"Nothing Was Lost in the Masquerade": The Protean Performance of Genre and Identity in Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale

Abstract

As many times as we reopen slavery's closure, we are hurtled rapidly forward into dizzying motions of symbolic enterprise, and it becomes increasingly clear that cultural synthesis we call slavery was never homogeneous in its practices and conception, nor unitary in faces it has yielded. But to behave as if it were so matches precisely telos of African persons in United States.... The collective and individual reinvention of discourse of slavery is, therefore, nothing other than an attempt to restore to spatio-temporal object its eminent historicity, to evoke person/persona in place of shady ideal. (Spillers, Changing Letter 29) In his novel Oxherding Tale (1982), Charles Johnson reopens slavery's closure through his reclamation of nineteenth-century slave narrative. In so doing, he undermines static formulations of literature, history, and identity: Viewing each account as potentially mutable rendering of and being, he limns their transformative through performative poetics. Just as Spillers posits slavery's closure as point of departure for recovery of that institution's complex historicity, Johnson deploys seemingly fixed categories of identity and genre in order to overturn deterministic models of being. Specifically, his enslaved, biracial protagonist Andrew Hawkins can only achieve emancipation by comprehending his own subjectivity as multiple, as heterogeneously constructed out of interstices between house and field, and white and black. In keeping with this new understanding, Andrew in his role as narrator must also transcend perspective and confines of traditional autobiography in order to enact first-person universal. By extension, Johnson forces his readers to confront limitations of conventional, realist reading method (as he calls it, a heavily conditioned seeing), proposing as an alterna- tive more liberated mode of readership (Being 5). Thus, Johnson seizes discursive aspect of slavery's displaced person(s)/persona(s): Refusing to fix subject, he instead conceives of personhood as effect of reiterative and citational practice, as palimpsest of performances. In both Johnson's philosophical fictions and his philosophy of fiction, he interrogates questions of subjectivity in relation to language and literary form. As he states in his phenomenological treatise on African-American fiction Being and Race (1988), he reserves his greatest respect for the protean writer, performer . . . who slides from genre to genre, style to style, leaving his or her distinctive signature on each form lovingly transfigured and pushed toward new possibilities (53). Here, Johnson challenges orthodoxy that impels black writers to adhere to realism as primary literary mode. Rejecting what he deems calcified vision, Johnson cautions writer against adopting preestablished models . . . for our experience, or for any experience (7). Instead, he calls for African-American writer to grapple with perceptual flux of that characterizes black world - and all worlds - to originate new meaning (15). In Johnson's view, then, good fiction should not only transgress generic boundaries, but it should also strategically stage these traversals in service of liberty for benefit of reader and writer. Using his principles to guide my own critique, I read Oxherding Tale as text which performs myriad versions of genre and identity in order to attain ontological and narrative freedom. As post-modern subversion of classical American slave narrative with resonances of an Eastern parable, novel exemplifies Johnson's own protean dictate[middle dot] By reiterating and mimicking these disparate literary traditions, Johnson invents his characters through complex citational process which allows him to critique notions of authenticity and essentialism and to negotiate new constructions of personhood (Parker and Sedgwick 2). …