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

Reviewed by George Hutchinson University of Tennessee-Knoxville

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.

The greatest antagonist to Thomas Dixon is not the black nationalist or "race man" but the "miscegenationist," and Toomer knew it. He was also aware of how racial designations had changed over time and varied by place - in his own family history. Jones's reductive position that "reified thinking" prevented Toomer from recognizing the "reality" of his racial position and social responsibility will no doubt suit many readers, but it ignores the extent to which "amalgamation" was a live issue in Toomer's day (Franz Boas actually advocating it, many NAACP officers expecting it in the long term) and rather too easily dismisses Toomer's critique of the rigidifying racial binarism of American ideology. This is not to say we should accept Toomer's ideas but rather that we cannot comprehend them without a new way of understanding his relation to the historical moment, a prerequisite being that we know more history and try a little harder to understand the historical contradictions he embodied and addressed.

If Jones's reading of Toomer's racial positions founders in part because of a "historicism" that is not nearly historical enough, that problem is exacerbated by the uncritical use of Lukacs in judgments on aesthetics, because Lukacs himself historicized modernist aesthetics inadequately. Moreover, Jones's use of Lukacs in relation to Toomer's aesthetics is rather crude. Yes, Lukacs associated "Modernism" with reification; for example, he charged that impressionism's thrust toward the autonomy of visual experience merely reflected capitalist alienation and fragmentation of experience, whereas what was needed was naturalism and critical realism. But Toomer did not follow such developments blindly; and, secondly, the Lukacsian critique is too simplistic. Lamenting Lukacs's insensitivity to the historical work of the new techniques, Jameson has demonstrated how modernist art heightened the languages of sense to restore libidinal gratifications to a mechanistic and quantified world - that is, it worked against reification. Furthermore, Toomer's occasionally brilliant attempts to transgress literary boundaries of form and diction, to meld genres back into a new ritualistic form, reveal his desire to re-humanize and re-integrate a world fractured by capitalism (and racism). This violation of generic boundaries, because it seeks an idealistic "merging" of literary forms, Jones considers merely another instance of "reified thinking." It would seem to me to be a reaction against reification. Toomer's very frustration with "literature" derived in part from his belief that the careerism of the artistic vocation in advanced capitalism was part of the disease of reification, not part of the cure.

Rather than supporting his contentions with supple readings, careful analysis, and exposition, the author supplies summaries of texts, alternating with brief quotations from theorists that do not always bear the weight thrust on them. Even when Jones valorizes particular texts as "minor masterpieces" of American literature, the judgments are supported only by showing parallels with already canonized "modernist" texts. This obviates the need for a critical argument. In the course of his synopses of poems, plays, and stories, Jones frequently outlines broad parallels to Stein, Pound, Eliot, Yeats, and Joyce - and then plugs in his simplified notion of reification in a concluding paragraph to each reading. Subtleties and complexities that distinguish the work from that of Stein, Pound, and others are simply passed over, despite Toomer's explicit critiques of their work. At the same time, Jones almost completely ignores Toomer's more intimate affiliations, especially in his formative years, with the "native" modernists and cultural nationalists who combined social and "spiritual" concerns about the possibilities of democracy with aesthetic criticism - the likes of Waldo Frank, Paul Rosenfeld, Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Romain Rolland. These artists' differences with Eliot and Pound were actually as great as those between the self-identified "New Negro" authors and Jean Toomer throughout the late teens and the twenties.

This book's main contribution, perhaps, is to introduce many relatively unknown (and mostly unpublished) texts and to reveal broad parallels with contemporary "high modernist" texts, while generally outlining the changing shape of Toomer's philosophical and religious positions. The book concludes with a very useful bibliography of Toomer's canon and of comment on his work (reliable through 1989, incomplete thereafter). To end on a note of praise: We can be thankful to Robert B. Jones for giving us a broader view of Toomer's literary efforts, in this and in other books, some yet to appear.