Cane

A classic of the New Negro movement or Harlem Renaissance, Jean Toomer's Cane (1923) captures the spirit of experimentalism at the core of American modernism. A seminal work of sketches, poetry, and drama, Cane's ancestry is as complex as that of its author who was physically white but racially mixed and who defined himself not as an African American but as an American. Hybridity and innovation are the defining features of the artist as well as the classic he produced. Cane bears the influence of Gertrude Stein's Three Lives (1909), James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919), and slave narratives. It exercised a shaping influence upon the poetry of Langston Hughes and Sterling A. Brown, and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

Conceived in Sparta, Georgia, where, during the summer of 1921 Toomer was acting principal of the Sparta Agricultural and Industrial Institute, Cane is a record of Toomer's discovery of his southern heritage, an homage to a folk culture that he believed was doomed to extinction because of the migration of African Americans from the South to the North, and a meditation upon the forces that he believed accounted for the spiritual fragmentation of the modern era. Published in 1923 by Horace Liveright, several of the sketches and poems of Cane had first appeared in the Crisis, Double Dealer, Liberator, Modern Review, Broom, and Little Review. When he submitted the manuscript to Liveright, Toomer had only written the sketches, poems, and drama that comprise the first and third sections, and which are set in the fictional community of Sempter, Georgia. Impressed by the poetic treatment of African American folklife but desirous of a lengthier manuscript, Liveright suggested that Toomer enlarge the work. Subsequently, the stories and poems that have Chicago and Washington, D.C., as their setting were added to what is now the middle section of Cane.

Although praised by reviewers, Cane sold less than five hundred copies when it was first published. Many readers were unprepared for the daring treatment of black sexuality, miscegenation, and slavery. The ambiguous nature of Cane's form also alienated many readers. The lyricism, the calculated mixture of poetry and prose, the experimental narrative strategies, and shifting point of view defy conventional definitions of the novel. These elements remain the basis for an ongoing scholarly debate regarding Cane's formal identity.

While scholars are divided on questions of genre and meaning, there is widespread agreement regarding Cane's central place in the African American literary tradition. Retrieved from obscurity in 1969 with the publication of a new edition, Cane's influence is clearly discernible in the writings of such contemporary African American writers as Ernest J. Gaines, Alice Walker, Michael S. Harper, Charles R. Johnson, and Gloria Naylor. These and other writers admire Cane for the challenge it poses to conventional definitions of the novel, its nuanced representation of African American history and culture, and its deeply philosophical approach to questions of identity.

Bibliography

• Nellie Y. McKay, Jean Toomer, Artist: A Study of His Literary Life and Work, 1894–1936, 1984.
• Rudolph P. Byrd, Jean Toomer's Years with Gurdjieff: Portrait of an Artist, 1923–1936, 1990

Rudolph P. Byrd

Cane is a haunting, lyrical book, one of the most influential works ever written by an African-American artist. Critics wrote of the book, when it was published in 1923, that it would endure for generations, that it heralded the advent of a new class of artist, the black intellectual. The book is in fact considered to be a leading influence on the Harlem Renaissance, a period of time in the 1920s and 1930s when there was a flourishing of creativity in the black community and white society became interested in the artistry produced by writers, painters, and musicians associated with the Harlem area of New York. The book's experiments with form brought respect from people around the world for its characters, including rural Negroes who acted from habit and superstition; women who were treated as objects in a culture that itself was struggling with its history of having been slaves; and intellectuals who sought to reconcile their love of their own race with the degradation in which they were forced to live.

One of the most fascinating aspects about Cane is what it failed to accomplish. Despite the glowing praise and anticipation of reviewers, the book only ended up selling two thousand copies. Jean Toomer, who was of mixed blood, decided to stop writing about the black experience, and he had a difficult time publishing works on other subjects. By 1930 he was no longer the promising new literary star, but a literary has-been, only occasionally publishing poems and reviews. He lived for almost forty more years in obscurity. It was not until a new edition of Cane came out during the 1960s that the world realized what a stunning achievement the book represents, and it has been in print since then.