The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Zora Neale Hurston · a novel in twenty chapters · J. B. Lippincott, Philadelphia, September 1937 · scored on Hurston’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
A woman’s life told in a frame to one listener; a novel of three marriages and of a voice found, with the comic, the lyric and the catastrophic in one telling
Mythos
The pear tree and the bee, a marriage of the world; the horizon narrowed and pulled in; the mule of the world; the deluge and judgment; the beloved returned as death
Phase
From Janie at sixteen in her grandmother’s yard, through marriage to Logan Killicks and twenty years as Joe Starks’s wife in Eatonville, to the muck with Tea Cake, the hurricane, the shooting and the trial, all told at sundown on her return
Presentation
Prose narrative in twenty chapters, framed by Janie’s telling to Pheoby Watson on her back steps; a third person narrator in a figured literary English, with the characters’ speech in Black Southern dialect taken more and more into the narration
Register
Aphoristic and lyric narration; the porch’s lies, insults and courtship in exact cadence; a mock sermon over a mule; the flood told at length and without hurry
Scale
One woman from sixteen to about forty; three marriages; an all-Black town and its store; the bean fields of the Everglades and their migrant pickers; a hurricane; a white court; God, named in the title
Governing Proposition
A woman walks back at sundown into the all-Black town of Eatonville, Florida, past the porch that talks about her, and tells her friend on her back steps the story of her three marriages. The wager of the book is that a Black woman of the rural South has an inner life of desire and judgment that neither her grandmother’s protection nor her husbands’ property in her can reach, and that the condition of her freedom is speech: told in a narration that takes her people’s idiom into itself as she comes to her voice.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.” So the book begins, in the register of parable, and its first page gives the rule its heroine will live by: “The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.” Then a woman walks back into Eatonville, Florida, at sundown, past the people sitting on the porch, who watch her and talk. She is Janie Crawford, and she has come back alone.
She sits on her back steps with her friend Pheoby Watson and tells her where she has been. The tale runs from there to the twentieth chapter, where the frame closes in Janie’s upstairs room. Everything between is speech to a listener. The book is about a woman coming to her voice, and it is built as that voice in use: the telling is the act the story leads to.
Hurston wrote the book in Haiti in 1936, in about seven weeks by her own account in Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), and J. B. Lippincott published it in Philadelphia in September 1937: a short novel in twenty chapters. The narrator speaks a figured literary English, the characters the Black Southern speech of the town, and in the course of the book the narration takes more and more of that speech into itself, until the two are hard to part. The unit is the novel as published in 1937.
Movement II
The tale begins with Janie at sixteen under the pear tree in her grandmother’s back yard, watching a bee sink into the bloom. The narrator makes the moment a marriage of the world. It is the book’s first figure and its standard: every marriage that follows is measured against the tree.
Her grandmother, Nanny, sees the girl’s desire and moves to protect her from it. Her account of the order the girl was born into is given in one line: “De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see.” Her protection is a narrowing of the horizon, and she arranges a marriage for Janie with Logan Killicks.
Killicks’s life is a mule and a plough, the life Nanny chose for her, and nothing in it answers the pear tree. Janie leaves it for Joe Starks. The mule, Nanny’s emblem of what a woman is made to carry, does not leave the book: it comes back in the next marriage as comedy and as fable.
Movement III
Starks, called Jody, takes her to Eatonville, an all-Black town, and makes himself its man. He keeps the store, puts up the street lamp and becomes the town’s mayor, and the marriage lasts twenty years. The store and the lamp are the life Janie chose against Nanny’s, and in it she finds herself placed as one more of her husband’s goods.
The porch of the store is where the town talks: lies, insults and courtship, in exact cadence. Matt Bonner’s yellow mule is its standing joke. Starks buys the mule free, and when it dies it is buried with a mock sermon while the buzzards hold their own parliament over it. The set piece is comic and it carries weight: it shows the town’s talk as the community’s art, and Starks’s power as owning it. His wife is kept from that talk.
At the dinner table Starks strikes her, and from then on the marriage is a contest of public voice. Janie answers him at last in the store, before the porch, mocking his aging body in front of the men whose talk is his power. Starks dies, and the twenty years end. The book has shown a marriage as a struggle over who may speak, and in front of whom.
Movement IV
Vergible Woods, called Tea Cake, is the life Janie chooses for herself. She goes with him to the muck of the Everglades around Lake Okeechobee: the bean fields, the migrant pickers, Black and Bahamian. On the muck the narration is closest to her: the free indirect passages are hers, and her voice and the narrator’s are hard to part.
The muck has its own order. Mrs. Turner brings colour within the community into the story; the episode makes its point and is dropped. Tea Cake beats Janie to show the Turners who owns her, and the book handles it in a paragraph and absorbs it as a sign of love. Here the book’s law of mutual voice is under the most strain, and the narrative does not weigh it.
Then the hurricane. The animals move east; the lake rises and walks out of its bed; in the shanties the people wait: “They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.” The flight across the flooded land follows, with a dog riding on a cow’s back, and Tea Cake, saving Janie from the water, is bitten by a rabid dog. After the storm the dead are buried by colour. The flood is a deluge, and the title has named whose judgment it is.
Movement V
Tea Cake goes mad. He fires on Janie, and she shoots him. The man who brought her to life comes back from the flood as death, and she must kill him to live. A white jury acquits her the same day, while the Black community from the muck stands hostile. Her testimony is reported, not given: the book withholds the speech in which its form should culminate, and readers have argued over that silence ever since.
The frame closes in her upstairs room, after the telling. The last paragraph gathers the book’s figures into one: “She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.” The horizon Nanny narrowed is drawn in by Janie herself, and what she has told is what she holds.
Reviewed in 1937, the book drew Richard Wright’s hostile notice in New Masses, and the charge of pandering. It was out of print from the 1940s to the 1970s. Alice Walker’s essay “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” (Ms., 1975) and the University of Illinois Press reissue of 1978 brought it back, and since then it has been one of the most taught American novels of its century.
Act III · The Twelve
The frame is required: the story exists because Janie comes back and tells it, and the last chapter returns to Pheoby so that the telling becomes the act the book is about. Each marriage is required by the next. Killicks’s mule and plough are the life Nanny chose; Starks’s store and lamp are the life Janie chose against it; Tea Cake is the life she chose for herself, and its price is paid in the flood. Even the mule’s mock funeral, a comic set piece, carries load. Subtraction still finds loose matter: the Mrs. Turner episode makes its point and is dropped; the trial is so compressed that the climactic speech is withheld; the beating on the muck takes a paragraph and leaves no mark on the form.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: a Black woman in the rural South of the 1900s to the 1920s has an inner life of desire and judgment that neither her grandmother’s protective scheme nor her husbands’ property in her can reach, and the condition of her freedom is speech. Nanny states the order the book opens: “De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see.” Starks’s slap at the dinner table, and Janie’s answer to him in the store before the porch, show with precision that a marriage is a contest of public voice. The town’s talk is shown as both art and cage. Held below the summit novels because the disclosure narrows where the book turns from it: the beating and the trial are seen, not opened.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The book rises often, and in two keys. The lyric: the pear tree in Nanny’s yard, a girl of sixteen watching a bee sink into the bloom, which the narrator makes a marriage of the world; and the last paragraph, the horizon pulled in like a fish-net. The dreadful: the hurricane, the lake walking out of its bed, the people in the shanties waiting, “They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God”, then the flight across the flooded land, a dog riding on a cow’s back, and at last the shooting. Between these the comic heights of the porch, its lies and its mule, have their own elevation. Held below the summit novels in height; the frequency is good for a short book.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Myth here is mostly built. The pear tree is the standard against which each marriage is measured. The horizon is built the same way, from Nanny’s narrowing of it to the fish-net at the close. The mule, Nanny’s emblem, becomes Matt Bonner’s yellow mule, bought free by Starks and buried with a mock sermon while the buzzards hold their own parliament over him: a fable inside the novel. The flood is a deluge, with God’s judgment in the title, and the man who brought her to life comes back from it mad, so that she must kill him to live: the beloved returned as death. Held at the bar, not above it, because in places the figure is announced more than built, as in the narrator’s gloss on Janie’s inside and outside.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The Black American novel of the 1920s and 1930s asked for protest or uplift, a fiction measured by its argument with white America. Hurston turned from both. White America is kept almost wholly off the page until the hurricane and the court; at the centre stand a woman’s love life and the speech of an all-Black town, in a dialect the uplift tradition feared as a minstrel risk. The turn is formal too: a narrator whose literary English admits the folk idiom until the two are hard to part. The stake was paid, in Richard Wright’s hostile review, the charge of pandering and some thirty years out of print. Held below the top because the underlying shape, a woman’s three marriages and her search for love, is familiar: the swerve is in voice, subject and allegiance, not in structure, and it is no break of the order of Ulysses or The Sound and the Fury.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. As a first person memoir it would lose the narrator’s lyric distance and the counterpoint between the narrator’s English and the characters’ speech; as plain third person realism it would lose the frame, which makes the whole tale an act of speech to a listener, the very thing Starks forbade. The book’s point is that Janie comes to her voice, and the form enacts it: the narration, standard at the start, takes in more of the idiom as her voice grows, until on the muck the free indirect passages are hers. The cost falls where the form should culminate. At the trial her speech is reported and withheld, and elsewhere the narrator sometimes glosses what the form has already shown.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Evidence, not promise: since its recovery in the 1970s the book has borne nearly fifty years of sustained reading without being used up. It has been read as a feminist novel of formation; against itself, for Janie’s silence at the trial, by Robert Stepto and others; for its handling of violence in love, the beating and the shooting; for colour within the community, in Mrs. Turner and in Janie’s own light skin and long hair; and for its ecology of the muck and the storm. These readings conflict, and the book holds all of them. Held below the summit novels because the well is narrower in structure: a short book of one consciousness, whose return has gathered on a few cruxes rather than across a world.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The intrinsic force is large: the book showed that a Black woman’s interior life, in her own idiom, could be the whole matter of a serious novel, and it made the vernacular an instrument of narration rather than a quoted specimen. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Alice Walker’s essay “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” (Ms., 1975) and her novel The Color Purple (1982) take Hurston as their ancestor; the book is the founding text of the recovery that made a Black women’s literary tradition a field of study, and it reorganised the canon of the Harlem Renaissance around itself. Held at the bar because that reach was delayed by nearly forty years: in its own decade the book moved little, and Wright’s line of protest fiction prevailed.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Eighty-nine years from 1937, on the step for seventy years to two centuries. Form: the text is whole and was never in doubt. Presence is charged: the book was out of print and little read from the 1940s to the mid-1970s, nearly half its life. Since the reissue of 1978 its presence has been very wide, on reading lists from school to graduate seminar and in translation; a television film of 2005 counts as presence only. The surface is not fixed to its moment: the dialect, which once seemed to date it, is now read as its art. Held below the usual figure for its age by the neglect, as against Go Tell It on the Mountain’s 9.0 for a younger book that did not suffer it, and above the floor for neglect by fifty years of return.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The making is load-bearing. The narrator’s sentences are figured, aphoristic and sure: “The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.” The dialogue is a sustained transcription of a speech community, its lies, insults and courtship in exact cadence. The hurricane is controlled at length, from the animals moving east to the lake’s rising to the walk over the water. The shift of the narration toward the idiom is a technical achievement of its own. Charged: written in about seven weeks, the book shows its speed in the last third, where the muck chapters run as episodes rather than build, the Turner material is thin and the trial is a summary; and the narrator’s glosses sometimes explain a figure already made.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Take the two farthest elements: the porch comedy of the mule’s funeral and the shooting of Tea Cake in the house on the muck. One law governs both: a life is made and judged by talk, by the porch, by the court and at last by the woman who tells it, and love is real only where it lets the other speak. The pear tree and the flood belong to one nature, bloom and judgment. The law strains in two places. Tea Cake’s beating of Janie, which the law of mutual voice should condemn, is absorbed by the narrative as a sign of love. At the trial the porch’s law, the Black community hostile, and the court’s, the white jury lenient, are set side by side without being fully weighed.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The orders held are many for a short book: one consciousness from sixteen to about forty; marriage three times over; the town, its founding, store, mayor, street lamp and speech; labour, from the plough and the store to the bean fields of the muck and the migrant pickers, Black and Bahamian; race and colour within the community, and the white world at its edge, in the burial of the storm’s dead by colour and in the jury; the natural order in the storm; and God, named in the title and faced in the dark. They are held, not listed: the storm and the court both pass judgment on the marriage. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the book’s size and its one consciousness: the state and history enter only at the edges.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.8, The Unconcealment and The Made at 8.7. A text whole since 1937 that came back from thirty years’ neglect to fifty years of wide return; a disclosure that holds, that a woman’s inner life lies beyond the reach of protection and of property and that her freedom is speech; and a making in which the narration takes in its people’s idiom as its heroine comes to her voice.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.0: the town, labour, colour, the storm and God are held in one short book of one consciousness, with the state and history only at its edges. Next above it, The Inevitable at 8.2: a frame and three marriages each required by the next, but the Turner episode dropped, the beating absorbed in a paragraph and the trial so compressed that the climactic speech is withheld.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.6, The Made at 8.7, The Inner Law at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 8.8, The Unconcealment at 8.7 and The Swerve at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Archetypal Deep and Pressure on Tradition stand on it at 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met (the lowest of the eleven axes it covers is The Inevitable at 8.2, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.0. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, 8.5 on a sum of 102.3.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, a novel in twenty chapters, published by J. B. Lippincott, Philadelphia, in September 1937. It is scored as the novel as published in 1937. English is the original; no translation is in question. No text was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain: the first sentence, the narrator’s sentences on the dream from the first page, Nanny’s line on the mule of the world, the sentence from the hurricane that gives the book its title, and the last paragraph. Dialect is given in Hurston’s spellings only in that one line of Nanny’s. Dialogue that could be recalled only closely, Janie’s answer to Starks in the store among it, is given in paraphrase. The reissue by the University of Illinois Press (1978) and the television film of 2005 are named as records of the book’s presence and are not part of the work. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the word count, the chapters in which the later events fall, whether later printings were revised, the wording of Wright’s review and the fuller line of the book’s descendants. Citations are by episode.