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

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

This rich tradition in letters is called philosophical black fiction, the elements of which Johnson has set forth in his essay "Philosophy and Black Fiction." In general terms, Johnson defines philosophical black fiction as art which interrogates experience. More specifically, it is a fiction that is first and foremost a mode of thought and a process of hermeneutics. It is also a fiction which works to suspend, shelve, and bracket all presuppositions regarding African American life. With this bracketing accomplished, African American experience becomes, Johnson theorizes, a pure field of appearances within two poles: consciousness, and the persons and phenomena to which consciousness is related intentionally. Drawing upon a range of philosophical systems, the writer of philosophical black fiction describes how these phenomena appear and observes that black subjectivity stains them with a particular sense. The principal themes of this fiction are, among many, identity, liberation, and enlightenment. Intent upon the liberation of perception, for the reader and the writer, philosophical black fiction produces what Johnson terms "whole sight"; that is, the calculated projection of a plurality of meanings across a shifting and expansive symbolic geography of forms, texts, and traditions.

This twentieth-century tradition in African American literature begins with W. E. B. Du Bois's The Quest of the Silver Fleece and includes Jean Toomer's Cane, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Richard Wright's The Man Who Lived Underground and The Outsider, James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Cyrus Colter's The Hippodrome, Gloria Naylor's Bailey's Cafe, and Samuel R. Delany's The Mad Man. To date, these are the writers who, in my view, comprise this hidden tradition in twentieth-century African American literature which Johnson has aptly termed philosophical black fiction. Inaugurated and dominated by male authors, this tradition of adapting complex philosophical systems - Platonism, Eastern Philosophy, Continental Philosophy, Christianity, and psychoanalytic theory - to construct a coherent fictional universe seems to be, with the exception of selected novels by John Gardner and Rebecca Goldstein, the sole province of African American writers.

Of the many writers in this dynamic tradition, Johnson is the only writer trained in philosophy. Moreover, he is the most self-conscious in terms of his stated goals of employing diverse philosophical systems to examine questions which have a moral cast, and which also endow his explorations of African American life with originality and force. The conceptualization of this emerging tradition reflects Johnson's commitment to combine his artistic goals and impulses with his broad intellectual interests while endowing the American novel with greater depth and force. Clearly, such a tradition was nurtured by Johnson's reading of Toomer, Wright, and most especially Ellison. The foundational writer, however, the writer whose skillful combining of philosophy and literature provided Johnson with both the impetus and the model, is Herman Hesse. One of the foundational texts in this evolving and hybrid tradition which Johnson has named and significantly increased through the force of his own imagination is, as I have argued, Siddhartha.