Zora Neale Hurston and the post-modern self in 'Dust Tracks on a Road.'

African American Review, Fall, 1998 by Pierre A. Walker

Hurston's autobiography has received some of the most negative criticism of any of her books and for this reason serves as an interesting case in point about the Hurston canon. Hurston's warmest admirers have criticized Dust Tracks. In his biography of Hurston, Robert Hemenway calls Dust Tracks "a discomfiting book" which "has probably harmed Hurston's reputation" (276); Alice Walker has called Dust Tracks "the most unfortunate thing Zora ever wrote" (xvii)(2); and Nellie McKay includes Dust Tracks "among the most problematical of autobiographies by black women" (179). However, post-structuralist theory can help readers to appreciate Dust Tracks-and for some of the very reasons that it previously received criticism.

Three complaints recur most in critics' ambivalent response over the years to Hurston's autobiography, and they no doubt account for much of the book's relative scholarly neglect: its apparent unreliability, its inconsistency or fragmentary nature, and its seemingly assimilationist racial politics. Although these deficiencies exist in other Hurston texts, including Their Eyes,(3) their presence in Dust Tracks is particularly problematic. The complaints about Dust Tracks are valid, especially those about its unreliability and its fragmentariness, if one insists on conventional notions of the consistency of autobiography and of the individual. But Dust Tracks is never consistent: not with itself, not with the conventions of autobiography in general or those of African American autobiography, not with the facts of Hurston's life, not with what probably were its author's real feelings about racial politics.(4) The individual persona who is both the subject and object of Dust Tracks on a Road is not the homogeneous, unitary, and autonomous protagonist of conventional autobiography but heterogeneous, fragmentary, and inextricably and in various ways part of the culture and society in which she lives. So as to correspond better to the persona represented in and by the text, Dust Tracks resists two cardinal conventions of autobiographical representation: traditional autobiographical structure and formal organization, and a focused projection of the autobiographical persona. Instead of satisfying these conventions, Dust Tracks on a Road focuses on the life of Zora's imagination, on the psychological dynamics of her family, on retelling community stories, on depicting the character of certain friends, and on Hurston's ambiguous pronouncements about race. In so doing, Dust Tracks portrays an individual persona that resists reduction to a coherent, consistent unity and instead portrays a person of many moods who is in tension with the world in which she moves.(5)

In calling Dust Tracks unreliable, critics are arguing that Hurston does not represent herself truthfully and that the book is a deceptive and unfaithful representation-although it "may be the best fiction Zora Neale Hurston ever wrote" (Turner, "Introduction" iv). According to Maya Angelou, "It is difficult, if not impossible, to find and touch the real Zora Neale Hurston" (xi-xii) in Dust Tracks. For Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, "Hurston's autobiography singularly lacks any convincing picture of her own feelings" ("My Statue" 78-79; "To Write" 172-73). And Mary Helen Washington accuses Dust Tracks of "at all times deftly avoiding self-revelation" (19-20).

These criticisms presuppose that there is such a thing as a "real Zora Neale Hurston," to use Angelou's words, which one can differentiate from other "Zora Neale Hurstons" (as well as the fact that it is possible to represent this "real Zora Neale Hurston"). The possibility of representing the "real Zora Neale Hurston" presupposes that she is a single, autonomous, homogeneous unity. However, the kind of individual that Dust Tracks represents is heterogeneous and inseparable from her environment, since it is in her relationship to her environment that the individual is defined.(6) Angelou seems to yearn for the Enlightenment view of the individual, and the protagonist's apparent absence of coherence, unity, and consistency in Dust Tracks partly explains the greater scholarly interest in Their Eyes Were Watching God since, as James Krasner says, Their Eyes "is . . . a good deal more consistent" and therefore "a good deal more critically acceptable" than Dust Tracks (117).(7) But because Hurston's autobiography presents an individual that poststructuralist theory would identify as the postmodern subject - a fragmented, heterogeneous individual, inextricably interconnected with the rest of the world and human society-the lack of consistency, coherence, and unity is the most important feature of her text.

The subject as conceived in poststructuralist theory is a response against the notion of the individual central to humanism, a notion of the individual that we can trace back at least to Descartes. "The existence of a stable, coherent self, is the first of the Enlightenment-derived "beliefs still prevalent in (especially American) culture" that "postmodern philosophers seek to throw into radical doubt" (Flax 624). As a result, one can read into virtually everything the most influential post-structuralists have written a fundamental, underlying skepticism of Descartes's certainty of the existence of the individual human being standing alone - or, to phrase it as a post-structuralist would, the autonomous subject.(8)