Charles Johnson's quest for black freedom in 'Oxherding Tale.'

Charles Johnson's main emphasis in Oxherding Tale (1982) is 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 in 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), in written texts, and it is 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), in which Johnson critiques contemporary black fiction, he says that he centers his own 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 is 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 is the phenomenological concept of epoche, the suspension or bracketing of presuppositions in order to perceive freshly. In Oxherding Tale, bracketing applies to the black written tradition, the characters, and the reader. The written tradition must bracket is own 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 is not the goal, though Participating in Merleau-Ponty's Lifeworld of constant linguistic interaction is the goal. The linguistic Lifeworld is 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, in 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 is leading us in a direction we know is inevitable but toward which we sometimes do not wish to go, especially if it will . . . displace us from our fondest prejudices? To read is to inhabit the role and real place of others; to write is 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, is one in which he situates his text in 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 in the black world's own unexplored "embarrassment of rich, contradictory material" (Being 11). Viewed in this way, phenomenologically and intertextually situated among a range of texts and literary traditions covering centuries, Oxherding Tale works according to Johnson's theory: It liberates itself from the stereotypes imposed by the black written tradition and becomes multitraditional, mutlicultural, and multiracial; it changes our perception of what a black novel is.(5)

Johnson makes Oxherding Tale a slave narrative, and uses the slave narrative as the archetype of the written black text whose hegemony he tries to break. In the Oxherding Tale chapter entitled "The Manumission of First Person Viewpoint," the narrator revises the definition of the black narrative in terms synonymous with Johnson's intertextual, phenomenological paradigm of freedom and liberation. The narrator talks about Oxherding Tale's first-person viewpoint as a slave narrative:

The Self, this perceiving Subject who puffs on and on, is, for all purposes, a palimpsest, interwoven with everything - literally everything - that can be thought or felt. We can go further: The Subject of the Slave Narrative, like all Subjects, is forever outside itself in others, objects; he is parasitic, if you like, drawing his life from everything he is not, and at precisely the instant he makes possible their appearance.... to think the Slave Narrative properly is to see nowhere a narrator who falteringly interprets the world, but a narrator who is that world: who is less a reporter than an opening through which the world is delivered: first-person (if you wish) universal. (152-53)

The Self described above is first and foremost textual and linguistic, a Self that writes itself among and integrates with all the other selves imprinted among the intertexts. The Self speaks the realities of the other selves as much as its own: It is "outside itself" in these other selves, taking its life from them and writing the other selves at the same time. This universalization of the Self is freeing and liberating. This Self knows no limits; it can explore spiritual and psychological possibilities that have been unexplored by the black written tradition.

However, in using the slave narrative as the archetype of the black narrative that he wants to revise, Johnson does not negate and trivialize the feelings and actions of his characters who are slaves. Johnson respects and honors his characters within the exigencies and constraints of their historical reality, but he also portrays time in multiple dimensions in order to project his phenomenologically mediatory, intertextual process that encompasses all time - past, present, and future.

The text's time dimensions are chronological, synchronic, and diachronic. We can view the chronological in at least three ways: the chronological order of events in the slaves' lives; the chronology of the novel, which begins in 1838 and ends sometime after the Civil War; and a larger chronology of black American history which overarches all of this. The three aspects of chronological time all imply cause, effect, sequence, beginning, end, and progressive movement, or at least the will toward progressive movement. The chronological implies a detectable order, and in the minds of the slaves living their histories, a clear, progressive movement from this order, even if the movement is a painful struggle. Most importantly, the chronological honors the slaves' point of view.

The synchronic time dimension, which is all times simultaneously, allegorizes the process of phenomenological, intertextual mediation among texts and traditions that liberates the black written tradition. That is, the novel's reality and the characters' acts of resignation, faith, and acceptance, which transport them beyond the concerns and desires caused by chronological life events into a selfless, synchronic spiritual realm, symbolize the mediation of the phenomenological, intertextual paradigm. In the novel, the Soulcatcher's "necropolis" is not a world of death after all. It is a world of dead things transformed to a grand, spiritual, polymorphic interconnectedness with everything else by the timeless spirit of the universe. This spiritual realm conserves everything; it loses nothing. And more than this, the text sublimates all life experiences, including ones that entail evil, to produce delight, beauty, and love. The text gives back to Andrew, the main character, the love of his father, murdered by the Soulcatcher, in its entire network of interconnection (176). And, consequently, evil is not what it really seems, or at least it does not have the detrimental effect that it might appear to have. Everything moves with a high universal purpose that produces a harmony which is good. Freedom for the characters means openly interacting with everyone, resigning themselves to their experiences, both good and bad, and accepting this universe of wonderful possibility. Theorized as a phenomenological, intertextual construct, Oxherding Tale interacts with other texts and traditions in a similar fashion, and achieves a similar freedom and universality.

In the text's diachronic time dimension, I find an implicit allegorization of the reader's participation in the phenomenological process at the point of extrapolating "real-life" political and social relevance from the text.(6) The novel's diachronic time dimension, like the chronological, depends on progress over time, but it makes the specifics of movement, cause, effect, beginning, and end uncertain. Historical events and individual experiences mediate and move toward enlightenment, but they do so very uncertainly and ambiguously. It is hard to detect, define, and analyze a clear pattern. A deep faith is needed to fill the interstices. What this means for the reader politically in the "real world" is uncertain, because of the uncertainty defined in the diachronic dimension. The reader needs a deep faith that history will work out for the good at some unspecified time. But the effect can be powerful because it can free the reader from the hegemony of the black text's traditional narrative and project a fresh, universally encompassing perspective.

A reader can see that somehow, uncertainly and ambiguously, good deeds (and everything else) do count in a process that moves in a moral direction and provides for black survival. Black individuals should do what they feel like doing. But they should not emphasize their victimization, position themselves oppositionally to whites, and focus so much energy in the struggle against whites. Generally, written black narratives, in Johnson's view, stereotype black characters and their experience by emphasizing oppression and struggle. According to Oxherding Tale, this kind of narrative loses touch with a high, spiritual, universal reality, and blacks who position themselves oppositionally in this fashion poison themselves needlessly. The black individual who acts this way will always be a slave to that which comes from within, and closes out the higher universal spiritual process. And this will ensure that blacks will always be slaves no matter what the laws and institutions of society say, and no matter what time it is. Ultimately, freedom resides in freeing and purifying the self and the spirit so that they can connect to the higher synchronic spiritual realm. At some point in time, there will be a free world for black people collectively; or if this is not true, black individuals will make a better world along the way, as they devote themselves to spiritual interaction with others and with the universe.

Keeping in mind the multiple time dimensions' allegorization of Johnson's central phenomenological, intertextual process of revising the black written tradition, and consequently freeing and liberating it, I want first to analyze the novel's characters and events in terms of the multiple time dimensions. Then, still keeping Johnson's central process and goal in mind, I want to analyze how Johnson uses the themes and structures of various non-black intertexts.

The chronological time dimension presents a perspective sympathetic to the slaves and their life histories during the nineteenth century in black American history. At one level, Oxherding Tale is a very realistic slave story. After a humorous account of the birth of Andrew, the main character, that is as reminiscent of a black folk tale as of Tristram Shandy (the master talks George, Andrew's father, into trading places with him, and George fathers Andrew with the master's wife), the text articulates many of the hard realities of slavery. Andrew falls in love with a slave girl named Minty, and offers to work to buy the freedom of Minty, his family, and all the other slaves that he can. The master allows Andrew to work for a white plantation owner named Flo Hatfield, but will sign no freedom papers. While at Flo's, Andrew learns that the slaves at Cripplegate, his old plantation, have rebelled, that some have run for freedom, and that the mistress has sold the others. Andrew panics and hits Flo out of frustration when she refuses to pay him his wages so that he can assist Minty and the others. She orders Andrew and Reb, his friend, to the mines, which is tantamount to a death sentence. Through his guile, Andrew fashions their escape, but their horrors do not diminish, because a relentless Soulcatcher/slave-catcher named Horace Bannon pursues them. Andrew eventually escapes by passing for white, but Bannon can still find him out and capture him. After a great struggle with Bannon, and because of Reb's influence on Bannon, Andrew finally attains his freedom.

In the context of this time dimension, slavery is a hard reality. The Soulcatcher catches and kills George when he runs away. Minty's experience over the years devastates and kills her. And Andrew himself almost succumbs as a result of his acting out his frustrations in reaction to slavery's brutality and his powerlessness as a slave. The text presents a perspective that is very sympathetic to the slaves trapped in the reality of nineteenth-century history.

While Johnson does not want to belittle or trivialize the slave experience, he does want to liberate the black written tradition from what he sees as the slave narrative's legacy of narrow, limiting propaganda; therefore, Johnson also presents the perspective of the synchronic time dimension. Here, the novel's characters and events allegorize the phenomenological, intertextual process that universalizes the black text and liberates the black tradition. The actions and interactions of Andrew, the Soulcatcher, Reb, and George mainly perform this role.

In the context of the novel's universalizing, liberating allegory, George enslaves himself through his narrow racial, nationalistic narrative construction of his own reality and black reality in general. Andrew imagines what George would say if he knew that Andrew had passed for white and married a white woman.

"Hawk [Andrew Hawkins], you gonna sleep beside her after what they done to us? . . . Why don't you marry a cullud girl and lift her up?" Some nights, I remembered, he prayed, "Oh Lord, kill all the whitefolks and leave all the nigguhs," and Mattie [Andrew's stepmother], miffed, slapped him from behind, which made George yelp, "Lord! Don't you know a white man from a nigguh?" He would reject me, claiming I had rejected him, and this was partly true: I rejected (in George) the need to be an Untouchable. . . . My father kept the pain [of racism] alive. He needed to rekindle racial horrors, revive old pains, review disappointments like a sick man fingering his sores. Like my tutor [Ezekiel Sykes-Withers], he chose misery. Grief was the grillwork - the emotional grid - through which George Hawkins sifted and sorted events, simplified a world so overrich in sense it outstripped him, and all that was necessary to break this spell of hatred, this self-inflicted segregation from the Whole, was to acknowledge, once and for all, that what he allowed to be determinant for his life depended on himself and no one else.(142)

George chooses misery, horror, pain, and consequently enslavement because he refuses to acknowledge the rich possibility of experience and reality. George needs to acknowledge the world's richness and possibility and to give it the consequent narrative construction to be "Whole" and free. The same is true for the black written tradition.

The synchronic allegory also determines Andrew's and the text's portrayal of evil itself. Horace Bannon, the Soulcatcher, is a character who catches runaway slaves, a slave catcher, and a thematization of evil, the evil that always catches up with and kills black souls. This evil is black victimization by racism.

Andrew realizes that Bannon's evil could have a tremendous determining effect on the outcome of things. Andrew listens to Bannon talk about himself and his actions, and "it was as though we were the last men in the world, survivors of a holocaust at Hegel's end of history, trying to figure out what went wrong" (114). This nightmarish vision makes the evil of racism the determining factor; slavery's catching and killing of black souls is the reality. From this standpoint, Andrew would have to validate George's actions and attitudes in his struggle against slavery and racism. Struggle may be the only hope to avert the grim possibility that Andrew sees at the "end of history."

But long before he sees the novel's liberating truth, Andrew accidentally discovers how to elude the Soulcatcher temporarily and affirm allegorically the idea of Johnson's liberating universalism. He accidentally discovers that he can pass for white and exploit the "Self's polymorphy" (159) to live as a white man outside the Soulcatcher's grasp; in doing this, he replicates Johnson's liberated black tradition's phenomenological mediation and intertextual process. The key for Andrew during the time that he eludes the Soulcatcher is to submit himself to his experience as this experience reveals itself. In the chores of building a house alongside his wife, Andrew realizes and accepts that ". . . Fate spoiled a fine dialectician to make a poor, hod-carting carpenter: me" (145). Andrew and his wife Peggy have questions about their marriage, but they do not spend a lot of time dealing with them. They spend their time living and doing: "Suspecting these questions were poison - perhaps not even real questions - we did not give them voice; the house, hammering and scrubbing, kept us focused not on each other but on a spot between and just ahead of us both. Not, in other words, on what she wanted, or I. But on what we built in the interstices" (145). In giving up the self, Andrew participates in an important process of interacting and sharing.

But witnessing a slave auction in which the auctioneer tries to sell Minty makes Andrew feel that he is a traitor to the struggle of black slaves for freedom. Andrew thinks as he listens to a slave plead to be sold with his wife:

How much worse this was than being on the Block! I was, having passed, a witness. The vilest of turncoats to my father's values. To see persecution to others and be powerless to end it - to be by accident above it - was, I saw, the same as consent. (151)

Here again, Andrew feels the immediacy of slavery as George and other slaves felt it, and decides to struggle against it. Andrew buys Minty and tries to save her life, and even sees a vision of her as a freewoman. But this vision vanishes in a "gush of black vomit," as "the Devil came and sat on Minty . . ." (167). As guilt fills Andrew's chest when Minty dies, the Soulcatcher taps him on the shoulder.

Andrew might fall prey to the despair caused by his struggle and opposition, just as George did, but because Reb escapes from the Soulcatcher, Andrew gets the opportunity to put the Soulcatcher in perspective and to see the novel's liberating truth, in essence the allegory of Johnson's liberating phenomenological, intertextual process. When the Soulcatcher first takes him outside, however, Andrew thinks the Soulcatcher has killed Reb and will now kill him, and in light of his impending death and of what he has seen of life, he asks a question:" 'Is it . . . possible that a man may love the Good, pledge his life to it and, in spite of his best efforts, still be the steward of suffering and evil?' "The Soulcatcher replies," 'Ah have kilt many Negroes . . . whose every good action led to evil.'" Astounded, Andrew asks, "'Is that fair! . . . do you approve?'" And the Soulcatcher answers, "'Ah approves everythin'. Ah approves nothin''" (172-73). During this same time, Andrew notices how the Soulcatcher moves:

. . . Bannon moved like [Reb] the Coffinmaker, as if Time were fiction, all that was and would be held suspended in this single moment, which was forever, using every part of his foot as he walked, like an animal. First the heel falling gently, then the ball of his foot, not slamming down (as I walked), but firmly taking hold of the planet, pushing down as the ground pushed back in perfect balance: a slow, frightening tread.... (172)

The Soulcatcher embodies synchronic time and Johnson's phenomenological, intertextual process in his every movement, and his movement also puts him firmly in rhythm with the planet's movement. His movements suggest that chronological "time [is] fiction" and that a "single moment" holds "all that was" and what "would be . . . forever." He exists outside the realm of chronological time, where conventional moral standards hold relevance. He has no regard for "'the Good,'" just rewards, or fairness, as we judge those things at any point in chronological time. He sees that, in any black person's life, good can easily lead to evil, and this does not bother him. He neither approves nor disapproves. But his neutrality also shows that he is amoral, like the movement of the planet with which he coordinates his own movement. He embodies evil and causes death, but he does not wish evil any more than the inexorable movement of the planet wishes evil when it causes death. He simply is this amoral, inexorable process that is past, present, and future, and he thus symbolizes part of Johnson's phenomenological, intertextual process.

But if this amoral death and destruction exist synchronically, so does another inexorable force which contains death and destruction, Reb the Coffinmaker. Reb is very much like the Soulcatcher; they both embody the text's allegory. They move synchronically in rhythm with the planet, "as if Time were fiction." And as the Soulcatcher says of Reb, "'Befo', afterwards, and in between didn't mean nothin' to him'" (174). Like the Soulcatcher, Reb does not approve or disapprove of good and evil; he accepts everything that happens to him. Johnson's revised, liberated black written tradition would also accept everything and leave itself open to all possibilities.

Reb is one of the Allmuseri, an African tribe invented by Johnson, and he lives a synchronic-like life of the spirit which is his Allmuseri legacy. As an Allmuseri, Reb learned

how to send his kra forth to dwell in oxen in the cattle kraals. It took up ten thousand hosts, this I, slipped into men, women, giraffes, gibbering monkeys, perished, pilgrimaged in the animal and spirit worlds, dwelled peacefully in baobab trees. He learned intimately the life of these objects and others, died their unrecorded deaths, and ever returned to himself richer . . . . [In spite of his capture and enslavement,] still his kra remained the same, unspoiled, despite three masters in as many states before he was purchased by Earl Hatfield [Flo's husband]. (49-50)

One can separate Reb's polymorphic life force from the events and encounters in his chronological experience; Reb's life force is timeless. It does not have a chronological beginning with his physical being, and it does not have a chronological ending with the things that it inhabits. It submits itself to everything, but this submission to experience does not despoil Reb's life force, which actually becomes richer in the process.

Because of Reb's life force and consequent ethos, the Soulcatcher cannot capture him. The Soulcatcher tells Andrew: "'For me to capture a Negro the right way,... Ah have to feel what he feels, want what he wants, 'fore Ah knows him good enough to hep him finish hisself'" (173). But Reb does not want anything:

"That's hit right there - what threw me off . . . yo friend didn't want nothin'. How the hell you gonna catch a Negro like that? He can't be caught, he's already free. Not legally, but you know what Ah'm sayin'. Well suh, Ah had to think a spell about strategy. Ah's always worked on the principle that the thing what destroys a man, what finally unstrings him, starts off first as an appetite. Yo friend had no appetites. There wasn't no way Ah could git a handhold on the nigguh, he was like smoke. So Ah went back to Square One, so to speak: Ah studied him, lookin' fo' a weakness, a flaw somewheres so Ah could squiggle inside and take root [but] . . . yo friend . . . didn't have no place inside him fo' me to settle. He wasn't positioned nowhere. . . . He had no home. No permanent home. He didn't care 'bout merit or evil. What Ah'm sayin'," his fist struck [a] tree ..., "is that Ah couldn't entirely become the nigguh because you got to have somethin' dead or static already inside you - an image of yoself - fo' a real slave catcher to latch onto." (173-74)

The Soulcatcher gives the key to freedom in the text and liberation from what Johnson thinks are the black written tradition's narrow limitations. The key is letting go of the self in order to access a timeless spirituality as Reb has done, and implicitly the key is also a deep faith that resignation and acceptance are ultimately empowering and freeing. This approach avoids the binary oppositions of black/white and male/female that poison George and allow the Soulcatcher to kill him. The poison that kills comes from within, and the black person who does not poison himself with his own stasis, and strong appetites and desires catalyzed by his experiences, will always be free - de facto, if not de jure. Allegorically, the text projects a similar liberation for the black written tradition.

As the text closes, it reveals the Soulcatcher's body as an allegory of Johnson's phenomenological, intertextual process. Slowly Andrew comes to understand what has happened, that Reb has escaped and that the Soulcatcher will free him because he vowed to give up slave catching if a slave ever escaped him. Andrew asks if his father died hating him, and the Soulcatcher pulls the shirt off his tattooed body and says, "'He's heah .... Ask him yeself'" (175). As Andrew awaits the Soulcatcher's further explanation, his

gaze drop[s] from his face to his chest and forearms, where the intricately woven brown tattooes present, in the brilliance of a silver-gray sky at dawn, an impossible flesh tapestry of a thousand individualities no longer static, mere drawings, but if you looked at them long enough, bodies moving like Lilliputians over the surface of his skin. Not tattooes at all, I saw, but forms sardined in his contour, creatures Bannon had killed since childhood: spineless insects, flies he'd dewinged; yet even the tiniest of these thrashing within the body mosaic was, clearly, a society as complex as the higher forms, a concrescence of molecules cells atoms in concert, for nothing in the necropolis he'd filled stood alone, wished to stand alone, had to stand alone, and the commonwealth of the dead shape-shifted on his chest, his full belly, his fat shoulders, traded hand for claw, feet for hooves, legs for wings, their metamorphosis having no purpose beyond the delight the universe took in diversity for its own sake, the proliferation of beauty, and yet all were conserved in this process of doubling, nothing was lost in the masquerade, the cosmic costume ball .... (175)

Not only does Andrew find his father here; he also finds a timeless proliferation of love in his connection to his father. Johnson believes that the black written tradition could achieve a similar freedom, depth, complexity, and beauty if it gave up its narrow, propagandistic agenda.

But Andrew's voice also becomes the text's voice that adds a diachronic dimension by articulating a new vision of freedom for the twentieth century. Andrew reminds us of this in the only footnote in the novel. In footnote number 1, which explains why he has said that a white boy with virulently racist attitudes "was not a bad sort, considering the day," Andrew gives this account of future events:

He is fifteen in my account. In two years this boy - James Travis, Jr. - will be wounded at Fort Sumter, fighting with major Robert Anderson; his nurse will be a black girl, Zelphy Thomas, and James, finding her with child on August 3, 1861, will choose love over bigotry, moving his new family to southern Illinois, where his great-granddaughter, Ellen, an early NAACP activist, will integrate a lunch counter on April 23, 1935. She will die five years later, on the Northeast Side of Carbondale, surrounded by admirers, white and black. (110)

In a sense, Andrew steps out of the text and speaks to the reader; he implies an allegorization of the phenomenological process in a diachronic, twentieth-century time dimension where the reader participates. Andrew specifies a time, but the time is arbitrary and not verifiable in terms of a chronology of twentieth-century American history. The real event is therefore ambiguous and uncertain. In a "real-life" political context, the reader sees that resignation and faith such as that thematized in the novel are justified. It is unclear when race relations will change for the better, but things do change through the process allegorized in the novel. Like the black written tradition, the reader can also become free by participating openly in the world and accepting everything as the universe's processes unfold. This also encourages the reader to break the hegemony of the black written tradition's narrow, propagandistic narratives.

One of Johnson's main goals is to use non-black intertexts to defamiliarize the black text, to break down what he thinks is a hegemonic black written tradition. The non-black intertexts relate both to Johnson's paradigm of the phenomenological, intertextual process and to the novel's synchronic allegory. More specifically, they show a praxis of Johnson's paradigmatic process. In this praxis, the intertexts mediate Oxherding Tale's structure and theme, and Oxherding Tale mediates the intertexts by making them the objects of its subversion. And, as an integral part of all this, the intertexts support the themes worked out in the synchronic allegory or are the objects of its thematic subversion. The levels of intertextual relationship form an inextricable nexus.

A primary way that Johnson defamiliarizes Oxherding Tale is through the strangest, most bizarre use of a white philosopher and his philosophy found in any black American novel. Johnson makes Karl Marx a text that serves this purpose. The text of Marx is an amalgamation of Marx as character and visual image, Marx as perceived ideologue, and Marx as verbal counterpoint to the perception of his own ideology. In a very odd occurrence in the novel, Marx shows up in South Carolina in 1850, and the philosophy that he espouses in the text is not the philosophy of the ideologue. Marx's appearance in itself is stunning, and what he says and does surprises further. Marx's presence and his strange words mediate the structure and tone of Oxherding Tale, breaking down preconceptions of a black novel and of Marx, making the novel a strange hybrid that is not clearly black. The intertextual mediation between Marx and Oxherding Tale pushes the novel into new, defamiliarized territory for a black text and, in Johnson's terms, helps to liberate it and the black written tradition.

This is an example of the text demonstrating the praxis of Johnson's paradigmatic process; as the text of Marx opposes the perception of his own position as an ideologue, it also supports the novel's synchronic allegory by showing that to interact with people in life and accept one's life experience are most important.

Marx's part in the novel takes the form of an encounter with a character named Ezekiel William Sykes-Withers, who is a Transcendentalist, an intellectual, and an activist somewhat reminiscent of Henry David Thoreau. Ezekiel is also a mystic and ascetic steeped in Eastern philosophy, along with a wide range of other philosophies.(7) The text articulates some specifics of Marx's harsh life experiences after his political expulsion from Belgium and Germany (81-82). In June of 1850, when Marx arrives in South Carolina, he wants "simply to unwind and see an old friend" (83) and to get away from his political troubles, which have solidified themselves in the form of impoverished exile in London. Because of his state of affairs, "... Marx diverted Ezekiel's conversation from social evil and deep-ploughing philosophy to the few pockets of well-being made possible by capital. And capital alone" (84). The text later points out Marx's revision of Hegelian idealism (86), but here Marx also hardly sounds like the ideologue who believed that man could realize his highest potential in the communist state, where money would not be the chief determinant of human relationships.

Marx's later comments about the Transcendental Ego, existence, and love (86-88) help to make the point about his text opposing the perception of his position as an ideologue. Marx tells Ezekiel that his Hegelian thesis - that wholeness for the Transcendental Ego means that "'. . . alienation in the Other is necessary in every act of perception'" - is not enough. He revises and extends this idealist philosophical abstraction: "'The universal name for [the Transcendental Ego's] final, ontological achievement, this liberation . . . in which each subject finds another essential is love. . . . Do you haf a lover?'" (86). Marx thus brings the discussion of the realm of the Transcendental Ego to the reality of Ezekiel's love life.

Ezekiel does not have a lover, and he falters badly when Marx takes him from the abstract ideal and places him in the reality of human relationships. Ezekiel shows deadly fear of what would happen if an Other, a lover, did not return his love: "'It would kill me. . . . I would perceive them as beautiful, and I would obliterate myself to let be their beauty, which only I can do, but on their side they wouldn't know I existed - denying me love, they would, strictly speaking, deny me life'" (87). Marx further confounds Ezekiel when he tells him that, if a woman denies him love as he fears, he should "'rejoice'" (87).

Ezekiel is the rigid ideologue that one might perceive Marx to be, and Marx suggests to him an open participation in life and acceptance of one's life experience that relates to the synchronic allegory. Marx's final word is that Ezekiel should "'rejoice'" about what life has to offer. Like Reb, Ezekiel should accept the reality of good, evil, and indifference and go on living his life in spite of everything.

There are more intricate ways that Johnson uses Marx: The written texts of Marx are implied intertexts which Oxherding Tale's text of Marx and synchronic allegory subvert, concomitantly showing intertextual mediation and the praxis of the paradigmatic process.

In the manuscripts of 1844, Marx theorizes about a revolutionary new world where a true humanity will replace money as the controlling factor in human relationships:

Assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust, etc. If you want to enjoy art, you must be an artistically cultivated person; if you want to exercise influence over other people, you must be a person with a stimulating and encouraging effect on other people. Every one of your relations to man and to nature must be a specific expression, corresponding to the object of your will, of your real individual life. If you love without evoking love in return - that is, if your loving as loving does not produce reciprocal love; if through a living expression of yourself as a loving person you do not make yourself a loved person, then your love is impotent - a misfortune. (Tucker 105)

This does seem to be Marx the ideologue, formulating the ideology of struggle which will create an ideal new world of justice. Unrequited love is a "misfortune," but the passage also shows its justice. The unreciprocated lover deserves not to have his love returned, but he can reap reciprocal human regards according to his human accomplishment. And every person can do this.

Oxherding Tale's text of Marx that speaks to Ezekiel about love explicitly echoes and subverts Marx's written text, and the novel's synchronic allegory implicitly subverts it too. Marx the character/text can take solace in the "few pockets of well-being made possible by capital" and can forget about the need to create a just political state where everyone can attain just rewards. One should "'rejoice'" and live. This also is the message of the synchronic allegory.

The texts of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651) and Flo Hatfield's Leviathan plantation relate to Oxherding Tale and each other in similar terms of intertextual, phenomenological praxis and thematic influence and subversion. Flo's creation of her Leviathan clearly implies Hobbes's Leviathan as an intertext. Hobbes talks exclusively about man, and thinks that man can only be safe in a commonwealth/Leviathan, which is an artificial machine, and man a natural one (Hobbes 13). The emotions of men always lead them to perverse, negative, and destructive actions and experiences that the sovereign, representative of the artificial machine of the commonwealth, controls. In the process of Oxherding Tale's praxis of its phenomenology and intertextuality and thematization of the synchronic allegory, it subverts Leviathan and its narrow, restrictive philosophy.

Flo Hatfield's Leviathan is a slave plantation, and in a sense Flo makes her Leviathan a text with which she is synonymous. Flo proclaims herself

"Leviathan's sovereign, its soul. All others are, in a manner of speaking, the joints, tendons, nerves, and tissues that sustain the soul. You have read Jeremy Bentham? No? Well, no matter. Leviathan supports, oh, fifty slaves...."(38)

As the sovereign, she centers everything in herself. When Andrew asks, "'What do you feel when you touch me?'" Flo responds," 'Me.... I feel my own pulse. My own sensations.... I have a pulse everywhere.'" Andrew asks further, "'That's all you feel?'" and Flo replies, "'Yes'" (53). In the context of these feelings and the power she has acquired, Flo enslaves black men and sometimes white men to her passions, and condemns black men when they do not satisfy her passions. In one way, Flo's Leviathan sounds even worse than Hobbes's, because she does not protect her subjects from their perverse emotions; she sacrifices them to her all-consuming passions.

Although Flo's Leviathan takes the name of Hobbes's, she names Jeremy Bentham as her philosophical mentor; however, Flo strays far from the goals of Bentham's philosophy. Bentham, a radical, utilitarian, reformist philosopher, focused on maximizing the public good, the pleasure and happiness of the greatest number; in this sense, he was the opposite of Hobbes. Flo, however, distorts his doctrine of pleasure. In An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), Bentham names fourteen "simple pleasures of which human nature is susceptible" (33): the pleasures of sense, wealth, skill, amity, good name, power, piety, benevolence, malevolence, memory, imagination, expectation, association, and relief. Largely speaking, Flo has constricted the pleasures and turned everything toward the service of her own sense of sexual pleasure (and power). Leviathan does not, as Flo claims, really support fifty slaves, which would be good in the Benthamite context. Leviathan supports Flo and maximizes her sense of pleasure; she controls and uses the slaves in her pursuit of pleasure. In this way, Flo distorts Bentham to create a Leviathan no better than Hobbes's, and Oxherding Tale relates to Flo's Leviathan subversively.

Clearly though, Flo's oppressiveness is a product of her oppression by white males. White men "again and again, and yet again" said to Flo, "'You are nothing'" (75). They mounted a "massive assault on [her] ego," and she did "anything to avoid self-obliteration" (76). Flo's Leviathan is an attempt to realize herself, soul and body.

Flo's oppression by white men clearly warps her, but as a woman who opens herself to and at least partially internalizes a radical, utilitarian philosophy, she makes a Leviathan that significantly revises Hobbes's Leviathan. Flo metaphorically speaks of her Leviathan in terms of soul and body, a pairing which suggests feeling, emotion, experience, birth, and death, not the ahuman, machine-like reality that Ezekiel associates with philosophers such as Hobbes (31). Flo is a different kind of white woman, one who has inverted the white-male oppressive hierarchy by putting herself at the top, but her engagement of the passions of others to fulfill herself does show her lust for a certain type of experience. Although Flo is complex, her text of Leviathan still retains something in common with Bentham's philosophy, which is compatible with the synchronic allegory.

Andrew learns from Flo's revised Leviathan

that lovemaking was magic; was, if properly understood, a Way. There were, I had heard, many Ways, but if you wished to experience pleasure, you must - she taught me - give pleasure, and to do this unfailingly the lover must get the feel of sacrifice and the ideal of service into his head, which sounded odd when she first said it, sitting naked on her sofa in the boudoir, her tangled laphair soaking, one hand on her smooth-muscled belly, for I'd always regarded sexuality as nothing if not self-gratifying, yet (said Flo) to learn her rhythms and responses - to play her well, like a finely tuned instrument, I, Andrew Hawkins, had to transform myself. I speak, sir, of what I know. Lovemaking at Leviathan, after Flo Hatfield closed her shutters, locked her doors, and spread herself in an X on the sofa, was exactly the inverse of my training [by Ezekiel, my tutor] - all thought and cognition.... (64)

In her quest to realize herself through pleasurable experience, Flo only experiences her own sensations, in a way becomes a self-limiting, self-enslaving text that Oxherding Tale subverts, but her Leviathan text also gives Andrew valuable lessons in the themes of the synchronic allegory. Andrew learns to set aside Ezekiel's "training - all thought and cognition" - in order to "get the feel of sacrifice and the ideal of service into his head." He gives up his self-gratification to "play [Flo] like a finely tuned instrument." His giving up of the self to experience is very much like Reb's acceptance of life and possibility. Flo's Levia-than text has flaws, but its influence on Andrew is largely a positive one that helps to direct him until he fully understands Oxherding Tale's allegory in the text of the Soulcatcher's body.

Oxherding Tale's intertextual mediation with philosophical texts is an important element that defamiliarizes it, makes it curious and strange, and liberates it from the familiar praxis and themes of the black written tradition. But Johnson also utilizes non-black novelistic intertexts as part of the praxis of his phenomenological process and thematic allegorization. Tristram Shandy (1759-67) is an example. As Ashraf H. A. Rushdy points out, "Like Tristram Shandy, the narrator Andrew begins his autobiography by recounting the night of his conception" (386). This is the first connection, but there are other ways that Oxherding Tale shows the imprint of Tristram Shandy.

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman speaks directly and intimately to a reader whom it addresses as "Sir"; throughout its text, Oxherding Tale sometimes addresses its reader as "sir." Also, two of Tristram Shandy's chief features are humor and satire, and Johnson manages to make humor and satire integral parts of Oxherding Tale's serious, complex form. Tristram Shandy's satire and humor encompass both the hobby horses of the father's recondite philosophical speculation and Uncle Toby's simple, naive, one-track association of everything with the military (Work lii-lv). Oxherding Tale looks askance at Ezekiel's one-dimensional proclivity for "deep-plowing philosophy" (Oxherding 84), and it often satirizes Andrew's father's simple, naive assignment of black problems to a racial cause and determination of black nationalistic solutions to these problems. The point is that satire and humor encompass a range of extremes in both texts, and include just about everything. The structures of Tristram Shandy mediate and become a part of Oxherding Tale.

But both texts also accept the wide range of experiences and situations that they encompass; and it is here that both Oxherding Tale's praxis and its allegory intersect the ethos of Tristram Shandy. "Sterne developed, perhaps unconsciously [because of his precarious physical condition], a hedonism which led him to embrace life zestfully as it came, accepting as inevitable both its pleasures and pains" (Work xlv). Sterne's attitude reflects itself in his text's wide embrace of life, which he celebrated through his satire and humor. I would not call Johnson a hedonist. But Oxherding Tale does delight in almost everything that it encompasses from the standpoint of its phenomenological praxis and synchronic allegory. Ezekiel's seriousness and commitment are important and even heroic, although Ezekiel self-destructs because of these same qualifies. And Andrew deeply loves and appreciates his father George, although the father lives a bitter life and experiences a horrible death because of his narrow views. Oxherding Tale accepts all of this in demonstrating its praxis and working out its allegory.

Johnson succeeds ingeniously in Oxherding Tale; he writes a black/non-black text that is intertextually imprinted with the structures of non-black texts and inseminated with their ideas and viewpoints. Johnson indeed does liberate the black text and written tradition from their familiar patterns. But is this really necessary, as Johnson asserts? Some would disagree vociferously; Johnson would assert the necessity just as strongly. Johnson has said that his fellow black writers

abdicate our responsibility as Black creators by embracing all too easy interpretations of our being-in-the World. We "control" our images too rigidly and, consequently, stifle our fictions with worlds so ossified, so stamped with sameness they seem to be the product of a committee, not an individual consciousness grappling with meaning.... we have frozen our vision in figures that caricature, at best, the complexity of our lives, and leave the real artistic chore of interpretation unfinished. ("Philosophy" 60)

Johnson does create controversy, but whether he is right is not the most important question, because, right or wrong, Johnson produces excellent, exciting work that helps to open up important areas of study about the black fictional tradition.

What fascinates me is that Johnson sticks so closely to the praxis of written traditions, largely excluding the influences of oral discourses as they relate to a liberated black text and to the issue of black liberation broadly considered.(8) This shows that Johnson has more in common with other contemporary black male writers than he would probably admit. Writers such as Clarence Major, John Edgar Wideman, and Ishmael Reed are different from Johnson (and from each other) in many ways, but, in important ways, they also manifest Johnson's concern with written textuality. In terms that are perhaps more related to poststructuralism than to phenomenology, Reed thematizes writing and stresses the necessity of black written texts being open to a very broad range of possibilities. Major and Wideman, particularly in his more recent work, agonize about a black written tradition imprisoned by the hegemonic inscriptions of the Western tradition, especially the inscriptions of black males. Unlike contemporary black women writers, they all thematize written textuality and stress the power of written discourse as inscribed in Western texts.(9) The reasons for this aspect of the male writers' works are important areas of study to me. Johnson and these male writers are not read enough, but they do have interesting viewpoints and a very significant place among contemporary black fiction writers.

Notes

1. In Being and Race, Johnson says that "image control has been the aim of black fiction - and perhaps its problem - from the very beginning of black literary production and was sounded as a specific goal ... during the Harlem Renaissance.... But the Harlem Renaissance writers did not so much promote efflorescence of meaning in black literature and life as they replaced old stereotypes with new ones" (17-18).

2. Johnson makes it very clear in Being and Race (4-5) that novelists use the novels of other novelists as their influence and inspiration, Johnson seems effectively to leave out the mediatory effect on the writer of oral discourse and oral culture.

3. Besides Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, Johnson mentions Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Mikel Dufrenne, and Roman Ingarden.

4. In the phenomenological tradition, mediation is another key concept. Generally, the mediation among author, text, and reader is uncertain and ambiguous, but powerful in its potential to produce fresh perspectives and liberate. More specifically, this same ambiguous, powerful mediatory process applies to Oxherding Tale's internal structure, what I will call its synchronic and diachronic time dimensions and allegories, which the reader frees himself to perceive. In terms both general and specific, indeterminacy in the novel becomes even more complex and convoluted because the reader's perception, though fresh and liberating, is not a replication of the author's intention.

5. As William Gleason has shown, the writings of Zen Buddhism are a cross-cultural influence that Johnson uses in Oxherding Tale as part of his unique project of liberation. And much of the novel's universalism which Johnson portrays in the synchronic allegory has a parallel in the Eastern philosophy and religion to which Johnson is devoted. So Johnson's intertextual system encompasses not just the black American and the white Western, but also the Eastern. Obviously, a study of Oxherding Tale could go in several directions.

6. See n4 for a more detailed account of the reader's place in Johnson's phenomenological process.

7. Ezekiel's role in the novel is very strange and bizarre, too. His role is an instance of defamiliarization somewhat similar to the role of the text of Marx.

8. See Karla F. C. Holloway's Moorings and Metaphors for a very good, comprehensive analysis of the influence of black female oral discourses and oral culture on the texts of contemporary black American and West African women writers.

9. See n8.

Works Cited

Bentham, Jeremy. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. Ed. Oskar Piest. Intro. Laurence J. LaFleur. New York: Hafner, 1948.

Gleason, William. "The Liberation of Perception: Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale." Black American Literature Forum 25 (1991): 705-28.

Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan: or the Matter Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil. Ed. Michael Oakeshott. Intro. Richard S. Peters. London: Collier, 1969.

Holloway, Karla F. C. Moorings and Metaphors: Figures of Culture and Gender in Black Women's Literature. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1992.

Johnson, Charles. Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988.

-----. Oxherding Tale. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982.

-----. "Philosophy and Black Fiction." Obsidian 6.1-2 (1980): 55-61.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Prose of the World. Ed. Claude Lefort. Trans. John O'Neill. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973.

Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. "The Phenomenology of the Allmuseri: Charles Johnson and the Subject of the Narrative of Slavery." African American Review 26 (1992): 373-94.

Tucker, Robert C, ed. The Marx-Engels Reader. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 1978.

Work, James A. Introduction. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne. Ed. Work. New York: Odyssey, 1940. ix-lxxv.

James W. Coleman is Associate Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His essay on Clarence Major's All-Night Visitors appeared in the Spring 1994 issue of AAR.