Jean Toomer's Lost and Dominant: Landscape of the Modern Waste Land

JEAN TOOMER'S LOST AND DOMINANT: LANDSCAPE OF THE MODERN WASTE LAND Robert B. Jones University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee We of the western world, whose thoughts have been shaped and molded by the poets from Plato to Whitman ... no longer hear the mighty voices of the past. Or rather, we hear them, but as a tired man hears a symphony; there is an auditory titillation, but no soul expansion—the spirit is too weary to respond.1 Jean Toomer In the decade following the First World War, a generation of artists, intellectuals, and writers sought to dissociate themselves from the values of postwar America. "In much of the literature of the twenties," writes Frederick Hoffman, "there was a continuous statement of rejection; this was in part a naive awakening to the existence of new forms of evil in the world, but it also served as an indignant protest against a civilization that had played a bad joke on itself."2 The postwar temper of rejection is evident in such novels of war consciousness as John Dos Passos' One Man's Initiation (1920) and Three Soldiers (1921) as well as E. E. Cummings ' The Enormous Room (1922) and Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (1929). Yet it is also present in the expatriate movement and in the titles of little magazines such as Broom (sweeping aside old ideas) and Secession (disaffiliation with the postwar world). It is present in writers' critiques of materialism and capitalism, as in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925), and in satirical portraits of the modern businessman, as in Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt (1922). It is also reflected in the images and themes modern writers created to represent cultural and moral failure, such as T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) or Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926), and in formal improvisation and literary experimentation , as in the Imagist poetry of Ezra Pound and H. D. and in William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (1929). Jean Toomer shared in the postwar temper of rejection, as Warren French demonstrates in his impressive comparative analysis of Cane and The Waste Land.3 Toomer's most efficacious literary representation of the modern world as waste land, however, occurs in Losr and Dominant, an unpublished volume of short stories manifesting his dissociation from the cultural and moral failure of the twenties.4 Begun in 1925 and completed in 1930, this volume presents symbolic portraits of modern man in the postwar decade. Losr and Dominant opens with individual dramatizations of private life in the "unreal" city, then shifts to a panorama of the spiritually desolate landscape of the modern world.5 The first two stories, "Drack- 78Robert B. Jones man" and "Mr. Costyve Duditch," present parallel portraits of man as victim of his urban environment. The first portrait is of a New York businessman destroyed by materialism and egocentrism. Rich and powerful , with one of the city's finest skyscrapers bearing his name, Daniel C. Drackman is characterized as hard, cold, and dominant. The story portrays the air and atmosphere of New York's business district as contaminated by germs of egomania. When Drackman succumbs to these germs, he suffers a series of nervous breakdowns. During one of his fits of insanity , he reveals tragic dimensions while railing at his wife: "Do you remember the old legend telling how the gods, jealous of man's power, fearful that man would dominate them, deliberately cut down and took away his force? My job is to assert myself! I've got to conquer the skies. I've got to rule earth and heaven!" As a "dominant" yet "lost" willful protagonist, Drackman is truly a tragic figure. Though he manages to recoup his sanity by the end of the narrative, the cycle of egomania and insanity is set to repeat itself for as long as he remains in the commercial atmosphere of the waste land. Set in Chicago, "Mr. Costyve Duditch" also portrays a modern businessman. Like Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock in personality and temperament , Duditch is invited to tea parties hosted by the social elite and, like Prufrock, he is plagued by feelings of insecurity when his pathetic side...