Alternatives to language in Jean Toomer’s Cane.

Jean Toomer’s Cane, often cited as an exemplar of Afro-American literature from the Harlem Renaissance, contains stories, poems and sketches concerning rural and urban black life. Toomer’s modernist concern of attempting to “offer alternative modes of representation” (Childs, Modernism 3) and his critique of the way language is manipulated or is inadequate is evident throughout Cane. Modernism has been described as being “part of the historical process by which the arts have dissociated themselves from nineteenth-century assumptions, which had come in the course of time to seem like dead conventions” (Faulkner 1). Modernist writers like Toomer can be seen as moving away from the “dead conventions” of Victorian realism and language, which fail to account for the “infinite complexity of reality” (Faulkner 15), towards unconventional, alternative methods of representation in an attempt to get around the limitations of language. Cane makes use of several devices such as stream-of-consciousness writing, repetition and startling imagery (“And her channeled muscles/ are cluster grapes of sorrow/ purple in the evening sun/ nearly ripe for worms” (Toomer 8)), which all contribute to an “exploration of the possibilities of black representation and agency, from the traditional, southern and folkloric, to the urban, northern and progressive” (120) – an explorations that the critic Peter Childs describes as the linking element among artists of the Harlem Renaissance.Bachelor of Art