Ethical Representation and Zora Neale Hurston

Our readings this past week engaged with the question of critical responsibility -- whether directly, as in Stephen Best's call for an end to the morbid search for Black liberation in hindsight, or indirectly, as evoked by Zach's questions about erroneous historical representation in Elizabeth Maddock Dillon's recovery of an alternate history of the Early American novel.

There is no Internal Review Board in English criticism and theory: no official guidelines or methodologies (except for MLA citation and the struggle for publication in academia). So where do we draw the line? If the ethics of the University are constituted by a will to knowledge, a search for better understanding, then how do we know if our critical methodology serves that purpose? How do we know whether we're moving closer to the truth or drifting away?

This question bothers me, and I hope to attack it in some form over the rest of the quarter in progressively less naive and more nuanced ways. This week, I start by arguing that answering this question is a hopeless endeavor because we ought to abandon the pursuit of truth altogether. The terms of my conclusion come from the circular dialogue between Zora Neale Hurston's 1937 text Their Eyes Were Watching God and Stephen Best's 2012 article "On Failing to Make the Past Present". Both Hurston and Best write to distance themselves from the idea that a universal message (whether that be uplifting or consumed with melancholy) must characterize the Black writing of their age. However, in pursuing a contrapuntal, more historically "ethical" vision of Black history and politics, Hurston and Best are left open to criticism about their inability to leave a more productive methodology in its place. Ultimately, there is no solidarity, but also no alternative; both literature and its criticism point only to pluralism, the sum total of viewpoints in all their contradiction.

I've provided a brief summary in my introductory post below about the novel, but the important thing to note is that Hurston saw her work as standing apart from the "Racial Uplift" themes that she saw in the years preceding and during the Harlem Renaissance. The novel rejects easy categorization among urban melancholia, the progressive New Negro protagonist, and the narrative in which Blacks triumph over White supremacy. Hurston's novel takes place in rural central and southern Florida, far from Harlem and other contemporary narratives of life in the city. It is focalized through Janie Crawford, a biracial child of rape who aspires not to education, wealth, or to become a pillar of any community, but rather to sexual awakening and to love. Despite its setting in the southern United States barely a generation after slavery, there is no easy antagonism set up between blacks and whites. It is with a white family that Janie experiences childhood acceptance and care, it is a schoolyard of jealous black children that mistreats her. As an adult, it is black male friends that wrongfully accuse Janie of murder, and an all-white, all-female jury that acquits her.

Hurston attempted to resist a pigeonholing of both herself and the common conception of Black literature of the time by privileging different settings, protagonists, and themes. However, this privileging does not imply that the alternative is lost, for in the focus on rural living in the muck, there is still the metropolis reflected in the aspirations of characters like Jody Starks. Janie Crawford's "oldest human longing" -- that of "self revelation" could be seen as having its own sort of valor, its own sort of counternnarrative of assertion of selfhood, of resistance.