Hey peoples. Something that I have been privately trying to do lately concerning our class readings is make connections between the literary/musical works we are covering and the disparate and compelling theoretical pieces we have encountered this semester. I realize that making this "theoretical"/"literary" dichotomy has its own problems, but I'm still doing it. While moving through Cane, I realized that something was looming constantly in my mind: the bridge that we read of in Michel de Certeau some weeks back--an idea that I am very grateful we encountered through this class. To refresh our memories, de Certeau writes that "Stories are actuated by a contradiction that is represented in them by the relationship between the frontier and the bridge, that is, between a (legitimate) space and its (alien) exteriority," later stating that "The bridge is ambiguous everywhere: it alternately welds together and opposes insularities. It distinguishes them and threatens them. It liberates from enclosure and destroys autonomy." Furthermore, de Certeau characterizes the bridge as "a transgression of the limit, a disobedience of the law of the place, it represents a departure, an attack on a state, the ambition of a conquering power, or the flight of an exile; in any case, the 'betrayal' of an order. But at the same time as it offers the possibility of a bewildering exteriority, it allows or cause the re-emergence beyond the frontiers of the alien element that was controlled in the interior, and gives objectivity...to the alterity which was hidden inside the limits..."
I know that the above is a lot of quoting to set-up my question, but I think there is a lot to talk about in connecting this week's reading and de Certeau's thinking. In what ways (and how) might we envision Jean Toomer's Cane as effectively (or uneffectively) working as a "bridge" of sorts? Some things to consider might be the unique format of the work itself (the difficulty people have in pigeonholing it as a certain genre), the author's shifting position of self-identification (and the racial divide constantly riding the work), the literary-historical timing of Cane, the physical locations described in Cane, etc.
As a way of sidestepping the possibility of each of us saying the same thing, I'll offer some other questions in sort of a grab-bag format:
*What other of our "theory" readings do you see having compelling application to Cane, and can you give us an example (Frye, Walker, Freud, et al)?
*We have talked at length about the ethos constructed in an artist's life experiences. How did reading the introduction to Cane influence your reception of the work and the role/situatedness of the author?
I think this text works effectively as a "bridge" according to de Certeau's definition-- it is a departure from the "known" but simultaneously brings us back to something we know (perhaps taking a bit of liberty with this definition, but ever since Mandy made the connection between de Certeau's bridge and a song bridge, I haven't been able to separate the two.) I'm not sure it's necessary, for our purposes?
ReplyDeleteAs for the theory tie-in, I think Middelton’s idea of a trance induced by repetition could be kind of at work here; I’d like to say that this book supports my paper’s claim—that refrain serves as a space in which the audience reconnects/processes/insert themselves and/or refrain serves as glue for the text itself, but I’m not sure that’s the case here. The refrain is utilized (generally in the form of song) to varying effect: in “Karintha,” the opener, it refrain works beautifully: “Her skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon” changes and matures as she does (and becomes more stripped down, as her character does) and ends with the gorgeous repeated “goes down.”
However, in “Kabnis,” a nursery rhyme cleaves uncomfortably to Toomer’s own verses: “Rock a-by baby… Her breath hums through pine-cones./ cradle will fall…/ Teat moon-children at your breast” etc. Interestingly, the song refrain is always carried on the wind—suggesting, perhaps the “natural,” the routinely changing(?) like a refrain?
I don’t think I could argue that the “song” or even “lyric” poetic moments serve as “spaces”—at least not as I defined them—because they seem to stand alone. They are doing work for cohesion, though, which leads me into my question: “Why the mix?”
Toomer’s text feels simultaneously like Williams’s Spring and All and Thalia Field’s Point and Line, and the mix of genres is dizzying: short story, flash fiction, poem, song, play—it almost feels an anthology. In my edition, Waldo Frank’s foreword calls Cane “the voice of the South,” which he quickly qualifies as not being definitive—but given that definition, it makes sense that the voice would be multiple and varied. Also calls to mind criticism from Walker (Alice) in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, in which she describes African American art as being constructed from scraps—whether it be visual art, cuisine, music, or language (etc.)—“quilting,” a term I’ll borrow from Meg, that seems most appropriate here. I’d guess that Toomer’s reason for including a mix of genres would be that it “felt right,” and I only say this because I am a writer, and that’s the best excuse I can present for my work.
I am interested to hear what everyone thinks of “Kabnis”—apparently an unsuccessful stage play, it doesn’t seem to hold up (for me) as a short story; it wasn’t staged due to its “lack of plot,” so why end this complicated, multifaceted book on such a monotone note? It’s a somewhat interesting piece, but it falls flat for me.
Also: what’s up with the parentheses mark things in between sections? Do you all have editions that include these? Are they supposed to mimic the cycles of the moon or something?
First off, I didn’t know about Toomer and read the introduction, as always I seem to do (oops!) after reading the body of the text.
ReplyDeleteAlthough there are more than a few questions here to address I was drawn to a different kind of “bridge” in Cane. The observer, as Toomer seems to be in most narratives/poems, focuses on women as main characters, and I am going to argue, as holding most of the cards in terms of voice, or maybe just holding most of the attention. The “bridge” or connection I’m trying to talk about is between races and gender/power struggle. Toomer has strong female characters, although they are often silent in accepting some of their circumstances. I am talking mainly about the contradiction between how Toomer seems to focus on women, to give them choices or a means to push away suitors (ex. “Becky,” “Esther” and “Blood Burning Moon”) but still they are tied to their race/social class. Also there are often two suitors women characters have to choose between: one white and one Black. The women, let’s use Becky as an example, do not seem to choose one suitor or the other, no matter what the situation. If anything, they seem to reject both or not admit any desire for one suitor over the other (ex. “Fern). Becky is exiled for having two “Negro” sons, but she seems to have some power in not revealing their fathers. She is pushed out of town, but still pitied, still fed (albeit not regularly) by the towns’ people. Does she represent the rift between Toomer’s elementary school years in a “white” world and his later years in a Black community when he moved in with his Uncle Bismarck? I think Becky does. She chooses not to reveal paternity and although she suffers (I assume she has already suffered in being silent) in making a decision not to tell and not to feel shame, or at least she doesn’t seem ashamed, she holds some kind of power, even while being alienated. She keeps her silence. She has two “Negro” sons who cannot pass as white and is exiled. Seems the easy answer is she is exiled for having interracial relationships, but it’s not clear that she is exiled for the children or for her silence.
What I got out of Cane was this: Toomer might not have spoke through his characters in dialogue but in their silence, by writing about female characters, African American and Caucasian alike. His characters, as it discussed in Darwin’s introduction, like Toomer, chose not to align with one race. Toomer spoke about and wrote, although they were unpublished, essays and poems about a third American race. Where these characters a means to address the struggle between his two selves? Or was there a third self or one person containing both of these races that he was trying to address? I don’t think I can argue that these female characters embodied Toomer, but they do seem to represent a kind of silent struggle with race and passing as white as Toomer did for most of his childhood.
The idea of the impact of the book is interesting in a bridge sort of way. The blurb on the back of my edition says that Toomer was as important to the modern idiom as Hemmingway, Stein, Pound and Eliot. What makes this book so important that it’s able to not only cross the race line in literature, but also be looked at with writers that generally were at their prime 20-30 years after this was written? Toomer really speaks to a universal audience. The Northern Migration that is shown in this book affected all of America, not just the south, not just the north
ReplyDeleteI wonder if the “fort da” principle could be seen through some of the pieces in this. In “Fern”, it seems like the title character is raped as a child (or at least pushed into sex). Afterwards, is her cold, mechanical willingness to go along with the men an example of her repeating this painful experience? It seems the hold she has over the men is because of her coldness and their desire to overcome it when they’re through with the physical.
The repetition and refrain of the songs can be an example of fort da as well. Like Jackie’s point of the refrain inducing a trance, it can be an example of the trance-like state that people exuded. “Becky was a white woman who had two negro sons” is repeated. Throughout the story people give charity and food to this woman, even when they’re not sure she’s still alive. This helps them with the guilt over not being able to accept her. Instead of accepting her, they reenact her isolation by doing everything in secret.
Joe, I think that De Certeau's "Spatial Stories" is particularly useful when considering this work. After reading your post, I revisited the discussion of bridges in the text and discovered a quote that I think clearly relates to Toomer's work. In speaking of the bridge, De Certeau writes, "[I]t represents a departure, an attack on a state... the betrayal of an order. But at the same time ...it allows or causes the re-emergence beyond the frontiers of an alien element that was controlled in the interior..." (67). Toomer's work seems to depart from rigid genres that govern a work. Also, the text resists simple black/white dichotomies, and it challenges rigid notions of gender and sexuality. If this can be viewed as a type of crossing (via the bridge), the alien element that emerges on the other side would be that space in between simple notions of black/white, male/female, straight/gay, prose/verse, the governing "order" of simple binaries that Toomer complicates throughout the text.
ReplyDeleteJust to add a theorist to the mix, Houston Baker's idea of a blues matrix, which he outlines in "Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature," seems to really fit Cane. For Baker, the Blues is the "multiplex, enabling script in which Afro-American cultural discourse is inscribed." While "script" implies fixedness, the idea of a matrix suggests "a web of intersecting, crisscrossing impulses always in productive transit." Because I'm being a dork and borrowing from a source not in the coursepack, I'll quote Baker at length so that I don't do him injustice by weakly summarizing:
"To suggest a trope for the blues as a forceful matrix in cultural understanding is to summon an image of the black blues singer at the railway junction lustily transforming experiences of a durative (unceasingly oppressive) landscape into the energies of rhythmic sound. The railway juncture is marked by transience. Its inhabitants are always travelers—a multifarious assembly in transit. The "X" of crossing roadbeds signals the multidirectionality of the juncture and is simply a single instance in a boundless network that redoubles and circles, makes sidings and ladders, forms Y's and branches over the vastness of hundreds of thousands of American miles. Polymorphous and multidirectional, scene of arrivals and departures, place betwixt and between, the juncture is the way-station of the blues." (end quote)
Though Toomer resists being labeled an African-American writer, and Baker is specifically talking about Afro-American culture, so much of Cane reminds me of this quote. Toomer constructs crossroads between North/South, rural/urban. Images of railroads traveling in the background pervade the text. The multidirectionality Baker references makes me think of the various "directions" this novel takes as a collection of narratives, poems, and songs. I found energy and rhythmic sound throughout this work, especially in the prose sections where Toomer utilized rhyme on occasion. Also, the idea of transforming experiences of oppression into energy makes me think of the biographical material about Toomer. While Toomer's experience (and the experience of his characters) is not simply African-American, racial politics and racial injustice pervade the novel.
I wonder-what is the relationship between De Certeau's bridge and Baker's railroad juncture, as described above? Is there one, or am I just reading too much into this? More generally, is there a relationship between the blues and Toomer's Cane? If so, what is it?
Think I might bring Burke into the discussion, if only because no one else has yet. Looking back at “Lexicon Rhetoricæ,” it seems Cane works as something of an inversion of Burke’s conception of repetitive form. That is, if Burke offers one definition of repetitive form as “a restatement of the same thing in different ways” (125), then Toomer states different things in the same way. Up until “Kabnis” (page 81 in my edition), at least, Cane comprises a recurring cycle of narrative vignettes (often with songs worked in), poems and freestanding songs—in that order, for the most part. I can imagine this cycle almost cinematically, since the vignettes and poems are so image-rich. The mise-en-scene dims for the sake of the songs, though, leaving the emphasis on the words, the imagined human voice, and the form they might take when strung to a melody. It’s a sensory cycle, alternately emphasizing the visual and the auditory. Burke identifies the “rhythmic regularity of blank verse” as a repetitive form (125); this sensory cycle seems to work similarly to me. It’s a rhythmic regularity writ large.
ReplyDeleteWith this in mind, I wonder, Jackie, if your concept of the refrain as a reflective space might yet apply here. The freestanding songs seem put the reader in a new place—a new place sensorially, anyhow—that maybe allows for reflection on the preceding narrative and imagery. Maybe, maybe not. But it’s an interesting idea, I think.
If race and gender are bridged in Cane, I’d say that settings work as another bridged dichotomy in Toomer’s novel. The three sections seemed to profile two different types of (African?) Americans, rural and urban, and the third segment bridges the two with Kubris—the man who’s existed in both places. His desire seems to be to reconcile the two. I also thought of the religious jargon that appears in much of the novel’s dialogue in context with de Certeau’s idea that language works as space—something we discussed after listening to the religious songs.
ReplyDeleteI must admit, though, that I mostly read Cane as an example of using song structure in prose—a concept I’ve been thinking about since Cathy suggested Rachel and I write a story that somehow responds to song structures. I suppose our first question will be, “what kind of song?” Do we want to write folk songs or pop songs? With that in mind, I went back to Brunvand’s chapters on Ballads and Folksongs, to see if I could see any correlation with Toomer’s work. I saw examples of both.
Brunvand called ballads “narrative folksongs” (176) which I thought might be a good way to describe many of the stories in Cane, particularly in the first segment. The refrain, which several of you brought up working as a bridge, also seems to help to understand some of the stories as resembling ballads. I thought of how refrains worked within the ballads we read, how the narrative segments interacted with the refrains—each giving insight to the other, and the refrain slightly changing meaning with each repetition. In Carma, for instance, I wondered if “wind is in the cane” somehow, with help from the narrative, morphed into the ‘crude melodrama’ the narrator reminds us her life had been. Morphed, maybe, from merely setting the tone before the story starts to the end, when it becomes a sort of symbol for her story getting passed through the fields. Is that too much of a stretch? Sorry if it is.
In describing ballad characteristics, Brunvard noted that, “Some ballads begin in the middle of a story, abruptly, in medias res, and are highly dramatic in terms of dialogue and action” (181). I saw this in several of the sections, ‘Bona and Paul,” “Fern,” and “Blood Burning Moon.” I’ve seen this structure preached from the proser’s pulpit—we are often told to begin a story right in the middle of the action and save the background for later. This made me wonder if our storytelling traditions came from ballads, or if ballads are just the tradition in song form?
So, I'm just a tad gloomy that no one commented on my post for last week. I don't blame anyone a bit--it's just that it looks so lonely up on its own. So, if no one objects, I might continue with my train of thought about how song might act as a bridge in narrative (potentially in opposition to Boulton--and possibly even our own--notion of song as a disruption in text). If our internal dialogue is indeed jarred by the sudden (or not so sudden) appearance of a song we are more than ready to recognize its potential as a forcefully effect device meant to make us stop and take note: Why is there a change here? What should I be noticing? Why is the author pulling me out of my "groove"?
ReplyDeleteBut is that not the purpose of a bridge? We would be simpletons indeed if we were just plugging along the path looking at the ground at our feet, never noticing the bridge, the chasm it spans, feeling only annoyance at the blast of wind that disturbs our trudging. Our job is to be looking at the scenery along the path, figuring out what is behind every curve and twist, tree and bush, what breathless spectacles await us as we take the next bend.
...I'll stop with the romanticizing. It isn't exactly apropos for *Cane*, after all, is it? I think an interesting subject for discussion might be found in "Carma." In "Carma" Toomer writes, "Pungent and composite, the smell of farmyards is the fragrance of the woman. She does not sing; her body is the song. She is in the forest dancing." The motif of the feminine body, as seen in "Her skin is like dust...," "Face," "Portrait in Georgia," etc. can, I think, be seen as a metaphor of the narrative body, though only as it includes song/verse. Its song is a paradox (or duality?) of words and physicality: necessarily discursive in its medium, but intensely physical in its very word choice and structure.
The feminine verse, as we have seen in Sidney's Arcadia, can be paired as a binary with the masculine narrative to illustrate the necessary opposition of the two--rendering both defensible as art (think Sidney's "Defense of Poesy"). So, if, "Stories are actuated by a contradiction that is represented in them by the relationship between the frontier and the bridge, that is, between a (legitimate) space and its (alien) exteriority," might we here suggest that the feminine metaphor of the body, the "alien exteriority," is used as an self-prescribing imperative antithesis to the masculine "legitimate space" of the narrative? The gender-tension is arguably here an illustration of this bridge which is necessary to the motivation of the story. Too abstract?