The Artist as Universal Mind: Berkeley's Influence on Charles Johnson

Abstract

C_ harles Johnson's volume of short stories The Sorcerer's Apprentice opposes the artist's imaginative world to a naive realism that reduces all objects to their sheer materialistic value. In general terms, the negative characters of Johnson's stories are all materialists, and their world view postulates a mind-independent universe of physical objects obeying laws of force, energy, and economics. Against these characters, Johnson deploys metaphorical artists whose job it is symbolically to restructure the world into spiritual patterns, restoring a cohesive sense of connectedness. The controlling motif of the volume is a competition of alternative metaphysics, pitting the artist who creates reality against the skeptical materialist who would segment and divide it. In opposing the artist to the materialist, Johnson explores alternative metaphysical positions of Realism and Idealism-the two fundamentally different ways people conceive of their world, think about their world, and make crucial decisions about their world and other people. Johnson intends to jolt emotionally the assumed realist reader into an entirely different perception of the world, making him/her forego a customary, conditioned, and ordinary version of material reality in favor of a more expansive and aesthetic sense of the world. Johnson reveals himself to be an Idealist whose mission is to persuade his readers of the philosophical claims of Idealism, a vocational calling that he has made his own in interviews and his book Being & Race. Johnson writes that the purpose of all great is beyond conventional morality; it is to challenge our metaphysics: Our perception-or way of seeing-has been shaken, if one is talking about great art (Being 4). Johnson's artist combats the Age of Hype (xi)-the province of the marketplace-to establish an intellectual justification for his or her art. In The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Bishop George Berkeley's metaphysics guides Johnson's thematics, for in Berkeley's philosophy, Johnson discovers his ally against what he envisions as a reductionist world view. A commercialized version of the world is based, for Johnson, on a materialist metaphysics. This essay will investigate the Berkeleyan framework that Johnson employs, then apply it to two stories in the volume, Menagerie and China. Menagerie satirizes a world that banishes Berkeleyan Idealism in favor of a crass materialism, while China enacts the performance of the artist as Divine Creator. The stories depict the conflict between the Artist and the Marketplace in philosophical terms, with Bishop Berkeley of Cloyne used metaphorically in each story. Berkeley's philosophy assists Johnson in arguing for a view of the world appropriate to his own exalted vision of the