Charles Johnson's Quest for Black Freedom in Oxherding Tale

Abstract

Charles Johnson's main emphasis Oxherding Tale (1982) on black written textuality. Oxherding Tale tries to achieve freedom from the hegemony of what Johnson sees as a narrow, limiting tradition of written black texts. This tradition, according to Johnson, propagandistically controls black images(1) by stereotypically depicting blacks as the victims of racist oppression and by defining black experience terms of struggle against white racism and binary opposition to whiteness. Johnson focuses on the black experience as it exists in literature(2) (Being 5), written texts, and it through the revision of the written textual tradition that Johnson tries to break its hegemony, to inscribe a revised black freedom and liberation. In Being and Race (1988), which Johnson critiques contemporary black fiction, he says that he centers his writing around a phenomenological theory and praxis; I now want to link this theory and praxis to Johnson's attempt at black textual revision and his quest for freedom and liberation. Johnson draws on the tradition of Edmund Husserl and synthesizes several phenomenologists to develop his own quirky variations on phenomenology (Being ix); Johnson's most important influence French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty,(3) from whom he takes the concept of a Lifeworld of language and experience (Being viii-ix, 44). In the context of Merleau-Ponty's Lifeworld, texts and traditions become part of an open-ended mediatory process which accepts everything and depends on never-ending interaction and change. Central for Johnson the phenomenological concept of epoche, the suspension or bracketing of presuppositions order to perceive freshly. In Oxherding Tale, bracketing applies to the black written tradition, the characters, and the reader. The written tradition must bracket narrow, propagandistic presuppositions to liberate itself. The characters need to set aside their rigid ideas and ideologies and open themselves up to fresh possibilities. And the reader should bracket preconceptions to experience the text and the author's themes. Bracketing preconceptions to replace them with new, determinate, fixed meanings not the goal, though Participating Merleau-Ponty's Lifeworld of constant linguistic interaction the goal. The linguistic Lifeworld timeless because it incorporates language from the past and present, constantly makes the present the future, and, at the same time, enfolds the present and future back into the past. Johnson says that, the words of Merleau-Ponty's The Prose of the World, the Lifeworld is the trespass of oneself upon the other and of the other upon me.... Why else do we fling books into the fire if not because,... deep within our depths, the writer leading us a direction we know inevitable but toward which we sometimes do not wish to go, especially if it will . . . displace us from our fondest prejudices? To read to inhabit the role and real place of others; to write a stranger experience yet, for it involves a corresponding act of self-surrender such that my perceptions and experiences are allowed to coincide with those who came before me and despoiled words, shaped their sense and use . . . . (Being 39)(4) Johnson's phenomenology, then, one which he situates his text a system of intertexts that mediate and change that text, as his text mediates and changes the intertexts. The black text does not maintain its unique black perspective on white oppression, black victimization, black struggle, and black binary opposition to whiteness. The black text gets influenced by white perspectives, and by all the perspectives inscribed among the intertexts. But at the same time, the black text provides counter-influences to the portrayals of blackness set forth by whites and others. Johnson wants to liberate the black text from its narrow, limited black perspective so that it can explore its larger spiritual and psychological potential, part of which Johnson finds the black world's unexplored embarrassment of rich, contradictory material (Being 11). …