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Coda: Black Super-Vaudeville: History and Form in Cane
- University of Illinois Press
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Coda Black Super-Vaudeville: History and Form in Cane In the dark times Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing About the dark times. —Bertolt Brecht, “Motto” (1938) Cane is black vaudeville. It is black super-vaudeville out of the South. —Jean Toomer, publicity sketch for Cane (1923) We now turn to a brief consideration of the relationship between history and form in Cane. Given the wide range of interpretations of the text’s parts, it comes as no surprise that critics have offered dramatically differing interpretations of the whole. Some have discerned a progression toward resolution and synthesis; others a suspended state of fragmentation and division; still others a triumphant achievement of polyphony and hybridity. With a few noteworthy exceptions, however , commentaries on Cane have largely overlooked the text’s engagement with history. They may address Cane’s representation of the present as an outgrowth of the past, its connection with contemporaneous racial discourses and practices, or its placement within literary experimentalism; but they do not generally treat the text’s form as itself an enactment of the historical contradictions shaping the time and place of its creation. In The Political Unconscious, Fredric Jameson proposes that it is primarily at the level of form—of genre—that a text displays its relationship to the shifting and clashing modes of production in the world from which it arises. “Cultural revolution ,” he writes, designates “that moment in which the coexistence of various modes of production becomes visibly antagonistic, their contradictions moving to the very center of political, social, and historical life.” As we have seen, Cane’s poems and sketches, as well as their ordering within and among the text’s sections , bear out this formulation of its dramatically variegated nature. The text’s movement from South to North to South exhibits the changing social practices and modes of consciousness accompanying the starkly uneven development of 254 coda capitalism in the early twentieth-century United States. The divergent outcomes to interracial sexual relationships in “Blood-Burning Moon” and “Bona and Paul” point to qualitatively different manifestations of Jim Crow in rural Georgia and urban Illinois; the fates of Sam Raymon and Rhobert exhibit the workings of hegemony in markedly varying admixtures of ideology and coercion; and “Portrait in Georgia” and “Her Lips Are Copper Wire” represent conditions of human possibility that are, to all appearances, worlds apart. Moreover, Toomer’s skilful maneuvering between and among his kaleidoscopic array of themes, images, and styles permits the reader to see all these texts as mediations of a socioeconomic system that rests on not one but many modes of abstracted labor: the cotton that supplies the basis of open racist terrorism against debt peons in “Kabnis” is remediated as exchangeable goods in “Esther” and then again as pastoral nostalgia in “Calling Jesus.” At the same time, the reader catches glimpses of the various modes of resistance to which reification gives rise: Mame Lamkins’s defiance of her lynchers in “Kabnis”; the cotton baler’s unwillingness to wait for Judgment Day in “Cotton Song”; the migrants’ rejection of “whitewash” in “Seventh Street”; Dan Moore’s messianic call to Washington, DC, theatergoers to join the revolt of the world’s submerged masses in “Box Seat.”1 Toomer’s ability to capture all these voices, moods, and scenes in a single text derives in no small measure, I argue, from the vision of possibility that opened up in the wake of the Russian Revolution and the class struggles of 1919: the text’s formal embodiment of “cultural revolution” hinges largely on its emergence from a revolutionary conjuncture in one part of the world that promised, for many, to become a transformative event on a global scale. Cane’s attention to uneven geographical and historical development, both global and national, is largely what permits Toomer to draw together poetry, prose, and drama in an experimental collage without precedent in U.S. literary history. His description of Cane as “black super-vaudeville out of the South” conveys this aspect of the text’s performance. Stipulating both the South and blackness—routinely viewed as backward—as the sources of inspiration, Toomer proposes that his text, like a vaudeville performance, has something for everyone. Indeed, its “super-” quality derives from its ability to stage a range of possible destinies, thereby mediating the multiple contradictions of its historical moment. Alluding to the only text in Cane directly featuring a vaudeville performance, “Box Seat,” Toomer’s description of the...