Cane

by Jean Toomer

Yet racial modes of thinking and feeling had taken on a semiautonomous life of their own that prevented any intelligent grappling with the basic inequities of modern society and merely contributed to the trap in which all Americans were caught.

Thus the American people were reduced to automatons serving capitalist overlords and their machines.

Industrialism and

materialism rendered the nation a cultural and spi...

A sense of spiritual and emotional frustration, failure of basic communication between individuals, and repression of natural energies suffuses the book, revealing the chaos of contemporary American life and the need for a spiritual awakening, a bursting of unconscious forces through the crust of worn-out traditions.

The introduction of the machine, he believed, had destroyed humanity’s balance with nature, creating spiritual conflicts to which artists had responded either by rejecting “the Machine” and suggesting back-to-nature programs or by accepting the machine as a necessary evil and creating aesthetic “counter-forms” against its destructive features.

Like jazz, slang and colloquialisms kept pace with the introduction of new forces into society; literary artists should do no less.

Toomer structured the plot around “slopes,” “curves,” and “crescendos” of cognition, physical action, and emotion, to use the contemporary lingo of Frank, Munson, and Toomer.

The overall structure of a work should have an underlying spherical form, with a curve cementing the various

parts together and “giving the Whole a dynamic propulsion forward,”

Nonetheless, Cane also reveals the damage done to women by the restriction of their lives, particularly through men’s use of them as mere vessels of meaning, routes to higher consciousness, or means of sexual satisfaction—roles that women often played in Toomer’s own life.

“My racial composition and my position in the world are realities which I alone may determine. . . . I expect and demand acceptance of myself on their basis. I do not expect to be told what I should consider myself to be.”

Toomer taught “that we all have the potentialities of intellectual, artistic giants if we could only get to the bottom of our real selves. He claims that back deep in our natures there is a mine of unused power, a source, a hitherto little known faculty which is neither body, emotion nor intellect, but is equal to the combined power of all. The key to this source is self-observation. The ultimate goal is free will.”

Toomer was not “confused, racially misidentified, or frustrated with the limits of language, but rather struggling to convey a holistic understanding” in a society

that would not, and still cannot, accept that understanding.