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Critics of Jean Toomer's Cane disagree about the text's relation to the economic and social realities confronting rural and small-town Georgia blacks in the early 1920s. Some scholars read the novel as a nostalgic celebration of a vanishing peasant existence close to the earth. If the text acknowledges the harshness of racism and poverty, it subordinates social protest to lyricism, the representation of the here and now to the search for prophetic truths beyond the limits of history. Bonnie Barthold, for example, noting that the text eschews "linear development," argues that "the achievement of Cane" is its "mythic portrayal of a mythic truth on the verge of destruction" (159). Bowie Duncan, reading the text as an "oracular" articulation of post-Einsteinian notions of space and time, remarks that "the meaning of [Cane's] oracle is its multiplicity and uncertainty of meaning" (329). Alain Solard reads "Blood-Burning Moon" as only incidentally the story of a lynching: As the narrative unfolds, the "outline of reality gives way to the haunting presence of a visionary world" (552). Catherine Innes stresses the influence upon Toomer of P. D. Ouspensky's idealist view of "a living universe in which the hidden meaning of all things will be realized and felt, and the unity of all things understood" (155); in this context, Innes reads the Lewis of the text's "Kabnis" section as "a man capable of the cosmic vision, of penetrating the world of appearances, and of fusing together past and present, anguish and joy, 'soil and the overarching heavens' " (163).
All the critics who read Cane as subsuming history under myth do not necessarily applaud the political implications of its idealism. Robert Jones notes that "Too mer's reification of thought is evident in the way he consistently proposed idealism as the solution to racism and social problems, yet without the praxis of social activism" (17). Maria Caldeira chides Toomer for his "belief that he would be able to transcend or solve his conflicts with reality through Art" and charges that he "substituted mysticism for his craving for equality and harmony among people" (548). Edward Margolies contends that Cane achieves a specious unity by "celebrating the passions and instincts of folk persons close to the soil, as opposed to the corruption of their...