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3. Middle Passage: What is the Nature of Freedom?
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102 3 MIDDLE PASSAGE: WHAT IS THE NATURE OF FREEDOM? The deep immortal human wish, the timeless will: Cinquez its deathless primaveral image life that transfigures many lives. —Robert Hayden, “Middle Passage” “Great is the Maker,” said the sick one, “Who has made me as I am!” —Chuang Tzu, “Metamorphosis” The one is independent, and its essential nature is to be for itself; the other is dependent, and its essence is life or existence for another. The former is the Master, or Lord, the latter the Bondsman. —George Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind The third novel in a corpus of four, Middle Passage established Johnson as a national and international figure in letters, and earned him the National Book Award for Fiction in 1990: he was the first African American male author so honored since Ralph Ellison was awarded this prize for his first novel, Invisible Man (1952). This fortuitous event links two writers who have broken consistently new ground in the writing of fiction. In a tribute on the occasion of receiving the National Book Award, Johnson generously acknowledged his indebtedness to Ellison, whose great novel of ideas contains , the younger writer asserted on this occasion, many instances “where fiction and philosophy meet.”1 Middle Passage is the site upon which Johnson advances the ambitious project he terms philosophical black fiction, and in the process he continues his interrogations, through a double-voiced, internally dialogized discourse, that possesses both a moral and ontological cast always within the framework of specific philosophical systems. Like Oxherding Tale, Middle Passage is a work of historical fiction, or to 103 Middle Passage be more precise, it is a philosophical novel rooted in the past. At every turn in a novel that is a great sea yarn, a profound meditation on freedom, and a revisiting as well as revising of some of the most important works by Herman Melville and Jack London, Johnson collapses the historical distance between us and his very artful narrator Rutherford Calhoun. Like his contemporary Andrew Hawkins of Oxherding Tale, Calhoun strikes us as our contemporary as a result of the masterful manner in which Johnson integrates modes of contemporary speech as well as contemporary political and cultural debates (on affirmative action, the lonely condition of modern black women, the meaning of masculinity, and the rise of black leadership in declining American urban centers) into a novel that takes place in 1830. Moreover , like Oxherding Tale, Middle Passage is a deeply masculinist text in the sense that Johnson has created a narrator who addresses and seems only to imagine a male readership, and who, as the author of the ship’s log, explores many of the themes and questions that shape the lives of men. These themes and questions include father–son relationships, the rivalry between male siblings , the special appeal of a bachelor’s existence in contrast to the bondage of wedlock, the manner in which a man deviates from or accepts normative standards of masculinity, and perhaps most importantly the degree to which he, as a free and purposeful agent, negotiates and creates for himself a place in the world that surpasses or at least rivals the accomplishments of his father or other significant male figures.2 Needless to say, such themes are deeply complicated by race and caste, for Johnson’s narrator is a newly emancipated bondsman who is uncertain of what to make of the possibilities and responsibilities of freedom in an era of slavery and marked racism. Certainly, one of the central questions in Middle Passage, I would like to suggest here, is what is the nature of freedom for a newly emancipated slave? Or put another way, how is freedom to be realized, used and interpreted in the life of a man who has known only its opposite? How does Rutherford Calhoun imagine and define freedom? And what are the forces and events that catalyze him to imagine freedom in communal rather than individualistic terms? These are the issues I will engage in throughout the course of this chapter. In taking up these questions, I also am interested in examining the manner in which Johnson, as an artist and philosopher, stains these questions with the sense and meanings derived from Continental philosophy, most specifically phenomenology , as well as Platonism and Taoism. As I will demonstrate, these are the philosophical systems that constitute the rich ground for Johnson’s posing of the several questions related to freedom that undergird thought and action in Middle Passage...