Hurston, Zora Neale. Dust Tracks On a Road
New York: HarperCollins, 1991. 278 pages
It seems like such a shame to have to stop and analyze such an enjoyable book. However, there is a feature of this book that makes me stop to consider the premises that all fiction is autobiographical and all biography is fiction. Hurston includes long sections of dialogue in this work. How is it that she can remember the specifics of dialogue which occurred before her tenth birthday. Further, how is it that she is privy to the details of conversation that did not take place in her presence. Many of the specifics have obviously been passed on by a culture which is given to maintaining an oral history. However, it also seems obvious that she has taken some literary license in the writing of her autobiography. The long sections of conversation do not seem to be the only areas where she has thought it appropriate to "supply" material. Some of the details of her stories seem to be just a little too "full" for her to be relying upon memory alone. Has she invented her autobiography like she did Mrs. Corn-Shuck and Mr. Sweet Smell?
I do not fault her for supplementing the details of her life with materials from her imagination or derived from the culture in which she lived any more than I would argue against the use of her own life stories in her works of fiction. I think that, of necessity, we all create our histories any time they are the subject of our discourse. Hurston is just better at creating it than most of us. As she writes of her time with the Gilbert and Sullivan show, she notes that her language is a mixture of image and invective because that is the soil from which she grew. But it is more than just language. She seems to have a view of things which animates everything so that trains are angry, houses frown, trees creep, etc. Thing, Time, and Mystery are more than categories of understanding, they are personal, as real and as personal as are Fannie Hurst and Ethel Waters. And, just as she "saw" Odin swing his short-handled hammer while reading Norse Tales, it seems that she "sees" and "hears" the past and wants to translate this vision in such a way that her readers "see" it and "hear" it. She wants her readers to see the statue of herself which she envisions as she looks back. But her statue is one that breathes, laughs, and cries.
