Zora Neale Hurston and the Post-Modern Self in Dust Tracks on a Road

Abstract

In last thirty-five years, Zora Neale literary grown from obscurity in which died to status of major American author. However, despite her substantial body of work, revival of her relies largely on Their Eyes Were Watching God, her second novel, which provoked far more scholarly writing than all of other books combined.(1) Nonetheless, other books are interesting and merit serious consideration too, and current literary theory offers new and different ways to appreciate them, especially her 1942 autobiography Dust Tracks on Road, and its complex representation of its subject. autobiography received some of most negative criticism of any of her books and for this reason serves as an interesting case in point about canon. warmest admirers have criticized Dust Tracks. In his biography of Hurston, Robert Hemenway calls Dust Tracks a discomfiting which has probably harmed reputation (276); Alice Walker called Dust Tracks the most unfortunate thing Zora ever wrote (xvii)(2); and Nellie McKay includes Dust Tracks among most problematical of autobiographies by black women (179). However, post-structuralist theory can help readers to appreciate Dust Tracks-and for some of very reasons that it previously received criticism. Three complaints recur most in critics' ambivalent response over years to autobiography, and they no doubt account for much of book's relative scholarly neglect: its apparent unreliability, its inconsistency or fragmentary nature, and its seemingly assimilationist racial politics. Although these deficiencies exist in other texts, including Their Eyes,(3) their presence in Dust Tracks is particularly problematic. The complaints about Dust Tracks are valid, especially those about its unreliability and its fragmentariness, if one insists on conventional notions of consistency of autobiography and of individual. But Dust Tracks is never consistent: not with itself, not with conventions of autobiography in general or those of African American autobiography, not with facts of life, not with what probably were its author's real about racial politics.(4) The individual persona who is both subject and object of Dust Tracks on Road is not homogeneous, unitary, and autonomous protagonist of conventional autobiography but heterogeneous, fragmentary, and inextricably and in various ways part of culture and society in which she lives. So as to correspond better to persona represented in and by text, Dust Tracks resists two cardinal conventions of autobiographical representation: traditional autobiographical structure and formal organization, and focused projection of autobiographical persona. Instead of satisfying these conventions, Dust Tracks on Road focuses on life of Zora's imagination, on psychological dynamics of her family, on retelling community stories, on depicting character of certain friends, and on ambiguous pronouncements about race. In so doing, Dust Tracks portrays an individual persona that resists reduction to coherent, consistent unity and instead portrays person of many moods who is in tension with world in which she moves.(5) In calling Dust Tracks unreliable, critics are arguing that does not represent herself truthfully and that book is deceptive and unfaithful representation-although it may be best fiction Zora Neale ever wrote (Turner, Introduction iv). According to Maya Angelou, It is difficult, if not impossible, to find and touch real Zora Neale Hurston (xi-xii) in Dust Tracks. For Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Hurston's autobiography singularly lacks any convincing picture of her own feelings (My Statue 78-79; To Write 172-73). And Mary Helen Washington accuses Dust Tracks of at all times deftly avoiding self-revelation (19-20). …