"Always your heart": the "great design" of Toomer's Cane.

"I want great art. This means I want great design." Jean Toomer, "Open Letter to Gorham Munson"

Given the present emphasis on issues surrounding identity politics and the representational logic of cultural studies, it is perhaps not surprising that in the reams of criticism on Jean Toomer's Cane there is remarkably little concerning the issues of direct address and narrative authority. Yet in Cane, Toomer's use of direct address, going against interpretations that marginalize his representations for being insufficiently "folk" or "racial," is crucial in evoking a relationship of sympathy and identification in the reader while creating a distinctly modernist form of storytelling. Cane's narrator, (1) a teller in a social community, adopts a narrative design that shows us how a self-reflective storyteller (2) can "essentialize" and "spiritualize" experience. At the same time, Toomer undertakes a rhetorical project of positioning his readers in a variety of identifications, which serve to illustrate his repudiating of essentialist notions of race. By forcefully bringing together the narrator and reader and/or the narrator and implied reader, Toomer reveals false categories and separations that are both literary and social. The relationship between the narrator and his addressees thus becomes Cane's plot.

Part of Toomer's "great design" in Cane is that his text, like any written text and paralleling any oral performance, is by someone and to someone. It is, then, a social transaction that does not present what is said to the exclusion of who says it to whom and for what purpose (see Ricoeur). Although Cane's characters receive relatively brief treatment, the identity of the novel's narrator is presented in more fully developed terms, both as a process of consciousness and unconsciousness and as a subject impinged on and affected by interactions with his characters and narratee. The narrator renders his "individuality" through a socialized interdependence based on forms of direct address and a creative negotiation of narrative authority. Toomer's radically new formal transgressions, which follow his radical positions on race and culture, speak to the need to understand Cane in terms of both stylistic function and thematic expression.

My purpose here is to trace Toomer's self-reflective narrators in the three sections of Cane in order to show how Toomer raises the issue of "social transaction" implied by the choice of narrative method and by the identification of narrator, narratee, and reader. In effect, Toomer does not assert cognitive authority but concentrates instead on articulating modes of narrative authority and patterns of feeling that directly modify not how we understand the world so much as how we engage it. He suggests that there are modes other than "race" that afford significant ways of resisting the dominant cultural emphases on difference. I want to show how these concepts and modes are inflected by the geographical movements of the book, what shifts in the identification of narrator and narratee are implied by shifts in the nature of the communal experience in Cane's three sections, and how the subjectivities of characters, narrators, and real and implied readers have been shaped by different communal experiences. Cane is a productive rewriting of "race," allowing for the recognition of multiple authentic African American voices, identifications complicated by class, gender, and geography, and greatly enriched by the significant modulations in narrative address that Toomer undertakes.

Moreover, I want to consider how each of Cane's three sections records an emergence of a special racial ethos of modern life. Part One involves the narrator building a foundation of restoring "race" to a metaphorical position equal to, even identical with, the "soul" while at the same time he expresses the impossibility of sustaining such a creation. Intending to "vivify" both the narrator and reader, the narrator discloses his inability to fully enter the communities he describes. While keeping Part One's narrative strategy as a sub-tone, Part Two centers on the fragmentation, uncertainties, and multi-social positions of the new urban black communities that the narrator attempts to "reconcile" but with which he cannot totally identify. The multiple discourses of this section, however, suggest a more complex sympathy with the narratee as well as a deep identification with a new racial future. Part Three focuses on a narrator who, while identifying with the protagonist "Kabnis," self-reflectively points to Toomer's own racial re-examination and the need for a new racial discourse and expansion. Kabnis's intimations of self-closure and self-repression, however, mark off his inability to enter this discourse or to connect with his community. All three sections similarly attempt some kind of inter-racial unity in which the "I" and "you" can be represented by the same voice but each section reveals differences in attempting to achieve this unity. Toomer probes for a voice that would reconcile his own racial dichotomies and those of the United States in the 1920s.

I.

In Part One of Cane Toomer immediately wishes to make the bridge between the "I" and "You" a most conscious relationship, pushing the purely aesthetic phase of art "into a sort of religious function." Thus he saw his artistic role, as suggested in a 1922 letter to Sherwood Anderson, as an interracial negotiator and unifier of representational identity: "And `I' together with all the other `I's' am the reconciler" (qtd. in Helbing 138). This position cannot be separated from Toomer's emerging beliefs, formulated throughout the 1920-22 period, in which he puts forth the idea that "here in America we are in the process of forming a new race, [and] that I was one of the first conscious members of this race" (qtd. in Helbing 144). Toomer's vision of the integration of various racial elements within himself is inscribed into the narratorial "I" pronoun in Cane:

   I am at once no one of the races and I am all of them. I belong to no
   one of them and I belong to all.... Heredity and environment will
   combine to produce a race which will be at once interracial and
   unique. I may be the turning point for the return of mankind, now
   divided into hostile races, to one unified race, namely, to the human
   race. ("Crock of Problems" 58-59)

Never comfortably identifying himself with any one element of his racial heritage, Toomer acts out his own racial anxieties while attempting to deconstruct a stable racial identity in Cane, two notions that are not incompatible. Indeed, the tension between these conflicting impulses informs every chapter in the novel, leading to Toomer's desire to integrate his own heterogeneous identity into an "American" identity and to portray himself as "representative." But Toomer's narrative vision never reaches its goal of thematic and racial unification. Instead, claiming that Cane is a "swan song," Toomer suggests that his vision, though not immediately realizable, can ideally lead to a modern sense of belonging (complicating, even going beyond, the black vs. white binary) that might eventually replace visible, concrete communities and redefine relational and national orders.

To evoke such a vision Toomer wishes to inspire actual readers with the "you" in the text. (3) In the first four stories the narrator, as an attached observer and creator, seeks to (sympathetically) understand and identify (though sometimes admitting the impossibility of such a task) with "Karintha," "Becky," "Carma," and "Fern." Employing narrative interventions that are almost always spoken in earnest, he engages the reader to share in the mystery and elusiveness of these women. As an "engaging" and "unifying" narrator, he "addresses a `you' that is evidently intended to evoke recognition and identification in the person who holds the book and reads, even if the `you' in the text resembles that person only slightly" (Warhol, Gendered 29). In this way, the narrator addresses his readers as people "like" himself, which means that each will be both similar to and different from him. (4) Toomer's use of direct address and narrative authority serve to confirm these assertions.

In this first section the "you" points to a fictionalized version of the reader, a "narratee." (5) As the section progresses, however, the narrator tries to close the gap between the "you" and the actual reader, drawing the reader into the sketches before the pronoun is particularized. At the same time, the "you" can also refer to a narrator who is either talking to himself or using the "you" to substitute for or disguise a self-referential "I." In all these cases, however, judgment (of himself, the described community, the South and its "dying" way of life, the narratee) is the narrator's principal task. The nature of this judgment is shaped by the "you" and "one" pronouns in relation to personal and communal responses. The narrator wants to confer some kind of authority on his description of events while wishing the narratee (as he draws the narratee into the described community) to share in his elations, trepidations, and failures, however provisional, partial, and incomplete.

The southern setting of the tales in Part One not only works to identify the various narratees, but to reveal the narrator, through the characters and communities he describes, as a self-reflective commentator. The geographical and temporal become integral to the narrative itself, the novel's actual reader understanding the narrator's characterization of the embedded "you" as subjective, provisionary, flawed, but (increasingly) aimed at her or him. This aiming reinforces the notion that individual and communal remembrance are the narrator's imperatives in order to counter and immortalize a "dying" way of life. At the same time, the second-person address can both blend with and differentiate itself from an address to actual readers, readers who simultaneously occupy the position of addressee and observer.

Thus in his use of descriptive anecdotes, legends, and communal gossip surrounding "Karintha," "Becky," "Carma," and "Fern," the narrator resorts to various forms of direct address. In "Karintha" he speaks directly to the "you," and begins with a sensory appeal:

   At sunset, when there was no wind, and the pine-smoke from over by
   the sawmill hugged the earth, and you couldn't see more than a few
   feet in front, [Karintha's] sudden darting past you was a bit of
   vivid color, like a black bird that flashes in light. (3)

The narrator shifts from the pronoun "you" in these sentences to the pronoun "one" in the next:

   With the other children one could hear, some distance off, their feet
   flopping in the two-inch dust. (3)

"Fern" contains similar shifts:

   what thoughts would come to you, had you seen her in a quick flash,
   keen and intuitively, as she sat there on her porch when your train
   thundered by? (18)

   When one is on the soil of one's ancestors, most anything can come
   to one. (19)

The implied situation of the "one" and "you" serves the narrator's integrative purposes: he wishes the actual reader to "enter" in the described community through glimpses that suggest immediacy and physical closeness: the darting, twelve-year-old Karintha who appears to come from nowhere, or Karintha as a quick flash seen from a train window. The narrator contrasts the child Karintha whose run was a "whir," with the other children whose feet "flo[p] in the two-inch dust" (3). The narrator then goes from Karintha's specific case, "Karintha had seen or heard perhaps she had felt her parents loving," to an interpretive maxim aimed at both Karintha and the narratee, "One could but imitate one's parents, for to follow them was the way of God" (4). The comment on the ancestors' "soil" in "Fern" serves a similar purpose, coming, not surprisingly, after this sentence: "People have [visions] in Georgia more often than you would suppose" (18). By offering these different interpersonal orientations, the narrator operates to evoke a personal and communal (public) response.

In both "Fern" and "Karintha" the "one" pronoun refers to a broader more inclusive narratee than does the "you" pronoun, evoking the narrator's attitude towards his "dissimilar" community (which can include himself and the narratee as outsiders). In his stance toward the reader the narrator places "one" on the same plane of reality that he himself occupies. In this way Toomer begins to establish his pattern (narrator to character, narrator to community, narrator to narratee, narrator to actual reader) of a socialized and racial interdependence. (6)

In "Karintha," the narrator, while alternately presenting a romanticized notion of mystical truth, "Men do not know that the soul of her was a growing thing ripened too soon" (4), along with a communal vision of reality, "the interest of the male ... could mean no good to her" (3), assumes his role as a kind of link or mediator among the story's differentiated racial groups. It must be noted, however, that in this role, the narrator's knowledge about his characters is incomplete and limited, and consequently the stories end in suspension, speculative refrain, or a comment about the narrator's insufficient understanding. "Karintha," for example, concludes with a tension between the possibility of transcendence, "smoke" in "odd wraiths about the trees," and doom, as presented in the refrained image of Karintha at twenty, her "skin like the dusk on the eastern horizon / ... When the sun goes down" / Goes down." (4). The doubts and expansive possibilities the narrator expresses are an acknowledgement that his vision is subjective. But by stressing his subjectivity, the narrator also implies that he is reporting events that are only provisionally "true," and therefore open to the reader's subjective interpretation. By placing his readers in a variety of identifications and positions of reception, the narrator's promulgation of "race" is made, as we shall see, literally indistinguishable from his strategies of narration. (7)

In "Becky," for example, the narrator, in conducing his story to strategies of social and racial interdependence, embeds the voices of white and black responses:

   Becky had one Negro son, who gave it to her? Damn buck nigger,
   said the white folks' mouths. She wouldn't tell.

   Who gave it to her? Low-down nigger with no self-respect, said the
   black folks' mouths. She wouldn't tell. (7)

Here the narrator, through directly addressing a witnessing community, prepares a participation that not only intensifies his voice in the community, but also allows him to become a spokesperson and storyteller of it. Again the variation of address creates a story that is his as well as the community's but this time includes the narrator's guilt and fear: "We who had cast out their mother"; "fear closed my mind" (8). As in "Karintha," the narrator cannot give the community the final, true "word" (9), and we have the contradictory (destructive/transcendent) images of smoke from Becky's chimney and the imploration/exclamation to Jesus: "O pines, whisper to Jesus"; "Pines shout to Jesus" (8). Aesthetically and socially, "Karintha" and "Becky" set the pattern of conflating speech, song, and refrain into an improvisatory, transformational power that the female protagonists appear to possess but that the narrator can only partially understand and articulate. The narrator does not claim to speak from a privileged "in-group" vantage point. (8)

The subjectivities of the narrator, characters, and narratees are shaped in different ways by the communal experiences in Part One. When the narrator changes from a passive observer ("Karintha") to a participant witness ("Becky"), he asks the narratee to respond, to build connections and patterns, to become part of the "we" that passes Becky's cabin and "g[ets] away" (8-9). But he does so under the conditions that the narratee recognize in "Becky" and "Karintha" a communal cowardice and incomprehension. The emphasis he puts on the visual and seeing in these two sections ("Her skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon, / O cant you see it, O cant you see it" (3)) serves as a self- and communal remonstrance and an invitation to the narratee to "reperceive" the stories by seeing them from the views of the titular subjects.

Toomer's socialized and racialized interdependence takes a multitude of forms in Cane. As in "Karintha" and "Becky," in "Carma" the narrator interacts, this time even more directly, with his subject character: "I leave the men around the stove to follow her with with my eyes down the red dust road.... Maybe she feels my gaze, perhaps she expects it" (12). As in the previous stories, the narrator relates a "sad story song" that centers on a vision but one more expansive and transportive than those in "Karintha" and "Becky," a vision that parallels the narrator's notion, under the spell of Carma's "dance," that "time and space have no meaning in a canefield. No more than the interminable stalks" (13). In an open voice the narrator implores the reader to "Come along," to enter the "wind" that sweeps over the cane (12-13), to become part of this vision based on an almost physical palpability.

As the section moves to "Carma," the narrator focuses on a spiritual power that dominates his imagination. "Carma" becomes the "wind" in the cane, and "[t]he sun, which has been slanting over her shoulder, shoots primitive rockets into her mangrove-gloomed, yellow flower face" (12). The narrator wishes both Carma and the narratee to "feel [his] gaze," to recognize his presence as a communal and spiritual mediator (however unsuccessful his endeavors might be), and to solicit, "Come Along" (12-13), the creative involvement of the narratee.

The narrator's "representativeness" and self-reflectiveness converge in Cane. Although an observer to Carma's incident in the canefield (and many events in these first four stories), the narrator is, more importantly, aware of himself as a writer, "this Carma ... whose tale as I have told it" (13), and participant in his tales, "I began to wonder if perhaps my own emotional sensibility had played one of its tricks on me" (18). He manifests no desire to screen himself from the reader's attentions: we are directly brought into his conscious and unconscious process of forming a narrative identity. We are given a sustained, inside view of relationship to his characters. In "Avey," for example, he proclaims, "But what a bluff I put up about forgetting her" (47). The narrator, in broad terms, creates social interaction by defining himself in relation to his characters, community, and narratee and gives the reader the responsibility for acknowledging (racial and social) diversity.

This process gains force as the narrative progresses. The narrator becomes even more participative in "Fern" and intensifies his plea that the narratee (the "you") seek an even closer intimacy with the tale:

   The soft suggestion of down slightly darkened, like the shadow of a
   bird's wing might, the creamy brown color of her upper lip. Why,
   after noticing it, you sought her eyes, I cannot tell you. Her nose
   was aquiline, Semitic. If you have heard a Jewish cantor sing, if he
   has touched you and made your own sorrow seem trivial when compared
   with his, you will know when I follow the curves of her profile, like
   mobile rivers, to their community. (16)

And, more than in the preceding stories, he stresses his own presence as well as the narratee's:

   I first saw [Fern] on the porch. I was passing with a fellow ... (I
   was from the North and suspected of being prejudiced and stuck-up).
   (17)

He then implicates the narratee in his analysis of character, suggesting, for example, that Fern would be better off listening to "folk-songs at dusk in Georgia, you would say, and so would I" than "sitting at a tenement window looking down on the indifferent throngs of Harlem" (17). In this story the narratee is endowed with certain qualities, inclinations, and faculties that parallel the narrator's opinions and the obligations he feels should be respected:

   You and I know, who have had experience in such things, that love is
   not a thing like prejudice which can be bettered by changes of town.

   You and I who know men in these cities will have to say, they could
   not [bring her something left vacant by the bestowal of their bodies]
   (18)

Here the narrator refers to an anterior, extra-textual experience known to the narrator and narratee and, in a new twist to the interdependencies that underlie the novel, designates the narratee by the word "friend" (18).

To the "Fern" narratee, the narrator multiplies his explanations and justifies the particularities of his narrative. What appears to count here, then, is not only the extent of the narratee's agreement with the theses of the narrator but the narrator's solicitation to the narratee: "Your thoughts can help me, and I would like to know. Something I would do for her" (18). As in no other story in Cane, the narrator entreats the narratee to enter into his situation of distress. Here the narratee constitutes a relay between the narrator and the reader and the character Fern; he aids in establishing the narrative framework, and he serves as a reflector of the narrator and the narrator's "pre-Fern" world. At the same time, the narratee is prompted by the narrator's urge to accept the patterns of consciousness that include transcending a mere racial content.

As in the first three stories, the emphasis in "Fern" is put on the narrative discourse as opposed to story and on the narrator's responses as opposed to plot. Most importantly, however, the narrator through his discourse spiritualizes the experiences he treats, applying his observations to himself, the narratee, and the reader. (9) Like Karintha, Carma, and Becky, Fern incarnates something mysterious and mystical: the "whole countryside seemed to flow into her eyes" (17), and the narrator sees "her face flow into them" (19). Earlier the narrator "feels that things unseen to men were tangibly immediate. It would not have surprised me had I had a vision" (19). "Fern" ends with one last appeal to the narratee: "Something I would do for her. Some fine unnamed thing ... And, friend, you?" (19).

The narrator's concern about the titular subjects culminates in "Fern," the woman with whom he has the most personal and sustained contact. Significantly, "Fern" is the story that contains the most "I's" and "you's," indicating that the quest for the actual reader is to cross the gap between "I" and "you," a transaction that becomes the central plot and metaphor of Cane. In this first section, the "I" may seem to possess the power to wander freely from community to community, subjectivity to subjectivity, but in fact he has to keep returning to his readers, and he constantly works to bring his readers to him and into his described community. An instrumental part of such transactions, direct address in "Fern" does not so much represent an event as produce one. It is not only a means by which the narrator works to promote a sense of the author's own presence in the text, but it serves to bring together (through its constant appeals to the narratee for confirmation and approval) the objective and subjective content of the tales. (10)

Not resorting to direct address, "Esther" is the first portrait in Part One to adopt a third-person narration. But as in the other sections, form becomes a sequential process of construction, emphasized by Esther's age (nine, sixteen, twenty-two, twenty-seven) prefacing each section, and, as in the previous sections, producing a series of provisional hypotheses in the mind of the narratee. Toomer emphasizes process as opposed to structure to create his design. In so doing, he casts his narrative exclusively in the present tense, suggesting that everything takes place as if the question of the story's duration had no relevance. Because the narrative "I" is not used in "Esther," the narrator appears to lose his mediatory role, adopting instead realistic, grotesque, comic descriptions, and symbolic representation, though still relying (through Esther herself) on self-conscious moments. Thus instead of Karintha's beauty, "perfect as dusk when the sun goes down" (4), or Fern's mystically eerie connections (19), Esther at twenty-seven becomes "lean and beaten" (25) and her face is "the color of the gray dust that dances with dead cotton leaves" (25).

Esther is, arguably, the most racially anguished of Toomer's characters not only because she is the first woman in Part One to be given an interior consciousness (a device conducive to denoting her personal torment) but because she is "near white" and "her father is the richest colored man in town" (24). Esther is a racial outsider. We receive an inside, sustained view of Esther's mind (what she dreams, thinks, sees, hears, knows), which temporarily turns her into a kind of narrator. Like the narrator in the previous sections, Esther becomes the focus of an examination of socio-racial relations in a small Southern town but she loses the narrator's reconciliatory role. Instead, Esther's pain, as poignant as Fern's and Karintha's strength and beauty, stresses the need for such unity and the reconstitution of the black-white community that rejects her.

Not coincidentally, as in no other section, the narrator constantly juxtaposes blacks and whites who contrast with, and ultimately pit themselves against, Esther:

   White and black men loafing on the corner hold no interest for her.
   (22)

   The town fire department rushes madly down the road. It ruthlessly
   shoves black and white idlers to one side. (24)

   Women, fat chunky Negro women, lean scrawny white women, pull
   their skirts up above their heads and display the most ludicrous
   underclothes.
   (24)

   A sharply dressed white girl passes by. For a moment Esther wishes
   that she might be like her. Not white; she has no need for being
   that.
   But sharp, sporty, with get-up about her. (25)

As the subject and object of focus, Esther must consider "the town folks" (22) in her resolve to tell King Barlo, the itinerant gambler, preacher, and epic visionary, that she loves him. But both blacks and whites want to drive Barlo out of town, which is why "white and black preachers confer as to how best to rid themselves of the vagrant, usurping fellow" (23). Strangely, according to town legend and Esther's perceptions, Barlo appears to possess the power to make "angels and demons parad[e] up and down the street all night"; to make "Limp Underwood, who hated niggers, w[ake] up next morning to find that he held a black man in his arms"; to inspire a Negress, "of wide reputation," to draw "a portrait of a black madonna on the courthouse wall"; and to leave "his image indelibly upon the mind of Esther" (23). Indeed, Barlo becomes "the starting point of the only living patterns that her mind was to know" (23). Esther senses and pursues Barlo's mystical qualities, though by the end of the tale the reality of Barlo and the disapproving community make her "dra[w] away, frozen" (27).

"Blood Burning Moon," the last story of Part One, enacts a conflict between whites and blacks only suggested in the previous sections. The characters take on a behavioral complexity and a consciousness of their own. We are again given access to characters' interiorities, as in the case of Louisa:

   [Tom Burwell's] black balanced, and pulled against the white of
   [Bob] Stone, when she thought of them. And her mind was vaguely
   upon them as she came over the crest of the hill, coming from the
   white folks' kitchen. As she sang softly at the evil face of the full
   moon. (30)

Centering on the confrontation between the white Bob Stone and the black Tom Burwell, action and dialogue dominate the narrative. More specifically, the plot of the story is its focus, and becomes a form of understanding and explanation of racial antagonisms.

The narrator in this story, cast in the third-person, is "undramatized" and impersonal, and largely stands apart as an observer. Interestingly, though, narratorial presence comes most forcefully in the depiction of the "Blood Burning Moon," which at once symbolizes racial hostilities and appears to take Louisa's attention away from the two competing men:

   A strange stir was in her. Indolently, she tried to fix upon Bob or
   Tom as the cause of it. To meet Bob in the canebreak, as she was
   going to do an hour or so later, was nothing new. And Tom's proposal
   which she felt on its way to her could be indefinitely put off.
   Separately, there was no unusual significance to either one. But for
   some reason, they jumbled when her eyes gazed vacantly at the rising
   moon. (30)

The rising moon that ends section one prefigures the rising sun (117), the symbol that ends section three. The former is "an evil thing, an omen" (36); the latter, "a birth song" (117), but a song that offers no tangible hope or completion. The point is that in both sections a natural symbol has the final word, making us conscious of the narrator's experiencing mind whose views of the experience intervene between the narratee and the event. At the same time, the natural symbol, deeply rooted in the experience of the physical body, reinforces the sensory and visionary atmosphere of Part One.

Although containing no uses of direct address, "Esther" and "Blood Burning Moon" forward Toomer's design. What happens most often in these two stories, both set in small southern towns, is that, in "juxtaposition[s] of the white and black races ... so typical of Southern life" (Toomer, "South" 12), poetic passages battle the realistic elements of the text for narrative control. This conflict is never allowed to reach its completion, formally expressed, for example, by long dashes to break paragraphs in "Esther" (23) and the use of ellipses in "Blood Burning Moon" (35). Most pointedly, this competition between lyrical and realistic elements extends the form that the narrator tries to give to complex states of human consciousness while simultaneously putting forth his own inner states of racial awareness, divisiveness, and conflict.

What is striking about Toomer's narrative methods in Part One is the importance he places on the attachment of the actual reader to the narrator and the communally detached female characters. The second-person narrative in this section correlates with the most profound emotional depths of the novel because the dialogic relationship it establishes guides the reader to new inscriptions of place, race, and social need. Toomer's decision to avail himself of the second person in Cane is a self-conscious one; the narrator wishes to alert the reader to pay attention to what he describes because the reader may be called upon (as evidenced by so many of the imperative syntactical constructions) to respond and react. Although the creation of such a community is continually frustrated by the racial realities represented in the text, the narrator wants to bring the reader into a "new" nonessentialized community of possibility.

II.

The shift in time and place to Washington, D.C. and Chicago in the second section intensifies the narrator's need to anchor the self, confirm control, and finally, as in "Avey," assert his often tenuous, provisional beliefs over others. These urban environments contribute to the self-repression and apathy of the characters while making the narrator more assertive and aggressive. In "Avey" the narrator "sp[eaks) sharply (48) to Avey who shows no particular interest in his monologue and appears incapable of deciphering his references to spirituals and black folklore. She falls asleep while listening to him. Conversely, the role of the narratee gains in relative importance: the narrator and narratee can share in the same "realm" of existence, a realm not necessarily available to these urban characters (Rhobert, Avey, Muriel, Bona, Paul). Thus rather than using local descriptions to illustrate a hermetic and lost world, the narrator relies on the resources of expression to make them functional, to call the narratee into these "present" communities, and to share the levels of both story and discourse.

The geographical movement in Part Two to Washington, D.C. and Chicago, however, emblematizes the impossibility of sustaining the reflective "swan song" of Part One. One linguistic result of this effort in Part Two is that the narrator becomes multipersonal and, reflecting the fragmentation and shattered quality of these urban environments, the narrative voices, while more imperious and aggressive than in Part One, become disparate and diffuse. The narrator's role as reconciler and unifier commensurately suffers. At the same time, the shifting use of the narrative "you" is used to create an identity between the reader and the dispossessed urban characters. Toomer's narrative strategy is to relate the means of narration to live social experience in order to stress (racial, social) diversity--in all its indeterminacies, potential dangers, and complexities--and the narratee's role in this diversity, a role most directly inscribed in the novel.

In Part Two the narrator continues to rely on forms of direct address, first-person narration, and invocation but adds a stringent undercurrent of irony and urgency. "Seventh Street," a transitional sketch denoting the new setting of Washington, D.C., presents images of decadence, "Ballooned, zooming Cadillac," and corruption, "Money bums the pocket, pocket hurts, / Bootleggers in silken shirts" (41), towards which the narrator, in relation to Sempter, takes a more critical stance. "Black reddish blood," the narrator enunciates, "[p]ouring for crude-boned soft skinned life, who set you flowing?" and then three times repeats "who set you flowing." (11)

As Toomer said of this second section,

   the life [in Washington, D.C.] becomes more conscious, more restless
   and stirring, and hence more complex. But the soft loveliness of the
   city streets, the rich warm taste of dark-skinned life, and the music
   and the humor give a pervasive sub-tone which is distinctly of the
   South ("South" 14)

The "sub-tone" in "Seventh Street" foregrounds the interplay between the black and white communities: "black reddish blood into the white and whitewashed wood of Washington" (41); "White and Whitewash disappear in blood" (41), a process that the narrator describes as natural, flowing, organic, despite the white racial forces that threaten this new existence. In its "eddying" and "swirling" the blood has literally and figuratively brought a new life to the city. (12) "Seventh Street" represents a new shift in subjectivities. The narrator's sensibilities flow into the "life-giving blood" of Seventh Street in order to explore the psychological oppression, violence, and uncertainties of these new black communities. The narrator directs his "you" toward the blood itself, "Who set you flowing?" (41).

The next sketch, "Rhobert," shifts emphasis, evoking the hopelessness that is a product of the spiritual corruption and fragmentation of the figures in Part Two. The tone is more sardonic, intellectualized, than in "Seventh Street," but the narrator continues his different varieties and styles of address: "it is sinful to draw one's head out of live stuffing in a dead house"; "It is sinful to have one's own head crashed" (42). The narrative voice, filled with ironic sermonlike exhortations to the narratee ("one"), is distant and aloof. Here the one pronoun is on the scale between narration and interior monologue, where the text's address can be read as an instance of self-address through which the narrator communicates his despair to the narratee. In direct appeal, the narrator concludes the tale with a corrosive "elegiac" address to Rhobert:

   Lets give it to him. Lets call him great when the water shall have
   been all drawn off. Lets build a monument and set it in the ooze when
   he goes down ... Lets open our throats, brother, and sing "Deep
   River" when he goes down. (43)

The narrator's suggestion for a reconciliation of the past, signalled by the "monument" and the song "Deep River," and a movement beyond the present into future identities is surpassed by the section's nonreflective claims and sardonic phrasings. The community cannot change the fate of Rhobert but only sing to him as "he goes down." (13)

"Avey" signals a return to a first-person narrative. Convinced that he can "understand" her and transform her folk spirit into art with him as the recreator, the narrator describes Avey as a receptacle of his own cause:

   I described her own nature and temperament. Told how they needed a
   larger life for their expression. How incapable Washington was of
   understanding that need. How it could not meet it. I pointed out that
   in lieu of proper channels, her emotions had overflowed into paths
   that dissipated them. I talked, beautifully I thought, about an art
   that would be born, an art that would open the way for women the
   likes of her. I asked her to hope, and build up an inner life
   against the coming of that day. (48)

But like the other titular subjects in Cane, Avey and the responses she evokes, "The general gossips could hardly say more than they had" (46), cannot be fully understood: "Just how I came to love her ... I do not know" (44). Even beyond this, in coming to the forefront to participate in such an intimate struggle, the narrator draws the reader's attention to himself, to such a degree that the narrator (and his delusion, his "promise-song") becomes the principal focus. Avey, however, like many of the female characters in Cane, is represented less as individual than as a figuration or movement, in this way resembling the function of the fluid and combinatory modulations of Toomer's narrative addresses.

The second part of Cane is dominated, of course, not by a first-person narrator or forms of direct address but by a third-person narrative. The second part depends on internal monologues ("Theater"), free indirect discourse ("Box-seat"), and quasi-direct speech ("Bona and Paul"), in which one is unsure whether the source of the utterance is the narrator, the character, or both at once. Toomer does not hesitate to establish between narrator and characters, and narrator and reader, and narrator and community "a variable or floating relationship, a pronominal vertigo in tune with a freer logic and a more complex conception of [the narrator's] `personality'" (Genette 185). But this relationship (with all addressees) results from a common appeal to self-reflectiveness that is, in Robert Siegle's words, "not a single-minded focus on art for art's sake, and hardly a betrayal of the larger issues challenging the narrative artist, but rather is the most comprehensive fulfillment of those challenges that considers not only what it will say but the philosophical ground and means for saying it" (3). Although the narrator wants his readers to "follow" him by placing them in a variety of rhetorical, geographical, multiethnic, social positions, and, in so doing, to express his commitment to a new ontology of racial identity, he continues to struggle to define and become part of the community's "common soul" (qtd in Helbing). (14)

In structure "Theater" is a combination of lyrical description, dialogue, "dance instruction" interfused with "jazz songs" (53) and descriptions of dream states. Set in the Howard Theater in Washington, "Theatre" highlights the distinction between spoken words--audible to others and perceptible even when narrative attention lies with someone else, and unspoken words--thoughts, internal monologues, dreams, which no matter how developed are not perceptible to other characters. The effect of this convention is that readers are given extended information about the thoughts of characters, which the other characters are unaware of. Toomer conveys these thoughts, however, in the way a playwright would generally designate that a character's speech will follow, as when Dorris asks these questions about herself: (15)

      Dorris: Nothin doin? Aint I as good as him? Couldn't I get an
   education if I'd wanted one? Don't I know respectable folks, lots
   of em, in Philadelphia and New York and Chicago? Aint I had men as
   good as him? Better. Doctors and lawyers. Whats a manager's brother,
   anyhow? (53-54)

The narrator also resorts to this device when relating a character's feelings and "dreams":

   John Dreams:

      Dorris is dressed in a loose black gown splashed with lemon
   ribbons. Her feet taper long and slim from trim ankles. She waits
   for him just inside the stage door ... John's melancholy is a deep
   thing that seals all senses but his eyes, and makes him whole. (55)

The narrator does not, however, merely describe John's dream, as the punctuation might indicate, but interprets John's dream, and his "sadness" "too deep for sweet untruth," and his potential "whole[ness]" (55).

The overall effect is that the narrator, while creating the impression that "Theatre," as the name suggests, is character driven, dramatic in structure, and interactive, gives free reign to his narratorial presence. I would agree with Nellie Y. McKay that in "Theatre" "Toomer uses the divisive effects of class distinctions among black people to continue to explore the negative results of unnatural social restraint" (139). Less obvious is the narrator's strategy in articulating his position on this divisiveness and restraint and in his subsuming the "dialogue" with characters' thoughts and his own interpretations and interventions. Lyrical descriptions blur into dialogue, which blurs into internal monologue, which, in the narrator's multiplicity of codes, is transformed into a virtual image of his attitudes.

Marking his discourse in such multiple ways, Toomer easily goes from a third-person to a second-person narration in "Calling Jesus," which presents an unnatural separation of a woman's body and soul to which the narratee is witness. But blurring the distinctions between narratee and character (and later narrator and narratee), it also presents (reinforcing Toomer's free-floating social interaction), an unusual combination of third- and second-person voices:

   When you meet her in the daytime on the streets, the little dog keeps
   coming. Nothing happens at first, and then, when she has forgotten
   the street and alleys, and the large house where she goes to bed of
   nights, a soft thing like fur begins to rub your limbs, and you hear
   a low scared voice, calling, and you know that cool something nozzles
   moisture in your palms. (58)

"Calling Jesus" gives no priority to any of the narrative voices, suggesting that the discourse has a variant core, a sequence of voices which can be presented in a number of ways. The narrative and social interaction therefore seems to become something that exists independently of and prior to narrative presentation. (16)

The communal conflicts in "Box Seat," the next section, center on the loss of the folk culture and the struggle to find new urban values to replace it: Muriel tries to get Dan Moore "to get a job and settle down ... to work more and think less" (62). But Dan believes her "aim is wrong. There is no such thing as happiness. Life bends joy and pain, beauty and ugliness, in such a way that no one may isolate them" (62). Echoing Dan's poetic call, the narrator at the beginning of "Box Seat" addresses the community (and himself), but also wishes the narratee to share in his subjectivity: "Stir the root-life of a withered people. Call them from their houses, and teach them to dream" (59). Here the narrator depicts the rhetorical situation as a very communal one.

Such a situation is later extended by Muriel in her thoughts about Mrs. Pribby:

   What has [Mrs. Pribby] got to do with me? She is me, somehow. No
   she's not. Yes she is. She is the town, and the town wont let me love
   you, Dan. (61)

Two conflicts are at work here. One is broadly racial, ever-present, but not overtly confrontational: "The lean white spring" (59) is set against the "Id]ark swaying forms of Negroes [that] are street songs that woo virginal houses" (59). The other is communal and relational: Muriel and her black, urban, and highly class-conscious environment is pitted against Dan Moore and his world of prophetic vision and the former folk culture. Not coincidentally, Walt Whitman, with whose ideas on the "new American race" and a "transcendental" America Toomer largely agreed, is the "strange force" to which Dan, "a new world Christ ... coming up" (65), is drawn (68, see Jones 71-72). Importantly, the narrator sympathizes with Dan, "a green stem that has just shed its flower" (69), encouraging his "forgotten" (and for the black urban community, frightening) song: "Come on, Dan Moore, come on. Dan Sings" (59).

Part Two ends with "Bona and Paul," set in Chicago, a sketch which returns to the theme of forging a wholeness out of the fractured relations between the black and white communities. Thought to be black, but apparently multi-racial like Toomer himself (and resembling him physically and intellectually (17)), Paul wishes to bring to his consciousness the natural and racial beauty of the South:

   Paul follows the sun to a pine-matted hillock in Georgia. He sees the
   slanting roofs of gray unpainted cabins and tinted lavender. A
   Negress chants a lullaby beneath the mate-eyes of a southern planter.
   Her breasts are ample for the suckling of a song. She weans it, and
   sends it, curiously weaving, among lush melodies of cane and corn.
   (73)

Inseparable from Paul's own efforts towards racial wholeness, this beauty is foremost an aesthetic beauty, which Paul must create not only to attain self-understanding but to come to terms with his racialized community. In so doing, he must, while fashioning his own "racial" interiority, completely figuralize his relations to his white community and white friends:

   Mellow stone mansions overshadow clapboard homes which now resemble
   Negro shanties in some southern alley. (75-76)

   Perhaps for some reason, white skins are not supposed to live at
   night. Surely, enough nights would transform them fantastically, or
   kill them. And their red passion? Night paled that too, and made it
   moony. Moony. (75)

Bona Hale, a white southern woman in love with Paul, cannot transcend the racial tradition that impels her. As Helbing writes, "Bona's ambivalence, the attitudes of others, and Paul's ambivalence as to his racial identity contribute to the tensions he experiences. Paul, however, responds to rather than avoids, the racial emotions that Bona chooses to deny" (140). But how does Paul respond and what is the narrator's role in this response?

These questions are most fully addressed in part four of "Bona and Paul" in which the narrator begins with the pronominal proclamation, "So one feels" (76). He then links Paul's feelings to the "one" pronoun (the pronoun the narrator normally uses when addressing a broad inclusive narratee), suggesting that such feelings could be common to both Paul and the narratee:

   A strange thing happened to Paul. Suddenly he knew that he was
   apart from the people around him. Apart from the pain which they
   had unconsciously caused. Suddenly he knew that people saw, not
   attractiveness in his dark skin, but difference. Their stares, giving
   him to himself, filled something long empty within him, and were like
   green blades sprouting in his consciousness. There was fullness, and
   strength and peace about it all. (77)

Green blades not only bring Paul to an artistic (re)envisioning of the south and make him "cool like the dusk, and like the dusk, detached" (75), but signal his own self-conscious presence in the text. From such moments, the narrator takes us to Paul's futile attempt to create a racial, communal harmony, to gather the "petals of roses" and "petals of dusk" (80). (18) In the closing moments of "Bona and Paul," after addressing the black doorman as "brother" (80), Paul takes on the role of the narrator and in his narratorial capacity refers to the narratee as "brother" (80). Typically, like Cane's narrator, Paul, in the closing paragraphs, while unable to effect his desired harmony, personalizes his relationship with the narratee and actual reader.

III.

An emblem of the last geographical movement in Cane, "Kabnis" signals the narrator's return to rural Georgia from the urban environments of Washington, D.C. and Chicago, and thus the novel comes full circle. Unlike the narratees in the preceding parts, the narratee in Part Three is not represented by a character, nor is he mentioned explicitly by the narrator. Instead, the emphasis shifts: the intervening narrator and the character Kabnis point to the autobiographical Toomer: "Toomer places himself at the center of `Kabnis'" (McKay 84); the narrator tells his "story." But for both the narrator and Kabnis, their desires, their subjectivities, cannot be satisfactorily articulated until they find a means with which to mediate them. Paralleling Kabnis's struggles to do so, the narrator commingles the private with public in "Kabnis," using a self-addressed and autobiographical "you" and a tone of voice that runs the gamut from the stridency of the orator to the tenderness of the poet: "Shadows of pines are dreams the sun shakes from its eyes" (117). He can be nurturing: "Dead blind father of a muted folk who feel their way upward to a life that crushes or absorbs them. (speak, Father!)" (106). He can be sardonic: "[Hanby] is well dressed, smooth, rich, black-skinned Negro who thinks there is no one quite so suave and polished as himself" (95), and he can be merely a neutral describer of actions: "He stands by the hearth, rocking backward and forward. He stretches his hands out to the fire" (100). (19) On the one hand, "Kabnis" renders a kind of individual and communal tragic subjectivity in which the narrator dramatizes the forces destroying the folk culture and causing racial oppression. On the other, "Kabnis" is as much about the narrator's self-exploration (and Toomer's own) as it is a portrayal of communal subjectivities and experience.

"Kabnis" brings a new shaping of subjectivities, most notably those of the narrator and Kabnis. The narrator integrates into Kabnis strong undercurrents of irony, parody, and the burlesque, and casts the story into a kind of mock-epic form. Unlike Carma, Fern, and Karintha whose minds the narrator cannot penetrate, the narrator does know the mind of Kabnis. Yet the subjectivity the narrator produces (his own and Kabnis's) creates a mysterious and elusive atmosphere, particularly in the context of Kabnis's many roles: as a protagonist in the drama, as an educated outsider, as a poet who wants to become the "lips of the south," as "a ridiculous pathetic figure in his showy robe" (110). The first section in the drama portrays Kabnis's isolated subjectivity, which is countered in the following sections when Kabnis comes into contact with the community. With communal contact, mostly among Sempter's black men, Kabnis searches for the security of self, and the identity of a racial self, in others.

But Kabnis fails to find this self and to integrate into the community of "peace" (86). Instead, he feels "suspended a few feet above the soil whose touch would resurrect him" (98). Although he dreams of giving words to the South, he can neither reconcile the cultures of North and South nor, even in moments of heightened self-consciousness, face his racial past. Indeed, Lewis confronts Kabnis with the memory of the past he can either deny and let "die an impotent and meaningless death, or use ... to become a sustaining, spiritual force behind a reawakened sense of race consciousness" (Lieber 192):

      Lewis: The old man as symbol, flesh, and spirit of the past, what
   do you think he would say if he could see you? You look at him,
   Kabnis.

      Kabnis: Just like any done-up preacher is what he looks like to
   me. Jam some false teeth in his mouth and crank him, an youd have God
   Almighty spit in torrents all around th floor. Oh, hell, an he
   reminds me of that black cockroach over yonder. An besides, he aint
   my past. My ancestors were Southern blue-bloods--

      Lewis: And black.

      Kabnis: Aint much difference between blue and black.

      Lewis: Enough to draw a denial from you. Can't hold them, can
   you? Master; slave. Soil; and the overarching heavens. Dusk; dawn.
   They fight and bastardize you. The sun tint of your cheeks, flame of
   the great season's multi-colored leaves, tarnished, burned, Split,
   shredded; easily burned. No use. (108-109) (20)

Despite such denials, Kabnis, from a certain perspective, represents the narrator of the first two sections who tries to become integrated into the community and must humble himself and suffer humility in his attempt to do so. Kabnis's intense loneliness, his consuming self-centeredness, and his various "denials," elations, and disintegrations are parts that the narrator later tries to bring together into a "soft circle" (117), a spirit of individual and communal consciousness.

In addressing the community and the narratee the participant-narrator resorts to an invocatory, imperative form: "Night winds fare the breathing of the unborn child whose calm throbbing in the belly of a Negress sets them somnolently singing. Hear their song" (105). "The night winds in Georgia," the narrator urges, "are vagrant poets whispering," and the "weird chill of their song," a song which serves as a refrain for "Kabnis," must be listened to:

   White-man's land
   Niggers sing.
   burn, bear black children
   till poor rivers glory
   In Camp Ground. (83)

Moreover, as in Parts One and Two, lyricism, "White paint on the wealthier houses has the chill blue glitter of distant stars" (105), interfuses with speculation and uncertainty to dominate the descriptions: "it seems huge, limitless in the candle light" (105); "Someone is coming down the stairs" (115). The narrator, as part of his self-examination, struggles to discover and interrogate reality, and at times casts doubt not only on his own declarations and predispositions but on the literal reality of his characters' perceptions. This doubt spreads to the narrator's reliance on the narratee's assent and approval. The narrator's earlier confidential attitudes toward the "you," which "encourage actual readers to see themselves reflected in that pronoun" (Warhol, "Toward a Theory" 814) are in this section conspicuously absent.

What replaces this particular narrator-you relationship is Toomer's use of a self-addressed you. Kabnis directs his inner thoughts to "God Almighty, Dear God, Dear Jesus," then to a self-reflective self, "Get up you damn fool. Look around. What's beautiful there?" (85), before addressing his own feelings, "Oh no, I won't let that emotion come up in me. Stay down, I tell you" (85). He later returns to a remonstrative self, "Come, Ralph, old man, pull yourself together" (85). In this section the comments of an omniscient narrator, "Kabnis' mind clears" (85), alternate with Kabnis's various addresses to Jesus, "Jesus how still everything is" (86), and to himself, "Come, Ralph, pull yourself together ... You know, Ralph, old man, it wouldn't surprise me at all to see a ghost" (86). Hence the text accommodates a variety of "you's" as it earlier accommodated a variety of "I's." But Kabnis's "you" is self-directed, revealing, insofar as a character-speaker emerges in the text, Kabnis's solipsism and his failure to resolve his differences with the community.

Toomer wished to create "a new idiom which could introduce a greater diversity of perspective and voices, and elements that his lyrical narrative, his poetical or realistic descriptions could not include" (Fabre 71). But stylistic diversity is, to say the least, everywhere in Cane. The narrator, wishing to engage the "you" and to establish a relation between the narratee and actual reader in Part One, can use the "you's" to substitute or disguise a self-referential `T' in Part Two. The narrator in this section, though less reflective than in the first section, continues to foster sympathy for real-world sufferers and continues to assume that his narratees are in perfect sympathy with him. The narrator in Part Three works against the grain of the protagonist's discourse, providing it with a meaning that, though not explicitly articulated, is (silently) conveyed to the reader behind the protagonist's back. Through such narrative interventions and a posturing of the "you," the narrator emphasizes the fact that the author exists, in all his ambiguities, complexities, and failures, and is very much in the text.

What is the purpose of Cane's diverse narrative stances and strategies? As Toomer said of Cane, "There is nothing about these pieces of the buoyant expression of a new race" and the stories emphasize that socially one's "position here is transient" (Toomer to Waldo Frank, undated, TP, Folder 83, Jean Toomer Papers). But paralleling Toomer's "spiritualization of experience," there is a social configuration, evoked by the narrator, which includes a consciousness that the stories, poems, and dramatic form of the text involve the reader in acts of judgement, call for social transactions, and create spaces in which racial meanings are renegotiated. Cane's poems can be seen in this light, in which direct address and invocatory voices take the form of a spiritual, "Cotton song": "Shackles fall upon the Judgement Day / But lets not wait for it" (11), an imagistic lyric, "Her Lips Are Copper Wire": "and press your lips to mine / till they fare incandescent" (57), or a communal hymn, as in "Harvest Song":

   O my brothers, I beat my palms, still soft, against the stubble of my
   harvesting. (You beat your soft palms, too.) My pain is
   sweet. Sweeter than the oats or wheat or corn. It will not
   bring me knowledge of my hunger. (71)

Hence there is a constant tension between conflicting strategies: between the narrator's self-reflectiveness, whereby the story draws attention to its status as art, and forms of narrative, whereby the story is concerned with its informational, thematic contents. Self-reflectiveness as a mode of exercising narrative authority has the signal advantage that it cannot be deceptive: the artistic "folk song" being laid claim to cannot be mistaken for anything but what it is. So, it is significant that the mode adopted by the narrator of Cane, for which he takes responsibility, is self-reflectiveness. It remains for the narrator to incorporate into his own art of narration the advantages of artistic indirection with the certainty of effects. Finally, unlike the storytelling in many modernist texts, Cane does not drive the teller out of the tale. (21) Rather, as part of Toomer's "intimate connection of things" (James 38), the narrator is an essential element in mediating between his self-designation, his own spiritual life and survival, and that of his fictional communities, narratee, and readers. To this end, social interdependence and its racial implications in Cane, even if non-transcendent and derived from "a knowledge of [Toomer's] futility to check solution," become the heart of a "great design" (Toomer to Waldo Frank, undated, TP, Folder 83, Jean Toomer Papers).

Notes

Note: The phrase "Always your heart" is taken from Toomer's poem "Honey of Being" (Wayward 204).

(1.) Although I use the term "narrator" throughout this text, this is not to deny the possibility of Cane's multiple narrators and narrative voices. In Cane first-, second- and third-person narrators and modalities freely alternate and conflate in fluid and interactive ways.

(2.) Toomer's self-reflective or self-conscious moments are central to the structure and purpose of Cane. By the term "self-reflectiveness" I mean the thought, consciousness, reflection, awareness accompanying action. The self-reflective novel, in Alter's words, is "a novel which systematically flaunts its own condition of artifice and by so doing probes into the problematic relationship between real-seeming artifice and reality" (x).

(3.) To be clear, the "you" in the text can sometimes function rhetorically-pointing to no person at all, the "you" simply being a term in a figure of speech--or signal various spoken idioms, but it most omen does so as part of an ongoing "conversation" between narrator and narratee.

(4.) This is a crucial distinction in Toomer's "great design," particularly given his concepts of "race" and "racialism." Indeed, as Hutchinson argues, Toomer should be reconsidered in terms of repudiating "essentialist assumptions that race is a natural category of identity" and for recognizing "the importance of racialization (the enculturation of identity along `racial' lines enforced by racist domination) to American identity and thus to American writing" (vii).

(5.) Narratees in Cane may range from fictional characters to less obtrusive fictional addressees but the various narratees generally shade into the textual reader. The discussion that follows reflects Genette's definition of the "extra-diegetic" narratee: "the extradiegetic narrator ... can aim only at an extradiegetic narratee, who merges with the implied reader and with whom each real reader can identify" (186).

(6.) "Toomer forces us," as Gates argues, "to abandon any definition of Afro-American literature that would posit the racial identity of an author as its principal criterion" (206). I would agree with Gates that in understanding Toomer's racial position, particularly as it pertained to himself, one must consider that "the critical difference for Toomer was not so much his race ... as what he sought to represent and how he represented it" (209). But to suggest that Toomer, in his struggle to find the language that would not distort the subject he tries to represent, can best be understood as "postmodern," or as some kind of postmodern contemporary (Gates 209), does not cover Toomer's creation of a new "I-you" subjectivity and the inter-relational and racial features of his design.

(7.) In a 1930 letter to James Weldon Johnson, for example, Toomer writes: "My poems are not Negro poems, nor are they Anglo-Saxon or white or English poems. My prose, likewise ... I take this opportunity of noting these things in order to clear up a misunderstanding of my position which has existed to some extent ever since the publishing of Cane" (qtd in Helbing 130).

(8.) Rather, Toomer's concern is with the "modernity" of ethnicity, which he believed could eventually lead to a "new race" (transethnic, polyethnic, and international) in which no "groups" exist, privileged or otherwise.

(9.) In this, the narrator replicates Toomer's ideas on narration, as argued in "The Psychology and Craft of Writing" (ca. 1930):

   To spiritualize is to digest, assimilate, up-grade, and form the
   materials of experience--in fine, to form oneself. It is the direct
   opposite of sensualization, and of mechanization. It has to do with
   intensifying and vivifying both the writer and the reader (44).

(10.) As Lieber has argued, "Cane is designed to function in both objective and subjective terms. In an objective sense it is a chronicle of what the `souls of slavery' were. In a personal sense it is a description of `what they are to me' and, by inference, what they can be to any man who accepts them and the heritage they represent: the substance of spiritual life and survival" (182).

(11.) "Seventh Street" is "an invocation of the contrast between `the white and whitewashed wood of Washington' and black inhabited Seventh Street" (Innes 158), but it is also a celebration of Toomer's modernism, a rejection of racial essentialism, and his prototypical "American" selfhood. In a letter (undated) to Waldo Frank, Toomer writes:

   When I come up to Seventh Street and Theatre, a wholly new life
   confronts me.... For it is jazzed, strident, modern. Seventh Street
   is the song of crude new life. Of a new people. Negro? Only in the
   boldness of expression. In its healthy freedom. American. (qtd in
   North 167)

(12.) This movement connects to Toomer's visualization of Cane as a starting point that would contribute to initiating "the adjustments, the health, and art and joy and beauty that, expanding, will determine the tone and content of the entire country" (qtd. in Helbing 144).

(13.) Toomer's ideal, of course, is that the future should not be constricted to confining binaries of the past, but should be driven by the prospects of a reconstituted and integrated individual connected to a viable community, as represented, for example, in "The Hill" (1934):

   A man in his world. A world which he has made, not found already
   made. No one group, no race, no nation could have built it for him.
   His function in life was not to fit into something that already
   existed but to create a new form by the force of his growth. (302)

"Racial strains," in America, Toomer wrote in 1934, "do not exist separately in a man but blend to form a new product.... They never understood that the real factors operating in the United States ... are creating a new people in this world, a people to whom all Americans, without exception, belong." (Eldridge and Kerman 80-81).

(14.) This ontology was internal to both Toomer's narration and to his modernism. For the deep connection of modernism to race consciousness, see, for example, Baker, Doyle, and Gilroy. It must be noted that Toomer's modernism, as Cane forcefully shows, goes against a racialized conception of culture and the grounding of difference in immutable notions of race and racial identity.

(15.) This is a technique that begins in "Theatre" but which Toomer uses throughout the rest of the text.

(16.) At the same time, the tension created among these (often conflicting) voices echoes Toomer's own multiethnic biological makeup, his unease over his connection to black America (weighed against his strong sense of the communal in Cane), and his unrealizable efforts to reach his goals of thematic and social unification.

(17.) On this subject Toomer writes, "There is no valid reason why an author should not project portions of himself into his characters. In fact there is a very definite artistic reason why he should. For this is the method of great creation" ("Waldo Frank's Holiday" 9).

(18.) This attempt appears to anticipate Toomer's later proclamation: "I stand for Mankind United. This perhaps is the largest and most significant single fact in my life" (Benson and Dillard 43).

(19.) All of this is consistent with the notion of Toomer's divided racial self, and the need to sometimes keep the division hidden from himself

(20.) Lewis and Kabnis function as sources for Toomer's own racial reexamination and sense of integration. As Toomer stated in a 1923 letter to Horace Liverwright, Lewis possesses "the sense of direction and intelligent grip on things that Kabnis lacks, Kabnis ... [has] the sensitivity and emotion Lewis does not have" (Jean Toomer to Horace Liverwright, March 1923, TP, Folder 6, Jean Toomer Papers).

(21.) Nor does the narrator address readers as "undefined, anonymous, and conceived as responding in purely aesthetic terms" (Kroeber 99).

Works Cited

Alter, Robert. Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre. Berkeley: U of California P, 1975.

Baker, Houston A. Jr. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.

Bell, Bernard W. The Afro-American Novel and Its Traditions. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1987.

Benson, Brian J. and Mabel M. Dillard, Jean Toomer. Boston: Twayne, 1980.

Doyle, Laura. Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1994.

Eldridge, Richard and Cynthia Earl Kerman. The Lives of Jean Toomer: A Hunger for Wholeness. Baton Rouge: Louisiana UP, 1987.

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--. "Open Letter to Gorham Munson." Selected Essays and Literary Criticism. Ed. Robert B. Jones. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1996. 19-20.

--. "The Psychology and Craft of Writing." Jean Toomer: Selected Essays and Literary Criticism. Ed. Robert B. Jones. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1996. 42-44.

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--. "Toward a Theory of the Engaging Narrator: Earnest Intervention in Gaskell, Stowe, and Eliot." PMLA 101.5 (1986): 811-18.

William Dow is a Maitre de conferences at The University of Valenciennes and an Assistant Professor of English at the American University of Paris. He has published articles in the fields of American nineteenth-century literature and American twentieth-century fiction, in such journals as Publications of the Modern Language Association, The Emily Dickinson Journal, Twentieth-Century Literature, ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, Critique, The Hemingway Review, Revue Francaises D'Etudes Americaines, Actes Sud, Profils americains, and Annales du Monde. His current projects include a book, Culture and Community: Narrating Class in American Fiction, and the editing of an anthology of American nostalgia.