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

[T]he black urban experience . . . separated the people from the basic values of the folk culture. City life initiated black people into the world of western culture, which, in its advanced stages of industrialization and mechanization, has become sterile, limiting, and destructive to the human spirit. (McKay 126)

Subscribers to this view see Dan Moore as something of an urban John the Baptist, anxious to turn his people away from the false gods of city life and prepare them for the "new world Christ ... coming up" from the rural South (Cane 65). This reading requires a corollary, supportive view that rural and urban exist in pure opposition--that the first offers "basic values," a sort of spiritual illumination that the second not only can't offer but actively seeks to destroy. An opposition of rural and urban that lines the first up with black and the second with white, and then elevates the former over the latter, is widely held to be the central point of Cane. [19] But the use of the mirror in "Box Seat" places all these assumptions in question, as both Dan's vision of himself as agrarian prophet and the dwarf's decadent, urban, sentimental song are enclosed in a theater and made subject to relational and performative, rather than absolute, readings--the meaning of each arises only in terms of the other.

Toomer uses nature as a "mirror" that both critically represents and is forced into being by domination and repression, a dialectic made clear in his tendency to equate women and nature. [20] In attempting to portray women simply as creatures of nature, Cane makes clear the "nature" of dominance in aesthetics and politics. [21] The gradual emergence and eventual disappearance of a narrator through parts 1 and 2 also demonstrate the roles aesthetic and political domination play in the formation of the "independent" speaking subject and how a certain pointed exploration of that domination leads to the dissolution of that traditional subject. Susan Blake's observation that "the central conflict of Cane is the struggle of the spectatorial artist to involve himself in his material" (196) underlines how an understanding of Cane as a dialectic between liberation and domination subtends the artist's struggles to strike a modernist posture toward the African American subject.

"Karintha," the piece that opens Cane, is a brief character sketch of a beautiful woman whose "skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon" (3). It is not only that Karintha's skin is dark; her whole self draws its worth from her "carrying beauty, perfect as dusk when the sun goes down" (3). A sense of how this worth is measured is given in the second paragraph, where dusk is made more specific: it is a "sunset, when there was no wind, and the pine-smoke from over by the sawmill hugged the earth...dusk, during the hush just after the sawmill had closed down" (3). Karintha's beauty is, first, something ascribed to her, something she is made to "carry"; second, it is a beauty that draws its power through identification with a system of exploitation.