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Holy Heat: Rituals of the Spirit in Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God"Author(s): Karla F. C. HollowaySource: Religion & Literature , Vol. 23, No. 3, Reconstructing the Word: Spirituality inWomen's Writing (Autumn, 1991), pp. 127-141

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HOLY HEAT: RITUALS OF THE SPIRIT

IN ZORA NEALE HURSTON'S

THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD

Karla F.C. Holloway

I know that nothing is destructible.

Things merely change forms.

- Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road

In 1987, writing of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching

God, I argued for an interpretation of textual voice as a character that

"pushes itself to control the activity and the thought in the novel"

{Character, ch. 4). My thesis, that "the narrative voice of the last part

of the novel [is] enriched by the spiritual concepts gained from the

dialect," considered the rhetorical activity in this "speakerly text" as a

synthesizer of the implicit knowledge within the narrative voice and

the poetic self-realization that Janie Crawford's character eventually

achieves (70). l In this essay, I want to carry that argument over to

what I now see as its logical extension. This parallel interpretation sug-

gests that Janie's character also experiences a transformational shift

that results in a dramatic change in her own form. Jamie achieves the

metaphorical essence of spirit - a metaphysical transubstantiation

accomplished by the conflation of imagery and metaphor within the

story, the activity of her own re-telling, and the "holy heat" that the

story she tells consumes and generates. The result of her transforma-

tion is locus - a place for her own spiritual life.

In popular and academic cultures, Their Eyes Were Watching God has

achieved what the record industry would call "cross-over" success. Not

only is it available in drug stores; it is read on university campuses

across disciplines and discussed in suburban and urban book clubs

R&L 23.3 (Autumn 1991)

1 27



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128 Religion Literature

across economic and class boundaries. In women's prisons it is re-

quested reading and in high school English classes it is assigned

reading. Most significantly, its author, Zora Neale Hurston, is hailed

as the foremother of contemporary black women's literature. I believe

we can partially understand the revivalist fervor that surrounds this

story and its author through the eschatological vision within the novel.

This vision imagistically portrays the ascension of spirit and its taking

up residence in a figurative upper room. The popular appeal of this

novel may be in some measure a response to its figurative construc-

tion of a spiritual place that is both accessible and near. Within this

perspective, the literary ancestry that Hurston has come to embody

owes some of its generation to her authorship of this spiritual potential.

Ah wanted to preach a great sermon about colored women sittin on high, but

they wasn't no pulpit for me. . . . The next thing Ah knowed you was in de

world. ... Ah said Ah'd save de text for you.

- Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

My mother always told this story with a most curious expression on her face.

She . . . raised her head higher . . . and there was a look of righteousness, a

kind of holy heat coming from her eyes.

- Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mother's Gardens

Much of the popular discussion of Their Eyes centers itself on Janie's

shift from a girl whose evanescent desires are somehow associated

with horizons to a woman whose experiences have taken her "to the

horizon and back" (264). This story is certainly one of the most

engaging dimensions of this text, and Hurston has woven a shimmer-

ing metaphorical imagery into its telling. However, Janie's own "text,"

the one saved for her by her grandmother, reveals an even more

intricate pattern in this novel. Its weave ritualizes elements from

Hurston's academic training, her religious convictions, and her skill

as a storyteller. The final, numinous image of Janie ascending the

stairs, carrying a light that is "like a spark of sun-stuff," and entering

the upper rooms of her own spirit is the vision that inscribes the inner

weave of this text (285). Its effectiveness depends on acknowledging

a metaphorical relationship between two essential figures in this text:

the sun and the horizon, and the reflected image of Janie (in a photo-

graph or mirror). These two figures exchange their refractive/reflective

natures with Janie until she embodies both of them in a self-reflexive

gesture that acknowledges her reconfigured nature. The final stage of



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KARLA FC HOLLOWAY 129

her transformation is signalled during her conversation with Phoeby

when Janie's pregnant spirit is ready for its separation. She is "full of

that oldest human longing- self revelation" (18). It is complete when

Janie acknowledges that she has come full circle; she has "been tuh

de horizon and back" (284). Between these two moments lies her story.

Its telling is the labor of her spiritual enablement and the transforma-

tional moment is accomplished by its evocation.

Hurston's figurative use of the photograph and mirror recalls Kim-

berly Benston's recent discussion of a "topos of facing" in African

American literature. Benston postulates that conjunction of exegesis

and inscription occurs when the "face catch[es] its reflection in one ver-

sion of the other (be it racial, familial, or even psychical)" (99). What

Benston claims as a "specular event" is, in this novel, reflected as a

metaphorical testament to the transformative powers of spirituality.

Janie's first image of herself is in a photograph - figuratively a dark-

ened mirror. But she doesn't recognize herself in this picture as the

"real dark little girl with long hair" (21). At a later point in Janie's

story, Tea Cake encourages her to search for her "selP in the mirror-

"Ah betcha you don't never go tuh de lookin' glass and enjoy yo' eyes

yo' self" (157). Implicit in Tea Cake's speculation is that she would find

her spirit by looking in her eyes. The conventional metaphor of the

eyes as the soul's mirror is the subtext of Tea Cake's suggestion.

Although Janie's eyes would reflect her spirit back to her, until this

point in her life, Janie, who "never gazes at 'em in de lookin' glass"

(157), has eschewed contact with her spiritual Other. The physical

journeys of that photographic figure (the "dark little girl") parallel the

references to Janie's increasingly revealing glimpses in the mirror.

Janie's shifts in residence not only indicate her movement from one

version of selfhood to another, but also they signal a radical configura-

tion of her spiritual self.

Loving Tea Cake, the man who encourages her to look into her

soul, enables her spiritual liberation. He made her feel a "^(/"-crushing

love" that released her spirit - "her soul crawled out from its hiding

place" (192; emphasis added). This is an especially poignant accomplish-

ment for Janie and it is worthy of the high drama of spiritual conver-

sion. Consider the stark contrast it forms against her grandmother's

experience. For Nanny Killicks, the barriers of racism, sexism, and

classism have been so effective that, regardless of her effort to claim

a place (a pulpit) and her desire for a voice (the "great sermon"),

Nanny is forced to live with the soul-crushing conclusion that "de

nigger woman is de mule of de world" (29). Nanny's inability to



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transcend this burden has made the power of her voice ineffective in

her own life and inaccessible to Janie whose dream of "far horizons"

is opposed to Nanny's limited vision.

One means of understanding Janie's transformation may be through

a comparison of it to Luce Irigaray's notion of nearness - aa ceaseless

exchange of herself with the [OJther" {This Sex 31). Irigaray prefaces

her explication of nearness with an important claim. Noting that near-

ness is a familiar territory for "the feminine," Irigaray asserts that

"ownership and property are doubtless quite foreign to [her]" (31).

Janie's experience validates this philosophical position. At the moment

that her friend Phoeby is both physically and spiritually close enough

to her to be in the realm that Irigaray would call "near," Janie has left

two husbands who would claim her as their property and make her

complicit in their acquisition of land and power.

In This Sex, Irigaray explains that "[E] scape from their proletarian-

ization on the exchange market" happens only if women can learn

to keep themselves apart from men long enough to learn to defend their desire,

especially through speech, to discover the love of other women while sheltered

from men's imperious choices that put them in the position of rival com-

modities. . . . (33; emphasis added)

In her first two marriages, Janie was her husband's commodity. She

was a marketable item both on Logan's farm as a human mule and

in Jody's town as an emblem of his status and power. However, when

she distances herself from the economic exchange implicit in these rela-

tionships, Janie enables the development of her own voice and subse-

quently her spiritual empowerment. It is especially important to under-

stand the significance of Phoeby's proximity to Janie at the moment

when her spirituality is fully formed.

Janie's willingness to share her voice with Phoeby, whom she

instructs to tell her story to the absent but watchful community,

is literally a "defense (an explication) of [her] desire through speech."

Janie's sharing of voice with her "near"est friend reifies the "ceaseless

exchange" of self and other that Irigaray identifies. In this way,

Phoeby's closeness to Janie allows Irigaray's figure of "two lips" which

"keep woman in touch with herself, but without any possibility of dis-

tinguishing what is touching from what is touched" a compelling enact-

ment. This vision of Irigaray's idea of nearness seems especially clear

as Janie acknowledges Phoeby's evocative significance to her. Janie

allows Phoeby to tell her story, because "mah tongue is in mah friend's

m ouP (17).



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Irigaray specifies a space for touch - a point of metonymic contact.

Hurston's Janie specifies a space for voice - a metaphorical exchange.

Janie's exchange reaches its metaphorical peak at the moment she tells

her story to Phoeby. At that moment, the "ceaseless exchange of self

and other" that has sustained (and nurtured) the energy of this novel's

story, inscribes Irigaray's notion that "by speaking as a woman, one

may attempt to provide a place for the 'other' as feminine" {This Sex

135). Janie's tongue, figuratively in her friend's mouth, provides this

space and this voice - an exchange between metaphor and metonomy,

self and other.

The engaging dimension of this exchange of body and language lies

within its implicit intimacy and its creativity. It is generative in its

contact - the place of spiritual enactment extends from the self-reflexive

gesture. In addition, a shift of essence occurs that answers Irigaray's

question in This Sex: "whether the feminine has an unconscious or

whether it is the unconscious" (73). Reflexivity enacts Irigaray's prin-

ciple of nearness especially as she writes of the "pleasure from what

is so near that she cannot have it, nor have herself" (31). The reflected un-

conscious acknowledges nearness. In the final essay of This Sex, "When

Our Lips Speak Together," Irigaray claims that a "luminous mutual-

ity" resides within the space of the undivided body, the "body shared."

In doing so, she makes it clear that far from being an issue of having

or being (possession or essence), nearness is situation - an (ideological)

place of the spirit.

II

The radiance of the eyes . . . reflects ashe, the brightness of the spirit. Accord-

ing to the Yoruba: "When a person comes under the influence of a spirit, his

ordinary eyes swell to accommodate the inner eyes, the eyes of the god."

- Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit

When Janie's shape shifts from self to spirit - a heterological enact-

ment of a "specular event" - she is ready for a final stage of her trans-

formation, a metaphorical embodiment of the sun's "holy heat." The

association and the ritualistic relationship between the images of the

sun, the horizon, and the reflected figure of Janie's spirit echo and

announce her transformation.

A syntactic nod to the opening lines of Genesis ("In the beginning")

foreshadows the mythic and religious nature of Janie's homecoming

and encourages the transformational potential of the story: "So the

beginning of this was a woman . . ." (9). Hurston is careful to place



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Janie's return in relation to the sun's activity: "it was sundown. The

sun was gone, but he had left his footprints in the sky." It seems, at

first, that the gossip her return generates may be the "holy heat" that

replaces the sun's presence. Hurston writes that "they made burning

statements with questions"; but the community engages in merely a

ritual performance - a symbolic activity of language designed to for-

malize the narrative that will follow (10).2

Hurston's familiarity with ritual as cultural performance came from

her training under Franz Boas. His explication of the ritualistic prac-

tices of folklore and myth was standard in cultural anthropology dur-

ing her studies of this field at Barnard. In 1898, Boas had written that

the fragments of mythological worlds were constantly revived as the

grist of new worlds. The folkloric strategy that Boas described is echoed

in the fictive strategy within Their Eyes. For example, not only do the

porch gossipers introduce the cultural ritual of call and response into

Janie's text, but the social drama they enact uses the mediative poten-

tial of ritual as a palliative.3 In a sense, the ceremonial call of their

gossip - "What she doin' coming back here in dem overhalls? . . .

Where all dat money? . . . What dat ole forty year ole 'oman doin' "?

. . . Where she left dat young lad of a boy? . . . Where he left her?"

prepares the way for the response of Janie's text - the story that she tells

to Phoeby (10). Call and response combine with other significant

cultural icons in this novel and reveal Hurston's textual strategy as a

form of bricolage. She mythologizes the essential (and essentially frag-

mented) components of her story by piecing these gathered fragments

together into a signifying structure. The strategic association of these

signs - a resonant cultural figure (the grandmother as ancestor); a

symbolic transfiguration (Janie and the sun); and the poetic language

within the narrative voice - assures the mythic transposition of this

narrative.

Ritual is also a dimension of what Frangoise Lionnet identifies as

Hurston's Spinozist ethic - a philosophy that encourages an organic

association between body, mind, existence, and nature.4 Each of these

is directly involved in Janie's story. Not only is she consistently self-

reflective, but her thoughtfulness and introspection encourage her to

change the way she is living, the places she lives in, and the men she

lives with: "So new thoughts had to be thought and new words said.

She didn't want to live like that" (125). Further, the narrative reflec-

tion of her thinking is characteristically mediated through the natural

imagery of the sun: "Janie pulled back a long time because [Jody] did

not represent sun-up . . . but he spoke for far horizon" (50). The con-



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sequence of this metaphorical embodiment of the textual events is that

the internal dialogic strategy of the text constitutes its own ritual of

reflection and enactment.

We can see additional evidence of the ritualistic strategies in this

novel in Hurston's introduction of Janie's story-telling. Her plea to

Phoeby is framed like a mythic evocation to a muse: "we been kissin-

friends for twenty years, so Ah depend on you for a good thought.

And Ah'm talking to you from dat standpoint" (19).5 Because Janie

is experiencing the last phases of her own human nature as she begins

her story-telling, Phoeby (whose name means "like the moon") is well-

positioned to reflect the secondary effects of Janie's transformational

aura

In Flash of the Spirit, Robert Thompson explains the gift of ashe-

the radiance of spiritual possession - as a "privilege of righteous living

[and] of recognizing significant communications . . ." (18-19). 6 Phoeby

is near enough to Janie's transformation and empathetic enough to the

significance of her story to be gifted with the reflected "brightness" of

her friend's spirituality. Under her influence, and as if in testimony

to Janie's accomplishment, Phoeby receives the benediction of ashe.

Phoeby is a significant participant in this exchange because she is

near enough to Janie to consume the physical life that her friend relin-

quishes. Janie says: "Ah'm satisfied tuh be heah. Ah done been tuh

de horizon and back and now Ah kin set heah in mah house and live

by comparisons" (284). As if in recognition of the status that Janie has

assumed, Phoeby cries out "Lawd " and asserts that she has gained

energy and body from Janie's story: "Ah done growed ten feet higher

from jus listenin' tuh you, Janie. Ah ain't satisfied wid mahself no mo'.

Ah means tuh make Sam take me fishin' wid him ..." (284). 7

Kimberly Benston describes moments of "facing" in the African

American text as a "topos of re-vision" in which the "subjects can

create culture by engaging ideology in awareness of the positions from

which they speak" (107). According to Benston, the "reciprocal com-

prehension" that extends from this position is a "moment of pure

interchange" that may culminate with "an awareness that absolute self-

integrity is, in fact, self-loss - an emptying of meaning of love' con-

ferred by the reciprocal gaze of an actual . . . other" (105).

It may be useful to examine the moment of exchange between

Phoeby and Janie in light of Benston's notion of "reciprocal compre-

hension." If we do so, a critical imbalance comes to light. The "facing"

that Phoeby and Janie experience is not quite a moment of reciprocity.

Phoeby remains at a safe and non-challenging distance from Janie's



9/16


transfiguration. While she participates as an observer, and does

extract some benefit from her vicarious posture, Phoeby's gain is

finally, merely residual. Her bold declaration to try to experience some

of what Janie has experienced is a literal declaration of physical

intent, but it eschews the figurative commitment of spirit. On the

other hand, Janie's commitment to her spirit has earned her a figural

transformation. We know the moment can only be completed as she

fulfills that "longing" need for self-revelation, so, although Phoeby's

presence is critical to Janie, it does not assure Phoeby's equivalent

experience.

The Phoeby/Janie exchange is a literal representation of the image

of the mirror/photograph. The figurative becomes possible only be-

cause of Janie's willingness to be introspective rather than, like Phoeby,

imitative. Phoeby is, however, not totally abandoned. The last phases

of Janie's transformation still allow her best friend to be the recipient

of ashe. Phoebe reflects the brightness of Janie's spirit - the shimmering

legacy of a numinous transformation - even though, like the moon,

she has no light of her own.

Because Janie had "decided that her conscious life had commenced

at Nanny's gate," Nanny's presence and words are critical to her story.

She is the ancestral presence in this work, there to provide "a certain

kind of wisdom" and to leave the labor from her words to her grand-

daughter.8 Janie inherits the task of forging "the text" of the sermon

that her grandmother was unable to deliver because she was poor,

black, female, and subject to abuse from each of these socio-political

inscriptors. Janie's ability to engage the task that overwhelmed Nanny

comes because she casts aside the negative weight of her grandmother's

experiences.

Janie disabuses herself of her grandmother's economic ethic, and

allows her own image of herself to empower her transformation. She

goes to the glass and "takes a good look at her mouth [her voice], her

eyes [her soul], and her hair [her body]." The acknowledgment of the

reflected image allows Janie to effect an awakening of her physical

and spiritual selves.9 With this revelation, the seductive dialogues

represented in Irigaray's claim of a "luminous mutuality" within

the undivided body and the "nearness" of the female Other fold

into each other, herald the comfortable co-existence of spirituality

and sexuality, and celebrate the ecstasy generated within this intimate

relationship.



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III

And Isie, when Ahm dyin' don't you let 'em ... be covering up de lookin' glass.

. . . [T]urn tuh de Twenty-Sixth Chapter of de Acts fuh me.

- Hurston, Jonah's Gourd Vine

But rise, and stand upon thy feet: for I have appeared unto thee for this pur-

pose, to make thee a minister and a witness both of these things which thou

has seen, and of those things in which I will appear unto thee.

-Acts 26.16

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in

part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

- 1 Corinthians 13.12

Janie's transformation from body to spirit is not so far a leap into

the metaphysical as it may initially seem. When the scene of Hurston's

mother's death is fictively engaged in Jonah's Gourd Vine, her mother's

warning not to cover the mirror becomes an essential part of the

scene.10 The other directive in this scene from Jonah is Lucy's instruc-

tion to her daughter Isie to turn to the Biblical text and the passage

that implies her two roles. She will be "both" a minister, "preaching

a great sermon," and a "witness" of the spirit ("those things in which

I will appear unto thee").11 The unveiled mirror would have engaged

this duality - the image and the self would confront each other. This

enactment of Benston's "reciprocal comprehension" would allow Isie

the pure exchange Benston predicts. In this instance, however, "self-

loss" would mean the gain of a spiritual Other. The witness and the

minister of the Biblical text would be both seer and visionary - "those

things which thou hast seen . . . and those things in which I will

appear." In Jonah as well as in her autobiography (where Hurston's

mother's death scene imagistically replicates the moment recorded in

Jonah), the mother's instruction to her daughter is unfulfilled. Instead,

the neighbors and her father intervene, preventing the child Zora or

the character Isie from fulfilling their mothers' death-bed wish.

Therefore, in Their Eyes, a mythic and more resonant text than

Jonah's Gourd Vine, when Hurston allows Janie several glimpses in a

mirror, this moment has critical significance. It assures Janie's ability

to effect an exchange between her body and soul (mind/body; self/

spirit). The result is that Nanny's (nearly) death-bed prayer that life

"be different" with Janie is actually fulfilled. Even though Nanny can-

not use her voice to effect change in her own life, and although Janie

has learned not to allow her grandmother's meager vision of safety and

security to circumscribe her own, Nanny still has access to spiritual



11/16


power because she has held onto the power of prayer. Prayer trans-

forms her voice into an enabling spiritual energy that offers her grand-

daughter an alternative to the narrow lifestyle she has experienced.

Therefore, it is important to understand the powerful phrasing of

Nanny's prayer. She pleads for Janie's psyche - that Janie's "mind will

change" (43). Her supplication is almost immediately followed by the

moment in the story when Janie suddenly recognizes that she "knew

things that nobody had ever told her . . . the words of the trees and

the wind . . . that God tore down the old world every evening and

built a new one by sun-up [and that] it was wonderful to see it take

form with the sun" (44).

The development of this knowledge is the direct legacy of her

ancestor's prayer for spiritual change, and significantly, it is initially

associated with the metaphor of the sun as a shapemaker- the world

takes its form "with the sun." Following this epiphanic moment, Janie

learns to anticipate the way that it will come and accompany her own

dreams and desires. She "pulled back a long time" from a relationship

with Joe Starks because "he did not represent sun-up." She was right;

the "coldness" that eventually takes hold of her as she comes to recog-

nize the ways that Jody's assertive demeanor is suffocating indicates

the loss of her metaphorical heat. Even though "every morning the

world flung itself over and exposed the town to the sun," it was merely

"another day" for Janie because she was not exposed to its energizing

powers (81). Instead, she was kept literally cloistered in the back rooms

of the store and figuratively forced to live in the shadows of Jody's big

presence. It is not until she learns to separate her "inside and outside"

selves that she is able to begin the spiritual work that her grandmother

had bequeathed her (112).

At this point in the novel, there is a radical transformation in Janie's

powers. She acquires what might best be described as a shamanistic

essence as she learns to alter both her being and her consciousness.

The "shadow" of herself remains bound to the prison-house of Jody's

language while "she herselP reclines under one of those shady trees

that, Hurston has noted before, promised her "dawn."

[S]he sat and watched the shadow of herself going about tending store and

prostrating itself before Jody, while all the time she herself sat under a shady

tree . . . making summertime out of lonesomeness. . . . This was the first time

it happened, but after a while it got so common she ceased to be surprised.

It was like a drug. . . . [I]t reconciled her to things. (119)

This separation of the objective and subjective selves is a classic

Hurston fictive strategy. In addition, it echoes Hurston's own experi-



12/16


ence with transformation as she practiced vodun, and it recalls the

vivid descriptions of the religious ecstasy and emotional fire in her

father's congregation.12 Janie's experience combines Hurston's ex-

pressed need to reconcile the religious ecstasy she witnessed with

her own search for form:

Somebody else may have my rapturous glance at the archangels. The spring-

ing of the yellow line of morning out of the misty deep of dawn is glory enough

for me. I know that nothing is destructible; things merely change forms. (Dust

Tracks 279)

It is not, therefore, Janie's effort to watch god that enables her

transformation from body to spirit; it is her measured progress from

the dusty roads toward the horizon. Once her soulful power is acknowl-

edged, she can objectively think about herself- a moment of subjec-

tive recovery that Hurston accompanies with the figurative presence

of another form of the mirror. The first, the photograph that merely

stared back at her, enacted the scriptural reference, "now we see as

through a glass darkly":

So when we looked at de picture and everybody got pointed out there wasn't

nobody left except a real dark little girl with long hair standing by Eleanor.

. . . Ah couldn't recognize dat dark child as me. (21)

It was not until Jody died that she recalls the "girl selP she had told

to "wait for her in the looking glass" and sees herself "face to face": "she

starched and ironed her face, forming it into just what people wanted

to see" (134, 135). However, because she has learned and practiced

interiority, this time she keeps her revelation to herself. (Her earlier

look had resulted in her exclamation "Aw, aw Ah'm colored " - and

had caused her gathered (white) friends and their parents to "laugh

real hard" [21].) At this juncture, because she is more mature and

closer to realizing her shamanistic potential, she calls upon her ability

to assume the veil and to separate her inside and outside selves. With

this accomplishment, Janie is able to use her newly acquired ability

to its fullest. Her spirit, energized and enabled by the nurturing

warmth of the sun, takes flight. Janie sends "her face to Joe's funeral,

and herself . . . rollicking with the springtime across the world" (137;

emphasis added).

In this configuration of the novel, Tea Cake, like others who have

loved Janie (her grandmother and Phoeby), is an enabler of her trans-

formation. As a "son of Evening Sun" it is almost as if he is sent to

her as a guide, to assure that her ability to transform reaches its

highest potential. He encourages her metaphorical glimpse into her



13/16


soul: "go tuh de lookin' glass and enjoy yo' eyes." He alone is able to

recognize the separation of self and spirit that she can achieve ("Yo'

face jus' left here and went off somewhere else" [158]). Most impor-

tantly, it is their relationship that allows her to begin the final stages

of her quest. She must "go there to know there," and, caught as she

is in Jody's soul-crushing town, there remains a significant distance

between her spiritual empowerment and the places of her spiritual

enactment.

With Tea Cake, however, her spirit soars. During their residency

in south Florida (a place nearer the equatorial sun than any other she

has lived in), the fury of a hurricane propels her toward that final

moment of exchange: "Tea Cake, the son of Evening sun, had to die

for loving her" (264). She loses him as her guide, but gains full control

of her liberated spirit. The syntactic structure of the text subtly moves

towards an ambiguity that allows a certain integration of her own

movements and the activity of the sun:

The sun was almost down and Janie had seen the sun rise on her troubled love

and then she had shot Tea Cake. . . . Nothing to do with the little that was

left of the day but to visit the kind white friends who had realized her feelings

and thank them. So the sun went down. (283)

Janie buries Tea Cake, and her sundown return to Eatonville is related

as the final change in geographic space that she makes in this story.

It is, however, the story's concluding image that collapses the meta-

phorical and structural dimensions of the narrative and that generates

the holy heat of the spirit's place.

After Janie finishes her story, Phoeby leaves, invested with enough

of Janie's light to "cut the darkness in flight." Then Janie "shut[s] and

fasten[s]" the downstairs of her house in a "finished silence" (285).

There is more finished here than just the telling of a story. The

changes that have taken place, both in Phoeby and in Janie, have been

acknowledged in the story's events as well as in its narrative structures.

At this point the narrative recalls for the last time the imagery of the

mirror. This image too has experienced a radical reformulation. It no

longer promises only reflection, but it has gained refractive powers as

well. Now it is a lamp - a "light in her hand [that] was like a spark

of sun-stuff washing her face in fire" (285). The mirror/lamp images

exchange their reflective, reflexive, and refractive natures; and Janie,

transformed as she is by this fiery potential, contains this imagery.

Her final movement is ascension - the anticipated next phase of the

setting sun as well as of the spirit. Janie's spiritual upper room is the



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final place of convergence. She has been transformed, a shift in her

essence that allows Tea Cake's spirit to appear, with the "sun for a

shawl," literally wrapped in a horizon that Janie now commands: "she

pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net . . . and draped it over her

shoulder" (286).

The narrative convergence of poetic voices in this novel can finally

be explained in terms of a parallel transformation of character. Here

is a version of reciprocity that extends beyond the boundaries within

the text to encompass the text itself. The transformative thesis is then

metatextual. Phoeby's imitative change is a fragment of the new world

that Janie's figurative essence generates for itself. The boundaries be-

tween the narrative structures and the character that are dissolved in

the final pages of this story are figurative enactments of the dissolu-

tion of forms that, in the holy heat of Janie's new dimension, is a

refigured place for the spirit: "She called in her soul to come and

see (286).

North Carolina State University

NOTES

1 . In The Signifying Monkey, Henry Louis Gates describes a speakerly text as one

that "contains certain rhetorical structures . . . verbal signals [that] signify the sheer

play of black language which Their Eyes seems to celebrate" (194).

2. Hurston dramatizes the symbolic action of ritual. Although Clifford Geertz

has identified the "affinities of theatre and religion" as opposing directions of ritual

theory (drama as communion vs. drama as persuasion) (27-29), Hurston's novel syn-

thesizes these oppositions in her use of ritual as the "communion" of Janie's spirit and

the "persuasion" of her body to relinquish itself to spiritual dominance.

3. Geertz cites Victor Turner's social science approach to ritual theory as a "re-

generative project" wherein social drama calls upon ritualized responses to conflict

situations (27, 28). The mediative dimension of ritual theory is engaged in its appli-

cation to social dramas.

4. Francoise Lionnet cites from Spinoza s Ethics: "Every substance is necessarily

infinite" to support Hurston's autobiographical claim of her interest in and familiarity

with the works of Spinoza. Lionnet writes that "Hurston affirms a (Spinozist) prin-

ciple of eternal change based on her observation of the radical fluidity of inorganic,

organic, social, and cultural forces" (Lionnet 396, 413 nt. 24).

5. For a discussion of Hurston's use of figures from mythology, see Holloway,

ch. 3. Lionnet argues that a "myth of ancient Afro-Mediterranean folklore" is evident

in Hurston's characterizations in Jonah and her allusions in Dust Tracks (401-08).

6. In Flash of the Spirit, Thompson identifies ashe, the bnghtness of the spint, as

a state of both grace and possession (7-9).



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7. Benjamin Ray notes that there are "forms of sacredness other than divinity"

and, in a discussion of the divine nature of kingship in Buganda, argues for an asso-

ciation of myth and ritual with the elevation inherent in a kingship that is socially

(but not essentially) transformative. Their Eyes takes this principle to a fictive realm,

and transformation - achieved through a narrative relationship between myth and

ritual - becomes a substantive change of essence for Janie and of intent (or behavior)

for Phoeby.

8. Although Nanny's characterization follows the convention in African American

literature of the ancestor's bequest (her gift to Janie is spiritual power), it is impor-

tant to note the irony that remains. Nanny dies, in an "infinity of conscious pain,"

anguished over what she perceives as her failure to help her granddaughter. She is

never aware of the powerful gift that she leaves. Janie, who is also unaware of her

grandmother's legacy, resents what she considers as her grandmother's choke-hold

over her. She vows that she "hate[s] the old woman who had twisted her so in the

name of love" (138). Although their loss of each other (Nanny's death and Janie's

rejection of her) is a tragedy in this novel, it is somewhat mediated by the reader's

knowledge of the nature of Nanny's gift and Janie's ability to use it so powerfully.

I discuss African American women writers' reclamation of the figurative ancestor

in my forthcoming work: Moorings and Metaphors: Figures of Culture and Gender in Black

Women's Literature (Rutgers, 1992).

9. See Gixous and Clement, 165. The expressive dimensions of Their Eyes- the,

association of body, language, and spirit - are echoed in the definition oijouissance

found in the glossary of The Newly Born Woman. This word allows the body to "tell

what they [women] know" (166).

10. Hurston's mother begs her not to allow the mirror's covering in Dust Tracks

(86-87). The scene of Isie's mother's death in Jonah's Gourd Vine nearly parallels the

Dust Tracks scene and the failed supplication of Isie's mother is also an integral part

of this novel. See Holloway (ch. 2), Gates (183), and Lionnet (400).

1 1 . The syntax of the Biblical passage allows two readings to exist simultaneously:

"a minister and a witness both" suggests that Paul will assume both of these roles.

"[Both] of these things which thou has seen, and of those things in which I will appear

unto thee" allows the adjective (both) to influence equally things subjectively encoun-

tered as well as things that are objectively reported. The potential for simultaneity

within this discourse underscores Hurston's appreciation for the flexibility within the

speakerly text - she celebrates such ludic verbal signals.

12. In Dust Tracks Hurston writes that the appeal of the religious ecstasy in her

father's congregation was due to its "high drama" (270-74).

WORKS CITED

Benston, Kimberly. "Facing Tradition: Revisionary Scenes in African American

Literature." PMLA 105.1 (January 1990): 97-109.

Cixous, Helene and Clement, Catherine. The Newly Born Woman. Trans. Betsy Wing.

Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey. New York: Oxford UP, 1988.

Geertz, Clifford. Local Knowledge. New York: Basic Books, 1983.

Holloway, Karla F. C. The Character of the Word: The Texts ofZora Neale Hurston. West-

port, Conn.: Greenwood P, 1987.



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KARLA FC HOLLO WAY 141

Hurston, Zora Neale. Dust Tracks on a Road. 1942; Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1984.

Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter with Caroline

Burke. Ithaca: Cornell UP 1985.

Lionnet, Franchise. "Autoethnography: The An- Archie Style of Dust Tracks on a Road.1*

Reading Black, Reading Feminist. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: New

American Library, 1990. 382-414.

Ray, Benjamin C. Myth, Ritual, and Kingship in Buganda. New York: Oxford UP,

1991.

Thompson, Robert Farris. Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philos-

ophy. New York: Vintage, 1984.

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