Brief note: Joseph Knight

James Robertson's Joseph Knight (2003) reimagines the aftermath of a famous eighteenth-century case, Knight v. Wedderburn, in which Knight, a slave brought from Jamaica, successfully sued his master for his freedom.  In reality, we don't know what happened to Knight after the court case ended--a mystery that Robertson turns to good narrative effect.  Knight, in fact, is almost entirely missing from the novel; characters look for him, write about him, think about him, and argue in court about him, but it's only in the last few pages that readers encounter his POV.  Even the name "Joseph Knight" does not actually identify the man himself: "He had to keep his name [his African name] whole, away from others, away, especially from white people" (352).   This pointed evasiveness turns the novel into something of a mystery story, and Robertson indeed compares Archie Jamieson (employed by Wedderburn to search for Knight) to a detective. But it also disrupts readers' expectations about the narrative's outcome: most significantly, we do not "see" the trial from the participants' actual POVs, but only as Jamieson imaginatively reconstructs how it went [1]. Nor do we see the moment at which Knight's side wins the case; instead, another black man, Peter Burnet, retells the long-lost Knight's story of what happened.  Why deny the reader her payoff? In one sense, because the novel denies that the verdict is the point; in another, because elevating the verdict  means further displacing Joseph, who can only watch the lawyers as they argue for and against.  As Joseph wearily observes, he was "outwith their circle" (355).  Robertson thus puts the problem of narrating a slave's story front and center: how does one tell a story about a slave without stripping him even further (if such a thing is possible) of his agency? Denying us our expected climax offers one solution, since it reminds us that the victory we would be celebrating primarily belongs to...the white lawyers.  At the moment we might be most excited about the lawyers' triumph, we are abruptly shunted elsewhere.

[1]  Knight does something similar when, at the end of the novel, he "remembers" what one sailor must have said to another about the slaves--even though the event took place before he could speak English.