Readers of Their Eyes Were Watching God notice Hurston’s “double-voiced” narrative style right away—the third-person narrator frames the story of Janie returning to Eatonville, alone, in her muddy overalls, which then shifts to Janie telling her story to her friend Pheoby Watson that evening, and then Janie’s spoken narrative to Pheoby is taken over by Hurston’s narrator (which represents more or less what Janie tells Pheoby—although the formal narrative includes all kinds of details she wouldn’t need to tell Pheoby, since Pheoby would have witnessed them herself or known about them, and reflects events Janie wasn't present for, and points of view other than hers). What we’re reading, chapter by chapter, is taken to be a novelistic expansion of the story Janie tells to her friend.
Hurston’s narrative voice is strikingly lyrical and poetic—she does a lot more than merely convey information. The novel opens with a proverbial voice that sets out a putative distinction between the ways men and women view the world: “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time” (1). “Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget,” the narrator continues. “The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly” (1). There’s a ceremonial formality to the novel’s opening—forget about whether or not these statements about how men and women view reality in entirely different and maybe incompatible ways is true. It sounds incontrovertible, coming from this narrator, largely because of the aphoristic, metaphorical form that these statements take. They sound like proverbial wisdom, as we imagine the quintessential “man” gazing forever at the ships on the horizon. The narrator’s language is figurative and metaphorical (“The sun was gone, but he had left his footprints in the sky” [1]; “[T]hey chewed up the back parts of their minds and swallowed with relish” [2]; “She left the porch pelting her back with unanswered questions” [4]). These examples are all drawn from the first chapter, but this lyrical and metaphor-laden language continues throughout the novel—it’s one of the most distinctive aspect of Hurston’s fictional style, and the thing many of her admirers most enjoy about her work. Her narrator seems to transform ordinary life—even modest, hardscrabble, impoverished life—into something magical and artistically rich. It might be easier and more efficient to merely state that the sun had set, and the twilight was fading; but poetry isn’t concerned with efficiency and simple information, and thus we get the memorable image of the sun leaving its footprints in the sky.
When the narrator quotes the fictional characters, though, the effect can be jarring, as we shift from the lofty, wise musicality of the third-person voice to the speech of the people: “‘What she doin coming back here in dem overhalls? Can’t she find no dress to put on?—Where dat blue satin dress she left here in?—Where all dat money her husband took and died and left her?’” (2). Hurston’s rural Floridian African Americans speak in a manner that is anthropologically accurate—she grew up in this area, indeed in the very town of Eatonville, and she studied the folk cultures of the African American South extensively as an anthropologist. She renders her characters’ speech with phonetic spellings (“dat,” “dem,” “overhalls”) to try and capture their accent and pronunciation, and she also reflects the nonstandard English grammar that follows its own internally consistent rules as a dialect (“Where all dat money”?). It takes some getting used to, for many readers—we need to start seeing the first-person pronoun as “Ah” instead of “I.” It helps to read these passages aloud; I can hear her characters quite clearly when I read, even if I sound silly trying to convey what I hear when I read such passages aloud in class. I also recommend the excellent audiobook, with the late Ruby Dee narrating—she moves easily between the narrator's voice and the characters' voices, and if you're having trouble with the syntax and speech rhythms of the dialogue, her rendering will make it clear for you. (Thanks to Elias, Madeleine, and Sam K. for passing on this recommendation.)
Janie’s story is presented as a frame narrative—she’s telling Pheoby her story—and at first, Hurston allows her to narrate for herself: “Ah ain’t never seen mah papa,” she begins. “And Ah didn’t know ’im if Ah did. Mah mama neither. She was gone from round dere long before Ah wuz big enough tuh know” (9). But the narrator soon intervenes, speaking “for” Janie as she narrates: “It was a spring afternoon in West Florida. Janie had spent most of the day under a blossoming pear tree in the back-yard. She had been spending every minute that she could steal from her chores under that tree for the last three days” (10). Now, some readers are probably relieved that the entire novel will not be narrated in Janie’s oral dialect; the narrator’s style is more “literate” in the sense that it is written language meant to be read on the page. Hurston’s narrator often sounds like she’s writing, not speaking. Janie’s language is an oral narrative, meant to be listened to. And throughout the novel, there will be this discrepancy between the authorial narrator’s voice, telling Janie’s story on her behalf in a “poetic” prose style, with (mostly) standard English grammar and a comfortably familiar “literary” style, and the speech of the characters within that narrative, who speak in dialect throughout. (Janie, narrating in dialect, presumably renders others’ speech in the same voice as her narration.)
What do we do with this perceived “distance” between the author and her characters? Is it the case that Hurston herself wants to assert some space between her identity as the author and the characters (and speech styles) she depicts? Does the narrator seem to be a part of this community, or to hover “above” it somewhere, speaking “for” them, like Max speaks for Bigger in court? Is Hurston representing these characters on their own terms, or is she “translating” them for her presumably northern, educated readership? And is something important lost in translation? Does the author condescend to the people she represents in her novel?
We’re touching on one of the enduring debates surrounding this novel (as we’ll see in the documentary Jump at the Sun), and it’s too big a question for me to even try to settle here on this modest blog. But whenever the topic of Hurston’s dialect comes up, I feel compelled to point out the remarkably poetic nature of folk speech as she depicts it. We might be tempted to ascribe all the novel’s lyricism to the authorial narrator, who writes so stirringly about the sun leaving footprints in the sky, and to describe the dialogue as “earthy” and “authentic,” or even “crude,” in contrast. But be careful not to overlook the wonderfully metaphorical speech of these characters. Hurston based her dialogue on careful recording and study of the ways black people actually spoke in the region she’s depicting, so there is a kind of quasi-scholarly “authenticity” to it, but like James Joyce depicting Irish English, Hurston depicts her everyday people as spontaneous poets—not writers of formal poetry, but makers of metaphor and innovative turns of phrase and figurative language in day-to-day situations. My reading is often halted not by confusion about syntax or phonetic spellings of familiar words but by the sheer strangeness and wonder of the way her characters speak. You have to pause and interpret, much as with a poem.
When Janie brushes off the gossips on the porch with the phrase, “If God don’t think no mo’ ’bout them than Ah do, they’s a lost ball in de high grass” (5), I have to stop and turn it around a couple of times in my mind. To hazard a paraphrase, she’s pretty much saying that she doesn’t think about these gossips and haters anyway, so she’s not going to worry about what they think of her. But by connecting her indifference to God’s, she neatly inflects it with a moral judgment, driven home by the familiar image of a “lost ball in de high grass.” The porch-talkers are out of sight and out of mind—to Janie and to God. And I can’t think of a more eloquent symbol for irrelevance than a lost ball that no one’s even searching for anymore. All of this is conveyed with a compact, humorous, and self-affirming one-liner that refutes all the jealousy and scorn without even dignifying it with a reply. It’s poetry. I wish I could talk this way off the top of my head sometimes. I want to remember the line and use it at the next opportunity.
Just as the authorial narrator takes a “proverbial” tone at the start of the novel, sometimes Hurston’s characters speak in phrases that could be proverbs—only I’ve never heard these particular proverbial phrases anywhere but in the fiction of Zora Neale Hurston. Like when Janie is explaining why she has to tell her story in such personal detail for Pheoby to really get it—to “give [her] de understandin’ to go ’long wid it”: “Unless you see de fur, a mink skin ain’t no different from a coon hide” (7). Doesn’t this sound like a phrase that could be a familiar old line, like “Don’t judge a book by its cover” or something? But what a nifty way to get at the idea that the individual story needs all its individual details to really communicate its meaning—Janie’s story might bear certain superficial structural resemblances to other stories you’ve heard, just as a raccoon skin would resemble a mink’s, shorn of fur (or is it that the fur will feel the same to the touch, if you can't see the difference?). The story, the details, the value is in the “fur”—and we need to hear out the full story to realize we’ve got a mink, so to speak. The paraphrase sounds clunky in a way that the original doesn’t—Janie’s version is much more eloquent and memorable than mine, even if it requires a few moments of contemplation to “get” it. This is how poetry works: it gives us pause, we turn the phrase and image around in our minds, and then (sometimes) a lightbulb goes off. There’s a compactness and grace—and humor—to Janie’s proverbial phrase that resists paraphrase, just like the best poetry. It says more than it says on the surface.
One of the simplest examples in the first few pages of the novel comes when Janie tells Pheoby that it’s fine with her if Pheoby tells everyone else in town what happened to Janie, even if Janie herself doesn’t intend to “bother wid tellin’ ’em nothin’” (6). As the ideal, sympathetic audience for her narrative—as a friend hearing a friend’s story—Pheoby would be a reliable conduit for Janie’s own point of view: “You can tell ’em what Ah say if you wants to. Dat’s just de same as me ’cause mah tongue is in mah friend’s mouf” (6). At first glance, the image might be a little suggestive (are they kissing?). But clearly “tongue” here is a metonym for speech, for narration, and the idea that a sympathetic listener/reader can convey a story faithfully because of that sympathy is captured beautifully in the image of a “borrowed tongue.” Pheoby will speak for Janie, and Janie has full faith that her friend will represent her accurately and sympathetically—much as Hurston’s narrator speaks for her within this novel.
Examples can be found on just about every page of the novel—and not just in Janie’s speech, either. Hurston’s dialogue is infused throughout with such striking bits of poetry. Maybe some—or even most—of these are a product of Hurston’s anthropological work, as she recorded folk tales and speech styles throughout the American South. And maybe some are phrases she remembers people using when she was a girl in Eatonville. But as you sort through the controversy surrounding Hurston’s depiction of poor, rural, mostly illiterate African American folk culture in the post-Reconstruction South, keep in mind the fact that she renders them as spontaneous poets.
And definitely be on the lookout for the next opportunity to refer to someone as “sitting on their royal diasticutis.”
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