'Oxherding Tale' and 'Siddhartha:' philosophy, fiction, and the emergence of a hidden tradition

African American Review, Winter, 1996 by Rudolph P. Byrd

Oxherding Tale is perhaps the most widely taught and admired of Johnson's novels, and the author regards it as his "platform" book (xvii). He adds that platform is a "playful reference" to The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, a canonical work in Zen Buddhism. Oxherding Tale is Johnson's "platform" book in the sense, as he writes in the introduction, "that everything else I attempted to do would in one way or another be based upon and refer to it" (xvii). As the pivotal work of fiction that constituted the greatest challenge in intellectual and artistic terms, Oxherding Tale had far-reaching influence on Johnson's subsequent fiction. For example, in Oxherding Tale Johnson begins his exploration of the physical and metaphysical nature of slavery within the framework of Buddhism, Taoism, and. Hinduism. Beyond the painful and patent fact of chattel slavery, in what other ways, ruminates Johnson in Oxherding Tale, can we be enslaved? This is the central question in this metaphysical slave narrative whose title-page, Johnson notes, bears the imprint of the "Taoist symbol for a man travelling on the Way" (xvii). Further, and related to this systematic exploration of the various species of slavery within the framework of Eastern philosophy, the Allmuseri, a fictional African clan, is a defining presence through the character of Reb, the Coffinmaker, in Oxherding Tale, but a dominant presence through the character of Ngonyama in Middle Passage. Plainly, in these and other ways Oxherding Tale has had a profound impact upon the content and intellectual concerns of Johnson's subsequent fiction. It is for this reason that he has taken such pains to reconstruct the context and process of Oxherding Tale's composition and publication.

Certainly, Johnson's foray into literary criticism is, in some sense, a response to certain personal and historical exigencies; that is, a desire to make his own past as an artist visible, coherent, and accessible. Being & Race: Black Writing since 1970 (1988), Johnson's only book of literary criticism, is, in part, an earlier and extended elaboration of this desire. Johnson's more recent and much welcomed public reflection springs, however, from yet another source. There is in his introduction a desire to assess and weigh the aesthetic value of Oxherding Tale in relationship to his other novels. And, in my view, Oxherding Tale remains the work of fiction in which Johnson's artistic and intellectual vision is most fully realized. While Faith and the Good Thing and Middle Passage are unified, coherent, and complex works of art, there is, I believe, a degree of depth, strangeness, and power in Oxherding Tale that is unequaled in the other novels. Johnson himself holds a similar view of the value of his "platform" book. In comparing Oxherding Tale with Middle Passage, the novel for which he was awarded the National Book Award in 1990, Johnson writes that his prizewinning third novel "contains only a fraction of its predecessor's complexity" (xvii). Johnson's candor and lack of sentimentality regarding the artistic achievement of his novels is unusual and admirable. As an artist, it is evident that the value he assigns to a particular work is linked neither to encomia nor to prestigious literary prizes, but rather to his own independent evaluative standard. It seems that Johnson, like Jean Toomer in the writing of Cane, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the writing of One Hundred Years of Solitude, wrote his most important and influential work of fiction to date early in his artistic career.(1)

In 1975, Johnson undertook the difficult but meaningful work of writing his most highly esteemed novel with, in his words, "absolutely no encouragement" (xiii) - neither polite interest from colleagues nor advances from publishers. This spite work, for in one sense it is plain that Johnson embarked upon this ambitious literary experiment in defiance of his detractors, would take five years to complete. Of the many writers whose works sustained and influenced him during the long and lonely period of Oxherding Tale's composition, Johnson acknowledges an. intellectual debt to Herman Melville, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and most importantly Herman Hesse. Of the several writers mentioned in the introduction to the Plume edition of Oxherding Tale, Hesse's influence is the most profound.

While Johnson read and studied all of the novels by the German writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946, Hesse's Siddhartha (1951) exercised a decisive influence on Oxherding Tale. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to assert that Siddhartha, in the conceptualization of Oxherding Tale, occupies a position of co-equality with The Ten Oxherding Pictures by Kaku-an Shi-en, a foundational work of Zen Buddhism, and the conversion and slave narratives of American and African American literature.

In what specific ways can we discern the imprint of Siddhartha upon Oxherding Tale? As an artist who is self-consciously creating a distinctive body of work that reflects the influence of a range of literary ancestors, what did Johnson imbibe from his immersion in the fictional universe of Hesse that has endowed Oxherding Tale and the other fictions which so forcefully emanate from it with their particular intellectual cast and trajectory? These are the central questions I wish to explore within this essay.