• The quotation cited above expresses a positive function of storytelling. Are there also examples in the novel of characters who have fallen victim to false stories, either their own or those of others?
• The term metafiction refers to fictional works that call attention to their own making, breaking the illusion that the world created by the writer is real. Instead of wanting us to forget that the story is a work of fiction that has been made up, authors of metafictional texts keep reminding us that the world they have created is artificial. In what ways is Middle Passage metafictional?
• Why do you think Johnson chose a metafictional approach to telling his story? Think about the names Johnson assigns to people, places, and things. There are characters named Rutherford Calhoun, Squibb, Cringle, and Falcon, a country called Bangalang, and a slave ship christened the Republic.
• What are the implications and ironies of some of the names Johnson uses in Middle Passage? The Republic was unstable physically and the crew was constantly rebuilding it. The ship was, according to Calhoun, “a process” (p. 36). Cringle says that the ship would not remain the same as it was when leaving New Orleans; the Middle Passage would change it.
• Is the ship the metaphor for the process of life itself?
• If so, what is Johnson saying about the human condition? The historical Middle Passage was a source of horrific emotional, physical, and spiritual suffering for millions of Africans. In addition, it served as their introduction to the dehumanizing institution of slavery. Johnson has been criticized for transforming that grim reality into a comic (at least in part) adventure story.
• Do you agree with these criticisms?
• Why or why not?
2. Freedom and Bondage
Issues related to freedom and bondage play an important role in Middle Passage. The institution of slavery is an obvious form of physical bondage. Johnson seems to suggest that minds can be enslaved as well as bodies.
• Consider the ways that characters in the novel are enslaved — to marriage, to money, to ignorance, to habit, to false traditions, to debt, etc. Is anyone in the novel free? If so, who?
• What characters are enslaved? To what are they enslaved? Are they aware of their enslavement? Can they become free? And if so, how?
• What does freedom mean for Rutherford Calhoun? For you?
3. Identity and Transformation
Liminality is a sociocultural state of being in which a person is betwixt and between, neither this nor that, belonging to two groups and to none. The condition of being liminal often gives one license to do things and go places typically denied others. Rutherford Calhoun says that the Middle Passage has rendered him a “cultural mongrel” (p. 187), and thus liminal.
• In what ways is Rutherford Calhoun both a part of and separate from American society?
• In what ways is he similar to and different from his African-American contemporaries?
• In what ways is he both a part of and separate from the ship’s social system?
• What freedoms and what limitations arise from Rutherford Calhoun’s liminality? Throughout Middle Passage, there is a sustained examination of issues related to ethnic/racial identity, whether “White” or “Black,” “pure bred” or mixed-race Creoles, “American” or “African,” etc.
• Is “race” biological? Cultural? Social? Is it a useful category? Why or why not?
• In what ways have attitudes toward race changed since the mid-nineteenth century? In what ways have attitudes remained the same?
4. Union and Transcendence of Opposites
Johnson’s work frequently draws upon Eastern philosophy, and in this respect, Middle Passage is no exception. An appreciation of duality is central to many Eastern approaches to understanding the role complementary opposites (e.g., male/female, free/enslaved) play in shaping our lives and the universe we inhabit. When reading, be attentive to these dualist couplings of seeming opposites.
• Consider the opposition of shore and sea in the novel and the qualities that Johnson attaches to each. Why does Calhoun, who seeks freedom on the sea, long for “solid ground” (p. 204) at the novel’s end?
• What other oppositional pairings can you find? Are any transcended? If so, how?
5. Quest
American literature is filled with men and boys who leave the restrictions of society behind to seek a new, free life on the untamed frontier. In many respects, men of the sea have much in common with the rugged frontiersmen who followed the dictate “Go West, Young Man” in seeking both their fortune and freedom.
• How does Rutherford Calhoun’s sea tale follow the pattern of such mythic American quests?
• Is the sea, like the frontier, a place to test his masculinity? (See p. 41.) Does he successfully leave the past behind and stage his own rebirth? Rutherford Calhoun also observes at one point that there was an exaggerated sense of “manhood” on shipboard, one developed in the absence of women, who are said to be a civilizing influence. This conception of ship life seems to suggest that the sea is an antidote to the weakness of “civilization and urban life,” which is viewed as feminine.
• Do you agree that men are truly wild and women truly civilized? Why or why not?
• How is this dynamic played out in the relationship between Rutherford Calhoun and Isadora Bailey?
6. Historical Issues
Johnson’s Middle Passage is a work of fiction rather than historical scholarship. As such, creative license is taken with the historical setting in which the book’s narrative is situated. One example of such license is the author’s inclusion of anachronisms in the story he tells. An anachronism is something (or someone) that is historically out of place, such as a microwave in a movie set during the American Revolution. There are many anachronisms, most far less obvious than the microwave, in Johnson’s Middle Passage. There is, for instance, a mention of the Piltdown Man, an archeological hoax perpetuated in the early twentieth century, long after the time in which Johnson’s narrative is set.
• When you notice an anachronism, mark it, and as you read the book, try to come up with some possible reasons as to why an author would intentionally insert them into his story. In addition to inserting anachronisms into his tale, Johnson also invents people, places, and things that never existed in any historical context. The Almuseri, for example, are a fictional tribe. They are described as an ancient people of achievements when Europe was still embryonic, the repository of the achievements of all on the continent who had gone on before. There is also mention of “headhunting natives” residing near Bangalang (p. 44). The inclusion of such nonhistorical inventions may be used to serve a larger literary purpose.
• What aspects of the authors portrait of the African background are least accurate?
• What aspects are more accurate?
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