Transcript Oxherding Tale II - Colorado Mesa University

Oxherding Tale II
Mostly from Charles Johnson’s
Spiritual Imagination
By Jonathan Little
Hinduism vs. Buddhism
• Whereas, the Buddhist, in the Oxherding tales
and the four virtues and the eight fold path
encourages the deletion, erasure, removal of
self, the four stages of life in Hinduism,
encourage, to some extent, engagement and
social responsibility.
• http://uwacadweb.uwyo.edu/religionet/er/hinduis
m/HSLIFE.HTM
• See p. 147 – Oxherding. What is Williams’s
dharma?
Reb/Swamp Woman
• P. 49-50 OT
• Reb learned, from his great-grandfather “how to
send his kra forth to dwell in oxen in the cattle
kraals. It took up 10,000 hosts, this I, slipped
into men, women, giraffes, . . . perished,
pilgrimaged in the animal and spirit worlds,
dwelled peacefully in baobab trees. He learned
intimately the life of these objects and others,
died their unrecorded deaths, and ever returned
to himself richer, ready to assume a sorcerer’s
role.”
Reb as passive and aggressive
(not passive/aggressive)
• He lets ideas seep into him, sure, but “his ability
to project himself into others allows him to
anticipate their every move and outsmart them.”
• Reb as short for “Reb”ellious?
• Reb – phenomenology and Zen? (P. 77 OT)
•
•
•
•
Side 1 = young self, present self
Side 2 = suffering
Side 3 = white man/master, what Andrew becomes to Reb
Side 4 = blank – the Zen stage of selflessness?, the empty
circle of the eighth Oxherding tale?, the unfinished or
unwritten nature of Andrew’s development
Bannon as Reb’s reversal
• Bannon’s face is an amalgam of the features of
slaves who have been his victims.
• Andrew sees George in Bannon, because
George was one of his victims.
• Bannon represents Reb’s principles of inclusion,
absorption, gone awry, “revealing the monstrous
aspect of Johnson’s preferred aesthetic and how
it can potentially lead to a collation of profiles
that is only hideous and, finally, evil.”
Metafiction and the Slave Narrative
• What happens to Andrew’s identity for the reader
when this authorial first person voice interjects?
– He is displaced as the authority, the autobiographical
expert, witness, “experiencer” and becomes a
“symbol of the phenomenological and aesthetic
process. . . . He [becomes] a combination of
conventions of various literary traditions – the slave
narrative, the novel of manners, the picaresque novel,
the philosophical novel.”
Metafiction and Point of View
• P. 152 – what’s Johnson up to here?
• A first person narrator is usually limited to his or her own
thoughts.
• By writing a slave narrative – by definition first person –
in the third person, Johnson has created a first person
narrator who is “a palimpsest, interwoven with everything
– literally everything – that can be thought or felt . . . first
person universal[!]”
• This connects back to Zen and the Oxherding Tales in
that “individual perceivers both contain everything
through their perception and are responsible for
everything as the authors of their own inclusive beings.”