Jean Toomer’s famous work of the Harlem Renaissance, Cane,
manipulates the lines between illusion and reality. In a search for meaning in
this work, the disunity the reader experiences is better understood through the
reduction of token meaning and the relocation of expectation directed at
explicitly comprehensible structures and themes. Characteristically, beauty
functions as a deceptive tool of Toomer’s, promising depth but creating
illusion and insignificance in its place. Toomer reduces flower, woman, and the
word, as representative of beauty in the text, to emblems lacking dimension.
Violence and the suffocation of space are both agents and products of this
reduction, as anything so reduced cannot possibly remain stable. Meaning is
violated and flawed. The reader is intentionally deceived by the forms of beauty
and left with absence instead of significance. T.S. Eliot was a promoter of the
author’s role in provoking the reader to come to terms with the displacement
experienced by Modernism. In his essay, “The Metaphysical Poets”, he
asserts, “The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive,
more indirect, in order to force, in order to dislocate if necessary, language
into its meaning” (Abrams 2137). Toomer’s text is similarly violated by the
deceptive transmutations of beauty in order to enforce his ideas as developed
among the modernist sensibility of the time.
The more American experience of Modernism, which was experienced by many
who participated in and around the Harlem Renaissance, is described by Helbling.
He writes:
For woven into the very texture of American modernism was both a search for and a questioning of all forms of collective identity. At issue was the question of identity…of the individual. For in the very search for a meaningful structure … there existed a simultaneous questioning of the very grounds that one imagined how personality might be achieved. In other words, American modernism is marked by an inner tension that structured as well as complicated this critical discourse…Van Wyck Brooks argued that the essence of art, religion, literature’ …had to be engaged if one was to think seriously about society and social reform (10).
Toomer
heightens the reader’s senses through the conjunction of beautiful images with
violent, explosive, and disturbing thematic overtures in order to confuse their
sense of meaning. He works to destroy the pretense of beauty by creating a text
that involves the reader to the intimate level of forcing their discourse in
order to make the book whole.
Toomer describes many scapes of beauty, moving the reader with deeply
beautiful and intricate language. Not only does he approach the abstract
qualities of aestheticism but he delves into the intimacy of nature’s beauty
and the immediacy of human beauty. However, though Toomer begins many of his
vignettes with seemingly bucolic imagery or qualifies a character in his writing
by her beauty, the breakdown of the aesthetic within his work is widespread.
Beauty is observed by the reader as it would appear on the other side of the
looking glass. It seems to be in proportion with reality but at a closer glance,
it is better understood as distorted. Beauty gives way to nightmarish images and
relationships. Expecting to see and experience beauty, we cringe when faced with
its distortion, embodied in the skin of Toomer’s heavy text.
The arresting union of beauty and decay in the unexpected form of flower
is experienced in the poem “November Cotton Flower”. As Toomer’s story
“Karintha” establishes, the November cotton flower should not be assumed to
hold the beautiful, pastoral qualities one may relate to a flower. Instead,
Karintha’s “lovely innocence” is compared to this very same flower by
Toomer in the context of falsehood. The following sentence in “Karintha”
alerts the reader to this contradiction, stating, “Already, rumors were out
about her” (1). Toomer continues by describing the lovemaking Karintha has
seen and which she actively replicates at a very young age. Therefore, by
association, we gain the knowledge that the November cotton flower is deceptive
in its beauty and is far from the “lovely innocence” one may assume.
In this poem, Toomer writes of the blooming of the flower during a time
of death. The poem reads, “…dead birds were found/ In wells a hundred feet
below the ground --/ Such was the season when the flower bloomed” (4). Linked
by a hyphen to the verses preceding the arrival of the flower, the flower must
be understood as a direct result of the death in the surrounding environment.
Though it appears that the flower is overcoming a time of death and ugliness
through its birth, the flower’s creation due to the dry, dying soil and the
illusion to Karintha’s false “lovely innocence” emphasizes the death and
pain inherent in the flower as well. The text proclaims, “Drouth fighting soil
had caused the soil to take/ all water from the streams; dead birds were found/
In wells a hundred feet below the ground” (4). Toomer causes the reader to
question, what is different about this flower that allows it, unlike the birds,
to live and thrive? Is it stronger, more resilient, than either the streams or
the birds? Or is the flower’s inherent poison greater than even the death
strangling this land can choke?
As a response, the flower becomes quickly entangled in superstition and
disquietude. “Old folks were startled, and it soon assumed/ Significance.
Superstition saw/ Something it had never seen before”, the following lines
concede (4). The flower is at once consumed by superstition and prejudice
because of its rebellion against the context in which it blooms. The nature in
which the town’s people accept this blooming death exhibits their ignorance
toward beauty’s deception. Toomer describes, “Brown eyes that loved without
a trace of fear,/ Beauty so sudden for that time of year” (4). One expecting
the flower to represent beauty’s strength, magic, and resilience finds a
deception devoid of the depth and clarity the reader wishes of it. Violence and
death simply have begotten violence and death. The blooming flower of death and
lost innocence allows one to glimpse how the aesthetic is often reduced in
Toomer’s work because of the contextual circumstances.
Flowers in the short poem, “Storm Ending”, provide a different twist
on Toomer’s manipulation of beauty. “[B]lossoms and “[f]ull-lipped
flowers” are coupled with thunder as the poem draws the reader to examine the
power inherent in beauty (49). A scene that may seem dangerous or explosive like
a thunderstorm is here represented in beautiful verse. The violence of booming
thunder cuts across the sky in the form of excessive noise and streaks of
lightening. The storm is described through the imagery of flowers by Toomer as
he states, “Thunder blossoms gorgeously above our heads,/ Great, hollow,
bell-like flowers,/ Rumbling in the wind” (49). The feeling the poem evokes is
that of glory and wonder. Beauty is power, the text wants to relate, hitting the
reader with a sensual, exuberant quality. The reach of the beauty is symbolized
in flowers “stretching clappers to strike our ears…” (49).
Yet there is an explicit,
though understated, violence which breaths heavily through the words of Toomer.
Certainly one could see an image that attacks the ear through noise as being
violent, but this action could as simply be an enactment of beauty as power.
However, as Gysin’s analysis highlights, “…[The analysis of imagery]
renders [the] grotesque by employing the distorting, animating, and alienating
faculties of poetic language” (59). The violence of the poem strikes more in
the very human characteristics the flowers take on midway through the poem. In
this sense, the reader is struck by the violated nature of the flowers, ripped
open and left to bleed. “Full lipped flowers/ Bitten by the sun/ Bleeding
rain”, Toomer quips (49). The image portrayed is that of a face, full-lipped
and bitten. The lips of the flowering thunder are bitten until they bleed, their
skin torn until they bleed onto the earth as rain. Even though the rain is
compared through simile to “golden honey”, the grotesque is apparent as the
reader comes to terms with what makes the rain golden.
Both honey and blood are thick and slow to drip, contrasting with the
ordinary image of water as rain. The result of the thick, bleeding rain is
compounded by the notion of the “sweet earth flying from the thunder” (49).
The earth is sweetened by blood as thick and sticky as honey because of the
violence invoked from the end of this raging storm.
Once the poem is reflected on in this manner, the image of the flower as
beauty is lost or questioned. If beauty, what kind of beauty bleeds? The
conjunction of these two images disturbs the reader and causes one to wonder,
what will become of the bleeding flower once the storm is over? The mood of
temporality is overwhelming. The flower of thunder is bitten by the sun,
pointing to the entrance of the sun across the sky and the subsequent and final
conclusion of the storm. Therefore, the flower as thunder represents the death
of the storm and the futility of the power that had seemed to enable the flower.
The flowers of thunder are “hollow” as Toomer describes for this reason
(49). They are created as emblems for the futility of power and noise. The
flowers are empty, reduced to a state where they have been bitten and bleed,
seeping onto those below but holding no power or strength of their own to push
away the sun.
The concentration by Paul on roses at the end of the short story, “Bona
and Paul”, highlights an attempt by Toomer to convince his own character of
the significance, the deeper meaning, behind the beauty of flowers. The manner
in which Paul’s search for this meaning fails exhibits Toomer’s use of
beauty as a shallow emblem in which to critique the formation of standard
literature of the day, much as T.S. Eliot’s notion of the poet had suggested.
Paul is a victim of Toomer’s Modernist criticism as he swings hopelessly back
and forth on his feelings for Bona. He feels he needs some sort of sign or
pivotal moment to make his need for her true. The moment is related by Toomer as
he states, “The chill air is a shock to Paul. A strange thing happens. He sees
the Gardens purple, as if he were way off. And a spot is in the purple. The spot
comes furiously toward him” (78). Paul comprehends no reason to get to know
Bona before the moment of apparent significance hits him. In waiting for some
sort of epiphany to relate to him Bona’s importance, he allows her to pass him
by.
The moment he sees the purple glow of the gardens, Paul is affected
enough by the moment to leave Bona’s side and return to the doorman. He feels
the need to explain that they are not a couple hurrying off to have sex, that he
is, from that moment onward, going to try to know Bona as a person, a fully
dimensional human being. Paul proclaims to the door-man, “‘…something
beautiful is going to happen…I came into…life in the Gardens with one whom I
did not know…I am going out and gather petals…I am going out and know her
whom I brought here with me to these Gardens which are purple like a bed of
roses would be at dusk’” (78). This quotation from the text reverberates
with two well known allusions, one to Robert Herrick’s famous line, “Gather
ye rosebuds while ye may”, from the poem “To the Virgins, to Make Much of
Time”. It does not dawn on Paul to approach Bona in such way as to actually
get to know her until he is hit by the striking purple of the roses at dusk. At
this point he hopes to take advantage of the opportunity that is presenting
itself. The other literary text alluded to by the quotation stems from the
Bible’s story of Adam and Eve. An explosion of knowledge occurs to Adam and
Eve as well while in the Garden due to the pivotal moment of their eating the
fruit. Until this moment, they had been content to ignore any inner meaning of
their utopian world. Thus, Paul’s epiphany has a strong literary basis that
gives the reader the illusion that it must be weighted in significance.
However the emptiness of this claim soon strikes the reader with more of
an abrupt slap than the chilled air shocks Paul as he spots the purple Gardens.
Toomer’s last sentence of the story, a sentence allowed to stand on its own,
states, “When he reached the spot where they had been standing, Bona was
gone” (78). If there was meaning or significance in the roses in the garden,
if they truly meant that “something beautiful is going to happen”, Toomer
rejects these notions by striking Paul down at the end of the story. The flowers
of the Gardens come too late, or even worse, mean nothing in the first place.
Instead they are tools employed by Toomer to illustrate the emblematic,
reductionist representation of beauty within the text. Scruggs and VanDemarr
confirm that “Toomer understood that the consequences of that abandonment
would include cultural stagnation, political estrangement, and personal
isolation” (171). Therefore, Toomer asks the reader if we should understand
the modernist dialogue as an issue that leads to this decay or as the emblem
that represents it.
On a larger scale, the women of Toomer’s work, and the multiplicity of
definitions pressed upon the woman, provide a template through which to better
understand the reduction of the aesthetic. Though Toomer first conceives the
woman to be perfect, he proceeds to strike her down and reduce her to many
one-word definitions and emblematic equations. In doing this, Toomer is able to
create a dialogue between the clashing meanings. Accordingly, in the very first
story of Cane, “Karintha”, the reader is introduced to the idea of
beauty as woman consumed by ruin and despair. Toomer develops this alarming
juxtaposition by dispassionately linking industry and pollution to the pastoral
image of the forest. He writes, “Pine-needles are smooth and sweet. They are
elastic to the feet of rabbits…A sawmill was nearby” (2). Purposely placing
an ellipse between the words “rabbits” and “a sawmill” combines two
images that the reader prefers not to intersect. Only a few sentences later, he
expands the imagery by making the pollution so substantive that Karintha must
physically consume the impurity. “Weeks after Karintha returned home the smoke
was so heavy that you tasted it in water”, Toomer adds (2). The “you”
brings the reader into a much more intimate relationship with the text,
forming in her the ill feeling of the pollution which Karintha has left to rot.
Moreover, as suggested by Scruggs and VanDemarr, “…like the smoke
from the sawdust pile in “Karintha”, [the world’s] incarnations reveal and
conceal at the same time” (164). Karintha is not only a victim of the smoke
but the creator of it, expelling a baby from her body into the soft pine needles
and releasing a smoke more incapacitating and sickening that the smoke of the
nearby factories. The text states, “A child fell out of her womb and onto a
bed of pine needles in the forest…Its pyramidal sawdust pile smouldered. It is
a year before one completely burns. Meanwhile, the smoke…hangs in odd wraiths
about the trees” (2). The rotting infant’s body discharges a smoke that
surpasses the polluting quality of the sawmill nearby. Toomer explains how even
the excrement of the sawmill, its “sawdust pile”, burns with the death of
Karintha’s baby. The death hangs in the air for much longer than the smoke of
the mill, reminding those of the human rot they ingest.
Another element of the smoke and contaminated lingering of the air arises
as well from the image of Karintha’s body but in a much less tangible, human
form than the baby represents. Toomer, however, transforms the nature of the
intangible soul and fabricates an image of over ripened fruit in its stead.
Toomer writes, “Men do not know that the soul of [Karintha] was a growing
thing ripened too soon. They will bring their money; they will die not having
found it out” (2). Thus he suggests that not only is the soul a tangible
“thing” which can become prematurely ripened but that other humans have the
means of figuring “it” out. The implication that men have the power to
understand and decipher the soul is an ambitious act and one Toomer throws out
in order for the reader to become estranged by it. The simple equalities he
makes must be questioned. We have watched Toomer explore the textual equation of
a pollutant to a violently born child as well as the soul to a prematurely
ripened “thing”. Each swells and smells and contaminates. Each is a product
of the men who pursue a woman solely because of her beauty.
Karintha sells her body to these men because she is a woman. The
causative relationship established by Toomer is enacted by the proximity of the
simple sentences he phrases. He declares, “She has contempt for [the old men].
Karintha is a woman. Young men run stills to make her money” (2). By
condensing the apparent sentiment through short, awkward sentences and by
sandwiching the declaration that Karintha is a woman between her contempt for
men and the money men give her, Toomer deceives the reader into accepting the
emblematic representation of woman and her fertility. Wrongly, Davis suggests,
“Toomer saw a beautiful land of pine trees, mist, and red soil…a land in
which fertility was finally stronger than terror, though moved by a threat of
violence that seemed all-pervasive” (190-191). In this matter, we look for
agency and strength in Karintha’s choices and in the corruption of her
fertility but we are disappointed.
The violence which seems “all-pervasive” is a trap established to
illustrated the reduction of Karintha’s beauty and the weakness of her womanly
ties to fertility, however strengthened by the “beautiful land” she may be.
The woman is prostituted because of her beauty and the fertility normally
natural in woman is made into an object of disgust and death. Karintha is
corrupted by greedy men and her lost soul is represented by the prematurely
ripened baby whom no one sees but whose pollution everyone consumes. This
symbiotic relationship is hinted at explicitly by Toomer at the beginning of the
story when he states, “This interest of the male, who wishes to ripen a
growing thing too soon, could mean no good to her” (1). Thus Karintha is
doomed from the start. She is a symbol aching and oozing with sexuality from a
very young age.
Karintha
grows into the distorted, hollowed out figure the reader would expect from a
woman commodified. The first sentence, after the short poem at the beginning of
the story, quips, “Men had always wanted her, this Karintha, even as a
child…” (1). She is never realized as a fully dimensional character because
her figure in the story occupies a role of lust and want. Ironically, even the
most religious man in town is attracted to her and ranks her beauty above her
morals, choosing to praise her appearance rather than teaching her how to
behave. Toomer writes, “She stoned the cows, and beat her dog, and fought the
other children… Even the preacher, who caught her at her mischief, told
himself that she was as innocent lovely as a November cotton flower” (1).
Karintha is far from a beautiful human being.
In this manner, the beauty of Karintha is cultivated by the men
themselves to reach only skin deep. This shallowness represents the reduction of
Toomer’s figures into flattened emblems in order to force the reading of a
level beyond the textual and metaphorical, behind the imagery, and into
recognition.
Woman
as animal is introduced by Toomer, reducing a woman’s beauty into the bovine,
for example, in the short story, “Avey.” The listless, defeated weight of
woman resonates strongly in this character. The nameless, first person narrator
is only drawn to Avey because of her beauty. Her indifference and silence toward
him, even in tender moments, reduces the aesthetic appeal she offers. The
narrator understands Avey’s silence to be laziness and wonders how she could
have fallen asleep when listening to him. He explains, “I described her own
nature and temperament…I talked, beautifully I thought…” (46). Over the
course of his narration to her, he speaks on the topic of many subjects,
allowing no room for response or recognition. He does not wonder why Avey has
not responded to him until the very end of his oration, illustrating the lack of
notice he shows Avey regardless of how little notice she may or may not show
him.
His self-absorption points to his misdirecting of blame and meaning. He
is ready to forgive her the sin of not listening closely to his endless speech
when he is reminded of her body and becomes impassioned. He thinks, “My
old-time feeling about her laziness came back. I spoke sharply…I began to
visualize certain possibilities. An immediate and urgent passion swept over
me” (46). However this passion is just as quickly quelled, when he realizes
that Avey has actually fallen asleep. If she cannot stay alert while he is
talking, she is no better than a cow, he decides. As the narrator proclaims,
“There was no excuse for a healthy girl taking life so easy. Hell! she was no
better than a cow. I was certain that she was a cow when I felt an udder in a
Wisconsin stock-judging class” (45). Avey is crudely transformed into a cow
out of bitterness, frustration, and self-absorption. Ugliness of emotion creates
an animal out of woman.
The simplicity with which the narrator draws this connection points to
Toomer’s focus on reducing beauty to the grotesque. The evaluation of the
grotesque in Cane materializes concretely during “Avey” because she
is written as a figure with so few redeeming qualities and so many
contradictions. The transformation of human into a worthless bovine out of a
bitterness toward beauty and a passion denied brings the grotesque to an
immediacy in Toomer’s book. Gysin defines the grotesque figure as “a human
figure that is dehumanized by distortion to the point where it appears at the
same time real and fantastic, beautiful and ugly, tragic and comic, human and
inhuman, living and dead, or demonic and ludicrous” (46-47). Fulfilling many
of these binaries, Avey portrays beauty reduced to the emblem of the grotesque
in a modern society where Toomer is not content to simply display the decay of
culture, but asks the reader to question the role of the narrator.
The narrator is selfish, as Toomer makes room in the text for solely his
thoughts and his observations. He is attracted to Avey because of her beauty and
is thus deceived into expecting more out of her because of this. When she does
not respond with the attention the narrator wants from her, both verbally and
physically, he lashes out and strips her of the beauty he first endowed her
with. At the end of the story, he claims, “Avey’s face was pale, and her
eyes were heavy. She did not have the gray-crimson-splashed beauty of the
dawn” (47). Avey’s beauty lessens because she will not perform or act the
part willed by the narrator. Her character in the story falls flat, reduced to a
cow that simply utters a few, senseless comments, looks nice, and falls asleep.
Unable to possess the beauty of Avey, the narrator strips her of humanity,
creating an emblem out of the stupid waste of beauty in representing the
reduction of modern society.
The reader faces a harsh realization during the middle section of the
book where it seems not only that the aesthetic is being reduced to an emblem
but that it is being replaced by a mechanized, dehumanized face of society.
Davis contends, “The preoccupation with the problems of consciousness is
responsible for the design…Toomer is not content simply to explore the
situations in which an alien Northern intelligence confronts Southern realities;
he is as much concerned with analyzing the factors that have shaped the Northern
mind” (193). And, yet what are these factors? The reader is never explicitly
alerted to the factors that have contributed to the mechanization Toomer
unfolds. Toomer produces a sterile state of the modern city contrasted with the
anguished, often unsaid, independent struggle in the consciousness of his
characters in order to place the reader in the position of developing a
justification or in accepting the lack thereof. Toomer himself only supplies the
means of doing so. Commenting on Toomer’s vision of his city-based vignettes,
Scruggs and VanDemarr remark that, “Using city imagery reminiscent of T.S.
Eliot’s early poems, Toomer…touches on themes of social connection and
interchange.” (174). The reduction in and disjointed quality of “social
connection and interchange” in Toomer’s vision provides the reader with a
lens to view the harsh imagery of the middle section.
Here, woman is most often described as a material object or machine.
Expanding upon the connection drawn in “Karintha”, industry has a consuming
effect upon the language and sources of beauty found in the second section. In
the story, “Box Seat”, women are equated to houses and the story begins with
a hint of promise underlying the beauty of the environment. Toomer describes,
“Chestnut buds and blossoms are wool [Dan Moore] walks upon. The eyes of
houses faintly touch him as he passes them. Soft girl-eyes, they set him
singing” (56). However, only a page later, the deceptive quality of the beauty
is uncovered and that beauty is altered. Suddenly the houses are no longer
beautiful, but cogs in a machine that trap Dan within and suffocate him. “The
house contracts about [Dan]. It is a sharp-edged, massed, metallic house.
Bolted. About Mrs. Pribby. Bolted to the endless rows of metal houses. Mrs.
Pribby’s house. The rows of houses belong to other Mrs. Pribbys. No wonder he
couldn’t sing to them”, Toomer writes (57).
Scruggs and VanDemarr understand this transmutation of the house’s form
as a satire illuminating the reader to “…an inseparable extension of the
black middle class and a symbol of its agoraphobia -- its fear of the ‘social
disharmony and conflict’ expressed by the drama that takes place in the
city’s streets” (170). Though the diminishment of space largely
differentiates the cityscape from the more pastoral South of Toomer’s first
and third sections of the book, reading only along the lines of the
socioeconomic conflict is to miss the point of the decaying state of nature and
humanity which Toomer undoubtedly acknowledges. Industrialization as an emblem
of modernity is on the horizon, threatening, provoking question, from the very
first pages. A later comment by these critics is seemingly more appropriate in
this context. They note, “The image of a boxed tree in the street {in “Avey”]
and the first of a series of images of military drill that will appear in the
city stories represent an alternative view of the middle-class regimen” (167).
Thus, at least the critics have recognized the break down of regimen. The
lessening of insistence on the weighted meaning behind metaphor and symbolism
allows for the reductionist stance from which Toomer is functioning. Therefore,
the beauty of Dan’s soul is better understood as being consumed by the
mechanization of the scene and the abnormally “sharp-edged” nature of the
text.
Moreover, women, illustrated by Toomer as interchangeable bolts and cogs,
lack any substance for which there is beauty or significance. Beauty instead
becomes the emblem of the Modernist movement in which Toomer participated and in
many ways, reflects the tenor of T.S. Eliot. Eliot’s motivation in writing
“The Waste Land” has been described as “[an attempt] to paint a symbolic
picture of the modern Waste Land and the need for regeneration. The terror of
that life--its loneliness, emptiness, and irrational apprehensions--as well as
the misuse of sexuality are vividly presented” (Abrams 2146). Sexuality is
used superficially by Toomer to represent beauty and beauty is reduced to echo
the emptiness and harsh disunity of sensibility that was felt by modernists. All
that had once stood whole breaks down into elements that no longer represent the
whole they came from. A woman’s beautiful eyes mutate into a row of identical,
mechanical, steel houses lined in a row without feel or life attached. In this
sense, beauty is vacated and reduced to a very flat formation, devoid of
meaning. Toomer’s creation and devaluation of a beauty which seems so full of
meaning and literary value is used as a deceptive tool to force the reader into
placing a self-imposed meaning onto the emblem which does not, on its own,
exist. Once the reader realizes that the symbol has been reduced to the
simplistic equations she was hoping it avoided, the violence and steel of the
world comes through and breeds a new recognition of the modern society in which
Toomer lived.
Beauty is also trapped within the imagery of the vignette, “Theater”.
Though Dorris is illustrated as a beautifully free dancer, the flesh of her body
is soon transformed by Toomer into a suffocating and consuming mass. Within the
smaller, compressed text of John’s dream, Dorris’s beauty is mutated into a
material object. He dreams, “They are in a room. John knows nothing of it.
Only, that the flesh and blood of Dorris are its walls” (53). The walls are
used throughout the short story to express permeability and inconstancy; they
absorb and expel feelings and form. “Songs soak the walls and seep out to the
nigger life of alleys and near-beer saloons…” Toomer establishes (50). The
walls also lead toward sexuality, as described during the rehearsal that John
observes. The text exhibits, “The walls sing and press inward. They press men
and girls, they press John towards a center of physical ecstasy” (51). By
equating Dorris to the walls that mirror the action they observe, boomerang the
sentiment they witness, or leak out the lives they contain, John has reduced her
to an object that serves as a tool of the environment in which it is placed. Her
movements then, in a sense, are predetermined or beyond her control. Devoid of
agency, John strips Dorris of her humanity.
Yet the reader is privy to Dorris’ thoughts as well as John’s, making
the reduction enacted by John more violent and possessive. He is threatened by
Dorris’ blatant sexuality and freedom of movement and thus reacts by trapping
it within a socially constructed barrier lacking agency or humanity. Scruggs and
VanDemarr highlight John’s weakness by adding, “John’s position ‘above
the desire of the body’ thinly veils a fear of both the ‘crude’ energy and
the ‘individualized’ self, what Dorris trusts toward him when she breaks
free of the chorus line and dances” (172). The energies of Dorris and John
seem to be moving toward each other, regardless of their attempts to convince
themselves differently. His effort to separate Dorris from her beauty highlights
his act of dehumanization toward Dorris. John hungers, “Let her go. (Dance and
I’ll love you!) And keep her loveliness” (52). Scruggs and VanDemarr
correctly analyze this transformation by noting, “In abstracting Dorris from
her dance, John’s dream reduces her to a passive, virtually anonymous
spectator” (173). John traps Dorris further within his dream and loses all
sense of reality. Scruggs and VanDemarr further formulate this reductionist
function by analyzing, “‘John reaches for a manuscript of his, and reads.
Dorris, who has no eyes, has eyes to understand him.’ ‘Her eyes’-- her
personality--are effaced; she is subsumed in his” (173). By erasing Dorris’
humanity, John succeeds in reducing her threat to him by mutating it into an
blind, pulsating form of wall that he has the power to resist.
Consequently, John’s reduction of Dorris’ flesh into that of a room
leads her to find him dead. Trapped within his dream and the enactment of
dehumanization, John’s face becomes empty and devoid of his previous
attraction. As the text relates, “His whole face is in shadow. She seeks for
her dance in it. She finds it a dead thing in the shadow that is his dream. She
rushes from the stage” (53). Without emotional response, Dorris is lost and
the connection is severed. She is reduced to the position of wall and, without
the stimulus of John’s visible attraction, she can only emit the emptiness he
does. Her physical beauty and the beauty of her freedom symbolized by her dance,
are rejected and reduced to a manipulated form, creating solely an emblem for
the deeper feeling and humanity that should have remained.
As the last third of the book, “Kabnis” not only illustrates the
oppressively violent distortion of beauty in its fullest dimension, but makes
the last jump concerning the breakdown of the aesthetic. One of the most
touching moments of the piece occurs when Kabnis rages against the beauty of the
night sky and philosophizes on the power and ambiguity of beauty itself. The
beauty of the moment tortures Kabnis and he cannot break free from its
oppression. In fact, beauty has the power to hurt and torment as much as
anything tangible might. Kabnis
cries, “God Almighty, dear God, dear Jesus, do not torture me with beauty.
Take it away. Give me an ugly world. Ha, ugly. Stinking like unwashed niggers…Whats
beauty anyway but ugliness if it hurts you?” (83). Here Kabnis refuses to
reduce beauty to a simple emblem devoid of meaning. However, giving beauty the
tangible agency to hurt someone is misunderstood by Kabnis who is not only a
victim of the beauty but who is used by Toomer to show the reduction of
beauty’s power within the story.
The aesthetic contains only
the power instilled into it by society and the context in which it is found.
Though that line is often ambiguous, the breakdown of the aesthetic within Cane
forces the reader to examine the language in which it is placed in order to
determine its meaning. Similarly, in “Kabnis”, Toomer finally allows his
character to explicitly touch upon the violence and ugliness that can be
instilled within the deception of beauty. Kabnis thus permits the reader to
understand how Toomer has simultaneously created a beautiful, ugly, whimsical,
nightmarish, and violent text through the power of language. A tormented Kabnis
exclaims, “Th form thats burnt int my soul is some twisted awful thing…An it
lives on words. Not beautiful words…Misshapen, split-gut, tortured, twisted
words…This whole damn bloated purple country feeds it cause its goin down t
hell in a holy avalanche of words” (110). The beautiful within Toomer’s
text, Kabnis implies, is distorted and “misshapen”. In support of his
realization, ugliness is spewed forth by Kabnis in the form of his own
self-hatred. Gysin writes, “The characterization of Kabnis is a combination of
realistic description and distortion;
the accumulation of grotesque traits accompanies the decline of his will-power
and the increase of his morbid self-hatred” (80). Beauty is reduced to
ugliness and alienation; it does not imply further significance or have a deeper
meaning within for the reader to uncover.
Toomer creates the character of Father John within the story “Kabnis”
in order to clarify the reductionist stance of his work and to formulate a
figure who could present the themes of the entire book. As Davis asserts,
“‘Kabnis’ is…an effective demonstration of the inconclusiveness of Cane,
offering a most thorough exploration of the unhappy disjunction between mind and
emotion that has haunted the black characters of the urban section” (197).
Kabnis’ anguish, paranoia, and bitterness are responded to by Toomer only
within the last few moments of the text as Toomer focuses his attention on the
characters of Carrie and Father John. Father John is Carrie’s and Halsey’s
old, silent father whom Kabnis uses to express himself, as Father John is
someone who has no choice but to listen. In fact, Kabnis hopes that Father John
is unable to hear so that he would be solely bouncing his words off against
himself. He hopes for no reaction or response. At Kabnis’ vehement refusal of
Father John’s sensory awareness, Father John stirs to life and one words seeps
from his lips, “Sin” (115). Kabnis tries to accept the blame for sin and
make himself the victim of it but Father John stresses instead “th sin th
white folks ‘mitted when they made the Bible lie” (115). Kabnis’ rage
against the futility of this statement reflects the reader’s response toward
the futility and deception of beauty within Toomer’s book.
The existence of Father John, the one who sits as an emblem of the past
and listens silently without provoking the harmful, beautiful, ugly quality of
words and life that scares Kabnis so, promotes the expectancy of great
revelation when words do form on his lips. Thompson’s examination of Father
John’s character strikes upon deception toward meaning through the functioning
of the grotesque and establishment of simplistic, reductionist equations. He
concludes, “Father John is the symbolic connection with the ancestral past…Toomer
himself says, ‘It is well to remember that the past, having meaning, cannot
serve as an objective for contemporary man.’ Therefore, when [Father John]
finally does speak, his words mean nothing” (62). Modernity has shifted the
emphasis of its emblems away from a knowing truth, saturated in a universal
meaning of love, hate, or other generalized symbolic significance. Instead, the
emblems have come to represent the promise of something greater, only to
disappoint, producing nothing beyond the state of the emblems themselves.
Modernity has created authors like Toomer who provoke their reader through the
deception of beauty. The beauty of the word fulfills this role and complicates
the futility of trying to understand it. Kabnis understands beauty as harm but
knows not how to combat or reflect upon it in an individualistic manner. Gysin
explains, “…Kabnis finds it difficult to act on what he knows, and ‘things
are so so immediate in Georgia’ that they leave him without time to think or
formulate a response” (190).
Kabnis looks to Father John but cannot face the jumble of nonsensical
images that leave the man’s mouth. Thompson confirms, “Kabnis, in his total
state of denial of the old man, can only sink into the quicksand of self-hate”
(62). Thus his character has learned nothing and progressed nowhere. Often seen
as a Christ figure, the implication of a savior is withdrawn from Kabnis as he
stagnates in the emblematic state of the text. He leaves the story before the
light of sun reaches down in a circle of light and represents the void which
universal significance has failed to satisfy. Toomer writes of the moment after
Kabnis stumbles away, stating, “[Carrie’s] lips murmur, ‘Jesus come.’
Light streaks through the iron-barred cellar window. Within its soft-circle, the
figure of Carrie and Father John” (116). Kabnis does not want to confront the
modern world without a collective knowledge but is hit by the fact that there is
not a universal truth to which he can grasp. Beauty has not harmed but deceived
Kabnis in its seduction of the senses and its provocation toward a search for
meaning that does not exist.
Throughout Toomer’s text we have followed the progression of images
representing the beautiful. Moreover, we have analyzed that their role in the
book functions as misleading promoters of agency and significance. The reduction
of beauty to the mere state of an unfulfilled emblem reflects on Toomer’s
position within the state of American modernity and the decay of culture as
viewed by T.S. Eliot. Thompson felt that Toomer’s piece focused on the search
of the individual and described the masterpiece as “…[capturing] the beauty
and the ugliness, the power and the weakness, the ‘triumph and the tragedy’
of life in the United States. Cane is a…chronicle of Toomer’s search as
writer, as man, as modern man trying to find himself and consequently, peace”
(62). Yet, is Cane Toomer’s journey for peace and his humanity? Or does
he simply provoke the sensibilities of his fellow Americans into questioning
their existence as individuals within society by promoting an alarming and
unsatisfying emblematic reduction of beauty? His genius in this book stems not
from a personal, existential struggle toward peace and unity, but from his
awakening in the reader of the disunity we must come to terms with in modern
society. Avey cannot provide answers any more than Father John can, or Toomer
for that matter.
Bibliography
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W.W.
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