RALPH ELLISON’S MYTHICAL METHOD IN INVISIBLE MAN A thesis submitted To Kent State University in partial Fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts by Kenton Bryan Butcher May 2016 © Copyright All rights reserved Except for previously published materials 1 Thesis written by Kenton Butcher B. A. Miami University, 2009 M. A. Kent State University, 2016 ______________________________________ Advisor Babacar M’Baye, Ph. D. ______________________________________ Chair, Department of English Robert Trogdon, Ph. D. ______________________________________ Dean, College of Arts and Sciences James L. Blank, Ph. D. 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS...............................................................................................................iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS............................................................................................................iv CHAPTERS I. Introduction: Ellison’s (In)Visible Myth.............................................................................1 II. Myth, Folklore, and Canonical Literature..........................................................................11 III. Joyce and Eliot: Ellison’s Antecedents..............................................................................26 IV. Ellison’s Mythical Method in Invisible Man.....................................................................39 CONCLUSION: RECURRING TRADITIONS...........................................................................64 WORKS CITED............................................................................................................................68 iii Acknowledgements I would first like to thank my wife for her love and support. There are no words. Thanks to Babacar M’Baye for his advice and infinite patience over the course of this project. I also wish to thank Don-John Dugas, Tammy Clewell, and Jennifer Larson for their help and insight. Finally, I would like to than the Kent State University English Department for taking a chance on me. This program changed the course of my professional and academic future, and I am forever grateful. iv I. Introduction: Ellison’s (In)Visible Myth I knew the trickster Ulysses just as early as I knew the wily rabbit of Negro American lore, and I could easily imagine myself a pint- sized Ulysses but hardly a rabbit, no matter how human and resourceful or Negro. —Ralph Ellison “Change the Joke and Slip the Joke” In Ellison’s prose and interviews, he suggests that African American folklore, myth, and rituals do not exist in a vacuum, separated from the wider American society—black and white cultures are entwined and inseparable. The African-American experience is a fundamental part of America and the West in general, and it is “as rich a body of experience as one would find anywhere. We can view it narrowly as something exotic, folksy or ‘low-down,’ or we may identify ourselves with it and recognize it as an important segment of the larger selves with it and recognize it as an important segment of the larger American experience—not lying at the bottom of it, but intertwined, diffused in its very texture” (Collected Essays 214). In other words, one cannot be removed without fundamentally changing the other. Herman Beavers notes that Ellison’s comments on the cross cultural engagement between black and white American cultures are “richly problematic” in that Ellison argues for “an American identity that issues from cultural collaboration, even in instances where the participants are less than willing to acknowledge it as such” (Beavers 1). American culture arises from “collisions between different racial groups” (Beavers 1), and Ellison works to bring this fact to the surface of his novel, Invisible Man, using an integrative narrative method. 1 Ellison acknowledges that myths, rites, and traditions obfuscate America’s integrated cultural history because individual and group participants perpetuate the spurious notion of racial separatism and a brutal racial caste system. However, Ellison shows over the course of Invisible Man that two cultures as culturally, historically, and politically entwined as the cultures of African Americans and European Americans unavoidably inform and influence one another. Ellison provides an example of this inevitable cross-cultural identification from his own life, reminiscing that as a child, he and his playmates “fabricated [their] own heroes and ideals catch- as-catch-can, and with an outrageous and irreverent sense of freedom” (Collected Essays 53). In the minds of Ellison and his schoolmates, unhampered by rules of decorum or social constraints, characters from their lives permeated and merged with characters they discovered throughout the annals of white-dominated, Western cultures: Gamblers and scholars, jazz musicians and scientists, Negro cowboys and soldiers from the Spanish-American and first world wars, movie stars and stunt men, figures from the Italian Renaissance and literature, both classical and popular, were combined with the special virtues of some local bootlegger, the eloquence of some Negro preacher, the strength and grace of some local athlete, the ruthlessness of some businessman-physician, the elegance in dress and manners of some headwaiter or hotel doorman. (Collected Essays 53) Ellison’s imaginative practice of cultural integration did not cease when he reached adulthood; Invisible Man emphasizes this shared and integrated cultural history on an individual and societal level, and I will show that Ellison’s accomplishment rests on a narrative method that seeks to synthesize antecedent cultural forms, specifically Greco-Roman myth, African American folklore, and canonical Western texts. 2 Invisible Man’s two epigraphs from Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno and T. S. Eliot’s Family Reunion, respectively, speak to this narrative method. Thomas Volger suggests that the first epigraph from Melville “suggests the nature of the change the invisible man undergoes in the novel” and the second, from Eliot, “suggests the discovery of [Invisible’s] invisibility which is an essential part of the change” (129). Although Volger’s assertion is certainly edifying, I would add that the title of Eliot’s work, Family Reunion, suggests a (re)unification of entities with a shared history. The context of the epigraph is that Harry is addressing a distant relative, Mary, whom Harry’s mother designates as his future spouse: HARRY: I tell you, it is not me you are looking at, Not me you are grinning at, not me your confidential looks Incriminate, but that other person, if person, You thought I was: let your necrophily Feed upon that carcase [sic]… (qtd. in Invisible Man) In addition to the notion of invisibility, Harry’s words call forth several taboos—i. e., traditions which govern human interaction, such as necrophilia and cannibalism. The epigraph foregrounds Ellison’s fixation with myth as it functions in everyday events throughout Invisible Man. Myths and traditions in Invisible Man work in such a way that Invisible and the other characters participate in these rites both consciously and unconsciously. Invisible is reluctant to bring such traditions to the forefront of consciousness, “given the large numbers of people who wish to adhere to illusion” (Beavers 23). Initially, Invisible was one of the individuals who adhered to illusion, and as a result, the traditions structuring American society cause Invisible to “accept the rigid and restraining role imposed on [him] as true identity” (Tanner 83). Invisible is not the only one with misapprehensions about his existential reality, as representatives of social 3 power in Invisible Man like “teacher[s], preacher[s], doctor[s], factory-owner[s], [or] Party member[s]” spuriously attempt to “control reality, and they believe that they can run it according to their plan” (Tanner 83). In Invisible Man, traditions mechanize consciousness and cause individuals to act without considering why they act in such a way, and the narrator discovers that the cyclical, repetitive traditions that undergird society perpetuate mindless adherence to social practices that victimize subaltern groups, “the manner by which African Americans became a resource whose purpose was one of providing white Americans with the raw materials necessary to formulate a contingent identity” (Beavers 3). In “The Art of Fiction” (1954), Ellison defines myth and its significance for American (or any other) culture and society. For Ellison, myth and folklore address a specific question: [W]hat in our background is worth preserving or abandoning? The clue to this can be found in folklore, which offers the first drawings of any group’s character. It preserves mainly those situations which have repeated themselves again and again in the history of any given group. It describes those rites, manners, customs, and so forth, which insure the good life or destroy it, and it describes those boundaries of feeling, thought and action which that particular group has found to be the limitation of the human condition. (Collected Essays 213) In other words, myths and folktales initially arise as an instinct to preserve cultural values, and certain American traditions encourage the mindless repetition of customs that perpetually provide white society with the “raw materials to formulate a contingent identity” based on the status of subaltern groups. As a result of the inherently cyclical nature of these traditions, the events of Invisible’s life bear the mark of Absurdist repetition in that they occur over