Table Of ContentLiterary Criticism and
Cultural Theory
The Interaction of Text
and Society
Edited by
William E. Cain
Professor of English, Wellesley College
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Modern Primitives
Race and Language in Gertrude
Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and
Zora Neale Hurston
Susanna Pavloska
I
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LONDON AND NEW YORK
First Published 2000 by
Garland Publishing, Inc.
Published 2013 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Copyright © 2000 by Susanna Pavloska
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, with
out permission in writing from the publishers.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the the
Library of Congress.
ISBN: 978-0-8153-3650-1
ISBN: 978-0-815-33650-1 (hbk)
Contents
Preface vii
Introduction: Primitivism as a Theme in Rhetoric, Science,
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1. Stein and Picasso: The Anti-Aesthetes 3
2. The Fact of Blackness in "Melanctha" 31
3. Hemingway's Primal Scene 55
4. Zora Neale Hurston's Ethnological Fiction 75
Bibliography 99
Index 119
v
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Preface
Modernist primitivism was an international, or to be more precise, a
transatlantic phenomenon that had different characteristics in each of
countries in which it existed. In France, it represented the latest
manifestation of a long tradition reaching beyond the Enlightenment to
the classical age. In Britain it was embroiled in issues of empire and the
nation's relationship to its former colonies, past and present. For the
three American writers who are the subject of this study, it signaled the
arrival of the United States onto the world stage. Primitivism in all its
forms involves the viewing of one culture through the eyes of another,
whether it be the United States through the eyes of Europe, or Harlem
through the eyes of the white cultural majority. This scrutiny can serve
to both disable and enable, as we shall see.
Since this study was completed, a number of important books
relevant to this topic have come out, including M. Lynn Weiss's
Gertrude Stein and Richard Wright: The Poetics and Politics of
Modernism, Daniel R. Schwartz's Reconfiguring Modernism:
Explorations in the Relationship Between Modem Art and Modem
Literature, and especially Michael North's The Dialect of Modernism:
Race, Language and Twentieth Century Literature. North investigates
how white modernist writers used African-American dialect to
modernize their writing, and the problems this appropriation caused for
twentieth-century African-American writers, who were likewise
struggling to find a voice. Although my theoretical approach is
different, I have benefited immensely from North's study, especially in
revising my chapter on Zora Neale Hurston.
vii
viii Preface
Julia Kristeva had touched upon the topic of what North refers to
as "racial ventriloquism," arguing in Revolution in Poetic Language
that in order to "enunciate," a "subject must separate from and through
his image, from and through his objects" (41). That is to say, both
identification and differentiation are essential in finding a voice.
Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway and Zora Neale Hurston used
dialect with the self-conscious awareness that they were putting on a
mask, "performing" for an audience that they perceived to be different
from themselves. At the same time, however, all three felt a deep
identification with the masks they adopted: while Stein only discussed
her "nigger" side in her notebooks, Hemingway actively promoted the
myth that he had Native American blood; Zora Neale Hurston, perhaps
the most complicated and problematic of the three, willed away her
white ancestors in an act of self-conscious racial identification. In each
case, this identification enabled the act of creation, but not without
exacting a price in the form of critical misunderstanding.
This book is divided into five parts. The Introduction traces the
history of primitivism from a classical rhetorical trope to a set of
arguments protesting against Enlightenment assumptions about
scientific progress, and finally to its emergence in the twentieth century
as an aesthetic, exemplified by Picasso and his use of African masks,
that combined new work in the human sciences, especially
anthropology and psychology, with new ideas in the visual arts to
challenge traditional ideas of realism and artistic accomplishment. The
first two chapters, which are devoted to Gertrude Stein, bring together
visual evidence, published and unpublished writings, and linguistic
theory to give a detailed account of the theoretical and gender concerns
of the Stein-Picasso collaboration that culminated in Picasso's Les
demoiselles d'Avignon and Stein's "Melanctha."
The final two chapters discuss how both Hemingway and Hurston
participated in the racialist scientific debates of the 1920s and created
some of their major works in dialogue with them: Hemingway in the
recasting of his life narrative in his autobiographical fiction, and
Hurston in her use of her anthropological training to construct a theory
of African-American culture in an attempt to rescue it from its
appropriation by white modernists.
Preface ix
This study benefited from the wisdom and guidance of Professors
William Howarth and Arnold Rampersad of Princeton University. I
would also like to thank Professor Emory Elliott of the University of
California, Riverside, for his support and encouragement over many
years, and the librarians and staff at the Cone Collection at the
Baltimore Museum of Art and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript
Library at Yale University for their assistance.
