SOURCE: “To ‘Flash White Light from Ebony’: The Problem of Modernism in Jean Toomer's Cane,” in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 46, No. 1, Spring, 2000, pp. 1-19.

In the following essay, Kodat delineates the two camps of Toomer criticism and asserts that the “great strength of Cane lies in Toomer's risky decision to represent racial and gender oppression through modernist literary technique.”

The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation—and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic—and, lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject's entire mental development.

—Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage” (Ecrits 4)

The idea of freedom, akin to aesthetic autonomy, was...