Their Eyes Were Watching God :: Zora Neale Hurston Literature Novels Essays

Their Eyes Were ceremonial occasion GodWhile reading Zora Neale Hurstons Their Eyes Were Watching God, I was struck with the similarity of the attitude towards life which she shared with the draw of the French surrealist group, Andr Breton. Like Breton, Hurstons central value was the marvelous, especially as it ordure be seen in the world of love. Breton defined the marvelous in billet to the wild. Le merveilleux, nul nest mieux parvenu le dfinir par opposition au fantastique qui tend, hlas, de plus en plus le supplanter auprs de nos contemporains. Cest que le fantastique est presque toujours de lordre de la fiction sans consquence, alors que le merveilleux luit lextrme pointe du mouvement vital et engage laffectivit swagger entire (Preface 16). The marvelous, there is no better way to define it than by opposition to the fantastic, which, alas, is increasingly tending to supplant it in the eyes of our contemporaries. The fantastic is almost always of the order of a fiction w ithout consequence, whereas the marvelous shines at that extreme point of the spirits ability of movement and entirely engages the emotions. Hurstons famous institute certainly achieves this definition of the marvelous, but could we therefore say that she was a surrealist? She doesnt cite the French surrealists in her works, and yet, I think we can see her modernity with the surrealist movement not only in terms of the times in which she lived, but also the concerns she dealt with, if we borrow yet another definition, this time from the American critic Kenneth Burke. For instance, if modern New York is much like decadent Rome, so we are contemporaneous with decadent Rome, or with some corresponding decadent urban center among the Mayas, etc. It is in this sense that situations are timeless, nonhistorical, contemporaneous (301302). Hurston, like the surrealists, shared an chase in mad love over other more conservative values, and she found her interests incarnated in the islan d of Haiti, and its cult of Erzulie, the goddess of divine love. Andr Breton visited the island of Haiti, and was extremely interested in the poets and writers he encountered there, praising the Haitian poet Magloire St. Aude, for example, as the only contemporary who could capable the intensity of the recently deceased Apollinaire, Nerval, and Stephane Mallarm (Magloire St. Aude 171). The Haitian goddess of love, Erzulie, could be, in turn, considered a baby of the beautiful goddess that Nadja represented in Bretons most important work, and Hurstons Their Eyes could be seen as one of the few books which can match the intensity of Nadja.