Abstract

The ontological project presented by African American spiritual and narrative phenomena has long been a subject of theoretical deliberation. Existing scholarship has been predominantly concerned with the role of narrative voice in providing African American bodies with visibility, upward mobility, and agency within the dominant and, ultimately, unsympathetic cultural framework. Certainly, this notion of voice is what bestows the African American narrative tradition with sacrality; it has allowed these peoples to cope with the unseen order of the universe, which is fundamentally chaotic and unpredictable. Furthermore, narrative voice, autonomy, and authority are the mediums through which the unseen order, as it is called, is categorized and interacted with. To be clear, existing scholarship has not explicitly theorized the encounters of these bodies with the sacred according to the narrative voice of the latter. Perhaps, this pedagogical problem is, in part, due to the ontological nature of the narrative voices ascribed to the sacred by African American narrative cosmology: these forces seemingly lack a voice, yet they are still granted divine status within this cosmological framework. This analysis seeks to understand this absence of narrative voice in Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain, and specifically as it appears during Moses’ encounter with the God of Mount Horeb.

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