Cosmic Upset: Cultural Revolution and the Contradictions of Zora Neale Hurston

In the literary criticism of the last few decades, the predominant approach to the problem of literature's relationship to properly social contradictions has been what might be called an archaeological or "resolutionary" one. At work in certain strains of Althusserianism, but given precise and productive formulation in the work of Fredric Jameson, the space of the text is here posited as one of ideological management, wherein contradictions—in themselves inescapable for the cultural imagination, and unprocessable by dominant ideologies—are overcoded or layered, and subjected to so many fantasy solutions. As detailed chiefly in The Political Unconscious, the task of the critic is thus to unearth the disguised contradictions, and reveal the tense and unruly sociopolitical subtext beneath the relatively placid, or at least assuredly aestheticized, textual surface.¹ While there are many writers for whom this method makes a good deal of sense, the emphasis on unconscious ideological processes (as the text registers social content in complicated ways while the conscious mind of the writer might be focused entirely elsewhere) seems less useful when confronted by a writer for whom matters of social tension and historical crisis are rather more out in the open, as it were. This is not to suggest that any writer is free of ideology and its accompanying domain of fantasy. But what do we do with a writer—particularly one from the modernist period, when aesthetics and politics were verso and recto to one another—who is extremely self-conscious about her unique and unstable position as a cultural producer, and its attendant, and knotty, cultural politics? One who is acutely aware of many of the prevailing social cleavages of her era? One who attests to a strong yet nonetheless highly ramified and self-critical sense of group affiliation? One who is, in short, an intellectual, in all of the charged and conflicting senses of that term? One who's name, finally, happens to be Zora Neale Hurston.

Hurston's own contradictions are many, a source of frustration and sometimes puzzlement to her growing legion of admirers and commentators. Indeed, as one reflects upon the full range of her output as novelist and folklorist, what manifests itself is less a coherent or tightly-knit ideological texture than a discordant welter of conceptual positions, narrative outcomes, and figurative implications. While amidst this tangled thicket there are certainly what might be thought of as local solutions, moments when the pressures inherent in the deep structure of the writer's material find a deceptively seamless figuration and sense of closure (such as would I think be the case with any writer), such moments in Hurston fail to track or link up across her work, and thus do not really coalesce into any impression or facade of ideological unity. One might, to begin, simply invoke some of the more striking and insistent of these antithetical moments, a list that will no doubt be familiar to many readers. For instance, she seems to promote a notion of authentic racial identity while at the same time disparaging the very notion of race. Similarly, she invests heavily in the images and practices of an older folk community while often championing the forces of capitalist modernization. And who and what are these folk, when measured against her own often stridently individualist rhetoric? Her strong and subversive female characters, meanwhile, are sometimes undercut by ambivalent and troubling depictions of gender submissiveness. In short, Hurston can appear remarkably progressive and disturbingly reactionary all at once, and in ways where the valences are sometimes difficult to sort out. No doubt a catalogue such as the foregoing risks masking many subtleties, and runs together various sites and situations in her career. However, I think it does fairly represent the kinds of dilemmas that critics repeatedly encounter when they focus on her writings from the mid-1930s to the early 1940s, Hurston's most productive period as novelist and folklorist.

We are better positioned today to grapple with these kinds of questions. During the earlier, essentially canonizing phase of Hurston criticism, from the late seventies to late eighties, the...