Jean Toomer and the Harlem Renaissance by Michel Feith (review)

Abstract

for itsweaknesses,which include a depressingamount of solecismsand grammatical errors. TRINITY COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF DUBLIN STEPHEN MATTERSON Jean Toomerand theHarlemRenaissance.Ed. by GENEVIEVE FABREand MICHELFEITH. New Brunswick,NJ, and London:RutgersUniversityPress.200I. xii + 235pp. $52 (pbk $22). ISBN:0-8135-2845-3 (pbk 0-8135-2846-I). Caucasian in appearance, 'Negro' in American law, in practice Jean Toomer consideredhimselfto be a member of a 'new race'.Although the literatiof the I920S repeatedly tried to haul him aboard Harlem's 'New Negro' bandwagon, Toomer preferredto disavowthe connection and, instead,spentmost of his adultlife searching for and advocating 'a position above the hypnotic divisions of America into white and black'(p. 4). Consequently,as the editorsof thisvolume point out, he has often been regardedas a renegade and dissenterfrom the racializedaestheticsand identity politics of his day. Both the man and his work resist affiliation,refuse to be pigeon-holed. Wisely, therefore, Genevieve Fabre and Michel Feith approach their subjectwith criticalcaution. A gleaning of salientepithetsfrom their introduction warns us that, even today, Toomer remains singular, enigmatic, puzzling, contradictory,disconcerting,marginal, eccentric, and (above all, perhaps)elusive. The twelve essays collected here stem from a 1998 Paris conference on the Harlem Renaissance.As with many conference collections,the qualityof individual contributionsis a bit uneven, with areas of overlap and repetition. However, there is a decent mixture of established authorities and more recent recruits to the field, and the work of seven non-American (predominantlyFrench) scholarssheds an interestinglight on how Toomer and the achievement of Cane are perceived and studied in continental Europe. Werner Sollors and George Hutchinson, in the first two essays, provide a judicious outline and appraisalof the criticaldiscoveriesand debates that, over the past decade, have galvanized received assumptionsabout Toomer's life and writings . New thinking surroundshis shiftingand complex relationshipswith both the Harlem Renaissance and the American modernist movement, his ambivalent response to the 'swan song' of black folk culture in the rural South, his utopian effortsto revise the terms of contemporaryracial discourse,and the formal characteristicsof Caneitself. Sollors'sfocus is primarilyliterary-critical,emphasizing how Caneis structuredthrough an interplaybetween fragmentationand 'the quest for wholeness',while Hutchinson'sapproachis more biographical,exploringToomer's intellectualtrajectoryas one of 'identityin motion'. Ideas of quest and mobility are taken up again in Charles-YvesGrandjeat'sdetailed analysisof Cane's language and symbolic landscape. Grandjeatarguesthat Toomer's search for a way to transcend the dualitiesof oppositionalthinkingis enacted in a 'poeticsof passing'that refersus to unstable,intermediate,and transitionalrealmswhere meaning itselfis in constant movement. Several contributors mine individual sections of Canefor evidence of textual ambivalence and unresolved tensions. Monica Michlin, for example, finds evasion and dissonance in the narrativevoice of 'Karintha',while Genevieve Fabre examines dramatic and musical structuresin 'Harvest Song' and 'Kabnis' and discerns, in the interweavingof the two pieces, 'a sense of unfulfilledhopes and [...] partial for itsweaknesses,which include a depressingamount of solecismsand grammatical errors. TRINITY COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF DUBLIN STEPHEN MATTERSON Jean Toomerand theHarlemRenaissance.Ed. by GENEVIEVE FABREand MICHELFEITH. New Brunswick,NJ, and London:RutgersUniversityPress.200I. xii + 235pp. $52 (pbk $22). ISBN:0-8135-2845-3 (pbk 0-8135-2846-I). Caucasian in appearance, 'Negro' in American law, in practice Jean Toomer consideredhimselfto be a member of a 'new race'.Although the literatiof the I920S repeatedly tried to haul him aboard Harlem's 'New Negro' bandwagon, Toomer preferredto disavowthe connection and, instead,spentmost of his adultlife searching for and advocating 'a position above the hypnotic divisions of America into white and black'(p. 4). Consequently,as the editorsof thisvolume point out, he has often been regardedas a renegade and dissenterfrom the racializedaestheticsand identity politics of his day. Both the man and his work resist affiliation,refuse to be pigeon-holed. Wisely, therefore, Genevieve Fabre and Michel Feith approach their subjectwith criticalcaution. A gleaning of salientepithetsfrom their introduction warns us that, even today, Toomer remains singular, enigmatic, puzzling, contradictory,disconcerting,marginal, eccentric, and (above all, perhaps)elusive. The twelve essays collected here stem from a 1998 Paris conference on the Harlem Renaissance.As with many conference collections,the qualityof individual contributionsis a bit uneven, with areas of overlap and repetition. However, there is a decent mixture of established authorities and more recent recruits to the field, and the work of seven...