So over the three day weekend I read the first three chapters of a book for African-American Lit...but it was the wrong book. I read the first three chapters of Toni Morrison's Beloved instead of Their Eyes were Watching God by Zora Hurston, discovering this only shortly before class today. Now that I have read the first three chapters of Their Eyes were Watching God, the first three chapters of Beloved provide an interesting point of comparison. In the first three chapters of each book, I was very lost. I was struggling to figure out what was happening, barely staying afloat in the whirlpool of plot threads. In both of the books, the first few chapters try to intertwine numerous plot threads. In Beloved, it is a struggle to figure out what is going on in the present day and what is flashbacks, and also how fast time is moving. At the beginning part of the book, the present day has Baby Suggs still alive, but only a few pages later (and after some flashbacks), Baby Suggs has been dead a long time. It does't help that the point of view keeps changing. First Denver, then Sethe, then Paul D, then Sethe from 20 years ago. I think I was starting to get my bearings by the end of the third chapter, but I was still a bit unsure.
I was also confused during the first three chapters of Their Eyes, though not quite as much. The first chapter is a frame narrative, and because of the poetic nature of the speech it is really hard to pick it out as a frame narrative at first. As soon as I was getting a hang of what was going on at the end of chapter 1, it changes almost completely. Then the narration switches from Janie to the grandma, then back to Janie. All the while, this all-knowing, fancy-talking narrator keeps breaking up then narrative of Janie. There is a lot of symbolism that makes things harder to understand.
I had none of these struggles in Native Son or Invisible Man. In Native Son, the narrator is consistent and the story is very action, with the narrator more telling events than trying to interpret them. I suppose it is expected then that it is very easy to understand. Invisble Man seems like it could be hard to figure things out, but I actually had a very easy time of it. The narrator in the prologue was eccentric, but his narrative style was straightforward and logical. It was like he was having a conversation with him. And once the first chapter started it was even easier, since the narrator is mostly relating events. There is symbolism in Ellison's book, but the symbolism does not need to be understood to understand the plot like in Hurston.
I know this is a small sample size, but I wondered if the gender of the author had anything to do with my understanding the first few chapters of a book. I had no trouble understanding the men Wright and Ellison, but was completely lost trying to interpret Morrison and Hurston. I was wondering if men and women's minds just worked in different ways, ways that made it very easy for me as a male to know what men were trying to convey but being lost on what the females were trying to say. Maybe women are simply more competent at switching between plots and narratives than men are. Or maybe I am just thinking to much about the differences between how men and women think after reading Their Eyes were Watching God.
Wow--the first three chapters of _Beloved_ are no picnic. Morrison deliberately begins that novel in a disorienting, in medias res fashion, and we'll spend the first few classes (way far away in December!) trying to get a handle on where she's going.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if the first few chapters of Hurston would have been as disorienting if you didn't have Morrison's influence still ringing in your head. The "two voices" (the authorial narrator and the dialect narration of Janie) can be confusing, and there is a bit of chronological disorientation as we witness Janie returning from the story she's about to tell at the start. But once this thing gets under way, the narrative moves sequentially in a pretty straightforward manner--Janie goes back to the beginning and tells her story chronologically. The dialogue still takes some getting used to, and it remains dense with figurative language, metaphor, and unconventional syntax, but see if you start to "learn the language" more as the novel unfolds.
I know I read somewhere that women are better at multitasking than men, so maybe it is typically easier for them to comprehend the web of stories and speakers that's found in the beginning of both books. I didn't find the first few chapters hard to understand in terms of who was speaking though, because when the grandma starts speaking I thought Hurston included enough "Janie this Janie that" to remind us that the grandma was speaking to Janie. Like you being confused about the timing in _Beloved_ I was a little confused about time sequence in _Their Eyes_. The few minutes where Janie walks back into the neighborhood and sits down with Phoebe take up an entire chapter, but her marriage to Mr. Killicks lasts only five pages or so. I imagine this was intentional to show its affect on Janie, but like Invisible Man the lack of dates and times still disoriented me (this may have been intentional on Hurston's part as well).
ReplyDeleteI think that by the same reason that it might be hard for you to understand Janie's voice, it is also what makes it hard for you to understand her actions. I know that we have had this conversation before (and will probably again in the future!), about how it's difficult to get her motivations and relate to her decisions. I understand that and can see where you're coming from. However, I also think that it is true that men and women think differently and write differently. It is so rare that we read a book about a female main character, and even rarer to find one that male readers like and sympathize with. I personally can relate to and understand Janie's actions, in a way that it sounds like you did with the Narrator more so. I was the opposite, and struggled a lot to get into the Narrator's mindset. I think it will be interesting to see where this female protagonist goes, and how much the class (boys and girls) will end up liking/understand her.
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