Tea Cake and literary play.

Derrida illustrates the seeming contradiction of "destroying" a structure by writing against it, an act which leaves the aspiring contrapuntalist locked in a closed circle. Using the example of the rise of the discipline of ethnology, Derrida writes:

Consequently, whether he wants to or not -- and this does not depend on a decision on his part -- the ethnologist accepts into his discourse the premises of ethnocentrism at the very moment when he denounces them. (282)

Derrida's point seems like mere semantics, but the more you think about the implications, the freakier things get. What is lost when a concept is undermined by demonstrated evidence and critique -- whether that be psychoanalysis or young-Earth creationism? Are we replacing that earlier lie with the truth? What happens when that subsequent truth is undermined?

Derrida proposes a solution to this quandary, and it is as simple and complex as its name: play, which is

no longer turned toward the origin...and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name of man being the name of that being who...has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of play. (292)

Play -- a field without expectations for discovering a universal human truth. Play, which allows for a constant questioning and substitution of one idea for another, a guiltless review of old methods and tired theory. Play allows us to generate more ideas and spend more time developing them, rather than fearing that their existence is threatening ours.

To read Their Eyes Were Watching God is also to witness the sort of play that has made Zora Neale Hurston's novel the subject of so much debate. In the way that she depicts Janie's search for love and subsequent romance with Tea Cake, Hurston sets up readerly expectations about the common trope of women taken advantage of in love, and leaves us unsure whether she has confirmed or contradicted them.

Tea Cake, the younger lover with whom Janie steals away to the Everglades in the second half of the novel, is met with suspicion by many characters in the novel, including Janie herself. After first meeting the charming 25-year-old, Janie wonders

Then again he didn't look like he had too much. Maybe he was hanging around to get in with her and strip her of all that she had. (119)

After Janie has left her old town to live with Tea Cake, Hurston writes a scene which sets up the expectation that Tea Cake has finally fulfilled Janie's fears by abandoning her in a strange city and stealing the three hundred dollars she had brought with her. After waiting for Tea Cake all day and realizing that her money has been taken, Janie sits in her empty room all night, recalling the fate of another woman who had left town with a younger man, had

gone off laughing and sure. As sure as Janie had been. (140)

The reverie ends with the woman, Annie Tyler, returning destitute and broken, having "waited all her life for something, and it had killed her when it found her" (141).

Despite all this foreshadowing of misery, Tea Cake returns the next morning chiding Janie for having doubted him, but admitting that he had taken her money and ultimately spent it. Tea Cake's explanation is long, rambling, and fantastical, and yet Janie believes his story and throughout the rest of the novel Tea Cake is never revealed to be a con artist (though he is by no means innocent, having several more episodes of losing Janie's money through a complex sequence of events).

In this way, Tea Cake both speaks back to a trope and denies it; ultimately his character hovers somewhere in between con artist and romantic hero, abuser and selfless lover. This sort of complex characterization comes about exactly through a sort of literary play -- an acknowledgment of tropes, stereotypes, and a literary tradition (and its foils), but an effort to pursue complexity rather than reveal a "true" and fully explained nature.

(wc: 672)