Cheryl A. Wall, "Zora Neale Hurston's Essays: On Art and Such" (page 4 of
6)
In essays written during the 1930s and 1940s, especially
"Characteristics of Negro Expression," "Spirituals and Neo-Spirituals,"
and "Folklore and Music," Hurston elaborates her concepts of art and
beauty; she defines the art that was the object of exchange referenced
in "How It Feels." Her ideas are in dialogue with the debate about
definitions of Negro art initiated by DuBois, Fauset, Johnson, Locke,
and Langston Hughes, but she declines to engage that debate directly.
Under the rubric, "The Negro in Art: How Shall He Be Portrayed," DuBois
and Fauset had produced a symposium in the pages of The Crisis in
1926 that explored the duties of the black artist as well as the
criteria by which art by and about black people should be judged. James
Weldon Johnson set forth his own criteria as well as a literary history
in his two prefaces to The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922,
1931). In the essays he contributed to The New Negro (1925),
Locke concurred with Johnson that art played a key role in the struggle
for racial equality. In "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain"
(1926), Hughes had declared his independence to write whatever and
however he chose.
While Hurston's views come closest to Hughes's, her essays differ
from those of her peers in their premises, and more strikingly in their
presentation. Retrospectively, critics have used these pieces,
especially "Characteristics of Negro Expression," to provide a protocol
for reading Hurston's novels. But we have paid inadequate attention to
the formal qualities of the essays themselves. Although presented as
field notes, "Characteristics" is suggestive formally as well as
substantively. In the stories it recounts, "Characteristics" reflects
the drama, to which Hurston gives priority among the elements of African
American expression. The essay contains much evidence of the "will to
adorn." Indeed, its profusion of metaphor and simile exist not only in
the examples that are offered to support that observation, but
throughout the essay itself.
Drama and language are necessarily linked, as Hurston finds drama in
the very words that African Americans speak. They are, she asserts,
"action words," words that paint concrete pictures rather than convey
abstract ideas. By way of illustration, Hurston offers the first simile
in an essay that spills over with figures: "Language is like money," she
writes.[12] Black
Americans are barterers, whose words embody their
meaning. By contrast, white Americans' relationship to language is like
the relationship of paper money to the items they purchase. On another
level altogether, white literary artists use language like checks; their
words stand in a purely abstract relation to their meaning. As she
elaborates her argument, Hurston relies on the binary opposition of
primitive and civilized, which substantially undermines it validity for
readers today. However, as Lynda Hill notes, Hurston "displays
essentialist ideas of her time while illustrating the contradictions
implicit in racialist conceptions of
culture."[13] In addition to its
skillful deployment of the ironies that derive from those
contradictions, "Characteristics" defers objections to its argument by
the effectiveness of its address. Not only does it engage readers
through its deployment of metaphor, it addresses them directly ("Who has
not observed?") and indirectly ("Anyone watching Negro
dancers").[14] In
other words, the essay asks its readers to puzzle out its argument and
to confirm the validity of its claims.
Early on the essay rejects the "conventional standards" of art that
obscure black people's contributions. Once the blinders imposed by those
standards are removed, art is visible everywhere one looks: in the
improvised performances of daily life, in the language ("the American
Negro has done wonders to the English language"), in music, dance, and
storytelling.[15] The
folktales create the effect of polyphony; typically
in Hurston's essays, many voices speak. In addition, "Characteristics"
offers multiple examples and several lists, which allow spaces for the
reader to enter the text, to affirm his or her independent knowledge of
the metaphors, or to provide his or her own examples, of say, double
descriptives or verbal nouns. Many critics, including Henry Louis Gates
Jr., Karla Holloway, and Lynda Hill have remarked on the intellectual
boldness and the insightful brilliance of this essay. In my judgment
Hurston's ability to perceive beauty and complexity in the lives of
ordinary black folk remains unrivaled. But few critics have acknowledged
that the essay's form is as original as its argument. After readers have
added their own evidence to Hurston's more modest claims, they are
better inclined to accept her most challenging ones, for example, that
the Negro dancer compared to the white is the better artist, because
"his dancing is realistic suggestion, and that is about all a great
artist can do."[16]
Some readers are even inclined to accept the heresy
that "the beauty of the Old Testament does exceed that of a Negro
prayer."[17]
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