When one thinks of great literature, authors such as Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, and many others come to mind. These writers created seminal works of American literature and gave credibility to the burgeoning American literary tradition. Their work is revered as great literature for its ability to transcend cultural and generational boundaries and its capacity for appealing to people all over the world. As generations come and go, the body of great literature continually increases.
Within the past thirty years a trend has developed where academics, particularly feminists, considered Zora Neale Hurstons Their Eyes Were Watching God as being great literature. The fascination with her book has grown so large that it is being read in high schools all over America; her book was resurrected from relative obscurity and brought into the mainstream. Their Eyes Were Watching God does not cross cultural or generational boundaries, and it utterly fails to appeal to foreign or domestic readers.
Their Eyes Were Watching God is concerned with many events that future readers would find difficult to relate to. Hurston devotes an entire chapter to the treatment of a mule by the population of a town in Florida. Not only does she spend too much time on the petty symbolism of the mule, she also does it through the characters and their dialogue, which is sometimes unintelligible. Hurston also fails to speak to future generations because the material whereof she writes is often trivial and uninteresting.
Only twice in the novel are there any significant passages and they occur at the beginning and end of the book. For the rest of the novel Hurston is essentially a biographer of the life of her dull and tiresome protagonist, Janie. Janies life is a sordid tale of love, deceit, and death. The author knows of few nobler pursuits about which to write a novel. In short, Hurstons book is not the stuff of legend. Hurstons novel, seen as a discourse on African-American history is notable, although in many respects it fails to bridge a critical cultural divide, especially with those cultures outside of the United States.
Hurston continually uses colloquialisms in both her dialogue and also in her narrative. Her overwhelming obsession with linguistic accuracy in depicting her characters tends to make the dialogue in Their Eyes Were Watching God almost unreadable. If native English speakers and even those accustomed to southern dialect have trouble deciphering Hurstons text, then certainly people of other cultures would find her style to be at least tedious, and most likely impossible. Her novel seems to lack a unifying direction, aside from that of chronology.
This lack of a consistent theme would leave foreign readers confused, in addition to their already monumental task of wading through Hurstons dialogue. Readers therefore cannot appreciate the message of Their Eyes Were Watching God as there is no discernable message to be appreciated. Their Eyes Were Watching God does not meet the requirements of great literature because it fails to transcend cultural boundaries and because it cannot appeal to the readers of future generations. Readers must be wary of new additions to the body of great literature; they must be independent thinkers.
If their teacher tells them a book belongs in the canon of great literature then the reader must investigate that himself. It is with the authors where books must begin, but it is with the readers where their books shall grow, for the greatest books are not merely works of literature, they are a cooperative relationship between the reader and author. All authors must continually strive for this relationship because when they lose sight of this goal, they have lost touch with the reader, and their books will be doomed to obscurity.
