“Adventuring through the Pieces of a still Unorganized Mosaic”: Reading Jean Toomer's Collage Aesthetic in Cane

Abstract

In Cane the reader is immediately struck by Jean Toomer's bold manipulation of a collage technique; he abandons progressive plotting, instead assembling a variety of disparate forms and genres. As well as signalling the heterogeneity of the collage elements through typographical layout, he stretches and scrambles familiar forms, breaking them, splitting them open and stitching them onto other genres. In a letter to Toomer on 25 April 1922, Waldo Frank describes the effect of these broken forms: “in the reading the mind does not catch on to a uniformly moving Life that conveys it whole to the end, but rather steps from piece to piece as if adventuring through the pieces of a still unorganized mosaic.” As Frank points out, Toomer abandons linear narrative and “uniform” progression, subjecting the reader to chaotic surprises and unexpected truths revealed through the process of piecing together the meaning of seemingly random fragments.