Their Eyes Were Watching God

Their Eyes Were Watching God

While reading Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, I was struck with the similarity of the attitude towards life which she shared with the leader of the French surrealist group, André Breton. Like Breton, Hurston's central value was the "marvelous," especially as it can be seen in the world of love. Breton defined the "marvelous" in contrast to the fantastic. "Le merveilleux, nul n'est mieux parvenu à le définir par opposition au `fantastique' qui tend, hélas, de plus en plus à le supplanter auprès de nos contemporains. C'est que le fantastique est presque toujours de l'ordre de la fiction sans conséquence, alors que le merveilleux luit à l'extrême pointe du mouvement vital et engage l'affectivité tout entière" (Preface 16). [The marvelous, there is no better way 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 spirit's ability of movement and entirely engages the emotions.] Hurston's famous work certainly achieves this definition of the "marvelous," but could we therefore say that she was a surrealist? She doesn't mention 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 decadent 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. André 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 Mallarmé ("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 Breton's most important work, and Hurston's Their Eyes could be seen as one of the few books which can match the intensity of Nadja.