"[J]us' listenin' tuh you": Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and the Gospel Impulse

• Published in: The Southern literary journal Vol. 41; no. 1; pp. 109 - 130
• Main Author: Dubek, Laura
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Chapel Hill Department of English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 22.09.2008; The University of North Carolina Press; University of North Carolina Press
• Subjects: African American culture; African American literature; African Americans; American literature; Baptist churches; Baraka, Amiri (1934-2014); Black communities; Black literature; Collectivity; Criticism and interpretation; Ellison, Ralph (1914-1994); Essays; God; Hurston, Zora Neale; Hurston, Zora Neale (1891-1960); Jazz; Jazz music; Laughter; Literary criticism; Malcolm X; Narrators; Novels; Philosophy; Portrayals; Religious aspects; Religious novels; Self concept; Singing; Storytelling; Traditions; Walker, Alice (1944- ); White people; United States
• ISSN: 0038-4291; 1534-1461; 2470-9506; 1534-1461; 2474-8102
• DOI: 10.1353/slj.0.0027

Titled "Between Laughter and Tears," Wright's infamous dismissal of Hurston's novel precedes Ralph Ellison's famous definition of the blues, included in his 1945 essay on Wright's autobiography, Black Boy: "The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism" (Ellison 78). Each true jazz moment (as distinct from the uninspired commercial performance) springs from a contest in which each artist challenges all the rest; each solo flight, or improvisation, represents (like the successive canvases of a painter) a definition of his identity: as individual, as member of the collectivity and as a link in the chain of tradition (234).\n Alice Walker declared Hurston before her time (xv).