Passing the Three Gates: Interviews with Charles Johnson

Charles Johnson (1987)

CHARLES JOHNSON NICHOLAS O’CONNELL Ch a r l e s j o h n s o n ’ s novels, short stories, and television scripts explore classical problems and metaphysical questions against the background of black American life. His approach to writing is phenomenological , in the style of philosopher Edmund Husserl, but he also draws inspiration from the entire continuum of Asian thought, from the Vedas to Zen Buddhism. His work brings together Eastern and Western philosophical traditions, with the hope that some new perception of experience, especially black experience, will emerge. Johnson was born in Evanston, Illinois, in 1948. He demonstrated an early talent for drawing and began a career as a cartoonist at seventeen. After graduating in journalism from 16 Reprinted from At the Field’s End: Interviews with 22 Pacific Northwest Writers (University of Washington Press, 1998), by permission of Nicholas O’Connell. First published 1987 by Madrona Publishers. Southern Illinois University at Carbondale in 1971, Johnson went on to write and co-produce the PBS series Charlie’s Pad. He received his MA in philosophy from Southern Illinois University in 1973, and while there met novelist John Gardner, who guided him in the writing of the novel Faith and the GoodThing (1974). Johnson did graduate work in phenomenology and literary aesthetics in the PhD program at SUNY-Stony Brook before becoming a professor of English at the University of Washington in 1976. He is the author of the novel Oxherding Tale (1982), a collection of short stories entitled The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1986), two collections of cartoons, and television scripts for the PBS series Booker (1984) and Charlie Smith and the Fritter Tree (1978). He is currently at work on the novel Rutherford’s Travels and has recently completed Being and Race: BlackWriting Since 1970, a book-length essay which will be published by Indiana University Press. He is the fiction editor of the Seattle Review and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction in 1987. In 1970, Johnson married Joan New, an elementary-school teacher. They and their two children live in Seattle. The interview took place in the spring of 1985 in Johnson’s office on the campus of the University ofWashington. Surrounded by the works of Hegel, Kant, Marx, and Heidegger, and equipped with several packs of cigarettes, Johnson talked long into the night about his approaches to fiction and philosophy. O’CONNELL: You’ve been a cartoonist, a student of philosophy, a television producer, and a photojournalist. Why did you choose to write fiction rather than continuing in one of these other fields? JOHNSON: I still do all of those things. It’s not like one got left behind and another was picked up, but when you’re talking about language, you have the possibility of multiple levels of meaning. If I shifted at all from the image to the word it’s Charles Johnson (1987) 17 because the word is polymorphous and you can create a work of fiction that has more dimensions than a drawing or even a film. Film, of course, is wonderful, but I can’t think of a single film, even the ones that I love, that are as rich and complex, and have the same vision and depth, as the greatest novels. O’CONNELL: Do you think that you will keep writing fiction, or will you use it up and go on to something else? JOHNSON: Right now, fiction is at the center of my work: telling stories in many different forms. I just do the film because it’s fun, and because I like to work with producers and creative people who extend my own imagination, and because I want to make some money. But fiction is the basic thing. When you write a story, you have to do everything that the entire film crew listed in the movie credits does, which is work as a scriptwriter, producer, prop person, costume designer—the whole thing.You have far greater freedom as a writer of fiction, and you’re challenged to force your imagination into all these different roles. O’CONNELL: So fiction is a more aristocratic art form, whereas film is more democratic? JOHNSON: More aristocratic, yes. Every film is a celebration of the crew. Every book, no matter what the writer might have drawn upon, is ultimately the product of a single consciousness. O’CONNELL: Did writing come easily for you...