Cane and Walden

I’ve given up trying to read Maria Alfaro’s “Intertextuality”. The language is thick and academic and the allusions to literary theorist after literary theorist are formidable. But it hasn’t escaped my notice that half of our class’s name (Cane Intertext) is derived from this text and that it will probably play a significant role in classwork and discussion over the next semester, so I decided to apply an online filter to the information in Alfaro’s analysis. I decided to do what teachers have discouraged me from doing since the sixth grade.

I decided to go to Wikipedia.

For anyone else who struggled through the explanation of intertextuality, I recommend opening up a web browser and simply googling the term. Wikipedia, which is the first link, provides more or less all of the information that is provided by the reading and it provides at least enough to give anyone a comprehensive understanding of what the term means and where it came from. The main difference between the online and offline resources, which makes Wikipedia a more efficient medium for the information, is that whereas Alfaro provides lengthy digressions Wikipedia is able to include a svelte link to another article, and whereas Alfaro includes reference after reference to related texts Wikipedia is able to include its own related readings at the bottom of the page and leave you unimpeded. 

And, despite having skipped the required reading on intertextuality, I believe I’ve already found my first example of dialogism within the second arc of Cane. I was reading through the arc again this weekend in order to refresh my memory for discussion on Monday, and my recent experiences with Julia Kristeva’s intertextual ideas emphasized some of the things that missed on my first read through. In particular it emphasized similarities between a specific vignette of Toomer’s, Rhobert, and a book written about eighty years prior to Cane by Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods. Most Americans – and certainly most English majors – are at least peripherally familiar with Walden. What most people understand as the basic premise is that Henry David Thoreau attempts a two-year experiment living and writing in the woods, but what I learned when I actually began to read the book is that there is no basic premise. Anyone looking for a narrative within Walden will be disappointed. It is not a novel, even by the loosest definition. It is Thoreau’s transcendental manifesto and his tomb of philosophy, and the cabin that he built essentially served as a giant wooden middle finger to nineteenth century society erected in the middle of the Massachusetts wilderness.

I won’t pretend that I’ve actually managed to survive reading the entire book, but I have read a significant portion of it – enough to gather some philosophical droppings, as Thoreau rants from page to page. However, one would need only read through the third page of Walden to come across a very similar series of images to the ones found in Cane’s Rhobert. In Rhobert, Toomer writes about a man who “wears a house, like a monstrous diver’s helmet, on his head”, using the house to represent the responsibilities that he has accrued and inherited. (Toomer, 55) Toomer also continues to describe the house itself as “a dead thing that weighs him down” as he walks, causing him to sink, trapped, where he is. (Toomer, 55) Thoreau describes an almost identical sight in Walden when he writes about men he has seen physically weighed down by their houses that he has “met nigh crushed and smother under [their] load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before [them] a barn seventy-five feet by forty, [their] Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture and wood-lot”, implying that physical possessions are actually burdens rather than comforts. (Thoreau, 3)

Both of these texts are clearly at least marginally connected by their similar images and ideas, and they are therefore intertextual. But, as T.S. Eliot states in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, “the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past” and Toomer has clearly chosen to discuss a distinctly different concept while relying heavily on Thoreau’s original image. (Eliot) Toomer, unlike Thoreau, emphasizes the burden of Rhobert’s family in addition to the weight of the house itself by stating that “the stuffing” within the already hefty house is “alive”, and that at the same time “it is sinful to draw one’s head out of live stuffing in a dead house”. (Toomer, 55) While Thoreau was clearly railing against the dilemma of inherited land and jobs in his age, Toomer has expanded upon this rant to include the crushing weight that he believes men like Rhobert feel from supporting a family as well as whatever meager property they’ve been given.

That was just an observation that I made and that I felt like sharing, and I look forward to discussing it more in class.

 

 

Sources:

Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London: Methuen, 1960. Print.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden; Or, Life in the Woods. Boston: Beacon, 2004. Print.

Toomer, Jean. Cane. New York: Liveright, 2011. Print.

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