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

Their Eyes Were Watching GodWhile meter reading Zora Neale Hurstons Their Eyes Were Watching God, I was struck with the similarity of the attitude towards life sentence which she shared with the leader of the French surrealist group, Andr Breton. Like Breton, Hurstons central value was the marvellous, especially as it sight be seen in the world of love. Breton defined the marvelous in contrast to the fantastic. Le merveilleux, nul nest mieux hitvenu le dfinir par opposition au fantastique qui tend, hlas, de plus en plus le supplanter auprs de nos contemporains. Cest que le fantastique est presque toujours de lordre de la manufacture sans consquence, alors que le merveilleux luit lextrme pointe du mouvement resilient et engage laffectivit tout entire (Preface 16). The marvelous, there is no better room 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 exclusively engages the emotions. Hurstons famous work certainly achieves this definition of the marvelous, but could we therefore distinguish that she was a surrealist? She doesnt mention the French surrealists in her works, and yet, I think we can see her contemporaneity with the surrealist movement not yet in price of the times in which she lived, but also the concerns she dealt with, if we borrow yet former(a) definition, this time from the American critic Kenneth Burke. For instance, if modern New York is much wish well decadent Rome, then we are contemporaneous with decadent Rome, or with some a alike(p)(p) 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 fou nd 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 heavy work, and Hurstons Their Eyes could be seen as one of the few books which can pertain the intensity of Nadja.