… with a motif of talk: ‘It was the time to hear things and talk.’ Janey ends the novel with a comment on this talk: ‘Talking don’t amount to a hill of beans when y uh can’t do nothing’ else.’ The bulk of the novel itself is composed of Janey’s dialogue. The book addresses the role of language, and speaking in society and inner growth. Why the emphasis on language, and it’s opposite, silence? Without the silence in Janey’s earlier years, could she have asked questions? How could she have found questions if there were no years to ask questions? Language is important to humankind for communication, but beyond that, language serves as the medium for preserving culture. Specifically for African-Americans, storytelling is the form used to preserve their society. Even in times of extreme hardship, storytelling eased the long days and added laughs to weary faces.
(Sidenote: when Janey wanted to join in the storytelling about the mule, she was excluded from it. Conclusion drawn: is important, but only to the extent where it does not limit personal growth. ) In this sense, and storytelling are synonymous. When we lose an oral society and move to a literate (visually communicating) society, we lose the art of storytelling. As an anthropologist, Hurston knows this better than any. Their Eyes is all about language and storytelling.
Why is storytelling so important? Because sound relates to the inferiority of human consciousness, the preservation of the individual in its truest self. ‘Taste and smell are not much help in registering inferiority or. Touch is, but touch partially destroys inferiority in the process of perceiving it… Hearing can register inferiority without violating it… Sound is thus a unifying sense. (It) enters deeply into human beings’ feel for existence.’ In their essay, ‘The Consequences of Literacy,’ anthropologists Jack Goody and Ian Watts say, ‘Literate society, merely by having no system of elimination, no ‘structural amnesia,’ prevents the individual from participating fully in the total cultural tradition to anything like the extent possible in non-literate society…
the literate individual has in practice so large a field of personal selection from the total cultural repertoire that the odds are strongly against his experiencing the cultural tradition as any sort of a patterned whole.’ They continue on to imply that the effects of oral conversation are intrinsically deeper and more permanent than the effects of visual communications, and that the compartmentalization of knowledge disregards the individual’s social experience and immediate personal context. It restricts the kind of connections which the individual can establish with the natural and social world. The problems confronted with a disappearing is what Hurston is addressing in Their Eyes Were Watching God. By claiming that her work had ‘no meaning’ because it was not political and radical, Wright completely overlooks the very nature of the African-American society — the oral traditions that have connected the black people as a race. In his push for equality and rights, Wright has passed over the thing most important to the people he is attempting to gain equality for — their voice. Goody and Watts, the anthropologists who wrote the last article referred to above, have done pioneering work on the cultural and psychological implications of literacy.
Thus, they are academic contemporaries of Hurston, and reiterate the issues she has addressed in Their Eyes. They believe in the strength of oral culture’s homogeneity. Hurston is not suggesting discarding literacy to preserve the authenticity of the culture, she is reminding the other authors of her time not to forget the roots of their culture in their quest to be equal. She is the watchman, crying out to remember the individual in the effort from the whole, to not discard the pieces that make up the unit. Jody’s relationship to Janie represents more than the African-American male / female relationship, it represents all blacks who wanted to be more white, more progressive, more political — at the expense of suppressing their poem-reciting, story-telling, blossom-seeking counterparts. Janie’s statement to the dying Jody — ‘Mah own mind had t uh be squeezed and crowded out t uh make room for yours in me (82) ‘ — is a direct statement to Wright and the others who were in step with the ‘more serious trends of the times.’ This passage in the book’s foreword: ‘By the end of the forties, a decade dominated by Wright and by the stormy fiction of social realism, the quieter voice of a woman searching for self-realization could not, or would not, be heard (viii) ‘ is strangely evocative of a section from pigs.
45-47 of the novel, where the men of Eaton ville are talking about Mayor Starks, who has made so much social change. ‘Us needs him. De town wouldn’t be nothing’ if it weren’t for him… [but] Ah often wonder how dat wife of his makes out with him, ’cause he’s us man dat changes everything, but nothing’ don’t change him… she so’ don’t talk much.’ The relationship between Janie and Jody easily translate to Wright and Hurston’s relationship. Keeping in mind that due to the racial ideologies of her influential black contemporaries, a brilliant author / anthropologist virtually disappeared from readership for three decades — the following words ring with a new meaning: ‘The years took all the fight out of Janie’s face.
No matter what Jody did, she did nothing… she was a rut in the road. Plenty of life beneath the surface but it was kept beaten down by the wheels… .’ continuing on, Janie finally finds the voice to tell Jody, ‘You could have… [known me and what I represent] but you was so busy… cuff in’ folks around in their minds till you didn’t see a whole heap uh things y uh could have…
You ain’t tried to pacify nobody but yo ” self. Too busy listening t uh yo’ own big voice.’ Like Janie, Hurston’s voice has been dismissed — as not bitter enough, not depicting the harsher side of black Southern life. She chose to depict the need for individualism, the need to retain that marvelousness of black society known as storytelling- -tantamount to the book. But the Black arts movement had become a grindstone, making the same out of all it touched.
Hurston refused to accept the idea that ‘racism had reduced black people to mere ciphers… whose culture is ‘deprived’ when different.’ She characterized her contemporaries who possessed that ideology in Starks and Nanny Crawford, who have been victimized by the power relations of their society, but seek only to change their status within the prevailing system. Through Janie, Hurston rejects the system’s terms altogether and finds fulfillment in interpreting her own experience. Hurston implies that such an individual decision can be more important than political protest.
Janie was not limited by her race or sex or class, but by the attitudes others sought to make her take towards those conditions. In rejecting those limiting attitudes, Janie remade the meaning of her experience. Hurston asserts her faith in such women and celebrates the Janie of the world — and her own departure from such attitudes — in Their Eyes.