'Sorcery is dialectical:' Plato and Jean Toomer in Charles Johnson's 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice.'

African American Review, Winter, 1996 by Frederick T. Griffiths

Allan and Kabnis, both apprenticed as blacksmiths, are restive in their practical business. Fittingly it is a wagon wheel that wounds Richard on Freedom Day (152) and that Kabnis takes as a symbol of bondage: "Great God Almighty, a soul like mine cant pin itself onto a wagon wheel an satisfy itself in spinnin round" (234). The young men restlessly aim for "higher knowledge" (Sorcerer's 150) or "oratory" (Cane 223) but, failing of their primary ambitions (sorcery and school-teaching), revert desperately to darker powers: "Th form thats burned int my soul is some twisted awful thing that crept in from a dream, a godam nightmare, an wont stay still unless I feed it. An it lives on words. Not beautiful words" (Cane 224). To be sure, Kabnis is a far more evolved literary character than Allan Jackson, especially as an artist, and it is Kabnis, not the father figure, who recoils. But the concluding ambiguities are similar: Is this the end or the beginning of a pilgrimage when Allan is left in limbo, unclaimed by either heaven or hell and fallen upon by his father? In the judgment of Houston A. Baker, Jr., "The concluding scene witnesses Kabnis as a new-world creator, ascending from the cellar as the herald and agent of the dawn prophesied by Barlo in 'Esther' "(78). But his carrying of the ash bucket upstairs could also be taken as a via dolorosa (or melodramatic staging of one) or as the catharsis of an Invisible Man, now "bereft of illusion" (Moore 38). At the end of the Symposium it is a sign of perfect freedom and self-possession when Socrates, having drunk the symposiasts under the table, goes out to the dawn and to his daily rounds, presumably "seeking better game." The terms of Kabnis's ascent are certainly more troubling. The uplifting, torturing forms that are "burned" (224) and "branded" (223) on his soul are more incarnate than Platonic forms (or "ideas"), more terrible, and more ravishingly alive in history. In response to Socrates' impervious and blissful sobriety (there being no scandalous veritas to give itself away in vino), Toomer and Johnson side with the drunks. It is Saphathoral, demon of drunkenness, that Allan first envisions after his six tequilas (159). Kabnis glimpses eternal beauty through wet eyes: "Oh, I'm drunk an just as good as dead, but no eyes that have seen beauty ever lose their sight" (232).

Wider grounds for comparing The Sorcerer's Apprentice with Cane can quickly be catalogued, starting with their tripartite structures. Echoing the movement from canefield to classroom and back, Johnson's collection starts and ends with rural settings ("The Education of Mingo" and "The Sorcerer's Apprentice") and sandwiches Chicago in between. (Faith and the Good Thing also moves from South Carolina to Chicago and back.) Both collections draw on Buddhism, folklore, and other traditions to rework the Platonic parables of love and learning, whose liberatory promises have not well survived the school of slavery. In opposition to Platonic dualism, both Toomer and Johnson leave black and white - in racial, moral, aesthetic, and ontological terms - to be experienced only in combination and in process. Allan's insistence in respect to magic, morals, and careers on "getting it white" can stand as a telling negative example. It remains controversial how much further along as a theorist is Paul, who also loses the Good (Bona), in his fond conceit of the petals of roses and petals of dusk (152-53). Lewis sees Kabnis as trapped in such dualism: "Cant hold them, can you? Master; slave. Soil; and the overarching heavens. Dusk; dawn. They fight and bastardize you" (218).