Encouraged by the request of two scholars at the University of Washington Bothell to reproduce my Signifying Monkey memorandum in a book they are editing, I thought I would revive another memo I wrote to the same group of students in the same Spring -- this one from two months earlier, concerning the famous Zora Neale Hurston novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Who knows? Maybe it will encourage some of you to read the novel. Like every other book in our list of fifty, the novel was to be read for one of the bi-weekly meetings of the first year seminar. It went on that way all year -- another class, another book, another paper. It was, and remains to this day, an extraordinary educational experience, both for the students and for the members of the Department.
March 19, 1998
From: Bob
Wolff
To: The
Members of the Major Works Seminar
Subject: Their
Eyes Were Watching God
I would like to make some preliminary and elementary
observations that are designed to deepen your reading of the novel and make
your understanding of it more complicated.
First of all, a warning:
Don't make the mistake of supposing that this book, because it is a novel, and not a theoretical treatise, is
simply an unreflective story. Their Eyes, because it is a direct, powerful, affecting story, is liable
to fool you. To this must be added the
fact that critics have tended not to accord to female authors in the African‑American
literary tradition the same level of self‑conscious artistry that they impute
to male authors in that tradition, and that they automatically impute to all
white authors in the main, or canonical, tradition of western literature. It would never occur to a sophisticated
literary critic to suppose that Pamela, or Bleak House, or Pride
and Prejudice, or The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is
simply a good story, told naively and directly by an author with no self‑conscious
conception of literary form or technique. And yet, critics have, oddly enough,
been ready to see Hurston in the same tradition that way. So ‑ be warned!
Now, some absolutely elementary ideas which you should keep
with you at all times.
1. The author of
a novel is not the narrator. The narrator
[or, of course, the narrators] exists in the fictional world of the novel; the author exists in the same real world we
inhabit. Zora Neale Hurston is not
Janie. At every step, on every page, you
must ask yourself what literary intention the author has in putting such words
as she, or he, does in the mouth of the narrator. The power of a narrative voice may be so
great that it seizes you, overwhelms you, compels you. Assuming that the author is skillful, that
effect on you is intentional. Ask
yourself why the author has chosen to create that effect.
2. Which brings
us to the subject of voice. A
novel calls a fictional world into existence by the use of words ["In the
Beginning Was the Word, and the Word was God, and the Word was with God" ‑
think of Aslan in the Narnia tales roaring the world into existence ‑ as long
as there have been novels, novelists have been playing with the connection
between authorship and creation.] Some
of those words are the words of the narrator, who may, or may not, be a
character in the fictional world [in David Copperfield and Great
Expectations, for example, the narrator is the principal character. In Jane Austen's novels, on the other hand,
the narrator is not ‑ but, nevertheless, the narrator is someone whose values,
social presuppositions, etc. are clearly historically and socially
locatable.] Some of the words are those
of characters in the novel. Leaving
aside picture books, the entire fictional world is conjured up, constituted,
created by those words.
Thus, an absolutely central factor in the constitution of the
fictional world of the novel is the character of the voices in which
the narrator and other characters speak.
By voice, I mean, in the first instance, the words the characters
speak [there is, strictly speaking, nothing else]. But then, by extension, I mean the tone, the
choice of locutions [i.e., the diction], etc.
In Their Eyes, for example, Hurston makes an effort to reproduce
the sounds, the cadences, the turns of phrase, the grammar, of the colloquial
speech of certain segments of African‑American society. This is, itself, a deliberate and literarily
problematic choice for the authors ‑ one that was first faced in the English
literary tradition by Sir Walter Scott [who sought to reproduce Scottish
dialect.]
One of your central tasks, as a reader, is to become
conscious of the voices in a novel, as voices, and to make yourself aware of
the literary techniques by which the author is creating and sustaining those
voices. You must, at all times, be
asking yourself why the author has made those choices, what the purpose of them
is, and what their effects are.
3. Novelists are
readers of novels, just as poets are readers of poetry and composers are
listeners to music. Novelists self‑consciously
write against, or with, or to, or about, or in relation to, previous
novelists. This is true of all
novelists, of course, but is especially important with regard to Hurston, for
one of the central issues that concerns her is the existence of a tradition of
African‑American literature and its place in, or relation to, the established
tradition of western novels by white authors.
4. Novelists are
also, quite often, self‑reflective about the nature of art, and about what it
is to be an artist. Frequently, this
translates into a concern, in the novel, with voice. You will find, as you start to read Their
Eyes, that it is, in one sense, about voice. You should try to locate the precise phrases,
sentences, passages in which the subject of voice comes up [this is not hard ‑
it runs throughout the novel]. Whose
voice? What is the relationship between
the voices of the characters in the novel and the author's voice? Once again, let me emphasize that voice is
important in a novel precisely because, in a novel but not in the real world,
voice creates the world. In life, one
can act decisively without ever finding one's voice. But in a novel, action exists only as voiced
by someone [either a character or a narrator].
5. Finally, with
all this in mind, how should you read a novel?
It would appear that anyone who takes all of this advice to heart will
become utterly immobilized by it! Pen in
hand, endlessly hunting for evidences of voice, of inner and outer references,
alert to self‑referential turns of phrase, you will end up reading novels as
though they were chemistry texts. Right?
Wrong! The best way I
can think of to describe how you should read a novel is to draw an analogy with
the way a psychoanalyst has to work. The
analyst listens to the patient, and allows herself to react directly and
emotionally to the patient. The analyst
may find that one day she is fascinated by what the patient has to say, and the
next day is utterly bored, wishing the hour would end and the patient would
leave. One day the analyst may be
sexually aroused by the patient, the next day repelled. The analyst may find that the presence of the
patient is triggering a series of fantasies in her own mind. And so forth.
To function in a therapeutically effective fashion, the analyst must
allow herself to feel all of these feelings, and must at the same time use them
as evidences of concealed or subliminal communications from the patient,
reflecting on them with all of the theoretical understanding at her
disposal. If she tries to distance
herself emotionally from her own reactions, deprecating them as unprofessional; or, alternatively, if she simply reacts,
without using the reactions as the raw material for reflection ‑ in either
case, she will not be an effective therapist.
In analogous fashion, you, as the reader of a novel, must
allow yourself to be caught up in the novel, to be moved by it, to react as a
naive reader for whom there is no distance between self and fictional
world. You must allow yourself to feel,
immediately, whatever it is that the words on the page evoke in you. BUT:
You must, at the same time, reflect on your reactions, use them as the
raw material for your interpretation, achieve an ironic distance from the novel
while also becoming engaged with it and moved by it. Only then can you become an effective and
insightful reader.
The analyst assumes, as a methodological presupposition of
the therapy, that there are repressed wishes, fantasies, memories in the
patient's unconscious that will erupt into the patient's discourse and self‑presentation
in ways that will allow for therapeutic intervention. What is more, of course, the analyst encounters
only persons who choose to become patients, presumably because they are
suffering some sort of pain or unhappiness that they seek to alleviate. You, as a reader of novels, must start with
the methodological presupposition that the book you are reading is written by
an author sufficiently in control of voice and diction, with a sufficiently
interesting literary purpose, to make the reading of the novel worthwhile. Frequently, of course, that turns out to be
false, and you either stop reading, or else plow on to the end and toss the
novel aside as not worth reflecting on.
All I ask with regard to this novel [and all novels of course] is that
you give them, at least initially, the benefit of the doubt, and that you
combine an emotional openness to them as compelling stories with an
intelligent, reflective awareness of them as artfully constructed literary
works.
Let us now take a look at Their Eyes.
Hurston was born in 1891 and died in 1960. She was brought up in Eatonville, Florida,
the town in which the novel is set. It
was, as she represents it in the novel, an all‑Black town. The novel takes place in October 1928. How do I know this? Because the hurricane that occupies the last
segment of the novel was an actual event, pretty much just as it is represented
in the novel.
Hurston was, among other things, a skilled folklorist and
ethnographer who studied at Barnard College under the great anthropologist
Franz Boas. Between 1927 and 1932, she
made a number of trips to the South, beginning with Eatonville, to collect folk
tales; she traveled as well to New
Orleans where she gathered material on Voodoo.
All of this made its appearance first in Mules and Men, published
in 1935. In 1937, she wrote Their
Eyes in seven weeks [!!], incorporating a good deal of the material of Mules
and Men as background. [For example,
in Mules and Men, she describes the store in Eatonville, with its front
porch, where the men sat and swapped tales.
The store's owner was Joe Clark(!)]
The novel is constructed economically and with great
care. There are a relatively small
number of verbal themes and echoes that hold the narrative together, for which
you should be on the lookout. For
example, the second sentence introduces us to the image of the horizon. That image recurs on pages 28, 85, and 182,
and is then reinvoked in the last lines of the novel to pull it together and
bring it to a close. A less significant
but still suggestive theme is Janie's hair ‑ See pages 2, 47, 51, and 83, for
example. Again, the image of a
"high, ruling chair" in which one can sit, surveying the surrounding
society ‑ pages 31, 58, 109. Or, yet
again, the very important series of images of trees, branches, and roots ‑
pages 8, 12, 15, 73 and elsewhere, almost certainly Hurston's way of talking
about the existence or lack of existence of an Afro‑American tradition. And, of course, the extraordinarily beautiful
set of images of the bee in the pear bloom ‑ pages 10, 31, 67, 101 and
elsewhere, perhaps the emotionally dominant image in the book.
The trick in reading a novel like this is, at one and the
same time, to give yourself up to it emotionally and yet also remain aware of
these literary devices and structural features, which the author uses to carry
much of her meaning.
A word about the narrative structure of the novel. It is, of course, a frame structure, though
of a rather odd sort. The novel begins
as Janie returns to Eatonville after an eighteen month absence. She puts her feet in a pan of water to soothe
them, and begins to tell her friend, Phoeby, where she has been and what she
has done. 174 pages later, she takes her
feet out of the water, and the novel comes to an end. This is a familiar narrative device, but it
is here used somewhat oddly ‑ Janie tells Phoeby a great deal about her life
before she came to Eatonville ‑ things you would suppose she had already told
Phoeby during their twenty‑year friendship ‑ and a great deal about what
happened to her in Eatonville, which Phoeby must know, because she was
there. Notice the effect of the frame
device ‑ it creates an elegaic effect.
All during the tumultuous events of the Hurricane, for example, we, the
readers, know that she has survived, because she is narrating this to
Phoeby. This has the effect of putting
distance between us and the narrative, and enhances the rather dreamy quality
of the narrative, already set up for us by the pear bloom passage.
What is the novel about?
Well, at the most immediate, accessible level, it is about voice,
about Janie's finding a voice and thereby coming into her own as an emotionally
and sexually complete person, as an authoritative, active, effective
person. The theme of voice appears
almost on every page, beginning with the fourth paragraph of the first page,
when she reenters Eatonville and encounters the bander log on the store
porch. ["Bander log," or
"bandar log," as it is usually spelled, is a term from Kipling's Jungle
Book. "Bandar" is a Hindu
term meaning "people," and the bander log are the log people ‑ i.e.,
the monkeys, who sit on logs chattering and gossiping. The dictionary glosses it as "any body
of irresponsible chatterers," which is just about a perfect description
of the people on the porch. They are, in
Henry Louis Gates' term, signifying monkeys.] As the inner narrative progresses, Janie
moves from being silent [with her grandmother] to being silenced [by Joe
Starks] to finding a voice, and finally to signifying or playing the dozens on
Joe [in the great passage on page 75], who has been swaggering about as a big voice,
playing God. And yet ‑ this, of course,
is perhaps the central thematic point made by a number of commentators ‑ Janie
does not, like Joe, arrogate voice to herself, and make the achievement
of her voice the occasion for setting herself above and against those around
her. Instead, in that very important
passage on page 6 [echoed in her grandmother's statement on page 15], she says
to Phoeby, "You can tell 'em what Ah say if you wants to. Dat's just de same as me 'cause mah tongue is
in mah friend's mouf."
The pivotal passage in the book, in my judgment [which,
needless to say, on matters like this may not be worth the paper it is xeroxed
on], is to be found on pages 67‑68, in the paragraph that begins "Janie
stood where he left her ..." It
seems clear that Hurston is here echoing du Bois' notion of double
consciousness, but with a crucial difference [or revision, as the literary
critics like to say.]
Hurston's revision, it seems to me, is that for du Bois, it
is the experience of being a Negro in a white world that makes for the double
consciousness, whereas for Janie, it is the experience of being a woman in a
man's world that produces this effect.
Notice, by the way, that by setting her novel in Eatonville, which is an
all‑black town, she brackets the very doubling to which du Bois is
referring. Janie's only encounters with
whites, in the sequences during and after the hurricane at the very end of the
novel, are managed in such a fashion that they do not really alter the central
thematic development.
Now some questions about the novel, to which we might address
ourselves.
First, what is the meaning of the title? The title phrase is from the hurricane sequence,
of course, page 151, "They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their
eyes were watching God." The novel is filled with religious metaphors and
language, and Joe Starks' quest for a Big Voice, a High Chair, his favorite
expression, "I God," and the manner in which he is described by
others as authoritative and God‑like, and of course the fact that he is hollow,
a false god, lead one to think that this religious theme must have some central
significance. But I must confess I am
not sure what it is.
Second, how shall we understand the theme of loneliness that
runs through the novel? Janie is
repeatedly described as lonely. At the
end, however, although she is alone, she is no longer lonely. This needs some explicating.
Third, what are we to make of what is for me the most
puzzling passage in the novel, Tea Cake's beating up of Janie? What is puzzling is not the fact that the
incident occurs, but the way it is treated by Hurston. It is introduced more or less gratuitously,
in a way that doesn't really advance the plot, and it seems not at all to have
colored or qualified Janie's positive memories of Tea Cake at the end of the
novel. Let us assume, for the sake of
argument, that the incident is accurate, in the sense that the sorts of people
Hurston represents in her novel would in fact have responded to such an event
in that fashion ‑ both the men and the women.
I am very hesitant simply to embrace an ideologically simple‑minded
"feminist" reading of the incident, and construe Hurston as saying in
the novel that an independent woman who finds her voice can have no place in
her life for a man, because that seems to me incompatible with the tone and
language of the final pages. [See page
184, "Then Tea Cake came prancing around her etc etc."] So, it is a puzzle.
Finally, a minor matter.
What on earth is the whole Mrs. Turner episode doing in the novel
[around pages 130 ff]? This dispute
about Negroes trying to look white, etc, though true to life, no doubt, doesn't
seem to have anything to do with the rest of the novel. Is this obtuseness on my part, authorial
clumsiness on Hurston's part, or what?
