Charles Johnson's Novels: Writing the American Palimpsest

1. Faith and the Good Thing: What is the Nature of the Good?

11 1 FAITH AND THE GOOD THING: WHAT IS THE NATURE OF THE GOOD? See human beings as though they were in an underground cavelike dwelling with its entrance, a long one, open to the light across the whole width of the cave. They are in it from childhood with their legs and necks in bonds so that they are fixed, seeing only in front of them, unable because of the bond to turn their heads all the way around. Their light is from a fire burning far above and behind them. —Plato, The Republic It was, however, in a folklore moulded out of rigorous and inhuman conditions of life that the Negro achieved his most indigenous and complete expression. —Richard Wright, “Blueprint for Negro Writing” The word is born in a dialogue as a living rejoinder within it, the word is shaped in a dialogic interaction with an alien word that is already in the object. A word forms a concept of its own object in a dialogic way. —M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination Faith tuned Barrett out, studying him from the great distance of objectivity, the way one reads a novel about philosophical ideas, with haste and indifference. —Charles Johnson, Faith and the Good Thing In one sense, a writer’s first novel is a dialogue in which he or she tests and explores many of the themes and questions that will be revisited in subsequent novels. Often the writer will return to these defining preoccupations because he or she may feel that these aspects were not endowed with the depth and beauty they deserved in the debut novel, or it may be that he or she has discovered in these preoccupations the passions that are the foundations for the art. If the novelist is fortunate, these passions may, in his or 12 CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS her brave embrace of them, infuse the writer’s life with an unexpected but always much-sought-after harmony. At the very least, in the inaugural work, we discover a perspective, informed by both experience and art, that infuses each subsequent labor and each subsequent dialogue. In Cane (1923), Jean Toomer inaugurates his investigation of spirituality and the search for wholeness under the increasing pressures of modernity. Native Son (1940) announces Richard Wright’s determination to force the white world to face the realities of the black world it may continue to look away from at its peril. In Invisible Man (1952), Ralph Ellison creates the metaphors and terms that reveal the complexities of identity, race, and culture in this democratic republic ; he also charts his enduring faith in the possibilities of American democratic politics. As models and literary ancestors, Toomer, Wright, and Ellison establish a standard in their commitment to the craft and art of fiction that Johnson would endeavor to meet not only in his first novel, but also in the several others that would follow, in an organic and intentional fashion, from his first great labor. In his debut novel, Faith and the Good Thing (1974), a very ambitious Johnson sets out, at the improbable age of twenty-six, to begin an artistic and intellectual project that would later link Faith and the Good Thing to Oxherding Tale (1982), Middle Passage (1990), and Dreamer (1998). While Johnson would not articulate the arc and span of this project until after the completion of his second novel, the desire, the intention, and the pattern are nevertheless fully present in the necessary exertions and accomplishment of the first novel. I refer, of course, to Johnson’s desire to create new worlds in fiction grounded in philosophy. In each of his novels, Johnson sets for himself the challenging task of creating a fictional universe that is simultaneously infused with African American culture and history, as well as a staggering array of philosophical traditions. As an artist, Johnson brings to the craft and art of fiction the perspectives of a classically trained philosopher. These perspectives acquire their force and particularity from the beauty, jeopardy , and sense of possibility that is everywhere in evidence in the black world. Johnson first articulated the objectives and scope of the artistic and intellectual project he terms philosophical black fiction in an early essay entitled “Philosophy and Black Fiction” (1980), and subsequently in such foundational essays as “Whole Sight: Notes on New Black Fiction” (1984), “Where Fiction and Philosophy Meet” (1988),1 and Being and Race: Black Writing since 1970 (1988). In these texts, Johnson provides us...