SOURCE: “Jean Toomer's Cane: Self as Montage and the Drive toward Integration,” in American Literature, Vol. 72, No. 2, June, 2000, pp. 275-90.

In the following essay, Peckham provides a stylistic analysis of Cane, particularly the way the disparate elements of text work together as a unified whole.

In the past decade several important preliminary studies have begun to focus on the relation between the modernist aesthetic and the thematic and formal elements of Jean Toomer's Cane. But while scholars have done much to elucidate the fragmented, avant-garde nature of the text's form and to pose possible unifying themes, their efforts have been hampered by critical assumptions usually applied to poetry and fiction. Critical criteria such as unity and closure, as they have been traditionally used in judging a novel's or poem's “success,” are not relevant to Cane. In Cane, Toomer attempts to enact a disruption of social boundaries through literary...