Mixed Race Studies

“Cane”, Race, and “Neither/Norism”

The Southern Literary Journal
Volume 32, Number 2 (Spring, 2000)
pages 90-101

Charles Harmon

“My racial composition and my position in the world are realities which I alone may determine.”

—Jean Toomer to Horace Liveright

Of all people, Jean Toomer wrote Cane. For a long time, this fact has made critics a little uneasy, a little wistful. The elusiveness of the text itself is the source of some of this wistfulness, and this feeling is only compounded by the elusiveness of Toomer the man. Still, critics have devised serviceable methods to control the ambiguity of both text and author. The currently routine way to read Cane controls the ambiguity of the text itself by interpreting it in a manner similar to the routine way to read that once-mysterious landmark, The Waste Land. Faced with an intriguing array of textual shards, Toomer’s critics patiently triangulate behind the words of Cane until they reach what Nellie Y. McKay has called Toomer’s “song of celebration to the elements that constitute Afro-American experience” (33). In the same way that The Waste Land arranges fragments of desiccated gloom in order to adumbrate a between-the-lines intuition of vernal hope, Cane, according to many critics, arranges fragmentary representations of racial confusion in order to communicate a between-the-lines intuition of racial coherence. In the words of Houston Baker, “As the reader struggles to fit the details together” he or she takes “a journey toward liberating black American art” (80).

The other elusiveness I have mentioned—that of Toomer himself—is not disposed of so easily. As is well known, Toomer took offense at marketing Cane as a work of African American literature. Although he did not always deny the possibility of having African American ancestry, he disliked having any racial designation whatsoever (besides “American”) placed upon him. His biographers have made clear that partly in response to having race be an aspect of his literary persona, Toomer stopped writing the kinds of books that appealed to the audience that admired Cane. Instead of writing other modernist texts, after Cane Toomer mostly wrote linear (and in his life unpublished) books–books that tend to dwell with numbing clarity upon the serenity he found in various philosophical systems. Many of these writings have now been dufffully read and analyzed by scholars of Cane. Still, it remains fair to say that critics have admired the Toomer of Cane because they believe that during the relatively brief time he worked on that particular text, Toomer found a way to strike a balance between racial solidarity and literary ambiguity. No matter how difficult his writing may have been, critics believe that in his heart Toomer disciplined his speculative nature by ultimately identifying himself with African American culture. By contrast, critics have disliked, pitied, or condescended to the Toomer that came after Cane because they believe that during that period of his life, Toomer shifted the quality of ambiguity from his writing to his race. His books became (if anything) too easy to understand, while his sense of racial solidarity became harder and harder to divine.

Thus, we have been left with a “good” Toomer and a “bad” Toomer. The good Toomer briefly and tactfully uses race to contain literary ambiguity, but the bad Toomer jettisons both race and literary ambiguity in favor of such systems as Quakerism and the teachings of Gurdjieff. Whatever one may think of this view of Toomer’s career, there is little doubt that—simply by ensuring Cane’s solid canonization—it has had a beneficial effect upon the study of twentieth-century literature. With Cane’s interest and importance thus solidified, however, other critics have gone on to challenge the orthodox reading of Toomer that has resulted in Cane’s current status. These critics have argued that Toomer’s ambivalence toward racial identity is much more evident in Cane than such critics as McKay and Baker have recognized. Donald B. Gibson, for instance, has insisted that far from being a monument of black American literature, Cane is the “response of one for whom black life.., was too much to bear” (179). In a more moderate vein, George Hutchinson has also claimed that Cane ultimately distances itself from the traditions and resources of African American culture. The text does this, Hutchinson argues, less out of Toomer’s fear of blackness and more out of his desire to represent “a new kind of ethnic subject, the possibility of whose existence was disallowed by both…