It Seemed He Fell
Charles Johnson's Buddhist-Christian novel about the "vaticide" of Martin Luther King, Jr
Charles Johnson has the exhilarating talent of discovering that absolutely any experience perfectly expresses the truths of Zen Buddhism. Middle Passage is a slender horror novel about a free black man in antebellum New Orleans who finds himself accidentally on a slave ship with a god; this experience only makes sense (within the novel) in a world where desire divides, and hides from us the truth that all Being is one. The guy is an amateur thief and when he steals stuff it’s also because desire divides and hides from us the truth that all Being is one. Cannibalism… translation… a hangover—purity of heart, my friends, is to write one thing.
Johnson’s writing is fearless, indulgent in technical terminology, gory, erudite, liberationist and conservative. And suffused with a deep, thwarted longing. So many of his stories are about what it’s like to live in a world where Zen Buddhism is true, but you don’t see it. Or, as I found myself thinking after I finished Dreamer, his novel about MLK’s maybe-fratricidal doppelganger, It’s as if in this book Buddhism is the true metaphysics, but not for people like us.
Chaym Smith, who looks just like MLK, is a figure of fractured consciousness and contradictions: His name hints at life (chaim) and also Cain, builder of cities. Dreamer merges consciousnesses, with MLK’s perspective sometimes taking over even the chapters seemingly narrated by Movement foot soldier Matthew Bishop. Here’s Bishop’s first glimpse of Smith: “His workshirt was torn in at least two places, and yellowed by his life in it; his trousers were splotchy with undecipherable stains and threadbare at the knees—he was the kind of Negro the Movement had for years kept away from the world’s cameras: sullen, ill-kept, the very embodiment of the blues.”
Oh, but here’s Bishop on Smith just a few pages later: “And then, suddenly, Smith looked straight at me, flashing that ironical, almost erotic smirk again, as if somehow we were co-conspirators, or maybe he knew something scandalous about me, though we’d met only minutes earlier.”
The outcast, the trickster, the seducer, the betrayed. Is MLK a vessel of faith or an empty shell? Can he be worn, like a costume, by one without faith? Are we “everlasting debtors—ontological thieves—in a universe of interrelatedness”? This is a book in which our inextricable implication in one another is expressed through characters who are scapegoats, representatives, impersonators; Christianity as the metaphysics of the patsy.
I kept thinking of Marilynne Robinson while I was reading this. I don’t know if I can really say, “If you love the Gilead novels, you’ll love this.” I don’t quite grasp what other people love in that series; I love Home the most because I’ll always suck a bruise, Gilead is beautiful in a slightly over-sighing way, I wrote about Lila here and didn’t write about Jack because I disliked it intensely. ANYWAYS my point is that if what you like in those novels is the exploration of what it means, theologically and emotionally and politically, to believe oneself damned—or, deeper, to perceive an inequality in the mind of God, where the offerings of some are accepted and some rejected, where there is always an elder brother whose blessing is stolen—well, you might try Dreamer, and see what you make of Chaym Smith.
By the end Johnson does skid too far into preaching. It starts to feel like he’s just telling us what he thinks. That may or may not be true, I’m just saying everything Bishop thinks feels plausible as something Johnson might want us to agree with, and I don’t love that in a novel, it’s like in an art gallery when the captions tell you what the paintings mean.
But before that—there’s a terrifying scene of a white (Catholic…) mob. There’s ferocious and ongoing critique of the Civil Rights Movement: Black leaders take “the body but not necessarily the soul of the mahatma’s method.” A demand for “economic justice” starts to reveal itself as materialism, patronage, defining liberation as homeownership. Direct action, maybe inevitably, provokes a reaction, rather than a reconciliation. “How to end evil without engendering error or evil. The question had apparently slowed down Howard [University]’s activists and the SCLC and the CCCO not at all.”
And King himself, though not merely Dreamer’s hero but its saint, is described like this: “[H]e was august, hugely present, relaxed, munificent, established in mercy, but at his center I felt a cemetery—a coolness and crypt—in which all regard for himself and his safety lay buried. ...In some way that I could not coax into clarity, his very presence challenged me and commented, without his having yet said a word, on my own staggering shortcomings as a man, a Negro, a Christian.” A provoker of reactions, a Joseph among his dreamless brothers.
Look, Dreamer isn’t perfect; there’s a romance that struck me as cliched, there’s various lacunae, a bit of overexplanation (though mostly the explicitly philosophical and theological passages are also wrenching, reflecting the hopes and shames of both the characters and The Reader). All these things, and yet also—a completely convincing portrayal of our American universe, tilting between a strangely Buddhist Christianity and a strangely Christian Buddhism, a country where we need to rediscover the word “sin” and where all sins are somehow suspended by being shared; a world where the Incarnation is treated as every form of integration has been treated since.
Memorial poster of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr via the Library of Congress and in the public domain.
Charles Johnson was a student of my favorite writer John Gardner, and I remember he told some story that they were arguing about Buddhism and Gardner slamming the table and saying something like "Buddhism is wrong!" And that prompting Johnson to answer him with the moral laboratory of fiction, which is a very Gardnerian way to do that.