In the past decade several important preliminary studies have begun to focus on the relation between the modernist aesthetic and the thematic and formal elements of Jean Toomer's Cane. But while scholars have done much to elucidate the fragmented, avant-garde nature of the text's form and to pose possible unifying themes, their efforts have been hampered by critical assumptions usually applied to poetry and fiction. Critical criteria such as unity and closure, as they have been traditionally used in judging a novel's or poem's “success,” are not relevant to Cane. In Cane, Toomer attempts to enact a disruption of social boundaries through literary form by exploding the genre borders of fiction, lyric poetry, and drama. By forcibly bringing together the disparate elements of the text, Toomer exposes false dichotomies and separations that are both literary and social. The form of the text thus becomes its central metaphor.

Applying Peter Bürger's conception of the montage to Toomer himself, to Cane's thematic organization, and to Toomer's aesthetic methods (particularly in the lyric-narrative sections of the work), I will make clear the way in which this unsettling and unsettled narrative exhibits both disjunctive and nondisjunctive tendencies, tendencies that drive the text's disparate elements toward unification and tendencies that frustrate its movement toward integration. A study of the way in which Toomer's radical formal transgressions reflect his radical political position should ultimately prove valuable for understanding not only Toomer's work but also the narrative dialectic in general and the extent to which narrative mode functions as an effective tool in avant-garde expression.

THE SELF AS MONTAGE AND THE MULTIPLE NARRATOR

In Theory of the Avant-Garde Bürger argues that the autonomy achieved by the increasingly socially isolated aesthetic movement of the late nineteenth century made the formal experiments of the modernist period possible. The avant-garde artists, however, were critical of this dissociation and strove to reintegrate their new worldviews with society at large.¹ The idea was to disrupt bourgeois conceptions of both art and reality by challenging not only conventional, institutional ideas of what art was but also ideas about how it was produced. Bürger argues that the montage, because of its ability to combine the real and the artificial, the object itself and the object represented, was the most powerful formal innovation of early-twentieth-century avant-gardism.²

Although Toomer was not a member of the European avant-gardist circle, several personal, historical, and political factors made him susceptible to the influence of a movement and a form that stressed fragmentation and reintegration while using the freedom of autonomy to challenge bourgeois worldviews and bring about social change. Toomer's autonomy was generated less by the aesthetic revolution in Europe (though as an artist he was influenced by it) than by the ongoing social revolution in America. In the late nineteenth century the United States emerged from the aftermath of a civil war that had disrupted the dominant social order, which had prevailed for well over a century. By the turn of the century African Americans found themselves in a strange, autonomous social position—not quite slave but not nearly equal. Eroticized, romanticized, orientalized, and demonized, African American artists found themselves possessed of a paradoxical lyric and social independence that made their art possible. Because of their special position, however, African American art was largely contained by the very mystery that aroused white curiosity. The social and artistic validity of this art depended on its remaining within established borders.

Jean Toomer's status as a multiethnic American with some African American blood arguably made his position even more isolated and unstable than that of other Harlem Renaissance writers—more isolated because Toomer could not fully accept identification with the African American community and was not really accepted by the white community, more unstable because Toomer found in his multiethnic biological makeup a possible model for the transgression of societal and social boundaries. He was, in his own view, a human montage in which various elements were integrated within a single individual:

I am at once no one of the races and I am all of them. I belong to no one of them and I belong to all. I am, in a strict racial sense, a member of a new race. This new race, of which I happen to be one of the first articulate members, is now forming perhaps everywhere on earth, but its formation is more rapid and marked in certain countries, one of which is America. … Heredity and environment will combine to produce a race which will be at once interracial and unique. It may be the turning point for the return of mankind, now divided into hostile races, to one unified race, namely, to the human race. … Jean Toomer is an American. There is no other name in general use which covers with equal exactitude the facts of my heredity and the facts of my environment. In so far as a race and nationality are concerned, I wish to be known as an American.³

While Toomer's desire for a multiethnic status as an “American” is understandable in light of his mixed racial and ethnic heritage, which included “Spanish, Dutch, Welsh, Jewish, Negro, Indian [Native American], German and French … racial and national strains,”⁴ he must have known that such a heterogeneous identity was untenable in a society in which one drop of “Negro” blood was enough to classify anyone as “Negro.” This social reality was never more evident than when Toomer, having found a publisher for Cane, was pressured to stress his “Negro” heritage—obviously for the purpose of marketing the book as an exotic new “Negro” novel. Because the introduction to Cane written by Toomer and his literary mentor Waldo Frank was unclear about Toomer's racial heritage, publisher John Liveright asked Toomer to rewrite it: “I feel that right at the very start there should be a definite note sounded about your colored blood. To my mind this is the real human interest value of your story and I don't see why you should dodge it.”⁵ Although the arrogance and presumption of such a request is unsettling today, the note does point to an important element in Toomer's psychological makeup: he was never comfortable identifying with any single element of his racial heritage. And who could blame him? To accept one element would be to reject the others; it would be like chopping off limbs. At the same time, however, integration of different racial groups was simply not a viable option at this point in American history, precisely because of the racial hostility that Toomer points out in his self-description.

Despite Toomer's desire to remain racially multivalent, it would be inaccurate to argue that he never emphasized one element of his racial makeup over the others. At the time of Cane, he seems to have been trying to balance his desire to claim all elements of his heritage with the special connection that he felt to the African American community of the South. The tension between these conflicting impulses creates the principal drive of the work. Toomer's discomfort with his connection to black America, his nevertheless strong sense of community with that world, his intellectual understanding of social reality, and his desire for integration of all the fragmented elements of his own psyche—all these push and pull against one another in Cane, creating a drama of longing and frustration that propels the work toward explosive, climactic moments of disruption and transgression but never allows it to reach its goal of thematic and social unification.

Toomer's ambivalence with respect to his racial heritage is perhaps most directly inscribed in the novel though an elusive narrator figure who is alternately actor, participant, and omniscient observer. In fact, one of the formal elements that most thoroughly distances Cane from traditional realistic narration is the lack of a stable or even identifiable narrator. Though many scholars have tried to track a development of the narrator in this work that ultimately inscribes the author as principal actor, there is little objective evidence to support such character development or any consistent or logical progression of narrative positions. Often the narrator's intrusion as a participant in the action seems sudden and disconcerting. The reader is not prepared for the insertion of the narrator as an actor in this drama until the end of the second section of the text, when the personal pronoun “our” is introduced in the line “[o]ur congregation had been visiting at Pulverton, and were coming home.”⁶ The only earlier use of a first-person pronoun occurs in the poem “Reapers” (“I see them place the hones / In their hip-pockets” [6]). The line “Barlo and I were pulled out of our seats” (12) has a startling and difficult-to-evaluate effect. The sense of unease created by the narrator's sudden presence is amplified by his seemingly strange and illogical actions. After hearing Becky groan beneath the ruins of her home, the speaker and his friend sanctify the rubble by tossing Barlo's Bible on it, then run away without trying to help her. It is as if too much participation would imply too much involvement, too much implication. Overall, the narrator comes across as a voyeuristic presence only tangentially related to the events and characters that enter his life. But this tangential relation is complicated by an omniscience not attainable by a traditional first-person narrator. Toomer's narrator knows the unspoken thoughts of many of the characters he observes, and he describes events at which he is not present. The effect of this complex narrative position is a representation of the artist as both detached and implicated, as autonomous yet present—as, in a word, unstable.

Of course the desire to create confusion in the mind of the viewer (or reader) about the nature of artistic presence and production is a key element in avant-garde art. Bürger points out, for example, that Duchamp's “found” art (such as the inverted urinal and the snow-shovel placed haphazardly against an art gallery wall) had the effect of questioning the entire concept of artistic production.⁷ Such deliberate confusion was intended to open a dialectic in which the viewer was rendered a coparticipant in the act of creation. In Cane, the instability of the narrator draws the reader into the text in a similar way, creating a sense of shared experience and implication. It also functions to make the relationship between narrator and narratee more complex. In A Revolution in Poetic Language, Julia Kristeva writes of the matrix of enunciation in any novel as a dialectic that “tends to center on an axial position that is explicitly or implicitly called ‘I’ or ‘author.’ … But this “position is mobile,” taking on all possible roles.⁸ Because this “axial position presupposes an addressee who is required to recognize himself [sic] in the multiple I's of the author,” the text itself becomes a “subjectal space” in which meaning is negotiated between the addressor and the addressee. The problem with the traditional model of bourgeois narration, according to Kristeva, is that these roles are “locked in place to the extent that the parental and social network is applied to it.” By complicating the position of the narrator, however, Toomer is able to cause disjunctions in that relationship. Because there is no stable “I” with whom to identify, the subjectal space is necessarily opened up, ruptured. Since the narrative voice doesn't dominate, the possibility exists that all subject positions are equally valid. Because the narrator's position as a participant is often questionable, his ethical position is likewise undermined. The reader is invited to interrogate the narrator and identify with various characters. As a participant in “Avey,” for example, the speaker is undermined by the reader's opportunity to judge negatively his actions as a character and his arrogant assumption that he can save the woman, the object of desire, from the mechanized world of the city by, in effect, telling her who she is.

MONTAGE AS THEME

The creation of a sense of the equal validity of various angles of perception and understandings of reality is one of the objects of avantgarde art and of montage in particular. And Toomer unquestionably desired to create a space in which meanings were renegotiated, in which social values could be called into question. But he was interested in more than disrupting the dialectic relationship; he hoped to guide a new inscription in places where he saw a social need.

One of the main “problems” in the text is the difficulty the narrator seems to have in integrating the inherently contradictory white and black cultures portrayed in Cane. There is a narrative drive toward integration, but it is continually frustrated by the impassable gulfs separating black and white culture, differences that are represented aesthetically. For the most part white society in Cane is superficial and either violent or apathetic, while black culture, manifested most clearly through Toomer's representations of individual African American men and women, is mythical, dark, mysterious, and magical. The orientalizing of the African American world, specifically the Southern African American world, has a defamiliarizing effect typical of the modernist aesthetic. The question to be asked is whether or not the presentation of familiar, realistic white society and Northern black society alongside defamiliarized, lyrical, Southern African American society succeeds in creating the intended blurring of the real/artificial distinction sought by montage or whether that presentation manages only to present the two (or three) cultures as inherently and irresolvably conflicting.

In Cane, white society is most clearly represented by the controlling figure of the Northern city as an inhibitor of lyric impulses. Its walls both shut out the breezes rising from the cane fields in the South and contain the energy of black culture within it that seeks to escape. The city, seen chiefly through its walls and houses, constantly threatens to crush lyric activity. In “Box Seat,” for example, the houses represent the confining, empty presence of white society. They are boxes that exist principally to subdue the welling up of energy, the “rumble” coming “from the deep earth's core” that the protagonist Dan Moore feels he must release if he is to possess the object of his desire, Muriel, a black woman living in a white woman's house (108). Dan wants to release Muriel from this restrictive world, but he is frustrated by the barriers it has interposed between him and the object of his desire. When he tries to “sing” to her of his love, he feels “the house contract about him. It is a sharp-edged, massed, metallic house. Bolted. About Mrs. Pribby. Bolted to the endless rows of metal houses. Mrs. Pribby's house. The rows of houses belong to other Mrs. Pribbys. No wonder he couldn't sing to them” (107).

The other metaphor for city life in this sequence is the newspaper. For Toomer, the newspaper symbolizes white, realistic speech—an empty, shallow reflection of reality. Mrs. Pribby's eyes “are weak. They are bluish and watery from reading newspapers. The blue is steel. It gimlets Dan while her mouth flaps amiably to him” (107). Her words are meaningless, and language is reduced to a mere flapping of lips.

In fact, Toomer consistently presents white culture as the locus for empty speech. White speech is the papering over an absence where the soul should be. White city dwellers in the North use words either for the instrumental passing of information (the newspaper) or as a way to pass the time socially. However empty, their words are extremely functional in one sense, since in Northern white society speech becomes a kind of protective border, as if by speaking constantly about nothing white city dwellers could prevent anything from actually being said. The goal seems to be to crowd out deep thought, deep emotion, deep speech, so the structure of society can be maintained. In “Bona and Paul,” for example, we are given a scene in which two white men try to get their black friend Paul to snap out of a lyric reverie:

Paul's room-mate comes in.

“Say, Paul, I've got a date for you. Come on. Shake a leg will you?”

His blonde hair is combed slick. His vest is snug about him.

He is like the electric light which he snaps on.

“Whatdoyosay, Paul? Get a wiggle on. Come on. We havent got much time by the time we eat and dress and everything.”

His Bustling concentrates on the brushing of his hair.

Art: What in hell's getting into Paul of late, anyway? Christ, but he's getting moony. Its his blood. Dark blood: moony. Doesn't get anywhere unless you boost it. You've got to keep it going.

(138-39)

Both Art and Paul's rooomate manipulate meaningless speech and meaningless activity as a means of controlling and subduing the dark, moony, lyric presence. One cannot allow much lyricism in a world that emphasizes the value of being on time, of having one's hair combed properly, of maintaining a sleek, buttoned-down appearance.

Struggling against the repressive power of white speech and white society is the lyric force manifest in Southern African American culture. The central unifying figure for this mysterious, lyrical world is the cane field. Through cane Toomer attempts to represent the strange, lyric intensity of the Southern black world. Maria Isabel Caldiera argues that “cane stands for the reality of black people's experiences on American soil” (545). The reality of the cane field, though, is defamiliarized. Toomer never represents the cane field realistically—it is a narcotic, a source of vision, a place through which people pass to have illicit sexual meetings, a place where one might hide or become lost, a place that can drive the uninitiated mad, a place in which “time and space have no meaning. … No more than the interminable stalks” (19). And out of this distorted lyrical world Toomer builds the song and scent of the South—a song that is embodied in both men and women.

Many scholars and poets have questioned Toomer's exotic presentation of the African American woman. There is little question that Toomer intentionally mystifies and lyricizes the women in Cane. As Janet M. Whyde has pointed out:

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. The woman's body in Part I is continually transformed into poem/songs in such a way that it becomes the narrative's direct link to African-American origins.⁹

For the most part, this assessment is both accurate and fair. The women in Cane, particularly the Southern African American women, are defamiliarized, unreal, metaphoric, mythical constructs. From the near bodiless Karintha, who “was a wild flash that told the other folks just what it was to live,” “darting past you” like “a bit of vivid color, like a black bird that flashes in light,” to “Fern,” whose “face flowed into her eyes … in such a way that wherever your glance may momentarily have rested, it immediately thereafter wavered in the direction of her eyes” (1, 2, 24), these women are more metaphors than people. As metaphors they are ambiguous and multitextured. They are representative of the Southern black lyrical world that is dying; they are the objects of male desire; they are the battleground on which white and black males contend for dominance and validity.

Toomer has been criticized for this dehumanizing representation of women, but faulting him for mythologizing and metaphorizing of the African American woman is not entirely fair. Not all of his women are handled stereotypically, while some of his male characters definitely are. Barlo, for instance, offers a perfect example of the mythologized Southern black man:

Black. Magnetically so. Best cotton picker in the county, in the state, in the whole world for that matter. Best man with his fists, best man with dice, with a razor. Promoter of church benefits. Of colored fairs. Vagrant preacher. Lover of all the women for miles and miles around.

(42-43)

Such Southern black men are intensely mythological; they are also lyrical. In “Blood Burning Moon,” for example, Tom Burwell, although instinctively skeptical of language, exhibits a lyric propensity: “words is like the spots on dice: no matter how y fumbles em, there's times when they jes wont come” (56). Like Barlo, Tom is a master worker and fighter, mythologically physical and powerful. Reading Cane carefully, one becomes aware that Toomer has orientalized and mystified not just the women but the entire Southern African American realm as a lyric contrast to the superficial realm of Northern white culture.

Critics are right, however, to point out the central thematic function of the African American women in the text. Because of their complex nature as representative figures, they function almost as the chora of the work, a term that Kristeva borrows from Plato to describe “an invisible and formless being which receives all things and in some mysterious way partakes of the intelligible, and is most incomprehensible.”¹⁰ The minds of women are constantly presented in Cane as inscrutable and unreadable. Fern, for example, is described as having eyes that “sought nothing—that is, nothing that was obvious and tangible and that one could see” (2). For this reason women are eminently inscribable. When the speaker is confronted with Avey's impenetrable nature, for example, he attempts to fill the void in his understanding with words:

I pointed out that in lieu of proper channels, her emotions had overflowed into paths that dissipated them. 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 recited some of my own things to her. I sang, with a strange quiver in my voice, a promise song. And then I began to wonder why her hand had not once returned a single pressure.

(87)

In the body of the woman the speaker finds a place in which the cane field, sending a breeze blowing north to the city, can be reaffirmed. It is important to note that the speaker is unsuccessful in his attempt to give Avey a center. She does not acknowledge him or what he is trying to do. In fact, his words have only the effect of sending their intended object to the deep, unreachable realm of sleep. Still, the women in the novel represent the possibility of unification for the various elements in the text through consummation of sexual desire and birth. They possess the capacity to receive all things through sexual activity. And because of this capacity they have the potential to produce, through miscegenation, the unification of black and white worlds. Most of the women in the work, multiethnic themselves, are objects of desire for members of races different from their own, or they have children of another race. Women are metaphorized as the instruments of consummation, and they therefore represent the narrative's fundamental drive toward integration. In a sense, their reproductive capacity gives the women in Cane a superhuman, almost Whitmanesque quality. They are large; they contain multitudes. And Toomer does his best to present this massive, sexually integrating potential in a positive light. Of Carma, for example, he asks, “Should she not take others, this Carma, strong as a man, whose tale as I have told it is the crudest melodrama?” (20).

Women like Carma are also important to Toomer because they represent what Kristeva would term the main abject presence in the sequence—a presence that “disturbs identity, system, order,” that “does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.”¹¹ Without such characters there could be no hope of a breaking down of the social order that separates blacks from whites, the lyric from the realistic, the soul from the surface. Karintha, Carma, Esther, Louisa, Avey, Fern, and even Bona are all figures willing to cross social borders. By making these central characters inherently transgressive, Toomer effectively gives up the narrative to figures of abjection. He asks readers to identify with them and their drive toward transgression and integration.

The desire for integration represented by these characters is, however, never satisfied in Cane. Whenever the prosaic world of whites and the lyric world of Southern blacks come into contact, whenever transgression is achieved, integration is frustrated. The result of transgression is either disastrous and violent or simply blocked—a reaffirming of the social order that seeks to contain and separate. When Paul decides to accept Bona, she disappears; when Esther attempts sexual union with Barlo, she is mocked; when a white and a black man desire the same woman, the result is a fight, a murder, and a lynching; when a white woman has two black children, she is first ostracized by society and then destroyed by the house built to contain her. In every case, the controlling force of white society prevents any social change. The ruptures are prevented or paved over, buried.

MONTAGE AS FORM

Both the desire for integration and the frustration of that desire are enhanced by Toomer's choice of a form. For Cane is not only a thematic montage of realistic and lyrical presences but a formal montage of realistic and lyric passages, a work that combines poems, prose poems, lyric narratives, dramatic narratives, and prose narratives. This radical mixing, combined with Toomer's stated desire for integration, has led many critics to seek the formal unity of the work. Robert B. Jones, for example, effectively demonstrates how lyricism and realism are equally present in the text; he argues that Toomer collapses the boundaries separating narrative from lyric by combining elements of both within individual passages.¹²

Jones's argument is a convincing one. Certainly, Toomer was one of the earliest modernist writers to make use of a large assemblage of poetic effects—including surrealism, repetition, temporal disjunctions, and heavy symbolism—within a prose narrative framework. Cane's first narrative passage, “Karintha,” is a case in point. Toomer includes in “Karintha” passages set off from the text typographically that are clearly meant to be read as poetry:

Her skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon,
O cant you see it, O cant you see it,
Her skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon
… When the sun goes down.

(1)

This is unquestionably poetry; from the suggestive imagery to the repetitive phrasing and the line breaks, the form is traditionally poetic.

While interjecting poetry into the narrative framework is formally transgressive, what is interesting about “Karintha” is that the poetry is not confined to the typographically marked lines. As Jones points out, the narrative itself contains many of the same elements as this poem. The images of the dusk and the setting sun are reused repeatedly. And the prose does not merely mirror the poem's lines; it borrows poetic techniques. One obvious example of this is Toomer's manipulation of repeated phrases in the narrative. The line “Karintha is a woman,” which occurs at three different moments, has the effect of upsetting the temporal structure of the narrative. Each time the line is repeated, it gathers power and returns the action to the present. One experiences the distinctly modernist sense of running in place. In “Karintha” Toomer weaves several poetic effects into the prose narrative framework in a fairly seamless manner.

Still, the question remains whether or not distinctions between prose and poetry—and between realistic form and lyric form—have actually been collapsed. One might argue that there really is very little prose in this sequence, that “Karintha” is a prose poem, and that all Toomer has done is to write a narrative poem without line breaks. One might also question whether Toomer's blurring of formal distinctions in some individual sequences overrides the fragmented nature of the text as a whole. In any case, the prose poem is not the dominant stylistic form of Cane. In fact, most of the narratives seem fragmentary and disjunctive, reinforcing the montage effect of the work as a whole. This fragmentation, far from representing a structural flaw in the work, is the source of Cane's strange power.

In order to understand how fragmentation functions in Cane, one must consider the function of montage as an avant-garde form. Montage presentation relies on the presence of disjunction and dissociation even as it attempts to call into question that dissociation. When a modern painter glues a real piece of a peach basket to a representation of a peach, he or she is trying to force the viewer to question traditional conceptions of the relation between art and reality. The distinction between the two isn't so much collapsed as momentarily ruptured, thrown into doubt. In such a painting the viewer must understand the “real” peach basket in relation to the “artificial” peach. Without the institutional and social borders that govern the way the viewer looks at these two artifacts, the montage has no effect. In order to be transgressive, the artist must have something to transgress. Borders are essential. A literary montage draws its formal and thematic power from the constant collision of disruptive forces that seek to transgress formal and social borders even as they simultaneously strengthen them. Kristeva's argument that poetic language is inherently disruptive seems particularly valuable here. She claims that traditional narrative tends to be constrained by the dominant social bourgeois reality.¹³ Realistic writing, then, is inherently nondisjunctive, and it thus seeks to resolve complications and ambiguities by reintegrating them into the social order. Poetic language, by contrast, is inherently disruptive because it is ambiguous and therefore challenges traditional bourgeois norms of thought and association. In other words, the two forms are fundamentally opposed in purpose.

What happens most often in Toomer's text is that the lyric and disruptive passages battle the realistic elements of the narrative for dominance. This conflict is most often seen in passages in which lyric attempts to reach for the inexpressible truth or soul of a matter are interrupted by more realistic speech or dramatic action. Formally, this interruption is represented by a long dash or an ellipsis followed by a break in paragraphing and then a flat statement or dramatic sequence. The effect of this stylistic break is to create a sense that the lyric is never allowed to reach its completion, that it is in unequal competition with reality. In “Box Seat,” for example, Dan Moore's lyric thoughts are interrupted first by a dramatic action and then by empty speech:

Dan goes to the wall and places his ear against it. A passing street car and something vibrant from the earth sends a rumble to him. That rumble comes from the earth's deep core. It is the mutter of powerful underground races. Dan has a picture of all the people rushing to put their ears against walls, to listen to it. The next world-savior is coming up that way. Coming up. A continent sinks down. The new-world Christ will need consummate skill to walk upon the waters where huge bubbles burst. … Thuds of Muriel coming down. Dan turns to the piano and glances through a stack of jazz music sheets. Ji-ji-bo, JI-JI-BO! …

“Hello, Dan stranger, what brought you here?”

(108)

In passages of this sort the distinction between realistic prose and lyricism has not been collapsed. In fact, it has been amplified by juxtaposition.

Of course, one could argue that Toomer is more successful in collapsing the distinction between narrative and poetic forms in the earlier passages, where the lyricism is more dominant. But even in the most obviously poetic narratives of Cane's opening sequences, the stylistic separation between poetic and prose passages is fairly easy to recognize.

In some ways a seamless integration of the forms would not only be impossible in Cane but also neither practical nor politically purposeful. Montage relies on dissociation and fragmentation even as it implies a desire for the integration of its various fragments. Far from being a form that erases difference, montage is a technique that encourages a dialectic in which the artist invites the viewer to explore the ruptures caused by placing divergent or discordant elements together. In the process, both the creation of meaning and the authorship of meaning become negotiable. In the passage from “Bona and Paul” quoted above, Toomer forces his reader to view the two realities as they coexist in society. The reader must understand each reality in terms of the other. White reality can be understood only in terms of African American lyricism. Presenting the two contrasting modes of perception together is a political statement in itself—as is the practice of rupturing the realistic narrative with a lyric, poetic passage. And the proximity of these contradictory forces intensifies both the longing for integration and the rigidity of the borders that separate them. Cane achieves its powerful effect not from seamless unity—which, had it been achieved, might have canceled out the power of the “novel” as either an avant-gardist or a subversive text—but from a desire for unity intensified by the impossibility of its realization.

Toomer deliberately organized Cane into three separate sequences; the first he locates mostly in the Southern, lyrical realm; the second, in the Northern, realistic realm of white society. Finally, in “Kabnis,” he brings the two worlds into conflict by returning a multiethnic male, educated in the North, to the Southern lyrical world. Before each of the first two sequences Toomer places a line drawing—an arc. Before “Kabnis” the two arcs are almost brought together to form a complete circle. But the lines do not touch. They cannot. For it is in the space between those lines that the disruptive forces of lyric desire accumulate. By manipulating the thematic and formal borders of his narrative to create such ruptures, Toomer asks his readers to re-inscribe that rupture with a new understanding that can bring the lines together. In this way the space between those lines resembles the great blue field between the outstretched fingers on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The energy of creation is in the possibilities that all such spaces imply.

Notes

1. See Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984), 22.

2. Ibid., 73-74.

3. Jean Toomer, “The Crock of Problems,” in Jean Toomer: Selected Essays and Literary Criticism, ed. Robert B. Jones (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1996), 58-59.

4. Ibid., 56.

5. John Liveright to Jean Toomer, [early 1923], quoted in Charles L. Larson, Invisible Darkness: Jean Toomer and Nella Larson (Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press, 1993), 21.

6. Jean Toomer, Cane (1923; reprint, New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 11. All further references will be to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text.

7. Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 52-54.

8. Julia Kristeva, A Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1984), 91.

9. Janet M. Whyde, “Mediating Forms: Narrating the Body in Jean Toomer's Cane,” Southern Literary Journal 26 (fall 1993): 41.

10. Leon S. Roudiez, introduction to Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language, ed. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1980), 6.

11. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1982), 4.

12. Robert B. Jones, Jean Toomer and the Prison-House of Thought (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 33-48.

13. Kristeva, Desire in Language, 37.