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Across the Great Chasm
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19820 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1991 |
2,877 Words |
| Author
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Joseph Coates
Joseph Coates is the Chicago Tribune book critic. |
There is a special insight to be gained by revisiting a classic at different times in one's life. This truth takes on a certain urgency and even danger when the classic is less than a year old and you were the only critic to see it as such in a review written under the deadline pressures of weekly and daily reviewing. Charles Johnson's novel has won a National Book Award since my July 1990 reading, but would a re-reading a few months later support the comparisons with Moby Dick, Invisible Man and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?
Taking a slower and more considered look at it, I once again found myself furiously transcribing line after line of Johnson's pungent and lyrical prose on legal pads, bouncing echoes of everything I'd ever read like sonar off the insides of my head. I'm now convinced that Middle Passage is probably the best philosophical novel by an American I've ever read, while remaining essentially a fast-moving adventure story.
As a story of a young black freedman that begins with his arrival in New Orleans from an Illinois farm after his manumission in 1829 by a cultured and guilt-ridden master, a clergyman who has provided him with a goodly chunk of the Western intellectual and philosophical heritage, it is nearly the perfect existential novel, in that just about every social situation Rutherford Calhoun encounters is ethically and culturally unique.
Free, black, and twenty-three, Calhoun has no inherited tradition or language to back him up, not even the ethos and patois of slavery; in every brush with both the white and black worlds of polyglot New Orleans--a microcosm of the transplanted European cultures he knows only from books--he has to make himself up as he goes along. To my admittedly incomplete knowledge, no European writer has so impeccably and continuously dramatized the existential situation, for the simple reason that none has been black and American. Such inextricably entwined conditions require a daily, spontaneously self-definitive response to being in a world one never made, with nothing to steer by and in a condition of born-again freedom, yet with angers and resentments lingering, in Calhoun's case, from his birth in bondage in southern Illinois (known locally to this day as Little Egypt).
Calhoun sees the New Orleans he is born into, grown and fully conscious as Adam, as a literal Eden. But because the only use he makes of this freedom is theft, whoring, and gambling, it is immediately threatened by a new kind of bondage, and still another rebirth is required to bring him to full
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