Jean Toomer and Kenneth Burke and the Persistence of the Past

When you a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts trying to be Paul--though you still Sauls around on the side.

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

There is a continuous identity persisting along with a change of identity. Even the "twice born" retain much of what they were (when the warrior Saul became a Christian, he was a "militant" Christian, even though he did change the first letter of his name).

Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History

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Recent critical focus on Kenneth Burke's influence on Afri can-American writers has centered on Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, novelists who were reading Burke at the height of his powers as a philosopher of language and culture. By 1940, the year Wright's Native Son appeared, Burke had written Counter-Statement (1931), Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose (1935), and Attitudes Toward History (1937), and by the time of Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), he had also published The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action (1941), A Grammar of Motives (1945), and A Rhetoric of Motives (1950), monumental texts that had established him as one of America's leading intellectuals. However, in the early 1920s when he was virtually unknown except within a small circle of fellow avant-garde writers, Burke had a literary relationship with a black author, Jean Toomer, that would have a significant impact on them both. As we now know, Toomer's hybrid short-story cycle Cane (1923) would become a (if not the) major inspiration for the Harlem Renaissance, yet as early as 1922 when Toomer was revising stories and poems that would go into Cane and assembling its parts into an organic whole, he was reading Burke's work in Secession and The Dial, magazines devoted to literary modernism. Burke's statements regarding literary form would steer Toomer away from Waldo Frank's metaphysical influence and onto the subject of history, which in turn would become the foundation of Cane's Gothic perspective. ¹

Equally important is the fact that Toomer influenced Burke as much as Burke influenced him. The year after Cane appeared Burke also published a first book, a short-story collection called The White Oxen (1924), and Toomer's review of that book in The Little Review, as Burke confessed to Toomer in an unpublished letter, helped Burke to become aware of a theme that hitherto had been latent in all his fiction, poetry, and critical writings: human beings as logocentric animals. This realization freed him from a purely aesthetic interest in language, or rather it forced him to come to grips with linguistic issues outside the literary text. Yet despite the effect that each had on the other, the careers of both Toomer and Burke would head in opposite directions. Even as Cane appeared in the bookstores, Toomer began to reject his identity as an African American and his vocation as a black writer, publishing only one other book in his lifetime, a thin book of aphorisms (Essentials [1931]), whereas Burke would begin to incorporate his aesthetic interests into larger philosophical projects concerning language and society. And yet the irony of intellectual history is such that the one book Toomer wrote would have almost as great an impact on African-American literature as Burke's works would have on literary criticism, literary theory, and theories about rhetoric and composition. For Cane would not only become the major text of the Harlem Renaissance but would have a new life as a significant influence on a second, and even a third, generation of black writers, especially recent women writers such as Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, and Alice Walker. ²

Toomer had probably met Burke through Gorham Munson, one of the coeditors of Secession, but he knew of him even earlier through his friendship with Frank. A former associate editor of The Seven Arts (1916-17), the little...