Toomer's Cane Research Articles

When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote: African-Native American Literature (review)

252Reviews ers return to Toomer's Cane. Like Cane, Wardi's text generates possibilities for further exploration and discovery, more critical analysis. Wardi's study can be read as an elegy that signals a return to origins, to those seminal texts in the African American literary tradition that are invested in the process of remembering. In her poignant conclusion, "Our People's Graves," Wardi reexamines the material markers of death in the novel Mama Dayand in Alice Walker's poem "Burial." Wardi's return to these markers and her treatment of Cane function as a metaphor for what her work offers. Suggesting that the pastoral is a site of ongoing song, of elegy, Wardi provides a means to recover (at least partially) aspects of an African American literary tradition. By reviewing the past and its literature and by "unearthing buried histories" (166), Wardi demonstrates an act of recovery similar to the ones she discovers in these literary texts. Ultimately, the arc ofmourning—ofremembering and finding meaning— comes full circle. Florida Institute of TechnologyLisa K. Perdigao Brennan, Jonathan, ed. When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote: AfricanNative American Literature. Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2003. xvii + 307 pp. Cloth: $39.95. Jonathan Brennan has done Americanists a great service by putting together this collection of ten essays on African-Native American history and literature. The first striking aspect of the edited volume is its extensive introduction—which comprises one-third of the book and includes 269 endnotes. Brennan's introduction presents a thorough account of the historical, political, cultural, and literary connections between what have been considered separate entities in ethnic studies: Americans of African and those ofindigenous ancestry. The fact that many visibly dark-skinned Americans—individuals classified as African Americans—are actually partAmerican Indian (and likely part white European American) is a salient point in the volume. While miscegenation is widely recognized among scholars today, the existence and specific history ofAfrican-Native Americans has been, according to Brennan and his contributors, a best-kept secret . Thus, as a collection of essays focused on the culture and literature of African-Native Americans, When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote identifies a long-neglected area of scholarship in ethnic studies. In discussing African-Native American writers, Brennan cites the hostility that Alice Walker has faced in claiming the Cherokee and white European parts of her racial heritage. As he reminds us, "although the former English colonies have structured racial and cultural categories in such a way as to make it difficult for writers to claim their African-Native Studies in American Fiction253 identity (in contrast to the more permeable policies of former French and Spanish colonies), African-Native Americans are not obligated to choose one community over the other. When they do choose to assume both identities , they sometimes alternate between identities and sometimes assume them simultaneously" (31). Several ofthe essays rightfully assert that, given the unique strain of racial classification in the U. S., identity politics cannot be ignored. The four parts of the book—ranging from discussions of folklore to captivity and slave narratives to treatments of crossblood subjectivities in contemporary ethnic works—address issues of identity from different angles. The cumulative effect is the convincing argument that multiethnic literary scholars should move beyond rigidly construed ethnicities to explore the fertile connection between African and Native American cultures. Part 1 includes two essays that examine "cultural syncretism" between African and Native Americans. Both essays identify historical moments when cultural contact occurred and forged hybrid versions of folktales that already existed in African and Native traditions. While researchers have been busy establishing the African origin of these stories, David Gay points out, they "overlook[ed] the fact that the Native American and African American versions oftrickster stories more closely resemble each other than their supposed African exemplars" (105). In fact, according to Sandra Baringer, the focus on origins "effaces opportunities for the study of cultural exchange, which is more complex than one oppressor versus one oppressed" (118) and, ultimately, "misunderstands the way oral storytelling works" (120). Part 2 includes three essays that examine the parallels and contrasts between Indian captivity narratives and African American slave narratives. According to the authors, because narratives by Indian...

Jean Toomer's Eternal South

"This book is the South," declared Waldo Frank in the 1923 foreword to his friend Jean Toomer's Cane (Frank 138). Toomer's fresh, new treatment of southern folk, he averred, made Cane "a harbinger of the South's literary maturity" (139). Yet neither man was southern. Frank was a white northeasterner who had visited the South on three occasions then wrote a bad novel, Holiday, ineptly interpreting southern culture and lynching. For his part, Jean Toomer visited the Deep South only twice, totaling less than three months. Nonetheless his own anonymous review of Cane, intended for publication in The Call, emphasized his achievement in depicting the South. 1 Noting the emergence of contemporary regionalists such as Frost, Sandburg, Masters, and Sherwood Anderson, he claimed that in the South, too, "a splendid birth was imminent" (Jones, Selected Essays 11). As to Cane, despite its inclusion of considerable material not set in Georgia, he emphasized that it all "is so evidently Southern in content" (15).

"Always Your Heart": The "Great Design" of Toomer's Cane

want art. This means I want design. Jean Toomer, Open Letter to Gorham Munson Given the present emphasis on issues surrounding identity politics and the representational logic of cultural studies, it is perhaps not surprising that in the reams of criticism on Jean Toomer's Cane there is remarkably little concerning the issues of direct address and narrative authority. Yet in Cane, Toomer's use of direct address, going against interpretations that marginalize his representations for being insufficiently folk or racial, is crucial in evoking a relationship of sympathy and identification in the reader while creating a distinctly modernist form of storytelling. Cane's narrator, (1) a teller in a community, adopts a narrative that shows us how a self-reflective storyteller (2) can essentialize and spiritualize experience. At the same time, Toomer undertakes a rhetorical project of positioning his readers in a variety of identifications, which serve to illustrate his repudiating of essentialist notions of race. By forcefully bringing together the narrator and reader and/or the narrator and implied reader, Toomer reveals false categories and separations that are both literary and social. The relationship between the narrator and his addressees thus becomes Cane's plot. Part of Toomer's great design in Cane is that his text, like any written text and paralleling any oral performance, is by someone and to someone. It is, then, a that does not present what is said to the exclusion of who says it to whom and for what purpose (see Ricoeur). Although Cane's characters receive relatively brief treatment, the identity of the novel's narrator is presented in more fully developed terms, both as a process of consciousness and unconsciousness and as a subject impinged on and affected by interactions with his characters and narratee. The narrator renders his individuality through a socialized interdependence based on forms of direct address and a creative negotiation of narrative authority. Toomer's radically new formal transgressions, which follow his radical positions on and culture, speak to the need to understand Cane in terms of both stylistic function and thematic expression. My purpose here is to trace Toomer's self-reflective narrators in the three sections of Cane in order to show how Toomer raises the issue of social transaction implied by the choice of narrative method and by the identification of narrator, narratee, and reader. In effect, Toomer does not assert cognitive authority but concentrates instead on articulating modes of narrative authority and patterns of feeling that directly modify not how we understand the world so much as how we engage it. He suggests that there are modes other than race that afford significant ways of resisting the dominant cultural emphases on difference. I want to show how these concepts and modes are inflected by the geographical movements of the book, what shifts in the identification of narrator and narratee are implied by shifts in the nature of the communal experience in Cane's three sections, and how the subjectivities of characters, narrators, and real and implied readers have been shaped by different communal experiences. Cane is a productive rewriting of race, allowing for the recognition of multiple authentic African American voices, identifications complicated by class, gender, and geography, and greatly enriched by the significant modulations in narrative address that Toomer undertakes. Moreover, I want to consider how each of Cane's three sections records an emergence of a special racial ethos of modern life. Part One involves the narrator building a foundation of restoring race to a metaphorical position equal to, even identical with, the soul while at the same time he expresses the impossibility of sustaining such a creation. …

Hypertext and the Teaching of Modernist Difficulty

T. S. Eliot (1963: 112), who famously declared in 1921 that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult, made difficulty a badge of modernist honor. The attitudes of academic criticism since then might be categorized according to their degree of acceptance or rejection of this premise. New Criticism, by and large, made a virtue of difficulty, measuring poetic achievement in terms of the poet's management of tension and paradox. Conversely, recent criticism has often looked askance at difficulty, suspecting that it may be a form of mystificatory elitism or an instance of dishonestly evasive impersonality. However one chooses to view the matter theoretically, difficulty is an inescapable dimension of modernist texts, especially those that exemplify high-modernist experimentation -- Eliot's The Waste Land, Pound's Cantos, Joyce's Ulysses, Barnes's Nightwood, Stein's Tender Buttons, Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Toomer's Cane, Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy -- in short, many of the most frequently taught works in the curriculum of twentieth-century literature. This essay proposes that hypertext is a practical, though partial, solution to the nearly insuperable problems associated with reading and teaching the difficult modernist text. Because my students and I have created and studied with a hypertext of Pound's Canto 81, my examples are drawn primarily from that poem. The hypertextual version of this Canto provides access not only to the poem's information but to Pound's working methods, his aims in writing this including history, and his presentation of the poem as covert and overt pedagogy.

Jean Toomer and the Harlem Renaissance, and: The Evidence of Things Not Said (review)

In his dedication to the posthumously published Juneteenth, Ralph Ellison eulogizes "That Vanished Tribe into Which [he] Was Born, / The American Negroes." As culled from over 2,000 manuscript pages by his literary executor, John McCallahan, Juneteenth, like Invisible Man, traces the extinction of Alain Locke's "New Negro" by forces both intrinsic and extrinsic to the former Africans, not the least of which is the phenomenon of "passing," a Trojan Horse strategy that straddles the boundary between the intraracial and the interracial as simultaneous self-extinction and transcendence. Following a line of thought [End Page 462] already displayed by the accessorized identities of Rinehart in Invisible Man, Ellison's posthumous send-up of ethnic and racial machinations demonstrates, à la Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Morrison and others, that "passing" is the sine qua non of what it means "to be" an American. Thus, to a certain extent, Juneteenth can be read as an appended chapter to Jean Toomer's Cane, a book which, as Werner Sollors notes in his contribution to a new collection of essays on Toomer, analogously depicts the "disappearing African culture on the American continent." And if Ellison's work also foretells the coming "black" man, those "race men" whom Toomer had to both embrace and repel, James Baldwin's work in toto relentlessly puts "black men" on stage in order to both gape at and gaze beyond them. For Toomer and Baldwin, these reactions to the dilemma of race and racism in America add up to Ellisonian ambivalence, the theses and antitheses of twentieth-century America in the throes of giving birth to America "tomorrow," when men will one day live as they have been created, as equals.

Jean Toomer and Okot p'Bitek in Alice Walker's "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens"

By writing In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, Alice Walker hopes to fulfill a twofold purpose: to create a sense of literary continuity among black women by saving writers like Zora Neale Hurston and Phillis Wheatley from oblivion and, as Felipe Smith has written, to provide wisdom of the past both to ensure the continuity of the folk ethos and to serve as a blueprint for personal and communal survival for those who require artistic models (438).(1) Less straightforward, however, is her handling of the work of two black male predecessors: the epigraph to the essay is taken from the Avey chapter of Jean Toomer's Cane, and later on Walker adapts a passage from Ugandan poet Okot p'Bitek's Song of Lawino. Both Toomer in Avey and Walker in her paraphrase of p'Bitek comment on women's creative potential, but Toomer is not as positive, or the paraphrase of p'Bitek as negative, as the may at first assume. The paraphrase, for example, although a cry of unfulfilled potential, is in harmony with Walker's point that black women were creative in singing hymns, quilting, and growing flowers despite impediments that cut them off from the possibility of art on a grander scale. Exploring Walker's handling of the material from Toomer and p'Bitek, then, will take us deeper into In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens and provide a firmer grasp on the essay's intricacies. Bloom's anxiety theory has sparked contrasting views on influence among black female writers. According to Barbara Christian, a contemporary woman writer of color covers over more profoundly than does the white writer her ambivalence about matrilineage, her own misreading of precursors, and her link to an oral as well as a written (Black Woman Artist 116). What Bloom calls clinamen, or a swerving away from the parent work, may exist in masked form among black female writers (Anxiety 14). Deborah E. McDowell offers a contrasting view: Bloom's linear theory of the oedipal war between literary fathers and sons does not obtain among black woman writers, many of whom reverently acknowledge their debts to their foremothers. Unlike Bloom, see literary influence, to borrow from Julia Kristeva, in the intertextual sense, each text in dialogue with all previous texts, transforming and retaining narrative patterns and strategies in endless possibility. (148) Walker's own statement on literary influence in Beyond the Peacock is closer to reverent acknowledgement and transforming dialogue than to Christian's sense of ambivalent misreading: I believe that the truth about any subject only comes when all the sides of the story are put together, and all their different meanings make one new one. Each writer writes the missing to the other writer's story. And the whole story is what I'm after (Search 49). We could easily substitute the word reader for the word writer, for both contribute missing parts to previous works. Walker is to Hurston, Wheatley, Woolf, and other writers as the is to the essay and the allusions within it. As Walker's own emphasis on completion suggests, her relationships with her literary foremothers cannot be properly characterized by misprision proper (Anxiety 14). Walker does not carve out a project for herself by misreading and thus defeating a literary foremother. Instead, as in McDowell's model, Walker engages in a wholistic act of completion by seeking connections with literary foremothers. This is the realm of Bloom's tessera, in which a writer antithetically `completes' his precursor, by so reading the parent-poem as to retain its terms but to mean them in another sense, as though the precursor had failed to go far enough (14). As Diane Sadoff observes, `In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens' transforms Woolf's model of the white female tradition by inserting in brackets the black equivalents for Woolf's exemplary writers and issues: instead of `Emily Bronte,' `Zora Hurston'; instead of `wise women,' `root workers' (121). …

Jean Toomer's Cane: Self as Montage and the Drive toward Integration

Jean Toomer's <i>Cane</i>: Self as Montage and the Drive toward Integration

Literature and Lynching: Identity in Jean Toomer's Cane

Literature and Lynching: Identity in Jean Toomer's Cane

The Reluctant Witness: What Jean Toomer Remembered from Winesburg, Ohio

Ohio and Triumph of the Egg are elements of my growing. It is hard to think of my maturing without them. --Jean Toomer to Sherwood Anderson, December 18, 1922 Sherwood Anderson whom Toomer said he admired was the Anderson who affirmed the value of existence despite the painful loneliness, isolation, and existential angst experienced by his characters. As he told Anderson, Your acute of the of life could easily have led to lean pessimism in less abundant soul. Your Yea! to life is one of the clear fine tones in our medley of harsh discordant sounds. Life is measured by your own glowing, and you find life, you find its possibilities deeply hopeful and beautiful. It seems to me that art in our day, other than its purely aesthetic phase, has sort of religious function. It is religion, of the immediate. And ever since I first touched you, I have thought of you in this connection. As we know, the religious impulse and the affirmation of life did find their way into Cane (1923), the brilliant hybrid short-story cycle that helped inspire the Harlem Renaissance, but Anderson's real influence is hinted at in complaint Toomer made to Waldo Frank: Anderson, Toomer said, only saw in Cane themes commensurate with his own, a of the tragic separateness, the tragic sterility of people. In actuality, what Toomer did was to take Anderson's sense of ... tragic separateness and put that theme in horrific sociological context. Toomer who wrote of the collapsing house in Becky as the South in ruins, or who described brutal lynching in Portrait in Georgia in terms of Petrarchan conventions, or who identified with Kabnis's paranoia in Kabnis, was the Toomer who changed Anderson's nightworld of human personality in Winesburg, Ohio (1919) into the nightmare of racial in Cane. That is, Anderson's real influence on Toomer's Cane was not the spiritualization of the immediate, but Kabnis's realization that things are so immediate in Georgia, for Toomer understood that the South's intangible oppression reshaped the lonely grotesques of Winesburg into the anguished souls in Halsey's cellar. Despite his wish to see himself as The First in which his six blood minglings represented synthesis in microcosm of the utopian future predicted by Frank in Our America (1919), Toomer would recontextualize Winesburg's small-town's psyche into southern Gothicism that underlined his own social position in the American scene as an African-American.(1) A common theme in Anderson's stories is the clash between an inchoate inner life and the all too tangible facts of human experience. In Winesburg, Anderson uses words like adventure and hands not only to link stories but also to express man and woman's desperate attempts to break through the finite world of social and physical limitation to some hidden truth or vital connection. attempts, however, almost always fail, as doors, walls, and houses become Anderson's metaphors for the barriers placed between the shadowy world of desire and human fulfillment. As he has character say in the story Seeds in Triumph of the Egg (1921): To be sure she is grotesque, but then all the people in the world are grotesques. We all need to be loved. What would cure her would cure the rest of us also. disease she had is, you see, universal. We all want to be loved and the world has no plan for creating our lovers. For Anderson the Incarnation means that the flesh (canis) of the world creates more or less permanent veil between self and other, expression and feeling, desire and fulfillment, that is overcome only at rare moments.(2) Thus, while often grounded in social and/or historical context, Anderson's grotesques are not always foregrounded in that context. They appear to the old storyteller in dream in The Book of the Grotesque, as they pass in procession, one by one, devoid of all context except the context of dream. …

To "Flash White Light from Ebony": The Problem of Modernism in Jean Toomer's Cane

To "Flash White Light from Ebony": The Problem of Modernism in Jean Toomer's Cane

To “Flash White Light from Ebony”: The Problem of Modernism in Jean Toomer’s Cane

Research Article| March 01 2000 To “Flash White Light from Ebony”: The Problem of Modernism in Jean Toomer’s Cane Catherine Gunther Kodat Catherine Gunther Kodat Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Twentieth-Century Literature (2000) 46 (1): 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2000-2007 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Catherine Gunther Kodat; To “Flash White Light from Ebony”: The Problem of Modernism in Jean Toomer’s Cane. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 March 2000; 46 (1): 1–19. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2000-2007 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsTwentieth-Century Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © Hofstra University2000 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.

"In the Land of Cotton": Economics and Violence in Jean Toomer's Cane

"In the Land of Cotton": Economics and Violence in Jean Toomer's Cane

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

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

Shared Orientation and Narrative Acts in Cane, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Meridian

While one can do nothing about choosing one's relatives, one can, as artist, choose one's ancestors. In many places, particularly in In Search of Our Mother's Gardens, Alice Walker has identified those writers who have influenced her development as a writer and determined her stance towards the tradition of letters not only in North America, also in Europe, Africa and Latin America. In her essays, Walker writes with respect and gratitude for the example of such writers as Collette, Anais Nin, Tillie Olsen, Flannery O'Connor, Langston Hughes, Virginia Woolf, Camara Laye and Gabriel Garcia Marquez: writers who collectively have made Walker a more critical, disciplined witness to all forms of life on the planet and who have taught her the immense and enduring value of fantasy, myth and mystery (Interview 259). While these writers have provided a certain texture, a certain edge to Walker's thinking and writing, the major figures in her development as a writer (at least at this particular period in her career) are Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Toomer. When Walker writes of her admiration for Hurston and Toomer, when she expounds upon the value of their work for hers, we are witnesses not only to an observable change in the character of her prose, more importantly to self-conscious acts of identification that are a measure of her own aspirations as a writer. When writing of her admiration for Cane and Their Eyes Were Watching God, Walker's often elegant, impassioned, sometimes didactic prose becomes even more impassioned, even more didactic. There even perhaps an erosion of objectivity, all of which indicates that Walker, in the act of publicly declaring her allegiance and her debt to Toomer and Hurston, shares the spiritual space of fellow imaginative artists, or what Ralph Ellison would call ancestors, whose fives and work are of vital and enduring significance to her. did not read Cane until 1967, asserts Walker, but has been reverberating in me to an astonishing degree. I love passionately; could not possibly exist without it (Interview 259). In order to indicate her unqualified admiration for Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Walker continues to employ the same spirited prose, to make certain that the force and weight of her convictions are felt, she resorts to melodrama: Condemned to a desert island for life, with an allotment of ten books to see me through, I would chose, unhesitatingly, two of Zora's: Mules and Men... and Their Eyes Were Watching God. Concerning her later work, Walker declares that there is no book more important to me than this one (including Toomer's Cane, which comes close, from what I recognize a more. perilous direction) (Zora 86). Certainly, these declarations are convincing testimony of the very honored position Hurston and Toomer occupy in Walker's pantheon of writers. While these expressions of admiration and kinship reveal very clearly what Toomer and Hurston mean to Walker as an individual, as well as something of her tastes and preferences in literature, they do not reveal how the examples of Toomer and Hurston have influenced Walker's intellectual and artistic development; that to say, they do not reveal how Their Eyes Were Watching God and Cane shape and inform Walkeys own vibrant fiction. Of course, there more between Walker and Hurston, Walker and Toomer than just praise and admiration. The literary line of descent from Toomer and Hurston to Walker long and complicated. Walker's preoccupation with the lives of Toomer and Hurston, and what plainly her incurable addiction to the fiction of these writers, are a consequence not only of what may be termed a shared orientation, also of specific narrative acts of great symbolic power. By shared orientation I mean two things. The first an identification with the people and history of a particular region. Like Toomer and Hurston, Walker a writer of the South. …

The Ancestor as Foundation in Their Eyes Were Watching God and Tar Baby

restorative power of folklore is a recurring theme in African-American literature. In novels like James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), Jean Toomer's Cane (1923), and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), folklore is a powerful spiritual and artistic resource. Conversely, cultural orphanage is associated with spiritual malaise, a loss of creativity, and a variety of psychic disorders. It is the price African-Americans pay for upward social mobility in a racist society. In novels like Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977), Toni Cade Bambara's Salt-Eaters (1980), and Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow (1983), folklore is perceived as the repository of a complex culture of survival. Reconnection with folk culture is the key to psychological and spiritual reconstruction in a hostile and culturally alienating environment. In The Art of Fiction Ralph Ellison speaks explicitly to the importance of folklore to an ever-expanding African-American literary tradition. Ellison looks to folklore to discover What in our background is worth preserving or abandoning:

Jean Toomer's Early Identification: The Two Black Plays

Readers of Jean Toomer's Cane are familiar with the major contrast in that book: rural South vs. urban North, primitivism vs. sophistication. Toomer grew up in a middle-class section of Washington, D.C., but before writing Cane he had experienced the rural South. He had also spent some time in Chicago. Thus he had seen the contrast firsthand. Taken together, two little-known plays, Balo and Natalie Mann, written around the time of Cane's composition, also illustrate the rural/urban contrast.1 In addition, the plays reflect both Toomer's successes and failures as he worked with the portrayal of black life and his own black identity during his early years as a writer.2 In 1921, Toomer spent about four months teaching at the Georgia Normal and Industrial Institute in Sparta, Georgia.3 This was Toomer's second sojourn into the South. In 1920, he had traveled in the South with Waldo Frank.4 The experience of teaching in Georgia and the trip with Frank a year earlier were very important to Toomer. In a 1922 letter to The Liberator, he wrote, A visit to Georgia last fall was the starting point of almost everything of worth that I have done.5 What Toomer saw in Georgia was not the urban black of his home city of Washington, but the rural black peasant living off the land, the sweet land of cane, the dark land of lynching, a soft land of folk song and red earth in contrast to Washington's jazz and concrete. Toomer viewed this land with excitement, and much of Cane, published in 1923, was inspired by his Southern experience in Sparta, called Sempter in his book. Nevertheless, by the mid-twenties, when the Harlem Renaissance was in full flower, Toomer had abandoned black writing and had traveled to Europe in pursuit of the mystical wisdom of Georges I. Gurdjieff.6 Although Cane is the fruit of his enthusiasm for rural black culture, even as he was writing the book, Toomer felt he was depicting a culture that was dying,7 and after the publication of Cane, he gave up his attempts at depicting black life in his creative work. Cane, however, is not Toomer's only piece of black writing: Balo and Natalie Mann, neither as artistically

Myth and Narrative Fiction in Cane: "Blood-Burning Moon"

Jean Toomer's Cane,1 from which Blood-Burning Moon is taken, is a collection of short stories interspersed with poems, which makes up a whole. It is divided into three parts. The first part includes the portraits of six southern women who are victims of the caste system. Most of the narratives in it take place in the atmosphere of a setting sun, at dusk, a symbol of the vanishing slave culture. The four stories of the second part are staged in northern cities; the protagonists, mostly cut off as they are from their spiritual heritage and unable to conform to white standards, suffer from a sense of spiritual sterility. Part three corresponds to a semi-dramatic narrative, Kabnis, the name of a black northerner who has come to Georgia to attempt to reestablish contact with his own roots. And whereas the South, in spite of the prevailing white norms, calls to mind the passions, mysticism and freedom of a mythical Africa, the North symbolizes whiteness-the oppressive civilization of puritanism. One critic of Cane has established that most of its protagonists, unable to achieve a fusion of opposite poles, are torn between passion and intellect, past and present, an agrarian and an industrial society, nature and culture. As if they were uncertain of their own identity, they alternately tend towards blackness or whiteness: or, when the tension is too unbearable, they will take refuge away from material conditions, in the spiritual, or mystical, realm.2 I wholly agree with this interpretation of Cane. Blood-Burning Moon ends and climaxes the first section of Cane. It is the only short story staging an open confrontation between the two races. The title of the short story under discussion differs from that of the five preceding narratives in that it is not a woman's name. This seems to point out the importance of the moon as an actor in the ensuing tragedy. Therefore, we may wonder whether Toomer, classified as black, struck a note of protest here, or whether the poet of the South tapped mythological sources to depict passion in an appropriate setting. Or did both elements enter into the picture? In order to assess Toomer's point of view in that respect, I intend first to make an intratextual study of this text, with a description of the poetic and dramatic setting; then, an analysis of the motivations of those characters involved in the drama will-hopefully-enable me to throw light on the racial conflict-a conflict which may be rooted in the deep recesses of the southern collective soul.

Jean Toomer's Cane: The Anxiety of the Modern Artist

Jean Toomer's Cane: The Anxiety of the Modern Artist

The Status of Waldo Frank in American Letters

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Primitivism and Intellect in Toomer's Cane and McKay's Banana Bottom: The Need for an Integrated Black Consciousness

Primitivism and Intellect in Toomer's Cane and McKay's Banana Bottom: The Need for an Integrated Black Consciousness