492
PAR.TISAN R.EVIEW
Though Rutherford's body has been lacerated, and his soul changed
forever, by the harrowing voyage, he knows exactly who he is. Eager
to
sing a hosanna for his country, he proudly declares himself a patriot.
"What Negro, in his heart, if he's not a hypocrite, is not?" And it is at
this point that we can finally see johnson's reason for choosing the dis–
tance of history: it allows him to drive home the fact that the blacks of
this country are Americans, not Africans, and that Rutherford Calhoun
would never think of calling himself an Afro-American.
Middle Passage
is not a protest novel, and though it leaves deep scars
in the mind, it is free of the self-righteousness and polemical rage that
often disfigure the fiction of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. Charles
johnson is a Buddhist, which may be one of the reasons he has made it
plain in interviews that he speaks only for himself. Equally , like Ralph
Ellison before him, he rejects the notion that a single black writer can
speak for all the members of a huge and multifarious race. "Our task," as
Ellison has insisted, "is that of making ourselves individuals." Charles
johnson's masterly realization of an individual like Rutherford Calhoun
is a heartening sign that an American novel is still capable of rendering
the somber reality of history and the complexity of human innocence
and corruption, and, paradoxically, that it still has a capacity, not in the
least naive, for celebration.
Are there any conclusions? Roman soothsayers consulted the entrails
of animals to foretell the future; sociologists examine the leavings of lit–
erature to uncover the
ZeifJZcisf.
But it is always too difficult
to
discem
any unambiguous trends in fiction, and in any case it is only minor writ–
ing that "reflects" the society of its day. Imaginative literature transcends
its time and place without losing its source in experience. Are there any
clues? One can say that the stylistic highjinks and verbal somersaults that
have been so prominent in the past few years have reached a dead end.
Such writers are more than clever and less than serious . Beyond that we
can only look, as we must, for the individual novel, such as those
by
Michael Cunningham and Charles johnson, that has the stamp of singu–
larity and the ability, all too rare, to change us.
