Abstract
Perhaps only by strange synchronicity would Jean Toomer and JeanMichel Basquiat inhabit a single essay, unless it were a meandering, improvisational yarn critiquing both Modernism and Postmodernism with an odd assortment of evidence: the damaged black masculine body, crossed genres, image and text, the circle as cane stalk and letter, epistrophyc6 sign: “nothing to be gained here.”
More meditation than analysis, this chapter roams between rational and lyrical language, image and text, sampling and remixing Toomer’s 1920 graphic arcs in Cane and Basquiat’s paintings to explore symbolic webs. The chapter grows from my studies during a 2001 summer seminar on jazz and literature at the University of Kansas, during which Distinguished Visiting Scholar Herman Beavers suggested that “hermeneutic” writing could express a critical perspective that was both beautiful and responsible.
Jean Toomer, Cane, ed. Darwin T. Turner (New York: Norton Critical Editions, 1988 [1923]).
My discussion of Basquiat’s visual art is based on reproductions in Richard Marshall, ed. Jean-Michel Basquiat (Whitney Museum: New York, 1992).
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Notes
More meditation than analysis, this chapter roams between rational and lyrical language, image and text, sampling and remixing Toomer’s 1920 graphic arcs in Cane and Basquiat’s paintings to explore symbolic webs. The chapter grows from my studies during a 2001 summer seminar on jazz and literature at the University of Kansas, during which Distinguished Visiting Scholar Herman Beavers suggested that “hermeneutic” writing could express a critical perspective that was both beautiful and responsible. Russell McDougall, writing in 1987, posits “a theory of action, from which develops a hermeneutic practice: reading as a dance of attitudes, criticism as participation.” See Russell McDougall, “The Body as Cultural Signifier,” in The Post-colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Triffin (New York: Routledge, 1995), 336.
Charles Bernstein, A Poetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
My discussion of Basquiat’s visual art is based on reproductions in Richard Marshall, ed. Jean-Michel Basquiat (Whitney Museum: New York, 1992).
Trinh T. Minh-ha writes: “While the full moon generally represents the conjunction of yin and yang, of stillness and action, or of beings dear to one another (the cyclic encounter of Hou Yi and Chang E), the autumn Harvest moon connotes more specifically distant presence and desire for reunion. …” Trinh T. Minh-ha. When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender, and Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1991), 7.
Tony Bolden theorizes “epistrophy,” a trope akin to epistrophe, but drawn from Thelonius Monk’s tune title, “Epistrophy.” Bolden describes Monk’s epistrophy as “an instance of musical self-reflexivity wherein the pianist repeats certain sounds at the end of a phrase or riff.” Bolden defines poetic epistrophy as “a creative process that reflects and refracts African American cultural experiences by combining a wide range of forms, images, titles, lyrics, quotations, and names to create a poetic collage.” In Cane, the arc graphically evokes multiplying clusters of charged motifs, elements Bolden would call “term[s] of cultural (re)memory,” coalescing as epistrophy. Tony Bolden, Afro-Blue: Improvisations in African American Poetry and Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 57–58.
Marjorie Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1981).
Matthew Pratt Guterl, The Color of Race in America: 1900–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 172.
Jon Woodson, To Make a New Race: Gurdjieff, Toomer, and the Harlem Renaissance (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999).
Woodson describes Toomer’s lifetime spiritual quest, which led him to Gurdjieff soon after Cane’s publication. The (a)symmetry, cycling, and symbolism of Cane had set the stage for Toomer’s deep identification with Gurdjieff’s ideals. Prior to and during Cane’s composition, in the Art as Vision group, he had encountered H. P. Blavatsky’s notion of the Meridian of Races. See Woodson, 31; also see Helena P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy (Pasadena: Theosophical University Press, 1999, http://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/sd/sd-hp.htm). Toomer placed himself in the “sixth root race,” which “did not represent a blend of the present biological ‘races’ into a racially fused man, but an altogether new type of humanity …” (Woodson, 42). Significantly, the seventh root race is diagrammed in Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine as an arc-like fragment of a widening gyre. Only months after Cane’s publication (January 1924), Toomer was first drawn to Gurdjieff by “demonstrations of... [his sacred] dances in New York” (Woodson 42). Gurdjieff instructed followers in a geometrical placement of limbs and steps, toward a bodily symmetry, or an embodied abstraction of human form and motion. Sources for those dances included the whirling dervishes of Turkey. See Peter Brooks, director, Meetings with Remarkable Men, Parabola Studio, 1979. Finally, See Hortense Spillers, Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003)
Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongerel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Frarrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1995), 271.
W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 5.
See Willard Bohn, The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry: 1914–1928 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986)
Marjorie Perloff and Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).
My heartfelt thanks to Elizabeth Schultz, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Kansas, for the original inspiration to write about Cane’s graphic arcs. In conversations since, Professor Schultz mentioned several times her fascination with the arcs. Schultz has written specifically on Toomer as well as about Jean-Michel Basquiat, particularly in connection with Basquiat’s depictions of the front material in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. See Elizabeth Schultz, Unpainted to the Last: Moby-Dick and Twentieth-Century American Art (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1995).
Cynthia Earl Kerman and Richard Eldridge, The Lives of Jean Toomer: A Hunger for Wholeness (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 100.
Coco Fusco, The Bodies That Were Not Ours: And Other Writings (New York: Routledge, 2001), 11.
Maria Isabel Caldeira, “Jean Toomer’s Cane: The Anxiety of the Modern Artist,” Callaloo 25 (1985): 544–50
Mitchell, 16. Aldon Lynn Nielsen warns that, though sound is central to African American literature, critics placing “emphasis upon the ear will still miss a great deal...” (p. 25). Nielsen analyzes image and text by poets writing after Cane—such as Julia Fields, Russell Atkins, and De Leon Harrison. Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Martha Jane Nadell contends that, in Cane, Toomer’s key move in transcending race is to “eradicate color as a demarcation of racial identity and to return literal colors to the realm of visual description.” In other words, Nadell observes, the social construction of race as color faces off against Toomer’s rendering of the pictorial actuality of color—of “physical appearance... [as] purely formal, ahistorical, and visual.” Martha Jane Nadell, “Race and the Visual Arts in the Works of Jean Toomer and Georgia O’Keefe,” in Jean Toomer and the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Geneviève Fabre and Michel Feith (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 145.
Muriel Rukeyser, “Orpheus” 1949, in Out of Silence: Selected Poems, ed. Kate Daniels (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1992), 107.
Ihab Hassan, The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987).
In discussing hip-hop culture, Keyes identifies graffiti writers among the widely recognized practitioners of the movement’s aesthetic. Further, she categorizes hip-hop as a “musical form that makes use of rhyme, rhythmic speech, and street vernacular, which is recited or loosely chanted over a musical soundtrack.” Cheryl Keyes, Rap Music and Street Consciousness (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 1.
Phoebe Hoban, Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art (New York: Penguin, 1998).
Lucy R. Lippard, Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America (New York: Pantheon, 1990), 165.
Quoted in Judith Wilson, Black Arts Annual 1987/88 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1989), 48.
Nicholas Mirzoeff, Bodyscape: Art, Modernity and the Ideal Figure (London: Routledge, 1995), 162.
Quoted in Elizabeth Schultz, Unpainted to the Last: Moby-Dick and Twentieth-Century American Art (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995), 2.
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or the Whale (New York: Modern Library, 1992 [1851]).
Langston Hughes’ italics. Langston Hughes, The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed. Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel (New York: Knopf, 1995), 427.
Louis Armand, “Jean-Michel Basquiat: Identity and the Art of (Dis) Empowerment,” Litteraria Pragensia 11, no. 21 (2001): 94–106
Ralph Ellison. Invisible Man, (New York: Modern Library, 1994 [1952]), 561.
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© 2008 Tony Bolden
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Ohnesorge, K. (2008). Cane Fields, Blues Text-ure: An Improvisational Meditation on Jean Toomer’s Cane and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Undiscovered Genius of the Mississippi Delta. In: Bolden, T. (eds) The Funk Era and Beyond. Signs of Race. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-61453-6_7
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