'Sorcery is dialectical:' Plato and Jean Toomer in Charles Johnson's 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice.' (philosopher; authors)

"The Sorcerer's Apprentice"

Johnson's collection of "tales and conjurations" ends uncannily in a conjuration with an uncertain outcome. With all the good intentions in the world Allan Jackson has finished his apprenticeship to the Allmuseri sorcerer Rubin Bailey, who once healed his father's hand and now in old age seeks to pass on his art. In the way of good sons, Allan aims high to repay what his father Richard lost in slavery and thereby instill pride, since paternal affection is not forthcoming. This zealous student was once seized - literally seized - by early success, though it "made him feel unessential, anonymous, like a tool in which the spell sang itself" (156). He remains impatient, unsure of his skills, and adamant that his White Magic must know no taint or ambiguity. He must "unfailingly do good" (157).

From Goethe's "Zauberlehrling" and Disney's Fantasia we know the trouble that over-eager apprentices get into when left to the sorcerer's devices. Ritual pyrotechnics have been mentioned. The terrors of All Hell Breaking Loose are a required part of the curriculum for Faith, Hawk, and Rutherford, the youthful seekers of Johnson's novels. Though respectively charred, caught by the Soulcatcher, or trapped in the belly of the beast, these other phenomenological pilgrims come to see differently and live to tell about it.

Yet for Allan, nothing. There are demons to be sure, but they will not have him. Failing to cure a client sent by Rubin and thereby falling short of his own steep standards for White Magic, Allan has despairingly consigned himself to the powers of darkness. After seven tales we are entitled to a conjuration. Yet Allan's ordeal sounds like nothing so much as the thesis defense from hell, with professional credentials, rather than a soul, hanging in the balance:

"Because," said the demon of the West, "to love the good, the beautiful is right, but to labor on and will the work when you are obviously beneath this service is to parody them, twist them beyond recognition, to lay hold of what was once beautiful and make it a monstrosity. It becomes black magic. Sorcery is relative, student - dialectical, if you like expensive speech. And this, exactly, is what you have done with the teachings of Rubin Bailey." (167)

At the story's end the demons leave, "seeking better game" (169).

Here, against tradition, is a sorcerer's apprentice who dabbles in dark powers and gets less, much less, than he bargained for. Instead of an easeful fall into damnation, Allan gets an earful of recycled Platonic distinctions: Black magic is not a "what" - the devilish antithesis of white magic - but a "how" - the good pursued wrongly and loved insufficiently. Yet as the magister ludi Johnson vanishes from his own abruptly ending text, might not his readers feel that they are getting less than they bargained for? On the shelf beside the three novels, a volume entitled The Sorcerer's Apprentice promises something like another Bildungsroman. Not until this final story do we see the world unfolding through sincere young eyes like those of Faith, Hawk, and Rutherford, and even here it remains unclear how the epiphany has transformed Allan's experience. Unclaimed of either the Good or the Evil that he sets so firmly apart, Allan seems to end up in narrative limbo as well. His worried father has come looking for him and at Allan's comforting gesture falls "heavily toward his son" (169), giving the demons their exit cue. We can only wonder why Richard falls: in rescue? in recognition? in death? No clear-cut moral leaps out at us. Bring on the dancing brooms.

I propose to work from this cliffhanger to some observations about how, within the traditions of philosophical fiction, short forms end. Be they parables, fables, short stories, or memoirs - to cite only the forms in The Sorcerer's Apprentice - such narratives must of course close without foreclosing the author's ongoing speculative and, in Johnson's case, mythopoetic undertaking; that is, (in "expensive speech") without short circuiting the dialectic. "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" puts out strong warnings about hasty conclusions. In vainly stalking some certifiable happy ending for himself, poor Allan keeps trying to pin down Rubin as to recipes, formulas, propositions, and some moral to hang on to. But, no, quoth the demon, sorcery is dialectical - not a "what" to be copied from Rubin but the "how" of Allan's own pursuit of the good. The black of the black magic may be only in the viewer's blind spots. Some such explanation of how the dead end was reached is more than enough to end a Platonic dialogue. Allan should now "know what he does not know." Exit the philosopher, "seeking better game," to other dialogues on other days. A measure of indeterminacy here may shepherd the reader back to Johnson's novels, as does the story's nineteenth-century setting after the preceding six present-day narratives. Composed in tandem with Oxherding Tale (Johnson, "Philosopher" 14), these eight tales resonate with its philosophical concerns (Nash 137-82).

"The Sorcerer's Apprentice," however, is not a Platonic dialogue, though it embeds the form, but rather a parable set both in the strong time of "once upon a time" and in the unfinished present of African America: "There was a time, long ago, when many sorcerers lived in South Carolina, men not long from slavery . . ." (149). Even Plato, though he may let discussions trail off, does not bring the curtain down so abruptly. For example, we can trace Bazazath's lecture back to Socrates' distinction of "what" and "how" at Agathon's drinking party (Symposium 199c-204c). (Recall that Allan has had six tequilas earlier in the evening.) Eros is not so much a god, and therefore good, as a process, an energy toward the good (properly: a daimon, 'mediator,"instigator'). Allan has also gotten his theology wrong in expecting the demons to be fiends when in fact they are agents of the good - daimones in the Platonic sense - and more didactic than devilish. This famous Platonic scene also figures in the ritual encounter ("In This Sign Conjure" [191]) at the conclusion of Faith and the Good Thing (1974), when the Swamp Woman observes to Faith:" 'Dialectics don't hold to no single truth, child; it reaches out for the Good Thing, affirming and negating itself until the Good Thing's regained'" (189).

Yet these antecedents only make the ending of "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" seem the more enigmatic, for in the Symposium and Faith they lead on to scenes that stage and resolve the relationship of teacher and student. Socrates proceeds to rehearse what he learned from his "instructress in love," the priestess Diotima, about how Love at First Sight can be sublimated into Truth at First Sight, and thereby liberate the lover from physical desires - whereupon the sober symposiasts are invaded by Socrates' most infamous admirer, the general Alcibiades, who drunkenly impersonates Dionysus and rails about Socrates as inspiration and tease. From a heart more broken and baffled than well instructed, Alcibiades recounts Socrates' imperviousness to drink, to danger, to cold, and even to particular affections (e.g., his own). Here at the brink of military disaster (416 BCE), when Alcibiades has enthralled Athens to his will, his barbed reminiscences reflect boyish hurt at Socrates' role as daimon, facilitator, dispassionate "midwife of ideas." The passions stirred in men less perfect than Socrates may need someplace to go. Naturally, Plato means us to emulate Socrates' freedom from vanity, from appetite, from body. The Swamp Woman, by contrast, is "a midwife for the things hiding like tumors beneath a man's personality"(17). Like Diotima and Socrates, she sends her disciple off to seek the "good thing" (in Chicago, as it happens); unlike Diotima or Socrates, the witch is there to receive her disciple at the end of the quest and, in a final act of good faith, to switch skins with her. Among the things that the Swamp Woman knows is "whether Plato was really Socrates" (195), a proposition that would mean something quite different to her (in her shape-shifting, Buddhist, skin-switching way) than it would to Plato, as he puts words into his mentor's mouth. The reciprocity between Faith and the Swamp Woman answers the broken connection between Socrates and Alcibiades, as well as the Platonic dualism of mind and body. Plato's philosopher, having seen the true light, regretfully returns to the cave blinded and unbelievable. Faith's return to the swamp provokes jokes and rebirths.

Much less narrative resolution follows Bazazath's lecture. Importantly it is a concerned father who intrudes on the scene, rather than the sorcerer or a drunken Athenian general. Rubin's greatest healing may be to bring father and son together through the collapse of Allan's vain ambitions (Rushdie 18083). Richard comes to the conjuring out of concern, and Allan is held back by the cost of his death to his father. Last of the things that he now knows that he does not know is "how to comfort his father" (168), as he does with a wordless and right-handed gesture. Hitherto he has copied Rubin's left-handedness. Filiation provides a suitable Johnsonian end note for the collection and, indeed, something of a surprise after its thematic absence in the preceding tales, four of whose protagonists have been childless men facing mid-life crises. With fathers and sons we return to the world of the novels, whose protagonists are led to climactic recognitions of the meaning of their fathers' demises: Faith at her rape, Hawk in the Soulcatcher's tattoos, Rutherford with the shape-shifting god in the hold of the Republic. Though a living father needs no pyrotechnics, how strange it is to find Richard present and unaccounted for, and provoking immortal indifference:

Awkwardly, Allan lifted Richard's wrist with his right hand, for he was right-handed, then squeezed, tightly, the old man's thick, ruined fingers. For a second his father twitched back in an old slave reflex, the safety catch still on, then fell heavily toward his son. The demons looked on indifferently, then glanced at each other. After a moment they left, seeking better game. (168-69)

Some meanings are clear: The very hand mended by Rubin reveals that the wounds of slavery are not so easily healed as Allan once assumed. Allan spontaneously outgrows his affectation of left-handedness. Yet the reader's drift into a comforted sentimentality is disrupted by Richard's recoil and especially by his fall.

Enigmatic falls come to mind from the end of another collection, Toomer's Cane:

[Ralph Kabnis] starts across the floor. Half-way to the old man, he falls and lies quite still. . . . Carrie steps forward to help him. Kabnis is violently shocked at her touch. He springs back. . . . Her palms draw the fever out. With its passing, Kabnis crumples. (230-38)

"Kabnis," like "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," ends with a nocturnal ceremony. Just as Allan chalks a horseshoe and finally draws his father into it, the rising sun rings Carrie K. and Father John in its "soft circle" as Kabnis departs (239). "Fathers" emerge at the end of these two collections from the "muted folk" (Cane 212) of slavery, objects of reverence and guilt. Allan has his own understanding of how his father's remoteness might result from the "world of nightriders" (153). Father John is a richer and more ambiguous historical symbol for Lewis and Kabnis, partly biblical (Lewis: "A mute John the Baptist of a new religion" [211]) and arguably classical. Is his blindness prophetic, like that of Tiresias and Oedipus? Has he, like Plato's philosopher, seen the true light that leaves him blinded when he returns to this dark cave?

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).

Few authors could be less well served than are the mercurial Toomer and Johnson by generalizations at this level. Let me use two specific themes to draw the Symposium, "Kabnis," and "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" into some kind of alignment or, better, circle. The first is intellectual: the use of questions. The second is physical: the movement of limbs.

Allan asks too many questions. But how, by Socratic standards, could anyone ask too many questions? Rubin models his art, lives his art, sometimes explains his art, and always recommends knowing a trade. He does not systematically interrogate. Instead, it is Allan who proceeds by inquiry:" 'Did I do that?'" (154). "'Wrong? . . . Then why do you do it?' "(155). "'Without you? . . . How can I learn without you?'" (157). Consider his internal monologue: "Yet still he wondered: Was sorcery a gift given to a few, like poetry? Did the Lord come, lift you up, then drop you forever?" (158-59). Even as he faces down the demons he formulates the inescapably obvious as a question: "Was this surrender the one thing the Sorcerer could not teach?" (168). He cannot even meet his demise without a question:" 'Then,' Allan asked, 'you must destroy me?' It was less a question than a request" (167).

Converting desires into questions is certifiably Socratic and still sacred in the Academy. However, Allan's questions have less to do with curiosity or open-minded inquiry than with coercing clarity, imposing boundaries, protecting his own position, and reducing the world to a black-white dualism. His fervent and self-sacrificing docility misses the Socratic point, which is still the Liberal Arts point, for he substitutes imitation for understanding, seeks certitude though bafflement is the start of wisdom, aims for practical advantage where only self-forgetfulness can yield useful results. As in Plato, the young man who seeks advancement more than understanding cannot progress; vicarious paternal ambitions are not welcome. To be sure, this is a tale about sorcerers, not philosophers, who for millennia have demonized sorcery, superstition, and rhetoric (Kabnis's "oratory") as the Enemy. Such distinctions did not register on the Athenian jurors who convicted Socrates of corrupting the young and introducing new gods, and Plato himself repeatedly gets a story out of Socrates' ability to "enchant" the young. Those impressionable young Athenians should in time realize that they were only feeling the pull of sophia, the magnetic power of ideas. But the failed pupils - the Allan Jacksons of the dialogues - carry the story. Very like Kabnis with Father John, Alcibiades steals the show by upbraiding and mocking and eulogizing Socrates so as to provoke a response: viper, siren, hero, sorcerer, unseducible tempter! Though Socrates does not give provocation through a muteness like that of Richard and Father John, his thwarted admirers might experience his impermeable irony as much the same thing. In the Symposium, the monstrousness of Alcibiades' historical role helps Socrates to emerge unscathed in our sympathies. However, the coercions and broken promises of education are put in quite a different light by foregrounding milder sorts such as Allan and Kabnis, and at a moment of great historical contradictions. Allan, as noted, misuses the "Socratic method." But we may wonder how it is that Socrates' own questions are not themselves a way of coercing clarity, imposing boundaries, and reducing the world to a black-white dualism.

In Allan's initial phase as a striver, a questioner, and a leaver, he aims for the freedom and immunity that we are meant to admire in Socrates, but that we can only see as loss for this father and son. Allan's submissive courting of mastery (" 'You are the greatest magician in the world . . . '" [151]) betrays the adoring, ambitious eyes of the would-be master. He risks creating a displaced version of the very master-slave pathologies that he meant to heal and efface. Kabnis's bombastic swerves from adoration to denunciation provide a second and more immediate source for Allan's distancing questions. Consider his tirade at Father John: "Death. What does it mean t you? To you who died way back there in the 'sixties. What are y throwin it in my throat for? Whats it goin to get y?" (231). In an evocation and travesty of the call-and-response tradition, Kabnis uses questions to forestall response (Hajek 188-90). Both Allan and Kabnis are caught in the historical moment, not long from slavery, when the promises of uplift start to ring hollow. The enslaved fathers had been permitted no questions. In Oxherding Tale, as Hawk goes from Cripplegate to Leviathan, the privileged student's "Do you mean to say . . .?" becomes the slave's "Of course and Quite so" (61). Though the truth may set men free, the sons' limitless and compulsive questioning does not signify liberation but rather its absence. Kabnis's and Allan's overreaction to the muteness of the fathers becomes its own deafness, protection from a freedom they do not trust.

In intellectual style, then, Allan fails for being insufficiently open to the dialectic, as the demon observes. Yet on other counts the apprentice is all too Socratic: in his manipulative questioning, his striving for dispassion, his trust in some higher dualism. After his final question, he ends his role in listening and touching. Let me return now to his father's final recoil and to a second, physical theme shared by Plato, Toomer, and Johnson.

Richard's ruined fingers are a focus of the philosophical work in the story. When injured by the wagon wheel on Freedom Day, he "stared like it might be a stranger's hand" (152). Socrates would approve and indeed illustrates the claims of the whole over the part through men's willingness to amputate hands or feet if they are convinced that these parts are bad for them (Symposium 205e). Against Socrates' firm sense of boundary, Richard's numbed response may provide a Johnsonian corollary to the famous discussion in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception of the body's continuing experience of an amputated limb (73-97). Johnson inversely shows how living nerves can remain outside of experience - attached but numb - in ways that demonstrate the social and historical construction of the neural pathways. That is, Richard's non-experience of his own pain, as well as of his own emotions, is to be related to the wounds of slavery, the non-ownership of his own body. What is it that living chattel would experience of their (non)selves? Conventionally the slave is experienced as the master's "right arm." In the first story of the collection a new slaveholder observes," 'It's like I just shot out another arm and that's Mingo' "(10). Does not then the slave as non-person, socially cut off, become the "phantom limb" of the American corporate body, through which it may most tellingly experience itself? In the context of Aristotle's formulation of the slave as "living tool" (see below), Allan's resistance to experiencing himself as the "tool" of the spell becomes both more forgivable and more pernicious. He resists possession because his father was once possessed in another and damaging way.

If the ending of The Sorcerer's Apprentice resonates with the ending of Cane, it may thereby echo Toomer's own circular strategy of sending the reader back to what precedes: "plunges into Kabnis, emerges in Karintha" (Toomer to Frank). In inviting the reader to circle back from the problematic (non)ending - the final ambiguous plunge - of "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," Johnson may also draw more of Toomer and Plato into the loop. Let me follow the trail back a step.

"Alethia"

The comparison of Toomer and Johnson is a vast undertaking that I can only commend to the reader. And it is not my idea. At the midpoint of The Sorcerer's Apprentice, the philosophy professor of "Alethia" very nearly imposes it as an assignment on the academic reader. With professorial dissimulation as "hardly a man to conjure a fabulation," he disclaims any emulation of "that hallucinatory prose-poem called Cane" (99) before building up to a prose-poem about his own hallucinatory (or at least psychedelic) experience of return - if not south at least to his native South Side. As in "Kabnis," the nocturnal rite that he recounts ends with an epiphanic dawn. He was in an upstairs bedroom rather than in the Hole of Halsey's shop, but one "cool as a basement" (112). Though he is a phenomenologist, tenured, and fifty, his pursuit of alethia (Greek for 'truth') echoes that of Ralph Kabnis, minus the dialect and with some added metaphysics: ". . . alethia meant the celebration of exactly that ugly, lovely black life (so it was to me) I'd fled so long ago in my childhood, as if seeing beauty in every tissue and every vein of a world lacking discipline and obedience to law were the real goal of metaphysics . . ." (104).

The professor is a conjurer of quite a different sort than are Rubin or the Swamp Woman, for he strives to live up to the phenomenological responsibility of "conjuring only those visions from perceptual chaos that let be goodness, truth, beauty" (104). As Allan learned, such fastidious self-censorship precludes spirit possession. The specters that the professor calls up witness to a different art and one intriguingly close to Johnson's own: He is a name-dropper, allusion-maker, and recycler of classic philosophical narratives. This "first-rate tale of romance" (99) recounts how his lonely vigil in the ivory tower was disrupted by a student in need of a "B" and willing to offer her favors or, failing that, to play Potiphar's wife. His white colleagues, "shaken by Wittgenstein" (102), are given to such hanky-panky, but he, ever the self-pitying true believer, burns the midnight oil to read Hebrew, Greek, and Sanskrit. He had already discerned an oversight in his research on Husserl's co-worker Max Scheler: ". . . it came to me, sadly . . . that living for knowledge, ignoring love, as I had, was wrong, because love - transcendental love - was knowledge" (103). In luring him off to a wild party in his old neighborhood, the student Wendy offered experience that he can now take as authentic, perhaps even as the missing experiential link for his unfinished manuscripts. Thus imposed upon, he viewed his hand with a dissociation reminiscent of Richard's trauma, though here he is only trying to duck responsibility: "My hand had brought the pellet to my lips without telling my brain" (110). The first time is tragedy and the second, farce: The wound of slavery has become the wound of tenure and professional ethics. Drugs and dancing took the professor beyond his usual boundaries: "If I existed at all, it was in this kaleidoscopic party, this pinwheel of color, the I just a function, a flickerflash creation of this black chaos, the chaos no more, or less, than the I. There was an awful beauty in this" (110-11). This awful beauty, affirmed in every undisciplined vein and tissue, may be second-hand Kabnis, as well as phenomenological field study. The unpublished life is not worth leading. As often in Johnson, the ghost of Plato is not far behind.

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).

There is "a first-rate tale of romance" to be told about scholars pursuing the vanishing Lady Truth (or Beauty or the Good). Such is the fatal quest of the monastic tutor Ezekiel Sykes-Withers for the fabricated Althia in Oxherding Tale (Nash 161-62). There is a single outcome: The Lady vanishes. In ways appreciated by Toomer and Johnson, Plato made canonical quite another plot: The Philosopher vanishes, leaving convictions unsettled and perhaps hearts broken. In the Symposium, Alcibiades, man and youth, is twice eluded by a Socrates scampering off into the dawn. The iconic women of Cane and their symbol-seeking admirers participate in both plots. Does the Good (Bona) elude Paul, or has he already chosen the yet higher good of celebrating his discovery for the doorman? Is Avey vanishing as she dozes off on the narrator, or is he vanishing on her as he withdraws value from her sleeping form and looks to the Capitol dome that drifts like a ghost ship in the dawn? When Socrates can go out into another day of business after the symposium, it is a sign of enviable stamina; Kabnis's departure into the dawn is more troubling. When Bona asks," 'Since when have men like you grown cold?'" Paul replies," 'The first philosopher' "(Cane 150-51).

Whatever it is that Johnson's readers see the professor as admitting to his bed or admitting in his story may be largely a projection of what they themselves would do under the circumstances - a fitting end for "Alethia" as a study in solipsism. A comparable suspension ends the preceding story, "China," also a story of mid-life crisis: With failing vision Evelyn glimpses her husband, now transformed by kung fu, suspended in a flying kick twenty feet off the ground. Rudolph, the 54-year-old Chicago postman, experiences a physical transformation equal and opposite to the professor's mental transformation, and one with its own risks of one-sidedness and isolation. The fussy and now forlorn Evelyn sees her rejuvenated husband fading on her, emotionally as well as visually, for she is not the beneficiary of his rejuvenated flesh. She reaches acceptance in seeing his levitation: ". . . and the fighting in the farthest ring, in herself, perhaps in all the world, was over" (95). But what kind of let be is this? She may be accepting her retinal blindness or be taking comfort in its temporary remission at the moment of her husband's triumph. Does she see him escaping gravity, middle age, or herself? At the end of Cane's "Esther," it is loss that brings blindness to the young dreamer when she is rebuffed by King Barlo: "She steps out. There is no air, no street, and the town has completely disappeared" (48).

As befits autobiography, the truth or (to honor the Greek etymology) the 'undisclosing' of "Alethia" emerges from self-referentiality so turned in upon itself, as in a hall of mirrors, as to create a timeless infinity. The narrator has made a return southward, backward, and downward that, unlike Kabnis's return, has only taken him to the other side of town and to the other side of his own brain. Should he, like Kabnis, lose his teaching job, it would be another story. Only the lifted arm at the end might pry open the hermetic solipsism of this phenomenologist, who here is translating himself back into the text for us. In "Popper's Disease" another isolated professional, a doctor, gets trapped with "a sphincteral snap" (132) in the space ship of his own head. In "Alethia" the professor's light-footed escape from scandal and perhaps from intersubjectivity (does Wendy ever really register?) throws into higher relief another - and vibrantly open - universe in the text, namely, the intertextuality that brings legions of self-accounting I's (themselves fabricated from earlier I's) to dance on the head of this single pin. The professor's Quellen from the canons of autobiography are almost beyond count. The Symposium has been noted. For the professor, as for Alcibiades, the blindspots of the current apologia reveal the delusions that shaped the original experience - the bad learner he was when he had the chance. There is more. As is theorized in the didactic Melvillian interludes of Oxherding Tale (118-19, 152-53), one line of the autobiographical tradition restages the "Platonic movement from ignorance to wisdom, nonbeing to being" (119) via St. Augustine and the slave narratives. The professor has explicitly claimed Du Bols. We may also see a subterranean succession leading via Dostoevsky through Toomer's Kabnis, Ellison's Invisible Man, and Wright's Underground Man. Yet for all the professor's emancipatory hopes, his "manumission of first-person viewpoint" runs up against the white frame - not of the abolitionists, but of the ivory tower, by which he lets himself and Du Bois be defined. But, then, the mind itself is prone to such vanishing acts, especially as it experiences itself in autobiography. This is what Johnson calls "Popper's disease": ". . . It's the Self and There is no cure" (146). Yet for Johnson, this concatenating allusion (Toomer, Du Bois, Scheler, Hegel, Kant, Plato, et al.) is not just the drag of tradition, but is itself a way of experiencing. As the Swamp Woman knows, Plato was no mere ventriloquist but on the page really lived as Socrates. This textual hall of mirrors, crowded with the most interesting people imaginable, becomes in its hermetic self-enclosure a kind of epoche in which we inevitably over-schooled and solipsistic readers are invited to get lost - but then keep moving. For Chicago, like the cities of Cane, is only a way station.

"The Education of Mingo"

To complete this sketch of the averted allegories and unfolding arguments of The Sorcerer's Apprentice, I need to go back to the opening and earliest story in the collection, "The Education of Mingo" (1977). This ante-bellum parable about education and slavery is one bookend for the collection, with "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" as the other, and six contemporary tales in between. Paralleling and reversing the aging Allmuseri sorcerer Rubin and his overeager apprentice Allan are an all-too-astute Allmuseri apprentice, Mingo, and an aging Illinois farmer who, like Allan, attempts to kilt too many birds with one stone. For the childless and lonely Moses Green attempts to give himself a helpmate, companion, son, heir, and alter ego in the single person of his slave and pupil Mingo. Like Allan, he has all the best intentions in the world, perhaps even emancipation (he is a Moses), not to mention great innocence (Green). His missing sense of boundary and distinction puts him at a polar remove from the over-distinguished, over-distinguishing Chicago professor in his ivory tower. And thereby hangs a creation tale, in which Moses the lonely Monad supplies himself with an Other to be shaped in his own image much as God shapes Adam, or Frankenstein constructs his monster, or a writer plants his "spitting image" on the page. From Moses's primordial confusion the burgeoning Mingo brings alive linked distinctions: slave and master, black and white, mind and body, ultimately self and other ("'Mingo, you more me than I am myself'" [22]). Mingo learns rapidly by imitation, though with his own slight category confusions, such as in revering hawks and killing strangers. Leaping over Eve and the issue of sexual difference, the parable confronts the advent of violence in Cain and Abel. The innocently compliant Mingo twice acts on Moses's own murderous and unadmitted thoughts, which Moses finally owns up to: "'It was me set the gears in motion'" (22). In this Fall, it is master and slave who together are fugitives from the garden - to Missouri, as it happens.

In this story Johnson uses the tabula rasa of Moses's consciousness to sketch some elementary "lessons" about will and act, about self and other, and about the school of slavery. In recognizing that in Mingo he has "'shot out another arm'" (10), Moses reveals catastrophic historical blindness but also experiences intersubjectivity in ways still lost on the professor of "Alethia." Johnson cites "Mingo" as an example of how, in the world of parable, unseen "esoteric and moral laws" may move the narrative in ways lost on the protagonist (Being 49). As parable "Mingo" is a creation tale that can stand as a tragicomic prologue not only to the tales in Apprentice but arguably to the whole project of Johnson's novels. The evocation of Cain and Abel also recalls, even at a great distance in tone, Toomer's meditation on the warring brother races in Cane. Moreover, the name of the opinionated schoolmarm Harriet Bridgewater (widow of Henry) sounds sufficiently like Harriet Beecher Stowe (sister of Henry) to recommend the story as a subversive prologue to abolitionist fiction: an etiological tale about how education and slavery came into the world together that blurs the distinction between the slaveholders and the self-appointed emancipators, as well as between those who would deny the slave's selfhood and those who would appropriate and live through that self. This account of master and slave as they are finally cast out together is echoed in the Fall that starts off Oxherding Tale (1982), from which Andrew Hawkins takes his endlessly mixed and divided nature. An amiable casualness about boundary leads to sexual switching that casts both George Hawkins and Jonathan Polkinghorne into permanent domestic exile. Again, as with Moses and Mingo, we find a white (step)father encompassing a black (step)son with an educational program, as in the later case of Peleg Chandler and Rutherford Calhoun in Middle Passage. The failure of these more classical pedagogies to be liberatory can be predicted already from Moses's naive assumption that enslaving and instructing are two sides of the same coin. What Johnson excludes from "Mingo" is the myth of education as the automatic and sufficient liberation from slavery, rather than a process eternally at risk of becoming slavery's twin. Johnson elaborates the theme in the slave ship Republic of Middle Passage. Moses's various poses as master - father (and Father), teacher, and owner - all implicate each other.

Moses attempts nothing that Plato would call education, and properly so, for Plato lets ineducability define the nature of the slave. As self-appointed guardian of the classical tradition, the addled Harriet disparages Moses's project by citing Aristotle: "'Slaves are tools with life in them, Moses,'" and usefully adds a corollary, "'and tools are lifeless slaves'" (10). The implications for hammers, ploughs, and brooms are intriguing. Both Aristotle and Plato, she points out, were slaveholders. Harriet is pushed to other absurdities, including her explanation that "being and having were sorta the same thing" (8). The act of confusing man for tool, licensed by Aristotle, leaves other categories to fall like so many dominoes. The myth addresses a stage of the world before Plato - the powers of education before philosophers got hold of it.

The carousing philosopher and the Faustian Allan did not, try as they might, get much hell to break loose. Moses's confusion of owning, teaching, and being unleashes violence at quite another level. And, to repeat, Johnson uses the structures of myth to nip moral simplification in the bud. There is no tempter in this tale. This is, and radically is not, a "New Testament parable" (4) because the master (owner/teacher/Father) does not blame but joins his creature in the banishment from paradise, a felix culpa stemming from profound and profoundly confused love. Moses is at a polar remove from the plot of "the Professor vanishes." Like the Swamp Woman of Faith, he takes responsibility for his pupil. He is no "midwife of ideas" but is himself bearing and born in his alter ego Mingo. Moses is both wise and rustic in "cultivating the good" (5) in the human soil of Mingo. Having mistaken the slave for his own right arm, Moses does reasonably stay his trigger finger at the end, a great act of reason, though not to be dissociated from the "safety catch" (169) that will remain on for Richard Jackson generations later.

Mingo, Richard, Allan, and the professor (and with him the characters of the other five stories) could be arranged chronologically as stages in a single history. Instead, Johnson's tripartite structure, like that of Toomer, brackets the contemporary, urban, and professional between the opening and concluding parables of the rural past. There is nothing so clear and binding in the tales' final epiphanies as to defer the reader from circling back in loops that draw in Toomer and Plato (and Du Bois, Wright, Reed, Hegel, and many others). Such intertextual looping in the Lifeworld of Johnson's fiction is not a matter of Quellen and critique, but a process of reciprocal generation. As Hawk learns at the end of Oxherding Tale, "I was my father's father, and he my child" (176). The Swamp Woman, or Diotima in the skin of the Swamp Woman, knows that the question of whether Plato was really Socrates (or The Sorcerer's Apprentice is really a sequel or prequel to Cane, or to Plato's dialogues) admits of endless and various answers.

Works Cited

Baker, Houston A., Jr. Singers of Daybreak: Studies in Black American Literature. Washington: Howard UP, 1974.

Hajek, Friederike. "The Change in Literary Authority in the Harlem Renaissance: Jean Toomer's Cane." The Black Columbiad: Defining Moments in African American Literature and Culture. Ed. Werner Sollers and Maria Diedrich. Harvard English Studies 19. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994. 185-90.

Johnson, Charles. Being & Race: Black Writing since 1970. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988.

-----. Faith and the Good Thing. New York: Viking 1974.

-----. Oxherding Tale. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982.

-----. "The Philosopher and the American Novel." In Search of a Voice: Charles Johnson and Ron Chernow. Washington: Library of Congress, 1991. 1-18.

-----. The Sorcerer's Apprentice: Tales and Conjurations. New York: Atheneum, 1986.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. New York: Humanities P, 1962.

Moore, Lewis D. "Kabnis and the Reality of Hope: Jean Toomer's Cane." North Dakota Quarterly 54.2 (1986): 30-39.

Nash, William R. "Towards a Unified Articulation of the Self: Aesthetic Theory and Practice in Charles Johnson's Fiction." Diss. U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1994.

Rushdie, Ashraf H. A. "The Phenomenology of the Allmuseri: Charles Johnson and the Subject of the Narrative of Slavery." African American Review 26 (1992): 373-94.

Toomer, Jean. Cane. 1923. New York: Harper, 1969.

-----. Letter to Waldo Frank. 12 Dec. 1922. Box 3, Folder 6, No. 800. Jean Toomer Papers. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale U.

-----. The Wayward and the Seeking: A Collection of Writings by Jean Toomer. Ed. Darwin T. Turner. Washington: Howard UP, 1980.

Frederick T. Griffiths teaches courses in Classics and in Women's and Gender Studies at Amherst College. He is the author of Theocritus at Court (1979) and, with Stanley J. Rabinowitz, Novel Epics: Gogol, Dostoevsky, and National Narrative (1990). He is working on a comparative study of slavery and representation in Greek and American literature.