Is Mules and Men a Collection of Folklore or a Novel?
...d to tell the stories, and she tells them she comes to record their stories because they are valuable and many people want to hear them. According to Dolby-Stahl, “In Mules and Men the primary dramatis persona is Zora Neale Hurston , and the story is told by Hurston supposedly as a segment of her life story (51) Boas maintained traditional scientific attitudes toward “accurate” reportage while Hurston’s shifting points of view challenged the efficacy of his method. She thought to become an “insider” an observer must surrender “objectivity,” which revealed a problem with Boas’s participant-observer method. Hurston concluded that “subjects” will only reveal when and what they want to, perhaps never to outsiders, no matter how much researchers try to enter into the culture they wish to study” (Harrison 2). This skepticism about objective reportage is illustrated in the final tale, which closes the book—the story of Sis Cat and the Rat. The tale teller who invents the “lie” and the author who records it are Sis Cat while the Rat represents Hurston’s presumably white audience that has been repeatedly deceived by her lies. As Sis Cat uses lies to catch her Rat demonstrates the narrator’s method of gathering and reporting data. Hurston, as an anthropologist, has learned a new way of storytelling (“lying”) rather than adopting Boas’s scientific method” (Harrison 3). First, most critics consider Mules and Men a collection of folklore. Robert A. Bone (1958), one of the first critics to offer serious commentary on Hurston’s work, regards Mules and Men as a book of folklore. Ann L. Rayson (1974) considered it a “collection of folklore” (Dolby-Stahl 53). As Dolby-Stahl points out, “James W. Byrd, in an article in Tennessee Folklore Society Bulletin (1955) describes Mules and Men as a treasury of Negro folklore,” an entertaining and impressive collection (53). Darwin T. Turner (1971), one of Hurston’s contemporary champions, deals with Mules and Men only briefly, and then apart from the novels, as a folklore collection (Dolby-Stahl 53). However, writing in 1972, the socialogist Marion Kilson grouped all of Hurston’s narrative works together as the products of an “ethnographic artist”(Dolby-Stahl 53). Kilson thought Mules and Men was comparable to Their Eyes were Watching God as a narrative fiction. But Robert Hemenway (1977), Hurston’s biographer, addressed the underlying issue of genre that resulted in attention given to Hurston’s objectives and performance as an author in Mules and Men. Hemenway notes the “intimacy” that Boas described in the manuscript of Mules and Men: “The intimacy of Mules and Men is an obtained effect, an example of Hurston’s narrative skill. She represented oral art functioning to affect behavior in the black community; to display this art in its natural setting she created a narrator who would not intrude on the folklore event. A semifictional Zora Neale Hurston is our guide to southern black folk- lore, a curiously retiring figure who is more art than life… It is easy to overlook Hurston’s craft as she mediates between self and material in this presentation; yet she shaped Mules and Men in somewhat the same manner in which Henry David Thoreau created a unified experience in Walden ( qtd. in 1977: 164-65). Hemenway is suggesting that Mules and Men does illustrate literary artistry. Boas explicates that “it is easy to overlook Hurston’s craft…” because Zora is self and a part of the material in the book without intruding on the folklore event. This idea is to be expanded upon later in this paper. Although Hurston chose the personal narrative format, the fieldworker account, which is the product of any ethnographer’s or folklorist’s research career, she had a literary goal. Having chosen a novelist format rather than throw out the ethnographer’s viewpoint, she integrated it subtly into her literary format, blending it in with the creative writer’s skill and literary focus. This is the point Darwin Turner overlooks in his evaluation of the book as “disappointingly superficial” ethnography. Turner maintains that in Mules and Men Hurston offers no evidence of scholarly procedure, fails to classify her material meaningfully, and fails to ask essential, analytical questions” (qtd. in Turner 1971: 117). It is true that Hurston does not classify her material into generic categories. Neither does she include comparative notes for the stories or index numbers for the traditional tale types. However, Hurston offers a sufficient quantity of contextual information within the frame of a “fieldwork account"—a written personal narrative, which would allow any reader the option to speculate on the functions of the folklore in the book. A standard ethnography might focus only on narrative categories or only customs or beliefs, or perhaps only mythological narratives. Mules and Men records examples of well over twenty-five different categories of folklore material. For instance, there are tall tales, such as the Texas mosquito and the Great Hunt; etiological tales explaining the origin of black and white races or why cats have nine lives or why the ‘possum has a hairless tail; animal tales about the rabbit, ‘gator, and dog; folktales that are “ordinary”—about Jack and the Devil and popular categories of stories called “John and Old Massa.” There are stories “explaining” the Bible and descriptions of customs and traditional skills, children’s games, folk cookery, and hoodoo conjurations. There is full text of one folk sermon, which is full of formulas. Other examples include entertaining cumulative rhymes, traditional rhymes that begin or end long prose narratives, traditional insults or “dozens”, blues lyrics and their music, a text of the well-known ballad “John Henry,” citations of religious songs, street cries, and proverbial expressions. Finally, there are esoteric usages and items of folk speech explained in notes or in the glossary and several examples of the patterned repartee known as signifying or “woofing” (Dolby-Stahl 55-56). Thus, all of these kinds of folklore are scattered throughout the book in what appear to be natural context or at realistic settings so that Hurston can accomplish the literary goal of mimesis. Because of Hurston’s skill as a writer of mimetic fiction that creates the illusion of natural, context-bound ordering, she manipulates her readers to experience the “reality” of folkloristic contexts and authentic folklore material. She assumes it is more effective to elicit a profound appreciation for the material and people who perform it through using that literary goal to move her readers, and to do that she must not leave the response of her readers to chance. As Dolby-Stahl points out, “She must influence it by making art appear as reality, by turning ethnographic rawness into a personal narrative, a literary performance. She does this by “hiding the ethnographer’s observations within the very fabric of the narrative” (56). Another literary technique is her presentation of analytical commentary through the characters’ words rather than through her own formalized observations. Comments on folkloric or ethnographic concepts, generalizations on the variety of performance situations and abilities and other analytic statements are put into the mouths of the “informants” the fictionalized Zora encounters. Hurston skillfully mimics the phenomenon of metafolklore, folklore or folklore in which an allusion is made to some frame of reference known to be a part of the popular notion of folklore. For example, there are familiar characteristics of specific genre of folklore (the “once upon a time opening to fairy tales) or other well-known ballads, legends or stories. However Alan Dundes in an article published in The Monist (Dundes 1966) expanded the concept into the realm of “oral literary criticism,” which may be identified as comments about the folklore offered by the performers themselves or their audiences ( see Bauman and Briggs 1990 for a historiographic expansion on the effects of reflexive attention to contextualization in folklore research). Intuitively, Hurston uses metafolklore to present analytic comment and cultural-specific observations through realistic dialogues spoken by her “untrained” characters. For example, as Dolby-Stahl indicates, “ the concepts of etic and emic categories, the distinction between passive and active bearers… or folklorist might use in discussing analytically the body of folklore Hurston collected” (57). However, Hurston’s literary goal is in having the other characters in her personal narrative use these same concepts themselves in dialogues with her. For instance, in the case of Officer Richardson, who says when asked to recite “the white man’s prayer “: “Ah don’t jus’ know it well enough to say it. Ah jus’ know it well enough to know it” (Hurston 1978: 95). Although Officer Richardson does not have the jargon, he is saying with obvious understanding of the concept that he is a pas...