"Karintha"
Given the complex stylistic arrangement of the pieces--one might even call them movements--in Toomer's Cane, perhaps it's only natural that the first question provoked by the opening sketch, “Karintha,” should be, "Why does Toomer choose to begin his book with this particular piece, describing this particular woman and this particular set of actions in this particular way?" Of course, the first question, like so many other first questions that have come before, can only be answered after many others, usually generated by the first, have been addressed. And for me, the ideas sparked by one follow-up question in particular are critical to solving the problem posed by the first: "Does Toomer mean the name 'Karintha' to be a deliberate homophonic echo of 'Corinthians'?” In other words, does Toomer wish to evoke, by aural association, a thematic connection with the most famous reading in that book of the Bible, 1 Corinthians 13? If so, what might we bring into 'Karintha' by way of 1 Corinthians 13 that enhances or expands our understanding of the former?
It is my hunch that Toomer took for granted that his audience would be exceedingly biblically literate, and, by way of this kind of slant homophone, meant to trigger this other text as a kind of ghostly twin to the text at hand that gestures beyond it, both informing and expanding--even, perhaps, misleading us as to--its significance (could we argue this is some form of prosopoeia?). To that end, and at the risk of being both trite and excessive, I'd like to reproduce the entirety of this famous passage with my "Karintha"- and Cane-related commentary below:
1 Corinthians 13:1-13
13:1: If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but I do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. It is not difficult to see how this opening line ties into Toomer's project in Cane as a whole. The novel's "plot"--if it can indeed be called a novel and if it indeed could be said to have a plot (these are admittedly big "if's")--falls into the "quest" category. The dominant, or at the very least overarching, "quest" in the text is the artistic one--that is, one of Cane's chief driving forces is the desire to speak in the tongues of men and of angels--a desire that is too often thwarted by inarticulacy. That being said, when articulacy fails in Cane, the resultant noises, be they gongs or clanging cymbals, often have the power both to communicate that which is beyond articulation and to gesture toward a system of articulation running counter to, outside of or beyond the confines of our grammatical constructs.On one level, the text seems to be simultaneously trying to tap into the communicative power of music--to claim it for the word--and trying to structure itself along the lines of a symphony, to imitate musical composition in words.
13:2: And if I have prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so that I can remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If the quest to speak in the tongues of angels propels this novel, so, too, does the quest for a kind of healing and redemptive knowledge. The text is full of mysteries all insoluble (often symbolized by women such as Karintha, as is the South itself), degraded prophets whose messages are either indecipherable or so seemingly simple as to be overlooked, and young men brimming with faith that they can conquer all, know all, obtain the object of their collective desire. The unglossed lines below could be said to offer a veritable compendium of the qualities of such young men, especially Ralph Kabnis, defined in opposition to those attributed to love.
13:3: If I give away everything I own, and if I give over my body in order to boast, but do not have love, I receive no benefit.
13:4: Love is patient, love is kind, it is not envious. Love does not brag, it is not puffed up.
13:5: It is not rude, it is not self-serving, it is not easily angered or resentful.
13:6: It is not glad about injustice, but rejoices in the truth.
13:7: It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Such a presence, such an entity, or such an ideal is what is sought in Cane, something beyond fragmentation, brokenness, impermanence and contingency that can endure and bear up under all conditions. The underlying hope in Cane is that Art can be this presence, ideal, entity--that the appropriate intercourse between soul and mind might yield such an Art (or such an artist? or such a man?) and bring it forth into the world to heal it. This Messianic theme saturates Cane, but in an oddly elegiac, foreclosed way. Things sought are not found in the world that Toomer creates; as in the myth of Orpheus, lost objects are not retrieved, and longed-for unions (or re-uniuons) do not take place. Pregnancies are not fruitful and hoped-for acts of consummation are usually thwarted or abortive. Some kind of life waits to be born, but the overall impression is that of stillbirth.
13:8: Love never ends. But if there are prophecies, they will be set aside; if there are tongues, they will cease; if there is knowledge, it will be set aside.
13:9: For we know in part, and we prophesy in part,
13:10: but when what is perfect comes, the partial will be set aside.
13:11: When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. But when I became an adult, I set aside childish ways. The "will's" in the lines above do not come to pass in Cane, nor does "adulthood" arrive for those who could be considered protagonists of short stories (vs. the subjects of sketches--the subjects of sketches, as subjects, by nature of their treatment should be beyond change, as a "sketch" is meant to picture someone as s/he is in that moment, holding them there... but the subjects of Toomer's sketches often refuse to stand still... They demonstrate a kind of restlessness, a certain intractability. As for his short stories' protagonists, they, too, are recalcitrant, refusing to change or grow as protagonists are expected to do. Plots lack expected resolution. The resultant stories often feel inconclusive, partial, reliant on the other parts of the text to produce meaning even as the text as a whole resists coherence and totalization.
13:12: For now we see in a mirror indirectly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, just as I have been fully known. One of the tragedies that plague both the protagonists of the short stories and the narrator who struggles with the sketches is summed up here, in this partial ability to see, know, understand and portray. Toomer’s strategy to overcome this partiality is that of evocation, supplement.
13:13: And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love. One question that can be asked of almost every piece in Cane is, "Is there evidence of faith in this? Is there evidence of hope? Is there evidence of love?" However, the trouble with this line of questioning is that love is such a troublesome term. You have faith and hope in abstractions, but love requires (or seems to require) an "of"; love appears to demand an object that one can possess and know. Perhaps the entire point of this much-beloved Corinthians passage is that love is like faith and hope in being something we place in something else, as opposed to something that requires an object--that it, unlike desire, is object-less. Could we call Cane a novel without an object, just as we call Banjo a novel without a plot? I think an argument could be made, in that it is a novel of anticipation of what never comes to pass... not just a novel of thwarted expectation, where what is expected simply never happens, but one that foregrounds the process of trying to bring forth that which is just beyond articulation, and somehow succeeding without ever articulating or making that "something" concrete--without, that is, actually succeeding. This novel succeeds in producing absence. It delivers absence; it could even be said to serve as a midwife to absence, aporia.
Now that we’ve put spent some time exploring the absent text (and, I think it’s safe to say, have seen the extent to which Corinthians does indeed hover over, as evocation and absence, both the opening sketch and the fiction as a whole), we can take a closer look at the text that is present. "Karintha" is a compelling example of a sketch in which the subject refuses to sit still, to be pinned down or made to signify in any one way. And that is tough to do, given all the energies that are channeled into obtaining and defining her. Even as a child, "men had always wanted her," and the distant narrator, somehow omniscient and terribly limited, informs us that "[t]his interest of the male, who wishes to ripen a growing thing too soon, could mean no good to her" (1). As a woman, Karintha, though "married many times," still carries "beauty," and an aura of an innocence that she never actually possessed, even as a child. She inspires men to "do":
The men who populate the sketch insist on projecting onto Karintha ideals of beauty and innocence (“Even the preacher, who caught her at mischief, told himself that she was as innocently lovely as a November cotton flower” [1]), persistently trying, and perpetually failing, to contain her. Oddly enough, however, Karintha’s fugitive, unruly qualities actually seem to be what make her so attractive in the first place. We are told that
The text of the sketch itself engages in the drive to capture, contain and define Karintha, utilizing multiple formal strategies in its attempt to do so. The first of these is the use of epithet: throughout the scant, two-page sketch, Karintha is thrice referred to, with slight variation, as she "who carries" or is "carrying beauty, perfect as dusk when the sun goes down" (2). Like Homeric epithets, these phrases seem designed to summon her presence but can only serve to mark it metaphorically, ornamenting the name without substantively evoking the presence, shedding (reflected) light on the deified, abstract qualities that characterize her role in this community. Similarly, the narrator tries to place her by repeating the simple, declarative sentence, "Karintha is a woman." The basic structure of this sentence appears to set up an easy equation, but, constructed with two variations on a subject positioned on either side of an "is," it can't help but draw attention to its latent metaphorical properties; the equation is overloaded and cannot do the work of containment it's meant to. The line's repetition also attests to the strain; it appears four times on the second page of the sketch. Strung back to back, the lines could be said to resemble a blues stanza: "Karintha is a woman./ Karintha is a woman./ But Karintha is a woman, and she has a had a child./ Karintha is a woman" (2).
Due to its marked difference from the other three repetitions, the third one, of course, draws the reader's attention. The presence of the conjunction "but" introduces the condition of impossibility: the young men thought all they had to do to catch her was to "count time," BUT "she is a woman, and she has had a child" (2). This child, mentioned so matter-of-factly, almost casually, nevertheless functions obscurely, brought into view in order to all but disappear into the text:
The mention of the "child" falling out of her womb onto the forest floor marks Karintha's brief disappearance "behind the veil" of the text; she slips out of the reach of the words on the page, and these in turn can, for the span of a few sentences, neither proceed according to narrative logic nor cohere around subject matter, no matter how vague that matter might have been. The narrative voice seems to be at a loss for awhile--not for words, but for how to organize them. First the logic appears to be associative, as we are led (or distracted?) from the child's bed of pine-needles to some facts about pine-needles. Then we are moved, via ellipsis, into a subject that has no visible connection to the child and only a weakly associative connection to pine-needles, a sawmill and its sawdust pile that burns slowly, populating the forest with ghostly presences ("wraiths") before spreading across the Georgian landscape. Ellipsis then carries us to Karintha's return, where we are again presented with details that have no immediately discernible causal connection to the child's birth--the heaviness of the smoke, the anonymously composed song-response to the smoke-call.
Presumably, the perceptive reader can put two and two together, and supply for herself the material that the text itself refuses to yield. We can infer, for example, that Karintha has had her child (phrasing the birth so that the child, as the subject "fall[s] out of her womb," strips Karintha of any agency or complicity suggested by expressions such as, "the mother gave birth," or "delivered the child," or "brought the child into the world) and gotten rid of it, presumably by burning it on the sawdust pile (the adjective "pyramidal" gives the pile an archetypal, bier-like quality). Still, our best guess here remains, at the end of the day, a guess; Karintha, her motives and her actions remain inscrutable, illegible. All we know for certain is that upon her return, the child is never mentioned again. Textually, it is reproduced for us only as absence--as wraithlike smoke and the song that asks the smoke to deliver a soul to Jesus.
"Karintha" inaugurates Cane's preoccupation with failed unions and immersion. By foregrounding the inability to see and know everything, the narrator exposes the limits of his view; as detached observer, he cannot fully merge with his subject matter. This incapacity is intricately, though obscurely, bound up in Karintha's seeming lack of interest in bringing forth the life within her womb, as well as her refusal to bring the child out of the forest. Of his time in Sparta, Georgia, the site that would become the setting for Cane, Toomer said:
It is my hunch that Toomer took for granted that his audience would be exceedingly biblically literate, and, by way of this kind of slant homophone, meant to trigger this other text as a kind of ghostly twin to the text at hand that gestures beyond it, both informing and expanding--even, perhaps, misleading us as to--its significance (could we argue this is some form of prosopoeia?). To that end, and at the risk of being both trite and excessive, I'd like to reproduce the entirety of this famous passage with my "Karintha"- and Cane-related commentary below:
1 Corinthians 13:1-13
13:1: If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but I do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. It is not difficult to see how this opening line ties into Toomer's project in Cane as a whole. The novel's "plot"--if it can indeed be called a novel and if it indeed could be said to have a plot (these are admittedly big "if's")--falls into the "quest" category. The dominant, or at the very least overarching, "quest" in the text is the artistic one--that is, one of Cane's chief driving forces is the desire to speak in the tongues of men and of angels--a desire that is too often thwarted by inarticulacy. That being said, when articulacy fails in Cane, the resultant noises, be they gongs or clanging cymbals, often have the power both to communicate that which is beyond articulation and to gesture toward a system of articulation running counter to, outside of or beyond the confines of our grammatical constructs.On one level, the text seems to be simultaneously trying to tap into the communicative power of music--to claim it for the word--and trying to structure itself along the lines of a symphony, to imitate musical composition in words.
13:2: And if I have prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so that I can remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If the quest to speak in the tongues of angels propels this novel, so, too, does the quest for a kind of healing and redemptive knowledge. The text is full of mysteries all insoluble (often symbolized by women such as Karintha, as is the South itself), degraded prophets whose messages are either indecipherable or so seemingly simple as to be overlooked, and young men brimming with faith that they can conquer all, know all, obtain the object of their collective desire. The unglossed lines below could be said to offer a veritable compendium of the qualities of such young men, especially Ralph Kabnis, defined in opposition to those attributed to love.
13:3: If I give away everything I own, and if I give over my body in order to boast, but do not have love, I receive no benefit.
13:4: Love is patient, love is kind, it is not envious. Love does not brag, it is not puffed up.
13:5: It is not rude, it is not self-serving, it is not easily angered or resentful.
13:6: It is not glad about injustice, but rejoices in the truth.
13:7: It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Such a presence, such an entity, or such an ideal is what is sought in Cane, something beyond fragmentation, brokenness, impermanence and contingency that can endure and bear up under all conditions. The underlying hope in Cane is that Art can be this presence, ideal, entity--that the appropriate intercourse between soul and mind might yield such an Art (or such an artist? or such a man?) and bring it forth into the world to heal it. This Messianic theme saturates Cane, but in an oddly elegiac, foreclosed way. Things sought are not found in the world that Toomer creates; as in the myth of Orpheus, lost objects are not retrieved, and longed-for unions (or re-uniuons) do not take place. Pregnancies are not fruitful and hoped-for acts of consummation are usually thwarted or abortive. Some kind of life waits to be born, but the overall impression is that of stillbirth.
13:8: Love never ends. But if there are prophecies, they will be set aside; if there are tongues, they will cease; if there is knowledge, it will be set aside.
13:9: For we know in part, and we prophesy in part,
13:10: but when what is perfect comes, the partial will be set aside.
13:11: When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. But when I became an adult, I set aside childish ways. The "will's" in the lines above do not come to pass in Cane, nor does "adulthood" arrive for those who could be considered protagonists of short stories (vs. the subjects of sketches--the subjects of sketches, as subjects, by nature of their treatment should be beyond change, as a "sketch" is meant to picture someone as s/he is in that moment, holding them there... but the subjects of Toomer's sketches often refuse to stand still... They demonstrate a kind of restlessness, a certain intractability. As for his short stories' protagonists, they, too, are recalcitrant, refusing to change or grow as protagonists are expected to do. Plots lack expected resolution. The resultant stories often feel inconclusive, partial, reliant on the other parts of the text to produce meaning even as the text as a whole resists coherence and totalization.
13:12: For now we see in a mirror indirectly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, just as I have been fully known. One of the tragedies that plague both the protagonists of the short stories and the narrator who struggles with the sketches is summed up here, in this partial ability to see, know, understand and portray. Toomer’s strategy to overcome this partiality is that of evocation, supplement.
13:13: And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love. One question that can be asked of almost every piece in Cane is, "Is there evidence of faith in this? Is there evidence of hope? Is there evidence of love?" However, the trouble with this line of questioning is that love is such a troublesome term. You have faith and hope in abstractions, but love requires (or seems to require) an "of"; love appears to demand an object that one can possess and know. Perhaps the entire point of this much-beloved Corinthians passage is that love is like faith and hope in being something we place in something else, as opposed to something that requires an object--that it, unlike desire, is object-less. Could we call Cane a novel without an object, just as we call Banjo a novel without a plot? I think an argument could be made, in that it is a novel of anticipation of what never comes to pass... not just a novel of thwarted expectation, where what is expected simply never happens, but one that foregrounds the process of trying to bring forth that which is just beyond articulation, and somehow succeeding without ever articulating or making that "something" concrete--without, that is, actually succeeding. This novel succeeds in producing absence. It delivers absence; it could even be said to serve as a midwife to absence, aporia.
Now that we’ve put spent some time exploring the absent text (and, I think it’s safe to say, have seen the extent to which Corinthians does indeed hover over, as evocation and absence, both the opening sketch and the fiction as a whole), we can take a closer look at the text that is present. "Karintha" is a compelling example of a sketch in which the subject refuses to sit still, to be pinned down or made to signify in any one way. And that is tough to do, given all the energies that are channeled into obtaining and defining her. Even as a child, "men had always wanted her," and the distant narrator, somehow omniscient and terribly limited, informs us that "[t]his interest of the male, who wishes to ripen a growing thing too soon, could mean no good to her" (1). As a woman, Karintha, though "married many times," still carries "beauty," and an aura of an innocence that she never actually possessed, even as a child. She inspires men to "do":
Young men run stills to make her money. Young men go to big cities and run on the road. Young men go away to college. They all want to bring her money. These are the same young men who thought that all they had to do was to count time (2, italics mine).Like any ideal that inspires men to "do" so that they might possess the embodiment of that ideal for themselves, Karintha is made to function as a symbol both overdetermined and completely undefinable. The stanza of song that introduces the sketch--a blues stanza that is repeated three times in the piece--describes her as having skin "like dusk on the eastern horizon/ ...When the sun goes down." From the outset, then, we are clued into the fact that whatever Karintha is meant to signify is elusive, fugitive. Perpetually appearing to reflect the light of something that has just disappeared, something that, like the sun slipping down beyond the Western horizon, is always only slightly beyond our reach, she generates a feeling of almost-ness, a sense of very slight belatedness that is not without a tinge of hopefulness (and it is this tinge that keeps us chasing, after all, not realizing we are pursuing a mere reflection). The ellipsis that begins the fourth line of the stanza simply emphasizes her slipperiness, her not-thereness. (It is worth noting that it is only in the second repetition of what we might call this blues refrain, used to mark Karintha's transition from a little girl who had played "'home' with a small boy who was not afraid to do her bidding" (1) to a woman who had been “married many times” and presumably “known” sexually by many different men, that the ellipsis is eliminated, and the lines themselves are abbreviated, clipped, more confident, and lacking in the oddly wistful enjambment in the final two lines: “Her skin is like dusk,/ O cant you see it,/ Her skin is like dusk,/ When the sun goes down.” I see these alterations as reflecting the illusions of possession, containment and knowledge--the fundamental misapprehensions--that accompany any liaison with Karintha.)
The men who populate the sketch insist on projecting onto Karintha ideals of beauty and innocence (“Even the preacher, who caught her at mischief, told himself that she was as innocently lovely as a November cotton flower” [1]), persistently trying, and perpetually failing, to contain her. Oddly enough, however, Karintha’s fugitive, unruly qualities actually seem to be what make her so attractive in the first place. We are told that
Karintha, at twelve, was a wild flash that told the other folks just what it was to live. At sunset, when there was no wind, and the pine-smoke from over by the sawmill hugged the earth, and you couldn't see more than a few feet in front, her sudden darting past you was a bit of vivid color, like a black bird that flashes in the light... Karina's running was a whir. It had the sound of the red dust that sometimes makes a spiral in the road. At dusk, during the hush just after the sawmill had closed down, and before any of the women had started their supper-getting-ready songs, her voice, high-pitched, shrill, would put one's ears to itching (1).Again, Karintha is described in terms of just-missedness and incomprehension, like what one might see out of the corner of the eye as a bird takes off, or what one can hear in bird-song (as opposed to in the lyrics of a supper-getting-ready song). The overall impression she leaves in her wake is one of flight and wingedness, of being just beyond apprehension in all senses of the word, but in a sense that is somehow inspiring, even vitalizing. In the sensibility that informs black life in the depressed agrarian South at the time Toomer was writing Cane, any entity that could not be apprehended, trapped, snared or pinned down would likely have been an inherently hopeful, attractive figure.
The text of the sketch itself engages in the drive to capture, contain and define Karintha, utilizing multiple formal strategies in its attempt to do so. The first of these is the use of epithet: throughout the scant, two-page sketch, Karintha is thrice referred to, with slight variation, as she "who carries" or is "carrying beauty, perfect as dusk when the sun goes down" (2). Like Homeric epithets, these phrases seem designed to summon her presence but can only serve to mark it metaphorically, ornamenting the name without substantively evoking the presence, shedding (reflected) light on the deified, abstract qualities that characterize her role in this community. Similarly, the narrator tries to place her by repeating the simple, declarative sentence, "Karintha is a woman." The basic structure of this sentence appears to set up an easy equation, but, constructed with two variations on a subject positioned on either side of an "is," it can't help but draw attention to its latent metaphorical properties; the equation is overloaded and cannot do the work of containment it's meant to. The line's repetition also attests to the strain; it appears four times on the second page of the sketch. Strung back to back, the lines could be said to resemble a blues stanza: "Karintha is a woman./ Karintha is a woman./ But Karintha is a woman, and she has a had a child./ Karintha is a woman" (2).
Due to its marked difference from the other three repetitions, the third one, of course, draws the reader's attention. The presence of the conjunction "but" introduces the condition of impossibility: the young men thought all they had to do to catch her was to "count time," BUT "she is a woman, and she has had a child" (2). This child, mentioned so matter-of-factly, almost casually, nevertheless functions obscurely, brought into view in order to all but disappear into the text:
A child fell out of her womb onto a bed of pine-needles in the forest. Pine-needles are smooth and sweet. They are elastic to the feet of rabbits. . . A sawmill was nearby. Its pyramidal sawdust pile smouldered. It is a year before one completely burns. It is a year before one completely burns. Meanwhile, the smoke curls up and hangs in odd wraiths about the trees, curls up, and spreads itself over the valleys. . . Weeks after Karintha returned home the smoke was so heavy you tasted it in water. Some one made a song:
Smoke is on the hills. Rise up.
Smoke is on the hills, O rise
And take my soul to Jesus (2).
Presumably, the perceptive reader can put two and two together, and supply for herself the material that the text itself refuses to yield. We can infer, for example, that Karintha has had her child (phrasing the birth so that the child, as the subject "fall[s] out of her womb," strips Karintha of any agency or complicity suggested by expressions such as, "the mother gave birth," or "delivered the child," or "brought the child into the world) and gotten rid of it, presumably by burning it on the sawdust pile (the adjective "pyramidal" gives the pile an archetypal, bier-like quality). Still, our best guess here remains, at the end of the day, a guess; Karintha, her motives and her actions remain inscrutable, illegible. All we know for certain is that upon her return, the child is never mentioned again. Textually, it is reproduced for us only as absence--as wraithlike smoke and the song that asks the smoke to deliver a soul to Jesus.
"Karintha" inaugurates Cane's preoccupation with failed unions and immersion. By foregrounding the inability to see and know everything, the narrator exposes the limits of his view; as detached observer, he cannot fully merge with his subject matter. This incapacity is intricately, though obscurely, bound up in Karintha's seeming lack of interest in bringing forth the life within her womb, as well as her refusal to bring the child out of the forest. Of his time in Sparta, Georgia, the site that would become the setting for Cane, Toomer said:
[This] was the first time I'd ever heard the folk-songs and spirituals. They were very rich and sad and joyous and beautiful. But I learned that the Negroes of the town objected to them. They called them "shouting." They had victrolas and player-pianos. So, I realized with deep regret that the spirituals, meeting ridicule, would be certain to die out. With Negroes the trend also was towards the small town and then towards the city--and industry and commerce and machines. The folk-spirit was walking in to die on the modern desert. That spirit was so beautiful. Its death was so tragic. Just this seemed to sum life for me. And this was the feeling I put into Cane. Cane was a swan-song. It was a song of an end (xxii).In light of this comment, one cannot help read Karintha's child as embodying that endangered folk-spirit, but the narrator's making visible of his crisis of representation point to another, related anxiety--that of the artist who fears that his connection to that spirit is too tenuous to allow for a resuscitation, preservation or evocation of that spirit. I think that it is on account of this anxiety that Toomer composes Cane in the way he does, and I think it would be enormously fruitful to compare the way he formally presents these materials from what he perceived to be a dying way of life with Hurston's presentation of the same in Mules and Men.
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