Framing the Folk: Zora Neale Hurston, John Millington Synge, and the Politics of Aesthetic Ethnography

FRAMING THE FOLK: ZORA NEALE HURSTON, JOHN MILLINGTON SYNGE, AND THE POLITICS OF AESTHETIC ETHNOGRAPHY Anthony R. Hale Contrary to what many young critics may recall, African American literature has always been subject to comparisons. Not so long ago, its merits and defects were solely determined by how well it mimicked Anglo-American forms. The obligatory "authenticating documentation" affixed to the beginning of virtually every slave narrative, from that of Frederick Douglass to Harriet Wilson, reminds us of the grave doubts held by dominant society about black writing's authority, authenticity, and authorship. In this cultural context, a comparison is akin to hostile assimilation. Similarly, Irish literature has served as a palimpsest upon which the British imagination has often made its mark. Historically, Irish settings and literature appear in British writing as a reductive foil —a woman to England's man, a wild, rural landscape to London's urban cityscape. In many ways, these critical comparisons form a literary cognate to oppressive systems that would deny entire peoples' autonomy or freedom. By setting in comparison my African American and Irish writers, I do not intend here merely to replicate the vices of a "timehonored tradition." Rather, I think that this particular kind of critical conversation, between writers representing two racialized groups, is one which is still rarely expressed and routinely neglected, yet, I believe, represents an extraordinary value to both cultural and literary studies. My two subjects converge from perhaps two very divergent margins of domination; it is thus remarkable to me that they would have so much to say to each other. Both of my writers come from what were later respectively called "renaissances"—Hurston, of course, surfaced in Harlem while Synge helped to inaugurated the Irish Literary Renaissance. The notion of literary autonomy sprung most forcefully from these two, I would contend , related periods. Even within our writers' respective works, we see this notion exercised. Cultural nationalism, while not new to either country, finds a literary venue in Hurston's collective black sensibility and a re-tooled dramatic performance in Synge's "peasant" plays. In addition to working towards a kind of aesthetic, and perhaps political, independence, however, these two writers target themes ofcontainment. Hurston and Synge alike use performance to destabilize dominant racial and cultural positions while also insinuating that the indeterminacy released by a performative rendering of race and culture must be opposed by a general fixity, or else risk hostile assimilation. Their works are therefore circumscribed by what I will call a series of"frames," structural limits established through performance. These frames, I argue, mark political and territorial boundaries as much as they trouble the frontiers and betray the many inevitable border crossings. Vol. 20 (1996): 50 THE COMPAnATIST One of the most conspicuous transgressions is of a disciplinary nature . In the title of my paper, I use the term "aesthetic ethnography" ironically to refer more to the fiction of my two writers than to their anthropological works. Among other boundaries, the disciplinary integrity between ethnography and fiction falls prey to both Hurston's and Synge's writings. There is a striving quality about The Playboy of the Western World or Their Eyes Were Watching God, for instance, that seeks to capture or document a culture that is quickly "vanishing." These two fictional works essentially represent a maverick, consciously nostalgic, tendency to resist the overwhelming tide of modernization. Apparently turning their backs on the métropole, Hurston and Synge turn to the folk, which both call "the primitive." Synge would famously shun the Parisian intelligentsia, upon Yeats's famous urging, and "go to the Aran Islands. Live there as if you were one of the people themselves; express a life that has never found expression" (Yeats 63). Likewise, Hurston chose to forsake the promise ofW.E.B. DuBois's Talented Tenth philosophy and, encouraged by anthropologist Franz Boas, returned to the South so as to preserve her own rural black heritage. While her more apparently ethnographic Mules and Men aims to capture the folklore around her all-black hometown of Eatonville, Florida, her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God actually puts the speech-act into creative circulation. This novel is, after all, primarily concerned with...