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No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information contact: Bloom’s Literary Criticism An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest / edited with an introduction by Harold Bloom. p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern critical interpretations) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-7910-9616-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Kesey, Ken. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. 2. Psychiatric hospital patients in literature. 3. Mentally ill in literature.—Criticism and interpretation. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Title: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest PS3561.E667O5328 2008 813’.54—dc22 2007045157 Bloom’s Literary Criticism books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Bloom’s Literary Criticism on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com. Cover design by Printed in the United States of America Bang BCL 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper. All links and web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of pub- lication. Because of the dynamic nature of the web, some addresses and links may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. Contents Editor’s Note vii Introduction 1 Harold Bloom The Folk Preacher and Folk Sermon Form in Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road 7 Deborah G. Plant Zora Neale Hurston: A Voice of Her Own/ An Entertainment In Herself 23 Daniel J. Sundahl “‘ . Ah said Ah’d save de text for you’”: Recontextualizing the Sermon to Tell (Her)story in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God 35 Dolan Hubbard The Compelling Ambivalence of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God 51 William M. Ramsey Projecting Gender: Personification in the Works of Zora Neale Hurston 65 Gordon E. Thompson vi Contents From Mule Bones to Funny Bones: The Plays of Zora Neale Hurston 89 John Lowe Conflict and Resistance in Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men 105 Susan E. Meisenhelder Zora Neale Hurston 131 Michael Awkward and Michelle Johnson Hitting “A Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick”: Seraph on the Suwanee, Zora Neale Hurston’s Whiteface Novel 143 Claudia Tate Vodou Imagery, African-American Tradition and Cultural Transformation in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God 159 Daphne Lamothe Socioeconomics in Selected Short Stories of Zora Neale Hurston 181 Laurie Champion “The porch couldn’t talk for looking”: Voice and Vision in Their Eyes Were Watching God 197 Deborah Clarke Chronology 217 Contributors 221 Bibliography 225 Acknowledgments 229 Index 231 Editor’s Note My Introduction highly praises Hurston for her vitality, individualism, and freedom from ideology. Deborah Clarke credits Hurston for redefining African American rhetoric, after which Laurie Champion locates some of Hurston’s challenges to societal oppression in selected stories. Seraph on the Suwanee, a minor Hurston novel, is interpreted by Claudia Tate as a “seditious joke on racialism,” while John Lowe attempts to rescue Hurston’s plays from neglect. Dolan Hubbard centers upon Janie’s sermon in Their Eyes Were Watching God, after which Gordon E. Thompson examines personification in Hurston. Folk sermonizing in Dust Tracks on a Road is noted by Deborah G. Plant, while Susan Meisenhelder addresses herself to Mules and Men. Daniel J. Sundahl defends Hurston’s refusal to protest for the sake of protest, after which Daphne Lamothe finds Vodou imagery in Their Eyes . William M. Ramsey gazes at Hurston’s own ambivalences toward and in Their Eyes . , while Michael Awkward and Michelle Johnson contribute with a joint overview of Hurston. vii H arold B loom Introduction zora neale hurston (1891–1960) I Hurston was a vitalist, enormously alive. Sometimes I find myself thinking of her as a Shakespearean character, so much does she now belong to American literary legend. Of all major African-American writers, she appears to have possessed the most personal verve, a life-force wonderfully embodied in Their Eyes Were Watching God (surely one of the great titles). Flamboyant writers—Lord Byron, Oscar Wilde, Hemingway—manifest a curious relationship of the work to the life, one that breaks down the wavering demarcation between art and reality. Hurston—novelist, anthropologist, folklorist—had a fierce dislike of racial politics, black and white, and loathed any attempt to subsume her individuality under any category whatsoever. We all of us pay high prices for our freedom from cant, social dogma, and societal morality. Hurston, passionate and driven by a daemon, plunged into a terrible final decade, in which she alienated most of her friends, admirers, readers. She opposed desegregation, arguing that it would degrade black education. Rejected by the publishing world and by foundations, she died in a welfare home and was buried in an unmarked grave. Her mourners all have been retrospective. Ralph Ellison, a great writer and a warm acquaintance, once at dinner together told me he could not understand my admiration for Their Eyes Were Watching God, a novel he found alternately overwritten and underwritten. I recall replying that the book’s vitalism disarmed me: if the style was uneven, the abundant surge of outrageous will to live in the heroine Janie had a cosmic urgency, a persuasiveness I could not resist. Hurston is that rare Harold Bloom author who mothered herself into existence. She has a gusto that reminds me of Chaucer’s the Wife of Bath and Shakespeare’s Sir John Falstaff. It was probably inevitable that she would immerse herself in the destructive element, but she achieved one undying book, heroic and poignant. II Extra-literary factors have entered into the process of even secular canonization from Hellenistic Alexandria into the High Modernist Era of Eliot and Pound, so that it need not much dismay us if contemporary work by women and by minority writers becomes esteemed on grounds other than aesthetic. When the High Modernist critic Hugh Kenner assures us of the permanent eminence of the novelist and polemicist Wyndham Lewis, we can be persuaded, unless of course we actually read books like Tarr and Hitler. Reading Lewis is a rather painful experience, and makes me skeptical of Kenner’s canonical assertions. In the matter of Zora Neale Hurston, I have had a contrary experience, starting with skepticism when I first encountered essays by her admirers, let alone by her idolators. Reading Their Eyes Were Watching God dispels all skepticism. Moses: Man of the Mountain is an impressive book in its mode and ambitions, but a mixed achievement, unable to resolve problems of diction and of rhetorical stance. Essentially, Hurston is the author of one superb and moving novel, unique not in its kind but in its isolated excellence among other stories of the kind.