Mister Johnson

Joyce Cary

Description

The adventures and misadventures of a young Nigerian negro in the British colonial civil service.

A temporary clerk, still on probation, Mr Johnson has been in Fada, Nigeria, for six months and is already much in debt. Undaunted, he entertains on the grandest scale, with drums and smuggled gin. Not only that, he intends to pay a small fortune for his wife...

Sujets

• Historical
• African American
• Black
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 01 février 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781456636463
• Langue: English

Extrait

Mister Johnson
by Joyce Cary
Subjects: Fiction -- Action & Adventure; Africa

First published in 1952
This edition published by Reading Essentials
Victoria, BC Canada with branch offices in the Czech Republic and Germany
[e-mail]
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except in the case of excerpts by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
Mister Johnson
With a Prefatory Essay by the Author
JOYCE CARY














To
MUSA
' Remembered goodness is a benediction '


[Pg 5]
Mister Johnson
a prefatory essay by the author specially written for this edition


Mr. Johnson is a young clerk who turns his life into a romance, he is apoet who creates for himself a glorious destiny. I have been asked if heis from life. None of my characters is from life, but all of them arederived from some intuition of a person, often somebody I do not know, aman seen in a bus, a woman on a railway platform gathering her familyfor the train. And I remember the letters of some unknown African clerk,which passed through my hands for censorship during the war, and whichwere full of the most wonderful yarns for his people on the coast. Hewas always in danger from the Germans (who were at that moment twohundred miles away); he was pursued by wild elephants (who were evenfurther away from our station); he subdued raging mobs of 'this savagepeople' with a word. In his letters he was a hero on the frontier;actually he was a junior clerk in one of the most peaceful and sleepystations to be found in the whole country. That was one recollection.Another was of a clerk sent to me in a station in remote Borgu who oncespent all night copying a report, which he had done so badly in thefirst place that it could not go with the mail. I had not asked him todo the work again, for I saw that it was beyond him. I meant to do myown corrections. But at six o'clock in the morning, as I sat down to theletters, he appeared suddenly and uncalled (much to the indignation ofthe sleepy orderly at the door) and offered me the sheaf of papers,written in [Pg 6] his school copperplate (we did not own a typewriter) whichlooked so reassuringly firm, and was so delusive. I saw at once thatthis second copy was worse even than the first. A whole line was missingon the first page; whole paragraphs were repeated.
This clerk had been a disappointment; he was stupid, and he could not betrusted with the files. He seemed also, a rare thing in an African,unapproachable. He did not always respond even to good morning. Hisshyness had a sullen grieved air. What he now suddenly and unexpectedlydisclosed was not only a power of devotion but the imaginativeenterprise to show it.
Affection, self-sacrifice, are very common things in this world. Youfind them in any family, school, regiment, service, factory or business.But so is daylight, and yet we do feel a special moment of recognition(perhaps descended from times when every return of the lost sun seemed amiracle of grace) at every sunrise, we remember certain days, not merelysummer days, but all kinds of days which have struck us for some reasonwith special force of enjoyment, so that they stay with us for a longtime, for years. Everyone of us has pictures in his brain of somesparkling day among boats; a frozen lake with skaters, and a sky liketarnished silver, full of snow; as we have memory of some special act ofgenerosity.
So the clerk's effort stayed with me. I can still see his very look ashe shambled into the office (he was a shambling person in every way,with limbs too big for his flimsy body, and features too big for hisface), brought out the new copy and explained that he had been workingat it all night. What struck me so forcibly I suppose was that thisunhappy boy who was a failure at his job, who felt much more of an exilein Borgu, among the pagans whom he both feared and despised, than I did;who seemed so feeble and lost, was [Pg 7] capable of this dramatic gesture. Isay gesture because all he could say (unlike Johnson, he was veryinarticulate) was that he had not wanted me to 'catch trouble'; that is,to get a reprimand for being late with my quarterly report.
This poor clerk was nothing like Johnson, but I remembered him when Idrew Johnson. He reminded me too of something I had noticed as a generalthing, the warm-heartedness of the African; his readiness for friendshipon the smallest encouragement. I remember an occasion when I was ridingover a parade ground towards the end of the Kaiser war, when a sergeantdrilling his men in the distance suddenly dismissed them, and the wholehalf company came running to surround me. I could not even recognize themen. We had come together for one night in the midst of a very confusedand noisy battle (Banyo) when some lost units had attached themselves tomine.
No officer who has ever commanded a Nigerian company can forget theHausa Farewell, that tune upon the bugles played as he rides away forthe last time. But I don't know why, having met and greeted plenty ofveterans, I remember so vividly that scene on the parade ground—perhapsonly because I was taken by surprise, I can still see the sergeant'sface, the men running; I can't forget their grins (and laughter—anAfrican will laugh loudly with pleasure at any surprise), the handsstretched out, the shouts of greeting from the back where some young andshort soldier felt excluded. It is not true that Africans are eager butfickle. They remember friendship quite as long as they strongly feel it.
As for the style of the book, critics complained of the present tense.And when I answered that it was chosen because Johnson lives in thepresent, from hour to hour, they found this reason naïve andsuperficial. It is true that any analogy between the style and the castof a hero's mind [Pg 8] appears false. Style, it is said, gives the atmospherein which a hero acts; it is related to him only as a house, a period, isrelated to a living person.
But this, I think, is a view answering to a critical attitude whichnecessarily overlooks the actual situation of the reader. For a critic,no doubt, style is the atmosphere in which the action takes place. For areader (who may have as much critical acumen as you please, but is notreading in order to criticize), the whole work is a single continuousexperience. He does not distinguish style from action or character.
This is not to pretend that reading is a passive act. On the contrary,it is highly creative, or recreative; itself an art. It must be so. Forall the reader has before him is a lot of crooked marks on a piece ofpaper. From those marks he constructs the work of art which conveys ideaand feeling. But this creative act is largely in the subconscious. Thereader's mind and feelings are intensely active, but though he himselfis fully aware of the activity (it is part of his pleasure) he isabsorbed, or should be absorbed, in the tale. A subconscious creativeact may be a strange notion, but how else can one describe the passagefrom printer's ink into active complex experience. After all, a greatdeal of rational and constructive activity goes on in the subconscious.We hear of people who dream solutions of difficult mathematicalproblems. What is called intuitive flair is nothing but subconsciouslogic, where the brain works with the speed and short cuts of acalculating machine, upon material that no machine can deal with. Inshort, though talk about the mental machine, the mechanical brain, etc.,is highly misleading, for no brain is in the least like a machine, yetit is useful because that organism does tend to work automatically.Having been taught certain reactions, it will repeat them, on the samestimulus, till further orders; [Pg 9] that is, until the intelligence steps inagain to ask what exactly that reaction is worth.
But until the moment of criticism (which also arises from thesubconscious. It, so to speak, rings a bell for the managing director towarn him that there is trouble in the factory which can't be solved byany routine operation) the reader's conscious self is at liberty to feelwith the people of the book; he is at one with them. So if they are inthe past tense he is in the past, he takes part in events that havehappened, in history, over there. This is a true taking-part, whetherthe history is actual history or a novel. A reader can tremble still atthe crisis of Waterloo; or rage at the fate of Huss. He has in War andPeace a concentrated and lasting experience. But it is still a special,an historical experience; it derives much of its quality from therecognition of general causes, it is charged with reflection (such as aman among actual events may use even at a crisis, and in the middle ofdistress, but first withdrawing himself from among them), withcomparison and judgment.
But with a story in the present tense, when he too is in the present, heis carried unreflecting on the stream of events; his mood is notcontemplative but agitated.
This makes the present tense unsuitable for large pictures 'over there';it illuminates only a very narrow scene with a moving ray not much morecomprehensive than a hand-torch. It can give to a reader that suddenfeeling of insecurity (as if the very ground were made only of a deeperkind of darkness) which comes to a traveller who is bushed in unmappedcountry, when he feels all at once that not only has he utterly lost hisway, but also his own identity. He is, as they say, no longer sure ofhimself, or what he is good for; he is all adrift like sailors from somewreck, who go mad, not because of the privations inside, but outside,because they have nothing firm to rest their [Pg 10] minds on, becauseeverything round them is in everlasting motion.
This restless movement irritates many readers with the same feeling,that events ar