Hurston, Wright, McCullers, and Literary History
Hurston, Wright, McCullers, and
Literary History
Mentioning
Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright in the same sentence is an invitation to engage
heated disagreements, and these are based most frequently on one's passionate
ideological commitments. Some Hurston scholars delight in accusing Wright of being a misogynist, an unredeemed
sexist, and a dupe of Marxist thought for what he said or did not say in his
review of Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. They
minimize exploring Wright's early stances in judging literature. For them, it
is of little importance to assess Wright's framing of his thoughts through the
lens of "Blueprint for Negro Writing," the manifesto which guided his
critical creativity from 1937 to 1960.
Equally important, perhaps, is viewing his critical stances from the
angles of American literary politics to temper distortions. Accounting for
Wright's insights and blind spots is an obligation for Wright scholars and
literary historians who want to present a judicious portrait of Wright's mind
and the minds of African American writers who are forthcoming about their
political views.
It is
relatively clear that such iconic figures as Hurston, Wright, Booker T.
Washington and W. E. B. DuBois are "objects" emotion-raising
political debate about accommodationists and rebels. Literary matters are not
immune to the kinds of disputation to be
found in political discourses.. The
necessity of explaining over and over that Wright, Hurston, Washington and
DuBois are not enemies in an unbroken circle is a response to covert dynamics
in American publishing, to a contrived wedge used at project the semblance of
discord various times between selected
African American writers; the wedge creates a climate of control in marketing
works and literary reputations.. It is
far weightier than trash talk about the New Orleans Saints and the Philadelphia
Eagles, because deliberations about representative figures are more
life-invested than noisy arguments about sports. What is common, however, to both kinds of discourse is divisiveness.
The divisive
action is formulaic. Select two
figures --- Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.;
extract diametrically opposed quotations from each; magnify and distort the
differences and then claim that the difference is symbolic of some more or less
permanent flaw in the collective consciousness of a people. The gesture,
replete with ideological baggage, is one of bad sociology, bad psychology, and
bad history. If we incorporate the
gesture in our writing of literary history, we become complicit in undermining
the very collective memory we pretend we are building. We certainly do not have much control over the ultimate effects of critical language. For that reason we must be cautious in how we
use it in the manufacturing of values and history.
What is to
be explained insofar as making a narrative (a history) about African American
writing is concerned initially appears to be fairly simple. The task of placing
Zora Neale Hurston in conversation as it were with Richard Wright centers both
of them in the contexts of the Great Depression. Wright published “Between
Laughter and Tears,” a combined review of Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching
God and Waters Turpin’s These Low Grounds in the October 5, 1937
issue of New Masses. Wright’s evaluation of both novels was less-than
favorable. Apparently, Turpin did not
respond to Wright in print, but Hurston had a fine opportunity to repay Wright
in kind when she reviewed Uncle Tom’s Children in “Stories of Conflict.” Her comments on
Wright's stories in the April
2, 1938 issue of Saturday Review of Literature were less-than-favorable. Once we go beyond the
simple fact that the reviews were published, explanation becomes complicated.
Wright had
been critical of Hurston’s sentimentality, her exploration of the human heart
at the expense of ignoring any impact that de facto and de jure segregation,
systemic racism, might have had on the characters that peopled her novel. Hurston in turn was critical of Wright’s
preoccupation with race hatred, his exploitation of “the wish-fulfillment
theme,” and his apparent fidelity, as she informed her audience, to “the
picture of the South that the communists have been passing around of
late.” Hurston was not sympathetic to
the restrictions of thought implicit in Marxism American style. Wright had no patience with her “facile
sensuality” that could be a portal to the realm of minstrelsy. The difference that emerges is grounded in
opposing ideas about the function of literature or writing in life and the role
of the writer. On the surface one finds
a similar aesthetic difference in the
writing of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, but neither of those American
writers had to be anxious about the gaze and subsequent articulation of the racial
Other. Hurston and Wright, on the other
hand, had genuine reasons for concern about the effects of writing upon the
minds of racially embattled readers. As
we move forward in plotting a history in which call and response may be a
central ingredient, we engage motives and intentions and the wonderful
messiness we are seeking to tame.
Wright and
Hurston were very careful to deflect attention from personality to
writing. In our interpretation of the
reviews, it is crucial to note the judgments the two writers make about
technical skill.
“Miss Hurston can write,” Richard Wright admitted. He found, however, that her dialogue “manages
to catch the psychological movements of the Negro folk-mind in their simplicity
but that’s as far as it goes.” Hurston did not catch the “complex simplicity”
that Wright had promoted earlier in 1937 in “Blueprint for Negro Writing.” That
is to say, she succeeded in simplicity but missed “all the complexity, the
strangeness, the magic wonder of life that plays like a bright sheen over the
most sordid existence….”[Blueprint, section 6: Social Consciousness and
Responsibility] At second glance, it is
not Hurston’s romanticism or love of her people that Wright is criticizing. He condemns her failure to link folklore with “the
concepts that move and direct the forces of history today.” [section 6]
Hurston complimented Wright by
suggesting that “[s]ome of his sentences have the shocking-power of a
forty-four,” a feature that confirmed for her that Wright “knows his way around
among words.” Nevertheless, she found
his representation of dialect to be “a puzzling thing.” How did he arrive at it? “Certainly,” she proposed, “he does not write
by ear unless he is tone-deaf. But aside
from the broken speech of his characters, the book contains some beautiful
writing.” What was not beautiful was Wright’s male-dominated subject
matter. “This is a book about
hatreds. "Mr. Wright,” according to
Hurston, “serves notice by his title that he speaks of people in revolt, and
his stories are so grim that the Dismal Swamp
of race hatred must be where they live.
Not one act of understanding and sympathy comes to pass in the entire
work.” She noted later in the review that “Long Black Song” [Hurston did not
refer to the story by title] had “lavish killing” and perhaps enough of it “to
satisfy all male black readers.” It seems that Hurston's beliefs about the
function of art did not accommodate single-minded emphasis on the violence in
black Southern life publicized in such
black newspapers as the Chicago Defender.
What was excessive for Hurston was
normal for Wright.. Their Eyes Were
Watching God serves as a testament
that violence and hatred in fiction should be tempered by civility, love,
compassion. Uncle Tom's Children
offers counter-testimony that confronting lurid violence and hatred is a
writer's burden.
It is reasonable to assume that the
compliments are gestures of respect , applause for technical
accomplishment. The respect is balanced
by recognition of shortcomings regarding Hurston’s description of people’s mental habits (in
spaces that do not acknowledge fully the viciousness of the racial contract in
the United States) and Wright’s
description of how people sound, his inadequate depiction of variation in
dialects.
Hurston’s response came approximately six months after Wright’s call. It
is the recognition of balance or harmony
between the two reviews that is important in our analysis as we map
ideological African American spaces. .
It is a
vanished temporal space that the literary historian seeks to reconstruct. That
job depends on socially constructing what we imagine to have been reality
for Hurston and Wright and their readers, and the least controversial comment
we can make is that the two of them were contributors to a discourse that is
literary, social, and political. They
were writers writing about writing.
But to or for whom were Hurston and Wright
sending forth judgments? The messages in this instance were directed
toward the readers of New Masses and Saturday Review of Literature,
magazines that had different objectives. We do not have in-depth information about the actual composition of
those readerships, but we can speculate
that Wright addressed people who were sympathetic to proletarian and/or communist
views; Hurston addressed readers who thought of themselves as “cultured” and
perhaps not very much charmed by social facts
We should avoid using the
familiar liberal/conservative dichotomy, because it is misleading. It seems
better to speculate that Hurston and Wright intended to influence thinking
about what kind of African American (Negro in the 1930s) fiction ought to be
promoted. This “fact” precludes hasty
conclusions about the differences the writers were presenting. and about their motivations. It cautions us to try as best we can to make
our historical narrative subtle and nuanced (and we might even strive for
honesty) as we deal with what we think are the referents in and outside
their texts.
Comparing the reviews by Zora Neale Hurston and Richard
Wright does not give us a template for comparing their fiction and
non-fiction. It helps us, however, to
think more seriously about productive angles in literary history, about the
possibility that twentieth-century writers such as Hurston and Wright teach us
about the endless motions of the conservative and the subversive. The real work of making a narrative would
involve more ingredients ----a sense of how the reception of books was affected
by the latter stages of the Great
Depression , Wright’s immersion in the radical moment of 1937-38 and Hurston’s
creative transcendence of that moment, Wright’s conserving the radical
tradition of black nationalism and Hurston’s subverting the idea that a black
writer had to be radical in just one way, faithful to a single “ISM” in order
to be responsible. Wright and Hurston
teach us how literature is always trying to correct the partial blindness in
our grasp of our lives in a society.
Yes, literature can be a monument to individual and collective creativity. It is also an intervention that we allow to
entertain us or to instruct us, and intervenes best when we think of the
author’s work as writing not capital (L) literature.
Thus, pitting Hurston against Wright,
or pitting the whole tradition of male writing against the whole tradition of
female writing, helps us to achieve a strong sense of difference in values and
ideologies that are in need of contexts that are often not obvious. I think I am saying that our analysis is
partisan not disinterested and dispassionate.
The subjectivity involved in writing the literary history is not afraid
to articulate its presence, because no historian of anything is possessed of
omniscience.
In dealing with Wright's subjectivity,
we learn much about the expanse of his political" interests by inspecting
his August 5, 1940 review "Inner Landscape" in the New
Republic of Carson McCullers' The
Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Made
confident by the groundbreaking success of Native
Son, Wright could assess the achievement of McCullers' first novel by
displacing Marxist correctness with his own feelings about how race-marked
humanism might function in literature .in the modernist tradition of Gertrude
Stein, Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway.. Wright suggested that McCullers' depiction of
"loneliness, death, accident, insanity, fear, mob violence. and terror
" was uniquely individual. It
possessed o a "quality of despair….more natural and authentic that
that of Faulkner." Her writing
"makes Hemingway's terse prose seem warm and partisan by comparison." Wright chose his words carefully to highlight
his feelings about how the best of Southern white writing should give "the
violent colors of life…a sheen of weird tenderness." Wright upped the stake by proclaiming he did
not know what McCullers' novel was about.
Here is one key instance of the surprise that characterizes the working
of Wright's critical imagination. Wright
did know what McCullers' novel was about, and he demonstrates as much in his
economic tracing of the novel's plot, precise depiction of characters, and
evocation of "astonishing humanity."
Wright's pretense of ignorance is a
cover for his regard for the psychoanalytic profundity of McCullers' vision, as
he commends the novel for what three years earlier he claimed was missing in Their Eyes Were Watching God ----“all
the complexity, the strangeness, the magic wonder of life that plays like a
bright sheen over the most sordid existence." The word "sheen" is telling,
because Wright had strategically erased sheen from the text of Native Son. It can be argued that rather than
contradicting himself, Wright is reinforcing the idea that the value of
literature is embodied less in the saying than in "the angle of vision
from which life is seen and how "obscure, oblique and elusive
emotions" are accentuated. Wright's
enthusiastic appreciation of The Heart is
a Lonely Hunter is predicated on his consistent distrust of sentimentality
and efforts in his fiction to forge challenging angles of vision.
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