Week 8 — 3/23 — Texture | WORKSHOP SESSIONS: JANE, JACQUELINE

All writers bring a particular texture to a work just as all writers bring their own particular voice. Texture and voice are harmonious, but not entirely the same. Where voice can be found rooted in language, the writer’s authentic texture can be found in imagery and motifs. Joyce is known for not only his voice, but also his extraordinary textures and how he feeds these textures into the motifs and images and characters of his works: “He understands the tiny sins, the tiny virtues, the tiny venalities, the tiny advantages that people look for in life….” 

Texture

Texture is a term applied to the elements remaining in a literary work after a paraphrase of its argument has been made. Among such elements are details of situation, metaphor, meter, imagery, rhyme—in fact, all elements that are not considered part of the structure of the work. The separation of texture and structure has been a strategy employed by John Crowe Ransom and some others among the New Critics. (A Handbook to Literature)

Texture in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God

In Hurston’s protagonist, Janie, we find enormous strength and wonderment and a particular way of regarding the world that encompasses both an innocence and wisdom beyond her years. Janie’s voice grows in dimension as the reader not only respects Janie’s voice, but yearns for it. This dimensionality in Janie’s voice and motifs of water and movement and the female position create pattern and texture within the narrative. Wouldn’t her readers love to have Janie narrate their own lives? What would Janie see within us if given the opportunity?

Their Eyes Were Watching God

by Zora Neale Hurston

Chapter 1 Opening

Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.

Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.

So the beginning of this was a woman and she had come back from burying the dead. Not the dead of sick and ailing with friends at the pillow and the feet. She had come back from the sodden and the bloated; the sudden dead, their eyes flung wide open in judgment.

The people all saw her come because it was sundown. The sun was gone, but he had left his footprints in the sky. It was the time for sitting on porches beside the road. It was the time to hear things and talk. These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgment. Seeing the woman as she was made them remember the envy they had stored up from other times. So they chewed up the back parts of their minds and swallowed with relish. They made burning statements with questions, and killing tools out of laughs. It was mass cruelty. A mood come alive. Words walking without masters; walking altogether like harmony in a song.

“What she doin’ coming back here in dem overhalls? Can’t she find no dress to put on?—Where’s dat blue satin dress she left here in?—Where all dat money her husband took and died and left her?—What dat ole forty year ole ’oman doin’ wid her hair swingin’ down her back lak some young gal?—Where she left dat young lad of a boy she went off here wid?—Thought she was going to marry?—Where he left her?—What he done wid all her money?—Betcha he off wid some gal so young she ain’t even got no hairs—why she don’t stay in her class?—…”

Character, Structure and Texture: Writing the Arcs

Character Arc	Structural (Plot) Arc	Textural Arc
Conflict Character vs. Self i.e., Janie vs. self   *If you have not yet read Their Eyes Were Watching God I’m strongly encouraging you to read it now. See links above. Story is built on conflict. As literary writers, we most often begin with the essence of our most intriguing character and that character’s primary internal conflict. Begin with character and internal conflict focus when drafting a first version of a short story, novel or even a single scene. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, we meet Janie as she returns home from burying her lover, after running off from her “proper” life. She is broken and vulnerable and her neighbors and friends in Eatonville assume Janie’s lover, Tea Cake, has “done her wrong.”	Conflict Character vs. Character i.e., Janie vs. Joe vs. Nature i.e., Janie vs. hurricane vs. Society i.e., Janie vs. Eatonville vs. convention vs. Supernatural i.e., Janie versus God’s expectation of women   Janie battles not only the gender position of being female in Eatonville and a man’s world and a “white” run world but also the position of being human in a hurricane and “under God.” It seems that all the conventions are against her. She is a innocent, smart, strong, beautiful and capable character and we have the privilege of being with her as she takes her journey through multiple external conflicts. How does Janie, in some way, regardless of gender, ethnicity, community… embody something of you as the reader?	Conflict Imagery vs. Character vs. Place i.e., the sun’s footprints in the sky vs. Janie vs. porches Symbolism vs. Character vs. Place i.e., death vs. Janie vs. coming home Repetition vs. Character vs. Place  i.e., time vs. Janie vs. changing places   Time plays an important motif in the novel. We repeatedly return to Janie’s age and the repetition of returning home and how individuals, like water, can move out with the tide and come back to land again. Water also presents as motif in the different forms it can take: the sea and freshwater as in a lake or pond. Where Janie communes with her organic self, she not only moves out with the sea tide—leaves home, leaves Eatonville—she also communes with her “still self” when she wades and floats in the still freshwater. The repetition of age and water within the narrative creates a texture of human passage. Do we not all experience Janie’s movements within tides and stillness in our own ways?