Cane by Jean Toomer

Harlem Renaissance modernism

Cane, published in 1923, is a work of fiction by African American author Jean Toomer. (Toomer is a male author, so presumably Jean is pronounced in the French fashion.) This is a modernist work arising out of the Harlem Renaissance cultural movement. Many literary critics consider Cane a novel, but it does not conform to the conventional structure of a novel. It is really a collection of short stories and poetry that all share thematic and stylistic similarities. Each story or poem functions as a vignette depicting a view of African American life in the United States. In terms of formal structure, its closest approximation in mainstream literature would be Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio.

The book is roughly divided into thirds. The first section consists of scenes set in the rural South, frequently in the state of Georgia. The title of the book is derived from the sugar cane that grows on Southern plantations. The stories and poems of the second third of the book take place in urban settings including Washington, DC, and Chicago. The final third of the book is a novella entitled “Kabnis” that returns to the South for a story set in the fictional town of Sempter, Georgia. “Kabnis” is named after its main character, Ralph Kabnis, but surprisingly Toomer overwhelmingly favors female protagonists in the Cane stories. The book often feels like a study in womanhood as much as an exploration of the African American experience.

The Southern portions of the book are more powerful than the urban stories. Toomer combines the gritty reality of the modern South and echoes of slavery’s past with evocative images of the natural environment to create a new type of Southern Gothic atmosphere permeated by a lingering sense of dread. Toomer does for the Black South what William Faulkner did for the White South, but Toomer did it first. Without the added dimensions of the natural and Southern historical imagery, Toomer’s urban scenes are less compelling. The plots tend to be less about race and more about romantic relationships. These love stories aren’t conventional or formulaic by any means, however, but rather complex psychological portraits of sexual power politics. In the city stories, Toomer’s prose tends to be more ostentatiously modern. Like so many modernists of the 1920s, it seems like he wants to be the next James Joyce, which results in a lot of deliberate verbal gymnastics that turn the narrative into a puzzle that must be deciphered before it can be understood or appreciated. While this sort of experimental wordplay gets annoying in the fiction, it is quite at home in the poetry, which is intriguingly evocative throughout the book.

The rural Southern stories don’t suffer as much from the obtuse modernist style, but some of it leaks into “Kabnis,” a story about a Black Northerner transplanted into a small Southern town. Much of the novella is consists of dialogue, much like a play but written in prose form rather than as a dramatic script. “Kabnis” is more effective in its atmosphere and psychological authenticity than in its plot, which meanders to a conclusion that’s open to interpretation.

One’s appreciation of Cane will largely hinge upon the reader’s tolerance for the impressionistic stream-of-consciousness prose stylings of early modernist writers like Joyce or Faulkner. For those willing to decode the plot and all its symbolism, this groundbreaking work yields much insight into the racial reality of early twentieth-century America.
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