The Worm Against the Word: The Hermeneutical Challenge in Hurston's Jonah's Gourd Vine.

Daughter of a Baptist preacher, Zora Neale Hurston spoke from the pulpit every time that she wrote. She did not follow the conventional path of testifying to her father's faith. Although she enjoyed her parent's rhapsodic language at revival meetings, Hurston had early doubts about the theological mysteries that were being sublimely dramatized in his sermons (Dust Tracks 194-97). Nor did she turn her fiction into the overtly political homilies that some of her male contemporaries would have preferred. Hurston the artist regarded such polemics with the same displeasure that a member of the congregation showed in Jonah's Gourd Vine after she heard a man of God speak on the "race problem": "'Dat wan't no sermon. Dat wuz uh lecture"' (159). [1] Opposed to such moralizing, Hurston was always attracted to what won the amens of the assembly, to "'uh preachin' piece uh plunder'" (158).

Hurston preached not by imitating the models for religious proselytism or social protest offered by men but by living up to the unvoiced expectation that her mother seemed to evoke as she lay dying. Since Lucy Ann Potts Hurston was so weakened that she could not speak, her nine-year-old daughter felt herself called to be her spokeswoman (Dust Tracks 63). Throughout her life Hurston devoted herself with almost evangelical ardor to a celebration and exploration of the connection between language and identity. In undertaking this ministry, she liberally drew upon the heritage of African-American preaching. Hurston made her writing, as Deborah Plant has shown, echo the rhetoric and the good news about empowerment that had long inspired the congregations in black churches (93-115). But the artist as homilist turned such sermons back on themselves. What Hurston preached was the very act of preaching, of undertaking the hermeneutical challenge to know the self by way of the spoken and written word.

The "Reverend" Hurston recorded her vocation in her novels. They tell about characters who are called to be preachers, for, according to Karla Holloway. they "must connect the self to the spiritual source of linguistic power" (116). [2] In Their Eyes Were Watching God Hurston portrays a version of her own matrilineal commission. Janie's grandmother recalls that "'Ah wanted to preach a great sermon about colored women sittin' on high, but they wasn't no pulpit for me"' (21). Disappointed that her daughter would not "'expound what Ah felt,"' Nanny tendered the mission to her granddaughter, resolving, "'Ah'd save de text for you'" (22). Janie's spirit-filled narrative finally becomes that long-desired sermon on female selfhood. Having gained a freedom greater than any that her grandmother could ever have envisioned, Janie witnesses to and interprets the text of her life. In

Moses, Man of the Mountain, Hurston delivers an extended folk homily on the Exodus. She conceives of the lawgiver as the preacher par excellence, the magical bearer of language and liberation, of language as liberation. In Seraph on the Suwanee Hurston portrays the failure of a life in language. Although Arvay Henson aspires to be a missionary, she is a radically diminished speaker who never discovers the words that give adequate voice to her selfhood.

The preacher/hero of Hurston's first novel anticipates the triumphs of Janie and Moses as well as the unfulfilled promise of Arvay Henson. Since the title of Jonah's Gourd Vine refers to a biblical text (Jonah 4.6-8), the novel itself becomes a kind of sermon that explains and expands the scriptural citation. It tells how John Pearson grows in linguistic consciousness, flourishes as a preacher, and finally meets his own version of the misfortune that befalls the prophet's sheltering plant. However, the Reverend Pearson is not just a preacher but the subject of Hurston's preaching. Because the evangelist is called "Two-Eye-John," after a reference in a sermon that his mother once heard, John Lowe suggests that he "should be read as a text himself" (94, 105). Hurston's first novel is, then, a sermonic text based on a biblical text about a preacher of texts who himself requires textual interpretation. The minister at Reverend Pearson's funeral implies that he ultimately eludes human understanding, for" 'nobody knowed 'im but God'" (202). If readers are not to write John off as equally inscrutable, they may come closer to the challenge of interpreting the preacher by trying to understand his life as an interpreter.

As John progresses from discovering his voice through speaking, to reading and writing, and finally to preaching, he engages in the kind of hermeneutical enterprise that has been described by Paul Ricoeur, who examines how speaking brings the meaning of experience to language, how writing surpasses the limits of spoken discourse, and how reading may disclose new possibilities of being in the world. Rejecting the idea of a Cartesian self that is immediately transparent to its own reflection, Ricoeur maintains that "there is no self-understanding which is not mediated by signs, symbols and texts" ("On Interpretation" 191). As John searches for such knowledge of and by words in Jonah 's Gourd Vine, he illustrates Henry Louis Gates's parallel contention that the quest for selfhood through the medium of language is a signal theme in African-American literature (169). However, John's vine-like growth toward his hermeneutical identity finally withers. He fails to give an adequate interpretation of himself because h e fails to give an adequate interpretation of "signs, symbols and texts." Although Jonah's Gourd Vine has typically been criticized because Hurston's love of language overwhelms her plot and characterization, the novel seems more artfully constructed if language--spoken and heard, written and read--is understood as central to the plot and characterization. The novel does not just celebrate an African-American world of words but ponders the very implications of orality and literacy for achieving selfhood.

The sixteen-year-old John Buddy senses the hermeneutical task that defines his whole life when he confronts a train for the first time at the beginning of the novel. The throbbing vehicle offers neither a recognizable message to be heard nor a conventional text to be read; rather, it challenges the young language user with the pure problem of interpretation. "'It say something,'" John remarks, "'but Ah ain't heered it 'nough tuh tell whut it say yit'" (16). The novice's tentative commentary on the train articulates the way that language, according to Ricoeur, makes public not the event, which is always private, but the meaning of the event to the participant. It is "the exteriorization thanks to which an impression is transcended and becomes an expression" (Interpretation 19). Although John lacks the experience to translate the engine's secrets, what his words express is the guess that always begins the hermeneutical endeavor for Ricoeur. The youth is not yet able to explain, but he at least understands that there is something more to be understood (Interpretation 74-77). Because of this intimation of meaning, John disagrees with a fellow spectator who claims, "'It don't say nothin'. It jes' make uh powerful racket, dass all'" (16).

Whereas the hermeneutics of suspicion hears the train's only significance in its absence of significance. John discerns its potential message as part of the exegesis that engages him throughout the novel:" 'Naw, it say some words too. Ahm comin' heah plenty mo' times and den Ah tell yuh whut it say'" (16). Terrified yet somehow pleased by this panting monster of a train with a single eye, John dedicates himself to interpreting this mysterium tremendum fascinans, this godlike machine. Until killed by another train, the devotee struggles to bring his understanding of such deepest mysteries to speech, to achieve what Ricoeur calls "the elevation of a part of our life into the logos of discourse" (Interpretation 19). John's quest to voice the words of the almighty train identifies him as a descendant of Esu-Elegbara, the Fon and Yoruba god of interpretation, whom Gates regards as the "muse of the critic" of African-American texts (35). If this African twin of Hermes is "master of that elusive, mystical barrier t hat separates the divine world from the profane" (6), John must also mediate between heaven and earth through the liminality of his language. Like the great drum that he hears played during the cotton harvest celebration, John must become the hermeneutical instrument that "speaks to gods as a man and to men as a God" (29).

The future preacher first learns how speaking may express selfhood through the contrasting ways his parents use language. Accustomed to speak in commands--shut the door, get some water--Ned Crittenden voices the desire for domination behind all of his imperatives when he orders his wife, "'Table dat talk'" (10). Yet his linguistic sovereignty in the family is undermined by his own quiet compromise with racial injustice. Since Ned tacitly submits to white oppression, he rebukes his more defiant wife for speaking too loudly, "'You better quit talkin' 'bout de buckra.[ldots] Ah done tole yuh but you won't hear'" (7). Amy Crittenden will not only talk; she will challenge the hegemony of her husband's speech by talking about his talk. If Ned understands every additional mouth in the family as a drain on the meal barrel, Amy charges that her husband is "'mealy-moufin round'" (6) because he is scared to talk back to Major Beasley, who cheated the family out of its rightful share of cotton. She claims that Ned's wor ds are not even original: When he slanders his mulatto stepson, he just repeats the foolish prejudices heard from Captain Mimms. Amy shows her alternately arrogant and subservient husband how mouths can be sources of rightful power. Although Ned uses language to demand authority in his family and to defer to other authorities outside his cabin, Amy provides a model for how speech may reflect a liberating sense of the self as an author.

John imitates his mother's daring self-expression in language. He challenges Ned's decree not to give him "'no word for word'" (2) and finally flees the speakerly servitude of his stepfather's house. Supported only by his mother's words, the fugitive son seeks the freedom to use the mother tongue. As John crosses the creek that separates him from the land where he was born, he transforms his version of the passage through the Red Sea and the flight of runaway slaves into a linguistic exodus. Freed to speak, John rejoices, like a precursor of Hurston's Moses, in a virtuoso outburst of verbal creativity. The celebrant begins "singing a new song and stomping the beats," making "some words to go with the drums of the Creek" (12). The fusion of John's rapped-out lyrics with Nature's own percussion sounds his full membership in the culture of orality, where speech is filled with power and the cosmos is "an ongoing event with man at its center" (Ong 73). If God uses a drum as his creative word in several West Afric an myths (Holloway 113), John uses his words to redouble creation's drums. He speaks like the African American that Hurston describes in "Characteristics of Negro Expression": His "terms are all close fitting," so intimately connected with the world that they dramatize and depict it (Sanctified 49). Although Amy had warned her son about a dangerous snake in the Songahatchee, no poisonous worm yet undermines the words of Hurston's latter-day Jonah. He is a lord in language.

Since John's brothers later talk of nothing but" 'over de Creek,' and 'man when us git on dat ole train'" (44), John's crossing is a movement toward speaking the words of the mysterious engine that he saw on the tracks. Indeed, while working across the creek, John eventually becomes so forceful in speech that, when he briefly returns home to help his family, he uses language to stage the vicarious murder of the parent who would keep him in silence. After Ned fails to carry out a threat to shoot his stepson, John mocks Crittenden's impotent bluster, "'Tryin' tuh kill somebody wid talk."' He proves his own verbal mastery by reversing the direction of the threat and turning his sarcastic denunciation of Ned's pusillanimous words into the means for committing ritual patricide. The upstart son kills his flaccid stepfather with talk. Addressing a charred tree trunk, John "threw the character of Ned Crittenden upon it" (47) and then casts both a large rock as well as boastful taunts upon this surrogate parent. Trud ier Harris finds this scene typical of how Hurston's revelry in folk expressions gets in the way of her responsibilities as a novelist in Jonah's Gourd Vine. However, the violence in deed and word actually forms a complex act of signification that dramatizes John's growing oral supremacy. To assault his stepfather as tyrant, he stones the tree in symbol; and to attack this worm of a man as a feckless speaker, he flings epithets in the kind of signifying that Gates has defined as "the trope of tropes" (52) for African-American literature: "'And you, you ole battle-hammed, slew-foot, box-ankled nubbin, you! [ldots] You ain't nothin' but uh big ole pan of fell bread'" (47). This particular form of signifying resounds with linguistic and personal integrity. As Susan Willis observes, such "specifying," or name-calling, "speaks for a noncommodified relationship to language, a time when the slippage between words and meaning would not have obtained or been tolerated" (16). "'Now dat's de word wid de bark on it'" (47 ), the assailant cries, right before hurling a stone to make material his verbal barrage. Just as when John sang in union with the creek, the mouthy youth knows a harmony between signifier and signified.

John's love affair with Lucy Ann Potts helps to make possible such signifying, for it is a courtship in and of language. She models for John the ingenuity with speech that, as Debra Beilke has shown, he needs to succeed in a society that values verbal performance (26-27). But Lucy also leads him from such powerful orality to the more problematic transcendence of literacy. [3] The thirteen-year-old, who has reputedly mastered every word in Lippincott's Speller, is a spirited lady of the printed page who encourages John to attend school so that he may learn to read and write. As if his life were taking a chapter from a long tradition of slave narratives, John discovers how literacy may bring liberty. While the wordstruck student spells out what he reads on "barns and wagons, almanacs, horse-medicine-bottles, wrapping-paper" (27), he seems to make a linguistic passage into a chirographic world that parallels his earlier crossing of the creek.

Since Lucy is the word of words for John, he fittingly woos her through both reading and writing. John studies his lessons to impress Lucy. And he is pleased to join her in a duet on the last night of school because it will demonstrate his mastery of the text. His notes to Lucy transform the newly learned letters of the alphabet into the most heartfelt form of literacy--love letters. When the ever vigilant Mrs. Potts sits between John and Lucy in the parlor, John notices Lucy's slate for school and tries to use it to send her a secret message. He nearly pencils his way toward a rendezvous, but his romance in writing is appropriately opposed by one who cannot read. John's future mother-in-law snatches the slate and shows how "she could erase as well as the world's greatest professor," although she does not understand what she is erasing (72). If John cannot court Lucy in the flesh, he can always love her as text. Because his learned young lady is inscribed in his consciousness, he "proved his new power to com municate his thoughts by scratching Lucy's name in the clay wherever he found a convenient spot" (32). The lovesick writer even returns to gaze at the many varieties of her name that he has etched on Pheemy's chimney. Beginning with "Lucy," "Lucy Ann," and "Lucy Potts," the inscriptions mark out the revision possible in writing but not in speech. "Lucy and John" becomes "Lucy is John's girl," "no 'nile can cut our love into," and finally "Lucy Pearson" (41).

As reader and writer, John experiences what Ricoeur describes as the paradoxical spirituality of the text (Interpretation 31). Although the printed word seems more material than the spoken word because it has space and shape, it is freed from the physical confines of the face-to-face encounter that restricts speaking. Inscribing Lucy's name, rethinking it, and then reinscribing a different version, John transcends the boundaries of time, place, and particular audience that define dialogue to dwell in increasingly daring possibilities. Writing makes possible for him a new set of non-ostensive references that are completely independent of the situational references to which he is limited as a speaker. It allows John to live not in the immediacy of the spoken word but in the implications of the written world, the "ensemble of references opened up by the texts" (Interpretation 36). Writing Lucy's current name leads to writing what John hopes will be her future name. His sequence of revisions traces how writing e xtends the scope of reference not just beyond the moment of speech (e.g., the written word for the uttered name of Lucy herself) but toward projecting what Ricoeur calls "the outline of a new way of being in the world" (Interpretation 37). Before he ever weds Lucy, John writes her as his wife.

If literacy introduces John to the spirituality of the text, it also seems to spiritualize Lucy. Whereas his words once beat out the rhythm of the creek and later beat up his stepfather as he stoned a symbolic tree, they now seem divided from the context of his immediate experience. John can dally with a host of other women but never find in them the revelation of heavenly glory that he beholds after the most awkward kiss with the scholarly Lucy. He can write of Lucy but not woo the well-educated Miss Potts as he would like. Other women "merely called for action, but with Lucy he needed words and words that he did not have" (32). John actually has "words"; they simply seem too fleshly. He considers reciting the rhymes that other young women thought so witty but decides that such ditties would only offend a lady as refined as Lucy. John's schoolbook lessons seem unconnected with the more carnal forms of knowledge that he desires. Since the oral culture in which John was raised is "situational rather than abstract" (Ong 49), he is uncertain in the less embodied world of reading and writing to which Lucy calls him.

What John does not realize is that Lucy transcends the opposition between flesh and print. Although she is less robust than the other women who lure John, she is very much a woman of the novel's world--a shrewd counselor, a gifted and humorous conversationalist, a bright-eyed adolescent who exults at discovering her incipient puberty. Yet John demonstrates his tendency to view identity in binary terms (Hutchings 179-86) by repeatedly vacillating between his love for Lucy and literacy and his pursuit of less bookish pleasures. The would-be student stays out late playing Hide and Seek with the girls on the Pearson plantation and then does not attend school the next morning. But that evening the truant resists the enticements of the flavorful Mehaley, and the following morning he faithfully goes to class. Mehaley's physicality makes her instinctually understand how Lucy has fostered John's growth in written language. Mehaley's ultimate vengeance on her studious lover is to erase the names of Lucy that John had written on Pheemy's chimney. However, after being once again captivated by Mehaley, John tries to right his love by writing Lucy's name on some fresh whitewash behind his granny's house. When John later works in the tie-camp, he leaves one Saturday night to buy pencil and paper but gets detoured by the attractions of women in town and does not return until Sunday night. His infidelity means that he neglects writing to Lucy for two weeks.

John typically reacts to Lucy as if her textuality seems to compromise her sexuality. Although he can easily court Lucy by killing the moccasin that terrifies her in the stream, he has difficulty in confronting a beast of a different kind. The worm that begins to attack the word of the future preacher is more than just phallic. Ricoeur's hermeneutics suggests that it is an inability to live between the transcendent alterity of the written world and the personal immediacy of an oral culture. If writing seems to distance John from the physical vitality of the spoken life, it is guilty of the charge that Ricoeur traces in varying forms from Bergson and Rousseau back to Plato's Phaedrus (Interpretation 38-40). In that dialogue Socrates recounts the hermeneutical myth that underlies this longstanding critique of literacy. When Theuth, the divine patron of interpreters, offered the king of Thebes the gift of writing as an aid to memory, the monarch rejected the dubious present. He argued that, far from improving t he power to remember, it would actually encourage humans to forget what they could readily recall in a text. Whereas Socrates comes to associate writing with all that separates the self from its inner wisdom, he views speaking as the voice of the soul's own recollection.

As a celebrant of oral culture in her fiction and non-fiction, Hurston had to face the same dilemma as does John:Does the otherworldliness of writing betray the more immanent universe of the spoken word? So central was this problem in her first novel that she even gave voice to outright denunciations of reading and writing so that her text seems to turn against itself. Ned Crittenden sneers that none of his children needs to be as educated as John:

"Dat's all dese book-learnt niggers do--fill up de jails and chain-gangs. Dese boys is comin' 'long all right. All dey need tuh learn is how tuh swing uh hoe and turn a furrer. Ah ain't rubbed de hair offa mah haid 'gin no college walls and Ah got good sense. (28)

Hurston later lets an anonymous speaker vent the full force of his orality upon the arch-representative of literacy:

"Whut did dis Du Bois ever do? He writes up books and papers, hunh? Shucks! dat ain't nothin anybody kin put down words on uh piece of paper. Gimme da paper sack and lemme see dat pencil uh minute. Shucks! Writing! Man Ali thought you wuz tilkedn' 'bout uh man whut had done sumpin. Ah thought maybe he wuz de man dat could make sidemeat taste lak ham." (148)

What intensifies the comedy and the complexity of these attacks is that these voices against writing are all created by writing. Since they depend on what they deride, the novel's critics of literacy actually give testimony to literacy, in particular to Hurston's ability to make the tension between speech and text the very source of her art. Just as Derrida shows that the opposition between writing and speaking is actually not so absolute as it seems by deconstructing the Phaedrus in "Plato's Pharmacy," Hurston elides the borders between oral and written discourse by creating what Gates has called "speakerly texts." These writings exalt the world of the voice--its sounds and rules, rituals and semants--to the extent of deemphasizing such traditional features of fiction as plot and character (Gates 181, 194). In bringing talk so vividly to the foreground, Hurston's work illustrates Ricoeur's contention that writing may be revelatory. Much as the visual arts offer an "aesthetic augmentation of reality" by prese nting to the viewer more than would normally be seen by everyday vision, writing can enhance the reader's ability to perceive the world (Ricoeur, Interpretation 42). Hurston's speakerly texts achieve this heightening by making literacy into the means to hear orality with newly opened ears.

Whereas Hurston found the ambivalent relationship between the written and spoken word immensely creative, John eventually founders on this dichotomy. His literacy at first allows him to prosper. Since John can read and write, Mister Alf entrusts him with recording entries in his account books. And after John becomes the Reverend Pearson, his learning distinguishes him as a proper man of God from a stumpknocker in the swamp. Unlike the unlettered Woody Grant, who pretends to read his daughter's wedding ceremony from a volume that is nothing more than an almanac, John has the knowledge of texts that was expected of African-American preachers since before the Civil War (Cornelius 85-94). However, John limits the role of the written word in his life to bring about what Ricoeur calls the "enlarging of our horizon of existence" (Interpretation 37). He can write out his dream of marrying Lucy Potts by the simple inscription of "Lucy Pearson" but never live out faithfully the union that such writing implies. And he can read the words of Scripture yet never completely let the sacred book inform his life when he is not giving a sermon.

John's vocation as a preacher marks the climax of his growth in language even as it widens the schism that he first felt between Lucy and his logocentric world. Hurston suggests the connection between his verbal skill and his sacred calling when in "Characteristics of Negro Expression" she observes that the highly pictorial language of African Americans favors smiles and metaphors, and that their religious services are "for the greater part excellent prose poetry" (Sanctified 54). The Reverend Pearson lets this penchant for figurative language enrich his preaching. Ricoeur defines preaching in terms of a theology of discourse derived from the Bible. If God reveals himself in words, becomes the human Word in Jesus, and is proclaimed by early Christians, subsequent preaching "is in its way the actualization of this first word, primarily in a new Word intelligible for our times" (Ricoeur, qtd. in Wallace 31). John succeeds at becoming a masterly reinterpreter because his preaching relies upon rhetorical original ity to express the continuing vitality of the primal sacred word. He always, according to Hurston's narrator, found "some new figure, some new praise-giving name for God, every time he knelt in church" (89).

Such semantic innovation forms the basis for Ricoeur's understanding of metaphor. Metaphor provides startling redescriptions of the world by revealing an unexpected resemblance between once distant and divergent terms. The conjunction of these terms at first seems senseless. But Ricoeur argues that, when the literal interpretation of a metaphor falters, meaning is found amid the apparent meaninglessness. In resolving this dissonance, metaphor "tells us something new about reality" (Interpretation 53). John creates precisely such eyeopening redefinitions of the sacred through the novelty of his poetic figures. Since the Reverend Pearson puts the artful use of language to its most transcendent end, he is the supreme example of the Signifying Monkey. Gates's African-American counterpart to the divine interpreter Esu-Elegbara is not just the master of rhetorical figures. He "is technique, or style, or the literariness of literary language" (Gates 54). Having confronted in the train the mystery of meaning, the Re verend Pearson uses all of his figures as skillful maneuvers to express this elusive ultimacy.

John's tropes gain their newness from their roots in his ancestral faith. "He rolled his African drum up to the altar," declares the knowing narrator of Jonah's Gourd Vine, "and called his Congo Gods by Christian names" (89). He thrills his listeners in church with his "barbaric poetry" (89) and "Pagan poesy" (141). Speaking with the resourcefulness of the Signifying Monkey, John uses the indeterminacy and indirection of his cross-cultural language as a "trick of mediation" (Gates 56) between different religious traditions. John's double-voiced discourse makes him a participant in the hermeneutical endeavor that defines the originality of the African American for Hurston. "While he lives and moves in the midst of a white civilization," she writes, "everything that he touches is re-interpreted for his own use" (Sanctified 58). If the essence of signifying involves repetition and revision (Gates 52), the preacher as Signifying Monkey reinterprets African faith in terms of biblical belief. Through such translat ion, John realizes precisely what Hurston wrote about such syncretism: "[ldots] the congregation is restored to its primitive altars under the new name of Christ" (Sanctified (104). [4]

Although the Reverend Pearson wins glory as a spokesman of sacred truths while in church, he does not achieve the final stage of the interpretive process, what Ricoeur calls "appropriation." [5] The poetic language of his preaching, like the revelatory discourse of the Bible, proposes "a world [one] may inhabit and wherein [one] can project [his/her] ownmost possibilities" (Ricoeur, "Toward" 102). However, John does not permanently enter into this transfigured cosmos and make it his own. When his prayers and sermons have been completed, he follows the example of the prophet by the gourd vine: He lives at odds with the Word and his words. Hurston once explained the title of her first novel by referring to the protecting plant in chapter 4 of Jonah (Hemenway 192), yet she actually signified on the whole Old Testament book to create a more telling analogue for her preacher's hermeneutical struggle. [6] If the prophet, according to Ricoeur, "presents himself as not speaking in his own name, but in the name of an other" ("Toward" 75), John appropriately admits that he is not the authority for his utterances. "'When Ah speak tuh yuh from dispulpit, dat ain't me talkin',' "he explains," 'dat's de voice uh God speakin' thru me'" (122). Like Jonah,

John at first resists delivering God's word before he finally accepts his mission to preach. And just as Jonah's bitterness at the repentance of the Ninevehites reveals how he has failed to internalize his own message about forgiveness, John calls for conversion but cannot achieve his own definitive change of heart. Rather, he seems as alienated from his religious language as he once felt separated from the literacy associated with Lucy. If his beloved paragon of reading and writing made John sense a rift between the spirituality of the text and his life in the body, his vocation as a prophet and preacher seems to perpetuate this division by opposing the words of the Spirit to the flesh of their recipient. Describing his role as the mouthpiece of God, he contends," 'When de voice is thew, Ah jus' uhnother one uh God's crumblin' clods.[ldots] Ahm uh natchel man but look lak some uh y'all is dumb tuh de fack'" (122). Like Jonah, John views the word as entirely other and apart from its bearer.

Despite seeking to reinterpret religious traditions, John lives by neither Christian belief nor the faith of his African ancestors. The preacher's adulteries scandalize the Scripture-reading congregation of Zion Hope. As J. D. Y. Peel observes, literacy often makes the religious beliefs and moral principles of a culture more fixed, because they can be referred back to a definitive text that provides an unchanging source of authority (139-40). John's Baptist flock finds such codified standards in the Bible, whereas the philandering pastor does not live by the book of books. However, it is difficult to justify John as following the more flexible situational ethics that Peel views as characterizing oral cultures. Although Larry Neal has sympathetically argued that the Reverend Pearson may be practicing the spirituality of an ancestral non Christian society that makes no distinction between the spirit and the flesh, [7] John actually sins against the community of his own flesh and blood. He deserts Lucy in child birth, abandons his infant daughter as she nearly dies of typhoid, strikes his wife, and threatens to kill her if she ever practices the marital double standard that he exploits. Such unnaturalness to kin violates the holy spirit of natural supernaturalism.

Whereas the prodigious sexuality of Esu-Elegbara signifies his role as "the ultimate copula, connecting truth with understanding, the sacred with the profane, text with interpretation" (Gates 6), John's intercourse outside marriage never figures the supremely connecting power of his discourse. Instead, his liaisons provoke their speakerly opposite--silence. John's affairs inspire him with no heartfelt rhapsodies as did his early love for Lucy. Hurston presents John's adulteries with the utmost in fictional reticence--through cautious indirection, complete omission of all description, or poignant evocation of his felt absence from Lucy. Until her death John's wife speaks for a life founded on texts. As Lucy lies dying, she enjoins her daughter to "'git all de education you kin'" (130) and then teaches Isie further by asking her to open the Bible to Acts 26. The chapter on Paul's defense before King Agrippa silently witnesses to Lucy's zeal for secular and sacred writ. When Festus charges the apostle, "Much le arning doth make thee mad," Paul declares that he speaks "the words of truth and soberness" (26:24, 25). From schoolbooks to Scripture, the true and sober Lucy has allowed her reading to inform and transform her life. Such learning makes John's infidelity to Lucy an unfaithfulness to literacy itself. [8]

Since John never completes the hermeneutical enterprise, he succumbs to the power of stronger interpreters of texts. "'De Bible is de best conjure book in de world'" (147), Deacon Harris claims, and Moses is the greatest practitioner of hoodoo, for he gained power from learning the secret names of God. Although John once seemed a Moses in the making, he now falls victim to the hoodoo priests who follow in the tradition of the cabalistic man of the mountain. Before Lucy's death, Hattie seeks out the potent An' Dangie Dewoe to worm her way toward becoming the new Mrs. Pearson. Afterwards, she turns to another two-headed doctor to bewitch the seemingly neglectful John more completely for herself. Hattie has found a way to do what Deacon Harris desired, to "'cut down dat Jonah's gourd vine'" (146). Just as a worm attacks the tree that shaded the resentful prophet to the Ninevenhites, the conjuring of priests who know the magic of words undermines the preacher whose life is not rooted in the word. Unlike Esu-Eleg bara, often depicted as bearing the word of God in a calabash (Gates 7), Hurston's latter-day Jonah-by-his-gourd-vine now seems bereft of divine truth.

The Reverend Pearson's farewell sermon at Zion Hope dramatizes the limits of his success as an interpreter. Although Robert Hemenway thinks that the preacher's language on this final Sunday is "so powerful that the reader forgets that the sermon is intended as a climax of the novel" (196), interpreting John's interpretation of the Scriptural text as the climax of Jonah's Gourd Vine reveals how carefully Hurston has crafted her own fictional text. She has not simply inserted into the novel a homily that she actually heard in 1929 and later published in Nancy Cunard's Negro: An Anthology (1934). Rather, Hurston has made the preaching into John's culminating hermeneutical act. Whereas his "words had been very few since his divorce" from Hattie (173), he now seeks to define his self-understanding through speaking about a text. Ricoeur provides guidance for listening to this address when he explains that in the act of interpretation "it is not the reader who primarily projects himself. The reader rather is enlarg ed in his capacity of self-projection by receiving a new mode of being from the text itself" (Interpretation 94). John's last discourse shows both the self-aggrandizement that comes from abusing a text and the self-renewal that comes from letting oneself be used by it.

From the beginning of the sermon, Hurston calls attention to the textual basis of the preacher's art. Unlike the rivalrous Reverend Cozy, the Reverend Pearson knows that a homily with a precise Scriptural citation helps to keep it from becoming an unappealing lecture. And unlike the preacher John once heard who chided his audience, "'Don't you take and meddle wid whar Ah takes mah tex'. Long ez gives yuh de word uh Gawd, 'tain't none uh yo' business whar Ah gits it from'" (54), John does not hesitate to identify a specific text as his source for the divine message. "Following the Bible quotations," Gerald L. Davis writes in his study of the performed African-American sermon, "the preacher is obliged and expected to interpret, first literally then broadly, the quoted Bible passage" (74). The Reverend Pearson reads Zachariah 13:6 and Isaiah 53 as prophesying the wounds of Jesus. But John's commentary on these passages goes beyond this conventional christological interpretation to become a self-serving gloss on his own vulnerability. Often portrayed by Hurston as a Christ-figure (Howard, Zora 74), John has frequently imagined himself as betrayed and besieged by the members of his church. His sermon artfully uses Scripture to signify upon these adversaries. Although he seems to describe Jesus's suffering at the hands of his traitorous hosts, the Reverend Pearson actually voices his astonishment and indignation at the treachery of his congregation and wife: "'Now, a man usually gets wounded in the midst of his enemies, but this man was wounded, says the text, in the house of his friends. It is not your enemies that harm you all the time. Watch that close friend.'" John projects his own partial self-understanding into his interpretation, yet his implied analogy ignores the fact that he cannot say of himself what he says of the bloodied victim in the gospels,

"'Jesus was not unthoughtful. He was not overbearing. He was never a bully'" (175). The preacher reads the text by way of himself, but not himself by way of the text.

As the Reverend Pearson expands the text on the wounds of Jesus into a retelling of Christian salvation history, he allows the text, in turn, to enlarge him. No longer imposing himself on Scripture, John exposes himself to its meaning and takes from it a proposed world in which to live ("Toward" 108). He changes from being the prey of his supposed friends to becoming an excited spectator at a biblical panorama. Hurston's own text appropriately changes. After the prelude on the wounds of Jesus, it records the sermon as free verse rather than as prose, and it includes the locutionary mark-- "ha!"--to signal where the straining preacher violently exhales at the end of a line. Hurston's attention to rhythm and breathing sounds the way that John has entered the world of the Bible. His speech changes as well--from the standard usage of the introduction to the dialect of the sermon proper. "The dialect breaks through," Hurston writes about African-American religious services, "only when the speaker has reached the emotional pitch where he loses all self-consciousness" (Sanctified 81). Since the Reverend Pearson transcends his old egotism to dwell in the text, the traditional story from Genesis to Apocalypse is more than something read. It is actually witnessed:

"I see Jesus / Leaving heben with all of His grandeur .[ldots] I can see Him / Look down from His high towers of elevation. [ldots] I can see Him step out upon the rim bones of nothing. [ldots] I can see Him as He mounted Calvary and hung upon de cross for our sins." (177-79)

The visionary preacher lives in rather than against the word.

John participates most personally in the biblical texts on the wounds inflicted by friends when he turns to his own life for a metaphor to describe the entire spiritual drama that leads to the wounds of the cross. Although trains have provided a traditional source of images for sermons by African-American preachers, Hurston's novel reinterprets the familiar trope in terms of John's hermeneutical quest. From his adolescence in Alabama, John has sought to comprehend the cryptic significance of the vehicle that loomed before him. When he actually rode the coach to Florida, he came closer to understanding this sign. Viewing the train's engine and gilt decor as "a glorified thing [ldots] the greatest accumulation of power that he had ever seen" (104), John took pleasure in a mechanical version of the power and the glory. At a railroad camp he discovered his future vocation when he reenacted a sermon heard in church for the amusement of his fellow workers. The Reverend Pearson later found his own equivalent of the train's godliness in the sheer charism of his preaching, which at times raised him to divine heights. But he compromised such spiritual dynamism so that power gave way to pride, and glory to disgrace. The conclusion of John's sermon uses the imaged of the train to make the track of salvation history intersect with his own journey to interpret himself. It reveals a glimpse of a possibly glorious destiny when text and life are one.

The baroque climax of the Reverend Pearson's preaching conflates the metaphor of the train with he sermon's opening texts foreshadowing the wounds of Jesus. Having already presented the Savior as the engineer of" 'de well ordered train of mercy'" (178), John envisions the wild ride of " 'de damnation train'" as it eaves the Garden of Eden and speeds through the Law and the Prophets, until it is finally derailed in the last wound of Jesus: "'And on her way to Calvary, when she blew for de switch Jesus stood out on her track like a rough-backed mountain / And she threw her cow-catcher in His side and His blood ditched de train"' (181). The preacher has at last found his own words for the train that once spoke to him so enigmatically. As John beholds a surreal re-vision of the piercing in John 19, he speaks of the mighty vehicle as an engine of doom that transports him to the very heart of his preaching, the wound in the side of Jesus. Here, at the crossroads, where text and interpreter converge, where the init ial Scriptural citations are imaginatively entered and understood by way of John's passion for trains, the preacher gains new life through figurative language. If metaphor, according to Ricoeur, leads from the destruction of literal understanding to the discovery of a redescribed world, John rides his sermon's metaphorical train into his own wreck and renewal. Having used his lifetime fascination with trains to refigure the text, the Reverend Pearson now lets the text configure his life. Since the homilist is so completely a part of the world of his sermon, he portrays himself as a passenger in order to resolve the spiritual dilemma that has troubled him whenever he is not giving a homily. " 'That's where I got off de damnation train,' "John announces, as he begins to seek his place at the Judgment Convention (181). By this decision he opts for what Ricoeur calls "testimony," a witnessing in which "the exegesis of self" converges with "the exegesis of external signs" ("Toward" 112). As the preacher lays claim to the mode of being imagined in the text, his whole life will be a reading of the divine word. John will at last achieve that "unity of opposed forces" that Gates (6) sees embodied in the foremost interpreter, Esu-Elegbara.

For a time it seems as if the Reverend Pearson may indeed have disembarked from the damnation train to live out the metaphor of his sermon. In marrying the loving Sally Lovelace, John actually weds the sacred word, for his new wife bears the very name of the preacher--the Reverend C. C. Lovelace--whose sermon Hurston used as the basis of John's valediction at Zion Hope. No longer worm-eaten, he again becomes a flourishing gourd vine in the aptly named Plant City. But when the Reverend Pearson violates this harmony between sermon and self, he races toward a fatal train and his own final judgment. Although Ricoeur claims that appropriation of a text "implies a moment of dispossession of the egoistic and narcissistic ego" (Interpretation 94), Hurston's preacher cannot surrender himself completely to the glorious self-giving envisioned at the end of his sermon. He tries to resist the blandishments of Ora Patten when he returns in triumph to Sanford, but he eventually succumbs to her advances. As John drives home in the new Cadillac given him by his wife, he comes to the clearest recognition of his own failure and of the sheltering love provided by his wives: "False pretender! Outside show to the world! [ldots] He had prayed for Lucy's return and God had answered with Sally" (200). Blinded by his guilt, he is struck by a train and killed while still on the journey toward self-understanding. Whereas Jesus stopped the sermon's damnation train by the wound in his side, John is tossed out of his car after the awful engine of judgment hits it in the side. The Reverend Pearson finds the climactic metaphor of his homily coming to perverse life. As the novel's many snake images converge in this final mechanical worm, the deus ex machina cuts down the vine of the preacher who has never completely appropriated the texts on which he preached.

In writing Jonah's Gourd Vine Hurston pursued her own version of the hermeneutical quest that engaged John Pearson. Although the novelist modeled the preacher after her own father, she also wrote much of herself into him--her wanderlust, childhood defiance, fascination with trains, imaginative response to nature, but, above all, her efforts to serve as an interpreter of and for her culture. This desire to mediate and translate, as Eric Sundquist recognizes, made her share the same vocation as the Reverend Pearson (88)[9]. Like the preacher who announces, "'Ah takes mah tex' 'tween de lids uh de Bible'" (54), Hurston took as her text the culture that she heard in stories, work songs, sermons, ceremonies, and everyday speech. As she developed her interpretation of this text writ large, the novelist freely refashioned it into the speakerly text that does not merely transcribe a chorus of voices but listens to their interplay in the consciousness of her characters.

Jonah's Gourd Vine does not completely succeed as such a fictional interpretation of the world to which Hurston listened so lovingly. The frequent criticism that it fails to integrate the life of John Buddy with the record of his oral community suggests that Hurston the novelist had not yet fully taken possession of the work of Hurston the ethnologist. [10] But if such later narratives as Their Eyes Were Watching God and Moses, Man of the Mountain would be more unified, Hurston's ability to hear that the life of the Reverend Pearson was in dialogue with the voices of an entire culture indicates that she had begun to make the passage from "distanciation" to "appropriation," the very movement that defines the art of interpretation for Ricoeur (Interpretation 43). Hurston was no longer the anthropologist as interloper whose Barnard accent once made her countrypeople reluctant to share with her their talk and tales; she was becoming the celebrant of these oral traditions in her writings. She was moving from bein g outside the text at hand to living in its world so completely that she wrote from inside the great cultural legacy, as if it were entirely her own. "To 'make one's own' what was previously 'foreign' remains the ultimate aim of all hermeneutics," Ricoeur writes (Interpretation 91). Jonah's Gourd Vine announces that Hurs ton the preacher had started to accept that hermeneutical challenge.

Gary Ciuba is Associate Professor of English at Kent State University and the author of Walker Percy: Books of Revelations. His articles have appeared in American Literature, Mississippi Quarterly, Renascence, South Atlantic Quarterly, Southern Literay Journal, Southern Quarterly, and elsewhere.

Notes

(1.) Ford recounts a meeting with Hurston in which she responded to those who criticized Jonah's Gourd Vine for not dealing with the "race problem": "I was writing a novel and not a treatise on sociology" (96). Headon (28-37) argues that Hurston's emphasis on self-liberation makes her more revolutionary in politics than many of her contemporaries ever acknowledged.

(2.) Holloway writes that the death of Zora's mother initiated Hurston into the fact that the "fundamental creative potential of the universe is a female and a linguistic principle" (118).

(3.) Gates notes that the distinction between oral and written discourse has its counterpart in legend. While Esu-Elegbara is associated with writing, the Signifying Monkey is associated with speaking (21).

(4.) Speisman sees the native African religion as so dominant in the faith of the Reverend Pearson that he becomes "a minister who has renounced the tenets of Christianity and embraced the concepts and basic symbols of voodoo" (88).

(5.) Hurston described such a moment of appropriation when she recalled how she felt "not of the work-a-day world" for days after she first heard a nightschool teacher read "Kubla Khan": "This was my world, I said to myself, and I shall be in it, and surrounded by it, if it is the last thing I do on God's green dirt-ball" (Dust Tracks 107). In Their Eyes Were Watching God Hurston pays tribute to the way that reading can be revelatory when the narrator explains that Janie "didn't read books so she didn't know that she was the world and the heavens boiled down to a drop" (93).

(6.) Turner finds the analogy implied by the title "strained" (105). Howard (Zora 88-90) traces the "escape motif" as the major parallel between John and Jonah.

(7.) Neal's interpretation has been widely accepted; see, for example, Daniel (86), Howard (Zora 76), and Hemenway (199-200). But Gayle (141-42) and Brown (79-80) view John as a tragic victim of his sexual desire.

(8.) Karanja argues that, although Lucy dies, she acquires the supernatural power associated with women in ancient African lore (128).

(9.) Connor describes Hurston as "called to preach" the vitality of her African-American heritage (110-69).

(10.) Bell (120-21), Bone (127), Hemenway (198-200), and Thomas (52) criticize the way that Hurston's interest in folk culture takes precedence over concerns for plot and character in Jonah's Gourd Vine.

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