Voice and Narrative - Zora Neale Hurston*

Hurston's Materialisation of Afro-American Oral Tradition & Dialect as Literary References

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was indisputably one of the talented people who took upon themselves the task of articulating a self-conscious and collective expression of black culture; a task that commenced with the literary and artistic explosion of the 1920s known as the Harlem Renaissance. Novelist, folklorist, anthropologist, autobiographer, playwright and critic, Zora Neale Hurston is rightfully considered the most prolific writer of the Harlem Renaissance.

Before undertaking to detect the qualities that established Hurston as a metaphor for the black woman writer’s search for tradition, it is wise to place her in a wider context and demonstrate the attitudes towards Afro-American folk material.

There were various approaches to art by the Harlem ‘literati’. For example, W.E.B. Du Bois associated art with propaganda and accordingly he directs artists to a polemical approach, thus projecting a negative image of the lower class Negro people that distinguishes them from the black elite. Alain Locke, another contemporary pre-eminent figure, a distinguished academic who defined the New Negro, albeit not an advocate of the social protest novel was preoccupied with the elevation of the race, thus implying a desire for respectability and acceptance within the established (white people’s) socio-cultural milieu, and by extension an aspiration to becoming urban rather than remaining loyal to one’s cultural roots. Jessie Fauset was writing ‘passing’ novels, that is, novels portraying the life of light-complexioned Afro-American women, the ‘tragic mulatta’ types, whose lives were determined by bourgeois expectations. And, although, Jean Toomer was not an urban writer, thus addressed rural and folk issues, his masterpiece Cane (1923) is not written in dialect.

In relation to the ‘Harlem literati’ circle, Hurston proclaimed herself ‘Queen of the Niggerati’, thus allowing a trace of Negroism to appear in her own personality. Hurston did not follow the dominant contemporary literary trends but tried to establish herself as an ‘oral artist’, a griot, that is ‘a person of the spoken word’ whose ‘fate is tied to the fortunes and reputation of orality’ (Miller,90). Therefore, she went counter to the Afro-American intellectual hierarchy by believing in the inherent poetic qualities of black dialect as well as in the material provided by her own culture, even if this was preserved by the slaves.

Although the study of the psychodynamics of orality was practically non-existent in the 1920s, one must take into account that Zora Neale Huston studied anthropology at Barnard College under Franz Boas, a primary figure among the diffusionists[1]. Boas, in accordance with his anthropological beliefs, does not adhere to a model of a superior and dominating culture or race, but believes in independent historical development of types of culture which develop along culturally specific patterns (Boas,250).

Hurston’s work revolves around the perspective that racial differences cannot account for cultural differences and with this model in mind she concentrates almost exclusively on black communities in an effort to explore individual mental life and culture. Accordingly, she does not repeat Joel Chandler Harris’s mistake of creating sharp linguistic and behavioural contrasts between characters. Furthermore, she deviates from the plantation tradition, for her characters develop intra-racially rather than inter-racially. By treating folklore not as a result of ‘survivals’ from primitive stages of illiterate cultures, but as art forms, she invests in their cultural value where each oral performance evidences the potential for ingenuous complexity.

I am now going to take a look at Mules and Men (1935) which fully reflects her objective to re-evaluate the expressive forms of illiterate rural people, and consolidates her stance as a strong individualist who defied the dominant trends towards ‘Negroisms’. 

Mules and Men is replete with signs of the natural progress of the societies at Eatonville -where Hurston was born- and Polk Country. This natural progress is due to the fact that both societies constitute idyllic microcosms, populated entirely by black people. The representation of this pastoral milieu is quite a utopian one since these societies cannot pose as the entire black community. Nevertheless, it illustrates a standpoint of Hurston’s, later to influence her political ideology that opposed her to the supreme desegregation decision in 1954 and made her favour segregation to integration. These societies are instances of autonomous development which contributed to the community’s socio-cultural independence. In these societies, entirely unimpeded by white people’s constraints and Jim Crow practices, black people develop an expressive potential of their own which stands for non-militant black solidarity. Moreover, by indulging in the oral practices that derive from their African ancestors, they explode racial stereotypes, since their tales, songs, proverbs, etc. contain social comment and wisdom while the constant activation of voice, the quasi-musical setting of the line and rhythmic repetition imply power and movement towards the audience.

Since Mules and Men is not fiction but a collection of Afro-American manifestations of orality, it is almost entirely rendered in direct dialectal speech by its characters who are not treated as objects or stereotypes, but portrayed as enunciating subjects who are not defined in terms of binary oppositions such as black/white or upper/lower class. Hurston introduces the reader to the material or sometimes comments upon its cultural significance. Moreover, she constantly experiments with voices. On the one hand, Hurston signals her presence as a novelist by citing whole passages written in overwrought language and by making use of adorned imagery and elaborate artistic forms. On the other hand, her mastery of the rural black southern dialect enables her to resort frequently to dialect usage as an interlocutor. By mastering their code, Hurston ‘deforms mastery’ with regard to ‘master and servant’ paradigms; paradigms perpetuated by whites, but also by black urban chroniclers like Du Bois or Locke who rejected dialect as a linguistic mask of stupidity and ignorance in Afro-American literature.

To be able to see the possibilities that are offered through dialect usage, we should concentrate first on the variety of oral modes found in Mules and Men. We are on safe ground to say that there is thematic analogy between Hurston’s approach to Afro-American oral tradition and Walt Whitman’s famous ‘catalogue technique’.

The revivification and preservation of the tradition starts with a collection of folk tales, or as they are called among the Afro-Americans lies. In Afro-American culture stories and lies become interchangeable terms (Dillard,140).

The lies we have in Mules and Men can be reduced to various categories. A lot of them illustrate the improvisatory and imaginative ability Black people have in humanizing animals and amusing themselves with references to certain behavioural patterns of the animals. These animal tales are trickster tales. There are also trickster tales revolving around the relationship between ‘Ole Massa and John’ which underscore the point that the stereotype of the unintelligent Negro was falsely fabricated and perpetuated by the whites[2].

Another category of tales are the why tales which give a humorous account of various events, including the origin of mankind, the principles underlying the behaviour that distinguishes men from women, etc.

Other tales are the tall tales which embody a mode of discourse that Houston Baker calls ‘mythomania’ and which he defines as a compulsion to embroider the truth, to exaggerate or to tell lies (Baker,74). In tall tales there is contest in hyperbole which continues until somebody reaches a climax of exaggeration.

Another verbal practice, unique in the Afro-American oral tradition is signifying. Forms of signification are sounding and playing the dozens. Both forms are speech acts defined as ritual and artistic insult. Moreover, they are instances of verbal ingenuity rather than an attempt to perpetuate enmity or hostility. The listener, for instance, is not supposed to take offence when the relatives-primarily the mother-are abased, but participates in the verbal contest, while the signifier is projected to a cultural hero[3].

The expected response to a ritual insult is laughter which reminds us of Bakhtin who perceives laughter as ‘a vital factor in laying down that pre-requisite for fearlessness without which it would be impossible to approach the world realistically’[4]. Through laughter Black people managed to cope with painful experiences, such as slavery and exploitation, but also with transcendental concerns, such as the fear of divine justice. In the last case, oral art reaches its climax in the prayer where the Afro-American preacher becomes the paradigm of the oral artist as he resorts to his own linguistic code-that is dialect-to invoke religious images.

The above mentioned manifestations of orality, songs and sermons included, are marked by a common pattern which defines the mode of communication. This communication process, which is called call-and-response, keeps the channel of communication open and consolidates the relationships of the community. Moreover, the primacy of the spoken word is foregrounded since the continuous exchange of tales, or even insults, creates an atmosphere of intimacy among the performers. 

Mules and Men is the best reflection of Afro-American reality because life and imagination are not regulated by external factors. Using her anthropological knowledge, Hurston explores the variety of oral modes found in Afro-American oral tradition, placing special emphasis upon language. As Gates remarks in praising her anthropological contribution, in Hurston voice does not only connote point of view, but also ‘the linguistic presence of a literary tradition that exists for us as a written text’ (Gates,181). Therefore, the folktales with their vivid descriptions of settings, skilful delineation of characters, unusual imagery derived from nature and powerful dramatic effect, open new possibilities for literary explorations. Furthermore, dialect becomes a major trope for Hurston and as a significant discursive element it establishes her as a modernist narrator. The unreflective and spontaneous element of folk art through dialect usage is captured by Hurston in her masterpiece Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).

In Their Eyes Were Watching God Hurston probes into the relationships of the Eatonville community as a novelist. Through her ability to combine linguistic and literary structures, she consolidates her position as a modernist narrator by resorting to a very elaborate narrative strategy which is called free indirect discourse and which projects a divided narrative consciousness through constant switching of codes between standardised literary language and dialect. Accordingly, due to the emphasis on the spoken word, the novel establishes itself as what Gates calls a multi-vocal speakerly text.

While the novel is a romance where men function as a kind of symbolic manifestation in Janie’s -the protagonist’s- development, Hurston’s command of black orality enables her to construct a book that is not only shaped around the love theme, but also around Janie’s progress towards self-awareness and articulation of voice. This process towards articulation and externalisation of feeling is pertinent to the narrative form of the novel, manifested through a framing voice, that of the omniscient narrator, and also a very strong sense of the character being involved in the story-telling. Gates comments upon this as follows: 

As the protagonist approaches self-consciousness, [however], not only does the text use free indirect discourse to represent her [Janie’s] development, but the diction of the black character’s discourse comes to inform the diction of the voice of the narrative commentary such that, in several passages, it is extraordinarily difficult to distinguish the narrator’s voice from the protagonist’s (Gates,191). 

The narrator does not only use free indirect discourse to represent Janie’s development, but also to signify the waning of other characters’ power. Moreover, this method of discourse is not only displayed through the diction; sometimes it is also indicated typographically -as with the absence of quotation marks otherwise used to signal first-person narration- or grammatically through change of aspect or through shift from third to first person pronouns, from past to present tense, etc.

The novel is structured like a three-act play with each act built around Janie’s relationship with a particular man-Logan Killicks, Joe Starks and Vergible ‘Tea Cake’. In the opening passage the narrative voice dominates the text since the characters have not yet reached their articulateness: 

Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.

Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.

So the beginning of this was a woman and she had come back from burying the dead. (Their Eyes,9). 

From the very beginning, men and women are placed in different positions according to their relation with Time. Men’s dreams can be favoured or not favoured by time. All they have to do is watch patiently. Women have to live their dreams. Then the detached, abstract and removed narrative voice narrows down and places Janie in this network of relationships.

Since the narrative is related in retrospect, the reader is drawn backwards into it in order to comprehend the validity of the novel’s opening statement. We soon realise that Janie is not aware of that universal truth at the early stages of her life. Thus she does not respond to this call of the narrator’s statement. The knowledge that a woman’s dreams cannot be materialised with the passage of time comes with the failure of her first marriage. Janie is defeated emotionally, since she fails to fulfil her sensual expectations and, moreover, she is defeated verbally by Logan Killicks since she does not confront his authoritative voice but instead escapes with Joe Starks.

Although initially in the new relationship Janie returns to her old florid childhood dreams and thoughts, and is determined to find words to externalise them, we soon realise that she is subjected to Joe’s intentions to objectify her and deprive her of her voice. The omniscient narrator signals Joe’s intentions by a switch to dialect not foregrounded by quotation marks: 

Joe Starks was the name, yeah Joe Starks from in and through Georgy… He had always wanted to be a big voice, but de white folks had all de sayso where he come from and everywhere else, exceptin’ dis place dat colored folks was buildin’ theirselves. Dat was right too. De man dat built things oughta boss it (Their Eyes,47-48). 

The passage is the first instance where the narrator’s and a character’s voice interpenetrate so clearly, to the point where they become almost indistinguishable. Joe calls for a big voice and the narrator responds by allowing him to displace standard language from the narrative commentary.

As the novel proceeds, Janie’s weakness and her lack of voice are indicated through her exclusion from culturally specific rituals like lies, woofing, playing the dozens, etc. Instead her life time and space are marked by Joe’s store which becomes a metonymy for her physical, emotional and verbal suppression.

Ironically enough, an incident in this store marks the beginning of Janie’s acquisition of voice. Joe’s humiliating remark when Janie cannot cut the tobacco properly initiates her into female signification. It is the first time Janie responds forcefully to Joe’s negative calls by uttering: ‘Talkin’ ‘bout me lookin’ old! When you pull down yo’ britches, you look lak de change uh life’ (Their Eyes,123). Janie is ‘playin’ de dozens’ and she receives the right response from the community which is laughter. What distinguishes the incident from communal practices, though, is that rather than trying to establish community relationships, Janie states her autonomous and superior position, which comes with the ability to express the awareness of her womanhood.

Along with Janie’s authorisation comes Joe’s gradual loss of voice. When Joe was first introduced in the text, the narrator was absorbed in his diction by integrating his discourse. After the store incident and his illness which follows it, dialect features are limited to the minimum. The narrator chooses not to integrate his language in the narrative commentary in order to underscore Janie’s linguistic and emotional liberation which will lead us to her third partner, that is Tea Cake.

The appearance of Tea Cake in the life of Janie is a further opportunity to evince the novel’s orality. Janie’s desire to acquire her voice through participation in culture can be fully realised in the face of Tea Cake who seems to be the embodiment of the Afro-American cultural spirit, often appearing as a ‘blues’ man. Thus, on meeting him, Janie repeats a phrase that was previously included in the narrative commentary: ‘So in the beginnin’ new thoughts had to be thought and new words said… He [Tea Cake] done taught me de maiden language all over’ (Their Eyes,173). Janie has reached the state where what was previously reported through the narrator is now articulated in her own words. Janie’s search for new words to externalise her new thoughts is facilitated by Tea Cake who has taught her the ‘maiden language’ -a language that is connected with her own gender and not defined by male discourse- rather than impose upon her a symbolic order.

With Tea Cake’s acceptance of Janie as a fully-integrated member of the community, comes her development into a speaking subject. This is demonstrated through various passages which are narrated in the light of folklore. In the stories that are incorporated in the narrative the narrator still switches from standard language to folk idiom while Janie’s language constantly becomes more poetic. Janie’s conclusive linguistic emancipation, though, comes with Tea Cake’s death after the hurricane incident which reinforces the palpability of oral narrative composition. Because of Tea Cake’s death, Janie returns to Eatonville, tells her story to her friend Phoeby and establishes herself as a story-teller, something which has validated her life all along. Janie’s call for acceptance as an articulate porch-talker is recognised by Phoeby who responds positively as Janie finishes her story: ‘Ah done growed ten feet higher from jus’ listenin’ tuh you, Janie’ (Their Eyes,284). Phoeby is the eager audience that responds to Janie’s desire for community. Moreover, Janie and the narrator establish their own private community foregrounded through free indirect discourse.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God the narrator engages in free indirect discourse to comment upon power relations. Therefore, the narrative commentary integrates the dialectal language of strong voices, whereas it tries to preserve narration in standardised language in instances where control over another character is not significant, primarily with regard to Janie’s relation with Tea Cake. Moreover, the constant vacillation between the two most opposed linguistic codes can be seen as a manifestation of the narrator’s involvement in the Afro-American call-and-response pattern. Since the narrative is related in retrospect, the narrator responds to Janie’s call to be acknowledged as a story-teller.

One could argue that there is something more profound in Hurston’s approach rather than a mere caprice to appear as ‘uncanonical’ with respect to dominant black intellectuals such as Du Bois or Locke. Through the ‘spy-glass of Anthropology’ and her inclusion in the ‘inner circle’ of the community, Hurston discovered the real value of the material provided by her own people. Moreover, this experience allowed her to experiment with voices in Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Hurston’s ambition to bridge the oral and the literary, inherently different intellectual realms, and her belief in genuine ‘raw’ Negro material is enshrined in the following paragraph from her autobiography Dust Tracks On a Road (1942): 

My sense of humor will always stand in the way of my seeing myself, my family, my race or my nation as the whole intent of the Universe. When I see what we really are like, I know that God is too great an artist for we folks on my side of the creek to be all of His best works. Some of His finest touches are among us, without doubt, but some more of His masterpieces are among those folks who live over the creek (Dust Tracks,281).

Hurston included the call -and -response pattern in her attitude towards life, too. Therefore, she responded to the call she received from ‘over the creek’, the illiterate black people, although this sometimes implied friction with the people from her ‘side of the creek’[5], the representatives of the better-thinking Negro. With her loss of difference, Hurston explored and clarified the artistic quality inherent in oral forms, utilised alternative possibilities for narration offered through them and vindicated herself as a modernist narrator.

Maria Emmanouilidou

*Emmanouelidou, M. (1997), 'Voice and Narrative: Zora Neale Hurston's Materialisation of Afro-American Oral Tradition & Dialect as Literary References', in Georgoudaki Ekaterini and Pastourmatzi Domna (eds), Women, Creators of Culture (171-180) Thessaloniki: Hellenic Association of American Studies. 
^Hurston's nonfiction book entitled Barracoon (The Story of the Last "Black Cargo") was published posthumously in 2018.


NOTES

1. About the middle of the last century and the first decades of the twentieth century African culture was examined by two anthropological trends. The evolutionists, for example Morgan, Tylor or Frazer, expressed more or less an ethnocentric attitude. According to the evolutionists, Europe was considered the dominant civilised culture (and by extension America), while primitive cultures followed a parallel pattern of development, aiming at reaching the upper strata of cultural hierarchy. Thus, instead of concentrating on the productions of particular cultures, the evolutionists sought to identify and classify the various stages of transition from the primitive to the civilised culture. The counter-argument came from the side of the diffusionists. Franz Boas and his followers -including M.J.Herskovits and W. Bascom- insisted on the exploration of cultural development by means of independent studies, rather than maintain the belief in the existence of a single and hierarchical culture. For more information see Franz Boas, Anthropology and Modern Life (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press,1962), Ruth Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), E.B.Tylor, The Origins of Culture (New York, 1958).
2. With regard to the animal trickster tales some folklorists associate the Brer Rabbit tales with an African origin. After an extensive study of Hausa and Fulani folk tales in Nigeria, H.A.S. Johnson remarked in 1966 on the parallel plots of some Hausa stories with those found in at least thirteen of the Uncle Remus stories. Johnson also pointed out that Brer Rabbit undoubtedly descended from the hare of African folk tales. In the animal trickster tales one animal outsmarts the other, thus perpetuating an eternal enmity. The hierarchy established in the animal kingdom is based upon intellect rather than physical power. Human trickster tales were adopted to modify stereotypes. According to white people’s standards, ‘John’ or ‘Jack’ becomes a paradigm for the category ‘servile, docile black servant with the meanest intelligence’. In the stories it seems that John consciously projects this image so as to actually outsmart his master who takes for granted that his servant is foolish and easy to be taken advantage of. See Janheinz Jahn, Muntu: An Outline of the New African Culture (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1961) and Eileen Julien, African Novels and the Question of Orality (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992).
3. The aim of signifying is not always to humiliate the listener. Woofing is another form of signifying and can be defined as culturally specific wooing.
4. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, and edited by Michael Holquist (Austin,1981), p.23. Quoted in Eileen Julien, op.cit., p.128.
5. Representatives of the ‘better-thinking Negro’ believed that dialect usage perpetuated the minstrel tradition. Alain Locke, for instance, undervalued the literary validity of Their Eyes Were Watching God by calling it ‘folklore fiction at its best’, thus implying a limitation in the genre. As an answer to the condescending and patronising attitude of Locke, Hurston responded that ‘To his discomfort I must say that those lines came out of my own head’. In Robert E. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1980), p. 242.
   
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