The Marginal but Unforgettable Bruno Schulz

The Marginal but Unforgettable Bruno Schulz

Originally Published on About.com’s Classic Literature Page

Bruno Schulz, self-portrait, 1920

Of the great European writers of the past century, Bruno Schulz may be the writer most highly regarded by the fewest people. He’s often compared to Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust and Robert Musil, but his provinciality—which was both deliberate and circumstantial, and which was key to his work—as well as his ill-timed life and death have conspired to keep him from standing on the stage alongside his very few equals. Schulz was a Galician Jew born in 1892 in Drogobycz, a small town that at the time was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; after the First World War the town was re-annexed by Poland, and at the start of the Second World War it was seized by the Soviet Union and then later taken by the Nazis. In addition to being a writer, in Polish, Schulz was a draftsman of extraordinary talent—he made his living teaching art at a school for boys—and during the Nazi occupation he was temporarily under the protection of a German officer who liked his drawings. Then in November of 1942 a Gestapo officer who had a grudge against Schulz’s “protector” shot Schulz dead in the street as he was carrying home a loaf of bread. According to the story, the murderer reported to his rival afterward, “I shot your Jew.”

Politics, geography, and ideology then further obscured Schulz as post-War Communist Poland condemned his work for being too personal and unrealistic, only partially rehabilitating his writing in 1957, but even then just to allow it into print, permitting no praise or study of it in any of the official literary journals. Translations into French and German re-spread some of the slight fame that Schulz had gained in his lifetime, and then in 1980 American writer Philip Roth introduced Schulz to English-language readers by sponsoring the “Writers from the Other Europe” series, which also included Milan Kundera, Danilo Kiš, and Tadeusz Borowski.

My own introduction to Schulz’s work was almost as roundabout. In my early twenties I read Cynthia Ozick’s extraordinary 1987 novel, The Messiah of Stockholm, which conjectured the extantcy of the fabled lost Schulz novel, The Messiah. Having never heard of Schulz, I thought that he was either the world’s greatest writer or that Ozick was the world’s greatest writer for inventing an author whose work sounded so inconceivably original and strange. Then a month or so later, by chance I read David Grossman’s novel See Under: Love (1986 in Hebrew; 1989 in English), which also delved deeply into Schulz’s life and work. I then immediately located a copy of The Complete Fiction of Bruno Schulz (published in 1989) and was affected by it in ways that not even these two brilliant novels had prepared me for.

Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote that, “Schulz cannot be easily classified.” In fact, the categories that Singer lists as aspects of Schulz’s style—surrealist, symbolist, expressionist, modernist—seem quaint and outmoded in comparison to Schulz’s striking approach. For Schulz the inner world becomes manifest in the outer world, and the borders between imagination and reality in his fiction are almost wholly eradicated. The main figure in Schulz’s work—which consists almost entirely of interconnected short stories—is Father, the inspired patriarch who communes with demons and wrestles with angels while his bourgeois family tries to live an ordinary existence. Father delves into the world’s essential quiddities, and at times he lives among his aviary and treats his birds as creatures equal to—or superior to—his family. At another time he treats his tailor’s dummies in the same manner, his experiments with the mutable nature of consciousness and persona recalling the Promethean Doctor Frankenstein, or, in the Jewish tradition, a maker of Golems. His strange communions lead him to the most bizarre personal transformations—into a horsefly in one story, and into a crab in another—which inevitably strengthen the comparisons to Kafka. Schulz certainly loved Kafka, and in fact he translated The Trial into Polish—and like Kafka, who was a Jew living in Prague but who wrote in German, Schulz also wrote not in Yiddish but in the literary language of his particular time and place. Schulz’s main inspirations were Maria Rainer Rilke and Thomas Mann, however, whose influences kept him from being overly consumed by Kafka. Kafka’s stories are exceptionally sharp and precise and deadpan, while Schulz’s are lush and oneiric and febrile. Even at his most luscious, though, Schulz tempers the absurdities of the overwrought Rilke and the ponderous Mann into a perfectly balanced imbalance, where all the exaggerated heights and depths are shaped into the most dazzling and tactile of forms.

From Schulz’s Book of Idolatry, etching, 1920–1922

Schulz’s first collection, Cinnamon Shops, was published in 1934, and his second collection, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, was published in 1937. He also published many other short stories in various journals, the longest of which, “The Comet,” was appended to his first collection when it was translated into English and renamed The Street of Crocodiles. The Complete Fiction collects all of this work and includes excellent essays by both the translator and the editor. Schulz also published a book of drawings called A Book of Idolatry, which showcases both his visionary artistic talent and his idiosyncratic sexual preoccupations. For decades after Schulz’s murder, literary acolyte Jerzy Ficowski scoured all of Europe to collect the diminished remnants of Schulz’s voluminous correspondence and published them in the Letters and Drawings of Bruno Schulz, which also contains three previously uncollected stories, most notably the fantastic “Fatherland.” Nobody knows what happened to his perhaps legendary novel, The Messiah. Or perhaps there’s still someone alive who does know. Time and circumstance have only been somewhat kind to Schulz’s legacy. But as small as it is, it’s an awesome legacy, and any reader who encounters it will be forever thankful for its singular disturbance to our collective literary consciousness.

—David Wiley

Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude

Chronicle of a Text Foretold:

Gabriel García Márquez’s

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Originally Published on About.com’s Classic Literature Page

When I first read Gabriel García Márquez’s 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, finishing it at 4:00 in the morning, aged twenty, I lay the book on my chest and said aloud to myself, “That was the best book I’ve ever read.”

Since then there have been many other favorites, but the impact of that overwhelming introduction to García Márquez’s world has remained one of the most formative reading experiences of my life. Looking back, I can see that it worked to aim me toward and prepare me for many of the major literary epiphanies that were soon to come, especially Jorge Luis Borges and Thomas Pynchon and Marcel Proust, but at the time it felt like a totality, a final culmination of everything that a book could ever contain or do. Modeled on the Bible, it seemed the Alpha and Omega of novels, and as I lay there on that old red couch with the cheap mass-market edition of the book rising and sinking so lightly upon my breathing body, I felt wholly satisfied and couldn’t imagine a future beyond the book’s all-encompassing boundaries.

The Earth never stops moving through space and time, however, no matter how damascene and seemingly final an experience a soul can have, and the mind and heart and body evolve and encompass further astonishments that often take you away from even the most profound revelations. But as with any other truly great experience, One Hundred Years of Solitude evolves and grows with you, encompassing more and more of what the universe has to show and teach you over the years.

Chronicling several generations of the Buendía family through the evolutions and revolutions and metamorphoses of the fictional/mythical South American town Macondo, One Hundred Years of Solitude sets up its own internal rules, following truths and logics exclusive to itself as its Genesis-like overture creates the book’s world and then carries the reader through its Bible-like begats that follow in dizzying succession and repetition. The universe of Macondo is peopled by patriarchs, matriarchs, prophets, and magicians who seem to circle through a fluid time and morph into one another, some characters even living to an age much longer than the novel’s ostensible one hundred years.

When the book was translated into English in 1970, the great writer and critic William Kennedy wrote that it was “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.” Many years later (the novel’s opening words are “Many years later”), after I’d graduated with a minor in Religious Studies and was doing a systematic study of the Bible while on a long trip across Europe, I began to see more than just Genesis in García Márquez’s vast novel-scheme, opening up an even more encompassing engagement that was far beyond my original reading.

After the novel’s first chapter, which echoes Genesis in many obvious and subtle ways, with things at the founding of Macondo being so new still that many of them didn’t even have names yet, and with the ruins of an old Spanish galleon found nearby on high ground suggesting Noah’s Ark alighting atop Mount Ararat after the biblical flood, the second chapter uses the word “exodus” to describe how the town’s original inhabitants had left their previous home in search of “the land that no one had promised them.” Then the rise and descent of the Buendía family, with all of its endlessly repeating name-variants of the family’s first-generation patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, mirrors the Bible’s arc from the Book of Joshua and the Book of Judges to the First and Second Book of Kings. Coming after the five books of the Torah (or in Greek the Pentateuch, comprising Genesis through Deuteronomy), this second major section of the Bible (called the “Deuteronomical History”) leads toward the establishment of the House of David over the land of Israel and then follows toward the nation’s inevitable disintegration. When Israel’s center cannot hold any longer and breaks into two parts (the northern Israel, which God dislikes, and the southern Judah, which God favors because it’s still ruled by David’s ancestors, whose supporters were the people who compiled and redacted the Bible and who were naturally written to be the winning team), the names and trajectories of the parallel northern and southern kings mirror each other (e.g. Jereboam/Reheboam) and sometimes even have the same name (and diminutive nickname). Eventually God “allows” the northern nation to fall to the Assyrians, but Judah endures long enough to have a kind of renaissance, when in order to repair their deteriorating temple King Josiah (read: José) has the high priest clean out the temple treasury, within which the priest discovers “the book of the law”—presumably an early version of Deuteronomy, which contains all the rules that the Israelites had supposedly forgotten in their decline.

Initial Letter L of Genesis, Wenceslas Bible,
c.1389, illuminated manuscript

After another brief golden age, Judah eventually goes the way of all flesh too and is conquered by the Babylonians as God decides that the nation has been sinning for way too long and that it’s too late to make up for it now. But the thread of Israel’s Davidic lineage continues in the Babylonian exile, because God has promised to let David’s descendants rule forever.

García Márquez mimics many of these biblical complexities and absurdities as Macondo develops and expands and then inevitably descends toward disintegration, which fascinatingly finds his dream city reverting into a bizarre parody of the Garden of Eden, and he has a mysterious Gypsy named Melquíades write it all down long beforehand in a profusion of unreadable parchments that detail Macondo’s entire one-hundred-year story, in perhaps the exact same words we read in the book we’re now holding in our hands. In the final pages of this novel’s reflection/reconstruction of Melquíades’s ur-chronicle the penultimate Buendía malechild, Aureliano Babilonia (note well his patronymic), finally decodes Melquíades’s parchments and in the last paragraph reads his own culminating story in it as the world around him swirls into oblivion. Thus, as with the Bible we now know, which is in part a redaction of the unearthed “book of the law,” we get a glimpse of this novel’s primal first draft in its last pages and can extrapolate some of how its final version makes its way into our hands.

A minor character named Gabriel Márquez, who’d been one of four of Aureliano Babilonia’s close friends, relocates before Macondo’s end/dissolution to Paris, where he perhaps writes the very book we’re reading, whose fictional original is presumably Melquíades’ parchment text. Thus the character Gabriel Márquez, who may or may not be the author Gabriel García Márquez, goes into a kind of “Babilonian” exile and is the only one left to tell the tale when it’s all over.

Or is he? And does he know the whole story? And how does he know it?

Gustave Doré’s The Wandering Jew, 1852

García Márquez chronicles a biblical rise and fall in his novel, with a heavy stress on the turn-turn-turn nihilism of Ecclesiastes, in which there’s a time for everything but no lasting or inherent meaning to any of it, and he assiduously avoids all of the Christian scriptures’ salvational trickery, which magically gives its communicants an escape route from life’s inexorable dissolution. In one of the novel’s last chapters the townspeople hunt down and kill a semi-human creature that they think is the Wandering Jew, a legendary figure who supposedly mocked Jesus as he was being taken to his death and who as punishment was cursed to walk the earth until Jesus’ return. Killing the Wandering Jew then necessarily precludes any kind of Second Coming or afterlife for García Márquez’s imagined world. But Aureliano Babilonia’s four close friends all get away before Macondo’s Alice-in-Wonderland house-of-cards collapse, and perhaps this novel is meant to suggest just one of Macondo’s imperfectly transmitted histories. Perhaps we’re meant to imagine the three other friends’ complementary and contradictory versions of the story, mirroring and parodying the Christian scriptures’ four wildly diverging testaments.

As in the Bible, we read in One Hundred Years of Solitude of an endlessly overlapping and circling mythical history that exists in written form within the novel itself as its own ur-chronicle and that’s presumably reconstituted later by one of its characters into a book that may or may not be conterminous with the novel we get to hold in our hands and read, creating for Macondo a multivalent literary afterlife rather than a merely facile celestial one. Or perhaps the character Gabriel Márquez in fact creates the book’s real original in Paris, only projecting a magic-lantern glimpse within its pages of a fantastical ur-version—which he wasn’t there to decode with Aureliano Babilonia and couldn’t be reconstructing from memory—as a ghostly precursor to the work he’s writing, which of course may or may not be the same text as the author Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.

García Márquez’s master, Jorge Luis Borges, slyly insinuates the myth of the Wandering Jew into his 1947 story “The Immortal,” never mentioning the reference in the text but suggestively naming its narrator Joseph Cartaphilus, which intertwines the biblical Joseph of Arimathea with the apocryphal Cartaphilus, who was said to mock Jesus on the way to the cross and who like the pious Joseph of Arimathea was believed in the thirteenth-century to be wandering the earth still in wait for Jesus’ return. This fusion of legends into one name was inspired by a tale in Roger of Wendover’s medieval chronicle Flores Historiarum that mentions both of these contrasting figures, and Borges’s play on it subtly reflects the crossed and conflated identities of his story’s interconnected immortals. The salient part of this connection is in how García Márquez’s novel plays with and extends the gamey last page of “The Immortals,” which includes this ruminative intimation of immortality: “When the end draws near, there no longer remain any remembered images; only words remain.” Borges then has an invented critic tease out a number of the story’s literary games and references—but nowhere near all of them, such as the fact that the Greek word Cartaphilus means “lover of paper,” which adds yet another level of resonance to the story’s ingenious paper chase—and it’s this deliberately elusive and open-ended tension between words and reality that García Márquez plays with so brilliantly in his novel’s astonishing hypertext.

At twenty, with my hands suddenly empty as the novel lay finished on my chest, I was entirely dazzled by the book from within its own parameters and only understood a glimmer of these vast resonances. But the book utterly changed me and sent me on journeys that I couldn’t have imagined at the time, making One Hundred Years of Solitude both a starting-place and an encompassing point of return that can be wholly loved and appreciated by the unschooled twenty year old and the older writer/critic alike—and in my case, connecting and uniting them into one constantly unfolding epiphany.

—David Wiley

Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God

Diamond Life:

Zora Neale Hurston’s

Their Eyes Were Watching God

Originally Published on About.com’s Classic Literature Page

Among the most dazzling gems of American literature, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God stands confidently in the company of such tautly shimmering masterpieces as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts, J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, each of these novels’ slim volumes serving as the receptacle of entire universes that have been hewn with diamond-tipped virtuosity and forged into eternal works of art.

First published in 1937, Their Eyes Were Watching God was a financial success, but it was extremely unpopular among many of Hurston’s African-American peers. Hurston wrote the novel in what today is known as Ebonics, and authors such as Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison lambasted it as backwards and Uncle-Tommish, a work that they felt didn’t help African-American writers gain any kind of serious literary voice or stature. Compounding the issue was the fact that Hurston was an anti-integrationist Republican who was lauded by whites who shared her beliefs, much in the same way that some of Malcolm X’s views would later be embraced by White Supremacists. It’s possible that today Hurston would simply be considered Afrocentric, but in her time her keen focus on African-American culture and dialect—she was a highly educated anthropologist and folklorist—caused her to be criticized of “ghettoizing” the literature of a people that was desperately trying to escape marginalization.

Again, today’s perspective might argue that rather than trying to write “protest” novels that exposed wrongs and promoted change, she was simply portraying and celebrating a culture that she felt was as valid and valuable and as worthy of high artistic representation as any other. But she didn’t live in our time, of course, and once her white admirers lost interest in her, she descended into obscurity and eventually died penniless in 1960, to be buried in an unmarked grave and almost totally forgotten.

Her work had been long out of print by the time of her death, but thanks to the efforts of Alice Walker and others in the 1970s, Hurston’s books received a second chance at life, and since then Their Eyes Were Watching God has singled itself out as a particularly astonishing work of art and has finally ascended to its deserved status as one of America’s true literary masterpieces. Recently reading this amazing book for the third time, it struck me as a strong contender for Greatest American Novel, matching Huck Finn’s oscillating complexity and maybe even surpassing The Scarlet Letter’s magical seamlessness.

Written while Hurston was doing field research in Haiti, Their Eyes Were Watching God takes place in Florida and tells the story of Janie Crawford, following her through her childhood and through three very different marriages, from the vantage-point of a forty-something Janie who’s telling her friend Phoeby about her life so that Phoeby can tell the gossiping community the truth about her. Only at times voiced in Janie’s direct speech, with Hurston very sophisticatedly refracting most of the novel through her main character’s unique mind and history to project an inventively original narrative language onto the page, Janie’s singular existence strikes the reader as startlingly unique, her unforgettably distinct personality comparable to that of Huckleberry Finn or Holden Caulfield, and her story is as equally penetrating as the language that tells it.

“Oh to be a Pear Tree,” Ann Tanksley, 2009 

Seeing the young Janie’s budding sexuality beginning to break loose, her grandmother marries her off young in an attempt to give her a stable life, but the girl’s early erotic reveries under a wild pear tree, watching the bees penetrate the calyxes in an orgiastic swarm, permanently orient her personality so that she yearns for both stimulation and satisfaction, leading her to follow a number of forking paths in her attempt to get her adult self back to that wild garden. Simply abandoning her first husband for the more ambitious Joe Starks, the still-young Janie accompanies her second husband as he lights out to found his own mini-universe, an all-Black town called Eatonville, which was a fictionalized version of a real Eatonville in Florida that Hurston cleverly kept the name of because of its serendipitous invocation of an “Eden town.” Setting himself up as a kind of Old Testament creator—note the ceremony that he makes when he installs the town’s first street lamp, letting there be light, as well as his favorite exclamation when agitated: “I god,” rather than “my god,” as if in anger he were merely invoking himself—he also exemplifies all of the Hebrew god’s childish narcissism, jealously demanding more and more devotion from Janie while offering none in return, as if doting attention were his birthright. After twenty miserable, abusive years together, with her pedestalled position as shopgirl in Joe’s store offering her no chance for self-expression or satisfaction, he finally dies—but not before she finally upbraids him for “worshippin’ de works of yo’ own hands”—and Janie suddenly finds herself financially independent and the master of her own world, and consequently in great demand among the entire state’s suitors, who all want to put her back in her place.

Michael Ealy and Halle Berry in the 2005 film
version of Their Eyes Were Watching God

Among her more persistent romantic supplicants, pressing his cause distantly through Janie’s friend Phoeby, is an undertaker from Sanford, but Janie tells Phoeby that she loves her freedom too much to think about anything like that just yet. Only one page later a younger man calling himself Tea Cake comes into her store and wakes up her long-dormant curiosity about life, treating her as the equal she is and rapidly opening up capacities in her that she’d never expected to find in herself. He teaches her to play checkers, which had been something her former husband had excluded her from, and she joyfully reflects to herself that “Somebody wanted her to play. Somebody thought it natural for her to play.” He teaches her to shoot a gun, and she quickly becomes a better shot than him. Not patronizing her at all, but rather marveling at how exceptional she is and how well matched they are, Tea Cake draws her out and shows her a new way of life, and a new self in herself that she’d almost stopped thinking she could ever achieve. Finally marrying for love—and also for the wild lust that had lain long dormant inside of her—Janie embarks on a life of her own choosing. Tea Cake is an unreliable drifter, and their relationship is far from perfect, but their love is all the more powerful and true for its flaws and fluctuations, and the couple gets to experience each other to the most profound depths.

As when Huck and Jim’s boat-trip down the Mississippi takes The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn into the strangest and most relative territory, the overwhelming reality and surreality of nature suddenly heighten Their Eyes Were Watching God to a near-dreamlike state when the 1928 Okeechobee hurricane hits Florida and subjects all living beings to its mindless and merciless power. Janie and Tea Cake survive, but after a biblically freakish series of occurrences leads Tea Cake to be bitten by a rabid dog that he’s trying to protect her from during the hurricane’s hallucinatory aftermath, Janie is forced to use her recently learned handiness with a gun to shoot him in self-defense when he goes mad from contracting the disease and tries to kill her. A subsequent trial acquits her of murder, but afterward Janie is tired of life and wants to recede from it, and so she returns to Eatonville and tells Phoeby her story.

Untitled, Jerry Pinkney, 1991

One of the rarely discussed enigmas of Their Eyes Were Watching God is that after Janie shoots Tea Cake, she holds him in her arms while he madly sinks his teeth into her during his death throes. The novel never again discusses this bite, which may or may not have transmitted the disease to Janie. Hurston cleverly arranges the events between the bite and Janie’s resigned retirement to be almost the exact same amount of time that it took for Tea Cake to develop symptoms, and the fact that the novel very deliberately doesn’t address Janie’s wound anywhere in its final pages leaves a vast ambiguity. Does Janie choose to follow Tea Cake in death? Is this novel, a story told to Phoeby—whose name means “moon” and suggests the reflection of light—her last testament? Or is she perhaps just telling her tale without knowing for sure what kind of life or death awaits her after she survives these crucial events?

Discussed even less often than this question is Hurston’s extraordinarily sly and sophisticated literary program for the novel. Using names and imagery that call up a vivid tapestry of literary and biblical associations, she asserts herself as one of the most cannily allusive of the great modernist masters. Joe Starks’ role as Old Testament deity is fairly overtly laid out, but Tea Cake’s personality and role seem so wholly and vividly original that readers can easily overlook the many layers of symbolism that Hurston builds around him. The reference that’s hiding in the plainest sight is that Tea Cake’s name is an allusion to the most famous tea cake in all of literature: the madeleine in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. In Proust’s associative cosmos, an entire 4,000+ page novel arises from the sense memories that spring from a chance combination of dipping a madeleine cookie into a cup of tea, a blend of flavors that his narrator hadn’t tasted in decades and that resurrects in him an entire universe of lost time within his super-sensitive frame. The word “resurrects” is key to the association, because in Proust the madeleine and tea are a kind of secular Eucharist, a bread and wine that reclaim new life within the seemingly dead. With this as part of Tea Cake’s literary baggage, Hurston has him usher in a new dispensation for Janie, figuratively saving her life as he delivers her back to the lost garden and then literally saving it when he takes the dog bite that in the hurricane’s oneiric aftermath seemed to have been destined for her. While Hurston never heavy-handedly makes him into a Christ figure, making sure that he’s his own vividly original entity and that her playful allusions remain mere shading, she nevertheless uses a lot of the same imagery for him that’s typically associated with Jesus. Most notably, Hurston uses a lot of son/sun metaphors to describe him, having Janie lament after his death that “Tea Cake, son of the Evening Sun, had to die for loving her.” On the novel’s final page, after Janie ascends the steps to her old upstairs bedroom in Eatonville, she reflects, “Tea Cake, with the Sun for a shawl. Of course he wasn’t dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking.” This brilliantly subtle sun-shading suggests volumes’ worth of associative links, while still allowing the characters’ original lights to shine for themselves.

“Janie and Tea Cake," relentlesscritic, 2010

The other half of Tea Cake’s literary resonance arises from his other, real, name, Vergible Woods, which he only mentions once, just before he introduces himself to Janie as Tea Cake. Offhandedly tossing this name aside, Hurston allows the inattentive reader to overlook it and move on, but when unpacking this character’s many strata his true name fairly clearly asserts itself as a reference to the beginning of the Divine Comedy, when Vergil/Virgil arrives to help Dante out of the darkened woods, which the pilgrim has lost his way in and is attempting to escape by trying to follow the sun, “the planet/that leads men straight ahead on every road,” but which he’s lost sight of because he’s looked back (as in the stories of the classical Orpheus and the Biblical Lot) and been distracted by a series of simultaneously real and symbolized wild animals. Thus, Tea Cake is both the Virgilian guide out of the woods and the sun toward which the lost pilgrim strives for salvation. Perhaps he’s also even the woods itself. Tying this Dante/Virgil aspect of his name to the Proustian aspect of his name is the scene at the end of Proust’s first volume, Swann’s Way. Prefiguring the fugitive years of the full novel’s subsequent half-dozen volumes, Proust’s narrator as an old man walks through the Bois de Boulogne (the Boulogne Woods), disgusted by the havoc that’s been done to the faces that he knew from the past, lamenting all that’s changed and been forever lost (in Moncrieff’s translation):

Alas! in the acacia-avenue—the myrtle-alley—I did see some of them again, grown old, no more now than grim spectres of what once they had been, wandering to and fro, in desperate search of heaven knew what, through the Virgilian groves. They had long fled, and still I stood vainly questioning the deserted paths. The sun’s face was hidden. 

This is not the blissful grove of the blessed from Book VI of Vergil’s Aeneid, but rather the sylvan nightmare that the poeticized Virgil finds the medieval Dante in (or it’s perhaps a combination of the two, since Proust never looked anything up and often confused and conflated his remembered references), and so with the sun’s face hidden in these Virgilian woods (dans les bosquets virgiliens, a phrase that Hurston transforms into the name Vergible Woods), Proust and his entire cast of characters are as lost as Dante at the beginning of the Divine Comedy, and by using just a few brilliantly placed words and names, Hurston conjures up all these associations as mere background coloring for a novel that’s as vibrant and complex and original as any of the classics that exist in its wake.

A true master, Hurston also remembers to balance all this gravity with a heaping helping of levity, and as she opens up the novel’s field of play she repeatedly references the greatest comic novel of them all: Don Quixote. One of Hurston’s most inspired bits is the tale of Matt Bonner’s mule, a miniature tragicomedy about a scrawny, abused beast of burden whose shiftless owner is Eatonville’s favorite figure of fun. Describing the mule in much of the same language that Cervantes uses to describe Quixote’s bony nag, Rocinante, Hurston brutalizes this poor creature and his owner with a hilariously inspired cruelty that nearly equals Cervantes’ relentless pummeling of Quixote and his ever-suffering steed. Perhaps, as in the case of Don Quixote, Hurston also draws inspiration from Apuleius’ second-century novel The Metamorphoses (also known as The Golden Ass), which follows the travails of a man who’s been transformed into a donkey and endures relentless abuse before finding salvation through the cult of Isis. Perhaps the strangest and most inspired part of the tale of Matt Bonner’s mule comes after the mule’s death, when a council of buzzards convenes to discuss and devour its remains. Holding up the proceedings, the buzzards’ parson asks his congregants about the mule’s death:  “What killed this man,” he intones two times, and the chorus responds each time with the phrase, “Bare, bare fat.” What this means is simply beyond me.

Drawing upon another one of Cervantes’ greatest set-pieces, the brawl at the inn near the end of the first part of Don Quixote, Hurston has Tea Cake raise a similar ruckus at a restaurant owned by a light-skinned black woman named Mrs. Turner, who’s been trying to lead the light-skinned Janie away from the dark-skinned Tea Cake and toward her own brother. Pretending to break up a fight in Mrs. Turner’s restaurant, Tea Cake in fact precipitates a wild melee whose riotous domino effect clearly mimics Cervantes’ brilliantly snowballing free-for-all, leaving the restaurant in a hilarious shambles. His agitation over Mrs. Turner’s brother returns, though, when he’s going mad from rabies and starts to fantasize that the ostensible suitor has returned after the hurricane to lure Janie away from him. His warped mind supposing that Janie’s been visiting Mrs. Turner’s brother when she was in fact out trying to get medical help, he accuses her again and again, and Janie discovers that he’s keeping a loaded pistol under his pillow. When he’s off in the outhouse she checks and sees that three of the six chambers have bullets in them, and so in order to give herself some warning time she spins the cylinder so that the first three attempted shots will be harmless. Finally losing his mind soon afterward, he aims at her and tries to shoot, the three clicks giving her time to grab the rifle that she’d hidden in the kitchen and to shoot him in self-defense, just as his fourth squeeze rings out, “the pistol just enough after the rifle to seem its echo.” Having Janie kill him with this Chekhovian rifle—and with the rising tension at each of the three clicks’ inevitable rush toward death perhaps suggesting the three times that, as per Jesus’ prediction, the Apostle Peter denies his master before the cock crows at dawn—Hurston ties up several of the novel’s interlocking themes in one elegantly bloody swoop.

Burying Tea Cake right before the novel’s end, Janie finally has her date with the undertaker, who in lieu of having become her third husband instead prepares her third husband for burial. It’s probably not the same undertaker as her earlier off-stage suitor, but bringing back this sepulchral theme vividly signals Janie’s full-circle growth between the deaths of her second and third husbands. Ingeniously tying up these remaining thematic loose ends with Tea Cake’s funeral—and with the lunar Phoeby set to reflect the light of the solar Tea Cake into the future—Hurston then opens the novel’s final end completely, leaving Janie’s ultimate fate as suggestively unresolved as any of the plots of the century’s subsequent postmodernist novels—particularly The Crying of Lot 49, which takes this device to its logical/illogical end. Does Tea Cake bring her death as well as life? Do we owe our sacrificing saviors the same price that they paid for us? Is death the full consummation of life? While Janie’s ambiguous resignation after Tea Cake’s death leaves the novel with a universe of echoing questions, its simultaneously succinct and resonant resolution also encloses her life on the page in a diamond-like artistic encapsulation. Hers is a story whose brilliantly hewn facets shine on far afield of the novel’s end, her life beyond this book’s deliberately brief 200 pages constantly bringing us back to marvel at its seemingly miraculously composition. Likewise, Hurston’s masterwork lives on far past the author’s decline and death and nearly complete literary oblivion to rise up and illuminate the generations of readers who will keep this radiant novel alive long past their own short times on Earth, its durable pigments resurrecting itself again and again, Phoenix-like, to live on in permanent literary immortality.

—David Wiley