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PARTISAN REVIEW
and Auster's lesson seems to be that chance, quirky and unpredictable,
controls everything men do and everything done to them. Freedom of
choice is a foolish and dangerous delusion, and luck, as in Pozzi's poker
game, is mostly bad. This is of course a deeply pessimistic view of man's
fate, but it is not morally or philosophically profound. Auster's concep–
tion of the unexpected and the unresolved is tricky, not tragic, and it is
so overdetermined that it inevitably defeats our willingness to be moved.
Moreover, Auster gives us little reason to care about the fate of the two
doomed souls; their lives and their deaths yield neither explicit nor subtle
meaning. Like Nashe's aimless driving around the country, this novel has
no destination. While Auster has been compared with Beckett, he is not
in that league . A clever manipulation of the random dishevelments of
chance is too contrived to disturb us as Beckett's vision of the unspeak–
able absurdity of human existence can do.
When Charles Johnson's
Middle Passage
8
won the National Book
Award for fiction last year, a disgruntled judge accused the jury of pan–
dering to ideology instead of rewarding literary merit. But Johnson's
novel eloquently demonstrates that this complaint was very wide of the
mark.
Middle Passage
is a remarkable work of historical imagination as
told by a recently freed young slave, Rutherford Calhoun, who has mi–
grated from Illinois to New Orleans in 1830 in search of a liberated and
dissolute life. Johnson has elected the distance of history from which
to
dramatize the appalling reality of the slave trade in nineteenth-century
America, and only gradually docs he reveal the complex justification for
his choice.
A shrewd and witty fellow, Rutherford is a thief and a scamp and
an absolute original. The minister who had been his master fed him from
boyhood on a gluttonous intellectual diet of theology, philosophy, and
literary classics, and Rutherford's learning trips easily off his tongue,
sometimes in the most unlikely contexts. For Rutherford, the reputation
of a ship's captain has "Brobdingnadian proportions," and a friend 's
nostalgia for the woman he loved and lost becomes "Sisyphean . .. a
quixotic, Parmenidean quest for beauty." To describe a group of African
tribesmen, he plucks a ripe allusion to "the Hegelian equation." His
meditations arc studded with evocations of Kant, Chaucer, St. Thomas,
and something he describes with blithe anachronism as "a post-Christian
roomscape." Indeed, Johnson deliberately feeds anachronisms into his
carefully researched re-creation of history, and these startling intrusions of
modernity, like much of Rutherford's erudition, Johnson has described as
"a kind of ironic winking at the reader." For him, history can be playful
8Middle PassQJie.
By Charles Johnson. 517.95.
