The Harlem Conversation
One of the really interesting things about the last three books that we’ve read is how closely together chronologically they were written. All of the different authors knew each other at least by name, and even wrote commentary on each other’s work. We’ve seen this especially with Wright’s review of Their Eyes Were Watching God. Looking at this, we can then start to see these books as reactions to each other, or even as the authors themselves having a conversation or argument through their literature. All of these books were written during the Harlem Renaissance, and were very different expressions of black culture at the time, expressing different opinions of what exactly it meant to be writing black literature. The first of these books to come out was Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, which was published in 1937 and focused mainly on expressing a very specific form of black culture in the south, almost completely disregarding racism and focusing instead on how people continue to live and enjoy their lives in such an oppressive environment as the Jim Crow South. Wright was not a fan of this kind of literature, as seen with his book review of Their Eyes Were Watching God. He believed instead that black literature should be focused completely on the oppressive nature of racism and how it completely shaped the lives of black people in America. He expressed his ideas in writing with his 1940 publication of Native Son, which showed a young black man backed into a corner and crushed by the racism and oppression that is deeply ingrained in society at the time.
Ellison on the other hand, decided to write Invisible Man in 1952 almost as a response to Wright’s portrayal of black life as being completely focused on racism. He instead decides to tell the story of a young black man growing up and discovering how racism and oppression affects his life and working to escape that influence. Showing many different situations, and expressing that black life was not completely focused on the effects of racism at the time but was still heavily influenced by it. In this way, Ellison was almost the median between the ideas of Wright and Hurston, combining them to give what he believed to be an accurate representation of how he saw society. These authors were all defining figures of the Harlem renaissance, and shaped how we see black literature to this day. It’s interesting to see such divides in this movement, and how these divides translated into works of literature.
I think its really interesting you bring this "conversation" up. Even though the 3 authors seem to disagree on how race should be portrayed in their respective novels, they each are trying to achieve a similar goal. All 3 seem to be highlighting black culture and bring awareness to the issues in society. For Hurston, she used black vernacular in her writing to show the beauty of this culture that had been repressed and viewed negatively for decades. Even though Wright disagreed, his book also focused on bringing awareness to another societal issue affecting Bigger in the book.
ReplyDeleteI agree that these three novels work well in "conversation" with each other, and that it's significant that all three authors come from a similar social and artistic circle, with strong ties to Harlem not just as a place they'd lived but as the place that cultivated and shaped them as artists. But I would clarify that of the three, Hurston is most closely associated with the Harlem Renaissance movement, which is usually understood to span from the early 1920s to the Second World War. Wright's novels are not typically seen as "Harlem Renaissance" productions, as by this point he was deeply involved in the American Communist Party and working out of Chicago, and Ellison came to Harlem at the tail end of the HR movement, but by the time his novel was published in 1952, the movement itself was long past its peak. Harlem is certainly an important common denominator for all three, though, especially in their artistic formative years.
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