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

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

The philosopher ends up rewriting the foundational tale of sexual harassment in the Academy, which comes from Plato's Symposium: the tale that the archetypal bad disciple Alcibiades tells about how he used his charms in a vain attempt to extort from Socrates some inside track on the miracles. Decades later, and still fishing for a reaction, Alcibiades tells how he finally trapped the old man in bed, but with no more results than from a father or elder brother (Symposium 217a-219e). "Alethia" tells the tale from the perspective of the professor, who of course has all the best intentions in the world.

He seems by the end to have played the Socrates role to the hilt, letting Wendy approach his bed in the dawn but then, with the terrible cunning of the chronic insomniac, falling asleep on her: ". . . I lifted my arm to let her move closer, and at last let my mind sleep" (112). Yet a phenomenologist might use "letting the mind sleep" as a figure for epoche, here the admission of another consciousness (with sex or without) to his one-person universe. It is hard to say just how much of the joke the professor tells on himself. The life of the "Negro professor" is, after all, just a "two-reel comedy" (101). Or too real, and no comedy at all? We can only guess how much experiential distance has been traveled from the dissociated hand that popped the pellet to, at the end, the arm lifted purposively to accommodate Wendy. Her consciousness still registers little in this memoir. Yet the philosopher, like Allan in his right-handed gesture of acceptance, may at least have made contact with his own body. In polar contrast to the preceding martial-arts tale, "China," "Alethia" hovers in the realm of disembodied mind. Again we can wonder if a single concluding gesture can change everything.

The one bit of "blood" the professor permits himself is not family, of which there is no mention, but a bit of race-inflected. academic style: "A skeptical old man, whose great forehead and gray forked beard most favor (when I flatter myself) those of that towering sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois" (99). The unnamed professor presents himself to us as a cameo, the black intellectual in. the Academy, but also as the type of the philosopher, since his description fits the ancient busts of Socrates fully as well as it does Du Bois. The immediately following reference to Toomer may also remind us of the portrait, again with beard and "high forehead," that is our introduction to Fred Halsey in "Kabnis" (16768), the portrait of his great-grandfather, "an English gentleman." This ancestor's "nature and features," "modified by marriage and circumstances," have been passed over the color line to Fred. This patriarch's evident "tendency to adventure" leads easily enough to the portrait gallery of Toomer's own racially mixed ancestors, including the bearded, high-foreheaded "adventurer" Grandfather Pinchback (Wayward 23-24). In other words, Johnson's professor distinguishes himself with the shiftiest of racial markers. This intensely self-conscious writer, knowing that he must construct for himself a body out of textual materials, telegraphs himself as a Du Bois type and disappears behind that mask. Du Bois himself disappears into the white frame of the Academy when the professor later pigeonholes "double consciousness" as "a brilliant stroke of classic Dualism" (102).