Their Eyes Were Watching God :: Zora Neale Hurston Literature Novels Essays

Their Eyes Were Watching GodWhile reading Zora Neale Hurstons Their Eyes Were Watching God, I was laid low(p) with the similarity of the attitude towards life which she shared with the leader of the French surrealist group, Andr Breton. Like Breton, Hurstons central value was the tall(a), especially as it can be seen in the piece of get it on. Breton defined the marvelous in contrast to the fantastic. Le merveilleux, nul nest mieux parvenu le dfinir par opposition au fantastique qui tend, hlas, de addition en plus le supplanter auprs de nos contemporains. Cest que le fantastique est presque toujours de lordre de la fiction sans consquence, alors que le merveilleux luit lextrme pointe du mouvement vital et engage laffectivit tout entire (Preface 16). The marvelous, there is no better appearance to define it than by opposition to the fantastic, which, alas, is increasingly tending to supplant it in the eyes of our contemporaries. The fantastic is almost always of the order of a fiction without consequence, whereas the marvelous shines at that extreme point of the spirits ability of movement and entirely engages the emotions. Hurstons famous work certainly achieves this definition of the marvelous, alone could we therefore say that she was a surrealist? She doesnt point the French surrealists in her works, and yet, I think we can see her contemporaneity with the surrealist movement not only in terms of the times in which she lived, but also the concerns she dealt with, if we borrow yet another definition, this time from the American critic Kenneth Burke. For instance, if modern New York is much like indulgent Rome, then we are contemporaneous with decadent Rome, or with some corresponding decadent city among the Mayas, etc. It is in this sense that situations are timeless, nonhistorical, contemporaneous (301302). Hurston, like the surrealists, shared an interest in mad love over other more materialistic values, and she found her interests incarnated in the island of Haiti, and its cult of Erzulie, the goddess of divine love. Andr Breton visited the island of Haiti, and was extremely interested in the poets and writers he encountered there, praising the Haitian poet Magloire St. Aude, for example, as the only contemporary who could equal the intensity of the recently deceased Apollinaire, Nerval, and Stephane Mallarm (Magloire St. Aude 171). The Haitian goddess of love, Erzulie, could be, in turn, considered a sister of the beautiful goddess that Nadja represented in Bretons most beta work, and Hurstons Their Eyes could be seen as one of the few books which can match the intensity of Nadja.