ABSTRACT
Zora Neale Hurston is one of the most significant unread authors in America, the author of two minor classics and four other major books. What follows is openly intended to stimulate further interest in her art, and is part of a more extensive study of her life and work now in progress. My purpose here is not to provide a comprehensive account of her association with the Harlem Renaissance, but to articulate one intellectual problem facing her during that period. It should be acknowledged from the start that it is a white man’s reconstruction of the intellectual process in a black woman’s mind. That is not an irrelevant fact, either sexually or racially; people falsely impressed with the mythical “objectivity” of criticism and the presumed “universality” of literature will claim that it is. They are wrong. All men possess an anthropology which is less their own creation than a special burden of value and idea culturally imposed. Inevitably this anthropology—this view of man as he is—affects analytic efforts, but it is not a fact the critic can or should apologize for. A published author belongs in a special way to the world of culture—he is subject to the inquiry of any reader who would seek his example and learn his truth. When this process of inquiry is shared with others, it becomes criticism, and the success of criticism depends directly on the critic’s ability to distinguish the parts of his cultural burden which can be responsibly shouldered from the parts to be shucked away forever because they limit his humanity. The existential irony making criticism frustrating is that one’s acceptance or rejection of such burdens is a process of self-discovery, a condition of becoming. This leaves the critic in the same tentative position as the artist: he creates offerings. That is all the following essay presumes to be.
