Passing the Three Gates: Interviews with Charles Johnson

Preface

PREFACE F i r s t a n d f o r e m o s t , Charles Johnson is a teacher. Not only has he taught creative writing at the University of Washington since 1976, and codirected the Twin Tigers studio for martial arts in Seattle since 1986, but also, and more importantly, he has taught through his fiction. As he states to Nicholas O’Connell, “Fiction should open us up to new possibilities. It should clarify for us. It should change our perception.” Indeed, Johnson’s fiction achieves this difficult goal, for it never ceases to ask the tough questions about who we are and—even more significantly—who we could be. This is what is meant by “moral fiction.”1 Three of Johnson’s four novels have a protagonist caught between two competing philosophies, a strategy best represented xvii 1. In many of his interviews, Johnson discusses how this phrase—coined by his friend and mentor John Gardner—has been misunderstood and trivialized . To locate those interviews, please refer to the index. in Middle Passage. Here, Rutherford Calhoun must choose between the philosophies of Captain Falcon and the Allmuseri. Falcon, imperialism personified, believes that the strongest— physically and mentally—are destined to rule the weakest. Slavery , then, is simply another manifestation of the natural order of the universe. Moreover, Falcon is a “dualist,” a man who believes that the mind and the body—as well as the self and the other—are irreparably split. For the Allmuseri, however, these notions are foolish. They believe that individual ownership of things is unnatural, indeed selfish. Furthermore, as Ngonyama demonstrates when he effortlessly carves a roast pig, the Allmuseri believe in an integrated mind and body. At the end of his arduous physical and spiritual journey, Rutherford therefore renounces his former life and becomes self-less when he decides to adopt Baleka and devote himself to her welfare. Rutherford has learned through the course of his journey the truth of the Allmuseri philosophy. While his fiction has been his most significant instructional tool, Johnson has also taught us through his critiques of literature (Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970); his essays about Buddhism (Turning theWheel: Essays on Buddhism and Writing); his drawings (Black Humor and Half-Past Nation Time); and his television scripts (Charlie Smith and the Fritter Tree and Booker). He even taught us the rudiments of drawing in his PBS series, Charlie’s Pad. More to the point of this collection, however, Johnson teaches us through his interviews. Since 1978, Charles Johnson has given more than 250 interviews (this section of his curriculum vitae runs a few lines longer than six single-spaced pages). Most of those interviews were radio or television broadcasts, but many were for newspapers, magazines, scholarly journals, and chapters in books. This volume collects the most significant of those print interviews.2 PREFACE xviii 2. For this volume, I have expanded the definition of “interview” beyond the question-and-answer format so that I can include four profiles for which Johnson was questioned at length. Also, I have edited all the inter- The first three interviews in this collection—those by Ken McCullough (1978), Nicholas O’Connell (1987), and George Myers (1988)—show a relatively young writer, not yet famous. For want of a better phrase, we might call him at this early point in his career “a writer’s writer,” by which I mean he was well respected in creative-writing circles on American campuses— particularly because of his involvement with the Associated Writing Programs (currently the Association of Writers and Writing Programs)—but had not yet published a best-seller. Even at this point in his career, however, Johnson had already formed his aesthetics. As he notes in all three interviews, for example, after some early experiments with naturalistic fiction (which he decided not to publish), his attention turned toward philosophical fiction, a mode of discourse that would allow him to explore questions of identity and the limits of self-knowledge. As he tells George Myers, he wants his protagonists to wrestle with the “profoundly painful effort to answer the question, ‘Who am I?’”Also apparent in these three interviews is Johnson’s sheer love of language—its complexities, subtleties, and elasticity. He teaches us that every word counts when writing serious fiction. Later in his career, interviewers would repeatedly ask...