The Fire That Genius Brings - Concept 1.

Running Head: THE FIRE THAT GENIUS BRINGS – CONCEPT

Concept Paper

The Fire That Genius Brings: Creativity and the Unhealed Companionship Between

Zora Neale Hurston and

Sharon D. Johnson

P.O. Box 491179, Los Angeles, CA 90049

[email protected]

646.401.3833

DP 932C Dissertation Development III

Track K-III

Dr. Jennifer Leigh Selig

Spring 2008

April 30, 2008 The Fire That Genius Brings - Concept 2.

Concept Paper

The Fire That Genius Brings: Creativity and the Unhealed Companionship Between

Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes

Introduction

Autobiographical Interest

My interest in writing my dissertation on the dynamic of the relationship between

Renaissance writers Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes has grown out of what seems like a lifetime of interests and experiences.

I began kindergarten in Brooklyn, New York in 1969, two years after Hughes’s death, and his image and his writing were very present in the hallways and classrooms. Hughes seemed larger than life. Especially in those early childhood elementary grades, the poetry of Langston

Hughes was a favorite to read and to emulate as I wrote poetry of my own. Even during my non- school time, I enjoyed writing poems and stories. Without my knowing, my teacher sent some of my poetry to a publisher compiling a volume of children’s writings on their experiences living in the inner city, titled I am Somebody (Ohenewaa, 1970). My work, in the end, was more optimistic in tone than the volume was intended to be. Still, I was given a copy of the book, in which the editor of the Ladies Home Journal wrote me a note affirming that, “You, Sharon, are not only somebody, you’re a poet and a writer.” That I might actually be a poet and a writer like my favorites, Gwendolyn Brooks and Langston Hughes, was pretty cool in my young mind. Not The Fire That Genius Brings - Concept 3. only my passion for writing, but also my bent toward optimism, toward wanting goodness and hope to prevail, would later come into play in my work as a writer, and in my dissertation.

Music and visual art were also areas of great interest to me where I showed ability. I took a free summer art class at the Brooklyn Museum in the early 70s, but otherwise, music and art lessons were not in the budget of a blue-collar family with four children. Writing required only a pencil and paper. Those I had plenty of. And so I wrote.

In junior high school, even as the literary repertoire expanded to include Shakespeare and term papers, I continued to write poetry. My ninth grade English teacher, Mr. Morris, an African

American man who was a published poet and writer himself, was a formidable figure in the classroom. Yet he always affirmed the interests of my classmates and me. A poem I would write as extra credit or for a special assignment would be rewarded by him with books of poetry and literature, by both the classic “canon” as well as African American writers. Langston Hughes was always in the mix, even as I became interested in Nikki Giovanni, Maya Angelou, and other strong African American female poetic voices. Mr. Morris was the first person who let me know, in a tangible way, that I could actually pursue writing as a career, as did these African American writers I admired and identified with.

Even throughout high school, an academically rigorous school specializing in math, science, and engineering, I maintained my passion for writing. I chose a major, graphic communications, which would keep me academically connected to the arts, with its classes in freehand drawing, layout and graphic design, and journalism. For honors English class, I chose to take creative writing, and I also worked on the literary magazine and, later, became literature editor or the yearbook. Similarly interested schoolmates and I would share poems we had written. Maya Angelou’s poem, “Still I Rise” (1978/1994), was a favorite amongst my The Fire That Genius Brings - Concept 4. girlfriends, and our own poetry also spoke of our nascent adult femininity. Personally, that developing aspect of my personality was challenged at home by seemingly constant conflict between my parents, conflict of which I was often in the middle, physically and emotionally. The conflicts didn’t begin during my adolescence; I remember witnessing periodic altercations as a young child. The divorce my mother announced to my older brother and me at that time never materialized, but later, as a teenager, I sometimes wished that it had. I would write in my diary, with amazing clarity, my interpretation of what was the real root of my parents’ conflict, making note of their behavior and character traits, and what they could and should do that would bring peace. They seemed to me, I wrote, like they were the willful teenagers, while I felt like the adult who had the maturity to apply some degree of wisdom to the situation.

Did this thing called marriage, called relationship, have to be so chaotic and difficult?

Why couldn’t two people, whom everyone else saw as a “great” couple, seem to see through their own “stuff” to the core of that greatness? My fascination with, and fear of, the realities of intimate personal relationship, informed by the experience of my parents’ relationship, of trying to “figure it out,” and “figure them out,” definitely colored the things I chose to read and write.

I didn’t learn about Zora Neale Hurston until I got to college in 1981. I had never heard of her, had never read or even seen any of her books, until then. She was the first African

American graduate of my college, and our organization of black women students held our meetings in the Hurston lounge. Zora was our model, our hero, a literal and figurative minority we could identify with. That she was also a writer and a social scientist (my major and

[undeclared] minor areas of study) added specificity to the connection I felt to her.

Twenty years after my graduation, when Hurston’s seminal novel, Their Eyes Were

Watching God (1937), was being turned in to a television movie by Oprah Winfrey (Winfrey & The Fire That Genius Brings - Concept 5.

Forte, 2005), I pitched the story to my college alumnae magazine and another literary magazine.

They both accepted the pitch, and so I began researching the journey of the novel from publication in 1937 to television production in 2005. In the course of my research, I became fascinated by Hurston’s letters, through which I realized that many of the writers of the Harlem

Renaissance weren’t just contemporaries or acquaintances, they were friends. Just as I had read about Dorothy Parker and other writers gathering at the Algonquin hotel, I imagined the same fraternization amongst Hurston, Dorothy West, and other black writers of that time. When I learned that Hurston and Langston Hughes were good friends, I was particularly excited. They were the giants to me (evidenced by their immortalization on U.S. postage stamps!). I knew vaguely about their play, Mule Bone (Hughes & Hurston, 1931/1991), but learned during my research for the articles that their collaboration ended badly, and ended their friendship. These two people, who hung out together, corresponded almost daily, supported each other emotionally and, at times, financially, who shared immense talent and a similar desire and goal to represent black life in all of its color and complexity. This intimate bond was unraveled by a dispute over authorship of Mule Bone, to the point that they never spoke to each other again after that. That the overall scholarly conclusion considered it a “literary conflict,” dismissing any other possibility or explanation for the tumultuous turn of events, rang too hollow and too easy to me.

Because I had deadlines to meet at the time, I could not fully research the

Hurston/Hughes connection, but it has remained a “to do” for three years. Over those three years,

I enrolled at Pacifica and received edification, structure, and focus to my interest in the social science of depth psychology. The autobiographical parallels of writing, financial concerns, and evolving African American culture that mark my interest are somewhat obvious. Van Manen

(1990) writes that to be deeply interested in something (inter-esse) is to be or stand in the midst The Fire That Genius Brings - Concept 6. of it (p. 43). I once stood in the middle of my biological parents’ complex relationship.

Ultimately, I am still that optimistic little girl and wise teenage young woman at heart, who now seeks to apply more acquired psychological insights and interpretations onto the complex, wounded relationship of my literary “parents” via my dissertation topic.

Relevance of the Topic for Depth Psychology

Edinger (1984) explains that, “Consciousness derives from con or cum, meaning “with” or “together, and scire, to “know” or “to see. In other words, consciousness is the experience of knowing together with an other, that is, in a setting of twoness” (p. 36). If Jungian psychology is concerned with bringing the unconscious into consciousness, then researching via a Jungian lens requires consideration of interpersonal and intrapsychic relationship. Exploring the dynamic of the Hurston/Hughes relationship, therefore, is a depth psychological exercise.

Further, the exercise will inform the field of depth psychology by opening up the areas of

African American culture and history, creativity and artistic expression for greater discussion in that field. Just as the lives, personal histories, and psychological theories of Sigmund Freud and

Carl Jung informed their relationship (and its demise), those of Hurston and Hughes informed their relationship (and its demise). This research will also engage and expand upon early and otherwise unknown psychological inquiries into Hurston and Hughes’s lives and work.

That there seems to be a conclusion already drawn and committed to by many among the community of Hurston and Hughes scholars with regard to their relationship seems to stunt the growth of new considerations and insights. These foregone conclusions deny the reader more possibilities which, Steven Tracy (2004) writes, “denies a full representation of Hughes” (p. 217) and Hurston. Depth psychology is concerned with the entire personality, dark and light, The Fire That Genius Brings - Concept 7. conscious and unconscious. An exploration of the life, writings, and creative collaboration of

Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes will provide a fuller representation of the two and of the nature of their relationship and creative impact on the soul of the national and international audiences they touched.

Literature Review

Introduction. The following literature review is organized thematically according to the five categories of material that capture Hurston and Hughes’ lived experiences, and which will undergo a depth psychological re-reading in my research. Those categories include

Autobiographical Literature, Biographical Literature, Literary Criticism and Essays, Creative

Literature, and Historical Literature. The autobiographical literature category reviews key texts that give firsthand accounts directly from Hurston and Hughes. The category on biographical literature mitigates, compensates, and complements any errors and omissions in the autobiographical material. Literary Criticism and Essay material provides insights on areas of exploration and re-interpretation with regard to Hurston and Hughes’ lives and literary works.

The Creative Literature category will focus primarily on the Mule Bone (1931/1991) play: Bass and Gates’ official published version, and the play’s source material, Hurston’s previously unpublished short story, “The Bone of Contention” (1991). Historical literature provides context for Hurston and Hughes’ lived experience during the Harlem Renaissance.

This literature review will not include discussion of the numerous unpublished drafts and revisions of Mule Bone housed at Yale and Howard Universities and the Library of Congress because I have not yet had access to this material. Review of some of Hurston and Hughes’ individual creative writings will not be reviewed here, as it will be discussed in the body of the The Fire That Genius Brings - Concept 8. dissertation text as I treat key moments and aspects of their lives and careers. Additionally, I do not treat Jungian Psychological literature here. Because I evaluate and interpret all the literature through a Jungian lens, themes and theories from Jungian material will be discussed briefly here within each literature category, as well as throughout the body of the dissertation text.

Autobiographical Literature. Carla Kaplan’s book, Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters

(2002), is the most comprehensive volume of correspondence between Hurston and her friends and colleagues, including many to and from Langston Hughes. Divided by decades of her life, each section of the letters includes an historical overview by Kaplan, which gives context to

Hurston’s humorous and insightful communication.

Similarly, Emily Bernard’s Remember Me To Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and , 1925-1964 (2001), and Arne Bontemps-Langston Hughes Letters, 1925-

1967 (1980) edited by Charles H. Nichols, capture the color, candor, and intimacy of Hughes’ communication with two men who knew well both Hughes and Hurston. These books of letters provide a living timeline that tracks Hurston and Hughes’ thoughts, ideas, activities, and expressions through significant times in their lives.

Hughes’ The Big Sea (1940/1993) is a lyrical autobiography, filled with evocative and resonant reflections from the first half of Hughes’ life. It includes his version of the Mule Bone

(1931/1991) controversy. Although Hurston’s autobiography,

(1942/1970), has been scrutinized for its many misrepresentations, these moves by Hurston to mask and fabricate may be as psychologically telling, if not more so, than a more “accurate” writing. Her omission of any mention of the Mule Bone incident, or of Hughes at all, certainly begs a psychological re-reading of the text. The Fire That Genius Brings - Concept 9.

Biographical Literature. Because I consider autobiography the ego’s remembrance of past lived experience, I include biographical literature to provide an alternate, arguably more objective review of a life. Certainly, Robert Hemenway’s seminal work, Zora Neale Hurston: A

Literary Biography (1977), provides a thorough and scholarly re-telling of Hurston’s lived experience, filling in many of the spaces that Hurston left in her autobiography. His chapter,

“Mule Bone” (pp. 136-158) is one of the more balanced assessments of what transpired between

Hurston and Hughes over the play. Valerie Boyd’s (2003) biography, Wrapped in Rainbows: The

Life of Zora Neale Hurston, although it covers much of the same ground as Hemenway’s work, is significant for the field of psychology because it introduces and relates, albeit cursorily, possible psychological underpinnings to the progression of Hurston’s life experiences. Most significant to my Jungian lens are Hurston’s early feelings of abandonment by her parents, and her decision to leave her father’s home and never look back (Boyd, 2003).

The Life of Langston Hughes: Vol. I, 1902-1941: I, Too, Sing America (1986) and The

Life of Langston Hughes: Vol. II, 1941-1967: I Dream A World (1986), by Arnold Rampersad, is considered the biography of record on Hughes. Because Rampersad was able to conduct firsthand interviews with many people who knew Hughes (including at least one woman to whom Hughes was engaged), this enhances Rampersad’s meticulous research and thorough treatment of Hughes’ life. Not totally unbiased, however, Rampersad does not elaborate on the matter of Hughes’ sexuality. Faith Berry’s interpretation, Before and Beyond Harlem: A

Biography of Langston Hughes (1995) is important because she not only includes details that

Hughes leaves out of his autobiography, she also challenges Rampersad’s account and includes discussion of Hughes’ sexuality. This aspect of Hughes’ personality is important to consider The Fire That Genius Brings - Concept 10. fully for a psychological re-reading of his conflict with Hurston and his creative decision to turn the Mule Bone play into a love triangle (Rosenberg, 1999).

Literary Criticism and Essays. One such essay that does explore the significance of

Hughes’s sexuality is John Edgar Tidwell’s “The Sounds of Silence: Langston Hughes as a

’Down Low’ Brother?” (2007). Weaving the threads of societal expectations at the time with glimpses into Hughes’ own temperament, this essay opens the field of discussion in an area scholarship has previously hesitated to venture. “: The Letters from Carrie Hughes

Clark to Langston Hughes, 1928-1938,” written by Regennia N. Williams and Carmaletta M.

Williams (2007), is significant literature for insights into Hughes’ relationship with his mother.

Carrie Hughes Clark did not support her son’s creative ambitions, and often abandoned him to the care of his grandmother, yet Hughes “loved her hopelessly” (Rampersad, quoted in Brooks,

1986, p. 7). Considering this essay through the lens of Jung’s Great Mother archetype and theories on the mother complex can provide deeper understanding of Hughes’ psyche.

Essays by Rachel A. Rosenberg and Ruthe T. Sheffey, two scholars who are not included in or even mentioned in the official published edition of Mule Bone (Hughes & Hurston,

1931/1991) and it supporting essays, are included here. Rosenberg, because her essay, “Looking for Zora’s Mule Bone: The Battle for Artistic Authority in the Hurston-Hughes Collaboration”

(1999), is perhaps the first suggestion that an in-depth psychological re-reading of the Mule Bone drafts be done to gain insight into the psychological dynamic between Hurston and Hughes.

Sheffey, because her article, “Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes’s Mule Bone: An

Authentic Folk Comedy and the Compromised Tradition” (1987/1989) is, according to

Rosenberg (1997), “the only critical analysis that examines the play texts for evidence of artistic disagreement” (p. 24). Sheffey’s work seems to parallel Carl Jung’s theory that “Creative work The Fire That Genius Brings - Concept 11. arises from unconscious depths” (CW 15, 1950/1978, par. 159), in that it suggests that the play texts hold and express the psychic projections of Hurston and Hughes’ growing creative dis-ease with each other.

Literature. The text of the play Mule Bone (Hughes & Hurston, 1931/1991) is based on

Hurston’s previously unpublished short story, “The Bone of Contention” (1991). Inspired by her fieldwork in the deep south, “The Bone of Contention” expresses the rituals, traditions, and vernacular of the black folk with whom Hurston lived during the course of her own life and academic research. In the story, two friends, Jim and Dave, argue over the shooting of a turkey.

Jim hits Dave in the head with the hip bone of a dead mule, confiscates the turkey for himself, and is later brought up on charges for the assault. The dispute pits the town’s two religious factions against each other. In the Baptist-church-turned-courthouse, each man must rely on rhetorical skill and creative facility with language in order to plead their respective cases. In the end, Jim is declared guilty of assault and theft, and he is run out of town.

The adaptation of “The Bone of Contention” into the play, Mule Bone, involved a move away from the metaphor and creative devise of African American vernacular and religious tradition of Hurston’s originating short story, and toward Hughes’ substitution of the turkey with a woman, Daisy (Hughes & Hurston, 1931/1991). Mule Bone would become the story of a love triangle, possibly mirroring the triangle that now existed between Hurston, Hughes, and their typist, Louise Thompson, whom Hughes promised one third of the profits from the production revenues of the play.

A depth psychological re-reading of these texts will be necessary to explore what motivated Hughes in his creative and practical reconfigurations, and to discover the possible The Fire That Genius Brings - Concept 12. parallels between the arc of the play’s development, and the progression of the relationships between Hurston, Hughes, and Thompson.

Additionally, re-reading the “previously unnoticed draft” (Rosenberg, 1997, p. 24) of

Mule Bone at the Library of Congress, wherein Hurston restores the turkey as the primary source of dispute between Dave and Jim, can possibly reveal more about Hurston’s personal politics and creative intent for the play.

Historical. For stronger grasp on the factors affecting Hurston’s position and actions during the time, I include Ralph D. Story’s essay, “Gender and Ambition: Zora Neale Hurston in the Harlem Renaissance” (1989), for its interpretations of Hurston’s personality, and the creative and social concerns of the time. I also include the book, Rereading the Harlem Renaissance:

Race, Class, and Gender in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, and Dorothy West, by Sharon L. Jones (2002), because it does review the period with specific emphasis on the cultural contexts of gender and race politics that certainly informed the psychology of both

Hurston and Hughes.

Establishing a “real Negro theatre” (Hughes & Hurston, 1931/1961, p. 9) which would showcase dramas featuring authentic black vernacular and lifestyle was important to both

Hurston and Hughes. Melvin B. Tolson’s The Harlem Group of Negro Writers (1940/2001) provides a study of this period and the cultural and artistic possibilities and imperatives that writers faced during that time. Harlem Speaks: A Living History of the Harlem Renaissance, by

Cary Wintz (2006), provides a multimedia immersion into the period. Because the cultural and historical context of one’s life is not separate from one’s psychology, these historical texts have implications on the psychological considerations in my work. The Fire That Genius Brings - Concept 13.

Summary. This literature review briefly discusses a critical phenomenological hermeneutics through a Jungian lens, as it applies to the textual expressions of Zora Neale

Hurston and Langston Hughes’ lived experience as friends and creative collaborators.

Categorizing the literature according to the themes of autobiography, biography, literary criticism and essays, creative literature, and history gives us a clearer idea of the textual material that reveals lived experience, and how a Jungian lens might inform the re-reading and understanding of that textual material. This depth psychological reinterpretation can reveal otherwise hidden or previously unrealized dynamics with regard to the relationship and creative collaboration between Hurston and Hughes, and how that relationship and collaboration can inform the fields of literature and depth psychology.

The Need for Research on the Topic in Psychology

If the aim of depth psychology is to tend the soul, then the need for my work on The Fire that Genius Brings can perhaps be expressed by Langston Hughes himself:

“Our art was broken” (Hughes & Hurston, 1931/1991, p. 160).

It is my position that Hurston and Hughes lived out as fate some inner brokenness that had not been made conscious (Jung, 1951/1968 [CW 9ii, par. 126]). Not only was their art, their creative collaboration broken, their friendship was also broken. Again, Jung reminds us that

“when an individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves” (par. 126). As Hurston and Hughes were torn into opposing halves, so too, it seems are the body of Hurston and Hughes scholars, with some seemingly biased against Hurston and in favor of Hughes, others more The Fire That Genius Brings - Concept 14. sympathetic toward Hurston and against if not Hughes himself, than certainly against an air of patriarchy that favors Hughes.

The many scholarly inquiries in the fields of language, literature, and history have not tended to this wound, this rupture, to arrive at some deeper understanding of the nature of creativity, relationship, and Hurston and Hughes’ lived experience. The fertile yet largely untilled ground is inquiry from the field of depth psychology. As Rosenberg (1999) foresaw, “a detailed psychoanalytic reading” is needed of Hurston and Hughes’ personal, creative, social, political, and cultural histories. Such research has the potential to transform our understanding of and functioning in relationship, creative practice, and psychic consciousness. It makes possible the healing of Hurston and Hughes’ memories and ruptured literary legacy, and the birth of new and transformed legacies in the fields of psychology and literature.

Statement of Research Topic

How might a depth psychological exploration of the lives, writings, and creative collaboration of Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes reveal new possibilities and generate deeper understanding of the dynamic of their relationship? Over the past four years, I have sensed that such depth psychological exploration could lead to revelation and generation of a new body of scholarship on these two writers, how and why their promising creative collaboration and deep friendship fell apart.

I do not necessarily agree with scholars such as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (1991) that there has yet been offered to readers “the fullest possible account of a complex and bizarre incident that will forever remain impossible to understand completely, beclouded in inexplicable The Fire That Genius Brings - Concept 15. motivation” (p. 6). There is still understanding to be gained, motivations to be examined for the possibility of greater psychological insight into the Hurston/Hughes relationship.

The word relationship, and the nature of the existing one between Hurston and Hughes, has been topic of discussion—albeit a seemingly quickly changed topic—among most scholars who have produced work on the history of these two writers. Relationship as a word or concept, in my estimation, is multivalent, and relationships themselves are multifaceted and complex, not always able to be reduced to singular descriptors such as “romance,” “friendship,” “business partner,” etc. My operational definition of the word relationship is, simply, the way, means, and context in and by which people relate/are connected to one another. This modifies and clarifies the somewhat common usage of the word as purely connotative of romance.

Another definition which I modify or clarify is that of the word Eros. Eros, in my opinion, exists in every relationship; it is the binder in relationship. However, similar to the word relationship, Eros seems to have adopted a solely sexual connotation. I move away from Eros as solely defining the sexual, to a more full meaning as creative life force. This is closer to the description of Eros espoused by Fran Ferder and John Heagle (2002), therapists and co-directors of Therapy and Renewal Associates (TARA) near Seattle, Washington, in their book, Tender

Fires: The Spiritual Promise of Sexuality. Hurston seems to allude to this metaphor of Eros as fire in her letter to Hughes on March 8, 1928 (quoted in Kaplan, 2002). She writes to Hughes expressing her desire to execute her work for their imminent collaboration “with all the fire that genius can bring” (p. 113). Creative genius, she seems to say, generates (and is generated by) fire, Eros, life force. It is in this spirit of these key terms that I conduct my research. The Fire That Genius Brings - Concept 16.

Methods

My theoretical work on The Fire that Genius Brings will apply critical phenomenological hermeneutics, through a Jungian lens. Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy of phenomenological hermeneutics “extended this model of interpretation to embrace all phenomena of a textual order” (Kearney, 2004, p. 19). One such phenomenon is a person’s lived experience, or “the historical horizon of a finite being-in-the-world” (p. 22). I intend my research to embrace the phenomenon of Hurston and Hughes’ relationship, and to plumb the depths of the

“textual unconscious” (Packer & Addison, 1989, p. 275) of their letters, collaborative literature, and biographical and autobiographical accounts of their lives. I will take “a critically interpretive approach to the texts” (Steele, 1989, p. 224), examining them “from odd angles, from perspectives that do not square with an authorized reading or conventional view” (p. 224).

Interpreting in this way, I intend to come to some deeper understanding of the lived experience of Hurston and Hughes’ relationship as friends and collaborators. Packer and

Addison (1989) explain that, “Interpretation is the working out of possibilities that have become apparent in a preliminary, dim understanding of events. . . . opened up by the researcher’s perspective” (p. 277). Four years ago, my perspective on information I had at the time generated this initial understanding. Through critical phenomenological hermeneutics, that dim understanding will be illumined by and, I intend, will illuminate previously unread possibilities in the Hurston/Hughes relationship, and the impact and missed potential of their work on the fields of psychology and American and world literature.

In The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature [CW 15, 1950/1978], Carl Jung writes that,

“Creative work arises from unconscious depths” (par. 159). It is my belief that the aborted creative work that is the Mule Bone play may both reveal and reflect some wound or rupture in The Fire That Genius Brings - Concept 17. the harmonious unconscious dynamic of Hurston and Hughes’ relationship. Exploring this possibility through a Jungian lens can certainly elucidate the nature of the Hurston/Hughes relationship in particular, and the dynamic of creativity and the creative personality in general.

Marion Woodman (n. d.) observes that, “there’s a divine marriage going on between the feminine and the masculine in every creative process” (online, no page). Considering the

Hurston/Hughes relationship through the lens of Jungian theories on masculine and feminine archetypes (e.g., animus and anima, the mother), relationship archetypes (e.g., the syzygy, the brother-sister, the heirous gamous), and creative processes of the psyche can amplify these concepts as well as generate new ideas on the nature of masculine and feminine as influencing and being influenced by the Hurston/Hughes relationship.

Jung (1950/1978) writes further that, “An artist is . . . a vehicle and molder of the unconscious psychic life of mankind” [CW 15, par. 157]. Certainly the creative work never written by Hurston and Hughes together—be it Mule Bone (1931/1991) or some other collaboration—leaves an empty space where so much of our psychic life and theirs could have had greater opportunity to be revealed and reflected to enrich the field of study in depth psychology.

By employing a critical phenomenological hermeneutics in interpreting their lives and their work, previously unrealized creative and psychological material can be freed for the enhancement of the fields of both literature and psychology because:

Interpretive inquiry . . . has the potential to emancipate people, to free them from practical troubles. . . . Emancipatory knowledge increases awareness of the contradictions hidden or distorted by everyday understandings, and in doing so, it directs attention to the possibilities for social transformation. (Packer & Addison, 1989, p. 287)

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (1991) cogently articulates one such missed opportunity for social transformation when he writes that, “Had [Mule Bone] been performed, the power of its poetic The Fire That Genius Brings - Concept 18. language could very well have altered forever the evolution of African-American drama enabling the theatre to fulfill its great—and still unfulfilled—potential among the African-American arts”

(p. 23).

Despite the body of collaborative material that was never created by Hurston and Hughes, there is still much scholarly and creative material to examine. A critical phenomenological hermeneutics is necessary to apply to the scholarly and creative material that does exist in order not to echo a “collective delusion” (Packer & Addison, 1989, p. 285) amongst some scholars that the Hurston/Hughes relationship was rent by nothing more that a literary conflict, or that the course of that relationship is somehow inscrutable and not able to be understood. The literary conflict, I posit, is informed by a deeper psychic conflict. My methodology will allow me not to

“focus purely on the positivity of what a text explicitly says” (Palmer, 1969, p. 234), but to “go behind the text to find what the text did not, and perhaps could not, say” (p. 234).

My scholarly interpretation of the discoveries that arise via this research will then inform my creation-based endpiece, a re-interpretation of the lived experience of Hurston and Hughes’ relationship via an original screenplay. I have decided to incorporate this particular creation- based data for several reasons. Firstly, I consider Hurston and Hughes’ lived experience as friends and collaborators to be my “phenomenon of a textual order” (Kearney, 2004, p. 19) and, as Van Manen (1990) writes:

When a phenomenologist asks for the essence of a phenomenon--a lived experience--then the phenomenological inquiry is not unlike an artistic endeavor, a creative attempt to somehow capture a certain phenomenon of life in a linguistic description that is both holistic and analytical, evocative and precise, unique and universal, powerful and sensitive. (p. 39)

Secondly, if, as Van Manen continues, “the task of phenomenological research and writing (is) to construct a possible interpretation of the nature of a certain human experience The Fire That Genius Brings - Concept 19.

(1990, p. 49), then the artistic endeavor of the screenplay is—in my estimation, informed by my own lived experience as a professional screenwriter and instructor of screenwriting—the most holisitc; evocative; powerful linguistic construction of my interpretation of the Hurston/Hughes relationship. The screenplay, with its elements of language/dialogue and visuals that depict human action, which reveals human motivation and behavior, is, in effect, a psychological text.

Further, the screenplay not only puts the researcher, but also the reader-as-viewer in the midst of the lived experience in question as it is unfolding, as if they are witnessing history. This position is supported by Palmer (1969), who points out that, “Hermeneutical experience is historical encounter” (p. 237). The screenplay “bridge(s) the distance between the text and the present” (p. 236).

It is the screenplay portion of The Fire that Genius Brings that may be more depth psychologically powerful and resonant than the scholarly research segment. David Hare (2005), writing in the Los Angeles Times about his dramatization of the events around 9/11, explains that, “Art takes us to a place that [scholarship] can’t: the psychological heart of the characters”

(online, no page).

Francis Ferguson (1992) explains that for Aristotle, the art of poetry “includes all the forms of literature and drama” (p. 5). Further, Aristotle writes that “the poet or ‘maker’ should be the maker of plots” (1951, p. 37). The historian, he elaborates, “relates what has happened. . . . the particular” (p. 35); the maker of plots, “what may happen. . . . the universal” (p. 35, italics mine). This potential to capture the universal, then, makes poetry—i.e., plot making—“a more philosophical and a higher thing than history” (p. 35).

Ultimately, my decision to punctuate my scholarly research with creation-based material is influenced by Jung’s theories on the process of transformation. If some degree of psychic The Fire That Genius Brings - Concept 20. balance; integration; and wholeness is to be achieved by embarking upon the psychological process of transformation, then I believe there is some degree of wholeness that can be achieved—for myself, for the wounded history of Hurston and Hughes’ relationship, and for the psychological understanding of the broader society—in completing the transformative journey of the research process with the creation-based material of the screenplay.

S. H. Butcher (1951) writes, “History is based upon facts;. . . poetry transforms its facts into truths” (p. 164). The screenplay, then, has the potential to transform the historical facts of scholarly research into truths.

The Fire That Genius Brings - Concept 21.

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