The Form and Politics of Networks in Jean Toomer's Cane

Abstract

Composed of 13 short prose pieces, 15 poems that include sonnets, ballads, and work songs, as well as a longer piece that nods toward the conventions of drama, Jean Toomer's Cane (1923) presents a number of taxonomic challenges with its form. The dominant trends today are to treat it as a volume or as a short-story cycle, but these rubrics are inadequate for Toomer's formal experiment: “volume” suggests a miscellaneousness that ignores the text's logic of interplay; “short-story cycle” precludes a significant amount of the text dedicated to verse and suggests some narrative conventions—a concrete plot, a common setting, and so on—that Cane does not deliver. Given the interplay of its component texts, along with the interchanges of commodity circulation that take place in the content, Cane may be best understood when read as a network of forms. Indeed, Cane operates on a logic of patterning and repetition that endows its several texts with nodal relationships to each other. I argue that reading Cane in this way alleviates readers' taxonomic struggles by allowing the independence of Cane's texts and simultaneously asserting their interdependence, even as it also helps us understand how these texts illuminate one another as well as the gaps that occur between them. In other words, this model addresses the perceived messiness of Cane by demonstrating the organization of its putatively disorganized composition. In addition to more aptly confronting Cane's formal construction, the network model is better suited for Toomer's major interventions in rendering national space. Through it, Toomer proposes a new model for race relations in interwar America.

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