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

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 2000 by Catherine Gunther Kodat

What is most striking in the mass of critical work on Jean Toomer and Cane is the way in which binary systems of ordering experience--form and content, black and white, rural and urban, bourgeois and peasant, unity and fragmentation, female and male--have come to dictate readings of Cane in much the same way that they dictated Toomer's life. [7] Ordered to "be" black, Toomer refused, and thereby discovered that, by default, he must "be" white. [8] Indeed, my decision to separate Toomer criticism into two schools itself shows what seductive power binary systems have on the imagination. However, there are good historical and conceptual reasons to question such an approach. First, any reading of Cane that anchors itself in Toomer's "decision" to pass runs the risk of ignoring or minimizing the powerfully controlling, historically evolved social structure that denied (and to a large extent still denies) any meaningful exercise of racial choice. [9] Second, such a view relies upon a notion of pure separation that misses the dialectical nature of the terms placed in opposition. [10] A further step usually taken in such readings--that Toomer's passing into whiteness led to artistic suicide--likewise draws on a notion of art more constricting than explanatory. It would be going too far to call Jean Toomer the first black performance artist; but his "artobiographic" remark to John McClure, which I have used as the third epigraph to this essay, invites casting Toomer in just such a role, and should provoke some recognition of the larger interpretive horizon that Cane deserves. [11]

In connecting my first two epigraphs--Jacques Lacan's explanation of the mirror stage and Adorno's provocative pairing of social domination and artistic form--I seek to set up an approach that casts Cane less as an exercise in self-definition than as a dialectical exploration of structures used to define and represent the self. This view uncovers a more sharply self-conscious and self-critical impulse to Toomer's work than is usually granted. By drawing on the mirror stage as one point of departure, I am not interested in using Lacan to psychoanalyze Toomer through Cane, thus adding another, more theoretical, layer of biographical criticism. Rather, I propose an investigation that attends to mirroring functions in their role as forces of domination as well as instruments of aesthetic reflection, an investigation that treats these functions as contingent and historically shaped by the twin stresses of modernity and racial politics. [12] Toomer's decision to clothe what are clearly prefabricated social stereot ypes (the mysterious woman, the heartless city, the anguished artist) in a modernist idiom forces a reckoning with those particular notions of representation that seemingly had been built to last, invested with universally identifiable characteristics and designed to be all-too-easily graspable. "I am not a romanticist," Toomer wrote of himself. "I am not a classicist or a realist, in the usual sense of these terms. I am an essentialist... I try to lift facts, things, happenings to the planes of rhythm, feeling, and significance" (Wayward 20). Fueling this declaration is the impulse to elevate--along with "facts, things, happenings"--the perceiving subject to a point of domination over all it surveys. What might result when such a subject sets as its task the representation of the (politically and socially) oppressed, the (psychologically) repressed? Among the answers to this question entertained in Cane is the possibility that even the voice of intimacy--the confessional mode, the direct request for recognit ion, stream-of-consciousness narrative--itself arises from a desire to dominate.