5 - Jean Toomer and the avant-garde

Summary

In 1923, amongst the many reviews of Jean Toomer's Cane, came two of very contrasting opinion. Disdaining “certain innovators who conceive language to be little more than a series of ejaculatory spasms,” the Minneapolis Journal suggested “if the Negro (and the south) is to become really articulate its new writers must seek better models than those Mr Toomer follows.” In contrast, the African American critic Montgomery Gregory, writing in the first issue of Opportunity, soon to become the pre-eminent forum for the incipient New Negro Renaissance, waxed more lyrical:

“Fate has played another of its freakish pranks in decreeing that southern life should be given its most notable artistic expression by the pen of a native son of Negro descent . . . Verse, fiction and drama are fused into a spiritual unity, an “aesthetic equivalent” of the Southland . . . “Cane” is not OF the South, it is not OF the Negro; it IS the South, it IS the Negro - as Jean Toomer has experienced them.

Despite their differences in opinion, these reviews nonetheless shared the evaluative criteria that characterized the reaction to Cane - and determined its importance - both in 1923 and in most of the subsequent (and voluminous) criticism devoted to it. Both were concerned with the effectiveness of the formal innovations and formal eclecticism of the work; with how well Jean Toomer had found either a voice or an “aesthetic equivalent” for the South; and to what degree Toomer was a “representative man,” a figurehead and a model for subsequent African American writing.