An Interview with Charles Johnson

Abstract

When approached to participate in this interview, Charles Johnson responded with his usual enthusiasm: Send me questions! I'll try to provide everything on my end. So I sat down and produced questions dealing with three general areas - artist, art, and audience. To these questions, Johnson responded with insight and wit, providing information that illuminates his writing. Boccia: Is there any little-known or unknown autobiographical information that would help us better understand your fiction? Johnson: As you probably know, my creative work did not begin when I started writing fiction. In 1967, when I was 17, I began publishing as a cartoonist (my first three short stories were published that same year, but in my teens the only thing I desired to be was a commercial artist). For seven years thereafter, I studied with cartoonist Lawrence Lariar; this career consumed me, leading to over 1,000 published drawings in dozens of publications ranging from Black World to The Chicago Tribune; to scripting for Charlton comic books and working as a political cartoonist; to creating, hosting, and co-producing an early PBS how-to-draw series called Charlie's Pad; to publishing two early collections of comic art, Black Humor (1970) and Half-Past Nation-Time (1972). My passion as a child was - and to a certain extent is still - for the visual arts. It occurs to me sometimes when I'm writing literary criticism, as in Being & Race, or discussing aesthetics, that I often cross genres in the language I use for analyzing fiction, borrowing certain terminology from the realm of drawing. Thus, drawing was my first passion. My second, which I discovered when I was 17, was philosophy. Writing was something I did strictly for fun: ghost-authoring papers for other students in my college dormitory, collaborating on metaphysical plays with my best friend at the time (another philosophy major), religiously keeping a journal, composing about 80 bad poems during my undergraduate days, and writing news articles (my other major was journalism). I read fiction hungrily, but mainly the authors who would appeal to a lover of philosophy - Sartre and Camus, Mann and Hesse, Hawthorne and Melville, etc. In the late 1960s and early 1970s my friends and I were very cross-disciplinary in our interests, and we understood fiction and philosophy to be sister disciplines. But no, I had no specific intention to become a writer of fiction. However, I did realize something when my interests turned to black American fiction - namely, how few black authors were concerned with probing the perennial questions of Western and Eastern philosophy in their stories. Only three black writers qualified (for me) as philosophically engaging: Jean Toomer, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison. I began writing novels in earnest in 1970 with one specific goal in mind, that of expanding the category we might call black philosophical fiction; i.e., opening up black literature to the same ethical, ontological, and epistemological questions - Western and Eastern - that I wrestled with as a student of philosophy. From the very beginning, I've had no other aim as a literary artist. Boccia: Can you tell us something about your life that we cannot find elsewhere, something which sheds light on your work? Johnson: Two things, I suppose, have importance: the martial arts and Buddhism. When I was 19, I trained at a Chicago martial-arts kwoon called Chi Tao Chuan of the Monastery, a very rough school that I've written about (see the author's preface to the new Plume edition of Oxherding Tale). Over the years I've trained in three traditional karate and three kung-fu systems, and for the last eight years have co-directed the Blue Phoenix Kung-fu Club in Seattle. I started with this system in 1981 in San Francisco at the main studio of grandmaster Doc-Fai Wong, and many of my closest friends today are also practitioners of this style. For me, traditional martial arts was a door-way into the theory and practice of Buddhism, a philosophy (or religion) that attracted me since my teens. …