Corina Crisu - Polytropic Identities in the Postmodern African American Novel - Chapter III - Toward “Heart of Darkness:” The Double-Sighted Narration

Corina Crisu

Rewriting

Polytropic Identities

in the Postmodern African American Novel

Chapter III

“A Cultural Mongrel”

Transatlantic Mediations in Charles Johnson’s

Middle Passage

Toward “Heart of Darkness:” The Double-Sighted Narration

Constructed though a complex process of textual refraction, Johnson’s novel rewrites not just Equiano’s narrative, but also Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.¹⁶ As in a distorted mirror where racial colors are reversed, Conrad’s white narrator is refracted by Johnson’s black narrator. Both Marlow and Calhoun are flaneurs, polytropic heroes with versatile identities, who travel to Africa from the Western hemisphere (one from England, the other one from America) acquiring a relativistic perspective. The kind of narrator proposed by Conrad and Johnson is a paradigmatic homo duplex, who learns to re-negotiate his identity across the African territory—an apparently blank page whose native message has to be deciphered.

The ontological redefinition that takes place through the encounter with the Other, is prompted in both Marlow’s and Calhoun’s case by an epistemological lack, a desire to enlarge their horizon of knowledge. Marlow’s “hankering after” the “blank spaces of the earth” (Conrad 11) and Rutherford’s intense staring at the sea express their desire to evade a circumscribed existence. Reiterating Frederick Douglass’ famous autobiographical scene of gazing at the ocean, Johnson initially places his hero on a limbo-like pier, his gate toward freedom:

I would sneak off to the waterfront, and there, sitting on the rain-leached pier in heavy, liquescent air, in simmering light so soft and opalescent that sunlight could not fully pierce the fine erotic mist, limpid and luminous at dusk, I would stare out at sea, envying the sailors riding out on merchantmen on the gift of good weather, wondering if there was some far-flung port, a foreign country or island far away at the earth’s rim where a freeman could escape the vanities cityfolk called self-interest, the mediocrity they called achievement, the blatant selfishness they called individual freedom (4).

Besides its escapist message, the above fragment works as a critique of the American fake ideals and self-centered values. As in Conrad’s text, the narrator undertakes a “retreat ‘inward,’ away from the real” (Artese 2003, 176), in which the possibility of a journey presupposes the actualization of a utopian project by reversing known conventions.

As the African uncharted terra nulla is a figment of their imagination, both Marlow’s and Calhoun’s accounts expose the faults of any historiography, its subjective relativism. Deeply fictionalized, Africa corresponds for Marlow to a mysterious “place of darkness” (12) inhabited by savages, a taboo zone from where nobody returns. In his turn, Calhoun initially perceives Africa through Cringle’s racist comments, which demonize its people as “sorcerers,” “devil-worshiping, spell-casting wizards” (43). Discussing the European colonial travel writing, Mary Louise Pratt demonstrates how the narrator is generally embodied by a white male who depicts the foreign territory by drawing binary oppositions (us/them), and vivisects the landscape from a Western “scientific” perspective in order to serve imperialist means. Pratt also mentions how in the Western narrative the indigenous population is bracketed, represented apart from the exotic landscape into separate chapters on ethnographic themes (1986).

Thematizing this opposition, Conrad’s description of the voyage inside Africa signifies a plunge into the unreal, an intrusion into an unknown, blank, unreadable territory, where the natives are just mysterious actors caught in an ambivalent love-hatred relation with the colonial invaders. Few are the instances in which Marlow can see or communicate with the natives, and even Mr. Kurtz’s relationship with the black people is ambivalent, (since he is perceived more as a superhuman presence to which they offer their ivory tribute). As Al-Dabbagh remarks, “Conrad’s ‘existentialist’ solution as well as the recourse of postcolonial discourse to ‘multiculturalism’ are ultimately pseudo-solutions that merely mirror, rather than remedy, the existing conditions of oppression” (2001, 81).

Compared to Conrad, who maintains most of the time the barrier between the Western characters and the African natives, Johnson succeeds in his politically correct goal of letting the subaltern speak, of allowing “Caliban” to expose the fantasy of his worldview. Like Houston A. Baker, Jr., Johnson believes in the necessity of escaping the simplistic “self-and-other” duality. As Baker states, “there is a need to explode the duality, for it often leads merely to an endless rehearsing of evidence (such as the ‘scientific’ proof that Caliban’s tribe is not really ‘racially’ deformed, but merely populationally different)” (1986, 389). In Middle Passage, Johnson solves the initial “self-and-other” opposition by means of a triangular relation. His main technique consists in placing an African American “Prospero” in the middle of a racial conflict—the angle of refraction through which the reader can rethink the stereotypical representations of the colonized African Other.

Johnson’s mediating vision is explored through Rutherford’s double-sighted text, which encodes two versions of the narrated events and enables him to redefine his identity through the complex interchange of the colonizer/colonized views.¹⁷ From one perspective, he presents the way in which the Africans project the Americans into the role of “raw barbarians” who are “shipping them to America to be eaten” (65, 75). From another perspective, Falcon’s log is revelatory, as he places the slaves next to the other “goods” in his cargo and treats them as savages whose undisciplined behavior has to be tamed: “if any Negro even looked as if he was thinking of rebellion, that man was to be birched and taught the sting of noose and yardarm” (66).¹⁸

Besides, Johnson avoids the stereotyping of the Africans and the bracketing of the colonized space in two ways. His first technique is to place between parentheses not Africa, but America, in the sense that it turns into a “weird, upside-down caricature,” a melting pot of “refugees and former indentured servants, religious heretics and half-breeds, whoresons and fugitives” (179). Alienated from itself, lacking any cohesion, America is a Babylonian land of contrasts—a topography that the hypocrite flaneur can no longer call home.¹⁹

His second technique is to project the narrated events upon a Transatlantic scenario, an “unshaped” area that serves as a fluid borderline between Africa and America. Both a mirroring surface and an unfathomable depth, it epitomizes the double process through which the characters pass—one of self-reflection and self-discovery.²⁰ The Atlantic is also an antinomian space, where conventions are dissolved: “All bonds, landside or on ships, between master and mates, women and men… were a lie forged briefly in the name of convenience and just as quickly broken when they no longer served one’s interest” (92). Envisaged in Paul Gilroy’s terms, the Black Atlantic transcends “both the structures of the nation state and the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity” (1993, 19). In this oceanic atopos, the categories “us” and “them” become elusive and slip into one another.

The most relevant proof of this categorial slippage is Rutherford’s journal that literally gets contaminated by the others’ difference. A heterogeneous fiction, the log attains the double-sighted quality of its owner, reflecting various existential paradigms in which the Euro-American and African worldviews intermingle. The log stages neither a promotion of Afrocentrism, nor a “painful demise of Eurocentrism” (Asante 1999). In this light, Johnson seems to reject both these viewpoints as essentialist.²¹ Through his character’s “middle” position, he endorses a cultural cross-fertilization that operates transformations upon both the European and African worldview.

Rutherford’s act of writing in Captain Falcon’s journal does not represent in the least a continuation of Falcon’s imperialist task. On the contrary, Rutherford’s gesture symbolically reenacts the postcolonial rewriting of colonial texts.²² Falcon’s log obviously frames the quintessence of a colonizer—“a patriot whose burning passion was the manifest destiny of the United States to Americanize the entire planet” (30). His dwarfish stature²³ sharply contrasts with his far-reaching ambition to take possession of most of the world: his unquenched passion to travel to new territories aims not at exploring, but at conquering, while his exceptional ability to learn new languages aims not at communicating, but at subduing. Both famous and infamous, this Faustian man is “a creature of preposterous, volatile contradictions” (49). His biography is inter-twinned with that of the young American nation, since “he, like the fledgling republic itself, felt expansive, eager to push frontiers, even to slide betimes into bulling others and taking, if need be, what was not offered” (50). His Franklinesque educational formula combines Puritan traits (his quest for perfection as well as his loneliness and estrangement from the others), with Transcendentalist ideas (his insurmountable trust in his own strength and self-reliance).

At an intertextual level, Ebenezer Falcon’s fictional portrait makes obvious reference to Conrad’s hero, Mr. Kurtz, the legendary figure of a white conqueror lost in the dark heart of Africa, “an angel or a fiend,” who “sen[t] in as much ivory as all the others put together” (Conrad 27). While both Falcon’s and Kurtz’s grandiloquent myths are concocted in the pages of Western newspapers, both of them exercise a mixture of awe and fear over the native people whom they rob either of their freedom or of their goods. Crushed in their Icarian flight of taking into possession the essence of otherness, both Falcon and Kurtz strive to transfer their accumulated knowledge to their literary successors—Marlow and Calhoun—the narrators who have the role of transmitting the story further on. Still, while Conrad’s text ends with the distribution of Kurtz’s documents to the others,²⁴ Johnson empowers Rutherford to continue Falcon’s story (as it appears in the scene of Falcon’s death):

‘…Do your best. Include everything you can remember, and what I told you, from the time you came on board. Not just Mr. Cringle’s side, I’m saying, or the story the mutineers will spin, but things I told you when we met alone in secret.’

To this I reluctantly agreed. I took his logbook from the ruins. But I promised myself that even though I’d tell the story (I knew he wanted to be remembered), it would be, first and foremost, as I saw it since my escape from New Orleans (146).

The lines above make direct reference to the unavoidable subjectivity of any historiography, which is nothing more than a mixture of various points of view. Even if Falcon used to write naked, as a way of showing his objective, “unclothed” approach to the narrated events, even if he advises Calhoun to include a multiplicity of perspectives, Rutherford realizes the impossibility of escaping a personal bias. Since writing means remembrance, and the journal spins back retrospectively (narrating the events that had happened about two months before), Rutherford is aware that “there is no historiography that is not ultimately dependent on individual testimonies” (Lyotard 1988, 45).²⁵

Rutherford’s taking into possession Falcon’s log turns into metaphor the significant act of investing the colonized with the power to recuperate and (re)write a history of dispossession. In fact, Rutherford’s narration is symptomatic for a postmodern text, as a reflection of/on modernity. Writing after Falcon (whose project is par excellence a modernist one), Rutherford’s postmodern, double-sighted story offers both the colonizer and the colonized perspective upon the transcription of events. Rutherford quotes accordingly passages from Falcon’s text only in order to question them. His position is noticeably not the same as Falcon’s, since there is an epistemic gap between the former slave and the actual slaver. The narrator thus offers a sharp contrast between his sympathetic view of the slaves’ suffering and Falcon’s Hobbesian, bellicose ideas that justify slavery.

In the same direction, Rutherford’s rummaging through Falcon’s cabin proves to be a symbolic gesture of claiming ownership over what was taken away from the colonized. For a dispossessed person like Rutherford, theft operates as a means of trespassing racial boundaries: “Theft, if the truth be told, was the closest thing I knew to transcendence” (46). Since the colonizer literally and metaphorically “stole” the identity of the colonized, theft involves the recuperation of what once belonged to the colonized. With its mesmerizing collage of plundered countries, the cabin is a museum that tropes his imperialist drives:

His biggest crates of plunder from every culture conceivable, which he covered with tarp at the rear of the room, were wrenched open, spilling onto the sloping floor bird-shaped Etruscan vases, Persian silk prayer carpets, and portfolios of Japanese paintings on rice paper… Slowly, it came to me… that he had a standing order from his financiers, powerful families in New Orleans who underwrote the Republic, to stock Yankee museums and their homes with whatever of value was not nailed down in the nations he visited. To bring back slaves, yes, but to salvage the best of their war-shocked cultures, too (48-9).

Suspended over the Atlantic space, the cabin is synecdochic of the American culture created through the assimilation of other cultures. In this melting pot, the assimilation is undertaken not through the annihilation of other cultures, but through their dislocation and relocation in the context of the newly formed American nation.²⁶

Hence, the ship that is symbolically named the Republic alludes to the American nation: a floating, unformed land that is still pushing its frontiers, a multicultural territory where the elusive “heart” of otherness is transplanted. Its “decentered interior” makes one “culturally dizzy” through its fusion of African, Asian, and European influences (Johnson 1990, 142). In this dynamic space, both the identities of the colonizers and that of the colonized are changed in a process of cultural appropriation. As pointed out in the next sections, a major consequence of the Middle Passage refers to the way in which both the African and the American identity can be re-negotiated by means of a mediating vision.

NOTES

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