Shared Orientation and Narrative Acts in Cane, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Meridian

While one can do nothing about choosing one's relatives, one can, as artist, choose one's ancestors. In many places, but particularly in In Search of Our Mother's Gardens, Alice Walker has identified those writers who have influenced her development as a writer and determined her stance towards the tradition of letters not only in North America, but also in Europe, Africa and Latin America. In her essays, Walker writes with respect and gratitude for the example of such writers as Collette, Anais Nin, Tillie Olsen, Flannery O'Connor, Langston Hughes, Virginia Woolf, Camara Laye and Gabriel Garcia Marquez: writers who collectively have made Walker a more critical, disciplined witness to all forms of life on the planet and who have taught her the immense and enduring value of fantasy, myth and mystery ("Interview" 259). While these writers have provided a certain texture, a certain edge to Walker's thinking and writing, the major figures in her development as a writer (at least at this particular period in her career) are Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Toomer. When Walker writes of her admiration for Hurston and Toomer, when she expounds upon the value of their work for hers, we are witnesses not only to an observable change in the character of her prose, but more importantly to self-conscious acts of identification that are a measure of her own aspirations as a writer. When writing of her admiration for Cane and Their Eyes Were Watching God, Walker's often elegant, impassioned, sometimes didactic prose becomes even more impassioned, even more didactic. There is even perhaps an erosion of objectivity, all of which indicates that Walker, in the act of publicly declaring her allegiance and her debt to Toomer and Hurston, shares the spiritual space of fellow imaginative artists, or what Ralph Ellison would call "literary ancestors," whose fives and work are of vital and enduring significance to her. "I did not read Cane until 1967," asserts Walker, "but it has been reverberating in me to an astonishing degree. I love it passionately; could not possibly exist without it" ("Interview" 259). In order to indicate her unqualified admiration for Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Walker continues to employ the same spirited prose, but to make certain that the force and weight of her convictions are felt, she resorts to melodrama: "Condemned to a desert island for life, with an allotment of ten books to see me through, I would chose, unhesitatingly, two of Zora's: Mules and Men... and Their Eyes Were Watching God." Concerning her later work, Walker declares that there "is no book more important to me than this one (including Toomer's Cane, which comes close, but from what I recognize is a more. perilous direction)" ("Zora" 86). Certainly, these declarations are convincing testimony of the very honored position Hurston and Toomer occupy in Walker's pantheon of writers. While these expressions of admiration and kinship reveal very clearly what Toomer and Hurston mean to Walker as an individual, as well as something of her tastes and preferences in literature, they do not reveal how the examples of Toomer and Hurston have influenced Walker's intellectual and artistic development; that is to say, they do not reveal how Their Eyes Were Watching God and Cane shape and inform Walkeys own vibrant fiction. Of course, there is more between Walker and Hurston, Walker and Toomer than just praise and admiration. The literary line of descent from Toomer and Hurston to Walker is long and complicated. Walker's preoccupation with the lives of Toomer and Hurston, and what is plainly her incurable addiction to the fiction of these writers, are a consequence not only of what may be termed a shared orientation, but also of specific narrative acts of great symbolic power. By shared orientation I mean two things. The first is an identification with the people and history of a particular region. Like Toomer and Hurston, Walker is a writer of the South. …