engaged in a voyage in order to escape the engulfing love of his Isadora/Penelope, the financial conspiracy of his creditors, and the urban state “of living death” (4). A manumitted slave from Louisiana, Rutherford comes to New Orleans only to embark on a slave ship moving between America and Africa. In the nine entries of his log, he narrates his voyage on board of the Republic, and spins terrifying stories about the slave commerce with Africans, Captain Falcon’s imperialistic ideas, the slave mutiny and the white crew’s revolt, acts of cannibalism, the destructive effects of a storm, and finally the blacks’ enslavement by their own people. In his travels, Rutherford learns how to question his own assumptions, discover his roots, and mostly how to live with alterity and see himself and his culture as another.

Hence, he achieves a “doubleness in writing,” which in his existential, textual, and “metaphoric” movement leads to the dislocation of the homogeneous spatial and temporal dimension of a single culture (Bhabha 1994, 141). Placed in a colonial scenario (the year is 1830), Rutherford’s double-sighted log incorporates both the perspectives of the colonizer and of the colonized, and draws our attention to the interchangeable master/slave roles. Through Rutherford’s mediating position, the Transatlantic “virtualization of national cultures” reveals not only the specificity of the African culture, but also America’s “particular customs and practices within a new, unfamiliar frame” (Giles 2002, 181).

NOTES

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