Form, Function, and Creative Tension in Cane: Jean Toomer and the Need for the Avant-Garde

In The Negro Novel in America, the book that may have initiated the resurrection of Jean Toomer's Cane (1923) and the renewed interest in Toomer himself, Robert Bone writes that Toomer: belongs to that first rank of writers who use words almost as a plastic medium, shaping new meanings from an original and highly personal style. Since stylistic innovation requires great technical dexterity, Toomer displays a concern for technique which is fully two decades in advance of the period. (81) While it may be an exaggeration to say that Toomer was twenty years ahead of his time, Bone's statement does point out one of the striking aspects of Cane: the book's form established Toomer well in the avantgarde of his time. Indeed, the form of Cane has caused some problems with critics. It certainly is not genre-specific. It is a collection of character sketches, stories, poems, and putative drama. Before the publication of Cane by Boni and Liveright, some of the pieces were printed separately in small literary magazines, and nowadays separate pieces are widely anthologized. However, Toomer was careful in his preparation of the complete book and was not happy with its being broken up for anthologies after its publication. Yet, while Bone discusses Cane in his critique of the Negro novel, the individual pieces seem in both genre and narrative too disparate to make up a unified novel in any traditional sense. Rather, the unity of the work springs from its stylistic experimentation and thematic consistency. Cane is wide-ranging in its formal experiments: fragmented and elliptical sentences; repetitions; surrealistic imagery ("Her mind is a pink meshbag filled with baby toes" [24]); oxymoron ("The full moon sank upward into the deep purple of the cloud-bank" [31]); personification ("the walls are sleeping singers" [50], "Ghost of a yell slipped through the flames and out the great door of the factory" [35]); stream of consciousness; musical variety from spirituals to jazz to variations on blues lines ("Aint much difference between blue an black" [107]); black dialect; and sustained symbols like the mysterious and magical use of dusk. All of these add up to a fascinating and exciting variety, capturing the moods of black people in the rural South and the urban North. Like a Charles Mingus jazz piece, Cane holds great variety in a small space, as for instance in these contrasting passages: The air is heavy with fresh tobacco smoke. It makes her sick. She wants to turn back. She goes up the steps. As if she were mounting to some great height, her head spins. She is violently dizzy. Blackness rushes to her eyes. And then she finds that she is in a large room. Barlo is before her. (24) Here the staccato, simple sentences build tension as Esther moves steadily towards her doomed black fantasy personified in the black superman, Barlo. Yet just four pages further on at the beginning of "Blood-Burning Moon," Toomer writes this contrasting periodic sentence: Up from the skeleton stone walls, up from the rotting floor boards and the solid hand-hewn beams of oak of the pre-war cotton factory, dusk came. (28) It is formal aspects like these and the entire mixture of prose and poetry that lead Charles Larson to call Cane: sui generis - unique piece of writing in American literature as well as in the entire scope of Third World writing....Cane is one of the most innovative works of 20th-century American fiction - a landmark in American literature, foreshadowing the soon-to-follow experimental works of John Dos Passos and William Faulkner. The experimental novel in America begins not with those writers but with Jean Toomer's Cane. (31, 32) Two major forces were working on Toomer as he composed Cane. One force was immediate: his circle of literary friends and acquaintances, Hart Crane, Alfred Kreymborg, Paul Rosenfeld, Gorham Munson, Lola Ridge - an editor of Broom magazine - and Waldo Frank - his mentor (Kerman and Eldridge 100-10). …