The Music of God, Man, and Beast: Spirituality and Modernity in Jonah's Gourd Vine

Abstract

In his 1994 essay "The Modern Idea of Culture," Louis Dupré claims that "the emptying of nature and the vanishing of man are directly connected with the death of God" (11). If we accept this assertion, at least in its figurative dimension, the title metaphor of Zora Neale Hurston's semi-autobiographical 1934 novel Jonah's Gourd Vine embodies modernity's most troubling aspects: Jonah's sanctuary withers away even as the solid foundations of community, self, and agency crumble in the modern age. In Jonah's Gourd Vine, John Pearson's sanctuary comes from his spiritual community, embodied in its purest form in the rhythms and music of African religion as it survives in the American South in the early part of the twentieth century, and later associated with the inextricably linked forces of his wife Lucy and the church. Modernity's general assault on religion, spirituality, and transcendence has been exhaustively documented. However, the southern African American in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries [End Page 64] found his central ways of understanding God and religion additionally challenged by the encroachment of orthodox Christian views on traditional African spirituality, creating a central dynamic which Hurston describes in The Sanctified Church as "the older forms of Negro religious expression asserting themselves against the new" (103).