Reading Class#1/Their Eyes were Watching God/ God is Me

God is Me

“Half-gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.” Quite distinctive from the popular description of God, Zora Neale Hearston describes a unique higher power. Starting from differentiating humans, demigods and true god, I will try to analyze who in the story can be classified to such groups, and suggest a new interpretation of Janie’s life.

No one in the story holds a ultimately strong power over others from first appearance. Logan Killicks, Jody Starks, Tea Cake and Janie all start as plain Negroes making a living. However, as time passes on in the story, every single one of them gets involved in conflicts with others (mostly with Janie) and acquires dominance over whom they fought with.

This point is something we have to consider carefully. From the fact that there is no morally perfect, divine and almighty individual in the story, we can state that the god Zora Neale Hurston was depicting was not a traditional Christian god. There is no moral concept that penetrates through the story, creating a single us-them boundary between the good and evil. There is no binary axis, but only several competing characters. This absence of moral is shown in the absence of guilty conscience of committing murder, adultery or slandering. The place of the traditional ultimate being is empty in the story. This indicates that a new concept should be employed to analyze the conflicts within the story.

However, there could be an interpretation that natural beings such as the Horizon, the Pear Tree and the Hurricane plays the role of God in the story. However, the Horizon and the Pear Tree does not play an actual role in the story, it exists in the Imaginary of Janie. It may have influenced Janie’s actions, but Janie fails to meet these subjective mirages in the Real. In fact, it can be said as a set of virtual images that highlights the limits of the Real of Janie.

If there should be a godly existence, the Hurricane would be the closest. However, the Hurricane is not in the place of God, it can be thought as divine violence, a trace of Godly being, not God itself. However, the fact that Janie is the one to pull the trigger to kill Tea cake after the Hurricane compels us to believe that this story is about demigods striving to be gods. Maybe the Hurricane might be a form of divine violence, but it is soon identified by the violence that Janie executes towards Tea cake. This will be further explained in the following paragraphs.

Anyhow, we would have to view the main characters in this story as demigods striving to become the true higher power. Logan Killicks, Jody Starks, Tea Cake and Janie all have certain powers and strong will that differentiates them from the plain townspeople. They do not obey each other, and in most cases, the existence of another is a threat to survival of oneself. From this, I was able to conclude that all of these demigods had “will to power”, trying to overcome others and escalate to a higher position, to a place where common men would never understand.

All four of the main characters are all respected to some degree, and this comes from the special power that they have, qualities that make them demigods, not just common men. For Logan Killicks, it was his diligence and land, while as for Jody Starks it was his political & financial power. Janie is praised for her beauty, and Tea Cake had the strongest, lasting dominance over Janie. They are all in a sense “worshipped in wine and flowers” by the townspeople.

However, there is one person who loses such respect from the town as the story heads to the end: Janie. By this, it can be said that she is no longer a demigod (praised in “flowers and wine”). Not only that, Janie is the sole character in this story who kills or takes away the power of demigods. This relates to the phrase “Real gods require blood”, which indicates that Janie is the closes character to a “real god”.

But to conclude so, there must be substantial proof to it. Logan Killicks’s power was diligence and ability to take care of his vast land. When Janie first marries him, she was part of his power. She helps Killicks do his production, but never something of herself. By deserting Killicks, it can be said that her portion of the production disappeared, thus weakening the power of Logan Killicks.

As for Jody Starks, the blow is much fatal. We must draw are interest at the fact that Starks plays god when he lights the lamp and say “let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.” This alludes to Genesis, and indicates that Starks is striving to become a true god. Also, his weapon used against Janie is making her shut up, taking away her voice. Janie uses the weapon at Starks’s disposal, and kills him with her own voice, slander. Janie uses the weapon at Starks’s disposal, and kills him with her own voice. It is dramatic and victorious when she kills Starks with the tool that Starks tried in vain to take away.

This goes same for Tea Cake as well. Janie shoots Tea Cake with the skill that Tea Cake taught her. This alludes to Shakespeare’s Tempest or Plath’s Daddy when the oppressor’s weapon is used by the weak to kill the oppressor. By getting rid of Tea Cake, Janie becomes independent and apart from common men of demigods.

However, there can be a claim that the case of Tea Cake is quite different from others, for he really loved Janie. But as Deleuze puts it, “if you are caught in another's dream, you are lost.” Love inherently brings of a Symbolic violence that Zizek in Violence points out. One can never know well of another, so love is “giving something one doesn't have to someone who doesn't want it.” The act of loving oppresses the true being of the loved. Because the object being loved and the subject of being is/are inevitably different, the loved feels an endless gap between the Symbolic and the Real.

In such sense, the love that Tea Cake gives to Janie is Symbolic violence. Then what can Janie do to go against it? In a world where there already is Symbolic violence, merely rejecting it or following is subduing. There needs to be a violence that relocates the linguistic power structure that the Symbolic violence had set. Such violence is named as “divine violence”. Divine violence is a violence that is neither unprepared nor led, but of pure despair and will to survive by the suppressed. Hence its name “divine”, we can refer back to the earlier analysis of this essay on the Hurricane. The Hurricane deviate the normal life (original power structure) between Janie and Tea Cake, and relocate the relationship between Janie and Tea Cake. Then Janie pulls the trigger, as the final action of the divine violence.

Janie was a subordinate woman, obeying to her grandmother, husbands and townspeople. However, towards the end of the end the story, Janie does not care about other’s gaze anymore. Hence “and listenin’ tuh lot kind uh talk is jus’ luke openin’ yo’ mouth and lettin’ de moon shine down yo’ throat.” Another statement implies the essence of this novel. Which is: “They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin’ fuh themselves.” If one meets his/her god, how can he/she be devoted to herself, not God? Maybe it was because God was herself for Janie; that was how she met and came to know herself, and started to live for what she truly wanted.