Literature

Zora Neal Hurston: An Introduction to the Supreme

Definition of Supreme:

  1. highest in rank or authority

  2. highest in degree or quality

  3. ultimate or  final

The word ‘supreme’ carries a lot of authority and stakes a pretty incredible claim. While I’ve used supreme in my title for this blog in a half-joking way (and mainly because I think it makes an impressive title and really fits the image), in many ways I do believe Zora Neale Hurston is the supreme black, female author of the world to date.

As I’m gearing my Master’s thesis around her, now, renowned novel Their Eyes Were Watching God my opinion may be slightly biased, but I do hope to prove, or at least cause you, dear readers, to consider Hurston as a “supreme” author.

Zora Neale Hurston, born in 1891, knew how to make an impression. She is described as someone who could so charm people with her wit and stories that they would offer help in anyway she needed it. Not shy of taking up those offers, what Hurston needed most was patronage. However, the idea of writing on a patron’s penny left many of her fellow African-American writers sour.

She wrote during the Harlem Renaissance, a time rich with the celebration of black culture, but also, unfortunately, a time when America’s black citizenship felt that they were being asked to prove their humanity. They did so through the arts, and so, Hurston was seen by some Renaissance participants as a puppet to her Anglo-American patrons. As a result, she suffered discrimination from her contemporaries.

Today, that discrimination is firmly their loss. Hurston was brilliant. During her career of more than thirty years, Hurston published four novels, two folklore collections, an autobiography, short stories, and a number of essays, articles, and plays (Boyd).

However, what some people may not know is that, though she’d already begun writing, Hurston went to university for an anthropology degree and worked under Franz Boas, an anthropologist who was the first to really practice the idea of field work. One has to wonder and speculate if his influence and her anthropological roots are what inspired her to go to Florida, Jamaica, and Haiti in order to write both Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938). She also wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), her most well-known novel, in Haiti in a matter of weeks.

Eatonville, Fl.–the small town wherein much of the novel takes place–mirrors Hurston’s own childhood, as well. Though born in Alabama, Hurston’s family moved to Eatonville, Florida when Hurston was still quite young.

Established in 1887, the small community was the nation’s first incorporated black township. Hurston described it as, “a city of five lakes, three croquet courts, three hundred brown skins, three hundred good swimmers, plenty guavas, two schools, and no jailhouse” (qtd. in Boyd).

Hurston’s personal experience with living in an incorporated black township/community certainly gives credence and authority to her novel’s reality, just as her field time in Florida,  Jamaica, and Haiti lend a more authentic tone to her folklore collections.

[There is a quant (albeit dated, in some ways) documentary on Hurston’s life which I saw part of some years ago on PBS. I’ve included a short youtube clip of the documentary, but you should also be able to purchase the full version from baybottomnews.com if you’re just really inspired to get to know more about her.]

Beyond the credentials I’ve touched on, a webpage dedicated to Hurston’s memory and biography provides a wonderful timeline account of her life and work. Please spend some time browsing the website if you’d like more information.

As Hurston’s work was not popularised during her lifetime, partly due to the discrimination of her fellow Renaissance writers, at the time of her death she was living in poverty. She was laid in an unmarked grave, sadly, as she left no money for a headstone.

Fortunately, some years later–in 1973–Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, found her grave and commissioned a stone that reads “Zora Neale Hurston: A Genius of the South.”

The epitaph, to me speaks to the quality of her work; especially as it was commissioned by another black, female author whom some would argue eclipsed Hurston. However, since its reissue in paperback form in 1978, Their Eyes Were Watching God has become arguably the most widely read and highly acclaimed novel in the cannon of African-American literature (Official Website of Zora Neale Hurston).

Her work has proved enduring, relevant, and powerful. Her command of oral tradition translated to written word is magnificent; her use of symbolism absolutely masterful… I feel indebted to Walker for her “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,” an essay which really sparked the revival Hurston’s work, but, for me, Hurston will forever be the ultimate, the Supreme, African-American author.

Works Cited:

Boyd, Valerie. “About Zora Neale Hurston.” Zora Neale Hurston: The Official Website of Zora Neale Hurston, 2015, http://www.zoranealehurston.com/about/index.html. Accessed 26 Jan. 2017.

Mirriam-Webster. Dictionary. 2017. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/supreme. Accessed 26 Jan. 2017.

Zora Neale Hurston. The Official Website of Zora Neale Hurston. 2015, http://www.zoranealehurston.com. Accessed 26 Jan. 2017.

Gothic Detour: Others and Authors in Joyce’s The Dead

Alright, confession time.

I may be working toward an MA in Modernities and researching various Modern/Postmodern literatures, but my favorite genre of literature is generally Gothic. Hands down, no contest. Give me a Bronte sister or Stoker any day. So, having an opportunity to combine my love for Gothic with my research interests is an opportunity I’ll happily take.

In one of my courses, we recently read James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ from his book The Dubliners (you can read ‘The Dead’ online here). I will be the first to concede and agree that Joyce is a modernist writer–he hugely influenced modernist writing in Ireland. However, one can read ‘The Dead’ and easily identify Gothic elements throughout, especially if one considers spatiality in the work.

Joyce makes use of Gothic spaces several places in ‘The Dead.’ Gothic spaces often involve closed doors/rooms, long or secret passageways, old and/or haunted living areas, and images of dark vs. light. He adheres to these ideas when he plays with enclosed, claustrophobic spaces–such as the downstairs pantry and, later, the drawing room, which must have its door kept closed so there was room for dancers: “[Gabriel] waited outside the drawing-room door until the waltz should finish, listening to the skirts that swept against it and to the shuffling of feet” (Joyce 203).

He also makes the home Gothic in other ways, likening it to House of Usher– nodding to Poe’s ‘Fall of the House of Usher’–and describing dark stairwells and long, empty hallways.

The hall though is perhaps the only translatable element of the Gothic into Joyce’s modernist meaning in ‘The Dead.’

Joyce uses the hall as a liminal space (something which Gothic writing relies on) in the story. He presents audiences with a moment between a married couple, Greta and Gabriel, occurring in the hallway which raises questions of Authorship.

In the scene, Gabriel stands in a “dark part of the hall” and gazes up the staircase at his wife (Joyce 240). She, too, stands in shadow so that Gabriel recognizes her from her terra-cotta and pink skirt, which seems black and white because of the dark:

She was leaning on the banisters, listening to something. Gabriel was surprised at her stillness and strained his ear to listen also. […] He stood still in the gloom of the hall, trying to catch the air that the voice was singing and gazing up at his wife. There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. (Joyce 240)

The idea of Authorship here concerns Gabriel’s reading of his wife. In his mind, he moves her to a symbol, a muse. He creates her as an object which he could project his own meaning on. [As a question outside of what we’ve been discussing, do you think that Joyce might be parodying or commenting on the woman symbolic of Ireland?]

Reading further, as they walk to the hotel they’re staying in for the night, the idea of Greta as an object seems to excite his sexuality:

The blood went bounding along his veins and the thoughts went rioting through his brain, proud, joyful, tender, valorous. She was walking on before him so lightly and so erect that he longed to run after her noiselessly, catch her by the shoulders and say something foolish and affectionate into her ear. She seemed to him so frail that he longed to defend her against something and then to be alone with her. (Joyce 243-244)

To me, these lines are both painfully awkward and a little creepy. But academically, they only pose problems as far as Authorship and Others are concerned.

Gabriel interprets Greta’s grace and mystery to suit the fiction of his own mind. He does not consider, does not question what might cause her to put on the attitudes he observes. Later in ‘The Dead,’ Joyce forcefully makes Gabriel realize Greta’s alterity when she presents to Gabriel her own fiction.

After they reach their room, Gabriel senses Greta’s preoccupation and attempts to draw her out of her melancholy to adhere to his fiction. He finds that she’s been dwelling on the memory of a young man from her past who she thinks died for her. This swiftly causes him to have a realization of the Other (as one might imagine, Gabriel wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about his wife pining over another man). This encounter with the Other causes him to examine her history, to wonder what it was apart from him. He also begins to dwell on other histories, on the vast number of the dead, and his own mortality in the grey winter of Ireland…

And that’s where Joyce ends ‘The Dead.’ We don’t know what the longterm consequences of Gabriel’s moment with the Other are, but I applaud Joyce for letting that future remain unauthored.

Hopefully, this post has intrigued a few minds. If you have unanswered questions, I’m sorry–I wrote this post more as a discussion than as an argument or a critique. Please do feel free to comment or contact me with any questions, though.

Also, there is a movie adaptation of ‘The Dead.’ I’m not sure how accurate it is to Joyce’s writing, but it certainly captures a feeling for the Gothic in this clip of the film!

 

Works Cited:

Joyce, James. Dubliners. 1914. Paladin Grafton Books, 1989.

Imagination, Authorship, Others: Atonement

As a research blog, I can think of no better way to begin than to examine and explain my research interests as they now stand. Mainly, I’m concerned with Otherness and Others, specifically in literature, along with the idea of an ethical authorship attached to them.

How much artistic liberty may Authors, fictitious or actual, apply to Others in their fiction? How does one “ethically” imagine and author an Other? And as Authors in our own lives and, thus, our own fictions, can we even attempt to answer that?

These questions first occurred to me while reading Ian McEwan’s Atonement. His book remains one of my favorite pieces of 20th Century literature, and also, remains the best way I know how to explain my Author/Other fascination.

McEwan’s Atonement follows the tragedy of a young couple, Robbie Turner and Cecilia Tallis, parted because of faults within Briony’s (Cecilia’s younger sister) imagination and Authorship of certain events. At the time of her crime-of-imagination, young Briony had already been identified by McEwan as a prolific writer. We also understand that she had complicit access to adult codes of her time and social class through her father’s library, which she perused at her leisure and which we are to assume, caused her imagination to grow. As a writer, and a child, the fact that she had imagination certainly doesn’t present itself as a problem or a crime; however, at her young age, she didn’t understand the way in which her world functioned well enough to form true interpretations of adult codes or to invent accurate fictions according to those actions. Due to her readings, she was most familiar with stereotypes of social orders within fictitious literatures. This caused her to recreate people, to recreate Others, according to her imagined motives for each.

McEwan illustrates this confusion early in the novel by having Briony witness her sister and Robbie interacting by the fountain on their estate. She read the scene incorrectly, thinking:

There was something rather formal about the way he stood, feet apart, head held back.          A proposal of marriage. Briony would not have been surprised. [….] Robbie Turner, only a son of a humble cleaning lady and of no known father, […] had the boldness of ambition of ask for Cecilia’s hand. It made perfect sense. Such leaps across boundaries were the stuff of daily romance. (McEwan 48)

What appeared to Briony as a possible proposal was actually a quarrel —definitely not the stuff of daily romance, I’d say.

Briony’s misunderstanding of the fountain scene and her authorship of it projected later that day onto a note from Robbie to Cecilia, which she read as an unintended audience. In the note, Robbie explicitly described what he would like to do to Cecilia–causing Briony to encounter an adult sexual code, which in her youth she did not comprehend.

[In an effort for concision, and to prevent this from reading anymore like an essay than it already does (which I am actively trying to avoid!), I’m going to summarize the next points of action quite quickly.]

Briony’s mind created a fiction around the note, because she didn’t understand it, and she concluded that Robbie must mean to hurt her sister. A scene which she later saw in the library compounded this assumption, causing her to accuse Robbie later in the evening of committing a crime of sexual violence against one of her cousins.

Unfortunately, her Authorship was accepted and became her most successful fiction.

McEwan makes sure that as an audience we understand that Briony was functioning under a fiction when she accused Robbie as her cousin’s attacker. The events of that day on a whole caused Briony to cast him as “evil incarnate” in her own melodrama (McEwan 147). Her understanding of upper-middle-class English society (another adult code) prevented her from considering her brother or his equally privileged friend, Paul, as the rapist.

Later, as she matured, Briony realized and fully understood the consequences of that fiction, but by that time, it was too late. Robbie and Cecilia died alone, far apart from each other, during World War II and Briony dedicated her life to “atoning” for her crime.

Essentially, life stinks and we all die. Woo. (Should I have said **spoilers** before now?)

So…

My stance on this is that Briony practiced unethical authorship toward an Other. I classify Robbie as an Other based on his social status in regards to Briony’s own. In the quote I provided from McEwan’s novel, she cites him as the son of the gardener at her family’s estate–social standing is a factor that can identify Others. Her immature categorization of Robbie caused Briony to create a biased fiction.

Trying to agree on or define what an ethical authorship is, at this point, too lengthy and unclear an endeavor to take up. However, my assertion for Authors is that fiction rests on possibilities, not certainties, and that fiction comes from what Others may be. To that end, I suppose this is what I hope to write on for my thesis.

For those who haven’t read this book, I highly recommend it! It was one of the most enjoyable texts I had the pleasure of reading during my undergrad work, and even though I may have ruined a couple of plot points (so sorry), it’s well worth the read!

 

Thanks for reading! Feel free to comment about the post or contact me with any questions you have. 

Works Cited:

McEwan, Ian. Atonement. New York: Anchor Books, 2002. Print.