SOURCE: “Mediating Forms: Narrating the Body in Jean Toomer's Cane, in Southern Literary Journal, Vol. 26, No. 1, Fall, 1993, pp. 42-53.

[In the following essay, Whyde investigates Toomer's narrative representation of the body in Cane.]

Long before Jean Toomer published his first novel, Cane, in 1923, the questions of racial definition and identification were important ones for blacks and whites alike.¹ For white Americans, the problem of the color line was primarily political. For African-Americans, however, more was at stake than just their right to vote or issues of skin color. In part, what African-Americans sought through self identification was definition and validation of their unique experience and culture, both by the dominant culture and within their own communities. To achieve this validation, African-Americans first had to become conscious of themselves as worthy to be subjects of serious art or study. Then, they had to make the more controversial choice of which experiences should be deemed appropriate for depiction. To this end, African-American artists and scholars sought the origins of their culture in their distant ancestral past in Africa and their not-so-distant ancestral past as slaves in the South.

Houston Baker, Jr., in his study of modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, notes that African-American modernists transform (“deform”) the language of mastery in the quest for their origins in the “sound and space of an African ancestral past” (56). The quest for origins assumes that African-Americans separated from their past cannot be whole, so implicit in the quest for origins is the quest for a unified self. Not accidentally, modernism occurs most forcefully at that historical moment when African-American artists consciously deny their function as objects and assert themselves as subjects for art. In Cane the quest for the self-defined, unified self gets played out most vividly in Toomer's narrative representations of the body, in which the body becomes the site for both external and internal conflicts—oppressions and repressions.

Nellie McKay has pointed out that Jean Toomer sought harmony of the mind, body, and intellect throughout his life. During his teaching stint in Sparta, Georgia, in 1921, which he accepted “as a respite from the frustrations of his divided life” (5), he discovered black folk culture: “he felt magnetically attracted to its spirit, and the disparate parts of him came together into a unity he had not experienced before. He began to write … with the assurance that he had found his own voice” (5). What he found were the songs that synthesized the African experience with the slave experience, the black experience with the white. With his new-found voice, Toomer produced Cane, a work that aims to produce unity from fragments and may be itself a narrative of the development of an artist who creates “from his own struggle with [a] … character's conflicts the work of art that frees him from the character's failure and consequent fragmentation” (Blake 210).

As Toomer's personal history will attest, the body is a problematic sign of one's race, and some results of this problematic sign are fragmentation and division, which are key motifs that Toomer emphasizes in Cane by reducing social relations into dialectics—male/female, black/white, past/present, North/South, and so forth. Toomer's goal is to reconcile and unify these opposites, but to do so, he must collapse the antinomies into mediating forms. In Part I of Cane, the body of the woman mediates between the past and the present, the ideal and the real. The various characters function not representatively as individuals, but as signs to be interpreted and reinterpreted. As such, “woman” in the first part is obliterated and transformed through interpretation by an outside agent—the narrator/speaker and/or male characters within the individual sketches—into metaphor.² The woman's body in Part I is continually transformed into poem/songs in such a way that it becomes the narrative direct link to the African-American's origins.

Many of the women portrayed in Part I are either partial bodies or nothing but ephemeral images; that is, they are not women but shadows of women. One of the most dramatic—if not violent—examples of dividing the female body occurs in the short poem “Portrait in Georgia.” Each body part is figuratively linked to the violence done to the slave's body—lynchings, burnings, whippings.³ The poem imagistically and forcefully expresses the pain of the African-American.

Perhaps the most dramatic shadow woman is Karintha [in “Karintha”], who is described as “carrying beauty, perfect as dusk when the sun goes down” (1, 3, 5), “a wild flash that told the other folks just what it was to live” (1), “a bit of vivid color, like a black bird that flashes in light” (2), “as innocently lovely as a November cotton flower” (2), “a woman” (3, 4). The imagistic similes and the unqualified, undefined noun take the place of Karintha's body. The flashes of light and color that characterize her replace her physical presence, and the desire men feel for her subsumes her. Woman is narratively transformed into desire, which mediates the relationship between male and female, literally and figuratively turning the two into one.

Denying her both body and voice—hers is “high-pitched, shrill” (2), but it does not speak—the narrator interprets her story: “Men do not know that the soul of her was a growing thing ripened too soon” (4). As a sign, she is narratively emptied of all meaning and then filled by the narrator; she is a passive object whose meaning is imposed on her from the outside. Her body, in fact, becomes embodied in the song that punctuates this cautionary tale. The song connects her experience with the past, connects her with the sound and space of her African ancestral past. Karintha is both transitory—“Beauty so sudden for that time of year” (7)—and eternal, embodied in the song that connects the past to the future, just as the poem/songs connect “Karintha” to “Becky.”

Unlike Karintha, Becky has a body, but it becomes a meaningful absence in the tale that ambiguously maintains and closes the gap between the white and black communities. “Her eyes were sunken, her neck stringy, her breasts fallen, till then. Taking their words, they filled her, like a bubble rising—then she broke. Mouth setting in a twist that held her eyes, harsh, vacant, staring …” (8). Within the narrative, her body disappears into ellipses—the punctuation of absent words—and the description of her body falls, quite literally, between the interpretation of her by the white community as an “insane white shameless wench” and by the black community as “Poor Catholic poor-white crazy woman” (8). Like Karintha, she is made into a passive object such that her body functions as a sign that, as it is interpreted by these two communities, unifies the communities and collapses the difference between white and black. The two communities reach hermeneutical consensus, but the very act of interpretation renders her a blank.

Having reached consensus, the communities have no need for her presence, though each must continue to maintain her as a sign of her sexual transgression and their difference. “Becky becomes, for the town, a scapegoat, an unrecognized Christ-figure. … [O]ther people create a myth centering on her social evil and use that both to restrict her from social interaction and as a scapegoat for their own ‘narrowness and cruelty’” (Clark 183). The house that sits in the no-man's land between the road and the railroad tracks replaces her body and serves as a constant reminder for the community. Like the difference between white and black in the interpretation of her body, her house/body collapses; whether or not she is buried remains ambiguous and largely irrelevant, as the house itself has come to be Becky. Like Karintha, Becky becomes embodied in the refrain that marks her story's beginning and ending; it divides her from the other narratives in the first part, and at the same time incorporates her into the song tradition that connects past to present.

Embodiment in song seems to be the fate for the individual subjected to interpretation. We see Toomer playing with this idea in “Cotton Song,” a poem/song connecting “Becky” to “Carma,” that calls for slaves to assume an active role in freeing themselves from shackles: “Cant blame God if we dont roll, / Come, brother, roll, roll!” (15). But Toomer more consciously effects this embodiment in “Carma,” such that the conflict over Carma's body reenacts the conflict of slavery, setting that historical conflict in the present, or, in other words, inscribing the sexual conflict over Carma's body as the historical conflict over the Africans' bodies. In this way, Toomer collapses the gap between past and present, slavery and freedom.

Carma may be a passive actress in the “crudest melodrama” (18, 20), but we must ask ourselves if that melodrama is indeed the sexual melodrama of Carma's inability “to limit her desire to one man” (Lieber 183). Like Karintha, Becky, and all the women of Part I, Carma is an object interpreted by the narrator who, by characterizing her story as “melodrama”—“a term that suggests both sensational events and hollow characters” (Blake 199)—reduces Carma to a mere role, a place holder in a prescribed plot. Although the narrator renders Carma a passive agent, he at the same time describes her as having a body that is both male and female: “Carma, in overalls, and strong as any man” (16). The female/male dichotomy disappears in her body, which is not only hermaphroditic, but also directly linked to the African past. “She does not sing; her body is a song. She is in the forest, dancing. Torches flare … juju men, greegree, witch-doctors … torches go out. … The Dixie Pike has grown from a goat path in Africa” (emphasis mine, 17-18). Unlike Karintha and Becky, she is not embodied in the song; she embodies the song of the past. In her body, the past and present collapse into one another.

Her body becomes, in fact, the site of the conflict of slavery redux, where sexual conflict is transmuted into historical conflict by the hermeneutical usurpation of her body. Like the other women, she disappears by being interpreted, transformed into the physical sign of a unifying abstraction. Bane—appropriately defined as “Fatal injury or ruin” and “a cause of death, destruction or ruin”—plays his part in the conflict as the destructive force that exerts his right to her body and, like the white slaveholder, brings about through violence his own loss of power over the body. Bane's words, “like corkscrews” (18), sap her strength and nearly bring about her destruction as he attempts to appropriate her body as his.

Her real bane, however, is the narrator, whose words have a more significant effect. He succeeds in narratively destroying Carma, reducing her story to a melodrama, by defining her body in such a way that she no longer functions as a character, an individual, but as a form to mediate the basic dichotomies of male/female, past/present, slavery/freedom. The narrator appropriates her story—“her tale as I have told it” (20)—to unify fragmented individual history and racial history. The narrator's final question—“Should she not take others, this Carma, strong as a man, whose tale as I have told it is the crudest melodrama?” (20)—is a political question that transcends the sexual and suggests the dilemma of the African-American in the 1920s. If she (he) takes others—i.e., asserts her freedom—she risks conflict; if she (he) does not, she tacitly accepts slavery, albeit in new forms.

Part II of Cane is composed of character sketches, set in the North, of individuals struggling with new forms of slavery. Slavery in Part II, however, is chosen, not imposed. Unlike the characters in Part I, the characters in Part II are not simply passive objects, but active agents of their own psychological imprisonment. “In the North, blacks struggle to establish an identity out of the remnants of their past and the values and ideals of their newly acquired home” (McKay 125-26). The body in Part II mediates between the intellect, associated with internalized white values, and passion or vitality, associated with their African heritage, which battle for control of the African-American's body.

The tone for Part II is set in the first vignette of the section, “Seventh Street.” The narrator metonymically reduces black life to blood flowing in the streets as a result of the violence generated by Prohibition and the War, both “white” events. The street itself is completely devoid of bodies, which appear instead in the opening/closing song. Black opportunists achieve material success on Seventh Street, but they pay the price of self destruction or obliteration.

In “Rhobert,” which follows “Seventh Street,” the narrator describes Rhobert's body—a grotesque combination of malnourished body and inanimate object. “Rhobert wears a house, like a monstrous diver's helmet, on his head” (73). This image makes external the internal landscape in which the conflict over control of Rhobert's body is being fought. As in “Seventh Street,” the consequence of capitulation to white values is obliteration, but Rhobert's middle-class version also carries with it the threat of more general acceptance: “Soon people will be looking at him and calling him a strong man” (75). Rhobert, then, is a sign of the more general struggle for control of the black community.

Toomer captures in this single image the process he dramatizes in the later sketches of Part II. In “Avey,” for example, a young, male narrator attempts to appropriate and define Avey to make her acceptable to his middle-class values. Like Rhobert, the narrator is trapped in a narrow conception of the world that he ultimately finds frustrating and limiting, like the boxes around the trees. The narrator has ambition and is concerned about Avey's lack of it. Sitting on the hill with Avey, he “wanted the Howard Glee Club to sing ‘Deep River, Deep River’” (86), the spiritual, ironically, that marks Rhobert's fate, his death by drowning. In each of his judgments of Avey and her “indifference” or “indolence,” he reveals the narrowness of his worldview and the sterility of his intellectualized passion.

Avey's own passion may be just as sterile, but the first-person point of view makes the narrator's characterization of Avey suspect. In fact, we learn very little about Avey. Avey's body functions in this sketch, then, as a means to reveal the narrator's narrowness and possible impotence. The narrator limits the information he provides about her, thus, like the narrator(s) of Part I, emptying her of meaning so that he may determine how and what she means. This narrative move, on one hand, reveals his power to make meaning, while, on the other, it reveals the very emptiness of this power and his character.

Although the narrator silences Avey, her body yet speaks to him, but as a mother: “She took me in hers [her arms]. And I could feel by the touch of it that it wasnt a man-to-woman love. … I felt chagrined. … I itched to break through her tenderness to passion” (80). Avey's continual rejection of his physical advances (half-hearted though they may be) does not stop his intellectual assault of her. Finally, however, he interprets her to no end but his own “death”:

I talked, beautifully I thought, about an art that would be born, an art that would open the way for women the likes of her. I asked her to hope, and build up an inner life against the coming of that day. … I began to visualize certain possibilities. An immediate and urgent passion swept over me. Then I looked at Avey. Her heavy eyes were closed. Her breathing was as faint and regular as a child's in slumber. My passion died.

(emphasis mine, 87)

The genesis of his passion is his own rhetoric and dreams, not the body of the woman lying next to him whose reality is unacceptable. It is in fact the implications of her passion that he reviles. In calling her, finally, “Orphan-woman” (88), he cuts her off from her roots and denies her the power to signify the racial heritage that they share but that he has repudiated or put to sleep in himself.

A similar act of repudiation occurs in “Theater.” Unlike Avey, Dorris's body, in “Theater,” is not completely silenced. She uses art, dance, to express her freedom, to connect to her African past, but John, “whose body is separate from the thoughts that pack his mind” (92), cannot let go of the social distinctions that define each of them. Dorris's body when she dances is free of social constraints or inhibitions or even choreographed steps:

Dorris dances. She forgets her tricks. She dances.
Glorious songs are the muscles of her limbs.
And her singing is of canebrake loves and mangrove feastings.

(98)

Much like Carma, she embodies the songs of her African origins in her dance. She uses her body to generate and communicate desire, which she thinks will break down the social wall between John and herself, close the gap between the stage and the spectator, the body and the mind. She is frustrated by the artificial social differences that he accepts and that stand in the way of her dream of marriage and children and of the artificial moral strictures that stigmatize the sexually experienced female: “Aint I as good as him? Couldnt I have got an education if I'd wanted one? Dont I know respectable folks … In Philadelphia and New York and Chicago? Aint I had men as good as him? Better” (95).

However, while her body evokes the physical freedom of passion and desire, she remains a slave to John's interpretation of her. That is, while she is able to affect John's body with her dance, she cannot capture it. When she is finished dancing, she “looks quick at John. His whole face is in shadow. She seeks for her dance in it. She finds it a dead thing in the shadow which is his dream” (99). John ultimately controls the fulfillment of her dream; while she is free on stage to express herself, to make herself an important subject, she is for John simply an object to be used for his own purposes in his own way.

John's interpretation is inscribed by the values that separate mind and body, privileging the mind over the body, and he finally repudiates the implications of her physical art. John's own body is physically inert, and though he finds a certain amount of freedom in his dreams, even in his dreams his sensuality is intellectualized. For example, in the midst of his final erotic daydream of Dorris, he “reaches for a manuscript of his, and reads” (99). What does he read? He reads the Dorris of his creation, the Dorris in his text. Dorris's reality, like Avey's, is unacceptable. John's repudiation of Dorris, finally, signals his repudiation of the past she signifies. The implications of this rejection is, as in the case between Avey and her narrator, a relationship between Dorris and John that is sterile, the result of John's paralysis of will.

In both “Box Seat” and “Bona & Paul,” men and women fail to come together in a meaningful, productive relationship because at least one part of the couple is trapped in a “divers helmet” of social convention and restriction. In this sense, the African-American body is oppressed by the internalization of white or middle-class values that privilege intellect and conformity over passion and spontaneity, glee clubs over jazz bands and spirituals. Oppression of the body in Part II takes the form of repression of physical desires and passions. The oppression is effected narratively through disembodiment, by the nearly complete suppression of concrete physical descriptions of particular characters.⁴ Rhobert's physical description suffices for all the characters suffering his malady; the internal reality is more real than the external signs. Whereas the bodies of the women in Part I are abstracted out of being by some outside consciousness, the bodies of characters in Part II, both male and female, most often disappear in the act of self repudiation.

Part III redefines the African-American body completely. The African-American body that is privileged is not the physical body, which is alien and irrelevant, but the art that develops out of the black experience. The physical body in Part III, then, becomes the mediating form between the art and the experience.

Kabnis [in “Kabnis”] as the would-be artist must interpret his experience and shape it into a coherent form, a body of art. However, like John in “Theater,” Kabnis is impotent, afraid to act. As Part III opens, Kabnis attempts to read himself to sleep. When that fails, he resorts to masturbation (Moore 34). Although this masturbation in the face of an imaginary sweetheart is a physically sterile and passionless act, it does point the way to the resolution of Kabnis's dilemma and of the impasse reached in the final scene:

Ralph Kabnis is a dream. And dreams are faces with large eyes and weak chins and broad brows that get smashed by the fists of square faces. The body of the world is bull-necked. A dream is a soft face that fits uncertainly upon it … God, if I could develop that in words. Give what I know a bull-neck and a heaving body, all would go well with me, wouldnt it, sweetheart? … If I, the dream (not what is weak and afraid in me) could become the face of the South. How my lips would sing for it, my songs being the lips of the soul.

(158)

Kabnis negates his own body, calling it a dream. He wishes to recreate it, to embody his experience and knowledge in words.

Kabnis's experiences in the South are determined not only by his relations with his black neighbors, but also by the bodies that are absent: the bodies of white men. The bodies most notably missing from Cane as a whole are the bodies of white people. Moore argues that

Toomer signals a change in the third part of the novel in the level of effect of the white man on black society. Although the white man has loomed significantly in the background of the other two sections, shaping the lives of the black people presented, he has seldom dominated the immediate action as he does now. … In Part Three, through Kabnis's fear and the stories of Halsey and Layman, the white man moves to the foreground, weakening the South as a place where passion and the black woman, both identified with the South in Part One, can deliver the black man.

(33)

In fact, white men do not appear bodily any more often in Part III than Parts I or II. But their influence is more significant not only because their effect on the black community is foregrounded, but also because their violence against and mutilation of the African-American body has rendered it meaningless by negating differences between and among individuals. The physical presence of the white man is not necessary as long as the stories generate the fear desired. In this way, oppression of, or control of, African-Americans is effected by the African-Americans themselves.

Halsey and Layman, having lived with the reality of lynchings and murders, tacitly reinforce the negation of themselves through acquiescence. They tell Kabnis vivid stories of the violence suffered by their neighbors, but they punctuate their stories with laughs. They recognize the acts as powerful symbolic acts to frighten the black community into obeisance and silence. Halsey and Layman clearly accept these acts as symbolic, not personal, attacks: “Layman: Nigger's a nigger down this away, Professor. An only two dividins: good an bad. An even they aint permanent categories. They sometimes mixes um up when it comes t lynchin” (172). And when Layman tells the story of “Mame Lamkins,” his “voice is uniformly low and soothing. A Canebrake, murmuring the tale to its neighbor-road would be more passionate” (178). Layman, in fact, survives despite his knowledge because he is silent, and Halsey accepts, and is satisfied with, his lot as a wheelwright as long as he has work. Kabnis, however, panics and becomes paranoid because he fails to understand the acts as symbolism and believes them to be personal.

In the face of the utter symbolic negation by the white man, we may find ironic the detailed physical descriptions of characters that occur in Part III. Toomer asserts the individuality of bodies in a setting or context that most denies that individuality. The shadows and types of the earlier sections are transformed into representative characters more in line with traditional realist fiction. In contrast to the techniques used in the first two parts of the novel, the dramatic technique used here, mixed with third-person interludes, assures that no character is monolithically silenced or interpreted by a narrator or another character. These individuals are the material, the subject of art, since they are the individuals that shape Kabnis's experience in the South.

At the opening of Part III, however, his experiences are intellectualized as he lives alienated from the community, physically and spiritually. Before he can embody himself and his experiences in words, he paradoxically must regain control of his body and connect himself to his neighbors. Like John or the narrator of “Avey,” he has repudiated his racial heritage in favor of intellectualism. In addition, his fear of the white man's violence has so emasculated him that he suffers a paralysis of the will: “Kabnis wants to rise and put both Halsey and Hanby in their places. He vaguely knows that he must do this, else the power of direction will completely slip from him to those outside” (189). Kabnis, unfortunately, cannot speak, much less put the others in their places. Later, Kabnis is completely feminized when he dresses in an ill-fitting long robe, which, ironically, he wears during the “seduction” of Cora and Stella.

Whether or not he completely recovers from his “degradation” is uncertain. He does remove the robe and resign himself to the manual labor awaiting him, settling at least one conflict, but the final bodies we see are those of Carrie K. united with Father John, an impotent reminder of the past emasculation of African-American men.⁵ In any case, Kabnis, “bereft of illusion” (Moore 38), does force himself out of “The Hole,” the infirmary, suggesting in his rising the rising of the sun, the “Gold-glowing child … [that] steps into the sky and sends a birth-song slanting down gray dust streets and sleepy windows of the southern town” (239). The southern town is transformed into a blank slate waiting to be populated by the bodies of the artist. Unlike “Seventh Street,” this street is full of possibility, not self-destruction.

Toomer was dissatisfied with the results of Cane because “he had not found personal liberation and unity in its meaning and could not accept, for himself, the identity that had caused him to write it” (McKay 5). While Kabnis's integration may be questionable (is he, indeed, the narrator of Cane?), we are still left with one body that speaks: the work itself, which embodies a search for a unified self. And while the dichotomies of the text may not be fully mediated, if such mediation is ever possible, or the contradictions not fully settled, Cane remains a remarkable artistic object—not because it is the “well-wrought urn,” but because it reflects, at a particular historical moment, the developing consciousness of a race with a rich history, and it engages directly some of the aesthetic problems faced by African-Americans struggling for artistic self-representation. It powerfully represents the tragedy of being a slave to the definition of others and celebrates the freedom that comes with speaking one's own voice.

Notes

1. For an analysis of the way the legal system redefined and separated the concept of race from color at the turn of the nineteenth century, especially in Plessy v. Ferguson, see Michaels's “Souls of White Folk.”

2. The two metaphors most often associated with women in this section are woman-as-song and woman-as-land. Kolodny has traced the development of the woman-as-land metaphor in American writing.

3. Scarry argues that one's pain is itself indescribable to others, but the sign of the object that causes pain may express the pain more forcefully. “Portrait in Georgia,” then, is a powerful imagistic expression of African-Americans' pain.

4. The two exceptions to this generalization occur in “Avey” and “Box Seat,” respectively. Avey is described as having a “pale” face and heavy eyes. “She did not have the gray crimson-splashed beauty of the dawn” (88). I read this description as further evidence of the narrator's negation of her at the end of the sketch. In “Box Seat” women are associated with the houses. At first, the houses contain possibility: “Houses are shy girls whose eyes shine reticently upon the dusky body of the street” (104). But at the end after Dan Moore's disillusionment with Muriel, the houses/women from which he is significantly barred are transformed into objects of constraint and limitations: “Eyes of houses, soft girl-eyes, glow reticently upon the hubbub and blink out” (130). Muriel is described in detail, but this description occurs when Dan is still hopeful of redeeming her. It may also point to the wasted life of her that hides inside the houses. (“Her face is fleshy. It would tend to coarseness but for the fresh fragrant something which is the life of it. Her hair like an Indian's. But more curly and bushed and vagrant. Her nostrils flare. The flushed ginger of her cheeks is touched orange by the shower of color from the lamp” [108-109].)

5. See also Blake, who describes the union of the “immobile old man and a passive young virgin” as sterile (211).

Works Cited

Baker, Jr., Houston A. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.

Blake, Susan L. “The Spectatorial Artist and the Structure of Cane.” In Jean Toomer: A Critical Evaluation. Ed. Therman B. O'Daniel. Washington, D.C.: Howard UP, 1988.

Clark, J. Michael. “Frustrated Redemption: Jean Toomer's Women in Cane, Part One.” In Jean Toomer: A Critical Evaluation. Ed. Therman B. O'Daniel. Washington, D.C.: Howard UP, 1988.

Kolodny, Annette. The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1975.

Lieber, Todd. “Design and Movement in Cane.” In Jean Toomer: A Critical Evaluation. Ed. Therman B. O'Daniel. Washington, D.C.: Howard UP, 1988.

McKay, Nellie Y. Jean Toomer, Artist: A Study of His Literary Life and Work, 1894-1936. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1984.

Michaels, Walter Benn. “The Souls of White Folk.” In Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons. Ed. Elaine Scarry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1988.

Moore, Lewis D. “Kabnis and the Reality of Hope: Jean Toomer's Cane.” North Dakota Quarterly 54.1 (1986): 30-39.

Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford UP, 1985.

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