Jean Toomer and the Prison-House of Thought: A Phenomenology of the Spirit

African American Review, Spring, 1996 by George Hutchinson

I must begin by admitting some embarrassment. Having recently written a foreword to a fine forthcoming anthology of Toomer's writings edited by the late Robert B. Jones, I looked forward to reviewing Jean Toomer and the Prison-House of Thought. It was a disappointment. Rather than speak in euphemisms I have been frank and critical, but I want to preface my remarks here by honoring Jones's many contributions to Toomer studies, including his edition of The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer (with Margot Toomer Latimer) and of Critical Essays on Jean Toomer.

The ambitious title of this book promises an intense philosophical exploration of Toomer's entire written corpus, and while it is useful for its survey of that corpus, the promise is never fully realized. What Jones presents is really a rapid reading of many texts, grouped according to the three main phases of the intellectual career (1918-1923, 1924-1939, and 1940-1955) in terms of a rather simplistic approach to literary modernism and philosophical idealism. In the end, despite a veneer of theoretical lingo, the book basically reinforces views of Toomer that have held sway since Waldo Frank's and Horace Liveright's disappointment with him as he evaded their "racial" expectations and abandoned a career as a literatus.

The book suffers grievously throughout from its fuzzy attempts at a theoretical frame derived from Georg Lukacs's critique of "Modernism" in literature. Working from the Marxian premise that the rationalization of life under capitalism leads to the commodification of human beings, alienation, and self-fragmentation, Lukacs used the concept of "reification" to repudiate various modernist styles that arose in response to these conditions without, in his terms, "realistically" critiquing them. Unfortunately, Jones shows no awareness of the later critiques of Lukacs, even friendly ones from such recent Marxist critics as Fredric Jameson. Rather, he adopts Lukacs's tendency to apply the concept of "reification" as a value judgment against whatever in his own view is not "realistic" (philosophically or aesthetically), and compounds the problem by using the concept so indiscriminately that it loses all purchase.

For example, "reified thinking" covers feelings of union with God and cosmos as well as feelings of alienation and estrangement from God. The problem is not just that these usages cancel each other out; since feelings of cosmic unity and alienation existed long before capitalism, it is hard to see them as examples of "reification" in any meaningful sense. According to Jones, symbolist and impressionist techniques show Toomer's thought to be "reified" - as do his religiosity, his contemplativeness, his attempts to merge genres, and, most crucially, his denial of his assigned "place" in American racial structures.

There is an irony in the latter charge. Toomer, raised on the racial boundary in a time of profound contradictions and conflict within the American ideology of "race," understood racialization as one form of the quantification and rationalization of human difference that developed with capitalism and modern slavery - part of what Lukacs would term "reification." He reacted against this reification in the direction of a search for "unity" that Jones repeatedly labels "reified thinking" because it is utopian and idealistic.

Taking off from Marx's statement that "idealism does not comprehend praxis, as it is devoid of 'sensuous human activity or real, lived experiences,' "Jones implies that, because of his idealism, Toomer did not know "real, sensuous activity as such" (3-4). This is a very odd charge, since Toomer prepared himself to be a teacher of "physical training" at the same time he developed his racial views. His desire to combine sensuous human activity with thought and feeling - which he believed would lead people beyond "racial" abstractions - is everywhere evident in his writing. His own lived experiences evidently put him at odds with American racial ideology.

It is past time to recognize that Toomer's racial theories developed in response to his experience and to his peculiar structural position in American society, and that they expressed an historically informed point of view. Jones faults him for ignoring the fanatical assaults on black humanity by the likes of Thomas Dixon, Lothrop Stoddard, and Madison Grant, retreating from an increasingly uncomfortable social reality into idealistic visions. There is truth to such charges, but Jones fails to note that one of the strongest motives behind racist arguments was the fear of "amalgamation" that rose to fever pitch with the end of slavery. The racists were scared to death that the U.S. would become a "mongrel" nation. Here is Thomas Dixon, Jr., in The Leopard's Spots (1902): "You can never get solidarity in a nation of equal rights out of two hostile races that do not intermarry. In a Democracy you can not build a nation inside of a nation of two antagonistic races, and therefore the future American must be either an Anglo Saxon or a Mulatto. And if a Mulatto, will the future be worth discussing?" In the same year that Cane appeared, Marcus Garvey promoted Earnest Sevier Cox's White America (1923), which identified miscegenation as the main threat to the United States.