New Essays on 'Their Eyes Were Watching God.' - book reviews

African American Review, Summer, 1994 by Missy Dehn Kubitschek

As the Critical Interpretations series of the 1960s aged with the advent of literary theory and increased attention to race, gender, class, and sexuality, several contenders for its replacement as undergraduate guides/graduate introductions emerged. Some of these series grew beyond their senior editors' bounds of literary enjoyment--hence Harold Bloom's curious half-disclaimer regarding the worth of Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God in his introduction to the Modern Critical Interpretations collection on that novel and the somewhat peculiar selection of reprinted "representative" essays. Michael Awkward's American Novel Series volume, though it seeks to introduce students to the main shifts in critical paradigms surrounding Their Eyes, does not reprint articles but instead presents new essays by scholars well known for their work on African American literature, or more specifically on Hurston: Awkward himself, Robert Hemenway, Nellie Y. McKay, Hazel V. Carby, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis. These critics discuss Their Eyes in larger contexts, often referring to Hurston's autobiography (Dust Tracks on the Road) and her essays. Awkward, Hemenway, and Carby address the history of the novel's reception by critics and the academy; McKay delineates the novel's relationship to traditions of autobiography; and DuPlessis explores the work's implications for feminist cultural studies. The theses of the essays are often explicitly identified, and although all present engaged, complicated analyses, their clarity and minimal jargon will make the volume particularly accessible to its principal audience.

Awkward's exemplary introduction delineates the critical premises that ignored or damned Their Eyes: the demand that black writers produce protest fiction, and the perception that Hurston was, in the Langston Hughes's phrase, "a perfect 'darkie.'" With admirable brevity, Awkward has denoted the dual foci of artistic purpose and personality that have guided the reaction to Hurston's productions. His presentation of what replaced or at least competed with these premises beginning in the 1970s is equally succinct: "the establishment of feminist literary criticism ... and the emergence of culturally specific forms of evaluation of Afro-American texts grounded in the black American oral storytelling traditions and discursive practices, or what I call throughout this introduction 'Afrocentric criticism'" (7). Awkward's directness and his graceful definitions of vexed terms like Afrocentric make this essay a very good case study for undergraduates of how literary criticism has functioned in the last fifty years. Particularly strong in avoiding oversimplification, the article scrupulously distinugishes between trends and individual proclivities; thus, the personal animus of Langston Hughes's response is differentiated from the equally critical stances of Alain Locke and Richard Wright. Finally, Awkward's essay introduces the reader to the issues that have dominated analyses that accept the novel as an important work: its feminist content and its presentation of Afro-American orality, particularly in storytelling. Even without the book's final bibliography, the endnotes to Awkward's introduction list most of the paradigm-shaping critical works.

The Hemenway and Carby articles illustrate that the controversies delineated in the introduction are ongoing rather than purely historical. As the dean of Hurston biography, Hemenway gamely examines the part of his generation of literary scholars in obscuring Hurston's worth. He critiques in particular the pigeonholing of Hurston as a Harlem Renaissance writer (most of her publications came long after the period) and the popularly accepted view of her relationship with white patrons. Hemenway traces the history of the ugly portait of Hurston as a sycophant who didn't mind functioning as a kind of superior pet for white folks, then delineates the real extent of the finances involved (which have been much exaggerated in popular understanding), and its costs: He maintains that Hurston "could not write creatively under the influence of personal patronage" (35). His essay also contains the electrifying information that the Library of Congress has a tape, recorded by Alan Lomax, of Hurston singing folksongs, and uses Hurston's recorded statement about an African crow dance to reinterpret the famous buzzard scene in Their Eyes. Throughout, Hemenway assumes the preeminence of Hurston as a writer and the excellence of Their Eyes.

These assumptions remain questionable in Carby's "Fiction, Anthropology, and the Folk," an interesting exploration of "the tensions arising from Hurston's position as writer in relation to the folk as community that she produces in her writing" (82). Whereas most critics have seen Hurston as a simultaneous participant in and preserver of black American folklore, Carby accents her distance from the folk, arguing that "the discourse of the folk is irrevocably displaced in the figuration of a discourse of individualized autonomy existing only for the pleasure of the self" (88). Carby's materialist perspective is evident in her foregrounding of class in her analysis; consider, for example, her perceptive remark that "critics often forget that Janie is a protagonist whose subject position is defined through class, that she can speak on a porch because she owns it" (86). This perspective is also present in Carby's characterization of the Wright/Hurston disagreement: "The antagonism between them reveals Wright to be a modernist and leaves Hurston embedded in the politics of Negro identity" (79). The partisanship here extends throughout the essay's evaluation of Hurston and her current place in the academy.