82 pages • 2 hours read
Jean ToomerCane
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1923A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
Arcs
Preceding each of the novel’s three parts, there is an arc or part of an incomplete circle. Before Part 1, it is the top left quarter of the circumference of a circle; before Part 2, it is approximately the top third of the circumference of a circle; before Part 3, it is two quarters of a circle’s circumference, specifically the top right and bottom left. As Toomer experiments with form in Cane—using prose, poetry, and song and pushing against traditional sentence structure and narrative conventions—these symbols introduce yet another formal experiment.
George Hutchinson’s introduction reproduces Toomer’s explanation in a letter to Waldo Frank about the narrative circularity that the arcs convey:
From three angles, Cane’s design is a circle. Aesthetically, from simple forms to complex ones, and back to simple forms. Regionally, from the South up into the North, and back into the South again. Or, from the North down into the South, and then a return North. From the point of view of the spiritual entity behind the work […], the curve really starts with Bona and Paul (awakening), plunges into Kabnis, emerges in Karintha, etc., swings upward into Theatre [sic] and Box Seat, and ends (pauses) in Harvest Song (xxv).
Red Dust
The red dust of the American South is a recurring element in Cane. It is a metaphor for the sound and sight of Karintha’s youthful vivacity: “Karintha’s running was a whir. It had the sound of the red dust that sometimes makes a spiral in the road” (2). The red dust is also the defining feature of the landscape that frames and introduces Carma: “I leave the men around the stove to follow her with my eyes down the red dust road” (12). Red soil is particularly prevalent in Georgia, making this element a quintessential element of the landscape where many stories in Cane are set; it is a metonymy for the entire South.
The red dust also carries a timelessness that evokes the history of people and events that have lived with that dust. In “Kabnis,” it conjures up remembrances of slavery: “Through the cracks, a powdery faded red dust sprays down on him. Dust of slave-fields, dried, scattered” (110). It is no wonder that Kabnis—a Northern, discontented man who feels overwhelmed by the South—is ambushed by falling red dust.
The Sun
The first part of Cane is preoccupied with laying out the natural Southern landscape. The sun is an element of nature and connects with the rhythms of human and animal life below. The setting sun conveys beauty; for example, Karintha is “perfect as dusk when the sun goes down” (1). Toomer also sets many scenes at dusk, marking the transition between the agricultural workday and leisure time. “Georgia Dusk” offers a glimpse into the moment of dusk, where “[t]he sawmill blows its whistle, the buzz-saws stop” (18), and the men head into the forest to barbecue and sing. The sunset indicates the transitional period between day and night, much like the lesser motif of autumn indicates the transitional period between summer and winter. This transitional quality of sunset and autumn also mirrors how the novel dances between binaries like North and South, Black and white, body and soul/mind, and past and present. Finally, the sun conveys the Southern heat and the figurative heat of animalistic desire that many of the men in the novel feel towards the women.
The Moon
The moon and nighttime appear in earlier chapters; however, when “Blood-Burning Moon” comes at the very end of Part 1, it definitively transitions the overarching narrative from the moment of sunset into night. Toomer writes, “Up from the dusk the full moon came” (38). In this story, the moon is a bad omen of Bob Stone and Tom Burwell’s imminent conflict and the lynch mob that follows. As imagery that appears in both the beginning and end of the story, the moon gives “Blood-Burning Moon” a cyclical narrative and marks the fact that very little time has passed. Like the sun, the moon is round, which also recalls the circularity of the novel as a whole and the arc symbols that Toomer placed before each part. In other moments the moon is evocative of love and tenderness, as in “Evening Song,” or a peaceful night, as in “Kabnis” (“The half-moon is a white child that sleeps upon the tree-tops of the forest” [111]).
Cane
Cane is ubiquitous in the novel’s landscape; it is an intimate meeting place for Bob and Louisa in “Blood-Burning Moon” and a maze where Carma gets lost in “Carma.” The uniformity and all-encompassing nature of a cane field also draw out various smaller motifs in the novel. For one, Toomer distorts the passage of time, stretching it out slowly in a story like “Blood-Burning Moon” or skipping across years and aging protagonists in “Karintha” or “Esther.” The temporality of a cane field is similarly distorted; as Toomer writes, “Time and space have no meaning in a canefield” (14). Additionally, the countless stalks of cane that are all the same yet slightly different evoke the repetition characteristic of Harlem Renaissance and Black Arts cultural production. James Snead writes, “In Black culture, repetition means that the thing circulates […] in an equilibrium” (Snead, James. “On Repetition in Black Culture.” African American Review, vo. 50, no. 4, 2017, p. 651-52). Snead argues that Black cultural production is comfortable with difference and collaborative repetition, unlike many European forms that value progress and accumulation. Toomer uses repetition as well, often reproducing a poetic refrain multiple times within a short story (see “Karintha,” “Becky,” and “Carma”) or repeating a line like “Who set you flowing?” (51) in “Seventh Street.” The repetitive strategies in Toomer’s writing style are reflected in the repetition of the cane field.
Like the red dust, the cane in the novel evokes the painful Southern past of slavery. George Hutchinson writes, “The ‘cane’ of the book is that of sorghum, a plant brought from Africa during the slave trade” (xv). Also like the dust, the cane establishes the natural Southern setting where Cane takes place. Hutchinson continues, “Throughout the southeastern United States, the cane stalks of sorghum” was the source of “the chief sweetener in southern homes” (xv). Establishing the historical moment of the Prohibition Era and Harlem Renaissance as well, “[s]orghum molasses, moreover, was a key ingredient for moonshine whiskey in the early twentieth century” (xv), only to be replaced in the 20s and 30s with cane sugar.
