In this blog post, I will discuss some of the sections in Zora Neale Hurston’s essay “Characteristics of Negro Expression” and how they relate to the writing we have read from the Harlem Renaissance. In this essay, she lists and dissects a number of tropes uniquely depicted in African American art. Each section corresponds to one of these ideas. For the most part, I think that her analysis clearly matches what we have read, but there were some concepts that I didn’t think we saw as much, or we saw in a different way than what she described.
One idea that Hurston really focuses on and brings out through a variety of different sections in her essay, is the connection of black writing to black music and dance. She describes how the style of music and dance influenced the style of writing. One of her sections is entitled “Asymmetry” and highlights asymmetry we see in black art, for example in blues poems that repeat the same line but with a variation. When we see the line begin to repeat, we expect symmetry, but we don’t quite get it. This evokes the asymmetry we find in musical rhythms and helps make the poetry something that feels almost like it was meant to be sung or that falls into place with a rhythm that starts playing in our head when we read it. This rhythm propels us forward, keeping us engaged, which I think relates to black dancing and how it is “dynamic”, as Hurston discusses. Finally, when we see parts of lines repeat or asymmetry in the lengths of the lines, that also gives the poem a bit of a disjointed feeling, something Hurston discusses as “angularity”.
Hurston sums a lot of these ideas together, when describing “the Jook” as a “pleasure house” a place of music and dancing (Hurston 9). She focuses on music and dancing as being emotional and focused on “feeling” rather than merely technical. As such, they align well with incorporation into literature, since the emotion leaves room for stories to be told. In Sterling Brown’s “Cabaret” and Langston Hughes’ “The Cat and the Saxophone”, we see not only the characteristics discussed earlier, but also poems that are actually set in Jooks with references to Jazz music or the Charleston step.
We can tell that a poem is set in a Jook, when we hear the sounds of a Jook in the lines of poetry. For example, in “The Cat and the Saxophone”, everyday conversation is juxtaposed with the voice of a singer in the background. In other poems, we sometimes see musical instruments as well. This is one of the ways in which multivocality is depicted in these poems. Hurston discusses this additional voice of the instruments and how they are imitated by people in her section on imitation. She explains that in the past people have criticized black people for imitation, saying that using imitation makes black art unoriginal, and responds by saying “He does it as the mocking-bird does it, for the love of it, and not because he wishes to be like the one imitated.” (Hurston 8). As she indicated, the love for music that can be found through its depiction in poetry is one way black art is unique. However, multivocality is more broad than just this. In her own story “The Gilded Six Bits”, Hurston also depicts multivocality, switching between the thoughts of Missie May and Joe in order to show both their perspectives. This trope also continued after the Harlem Renaissance. For example, in Richard Wright’s “Down by the Riverside” we see the narration style shift between a 3rd person narrator and a 1st person account of Mann’s thoughts written in the vernacular. Here, rather than giving us the atmosphere of a jook as context for the plot of the poem, multivocality allows us to see multiple points of view simultaneously, helping us keep any one point of view in perspective of the broader circumstances. This form of multivocality involving different human perspectives isn’t really mentioned explicitly by Hurston in her essay.
However, I do see other passages in her essay that relate to this form of multivocality. One of these is drama. In her “drama” section, Hurston discusses the presence of drama in everyday life, and how the idea of every action in regular life being dramatic as though it were acted out, comes into play in black art. As she writes “Every phase of Negro life is highly dramatised. No matter how joyful or how sad the case there is sufficient poise for drama. Everything is acted out” (Hurston 1). I think multivocality relates to drama, because the structure of writing with multivocality is often reminiscent of a play. Just as in a play, we get to see different characters treated equally by the author and hear all their voices. For example, “The Gilded Six Bits” feels very dramatic to me, both in that sense and more broadly. I didn’t really think of it that way when I was reading it, but after reading Hurston’s essay, I saw how the “game” that Missie May and Joe play is very much acted out: the sort of thing you might see in a movie. However, it’s interesting that here, the characters are fully aware of the play they are putting on. I thought this idea was really interesting, and it made me further appreciate the relationship between Missie May and Joe.
Overall, I thought Hurston’s characterization of black art fits well with what we read from the Harlem Renaissance, although it also made me reflect and see the black writing we read in a new light. One trope that she mentioned that I didn’t see as much in our class readings was the idea of “folklore” and “culture heroes” (figures like the devil, Rockefeller, and “Jack, the greatest culture hero of the South”) (Hurston 5). I’d be curious to read texts that depict these more, and learn more about how they are written about.
