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Cosmic Upset: Cultural Revolution and the Contradictions of Zora Neale Hurston

In the literary criticism of the last few decades, the pre- dominant approach to the problem of literature's relationship to properly social contradictions has been what might be called an archaeological or "resolutionary" one. At work in certain strains of Althusserianism, but given precise and productive formula- tion in the work of Fredric Jameson, the space of the text is here posited as one of ideological management, wherein contradic- tions—in themselves inescapable for the cultural imagination, and unprocessable by dominant ideologies—are overcoded or layered, and subjected to so many fantasy solutions. As detailed chiefly in The Political Unconscious, the task of the critic is thus to unearth the disguised contradictions, and reveal the tense and unruly sociopolitical subtext beneath the relatively placid, or at least assuredly aestheticized, textual surface. 1 While there are many writers for whom this method makes a good deal of sense, the emphasis on unconscious ideological processes (as the text registers social content in complicated ways while the conscious mind of the writer might be focused entirely elsewhere) seems less useful when confronted by a writer for whom matters of social tension and historical crisis are rather more out in the open, as it were. This is not to suggest that any writer is free of ideology and its accompanying domain of fantasy. But what do we do with a writer—particularly one from the modernist period, when aesthetics and politics were verso and recto to one another—who is extremely self-conscious about her unique and unstable position as a cultural producer, and its attendant, and knotty, cultural politics? One who is acutely aware of many of the prevailing social cleavages of her era? One who attests to a