In Moran’s Interdisciplinarity, he offers that a “theory is concerned with big questions about the nature of reality, language, power, gender, sexuality, the body, and the self, and it offers framework within which students and scholars can debate about these broad-ranging issues without getting too extensively mired in detailed arguments within disciplines” (83). I believe that Jean Toomer is exercising this ideology of “theory” through his work Cane. As Moran explains, this is a type of theory that is not used in the sciences, there is no scientific proof in supporting this type of theory. Toomer is using Cane as a vehicle for this theory where he is proposing big questions about all of these key particularities that Moran describes except he is doing so in a manner that doesn’t explicitly present these questions.
Toomer is questioning race – both the idea of race in the south and his own, he is questioning a culture that he has just laid eyes on, he is questioning the idea of self throughout the work both through literature and introspectively. All of these questions raveled in a piece of literature created by the experience of different disciplines – coming together from different subjects to form a piece that sheds light on questions that have been in the dark too long. Cane essentially is a theory.