SOURCE: “Cane: Hermeneutics of Form and Consciousness,” in Jean Toomer and the Prison-House of Thought: A Phenomenology of the Spirit, The University of Massachusetts Press, 1993, pp. 33-62.

THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE: METAPHOR AND METONYMY

In his foreword to the 1923 edition of Cane, Waldo Frank properly locates the pulse of Toomer's Symbolist-Modernist aesthetic, heralding him as “a poet in prose.” In describing his own writing, Toomer corroborates Frank's assessment: “As for writing—I am not a romanticist. I am not a classicist nor a realist, in the usual sense of those terms. I am an essentialist. Or, to put it in other words, I am a spiritualizer, a poetic realist. This means two things. I try to lift facts, things, happenings to the planes of rhythm, feeling, and significance. I try to clothe and give body to potentialities.”¹ In words reminiscent of Ezra Pound's summons to “make it new,” Toomer asserts that the modern writer “has a wish to produce by experimentation a new form. Certainly he will aim to make an individual use of the old forms.”² Toomer's original use of literary forms intermediate between poetry and prose not only accentuates his own search for form, it foregrounds the structure of language in Cane. In this context, Roman Jakobson's research on the nature of poetic language and Victor Shklovsky's theory of ostraneniye provide useful heuristic strategies for examining the book's range of verbal art.

The character of verbal art, according to Jakobson, is twofold: it develops either by contiguity, as in prose, or by similarity, as in poetry. The former is described as metonymic discourse, the latter as metaphoric.

In verbal art the interaction of [metonymy and metaphor] is especially pronounced. … [In poetry] The primacy of the metaphoric process in the literary schools of romanticism and symbolism has been repeatedly acknowledged, but it is still insufficiently realized that it is the predominance of metonymy which underlies and actually predetermines the so-called “realistic” trend, which belongs to an intermediary stage between the decline of romanticism and the rise of symbolism and is opposed to both.³

The “contiguous,” or metonymic, language of realistic narrative is essentially denotative and explicitly referential, as it advances by combination and contexture. The “similar,” or metaphoric, language of poetry, however, is essentially connotative and explicitly reflexive, as it advances by selection and substitution.

Jakobson also isolates six functions of language, noting that every “message,” though often fulfilling more than one role, is framed in a predominant context. He defines the domain which is specific to poetry by extension of his distinction between the metonymic and metaphoric poles of language: “The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection onto the axis of combination.”⁴ That is, the principal way in which the poetic function manifests itself is by projection of metaphoric language onto the metonymic speech act. “By emphasizing resemblances of sound, rhythm, and image, poetry thickens language, drawing attention to its formal properties and away from its referential significance.”⁵ Jakobson further observes that “similarity superimposed on contiguity imparts to poetry its thoroughgoing symbolic, multiplex, poly-semantic essence.”⁶ It is in this context that Victor Shklovsky's theory of defamiliarization complements Jakobson's description of the linguistic function which is specific to poetry.

In “Art as Technique,” Shklovsky argues that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic. Thus the purpose of art is to impart artfulness or literariness to life—by de-automatizing it, by defamiliarizing it—in order to distinguish it for sensuous perception. “The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.”⁷ “Defamiliarization” effectively transfers the object of perception into a new sphere of heightened perception. Victor Erlich, who labels the transference “semantic shift,” describes this sphere as the very raison d'être of poetry. “By tearing the object out of its habitual context, by bringing together disparate notions, the poet gives a coup de grâce to the verbal cliché and to the stock responses attendant upon it and focusses us into heightened awareness of things and their sensory texture. The act of creative deformation restores sharpness to our perceptions, giving ‘density’ to the world around us.”⁸

In “The Subject Matter of Art,” Toomer uses three examples to illustrate the Symbolist notion that art which derives from inner experience is the product of the self's artistic defamiliarization, a process which evokes, in Toomer's words, “a range of experiences” within the reader. The illustration is of five people riding in a car, including a man who is a musician. What type of music is he to create for the occasion? On the one hand, if he makes music of the sounds of the car (e.g., the whir of the motor and the rattle of the body), he merely translates an experience common to all, inspiring no one. On the other hand, if he makes music of the ordinary moods of himself and his companions (e.g., the excited mood of starting; the tedium; the restlessness), according to Toomer, there is nothing in this type of art to warrant one's having spent years mastering the techniques of music. However, as a third alternative, if the musician uses techniques to express his true inner life and utilizes his technical facility to evoke higher levels of consciousness in himself and in his companions, then he evokes a range of experiences which neither the car nor their moods could provide. “Imaginatively place yourself in that car. Ask yourself which type of music you'd most like to hear and participate in. There is no doubt that the third type would mean most, precisely because it would transport you into a creative state of being, a state of being inner active as never before, whereas types one and two but repeat that with which you are already familiar.” In other words, the musician's creative imagination defamiliarizes our common, habitual perceptions, distinguishing them for sensuous perception.

In narrative discourse defamiliarization is problematic, as it is in Cane. For whenever linguistic defamiliarization occurs within narration, a distinctly “poetic” dimension is introduced; that is, self-reflexive language in narration “makes strange” the metonymic speech act. When the “principle of equivalence” is projected from the metaphoric onto the metonymic axis of language, metaphor widens the gap between signifier and signified. The result is poetic verbal art, an aspect of creative deformation not unlike Brooks's dictum on the language of paradox, or Empson's types of ambiguity. In like fashion, Jakobson maintains that “ambiguity is an intrinsic, inalienable character of any self-focused message, briefly a corollary feature of poetry. … The supremacy of poetic function over referential function does not obliterate the reference, but makes it ambiguous.”⁹ For Jakobson, as for Shklovsky, the language of poetry widens the gap between the sign and its referent.

The function of poetry is to point out that the sign is not identical with its reference. Why do we need this reminder? … Because along with the awareness of the identity of the signs and the referent (A is A1), we need the consciousness of the inadequacy of this identity (A is not A1); this antinomy is essential, since without it the connection between the sign and the object becomes automatized and the perception of reality withers away.¹⁰

Shklovsky's defamiliarization theory illuminates Jakobson's theory of poetic discourse. For if the metaphoric language of poetry is more defamiliarized than the metonymic language of prose discourse, then metonymy may be equated with linguistic habituation (“the automatism of perception”), and metaphor with linguistic defamiliarization (heightened perception). That is, in prose we do not notice individual words as words, because perception in reading “smooth” or referential language presents little difficulty. But in poetry, language is “roughened” or sign oriented; the autonomy of the word is emphasized. It follows, then, that mimesis in Symbolist or “poetic” fiction is a complex process indeed, involving not only the way in which the “real” world is reflected (and distorted) but also how genre conventions are observed (and subverted). This is what Jonathan Culler implies in citing “linguistic deviation” as a major hallmark of “the true structure or state of poetry,” and what Ralph Freedman and Karl Uitti mean in employing the terms “distortions” and “deformations” to describe the techniques used by Symbolist novelists in their subversions of conventional, realistic narrative.¹¹ But clearly, all three critics understand poetic language to be a “heightened” form of prose, which transcends its sheerly mimetic qualities to achieve a higher level of ostraneniye than the corresponding act of “creative deformation” in realistic narratives.

In the light of Jakobson's and Shklovsky's research, we are able to posit a continuum illustrating the range of verbal art in Cane in terms of degrees of literary defamiliarization—that is, in terms of the predominance of self-reflexive poetic tropes, such as ambiguity, simile, metaphor, imagery, rhythm, and repetition.

METAPHORIC LANGUAGE

Poems: “Reapers,” “November Cotton Flower,” “Face,” “Cotton Song,” “Song of the Son,” “Georgia Dusk,” “Nullo,” “Evening Song,” “Conversion,” “Portrait in Georgia,” “Beehive,” “Storm Ending,” “Her Lips Are Copper Wire,” “Prayer,” “Harvest Song”

Prose poems: “Seventh Street,” “Robert,” “Calling Jesus”

METONYMIC LANGUAGE

Lyrical narratives: “Karintha,” “Becky,” “Carma,” “Fern”

Prose narratives: “Esther,” “Blood-Burning Moon,” “Avey,” “Theater,” “Box Seat,” “Bona and Paul,” “Kabnis”

In order to specify the degrees of distinctions among these forms, as well as explore the structure of language which inheres in each, let us examine “Song of the Son,” “Calling Jesus,” “Karintha,” and “Avey” as representative of their respective forms.¹²

Manifesting such lyrical tropes as imagery, metaphor, alliteration, repetition, and rhyme, “Song of the Son” represents the patently metaphoric pole of Cane's verbal art. Composed in iambic pentameter, the poem develops in two movements, the first composed of three five-line stanzas (a b b a a), the second of two four-line stanzas (a b b a). The first movement opens with an invocation to a late-evening singer, whose song evokes the essence of the “sawdust glow of night” and pierces the twilight silence and stillness. Here night symbolizes the oblivion into which the African-American folk spirit is passing. “Velvet pine-smoke” from the sawdust pile, like incense, transports the essence of the evening song, the essence of the Southern black experience, toward heaven. The song symbolizes the truth of artistic beauty, transcending the mutable world. The poet declares himself a prodigal son, returning home “just before an epoch's sun declines” to preserve in art the fleeting legacy of a “song-lit race of slaves.” The second movement comprises an apostrophe to the “souls of slavery,” described in terms of “dark purple ripened plums / Squeezed, and bursting in the pinewood air” (12). This image suggests the cloying state of fruit as it passes into the oblivion of the post-harvest. Yet the poet affirms the power of art to preserve and immortalize “one plum” and “one seed” of the passing African-American heritage in his

everlasting song, a singing tree,
Caroling softly would of slavery,
What they were, and what they are to me.

(12)

Further along the continuum of verbal art in Cane are the prose poem “Calling Jesus” and the lyrical narrative “Karintha,” both of which affirm Toomer's modernist predilection to “produce by experimentation a new form.” Few critics have attempted to define the prose poem, although it has existed as an autonomous literary genre for over three hundred years. The tradition of the prose poem dates from the publication of Fénelon's Les Aventures de Télémaque (1699), although it is more generally acknowledged that this hybrid form was created by Aloysius Bertrand in his poème en prose. The most popular practitioners of the prose poem were the French Symbolists, particularly Charles Baudelaire in Petits poèmes en prose (1869), Lautrémont in Les Chants de Maldoror (1867), and Arthur Rimbaud in Les Illuminations (1886). Although both poetic prose and the prose poem reveal a writer's predilection for metaphoric discourse, they represent distinctly different yet contiguous forms. Poetic prose remains essentially prose discourse, whereas the prose poem is precisely a poem. Susan Bernard proposed three criteria for the poème en prose: unité, gratuité, and breveté. For Bernard, the prose poem

presupposes a conscious will or organization into a poem; it must be an organic, autonomous whole, which allows it to be distinguished from poetic prose (which is but a raw material, or a form of the first degree if you prefer, starting with which one may construct essays, novels, or poems as well); this will lead to the notion of organic unity: as complex as it may be, and as free in appearance as it may be, the poem must form a whole, a closed universe. … a poem does not propose for itself any end outside of itself, not more narrative than demonstrative; it does utilize narrative or descriptive elements, it is with the condition that they are transcended and are made to “work” in a whole and to uniquely poetic ends. … the poem does not progress towards a goal, does not play out a succession of actions or ideas, but proposes itself to the reader. … the modern prose poem is always brief.¹³

According to Bernard, the poème en prose endeavors to transcend the double principle which inheres in its hybrid form: it wills to go beyond language while utilizing language; it strives to destroy form while creating form; and it struggles to escape from literature even as it exists as an autonomous literary genre. It is this internal contradiction, this essential antinomy, Bernard argues, that gives the prose poem the character of an Icarian art, reaching toward an impossible self-transcendence, toward a negation of its own conditions of existence. Owing to degrees of artistic defamiliarization, we are able to contrast the language of the prose poem “Calling Jesus” with the language of the poetic narrative “Karintha” in order to specify the distinctions between these forms.

A poem in three movements, “Calling Jesus” unfolds as an extended metaphor of the relationship between existence and essence, here symbolized by Nora and her “little thrust-tailed dog,” respectively, to comment upon the dissociation of body and soul and the need for self-integration. Here, as in his poetry, Toomer employs such tropes as simile, metaphor, imagery, and repetition (parallelism) to establish lyrical form. The first movement opens with a simile comparing Nora's soul to a small dog separated from its mistress. The poet uses the vestibule of a house to symbolize the threshold that separates inner from outer, spiritual from physical. To be sure, Nora demonstrates a callous disregard for her spiritual self-development, leaving her dog in the cold vestibule overnight. Yet the poet envisions the force of transcendental unity, “soft as a cotton ball brushed against the milk-pod cheek of Christ, stealing in to cover the little dog” and uniting it with Nora, who “sleeps upon clean hay cut in her dreams” (55). That is, though her self-integration is thwarted by the city and its “vestibules,” she dreams of union with her spiritual self, here described in rural nature imagery drawn from part 1 of Cane.

In the second movement we learn that during the day Nora experiences mystical flashes of self-integration, “when she has forgotten the streets and alleys, and the large house where she goes to bed at night.” It is precisely during these moments that “a soft thing like fur begins to rub your limbs, and you hear a low, scared voice, lonely, calling, and you know that a cool something nuzzles moisture in your palms.” In a moment of mystical union with the inner self, Nora's breath comes “sweet as honeysuckle whose pistils bear the life of coming song. And her eyes carry to where builders find no need for vestibules.”

The opening lines of the third movement repeat the opening lines of the poem, reiterating Nora's self-fragmentation. Here the little dog is imaged as lagging along behind her by day and, again, enclosed in the vestibule by night. In the closing lines the poet reintroduces the force of transcendental unity developed in the first movement, again affirming its power to reconcile both inner and outer selves. The simile of spiritual intervention, described as “soft as a cotton ball brushed against the milkpod cheek of Christ” in the first movement, is here imaged as “soft as the hare feet of Christ moving across bales of southern cotton.” Thus this spiritual mystical force is imaged as light and fleeting. The closing lines reiterate the need for spiritual awakening and self-integration. Again, as in the first movement, Nora's dreams are associated with the landscape of rural nature, “cradle in dream-fluted cane.” In sum, language in “Calling Jesus” is highly symbolic and self-reflexive, as in poetry.

Like the poème en prose, the lyrical narrative also derives from a time-honored tradition, including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister (which Toomer greatly admired), Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen, André Gide's La Symphonie Pastorale, J. K. Huysmans's A Rebours, and Virginia Woolf's The Waves. Yet a lyrical narrative is not a prose poem; rather, it employs patterns of reflexive references and poetic tropes to advance a narrative design. According to Ralph Freedman, “The characteristic differentiating lyrical from non-lyrical fiction is portraiture, the halting of the flow of time within constellations of images or figures.”)¹⁴ Thus while the lyrical narrative “tells a story,” in accordance with E. M. Forster's maxim on the art of fiction, it also renders the immediacy of portraiture through spatial form achieved by reflexive references. Lyrical narratives, then, unfold simultaneously on both metaphoric and metonymic levels of interpretation. Yet, ultimately, a constellation of images emerges to advance what is primarily a narrative design.

On the metaphoric or self-reflexive level, “Karintha” manifests extensive use of “roughened” or poetic language. There is the artful use of simile (Karintha's skin is “like dusk on the eastern horizon,” her beauty is “perfect as dusk,” she is “as innocently lovely as a November cotton flower,” her darting was “like a blackbird that flashes in light”), of metaphor (Karintha was “a growing thing ripened too soon” and “a wild flash,” her darting was “a bit of vivid color” and her running was “a whir”), of descriptive imagery (“dusk on the eastern horizon,” “feet flopping in the two inch dust,” “smooth and sweet” pine needles which are “elastic to the feet of rabbits,” smoke from a “pyramidal sawdust pile” which “curls up and hangs in odd wraiths about the trees” and “spreads itself out over the valley”), and of present tense verbs to arrest the immediacy of portraiture (“Karintha carrying beauty, perfect as dusk”; “Karintha is a woman. She who carries beauty”; “Karintha smiles and indulges her male suitors” (1).

On the metonymic or referential level, however, “Karintha” is a realistic and moral tale, narrating the untimely maturation of a beautiful young girl whose inner essence is ignored, especially by men. In this way, we come to understand Karintha as a victim of her environment. Even as a child her “perfect beauty” attracts men's attention. They dandle her on their knees, wishing “to ripen a growing thing too soon.” Over the years, the community indulges her mischief because of her physical beauty, and by age twelve she ripens under the rays of undisciplined free play: “She stoned the cows, and beat her dog, and fought the other children. … Even the preacher, who caught her at mischief, told himself that she was as innocent as a November cotton flower” (1). By age twenty she has been married several times and developed contempt for the men around her. Yet they all still desire to possess her, believing “that all they had to do was to count time.” Several weeks before giving birth to an infant, she inhabits a pine forest living near a sawmill until the baby is born—onto a bed of “smooth and sweet” pine needles. If indeed Karintha buries the infant under the smouldering pyramidal sawdust pile, as the text seems to suggest, then the smoke, which curls up in odd wraiths about the trees and is so dense that everyone tastes smoke in the water, is an ill omen and reminder for the community of shared guilt. The closing lines of this story reiterate the contrast between Karintha's inner essence and her outer beauty and tell how the members of her community, especially the men, regard only her physical development: “Men do not know that the soul of her was a growing thing ripened too soon. They will bring her money; they will die not having found it out.”

Representing the metonymic pole of language is “Avey,” the most conventional “realistic” narrative in Cane. While this short story employs such metaphoric tropes as simile (“trees that whinnied like colts impatient to be set free,” “Avey was as silent as those great trees,” “soil of my homeland falls like a fertile shower upon the lean streets,” “Their playing was like a tin spoon in one's mouth,” “The Capitol dome looked like a gray ghost ship drifting in from sea”), imagery (“the moon was brilliant. The air was sweet like clover. And every now and then, a stale tang, a stale drift of sea-weed,” “light spread like a blush against the darkened sky. Against the soft dusk sky of Washington,” “She did not have the gray crimson-splashed beauty of the dawn”), and repetition (“the moon was brilliant. The air was sweet like clover. And every now and then, a stale tang, a stale drift of sea-weed”), the language of the text remains primarily metonymic (42-47). Most important, however, there is a conspicuous absence of the reflexive reference patterns and constellations of repeated images used in the prose poems and lyrical narratives to arrest the immediacy of portraiture. To be sure, in “Avey” plot and not image is the measure of narrative design.

Reminiscent of James Joyce's “Araby,” “Avey” is a story of disillusionment and self-awareness. Avey herself represents modern woman in the postwar decade. Like Eliot's London secretary in The Waste Land, she countenances men's sexual advances with indifference. The plot unfolds in three intervals, each chronicling the narrator's increased self-awareness in terms of his encounters with Avey. Thus the narrator's quest, like that of Eliot's Parsifal, is directed by a debased Sybyl.

The first interval recounts a boyhood incident in which the narrator is sexually awakened by romantic illusions of Avey. Later in this account, his illusions are partially realized during an amorous encounter with her on board the Jane Moseley. His masculine pride is bruised, however, when she meets his affection with maternalistic condescension. “I could feel by the touch of it that it wasn't a man-to-woman love. … I itched to break through her tenderness of passion. … I gave her one burning kiss. Then she laid me in her lap as if I were a child. Helpless. I got sore when she started to hum a lullaby” (43-44).

During the second interval, which begins a year later, the narrator continues harboring romantic illusions about Avey, although his ideals are diminished when her indolence begins to offend him. Upon reflection, he surmises that it is precisely her environment (the modern world itself and Washington, in particular) which induces her spiritual sterility. Toomer's Sybyl leads the narrator on a quest of self-discovery, from Washington to Wisconsin to New York, as her metaphysical presence continues to haunt him.

The third interval describes the narrator's newfound self-awareness in terms of an epiphanic experience. After five years, he again meets Avey in Washington “strolling under the recently lit arc-lights of U Street” with a male companion. By now Avey is a courtesan, while the narrator has learned “to find the truth that people bury in their hearts.” Thus he attempts to lecture her on carelessness and inner self-development. In spite of his eloquence, however, when he turns to look at her, she is asleep, and his passion dissipates. Several hours later, watching the sun rise, the narrator experiences an epiphany. He is rid of his illusions about Avey forever. “I saw the dawn steal over Washington. The Capitol dome looked like a gray ghost ship drifting in from sea. Avey's face was pale, and her eyes were heavy. She did not have the gray crimson-splashed beauty of the dawn. I hated to wake her. Orphan-woman” (47). The range of Cane's verbal art reveals Toomer's search for form, particularly a form consistent with his idealism. Here we note his transcendental vision of modern art, a vision in which poetry and fiction, metaphor and metonymy, are reconciled as interactive entities, each blending into union with its antithesis. It is precisely in this manner that Toomer's literary experimentation locates him within the Symbolist-Modernist tradition. As we shall see, not only his experiments with language but also his experiments with spatial form define his modernist aesthetics.

THE ART OF LITERARY PORTRAITURE

The individual works which compose Cane illustrate Toomer's art of literary portraiture. His innovative experiments with time and plot progression demonstrate an ever-present attempt to collapse self and world, lyrical and narrative—in sum, to introduce poetic strategies into narrative. Moreover, portraiture, which employs imagery and description primarily, breaks up the consecutiveness of plot, thus thwarting the conventional narrative surge toward completion. “To call a narrative a ‘portrait’ is to warn the reader at once not to expect much action, to look for resolution in the completion of an artistic pattern rather than in status achieved in the lives of the characters. In his precocious first draft of A Portrait Joyce defined a literary portrait as an attempt to present the present not in “its iron memorial aspect” but as a “fluid succession of presents.”¹⁵ Joyce was not the only modern writer who attempted to arrest the wholeness and immediacy of experience in “a fluid succession of presents.” Indeed, the American who pioneered the art of literary portraiture was Gertrude Stein; in the context of Stein's portrait writing we are perhaps best able to understand Toomer's art of literary portraiture.

Stein often employed patterns of repetition, what she calls insistence, to spatialize form and produce literary portraits. Realizing that the spatial form which inheres in the plastic arts does not inhere in the literary arts, she sought to eliminate the illusion of time in her narratives, much in the way that Picasso sought to eliminate the illusion of depth during his Cubistic period. By de-emphasizing the temporal dimension of her art, Stein, like Picasso, was able to achieve heightened sensory perception, as well as the illusion of spatial creation. But the specific importance of Stein's experiments was the spatialization of literary form, which resulted in the introduction of a distinctly lyrical dimension into her art.

In creating literary portraits, Stein sought to create a “continuous present” by “beginning again and again.” In commenting on this method she used in creating the portraits of Picasso and Matisse, Stein tells us: “Every time I said what they were I said it so that they were this thing, and each time I said what they were as they were, as I was, naturally more or less but never the same each time that I said what they were, not that they were different nor that I was different but as it was not the same moment I said I said it with a difference. So finally I was emptied of saying this thing, and so no longer said what they were.”¹⁶ Accordingly, in her “Portrait of Picasso” she uses two patterns of insistence to depict this famous artist:

I

One whom some were certainly following was one who was completely charming

(line 1)

One whom some were certainly following was one who was completely charming

(lines 5-6)

Some were certainly following and were certain that the one they were following was one bringing out of himself then something that was coming to be a heavy thing, a solid thing and a complete thing

(lines 9-13)

One whom some were following and some were certainly following him

(lines 23-24)

This one had been one whom some were following

(line 35)

This one was one whom some were following

(lines 68-69)

He did have some following

(line 84)

II

… the one they were then following was one working and was one bringing out of himself then something

(lines 7-9)

One whom some were certainly following was one certainly working

(lines 24-25)

One whom some were certainly following was one having something coming out of him something having meaning and this one was certainly working

(lines 26-28)

This one was one who was working

(line 39)

This one was one going on working

(line 42)

This one was one who was working

(line 77)

This one was not one working to have anything come out of him. He always did have something having meaning that did come out of him

(lines 80-83)

He was one who was working

(lines 84-85).¹⁷

Here Stein relies upon present participles and nouns ending in -ing to create a sense of presentness and immediacy in narrative, much in the way Imagist poets relied upon the sustained image itself.

Like Stein, Toomer similarly sought to create a continuous present through lyrical “insistence” and an artful use of present tense forms. In many of the selections in Cane Toomer uses a tripartite formal design to approximate the presentness of portraiture: (1) an introductory lyric, (2) an exemplum, and (3) a concluding lyric. This formal strategy is evident in “Becky,” “Carma,” and “Calling Jesus,” but it is perhaps most artfully realized in “Karintha” and in “Seventh Street.”

“Karintha” unfolds as lyrical statement, lyrical narrative, and lyrical restatement. The lyrical statement and restatement frame this portrait of dusky beauty. Within the narrative itself, three patterns of reflexive references thwart the consecutiveness of narrative in favor of imagistic description and portraiture:

I

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

(lines 1-4)

                                        Her skin is like dusk,
                                        O cant you see it,
                                        Her skin is like dusk,
                                        When the sun goes down

(lines 36-39)

                                        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 hori-
                                        zon. …
                                        When the sun goes down

(lines 64-67)

II

… this Karintha, even as a child, Karintha
carrying beauty, perfect as dusk when the sun goes down

(lines 5-6)

She carries beauty, perfect as dusk when the sun goes down

(lines 40-41)

                                        Karintha at twenty, carrying beauty, perfect as dusk when the sun goes down

(lines 62-63)

III

Karintha is a woman

(lines 41)

                                        Karintha is a woman

(lines 45-46)

But Karintha is a woman, and she has a child

(lines 48-49)

Here is as artful an illustration of spatial form achieved by reflexive references as we will find in modern literature. Particularly significant is Toomer's emphasis upon “making you see” (“O cant you see her”). Indeed these three patterns function to depict (I) her dark skin, (II) her perfect “dusky beauty,” and (III) her femininity, all of which lead men to ignore her inner, spiritual essence. As in Stein's portrait, Toomer's reflexive references occur as present-tense verb forms (“carrying,” “carries,” “goes,” “Karintha is a woman,” “she has a child”). Finally, in both Stein's and Toomer's portraits, the reader is able to “see” the total portrait only retrospectively, after having moved beyond the parameters of the continuous present. Each of the individual (and repeated) references must be connected by the reader and viewed as a whole before the portrait fits together, like a mosaic, into a meaningful pattern; knowledge of the whole is essential to an understanding of its parts.

The lyrical statement in “Seventh Street” images materialism and activity:

Money burns the pocket, pocket hurts,
Bootleggers in silken shirts,
Ballooned, zooming cadillacs,
Whizzing, whizzing down the street-car tracks.

(39)

Within the lyrical narrative itself, reflexive images of “a wedge,” “white and whitewashed wood,” and “black reddish blood” attempt to capture the élan of Washington's Seventh Street in the Roaring Twenties:

Seventh Street is a crude-boned soft skinned wedge of nigger life
[Seventh Street is] thrusting unconscious rhythm, black
reddish blood into the white and whitewashed wood of Washington
.....Wedges are beautiful in the sun
.....Black reddish blood. Pouring for crude-boned soft skinned
life, who set you flowing?
.....Flowing down the smooth asphalt of Seventh Street, in
shanties, brick office building, theaters, drug stores,
restaurants, and cabarets? Eddying on the corners?

(39)

“Wedge” is an appropriate metaphor for Washington's Seventh Street, since this thorough fare thrusts (“wedges”) throngs of blacks through the channel of an otherwise all-white area of the city, the “white and whitewashed wood of Washington.” “Wood,” then, is a metaphor for the city itself, and “black reddish blood” is a metaphor for the urban blacks swirling and flowing through the office buildings, theaters, and cabarets. Moreover, Toomer's use of present tense and present participal verbs stimulates the presentness of portraiture: “money burns,” “pocket hurts,” bootleggers are “zooming cadillacs” and “whizzing down the street-car tracks,” Seventh Street itself is “breathing its loafer air” and “pouring unconscious rhythms,” black reddish blood is “pouring for crude-boned song unconscious rhythms,” and black reddish blood is “pouring for crude-boned soft-skinned life,” “flowing,” “eddying,” and “swirling.” The lyrical restatement concludes this portrait of vigorous spirit and movement.

On the micronarrative level, then, the individual works which compose Cane reveal Toomer's search for form within the Modernist-Formalist tradition. In terms of language, there are attempts to transcend dualistic genre distinctions to create new forms, like the prose poem and the lyrical narrative. As for plot, there are efforts to transcend history, to arrest time within constellations of images to create literary portraits. In both cases, these innovations represent the author's attempts to find literary equivalents for his idealism. Moreover, these literary experiments may be traced to Toomer's reified consciousness, specifically his efforts to reconcile his divided self, as well as self and world, within a unified philosophical system.

Beyond Toomer's formal uses of Symbolism to collapse poetry and prose and Imagism to create literary portraits, idealist reification is also manifested in Cane's character typology and themes. As for character typology, we note the alienated narrator and the exiled hero figure in “Fern,” “Beehive,” “Harvest Song,” “Bona and Paul,” and “Kabnis.” There is, moreover, the figure of the divided protagonist (Kabnis and Lewis) in “Kabnis.” Also, as in “Withered Skin of Berries” and in Natalie Mann, there is the male spiritual guide and idealist philosopher who serves as the instrument of female self-realization, as seen in “Avey.” Regarding themes revealing reification, we note the mind-body problem reconciled in favor of the mind and “inner essence” in “Karintha,” “Calling Jesus,” and “Prayer.” Also, the theme of mysticism is presented in “Becky,” “Georgia Dusk,” “Fern,” “Esther,” and “Kabnis.” Yet, other works manifest the author's struggles against reification. In terms of character typology, there is the first-person narrator or protagonist who participates in the community, as in “Becky,” “Carma,” “Song of the Son,” “Fern,” and “Kabnis.” There are themes of racism and social justice in “Becky,” “Esther,” “Blood-Burning Moon,” “Conversion,” “Portrait in Georgia,” “Bona and Paul,” and “Kabnis.” And the theme of the African-American past is treated from socially realistic perspectives in “Cotton Song,” “Song of the Son,” “Georgia Dusk,” and “Conversion.” Finally, there are satirical attacks on capitalism in the postwar decade in “Seventh Street” and in “Rhobert.” Toomer's struggles against alienation and self-fragmentation are further manifested on the macronarrative level. Yet it is Toomer's own commentary on the structure of plot in Cane that provides the most compelling evidence of the author's capitulation to idealist reification.

SPIRITUAL DESIGN AND THE STRUCTURE OF PLOT

Although Jean Toomer shared in the postwar temper of literary experimentation and was influenced by both Symbolist and Imagist aesthetics in the years before writing Cane, few critics have attempted to examine his masterwork from the perspective of Modernist-Formalist criticism. For more than six decades reviewers and critics have debated the issue of form in Cane.¹⁸ The polemical discussions on unity have centered on repeated elements within the book, from which general thematic analyses have developed. On the issue of genre, scholars remain divided over Cane's status as a novel, critics on both sides failing to consider the evolution of new literary forms within the modernist tradition and subscribing to the practice of judging all narrative literature by standards appropriate only to the novel. In formulating a theory of narrative, the critic must consider technique in its relationship to two major concepts: subject matter and overall structure. In Cane, both may be explained in terms of the author's metacommentary on spiritual design, and both elucidate the structure of plot. While there have been discussions of unifying themes, to date there has been no systematic analysis of the structure of plot in Cane. To my mind, it is the author himself who provides the most comprehensive commentary on form and narrative design.

From three angles, Cane's design is a circle. Aesthetically, from simple forms to complex forms, and back to simple forms. Regionally, from the South up to the North, and back into the South again. … From the point of view of the spiritual entity behind the work, the curve really starts with “Bona and Paul” (awakening), plunges into “Kabnis,” emerges in “Karintha,” etc., swings upward into “Theater” and “Box Seat,” and ends (pauses) in “Harvest Song.” … Between each of these sections, a curve. These to vaguely indicate the design.¹⁹

According to Toomer, design in Cane may be interpreted in three ways: aesthetically, regionally, and spiritually, and all in terms of a circle. While several critics have alluded to the aesthetic and regional “angles,” only Charles Scruggs and Rudolph Byrd have attempted to analyze spiritual design in Cane. Scruggs and Byrd define unity in terms of myth and theme, respectively, rather than the structure of plot, however; and neither defines the book as a specifically narrative account of a spiritual odyssey.²⁰ A narrative is distinguished by two requirements: a teller and a tale. In Cane, the teller is represented by the metaphor of the “spiritual entity behind the work.” This teller, the author's self in art, may be assimilated to the role of an implied narrator. “Even the novel in which no narrator is dramatized creates an implicit picture of an author who stands behind the scenes, whether as stage manager, as puppeteer, or as an indifferent God, silently paring his fingernails. This implied author is always distinct from the ‘real man’—whatever we may take him to be—who creates a superior version of himself, a ‘second self,’ as he creates his work.”²¹ The tale itself allegorizes the narrator's experiences as successive stages of consciousness. Indeed, the five arcs in Toomer's cyclical narrative design correspond to Evelyn Underhill's five stages in the development of spiritual consciousness.²² The subject of the tale, then, is the self, and the structure of plot may be represented as a mandala. …

As an instrument of the self's awakening and a chart of its spiritual evolution, a mandala comprises a constellation of images. Usually a formalized circular design containing or contained by a figure of five points of emphasis, each representing the chief objects of psychic interest for the maker, the mandala points toward spiritual perception. Carl Jung defines the psychic function of mandalas in Eastern philosophy as follows:

“Mandala” means a circle, more especially a magic circle. … quite in accord with the Eastern conception, the mandala symbol is not only a means of expression, but works an effect. It reacts upon its maker. Very ancient magic effects lie hidden in this symbol for it derives originally from the “enclosing circle,” the “charmed circle,” the magic of which has been preserved in countless folk customs. … by means of these concrete performances, the attention, or better said, the interest, is brought back to an inner, sacred domain, which is the source and goal of the soul and which contains the unity of life and consciousness. The unity once possessed has been lost, and must now be found again. … The unity of these two, life and consciousness, is the Tao.²³

Considering technique in its relationship both to subject matter and structure, we are able to read Cane as a dramatization of consciousness. In terms of the nature of narrative, the five arcs or stages of consciousness in Toomer's spiritual design may be assimilated to a Formalist critical perspective.

In his often-cited essay “Thematics,” Boris Tomashevsky makes an important distinction between story and plot. In the latter, events are “arranged and connected to the orderly sequence in which they were presented in the work,” while the former represents a background against which the plot arrangement is examined. The five arcs in Cane's narrative structure constitute an arrangement of the events of the story into an artful design. Consistent with Tomashevsky's poetics on narrative, these arcs may be defined as “bound motifs”: “Usually there are different kinds of motifs within a work. By simply retelling the story we immediately discover what may be omitted without destroying the coherence of the narrative and what may not be omitted without disturbing the connections among events. The motifs which cannot be omitted are bound motifs; those which may be omitted without disturbing the whole causal-chronological course of events are free motifs.”²⁴ The remaining “free” motifs in Cane are not inconsequential, for they sometimes dominate and determine the construction of plot. Yet it is the predominant “bound” motifs that chart a journey from spiritual awakening in “Bona and Paul” to spiritual loss in “Harvest Song.”

“Bona and Paul” allegorizes awakening to racial consciousness in Cane's spiritual design. Set in Chicago, the story recounts Paul Johnson's awakening perception of himself as dark and different. Paul's romance with Bona, who is white, provides the basis for the central conflict. Upon entering a cabaret with her, he becomes self-conscious when they are greeted by a multitude of stares. In an epiphanic moment, he suddenly experiences alienation:

A strange thing happened to Paul. Suddenly he knew that he was apart from the people around him. Apart from the pain which they had unconsciously caused. Suddenly he knew that people saw not attractiveness in his dark skin, but difference. Their stares, giving him to himself, filled something long empty within him, and were like green blades sprouting in his consciousness. There was fullness, and strength and peace about it all. He saw himself cloudy, but real.

(75)

According to Underhill, the awakening of the self “entails a vision of the Absolute: a sense of divine presence: but not true union with it.”²⁵ In the story this awakening is realized as Paul's mystical vision of the South and of himself.

Paul follows the sun, over the stockyards where a fresh stench is just arising, across wheat lands that are still waving above their stubble, into the sun. Paul follows the sun to a pine-matted hillock in Georgia. He sees the slanting roofs of gray unpainted cabins tinted lavender. A negress chants a lullaby beneath the mate-eyes of a southern planter. Her breasts are ample for the suckling of a song. She weans it, and sends it, curiously weaving, among lush melodies of cane and corn. Paul follows the sun into himself in Chicago.

(71)

His newly awakened identity is represented by his sudden spiritual identification with the black doorman, whom he addresses as Brother. Their handshake at the end of the story symbolizes Paul's acceptance of his total self.

“Kabnis” allegorizes the second cycle in Toomer's spiritual design, which is preparation for union with the spirit of African-American consciousness. In the character of Kabnis, the author embodies both the portrait of an alienated individual who attempts to become integrated into the community and the portrait of an artist who must surrender his pride and suffer humility before experiencing the illuminated vision requisite for literary creation. Kabnis's initiation proceeds in three stages.

The first stage is marked by alienation, which prevents him from transforming Sempter's black folk tradition into literary art: “If I … could become the face of the South. How my lips would sing for it, my songs being the lips of its soul” (81). He is tantalized by the spirit of intellectual beauty which surrounds him: “Dear Jesus, do not chain me to myself and set these hills and valleys, heaving with folk-songs, so close to me that I cannot reach them. There is a radiant beauty in the night that touches and … tortures me” (83). Kabnis stands outside of the Southern black tradition because his own participation in producing it is mystified. As a detached spectator, he exemplifies the split between observer and participant. The next stage describes his apprenticeship in Halsey's workshop, as he overcomes alienation through associations with members of the community. During this stage, as Underhill defines it, there is a struggle between the inharmonious elements of the self.²⁶ Toomer dramatizes this struggle in doubling Kabnis (the artist-observer) with Lewis (the reformer-participant). Using this technique, he represents the hero's encounter with his alter consciousness as a highly symbolic epiphany. Lewis's eyes “turn to Kabnis. In the instant of their shifting, a vision of the life they are to meet … Kabnis, a promise of the soil-soaked beauty; uprooted, thinning out. Suspended a few feet above the soil whose touch would resurrect him. There is a swift intuitive interchange of consciousness. Kabnis has a sudden need to rush into the arms of this man. His eyes call, ‘Brother’” (96).

Kabnis represents the reified self; he stands outside of the African-American tradition, and his participation in producing it is mystified. Lewis, however, represents the “real” self; he participates in reforming Sempter's social and racial climate, and he confronts Kabnis with the facts of racial heritage. In the final stage of his initiation, Kabnis descends into a cellar for an all-night party. By now he is a candidate for membership into the community, as symbolized by the robe he dons throughout the night, and he is soon referred to as Brother Kabnis. His most significant encounter during this stage, however, is with Father John, who symbolizes the perennial spirit of African-American consciousness. Initially, Kabnis denies any identification with Father John, while Lewis respects the old man as a symbol of racial heritage. Again, character doubling functions to suggest the blend of qualities Kabnis must possess if he is to capture the passing essence of the African-American folk experience. After a night underground, during which time the depths of his racial consciousness are tested, Kabnis takes off his candidate's robe, symbolizing initiation into the community. As he prepares to greet the rising sun of a new day and ascend the stairs ready to commence his labor as a humble blacksmith, he undertakes nothing less than the fulfillment of his desire to forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race. That conscience is artfully realized throughout the next motif, which celebrates a vision of union with the spirit of African-American consciousness.

The works from “Karintha” to “Blood-Burning Moon” convey the empathetic union motif, which I shall also term the Karintha cycle. Here the narrator perceives an extraordinary radiance and mystery in rural Georgia, its inhabitants, and its African-American heritage. Underhill notes that such illumination is accompanied by the perception of visions and that literary art produced during empathetic union with “the joy of illumination” is lyrical and mystical in nature.²⁷ Indeed, the illuminative process is incomplete unless it is coupled with the perception of visions. Whereas “bound motifs” dominate the first two stages in Cane, here four “free motifs” determine the construction of plot, each group representing a moment of vision.

I. PORTRAITS OF SOUTHERN BLACK WOMEN

“Karintha”

“Face”

“Carma”

“Fern”

“Evening Song”

“Esther”

II. LOCAL COLOR PORTRAITS

“November Cotton Flower”

“Cotton Song”

“Nullo”

III. SWANSONGS FOR THE BLACK FOLK TRADITION

“Reapers”

“Song of the Son”

“Georgia Dusk”

“Conversion”

IV. INDICTMENTS OF RACISM

“Becky”

“Portrait in Georgia”

“Blood-Burning Moon”

The Karintha cycle thus comprises four distinct subplots. The work in this cycle most representative of the narrator's empathetic union with ancestral consciousness is “Song of the Son.”

“Song of the Son” is a celebration of the narrator's illuminated vision of spiritual union with the African-American past. The first movement uses time, nature, and music imagery to represent the persona as a native son returning home “just before an epoch's sun declines,” intent upon representing in art the fleeting legacy of a “song-lit race of slaves” (12). The second movement symbolizes the African-American folk tradition as a plum tree nearly stripped of its fruit. Yet the poet is able to preserve “one plum” and “one seed” to immortalize the essence of an era in art. It is precisely this single, preserved “plum” which engenders the “everlasting song,” the “singing tree” that is Cane.

The fourth motif in Cane's spiritual design manifests a shift away from the illuminated visions that characterize the Karintha cycle to a spiritually sterile urban landscape during the postwar decade. The “Theater”—“Box Seat” cycle signals the narrator's return from empathetic union with the spirit of African-American consciousness following a period of sustained mystical activity. Underhill defines this stage as the Dark Night of the Soul: “The self which thought itself so spiritual, so firmly established upon the supersensual plane, is forced to turn back, to leave the Light, and pick up those qualities which it had left behind.”²⁸ This stage is also marked by spiritual ennui and the return of alienation, as the self once again becomes cognizant of its dissociation from the transcendental state of illumination. The works in this motif may be grouped into the following categories:

I. PORTRAITS OF URBAN MATERIALISM

“Seventh Street”

“Rhobert”

II. NARRATIVES OF EMOTIONAL AND SPIRITUAL STERILITY

“Theater”

“Box Seat”

“Avey”

III. PORTRAITS OF THE ALIENATED SELF

“Beehive”

“Calling Jesus”

“Prayer”

The only illuminated moments of vision in the “Theater”—“Box Seat” cycle are “Her Lips Are Copper Wire,” which intimates the possibility of love in the urban landscape, and “Storm Ending,” which images the return of sunshine and tranquility following a storm. The most representative work within this cycle is “Calling Jesus.”

In “Calling Jesus” imagery borrowed from the Karintha cycle symbolizes the narrator's nostalgia for the return of spiritual transcendence and for the unity of existence and essence in the urban wasteland. The text develops as an extended metaphor, comparing Nora's soul to a small dog separated from its mistress. Despite their separation by an urban vestibule, which symbolizes the gap between inner and outer reality, the narrator envisions a force of transcendental unity, “soft as a cotton ball brushed against the milk-pod cheek of Christ,” intervening to unite Nora, who “sleeps upon clean hay cut from her dreams,” with her spiritual essence: “Someone … eoho Jesus … soft as the bare feet of Christ moving across bales of Southern cotton, will steal in and cover it that it need not shiver, and carry it to her where she sleeps: cradled in dream-fluted cane” (55). In this way, the narrator allegorizes the dissociation and alienation that characterize this dark stage in consciousness. In Underhill's study, the Dark Night stage functions to bring the self “to the threshold of that completed life which is to be lived in intimate union with Reality.”²⁹ As we shall see, however, in Cane the Dark Night is no harbinger of the self's union with the spiritual world.

Completing the spiritual design, “Harvest Song” dramatizes the narrator's loss of empathetic union with the essence of African-American culture and consciousness. Ironically titled, the poem describes an artist's inability to transform the raw materials of his labor into art. Reminiscent of Robert Frost's “After Apple-Picking,” “Harvest Song” develops as an extended portrait of the poet as reaper. Although the poet-reaper has successfully cradled the fruits of his labor, when he cracks a grain from the store of his cradled oats, he cannot taste its inner essence. In vain, he attempts to stare through time and space to understand the sources of his inspiration; he also tries to make up the physical distance by straining to hear the calls of other reapers and their songs. But his dust-caked senses preclude any meaningful or helpful intervention. The “knowledge of hunger” he fears is the failure of consciousness and of the creative impulse. Thus he is reluctant to call other reapers, for fear they will share their truly inspiring grains, grains he is unable to assimilate.

It would be good to hear their songs … reapers of the sweet-stalk'd cane, cutters of the corn … even though their throats cracked and the strangeness of their voices deafened me.

Still, he beats his soft, sensitive palms against the stubble of the fields of labor, and his pain is sweeter and more rewarding than the harvest itself. He is then comforted by the pains of his struggles, although they will not bring him knowledge of his hunger.

Cane allegorizes a spiritual odyssey from awakening to racial identity in “Bona and Paul” to loss of racial identity in “Harvest Song,” and ends on a note of alienation rather than of union, which implies the narrator's loss of empathetic union with African-American consciousness. In this context, the “spiritual entity behind the work” is a metaphor for the reified self, divided between the “real” conception of himself as an African-American and the reified conception of himself as the transcendental “First American.” Thus, the loss of racial consciousness signals the ascendancy of reified consciousness. As early as July of 1922, Toomer conceded that “the impulse which sprang from Sparta, Georgia last fall has just about fulfilled and spent itself.” Still, the text remains a triumph of Romantic idealism. In John Keats's “Ode to a Nightingale,” the poet achieves empathetic union with the immortal spirit of nature in a truly transcendental moment of vision. After the passing of this moment in the final strophe, he remains alone, his dissociation from the nightingale complete. Yet he is enriched by the experience, having achieved, if only momentarily, the transcendental unity of inner and outer, self and world. The narrator in Cane achieves a similar transcendental union in the Karintha cycle, if only momentarily, and is similarly enriched. Indeed, retrospectively, Toomer viewed the book through the lens of his perennial idealism as a spiritual fusion, not only of life and consciousness, but also of life and art.

While my instinct to dreams and reading built up that inner life by means of which the outer is transformed into works of art, by means of which the outer gets its deeper meaning, it must not be thought, however, that these two loves existed, as it were, side by side in a mutual and sustaining contract. For a long while just the opposite was true. Whichever was for the time being dominant would try to deny and cut off the other. And from this conflict a most distressing friction arose. In fact, only a year or so ago did they creatively come together. Cane is the first evidence of this fusion.³⁰

In analyzing precisely why Toomer turned away from African-American subjects to Gurdjieffian “higher consciousness,” we need only return to the metacommentary that inheres in Cane's spiritual design. As the text allegorizes it, racial consciousness is awakened as a result of the narrator's alienation from white society, resulting in his identification with his African-American heritage, as seen throughout the Karintha cycle. Yet, after a period of heightened racial consciousness, he similarly experiences alienation from black society, as seen in “Harvest Song.” His alienation is thus complete, as he exiles himself from both races and adopts Gurdjieffian idealism, with its transcendental conception of humanity united.

CANE: TOWARD A DEFINITION OF FORM

If we are able to posit Toomer's spiritual design as the basis for formulating a theory of narrative in Cane, then we are also able to examine the issue of genre, as well. In Cane, the text telescopes the author and the narrator into a lyrical perspective that defines the book as a lyrical novel and as metafiction. Genre conventions (and a writer's abrogations of those conventions) affect our interpretation of a text. It follows, then, that valid interpretation begins with a valid inference about genre and that to misconstrue the emphases of a text is surely to misunderstand it. Indeed, artistry attributed to a given work often results from the way we perceive it. Thus the necessity remains for finding a method by which Cane may be understood in terms of its own constitutive features. In defining Cane as a lyrical novel, three issues must be considered: the concept of the self, the structure of language, and the structure of plot.

In a lyrical novel, the narrator or “symbolic hero” represents an idealized version of the self, the author's self in art. According to Ralph Freedman, this self-reflexive narrator creates a point of view analogous to the lyrical “I” in poetry.

He is the cause of the novel's world, its landscape and stylized textures of faces and events. In his point of view, perceptions, illusory or real, are transmuted into imagery. But he also plays the role of the protagonist: he unifies not only symbolic images but also the novel's scenes. The relationship between these two roles played by an identical figure constitutes an important dimension of lyrical fiction … reflected in an ambiguous world composed simultaneously of a texture of images and of the linear movement of narrative.³¹

Thus, the lyrical novel is ideologically conditioned, as it reflects an idealist epistemology of narrative. That is, the text seeks “to eliminate the disjunction of self and world in the very genre that seems most to require their separation.”³² In Cane, the “spiritual entity behind the work,” the author's self in art, assumes the role of a “symbolic hero,” a self-reflective narrator who proceeds to draw a self-portrait as he allegorizes his symbolic encounters in art.

Any discussion of the structure of language in the lyrical novel is inextricably related to the structure of plot. For the presence of both metaphoric and metonymic poles of language within the same text, as in Cane, thwarts any overall narrative surge toward completion. To include lyric within narrative, “roughened language” within the language of discontinuous plot, deprives narrative of the second-degree semiotic system by which it is constituted. In sum, roughened language inhibits the production of discontinuous plot when these two modes of literary defamiliarization are included within the same text.³³ A theory of narrative in Cane must therefore postulate a mechanism which reconciles lyric and narrative defamiliarization. That mechanism is reflexive reference. Reflexive reference is a technique for combining primary and secondary semiotic systems (poetic language and discontinuous plot) into a ternary system that forms a pattern of meaning, as in the lyrical novel. “Depicting experience and enacting it through a progression of images, the hero renders himself as a symbolic vision.”³⁴ In a lyrical novel, as in Cane, there is “a vast number of references and cross references that relate to each other independently of the time sequence of the narrative. These references must be connected by the reader and viewed as a whole before the book fits together into any meaningful pattern.”³⁵

As for the structure of plot, time in a lyrical novel is represented as a spatial form, resulting in literary portraiture. In other words, a constellation of images is fused with an underlying plot of spiritual evolution, from which a design of motifs emerges. “A lyrical novel assumes a unique form which transcends the causal and temporal movement of narrative. … rather than finding its Gestalt in the imitation of an action, the lyrical novel absorbs action altogether and refashions it as a pattern of imagery. … Ordering all parts [of the narrative] retrospectively in a total image … [the reader] sees complex details in juxtaposition and experiences them as a whole.”³⁶ In Cane, the constellation of images composing the five arcs of Toomer's spiritual design represent experience as a circle and as a spatial form. The underlying plot of spiritual evolution is represented by the successive stages in the narrator's self-reflexive dramatization of consciousness. In the tradition of the lyrical novel, Cane renders spiritual design as a symbolic vision and as a portrait of the artist.

Cane may also be defined as metafiction. In Writing Degree Zero, Roland Barthes employs the term écriture (mode of writing) to differentiate style (verbal obsessions) and language (the author's linguistic heritage) from the function a writer gives to language, the set of institutional conventions within which the activity of writing occurs.³⁷ Borrowing Barthes's concept of écriture, Culler develops a spectrum of modern modes of writing, ranging from realistic (the “socially given” text and the “general culture” text) to self-referential (the “conventionally natural,” or metafictional, text and the “parody and irony” text).³⁸ That is, as a text moves along a continuum from the sheerly mimetic to the sheerly self-referential, at some point its technique becomes its subject. It is at this point that a text crosses the line from the emphatically mimetic to the emphatically metafictional. Under Culler's system of “Naturalization,” the lyrical novel—in its formal synthesis of metaphor and metonymy and in its combination of both discontinuous plot and “roughened language” within a coherent narrative design—is “naturalized” at the level of metafiction. At this level, the lyrical novel

finds its coherence by being interpreted as a narrator's exercise of language and production of meaning. To naturalize it at this level is to read it as a statement about the writing of novels, a critique of mimetic fiction, an illustration of the production of a world by language. … The best way to explain this level of naturalization may be to say that citing or opposing conventions of a genre brings about a change in the mode of reading.³⁹

A metafictional text establishes an opposition between itself and its genre, so as “to make a statement about the imaginative ordering of the world that takes place in literature.” Thus, “We read the poem or novel as a statement about poems or novels (since it has, by its opposition, adumbrated that theme),” and we learn to “read particular elements or images as instances of the literary process.”⁴⁰ While Cane is essentially a mimetic text, holding a mirror up to nature throughout its lyrical narrative design, the text also manifests metafictional impulses. In order to extrapolate or “lay bare” those impulses, the critic must locate within the text an appropriate perspective that allows mimetic elements to be read as “instances of the literary process.”

Toomer's description of the “spiritual entity behind the work” may be assimilated to the role of a self-conscious narrator who plays upon the opposition between fiction and truth. As Fredric Jameson notes, metafictional analysis, or what he terms metacommentary, is of particular importance in understanding novels in which the narrator plays a significant role in shaping our perception of the plot. “In the novel of point of view, where little by little the action of the book comes to coincide with the consciousness of the hero, interpretation is once more interiorized, immanent to the work itself, for it is now the point-of-view figure himself who from within the book, reflecting on the meaning of his experience, does the actual work of exegesis for us before our own eyes.”⁴¹

The metaphor of the “spiritual entity” as interiorized critic implies that Cane may be read on a metafictional level as the story about the writing of a story—more specifically, a story chronicling the stages of consciousness during the writing of a story. Cane reveals other metafictional perspectives, as well. “Kabnis,” for example, represents the central character as a writer intent upon capturing the African-American folk spirit in art. And if we are able to read “Bona and Paul,” which immediately precedes “Kabnis,” as a symbolic awakening of the artist, then Paul Johnson is the prototype for Kabnis. Moreover, both “Song of the Son” and “Harvest Song” are patently metapoetic. In “Song of the Son” the writer figure as poet is imaged as a prodigal son returning to write about his homeland. On a metapoetic level, then, the “one seed” and “one plum” he saves are metaphors for the raw materials of his art; thus, the “everlasting song” and the “singing tree” are the text that is Cane itself. A similar metafictional perspective inheres in “Harvest Song.” In an extended metaphor of the poet as reaper, this poem describes the poet's inability to transform the fruits of his labor into art. The “fatigue” the reaper experiences, from a metapoetic perspective, symbolizes the failure of the poet's creative imagination. A similar metapoetic perspective inheres in “Prayer,” where the failure of creative powers is reflected in the lines “I am weak with much giving. / I am weak with the desire to give more.” Through these perspectives, Cane examines its own ontological status as art.

In a letter to Sherwood Anderson, Double Dealer editor John McClure praises Toomer as a “lyrical genius” and locates him within the modern Symbolist tradition.

[Toomer] can be an unusually good short story writer or a supremely fine lyrical rhapsodist, as he pleases. He should mold his stories into lyrical rhapsodies rather than attempt to present them realistically. … The lyrical genius is not restricted to poetry. A novel can be lyrical. Realism can be lyrical. … Toomer's character seems to me to be lyrical—he is so intensely an individual that it is useless for him to attempt anything other than to express himself. … Anything he touches will be transmuted into a personal expression.⁴²

As Toomer sought literary equivalents for his idealism, he not only fused his inner and outer selves to form a transcendental or symbolic self in art, he also attempted to reconcile lyric and narrative, metaphor and metonymy, metafiction and mimesis within the same text. Cane was not Jean Toomer's total life; yet it remains his most ambitious attempt to create an art reflective of his Symbolist idealism.

Notes

1. Turner, The Wayward and the Seeking, 20.

2. Toomer, “The Psychology and Craft of Writing.”

3. Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), 91-92.

4. Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” in Style in Language, ed. Thomas Sebeok (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), 358.

5. Robert Scholes, Structuralism in Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 26.

6. Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” 370.

7. Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” in Russian Formalist Criticism, trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 12.

8. Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism: History-Doctrine (The Hague: Mouton, 1965), 177.

9. Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” 370-71.

10. Quoted in Erlich, Russian Formalism, 181.

11. Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 164; Ralph Freedman, The Lyrical Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 10, 35, 36, 38, 179; Karl Uitti, The Concept of Self in the Symbolist Novel (The Hague: Mouton, 1961), 42-60.

12. These selections are from Jean Toomer, Cane (New York: Liveright Publishing, 1975). Further references are to this edition and will appear parenthetically with page numbers only.

13. Susan Bernard, The Prose Poem from Baudelaire to the Present, trans. Alan F. Rister (Paris: Librairie Nizet, 1959), 14-15. Bernard also quotes Mme. Durry, who maintains that prose poems share in common “the same desire to escape from known and familiar language, a wish to invent a hitherto unknown language in which at last may be expressed perhaps what men will never succeed in explaining by means of words” (12). See also Maurice Chapelan's introduction to Anthology of the Prose Poem (Paris: Julliard, 1946), where he notes that it is the very absence of generic conventions which confers upon the prose poem “a dynamism all the other genres of traditional lyricism have lost” (16); and Vista Clayton, The Prose Poem in French Poetry of the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936). Part 2 of Clayton's book is devoted to recalling the controversies concerning the relative value of verse and of prose, to presenting the theories on poetic prose and on the rhythm of prose, and to seeking out the principal elements that define poetic prose.

14. Freedman, Lyrical Novel, 273.

15. Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 237.

16. Gertrude Stein, “Portraits and Repetitions,” in Writings and Lectures: 1911-1945, ed. Patricia Meyerowitz (London: Peter Owen, 1967), 109.

17. Stein, Selected Writings, 333-35.

18. See Blyden Jackson, “Jean Toomer's Cane: An Issue of Genre,” in The Twenties, ed. Warren French (Deland, Fla.: Everett/Edwards, 1975), 317-33.

19. Toomer, letter to Waldo Frank, 12 December 1922, JTC Box 3, Folder 6. Several months earlier, Toomer projected a formal design ostensibly modeled after Whitman's Leaves of Grass: “I've had the impulse to collect my sketches and poems under the title perhaps of Cane. Such pieces as K. C. A. [“Karintha,” “Carma,” and “Avey”] and ‘Kabnis’ (revised) coming under the sub-head of Cane Stalks, Vignettes under Leaf Traceries in Washington” (letter to Waldo Frank, 19 July 1922). By December of 1922, however, Cane had evolved into a Whitmanian “Song of Myself.” As for the curves or arcs, two appear in the text between “Bona and Paul” and “Kabnis,” and one appears between “Blood-Burning Moon” and “Seventh Street.” These arcs plot the structure of spiritual design.

20. See Charles Scruggs, “The Mark of Cain and the Redemption of Art: A Study in Theme and Structure of Jean Toomer's Cane,” American Literature 44 (May 1972): 276-91. Scruggs argues that Toomer uses the biblical account of Cain's descendants to depict the black experience in mythical terms (277); see also Rudolph Byrd, Jean Toomer's Years with Gurdjieff: Portrait of an Artist, 1923-1936 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 16-48. Byrd attempts to show how the theme of “man's lack of and search for wholeness” unifies the works in Cane (17).

21. Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 151.

22. Underhill, Mysticism, 205-7.

23. The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life, trans. Richard Wilhelm, with a foreword and commentary by Carl Jung (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962), 99, 102, 103.

24. Boris Tomashevsky, “Thematics,” in Russian Formalist Criticism, 68.

25. Underhill, Mysticism, 206.

26. Ibid., 262.

27. Ibid., 287.

28. Ibid., 463.

29. Ibid., 480.

30. Jean Toomer, “Autobiographical Note,” JTC, Box 64, Folder 15. In a letter to The Liberator, dated 19 August 1922, Toomer writes: “From my point of view I am naturally and inevitably an American. I have strived for a spiritual fusion analogous to the fact of racial intermingling. Without denying a single element in me, with no desire to subdue one to another, I have sought to let them function as complements. I have tried to let them live in harmony. … Now I cannot conceive of myself as aloof and separated. My point of view has not changed; it has deepened; it has widened.”

31. Freedman, Lyrical Novel, 28. There are essentially three distinct points of view in Cane: the lyrical “I” (as in the poems), the first-person narrator (as in “Avey”), and the third-person narrator (as in “Karintha”). While Toomer's spiritual design seems to imply a first-person point of view, owing to its self-reflexive narrator, all three points of view may be ascribed to the perspective of the “spiritual entity,” or implied narrator. As Freedman notes, “Since the formal presentation of a self is a ‘self-reflexive’ method, most lyrical novels indeed seem to require a single point of view. But actually the tradition of lyrical fiction is considerably more generous; it is capable of including many novels which feature several important characters or suggest a panoramic form” (15).

32. Ibid., 17.

33. Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” 22-23. Shklovsky defines poetic language as highly “defamiliarized” or “roughened” language.

34. Freedman, Lyrical Novel, 9.

35. Joseph Frank, The Widening Gyre (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963), 16.

36. Freedman, Lyrical Novel, 2, 6.

37. Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero and Elements of Semiology, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), xvii and 9-18.

38. Culler, Structuralist Poetics, 140-60.

39. Ibid., 150-51.

40. Ibid., 151.

41. Fredric Jameson, “Metacommentary,” PMLA 86 (January 1971): 13.

42. John McClure, letter to Sherwood Anderson, 29 January 1924, JTC, Box 1, Folder 1.