The Worm Against the Word: The Hermeneutical Challenge in Hurston's Jonah's Gourd Vine - Critical Essay

African American Review, Spring, 2000 by Gary Ciuba

Daughter of a Baptist preacher, Zora Neale Hurston spoke from the pulpit every time that she wrote. She did not follow the conventional path of testifying to her father's faith. Although she enjoyed her parent's rhapsodic language at revival meetings, Hurston had early doubts about the theological mysteries that were being sublimely dramatized in his sermons (Dust Tracks 194-97). Nor did she turn her fiction into the overtly political homilies that some of her male contemporaries would have preferred. Hurston the artist regarded such polemics with the same displeasure that a member of the congregation showed in Jonah's Gourd Vine after she heard a man of God speak on the "race problem": "'Dat wan't no sermon. Dat wuz uh lecture"' (159). [1] Opposed to such moralizing, Hurston was always attracted to what won the amens of the assembly, to "'uh preachin' piece uh plunder'" (158).

Hurston preached not by imitating the models for religious proselytism or social protest offered by men but by living up to the unvoiced expectation that her mother seemed to evoke as she lay dying. Since Lucy Ann Potts Hurston was so weakened that she could not speak, her nine-year-old daughter felt herself called to be her spokeswoman (Dust Tracks 63). Throughout her life Hurston devoted herself with almost evangelical ardor to a celebration and exploration of the connection between language and identity. In undertaking this ministry, she liberally drew upon the heritage of African-American preaching. Hurston made her writing, as Deborah Plant has shown, echo the rhetoric and the good news about empowerment that had long inspired the congregations in black churches (93-115). But the artist as homilist turned such sermons back on themselves. What Hurston preached was the very act of preaching, of undertaking the hermeneutical challenge to know the self by way of the spoken and written word.

The "Reverend" Hurston recorded her vocation in her novels. They tell about characters who are called to be preachers, for, according to Karla Holloway. they "must connect the self to the spiritual source of linguistic power" (116). [2] In Their Eyes Were Watching God Hurston portrays a version of her own matrilineal commission. Janie's grandmother recalls that "'Ah wanted to preach a great sermon about colored women sittin' on high, but they wasn't no pulpit for me"' (21). Disappointed that her daughter would not "'expound what Ah felt,"' Nanny tendered the mission to her granddaughter, resolving, "'Ah'd save de text for you'" (22). Janie's spirit-filled narrative finally becomes that long-desired sermon on female selfhood. Having gained a freedom greater than any that her grandmother could ever have envisioned, Janie witnesses to and interprets the text of her life. In

Moses, Man of the Mountain, Hurston delivers an extended folk homily on the Exodus. She conceives of the lawgiver as the preacher par excellence, the magical bearer of language and liberation, of language as liberation. In Seraph on the Suwanee Hurston portrays the failure of a life in language. Although Arvay Henson aspires to be a missionary, she is a radically diminished speaker who never discovers the words that give adequate voice to her selfhood.

The preacher/hero of Hurston's first novel anticipates the triumphs of Janie and Moses as well as the unfulfilled promise of Arvay Henson. Since the title of Jonah's Gourd Vine refers to a biblical text (Jonah 4.6-8), the novel itself becomes a kind of sermon that explains and expands the scriptural citation. It tells how John Pearson grows in linguistic consciousness, flourishes as a preacher, and finally meets his own version of the misfortune that befalls the prophet's sheltering plant. However, the Reverend Pearson is not just a preacher but the subject of Hurston's preaching. Because the evangelist is called "Two-Eye-John," after a reference in a sermon that his mother once heard, John Lowe suggests that he "should be read as a text himself" (94, 105). Hurston's first novel is, then, a sermonic text based on a biblical text about a preacher of texts who himself requires textual interpretation. The minister at Reverend Pearson's funeral implies that he ultimately eludes human understanding, for" 'nobody knowed 'im but God'" (202). If readers are not to write John off as equally inscrutable, they may come closer to the challenge of interpreting the preacher by trying to understand his life as an interpreter.

As John progresses from discovering his voice through speaking, to reading and writing, and finally to preaching, he engages in the kind of hermeneutical enterprise that has been described by Paul Ricoeur, who examines how speaking brings the meaning of experience to language, how writing surpasses the limits of spoken discourse, and how reading may disclose new possibilities of being in the world. Rejecting the idea of a Cartesian self that is immediately transparent to its own reflection, Ricoeur maintains that "there is no self-understanding which is not mediated by signs, symbols and texts" ("On Interpretation" 191). As John searches for such knowledge of and by words in Jonah 's Gourd Vine, he illustrates Henry Louis Gates's parallel contention that the quest for selfhood through the medium of language is a signal theme in African-American literature (169). However, John's vine-like growth toward his hermeneutical identity finally withers. He fails to give an adequate interpretation of himself because h e fails to give an adequate interpretation of "signs, symbols and texts." Although Jonah's Gourd Vine has typically been criticized because Hurston's love of language overwhelms her plot and characterization, the novel seems more artfully constructed if language--spoken and heard, written and read--is understood as central to the plot and characterization. The novel does not just celebrate an African-American world of words but ponders the very implications of orality and literacy for achieving selfhood.