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Toomer's vision of psychological evolution later realized and racialized in "The Blue Meridian" (1936) has its precursor in Cane's closing chapter, the short drama "Kabnis," and in the figure of Kabnis as a biracial subject struggling to find speech representative of his psychological experience. (1) Kabnis's ambivalence toward his black ancestry manifests in blood rhetoric that both highlights and undermines the purity of the plantation aristocracy that has contributed to his making. He declares, "My ancestors were Southern blue-bloods--"; "And black," retorts Lewis, another educated black Northerner. Recognizing the pervasiveness of the one-drop rule for determining African descent--and the fact that Southerners frequently purged traces of black blood from their genealogical records--Kabnis argues that there "Aint much difference between blue and black" (108). There is a double recognition here: first, that black ancestry is inherent in the bodies of many who pass for white; and second, that as a linguistic term "blackness" constructs the "whiteness" of Americans who have expunged blackness from public record. That Kabnis's language becomes increasingly inflected by dialect further underscores a corresponding psychological transformation that results from the pervasiveness of biracialist discourse. Proximity to his ancestral past has proven dangerous to Kabnis. The "soil whose touch would resurrect him" (98) ends up forcing him to identify with and to become one with the downtrodden of his race. As the prototype for Toomer's "blue" race, Kabnis exemplifies this struggle, and perhaps documents the failure, to create a new language that reddems and preserves transracial or biracial difference within the conventional differences of "black" and "white." Toomer's entire literary career can be understood as an attempt to come to terms with, if not to escape, his imprisonment in a racialized body--a body that serves as a sign marking its ineradicable difference from racial purity idealized in turn-of-the-century Anglo-Saxon America--and to discover language adequate to the formulation of a new American transracial type of which he felt himself to be the "first articulate member" (Jones, 58).
In "The Blue Meridian" (1936) the "universal man" is the primary emblem of Toomer's synthesis of evolutionary biology and mysticism. In this work, Toomer conceives of the "blue" race--a synthesis of African, Anglo-Saxon, and American Indian races--as the signal metaphor of his complex position on his own racial composition. As an alternative to the racial typecasting of which he felt himself and other racial types to be the victims, Toomer developed his concept of the racially indeterminate "blue" race, a new classification authorized by his fusion of language from a variety of esoteric and scientific sources, including psychology, evolutionary biology, and cognitive science. At the heart of Toomer's poem is his advocacy of deliberate racial blending, disparagingly known as "miscegenation," as a means to transcend the boundaries of race ideology and fulfill evolutionary progress toward human perfection. Among the poem's "white," "black," and "red" "meridians"--the physical and psychological boundaries that symbolize the three primary races indivisibly joined in Toomer's genealogy of the American race--only the "blue meridian," a synthesis of all three, signals the fulfillment of Toomer's quest for racial transcendence and American cohesion in the new configuration of a nation of "red," "white," and "blue" individuals living in harmony. As Toomer sees it, the "universal man" that he imaginatively characterizes in "The Blue Meridian" as the "man of blue or purple / Beyond the little tags and small marks" (2) of cultural labels is not simply another classification, but an inevitable product of natural evolutionary forces, a view Toomer shares with nineteenth-century evolutionary theorists as well as other African-American writers, including Charles W. Chesnutt and Pauline Hopkins. The intersection of both science and occult mysticism in this work and in his unpublished "Psychologic Papers" of the same period helped Toomer create for himself a viable psychology of race, and by extension, of transracial subjectivity.
"The Blue Meridian" and Toomer's psychological writings have been largely ignored, in part, I would suggest, because their transracial terms are not easily assimilated into critical discourse that requires an author's public identification with either "black" or "white" politics. Since Cane's 1923 publication, Toomer's career has formed the center of contentious biracialist rhetoric. As George Hutchinson aptly notes, Toomer's demise so early in an otherwise promising literary career demonstrates "how the belief in unified coherent 'black' and 'white' American 'racial' identities depends formally and ethically upon the sacrifice of the identity that is both 'black' and 'white'" ("Racial Discourse," 228). According to Hutchinson, Toomer's numerous autobiographical attempts to explain his racial affiliation "led to a very precise awareness of the connection between language and ideology [and the realization of] the impossibility of developing an entirely 'new' discourse that would be independent of the inherited one" ("Racial Discourse," 230). Toomer tried, in the words of Hutchinson, to establish between black and white racial identification, a "new difference" (244). Hutchinson's commentary acknowledges a theme that Toomer makes explicit in his writings: the fundamental invisibility of the transracial subject as a result of conceptual language rigorously tied to the Manichean discourse of black and white.
Despite his attempts to overcome racial difference by creating characters who embody racial synthesis in his works, after Cane's publication and reception Toomer felt himself to be the victim of racial synecdoche, an arbitrary substitution of one part of his complex racial heritage--blackness--for the whole. Remarks Toomer, "Into the making of my body there have entered the following racial and national strains: Spanish, Dutch, Welsh, Jewish, Negro, [American] Indian, German, and French ... To what race do I belong?" (Jones, 56). Further complicating Toomer's already vexed position on race is the fact that Toomer's physical body was an open signifier of seemingly endless--and unavoidable--racial signification that challenged the turn-of-the-century biracialist rhetoric of "black" or "white." In his March 13, 1935 third preface to an unpublished autobiography entitled "Book X," for example, Toomer explains that "I have been taken for an Englishman, a Spaniard, a Dutchman, a Cuban, a South American, and Russian, a Japanese, an American Indian, a Hindoo, and Egyptian, a Frenchman ... my looks have determined my life and my life has determined my looks" and "as my life is, so my looks are, untypically American" (Rusch, 99-100). As Henry Louis Gates has argued, Toomer sought not so much to be white as to be "racially indeterminate" (Figures, 208), a position he argues that Toomer occupies rhetorically as well as physically. For Gates, Toomer's racial indeterminacy culminates in his allegiance to Russian mystic G. I. Gurdjieff's transcendental philosophy and his subsequent effacement of race entirely from his writing. The fundamental irony of Toomer's life is that while the biological elements and physical markers of his racial composition are indeterminate they have determined how others perceive him and have in part shaped the critical reception of his literary works. (3) The process of cultural reification, of giving tangibility to thought, was both the danger of racialist discourse authorized by evolutionary biology, and the desire Toomer had for the art he hoped would confront scientific racism with new perceptual language.
The discourse of racial difference popularized by evolutionary biology played out in particularly insidious ways throughout Toomer's literary career and pervaded critical responses to his work. His reviewers and colleagues alike drew upon evolutionary discourse that linked the African American with the purely emotive and sensual; for these critics, Toomer's lyric voice indicated a genetic inheritance that also determined the limitations of his literary talent. As North observes, Toomer's contemporaries qualified their acclaim of his work with a certain "old-fashioned condescension" (149). In a January 1924 review in the Double Dealer, for example, John McClure credited Toomer's "Negro heritage" with the "salient characteristics" of Cane: "ecstasy and music" (qtd. in Soto, 176). (4) In another review, Matthew Josephson cautioned Toomer not to exceed his intellectual limits: "Perhaps it were better for Toomer to follow his five or six senses rather than search for cerebral super-forms" (Josephson, 180). In a similar fashion, Gorham Munson urged Toomer to remain true to his "Negroid lyricism" (qtd. in North, 149), while Alfred Kreymborg qualified his praise of Toomer as "one of the finest artists among the dark people, if not the finest" with equally liberal condescension, adding that Toomer's "frankly lyrical strain [is] native to the darky everywhere" (Kreymborg, 575-76). Literary circles shared the common race prejudices of mainstream America, namely a belief that the presence of "dark blood" signaled in individuals fundamental psychological differences from those of Anglo-Saxon origin. In Toomer's case, critics were quick to view his African heritage as the essential genetic difference that inspired both his literary achievements and imposed specific intellectual limitations. This same racialist rhetoric did not accommodate Toomer's shift in interests from the literary and the explicitly racial to the philosophical--and implicitly racial. Toomer's absence from the literary scene in the 1930s is as much a result of his daring to transgress the intellectual boundaries that scientific discourse assumed for racialized subjects as it is his refusal to be labeled black or white.
My interest in Toomer's concept of the "blue" race concerns precisely Toomer's efforts to disrupt this established binary by forging a third indeterminate racial category and crafting a language of racial identification and inclusiveness culled from the discourses of evolutionary biology and psychology. Toomer's deployment throughout "The Blue Meridian" of organic metaphors such as "cultivation" and "podding" envisions the transracial subject as the fulfillment of evolutionary progress from simpler, more homogenous forms to complex, heterogeneous forms that signify more advanced psychological and spiritual development. Together, the synthesis of races and its appeal to a higher order of thought empties racial categories of their ideological power while creating a positive identification for the transracial subject. In what follows, I argue that Toomer's lifelong efforts to trace his racial origins, as well as to account for the various racial strains that constitute the interracial subjects he saw as prototypes for the "New American" race, are less an indication of Toomer's acceptance of the impossibility of this task--as Hutchinson would have it--so much as they signal his acknowledgement of the enormity of his project in light of the continuing pervasiveness of racialist assumptions drawn from evolutionary biology in America.
Next to Cane, Toomer scholars have generally likened "The Blue Meridian" to an island in a sea of Gurdjieffian propaganda, the last of Toomer's works to treat race, and the last of his works worth considering as serious literature. (5) This tendency to view Toomer's post-Cane writings as mere advertising for Gurdjieff's mystical philosophy has caused scholars to overlook the important intersection of science and mysticism in Toomer's later work at the cost of missing how both discourses converge in ways that contest the very terms of biracialist rhetoric, rooted as they are in the authority of turn-of-the-century biological science. As a result of this tendency to overemphasize Toomer's metaphysical interests, there remains in Toomer scholarship an important and underrepresented component of his intellectual biography: the crucial influence of his scientific training and interests throughout his lifetime. Before looking at how the language of evolutionary science and Gurdjieffian mysticism in "The Blue Meridian" fuse to create a language of cognition, I will show how Toomer's early training and reading in the biological sciences remained influential throughout his writing career.
I. Scientific Racism and Race Psychology
Toomer's training as a student of agricultural science, together with his study of physical anatomy and evolutionary biology, lays a foundation upon which to reconsider how the intersection of scientific and mystical discourses in "The Blue Meridian" and other post-Cane writings helps him destabilize the terms of biological and biracialist discourse and at the same time develop new terms upon which to assert the validity of a transracial identity. Rather than uphold Gates's argument that Toomer's position of racial indeterminacy is akin to racial effacement, we should understand Toomer's claim to be a member of the "blue" race as a position from which he affirmed the biological equality of transracial subjects while he exposed as myth the scientific terminology that naturalized racial categories and privileged Anglo-Saxon racial purity. Toomer's new vision of race entailed a corresponding shift in perception from a focus on the external physical markers of race to the invisible cognitive processes of the human psyche. In short, Toomer anticipates such theorizers of race psychology as Frantz Fanon in his interest in exploring how the invisible, ideological layers of thought and language cause the racialized subject to internalize racial classifications.
Before he finally settled on his writing career in 1921, Toomer made several intense and sporadic forays into the biological and sociological sciences. Toomer's interest in the relationship between science and racial representation was influenced in part by his study of scientific agriculture at the University of Wisconsin...
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