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1923 novel
Cane is a 1923 novel by noted Harlem Renaissance author Jean Toomer. The novel is structured as a series of vignettes revolving around the origins and experiences of African Americans in the United States. The vignettes alternate in structure between narrative prose, poetry, and play-like passages of dialogue. As a result, the novel has been classified as a composite novel or as a short story cycle. Though some characters and situations recur between vignettes, the vignettes are mostly freestanding, tied to the other vignettes thematically and contextually more than through specific plot details.

The ambitious, nontraditional structure of the novel – and its later influence on future generations of writers – have helped Cane gain status as a classic of modernism. Several of the vignettes have been excerpted or anthologized in literary collections; the poetic passage "Harvest Song" has been included in multiple Norton poetry anthologies. The poem opens with the line: "I am a reaper whose muscles set at sundown."

Writing Cane

Jean Toomer began writing sketches that would become the first section of Cane in November 1921 on a train from Georgia to Washington D.C. By Christmas of 1921, the first draft of those sketches and the short story “Kabnis” were complete. Waldo Frank, Toomer's close friend, suggested that Toomer combine the sketches into a book. In order to form a book-length manuscript, Toomer added sketches relating to the black urban experience. When Toomer completed the book, he wrote: “My words had become a book…I had actually finished something.”

However, before the book was published, Toomer's initial euphoria began to fade. He wrote, “The book is done but when I look for the beauty I thought I’d caught, they thin out and elude me.” He thought that the Georgia sketches lacked complexity and said they were “too damn simple for me.” In a letter to Sherwood Anderson, Toomer wrote that the story-teller style of “Fern” “had too much waste and made too many appeals to the reader.”

In August 1923, Toomer received a letter from Horace Liveright asking for revisions to the bibliographic statement Toomer had submitted for promotions of the book. Liveright requested that Toomer mention his “colored blood,” because that was the “real human interest value” of his story. Toomer had a history of complex beliefs about his own racial identity, and in the spring of 1923 he had written to the Associated Negro Press saying he would be pleased to write for the group's black readership on events that concerned them. However, when Toomer read Liveright's letter he was outraged. He responded that his “racial composition” was of no concern to anyone except himself, and asserted that he was not a “Negro” and would not “feature” himself as such. Toomer was even willing to cancel the publication of the book.
Structure

Toomer spent a great deal of time working on the structure of Cane. He said that the design was a circle. Aesthetically, Cane builds from simple to complex forms; regionally, it moves from the South to the North and then back to the South; and spiritually, it begins with “Bona and Paul,” grows through the Georgia narratives, and ends in “Harvest Song.” The first section focuses on southern folk culture; the second section focuses on urban life in Washington D.C. and Chicago; and the third section is about the racial conflicts experienced by a black Northerner living in the South.

In his autobiography, Toomer wrote: “I realized with deep regret, that the spirituals, meeting ridicule, would be certain to die out. With Negroes also the trend was towards the small town and then towards the city—and industry and commerce and machines. The folk-spirit was walking in to die on the modern desert. That spirit was so beautiful. Its death was so tragic. Just this seemed to sum life for me. And this was the feeling I put into Cane. Cane was a swan-song. It was a song of an end.”

Contents
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Cane

Preamble

First section:

Second section:

Third section:

Critical reception

Cane was largely ignored during the Harlem Renaissance by the average white and African American reader. Langston Hughes addressed this in his essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" by saying, “'O, be respectable, write about nice people, show how good we are,' say the Negroes. 'Be stereotyped, don’t go too far, don’t shatter our illusions about you, don’t amuse us too seriously. We will pay you,' say the whites. Both would have told Jean Toomer not to write Cane. The colored people did not praise it. Although the critics gave it good reviews, the public remained indifferent. Yet (excepting the works of Du Bois) Cane contains the finest prose written by a Negro in America. And like the singing of Robeson it is truly racial." Hughes suggests that Cane failed to be popular among the masses because it did not reinforce white views of African Americans. It did not fit the model of the “Old Negro” and did not depict the lifestyle of African Americans living in Harlem that whites wanted to see.

Cane was not widely read when it was published but was generally praised by both black and white critics. Montgomery Gregory, an African American, wrote in his 1923 review: "America has waited for its own counterpart of Maran—for that native son who would avoid the pitfalls of propaganda and moralizing on the one hand and the snares of a false and hollow race pride on the other hand. One whose soul mirrored the soul of his people, yet whose vision was universal. Jean Toomer…is the answer to this call." Gregory criticized Toomer for his labored and puzzling style and for Toomer's overuse of the folk. Gregory believed that Toomer was biased towards folk culture and resented city life.

W. E. B. Du Bois reviewed Cane in 1924, saying: "Toomer does not impress me as one who knows his Georgia but he does know human beings." Du Bois goes on to say that Toomer does not depict an exact likeness of humans but rather depicts them like an Impressionist painter. Du Bois also wrote that Toomer's writing is deliberately puzzling—"I cannot, for the life of me, for instance, see why Toomer could not have made the tragedy of Carma something that I could understand instead of vaguely guess at."

In his 1939 review "The New Negro", Sanders Redding wrote: "Cane was experimental, a potpourri of poetry and prose, in which the latter element is significant because of the influence it had on the course of Negro fiction."

White critics who reviewed Cane in 1923 were mostly positive about the novel, praising its new portrayal of African Americans. John Armstrong wrote: "It can perhaps be safely said that the Southern negro, at least, has found an authentic lyric voice in Jean Toomer…there is nothing of the theatrical coon-strutting high-brown, none of the conventional dice-throwing, chicken-stealing nigger of musical comedy and burlesque in the pages of Cane." He goes on to say, “the Negro has been libeled rather than depicted accurately in American fiction” because fiction typically portrays African Americans as stereotypes. Cane gave white readers a chance to see a human portrayal of blacks—“[blacks] were seldom ever presented to white eyes with any other sort of intelligence than that displayed by an idiot child with epilepsy.”

Robert Littell wrote in his 1923 review that "Cane does not remotely resemble any of the familiar, superficial views of the South on which we have been brought up. On the contrary, Mr. Toomer’s view is unfamiliar and bafflingly subterranean, the vision of a poet far more than the account of things seen by a novelist."

Modern criticism

Alice Walker said of the book, "It has been reverberating in me to an astonishing degree. I love it passionately, could not possibly exist without it."

In The Negro Novel in America, Robert A. Bone wrote: "By far the most impressive product of the Negro Renaissance, Cane ranks with Richard Wright’s Native Son and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man as a measure of the Negro novelist’s highest achievement. Jean Toomer belongs to that first rank of writers who use words almost as a plastic medium, shaping new meanings from an original and highly personal style."

Gerald Strauss points out that despite "critical uncertainty and controversy," he finds that Cane's structure is not without precedent: "it is similar to James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914) and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), two other thematically related story collections that develop unified and coherent visions of societies. It also echoes Edgar Lee Masters’s poetry collection Spoon River Anthology (1915) ... Toomer surely was familiar with the Joyce and Masters books, and he knew Anderson personally."

Legacy

In 1973, Alice Walker and fellow Zora Neale Hurston scholar Charlotte D. Hunt discovered a grave they thought was Hurston's in Ft. Pierce, Florida. Walker had it marked with a gray marker stating ZORA NEALE HURSTON / A GENIUS OF THE SOUTH / NOVELIST FOLKLORIST / ANTHROPOLOGIST / 1901–1960. The line "a genius of the south" is from Toomer's poem "Georgia Dusk", which appears in the novel. Hurston, who could be deceptive about her age, was actually born in 1891, not 1901.

The novel inspired the Gil Scott-Heron song "Cane", in which he sings about two main characters of the novel: Karintha and Becky.

The novel inspired Marion Brown in his "Georgia" trilogy of jazz albums, especially on Geechee Recollections (1973), where he put "Karintha" to music, recited by Bill Hasson.

Critical studies (since 2000)

as of March 2008:

Book monographs / articles/chapters

Articles on Cane in the collection Jean Toomer and the Harlem Renaissance

(Ed. Geneviève Fabre and Michel Feith, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press; 2001.)

Journal articles