"The world in a jug and the stopper in hand": 'Their Eyes' as blues performance

African American Review, Fall, 1998 by Maria V. Johnson

In passages like these, Hurston's movement from idiom to idiom and voice to voice within the narrative frame clearly achieves the expressive dramatic effect of music or theater. Critic John Callahan has suggested that Hurston's juxtaposition of voices in Their Eyes achieves a polyrhythmic musical effect (96). The textural contrasts Hurston creates through the use of shifts in idiom, address, and point of view are also aesthetically related to the use of distinctive timbres and contrasting sound colors in blues and other African American musics.(12)

Key to Hurston's shifts in voice and idiom and expressive use of variation and contrast in passages like these is that which Johnson and Gates have termed "a Black and idiomatic free indirect discourse," a "speakerly" language which mediates between standard English and Black dialect, showing and telling, in which narrative commentary aspires to the immediacy of the drama (76, 85). The contrasts which Johnson and Gates identify between direct and indirect discourse and between the free indirect discourse of Janie and Joe function much like musical contrast in the blues, underscoring conflict between characters and Janie's struggle to separate inner from outer, self from other, in the process of finding her own voice (80).

As family members, colleagues, and critics went to great lengths to stifle Hurston's voice during her lifetime, Jody tries hard to suppress Janie's voice in Their Eyes.(13) It is through her own self-division that Janie is able to survive the marriage with her own inner world of feelings, thoughts, and dreams put away more or less intact (Johnson, "Metaphor" 165). But Jody isn't satisfied with her submission. Out of his own pain and dissatisfaction, Joe abuses her verbally as well as physically, cruelly criticizing her "looks" and her "doings." Finally, he pushes her too far, and Janie is forced to speak the truth which exposes his lie and the contradictions of his life.

This is a climactic scene in the novel. Expressive intensity reaches a peak through Hurston's complex, multi-layered use of opposition, inversion, and hyperbole, in conjunction with the traditional vehicle of signifyin(g). While both Jody and Janie use inversion and signifyin(g), Jody uses it to distort reality whereas Janie uses it to restore and clarify the truth. In the following scene, Jody merges his looks and age with Janie's and focuses attention on her in order to divert attention away from his own condition. His attack culminates in signifyin(g):

"I god amighty! A woman stay round uh store till she get old as Methusalem and still can't cut a little thing like a plug of tobacco! Don't stand dere rollin' yo' pop eyes at me wid yo' rump hangin' nearly to yo' knees!" (121)

When Jody signifies on Janie, he also merges Janie's "doings" (her competence) with her age and "looks," exaggerating her age in the hope that making her look mentally and physically powerless (stupid and old) will make him look more powerful. At the same time, he also merges his "doings" with his "looks," hoping that if he exaggerates his "doings" and material power, it will hide his deteriorating physical condition.