CARLETON ri A%fVirf of Literature <&llje Liberal Arts VOL. XVIII, No. 3, Winter 1980 A RALPH ELLISON FESTIVAL
FEATURES AND REVIEWS Ralph Ellison: Going to the Territory Portrait of Inman Page Perspective of Literature R. W. B. Lewis: The Ceremonial Imagination of Ralph Ellison Nathan A. Scott, Jr.: Ellison's Vision of Communitas John Wright: Dedicated Dreamer, Consecrated Acts: Shadowing Ellison Chimed Chants from Dark and Dutiful Dyelis
John F. Callahan: Democracy and the Pursuit of Narrative Leon Forrest: Luminosity from the Lower Frequencies Melvin Dixon: O, Mary Rambo, Don't You Weep Robert Stepto: Literacy and Hibernation: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man Curtis Harnack: Out of the Mouths of Landladies Barry Beckham: How We Decided, Go With Richard Michael S. Harper: Remembering Robert E. Hayden
FICTION Jack M. Winters: In the Cell Late at Night
POETRY by Michael S. Harper, Terri Barnes, Frank Chipasula SPECIAL GUEST EDITORS: Michael S. Harper and John Wright
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We are indebted to the New York University School of Law for its permission to reprint Ralph Ellison's "Perspective of Literature," which originally appeared in American Law: The Third Century, The Law Bicentennial Volume, 1976. We are grateful also to John Foraste for the photograph of Ralph Ellison accepting the Yarde portrait of Inman Page. Robert Stepto's essay is excerpted from his book, From Behind the Veil, University of Illinois Press, 1979.
The Carleton Miscellany is not an official publication of Carleton College, nor are the views expressed in its pages necessarily those of the College. The editors assume no responsibility for the views of individual contributors.
Copyright 1980 by Carleton College
Cover design and title by Betsy Edwards
Back cover composite and Festival photos by Lawrence Sykes 1 r CMLEToS»_.yjJCLCifjy . J^SCBIAHY
A %e\U tf °f Literature <&• tlje Lihra Iyirts
Advisory Editors
Richard Wollheim
Philip Martin John Wain A.K. Ramanujan Chris Wallace-Crabbe
Editorial Board Robert Bonner Paul Riesman Charles Carlin Davis Taylor Roy Elveton Robert Tisdale David Porter John Wright Keith Harrison. Editor Donald Schier, Review Editor George Soule, Fiction Editor Carolyn Soule, Managing Editor
Editorial Assistants Dorothy Grice Joan Meyer
CONTENTS VOL. XVIII, NO. 3, WINTER 1980
Comments, Tributes: A First Word, A Last Word by Keith Harrison 5 Introduction A Ralph Ellison Festival by Michael S. Harper ... 6 Going to the Territory by Ralph Ellison 9 How We Decided, Go With Richard by Barry Beckham 26 A Portrait of Inman Page by Ralph Ellison 28 Poems by Terri Barnes 32 The Ceremonial Imagination of Ralph Ellison by R. W.B. Lewis 34 Out of the Mouths of Landladies by Curtis Harnack 38 Ellison's Vision of Cummunitas by Nathan A. Scott, Jr 41 Democracy and the Pursuit of Narrative by John F. Callahan 51 Perspective of Literature by Ralph Ellison 69 Luminosity From the Lower Frequencies by Leon Forrest 82 O, Mary Rambo, Don't You Weep by Melvin Dixon 98 Poems by Michael S. Harper 105 Literacy and Hibernation: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man by Robert Stepto 112 Dedicated Dreamer, Consecrated Acts: Shadowing Ellison by John Wright 142 In the Cell, Late at Night (story) by Jack M. Winters 200 Poem by Frank Chipasula 214 Chimed Chants from Dark and Dutiful Dyelis: A Review Essay by John Wright 215 Remembering Robert Hayden by Michael S. Harper 231 Notes on Contributors 236 Index to Volume XVIII 238
A FIRST WORD, A LAST WORD
With this issue of The Miscellany we are forced to take a rest. After much discussion, the Administration of the College, has decided that, in a time of budgetary constraint, the magazine, because of its small circulation, will have to bow to other needs of the College. This is a very sad time for many of us as the lineage of The Miscellany is a long and noble one. We have much to be proud of; in the field of American Letters we can hold our heads high. Yet it cannot be denied that in a period of inflation, recession — or whatever its technical name might be — the withering dialectic of money must have its say.
One of the things we have been trying to do recently is to chart some new areas in Literature and the Liberal Arts. We have had a Midwest Issue, an International Issue and had planned issues on Women in Literature and Commonwealth Literature. It is by a curious and fitting irony that we conclude our twenty-year span with an issue devoted to — until recently — the most neglected area of life and letters in this country: Black America. We are especially proud to honor Ralph Ellison in this issue and to give it over, almost entirely to a discussion of his work. John Wright and Michael Harper, our guest editors, have gathered some excellent material together and we thank them for a demanding task well done.
Hence our jacket cover is chosen for two reasons: we are in mourning. Yet as we mourn we rejoice. We do not go out with a whimper, but with a sense of new life — a life that many established literary journals have barely taken account of.
And now we must thank our friends. They are too numerous to be named individually. Let me, however, select a few whose support has been outstanding, while I apologize to all those stalwart writers and readers whom I cannot name here, but without whom this magazine could not have existed. Wayne Carver, our former editor and our colleague, has shown both tough-mindedness and compassion throughout the life of this magazine and gave himself unstintingly for many years to continuing its encouragement of good writing. What man can find a thankyou adequate for that? The members of the Editorial Board in America, England and Australia have all shown the kind of loyalty that, these days, is as rare as it is sustaining. The members of the Carleton faculty have been equally concerned with the welfare of the magazine. Carolyn Soule, who has for many years been the Managing Editor also deserves special praise for splendid service sometimes in the teeth of great difficulties. Four other people deserve our highest praise: Don Schier, review Editor and George Soule, fiction Editor, who have given hundreds of hours of unremitting and unremunerative work for the magazine; Erling Larsen, former editor, dead these several years, who held on and strove for quality and achieved it; and, finally, Reed Whittemore — 'onlie begetter' — who may have the curious distinction of having, in part, invented all of us.
This may be a lament for the makers, the scores of talented writers we have already published and those whom we might have published — a lament as a dark time of retrenchment comes on. But if it is a lament it is counter-balanced with feelings of great joy. We have had such excellent company.
Keith Harrison
GOING TO THE TERRITORY: ICONS OF GEOGRAPHY OF THE WORD: A MEDITATION ON THE LIFE AND TIMES OF RALPH WALDO ELLISON
Ethical schizophrenia you called it: come back to haunt the cattle-drive, Indians coming into blacktown because it's home; your father's will lies uncontested, his blood welling up in oil; 'Deep Second' hones its marks in Jimmy Rushing; Charlie Christian's father leads the blind.
Such instruments arrange themselves at Gettysburg, at Chickamauga; the whites in Tulsa apologize in the separate library, all the books you dreamed of, fairy tales and Satchmo jesting to the court of St. James, infirmary is the saints already home.
The hip connected to the thigh converges in tuberculosis; your mother's knees spank the planks of rectory, your father's image sanctified in documents, in acts won out on hallelujahs of "A" train, nine Scottsboro Boys spun upward over thresholds of Duke's dance.
Dance and mask collect their greasepaint, idioms stand on bandstand, in stove pipe pants of riverman, gambling shoes, gold-toothed venom vexing sundown, the choir at sunrise-service cleansing a life on a jim crow funeral car.
The first true phrase sings out in barnyard; the hunt in books for quail.
Michael S. Harper
"Geography is fate," Ralph Ellison once said, so we courted fate by bringing Ralph and Fanny Ellison to Brown University's campus during the first week of classes, September 19-21, 1979. The Rhode Island weather was providential, and friends and admirers came in number to pay homage to the Ellisons. At least one good reason for such a gathering was the hope that Ellison would return to his desk to write fiction, full time; he had just retired from his post as Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities at New York University. Another reason was Ellison's great contribution, in the public sector, as an abiding trustee of consciousness and conscientiousness — his large service on commissions and committees. Another was his role as a teacher and mentor; for his generosity at close quarters is well- known to those who search the meanings in his fiction and essays and numerous 'silent theatres'. But the idea for the festival came more specifically from a "Teaching Creative Writing" symposium at the Library of Congress back in January, 1973. Ellison did not give a major address there, but he appeared on two panels, one on fiction, the other on non-fiction; and he waxed strong in the clinches, and in the late rounds. His vocal reaffirmation of the writer's high calling and territorial prerogatives suggested then that, for Ralph Ellison, "goin' to the territory" meant more than that flight to the Indian 'nations' recounted so often and with such relish in the tales of fugitive slaves: to Ellison it meant also the movement toward imaginative freedom this festival celebrates. There are, of course, many to thank in the making of a successful festival. In this instance, most who we must thank are represented, in one version or another, by what is to follow; but some essentials have not been mentioned and ought to be cited here. Thanks are due to Brother Ah, for his short flute selection at the unveiling of the Inman Page portrait; to Ed Wilson, for his slide presentation of work conceived and articulated while making a bust of Mr. Ellison for the Ralph Waldo Ellison Library in Oklahoma City; to Julius Hemphill, for his reed concert with selections from "Ralph Ellison's Long Tongue," a composition inspired by Inx>isible Man; to George Garrett, for his remarks at the session on "The Writer's Tradition: Notes on the Vernacular"; to Marvin Campbell and Walter Stone for their dramatic reading from Ellison's "Juneteenth," two sermons on the transition from slavery to freedom; and, finally, to Fanny Ellison, whose steadying presence and special ways of bearing witness made it clear that no china doll is she.
DEDICATION
RALPH WALDO ELLISON: frontiersman, folklorist, comic story teller, musicologist, photographer, sculptor, novelist, cultural essayist, and trustee of American constitutionalism, your long attention span in life, art, and public service revitalizes our national faith in personal moral responsibility and artistic discipline. Your stance in confronting our swiftly changing world is in the best tradition of the explorers, the thinker-tinkerers of geography and jazz. Your narrative techniques meld vernacular and classical modes with elegance, conscientiousness, and healing power. This page
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Barry Beckham
HOW WE DECIDED, GO WITH RICHARD
It could only have been Richard Yarde, for his was the participation in this dance that sealed the movement as a recurring testament to the primacy of composition. We had at the time the example of personal composition, the example of Inman Page's 19th century testing at an Ivy League school in Providence, Rhode Island. He was son to a slave. He journeyed to Howard, then transferred to Brown where his forte, like the invisible narrator's, was the verbal, the spoken (again, composi tion — a putting together in coherent fashion the wonder of different sounds). So it was Page wearing the 1877 class orator's robe that June. Then, graduating, he composed a life of benefaction, of touching those who had not yet learned to know. And suddenly there was that strange moment when his spirit was entwined physically and metaphysically with the artist who was to chronicle the avenues of cultural composition: when Inman Edward Page as principal of a grade school in Oklahoma City grabbed an overly energetic student named Ralph Ellison in the hallway, by the arm. "Young man ..."
26 So it was Page's personal journey as composition, as putting together the features of his face, of composing a life that bled so for his people, which led us at Brown in the first place to go looking for an artist to paint a portrait in oils of the first black to have graduated from the college. His name had come up the way names float through and around an indeterminate haze and a thousand conversations without ever settling in anyone's consciousness. And then suddenly our committee was looking at his work. And we saw the attraction, the stated and overt proof, the screaming admittance of a love for composition. Now there was in the larger composition of our search for an artist the specific example of an artist revering composition — the putting together, the arranging of experience. And it was more than physical, more than a mere preoccupation with and idiosyncratic attraction for shapes and degrees and balance. No, it was a noticing, an implicit understanding that the nature of composition is the composition of nature. The artist composes to explain nature, which is saying that the artist composes to explain composition. Yarde's artistic statements rearranged or broke up the composition of the true bloods in our Afro-American history like Jack Johnson, powerfully bashful; and those kids on the brownstone steps, plain tively happy, and Daddy Grace, outrageously resplendent. Yarde is giving us reflections of cultural patterns, images of kin, snapshots of the soul. He, like Page and Ellison, is interested in composition, which can be the journey each of us is responsible for; and it is also the manner in which the artist composes the journey. Therefore, the curious affinity to Ellison's work: Yarde's sings of the same compositional patterns. He highlights recurring themes and moods which are anguished, ludicrous, comic stances like the composition of Page's history and the composition of the individual narrator's journey. The tones are earthy, worldly. The vision is sacred, prophetic.
Yarde, Page, Ellison: the three were contemporaneous in the playing out of their histories, their compositions of personal choice. The composition of nature demanded therefore that the three be linked, so Yarde was commissioned to paint the portrait of Page and then Ellison was presented with the watercolor study and at one point a photographer looked through his viewfinder in the lobby of the John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Library and composed a scene of Page, Ellison and Yarde — composers.
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Terri Barnes
MELTING THE WAX FROM THE HONEY
When February icicles dripped from clotheslines and tree limbs snow and ice crackled underfoot I remembered the back yard in July bees cruising through deep shadow turn-off into sudden sunlight over Mother's strawberries cloverleaf over the collards and my father bent over a meandering row.
The hazy air, the talk the last blossoms of the wild tree by the door the colander Mother piled high and red with berries have all turned to gold in my iron pot. The warm honey tasted of summer, of thick weed and seedling under my father's hands, of every month and mile.
32 CROSSROADS Africa. Africa: a fragile desert grows in the footprints of water; assistant district commissioner's flower in hot stucco rooms, saying how backward they, how civilized we, the tales of european flora memorized from grade-school. they took us to the camps of nomads, close to the road, silent women poured leather-soured milk. going South, darker eyes and hands fill with stalks of a bitter grain harvested in the war. the sun sets purple in Juba-town, lingering over the dancing plain of the Dinka.
TO EMILY DICKINSON
I, too, call you, Emily now that I know of you. I call to whatever poet's shards of you still rest on some New England hillside. did you sense at the horizon of your room the wave of an age which would fashion such a wonder as I, leaping through the colored sky to places as far as the far moon would return to furnish this anonymous room with weave of a dead spinster? your sturdy curtains flutter in the window distilling sifting of light into sweet power wine of Mind. Emily, from each day of any stray mote of sunlight will trigger the end of all this green and bitter world. I shall name my Mind's first child Emily and from the window of my life watch and record her singing passing. R. W. B. Lewis
THE CEREMONIAL IMAGINATION OF RALPH ELLISON
This is a ceremonial occasion, and I would like to say a word to begin with about Ralph Ellison's ceremonial imagination. He remarked once in the essay, "The World and the Jug," a now famous exchange with Irving Howe: "I believe that 'true novels', even when most pessimistic and bitter, arise out of an impulse to celebrate human life and therefore are ritualistic and ceremonial at their core." I'd like to get at that quality in Invisible Man and other writings rather obliquely and by going to a territory which I don't think Michael Harper or Ralph Ellison had in mind. I mean Bennington, Vermont. And, to begin with an autobiographical moment, I first met Ralph Ellison in Bennington, Vermont in 1948, which is 31 years ago, can you believe it? Ralph was slowly bringing Invisible Man to its conclusion; it was published just a few years later, and I was beginning to teach literature on the Bennington College faculty. The college and the community were pretty thick with literary talent at this time and since it was a very talkative and convivial community, large and laudable amounts of bourbon were consumed over long discussions on literary and critical matters. Stanley Edgar Hyman and his wife, Shirley Jackson, had a house in town. Shirley Jackson had just published "The Lottery," one of the most famous stories of our time. Stanley Hyman, a personality and a critic not to be forgotten, ever, had just published his landmark study of the then new American literary criticism, The Armed Vision. In fact, I think Ralph was on the scene, in part, during visits with the Hymans. On the faculty were the likes of Howard Nemerov, just beginning a distinguished career; he was at that time into a novel as I remember, The Melodramatist, and a book of poems. Stanley Kunitz was moving towards his second volume of poems called Intellectual Things: the influence of Blake was pretty heavy at this time in Bennington — that title, of course, comes from Blake, "A tear is an intellectual thing." Ben Belitt, graceful, intellectual poet, cultural critic, was on the faculty and there were the shadows of those who had taught until just recently, and had moved elsewhere; Theodore Roethke, whose major poem, "The Lost Son," was published with other poems that year, and Francis Ferguson during that year brought out his extraordinarily distinguished study, The Idea of the Theatre.
34 Now, I think the common link among us all, in addition to bourbon, writers and critics alike, was a deep concern with myth and ritual, with the mythic and the ritualistic elements in literature from the ancients. One of our Bibles was Lord Raglan's The Hero, with its spelling o^ut of the archetypal heroic pattern from the ancients onward. Later, Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces; and we were into, as we say now, the 'Cambridge School,' headed by Gilbert Murray and Jane Harrison who were writing about the ritual origins of ancient tragedy.
So, for example, we recognized at once, The Lottery for what it was: a tribal, scapegoat ritual set in contemporary New England. We applauded the ritual element in Roethke's poetry. Howard Nemerov offered a course called "The Myth of the Quest," Stanley Hyman gave lectures elaborating on the premises that myth is nothing other than the narrative working out of a rite. Ferguson's book explored myth and ritual in classic, Shakespearean, and modern drama. I think, Mr. Forrest, to be pedantic, that it was Ferguson who coined the formula: purpose, passion and perception — but drawing on Kenneth Burke, who in turn picked it up. Their minds moved together. And, indeed, our local hero was another member of the faculty, that is to say, Kenneth Burke. I suppose our Bible of Bibles was Burke's Philosophy of Literary Form, and his other books like Attitudes to History and not long after that, A Grammar of Motives with its dramatistic and ritualistic analysis of various literary genres. Well, I say all this, as I implied in the beginning, to make a point about the ritualistic quoting of Invisible Man and some of Ralph Ellison's other writings; not anything new, in fact I think nothing that Ralph himself has not mentioned.
There's no need for me to add to the volume of praise, honor and admiration that this extraordinary novel has received. I am glad, personally, to remember that when I reviewed it in 1952, I think I ended by saying: "No novel since Light in August has given so much, or holds itself so well." I think, today, if anything, I would make that statement stronger, yet. The novel continues to grow and to swell in my mind. My immediate point is that apart from many other aspects of Invisible Man, apart from Ralph's own experiences in Oklahoma and New York City and elsewhere, apart from the sheer power and drive, turbulence, comedy of the novel, that is structured by mythic and ritualistic patterns — the patterns we were all so obsessed with in the Bennington days. I think that in some indefinable way, the novel is happily infected by the intellectual atmosphere of those days,
35 especially perhaps, Kenneth Burke. Every once in a while, Ralph and I agree with each other that Kenneth Burke is the most powerful speculative mind of his time in America. I repeat, Ralph Ellison's imagination is by nature, ritualistic, ceremonial, but I also think it absorbed some of those things on the Vermont scene. A couple of quick examples, nothing that will startle you. The opening scene is what Kenneth Burke taught us to call a "representa tive anecdote," that is an episode in which the entire novel is implicit. You all, of course, remember it very well: a group of Black boys who are manipulated for the entertainment of white folks to watch the antics, to them terrifying, of a naked white woman, forced to dive competitively for coins on an electrified carpet, to fight one another blindfolded. This, I would say, is the basic ritual of the novel and the novel is a mythic working out of it. Ralph Ellison has pretty much said this, where he said, talking about that scene in an interview in "The Art of Fiction": "It is a ritual in preservation of caste lines, the keeping of taboos to appease the gods and ward off bad luck, an initiation ritual to which all greenhorns are subjected." A ritual of relationships, of power, sex, money, of blindfold warfare: it seems to me that the novel thereafter is a fleshing-out in narrative terms of everything implicit in that original rite. This is one of the ways through the mythicizing, ritualizing of experience Ralph Ellison 'dominates reality,' in a phrase that Mr. Nichols used. Second example: Obviously Invisible Man is a great instance in the great tradition of the myth of initiation. And a major component in that tradition is the matter of naming. The hero enters a new situation, he receives a new identity and is given a new name. Cooper's Natty Bumpo, after his first ritualistic combat with an Indian, receives the new name of Hawkeye; and similarly again in Invisible Man, you recall that the nameless narrator first forgets his name, forgets his mother's name, forgets everything after the savage and violent fracas and then, of course, when he's received into the Brotherhood, he is given a new name, written on a slip of paper. "This is your name," Brother Jack tells him. "Get used to it, memorize it," etc. Ralph Ellison has always been alert to the ritual significance of names. Shakespeare exploited this: you remember a climactic monent in Hamlet when he stands up and says: "It is I, Hamlet the Dane." That's a moment of resonant, ritual power. In his major autobio graphical essay, "Hidden Name and Complex Fate," Ralph ponders the significance of his hidden name, which of course, is Waldo. His father named him Ralph Waldo Ellison to associate him with one of
36 the Americans, I gather, he most honored. In this essay, Ralph tells us that the name puzzled him, troubled him in his younger years, he was teased about it, didn't understand it, he tried to suppress it by reducing it to a letter, W, and then finally by dropping it all together. But it obviously haunted him and at the end of that autobiographical essay, "Hidden Name and Complex Fate," he says this: "I could suppress the name of my namesake (Ralph Waldo Emerson) out of respect for the achievements of its original bearer, but I cannot escape the obligation of attempting to achieve some of the things which he asked of the American writer. As Henry James suggested, being an American is an arduous task, a complex fate, and for most of us, I suspect, the difficulty begins with the name." This leads me into the second and final dimension of his work. When I was just coming to know Ralph Ellison in Bennington, as it happened, I was beginning to study 19th century American cultural history and perhaps this helped to prepare me to recognize the very powerful, the very strong American strain in Ralph's writings. Mr. Forrest has pointed to both the extraordinary complexity and mythology in the work as well as the cultural sources, but I wanted to say a word about the particular American literary dimension in the writing. Most obviously, I suppose, is the presence of Herman Melville. One of the epigraphs from Invisible Man comes from Melville's Benito Cereno and characteristically, the other is from T.S. Eliot. I realized belatedly, that the marvelous figure of Rinehart in the latter portions, of the protean and metamorphic prince of chaos, has affinities, as Ralph Ellison has pointed out, with Melville's Confidence Man. There is also Hemingway, whom Ralph has written about, and has felt close to in many ways; Henry James, the supreme craftsman; T.S. Eliot; Stephen Crane, about whom Ralph Ellison has written very eloquently, and whose war-haunted imagin ation he partly shares. But behind all that, and this is what I want to point to, is the whole tradition of American humorist writing of the kind that's first and best been explored by Constance Rourke in her book, American Humor, which I know Ralph has found nourishment from. Now this tradition, or the part of it that intrests me, has its origins in the pre-Civil War Southwestern humor writing, especially Thomas Thorpe's story, "The Big Bear of Arkansas," and the fine "Luvingood" stories by George Washington Harris.
For me, the single clearest line of development in American literary history runs from Southwestern humor to Mark Twain and to William Faulkner and to Ralph Ellison. From Southwestern humor to Mark Twain, who grew up on it, to Faulkner who grew up on
37 Mark Twain and Southwestern humor; and I mean the implication of concluding a series of names, Mark Twain, Faulkner with Ralph Ellison. If I had to pick one element which characterizes that old Southwestern hrjmor and its tradition, it would be the explosive element, the all-hell-breaks-loose element as in the clothing party in the "Luvingood" story of Harris or that enormously comic tale by Faulkner called "Was", in which everybody is chasing everybody else and chasing foxes and slaves and women, husbands, dogs. Well, all-hell-breaks-loose with a sort of ritual periodicity, in Invisible Man. In that opening episode, the scene at the Golden Day, a wonderful name, a wonderful scene; in the paint factory; during the uproar about evicting the poor people from their Harlem homes, which our hero sets off in the course of trying to pacify everybody; and climactically, needless to say, in the race riot in the last part of the novel. Well, why this uproar? It's an essential part, it seems to me, of Ralph Ellison's vision, along with the sense that 'uproar' can be at once terrible and in the usual meaning of the word, uproarious, that it can be apocalyptic and that it can be enlivening. And here you find, it seems to me, one mode of that passion, that drive, that vitality that Mr. Ellison has felt has somewhat gone out of the twentieth century American fiction. It's an extraordinary American theme and exploited in Ralph Ellison's case by an extraordinary intimacy with the tradition that it draws on.
Curtis Harnack
OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF LANDLADIES
I wondered what would be left to say, this being the last session, so much wonderful talk already having happened in this room. But I thought, since I am not a literary critic, I really would not approach the subject this afternoon in that fashion. I might start by reminding us of something we all know, that a writer doesn't start out to write a book with all that critical apparatus in his head and then sort of put it down, with footnotes at the bottom — unless he's T.S. Eliot with The Waste Land." I suspect that for most writers (I believe this to be true of Ralph Ellison), the art is to do it all almost unconsciously, and then later you look at it and see how everything got into it without your really knowing it. The whole thing is done intuitively, with the separation coming later. Now unfortunately in order to talk about a book you do have to separate. You start by taking this aspect and that aspect and going at it.
38 So, after two days, some of you might feel that all this taking-apart is what the novel is, when in (act Invisible Man is all-of-a-piece. It's the whole thing that is the work of art. Invisible Man* with all its richness possesses that wholeness. The novel flows together, a single entity. I think Mr. Stepto this morning was starting to talk of Invisible Man this way, when he made an aside about the DuBois reference, saying he didn't mean Mr. Ellison was deliberately including DuBois's reference but that he was working in a con tinuum. I think that's exactly right. A novelist works within a large area of many sources, and a work of art presents many, many sides that can be talked about. But the essential wholeness must never be forgotten. I am here partly because I've been such a long admirer of Mr. Ellison's work and partly because twenty some years ago we met in Iowa City at a conference discussing — I don't know what. But I do remember that when my landlady asked where I was going, I said "to a symposium." She mis-heard this and replied: "Oh, a supposium!" And I thought, well, that really is what a symposium is. Which brings me to my subject this afternoon. I think we're always interested in words that arise unconsciously out of the mouths of landladies — anybody — for they often carry a tremendous weight or truth that the conscious world, especially the person speaking, may not be aware of. For me language is alive in two ways. There is a matter of the "blood of words," words that come directly from life in that way; and then there are those writers whose language feeds upon itself, a kind of energy of language out of language itself. Writers like James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov,, for instance; I think that's a real, rich, and interesting tradition. Vernacular language, which we're talking about today, is usually associated with another kind of literature, however. One of the tenets of the romantic tradition is that the source of poetry, the source of good language is word-creation and that it is accomplished unself consciously: ordinary people speaking, but acutely attuned to a rich speech original with them, not coming from the media or public communication of that sort. You've all heard of the mortals who speak poetry without even knowing it. It's that I am speaking of, because I think such language continues to revitalize itself, getting rid of awful phrases like "at this point in time." Unselfconscious people create in their language metaphorical images that have not happened before. Vernacular speech usually lies outside the literary world and beyond educated awareness. These days we live in a terrible time of word-beating, of words being done-to-death.
39 Vernacular language always involves the oral tradition, the speaking voice and the listening to tales. Now, Ralph Ellison has the ear and a great capacity to render human speech and give us wonderful comic flights, marvelous arrangements. The tale-telling, the story swapping, all of that in Invisible Man does help the reader share the experience of the narrator-hero. Mr. Callahan mentioned this morning that there is a sharing of experience when you hear a story. Not only are you sharing it, perhaps you can match it, top it; perhaps you are thinking of another story. Use of the vernacular draws one into the tale, makes it alive and intimate, makes any world no matter how unfamiliar, real. When I first read Invisible Man that world was somewhat foreign, since I came from quite a different background. And yet it was accessible; I could relate to everybody in the book. In the oral tradition people speak out of their own experience, in their own ways, without an awareness that what they're saying might have literary merit. The vernacular at its worst can become folksy or cute, which destroys the very thing I'm talking about. The vernacular is not dialect or language that is fashionable for a time but rather like the talk in Huckleberry Finn, in which current slang expressions and local idioms continue to have life. One of the amazing things about Huckleberry Finn is that its vernacular language is not dated. I don't know exactly how this comes about, except to say that a good writer knows the difference between what is contemporary slang, which will have its day and then be gone, and what is language that will continue to be alive and work. RereadingInvisible Man for this conference, I was again struck by how much it reminds me of Huckleberry Finn. It remains in its prose as alive, as juicy, as full of blood. I keep using those words because I think that's what good literature in the vernacular tradition is. Pick up a page and you know whether or not it's alive. The other thing about Invisible Man is that you hear Ralph's own particular voice, which even if you didn't know him in person is distinct, recognizable. You hear a certain style and cadence in the prose. This "voice" is something every good writer has, whether cultivated consciously or whether it arises full blown. Not too long ago I picked up an early copy of The New Republic, 1931 or 1932, which published John Cheever's first story called "Expelled." He wrote this at the age of seventeen. What amazed me in reading it was that one recognized it as a John Cheever story. Even at that age he already had the capacity to be himself in language. Now, I think Ralph Ellison has that too, and it's why I am happy to be here today to sing praises of that book and of his work.
40 Nathan A. Scott, Jr.
ELLISON'S VISION OF COMMUNITAS*
From the time of its first appearance in the spring of 1952 Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man has been thrusting itself forward, ever more insistently with the passage of each year, as the commanding masterpiece in the literature of contemporary American fiction — and, now that it has had a career of more than a quarter-century, its priority of place appears indeed to have been solidly consolidated. For no other text of these past years has so lodged itself in the national imagination as has Mr. Ellison's great book: it stands today as the preeminent American novel of our period, and all that I want here to try to do is to suggest something of what it is that accounts for the kind of powerful claim it continues to exert upon us. Ours is, of course, a period marked by an efflorescence of fictional talent on the American scene more notable surely than any compar able British or European insurgency. Yet, in its representative expressions, it is a talent, for all its variety and richness, that — in such writers as William Gass and John Barth and Donald Barthelme and Ronald Sukenick — often chooses to dwell (as the title of a book on recent American fiction by the English critic Tony Tanner says) in a City of Words. Bellow and Styron and Malamud and a few others, in their commitment to the traditional arts of narrative, remain sufficiently unreconstructed as to conceive the novel to be a mode of feigned history, but they, though retaining a large and devoted readership, do not carry the day and do not embody what Matthew Arnold called "the tone of the centre." For those who are advancing the new poetics of fiction take it for granted (as William Gass says) "that literature is language, that stories and the places and the people in them are merely made of words as chairs are made of smoothed sticks and sometimes of cloth or metal tubes," and thus, since "there are no events but words in fiction,"1 they think of the novelistic craft as simply an affair of putting words together in new and surprising combinations — which record nothing other than the event of the writer's having done certain interesting things with language itself. So charmed is the new literature with its own verbal universe of
*Four paragraphs of this essay have been drawn from an essay ("Black Literature") prepared for The Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing, ed. By Daniel Hoffman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979). This material is used with the permission of the Harvard University Press.
41 metaphor and metonymy that it refuses any deep involvements with the empirical, verifiable world of actual fact, preferring instead what Conrad long ago called the "prolonged hovering flight of the subjective over the outstretched ground of the case exposed." And though the analogical surprises of a John Barth, the shaped rhythms of a William Gass, the oneiric tabulations of a Rudloph Wurlitzer, the "Hoo-Doo" bizarreries of an Ishmael Reed, the "pricksongs and descants" of a Robert Coover, the jocular skiagraphs of a Thomas Berger, and the entropic auguries of a Thomas Pynchon may all present one or another kind of piquant divertissement, they are very clearly not informed by the kind of intentionality that looks toward finding new stratagems wherewith to give a liberating "shape and . . . significance to the immense panorama of. . . anarchy which is contemporary history": which is perhaps to say that they do not seek (in Yeats's great phrase) to hold "reality and justice in a single thought." The kind of dandysme which reigns now has in recent years been denominated by literary academicians specializing in Tendenz as "post-modernism," but a part of the immense appeal that belongs to a figure like Ralph Ellison is surely an affair of his fidelity to the ethic of classic modernism. For the great masters of this century — Joyce and Lawrence and Mann and Faulkner — were indeed proposing to do what T. S. Eliot in his famous review of Ulysses (in the issue of The Dial for November 1923) descried as Joyce's intention: namely, to give a "shape and . . . significance to the immense panorama of . . . anarchy which is contemporary history." The Magic Mountain and The Death of Virgil, Women in Love and The Sun Also Rises, The Sound and the Fury and Man's Fate are books that strike us today as having a remarkable kind of weight and contemporaneity, because they are, as it were, taking on the age: with a fierce kind of audacity, they seem to be intending to displace a daunting world, to clear a space for the human endeavor and thus to keep open the door of the future. Clearly, the novelists at work in these texts are fascinated with the gesticulatory possibilities inherent in the word, but they are writers who conceive the words they deploy to be ultimately something more than signs merely of grammatical connection. And thus they are not content with the kind of mverisimilitude by which the new avant-garde is so greatly bewitched, for they intend to show the very age and body of the time its form and pressure: in short, the rites and ceremonies and plots and arguments of their fictions are organized toward the end of envisaging new forms of life for the soul, and it is just in this that one element of the genius of twentieth- century modernism lies.
42 Now it is in this line that Ralph Ellison stands. Immediately after Invisible Man first appeared in 1952, the astonishing authority of its art quickly brought it to the forefront of the literary scene, and this at a time when, under the new influence of Henry James, so many representative American writers of the moment — such as Jean Stafford and Frederick Buechner and Isabel Bolton and Monroe Engel arid Mary McCarthy — were choosing to seek their effects by the unsaid and the withheld, by the dryly ironic analogy and the muted voice. In the early 'fifties, Mr. Ellison, like Faulkner and Penn Warren, was particularly notable for being unafraid to make his fiction howl and rage and hoot with laughter over "the complex fate" of the homo Americanus: indeed, the uninhibited exhilaration and suppleness of his rhetoric were at once felt to be a main source of the richness of texture distinguishing his extraordinary book. Yet the kind of continuing life that his novel has had is surely to be accounted for in terms not of sheer verbal energy alone but, more principally, in terms of the cogency of systematic vision that it enunciates. And though something like this has frequently been remarked, what is not essential in the basic stress and emphasis of the novel has just as frequently been misreckoned, no doubt largely because the book has so consistently been construed as having an import related exclusively to the experience of black Americans.
The protagonist of Invisible Man is, of course, a young black man (unnamed) who must pick his perilous way through the lunatic world that America has arranged for its Negro minority. In the beginning, he is what the white masters of the Southern world in which he grows up were once in the habit of calling "a good Negro": he has cheerfully accepted all the promises of that Establishment, so much so "that the oily-tongued and cynical president of his college, Dr. Bledsoe, has singled him out as his special ward. But, unhappily, on a certain day he unintentionally exposes a visiting white trustee from the North to the local Negro gin-mill and to the incestuous entanglements of a Negro farmer's family in the neighborhood — and, as a result, is ousted from the college, as a punishment for his having allowed a donor of the institution to see what visiting white patrons are not supposed to see. He then moves on to New York, there to journey through the treacherous byways of an infernally labyrinthine world, as he seeks to make contact with whatever it is that may authenticate his existence. The executive powers ordain that, being black, he shall be "invisible," and thus his great central effort becomes that of wresting an acknowledgment, of achieving visibility. He gets a job in a Long
43 Island paint factory, and there he becomes involved — again, inadvertently — as a scab in labor-violence. Soon afterward, however, he is taken up by "the Brotherhood" (i.e., the Communist Party), after he is heard to deliver an impassioned and a quite spontaneous speech one winter afternoon, as he finds himself part of a crowd watching the eviction of an elderly Negro couple from their Harlem tenement flat. The assignment he is given by his new confreres is that of organizing the sullenness of Harlem. But he soon discovers that the Negro's cause is but a pawn being used by "the Brotherhood" to promote its "line." So, after a furious race riot in the Harlem streets, he in utter disillusionment dives through a manhole, down into a cellar, for a period of "hibernation." He has tried the way of "humility," of being a "good Negro"; he has tried to find room for himself in American industry, to become a good cog in the technological machine; he has attempted to attach himself to leftist politics — he has tried all those things by means of which it would seem that a Negro might achieve visibility in American life. But, since none has offered a way into the culture, he has now chosen to become an underground man. All his reversals have been due to the blackness of his skin: so now, at last, he decides to stay in his cellar where, by way of a tapped line, he will steal the electricity for his 1,369 bulbs from Monopolated Light and Power and dine on sloe gin and vanilla ice cream and embrace "The Blackness of Blackness." Yet Mr. Ellison's protagonist, unlike so many of his counterparts in Negro fiction, is in the end by no means one merely wounded. True, he twice tells us, in the accent of Eliot's East Coker — first in the Prologue, and again at the end of his narrative — that his "end is in . . . [his] beginning." And so it is, for his last state — since it is an underworld, a place of exile, of dislodgment and expatriation — is in a way his first. But it is an underworld that he has illuminated. "Step outside the narrow borders of what men call reality and you step into chaos ... or imagination," he says. When, that is, you step outside the domesticated and the routinized, you may step into chaos, since the definition of the world, as he has discovered, is possibility — the very infiniteness of which may be defeating, unless by dint of a feat of imagination some transcendence can be realized. And since, as it would seem, the protagonist-narrator conceives art itself to be the definition of such a transcendence, he — midst the misrule and confusion of a demented world — has undertaken to form the lessons he has learned into a story, to "put it [all] down," and thereby (like another young man who became an artist) to forge in the smithy of his own soul the uncreated conscience of his native land. His story ends in a cellar, because, having constantly been told that it is in some
44 such hovel that he belongs, this eiron has chosen mockingly to descend, then, into a Harlem basement where, if he cannot have visibility, he can at least have vision — and where he can produce out of his abysmal pain a poetry that, as he says, "on the lower frequencies . . . [may] speak for you" — le lecteur. The book presents, as Alfred Kazin has suggested, one of the most engaging studies in recent literature in "the art of survival."2 And in relation to everything with which its young anti-hero must reckon Mr. Ellison displays a notable mastery. His reader finds himself, indeed, utterly immersed in all the concrete materialities of Black experience: one hears the very buzz and hum of Harlem in the racy, pungent speech of his West Indians and native hipsters; one sees the fearful nonchalance of the zootsuiter and hears the terrible anger of the Black nationalist on his streetcorner platform; and all the grotesquerie in the novel's account of a dreary little backwater of a remote Southern Negro college has in it a certain kind of empirically absolute rightness. The book is packed full of the acutest observations of the manners and idioms and human styles that comprise the ethos of Black life in America, and it gives us such a sense of social fact as can be come by nowhere in the manuals of academic sociology — all this being done with the ease that comes from enormous expertness of craft, from deep intimacy of knowledge, and love. Yet, deeply rooted as the novel is in the circumstances of Negro life and experience, it wants on its "lower frequencies" to speak about a larger condition, and, indeed, when Mr. Ellison is taken (as he customarily is) to be a barrister seeking on behalf of the black multitudes to impose a certain racial affidavit on the American conscience, what is most deeply prophetic in the testimony brought forward by his book is by way of being obscured. Nor is it at all inapposite to consider the authorial performance conveyed by Invisible Man as reflecting a prophetic intention, at least not if one thinks of prophetism in something like the terms proposed by the anthropologist Victor Turner. Professor Turner's theory of culture, based in large part on his extensive field-researches amongst the Ndembu people of northwest Zambia, entails an elaborate scheme which he has developed in numerous writings but most fully in three notable books, The Forest of Symbols (1967), The Ritual Process (1969), and Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors (1974). His starting-point is the concept of the "liminal phase" advanced by the Belgian ethnographer Arnold van Gennep in his classic work of 1909, Les Rites de passage. Van Gennep, in working out the logic of "transition" rites, remarked three phases into which they invariably fall and which he identified
45 as, first, separation, then margin (or limen, the Latin signifying "threshold"), and then reaggregation. That is to say, the neophyte first undergoes some detachment or dislocation from his established role in a social structure or cultural polity — whereupon he finds himself as novice in a "liminal" situation in which he is neither one thing nor another, neither here nor there, neither what he was nor yet what he will become. Then, in the third phase, the passage is completed by his reincorporation into a social or religious structure: no longer is he invisible by reason of his divestment of status and role, for, once again, he finds himself with acknowledged rights and obligations vis-a-vis those others who with him are members one of another in whatever body it is to which they jointly belong. Now Professor Turner is careful to remark that "liminars" are, in most human communities, by no means the only dSclassSs, for always there are various "outsiders" (shamans, monks, priests, hippies, hoboes, gypsies) who either by ascription or choice stand outside the established order, just as there are also various kinds of "marginals" (migrant foreigners, persons of mixed ethnic origin, the upwardly and downwardly mobile) who may be "simultaneously members ... of two or more groups whose social definitions and cultural norms are distinct from, and often even opposed to, one another."3 But, though at many points he is strongly insistent on these distinctions, at many others he seems to be treating "outsider- hood" and "marginality" as merely special modes of "liminality," and it appears for him to be the decisive antipode to "aggregation." What Professor Turner is most eager to remark, however, is the wrongheadness of regarding liminality as a merely negative state of privation: on the contrary, as he argues, it can be and often is an enormously fruitful seedbed of spiritual creativity, for it is precisely amidst the troubling ambiguities of the liminar's dSclassement that there is born in him a profound hunger for communitas. And Professor Turner prefers the Latin term, since he feels "community" connotes an ordered, systemized society — whereas the liminar's yearning is not for any simple kind of social structure but rather, as he says, for that spontaneous, immediate flowing from / to Thou of which Martin Buber is our great modern rhapsode.4 Which is to say that the liminar thirsts for communitas: this is what the naked neophyte in a seclusion lodge yearns for: this is what the dispossessed and the exiled dream of: this is what "dharma bums" and millenar- ians and holy mendicants and "rock" people are moved by — namely, the vision of an open society in which all the impulses and affections that are normally bound by social structure are liberated,
46 so that every barrier between / and Thou is broken down and the wind of communitas may blow where it listeth. Moreover, Victor Turner conceives it to be the distinctive mission of the prophet to lift communitas into the subjunctive mood: he is the liminal man par excellence whose special vocation, as a frontiersman dwelling on the edges of the established order, is to puncture "the cliches associated with status incumbency and role-playing"5 and to fill for his contemporaries the open space of absolute futurity with a vision of what the theologians of Russian Orthodoxy call sobornost — which is nothing other than that "catholicity," that "harmony," that "unanimity," that free "unity-in-diversity," which graces the human order when men give their suffrage to the "open morality" (as Bergson would have called it) of agape. Now it is when Invisible Man is regarded in its relation to the experiential realities addressed by Victor Turner that its special kind of prophetic discernment may perhaps be most clearly identified. True, its narrator is a young black man encumbered with all the disadvantage that American society has imposed on his kind. But his very last word to the reader — mon semblable, mon frere! — records his conviction that, " on the lower frequencies," he, in the story he tells about himself, is speaking about a condition that embraces not just his ancestral kinsmen but the human generality of his age. Which suggests that what is most essentially problematic in his situation is not merely his blackness but, rather, something else, and it is this which needs now to be defined. One of Mr. Ellison's critics speaks of how frequently his novel is by way of coming to an end and then having one more to start itself up again,6 and something like this is surely the case: at least, it may be said that the persistent rhythm of the novel is an affair of the protagonist's drifting into a relation with one or another of the various trustees of social power and then either digging in his heels or taking flight, when the connection threatens to abrogate his freedom. After he is expelled from his college, he takes to New York the various letters of introduction Dr. Bledsoe has provided, and it is his eventual discovery of the cruel dispraise that these sealed letters from the malignant old man have actually conveyed that leads him to think: "Everyone seemed to have some plan for me, and beneath that some more secret plan." And so indeed it is: wherever he turns, he finds himself dealing with those — whether it be Bledsoe or Mr. Norton or the Reverend Homer A. Barbee or the owner of the Long Island paint factory or Brother Jack — who are eager to map out a design for his life and to convert him into a kind of automaton of their own schemes: they may be agents of religion or education or industry or
47 radical politics, but, at bottom, they are (as Tony Tanner says) "mechanizers of consciousness"7 — and each is prepared to say something like what Bledsoe says in reference to his college: "This is a power set-up, son, and I'm at the controls." In fact, this young picaro does at last himself realize that all his various proctors and patrons have been "very much the same, each attempting to force his picture of reality upon me and neither giving a hoot in hell for how things looked to me." But he is unflagging in his refusal of obedient service to the organizers and manipulators: he wants to be free of that great alien force that we call Society. So, in the logic of the novel, his exemplary role is related not merely to the disinherited American Negro but, far more basically, to that "disintegrated" or "alienated" consciousness which, as Hegel reminds us in the Phenomenology of Mind, is distinguished by its antagonism to "the external power of society" and which, in the modern period, is not simply here or there — but everywhere. But, in his liminality, Mr. Ellison's young knight does not choose merely to pour scornful laughter on the social establishment, in the manner of Rinehart, for, isole though he is, he remains totally in earnest. There comes a moment when, though having separated himself from the Brotherhood, he is nevertheless one hunted by the partisans of the West Indian black nationalist, Ras the Exhorter, who conceives the interracialism of the Brotherhood to be a fearfully mischievous confusion of "the blahk man" and who is unrelenting in his pursuit of him who has been its chief spokesman in Harlem. So, by way of hurriedly arranging a scanty disguise, our principal purchases some darkly tinted spectacles and a flamboyant hat, and immediately he is mistaken on the streets for a man named Rinehart of whom he has never heard — and whom he never sees. One evening there suddenly emerges from a Lenox Avenue subway exit a large, blowsy prostitute reeking with "Christmas Night perfume" who for a moment takes him to be her Man: "Rinehart, baby, is that you? . . . Say, you ain't Rinehart, man ... git away from here before you get me in trouble." And, as he swings on, a few moments later he is hailed by a couple of hipsters who take him to be Rinehart the numbers man: "Rinehart, poppa, tell us what you putting down." Then a group of zoot-suiters greet him: "Hey now, daddy-o." And, again, in an Eighth Avenue tavern he is taken to be Rinehart by the barkeeper: "What brand you drinking tonight, Poppa-stopper?" Some larcenous policemen expecting a pay-off summon him from their patrol car to a curb and, when he denies that he is Rinehart, the response flung back at him is — "Well, you better be by morning." Then, again, outside a storefront church he is greeted by two aging, pious drones as
48 "Rever'n Rinehart," and they offer him assurances about how zealously they are collecting money for his building fund. And, after many such encounters, he begins to marvel at this extraordinary personage — "Rine the runner and Rine the gambler and Rine the briber and Rine the lover and Rinehart the Reverend." Indeed, he is at once fascinated by the virtuosity of this remarkable changeling — and, in a way, unhinged by the abyss of infinite possibility opened up by his glimpse of the "multiple personalities" worn by this black Proteus. But, no, not for him the way of this wily rascal who deals with the intractabilities of social circumstance by simply mocking them in the cultivation of an extravagant histrionism. No, Mr. Ellison's protag onist is a liminar who, though separated from the established orders of the world, is yet not estranged from himself. And thus he yearns for an authentic existence, not for Rinehart's world of no boundaries at all but for something like a New Jerusalem, where no man is an island and where Love is the name behind the design of the human City. He is unable to descry at any point on the horizon the merest prospect, however, of this good Place. And so at last he descends into an underground world. He is floundering about one night through Harlem streets inflamed by a savage race riot (carefully orchestrated by the Brotherhood itself), and, in his abstracted anguish at the sheer futility of this lunatic paroxysm, he stumbles into some black enrages who, being suddenly angered by the sight of his brief case, are about to set upon him, when he lifts the cover of a manhole and plunges down into a coal cellar below. There he finds a narrow passage that leads into a "dimensionless room," and this he elects to occupy as the site of his "hibernation." This liminar in his cellar bears no resemblance, however, to that bilious and exacerbated little cypher whose portrayal in Dostoievski's Letters from the Underworld has made him one of the great modern archetypes of the Underground Man. Mr. Ellison's hero has been "hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility," not only by American racism but by all those "mechanizers of consciousness" — by Bledsoe as well as by Mr. Norton, by Brother Jack as well as by Ras the Exhorter — whose great "passion [is] to make men conform to a pattern." Yet, in his hibernation, he realizes that, for all the vehemence with which hehas taken a stand " 'against' society," he still wants to defend "the principle on which the country was built." As he says, "I defend because in spite of all" — though "I sell you no phony forgiveness" — "I find that I love." He harbors no love for those who are moved by a "passion toward conformity," for,
49 as he insists, "diversity is the word." Life is to be lived, not controlled. . . ." So the dream that we shall "become one, and yet many": it is the dream of communitas. And it is in the eloquence with which the novel projects this vision for the human future that it proves (in the terms I have taken over from Victor Turner) its prophetic genius — and its special relevance to the American situation of our own immediate present. For, given the furious assertiveness that distinguishes the various racial and ethnic particu larisms making up our national society today, ours (as one thoughtful observer has recently remarked) is a country representing something like "pluralism gone mad." One of our great needs as a people is to recover a sense of common purposes and of a common destiny that overrides our "atomized world of a thousand me-first. . .groupings" of one kind or another.8 And it is the reminder in this connection that Mr. Ellison's novel brings that gives its testimony just now a special poignance. "Who knows," says the nameless protagonist — "Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?"
'William H. Gass, Fiction and the Figures of Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), pp. 27, 30. 2 Alfred Kazin, Bright Book of Life: American Novelists and Storytellers from Hemingway to Mailer (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1973), p. 246. ^Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), p. 233. 4Vide Victor Turner, The Ritual Process (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977 [paperback edition]), p. 127. Hbid., p. 128. Wide Marcus Klein, After Alienation: American Novels in Mid-Century (Cleveland-New York: World Publishing Co., 1964), pp. 107-109. 7Tony Tanner, City of Words: American Fiction, 1950-1970 (New York: Harper and Row, Inc., 1971), p. 53. 8Meg Greenfield, "Pluralism Gone Mad," in Newsweek Magazine, 27 August 1979, p. 76.
50 John F. Callahan
DEMOCRACY AND THE PURSUIT OF NARRATIVE The first narrative is the Declaration of Independence. Not only in its themes and principles and ideas but in its complex and open use of form the Declaration has set a tradition for American narrative. Its author, Jefferson, seems an early example of an American leader (and writer) yielding to an impulse of moral energy and enacting a form more open and improvisatory than what convention called for — in this case a simple, straightforward historical narrative of fact and argument. For he interrupts his sequence of logic and breaks into an eloquent assertion of those political and moral ideas and assump tions which inform the entire Declaration with a point of view and perhaps even a sense of narrative personality. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The sudden eloquent intrusion of these principles into a document ostensibly driven by fact and logic, argument and proof, opened up possibilities and responsibilities for American narrative form. For one thing, Jefferson and his colleagues on the drafting committee, chiefly Franklin and John Adams, were aware of history as a fluid reality unfolding and yet to unfold in the present and future. They were aware too of what Tocqueville would call " the continual movement that agitates a democratic community." In the second place, Jefferson knew that if the Revolution were won, the Declaration would be a shaping, enabling force for American democracy. To some extent, therefore, the Declaration of Independence is a document of state imbued with the improvising, imaginative power of fiction. And this is so not only because of the great affirming sentence by itself but also because in its closing lines the Declaration explicitly joins public and private destiny. There is little that is theoretical about saying, as Jefferson and the others did, that "for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor." Surely, this is the nation's first enactment of the union between private and public aspiration. Surely, the founders' pledge turns the narrative act into an expression of the pursuit of happiness. For, as articulate characters in their own narrative, the founders posed a question about personality and democracy which has intrigued and engaged succeeding generations of citizen writers. "And could politics ever be an expression of love?" Ellison's Invisible Man asked a hundred and seventy-five years later.
51 Certainly, we have in the Declaration, in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights of the 1780's, and later on in the state documents of the 1860's, what Ralph Ellison has called the essential American condition. "In the beginning," he wrote in "Society, Morality, and the Novel," "was not only the word but the contradiction of the word." This is so because the affirming open form of the word — what Ellison has called "our sacred commitments" — was contra dicted by the form of institutions — by slavery, for instance. In contradiction, however, lies a veiled world of possibility, and in its use of rhetorical form the Declaration mixes the perspective of fiction with that of history. It uses the historian's techniques of fact and argument authenticated by chronology to suggest a thesis about social rights and responsibilities. At the same time its words pose themes about reality, about the relationship between individuals and society — and in so doing the Declaration partakes of "that brooding questioning stance" Ralph Ellison believes "is necessary for fiction," a stance which leads the word into the complex ground of myth and archetype — usually the novelist's terrain. Of course, the Declaration of Independence is not fiction, but its mixing of forms sets a precedent and something of a standard for American state papers. Recall the 1860's and Abraham Lincoln's attempt for a while to keep personal principles apart from public responsibilities. Gradually Lincoln saw that stance as a contradiction he needed to resolve. He saw that private and public realities were linked not only in thought but in the very act of narrative. In the "Gettysburg Address," for instance, Lincoln's remarks comprise a narrative in the sense that they both recapitulate and project into the future the story of the experiment of the American nation. In this address Lincoln is conscious of the ways that the act of telling the American story adds to and complicates that story. One of the things Ralph Ellison had in mind when he wrote "that there was little about it that was simple" must have been Lincoln's effort to use form to shape the truth. Like the Declaration of Independence, the "Gettys burg Address" embeds fact and argument in a substratum of myth and archetype. The patterns of birth and death and rebirth are asserted in a way that gives public and national (and therefore more complete) meaning to the lives of thousands of individuals. The nation's life required that many die, and Lincoln does not leave this "nation" or "freedom" as abstractions. His phrases — "anew birth of freedom" and "government of the people, by the people, for the people" — echo and extend the Declaration's implied commitment to democratic equality not only as an idea but as the basis for the very form of American society.
52 From the beginning American novelists too have been intrigued by the improvisatory, experimental nature of American society. Speak ing explicitly of the "great documents of state," Ralph Ellison argues that "they inform our language and our conduct with public meaning, and they provide the broadest frame of reference for our most private dramas." What Ellison calls the "moral imperatives" of those documents have led.novelists and historians to cross forms — those narrative party lines which seem at times binding, at other times arbitrary — in their exploration of American society and personality. Because of the endless ways that personal and national experience are bound up with one another, it is no wonder narratives in American history and fiction partake of autobiographical tech niques. The stories told, the facts revealed, the arguments made, the themes explored belong to all of us in the sense that they turn up in the narrative of every American life. To an important extent, American novelists creating archetypal characters have had these characters tell their stories according to narrative forms and voices of their choosing. To compose a self requires that one be true to one's way of speaking and writing, in short, that one choose one's voice. In novels like Melville's Moby Dick, Twain's Huck Finn and Ellison's Invisible Man we confront the uses of narrative in relation to autobiography not in the sense that the autobiographical expression comes from the novelist's urge to merge his life with his character's. On the contrary, these novelists use autobiographical form and technique as a way of insisting that their characters take responsi bility for narrative. To writers like Melville, Twain, and Ellison the focus of consciousness shifts to the characters who participate in and tell the story of archetypal American experiences. It is both an illusion and a reality of narrative craft that Ishmael, Huck Finn, and Invisible Man become responsible for the word and the form of the word, and the task set for them is to test and extend the possibilities of democracy in the form of the novel. Certainly, American democratic traditions are diverse and com plex. That is explicit in all three novels in question: Moby Dick, Huck Finn, and Invisible Man. And there is something else implied: Melville, Twain, and Ellison share the idea that to bring the individual into true relationship with the changeless moral and social imperatives of American experience in its fluid, ever-changing guises and variations, American novelists need to keep the form open. They need to allow their characters the inventive freedom to mix and make up elements of narrative form in response to whatever new and different arrangements reality presents of those human emotions and experiences we hold in common — love and hate, fear
53 and exaltation, birth and death and initiation — initiation above all into the rich, unexpected, resisted, necessary and inevitable kinships of democracy. II Moby Dick was a first flowering ol the American novel in chaotic, multi-faceted democratic form. In it the mixing and merging of forms bear witness to the nature of American reality. The spokesman, of course, is Ishmael, a man in some ways more invisible than Invisible Man and a narrator who overlays the classic tragic dramatic form with an improvising spirit of narrative and rhetorical eclect icism. There is an exuberance and a mobility about Ishmael's rhetoric and experience which imbue Moby Dick with the quality of democratic experiment. As a scholar, remember, Ishmael makes his own way. He apparently has been a country schoolmaster. He is under the influence of learning, but his stance is a composite one. He treats learning comically, mockingly, and seriously. He is able to make a whole of these attitudes because he is willing to affirm and deny, embellish and undercut, above all, digress from the conventions of traditional narrative form. He composes an Etymology and page after page of Extracts, all of which establish the encyclopedic scale of the whale on natural, historical, and cosmic levels. There is too a humor implicit in Ishmael's narrrative strivings, a humor Melville sustains as Ishmael breaks up the story and drama with chapters having the form of treatises, anatomies — all manner of discourses. But these are highly individual and eclectic in form, faithful and unfaithful enough to the rules of different branches of knowledge to make Ishmael the first free-lancing, interdisciplinary scholar to narrate an American novel. This eclecticism of narrative extends to American idiom and dialect. Pip and Ahab, Fleece and Stubb, for instance, speak in different idioms, but they understand each other, and the richness of their conversings reflects the improvising principle inherent in that American motto e pluribus unum. It is the conventional, standard ized man, Starbuck who, having happened upon eloquence, cannot bear its incongruities, and thus gives up on the give and take of speaking with Ahab and thereby isolates the captain from the diversities of reality the old man still seeks to affirm. At any rate Ishmael's affirmation of the continuity of discontinuity, the possibil ities of chaos, places the narrative in the midst of the fluid, mobile, endlessly changing, accountable but ultimately uncontainable reality of American society. So the test is the familiar test of democracy and democratic principles. And these preoccupations not only break in upon but are contained in the action of the narrative.
54 Like those who follow him, Huck Finn and Invisible Man, for instance, Ishmael makes some of what is implicit explicit. He celebrates the dignity of man in words that recall the Declaration of Independence. (Two years earlier, in 1849, Melville interrupted the brooding, skeptical train of his thought in a letter suddenly to assert: "But the Declaration of Independence makes a difference.") Now Ishmael declares: "Thou shalt see it shining in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike; that democratic dignity which on all hands radiates without end from God; Himself! The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!" Who built the American canals and railroads, after all? The joining of men from the ends of the earth in the Pequod's enterprise is not a projection of an ideal so much as it is a representation of 19th century American diversity. Ishmael celebrates this diversity and mixture of men. Clearly too, he links some of the principles and rights of the Declaration of Independence. The right of fraternity, or, if you want, the commitment to common and individual responsibilities implied in the right to the pursuit of happiness, is according to Ishmael rooted in the acknowledgement of equality. The action of Moby Dick is also bound up with the theory and practice of democracy. Certainly Ahab carries the idea of equality to its farthest extreme, and it is clear that democracy is more a matter of the heart than of logical systems. Ahab slips into the breaks of democratic time and space and discovers he can subvert the unalien able rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness by appearing to invoke them. As captain, Ahab is master, acknowledged by Ishmael as "absolute dictator" and "supreme lord and dictator." Ahab is intriguing, though, because in a sense he casts himself as a democratic leader, perhaps a little in the tradition of Andrew Jackson. His first public act aboard the Pequod is to assemble the crew, speak openly of his real purpose and by force of eloquence persuade them, including Ishmael, to pledge allegiance to his war against Moby Dick. His goal becomes the unofficial common purpose, an application of the social meaning of the pursuit of happiness. Ahab himself understands the conflict and outright, unresolvable contradiction between official and unofficial objectives, for, after all, the official purpose of the voyage is bound up with profit and property, with the right of Bildad and Peleg to maximum return on their investment. He is also aware that he violates the principle on which his legal authority rests and that, abandoning his rightful purpose, he opens up the possibility that his crew, "with perfect
55 impunity, both moral and legal," according to Ishmael, might "refuse all further obedience to him." Ahab has got to fill the coffers of the Pequod with profitable sperm if he is to pursue his quest. Having covered the practical imperative, he is free to pursue his moral and metaphysical imperative toward chaos. To return to the issue of form and democracy, I think Ahab succeeds in maintaining the fiction of democracy because his facade is not entirely a fiction. He does allow his crew a certain freedom and fraternity which they experience outside the official conventions of 19th century American society. In this case let Ishmael stand for the crew. Consider his distinction between perception and experience, between responsibilities and dreams. Remember that narrating the past, he re-experiences its states of being and feeling, its oppositions, as a continuing dilemma. "For now," he writes, "since by many prolonged, repeated exper iences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country; now that I have perceived all this I am ready to squeeze case eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti." What is Ishmael's passage but a variation on the possibilities and conflicts inherent in the unalien able right to the pursuit of happiness? His exaggerated, comic dream imagery projects also the view that 19th century American fraternity may be tabooed sufficiently that its expression takes place outside the context of democratic responsibility which John Adams and Jeffer son associated with the idea of happiness. At any rate, Ishmael's perception of the necessary relationship between consciousness and the world is complex and suggestive. What Henry Nash Smith in his recent book, Democracy and the Novel, calls "the affirmation of a heterosexual bourgeois ideal of domestic tranquility, nineteenth- century style," I would interpret less ideologically as the affirmation of man's relation to family and society, an affirmation which given Ishmael's impatient tone, the fantasy that follows, and the complex ity of individual purpose, is not simple or unmixed. Indeed the passage may have emerged somewhat from Herman Melville's complex allegiances as he sat in Pittsfield writing his novel, caring for his wife and children, trying to support them, befriending Nathaniel Hawthorne, and taking some responsibility for what went on about him in the world. Rarely is there an easy reconciliation between one's social responsibilities and individual wishes, a conflict which Ishmael naturally enough presents in terms of fraternity with
5b homosexual overtones. But I think his very hyperbole suggests that the terms are inescapably profound and that one of the commitments of democracy is that individuals be willing to test out different possibilities of reconciliation between ideas of private and public happiness. Throughout Moby Dick slavery and freedom are conditions made to apply to averyone. "Who ain't a slave?" Ishmael asks early in his narrative, and he has the right to pose such a question partly because so many free Negroes enact important and articulate roles in this drama of freedom and slavery. There is Pip, the young Negro, an implicit bluesman whose stoical stance is born of experience as stark and terrifying as Ahab's own. Pip's contribution to the narrative is to improvise riddles which play out the themes of fate and freedom against conditions of pain and loss and love. There is another embodiment of that stoical capacity to look reality in the eye and "still retain," as Scott Fitzgerald suggested during his troubles, "the ability to function." I refer to the Negro preacher's text, "the blackness of darkness." Far more than Father Mapple's conventional Calvinist sermon, the unnamed, unknown Negro preacher's text acknowledges the chaos and contradiction of both what Virginia Woolf called "the world of reality" and the world of history. By the time of Moby Dick the phrase, "the blackness of darkness," had become almost a refrain for Herman Melville. That he assigns it to a free black preacher in New Bedford — Frederick Douglass's destina tion and the place of his emergence in a public role — bears wonderful witness to Melville's sense of American continuity and complexity. Not only Pip and the anonymous preacher but Daggoo, " an imperial Negro;" Fleece the cook whose sermon — "all angel is not'ing more than de shark well goberned" — affirms the form of reversal, the reality of chaos and contradiction; and also the three Long Island fiddlers who make music for the festivities aboard the sperm-heavy, fraternal and heterosexual, homeward-bound whaler, the Bachelor: all of these Negroes affirm in various guises Ishmael's declaration that democracy is a form and equality a principle which extend the possibilities of human experience and accomplishment. The complex presence of these Negro characters serves to re-enforce what is implicit in Moby Dick, and this is that although slavery and freedom are issues bound up with democracy, they are issues having to do with matters other than race. All this was made possible in fiction partly because Ishmael stands between Melville's story and ourselves. Melville has him do so, not to impose any ultimate or even definite order upon chaos but to have
57 Ishmael himself experience chaos immediately and directly. He does so and mysteriously is spared — "And I only am escaped alone to tell thee." After the fact, that solitary escape drives him to the act of narrative as a form able to express both the failure and, because of the combination of classical rhetoric and vernacular idiom in his narrative, perhaps the renewed possibility of democratic community. Through Ishmael, Melville fulfills the task of narrative; and Ishmael's eclectic sometimes unfathomable ebb and flow of form points to the diversity and oneness of themes and to the democratic responsibility of the American novelist. Ishmael's survival commits him to the task of narrative, and I think the very pat perfection of his Epilogue carries us back to the uncertainties and imperfections, the contin gencies and, above all, the imaginative and historical continuities of the narrative.
Ill Like Moby Dick, Huck Finn is bound up with issues of freedom and democracy seething in American consciousness and society during the years of its composition. Between 1876 and 1884 national politics worked out a series of policies which signaled the end of Reconstruction and an apparent halt in the effort to live up to those "sacred commitments" tested in the blood and fire of the Civil War. What is largely implicit about narrative form and democracy in Moby Dick becomes explicit in Huck Finn. Twain roots his novel in Huck Finn's assertion of the right to tell his own story. "That book," says Huck referring to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, "was made by Mr. Mark Twain," and damn it, he suggests, I am going to take charge of my story, tell it my way, in my voice, the vernacular, as I see fit. I am equal, he is saying, and so is the vernacular of the American spoken word. For this reason Huck himself is equal to the task of narrative and its forms — forms belonging previously to those whose right depended upon the primacy of the written word and standard English. There is an assumption behind Huck's point of view that goes back to Ishmael's assertion of democratic dignity and before that to Frederick Douglass's declaration that the right to tell one's story in one's own voice is an unalienable right, an application of the pursuit of happiness to one's craft. In Huck's case vernacular language is tied in with vernacular form. To get his bearings on all that he experiences and observes on his journey down the Mississippi, he goes to the yarn, the tall tale, to all manner of improvisation appropriate to a free-wheeling, episodic, comic narrative. As is often the case with the American comic tradition, a serious intent is present. The comic forms and expressions in Huck Finn evoke a
58 common response that emphasizes shared experience and allows us, as these techniques allowed Huck, the maneuvering room needed to sort out the essential issues involved in the narrative. Back behind Huck, Twain sets himself the complicated task of unriddling history in the narrative. Writing in the late '70s and early'80s, Twain tells a story of slavery days aware that his readers know slavery is over. His purpose is to make readers experience Huck Finn's social and moral choices as intense, immediate ones. The overlay of present upon past time works, largely because the nation had experienced in the decades after the 1840s both the affirmation and the negation of freedom: the word, to refer again to Ellison's paradigm, expressed complexly in the Emancipation Proclamation, Gettysburg Address and 2nd Inaugural of Abraham Lincoln and by the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments; and the contradiction of the word by the Hayes-Tilden Compromise and later reversals of Reconstruction already in the '80s on the way to culmination in the Plessy vs. Fergusson decision of 1896. Certainly, the moral and narrative principle at work in Huck Finn is that the question of freedom appears over and over in many guises, many times and places, and that the relationship between democratic theory and practice is often tenuous indeed. At the novel's climax Huck Finn's respect for the policy of slavery and the right to property is overlaid by his instinctive commitment to equality and the pursuit of happiness in the form of images of Jim, the individual, the man, the Negro, the slave. Above all, images of Jim, Huck's friend, flood his memory. In short, Huck's imaginative articulation of his experience and its implications overpowers the narrow form of merely logical argument that would have him uphold the laws affirming slavery. So Huck chooses hell, a word suggesting religion and also something else; namely the painful role of outcast and renegade from society. There follows a little quoted passage which carries overtones of the white Southerner's dilemma at that moment when the Civil War is over and the struggle over Reconstruction yet to begin. "And they've took my nigger," Huck says to the Duke, "which is the only nigger I've got in the world, and now I'm in a strange country, and ain't got no property no more, no nothing, and no way to make my living, so I sat down and cried. I slept in the woods all night. But what did become of the raft then? — and Jim, poor Jim!" In the exchange that follows Huck wheedles a fragment of truth out of the Duke, and continues to be an American archetype in the sense of one willing, slowly to confront his society's unfinished business in open, improvi satory form. In any case his speech to the Duke telescopes, I believe,
59 two points in time — the 1840s and the 1880s — in its evocation of a moment in time midway between the two. Huck, living in the '40s, anticipates while Twain, writing in the '80s, recapitulates the upheaval and changed circumstances and perhaps changing conscious ness of the South at the close of the Civil War. To many the South at that moment did appear a strange country; the defeat and destruction of the Confederacy coupled with the end of slavery seemed to signal the end of property. In the broken society of the war's ending, many saw no way to make their living. So Huck's tears of self-pity point ahead in the historical nar rative of America as does his sudden rush of sympathy and affection for Jim. What's become of him? And what, twenty years later, was to become of the newly freed slaves? In these words of Huck's, Twain has grasped come of the complexity of Lincoln's 2nd Inaugural, a point in history when it looked as though Reconstruction might be possible within Lincoln's framework of "malice toward none" and "charity for all" — a stance Twain's readers knew had so far failed and which in the further changed circumstances of the '80s could be attained only with utmost difficulty.
At about this point in Huck Finn, space becomes no longer fluid. The Phelps's plantation, unlike the river, is a fixed, stationary point in space, and it is a place where time too appears frozen and lacks the sense of change and possibility present earlier. As if in accord with this new image of space and time, the narrative voice and presence are drastically changed. Twain, perhaps sensing himself boxed in at the Phelps's, on the surface reverses identities. He changes Huck into Tom Sawyer, Tom into Huck Finn. The trouble is that although Huck can play Tom Sawyer, in no sense can Tom play Huck Finn. Jim, Tom Sawyer knows, is already free, but Tom is willing to risk Jim's life — and perhaps his own and Huck's — to play a charade of escape as it's written in the adventure books. Tom's knowledge confers on him a fraudulent innocence; seemingly, he can bail himself, Huck, and Jim out of trouble at any point with only a word. Huck, on the other hand, is witness to a terrible shrinking of options. This social and moral landscape is Tom Sawyer's turf, as the raft was Huck's and Jim's. Still, Twain has a point to make, a historical situation to unravel through the parody. Tragically and also necessarily as far as strategy is concerned, Twain brings his readers up to date on the status of freedom and democratic responsibility in the America of the '80s, not from Huck's
60 point of view or Jim's but from Tom Sawyer's perspective and in an approximation of Sawyer's voice:
Tom was in high spirits. He said it was the best fun he ever had in his life, and the most intellectual; and said if he only could see his way to it we would keep it up all the rest of our lives and leave Jim to our children to get out, for he believed Jim would come to like it better and better the more he got used to it. He said that in that way it could be strung out to as much as eighty year, and would be the best time on record. And he said it would make us all celebrated that had a hand in it. (My italics)
On the primary level of narrative it should be said that Huck's scrupulous use of language puts some distance between himself and Tom, just as at the high points of the novel it is Huck's use of language which enacts the love and respect between himself and Jim. Here Huck's repetition of he said gives the passage both its rhythm and its moral point of view. This ain't me, Huck is telling us, and there's the hint of a shrug as he reminds us implicitly of what it's like listening to Tom Sawyer yak on and on. Huck's silence is articulate and shrewd too; so far as he knows, Jim's freedom now depends entirely on Tom's cooperation, a condition that is assured only if Huck and Jim defer to Tom's leadership. On another level, that of time and history, Twin satirically testifies and prophesies about the nation's failure to live up to its "sacred commitments" to freedom, justice, and equality. As we now know, Huck's, really it is Tom's and Twain's, eighty year projection was too short if we take the 1840s as a starting point and about right if we begin with the 1870s and '80s. Legally free, Negro Americans lived under officially sanctioned segregation, though unofficially there were always openings, con nections, kinship ties based on culture as Ralph Ellison has pointed out so many times and also, as James McPherson recently affirmed in his important piece, "On Becoming an American Writer," ties based on the theory of American democracy. For McPherson observes that even though Albion Tourgee lost the Plessy v. Ferguson case before the Supreme Court, in his brief that lawyer-novelist argued from the 14th Amendment for a view of democratic citizenship which McPher son considers "still the most radical idea to come out of American constitutional law." There is a peculiar American paradox at work here; namely that Tourgee makes his proposal pleading a case whose outcome upheld for sixty years the exclusion of Negro Americans from some of the rights most basic to democracy.
61 At any rate, mixed up with history, morality, and democracy here and elsewhere, especially in the concluding chapter of Huck Finn, is a related point about narrative and the requirements of audience. On this issue Ralph Ellison shrewdly observed that in creating Jim, Twain "was not grounded enough in the reality of Negro American personality." Coming to issues of form and audience at the core of it, Ellison added that Huck Finn was a "collaboration between a white American novelist of good heart, of democratic vision, . . . and white readers, primarily." Now I suspect that Ellison might except from his assessment of Jim a speech or two, perhaps the one where Jim calls Huck trash and thereby implicitly works out their relationship on the terms of their differing social and racial identities. Certainly, Ellison is right in relation to the ending. Jim's stereotypical antics in response to Tom — he seems more pleased about the forty dollars than his freedom — partake of the minstrel tradition as whites mimed and misunderstood it, and not as many Negro performers practised it, with awareness of the complex relationship between internal and external realities. There is, as Ellison implies, nothing simple about the end oiHuck Finn. Twain does not intend any simple reversal or regression in his portraiture of Huck and Jim. To return to my theme, the trouble is that the presence of Tom Sawyer and his values — let him stand for the white audience Ralph Ellison refers to — overshadows the full human presence and potential of both Jim and Huck. But Tom Sawyer is more than audience; he is also a manipulator of the narrative. It is Sawyer far more than Aunt Sally who "civilizes" Huck in the narrowest, most conventional, unfree sense of the word. It appears that Huck knows this and tries to work around it with some ambiguity. For instance, when he declares he's "got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest," two things are clear. One is that his idea of the Territory differs from Tom Sawyer's image of "howling adventures amongst the Injuns," and the second thing is that he intends to go alone. Again, confirming Ellison's assertion that Huck Finn is a limited collaboration, Huck leaves out Jim as a partner even though, typically, it is left to Jim to perform the duty of telling Huck that his father is dead. What happens to Jim's intention to secure his wife's and children's freedom, if necessary by working with Abolition ists on the underground railroad? We do not know; we hear no more, and perhaps therefore the narrative is incomplete, incomplete that is, insofar as Jim's story and Jim's point of view are essential to the problems of democracy and equality posed in Twain's novel. Of course, Huck himself is incomplete, inchoate, and that may be why, at the end, Twain makes that one word, Territory, bear the whole
62 burden of American democratic possibility. The end, like the beginning, is a pledge to keep moving, keep mobile, stay open, stay loose. In their best light Huck's last words affirm the frontier as a place and a metaphor capable of keeping alive new possibilities of the American vernacular in the twin forms of narrative and experience.
IV In "Society, Morality, and the Novel," Ellison's 1956 essay on fiction and democracy, he states the case for the union between democratic values and narrative form in American fiction. "Every serious novel is beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft," he declares and goes to contend that "most prose fiction in the United States ... is basically 'about' the values and cost of living in a democracy." Clearly, it is Ellison's position that American writers have a special (and democratic) responsibility to extend the possibilities of their chosen form, and he makes the argument with impressive credentials, for in Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison resumed and advanced the tradition of Melville and Twain. His task has been to keep alive the spoken word in literary form while investing the written word with some of the energy, fluidity, and improvisation of the oral tradition. His narrative stance leads him to affirm that stream of unofficial American history which he rightly claims is "tightly connected with folklore and the oral tradition." Picking up the vernacular tradition of Ishmael, and expecially Huck Finn, Invisible Man mixes Afro-American forms into the American whole of the narrative. Folk tale, folk song, aphorism, sermon, speech, street-rap, spirituals, blues: these oral forms mingle with more fixed and literary forms of expression as Invisible Man seeks a voice suitable for his composite, open narrative. His act of narration brings a limited coherence to his life, and perhaps partly because of his status as a Negro American the narrative act becomes more than an act of story-telling and more than an autobiographical act of self-revelation, self-assertion. In Ellison's hands, Invisible Man's struggle with form is nothing less than an act of vocation. For in his transition and transformation from orator and rabble-rouser to writer — the terms are not entirely exclusive, the writer may contain the others — Invisible Man makes narrative form depend upon a rhetorical enactment of all the disparate materials of his experience. His purpose is to seek and shape a tradition that includes all the strands of American, Afro-American culture, and coming to conscious ness of his vocation as a writer, Invisible Man ends his narrative with a call asking and in the end requiring of us a response. "Who knows but that on the lower frequencies I speak for you?" His question is
63 rhetorical in the profound sense of what is possible between writer and reader and — to take up the essential allusions to Louis Armstrong's blues version of the rhetorical question: "What did I do to be so black and blue?" — between performer and audience. Now Invisible Man is looking for an answer. Of course he is. But that answer is not simple. On the contrary, the answer Invisible Man seeks is a narrative affirmation on the reader's part that is reflective and considered — critical — and at the same time quick and spontaneous — improvisational in the manner of oral rhetorical form. Through complex narrative craft he has transformed the written word into something approximate to the conversational act, and in this way Invisible Man's sign off enacts a rhetoric of contact between writer and reader.
Ellison's advance in narrative form is the conception Invisible Man brings to the Prologue and Epilogue of the novel. As with so much of his work, Ellison's originality is radical in the familiar sense of going back to essentials, in this case the root meaning of narrative. It comes from the word, narrare, to make known and to do so in the form of a story. So there is something of a distinction between narrative and story; in its stress on the act of storytelling, and the consequence of telling one's story on identity, narrative is a compli cating form. Place this distinction in the American context, and there emerges a theory and practice of the novel which Ellison seized on for Invisible Man and later worked out critically in "Society, Morality, and the Novel." In Ellison's view, American history is not reducible to an official, static, or self-contained story standing on its own apart from the cross-currents of different individual interests and points of view. Recall Invisible Man's words as he links the issues of form and nationhood in the "Epilogue": "America is woven of many strands . . . Our fate is to become one, and yet many." Epluribus unum, that old motto which is stamped upon our coins, Invisible Man would imprint indelibly on every American consciousness. For America one may read also the novel, or at any rate this novel whose extension of the tradition of mixed narrative forms poses once more the problem of democracy. With Ellison the test of fiction and form is precisely the test of democracy, and that is whether basic principles — equality and the unalienable rights, for instance, or the right of a single character to speak to and in some sense for everyone of his fellow citizens — can stand up under exposure to all the disparate materials of American experience. At the core of it is the meaning of democracy for culture and cultural forms, particularly the novel whose emergence has been so closely tied to experiments in democ-
64 racy. In this connection Ellison himself has been straightforward about what he regards as "the chief significance of Invisible Man as a fiction." In "Brave Words for a Startling Occasion," he defined that significance as "its experimental attitude and its attempt to return to the mood of personal moral responsibility for democracy which typified the best of our nineteenth-century fiction." Such an attitude and a mood are bound up with a return to Melville and Twain, yes, and also with a going forth to extend the frontiers of American form. It is this contemporary stance and the tradition accompanying it which drives Ellison to bring into existence the Prologue and Epilogue. In both, Invisible Man attempts the critical act of estimating the character and quality of his experience as he has crafted that experience in the novel proper. At issue is a fuller narrative opportunity than was the case with either Moby Dick or Huck Finn (or with '20s novels like The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises). Invisible Man is able to work away from the self- absorption of the Prologue to an absorption in the Epilogue with the possibilities inherent in his relation to American society. To put the matter in formal terms, as a chronology the Prologue follows, but as a sequence of consciousness it precedes the narrative because it forges the sense of self Invisible Man will overlay upon the story of past experience he is about to tell. By the time he comes to write the Epilogue, Invisible Man has re-engaged and re-experienced his past, and he has also fashioned a form suitable to express and transmit that experience. In short, he has changed as a person and as a writer, and brought those changes to bear on the form and purpose of the Epilogue. To illustrate: in the Prologue Invisible Man declares himself and his identity and in the course of that declaration, resolves to make music as well as metaphor out of invisibility. During the Prologue, Invisible Man tends to locate hmself in American exper ience explicitly, on the level of race, while by the time he has worked through the multiple forms of his narrative, the matter of race is largely implicit, as he explicitly extends the essentials of his experience and identity to everyone, and in a special sense to every American. Because he- has become a formidable interpreter of American theory and practice, Invisible Man is able to affirm his Afro-American identity even more powerfully and effectively at the end than at the beginning. For example, having listened to Louis Armstrong on a reefer and having wished for five phonographs to magnify the sound back in the Prologue, in the Epilogue Invisible Man carries Armstrong's "Black and Blue" in his mind; the music is now irrevocably part of himself beyond any appearance of posturing.
65 One of the keys is his effort to meld history into fiction by bringing together the critical act with the act of imagination. In the complex open form of his narrative, a true act of imagination requires critical and analytic as well as intuitive powers, while a genuine critical act of estimation partakes also of imaginative projection. The result is that fluidity becomes an impulse of form as well as a habit of mind and a condition of reality. To return to the Prologue, it is clear there at the starting point of his fiction that Ellison seeks to acknowledge and play his variation on what he has called "our two great nineteenth-century novels, Moby Dick and Huckleberry Finn." In particular, Moby Dick is a strongly resonant presence. Invisible Man shares with Ishmael a need to affirm anonymity and identity as a primary act of the writer. "I am an invisible man," somehow follows from "Call me Ishmael"; they share a resolve to brazen out the matter of identity. More obviously, when Invisible Man descends through layers of the Afro-American past, he sees a black preacher and his congregation basing their service on the text, "the blackness of blackness." There is no question that Ellison picks up where Ishmael left off after having glimpsed the New Bedford black church and its preacher's text, "the blackness of darkness." But Ishmael moved on at once from the black church. Not surprisingly, Invisible Man too feels uneasy at the vision of creation and chaos and ambiguity revealed in the course of his descent into the depths of Armstrong's music and the layers of the Afro-American past. Yet descend he does and his cryptic encounter with the "blackness of blackness" is a means of illuminating his ancestors' ability to stand and survive amidst contradictions. In the Prologue, however, there is no assurance that Invisible Man will come to see the craft of narrative form as a way of confronting chaos and spinning out new possibilities of action. He does not seem alert to the old singer of spirituals' suggestion that freedom "ain't nothing but knowing how to say what I got up in my head." Surely, this idea is bound up with the writer's task, but Invisible Man does not yet make the connection between the common borders of the spoken and the written word. On the contrary, he ends the Prologue on a violent and dangerous blue note, as with a perversity recalling Ahab and an irony all his own, he affirms personal instinctual violence by invoking with a certain logic "the higher interests of society." What is his stance here but a parody of the bond between the individual and society projected by democracy? Working through the narrative fashioning his own and others' stories in a mixture of rituals and idioms, Invisible Man comes to regard language and action as complimentary expressions of the
66 essentially improvisatory process of self. At the narrative's end and before the Epilogue, he is in the vague, inchoate, incipient position of Ishmael and Huck Finn at the end of their novels. What saVes him from their incomplete stance? One thing is his consciousness of narrative; he is aware that as a narrator he is in a tradition. "The end was in the beginning" is the line he casts down to end his narrative. Among other things this signifies that the end of the story is in the Prologue or the beginning of his attempt, afterwards, to tell it. This projection of the end turns out to be premature, for it does not take account of the Epilogue in which Invisible Man performs the critical act of estimating his position in light of his just completed experience as a narrator, and in light of the recognizable yet mysterious principles of democracy. This is as it should be, for the Epilogue is partly an afterthought in the improvising tradition. Its form is an advance on the tradition of first person American novels because it implies a continuing responsibility on the part of the narrator for his story. Invisible Man feels bound up enough with his audience to make known some of the changes he has gone through while shaping his narrative. Ishmael survives to tell the story; Huck lights out for the territory. Invisible Man takes up residence underground, and yet somehow his sense of narrative possibility and responsibility, his sense of wanting to create kinship and fraternity, compels him to give us an account of the territory of his mind up through and beyond his novel's conventional narrative text. Well, where does he take himself and us in the Epilogue? In my view he takes us right back into the familiar place of that most ambiguous, elusive and boldest of the unalienable rights — the right to the pursuit of happiness. Implicitly, the Epilogue takes us back to the question Invisible Man raised before Tod Clifton's funeral: "And could politics ever be an expression of love?" Only by the time he is ready to write the Epilogue is he ready to answer the question, and the answer is yes. Yes, that is, politics can be a matter of love and not only that but the novel is a literary narrative form able to project somewhat the reconciliation of politics with love. So we are right back with Jefferson and John Adams and their conviction that the pursuit of private and of public happiness in a democracy ought to be necessarily related expressions of self. Furthermore, just as the Declaration of Independence did not promise happiness but the right to pursue it, Invisible Man's affirmation of what he calls the principle — surely the democratic commitment to freedom and equality — in no way suggests that he (or Ellison) believes it will be realized, instantly or at all, necessarily. It does suggest that the
67 relationship between politics and love be pursued as part of the democratic commitment. In the end, harking back to his grandfather and to the Declaration of Independence as well, Invisible Man uses the ideas of democracy to set a standard for consciousness and for narrative — again those twin gardens of form. For him the pursuit of happiness has become the pursuit of narrative. Having told of his confusion between private and public happiness, he strips things down to the essentials of himself and his tradition, particularly those often archetypal manifes tations of Afro-American experience which, being so near and yet so far from awareness in the past, flood his consciousness and shore up his identity as he writes. As narrator, Invisible Man takes responsi bility for grasping and articulating an essential point. Archetypal form takes an inclusive view of culture: his tradition is ours, our tradition is his. So, at last, he is ready to emerge from both the underground and the narrative to play a "socially responsible role" — an advance from the cynical position he takes at the end of the Prologue and the illusory stance held for most of the novel. His will to emerge is a further enactment of the open form of the narrative. His precise destination is unclear — deliberately so. But his general destination is clear — suggestively so. The paradox reinforces the narrative act, and triggers the writer's release into the world of those energies generated by the essential tension between democracy and the literary vocation. Through the example of Invisible Man and his call to others — writers and citizens alike — to engage the possibilities of democracy, Ralph Ellison has brought the American novel, and maybe the culture at large, a little closer to what he sees as "that condition of man's being at home in the world, which is called love, and which we term democracy."
Copyright © 1980 by John F. Callahan
68 Ralph Ellison
PERSPECTIVE OF LITERATURE When I was a young boy I often went out to the Oklahoma State Capitol where I assisted Mr. J. D. Randolph with his duties as custodian of the State Law Library. I was about 11 years old at the time, quite impressionable, and very, very curious about the mysteri ous legal goings-on of the legislators. All the more so because while I was never able to observe the legislature in session, it was not at all unusual for me to look up from pushing a broom or dusting a desk to see one of the legislators dash into the library to ask Jeff — Mr. Randolph was always addressed by his first name — his opinion regarding some point of law. In fact, I soon came to look forward to such moments because I was amazed by the frequency with which Mr. Randolph managed to come up with satisfactory answers, even without consulting the heavy volumes which ranged the walls. I wasn't surprised that Mr. Randolph was a janitor instead of a lawyer or legislator; Oklahoma was segregated at the time and Afro- Americans were strictly limited in their freedom to partcipate in the process of government. We could obey or break laws, but not make or interpret them. In view of this, I was amazed that Mr. Randolph had come to know so much about the subject. This was a tantalizing mystery, but the fact that white men of power would show no shame in exploiting the knowledge of one far beneath them in status aroused my sense of irony. That "after all" was simply another example of white folks taking advantage of black folks. I was more impressed with the fact that Mr. Randolph could carry so many of the mysterious details of law and the laws which governed the State of Oklahoma within his own head. Now, I knew he had been one of the first school teachers in the city and the State, and that he read and owned a large collection of books. But just how he had come to learn the law was part of an experience about which I was never to hear him talk. I did know, however, that he had never attended college, and I was quite aware that many of our greatest lawyers had acquired their legal knowledge through the process of "reading" law with licensed members of the profession. I only knew that Mr. Randolph appeared to possess a surer grasp of law than certain of the legislators, and my youthful sense of justice led me to see his exclusion from the profession as an act of injustice. I never heard him complain about the situation, but I felt that there was something shameful, even degrading, about such a state of affairs, and that there was something rotten in the lawyers if not indeed in the law itself.
69 Nor was it possible for me to ignore the obvious fact that race was a source of that rot, and that even within the mystery of the legal process, the law was colored and rigged against my people. Later I became aware of the existence of a Negro lawyer, a Mr. Harrison, who was so skilled and eloquent that he got himself chased out of the State. Fortunately, he landed in Chicago where, in time, he became an Assistant Attorney General. Following this incident, however, there was much barbershop conversation centered around the Harrison affair, his legal skill, his way with words and the inability of white lawyers and judges to stomach a Negro more knowledgeable in the law than themselves. Interestingly enough, the men who engaged in these conversations while I shined shoes or swept the floors directed their disapproval not so much against law in general, but against those persons and forces which imposed the law undemocratically. This was a period during which the struggle to attain an anti- lynching bill was at its height and Mr. Roscoe Dungee, the editor and publisher of our local black newspaper, was writing very eloquent editorials suggesting that the real clue, the real ground for solving the racial predicament, rested in the Constitution. I read his editorials, but I must confess that, with my youthful cynicism, I didn't quite believe them. But anyway, the men in the barbershop believed in the spirit of the law, if not in its application. As for me, I saw no hope in the law. It was to be obeyed in everyday affairs, and in instances of extreme pressure, it was to be defied, even at the cost of one's life. In our common usage, law was associated more with men than with statutes. Law enforcement officers in our usage were "Laws," and many were men with reputations for being especially brutal toward Negroes. If such men were the cutting edge of the racially biased law, those above them were seldom better. "Alfalfa Bill" Murray, who took great pride in his knowledge of Roman constitutions, was Governor of the State and a very loud-mouthed white supremacist. And one occupant of the local bench, a certain Judge Estes, was famous for a quip made from the bench, to the effect that a Model T Ford full of Negroes ranging at large on the streets of the city was a more devastating piece of bad luck than having one's path crossed by a squad of thirteen howling, jet-black tomcats. Well, we laughed at it but held it against him. With such opinions issuing from the bench, I felt little inspired to trust the fairness of judges. During the Depression, which occurred during this period, I noted something else about the relationship between the law and the
70 attitudes of people, in this instance mostly white, who were suffering from the breakdown of economic order. This came in the form of their reaction to "Pretty Boy" Floyd, who at the time was in constant flight and on a rampage of lawbreaking; but he was frequently given sanctuary in Oklahoma City by law-abiding citizens. This was true not only of the city itself, but of towns all around Oklahoma. Well, it puzzled me. During June of 1933,1 found myself traveling by freight train in an effort to reach Tuskegee Institute in time to take advantage of a scholarship granted me. Having little money and no time left in which to earn the fare for a ticket, I grabbed an armful of freight car, a form of illegal travel quite common during the Great Depression. In fact, so many young men, young women, prostitutes, gamblers, and even some quite respectable but impoverished elderly and middleaged couples were hoboing that it was quite difficult for the railroad to control such passengers. I justified this out of sheer desperation, college being my one hope of improving my condition. But I was young and adventurous and regarded hoboing as the next best thing to floating down the Mississippi on a raft. My head was full of readings of the Rover Boys and Huckleberry Finn. I converted hoboing into a lark, until I found myself in the freight yards of Decatur, Alabama, where two white railroad detectives laying about them with the barrels of long nickel-plated .45 revolvers forced some forty or fifty of us, black and white alike, off the train and ordered us to line up along the tracks. For me, this was a most frightening moment. Not only was I guilty of stealing passage on a freight train, but I realized that I had been caught in the act in the town where, at that very moment, the Scottsboro case was being tried. The case and the incident which led to it were widely reported in the black press, and what I had read of the atmosphere of the trial, led me to believe that the young men in the case had absolutely no possibility of receiving a just decision. As I saw it, the trial was a macabre circus, a kangaroo proceeding that would be soon followed by an enactment of the gory rite of lynching, that ultimate form of racial victimage. I had no idea of what the detectives intended to do with me, but given the atmosphere of the town I feared that it would be most unpleasant and brutal. I too might well be a sacrificial scapegoat, simply because I was of the same race as the accused young men then being prepared for death. Therefore, when a group of white boys broke and ran, I plunged into their midst and running far closer to the ground than I had ever managed to do as a high school football running back, I kept running and moving until I came to a shed with a railroad loading dock, under which I scooted and there I remained
71 until dawn, when I grabbed the first thing that was smoking and headed south. A few days later, I reached Tuskegee, but that scrape with the law, the fear, the horror and sense of helplessness, before legal injustice, was most vivid in my mind, and it has so remained. Recently, a television dramatization of the Scottsboro case pre sented one of the judges that sat on the case as its hero. I was made aware of the snarl of personal and public motives, political and private interests, which had become the focus of the case. I was aware of the many factors locked in contention in the name of the purity of white womanhood, and as a writer I came to ask myself just why was it that American fiction had given so little attention to the law. Why, I asked myself, has the lawyer or the judge seldom appeared in our literature, serious or popular, in heroic roles? One answer is that the presentation of the law in an unfavorable light allows for the formal expression and sharing of attitudes which are impious and irreverent, and that given such attitudes, they must be socially controlled, made visible, and socialized; otherwise they might be a force for the destruction of social order. When one recalls Mark Twain's drawing of the judge in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the judge comes across as something of a self-serving hypocrite. Or compare the following incident from Pudd'nhead Wilson: Mr. Wilson appears before a reception committee expecting to make a name for himself in the town, but the proceedings are interrupted by the barking of a dog, whereupon Wilson says, "I wish that I owned one half of that dog." And someone said, "One half of the dog? What would you do with one half of the dog?" He said, "I would kill my half." Whereupon these legal-minded gentlemen looked at one another and said, "Could he be serious? Doesn't he realize that he kills his half of the dog, the other owner, the owner of the other half will be upset, will bring litigation against him, and that he will end up in all kinds of trouble?" Well, for being irreverent on the matter of ownership, poor Wilson was named "Pudd'nhead" and spent most of his life as an alien in the town. When we recall Melville's Benito Cereno, and place it back in its historical perspective, we realize that it was influenced by the Amistad case, a case in which a group of Africans were brought to trial at the insistence of Spain because they had revolted against the Spaniards who had sought to enslave them, killed several of the
72 officers, and in attempting to sail the ship back to their homeland, found themselves off the coast of New England. Melville takes the incident and makes of it one of his finest works of fiction. But what puzzles me a bit, and I know better than to be puzzled about such things, was why he made nothing of the fact that these Africans were freed by having been represented in court by John Quincy Adams? Remember, this was a time of slavery in our own country. Remember that it cost Mr. Adams something just to take that case. But at any rate, Melville did not bother with the lawyer on that occasion. But in Bartleby the Scrivener, we are introduced to the title character by his boss, a Wall Street lawyer who, for all of his goodwill, is as imperceptive in grasping the basic connotation as Captain Delano of Benito Cereno is unable to grasp the human complexity of the Africans who believed, like himself, so much in freedom that they were willing to kill for it. I am not going to burden you with recounting the legal climate of 1894, when Mark Twain published Pudd'nhead Wilson. I will just remind you that it was a period of great theft, of much legal skulduggery, and no doubt this had something to do with the presentation. But if we think a little bit about Mark Twain as a humorist, and think about literary form as having a social function, then perhaps Twain was being far more than irreverent when he presented men of the legal profession in a comic light, because by so presenting them he allowed people who were very upset by some of the legal goings-on in the society to reveal their feelings, to laugh at themselves, and most impious of all, to laugh at the courts and perhaps at the Constitution itself. At some point people, and especially American people, are pushed to recognize that behind the Constitution, which we say rests in principles which lie beyond the limits of death and dying, are really manmade, legal fictions. That doesn't stop them from being precious; that doesn't stop them from being sacred. But we can only stand so much of the sacred. We can only stand so much of piety. We must be able to express our dissent, especially when the members of the bench fail to do so for us. In the reading of Bartleby the Scrivener, Melville's story, we encounter a contest of wills between the lawyer, a genteel, learned lawyer who is admired by Mr. John Jacob Astor, a representative of the law and thus of order, a man with what de Tocqueville termed certain aristocratic propensities, and poor Bartleby, who owns hardly anything but the clothing on his back.
73 Bartleby has been hired to perform the job of copying, transcribing legal documents. The lawyer, as boss, is in the habit of sending his other employees to do various errands. Bartleby replies to each request with a simple phrase "I prefer not to." It is so unusual, this obstinate negativism, that the lawyer doesn't throw him out, but becomes locked in a psychological struggle through which he tries to bring Bartleby to his will. But in the process he reveals how little he understands of certain basic human attitudes which make the law and the order which it imposes quite necessary. Bartleby is never forced or persuaded or cajoled to agree. In the reading of the story one has a sensation of watching a man walking backwards past every boundary of human order and desire saying, "I prefer not to, I prefer not to," until at last he fades from sight and we are left with but the faint sound of his voice hanging thinly upon the air, still saying No. Bartleby's last remaining force, the force which at the very last he is asked to give up, is the power of the negative, that capability of language which Kenneth Burke has identified as a symbolic agency through which man has separated himself from nature and gone on to establish this complex of human positives which we identify as civilization. In this view, language is a primary agency of order. Why? Because it is the identifying characteristic of a symbol-using, symbol- misusing animal. It is through language that man has not only separated himself from his natural biologic condition as an animal, but it is through the symbolic action, the symbolic capabilities of action, that we seek simultaneously to maintain and evade our commitments as social beings. Human society in this regard is fictitious, and it might well be that at this point the legal fictions through which we seek to impose order upon society meet with, coincide with, the fictions of literature. Perhaps law and literature operate or cooperate, if the ter m is suitable for an interaction which is far less than implicit; in their respective ways these two systems, these two symbolic systems, work in the interests of social order. The one for stability — that is, the law is the law — the other striving to socialize those emotions and interests held in check by manners, conventions, and again by law. "Does not law, like art," writes Professor Paul Freund, "seek change within the framework of continuity, to bring heresy and heritage into fruitful tension? They are not dissimilar, and in their resolution, the resolution of passion and pattern, of frenzy and form, of contention and revolt, of order and spontaneity lies the clue to the creativity that will endure."
74 Given the bits of personal experience which I outlined at the start of this paper, I must both agree and disagree with the professor. He states the ideal as a writer; with my background, I must state something of the exception. By the way, I always found Justice Holmes and Justice Frankfurter a bit less attractive as human beings than I did as men of scholarly excellence. But then I was always a bit impatient and something of the cat who was fated to stare at the kings. I would also remind you, as one who somehow fits into the profession of Mark Twain, Emerson and Thoreau, that it is the writer's function precisely to yell "fire" in crowded theaters, and we do so, of course, through the form in which we work, and the forms of literature are social forms. We don't always take them seriously, but they are the start of seriousness, and an irreplaceable part of social order. But if there is one Freund statement with which I could agree wholeheartedly, it is this: "I have likened the Constitution to a work of art in its capacity to respond through interpretation to changing needs, concerns and aspirations," for I look upon the Constitution as the still vital convenant by which Americans of diverse backgrounds, religions, races and interests are bound. They are bound by the principles with which it inspirits us no less than by the legal apparatus which identifies us as a single American people. The Constitution is a script, by which we seek to act out the drama of democracy and the stage upon which we enact our roles. Viewed "dramatistically," which is Kenneth Burke's term, we can even suggest that the Declaration of Independence marked the verbalization of our colonial forefathers' intentions of disposing of the King's authority. The Revolutionary War marked the agonistic contest of wills through which the opposing forces were overthrown. The Constitution marked the gloriously optimistic assertion and legitimization of a new form of authority and proclaiming of a new set of purposes and promises. Upon these principles, which would be made manifest through the enactment of a new set of democratic hierarchal roles (or identities), the young nation would act. And through the dramatic conflict of democratic society it would seek to fulfill its revolutionary assertions. But then came a swift change of direction in which the young nation was forced to recognize that the mere assertion of revolutionary will was not enough to lead immediately to domestic tranquility. It brought upon the stage a new alignment of political forces in which the collectivity that had made the Revolution became fragmented.
75 Under the new dispensation the rights of individuals and minorities required protection from the will of the majority. As a new hierarchy began to function, those at its top were in better position to take advantage of the new-found benefits while those at the bottom were hardly better off than they had been under the Crown. Ironically, the nation's recognition of the new problems of its hierarchy were coeval with its increasing concern with its language, with its linguistic style, which reminds us of the paradox that the revolutionary documents which formed the constitutional grounds of our new system of justice and which set the stage for the enactment of a new democratic drama of human rights — these documents were written in the language of the very hierarchy which they had overthrown. And indeed the new conflict of interest was foreshadowed in the very process of drawing up the new ground for action out of the English language. Even as the democratic documents of state announced a new corporate purpose, proclaimed a new identity, assigned new roles and aroused new expectations for a redistribution of material resources and authority, a conflict arose between the terms in which revolutionary action had been taken and those in which it would be fulfilled. In drafting the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson had changed the old emotion-charged revolutionary slogan of equality, liberty and property, to equality, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And his demands for eternal separation from England and its people were deleted. Also rejected was Jefferson's indictment of slavery in which he overloaded the scapegoat, King George III, with a malignancy that was all too obviously shared by Americans. There was mystification here, if not blatant hypocrisy, because as Katherine Drinker Bowen observed of Jefferson's discarded first draft, "in Jefferson's indictment of the King he nowhere states that slavery is a disgrace to America, and should be abolished root and branch by Americans. Instead, he turns his anger on the wrong culprit, twists a shameful fact of American life into an instrument of propaganda against George III, condemns the slave trade, then draws the sting by putting the blame and responsibility on the King of England." Ironically, by his extreme eloquence, Jefferson provided his pro- slavery colleagues an escape from having to undergo the rigors of economic and perhaps spiritual mortification that would have given full credibility to their proclaimed principles of freedom and equality. Thus the new edenic political scene incorporated a flaw similar to the crack that appeared in the Liberty Bell and embodied a serpent like malignancy that would tempt government and individual alike
76 to a constantly recurring fall from democratic innocence. With one of its cardinal principles violated, the drama of democratic equality began with its main actors revealing in their noblest gestures "mots vagues" that were at odds with their spoken lines. Indeed, more often than not they ignored the acting script and being good Americans, they improvised. Portentiously, the founding fathers' refusal to cleanse themselves was motivated by hierarchical status and economic interests. It was rationalized by the code of social manners that went with their inherited form and manner of speech, their linguistic style. Revolutionary fervor notwithstanding, they were gentlemen, and Jefferson's indictment provided these men the convenient excuse for not violating their private interests and their standards of good taste. Thus the glaring transparencies of Jefferson's rhetoric afforded them a purely formal escape from the immediate dilemma posed by the conflict between freedom and slavery, and allowed them to use social tact as a tactic of moral evasion. One result of this evasion was to prove of far-reaching consequence, in that the principles of equality and freedom were splintered into warring entities, thus making for the unheralded emergence of a new principle or motive in the drama of American democracy. That motive or principle — and principles are motives, I will remind you — was race, a motive that would become a source of vast political power and authority and a major theme in American literature. And though not committed to sacred print, it was to radiate a qualifying influence upon all of the nation's principles and become the source of a war of words that has continued unto this day. Men like John Adams fought against it as did Jefferson, who himself owned slaves. But because this principle operated in the ethical sphere no less than in the material world, the principle of equality being a command that all men be treated as equals, while some were very obviously being designated unequal on the basis of color and race, this made for a split in America's moral identity which would infuse all of its acts and institutions with a quality of hypocrisy. Worse, it would fog the American's perception of himself, distort his national image, and blind him to the true nature of his cultural complexity. Later, behind the guise of States rights, it would explode the issue which led to the Civil War. So even as the English supports of the old hierarchical psychosis collapsed, it quickly reasserted itself in the immature and unfinished psyche of the new political order. That absentee authority and privilege once vested in kingship, now reappeared as the all-too-present authoritarian privilege of those possessing property and high social position. Social order is arduous
77 and power filters down to the lower levels of society only under constant pressure. Thus new tensions arose and while the Bill of Rights was enacted to relieve the new imbalance, the manifestations of those rights in the lives of those low in the order of social hierarchy would require time, contention and endless improvisation and many lawyers. As this process ensued, not even the most optimistic citizens found an adequate fulfillment of revolutionary expectations. Indeed, these expectations seemed for some to recede before the anguishing complexity of the new social reality. Instead of domestic tranquility, the Americans discovered that what their bloodshed and sacrifice had actually purchased them was not social perfection, but at best a firm new ground of hope. This was a great deal, but democratic equality remained the promise that would have to be achieved in the vividly imagined but illusory future. At Philadelphia, the founding fathers were presented the fleeting opportunity of mounting to the very peak of social possibility afforded by democracy. But after ascending to within a few yards of the summit they paused, finding the view to be one combining splendor with terror. From this height of human aspiration the ethical implications of democratic equality were revealed as tragic, for if there was radiance and glory in the future that stretched so grandly before them, there was also mystery and turbulence and darkness astir in its depths. Therefore, the final climb would require not only courage, but an acceptance of the tragic nature of their enterprise, and the adoption of a tragic attitude that was rendered unacceptable by the optimism developed in revolutionary struggle, no less than by the tempting and virginal richness of the land which was now rendered accessible. So having climbed so heroically, they descended and laid a foundation for democracy at a less breathtaking altitude, and in justification of their failure of nerve before the challenge of the summit, the founding fathers committed the sin of American racial pride. They designated one section of the American people to be the sacrificial victims for the benefit of the rest. And in failing their testing by what was later to be termed the American dilemma, they prepared the way for the evils that Jefferson had hoped to pile upon the royal head of England's King, and loaded them upon the black backs of anonymous American slaves. Worse, these Americans were designated as perfect victims for sacrifice and were placed beyond any possibility of democratic redemption, not because of any overt act of social guilt, but simply by virtue of their position in the social hierarchy. Indeed, they were thrust beneath the threshold of social hierarchy and expected to stay there.
78 To further justify this act of pride and failure of nerve, myths of racial superiority and inferiority were evoked, and endless sacrificial rights of moral evasion were set in motion. These appeared in folktales, jokes, and then popular stories, indeed in some unpopular, but quite serious works. Ironically, however, this initial act of pride was to give the Afro-American an inadvertent and unrecognized but crucial role in the nation's drama of conscience. Racism took on the symbolic force of an American form of original sin, and as a man chosen to suffer to advance the nation's spiritual and material well- being, the black American was endowed linguistically with an ambivalent power like that vested in Elizabethan clowns, Christian martyrs, and tragic heroes. This is important if we are to understand the prevalence of black figures in our literature. As a symbol of guilt and redemption, the Negro entered the deepest recesses of the American psyche and became crucially involved in its consciousness, subconsciousness, and conscience. He became keeper of the nation's sense of democratic achievement, and the human scale by which would be measured its painfully slow advance towards true equality. Regardless of the white American's feelings about the economic, psychological, and social conditions summed up in the term and symbol "Negro," that term and symbol was now firmly embedded in the operation of the American language. Despite their social powerlessness, Negro Americans were all unwittingly endowed with the vast powers of the linguistic negative, and would now be intricately involved in the use and misuse of a specific American form of symbolic action, the terminology of democracy. Not only in language, but through language into law and social arrangements, social ethics and manners, into sexuality and city planning or non- planning, and into art, religion and literature. In brief, race became a major cause, form, and symbol of the American hierarchical psychosis. As the unwilling and unjust personification of that psychosis and as its major victim, the Afro- American took on the complex symbolism of social health and social sickness. He became the raw labor force, the victim of social degradation, and symbolic of America's hope for future perfection. He was to be viewed at least by many whites as both cause and cure of our social malaise. This development, of course, contained a lot of mystification, for if there was hope for a cure to our condition, it lay in the direction of both white and black men undergoing that agonistic effort necessary to the fulfillment of the nation's commitment to those ethical principles compromised by the founding fathers. Until the time that this should come about, race would assert a malignant effect in areas
79 of national life that were far removed from that of civil rights for black Americans. It would function as a motive in Melville's Moby Dick; and, far beneath the fine prose of Henry James, it would goad the conscious ness of his characters. It would form the moral core of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, dominate the world of William Faulkner's fiction, and it would influence the attitudes of individual "secession- ism" displayed by the heroes of Ernest Hemingway. Further, the contentions it inspired would hinder the establishment of a National Drama, a theater, and account for the dismal stereotypes of popular literature, plays, motion pictures and television dramas, and for their triviality and lack of moral seriousness. What is more, it would lead to the moral negations of the current crop of black films and to much of what we dislike in rock music. But here we should pause. Here we will not recapitulate the Civil War. We know to what extent it was a war of words as well as of arms. We know to what extent the black American was involved. Very often, however, the issues of the Civil War and even the blacks appear in novels and other works of literature by other names. For instance, Crane's The Red Badge of Courage is about the Civil War, but only one black person appears, and then very briefly. It is concerned with the invasion of the private life by warfare, by the army, and by large impersonal social processes, a fact of American democratic life which was becoming a matter of consciousness some thirty years after the Civil War. We are in a period today when many of the men of my profession complain that American life has gotten out of hand, that it is too much for the methods and modes of fiction. They say that it is too dramatic, that it overwhelms the fictional imagination. I am not so sure about that. I think that the resources are there, we have only to seek to use them. But I think something else should be said since much of the atmosphere of our time is created by major transforma tions in our way of looking at the law and looking at the racial aspects of the law, going back to 1954 and coming through the measures passed during the sixties. We went about that with a feeling of good intentions, we sacrificed. We did much to rectify past injustices. But then with our usual American innocence, we failed to grasp that it was going to cost us something. It would cost us something in terms of personal sacrifices, it would cost us something in the rearrangement of the cities and the suburbs. It would cost us something in terms of the sheer acceleration of turmoil and conflict. And so, we became and have become a bit tired of this old business.
80 I, as a writer, would remind you, however, that when the Afro- American became symbolic of so many other issues in American life, that his increase in freedom acted on the youth at least as a sort of sudden release for which they were unprepared. It was as though the word had gone out, that the outsider, the unacceptable, was now acceptable, and they translated it to mean that all of the repressed psychological drives, all of the discipline of the instinct were now fair game. "Let it all hang out," they said. "We have all become black men and women." This projection, this identification of the socially unacceptable with the blacks, must be raised to consciousness. We must be aware of what is going on because only through this will we be able to reassume that optimism so necessary for living and dealing with the many problems of this diverse pluralistic society. Democracy is a collectivity of individuals. The great writers of the nineteenth century and the best of the twentieth have always reminded us that not only is the business of being an American an arduous task, as Henry James said, it requires constant attention to our consciousness and to our conscientiousness. The law insures the conditions, the stage upon which we act; the rest of it is up to the individual. (Copyright Reserved)
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81 Leon Forrest
LUMINOSITY FROM THE LOWER FREQUENCIES
I should like to discuss certain intellectual, cultural and historical influences upon Ralph Ellison's sense of the hero's character-in- process and the structure of the major chapters throughout his monumental novel, Invisible Man. Several influences come to mind: Kenneth Burke, Lord Raglan, Dostoyevsky amd Faulkner, as well as the artisitc and jazz-like rendering of folkloric sources. From the literary critic Burke, Ellison came to see the possibility of using a formula to structure a chapter. Burke held that a pattern could be employed to achieve character-in-process progression through the formula of Purpose, Passion and Perception: each chapter begins with a Purpose for the hero/out then much of the action of the middle section involves a struggle or Passion, over this Purpose, or quest. Out of this mix or confrontation with others and the self, the hero comes away with a heightened Perception, a keener awareness about his life, so that a metamorphosis, or Re-Birth is implied. But these moments are stages of his processing into life, and the cycle once completed, unleashes new problems and struggles. Another literary influence on Invisible Man came from Lord Raglan, whose seminal book The Hero, argues that a constant pattern of biographical data defines the lives of the Heroes of Tradition. The heroes Raglan calls forth run a gamut from Oedipus Rex to Elijah, Zeus, Orpheus and Robin Hood. The pattern traces some twenty-two steps from birth to death. But the central constant in Raglan's pattern of heroic dimension is this: that the hero dies, goes through a life underground and is Re-born. Raglan's concept meshes neatly with Burke's formula of Purpose, Passion and Perception. For instance, the Passion, or Conflict is quite similar to the turmoil in the mental Underground and all of the attendant agonies. The idea of a heightened Perception can be linked to Raglan's concept of Re-birth, or even Redemption in the Christian sense, and to discovery and self-recognition in the Aristotelian sense. In the major chapters of his novel, Ellison — a jazz trumpeter who studied musical composition — orchestrates and improvises upon an introductory theme raised through a character at the beginning of a chapter. And he ends the chapter on an up-beat thematic moment (sometimes with an enriching, elusive literary statement, that speaks for the chapter and the intelligence of the novel as a whole" at the lower frequencies") which stands in opposition to the opening
82 thematic idea. Our sense of luminosity is heightened with the hero's, because of the sweeping poles or polar distances traversed from the beginning to the end. These are mini-odysseys of purpose, passion and perception, we might say. Ellison's arrangement of characters and themes standing in during confrontational moments forms a constant source of instruction, as we see the hero's character-in-process evolve and the novel evolve; and it helps the reader to see how these apparently oppositional forces are really quite closely connected. This device recalls anthro pologist Levi-Strauss' concept of Thesis, Counter-thesis, Synthesis. And it is related to Dostoyevsky's uses of 'Doubling' and of character. One way of looking at Doubling is to see it as a blending of opposites — characters who stand in sharp opposition to each other and yet have much in common. The novel abounds with instances of this Dostoyevskian 'doubling'. There is for example the Norton/Trueblood pairing — a one-to-one confrontation, with the Oedipal desire/act forging a linkage between the rich, white, blue-blood, philanthropist, Norton, and the poor, black, uneducated peasant farmer, Jim Trueblood. In Trueblood's dream, we discover an abundance of underground images indicating that Trueblood lusts for power in the real world as much as the powerful Norton lusts for the body of his own daughter — behind the monument of money he has donated in her honor to the school. Another form of Dostoyevskian- 'doubling' occurs in the reverberat ing manner in which characters in apparent oppositional quest, status, or station are paired by a theme at completely different stages and times. For instance the theme of eloquence, its manipulation, uses and misuses, links the tall, Lincoln-like Hambro, mouthpiece for the Communist-like Brotherhood, with the spokesman-versifier for the Negro college and the American white way, the blind, Founder- celebrating minister, Homer Barbee. Short and ugly like Homer, Barbee gives a high-priest choral-arrangement and tribal eulogy for the Founder that sounds like Whitman praising Abe Lincoln (note Ellison's parody on the great Whitman's grand blindness to Abe's angularity, his blemishes, his body-and-soul torment over slavery, his complexity of motives). Now these two high-powered word artist- cum-magicians in turn, represent two power-mad, master tricksters. For Hambro illuminates the enslaving dogma espoused by the one- eyed, cyclops, Brother Jack, head white man in charge of the Brotherhood. And as Hambro attempts to drop the illuminating (but really enshrouding, and blinding) veil of 'understanding' over the student-hero's eyes, he also blinds himself to the pranks of public
83 policy that enslave the individual for the public good of this most private, elite of American parties. Thus he is veiled by his own public pronouncement^. And that high-priest of bamboozlement, Odyssey-echoing Homer Barbee, eloquently drops the enslaving veil of intellectual blindness across the students' eyes, to please that manipulator of polished slave chains, the college President Herbert Bledsoe and his captive audience of white trustees, i.e. over-seers. For in this situation at least, Bledsoe is not only the HNIC, but he has actually reversed the plantation system so that he is slave-master on this plantation, with Barbee as slave-driver of history. And Barbee in turn is blinded like the statue of the Founder, as he drops the veil honoring institutional power, which is manifested in the body and soul of the Founder's epic story (not in the student's learning and intellectual development). Barbee participates in his own self-impaling ceremony: he dims low the light of his own intellectual and moral vision of history, preferring the luxurious delusion of "sweet harmonies" over the reality of the chaos of African-American life. And as he extinguishes his vision with his words, Barbee recalls Oedipus, who having seen too much, tears out his eyes with the clasps of Jocasta's gown. Barbee's physical blindness seems a fitful banishment from the lost North-star light of daring freedom and progress, or as he himself says at one point, as he recalls the declining luminosity in the Founder's life on the train:
I remember how I looked out of the frosted pane and saw the looming great North Star and lost it, as though the sky had shut its eye.
In this sense too, the phrase-polishing Barbee becomes a kind of scapegoat for Bledsoe, as minister Homer leads the lamb-innocent Negro students to a slaughtered rendering of their history. Yet their only hope for escape is the underground railroad, as it were, and that too on an individual basis. For each must read his or her own way through Barbee's fabulous speil, and the only hope for escape from re-enslavement is to hold fast to the undersides of their history, beneath Barbee's words and memories, and hope that probing questions will ignite a liberating response from their fellow blacks. Indeed they must be ready to commit a kind of "treason" like that "snowy-headed man" at one of the Founder's ceremonial lectures who demands that the Founder cut the accommodationist speil and
Tell us what is to be done, sir! For God's sake, tell us! Tell us in the name of the son they snatched from me last week! And all through the room the voices arising, imploring, 'Tell us, tell us!' And the Founder is suddenly mute with tears.
Like Ulysses escaping the Cyclops in the cave, the students must approach Barbee's story with cunning to match the blinding light of his language, and like Ulysses, must catch hold of the sacred and the profaned aspects of their history under-the-belly, and hold on for dear life — as Ulysses says, "so I caught hold of the ram by the back, esconced myself in the thick wool under his belly and hung on patiently to his fleece, face upwards keeping a firm hold on it all of the time." For the students would need to reverse so much of Barbee's speech and to reveal the truths from oral history handed along by the great story-tellers, truths that he constantly subordinates and coun termands. This is a central problem for a young Negro confronted by all of the distortions of that peasant, underground history — a fact that the Klan-beset snowy-headed man in Homer JSarbee's saga-speil knows only too well. Ellison is concerned there in the Barbee-Founder-Bledsoe trinity, as it were, with the unquestioned reverence for leadership that still seems to haunt certain groups within the race vulnerable to the cult of the personality, especially when touched by the fires of political- religious enterprise. But there is a yeasty truth in Barbee's saga. Barbee know the language of power, and he manipulates it as it manipulates him — and in that sense he's masking the wisdom of his peasant tongue. Similarly, it is not so much what Brother Jack says about the party but the fact that he lost his eye which keeps him from facing his underground history. When his false eye drops out into the glass of water in a moment of confrontation with the hero late in the novel (over The Invisible Man's unauthorized speech for Tod Clifton), he must drop the party line that covers his vision and babble back into his peasant tongue or into the obscuring language of power. The dropping out of Jack's eye recalls the revelation of Barbee's blindness at the end of his speil, as he trips in his darkness after having maintained his verbal high-wire act with such deftness, symmetry of line, and balance of power. It recalls chaos-loving Rhinehart's manipulative speil of eloquence that extracts hand-outs from the blinded, lamb-innocent church ladies. Rhinehart's speil is tied to the profane eloquence of chaos-destroyed, hyper-sensitive Tod
85 Clifton, whose street-corner speil about the sambo-doll — that it will be whatever you want it to be — reflects the gist of what the streetcorner hustler tells all slum-dwellers hungry to be recognized or loved. Even in small segments of the novel we see how these clusters, formulas and influences operate with Ellison's materials. Chapter Nine starts off soon after the hero gets to Harlem on his way to Mr. Emerson to check out the job reference letter given to him by the powerful black president. The hero was booted out, you will recall, because quite by accident he showed the white trustee, Norton, the underground of Negro life and the black madness manifested at the riotous Golden Day, and showed him as well the base human passions (and by indirection Norton's own purposeful passion) revealed by Jim Trueblood's eloquent saga of incest. Now our hero starts off with the Purpose of finding a job but early on he runs into a Bluesman whose song celebrates the powerful, sexually fulfilling catharsis he achieves from his love-making lady, whose praises he sings, as follows:
She's got feet like a monkey Legs like a frog — Lawd, Lawd: But when she starts to loving me I holler Whoo, God-Dog! Cause I loves my Baabay, Better than I do myself. . .
Now this blues song celebrates the fulfiling sex life of a poor bluesman at the bottom, whose woman's beauty is questionable according to standards of beauty in the upper-world. Yet their sex life is an affirming glory of life at the bottom, and it leads him to swear that he loves her better than he does himself. The second point is this: the blues singer is certain about his identity, about who he is sexually; and as it turns out, he is a fierce individualist who tries to tell the hero to be what he is, not to masquerade himself, not to deny the bluesman. Now towards the end of the chapter the hero comes to discover and recognize his new fate, when he finds out that the masquerading trickster, Dr. Bledsoe, indeed has written the hero out of history and driven him towards the unattainable horizon, not with a job reference letter as the hero assumed, but rather with a prank piece of paper that says in effect — "To Whom It May Concern, Keep This Nigger-Boy Running." But now at this agony-filled, perception- sharpening junction, another kind of song comes bubbling up to the
86 surface of the hero's consciousness, rescuing him from self-pity — a mock dirge, played traditionally in the Oklahoma area. After a burial Negro Jazz musicians would light up into this dirge once they hit the Negro business section of town. It expresses the attitudes Central to the black man's memory of his history, that if he is to survive he must not allow himself to wallow in self-pity over death, or over the constant dream-shattering, death-dealing experience that is his fate. His mocked fate. The dirge goes:
O Well, they picked poor Robin clean O Well, they picked poor Robin clean Well, they tied poor Robin to a stump Lawd, they picked all the feathers 'round from Robin's rump Well, they picked poor Robin clean.
The bluesman's song is filled with life, possibility, affirmation of love and identity through fundamental sexual confrontation and confirmation. The dirge stands in apparent opposition, since it comes at the time of a Death; yet it is life giving and intelligence heightening, even as it is innocence destroying — mocking our hero's false pride and his naive hero worship of Bledsoe. The song mocks and thereby instructs him that each person must constantly die, or shed the skin of his innocence, in order to grow. The mock dirge comes after a moment of the hero's mock murder, through the pen of bloody Bledsoe. Finally,the song says that savage experience picks us clean of the plumage-like illusions round our baby-soft, rounded rumps and leaves us picked clean to the bone of our innocence — but then, perhaps that is indeed the necessary price of eating of the forbidden fruit of experience and knowledge. Unlike the Blues, "which allows no scapegoat but the self," the dirge allows us to "lighten our load by becoming one with the bird, as he symbolically takes over our bone-picked sorrow." This pattern of death, agony, and mocking affirmation or momen tary re-birth informs the entire novel, but is pointedly suggested in that marvelous skeleton of a call-and-response sermon by the black minister in the prologue. There, in the cellar of the hero's racial consciousness where Ellison's version of Underground Man is dwelling, the preacher says, "I said black is . . . an' black ain't . . . Black will git you and black won't... It do, Lawd ... an it don't — Black will make you ... or black will unmake you." Bledsoe, the black president of the college has undone the hero. And minister Barbee, looks through a glass darkly, never face to face. But it is a
87 black dirge that souringly surges forth from the underground racial past and it helps rescue, school, and repair the hero at the j unction in Chapter Nine. Here again the movement from affirmation through denial to affirmation, or from thesis to counter-thesis to synthesis is treated dialectically as it was by the man at the bottom, the bluesman, Peter Wheatstraw. The bluesman is 'doubled' with the hero in the Dostoyevskian sense. The street-wise bluesman knows everything about Northern idiom and what it takes to get along in this here man's town and on the lower frequencies; and yet Peter Wheatstraw is lost and homeless in the world of power, unable at the higher frequencies to manipulate its symbols or to manifest his vision, and he's uneducated in the school sense. At the other end The Invisible Man is lost in the streets of Harlem and is also homeless in the world of power, indeed the most powerful man in his world has just kicked him out of this world (upstairs, you might say, to the North) to Harlem, which is, of course, nowhere. And The Invisible Man is under-educated in the street sense. On the other hand, there is synthesis possible for the hero if he but trusts his underground peasant intelligence and memory. For as the hero reflects upon one riff in Peter Wheatstraw's speil he thinks,
I liked his words though I didn't know the answer. I'd known the stuff from childhood, but had forgotten it; had learned it back of school.
But at this junction, too, the hero and the Bluesman are tied . . i. together again because it is very important to him that this 'new-boy' in town not deny him. Peter Wheatstraw's concern is almost prophetic because, at the end of the chapter, the hero is to be denied by his Peter, Herbert Bledsoe. Bledsoe is glad to see him at first and then denies him privately. The fear of being denied by race brother, by public power, and by father figures sets the stage for the hero's next confrontation. In the middle of Chapter Nine, the hero undergoes the Passion phase of Burke's law via a confrontation with young Emerson, a man of shattered dreams, denied personal fulfillment, at the top of the economic spectrum. His sexuality is confused and so is his identity about a host of subjects, ranging from the way he really feels about Blacks to the ambivalence about his powerful father, who has figuratively devoured his son, like Cronus did unto Zeus. Young Emerson, a homosexual undergoing a form of psychoanalysis which apparently brings him no affirmation, stands then in direct opposi tion to the solidly based blues-singing, dirt-poor, black man of the
88 streets at the beginning of the chapter, who knows who he is. Yet this pairing also recalls the Norton-Trueblood pairing and doubling. And this pairing also recalls the old American story of the man who has everything and nothing: young Emerson is rich, white, free and 21, yet he really has nothing but a world of confusion; and the bluesman has nothing but a batch of blueprints showing his dreams of powerful towns and country clubs that he will never erect. He has everything, though, in a real woman who loves him with a great, sexual power, even though her beauty, at the lower frequencies, is invisible to all but the naked eye. It is young Emerson, the homosexual, who unfolds the truth of the letter to the hero, just as it is the remarkable looking lady of the bluesman who gives him the sexual, naked truth and renders him a celebrant of her naked powers, body and soul. One recalls how it is the blind hermaphrodite, Tiresias, who bears to Oedipus the truth below the king's self- righteous existence. But the homosexual at the top and the bluesman at the bottom are also linked; for both are existential outlaws in our society, yet at the same time both are high-priests from the peripheral underground, warning the hero of hidden reality. (Tangentially, we might reflect here that so many of our current musical dance patterns have their genesis in black bars on the one hand, and Gay bars on the other, long before we all began to dance, dance to the music.) Indeed one recalls that young Emerson tells the hero about a kind of peripheral bar, the Club Calamus . . .
You haven't? It's very well known. Many of my Harlem friends go there. It's a rendezvous for writers, artists and all kinds of celebrities. There's nothing like it in the city, and by some strange twist it has a truly continental flavor.
At this point the Hero has undergone a mini-motif of Lord Raglan's pattern in this chapter — he has figuratively died, under gone an underground agony, and been re-born tougher and more perceptive and able to laugh at himself. Finally the wonderful speil delivered by the bluesman as he is advising our hero has provided the first confrontation the Southern born hero has with a Northern black and it is significant that, although they are speaking the same language, he hardly understands the bluesman's transformed tongue, at first. Migrate from one part of America to another and you are often lost in terms of idiomatic meaning. Yet in the case of the black man the genesis of language has an ancestral underground root in the Old Country of the Southland. To show Ellison's many dimensioned
89 use of idiom, let me now attempt to unravel one of his Bluesman's riffs:
"All it takes to get along in this here man's town is a little shit, grit and mother-wit. And man, I was bawn with all three. In fact I'm seventhsonofaseventhsonbawnwitha cauloverbotheyesandraisedonblackcatboneshighjohnthe conquerorand greasygreens," he spieled with twinkling eyes, his lips working rapidly. "You dig me daddy?"
Let me suggest that here Ellison is rendering up the fusion of myth and lore which is the genesis of Negro/Black/white/Afro-American idiomatic versification. "The seventh son of a seventh son" comes from the Scottish-English influence upon the former slaves and suggests how myth-bound and haunted the slave-holders were and refers to one who is born lucky. "Bawn with a caul over both eyes" suggests one who is born with the gift of clairvoyance; and has an Ashanti linkage from the African aspect of the heritage. "Raised on black cat bones" is from the hiro-American version of Voodoo and the context is this: in Voodoo, which always reverses meaning (as does so much of Negro idiom): you throw a live black cat into a boiling pot of hot water; after the flesh has fallen away you pick out its bones and gnaw away, and if you are lucky, and gnaw down upon the right bone, you will become invisible. "High John the Con queror" is a mythical hero from slavery, an invisible hero who sided with the slaves, during bad times, with good advice. And "greasy- greens," of course, refers to African-American cuisine, in the old country Southland. The hero's presence in the North at this time in the novel recalls the migration from the South to the North of blacks who came, often on the run, pursuing the dream of a peaceful kingdom, jobs and personal fulfillment. But the hero's dream becomes a nightmare through a mocking note that, unbeknown to him, reads: "To Whom It May Concern: Keep This Nigger Boy Running." It is significant, and one of the ironies of the meshing of race and class, that (while looking for employment) the hero discovers this dimension of his representative fate in the north from a rich white entrepreneur's son whose mock employment has brought him no fulfillment. But it is even more significant that the hero first recalls the "Nigger Boy Running" joke via a recalled dream that he has of his grandfather, at the end of Chapter I, j ust after he wins his scholarship
90 to the Negro college. For in the dream, through his grandfather, the hero is ritually warned and instructed.
To open my brief case and read what was inside — next to the scholarship — and I did, finding an official envelope stamped with the state seal; and inside the envelope I found another and another endlessly and I thought I would fall of weariness. Them's years, he said, Now open that document containing a short message in letters of gold. Read it, my grandfather said. Out Loud! "To Whom It May Concern, I intoned, Keep This Nigger Boy Running."
And there is an underground story beneath this memory. For in the old South, a form of black-baiting which had its genesis in slavery would proceed as follows: a Negro newcomer would arrive upon the scene, looking for gainful employment; he would go to a prospective white employer. This ordinary small town white businessman would immediately spot the fact that this was not one of the local blacks and would tell the black outsider that he did not have work at this time but that he did know of someone who might have jobs available down the road, perhaps. The white businessman would then give the horizon-seeking black a sealed letter to take to the next prospective employer. Upon reaching the next white man, the letter would be presented, opened by the white man, read and mused over, and then the Negro would hear the same old story — "No Jobs" here but perhaps "Up the road" and then the white merchant would scribble something on the note, reseal the communique (like the Negro's fate) and then hand the letter back to the out-reaching dark hand. This would happen again and again, until the black finally opened the letter and read the message, or got the message, and read out his symbolic fate (or some variation upon the theme): "To Whom It May Concern, Keep This Nigger Boy Running." This brutal joke of course had its antecedents in slavery, when many or most slaves couldn't read or write, and could only go from plantation to plantation with a note signed by the Master, or his earthly representative. The slave didn't in fact know what might or might not be written down on that note. And although this tortuous ritual or bad-faith convenant came from the pastoral scenes of the gallant South, actually the "jobs" search and its attendant mocking ceremony were often played out in the industrial North. Or more to the point, the duplicity operative at the Paint Factory in Invisible Man, which in fact did hire our nameless hero,
91 but only as a scab (union strike buster), signified the way industrial bosses pitted the racial and ethnic groupings of the underclasses against each other. And when The Invisible Man's day-labor was used up he was discarded and put on tentative welfare after signing some papers which freed him from work — new slave papers meant to quiet his aggressive appetite for employment. It is structurally salient that Ellison establishes early the ancestral tie with the grandfather's folk voice, via the underground avenue of the dream. For the grandfather's appearance and intelligence in the dream is the deeper underground railroad reality beneath the American Dream for the Negro. And the grandfather is the oldest ancestor within the hero's family memory. And who is the grand father's authority? No doubt the oldest member of the tribe in his memory, perhaps his grandfather — and then we are back into slavery; so that in a highly oral culture the grandfather is the proper high-priest to pass on mythical reality and survival wisdom from the battle-zone. Throughout the novel, a warning or extolling voice issues forth from underground (often coming to the hero's aid, like Tarp's voice at the bottom of the Brotherhood) during moments of agony, conflict, trial, public and private passion. And (like the rescuing dirge, or High John the Conqueror) this intelligence informs his hard won experience, thereby constantly presenting the reader with a hero's awareness or perception that is heightened. Not all of the underground warning voices confer benefits upon the hero as they warn him, however, as Lucius Brockway, in the underground of the paint factory, demonstrates. Brockway becomes a most trying combination of Tar-Baby and Proteus for the Invisible Man. Now in some cases the ancestral voice comes directly out of the remembering hero's own past, as did the rescuing dirge. The second kind of ancestral voice issues from the hero's consciousness when he recalls moments from his own personal history, which then leads to racial memory as did the dream of the grandfather. The third kind of historical-ancestral linkage comes from symbols or specific items which don't touch the hero's own past but which form a lucid part of his racial memory and the consciousness of the race, in the Joycean sense, suggesting then a duty and a task and a covenant or responsibility to the ancestral community. Now these symbolic objects surge forth at moments of Passion or trial. For instance, when the hero, late in the novel, discovers another kind of "Keep this Nigger Boy Running" note on his desk at the Brotherhood's office, Brother Tarp, the man at the bottom of the organization, gives the hero a pictur e of Frederick Douglass, our man at the top of Negro leadership in the 19th century. Later Tarp gives
92 the hero his own leg irons, retained from a chain gang. The hero must learn to trust those symbolic ancestral tokens, voices, or manifestations^*— yet he must sort out the consulting surge of past and present counsellors. Indeed one of the hero's many agonies is to learn not to accept the advice from authority figures without question and to wrestle with advice until he's made it his own and understood it, or spurned it, or accepted it and by accepting it, made certain he's reshaped the advice to fit his own experience. For the other side of the most profane or the healthiest advice is that it renders the hero somebody's "running boy" and does not allow him to be his own man. So, motifs involving power, sex, women, images of light and dark, broken taboos, Afro-American folklore, papers of importance, quests for identity and responsibility, individualism, music, violence, uses of eloquence, all come in clusters and order the improvisations of Ellison's orchestated novel. Here we can see the influence of William Faulkner's Light in August, in which the major scenes are ordered by the presence of sex, women, food, money and in turn connected with images of light and dark, religion and slavery, as integrating forces which undergird the associative patterns of each narrative section. In terms of power Ellison is constantly improvising upon the whole plantation system as a metaphor for understanding American institutions. This improvisation on the plantation-like hierarchy can be seen in the "descent" section of the Prologue, in the pecking order at the Paint Factory Scene, in life at Mary Rambo's rooming house, in the Brotherhood, at the college, at the Battle-Royal smoker and at the Golden Day. Connected with this imagery of the plantation; is another, deeper dimension of Ellison's metaphoric patterning, in which he projects a symbolic model of American history — thereby joining the very select company of Melville, Hawthorne and especially Faulkner in this recombining of metaphorical vision with history. All of Faulkner's major works involving the Black presence, it seems to me, possess this epic design. For instance in Absalom, Absalom! the 'design' of metaphor can be read in the following manner: let the French architect stand for America's 'borrowed' French principles of refine ment, creativity, artistry, ideals of Culture, freedom and liberty (indeed our fitful intellectual indebtedness to the French Revolution) and let Sutpen stand for American know how, cunning, outlandish daring, bigotry, savage frontiersmanship-hustle, furious energy and industry, and white-ethnic class hatred; and let the Negro slaves of Sutpen's Hundreds stand as the enslaved bases of the American economic order.
93 Sutpen must reduce all others to "niggers" (blacks, women, his family, outside family, poor whites, his son) as he hacks his insanely ambitious way to the top. The new American Adam must reduce the French architect, at the other end of the social spectrum, to a sub human, to a nigger, once he has used up the architect's expertise. And he then attempts to free his body from Sutpen's clutches. Sutpen in turn re-enacts a mock French revolution by bringing down the French aristocrat-artist. But the French architect only flees when he discovers that he too is enslaved — thus the synthesis between slave and aristocrat is forged by slavery's chains. And the French architect's flight and Sutpen's pursuit of him with hound-dogs recalls that of a runaway slave and the ritual pursuit by hound dogs.
Dostoyevsky's hero in Notes From Underground, and the illu mined Invisible Man of the Ellison Prologue and Epilogue, are manifestations of hyper-awareness and terror concerning the inner meanness of the outer world: they observe it as a treacherous terrain. Structurally the Prologue contains within it all of the materials needed for Ellison's invention; and the core of the work then goes on to illustrate and orchestrate these materials. In Underground Man's world, Part I is a presentation of the Arguments and in Part II we have the illustrations. Notes From Underground can be seen as a monologue rich with personal and political commentary. The grand sweep of the many monologues in Invisible Man carry a similar personal, politcal 'doubleness'. But Ellison's monologues have a kind of epic grandness that go beyond Dostoyevsky. Witness for example, Trueblood's saga and Barbee's sermon. At every turn in Notes, Underground Man is out to shock the reader, to shock reason itself. The Invisible Man is out to shake the reader into an awareness that is streaked with a soured humour and a great gift for hyperbole. Both novels are within the tradition of the memoir, and like Notes, Invisible Man is seasoned in the tradition of confessional literature of the seductive underground diary. The Russia of Underground Man's day was highly repressive, and so for Ellison's hyper-aware man there is ever the feeling of alienation and dispossession. (And you will recall that The Invisible Man's second public address treats the theme of Dispossession and he uses it in his third address at the stadium). In Dostoyevsky's Russia you either accepted your socio-economic status as your fate or you dropped out. No mobility. Faced with the fitful combination of power, race and wrenching leadership, The Invisible Man faces a comparable terrain, cut off in the cellar from upward movement. Perhaps even more in keeping with the vaulting, scorning attitude of
94 Underground Man are the men in the Golden Day, who remain as Afro-American examples of broken men, though madness has consumed their soured brilliance. Both narrators appear to be on to something concerning the way the normal world of power operates in a system of deceit — especially if you are highly aware, you are apt to be driven to treason. For example after seeing too much, in an ancestal dream of the shattering past in the Prologue, The Invisible Man recalls . . .
And at the point a voice of trombone timbre screamed at me, "Git out of here, you fool! Is you ready to commit treason?"
Both narrators suggest that the mind of highly aware man contains much spite and even vengeance. Underground Man seeks revenge not justice. But the Invisible Man would seek both. There is a sense in both works — particularly in Notes — that hyper-consciousness leads to paralysis. Therefore the only action issues out of a sense of wilfulness and spitefulness. The Invisible Man though, is obsessed with responsibility, and cultural enterprise, and the rage for freedom that remains a viable ancestral imperative. The Invisible Man however, frets about overstaying his time of contemplation in the underground and knows he is bound to come up; he seeks love, and spite can only lead to disintegration of personality, as in those memorable figures in the Golden Day. Ultimately of course going underground is a kind of psychological going within oneself for both narrators. Ralph Ellison starts out wanting to reverse the idea, current at the time he conceived Invisible Man, that the Negro was invisible. The narrator says "I am invisible simply because you refuse to see me." But having committed himself to assaulting the current sociological metaphor of the day, Ellison turns the metaphor into a dialectic vision of modern America as a briar-patch. The metaphor of invisibility is 'doubly' enriched by his constant allusions to the plantation system. The logic is as follows: Thesis: You (society) say I'm a slave. Counter-thesis: but I'm not a slave in my soul, nor in my mind. Synthesis: I'll admit that slavery is the system in which I dwell, but I only see myself as slave in that system if you'll accept the metaphor of how the system enslaves us all, Master . . . And because I've lived with this knowledge longer, I've learned how to make the plantation my briar patch; though it enslaves my body I have learned how to keep my mind and spirit free from its damnation of the spirit.
95 And Master, economically your survival depends upon my body's productivity in the slave system that obsesses your mind and spirit. Alternatively The Invisible Man asks himself, and us, as he weaves through the possible meanings of the grandfather's advise in the Epilogue, Was it that we of all, we, most of all, had to affirm the principle, the plan in whose name we had been brutalized and sacrificed — because we would always be weak nor because we were afraid or opportunities, but because we were older than they, in the sense of what it took to live in the world, with others and because they had exhausted in us, some — not much, but some — of the human greed and smallness, yes, and the fear and superstition that had kept them running.
Like Dostoyevsky's Underground Man, The Invisible Man puts down the idea of racial invisibility; he embraces the metaphor, assaults it, then reverses it. He discovers at the height of the race riots in Harlem that he cannot return to Mary's either, that he is invisible to Mrs. Rambo as he is to Jack, Ras, and Bledsoe. For like Underground Man, he discovers that statistical computations for the collective good, or institutional asylums for the individual's good, or visions of the individual's good by powerful figures and forces constantly leave out one important impluse: man's urge and capacity to conceptualize his humanity beyond statistics and regimentation; his willfulness to do what he wants, in the underground economy of his imagination, to turn a plantation into an underground briar- patch or a hostile terrain into the sources and resource-points of escape via the mind's underground railroad. For finally The Invisible Man is underground, indeed; but he has decided that it is time to end his hibernation and come up to meet a new level of experience. And although it is plain to me at the end of the novel, our hero, re-born, is about to emerge from his womb of safety in the underground; and it is also clear that he is trapped in a personal way between two voices. For as he acknowledges:
Thus having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge. And there's still a conflict within me: with Louis Armstrong one half of me says, "Open the window and let the foul air out, "while the other says, "It was a good green corn before the harvest."
96 Now the 'Green corn' motif comes from a Leadbelly song and refers to a state of innocence before the harvest of experience. Innocence is beautiful but it carries dangerous naivete with it — a naive skin that our hero sheds. But first of all the hero hears a lyrical line from the man who makes poetry out of invisibility, Louis Armstrong, a song which suggests the sophisticated, toughened shape the hero's perception of reality has taken on out of the furnace-like bad air of passion and conflict which has been his experience throughout the life of the novel. The line refers to a song by Buddy Bolden which Louis Armstrong — also known as Dipper-Mouth and Bad-Air — used to sing.
I thought I heard Buddy Bolden say, Funky-Butt, Funky-Butt, take it away, I thought I heard somebody shout, Open up the window and let the foul air out.
The Funky-Butt was a powerhouse jazz night club in New Orleans, where the solos on the horns were as furious and glorious as the sex act itself, filled with bad air and ecstatic charges, Savage thrusts and stellar flourishes. Armstrong, as a kid of ten used to stand outside the door of the Funky-Butt and listen to Bolden, the great jazz trumpeter who ended up in a madhouse, blowing and singing and wailing. Bolden would sing the song in tribute to the funkiness and the foul air in the dance hall caused by the jelly-tight dancing. Without the liberating bad air, that riffs through the chamber of the good-bad horn of plenty (which also resembles the chamber from whence all life emerges) you can't have the real music of life, nor the dance. For as the hero comments,
Of course Louis was kidding he wouldn't have thrown old Bad-Air out, because it would have broken up the music and the dance, when it was the good music that came from the bell of old Bad-Air's horn that counted.
97 Melvin Dixon
O, MARY RAMBO, DON'T YOU WEEP
I would like to focus our attention briefly on an episode of Invisible Man that is less familiar to general readers, less familiar because it was edited out of the original manuscript and published separately ten years later as "Out of the Hospital and Under the Bar," in the anthology Soon One Morning.' This episode depicts in greater detail and with considerable narrative flourish just what happens to the nameless protagonist in the hospital during his recovery from the explosion at the Liberty Paint Factory, and how Mary Rambo, the ward cleaning lady, helps him escape to Harlem. The action goes like this: the protagonist awakens under the glass lid of a machine and sees Mary gesticulating above him, making signs. She unbolts the lid, lifts it slightly with great effort but enough to give the protagonist water and a pork sandwich — "what a down- home boy" needs. As she learns of his nameless identity and amnesia she refuses to believe him and grows more disgusted with his apparent unwillingness to escape. To gain her approbation and further aid, the boy invents a tall tale describing his sudden departure from the south because he had struck back at a white man, possibly killing him. Mary's confidence is gained through this fabricated tale-within-a-tale and the heroic posture the boy assumes. She brings him an herbal mixture to revive the atrophied muscles of his arms, which she has just untied, and offers him refuge in her Harlem apartment once he's able to leave the hospital. The protagonist leaves the machine, putting the body of a dead youth in his place. He then escapes to the basement. Chased by the white doctors he meets there, he discovers an adjoining underground passage which leads him safely to the basement of a Harlem bar. But there he faces recapture, this time by irate black bartenders. He escapes through the sewer, out the manhole cover and into the streets. Naked. He is greeted by several men who dub him Tyrone — for the daring lover he must have been to "grab window" when the husband returned to the unfaithful wife. They provide him with clothes and the hero then proceeds to Mary's address having recovered, in the act of escape, the memory of his initial flight north, of Bledsoe's cruel letters, and of his present predicament. All this occurs before the hero learns or is ready to learn the philosophical connection between self and yams.
98 Reviewing the plot of "Out of the Hospital. . ." let us reflect on its structural significance to Invisible Man. I, for one, understand more clearly now Ellison's use of the vernacular idiom and what he means by the vernacular process. To reveal my understanding, or lack of it, I thought of several titles for this essay: "How I Spent My Summer Operation, by I. Needa Name"; or, "Where Are Those Weary Blues: Blue Cross, Blue Shield?" But I settled finally on a third possibility. Fugitive slaves and former Fisk Jubilee Singers beware because the tune is catchy:
Mary Rambo you better weep, you better moan Pharoah's army is everywherel
Which brings us to my real subject: Mary Rambo, herself. I want to suggest that Mary Rambo, more than any other character, is the pivotal guide in the hero's effort to discover and to articulate the form of his identity and experience. He learns that this form is housed in a vernacular consciousness, not in the alien ideology of the Brotherhood or of industrial capitalism, or in racial absorption. This is one of the major themes of Invisible Man, and it is dramatized effectively in the missing episode. Ellison once acknowledged the episode's importance in an interview published in Chant of Saints. "It probably would have worked better in [the novel]," he said, which echoes his earlier sentiments in the Author's Note prefacing the published episode: "Mary Rambo deserved more space in the novel and would, I think, have made it a better book" (p. 243). In this regard, Ellison has often discussed; the importance of character and folklore. He has argued that the complexity of American culture lies in its vernacular idiom, which includes that process by which "we blend folk and classical modes into an art that is uniquely American."2 There is a technology inherent in this process, I would add. Ellison goes on to describe the American tradition as a "mixture of vernacular styles," those patterns of speech and manners that make us who we are and confirm our identity in a given cultural community. In Invisible Man, Mary Rambo dramatizes for the hero's own education the vernacular style and the cultural syncretism which are at the core of Afro-American and American experience. And she becomes the primary agent for the protagonist's maturation, even though journey underground and the narrative meant to explain such a retreat are incomplete and leave us with only the promise of his re-entry into society.
99 Unlike Mary Rambo of the published novel, a more matronly figure who prods the hero into assuming responsibility and leader ship, the Mary Rambo of "Out of the Hospital" has a larger, more aggressive character, and she reveals Ellison's appreciation for her femininity and her strength. The author depicts the hero as someone confined to the industrial hospital, indeed imprisoned by it, yet unable and unwilling to examine or to relieve his physical and mental enslavement. Enter Mary Rambo, the hero's most eager antagonistic co-operator, one so fully inbued with folk wisdom and an impulse for rebellion that she overrides the hero's attempt to limit her to stereotype or himself to passivity. The hero lies prone. Mary gets on top. She pries open the glass lid of the incubator-like machine with "work-swollen fingers." Her strength is apparent to the hero, he tells us, " as if freeing people from intricate machines was a usual thing." But this Mary Rambo remains no mere Harriet Tubman of the machine age, nor is she just another slave elder like the one who supplied Frederick Douglass with a conjure root to protect his escape north. Indeed, Mary does supply the hero with an herbal mixture from down-home which gives him the needed energy to complete his escape, but not until he has become accountable to his personal history, his hidden name, and his membership in an ancestral folk community: "Don't come telling me you don't remember," she chides the hero whom she refers to as "the gamest young scamp I most ever see." The hero's encounter with Mary is further dramatized by the contrast between his formal style of narration and Mary's colloquial speech, and between Mary's folk technology and his near blind faith in the scientific method. At first sight Mary appears above the machine mouthing "shucks" in staccato counterpoint to his lengthy description of his hospitalization. The hero sees Mary only as a stereotypical matriarch, which reveals his sexism, immaturity, and propensity for racial prejudgement. He calls her an "ignorant, unscientific old woman," whose painful efforts to free him produce only "animal" sounds. Mary, on the other hand, sees heroic potential in him and imagines that he is close in character to John Henry or Jack-the-Bear by his obvious trickster airs and potential physical strength. Her vision is shaped by a vernacular consciousness which values folk idiom as reference. The hero's vision, however, is marred by the values he has acquired in a pretentious upward mobility, the result of which, we know, is his alienating descent underground. The protagonist further dismisses the woman by calling her 'this old Mary," meaning a Sapphire or Aunt Jemima figure, before she has even introduced herself. In so doing, the hero proves himself not
100 above the fault of obscuring her identity with convenient disparaging labels as other have done to him, calling him "Brother," or "Rhinehart,"or "Tyrone," or nothing at all. Ironically, her name is Mary and the larger meaning Ellison may intend by her character still eludes the naive and nameless protagonist. It is precisely in Mary's name that we learn more about the intrinsic value of her vernacular character. And she emerges as a woman who is very different from Ellison's other female characters. Unlike the silent women who are the victims of Trueblood's incest and the recurrent telling of that tale, or the prologue's slave woman riddled with ambivalence about poisoning the master-lover-husband, or even white Sybil who is caricatured as confusing "the class struggle with the ass struggle" in arguing for the Woman Question, Mary Rambo vanquishes racial and sexual oppression. She is not the female Sambo the hero initially thinks she is or wants her to be in order to legitimize his rejection of her in his quest for individuality. More accurately, she is the woman chosen to bear the nameless hero into the adult world — a conception which would be as immaculate as in the Christian tradition were it not for the grime of the paint factory or the protagonist's duplicitous and stubborn naivete. Furthermore, Mary Rambo, in Ellison's refashioned myth, may be another kind of Mary Magdalene. She redeems herself from the stereotype of black woman as whore, prostitute, or mammy, and acquires the status of one among those women who discover that the stone or lid has been rolled away from the grave (dare I say, machine or incubator?), and who redeem Christ for posterity by announcing his resurrection. This Biblical allusion is corroborated by the hero's own recollection of Handel's Messiah, which may also reveal the hero's exaggerated self-esteem:
Hallelujah — Boom! Hallelujah — Crash! He's risen — Smash!
Not with a whimper, Ellison suggests, but a bang.
These classical and folk references underscore the importance of Mary Rambo's action in the episode. She dramatizes Ellison's reverence for the vernacular. Far from being a female stereotype, she is a female archetype, one whose character resonates among other courageous and resourceful women in history. Or, for that matter, men; for Mary's lifting the lid from the hero's confinement by white
101 doctors recalls Du Bois' effort to lift the veil from the confinement of "viewing ourselves through the eyes of others." The protagonist, however, continues to exercise only the freedoms white men grant him. Even when his arms are free of the leather straps which bind him to the machine, he hesitates.
Two physicians stood above me, one with a microscope like instrument. . . I felt myself filling with silent rage as I realized that I was no freer than before simply because they refused to acknowledge my freedom (p. 258-59).
The acknowledgement or practice of freedom is something that neither Mary Rambo nor Du Bois should provide. Like Frederick Douglass and Henry Bibbs — who needed more than a conjure root to find their way across the 'River Jordan' into free territory — the hero needs self-reliance. He must reaffirm a similar resolve: "It's your River Jordan, you have to cross over it." Still, the protagonist is reluctant to discard his previous misconceptions about Mary or the efficacy of her lore. He laments his partial freedom with nearly the same despair that Douglass felt when learning to read as a slave increased his knowledge of freedom but did not achieve it. Douglass once wrote:
I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy. It opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but to no ladder upon which to get out (Narrative, p. 42).
Ellison's hero not only sees the pit, he must wade through it. His lament is the same: "I had thought all that need be done to free myself was to have my arms released, but now I was as far from freedom as before, perhaps even farther." Yet, continuing to mistake Mary Rambo for Mary Sambo and limiting her ability to the realm of superstition not belief, he still yearns for an alien industrial technology and someone "trained in the intricacies of the machine" to free him. He asks:
Why hadn't old Mary been a nurse, a technician, a doctor? Or a lawyer with a writ of habeas corpus? Then instead of getting me into a worse predicament than before, she might have given me some real assistance (p. 257).
102 The hero's frustration that Mary "had partly freed me and rendered me more insecure" echoes Douglass's sentiments exactly. But only later does the protagonist acquire the courage to journey forth into the wilderness, and, finally, to transcend a collective racial past and memory:
Lincoln freed the slaves, I remember that. He freed the field niggers, and the house niggers and the stud niggers; the red niggers and the white niggers, and the yellow niggers and the blue niggers — and I'm freeing me. . .I'm climbing out... (p. 265).
Only by wading through the horrible pit will he come upon the ladder leading out of the sewer and into open territory. Just as Douglass needed to reinterpret the signs and symbols of the slave community, notably the spirituals and lore of conj ure, in order to uncover its technology, Ellison's hero must imbibe the root mixture proffered by Mary's 104 year old mother. The centenarian's credentials as an able practioner of folk technology and her experience in the vernacular values are established by her continued good health, productive garden, and physical longevity. Mary tells us, "Her hearing's good and she don't need no glasses and her teeth's better'n mine. . . She's a smart woman too. Useta sing alto, grow the best crops in the county, and right now she knows more about roots and herbs and midwifery and things than anybody you ever seen" (p. 260-61). Importantly, Mary administers this root. She has not created it herself. Her role in the episode enlarges further as she becomes an intermediary between the protagonist and the folklore of her Mama and her Mama's mama "who knew about it a long time." Mary's female character in this matrilineal heritage suggests that she bridges historical time. This same remedy may have been applied to others earlier in history and in a similar state of muscular atrophy due to long confinement. Mary exemplifies another dualism, as both the daughter of a conjure woman and a worker in the factory hospital. She links the world of science and industry with the world of nature and vernacular knowledge. She emerges as a technician of the folk, a representative of the cultural syncretism which lies at the root, if you will, of American civilization. Furthermore, Mary Rambo mediates between the poles of an apparent racial dichotomy and an insidious class struggle. Ellison, however, balances the extreme tensions between blacks and whites her actions reveal by emphasizing an opposition of consciousness
103 rather than color or class. Mary is black, and so is the protagonist. But he must free himself from the white world of the factory hospital, where microscopes are the instruments which confine him to further experimentation in the incubator, just as forcefully as he must free himself from the darkness of the Harlem bar, where the saxophone and trumpet are instruments which may yet confine him to the jukebox or segregation. The protagonist must move through the hospital, through its basement and underground passageway, under, then finally, above the bar. When he emerges reborn as "naked as ever he was born into the world," we realize that the architect and the Moses of this middle passage from hospital to bar, from nigger in the incubator to nigger in the coal pile, was Mary Rambo herself. Rambo's full character as depicted in this episode encapsulates the major drama of self-realization at the heart of Invisible Man. Rather than forget this episode, we should view the hero's dilemma and progress in the larger context of Ellison's conception of the novel and the centrality of Mary Rambo. Let's not limit our critical perspective to the textual borders of the published version. The next time the Red Sea appears as*a formidable barrier and we offer the vernacular idiom to command a way across, we should remember the woman to whom we announce that triumph in song:
O Mary don't you weep, don't you moan Pharoah's army got drownded.
NOTES
•Edited by Herbert Hill (New York: Knopf, 1969), pp. 242-290. Subse quent page references appear in the text. 2"Study and Experience: An Interview with Ralph Ellison," Chant of Saints eds. Michael Harper and Robert B. Stepto (Urbana: LJniversity of Illinois Press, 1979), p. 467.
104 Michael S. Harper
HEMP
The Big E. is still making up complexity; he can't be stolen from — his long black tongue isn't nearly as deadly as his memory which is of the frontier, the fiber and floor covering, the blossom and elixir of bhang and hashish, and the pen is quick: the seeds are used as food for caged birds
and so the Big E. enjoys a shared delight, a feast.
The Big E. don't like theft — he got powerful arms, a scarred eyelid, and a pocketknife that has a fast safety and quick release — it has a double-edge sword, it is as black as gunpowder, as red as a hieroglyphic rose; the Big E. is a gangplank with nettles on either side the berry sweet enough for the nightingale to eat, jam of the crow. The Big E. has orchestration — his patterns of the word fling out into destiny as a prairie used to when the Indians were called Kiowa, Crow, Dakota, Cheyenne.
The Big E. aint in love with Indian hating; he don't like phoney dance — he's got his problems with terrain in Mississippi — the great slab of stone on the Mississippi makes you swim —
105 The Big E. likes hawks; he's got time for deer — he can seed watermelon, pumpkins, canteloupe — he got problems with theft, highway robbery — his own name — and he likes the source of things, deeds, and the snakeskin well-wrought and finely earned; he likes the sentiment of defanging — he got two teeth with poison in between, got a hot, tested lip, a sense of ease at the break — he's got a tinker bell likes radio equipment, got tapes in his closet, old coats still in style from the haberdashery shop — has a sense of honor on the dancefloor, don't step on nobody's feet, brings his own smoke, can tan a hide, fish in the stream of the dream, the big dream — looks for the possible in things unwritten; and when it comes to rite, jokes, jokes bad!
NATHAN'S CADENZA
'You will be put out in the short grass'
Your sleek gestures still commence in exclamations, gyrations of the jaw, preacher of the hieroglyph right before our eyes — turning your full face, off-minor and microscoped in the full light of video, in sight of fallen gargoyles, would-be angels, Venus flytrap and the word: communitas as though the congregation could not spell the text, the glottal and the teeth of metaphor: invisibility, full seeing eye of the act and shadow and the grimace of our history.
106 Once, shotgun clean and still-close-shaven from Havana, Hemingway took up the word of bull-ring, of marlin and the bottletop boat which offered only solitude, a small ascendance in the light and dark, and you come straight-arrowed out of that slim volume of the pulpit, symbolism of the earth and fire, and the tonnage of the waters, and of one's feet firmly on the ground.
Mr. Scott, or 'episcopalian monk,' my mother called her grandfather, the missionary who did good time in Evaton, South Africa, "he'd rock in my grandmother's chair, come straight from Philadelphia for a quick, day visit, told once of having one poisonous snake crawl over him, and wild animals and children all ablur in rings of pipe-smoke, and meal- prayer, and of the soapy stoop. my mother was too frightened to sit down upon; not the golden stool, and with no scapula to keep the germs of summer far away — the wild belief of sacred text and forest people of the Serengeti, and of the gnawed body of the spirit and that grace, enunciations of the oaken table and of the books you write, which go unread by multitudes, and of the courage of that spendid composition.
107 STEPTO'S VEIL
I'm not blaming anyone either, but authorial control is a reality, does lie within the nexus of race, and elsewhere also; upstairs, where the saints carouse, upper registers of song, encounters on the levee, and in the stratospheres of Coleman Hawkins — broken on his own wings. I love the landing of a crippled bird, all by himself in any key, the glittering keyboard of a cartoon character's teeth scattered into a dice game. The confrontations of the word are like the grace notes, and if you add a race ritual or two, no harm in epiphanies, the private jokes of cages, arena and the mask of minstrelsy, folksongs underneath the stars.
You pull back the cottonbatting of the great traditons, such privacy and showmanship not only on the baseball field, or in the segregated corners of the dancehalls; I thought I saw you in a cumberbund, tuxedo junction and the white gloves of Bert Williams, who used to court my grandmother while riding horse down 5th Avenue, same avenue our ancestors went down going and coming from France.
I think of Thomas Jefferson's foray into the black section of Marseilles, storing up footnotes for the Louisiana purchase, and since land is personal, the myth of Haiti and the citadel. Which brings me to veils: the doctor would sit in his armchair making notes to the arpeggios of the word;
108 finding no text completely comfortable, he shook out his spats, smoked his last Benson & Hedges, checked the stairwell where he kept his piece, then went out on maneuvers in the midlands of the people. The buildings there were less than grand; there were holes in the canebrake, but the doctor had good eyesight, saw the swamp and campground, heard the music: the trouble with this century is more than history; as for intertextualities: this year's for Charlie Parker, born sixty years ago in August, died my senior year in high school — nobody knew his tunes where I ate my lunch with the sansei boys just out of camp. Solitude, the wound, is hibernation, all the fables of freedom, literate acts, latticed veils and vectors of the cubby hole.
RICHARD YARDE'S BLUES
'the corn is green,' said the musician
Just off the platform, in populist invention, and speaking impassionately of the underside of Vachel Lindsay's 'taking it to the people' I cab uptown to the gallery where Richard Yarde's black face envelopes between the phases of the moon, black faces in the portrait gallery on 57th street, how many blocks from Bird, how many blocks from the Savoy Dancers, project of the tse-tse fly, achilles tendon: "white folks don't want black faces staring at them on their walls," is why the portraits didn't sell; so we went across the street to celebrate over dinner — boys on roller skates pirouetted on the cobbled walks, on splintered alleyways and grandees — and we toasted to the artist.
109 I could have asked him to recite the famous epithets of Leadbelly, just off the chain gang, and evil in tonalities of "Irene," or asked about the fingerings on the twelve string guitar, or why Charlie Christian isn't in the gallery, but his blind father is — or what is musicianship to intermediaries who teach the finger positions to the poor, the popular. 'Your pictures border on the photographic' the reviewer said — photography of the passbook and the blotter where the heroes come to light; I leap upon a subway train, another underground station, on the way to Penn Station, tuxedo junction, and of the painter's pride in Massachusetts.
Frederick Douglass did recruiting for the 54th and you were born in Boston, one site of liberty, the baritones and goosesteps of other interior wars, spectral landscapes, and the close quarters of the colorist, the difficult edges of the nest,(nettles) maneuverings, and of the band on 5th Avenue.
SECRETARY Furnishing of an ancient time gone into oblivion, the vulgar taste and threshold of the sitting room, and so I think of the robbery of my friend in Providence, she asleep upstairs in the Yeatsian quiet of her children, two at home, two in the splintered bogland of the ancestors as Africa goes up and down in liberation and retreat of resources and human pain and blood: correspondences of the scarab and tse-tse in Nefertiti's bosom, in the pagan blanket of the druid attending the moon.
110 I should be writing the great archive of consciousness on the great oak bluff of space under my pen and paper, but my great grandfather's laugh comes to mind, his holding up a large hand full of grapes he'd just plucked from the arbor as the caboose near his window idled by: he bought this place at the deadend of the Catskill brickyard with his winnings from six weeks of tonk and rummy with the boys at the Grand Hotel, who kept all the white waiters out of the lobby, and off the horses at warmup in Saratoga; spas were in then, so was the cuisine of the thumb — the man touching his toes at ninety-six, his coccix touching the doorjamb, braintrust and curtsey of the minstrel banks with the dancing gadget I bought at a flea market for a friend.
I tell you this because, even now, you get called on your irish accent, while searching for the stolen silver of your grandmother, the irish lace on the secretary makes me mute.
I go out to the nettle bush surveying the ivy three and five leaf clovers for the itch and flame of resistance, and write it down.
Ill Robert B. Stepto
LITERACY AND HIBERNATION: RALPH ELLISON'S INVISIBLE MAN
I'm not blaming anyone for this state of affairs, mind you; nor merely crying mea culpa. The fact is that you carry part of your sickness within you, at least I do as an invisible man. I carried my sickness and though for a long time I tried to place it in the outside world, the attempt to write it down shows me that at least half of it lay within me. — Ralph .Ellison, Invisible Man
Anocheci Enfermo Amaneci bueno (I went to bed sick. I woke up well.) — Jay Wright, Dimensions of History
By the time we travel beyond the major work of Richard Wright, Afro-American literature's narrative tradition is still very much alive — even though the texts are rarely termed "narratives" by writer or reader, or consciously placed in an ongoing artistic continuum. However, after Wright it is also clear that the possibilities for significant revoicings of the ascent and immersion narratives (and their accompanying rhetorics) are virtually exhausted. This is not to say that ascent and immersion narratives do not appear in our recent literature; nor is it to say that Afro-American writers are no longer fascinated with creating rhetorics of racial soulfulness and soulless- ness. Indeed, in the last decade the abiding fascination with rhetorics of the former type has become so pronounced that in some quarters it is seen to be an Artistic Movement, and even an Aesthetic.Be this as it may, the fact remains that, after Black Boy in particular, the situation is such that any actual forwarding of the "historical consciousness" of Afro-American narrative must involve some kind of escape from the lockstep imposed by the tradition's dominant and prefiguring narrative patterns. In theory, the logical first stop beyond the narrative of ascent or immersion (a stop which need not be any more generic, in a conventional sense, than were the preceding stops) is one that somehow creates a fresh narrative strategy and arc out of a remarkable combination of ascent and immersion narrative proper ties. In theory, attempts to achieve such remarkable combinations are possible in Afro-American letters anytime after the appearance of The Souls of Black Folk in 1903. In practice, however, very few Afro-American narrativists appear to have comprehended the oppor tunity before, let alone fashioned combinations of merit and of a certain energy.
112 In The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, for example, James Weldon Johnson clearly demonstrates that he has some idea of the symbolic journeys and spaces which the new narrative will require, but his dedication to troping the Du Boisian nightmare of immersion aborted — which, in his hands, is fundamentally a com mitment to expressing a new narrative content — precludes his achieving a new narrative arc. In writing Cane, Jean Toomer takes further than Johnson did the idea of binding new narrative content to new narrative form; but the success of his effort is questionable, since a new narrative arc never really emerges from his aggressive yet orchestrated display of forms and voices. The absence of such an arc is a further indication of Toomer's inability to detail his persona's final posture outside the realms of ascent and immersion. Without this requisite clarification, Cane appears to be an inventive text that can evoke, but not advance, the historical consciousness of its parent forms. Before Invisible Man, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God is quite likely the only truly coherent narrative of both ascent and immersion, primarily because her effort to create a particular kind of questing heroine liberates her from the task (the compulsion, perhaps) of revoicing many of the traditional tropes of ascent and immersion. Of course, Hurston's narrative is neither entirely new nor entirely "feminine." The house "full ah thoughts" to which Janie ascends after her ritualized journey of immersion with Teacake into the "muck" of the Everglades ( recall here Du Bois's swamp in both The Souls and The Quest of the Silver Fleece) is clearly a private ritual ground, akin in construction if not in accoutrement to Du Bois's study. And Janie's posture as a storyteller — as an articulate figure knowledgeable of tribal tropes, (a feature probably overdone in the frame, but not the tale, of Their Eyes) and in apparent control of her personal history — is a familiar and valued final siting for a primary voice in an Afro-American narrative. Still, there is much that is new in Their Eyes. The narrative takes place in a seemingly ahistorical world: the spanking new all-black town is meticulously bereft of former slave cabins; there are no railroad trains, above or underground, with or without Jim Crow cars; Matt's mule is a bond with and catalyst for distinct tribal memories and rituals, but these do not include the hollow slogan, "forty acres and a mule"; Janie seeks freedom, selfhood, voice, and "living" but is hardly guided — or haunted — by Sojourner Truth or Harriet Tubman, let alone Frederick Douglass. But that world is actually a fresh expression of a history of assault. The first two men in Janie's adult life (Logan Killicks and Jody Starks) and the spatial
113 configurations through which they define themselves and seek to impose definition upon Janie (notably, a rural and agrarian space on one hand and a somewhat urban and mercantile space on the other) provide as much social structure as the narrative requires. Further more, the narrative's frame — the conversation "in the present" between Janie and Pheoby — creates something new in that it, and not the tale, is Hurston's vehicle for presenting the communal and possibly archetypal aspects of Janie's quest and final posture. Presentation does not always provide substantiation, and the clank ing of Hurston's narrative and rhetorical machinery calls attention to itself when Pheoby offers her sole remark in the final half of the frame: "Lawd!. . . Ah done growed ten feet higher from jus' listenin' tuh you, Janie. Ah ain't satisfied wid mahself no mo'. Ah means tuh make Sam take me fishin' wid him after this. Nobody better not criticize yuh in mah hearin'." But these minor imperfections do not delimit the narrative's grand effort to demystify and site the somewhat ethereal concept of group- and self-consciousness, forwarded espe cially by The Souls of Black Folk and Cane. Clearly, Hurston is after a treatment of Janie and Pheoby that releases them from their immediate posture of storyteller and listener, and that propels them to one in which their sisterhood suggests a special kinship among womankind at large. The one great flaw in Their Eyes involves not the framing dialogue, but Janie's tale itself. Through the frame Hurston creates the essential illusion that Janie has achieved her voice (along with everything else), and that she has even wrested from menfolk some control of the tribal posture of the storyteller. But the tale undercuts much of this, not because of its content — indeed, episodes such as the one in which Janie verbally abuses Jody in public abets Hurston's strategy — but because of its narration. Hurston's curious insistence on having Janie's tale — her personal history in and as a literary form — told by an omniscent third person, rather than by a first- person narrator, implies that Janie has not really won her voice and self after all — that her author (who is, quite likely, the omniscient narrating voice) cannot see her way clear to giving Janie her voice outright. Here, I think, Hurston is genuinely caught in the dilemma of how she might both govern and exploit the autobiographical impulses that partially direct her creation of Janie. On one hand, third-person narration of Janie's tale helps to build a space (or at least the illusion of a space) between author and character, for the author and her audience alike; on the other, when told in this fashion control of the tale remains, no matter how unintended, with the author alone.
114 Despite this problem, Their Eyes is a seminal narrative in Afro- American letters. It forwards the historical consciousness of the tradition's narrative forms, and helps to define those kinds of narratives which will also advance the literature in their turn. The narrative successes and failures of Their Eyes effectively prefigure several types of narratives; but, given the problems I have just discussed, one might say that the example of Their Eyes calls for a narrative in which the primary figure (like Janie) achieves a space beyond those defined by the tropes of ascent and immersion, but (unlike Janie) also achieves authorial control over both the frame and tale of his or her personal history. In short, Their Eyes, as a narrative strategy in a continuum of narrative strategies, directs us most immediately to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Janie is quite possibly more of a blood relative to Ellison's narrator than either the "male chauvinist" or "feminist" readers of the tradition would care to contemplate.
As I have suggested in previous chapters, the Afro-American pregeneric myth of the quest for freedom and literacy has occasioned two basic types of narrative expressions, the narratives of ascent and immersion. The classic ascent narrative launches an "enslaved" and semi-literate figure on a ritualized journey to a symbolic North; that journey is charted through spatial expressions of social structure, invariably systems of signs that the questing figure must read in order to be both increasingly literate and increasingly free. The ascent narrative conventionally ends with the questing figure situated in the least oppressive social structure afforded by the world of the narrative, and free in the sense that he or she has gained sufficient literacy to assume the mantle of an articulate survivor. As the phrase "articulate survivor" suggests, the hero or heroine of an ascent narrative must be willing to forsake familial or communal postures in the narrative's most oppressive social structure for a new posture in the least oppressive environment — at best, one of solitude; at worst, one of alienation. This last feature of the ascent narrative unquestionably helps bring about the rise and development of an immersion narrative in the tradition, for the immersion narrative is fundamentally an expression of a ritualized journey into a symbolic South, in which the protagonist seeks those aspects of tribal literacy that ameliorate, if not obliterate, the conditions imposed by solitude. The conventional immersion narrative ends almost paradoxically, with the questing figure located in or near the narrative's most oppressive social structure but free in the sense that he has gained or regained sufficient tribal literacy to assume the mantle of an
115 articulate kinsman. As the phrase "articulate kinsman" suggests, the hero or heroine of an immersion narrative must be willing to forsake highly individualized mobility in the narrative's least oppressive social structure for a posture of relative stasis in the most oppressive environment, a loss that is only occasionally assuaged by the newfound balms of group identity. (The argument is, of course, that these "shared epiphanies" were previously unavailable to the quest ing figure when he or she was adrift in a state of solitude.) When seen in this way, the primary features of the ascent and immersion narratives appear to call for an epiloging text that revoices the tradition's abiding tropes in such a way that answers to all of the following questions are attempted: Can a questing figure in a narrative occasioned by the pregeneric myth be both an articulate survivor and an articulate kinsman? Must all such quests in the narrative literature conclude as they began, in imposed configura tions of social structure? And can the literary history of Afro- American narrative forms — which is, at root, the chronicle of a dialectic between ascent and immersion expressions — become, in and of itself, the basis for a narrative form? The whole of Invisible Man is a grand attempt to answer these questions, but the burden of reply falls mainly upon the narrative's frame (its prologue and epilogue), rather than upon its tale. I do not wish to demean the tale, for it is a remarkable invention: it presents the spatial expressions of social structure as well as the nearly counterpointing rituals of ascent (to self-consciousness) and immer sion (in group consciousness) which collectively contextualize and in some sense occasion the questing narrator's progress from muteness to speech, or formlessness to form. However, what is narratively new in Invisible Man, and what permits it to answer the above-cited questions, is not its depiction of a pilgrim's progress, but its brave assertion that there is a self and form to be discovered beyond the lockstep of linear movement within imposed definitions of reality. For this reason the inventive tale of the questing narrator's steady progression to voice and selfhood cannot stand alone as the narrative of Ellison's hero. The tale must be framed, and in that sense controlled, because progression as a protean literary form and progress as a protean cultural myth must be contextualized. Invisible Man's success as a fresh narrative strategy depends upon its ability to formalize in art the "fiction" of history expounded primarily in its frame. To the extent that Invisible Man's frame controls its tale, its hero may gloss his personal history, and art may impose upon event.
116 With all this in mind, we may proceed to examine certain aspects of Invisible Man's frame. I would like to begin with the hero's hole itself, which, in the context of the tradition, is clearly a revoicing of the private ritual ground to which Du Bois's persona retreats after his ritual of immersion in the Black Belt. Despite the fact that these ritual grounds are situated differently — the prefiguring space is a "high Pisgah," while the epiloging space is a "warm hole" below ground — there are many similarities between the two constructions. In the first place, both spaces are discovered or achieved after several literal and figurative rail journeys that clearly revoice the primary episode of flight on the "freedom train." I refer here on one hand to Du Bois's various symbolic rides in that social structure-in-motion called the Jim Crow car, rides which prompt his vision and hope of communitas in this world, and on the other hand to the Invisible Man's equally conspicuous subway rides which establish the particular rhythm of immersion and ascent that guides him finally to see the people of Harlem ("They'd been there all along, but. . . I'd missed them. . .I'd been asleep") and to consider hibernation as a viable if transient state of being. In either case, the elevated study or the subterranean hole, the private space is a construction wherein the best thoughts occasioned by these travels may collect and linger — wherein physical motion is interrupted, and body and voice are at rest, but the mind travels on. Another point of similarity involves each space's distance from those spatial expressions of social structure (the Black Belt or Harlem) in which major acquisitions of tribal literacy are accom plished. In The Souls Du Bois's study is high up on Atlanta hill, not engulfed in the "dull red hideousness" of rural Georgia. In Invisible Man the hero's "warm hole" is not in "the jungle of Harlem," but in a "border area" that is, as the hero admits, a grand spatial and historical joke: it is of Harlem as far as the utility company's "master meter" is concerned, but out of Harlem according to most other conventional measurements of American reality, because it is a basement section of "a building rented strictly to whites" that was "shut off" (reconstructed?) and "forgotten during the nineteenth century" (Reconstruction?). In either case, vertical distance — place ment upon a different plane — accentuates the more apparent horizontal displacement between tribal space and private space. These distances force each questing narrator to fashion a rhetoric that earnestly seeks to minimize the distances and to portray the narrators as group-conscious as well as self-conscious figures. Here, I think, the points of congruence between Du Bois's study and Invisible Man's hole are most pronounced; yet here we can also
117 begin to see how Ellison's construction assumes its own integrity. When the Invisible Man speaks in the epilogue of how his grandfather must have meant "the principle, that we were to affirm the principle on which the country was built and not the men, or at least not the men who did the violence" and also of how "we of all, we, most of all, had to affirm the principle. . . because we were older than they, in the sense of what it took to live in the world with others," he clearly restates in his own terms Du Bois's persona's claim that "we the darker ones come even now not altogether empty-handed: there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of theDeclaration of Independence than the American Negroes." Furthermore, both questing narrators seek to qualify or contextualize these assertions of race pride and responsibility by forwarding expressions of their abiding faith in the ideal of cultural pluralism. Certainly this is suggested when we recall the following passage from chapter I of The Souls (which is, for all intents and purposes, that narrative's prologue):
Work, culture, liberty, — all these we need, not singly but together, not successively but together, each growing and aiding each, and all striving toward that vaster ideal that swims before the Negro people, the ideal of human brotherhood, gained through the unifying ideal of Race; The ideal of fostering and developing the traits and talents of the Negro, not in opposition to or contempt for other races, but rather in large conformity to the greater ideals of the American Republic . . . and place beside it these ringing, epiloging words from Invisible Man:
Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway? — diver sity is the word. Let man keep his many parts and you'll have no tyrant states. . . . America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain. It's "winner take nothing" that is the great truth of our country. Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat. Our fate is to become one, and yet many — This is not prophecy, but description.
Amid the similarities there lies one profound discrepancy: Ellison's refusal to sustain Du Bois's Herderian overlay of racial idealism. Ellison discerns a quite substantial distinction in meaning and image between the prospect of ideal races conforming to a national
118 fabric. That distinction has much to do with how he subsequently fashions his questing narrator as a group-conscious and self- conscious human being. In The Souls, Du Bois's hero's group consciousness is distinctly racial in character. Ensconced in his study after his immersion journey and transported by the bits of ancient song wafting up from below, he becomes a weary traveler in a tribal song — an embodied and embodying voice or, in terms indebted to Ellison, a tribally visible man. The creation of this voice and visibility is central to The Souls's narrative strategy; it provides the rationale for Du Bois's refusal to formalize his first and last chapters as framing prologue and epilogue, even though they function largely this way in the narrative. Unlike Ellison, Du Bois is not after an expression of group consciousness that bursts beyond tribal boundaries. Therefore he need not situate his hero's private ritual ground outside the geography of his hero's tale any more than he already has. Here we must recall especially that Du Bois's final siting of his hero is occasioned in part by autobiographical impulses. Through generous reference to the "master" Sorrow Songs, Du Bois binds his narrative's resulting space and his narrator's resulting self to what has come before, and in that way seeks his own visibility in the events and images his narrative has recorded. The whole machinery of The Souls is geared for acts of unveiling (making visible) the soul of a race and of a man; it lacks the components for processing such subtleties as invisible articulate heroes residing outside History and Veil alike. The final posture of Ellison's questing narrator may be clarified in the following terms. To begin with, the hero's hole is described in a formal frame removed from the tale. That frame is, in a sense, that hole, because Ellison is indeed after expressions of group conscious ness and self-consciousness that respectively transcend tribal literacy and resist the infecting germs of heroic self-portraiture. The whole of the frame (or, if you will, the whole of the hole) proclaims that the narrative distinction to be drawn between tale and frame is a trope for other distinctions central to Invisible Man, including those between blindness and insight, sleepfulness and wakefulness, sickness and health, social structure and nonstructure, History and history, embodied voice and disembodied voice, and acts of speech and of writing. All this occasions a second and fresh rhetoric that is not found in the framing chapters of The Souls, but is prefigured instead by the "why do I write" passages in slave narratives, several examples of which were given earlier. The strategy behind Ellison's rhetoric is, however, quite different from that of the fugitive slaves. Ellison is less interested in having his hero authenticate his tale (or rather, its
119 content) and more interested in having that tale de-valorized in such a way that the principles of living (which are, at base, principles of writing or artfulness) delineated in the frame may finally take hold and control the way in which the narrative as a whole is read. "So why do I write," the Invisible Man asks rhetorically, and again and again in the final pages of the epilogue his answers — brimming with references to release from lethargy, negation of "some of the anger and some of the bitterness," shaking off the old skin, springtime, and love — serve to minimize the distance between his private space and the "concrete, ornery, vile and sublimely wonder ful" world in which, alas, the rest of us reside. Indeed, we sense that when he asks the question with which the narrative ends — "Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?" — "for you" expresses that last distancing interval that remains before speech "to you." But finally it is writing or the experience of writing, and not speech, that shapes whatever group consciousness the Invisible Man will bring in tow upon his return. Writing has taught him much about himself — indeed, it has made him a highly self- aware invisible man. But it has also taught him that his personal history is but an arc of the parabola of human history, and that his personal tale is but a finite particle in the infinity of tale-telling. According to Ellison's vision, what group-orients the Invisible Man and ends his hibernation is his marvelously robust desire to take another swing around that arc of what other men call reality, to tell, shape, and/or "lie" his tale anew. In this way, then, he becomes both an articulate survivor and an articulate kinsman. Before we follow the Invisible Man to a realm beyond hibernation, the whys and wherefores of his writing while underground should be examined further. What interests me specifically is the apparent cause-and-effect relationship between the explicit emptying of the briefcase at the end of the tale and the implicit filling of pages during the term of hibernation, a sequence that revoices a feature of slave narratives such as Douglass's 1845 Narrative. The Douglass narrative tells us that, in 1835, Douglass and a few of his fellow slaves concocted an escape plan that depended mainly upon each slave's possessing a "protection" or "pass," allegedly written by "Master" William Hamilton but actually composed by Douglass himself. Such a pass granted each man "full liberty" to travel to Baltimore and spend the Easter holidays — celebrating, one assumes, the ancient Resurrection of the One, and the more recent ascent of at least another one. Unfortunately, the plan is thwarted, and each slave has to save his skin by "denying everything" and destroying his "forged" protection. But through telling the tale Douglass manages to inform
120 us once again of the great bond between freedom and literacy, and also of the great power that comes with an ability not only to read a culture's signs (in this case, a sign that is truly a written document) but also to write them and, in that supreme way, manipulate them. In short, the Narrative's escape episode is a primary trope for acts of authorial control over text and context. The lesson advanced by Douglass's escape or "protection" episode is one of many which Ellison's narrator is destined to learn the hard way; indeed, his remarkable innocence and gullibility regarding these matters provide a major comic strain in the narrative's tale. The perpetual sight of our valiant hero doggedly lugging his briefcase around New York, and even risking life and limb in order to retrieve it from a burning Harlem tenement, is funny enough; but the heart of the joke has less to do with the Invisible Man's attachment to his briefcase than with what he has consciously and subconsciously gathered inside it. Our hero's tale is substantially that of how he accumulates a motley array of cultural signs, mostly written "protec tions" or "passes" (diplomas, letters of recommendation, slips of paper bearing new names, etc.) that supposedly identify him and grant him "full liberty" in the "real" world beyond "home." Ellison's double-edged joke is that none of these "protections" are worth more than the paper they're written on (they are indeed "paper protections"), and that all of them ironically "keep a nigger-boy running," but not on a path that would be recognizable to Douglass or any other self-willed hero with any control over his fate. This is not to say that the non-written signs are without impor tance. On the contrary, part of Ellison's point is that Tarp's leg iron, Mary Rambo's "grinning darky" bank, Tod Clifton's sambo doll, and the Rinehart-like dark glasses and "high hat" are all cultural signs of a tribal sort. Our questing narrator thinks he knows how to read them, but he only knows or reads in a very limited way. Collectively, these non-written signs represent the Invisible Man's illiteracy vis-a-vis his tribe as much as the written signs betoken his illiteracy vis-a-vis the non-tribal social structures besetting him; his unwitting act of gathering both types of signs in one bulging briefcase finally occasions the demystification of the one type by the other. Once the Invisible Man sees this — once he comprehends that seemingly mute objects such as the dark glasses, hat, and leg iron are the only "protections" he possesses, and that the written documents from Bledsoe, Jack, and the rest are the only signs that may be usefully destroyed (here, burned to light his way) — he is ready to begin his life and tale again, or rather to prepare to begin again. The demystification and nearly simultaneous use and destruction of the
121 cultural signs gathered in the briefcase during the tale occasion his removal to a fresh space, the "warm hole" of the narrative's frame. All this suggests that the Invisible Man is finally free in his framing hole, and that that freedom is expressed most conspicuously by his nearly empty briefcase. But this is not completely true — nor is it in keeping with the full measure of the lesson learned from an innocent but almost deadly trafficking in false "protections." Perhaps the most profound lesson our hero learns when the once-precious "protections" are demystified is that they are worthless, not because of what they do or do not say, but because they are authenticating documents over which he has absolutely no authorial control. (They impose on him and his tale much as the competing authenticating texts of white guarantors often impose upon a fugitive slave's tale.) Seen in this light, the Invisible Man's frenzied movement and speech (his "sleepwalking" and "sleeptalking") in the narrative's tale are tropes for his total lack of control over that history or tale, and his relative stasis in the narrative's frame (pointedly, his "wakefulness") is a trope for his brave effort to assume control of his history or tale (and of tale-telling) through artful acts of written composition. Thus, another aspect — perhaps the other aspect — of the Invisible Man's newfound freedom is that he may now pursue acts of written articulateness and literary form-making, filling the empty briefcase with what are in effect "protections" or "passes" from his own hand. To compose such "protections" is to assert a marvelous and heroic concept of self-willed mobility, an idea of mobility that is in keeping with the narrative's definition of hibernation: "A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action." The covert filling of the satchel with the self-authored "protection" that constitutes the completed narrative (tale and frame) is Ellison's most convincing expression of his hero's inevitable return, partly because it revoices a primary trope inaugurated in the tradition by Frederick Douglass. All in all, the frame in Invisible Man is a familiar construction in Afro-American narrative literature, primarily because it is the mechanism for authentication and authorial control in the narrative. At the beginning of the frame, the competing or imposing fictions that surface in the tale as items in the hero's briefcase are generally defined — "When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination — indeed, everything and anything except me." By the end of the frame those fictive "certainties" have been subsumed by the hero's own self-authored "plan of living" or, as he calls it, his "pattern to the chaos." Perhaps even more impressive and resilient, however, is the manner in which this trumping of fictions with fictions is occasioned and sustained by
122 Ellison's remarkably explicit expression of one authenticating strategy overtaking and making a joke out of another. In the tale, the Invisible Man's briefcase is much more than a repository of cultural signs and false "protections"; it is, most ironically and humorously, the trope for the strategy of self-authentication the Invisible Man values during most of the tale. He carries it everywhere, never realizing that it possesses him far more than he possesses it. At the beginning of the tale, in the battle royal where he "earns" his briefcase and his first "protections" (the diploma and scholarship to Bledsoe's college), his speech full of echoes of Booker T. Washington's Atlanta Exposition Address is a signal not simply of initial rhetorical indebtedness to Washington, but (more profoundly) of an initial adherence to the Washingtonian strategy of narration and self- authentication as resume. The briefcase substantiates this idea because it is, in effect, a resume edited and amended by acts of sign-gathering during the course of the tale. In vivid contrast to Washington, however, the Invisible Man learns not only that he lacks a grand public speech to be authenticated by a tale of his life, but also that his accumulated resume isn't his tale.
* Like The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man and Black Boy, Invisible Man presents, as part of its narrative machinery, a series of portraits — on the wall as well as in the flesh — that may be loosely termed the narrative's portrait gallery. While it can be argued that any mobile or immobile character in any narrative is in some sense a portrait, the portraits which I'm about to discuss are special. They comprise a narrative strategy by which various models of voice and action are kept before the questing narrator, and by which the full range of human possibility in the differing social structures of the narrative may be defined and seen. In the chapter on The Autobiog raphy, I described at some length the portrait gallery in the parlor of the Ex-Coloured Man's Club; it is important to recall that gallery here, because it is our best example of a symbolic construction in which all of the models (from Frederick Douglass to the minstrel who yearns to be a Shakespearean) are valorized as heroic examples that the narrator would do well to emulate. The whole point to the construction is that the Ex-Coloured Man could have learned from these "portraits," but didn't — because he could not really see them, let alone see through them. In Black Boy, virtually the opposite is true. Few if any portraits are displayed on the walls of the narrative's prison-like interiors; the major portraits are intentionally "in the flesh" and, with the possible exceptions of Ella (the schoolteacher
123 who tells the story of Bluebeard), the editor of the Negro newspaper, and the Irishman who surreptitiously lends his library card to young Richard, they are all of men and women who are "warnings" rather than "examples." While the Ex-Coloured Man cannot fully see the heroic examples before him, and thus not only remains a non-hero but effectively relinquishes the narrative's space for heroic posturing to figures such as "Shiny," Wright's persona pursues a far different and aggressive course. In Black Boy the potential or assumed examples, especially the elder kinfolk, are systematically de-valorized and portrayed as "warnings" — partly so that a hellish landscape may be depicted and peopled, but mostly so that Wright's persona, as an emerging articulate survivor, may not only control but also fill the narrative's space for heroic posturing. In this way Wright's persona, unlike Johnson's Ex-Coloured Man, sees and aggressively sees through the major "portraits" in his tale. For this reason, to cite only one example, the persona meticulously buries his father alive in the red clay of Mississippi.
Invisible Man retains certain aspects of the portrait galleries found in both The Autobiography and Black Boy. The narrative offers portraits both on the wall and in the flesh, and the portrait motif is indeed central to Ellison's strategy of keeping both examples and warnings before the questing narrator. But more significant is how Invisible Man bursts beyond the strategies of portraiture and gallery construction that we find in Johnson's and Wright's prefiguring texts. At first glance, the portrait gallery in Invisible Man is much like that in Black Boy, in that it is not confined to a ritual space such as the Ex-Coloured Man's Club (or the outdoor revival in which the preacher, John Brown, and the master singer, Singing Johnson, are sketched) but is dispersed throughout the narrative. Furthermore, as in Black Boy, the portraits in Invisible Man are usually dismantled or demystified — that is, the figures are usually less than heroic. But this is also where the different treatment of this motif begins in each narrative. In Black Boy, one senses that Wright's portraits of would- be examples, such as the father and the persona's Uncle Tom, are always demystified; the figures thereby plummet from their assigned (if not always earned) heights to the depths of life as it is lived by partially animate warnings. But to judge from Invisible Man, Ellison appears perennially suspicious of such simple dichotomies, and in pursuit, therefore, of more complex and differentiated expressions. Hence we discover in his narrative that while Bledsoe, Norton, and the one-eyed Jack are indeed warnings, not examples, Trueblood, Brother Tarp, and most especially the advice-giving Grandfather are
124 neither examples nor warnings, but enigmas of varying sorts. They occupy and enlarge a fresh narrative space. While the demystification of these would-be examples is a prere quisite for the Invisible Man's blossoming as a truly literate figure, the thrust of the narrative is not to replace these portraits with that of the Invisible Man as a heroic example. Rather, it is to identify Bledsoe, Norton, and the rest as varying fictions of reality and history which must be deposed or, as we soon will see, defiled in order for the fiction that is the narrative to be imagined. The narrative and not the narrator, the "principle" and not the "men," and the frame far more than the tale collectively constitute the heroic example forwarded by Ellison's narrative and rhetorical strategies. To see this is to know a major way in which Invisible Man aggressively contradicts the abiding idea of the artist in Black Boy, and to know as well how it assumes its place in the Afro-American narrative tradition. One final preliminary point is that the portrait motif in Invisible Man is joined by, and in some sense conjoined to, what I am going to call the narrative's museum motif. There are at least three great "museum collections" in the narrative, and these are important to the narrative's machinery as contexts or syntaxes, just as the portraits are important as relatively discrete expressions. What binds the portrait motif to the museum motif is not simply the fact that portraits frequently form an integral part of certain specific contexts or syntaxes, but that both motifs are reduced, in the narrative's frame, to being one and the same expression and sign — the collected and displayed light for which certain other people's measurements of reality cannot account. The narrator's warm hole is at once a portrait gallery of light and an exquisite museum collection of light; the light "confirms" his "reality" and "gives birth" to his "form," just as other, ostensibly more delineated, portraits and displayed objects confirm other realities and give birth to other forms — especially of a literary sort. But perhaps, as the Invisible Man says of himself at the end of the beginning (which is the beginning of the end), I am moving too fast. The frame is not visible in its full splendor of invisibility unless we can see the proud visages and precious vestiges which it both visibly and invisibly frames. We must begin with Invisible Man's tale — even though it is neither the narrative's beginning nor its end — and with the portrait of the grandfather who seems, as a highly visible invisibility, to begin and end it all. The grandfather enters the tale at its beginning, in a speech — or, rather, as speech: " 'Live with your head in the lion's mouth. I want you to overcome 'em with yeses, undermine 'em with grins, agree 'em
125 to death and destruction, let 'em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open.' " This entrance is central to his place in the tale; he is a portrait-in-language that his grandson must learn to hear, read, and contextualize. But as the following passage from the end of the battle royal episode instructs, the grandfather is as much a portrait on the wall (of the mind, as well as of the space called "family" or "home") as he is one in language: When I reached home everyone was excited. Next day the neighbors came to congratulate me. I even felt safe from grandfather, whose deathbed curse usually spoiled my triumphs. I stood beneath his photograph with my brief case in hand and smiled triumphantly into his stolid black peasant's face. It was a face that fascinated me. The eyes seemed to follow everywhere I went. Several things are afoot here, and one of them is certainly a radical revision of the "obituary" with which Wright's Black Boy persona buries his father alive by calling him a "stranger" and a "black peasant." In Black Boy, the implication is clearly that the father is a known quantity; that he is fixed or immobilized in a "culture's" time and space, and that his portrait has been completely and consum mately read by his "civilized" questing kinsman. In Invisible Man, however, the grandfather is not quite so easily removed from the wall and (in that sense, among others) dismantled. As the phrase "the eyes seemed to follow everywhere I went" suggests, Ellison's narrator's grandfather is an unknown and mobile figure whose eyes are hardly "glazed" like those of the "dead" father in Black Boy; he will travel with and reappear before his youthful kinsman in word and image many times before the narrative's tale is finally complete. The grandfather, who provides the first portrait in the tale's portrait gallery, is neither a warning nor an example but a huge and looming question mark — an enigma. In this way his portrait prefigures those of other "peasants" in the narrative, such as Trueblood and Brother Tarp (Brother Veil? Brother Sail?), who are also enigmas, and the grandfather's portrait quite purposefully skews whatever preconceptions we might have regarding a simple system of dialecti cal or antipodal portraiture ("warning'V'example") in the narrative. The grandfather is, in short, a "Mr. In-Between," a Vergilian guide who occupies neither antipodal space not because he is supposedly dead (or thought "mad" by the intervening generation, the Invisible Man's parents), but because of the implicit distinction which the narrative draws between the spoken and written word and, hence, between guides and artists.
126 Another method of dismantling and possibly debunking an antipodal system of portraiture is simply to inaugurate a presentation in which examples, warnings, and the world they define are eventually and comically turned inside out. Ellison does essentially this with the portraits in the campus episodes and with the initially Edenic campus as a world within the world of the narrative. His activity differs from Wright's in Black Boy, mainly because Wright never allows a model to become an example before he shows it to be warning, or a space to assume paradisaical proportions before he demonstrates that it is a circle of hell. In the campus episodes, the portraits begin with the bronze statue of the college Founder. Ellison has a lot of fun with both his narrator and the conventions of heroic portraiture while describing this work of art:
It's so long ago and far away that here in my invisibility I wonder if it happened at all. Then in my mind's eye I see the bronze statue of the college Founder, the cold father symbol, his hands outstretched in the breathtaking gesture of lifting a veil that flutters in hard, metallic folds above the face of a kneeling slave; and I am standing puzzled, unable to decide whether the veil is really being lifted, or lowered more firmly in place; whether I am witnessing a revelation or a more efficient blinding. And as I gaze, there is a rustle of wings and I see a flock of starlings flighting before me and, when I look again, the bronze face, whose empty eyes look upon a world I have never seen, runs with liquid chalk — creating another ambiguity to puzzle my groping mind: Why is a bird-soiled statue more commanding than one that is clean?
Of course, there is much serious activity here that advances the narrative's discussion of what is visible and invisible, seen and unseen. The second veil of a very organic tulle joins the first, of bronze, adding a necessary complexity to the abiding question of who is the prophet, who the sheep, and what indeed can that prophet see. Furthermore, it prefigures other tropes in the narrative, such as the Liberty Paint Factory's celebrated optic white paint. But basically this comic portrait of Founder and narrator achieves its humor not so much because a heroic example is draped in guano or because the youthful narrator attempts to make and unmake a philosophical puzzle out of that event. Rather, its humor arises from the more profound incongruities that displace the narrator as seer from the Founder who, according to one definition of history, is a Seer, but who, according to at least one other definition, is the seen.
127 This high comedy continues in the narrative when Homer A. Barbee, the noted blind minister, preaches on and adds further luster to the legend of the Founder's death. Indeed, the inanimate statue on the lawn and the highly animated tale or "lie" as sermon are parts of the same composite portrait of the Founder. Through a marvelous orchestration of images, reminding us of many other train rides in written and verbal art (recall, for example, Lincoln's cortege in Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in Dooryard Bloom'd"), Homer Barbee transports us on another ride, a solemn ride of sorrowful rest and joyous resurrection: " 'When the train reached the summit of the mountain, he [the Founder] was no longer with us. . .' "But there is a new and finally quite funny twist to all of this: Barbee and Bledsoe, like two disciples become vaudevillians, are no board. Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Yessir, as a matter of fact I was! Me and Bledsoe! Right there! Barbee's sermon is finally less a valorization of the Founder than of A. Herbert Bledsoe. To put it another way, the text of his sermon is less a strategy for authenticating the legend of the Founder than one for authenticating the equally supreme fiction with which Bledsoe wields power and proffers a particular construction of historical reality:
"Oh, yes. Oh, yes," he [Barbee] said. "Oh, yes. That too is part of the glorious story. But think of it not as a death, but as a birth. A great seed has been planted. A seed which has continued to put forth its fruit in its season as surely as if the great creator had been resurrected. For in a sense he was, if not in the flesh, in the spirit. And in a sense in the flesh too. For has not your present leader become his living agent, his physical presence? Look about you if you doubt it. My young friends, my dear young friends! How can I tell you what manner of man this is who leads you! How can I convey to you how well he has kept his pledge to the Founder, how conscientious has been his stewardship?"
With words like these Homer Barbee demonstrates how he and Herbert Bledsoe — the Preacher and the Principal — are indeed quite a team, more than likely one of the most extraordinary comedy teams in Afro-American narrative literature. Evidently they have made a long black joke out of the long black song of the Founder's long black train. Who follows in his train? The shadows do. After the portrait of the Founder, the next arresting portrait in the campus episodes is of Norton's daughter. Appropriately enough, her image is not a photograph on the wall or a totem on the lawn, but
128 something of a cameo which her father reverently carries on his person, as close to his waist as to his heart:
Suddenly he fumbled in his vest pocket and thrust something over the back of the seat, surprising me. "Here, young man, you owe much of your good fortune in attending such a school to her." I looked upon the tinted miniature framed in engraved platinum. I almost dropped it. A young woman of delicate, dreamy features looked up at me. She was very beautiful, I thought at the time, so beautiful that I did not know whether I should express admiration to the extent I felt it or merely act polite. And yet I seemed to remember her, or someone like her, in the past. I know now that it was the flowing costume of soft, flimsy material that made for the effect; today, dressed in one of the smart, well-tailored, angular, sterile, streamlined, engine- turned, air-conditioned modern outfits you see in the women's magazines, she would appear as ordinary as an expensive piece of machine-tooled jewelry and just as lifeless. Then, however, I shared something of his enthusiasm.
Of course, the immediate business at hand here is a citing and sighting of Norton's erection of a pedestal for his "biblical maiden" of a daughter, which will soon crumple as he hears the sorrowful tale of Jim Trueblood. Perhaps, too, Ellison is up to some devilish tricks regarding what is unstated about Mr. Dalton and his virginal Mary in Native Son. Surely it is not stretching things to draw a parallel between Norton giving money for toys to the Truebloods and Dalton giving pingpong paddles to the "bloods" at the South Side Boys Club. More to the point, however, regarding Ellison's demystification of this portrait, are the Invisible Man's remarks about Miss Norton's costume in the miniature, and what she would have looked like in contemporary "engine-turned" dress. In truth, at this point in the tale he hasn't met the likes of her; but he is about to meet her again and again — and phrases like "an expensive piece of machine-tooled jewelry" instruct us as to where and when. The portrait of Miss Norton in her father's vest pocket is but an abiding, fiction of "modern" women like Emma and other women in the Brotherhood episodes — but especially of Emma, who, like a slick magician performing an ancient trick, will pull the narrator's new name out of her otherwise empty but interesting bosom. Miss Norton, or rather her portrait, may return to New York in her father's pocket; but it is
129 clear that, as that portrait is dismantled, it (and she) will not remain there. Indeed, one of the most remarkable images offered by the New York episodes is that of Norton's "daughters" entertaining the Brotherhood at the chic Chthonian, while Norton himself is lost in the subway. But we're not yet ready to go to New York; we must return to the campus and to Bledsoe's office — which is kind of annex to the college's museum of slavery, although no one there would dare call it that. Several aspects of this museum will be discussed shortly, but what interests me here are the "frame portrait photographs and relief plaques of presidents and industrialists, men of power." Evidently these portraits are redoubtable examples of heroic portraiture in which the "men of power" appear as heroic examples, or gods. In the process of attempting to describe their extraordinary presence in Bledsoe's sanctum sanctorum, the Invisible Man unwittingly stum bles upon much of the symbolic space's hidden significance when he writes that these men are "fixed like trophies or heraldic emblems upon the walls." He's right: the "men of power" are Bledsoe's "trophies" - he has bagged them (or, got them by their bags) in many senses of the term. The phrase "heraldic emblems" is also apt, because these men are messengers of given sovereignties, as well as of given fictions of historical reality. As such, they are harbingers of war, morticians to the dead, and custodians of national and genealogical signs. This fits them and, indeed, destines them for positions of stewardship to constructions such as Bledsoe's college; this is much of what the Invisible Man may finally see about them, once he is released from the pattern of their certainties and deep into the task of creating a competing fiction. In Bledsoe's office, however, wherein our hero is summarily expelled from "nigger heaven," the "men of power" are but a mute angelic choir (to Bledsoe's St. Peter) whose collective voices and visages seem to condemn him all the more with their silence. In the Brotherhood episodes, Ellison continues to give his portraits a comic texture, but he also seems intent on enlarging the space for enigmatic models in which the grandfather has already been situated. Quite fittingly, these portraits appear on the walls of the Invisible Man's office within the Brotherhood's Harlem headquarters, consti tuting a significant portion of the narrative strategy by which that space is positioned (and thereby read) within a spatial dynamic that also embraces Bledsoe's "trophy room" and the framing warm hole. Especially in their conversation with one another, the portraits expose the hidden seams in the elaborate fiction that the Invisible Man jokingly calls, in retrospect, his "days of certainty" with the
130 Brotherhood. The controversial "rainbow poster," for example, is described matter-of-factly — but not without a dollop of Ellisonian humor:
It was a symbolic poster of a group of heroic figures: An American Indian couple, representing the dispossessed past; a blond brother (in overalls) and a leading Irish sister, representing the dispossessed present; and Brother Tod Clifton and a young white couple (it had been felt unwise simply to show Clifton and the girl) surrounded by a group of children of mixed races, representing the future, a color photograph of bright skin texture and smooth contrast . . . [its] legened: "After the Struggle: The Rainbow of America's Future"
The rhetoric of heroic example offered here is at once antithetical to that put forth by Bledsoe's display of the "men of power," and yet much the same as that rhetoric in that it is another imposed fiction of reality. However, at this point in the narrative the Invisible Man cannot see or read this rhetoric, any more than he can comprehend what certain brotherhood members found objectionable about the poster. (Here, it is reasonable to assume that some brothers viewed the poster as being too 'racial" and/or "nationalistic" in its statement and, therefore, insufficient as an expression of the international class struggle.) One guesses that the Invisible Man probably overheard some Harlemite in a bar telling a "lie" about Josephine Baker and her "rainbow tribe," and "ran" with the idea in his own newly ideological way. All such guesses aside, however, it is clear that the rainbow poster portrays not just a rhetoric our hero thinks he can see, but also a compromise he has made which he can't see. The other portrait on the wall helps Ellison make much the same point. The first of several gifts the Invisible Man receives from Brother Tarp, it is of Frederick Douglass, and it is the first portrait of a truly heroic example to be hung in the narrative's gallery, but, unlike Johnson with his Ex-Coloured Man, Ellison is neither about the task of providing redoubtable examples for his confused protag onist nor about that of lamenting the sad fact that his narrator cannot see or see through Douglass. In the scene where the Douglass portrait is discussed, we receive instead another example of the Invisible Man's partial comprehension of a heroic rhetoric:
. . . I liked my work during those days of certainty. I kept my eyes wide and my ears alert. The Brotherhood was a world within a world and I was determined to discover all its secrets and to
131 advance as far as I could. I saw no limits, it was the one organization in the whole country in which I could reach the very top and I meant to get there. Even if it meant climbing a mountain of words. For now I had begun to believe, despite all the talk of science around me, that there was a magic in spoken words. Sometimes I sat watching the watery play of light upon Douglass' portrait, thinking how magical it was that he had talked his way from slavery to a government ministry, and so swiftly. Perhaps, I thought, something of the kind is happening to me. Douglass came north to escape and find work in the shipyards; a big fellow in a sailor's suite who, like me, had taken another name. What had his true name been? Whatever it was, it was as Douglass that he became himself, defined himself. And not as a boatwright as he'd expected, but as an orator. Perhaps the sense of magic lay in the unexpected transformations. "You start Saul, and end up Paul," my grandfather had often said. "When you're a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul — though you still Sauls around on the side."
Several things stand out in this remarkable piece of writing. One of them is the presumably naive way in which the Invisible Man convinces himself of the great truths subsumed within the fiction he is living by means of creating an authenticating fiction for his own life story. At the heart of this fiction is his questionable assertion that Douglass defined himself as an orator — as a private-become-public act of speech. Abetting this assertion are several revealing revisions of Douglass's language in the 1845 Narrative: "from slavery to a government ministry" is, for example, a remarkable revision or misreading of Douglass's famous "from slavery to freedom." Of course, he has the goal all wrong; but even more disastrously wrong than the goal is the misconception of literacy and its uses that lies behind it. In the Douglass Narrative, the phrase "from slavery to freedom," or more fully "the pathway from slavery to freedom," is Douglass's most felicitous expression for acts of reading and writing. He writes in chapter VI of what he learned when Mr. Auld forbade Mrs. Auld to instruct him any further in "The A B C": "From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom. It was just what I wanted, and I got it at a time when I the least expected it. . . .Though conscious of the difficulty of learning without a teacher, I set out with high hope, and a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble, to learn how to read" (italics added). This is the abiding idea of literacy and
132 its uses in the Narrative (and in the Afro-American tradition). Given the events of the Narrative, it isn't stretching things to say that, for Douglass, acts of literacy include acts of reading the signs and events, or "patterns of certainties," that comprise oppressive and imposing fictions of reality. Douglass didn't "talk" his way to freedom; rather, he "read" his way and, as far as the Narrative is concerned (it being his personal history as and in a literary form), "wrote" his way. In the Brotherhood episode wherein Douglass's portrait is hung, it is clear that the Invisible Man only partially comprehends the heroic example and rhetoric captured in that usually fierce visage, mainly because he is still wrapped up in the idea of composing a fiction in which he himself is a great speaker or act or sound. Somehow he senses — perhaps because Douglass's portrait forces him to hear unwelcome echoes of his grandfather's voice — that Douglass is as much an enigma to him as the grandfather, that both images will remain looming question-marks in his mind. Surely he will later sense that Douglass poses some very substantial questions about the fiction he is living, when he returns to Harlem to discover that Tod Clifton and Brother Tarp are missing and that Douglass's portrait has been torn down as well. In the meantime, however, during those days of certainty, the portraits on the walls of the narrator's bustling office only exhibit to him a full and sufficient expression of himself as a brother in the struggle — and on the make.
As I have suggested before, there is a museum as well as a portrait gallery in Invisible Man; that museum contains various collections that are contexts or syntaxes for certain portraits and, more to the point here, certain cultural artifacts or material objects. While a given portrait and artifact may function (and possibly resonate) in the narative in much the same way, an essential distinction must be drawn between how the portraits as a group (the gallery) and the artifacts as a group (the museum) operate as narrative strategies, especially within the tale. While the portraits present the full array of examples, warnings, and enigmas before the questing narrator, the artifacts present the full array of prescribed or pre-formed patterns of mobility. Of course, the collected portraits and artifacts alike are, at base, systems of models; but in Invisible Man they are differing systems, in so far as the portraits are prototypes for the self and the artifacts are prototypes for the self-in-motion. Returning to Bledsoe's office, which I have described before as an unofficial annex to the college's museum of slavery, we are led to discover, amid the heavy furniture, mementos of the Founder, and
133 collective gaze of the "men of power," an artifact of which Bledsoe as both curator and custodian is very proud.
He looked at me as though I had committed the worst crime imaginable. "Don't you know we can't tolerate such a thing? I gave you an opportunity to serve one of our best white friends, a man who could make your fortune. But in return you dragged the entire race into the slime!" Suddenly he reached for something beneath a pile of papers, an old leg shackle from slavery which he proudly called a "symbol of our progress." "You've got to be disciplined, boy." he said. "There's no ifs and ands about it." I have quoted from the text at some length because we must see the leg shackle both as an object and as language. As Ellison makes so very clear, as an object it is not a charmingly rustic paperweight gracing Bledsoe's many papers, but something far more sinister and weapon-like that must be concealed — perhaps, as in this instance, by a cloak of words. As language, the leg shackle is less a silence or pause than a transitional phrase — a veritable link — between the two cited parts of Bledsoe's speech. For Bledsoe, the shackle is a charged rhetorical object in the present ("a 'symbol of our prog ress' "), principally because it is also a rhetorical expression of the past (the "slime" which is invariably the nearly excremental quick sand of slavery; recall here, in contrast, Du Bois's swamp) and a paradigm for a fiction that may be imposed selectively on the future — in this case, the narrator's future. The half-dozen or so letters of introduction (the "protections") — which Bledsoe is able to produce so mysteriously in thirty minutes' time, and which allow the Invisible Man no mobility whatsoever except, ironically, a bus ride to New York (undoubtedly on the Bloodhound or North Star line) — are pre-figured before, in all of their nefarious qualities, by the "pile of papers" in collusion, as it were, with the leg shackle. Another telling aspect of Bledsoe's shackle is that it is smooth and unsullied, perhaps still gleaming as if brand new — or not yet put to its purpose. But we do not learn this until Brother Tarp presents the narrator with a very different leg iron, in the same Brotherhood episode when he hangs the portrait of Frederick Douglass: He was unwrapping the object now and I watched his old man's hands. "I'd like to pass it on to you, son. There," he said, handing it to me. "Funny thing to give somebody, but I think it's got a heap of signifying wrapped up in it and it might help you remember
134 what we're really fighting against. I don't think of it in terms of but two words, yes and no; but it signifies a heap more. ..." I saw him place his hand on the desk. "Brother," he said, calling me "Brother" for the first time, "I want you to take it. I guess it's a kind of luck piece. Anyway, it's the one I filed to get away." I took it in my hand, a thick dark, oily piece of filed steel that had been twisted open and forced partly back into place, on which I saw marks that might have been made by the blade of a hatchet. It was such a link as I had seen on Bledsoe's desk, only while that one had been smooth. Tarp's bore the marks of haste and violence, looking as though it had been attacked and conquered before it stubbornly yielded.
With these words the Invisible Man receives the first and only viable "protection" he is given in the tale. Shortly thereafter he fits the leg iron on his hand as if it were a pair of brass knuckles ("Finding no words to ask him more about it, I slipped the link over my knuckles and struck it sharply against the desk"), never dreaming that he will soon use it in this very manner in a pitched battle with Ras and his followers. Here we receive nothing less than a deft and momentous construction and ordering of the narrative as a whole. Tarp's shackle, in contrast to Bledsoe's, is worn, not just in the sense that it bears the marks of a violent attack and defeat, but also in that it has been literally worn — for nineteen years — by Brother Tarp. This suggests that Tarp is a very different kind of "curator" and, in some sense, author of the leg shackle and its accompanying fictions than is Bledsoe — recall here Tarp's earlier remark, " 'I'm tellin' it better'n I ever thought I could.' " As an author, Tarp has been both in and out of his tale, and has thereby gained the perspectives and techniques with which to see the tale and tell it well. He — Like certain other "peasants" in the narrative, such as the grandfather, Trueblood, and Frederick Douglass — is something of an artist, while Bledsoe — like certain other "uplifted" types, including Brother Jack — is not so much an artist or tale-teller as a manipulator of them. In either case, Tarp's or Bledsoe's, the leg iron which each man possesses, displays, and in varying senses gives away is an abiding expression of a posture as a "man of power" in the narrative, especially as far as art-making is concerned. Related is the substantial matter of how the two leg irons prompt another review of Bledsoe's and the Invisible Man's offices as contrasting symbolic spaces. I have already suggested how the
135 portraits alone help to construct these spaces, but what is pertinent here is how they are further assembled by the beams of meaning that stretch between portrait and artifact. The heart of the matter, I believe, is that once the portraits and leg irons are bound before us, we see more clearly the profound distinction between a rhetoric of progress and one of liberation. In Bledsoe's office, the "men of power" are the smooth, closed shackle — and the shackle the men — not only because the men are, in various meanings of the term, a "closed circle," but also because the rhetoric of progress which they as trustees (or is it trusties?) oversee, and in that sense enclose far more than the author, is as fixed or static as their conception (and perception) of the present. Indeed, much as Bledsoe is characterized in another episode as a "headwaiter" and not a consummate chef (hence the continuity in his career, from his college days as the best "slop dispenser" up to the narrative present), the "men of power" must be seen as figures who "serve" power: they dispense its prevailing fictions, yet are shackled to those fictions. The unending circle of Bledsoe's leg iron is a remarkable manifestation of a particular and prevailing uplift myth in which "service" is not just equated with "progress," but is also its literary form. In the Invisible Man's office, the portrait of Frederick Douglass is modally bound to the violently opened leg shackle party because Douglass, like Tarp, set himself free, and partly because Douglass, like the filed-open shackle, is an expression of human possibility. The key, as it were, to this construction is the exquisitely rude aperture that "defiles" the otherwise completed (or closed) form of the leg iron. On one level, that space is an exit or entrance; on another, it is a void to be filled, not once and for all but continually. Douglass and the open shackle speak as one, not just of human possibility but also of artistic possibility. To fill the space is less to close the form than to shape the form; and, to be sure, there can never be only one form. After all, hadn't Douglass written at least three tales of his life? Hadn't he hung a mighty door in his shackle's space and shaped his form not once but three times? Douglass's breaking of the shackle, his artful movement out and back in and out of the shackle, and his forming and (in all senses of the term) reforming of the shackle is finally the trope before the questing narrator for a viable pattern of mobility and a viable system of authorial control. Once the Invisible Man takes Tarp's shackle with him down into the narrative's framing warm hole and learns to read it, as well as to hear his grandfather and to return Douglass's gaze, he is ready to hibernate and write. Once these portraits and artifacts are removed from what Ishmael Reed has called "Centers of Art Detention" and are displayed
136 in that Center of Art Retention which Ellison calls the mind, he is ready to "birth his form." It would appear, then, that Ellison is pursuing a narrative strategy in which aspects of the tale are turned inside-out in the frame, much as the narrator is transformed from an illiterate to a literate protagonist. But this is not the case. The means by which Ellison avoids such a closure — which would destroy his narrative ->- tell us much about the strategies by which he seeks to burst beyond the prototypical narratives of ascent and immersion provided by Fred erick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois. Here I wish to suggest nothing less than that, on a level not altogether removed from the inner workings of Invisible Man, Bledsoe's smooth and closed shackle is a trope for inherited and? to a degree, imposed narrative forms in the tradition (of which Douglass's and Du Bois's forms are the dominant forms), and that Tarp's rudely opened shackle symbolizes both the release from these forms and the new form which is Invisible Man. Ellison appears only too aware that any step outside the shackles of what other men call reality necessitates an accompanying step outside what other men, including kinsmen, call literary form. Douglass's 1845 Narrative is built upon a strategy and rhetoric of triumphant reversal: "how a man became a slave" becomes "how a slave became a man." Furthermore, the world of the narrative reverses somehow, in accord with the reversal of the persona's condition, even though the persona is still situated in an imposed social structure. Invisible Man breaks with this strategy most obviously by more subtly by not completing all aspects of the reversal in the first place. While the Invisible Man does indeed "reverse" from visible to invisible (or invisible to visible) as well as from illiterate to literate, and while the portraits and artifacts of the tale move from the surfaces of the tale's symbolic interiors to those of the narrator's mind, the darkness or dimness that once occupied his mind is not transposed to the surfaces of the new symbolic space (the hole). Instead, it quite simply and profoundly vanishes. What are on these surfaces are expressions, if you will, not of darkness but of light; there are 1,369 light bulbs, and apparently more to come. These lights "speak" not of a former somnolent dimness, but of a contemporary illuminated wakefulness. And in addition to not expressing the narrator's previous abiding "dim-wattedness," the many lights are not portraits and artifacts like those in the tale. They are not competing or guiding fictions, but expressions of something that is distinctly pre-fiction, pre-form, and pre-art. In the warm hole of hibernation (or so Ellison's new construction informs us), what is so "torturous" about writing is not that one must work in the presence
137 of already formed artworks, but that this work must be accomplished under the scrutiny of a certain ra diant and self-inflicted brilliance The "brilliance" interests me principally because it is a constructed brilliance and, as such, part of a strategy by which Ellison bursts beyond the narrative model provided by Du Bois. Of course, the model as a whole is The Souls, but the particular aspect of that model which Ellison must revoice and revise in order to achieve a new narrative expression is the obviously Romantic primary scene at the end of the narrative, where brilliance makes its visit to the self- conscious artist in the form of an enlightening "sunshine." By way of a reminder, let me mention further that in The Souls Du Bois's light must enter his persona's private space, and that it is above all a natural energy that binds him to whatever "Eternal Good" resides in this and other worlds. Furthermore, once these beams are entwined with those of the songs of his generations ("My children, my little children, are singing to the sunshine"), they bind him to his "tribe" as well, and, more specifically still, to his tribe's genius loci. Quite to the point, and in full accord with other Romantic aspects of the model, Du Bois remarks on how these magnificent energies are "free"; these remarks are as conspicuous as the absence of even a veiled suggestion that he, too, is free. This primary scene in The Souls indicates that a price must be paid for accomplishing immer sion; it is the other side of the coin, as it were, to being self consciously situated in an isolated space, where the windows are few and "high" and latticed with bars of light and song. The brilliance that enlightens Du Bois's persona as self and artist speaks as much of loss as of gain, and this brilliance and its accompanying idea of artistic compensation must be radically revoiced in order for the "shackle" of the immersion narrative form to be broken. Ellison's deliberate positioning of the brilliance before his narrator inside the hole, all over the hole, and with many bulbs instead of a few high windows, is the beginning of such a revision and revoicing. Of course, there is more to his expression than this: the brilliance is a constructed brilliance in thatitismanmadeor "tinker-made," and it is an interior brilliance most particularly in that it is mind-made or "thinker-made." Indeed, as the Invisible Man informs us in the prologue, it is the self-work of a "thinker-tinker,' " an "inventor" with a "theory and a concept" who is almost anything but an embodiment of an "Eternal Good." This brilliance is "free" in a sense of the term very different from the one which Du Bois advances. In The Souls, the entwining beams of light and voice are free only in the sense that they are visible, audible, and mobile as those who reside
138 within the shadows of the Veil are invisible, inaudible, and immobile. This is clearly the sense of Du Bois's language when he writes:
If somewhere in this whirl and chaos of things there dwells Eternal Good, pitiful yet masterful, then anon in His good time America shall rend the Veil and the prisoned shall go free. Free, Free as the sunshine trickling down the morning into these high windows of mine, free as yonder fresh young voices welling up to me from the caverns of brick and mortar below. . . .
However, as I've suggested, these energies are not free to the persona; he has paid for them in various ways, including the undertaking of a requisite pilgrimage into more oppressive systems of social struc ture. For these reasons I think it might be said that the immersion narrative, like the narrative of ascent, is less about strategies for avoiding payment than about strategies for making payment that yield, in turn, a fresh posture within social structure which is somehow worth that payment — or more than worth it. Viewed in this way, ascent and immersion narratives are very much of a piece, and so it would appear that a strategy for bursting beyond the one is also a scheme for release from the other.
Ellison achieves such a strategy when he makes it clear that his narrator has found a way not only to stop paying for his life within what other men call reality, but also to avoid paying for his enlightenment once he has fallen outside those imposing fictions. The former discovery releases him as Du Bois and others are not released from various rhetorics of progress; the latter discovery allows him to gain as few others have gained a rhetoric of liberation. Above and beyond the hilarious joke of "socking it" to the power company with every socket installed (or of "screwing" them with every screw of a bulb) lies the very serious point that the self-initiated and self- constructed brilliance before the hibernating narrator does not, and in fact cannot, reverse the charge: it comes free and freely without a service payment, without a loss that the narrator must balance against his gain. In the narrative of hibernation — for so we must call it, because it is a new form in the tradition — what defines the new resulting posture and space for the questing narrator has nothing to do with whether he is situated in the most or least oppressive social structure of the narrative, and little to do with how much space lies between his hole and the "ornery" world above (after all, the Invisible Man can smell the stench of Spring), but everything to do
139 with whether it is a context in which the imagination is its own self-generating energy. The new resulting posture and space beyond those of the ascent and immersion narratives are ones in which the narrator eventually gains complete authorial control of the text of the narrative, and of the imagination as a trope subsumed within that text. (For those who have said through the years that Ellison has "grabbed all the marbles," but who don't know by what sleight of hand he did it — this is how he did it.) I have not forgotten that Du Bois's enlightening brilliance is an exquisite commingling of light and song — nor apparently has Ellison. Indeed, just as the Invisible Man wants more and more light, he also desires more and more machines with which to play Louis Armstrong's "What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue." This music, like the light it accompanies, does not have to waft in some high window, but emanates instead from within the space; it is a "thinker- tinker" music, music that has been improvised upon. The Invisible Man touches on this matter when he writes:
Sometimes now I listen to Louis while I have my favorite dessert of vanilla ice cream and sloe gin. I pour the red liquid over the white mound, watching it glisten and the vapor rising as Louis bends that military instrument into a beam of lyrical sound. Perhaps I like Louis Armstrong because he's made poetry out of being invisible. . . . And my own grasp of invisibility aids me to understand his music. . . . Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you're never quite on the beat. Sometimes you're ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps behind. And you slip into the breaks and look around. That's what you hear vaguely in Louis' music.
With these words Ellison clarifies an essential distinction between immersion and hibernation that is at root, in the terms afforded here, a distinction between embracing the music you hear and making the music you hear your own. The counterpointing image that immedi ately appears before us is one in which the good doctor is ensconced in his study, awaiting those entwined beams from above, while dear Louis is fashioning beams of a certain brilliance all his own. But of course the grand trope before us is the one with which we (and, in a certain sense, Ellison) began: Tarp's open leg shackle. Louis Armstrong's bending of a "military instrument into a beam of lyrical
140 sound" is a magnificent and heroic revoicing of Tarp's defiling of the shackle. As these brilliant images conjoin and speak as one, we see as perhaps never before the extent to which each figure is a poet of invisibility, not because they make art out of chaos or out of nothingness, but because they make art out of art. As master craftsmen to whom the Invisible Man is apprenticed, their master lesson for him (and us) is that, while the artist must be able to burst beyond the old forms, he also must be able to make light of the light that fills the resulting hole — "slip into the breaks and look around." In Invisible Man, "making light of the light" is a rhetoric of liberation, a theory of comedy, and a narrative strategy rolled into one. Once Ellison's questing narrator becomes a hibernating narrator and finally comprehends all of this, he may truly say, "Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form."
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141 John Wright
DEDICATED DREAMER, CONSECRATED ACTS: SHADOWING ELLISON
Nicknaming is a deadly art in black communities, Ralph Ellison taught us some years ago in a time of trial, an art much practiced in a tightly pressed but voluble social world supremely aware of the power of words to mask, to reveal, to assault, or to embrace whatever men do and are that warrants being codified. Streetcorner raconteurs have made nickmaning an analogical and hyperbolic art devoted to sizing up the ludicrous and the laudable, to extracting essences; and masters at "capping" simultaneously wreak havoc and do homage with simple sobriquets. So it suits vernacular tradition that poet Michael Harper's testamental riffs have bestowed "The Big E" on Ellison himself. For such a monicker evokes the muscular skill and grace of some Harlem hoopster or the vital force of some streetlife magnifico as an analogue for the creative and exegetical rigor of a major literary intellect. It unmasks the bodacious homeboy in a heady man of words. And of that coming-to-terms with articulate elders which the communal will to continuity and memory requires, it makes a celebration. A grimmer spectacle, though, has hypnotized the public eye during the past decade and a half through the literary politics which, Ellison himself admits, turned him for a moment in history into "a hateful straw man" targeted by radical discontent. There has been in this an unwitting rehearsal of those ancient rituals of sacrifice and exculpation around a scapegoat king that Ellison, ironically, an atomized nearly two decades ago in a provocative review essay on the private torments and public fate of fabled, waggishly monickered jazzman Charlie "Yardbird" Parker. Little of the orgiastic excesses and frenzied cult worship that ultimately maimed and martyred Bird, however, has surfaced in Ralph Ellison's experience as a writer. But in the much publicized images of Ellison as literary lion playing scarecrow to an irreverent, besieging throng of the black-plumed disaffected, there is more than a little of the spectacle he had so wryly described of the darktown rebel artist become, in reverse proportion to the intensity of his own creative struggles, a white hero-victim and black reprobate picked clean and picked again —like the eponymous Poor Robin in the old jazzman's ditty — before a culturally disoriented and divided public which has but the dimmest notion of his real significance. But with the savant's gasp of social ritual — and his entanglement
142 in it — Ellison, unlike Bird, marshalled the fortitude he cites as essential equipment for any vital man or artist and endured patiently the rites of political assault that threatened for a while to reduce the debate on his work and life "to the level of the dirty dozens." That same fortitude has sustained forty years of battlefield manuevers in the literary career he has long conceived of as "a guerilla action in a larger war, in which I found some of the most treacherous assaults against me committed by those who regarded themselves either as neutrals, as sympathizers, or as disinterested military advisers." Ellison traces his schooling in stylish forbearance to the Georgia- born, plantation-bred mother whose frontier odyssey in turn-of-the- century Oklahoma produced, among other things, a son whose passion for reading, dreams of faraway places, and drive to excel she nourished with the rich texture of her own limit-defying personal and political experience, and with her counterbalancing "tolerance for the affairs of the world." He credits too, more obliquely, the father who named him and then died when he was three — the ex-soldier, construction foreman, and lover of books who bequeathed his infant son the hidden name and complex fate of a poet and philosopher, which a recalcitrant, music-minded Ralph Waldo Ellison would through a first unconscious, then mysterious, then consuming process discipline his life to achieve. And in dedicating the collection of essays which still comprises the most profound statement of the pluralist position in Afro-American letters, to one Morteza Sprague, "A Dedicated Dreamer in a Land Most Strange," Ellison has acknowledged his indebtedness also to the idealistic black teachers who, by their own example, helped him see that dreamers could function responsibly and durably even in a nightmare world. That the dreamer's bent might be transformed by literary technique into consecrated acts of staggering power, Ellison claims first to have glimpsed through his Tuskeegee confrontation with T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land in 1935. And, decades later, from Eliot's "The Hollow Men," he gleaned a title for the America drama of power and pathos his gathered fugitive essays tried to name: "Between the idea / and the reality / Between the motion / and the act / Falls the Shadow." To return to Shadow and Act now, when many of the specific issues the essays addressed are faint at best in the popular imagination, must be justified by a focus on what it is they hold of enduring relevance, and on what — when their chronology is straightened somewhat and the broader context in which they originally appeared sketched out — they can reveal about the movement to maturity of one of the nation's most important literary minds. Despite Ellison's longevity in the public eye, we still know but little about these things.
143 And partly because of Ralph Ellison's characteristic rhetorical canniness and complexity in his fiction, essays, and interviews, and partly because both white and black readers of Invisible Man and Shadow and Act have routinely, even ritually, approached the politics, the art, and the "racial" values these books codify in terms narrower than those Ellison himself proposes, the body of "conscious thought" he has erected since the late thirties has been left in shadow, artificially isolated from its intellectual roots in Afro-American tradition, and almost invariably denied a critical context as pluralistic in its techniques and cultural references as Ellison's extraordinary eclecticism demands. In retrospect the reasons for his essay's ambiguous fate at the hands of the reading public seem clear enough. For the moment in American cultural history between Shadow and Act's hardback and sof tcover issuances in 1964 and 1966 was a time seized also, and more extravagantly, by the apocalyptic social essays of James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time and Leroi Jones' Home, and by the drama turgical insurgencies of the former's Blues for Mister Charlie and the latter's Dutchman & The Slave. In those years The A utobiography of Malcolm X and Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land uncloaked scarifying rites of racial passage that seemed attuned to the prophetic insurrectionary mode of Frantz Fanon's newly translated The Wretched of the Earth. And a "New Breed" of black poets led by African-aliased Jones and Don L. Lee were transmogrifying Langston Hughes' and Sterling Brown's folk panegyrics into incendiary "assassin poems" suffused with the ritual scatology and warrior ethos of urban street gangs. Entering the literary race war with vocal disdain for the "easy con game" of black separatist militancy and with continuing, if not uncritical, faith in the old black-Jewish-liberal alliance, Ellison's compilation of two decades' literary skirmishes and epiphanies struck establishment reviewers as comparatively calm and medi tative; and they remarked almost gratefully the aesthetic and integra- tionist concerns of Shadow and Act, and its divorce from the politics of protest and revolt. This, in concert with the 1965 Book Week recognition of Invisible Man as "the most distinguished single work published in the last twenty years" and with the by then conventional interpretation of Ellison's novel — through the lens of the fifties' preoccupations with existentialism, "identity crisis," and intro spection — as an all-American story about the search for self, installed Ellison's work as a laudable counterpoint to the literature of Black Power and American Negritude. Since Invisible Man's orig inal appearance, the WASP literary sensibility had almost invariably
144 blunted any wrenching confrontation with Ellison's world by diffusing his novel's specific angers into an abstract statement about Man, and at the same time confining the book to the traditional literary ghetto. Initial black critical response, limited largely to the Afro-American press and periodicals, had polarized around the black Left's formulaic allegations of reactionary decadence and the black bourgeoisie's racial uplift preachments against the novel's unseemly emphasis on the "unrepresentative" black lower class. Amidst clamorous disapproval the steady voices of Langston Hughes and Alain Locke, two "heroic figures" for Ellison since boyhood, had been almost alone in praising his big book in expansive terms. So, the whites had evaded Ellison's attack on racist ideology and seemed barely able to comprehend the broad implications of the first successful attempt to dramatize, through a single incisive metaphor, the historic panorama of an Afro-American cultural tradition that had been suppressed in the national mind since the Jazz Age; and black reviewers, bound to the exigencies of political struggle or the defensive imagery of upward mobility, disputed the cloying vision of reality Ellison proposed, and the modernist hyperbole with which he conveyed it. This first phase of glancing encounter with primarily white readers gave way in the Age of Black Power to a frontal collision with radical black scholarship and opinion. As Jacqueline Covo's 1971 survey of international reaction to Ellison's writings suggested, after the publication of Shadow and Act a second phase of Ellison's passage into the heart of the American darkness balanced the continued growth of his literary reputation against the exactions of ideological warfare, with Ellison himself registering the consequent tensions in an increasingly embattled series of interviews in the late sixties and early seventies. The "blackness" of his fictive vision became more and more suspect; and the black press essentially ignored Shadow and Act save for a few superficial or condemnatory notices. Converse ly, Ellison essays were embraced with uncommon attentiveness by white reviewers who nonetheless subordinated his focus on the relationships between Afro-American culture and national character to their own preoccupation with Ellison's unsparing chastisement of Irving Howe in "The World and the Jug." But Shadow and Act's temperate mood and analytic mode apparently undermined an image of Ellison that now took on various denigrified forms: to Reed Whittemore he seemed a "humanist of fairly spacious nineteenth century sort" propounding boyish dreams of possibility; to the Nation's reviewer he was a dark-skinned Huckleberry Finn somehow untouched by the black angst and actionism of the times; to Robert
145 Penn Warren he seemed a secular spokesman for Martin Luther King's Christian conception of agape; and to Norman Podhoretz he was a "touchy" but happily unaggressive antitype to the black nationalists, stubbornly denying the hard facts that the black world was graying even in his own work and that blacks, like Jews, must abide that homogenization is the price of relative acceptance and safety in America. Even the more knowing assessments by literary allies and clairvoyants seemed unable to place Ellison as intellectual in an Afro-American context, or to locate him in the larger world of ideas with his "Negroness" intact. And Ellison's refusal to discard "Negroness" for "blackness" at a time when nationalist fervor made these terms antonymic offered one more pretext for the assaults on Ellison's world that multiplied from outside the academy as a wave of new black journals and magazines formed during the height of the nationalist movements, and as older black periodicals yielded to the growing resistance against integra- tionism. With the spirit of Leroi Jones "Black Dada Nihilismus" presiding, two of the architects of the new Black Arts — Hoyt Fuller of Negro Digest, soon to be retitled Black World, and Larry Neal, arts editor of Liberator — shepherded a campaign against Ellison's alleged acts of artistic and political betrayal. Beginning in 1965 with a chastening review of Shadow and Act, Black World arraigned Ellison for "his above-it-all pose relative to the racial conflict," for his public criticism of radical black writers' technical deficiencies, and for his seemingly imperturbable optimism about the course of American democracy. And the campaign reached fever pitch late in the decade after Ellison's unflinching book jacket counter-thrust (on James Alan McPherson's quiet, workmanlike short story collection, Hue and Cry) against the "obscenely second-rate" and "dead, publicity-stained" literature which, he felt, had come increasingly, lamentably, "to stand for what is called 'black writing'." Defending that writing with apostolic fervor, Larry Neal, whose manifestoes in Liberator and elsewhere did more to define the emergent Black Arts Movement than any other force save his cohort Leroi Jones, had unleashed a series of essays in 1965 and 1966 outlining "The Black Writer's Role," which garroted Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin in succession with the sinuous thesis that "the Black writer's problem really grows out of a confusion about function, rather than a confusion about form." Recasting Wright's diagnosis from the thirties, Neal insisted that Western bourgeois assumptions about the uses of art, and a narcis sistic preoccupation with individual suffering and estrangement, had left black writers alienated from their folk tradition and oriented
146 more to entertaining whites than attending, "priest-like," the spiritual needs and social objectives of blacks. Ralph Ellison, aloof but a skilled technician, immersed in the Afro-American folk mythos but politically disengaged and read more by whites than blacks, posed a special problem. He was, Neal presumed, "a divided man," a walking repository of Afro-American lore, idioms, and blues whose critical ideas, on the other hand, derived from white writers. Instead of attempting to escape from black culture, though, Ellison was in fact a vague kind of "cultural nationalist" striving to apotheosize it — but one whose commitment to his communal tradition and his craft nonetheless left him detached from black audiences, movements, and institutions. The artist's responsibility to unify his art and ethics was the real issue, Neal announced, and he resurrected the more demonstrably radical Ellison of the 1940's Negro Quarterly to chide the now "silent and disillusioned" man, who, he charged, no longer had any intention of helping black leaders understand and canalize the repressed social energy and incipient forms of action revealed in black myths, symbols, and folklore. Remonstrances notwithstanding, the "New Breed" reaction to Ellison disclosed ambivalence more than antipathy, as the afterword to Neal's and Jones' movement anthology, Black Fire (1968), revealed in pronouncing Invisible Man simultaneously "a profound piece of writing" and as "having little bearing on the world as the New Breed sees it." And if in the Liberator series Neal mourned Ellison as another vital black mind "lost in the graveyard that is America," in Black World's special issue on Ellison in 1970, the Black Arts Movement's prime manifestant had so reversed his perspective on Ellison as to lead a vigorous defense against the studied invective of Ernest Kaiser's leftist anti-Ellison crusade in the same issue. The recantation had been sparked by Neal's plunge into black political history and by a careful culling of Ellison's "mean but eloquently controlled" rebuttal to Irving Howe's radical prescriptions and literary black-baiting in The New Leader. A look back at Wright's and Ellison's left-wing travail in the forties, augmented by Harold Cruse's trenchant historical anatomy of Marxist machinations in Afro-America, resolved the most pressing questions about the "function" of black literary liberationists and convinced Neal that even black Neo-Marxian thought generated miasmic oversimplifi cations about black life that weakened the movement and black art. Clearly, the social realism and formulaic stridency many of Ellison's critical antagonists espoused did not allow for the free play of fantasy and myth that Ellison had attempted, nor for the intellectually independent black political theory that he and Angelo
147 Herndon tried to fashion in the short-lived, Party-sponsored Negro Quarterly. Always resistant to regimentation, Ellison's early elevation of style over ideology as a cultural force, his "nascent, loosely structured form of black nationalism," and his counter-Marxian gropings for an indigenous cultural theory rooted in Afro-American imperatives, made Ellison's work highly relevant to the contemporary search for new systems of social organization and creative values, and revealed a complexly dimensioned vision "not that far removed from the ideas of some of the best Black writers and intellectuals working today." Indeed, in approaching Afro-American life through a psychology of survival and transcendence rather than a psychology of oppression, it was really Ralph Ellison, more than Richard Wright, Neal implied, who had provided the cultural blueprint for the new black literary radicals — with a positive version of black lifestyles as profoundly human and spir itually sustaining, and with a theory of black "cultural compulsives" that turned Marxian class analysis on its head and made such political meanings as are concealed in the psychic geometries of hipster zoot suits and ghetto choreography the cultural keys to a strategy of liberation. Con comitantly, Ellison had confronted many of the conceptual problems that now faced the Black Arts Movement; and his foray for answers into the murky world of mythology and folklore had yielded an unparalleled sensitivity to the blues, ballads, spirituals, dances, idioms, and heroic archetypes which could genuinely constitute a revolutionary aesthetic. It was in Ellison, Neal surmised, that one could find that "black aesthetic" at its best and find at the same time in Invisible Man one of the world's most successful "political" novels — the confusion had risen from not realizing that Ellison's politics are "ritualistic" rather than secular. In a concerted rapprochement that even paused to mediate the controversy raised by Ellison's harsh review of Leroi Jones' pro- crustean Blues People, Neal retained only one "fundamental differ ence" with the older man: while a zoot suit-like appropriation of white, Western aesthetic ideas did not mean that Ellison had become a white man, his insistent location of his philosophical and literary sensibility in the West and perhaps unintentionally fashioned that zoot suit into a straitjacket for younger black writers. Irretrievably disparate and distant to Wright, Ellison, and Baldwin, the non- Western world now offered a vitalizing avenue of cultural inquiry to a later Afro-American generation brought by simultaneous inter continental political resurgences, by the rise of diasporic festivals, by media magic and modern transport, into closer cultural colloquoy with ex-colonial men of Africa and the Third World, who had
148 become literary as well as political movers and shakers of the modern mind. Art was more psychically powerful than secular politics, Neal now concurred, and through it black people, as Ellison suggested, could 'dominate' Western culture or be 'dominated' by it. But the conglomerate of knowledge, East and West, was the proper source of a liberating black vision and the role of synthesizer the proper aesthetic stance in a world where, alone, no Western or Eastern ethos disclosed the means of mankind's spiritual emancipation. Though Neal's essay had appeared amidst the continuing ide ological onslaught that Ellison later admitted he "mentally walked away from," it signalled a growing sophistication among the New Breed literary radicals, and a fuller comprehension of Ellison's whole corpus of work. The "trials of the word" had not ended for him, however, as became clear in 1973 in a lengthy bipartite tract in Phylon — the long-lived Atlanta journal of race and culture founded by W.E.B. DuBois in the thirties — which attempted to reassess Invisible Man, and the world of Ellison's essays by extension, "within the framework of an American society which has experienced a radical alteration in black consciousness during the past twenty years." Ostensibly a vindication of Ellison's fictive vision, the essays exercised themselves to show how the very structure and controlling metaphors of Invisible Man, the optimistic Emersonian humanism of Shadow and Act, and Ellison's own public career as speaker and cultural committeeman had set the man and his work "running against the grain" of an ascendant concept of Negritude and a strategy of cultural decolonization whose antipathetic pressures had reduced Ellison "to a position of isolation." Taking the spirit of activism and racial self-pride in Du Bois's turn-of-the-century classic, The Souls of Black Folk, as a reference point, the Phylon reevaluation lauded the enduring humanist values of Ellison's work but corrobor ated the charge that Invisible Man's strategy of artistic amalgamation, and its apparent disavowal of any form of direct protest, showed "tendencies toward passive acquiescence and unworthy self-suppres sion" which linked it in spirit with Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and which, in "any reasonably thorough analysis," would spark in the hypothetical black man on the street" a sense of instinctive resent ment." Thoroughness, however, was hardly the leading attribute of analyses that read simple accommodationism into Ellison's jazz- derived concept of cultural synthesis as a subversive strategy of empowerment. And passivity was repudiated nowhere more em phatically than in Ellison's beseiged novel, which hypothesized not a mythic sickness unto death or dissimulation but a myth of rebirth effectively articulated by an originally ineffective activist hero whose
149 being buffeted into hibernation finally transforms him "from ranter to writer" and prepares him for a more socially responsible form of overt action than he has previously been capable of. He is a hero who, despite all his "sad, lost period" of misguided political enthusiasms, still believes "in nothing if not action," who has been a rabble rouser "and perhaps shall be again," and who has stopped smoking reefer, for instance, precisely because the drug inhibits action. The irony Jacqueline Covo noted in Invisible Man's career — that a book which had become a modern classic to American and European readers has been almost smothered in commentary yet largely ignored on its most challenging levels — stands starkest here. Amidst civil disorder and political assassination, amidst black cults and cadres often mis-led by charismatic impressarios or con men, critical responses remained fettered to radical cliche and academic exegeses of imagery and symbolism that all but ignored Invisible Man's central concern with political power and the problems of black leadership. And while scholars explored the novel's affinities with American apocalyptic, prophetic, picaresque, and comic traditions and linked Ellison's essays vaguely to nineteenth century transcendentalism and the mid- twentieth century existential temper, such explorations typically discovered blood ties only to traditional Anglo-European models and showed almost no comprehension of Ellison's relation to an Afro- American literary and philosophical tradition with its own syncretic modes and genres. The critical mind had come to see Ellison's connections to a black folk heritage of blues, jazz, and tales but not to a belletristic tradition of cosmopolitan humanist activism that ex tended from Benjamin Banneker, Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, and Alexander Crummell to W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright. And essays on Ellison as "brown-skinned aristo crat," and on his uses of the imagination, discussed his devotion to elegant and eloquent style and his ideas on literature, music, politics, and culture as if they embodied an idiosyncratic ethos without demonstrable antecedents. In fact Ellison's achievement is that of codifying, refining and extending for creative use a body of Afro- American thought on expressive character, on art and freedom, on democracy and the folk tradition, on pluralism and the national culture, which had been elaborated in detail in the first half of the twentieth century by Du Bois, Johnson, Locke and a legion of streetcorner intellectuals and Talented Tenth "race men." If almost no one seemed able to come fully to terms with Ellison's world of flux and contrariety and riddling codes of conduct, dissipating political tensions after the mid-seventies permitted the
150 freer dialogue that made fragments, at least, of Ellison's cultural thought a source of ethnomusicological and folkloric insights for a new generation of scholars reinterpreting America's pluralistic popular culture. And elements of his aesthetic furnished literary techniques and theories for black literary figures like Leon Forrest, Michael Harper, George Kent, James Mc Pherson, Toni Morrison, Albert Murray, Ishmael Reed, Nathan Scott, and Robert Stepto. However, though Stanley Edgar Hyman had acknowledged Ellison the profoundest cultural critic that we have, and though sociologists deemed him one of the few humanists at ease in the world of social theory, his meditations on subcultural autonomies and interde- pendencies, on the psychohistory of American race rituals, and on the vernacular process, have no more penetrated the formulas of social diagnosticians and prognosticators than the sardonic, heavy-headed "mugging" that opened Invisible Man penetrated the awareness of its white near-victim. The scholarly combine, while beginning to explore Ellison's "ancestral" ties to black literary traditions, has yet to see his career as a whole, to link his early fiction and political thinking to his mature work. And led by Leroi Jones ne Amiri Baraka's epithetical conversionary rhetoric, the current Marxian resurgence among black literary radicals inhibits dogmatically attempts to identify the patterns of continuity beneath the surface cliches about the political and generational animosities between Ellison and the Black Arts writers. So, Ellison's critique of Baraka's cultural hypotheses in Blues People continues to be submitted as evidence of these two writers' alien sensibilities, to the utter neglect of such confraternity as is implied, for example, in Baraka taking his most celebrated step toward a revolutionary black theater — Dutchman — through what is in part a dramatic development of Ellison's image of his naive narrator seated on a subway plunging underground into Harlem while "across the aisle a young platinum blond nibbled at a red Delicious apple as station lights rippled past behind her": that portent in Invisible Man of subsequent en tanglements in the labyrinthine psycho-sexual motives of pale bohemian sibyls which Baraka turned into transfixing Black Arts theater. Tangled just as undiscerningly in the superficialities of radical chic, fragmenting glosses of Ellison's essays and literary exchanges have persisted in focusing, out of context, on his declarations as a writer that political programs and ideologies are secondary to style, and that he is concerned more with art than with injustice. Couched in the full contour of Ellison's thinking however, these priorities reflect no overweening aestheticism but rather an unswerving belief
151 in the supreme moral force of the imagination and in the utility of approaching life's enduring problems through literary modes of perceiving and of investing meaning. Viewed in terms of the enduring tragic and comic aspects of the human condition, political parties and programs are transitory, pragmatic, and ameliorative agencies "guided not by humanism so much as by the expediencies of power." And Ellison's professed subordination of human wrongs to aesthetic imperatives follows tactically from his belief that "it is a matter of outrageous irony, perhaps, but in literature the great social clashes of history no less than the painful experience of the individual are secondary to the meaning which they take on through the skill, the talent, the imagination and personal vision of the writer who transforms them into art. Here they are reduced to more manageable proportions; here they are imbued with humane values; here injustice and catastrophe become less important in themselves than what the writer makes of them." Clearly Ellison came close to accepting what Richard Wright projected as an essentially hierophantic role devolving upon black writers: in the face of a decaying folk religion and a debilitated bourgeois leadership, they were being called, Wright had proclaimed, "to do no less than create values by which their race is to struggle, live, and die," "to furnish moral sanctions for action," to "create the myths and symbols that inspire a faith in life." Rooted more deeply in communal traditions, however, Ellison leaned away from Wright's Nietzchean autogeny and toward the conservation more than the creation of value. His detractors have read acquiescence, disillu sionment, or desperate optimism into his fiction and essays — and a corollary defection from the struggle for freedom — because they cannot comprehend or partisanly deny that his commitment to preserving attitudes toward life which are sometimes stoic, sometimes quietist, is no more a code of resignation than are his allusively omnipresent blues. Like the blues — which the radicals frequently repudiated but which Ellison used paradigmatically as an instrument of heightened consciousness — writing, for him, was to be a way of confronting the jagged pain and pleasure of black lives and of "seeing that it be not in vain," a way of striking through the masks of power and illusion that make remediable human problems seem insoluble and the insoluble seem unbearable. As such, despite all Ellison's derogations of the world of secular politics, the central drama of his work is the unravelling imaginative confrontation with the chimeric forms of power and of freedom. Drawn initially into writing, he has told us, by the desire to understand "the aesthetic nature of literary power" and the devices
152 through which literature commands the mind and emotions, he found himself, "like a sleepwalker searching for some important object," seized with a sense of mission to preserve in art, as codified in Afro-American experience, "those human values which can endure by confronting change." The essays and interviews of Shadow and Act are his witness to a shift of role and strategy in a continuing quest for power and possibility. They chronicle his "slow precarious growth of consciousness" and the related effort "to confront, to peer into, the shadow of my past and to remind myself of the complex resources for imaginative creation that are my heritage." From the early, doctrinaire jottings in his collected and uncollected articles, reviews, and short fiction, through the proliferating series of recent interviews, speeches, and profiles that have marked the anxious watch for his second novel, Ellison has been formulating his own "program" for a black literary initiative, and has enlisted himself "for the duration" in what he agreed with Wright was the pivotal political battle of American culture — the struggle between black men and white over the very nature of reality. Contrary to Wright's spartan ideological perception, however, for Ellison this is not the unrelievedly grim and morally unambiguous confrontation of a group and its allies challenging the defenders of an existing horror, but rather a tragicomic battle-royal the painful joke of which squares off two interbred, interdependent peoples each of whom knows its experience is the real American experience, knows the other group knows as much, and cannot understand why they won't admit it. From Ellison's effort to carry on the combat, what has emerged in the course of forty odd years of writing is a dynamic but self- consistent body of "conscious thought" devoted to transforming the themes, the enigmas, the contradictions of character and culture native to the Afro-American predicament, into literary capital. The Du Boisian echoes of Ellison's opening paragraphs in Shadow and Act — the Icarian image of himself "with these thin essays for wings. . .launched full flight into the dark" where "beyond the veil of consciousness" he seeks to function responsibly, "to range widely and, sometimes, even to soar" — mark the visionary and poetic mode in Ellison's essays that, though more muted than in Du Bois and largely unremarked by critics, yet signals a shared thrust beyond the attractive but reductive materialism of Marxist political theory to a more humane and liberating vision animated both by classical humanism and by the cultural ethos and spiritual strivings of black folk. This liberating vision in Ellison's work reveals at least four major organizing impulses, four intermingled disciplining strategies for
153 divining order in the experience he knows and for converting that experience into potent symbolic action: the syncretic impulse in his "passion to link together all I loved within the Negro community and all those things I felt in the world which lay beyond"; the celebratory impulse to explore "the full range of American Negro humanity" and to affirm the attitudes and values which gives Afro- American life "its sense of wholeness and which render it bearable and human, and when measured by our own terms, desirable"; the dialectical impulse behind his "ceaseless questioning of those formulas through which historians, politicians, sociologists, and an older generation of Negro leaders and writers — those of the so-called 'Negro Renaissance' — had evolved to describe my group's identity, its predicament, its fate and its relation to the larger society and the culture which we share"; and finally the demiurgic impulse to seek cultural power and personal freedom through art, to propose "an idea of human versatility and possibility which went against the barbs or over the palings of almost every fence which those who controlled social and political power had erected to restrict our roles in the life of the country," and so to dominate reality by a willed projection of cultural personality nourished on the highly developed Afro-American ability to abstract desirable qualities even from enemies and on the "yearning to make any-and everything of quality Negro American; to appropriate it, possess it, re-create it in our own group and individual images." The literary imagination, as a comprehensive way of perceiving and controlling, as "a form of energy through which experience is transformed into consciousness," became Ellison's agency for guiding these impulses and for answering the questions: "Who am I, what am I, how did I come to be? What shall I make of the life around me, what celebrate, what reject, how confront the snarl of good and evil which is inevitable? What does American society mean when regarded out of my own eyes, when informed by my own sense of the past and viewed by my own complex sense of the present?" From his vantage point in culture, regional geography, and the social hier archy, and out of his commitment to a fulsome Cartesian doubting of all negative definitions imposed on him by others, Ralph Ellison has tested and sifted and remolded the prevailing concepts of man, of culture, of the national experience, of high art and popular traditions, of the links between art and fredom, in order to fashion a credo capable of comprehending that experience in all its mystery, contradiction and plurality. The syncretic, the celebratory, the dialectical, and the demiurgic impulses that shape his critical vision mediate the tensions between the concepts he confronts and the
154 experience he knows in the same way that technique — ever the key to creative freedom for Ellison — mediates the tension between human desire and human ability. Ellison's syncretic drive to combine, reconcile, arid reintegrate competing cultural realities is amply evident throughout his work, but nowhere more suggestively than in his theories of Afro-American and American character and nowhere more unexpectedly than in his resurrection of Renaissance Man. In order to reveal the truths of his own experience and those around him, Ralph Ellison quite early discovered the need for a concept of man and a concept of culture that could illuminate that blind spot of irrationality Americans called "the Negro problem" — that site in psychic geography where he saw theologians and humanists and social scientists alike stumble, and "where Marx cries out for Freud and Freud for Marx." Gunnar Myrdal's 1943 proclamations in An American Dilemma notwith standing, Afro-American culture and personality were not simply a product of social pathology, Ellison argued in his then unpublished review, and black men had not lived and developed for over three hundred years simply by reacting "to more primary pressures from the side of the dominant white majority." Afro-Americans were more than creatures of white men. They had "helped create themselves out of what they found around them,'' had, j ust as men had made a life in caves and upon cliffs, "made a life upon the horns of the white man's dilemma," a life whose enforced distance and exclusion from white patterns had created the objectivity and counter-values that enabled black men to consciously reject or accept the allegedly "higher values" of the dominant group according to their own subjective design for the good life. Written as Ellison still struggled to incorporate his subjectivist cultural theories into a Marxian sociol ogy, this review, declined publication by the academic journal that commmissioned it, unveiled a startingly avant-garde conception of minority group culture as evolving from voluntaristic and interactive processes with the dominant society, regardless of the imbalance of power. It rejected the rigid environmentalism and social Darwinism of the Robert Park school of race relations theory and clarified the political role played by social science itself in the maintenance of racial oppression. Most of the detractors and many of the liberal defenders of black America — like Myrdal — had forgotten, Ellison emphasized in his paean two years later to Richard Wright's Black Boy, "that human life possesses an innate dignity and mankind an innate sense of nobility, that all men possess the tendency to dream and the compulsion to make their dreams reality, that the need to be ever
155 dissatisfied and the urge ever to seek satisfaction is implicit in the human organism, and that all men are the victims of the goading, tormenting, commanding, and informing activity of that imperious process known as the Mind — the Mind. . .' armed with its inexhaustible questions." The creative significance of the life black men had made upon the horns of the white man's dilemma could not be comprehended by the anthropology of Boas, Benedict, and Herskovits, by the sociological postulates of Myrdal and even E. Franklin Frazier — whose ideas Ellison often improvised upon — nor by the romantic mystique of the New Negro Movement. Man, as Ellison abstracted him from the concrete whirl of black migration and urbanization, from depression and disillusion, from folk endur ance, folk imagination, folk transcendence, was not the creature of fixed, innate feelings and intellect the interpreters of Negro life described. He was rather a multivariant plurality of essences and expressions, solitary and self-reliant in "a world so fluid and shifting that often within the mind the real and the unreal merge, and the marvelous beckons from behind the same sordid reality that denies it existence." Through the agency of their own symbolistic imagina tions, black men had steered a course through the three-dimensioned reality of racial oppression, revolutionary technological modernity, and the encapsulating American national experience, with cultural consequences Ellison tried to make comprehensible by progressively fusing, over the course of two decades, the existential concepts newly ascendant in the radical thought of the forties, the wide-ranging speculative insights of Kenneth Burke, and his own extrapolations from the Afro-American folk ethos. As he acknowledged in a recent interview with Ishmael Reed, the apprenticeship in literature which enabled him to accomplish this took place in the Harlem of the forties amidst the complex cross currents of the waning Negro Renaissance, the Federal Writers Project milieu, and the Stalinist-Tr otskyite radical Left. Besides "the living presence of Langston Hughes, Claude Mc Kay, Countee Cullen, Sterling Brown, and Alain Locke" and the powerful intellectual influence of Marxian political theory and Freudian psychology, his efforts "to make connections" between his own background and the larger world of ideas drew most extensively on the fiction and criticism of French writer-revolutionary Andre Malraux, to which he was initially led by Langston Hughes and through which he became aware of Soren Kierkegaard and Miguel de Unamuno and a body of ideas that revealed to him the existential elements in Afro-American spirituals, folk tales, and blues.
156 In Malraux, Ellison discovered a literary "ancestor" who combined in a single powerful personality the revolutionary artist, the hynoptic political 'rabble-rouser', the philosopher of art, the man of action, and the novelistic historian of cultural conflict and political crisis. In Man's Fate, Man's Hope, Days of Wrath, and The Human Condition — the novels Ellison most often alludes to — Malraux had fashioned artistic answers to human problems Ellison confronted in their American racial incarnation. Malraux had managed, in recreating the fervor and tension of the Chinese Revolution and the Spanish Civil War, to dramatize empathically the collision of diverse cultures, moral systems, national and social types, while discovering in partisan struggle the possibility of human brotherhood and in the act of "imposing the personality upon the external world" man's one and only chance of escaping, if imperfectly, from the emptiness and despair of modern life. Malraux's concept of fiction as transposed memoir and as a means of expressing the tragic in man, his belief in transcendence of the human condition through immersive action and through art, and his anti-determinist view of history as a dialectical progression of events willed by man, reinforced Ellison's aesthetic and philosophical inclinations and enlarged his sense of the possibilities in the fictional material around him in Afro-American life. Miguel de Unamuno, the Spanish philosopher and novelist whom Ellison first discovered as a character in Malraux's Man's Hope, and whose book, The Tragic Sense of Life, he later pored over with Richard Wright, had become a cause celebre for the American liberal intelligentsia after his defiance of Spain's Rivera dictatorship and his subsequent exile made him an international symbol of the artist- philosopher grappling with the political anxieties of the age. Lauded in America in the thirties for his prototypical "Spanishness" and for his "ideophobic" rebellion against Western rationalism, Unamuno had a special relevance for Ellison and Wright over later existentialists like Sartre and Camus precisely because of those facets of his thought which made him to many at home in Spain not so much a symbol of the Spanish spirit as of the subversion of Spanish tradition. For the image in the eyes of the outside world of Unamuno as Spain's "native son" was, as Ellison and Wright could understand from their own vantage point in black America, highly ironic. Born into the belabored Basque minority, his first novel an inspired reaction against the Carlist bombardment of his home city, Bilbao, Miguel de Unamuno had internalized and projected Spain's seem ingly permanent state of civil war. Torn by a philosophical attraction to Kierkegaard and the modern Protestant theologians on
157 the one hand and, on the other, by his spiritual roots in Catholic culture and pagan Spain, he saw himself, like Spain, as tragically divided; and he dramatized obsessively in his novels the theme of the fratricidal Cain complex and group hatreds he considered to be the national disease. A critic of Spanish machismo and the code of "honor," Unamuno had turned violently against European tra ditions, had emphasized the unique Spanish cultural legacy of a history shared intimately with Jews and Moors, and taking pride in Spain's African ancestry, prophesied further Africanization as the key to Spain's and Europe's regenesis. Unamuno's existential humanism, which Ellison and Wright absorbed without the religious framework, portrayed the human condition as a dramatic agon, a tragic wrestling with uncertainty en route to a meaningless death. Unamuno's prototypic "man of flesh and bone," a spiritual forebear of Ellison's Invisible Man, fights against destiny with no hope of victory but nevertheless "quixoti cally," in order to dramatize, at least, the injustice of life's inescapable agony. As Ellison's own fictive "man of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids" would later conclude in his heroic image of jazzman Louis Armstrong quixotically trumpeting a lyrical defiance to the world, "humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat." Unamuno's tragic vision, in delineating a code of conduct akin to Hemingway's canonical "grace under pressure" but immersed instead in a communal ethos, unveiled to Ellison the possibility of understanding the attitudes in the blues tradition, whose literary value Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown had helped him appreciate, not as something quaint, folksy, melancholy, fatalistic, and formless but as magisterial, tragicomic, transcendental, and spiritually disciplined. The blues, as Ellison subsequently re- conceived them, were actually "an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching con sciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism." Codified from long experience at the edge of an existential abyss, their emotive power lay in that "they at once express both the agony of life and the possibility of conquering it through sheer toughness of spirit.'' Much more than a laconic wail of the dispossessed, they were not "low-down" and peripheral to the American experience but, indeed, a gauge of the democratic experi ment and the closest Americans could come to embracing the tragic. Modally, they were an art of ambiguity and assertion capable of making the details of sex "convey meanings which touch upon the
158 metaphysical," and they were the only native art in the United States "which constantly reminds us of our limitations while encouraging us to see how far we can go." In a 1973 interview with novelist John Hersey, Ellison reiterated his non-dogmatic view of the existential quality in black life, emphasizing the ambiguity of Afro-American social status — kept violently below the threshold of American social hierarchy "in a way that neither our Christianity nor our belief in the principles of the Constitution could change," while being at the same time "exist- entially right in the middle of the social drama." In the face of a society that spent great rhetorical and political energy "proving to itself that we were not human and that we had no sense of the refinement of human values," black Americans were forced, in order to survive psychically, to rely upon their own resources and sense of life, were forced to define and act out their own idea of the heights and depths of the human condition. They had developed an existential outlook, Ellison maintained, "because human beings cannot live in a situation where violence can be visited upon them without any concern for justice — and in many cases without possibility of redress — without developing a very intense sense of the precariousness of all human life, not to mention the frailty and arbitrariness of human institutions." The culture and identity Afro-Americans had improvised out of ambiguity embodied an agon but not a state of irremediable agony, as Ellison had explained in a long, reiterably eloquent passage a decade earlier in the exchange with Irving Howe. "Negroness," he had maintained, resided in nothing so simple as skin color or victimage, but in a willed existential ?rfirmation of self as against all outside pressures: Being a Negro American has to do with the memory of slavery and the hope of emancipation and the betrayal by allies and the revenge and contempt inflicted by our former masters after the Reconstruction, and the myths, both Northern and Southern, which are propagated in justification of that betrayal. It involves, too, a special attitude toward the waves of immigrants who have come later and passed us by. It has to do with a special perspective on the national ideals and the national conduct, and with a tragicomic attitude toward the universe. It has to do with special emotions evoked by the details of cities and country-sides, with forms of labor and with forms of pleasure; with sex and with love, with food and with drink, with machines and with animals; with climates and with dwellings, with places of worship and places of entertainment; with garments and dreams and idioms of speech; with manners and customs, with religion and art, with life styles and hoping, and with the special sense of predicament and fate
159 which gives direction and resonance to the Freedom Movement. It involves a rugged initiation into the mysteries and rites of color which makes it possible for Negro Americans to suffer the injustice which race and color are used to excuse without losing sight of either the humanity of those who inflict that injustice or the motives, rational and irrational, out of which they act. It imposes the uneasy burden and occasional joy of a complex double vision, a fluid ambivalent response to men and events which represents, at its finest, a profoundly civilized adjustment to the cost of being human in this modern world. The conceptual keys for distilling fragmentary patterns of sense, memory, imagination, and rite into this careful codification of Afro- American ethos and world-view Ellison had discovered, in part, in the philosophic criticism of Kenneth Burke. Decades ahead of the anthropologists who have turned to Ernest Cassirer and to Burke for a semiotic concept of culture, Ralph Ellison appropriated the theories of symbolic action (after first hearing Burke's critique of Adolph Hitler's Mein Kampf in 1937) because he perceived that to approach Afro-American culture simply as patterned behavior or as a model in the mind, or even as a mixture of the two, failed to get at the true import of a way of life whose profound, inescapable material constraints and compensatorily muscular subjective structures im plied men who defined themselves, and dealt with the existential dilemmas of living, through the medium of symbolic actions. Neither material reflex or disengaged ideation, symbolic action gave ritual form to the attitudes men worked out, in solitude or in concert, for coping with real situations. And though we hardly recognized it, much of human "reality" consisted of such systems of gyroscopic meanings, for Man, as Burke conceived him, was quintessentially a symbol-making, self-fabricating being who struggled compulsively for order amidst the clutter of self-propagated signs and metaphors that constituted human culture. Man's cultural creations — myths, religion, folklore, music, dance, visual art, science, and literature — were all symbolic "equipments for living," stylized strategies for naming or prescribing attitudes toward recurring human problems. And the pattern of black life especially, as Burke pictured it, embodied a "complex, subtle, and gratifying" symbolicity that, under intense pressure, mediated aesthetically between the beleagured life of the body and the processes of spiritual gratification. As Ellison employed it, such a view made visible and dynamic black cultural patterns that had been shrouded by the concept of race or else misinterpreted mechanistically as impassive artifacts, traits, and survivals. Ellison saw Afro-American life as vitalistically ex pressed "in a body of folklore, in the musical forms of the spirituals.
160 jazz, and the blues; in an idiomatic version of American speech. . .; a cuisine; a body of dance forms and even a dramaturgy which is generally unrecognized as such because still tied to the more folkish Negro churches." But the culture itself consisted of actions, symbolic actions, that were no less real for often being checked, diverted, or concealed. Again, his accolade to Richard Wright's blues-toned autobiography, even as it marked the maturation of Ellison's prose style and offered penetrating literary insights, also provoked a cultural redefinition and a new awareness of covert black symbol systems. Besides presenting the now classic definition of the blues as a complex, cathartic symbolic strategy, Ellison attempted to describe in "Richard Wright's Blues" how, crucial for self-definition, black men always had had a margin of freedom to choose the cultural means and ends with which they would confront the destiny white oppression had prepared for them. That the resultant symbolic manuevering might distort the "inner world" or be maladaptive was evident to Ellison in the "homeo pathic" intrafamilial violence and "pre-individualistic" values Southern black communities employed, in the face of organized terrorism, to deflect the individual will from dangerous self-assertion. It was evident also in the deceptively "physical" character of black expressive culture, where music and dance were frenziedly erotic; religious ceremony violently ecstatic; speech rhythmical, gestural, and imagistic. But this sensuousness, Ellison admonished, did not "mean" the simple spontaneity of primitives and peasants that whites often interpreted it to be. For Afro-American life existed "in the seething vortex of those tensions generated by the most industri alized of Western nations," and the physicality offered as evidence of the black man's primitive simplicity was "actually the form of his complexity." In response to social conditions that drove the self in turns from comatose to hysterical states, black dance, for instance, had become a symbolic strategy for creating an alternative form of consciousness that was a kind of reverse cataleptic trance: "Instead of his consciousness being lucid to the reality around it while the body is rigid, here it is the body which is alert, reacting to pressures which the constricting forces of Jim Crow block off from the transforming, concept-creating activity of the brain. The 'eroticism' of Negro expression springs from much the same conflict as that displayed in the violent gesturing of a man who attempts to express a complicated concept with a limited vocabulary; thwarted ideational energy is converted into unsatisfactory pantomine, and his words are over burdened with meanings they cannot convey." Ideas and concepts which the intellect could not, or dare not, formulate, Ellison
161 hypothesized, were literally being, in Burke's terms, "danced out," albeit unsatisfactorily. And because the defensive character of black life transmuted the human "will toward organization" into a "will to camouflage, to dissimulate," the public meanings symbolized in such cultural forms were so distorted "as to render their recognition as difficult as finding a wounded quail against the brown and yellow leaves of a Mississippi thicket." Deciphering the covert symbolic meanings of Afro-American culture required the methodology of a quail hunt, then, Ellison hinted metaphorically, and hunters sympa thetic enough with the quarry to be able to ask themselves and to answer: "Where would I hide if / were a wounded quail?" That this mode of cultural inquiry would be neither an inspiriting jaunt or a pilgrimage for wound-worshippers, Ellison made clear in another essay unpublished before Shadow and Act, written in 1948 while he was hard at work on Invisible Man. "Harlem is Nowhere" presented his existentialist reading of Afro-American culture at its bleakest and most nearly deterministic, although this meditation on a visit to a psychiatric clinic for Harlem's underprivileged acknow ledged both the "mark of oppression" and the possibility of transcendence for men and women who had momentarily become confused before chaos. Sanity more than simple physical survival was the object of human action here, and the field for symbolic manuever had shifted from the feudal darkness of Wright's Southern nightmare world to a garish Northern urban surreality whose wastage, grotesqueries, and masquerades diverted the major energy of the imagination from creating an orienting art to overcoming the frustrations of discrimination, and to locating an alienated self in "a labyrinthine existence among streets that explode monotonously skyward with the spires and crosses of churches and clutter under foot with garbage and decay." The Harlem Ellison portrayed here was not the New Negro Mecca and culture-capitol it had been to James Weldon Johnson and Alain Locke in the twenties, but instead a wasteland ruin, "the scene and symbol of the Negro's perpetual alienation in the land of his birth," and a site where symbolic possibilities proliferated even as personality became more frag mented. Here the traditional symbolic linkages between black culture and personality had been disrupted so that the symbology of transcendence was that by which the talented grandchildren of peasants who believed in magic and possessed no written literature had come to master technology and "examine their lives through the eyes of Freud and Marx, Kierkegaard and Kafka, Malraux and Sartre." The symbology of prophylaxis was that word-magic through
162 which songs like the "Blow Top Blues" and vernacular expressions like "frantic," "buggy," and "mad" were conjured to neutralize the states they named: Harlemites answered the greeting, "How are you?" with a formulaic "I'm nowhere, man" that ritually objectified their feelings of homelessness and facelessness and their status as "displaced persons." And because to Ellison's dissecting eye the supports of Southern black rationality — the protective peasant cynicism, the sense of rootedness, the authoritative religion, the gyroscopic folklore — had been largely surrendered and not replaced through migration northward ( as "the near themeless technical virtuosity of bebop" did not replace the lyrical, ritual elements of folk jazz), black men had lost many of the symbolic bulwarks they had placed between themselves and the threat of chaos. The patients at the Lafargue clinic had succumbed to "irrational, incalculable forces that hover about the edges of human life like cosmic destruction lurking within an atomic stockpile," and for them the last ditch symbology of survival was the white man's frustrated psychic science, deflected from the treatment of a sick social order, and incapable of dispelling the unreality that haunted Harlem, but modestly attuned to helping bewildered black patients understand themselves and their environ ment enough to "reforge the will to endure in a hostile world." Against the backdrop of this tragic adaptation of symbolic action to social pathology, the concept of Renaissance Man that Ellison reclaimed from his boyhood for Shadow and Act by his own admission "seems a most unlikely and even comic concept to introduce." But he did so, and with a straight face, because, as taken over and transformed by his "wild free outlaw tribe" of Oklahoma boys, Renaissance Man became a potent symbol of that cultural playing with possibility and that syncretic and potentially subversive processing of dream and reality which Ellison believes to be the saving dynamic of Afro-American culture. Transmitted originally "from some book or from some idealistic Negro teacher, some dreamer," and suggesting a surreptitious sociology of ideas that intellectual historians have only begun to contemplate, Renaissance Man as elaborated by Ellison's youthful cadre functioned as a projective father-surrogate for boys who, like Ellison himself, were often fatherless. It offered, he reflected, a way to fuse symbolically the black middle class faith in education, and the idea of self-cultivation, with a notion of aristocratic elegance that was fervently populist and full of roguish style. A strategic antidote to self-hate and defen- siveness, it formulated an ideal image of intellectual competence and verve which was neither foppish or effete. It encouraged self-
163 discipline and expansive growth. And it "violated all ideas of social hierarchy and order and all accepted conceptions of the hero handed down by cultural, religious, and racist tradition": "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 athelete, the ruthlessness of some business man-physician, the elegance in dress and manners of some headwaiter or hotel doorman." No anachronistic nineteenth century humanism preserved in the Oklahoma black community through cultural lag, Renaissance Man in Ellison's "ragtime" version presented a thoroughly modern and palpably black distillation of an enduring human ideal— adaptive, humane, creative, moral, refined, and heroic. Embodying an implicit critique of the pillars of white society, who, from the confines of their segregated community Ellison's band always saw as "crooks, clowns, or hypocrites," this Renaissance Man functioned as a counter-image to the failed 'humanities' imaged in such figures as Melville's Ahab and Conrad's Kurtz. And as a cultural archetype it projected the humanist as self-redemptive outsider and outlaw who, like the jazzmen on whom he is so heavily modeled, is "less torn and damaged by the moral compromises and insincerities which have so sickened the life of our country." That this was the heroic ideal of black boys who lived so much in their imaginations, and to whom the cost of realizing such an ideal in action could barely be grasped, is simply more testimony toEllison of the vital social role of the imagination. For it was this ideal synthesized in childhood fantasy, he recalled, that later served "to mock and caution" him when Marxist political theory and the communist ideal claimed his attentions. It guided his subsequent apprenticeship as a writer. And, as he discovered in a recent return to Oklahoma City, in the remarkable multiform accomplishments of his boyhood comrades despite all racial ob stacles, it revealed the reverse potentiality for symbolic action to be converted into lived experience. Nor was it devoid of public and political meanings, for a prideful Oklahoma teacher had taught young Ralph Ellison Afro-American history and introduced him, through Alain Locke's volume, The New Negro, to the major figures of what seemed a glor ious racial awakening in Harlem — so that his boyhood "dream of possibility" took place precisely amidst that racial 'coming-of-age' called the Negro Renaissance, whose expansive exhortations to humanistic self-mastery and nationalistic black pride
164 wedded culture and commitment, elegance and militancy, fused Renaissance Man with Race Man in the intellectual leadership of W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, and Paul Robeson. The relation of this syncretic conception of communal style and ideal character to Ellison's encompassing view of the national culture is clear enough: Renaissance Man is an analogue, a metaphor for the broader cultural processes and national character as his torically evolved. Ellison's theories of American national culture cast aside completely "the sterile concept of race" (while conceding that the relations between culture and biology remain "mysterious") and carefully distinguish the forms of the nation's inner "spiritual" life as projected in the imagination, from the forms of material com pulsion. Like American literary nationalists from Emerson onward, Ellison's is the "organic" theory, Herderian in origin, that national culture is, or ought to be, a crystallization in language, music, dance, architecture, art, and literature, of the character of the people as a whole and the contours of the land. The radical heterogeneity of a population compressed together through colonial conquest, slavery, and immigration, and through the democratic principles that rationalized revolution, is the prime support, in Ellison's construct, of the cultural pluralism and the egalitarian "folk ideology" which he has inherited and extended. His roguish Renaissance Man, though, supplants Emerson's Representative Man as a projection of national possibility; and the jazz, folk blues, city/ country, cinematic, and vernacular folk/classical amalgam he personifies represents a new pluralism, philosophical and cultural, revived and progressively indigenized by Ellison's syncretic use of the Emerson-Whitman legacy, the theories of Constance Rourke, the literary works of Melville, Twain, and Faulkner, the critical insights of Kenneth Burke and Stanley Edgar Hyman, and the social thought of W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke. The strain of pluralist social thought in Ellison's speculations about the national culture has its broader antecedents in Thomas Paine's Quakerism and immigrant Hector St. John de Crevecoeur's agrarian cultural ecumenism; in Emerson's and Whitman's and Margaret Fuller's transcendentalist advocacy of a "spiritual" fusion of the races; in William James' pluriverse and John Dewey's promulgation of the "Freedom to Be One's Best Self"; in Randolph Bourne's image of a "Trans-National America"; and in the ideas of philosophers Horace Kallen and Alain Locke. Always at war with racism, with nativist xenophobia, and with the anti-amalgamation doctrine of racial purists, it has characteristically been a submerged,
165 antinomian current in our intellectual and imaginative life, championed in its fullest implications mainly by out-groups and radical democrats. For Ellison, the pluralist outlook afforded the only version of the past that could explain the complex present, and offered the only prospect for a liveable future. To him, the misnamed "Negro problem" has been the most potent symbol of the issues raised in America by the plurality of races and cultures. And the enduring relevance and power for him of the nineteenth century works of Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Twain is that, for them, he argues, the question of the Negro and other races in the development of an American literature was an "organic" part of the debate. And the question of slavery — it was not termed a "Negro problem" then, he tells us — was "a vital issue in the American consciousness, symbolic of the condition of Man, and a valid aspect of the writer's reality." But one of Ellison's most recurrent themes, elaborated earliest and most fully in the 1945 and 1946 essays "Beating That Boy" and "Twentieth Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity," is that the post-Civil War betrayal of Recon struction exacerbated in the white American mind an ethical schizophrenia and a guilty need to "force the Negro down into the deeper level of his consciousness." Sterling Brown's scholarship in the late thirties had demonstrated that the American literary imagin ation had historically been obsessed with the symbolic figure of the Negro — multivariously stereotypic — and Brown had initiated a critical war on literary stereotypy in support of which Ellison, with telling originality, now marshalled the psychoanalytic insights of Freud. The borders between the white world and the black, Ellison argued, were not spatial or merely social, but psychological and ritual. Racial oppression's social symbiosis had a psychic counter part which made it "practically impossible for the white American to think of sex, of economics, of crime, his children or womenfolk, or of sweeping socio-political changes, without summoning into con sciousness fear-flecked images of black men." The black man in the white mind had become an ambivalently attractive and repulsive image of "the unorganized, irrational forces of American life," and the black stereotype in literature became part of a ritual of exorcism, sacrifice, and consolation that sublimated white men's guilt, con firmed obversely the "white" identity, and systematically evaded human reality. The American writer, who, Ellison insisted, could be "no freer than the society in which he lives," was inescapably but uncalculatedly tied to the currents of popular belief; and in sup pressing in the moral imagination, since Reconstruction, the organic
166 national tragedy of race, American writers, with rare exception, routinely evaded their responsibility for the health of democracy. They had "formed the habit of living and thinking in a culture that is opposed to the deep thought and feeling necessary to profound art; hence its avoidance of emotion, its fear of ideas, its obsession with mere physical violence and pain, its overemphasis of understatement, its precise and complex verbal constructions for converting goatsong into carefully modulated squeaks." R.W.B. Lewis may have been correct in describing Ellison's countervailingly radical reading of the nineteenth century classic American writers as the idiosyncratic "critical paraphrase" through which every authentic writer fabricates a new literary tradition for himself. And clearly Ellison retrospectively pushed the ethos of the American Renaissance where many of its authors were loathe indeed to go — past Emerson's professed "instinctive colorphobia," past Whitman's nativist crudities and antimongrelization missives, past Hawthorne's derogation of social reform and Melville's fear of anarchy. With his sense of being symbolically rooted in an exemplary literary past buoyed by Constance Rourke's characterological citings of the cross-racial folk roots of the national culture, Ellison has opposed the monistic Brahmin reading of American traditions with a view that locates the keys to our creative evolution in the metaphorical power of blackness; in the masquerade of minstrelsy; in the drama of interbreedings, cultural and biological; in the irrepressible inter- penetration of ideas across caste and class lines; in the stimulus of cultural conflict and incessant change and rebellion. Ellison's is the almost anarchic, Jamesian philosophy of a world imperfectly unified still and perhaps always to remain so — spontaneous, discontinuous, unpredictable, and live with possibility: a reality analogous to the mind which struggles to navigate it. The wholeness and truth of American experience, to him, "lies in its diversity and swiftness of change," in its "almost magical fluidity and freedom." His literary apprenticeship gave this puzzling stream of the one-and-the-many a concrete, human form — "the mystery of how each of us despite his origin in diverse regions, with our diverse social, cultural, religious backgrounds, speaking his own diverse idiom of the American language in his own accent, is, nevertheless, American." The language to resolve the mystery and render this pluralist reality Ellison discovered in the "rich babel" of idiomatic black speech around him — "a language full of imagery and gesture and rhetorical canniness,. . .an alive language swirling with over three hundred years of American living, a mixture of the folk, the Biblical, the scientific and the political. Slangy in one instance,
167 academic in another, loaded poetically with imagery in the next," Ellison extended the cultural implications of Afro-American idiom beyond what the purified rendering of James Weldon Johnson had suggested, beyond the transcriptive "folksay" of Langston Hughes or the proletarian folk metaphysics of Sterling Brown; and what Whitman had left as mere hypothesis — the claim that the re presentative polyglot language of the new American literature would be found in the mouths of slaves — Ellison made a reality. But Ellison's transforming the nineteenth century's abstract racial romanticism into a modern existential pluralism rooted in Afro- American cultural particularities was no idiosyncrasy; it built carefully, if contentiously, upon the cultural history and theory of distinct "racial gifts" propounded since before the turn of the century by W.E.B. Du Bois in The Conservation of the Races (1897), The Souls of Black Folk (1903), and The Gift of Black Folk (1924); and it radicalized and refined the pluralist values and imperatives an nounced during the New Negro Movement and after, by Alain Locke. Du Bois's early cultural panorama had incorporated the nineteenth century phylogenetic notion of discrete, plural, "racial tempera ments" and "racial geniuses," and used it to confront the arrogantly Anglophile interpretations of American tradition with an image of the ostensibly inferior black man as in fact a consummate cultural creator and the bringer to the nation of largely unacknowledged racial "gifts" — "the gifts of story and song," "the gifts of sweat and brawn," "the gift of the spirit," and the gift of an uncompromised "vision of democracy." Du Bois had portrayed his "veiled" black genius as neither alien or exotic, neither a cultural error nor a liability, but as a venerable cultural insider woven so'thoroughly with the very warp and woof of the nation that "dramatically the Negro is the central thread of American history" — America's metaphor. "The whole story turns on him," Du Bois had argued, "whether we think of the dark and flying slave ship in the sixteenth century, the expanding plantations of the seventeenth, the swelling commerce of the eighteenth, or the fight for freedom in the nineteenth. It was the black man that raised a vision of democracy in America such as neither Americans nor Europeans conceived in the eighteenth century and such as they have not even accepted in the twentieth century; and yet such a conception which every clear sighted man knows is true and inevitable." Du Bois prophesied that, as they emerged from behind "the Veil" — the original analytic visual metaphor for racial alienation — double visioned black writers would eventually turn this story into great art; for even though economic stress and racial persecution forestalled the leisure
168 and poise necessary for stable literary development, "never in the world had a richer mass of material been accumulated by a people than that which the Negroes possess today and are becoming increasingly conscious of" — it awaited only the "artists of technic" whose alchemy would transmute it. As the new social and psychic sciences undermined the notion of innate racial genius, however, Du Bois had turned increasingly from mystical racial messianism to Marxian class analysis, so that critic- historian Benjamin Brawley and Alain Locke, a Rhodes Scholar and Harvard-trained philosopher-aesthetician, then masterminded the cultural interpretation of Afro-American experience. It was Locke, as literary "midwife" of the Negro Renaissance, who, in 1925, had spurred the black Younger Generation to reject the social attitudes which had made the Old Negro "more of a formula than a human being," Locke who proclaimed philosophically what Ralph Ellison would eventually dramatize in fiction — the necessary turn toward self-understanding of the prototypic "New Negro" leader who spiritually would have to "hurdle several generations of experience at a leap" and consciously transcend the distorted perspective in which, as social bogey and social burden, "his shadow, so to speak, has been more real to him than his personality." In promoting this racial awakening Locke had shifted the focus of cultural analysis from the racial mystique to the folk ethos and had elaborated a doctrine of formal cultural pluralism within the dual context of modern race relations theory and the new literary regionalism of the twenties and thirties — both of which, however, tended toward antiquarian views of folk tradition and evolutionary rather than revolutionary social change. Withijn this frame Locke projected a new model of cultural organicism: the national culture reflected and was evolving toward a heterogeneous, hybrid "con federation of minority traditions," a system not of water-tight compartments, or nations within a nation, but of profoundly interlinked variants of a diffuse cultural composite, so that Jim Crow notwithstanding, "the cultural products of the Negro [were] distinct hybrids, culturally 'mulatto' generations ahead of the mixed physical condition and ultimate biological destiny, perhaps, of the human stock." By an irony of history, racial oppression had, in spite of its political, economic, and social exactions, "turned out to be a great spiritual discipline and a cultural blessing in disguise," preserving and intensifying black folk values so that they now stood out in the "rather colorless amalgam of the general population" as the "corner stone spiritually in the making of a distinctive American culture." Locke described his nationally "emblematic" Negro folk culture as an indigenous synthesis, neither atavistically African nor imitatively
169 European but a distinctive new cultural creation. Locke's patrician ambivalence, however, about the world of the folk made it seem paradoxically both antiquated and modern, durable and doomed, appealingly universal but embarrassingly naive, profound but not fully articulate. Confronting Du Bois's and Locke's widely influential inter pretations, and with them the problematic creative legacy of the Negro Renaissance, Ralph Ellison struggled toward a philosophy of his own at the beginning of his career by retaining what seemed valuable, reconciling it with his then clear commitment to Marxist theory, and rejecting the rest. Richard Wright's manifesto essay of 1937, "Blueprint for Negro Writing," had offered an attractive challenge to young black writers, like the then twenty-three year old New York newcomer from Oklahoma, to help mount what seemed to be the staunchest program for a new synthetic revolutionary liter ature: it rejected the bourgeois mystique of race for a folk-oriented cultural nationalism that would ideally transcend itself in the wider Marxian social consciousness; it defined a sense of perspective, subject matter, and theme immersed in a holistic group history; and it asserted a thoroughgoing literary professionalism which differ entiated itself from "the so-called Harlem school" by its emphasis on the discipline and autonomy of craft and on the need for a rigorous criticism freed from racial defensiveness and self congratulation. Most important, it elevated art and the writer to the apex of the struggle for freedom and balanced the requirement of an orienting radical "ism" with the call for a literary vision that would flesh out "the magic wonder of life" and its "complex simplicity." Wright's ideas and literary achievements gave Ellison an initial point of reference for evaluating the racial tradition in literature and for erecting a controlling vision in accord with his own considered experiences. In his early reviews and essays for the radical press, he attempted, while straining against the limits of communist doctrine, to measure the formulas and handiwork of the Negro Renaissance against Wright's and his own maturing values. Ellison's review of Langston Hughes's autobiography, The Big Sea, in 1940, his notice praising the Negro Playwright Company's production that year of The Big White Fog (Theodore Ward's gripping drama of a black family pushed by oppression toward the polar millenialisms of the Garveyites and the Communists), and the critical essay he wrote the following summer discussing recent black fiction in the light of Native Son, present the clearest record of his thinking. The New Negro Movement as a whole Ellison denounced as an unqualified failure — he exempted only the work of Langston Hughes. Though the movement had apparently risen out of post-war riots and
170 lynchings which generated a new nationalistic phase in the black masses' struggle toward freedom, it had quickly fallen pray, Ellison declared in strident radical rhetoric, to the perverting bqhemianism of world-weary white exoticists and to the pathetic attempts of a self-serving Negro middle class to "reconcile unreconcilables" — bourgeois passivity with proletarian militancy. Brushing aside James Weldon Johnson's and Claude McKay's autobiographical chronicles of the movement as patently unrealistic and self-deceiving, Ellison lauded Hughes' book as the more realistic record of one of the few survivors of the Negro Renaissance who was still a vital writer on a revolutionary path. The source of that vitality, Ellison believed —and here he sounded a theme that would persist in his thinking long after the leftist line had vanished — was Hughes' rootedness in "the crystallized folk experience of the blues, spirituals, and folk tales" and his rejection of the ideological world of the black bourgeoisie. As an account of the personal struggle to achieve that vital consciousness, however, The Big Sea was analytically deficient — merely a charming, picaresque narrative of an adventurous life, limited to that superficial level by an understated style which avoided the dramatic deeper meanings of the life it described, and which deprived the book of "that unity which is formed by the mind's brooding over experience and transforming it into conscious thought." Ellison had come to see the crucial subject of literature to be the drama of mind, fettered by illusion, moving toward freedom through expanding, intensifying, self-consciousness. When he examined current black fiction at the turn of the decade, he noted first, caustically, that the older generation of black writers had produced little fiction since the early thirties; and he concluded that, while Arna Bontemps, Zora Neale Hurston, and William Attaway had all demonstrated "a slow but steady movement toward reality" in their work to that point, the prime contrast with the "timid," "apologetic" black fiction of the twenties was the fiction of Richard Wright. It was in Wright's work that a radical heightening of consciousness was most evident and the whole American caste system most clearly contradicted, for against the odds of inherited privilege and wealth he had mastered American civilization through the techniques and discipline of his art. Together with Langston Hughes, Wright offered the promise of reorienting a whole tradition which had "ignored the existence of Negro folklore and perceived no connection between its efforts and the symbols and images of Negro folk forms." It had "avoided psychology" and was "unconscious of politics and most of the deeper problems arising out of the relationship of the
171 Negro group to the American whole"; and it clung to "racial and narrowly nationalistic" protest that was divorced from "the inter national scheme of things." Ellison was actually offering inadvertent support here for Alain Locke's claim during the same years that the new black literary radicalism constituted not so much a counter-movement to the Negro Renaissance as a maturation of its ideals, and that the young post-Depression writers had systematically ignored or misinterpreted the New Negro credo to justify the strategy and tactics of their own generational rebellion. For Ellison's critique of the New Negro novel, shorn of the Marxian framework, provided in its implicit counter-theory a fairly precise restatement of Locke's own New Negro formulation, which Ellison would transmute into a radical and existential fiction over the course of the next decade. At the time, his short story, "Mister Toussan," which was published in New Masses late in the fall of 1941, attempted to chart a concrete course toward that fiction through the use of a revolutionary theme, folk motifs, and the mythic and ritualist mode. And when Ellison reviewed William Attaway's powerful new novel of the Great Migration, Blood on the Forge, the following month, he felt himself carried one step closer to the prose narrative his own ideas anticipated: here was a novel of Afro-American life which mined a vital body of folk experience through a system of cogent symbols and symbolically variegated attitudes toward life, a novel rich in the poetry of folk speech and the blues ethos, sophisticated in its economic analyses of the movement from medieval to modern America, and stylistically attuned to rendering the effects of technology and shifting social realities on the simultaneously expectant and disillusioned personal ity. What Attaway's work lacked, and Hughes', and even Wright's mind-numbing narratives, which Ellison would have to perfect, was the still unplumbed subjective drama of the processes by which the questing black personality attains a heightened consciousness, and the will to endure, amidst the flux and force of competing values and changing landscapes. Wright had fashioned a possible cultural and historical context for that drama in the text of his Twelve Million Black Voices, published that same fall, and which confronted Du Bois and Locke and the Talented Tenth reading of the cultural past with a lyrical, Marxian black "folk history" of the complex passage in America from plantation feudalism to urban, technological capitalism — a book Wright intended not only as a distillation of what was "qualitative and abiding" in the experience of the black masses but also as his framework for a planned saga cycle of novels. But Wright's outlook
172 largely elided or subordinated the questions that increasingly intrigued Ellison. So as the forties became for American literary intellectuals generally a time for synthesizing a balanced view from the insurgencies and accomplishments of the three previous decades, so Ellison's essays taken together reflected a conscious effort to retain the legacy of Du Bois's sweeping insights while separating them rigorously from the race concept, to divine the "technic" for integrating the resources of the black past into a framework of myth and rite, to resolve the cultural paradoxes Locke and the Negro Renaissance left intact, and to incorporate, free of Wright's con straining naturalism, an existentialist reading of the folk tradition. As his comments in several recent interviews make clear, in discussing these technical and conceptual problems with the older generation of black writers, Ellison found them to be essentially intuitive artists, largely inarticulate as literary theorists and tech nicians — save Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, whom he consciously distinguished from the rest by their more extensive contacts with the larger, white, literary world. But Hughes had written little fiction that could still interest Ellison, Wright had become less interesting to him as an ideological novelist than Malraux and the Russian masters, and Ellison turned increasingly to the world of critical scholars for syncretic strategies. Constance Rourke's regionalist folk criticism, for instance, opened new possibilities for the interpretation of national character through the medium of black folk and popular traditions, and suggested techniques for extracting valuable fictional material from the debilitating conventions of minstrelsy, the plantation tradition, and local color. The American folk tradition, Rourke had demonstrated in The Roots of American Culture (1942), was primarily abstract and formal rather than naturalistic and informal, a drama of comedy and archetypal character grounded in a ritual, allegorical rendering of a racially intermingled past. In her discussion of the "Traditions for a Negro Literature," Rourke showed that, claims of white provenience notwithstanding, and despite systematic distortion, Afro-American dances, jokes, jingles, and songs were the creative source of min strelsy's ritual forms and that, once stripped of the debasing dialect and pursued to their folk origins, black cultural elements preserved nowhere else save in minstrelsy could furnish a vital tradition of fabling, of protest and rebellion, and of comic and heroic character for contemporary writers. Ellison discovered scholarly grounds for his own intuitions in Rourke's cultural history and in her earlier American Humor (1931), which delineated a black comic mode rooted in "cryptic and submerged" revolt and in the triumphant
173 resilience of the folk. Rourke linked American rituals of comic masking to the ambiguities of national identity; and she portrayed the folk mind not as quaint and culturally subordinate but as energetically barbaric, subversively democractic, and a dominant national force in spite of social stricture. In treating Rourke along with the other major literary thinkers of the era, Stanley Edgar Hyman's The Armed Vision (1947), published later in the decade, served the forties synthesizers by identifying and dissecting the major critical achievements of the preceding decades and by suggesting the utility of "an integrative frame able to encompass and use the newest advances in all fields of knowledge," a frame such as most readily offered itself in the form of Marxism, or the concept of Organicism (the organic unity of the human person ality), or in Kenneth Burke's metaphor of Dramatism. Ellison ultimately absorbed all of these into his creative and critical method, along with the Cambridge School mythic and ritualist approaches that led him, for instance, to link Lord Raglan's and Otto Rank's studies of the myth of the hero with his own consuming interest in the political problems of black leadership — the genesis oiInvisible Man. The approach to Afro-American life through myth offered Ellison a conceptual release from racist intellectual and popular traditions that denied any broad significance to "minority" experi ence. And it allowed him to fuse his political, anthropological, psychological, and folkloric insights with classical aesthetic theory to provide a comparatist, pluralist framework grounded in American historical particularities but bound to timeless human universals. It enabled him also to extend the implications of Rourke's character- ology and comedie analysis to the sweeping interpretation of the national literary tradition that he attempted in "Twentieth Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity," where he reinvigorated an old Du Boisian trope by projecting American moral life as a ritual drama acted out upon the trussed and prostrate body of a Gulliverian black giant. But abstract myth-mongering and archetype hunting have held little creative value for Ellison, as he made clear in "Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke" (1958), his part of the exchange of essays with Hyman on the role of folklore in Afro-American writing. In The Armed Vision Hyman had argued that Constance Rourke's achieve ment was narrowed by a chauvinistic preoccupation with American national character which, in treating black folk tradition for instance, led to her failure to take up what Hyman felt was the basic question — "its complicated relationship to primitive African myth and ritual." But Ellison allied himself with Rourke's view that the
174 significance of Afro-American folk traditions, as with American folk traditions generally, lies not so much in their origins as in their uses; and he pointed out that Hyman's own preoccupation with archety pal origins led to his failure to distinguish Anglo-Saxon from Afro- American elements in the minstrel tradition, to "understand how mythography in America is qualified by the fact that "ours is no archaic society," and to see the incorporation of folklore in modern black writing not as a matter of racial or cultural predisposition but, as Ellison's long labor with Invisible Man showed, rather one of hard-won, self-conscious creative techniques. Ellison used folklore in his work, he argued, not because he was black but because other writers had made him conscious of the literary value of his folk inheritance. Yet though he had learned from Joyce and Eliot and Hemingway to value myth and ritual, they had not taught him how to adapt the material before him. For the framework to identify and deploy creatively the ritual forms beneath the social conventions of American life, Ellison feels most indebted to Kenneth Burke's dramatistic method and philosophy of literary form. Invisible Man, Ellison has acknowledged, was "charted" on a conceptual frame of interconnected symbols, ideas and incidents, in a three-part scheme dictated by Burke's theory that "ritual drama is the hub" of a work of art's symbolic action, and its ideal rhythm the protagonist's movement from "purpose to passion to perception." Burke's Aristotelian conclusions about the overriding psychological importance to the audience of beginnings and endings resonate in Ellison's comments about his Epilogue and Prologue to the novel and in his discussion of his early narrative struggle "to manipulate the simple structural unities." And Burke's emphasis on the strategic "placing" of a "representative anecdote" — a key narrative metaphor which contains the larger symbolic action in capsule form — seems clearly to have influenced Ellison's deployment of the multivalenced "battle royal" passage that some critics have found so intensely symbolic as to make what follows in Invisible Man seem almost anti-climactic. For a writer so devoted to conscious thought as Ellison, the metaphorical center of Burke's system — the dramatistic pentad of Act, Scene, Agent, Agency and Purpose — provided a scheme for analyzing the "drama of human relations" dialectically and sym metrically, in terms derived from the theories of fiction elaborated in Henry James prefaces — theories Ellison had assimilated approvingly early in his literary training. And besides these cues to the rhetoric of fiction Ellison is so mindful of, Burke's basic conceptions — of "literature as equipment for living"; of the symbolic act as "the
175 dancing of an attitude"; of the symbolic process as "the ritualistic naming and changing of identity"; of style as a "strategy" for commanding the army of one's thoughts; of "perspective by incon gruity" as a key to creative insight; of jokes and puns as powerful vehicles of illumination; of rituals for initiation, masking, rebirth, purification, and scapegoating as "magical ceremonies"; of "the comic" as an attitude of ambivalence dialectically fusing tran scendental and material motives — all have influences traceable in Ellison's critical and creative writing which this essay can only suggest. But more perhaps than discrete concepts, more than giving Ellison a consistent and comprehensive frame for expressing his own ideas, Burke offered what Ellison understood to be a supremely syncretic "intellectual Gestalt" — a willful unification and rectification of all human knowledge capable of illuminating literature and its linkages with life. Burke's infinitely fertile, frequently bewildering attempt to show the integral relationship among a great variety of cultural manifestations which were often considered only in isolation was a compelling analogue for Ellison's own syncretic passion to link the world within the Afro-American community with the world which lay beyond. And in Burke's reconciliation of contradictory theories in psychology, sociology, linguistics, philosophy, and theology, in order to turn them to the concerted illumination of a work of art, Ellison found a metaphor for his own struggle to transform the social sciences, the humanities, history, and political theory into tools for illuminating "my group's identity, its predicament, its fate and its relation to the larger society and the culture which we share." It was the integrative and analytical "play" of Burke's method, then, its ability to reconcile Marx with Freud, the anthropological with the humanistic concept of culture, high art with folk traditions, the sacred with the secular — not simply its eclecticism — that Ellison absorbed and turned to resolving the stubborn paradoxes of Afro- American culture. And it was Burke's philosophical pluralism, an analysis as multifaceted as the changing human reality it tried to chart — Man the Declaimer, Man the Artist, Man the Gesturer, Man the Warrior, Man the Actor, Man the Symbol-Maker — that helped guide Ellison's efforts to celebrate the pluralistic character of American life. What Ellison has found, in the face of radical despair, to celebrate in the dream and nightmare of American life is, first of all, the democratic principle that rebel slavemasters birthed in contradiction and which, Jack-the-Bear tells us, had been "dreamed into being out of the chaos and darkness of the feudal past, [then] violated and
176 compromised to the point of absurdity." Beyond this unretractable promise of a future, it is not the material, technological, or institutional achievements of American civilization he exalts — its ordering forces — but rather the qualities that most closely approx imate chaos and disorder: the formlessness, the fluidity, the insta bility, and the diversity of American life — precisely those features that American writers like Hawthorne and Henry James found cause to lament. Again, this is in Ellison not so much the obsecration of an anarchist, for whom chaos is a subversive god, but the revelation of an artist for whom chaos is possibility in life as in literature. For when Ellison turns to explore the broad continuum of Afro- American experience and to affirm its enduring values, it is the ordering, stabilizing, controlling qualities he celebrates most expan sively — style, discipline, technique, abstractive and assimilative powers, and will. This is no contradiction but an Hegelian corollary of Ellison's belief that "the mixture of the marvelous and the terrible is a basic condition of human life" and of the American experience. As in a fairy tale, "here the terrible represents all that hinders, all that opposes human aspiration, and the marvelous represents the triumph of the human spirit over chaos." And as in Marx's Hegelian phenomenology, here those who dominate through force and a contempt for human life exercise a destructive freedom that breeds death and chaos, while the dominated, forced to struggle with the world's intractability, learn its secrets and infuse it with mind, so that whether he is describing the intricate vocal pyrotechnics of Mahalia Jackson's priestly art or upholding that "American Negro tradition which teaches one to deflect racial provocation and to master and contain pain," Ellison perceives black men defining and creating themselves against the background of American's chaotic mixture of the marvelous and the terrible. And though admitting that he "would be hard put to say where the terrible could be localized in our national experience," he sees "in so much of American life which lies beyond the Negro community the very essence of the terrible." This is hardly the unqualified optimism often attributed to Ellison's outlook, hardly the non-partisan relativism that the liberal imagination embraced as supposedly separating him from Baldwin and Jones and other black artists whose "aggressive" assertions of black moral and cultural superiority were allegedly inimical to the pluralist ideal. For Ellison does believe, qualifiedly, in the moral and cultural superiority of the oppressed — in a complex cultural "secret" wherein "the weak do something to correct the wrongs of the strong." And he conceives of pluralism not as a passive idealism but,
177 like his ideal prose, as "confronting the inequalities and brutalities of our society forthrightly, but yet thrusting forth its images of hope, human fraternity and individual self-realization." As a writer he rejected the idea that novels are either "weapons" or public relations vehicles for the view that "true novels, even when most pessimistic and bitter, arise out of an impulse to celebrate human life and therefore are ritualistic and ceremonial at their core." The riddle posed him by the dual commitment to the black struggle for human freedom and to the celebration of human fraternity-in-difference has been — What values conditioned by oppression but opposed to it can be celebrated both by those who oppress and those who are oppressed? His answer has been to assert, first, that the condition of oppression is not the whole, or even the most salient feature of Afro-American experience; and insofar as it is salient, oppression has not "caused" but only occasioned or constrained the nature of the cultural forms black men willed into being. Their attitudes toward their "con dition," he emphasized in "The World and the Jug," and the strategies they styled for resolving, escaping, or surviving it, could no more be caused by oppression than their will and their imagination were "caused" by it: "For even as his life toughens the Negro, even as it brutalizes him, sensitizes him, dulls him, goads him to anger, moves him to irony, sometimes fracturing and sometimes affirming his hopes; even as it shapes his attitudes toward family, sex, love, religion; even as it modulates his humor, tempers his joy — it conditions him to deal with his life and with himself . . He must live it and try consciously to grasp its complexity until he can change it; must live it as he changes it." Rather than the product of unmediated victimage, "he is a product of the interaction between his racial predicament, his individual will, and the broader American cultural freedom in which he finds his ambiguous existence. Thus, he, too, in a limited way, is his own creation." Because even the struggle to destroy those limits took place within the context of a life that had to be lived — and might be lost — during the process of ever contested change, it was crucial, Ellison argued, to celebrate values of endurance and transcendence as well as those of revolt, to recognize that black men's "resistance to provocation, their coolness under pressure, their sense of timing and their tenacious hold on the ideal of their ultimate freedom are indepensable values in the struggle" and at least as characteristic as the rebelliousness militant ideology glorifies. As such, in their encompassment of life's inevitable flux and agon, the strategic values of endurance, fortitude, and forbearance are not a skin to be shed but a vital legacy to be
178 preserved, by all men, in a violent and divided plural society where change and struggle are pervasive and survival always at issue. The pluralist society Ellison celebrates, then, is no Utopian construct predicated on the elimination of group conflict and the achievement of absolute democracy, but rather a living, evolving, improvised social order struggling toward stability and coping — and sometimes failing to cope — with the fact of its radical heterogeneity, through the principles of democratic process on the one hand and the hard realities of a racial and cultural "battle royal" on the other. In the wake of the Negro Renaissance, Alain Locke, who in Ellison's eyes stood always for the "conscious approach to American culture," had elaborated, in a series of philosophical essays written between 1935 and 1944, his own theory for reintegrating into a cultural pluralist ideal the problematic facts of social diversity. Locke proposed to make the historically subordinate goal of "unity through diversity" the active social philosophy of American demo cracy. He claimed that it was, after all, our values and value systems that have divided us, "apart from and in many cases over and above our material issues of rivalry and conflict." And he insisted that "ideological peace" could be achieved between America's con tending ethnic cultures only through the pervasive diffusion of a relativistic perspective which might discover among the competing values some "harmony in contrariety, some commonality in diver gence." As Ellison acknowledged in a 1975 commemorative symposium at Harvard, for him "Locke was to act as a guide" in assessing the pluralistic condition of American culture and projecting an end to ethnic antagonisms. Ellison's conviction, however, was to be the tougher, more pragmatic view that conflict is inevitable but potentially creative as well as destructive; that because "the basic unity of human experience" moderates social fragmentation and assures us some organic possibility of identifying with those of other backgrounds, a proud assertion of cultural personality rather than a relativistic weakening of cultural loyalties is the richest form of cultural reciprocity; and that the principles of Constitutional democracy — when used strategically even by democracy's victims — are the most effective mediators of conflict. In "The World and the Jug," after chiding assimilated Jewish intellectuals for writing guiltily as though Jews were responsible for slavery and segregation, Ellison suggested that "passing for white" through a facile identifi cation with the power elite is where their real guilt lay, and that, in the interest of historical and social clarity, and in order to understand the specific political and cultural boons flowing from the Jewish
179 presence, the positive distinctions between whites and Jews should be maintained. To deny or fail to make such distinctions, he asserted, "could be offensive, embarrassing, unjust or even dangerous." The danger, he conceived, in part, to be the possible loss of the balancing forces which plural perspectives on reality provide: "it is to forget," he warned very soon after in "Hidden Name and Complex Fate," "that the small share of reality which each of our diverse groups is able to snatch from the whirling chaos of history belongs not to the group alone, but to all of us. It is a property and a witness which can be ignored only to the danger of the entire nation." Similarly, bound together in conflict and interdependence, no group within the United States, he contends, "achieves anything without asserting its claims against the counterclaims of other groups. . . As Americans we have accepted this conscious and ceaseless struggle struggle as a condition of our freedom." His often reiterated term for this process, wherever it operates in private or public life, is "antagonistic cooperation" — a dramatic and oxymoronic naming of social ambiguity rooted in Ellison's fertile strategy of infusing aesthetic concepts into social analysis, a strategy designed to yield "close readings" of the textured psychic, cultural, and political meanings in American social chaos by turning such subtle tools as poet-critic William Empson's concept of "ambiguity" into a multi form structural principle able to encompass intricacy, tragedy, dramatic irony, and progressive disorder in social spheres of buried meanings and tense contradiction. With all its encoded ambiguities, Ellison's celebration of the one- and-the-many in American culture, then, is ultimately a dialectical pluralism, which envisions America's unprecedentedly polygot and inescapably agonistic "culture of cultures" moving from lesser to greater forms of freedom only through an historical process of unending struggle. And the peculiarities of American history have made this developing social synthesis as mysterious and unpre dictable as the forms of our emblematic vernacular traditions. Here, ethnicity rather than class has been the fundamental schism dividing man against himself — though that fact, too, is being slowly reversed by change — and the guiding teleology in the nation's arduous evolution is, in Ellison's terms, the common search for "that condition of man's being at home in the world, which is called love, and which we term democracy." "The diversity of American life," he reasons, "is often painful, frequently burdensome and always a source of conflict, but in it lies our fate and our hope." The tragic optimism that this blues-tinged credo reveals is, in accord with how Ellison sees the marvelous and the terrible
180 distributed through American life, necessarily contingent on his faith in the broadly regenerative social potential of Afro-American values. The wisdom distilled from three centuries of unique American experience has an ineluctable role to play in the conquest of American reality and in the expansion of American freedom that Ellison sees, like the conquest of the frontier, as a necessarily cooperative and competitive venture in which no single group has a premium on truth. The tribal achievement Afro-American values represent is, he suggests, part of an inadvertent and mysterious division of cultural labors amongst the nation's tense tribal confed eration — and all the more significant for that. Most of Ellison's observers, of course, have acknowledged what he has made explicit — that he locates that achievement, first, in music; that his own "basic sense of artistic form" is musical; and that his love for the blues and jazz on the one hand and the European classics on the other weaves a complex design through the fabric of his literary ideas and social philosophy. But only glancing attention has been paid to larger political and cultural meanings conveyed in his celebration of Afro-American musical creativity. It is clear enough that jazz and the blues offer Ellison a model of technical excellence, discipline, tradition, and creative ethos; clear also that he sees a potential rectification of social democracy in the forms of black folk music. But it has been less apparent that jazz, in particular, as a form of consciousness, provides him a living metaphor both for the ver nacular process he idealizes as the cutting edge of cultural democracy in America and for the dynamics of the Freedom Movement whose secular politics embody black hopes and hold the shape of future freedoms for the entire nation. About the potency of the black achievement in sound, Ellison is unequivocal: "the most authoritative rendering of America in music is that of American Negroes," he argues; and he theorizes that "it would be impossible to pinpoint the time when they were not shaping. . .the mainstream of American music." The source of this specialized authority in sound, he stressed in the review of Leroi Jones' Blues People, is not "racial genius" but, first, cultural inheritance — "it was the African's origin in cultures in which art was highly functional which gave him an edge in shaping the music and dance of this nation"; and, second, social constraint — "art — the blues, the spiritual, the jazz, the dance, was what we had in place of freedom." Elsewhere, Ellison has often argued that the creative edge came also from the "freedom of experimentation" open to those who, at the bottom of the social hierarchy, could be innovative and daring because the strictures of "good taste" and aristocratic tradition were
181 not imposed on them save in ridicule. The main agency of black musical achievement, though, in his view, is what he calls "the vernacular process" — that diffusive, adaptive, assimilative, unsup- pressible flow of ideas, styles, images, attitudes, and techniques across all lines of caste, class, region or color: "In the United States," he insists, "when traditions are juxtaposed they tend, regardless of what we do to prevent it, irresistibly to merge." As he describes it the random and the regular social contacts between the disparate social segments of our hierarchically shifting society make this process inevitable on the interpersonal level; and the magic of human symbol systems makes it accessible to all but the most solitary victims of the most absolute repression. The vernacular process is the basis of the American revolutionary tradition, Ellison believes, as he believes it was the vernacular process which enabled slave musicians to realize themselves in music, as men, by appropriating any and all sound within hearing and then, impervious to the censure and ridicule of their masters, transmuting it into self-expression so aesthetically appealing as to fashion for themselves the ironic triumph "of enslaved and politically weak men successfully imposing their values upon a powerful society through song and dance.'' And in Ellison's recollections in Shadow and Act of his Oklahoma boyhood, it was the vernacular process exemplified in jazz that best represented a profound regional amalgam that was simultaneously confusing, liberating, tense, and omnipresent: "Culturally everything was mixed, you see, and beyond all question of conscious choices there was a level where you were claimed by emotion and movement and moods which you couldn't put into words." Operating below the level of conscious culture, the verna cular process infiltrated churches, schoolyards, barbershops, drug stores, poolrooms, and streetcorners. Through jazz, Ellison suggests, it became an unavoidable "third institution," complementing the churches and schools into whose official attitudes its eclecticism and unfettered imaginativeness did not fit. More than any other cultural force, the vernacular is Ellison's model of uncensored Mind freely acting — transcending time, space, geography, and social structure and offering in its fragmentary, chaotic simultaneity a populist, pluralist traditional reservoir of the cultural unconscious to supplant T.S. Eliot's repressive neoclassic tradition of the consciously super- eminent. "Consider," Ellison noted in his essay on the Charlie Parker legend, "that at least as early as T.S. Eliot's creation of a new aesthetic for poetry through the artful juxapositioning of earlier styles, Louis Armstrong, way down the river in New Orleans, was working out a
182 similar technique for jazz." From Ellison's perspective Louis Armstrong — trumpeter supreme, trickster, clown, scapegoat, and wearer of masks — is a kinsman of his boyhood's imaginary, roguish Renaissance Man, a live vernacular hero who helped make jazz a paradigm for liberating cultural processes in America by master minding the fusion of popular and classical traditions. The music of Armstrong and Charlie Christian and Charlie Parker, Ellison contends, grew out of the tension the black musician feels "between his desire to master the classical style of playing and his compulsion to express those sounds which form a musical definition of Negro American experience." The aesthetic counterpart of this tension is the relatively unrecognized conflict between "two separate bodies of instrumental techniques: the one classic and widely recognized and 'correct'; and the other eclectic, partly unconscious, and 'jazzy'." Crucial for Ellison's literary aesthetic and his theory of social democracy, this conflict of techniques and ways of experiencing the world had given rise to "a fully developed and endlessly flexible technique of jazz expression, which has become quite independent of the social environment in which it developed, if not of its spirit." For in codifying the subterranean conflicts, unconscious drives, random associations, and unrecorded history of American culture, jazz and the vernacular constituted the alternate reality required by Ellison's growing awareness as a novelist "that the forms of so many of the works which impressed me were too restricted to contain the experience which I knew." He rejected the "rather rigid concepts of reality" at the heart of the tight, well-made Jamesian novel and the understated forms of Hemingway's "hard-boiled" fiction for a fluid vernacular reality "far more mysterious and uncertain, and more exciting, and still despite its raw violence and capriciousness, more promising." Stirred by the aesthetic possibilities of American culture's radical forms of alienation, contradiction, and disorder — as Richard Chase suggests is characteristic of many of the best and most representative American writers — Ralph Ellison rejected the forms of realism for the "bright magic" of a marvelous and terrible existential fabling. The American tendency, when embracing the looser reality of fable and romance, has been to rest in contradiction, to leave moral problems unreconciled or equivocally so. But the vernacular gave Ralph Ellison a mode of consciousness that indeed reconciled the moral with the cultural order; and he used it to absorb all the contradictions and extremes into a normative view of American life as a "delicately poised unity of divergencies," tragi comic, transcendent, and protean.
183 As synthesized in jazz, the vernacular process presents reality through an elastic sense of time, a deperspectivized space, and a language Langston Hughes had described as one of conflicting changes, sudden nuances, sharp and impudent interjections, broken rhythms, riffs, runs, breaks and hyperbolic distortions. In the terms of Erich Auerbach's imposing summation of the Western world's mimetic tradition for representing reality, jazz is aparatactical mode, part of that recessive but periodically resurgent strain in Western thought and art which rejects the linguistically organized mind's syntactical coding of reality into dominative relationships of sub ordination and stress. In rejecting the orderly but provisional reality Western science and mimetic art have built upon, the paratactical consciousness jazz expresses maps the chaotic and diverse elements of experience not through syntactical strategies of hierarchical com bination but, as Walt Whitman's free verse "ensembles" attempted, by arranging them together, side by side in a sequential "democracy of lateral coexistence." The paratactical mode, though, has his torically been linked with archaic, myth-dominated, authoritarian societies or with movements of reaction during periods of crisis: that T.S. Eliot's royalist ressurection of myth and religious certitude adopted a paratactical style akin to jazz modulation was part of Ellison's original attraction to The Waste Land. But what differenti ates Whitman's parataxis and Ellison's from that of Eliot, and what suggests a new historical function in American culture for the paratactical consciousness, is its turn from the fall back into authoritarian myth toward the quest for a particularized and unified humanity. Ellison's rendering of the jazz metaphysic located in it a kaleidoscopic, communalistic, vernacular rebellion against the art, history, and ethics of a dominative, dis-integrative tradition — a counter-consciousness whose subversive and liberating powers Amer icans had readily intuited if only imperfectly understood. Although Ellison's jazz mythos is anti-reactionary and embodies a submerged political record of the Afro-American struggle for free dom, it does postulate a "golden age" when gods mingled with men and set the course of history. In a 1959 essay, "The Golden Age, Time Past," Ellison turned a retrospective look at jazz history's famed Minton's Playhouse into a celebration of communal myth, ritual, and revolt — all bound up in the birth of "bop" and the accompanying "revolution in culture" sounded by such resident deities at Minton's as Dizzy Gillespie, Kenny Clarke, Charlie Christian, Charlie "Bird" Parker, Thelonius Monk, Lester Young, Ben Webster, and Coleman Hawkins. As hallowed ground in a time now dead, gone, and misremembered, Minton's in the early forties
184 was, as Ellison painted it, a festive wartime sanctuary for jazz musicians, its significance obscured in the sweep of the war effort, the urban riots, the industrial tensions, and the continuing disregard of cultural critics. But it became host nonetheless to an exceptional musical moment when "the world was swinging with change." The music made at Minton's then Ellison described as a study in controlled fury — "a texture of fragments, repetitive, nervous, not fully formed; its melodic lines underground, secret and taunting; its riffs jeerings. . .; its timbres flat or shrill. Its rhythms were out of stride and seemingly arbitrary, its drummers frozen-faced introverts dedicated to chaos." To the young Europeans who pilgrimaged years later to Minton's in a steady stream, it was, he remarked, a shrine of legendary heroes and events associated emotionally "with those continental cafes in which great changes, political and artistic have been plotted." But Ellison insisted that the proper context for understanding Minton's is as "part of a total cultural expression" — as representing the national pattern of black cabarets, dance halls, and nightclubs, on the one hand, and on the other, as a ritual ground for the apprenticeships, ordeals, initiation ceremonies, and rebirths effected in jazz musicians' jam sessions. A people's complex history came to a focus in jazz, he maintained, and beyond offering the now famous portrait of the jam session as "the jazzman's true academy," he treated the Minton phenomenon as the locus of a subterranean dialogue about the politics of culture, carried on between an older generation of jazz lyricists and a younger generation seeking new identities in the undanceable discord of behop. For Ellison the achievement of personal identity and cultural self-expression free of defensiveness and alienation has always been the ultimate objective of the political struggle whose point, he states in Du Boisian terms, is "to be both Negro and American and to bring about that condition in American society in which this would be possible." In "Harlem is Nowhere," ten years before the essay on Minton's and directly astride the bebop movement, Ellison had seen the lyrical, ritual elements of Southern folk jazz as the embodiment of that dreamed of "superior democracy in which each individual cultivated his uniqueness and yet did not clash with his neighbors," while he perceived in "the near-themeless technical viruosity of behop" the musical equivalent of "slum-shocked" anomie. "In the perspective of time," he wrote, however, in "The Golden Age, Time Past," "we now see that what was happening at Minton's was a continuing symposium of jazz, a summation of all the styles, personal and traditional." Bop had not been birthed out of aim- lessness at all but out of a brooding recapitulation of the past which,
185 in the terms Ellison now provided, almost bespoke a "blueprint" in music akin to Richard Wright's manifesto in literature that theme for black artists would emerge when they had "begun to feel the meaning of the history of their race as though they in one lifetime had lived it themselves throughout all the long centuries." And in the developments at Minton's Ellison identified a pattern of generational tensions and external commercial exploitation that might stand for the problems of historical continuity and tactical constraint that confronted every phase of the Freedom Movement and the arts at mid-century: Introspectively subdued younger jazzmen, often formally trained, their formative years shaped by post-Depres sion developments, warred for mastery and recognition with exuberant older men whom they mistakenly labeled — as they did Louis Armstrong — Uncle Toms and minstrel men, not artists. And in misunderstanding their forebears, they misinterpreted themselves and their art through new myths and misconceptions: "That theirs was the only generation of Negro musicians who listened to or enjoyed the classics; that to be truly free they must act exactly the opposite of what white people might believe, rightly or wrongly, a Negro to be; that the performing artist can be completely and absolutely free of the obligations of the entertainer, and that they could play jazz with dignity only by frowning and treating the audience with aggressive contempt; and that to be in control, artistically and personally, one must be so cool as to quench one's liquid fire." Ellison imagined the birth of bop energized in part by the despair that "after all, is ever an important force in revolutions," and he pictured the bopsters, "like disgruntled conspirators meeting fatefully to assemble the random parts of a bomb," confronting the musical piracy of the white instrumentalists and big bands with an aggressive style fashioned from intricate chord progressions and melodic inversions that for a while at least were to be a shield against the white music industry's predatory imitators. But the lessons Ellison wanted readers to understand from his celebration of this moment of "momentous modulation" involved not just the names, the place, the mood, or the musical mode but the significance of jazz as a form of historical consciousness and the ways the meaning of such a phenomenon becomes victim to the selectivity of memory, the arbitrariness of the historical record, and the fragile idealism of tradition and innovation. And implicit in his exposure of how Minton's golden age had succumbed to the process which makes history "ever a tall tale told by inattentive idealists," was that relentless questioning of formulaic thinking that has been the central characteristic of Ellison's dialecti-
186 cal style. Though rejecting Marxian dogma, he has remained Hegelian enough in spirit to believe that error resides in incomplete ness and abstraction, and that it can be exposed through the contradictions they create. And he has devoted much of his literary and cultural criticism to singling out the absurdities and non sequitors latent in the fragmentary and one-dimensional theories generated by "that feverish industry dedicated to telling Negroes who and what they are, and which can usually be counted upon to deprive both humanity and culture of their complexity." "Since we are more complex than we think we are," he insists, "we are constantly making blunders." This, together with his uncompromising asser tion that human experience is of a whole, that in the mind as in nature, "the heel bone is connected to the head bone," has fueled his war on those partial and abstract views which reduce the dynamic Gestalts of personality, culture, history, and art to stereotype. When imposed on any of these, the concept of race especially, from Ellison's perspective, has bred a logic of illusion rooted in social expediencies and psychic repression — and he has confronted it everywhere he has found it. Dialectic has been his "coping-stone," and like Plato's dialectician, he is a man who knows how to ask and answer questions. In the published exchanges with friends, foes, and interviewers, Ellison has most commonly engaged them with the nearly psychotherapeutic tactic of forcing a confrontation between their racial half-truths or facile abstractions and the general human truths which racist assumption has suppressed or kept out of consciousness. Or he has pressed and accentuated the contradictions in over-simplified formulations by showing their helplessness before the concrete and particular. Ellison's unearthings of the vernacular process are ofttimes couched explicitly in the rhetoric of desublimation, as are his maneuvers in the long war against racial stereotypy. But in Shadow and Act, it is in the skirmishes with individual opponents — the exchanges with Irving Howe and Stanley Edgar Hyman, and the reviews of work by Gunnar Myrdal and Leroi Jones — that Ellison has mobilized the full force of his particularizing anti-theories and shown his formidable dialectical skills to best advantage. In "The World and the Jug," for instance, he opened his unsparing rejoinder to Howe's critical rehearsal of the shop-worn argument over the roles of art and protest in Afro-American writing by posing three epagogic questions: "Why is it so often true that when critics confront the American as Negro they suddenly drop their advanced critical armament and revert with an air of confident superiority to quite primitive modes of analysis? Why is it that sociology-oriented critics
187 seem to rate literature so far below politics and ideology that they would rather kill a novel than modify their presumptions concerning a given reality which it seeks in its own terms to project? Finally, why is it that so many of those who would tell us the meaning of Negro life never bother to learn how varied it really is?" Ellison proceeded to drop a rhetorical curtain on the puppet figures of radical agitprop by deftly severing the cords between the critic's prescriptive stereotype of clenched-fist black militancy and the palpably human features of experience and temperament that understandably distinguished Richard Wright's literary sensibility and James Baldwin's from his own. He revealed that what radical formula posited to be a sterile and irremediably agonizing state of "Negroness" was, for him, an emotionally complex, rewarding, and profoundly civilized way of life. And to the image of himself and other black writers Jim Crowed into intellectual endogamy he opposed the image of his own far-flung international and interracial family of literary "ancestors" and "relatives." With none of the ritual rancor and scatology of the dirty dozens but with all the rhetorical force of its ad hominem stripping away of pretense, Ellison's bravura stand for principles he knew to be more than personal issues raised an army of disproving particulars against abstract racial categories he found ultimately more oppressive "than the state of Mississippi." Such categorization left no room for the individual writer's unique existence — "for that intensity of personal anguish which compels the artist to seek relief by projecting it into the world in conjunction with other things; that anguish which might take the form of an acute sense of inferiority for one, homosexuality for another, an overwhelming sense of the absurdity of human life for still another. Nor does it leave room for the experience that might be caused by a harelip, by a stutter, by epilepsy — indeed, by any and everything in this life which plunges the talented individual into solitude while leaving him the will to transcend his condition through art." In the more amicable but no less exacting exchange with Stanley Hyman, Ellison, myth-minded writer that he is, nonetheless took his old friend and intellectual sparring partner to task for consistently oversimplifying the relationship between Afro-American literature and folklore, and more pointedly, for failing to guide his folkloric archetype-hunting with the caution that between literature and the folk tradition "there must needs be the living human being in a specific texture of time, place and circumstance, who must respond, make choices, achieve eloquence, and create specific works of art." Ellison rejected Hyman's approach to black literary folklore through the minstrel tradition's "darky entertainer" because, as an ostensible
188 Negro version of the archetypal trickster figure, it was actually an abstract imposition that glossed over the contradicting specificities of American historical and literary experience. For despite the "blackness" in its use of Afro-American idiom, songs, dance, and word-play, the darky entertainer was, Ellison insisted, a negative sign in a comedy of the grotesque and unacceptable which expressed not the Afro-American sense of the comic but "the white American's Manichean fascination with the symbolism of blackness and white ness." Pulling away from the detached panorama of universal archetype, Ellison showed that under close inspection, the specific rhetorical situation of minstrelsy serves white needs, not black, that it "involves the self-humiliation of the 'sacrificial' figure, and that a psychological dissociation from this symbolic self-maiming is one of the most powerful motives at work in the audience." Where Hyman insisted that the figure in black face is related to an archetypal trickster originating in Africa, Ellison countered by specifying its "homegrown, Western, and Calvinist" features which, together with the figure's adjustment to white American symbolic needs, pointed to indigenous developments "far more intriguing" than any abstract, intercontinental tracings. If repudiating Hyman's theoretically inspired distortion of cultural fact and literary fiction showed one continuing pattern of Ellison's dialectic, the turn therein away from "the African connection" spotlighted another. For despite his long-lived interest in African art, Ellison has persistently rejected as artificial all attempts by literary romanticists, racial mystics, Pan-African ideologues, and cultural anthropologists to establish a systematic cultural kinship between Afro-Americans and Africans. In an exchange in France in 1958, published in Shadow and Act as "Some Questions and Some Answers," he defined black Americans as having the world's only "Negro" culture, a culture native to the United States, basically Protestant in religion, Western in its kinship system, American in its sense of time, history, and secular values. What bound American Negroes to the world's other scattered peoples of "partially African origin" was not culture, he argued, but the hatred of European domination shared by most non-white peoples, a common denomin ator which had potent political value but whose cultural value, he claimed, was "almost nil." Three years earlier, in an interview for The Paris Review, he had declared that, because America's race problem had now lined up with the anti-colonialist struggle of the non- Western world, its possibilities for art had actually increased; but this too had implied no specifically cultural linkages. It is important to remember that Ellison, like Richard Wright, was
189 part of the intellectual cutting edge of a generation of black literary radicals, infused with Marx's and Freud's demystifying theories, who rejected the primitivist African vogue of the Negro Renaissance and the Garvey Movement as fanciful posturing and a flight from the existential realities of the Afro-American folk and proletarian experience. And like Wright and sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, Ellison rejected Melville Herskovits' later thesis of widespread African cultural survivals in America because he believed, as Wright did, that "it was only by and large in the concrete social frame of reference in which men lived that one could account for men being what they were." Though intrigued by Lorenzo Turner's study of Africanisms in the Sea Islands Gullah dialect, and though he later would find "some validity" in Herskovits' cross-cultural theories, Ellison initially dismissed The Myth of the Negro Past because "the context and the way [Herskovits] put it seemed to imply that we needed to apologize — that we needed a past." To a man who felt "no lack" in his cultural heritage as an Afro-American, and for whom all Americans were "people without a history — but with a new synthesis," the insistence of sociological theorists that he had special African ties which he could never discover in any concrete way made an identification with Africa and Africans that much more problem atic. Recently, remarking that he has never had any question but that he is part African, Ellison nevertheless reasserted his belief that the past does not have the relevance in America that it had in Europe and that there is a needless apology implicit in "Negro Americans walking around top-heavy from trying to Africanize themselves when that which is authentically African in them has come down to us through more subtle ways — and we are not the only inheritors of it." It is this sense of a black cultural tradition independent of political ideology, subtle, subterranean, and diffused throughout the social structure, which gave the dialectical animus to Ellison's 1964 review of Leroi Jones'/Imamu Baraka's Blues People. Ellison, like Baraka, has always seen the blues tradition as a special repository and focus of a collective history, as embodying a "total way of life." And Ellison lauded the effort to so treat the music in Baraka's "strictly theoretical" exegesis of the journey in sound from slavery to citizenship. Ellison's final evaluation, however, was that Baraka's theory "flounders before that complex of human motives which makes human history, and which is so characteristic of the American Negro." And as is so characteristic of Ralph Ellison, he armed his critique of Baraka's militant abstractions with pointed particularities the former could not contain. Where Baraka's theory attempted to
190 simplify the historical bifurcation of the blues into "country" and "city/ classic" forms by imposing Franklin Frazier's pejorative class anatomy of the rise of a self-eviscerating black bourgeoisie, Ellison confronted the resulting "rigid correlation between color, education, income and the Negro's preference in music" with the unruly instance of "a white-skinned Negro with brown freckles who owns sixteen oil wells sunk in a piece of Texas land once farmed by his ex-slave parents who were a blue-eyed, white-skinned, red-headed (kinky) Negro woman from Virginia and a blue-gummed, black- skinned, curly haired Negro male from Mississippi, and who not only sang bass in a Holy Roller church, played the market and voted Republican but collected blues recordings and was a walking depository of blues tradition." Where Baraka asserted categorically, that "a slave cannot be a man," Ellison countered, "But what, one might ask, of those moments when he feels his metabolism aroused by the rising of the sap in spring? What of his identity among other slaves? With his wife? And isn't it closer to the truth that far from considering themselves only in terms of that abstraction, 'a slave', the enslaved really thought of themselves as men who had been unjustly enslaved?" The implication that the test of theory is its ability to cope with concrete and idiosyncratic experience is the heart of Ellison's dialectic, and the idea of a culture of survival and transcendence built from the possibilities for manuevering in the face of the inevitable, from affirmative roles and identities irrepressible even in bondage, and from excellences forged under limitation, is the heart of his uncompromising embrace of Afro-American traditions. Nor is this an evasion of the problems of power and freedom or the necessity of social reconstruction. Ellison believes, with Hegel, that "consciousness is all," that "human life is a move toward the rational," and that freedom is a creation not of political institutions but of mind: "Simply to take down a barrier doesn't make a man free," he insists, "He can only free himself." He does so, Ellison believes, as he discovers and pushes against the extreme limits of his own possibilities, which happens in the context of societies that are not God-constructed worlds but man-made and improvisational "arrangements," inevitably hierarchical through the inheritance of power or talent, and always, tragically, productive of victimage, guilt, and scapegoats,"whether it's in a democracy, a socialistic society, or a communistic one." In contemporary America where, Ellison believes, the lines of color caste are blurring, class lines grow more rigid, offering the prospect not of an end to the need for victims and scapegoats but perhaps to the practice of designating them by
191 race. Realistically, the human challenge, he contends, is to moderate injustices and inequalities that sometimes may be ineradicable; and this can only be done by "keeping the ideal alive" as a conscious discipline. And for those individuals and groups who, like Afro- Americans, bear disproportionately the human costs of human systems, that keeping of ideals seems, in his view, to be simultaneously a pragmatic strategy of social reform and a mode of transcendence. The role of art, here, for Ellison, is crucial. Richard Wright, in the often alluded to passage in Black Boy where he broods upon the "cultural barrenness of black life," had wondered whether such human values as tenderness, love, honor, and loyalty were native to man or whether they were in fact "fostered, won, struggled and suffered for, preserved in ritual from one generation to another." Ellison, interpreting Wright's comment as an oblique affirmation of black men's struggle against alienation, visualized the conflict between Afro-Americans and white society as a ritual confrontation of willed values in which "Western culture must be won, confronted like the animal in a Spanish bullfight, dominated by the red shawl of codified experience and brought heaving to its knees." The arena for this imposition of a black vision on the world was, most properly, in the rituals of art, for, as Malraux had helped make clear to Ellison, "the organized significance of art is stronger than all the multiplicity of the world; . . . [and] that significance alone enables man to conquer chaos and master destiny." When the three volumes of Malraux's The Psychology of Art were published in the late forties, Ellison paid twenty-five dollars apiece and walked around with holes in his shoes in order to possess what then "was more important than having dry feet" — a revelation, fused in Malraux's art history, philosophy, and politics, of a secret and almost satanic path to power, freedom, and salvation. Malraux's opulent and exacting multivolume tribute to artistic genius vouchsafed the liberating possibility that, here in the middle of the twentieth century, artists for the first time drew on the whole continuum of the world's art, and thereby gave art works "a kind of ubiquity," and made all men both potential "heirs of the entire world" and, more important, creators and conquerors of what had profound social implications — "the first universal artistic culture." This looming, unalienable world of art, in its detachment from the social order, Malraux maintained, does not imitate life but rather imitates art and reveals life — is in its origins an aggressive negation of the material world and all values opposing its own, so that it is actually allied with whatever denies, destroys, transcends man's ordinary reality. Yet art is, Malraux agreed with Hegel, a vehicle for
192 the perpetuation of spirit and hence a guardian of human values. So the artist, as creator, engages in both negation and human salvation, in the mastery of art and the deliverance of man. Critics imagined an embarrassing contradiction here, not comprehending Malraux's artist as in fact a rebel demiurge, a re-creator god who is neither the originator of the world or an object of worship, but the Craftsman who turns chaos into cosmos, rectifying and reorganizing the elements of the universe. And in his alliance with the forces of negation, he becomes a gnostic lord of the lower powers, envisioning the rise to sovereignty of forces the surface world would subordinate. He wants no escape from the world into aestheticism but instead a planned conquest of that world which will compel us to see that the "sustaining, enriching, transforming" image of himself man has inherited through art is the justification of the mystery of human life. As such, Malraux's vision helped canalize Ellison's own demiurgic impulses, helped guide his efforts to interpet and use the cultural inheritance of the slave past and the repressive present as keys for transforming servant into sovereign. History would be an ally, for the black man was and had always been, as Du Bois had asserted in The Souls and again in The Gift of Black Folk, "primarily an artist" — regardless of his other considerable gifts. Benjamin Brawley, the first comprehensive chronicler of Afro-American cultural life, had docu mented that claim in The Social History of the American Negro (1921) and in The Negro Genius (1937), insisting that the pronounced distinction of black men in the arts, and their almost exclusively aesthetic influence on American civilization — the exception of enforced labor duly noted — implied, as current accomplishments confirmed, no incapacity for achievement in other spheres but only that a peculiar racial genius destined the Negro "to reach his greatest heights in the field of the artistic." And Alain Locke, tendering less confidently the old racial mysticism, had reasserted the idea even as the Negro Renaissance went into eclipse, writing in 1929 that "it is obvious, inspite of the great necessity for practical and economic contributions in the future on the part of the Negro, that the main line of Negro development must necessarily be artistic, cultural, moral, and spiritual. . . . Although he must qualify in all branches of American life and activity, the Negro can be of more general good in supplementing Nordic civilization than through merely competi tively imitating or extending it along lines in which it is at present successful and preeminent. Indeed, as what seems to be the special race genius matures and gains momentum, it becomes increasingly apparent that the Negro's unique experience and heredity combined may have fitted him for a special creative role in American life as an
193 artist class, as a social re-agent, and as a spiritual leaven." The racialism and historical romanticism of Brawley's and Locke's position, and what might be interpreted as its subtle acceptance of being relegated to the social role of "darky entertainer," were, of course, anathema to Ellison's generation of radicals — as Richard Wright's credo and the bop revolt emphasized. His political perspec tives led Ellison to focus as much on the potential role of Afro- American artistry in the struggle for liberation from American racial oppression as on the undeniable, though historically ironic, black artistic contribution to American civilization. Locke himself, by 1938, in the course of retracing the career of black art and literature from Emancipation through Depression, had changed his emphasis on art as showpiece to that of art as a liberating force, acknowledging that "every oppressed group is under the necessity, both after and before its physical emancipation from the shackles of slavery — be that slavery chattel or wage — of establishing a spiritual freedom of the mind. . . This cultural emancipation must be self-emancipation and is the proper and peculiar function of a minority literature and art." From the black abolitionists to the post-Reconstruction pastor- alists to the New Negroes to the New Deal leftists, each generation, with tactics shifting almost each decade in accord with changing social forces, Locke now realized, had been seeking freedom through art. Du Bois, too, his own philosophy transformed by his absorption of Marx and Freud, by the forties had exchanged his earlier progressivist faith in a black cultural messianism through which the meek black masses would inherit the earth, for a theory of humanist, pacific, socialist transformation rooted ultimately in cultivating the explosive freedoms in the inner regions of the spirit — "the dreams and fantasies of mind, of imagination and contrivance, playing with the infinite possibilities of ever-revealing truth." In the same year that Locke shifted ground, Du Bois proclaimed in "The Revelation of Saint Orgne the Damned," that "freedom is the path of art, and living in the fuller and broader sense of the term is the expression of art." But while Du Bois believed that art provided the ends and means for the most complete enjoyment of the possibilities of human existence, his special brand of Marxian humanism made art either defensive propaganda or a grand refuge from the world of material compul sions; and like Locke's cultural reformism it lacked what Ellison came to see as the active mode of true art — the passionate will to dominate the world and all reality. Beyond fueling that will, what Malraux's conception yielded when Ellison trained it on the Afro-American cultural predicament, and on
194 his own sense of the American national experience, was the oppor tunity to convert the traditionally constrained and compensatory art Locke and Du Bois described into an art of redemptive conquest. The rise of a universal artistic culture accessible to any literate man with the energy and will to appropriate it had special implications for men socially submerged in an American society whose pluralism, fluidity, and relative absence of stable traditions gave literature and the arts, and the novel particularly, an unprecedented role in the development of the nation. In the 1955 Paris Review session, Ellison concluded by insisting that his devotion to the novel afforded him the possibility of contributing not only to the growth of the literature but to the shaping of the culture as he should like it to be: the novel was literally a conquest of the frontier, creating the American experience in the process of describing it. But perhaps the clearest expression of the demiurgic mode in Ellison's aesthetic appeared through a foray into the visual arts in his 1968 catalogue introduction for an exhibition of the work of painter- collagist and long-time friend, Romare Bearden. That year of political assassinations, Ellison noted recently, had a chilling effect on the comic development of his novel-in-progress; and in "The Art of Romare Bearden" the tragic and agonistic quality of the times made obvious imprint. Against this backdrop Ellison pictured Bearden as a demiurgic paradigm — the Craftsman and true creator whose "nature and mode of action [is] to dominate all the world and time through technique and vision. His mission is to bring a new visual order into the world, and through his art he seeks to reset society's clock by imposing upon it his own method of defining the times." A lower world master of illusion and revelation whose amorphous physical appearance masked his world-absorbing black ness, Bearden worked to release us "from the prison of our media- dulled perception" by reintegrating the forms of experience; and his ultimate aim was to "destroy the accepted world by way of revealing the unseen." In making the unseen manifest, Bearden's tradition- steeped but eclectic play with plastic possibility effected a return of the repressed: he masked Harlemites with the abstract faces of African sculpture; and his Harlem became "a place inhabited by people who have in fact been resurrected, recreated by art. . . . And resurrected with them in the guise of fragmented ancestral figures and forgotten gods (really masks of the instincts, hopes, emotions, aspirations and dreams) are those powers that now surge in our land with a potentially destructive force which springs from the fact of their having for so long gone unrecognized, unseen."
195 Bearden's technique, as Ellison described it, was an eclectic and ceremonial parataxis "eloquent of the sharp breaks, leaps in con sciousness, distortions, paradoxes, reversals, telescoping of time and surreal blending of the styles, values, hopes and dreams which characterize much of Negro American history." And in its successful marshalling of all the resources of modern art to explore the tragic predicament of his people, and "without violating his passionate dedication to art as a fundamental and transcendent agency for confronting and revealing the world," Bearden's work mocked wordlessly the self-willed powerlessness of those aspiring black artists whose fascination with, and accommodation to, their "ana chronistic" social predicament made them believe the true artist's attitude toward the world to be "quite quixotic." Those who will be dominated by reality, Ellison counseled, are those who, "in the field of culture, where their freedom of self-definition is at a maximum, and where the techniques of artistic self-expression are most abun dantly available," allow the social imbalance to shrivel their sense of possibility and to dominate their thinking about themselves, their people, their country, and their art. And those who will dominate reality are those who, working from the heights of the time and with the most challenging possibilities of form, convert the unassimilated and anachronistic into elements of style captive to their own controlling vision. The power to dominate reality, social and aesthetic, which was so much the subject of the essay on Bearden's art, has never been for Ralph Ellison a mere matter of a field of force acting on inert human objects, nor a matter merely of "positive thinking." It has always been predicated on a relationship, a confrontation of active wills, somewhere on the continuum from antagonism to cooperation, between a wielder of power and men who value the things he controls. Power, influence, domination, in life and in art, are always, for Ellison, directed by will and effected by the mastery of organizing techniques. On one level of the social struggle for power in America, the answer to the riddle of black political impotence rests for Ellison in the failure of black leaders to recognize their true source of power — "which lies, as Martin Luther King perceived, in the Negro's ability to suffer even death for the attainment of our beliefs." On another, the political potency of a Booker T. Washington and the comparative inability of a W.E.B. Du Bois to effect his political will are measures, to Ellison, not so much of the values ihe two men espoused, however close or conflicting, but of their technical mastery over structured possibilities. Conversely, Ellison eschews organized violence as a means to black freedom and power in the United States
196 because, first, "we are outnumbered and. . . the major instruments of destruction are in the hands of the whites," but second, and most importantly, because black men have collectively willed neither political goal — separation or seizure of the government — which would make orchestrated violence "something to think about." But then, political violence and the ideologies that seek to wield it as an instrument of power are in Ellison's vision largely aspects of the chaos and illusion that life-affirming acts of self-definition must somehow reduce to redemptive form. On the level of aesthetics, the violence the demiurge does to provisional reality is, at the same time, an act of regeneration and deliverance. Such violence seeks no throne or ideology but only to reenergize the forces of life. Its power is an initiating vision that creates human desire, overcomes human resistances, redirects human actions by reshaping what men perceive their interests and possibilities to be. For Ellison as artist and wielder of the Word, this power to dominate men's minds lies in the capacity of technique — the ingenius, guileful, symbolic structuring of emotions and perceptions — to do violence to our "trained incapa city" to perceive the truth. And the revelation of truth — never mere reportage or "telling it like it is" — is always a function of style, whose test is not so much beauty as power. Ellison's awareness, however, of the ambivalence of experience, and the perception of that experience, extends to power and the word as well. Power, his Invisible Man learns, can be an anodyne or an illusion as well as an instrument of the rational will — and the will itself is never completely free or inviolable but always limited by recalcitrant necessity and always vulnerable to injury and deflection. And the Word, magical and Janus-faced, has the potency not only to revive and make us free, but to "blind, imprison, and destroy." "During the sixties," Ellison recently observed in the interview with Ishmael Reed, "the myth of the redeemed criminal had a tremendous influence on our young people, when criminals guilty of every crime from con games, to rape, to murder, exploited it by declaring themselves political activists and black leaders. As a result, many sincere, dedicated leaders of an older generation were swept aside. . . . I found it outrageous. Because not only did it distort the concrete historical differences between one period of struggle and another, it made heroes out of thugs and self-servers out of dedicated leaders. Worse, it gave many kids the notion that there was no point in developing their minds. . . . Years ago Du Bois stressed a leaderhsip based upon an elite of the intellect. During the Sixties it appeared that for many Afro-Americans all that was required for such a role
197 was a history of criminality, a capacity for it responsible rhetoric, and the passionate assertion of the mystique of 'Blackness'." Here clearly, and in the accumulating excerpts of the rumored multi-volume novel he has labored meticulously over these past years, Ralph Ellison remains outspokenly absorbed in the problems of power and leadership in "a land most strange." As ever, the mysticism and militancy that mask political naivete, personal opportunism, and an ignorance of the past are to him mirages of power and leadership in the social arena, whose counterparts in the rituals of the Word are the self-pitying sentiment and vapid propaganda of the defensively illiterate writer. If black writers are to sustain a place in American literature and to become more influential in the broader community, he told James Alan Mc Pherson in a lengthy exchange in 1969 when the war of invective against him was still intense, "they will do it in terms of style: by imposing a style upon a sufficient area of American life to give other readers a sense that this is true, that here is a revelation of reality." His hesitancy then to predict future popularity and impact for black wordsmen rested in his observation that "so many of them seem to be still caught up at the point of emphasizing inwardness," when in his view mastery of the rhetoric of fiction requires also an intricate awareness of the world outside the self and one's immediate community. No quarter given here in Ellison's continuing guerilla action against the forms of illusion. And no easy target offered by this one-time horn- blower and quail hunter turned literary grenadier, this streetcorner activist and pamphleteer turned minister of culture, this prideful danceman and raconteur for whom "eclecticism is the word" and "playing it by ear" the mode, this artificer of masks and names and comic chaos, and whose shifting guises as synthesizer, celebrant, dialectician, and demiurge make any manhunt fixed on this mind in motion as quixotic as wingshooting at shadows.
(Copyright 1980 by John Wright)
198 NOTE ON SOURCE MATERIAL For references for this article and for Ellison, generally, see:
Bernard Benoit and Michel Fabre. "A Bibliogaphy of Ralph Ellison's Published Writings." Studies in Black Literature (Autumn 1971).
Jacqueline Covo. The Blinking Eye: Ralph Waldo Ellison and His American, French, German, and Italian Critics, 1952-1971. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1974.
Joe Weixlmann and John O'Banion. "A Checklist of Ellison Criticism, 1972-1978." Black American Literature Forum. Vol. 12, No. 2, Summer 1978.
199 Jack M. Winters
IN THE CELL, LATE AT NIGHT
At first I was walking quietly in front of the guards, and then walking faster and faster, then running, my hands pumping, my head wobbling back and forth. I went down the hall and hit the door, the guards falling so far behind that they and their guns and their shouts seemed to run away from me, backwards and in slow motion. Everybody was grabbing at me when I came out into the yard: everybody, guards and prisoners. They were all yelling, but I could barely hear them I was moving so fast. The shouts and the yells fell away behind me like old newspapers whipping down a sidewalk in a wind, and there was nothing but the sound of blood pounding in my ears, my breath puffing in and out of me, and me gasping, "Mean mean mean to be free." They all kept trying to stop me: the guards yelling, "Halt or I'll shoot," and everybody else, more gray suits than faces, snatching at me and hollering. "Take me with you, take me with you." But I was up on my toes, ducking and dodging, leaning into the curve of the turn as I went around the basketball courts, dipping my shoulder and weaving like the world's greatest halfback. I was too fast to be stopped. Tore through all those hands that was snatching at me to make me take them with me or to make me stop since they couldn't come. Went on building up speed till them gray suits around me folded out of my way like high grass, and headed out into that wide strip of sand that's too close to the Wall, the one they call the Dead Strip. The guards started shooting then, the ones behind me, the ones up in the towers on the Wall. The bullets didn't have a chance: they were going to be out of breath before they caught up with me. And when I got to the Wall, I didn't even slow up. Just built up more speed and leaned forward on my toes until I was so far forward I knew I would fall if I didn't keep on running, and then, BAM, I went right through the Wall, like a cartoon character or one of them old heroes I used to read about in comic books. And then I was free. But I didn't stop. Kept right on running because it was dark suddenly, when it had been bright and hot before, and I was scared even though I didn't know why. I should've been tired from all that running but I wasn't, and I kept on running in dark so dense I couldn't see my hands or my knees when they came slashing up in front of me. And then I saw, way up overhead and in front of me, a light and I thought to myself, "Ain't that something," like I had never seen a star before. There were no sounds, none, not
200 even my feet hitting the ground, nothing but me and that star, and then the star went out like someone had hit a switch and turned it off, and the ground got softer and softer until I was not running but in a swamp, trying to keep from sinking and drowning. It was worse than the worst mud I've ever seen, thicker than the muck at the bottom of a river, and heavier than the mud that a flood leaves where there used to be dry dirt. Pulling my feet up to run only made me sink in deeper, and I was up to my hips and going in deeper, and splashing and still trying to run, and suddenly somebody was shaking me and saying, "Wake up, man. Wake up, man."
It was the white cat they'd j ust put in with us. He was standing next to my bunk so that his head was even with mine, and his hair hung down from his head and brushed my face while he kept shaking me. For the minute or two that it took me to get my head together, I thought it was a woman waking me up, and I had to focus on his blonde Fu Manchu to see that it wasn't true after all. I suppose I should've been glad that he dragged me back from my nightmare and all, but he went right on shaking me and telling me to wake up long after my eyes were open. I pushed his hand away and sat up real quick to clear my head and let that swamp drain out of my mind. "I'm awake now, man," I said. I scared him, I guess, sitting up like that and shoving his hand off me, 'cause he backed all the way across the cell to his own bunk. He flipped his hair back over his head with both hands and stood there looking at me like he was waiting for me to say or do something. After a bit, when I still hadn't said nothing, and he couldn't mess with his hair no more, he said, "You alright?" I didn't know what to say to that. I was glad he had pulled me away from that dream, but at the same time I thought he should've known better than to be putting hands on people, particularly ones who're sleeping. But I was glad he had made me wake up. "Yeah." There wasn't no way to tell what time it was, just that it was late because it was dark and the only sounds you could hear were the sounds of people snoring, and the echoes of the footsteps of the guards walking down the block. In the bunk below me, Gutierrez, the Sleeping Man said something softly in Spanish and turned over. I looked at the lightbulb that was halfway between our cell and the next one and wished that it was the sun, or that I could tell how close it was to morning by the way it got dimmer and dimmer until it finally went off. I heard that at the new minisecurity farm, the one they call Daycamp, that they got things like that: neon lights that go real bright until lights out, then go dim, and get dimmer until it's time to
201 get up. But this is an old prison, and all they got is lightbulbs which stay on all night so the guards ain't afraid to walk down the catwalks in the dark. The white boy suddenly said, "Smokes," and tossed me his pack without waiting to see if I wanted one or not. I had my own, but if he was going to give me his, fine. He'd learn quick enough, just like he'd learn not to be putting his hands on people. I fumbled around on my bunk for my lighter, lit my smoke, and tossed back the pack without saying a word. He caught it, and waited for me to toss him the lighter. I almost didn't. He lit his cigarette, and walked back over to hand me back the lighter. "Name's Burston," he said, blowing smoke out his nose. "James Burston. Friends call me Burst." Burst, like a balloon. Well, I wasn't going to call him that 'cause he wasn't no friend of mine, but a man give you a smoke, your name ain't much to ask in return. "Tarp," I said. "Name's Tarp." I took another drag of the smoke; it was strong, and it made me feel good, and awake. Burston went over to the toilet in the corner, flicked his ash into it. "Tarp? What kind of name is that, first or last?" He turned around and put his hands on his hips like he was waiting for an answer. I was getting tired of him. Putting his hands on people, trying to make friends, and now getting in my business. "Don't make no difference to you whether it's first, last, or middle. You want to call me, you call me Tarp." My voice was louder than I meant it to be, and across from me, in the bunk over Burston's, Butler grunted and rolled over; the springs in his bed creaked under his weight. Burston must've thought so too 'cause he was almost whispering when he came back to the center of the cell. "I didn't mean to pry," he said. "It's just that, well, you know," the tip of his cigarette made a small red circle as he waved his hand around, "I haven't ever been in here, in prison, before." He took another drag of his smoke. "I mean, like, is it cool to ask people what they did to get here? I need somebody to show me what to do." I couldn't believe the shit. Still determined to get in my business. But the nightmare was so far away that it wasn't nothing but a little speck, and I didn't feel quite so evil. "Asking folks stuff like that is a touchy thing. Bothers some, don't worry others. But I ain't never met anyone bothered by listening if someone's doing the telling." Gutierrez, the Sleeping Man muttered something in Spanish, and then, real carefully, like he was explaining something to a retard, said, "A man is trying to sleep down here." I flicked my ash at him before I tossed the butt in the toilet; it sizzled and went out. "That's Gutierrez, the Sleeping Man. He's looking at
202 twenty to life, and he goes to sleep every chance he gets. Guess he plans to sleep his way through, wake up one morning and be out of here." Burston went back to his bunk, got another smoke, lit it with the butt of the old one. "I guess what you're trying to tell me is that I can tell you, or you can tell me, but neither one of us can ask. I can understand that. This is a small enough place without people getting pushy." He sat down on his bunk and leaned forward so that his arms were resting on his legs. "I'm looking at twenty to life too. I killed my old lady." He said it like he thought it should shock me; I didn't bat an eye. There were a lot of guys in for doing a lot worse than that. "So?" He seemed kind of disappointed that I hadn't jumped back or something. "Yeah well, she was a model, you know? Not one of those topnotch ones you see in lady's magazines, more like the ones you see in the papers doing ads for the local stores. But she was pretty, real pretty, with long brown hair." "Longer than yours?" He brushed his hair back out of his face with a flick of his hand. "Yeah, a lot longer. All the way down to her waist. Anyway, I had lined up some piecemeal work refurbishing houses, and she was working fairly regularly modeling bathing suits and the new spring outfits, and everything was as smooth as a baby's ass. When I got home, Jacy would have dinner ready and we would eat, get high, and watch television, or, sometimes, we would go out to eat and then to a movie." He took a long pull on his smoke, then flicked what was left of the butt into the John with his thumb and finger. "But then I started noticing things. She started coming home later and later, or would be too tired to cook or go out, and every once in a while she'd come home and go right to bed without saying a word to me. At first I thought it was me, that I was, you know, freaking out behind some kind of strange expectations I had about what was involved with living together." I nodded my head to show that I was hip to what he was saying, but I don't think he even saw me he was so far off into what he was trying to tell me. "But then this thing started with the sheets. Let me tell you about the sheets. I started noticing that the sheets were being changed every day, and it became a problem for me. At first I thought I was just having my memory play tricks on me because who notices sheets, right? But after a couple of times of coming home to find butterflies and flowers where I remembered circles and squares, I was really bugged. And then it happened. I came home beat, figuring that I'd lay down if Jacy wasn't home. The sheets were just like I remembered them, which was great, but when I
203 got in the bed to catch a few winks, there was a big wet spot right in the middle of them. A sticky one." Burston's voice was so sad just thinking about it that I felt bad about wanting to laugh and tell him that if he dusted his old lady for messing in the bed he was the biggest fool I ever met. Well, a bigger one than me anyways. "That what you kill her for?" He shook his head, and his hair caught the little bit of light from the bulb out on the catwalk and turned dirty gold. "No, man. I didn't mean to kill her at all. Things just worked themselves out wrong, and when it finished going down, she was dead. See, the way I handled things after this thing with the sheets looked real bad in court. Premeditated, the D. A. said. I went to my foreman and told him I had to go home 'cause I didn't feel well, let myself into the apartment, and killed Jacy when I found her with another man. But that's not how it was. I knew I'd catch her because the sheets hadn't been switched for a couple of days, and I figured I'd just confront her and make her decide, go one way or the other. Well, they were screwing like rabbits when I snuck in. "I admit it didn't make me feel too good to hear her having more fun with whoever was in there with her than she ever had with me, but what can you do? I poured myself a drink and went into the kitchen to get myself some ice. The breakfast dishes were still in the sink, and that's when I got mad. She hadn't even washed the dishes she wanted it so bad from whoever was in there, that's all I could think, and I picked up the castiron skillet Jacy had cooked the eggs in and started smashing the dishes. I guess I looked pretty wild hammering away at the sink with that skillet because the minute she ran out and saw me, she started yelling for me to stay away from her with the skillet. Then this black guy appears in the bedroom door, wearing his pants and saying something about the situation not calling for all this, and I got madder and ran at him, thinking, I don't know, that I'd bop him in the head with the skillet. Jacy got between us somehow, he tried to pull away from me. We both slipped, and I hit her in the side of the head with the skillet. She died on the way to the hospital. Gutierrez, the Sleeping Man rolled over and said, "When a man's woman sleeps with another man, she is a puta, and a puta deserves whatever she gets. Now, you will be quiet please? There is a man trying to sleep." Further down on the block a voice said, "You ain't the only one, Gutierrez. Shut the fuck up!" Burston had jumped up like he didn't like the idea of Gutierrez calling his old lady a whore, even if she was dead, but when the voice
204 yelled out he sat down again and waited for me to say something. I didn't have nothing to say. What was there to tell a dumb ofay who beat his old lady to death with a skillet full of scrambled eggs 'cause he caught her in the sack with a nigger? But he must have wanted to hear something out of me or he wouldn't have gone through all those changes just to make me ask how he came to be sent up. Was I supposed to say, it's too bad for you, man, that you dusted your old lady like that, by accident, or tell him that I dug how he could have freaked out when he realized it was a brother making all his old lady's bells ring? Sometimes white people make my stomach hurt, and I was getting ready to tell him that when I heard the footsteps of the guard coming down the block. On Monday nights it was Malone, and Malone loved to mess with Butler. "Lie down on your bunk," I told Burston. "Roll over and face the wall and make like you sleep." "Why?" "You wanted to learn how to act in the Joint, didn't you? Do like I said." The footsteps got harder and louder the closer they got to our cell, and I could hear Malone humming to himself like he was a man out on a Sunday stroll; I put my head down on the end of the bunk facing the bars and rolled up against the wall so Malone wouldn't be able to tell I was awake. Burston looked at me for a minute, and then did what I did. We laid there for what seemed like the longest time, waiting on Malone. He must've heard our voices and known that we was awake because he made us wait like he knew we were waiting. Stood two cells away and hummed and whistled till it wasn't only me waiting, but what seemed like every little part of my body: my feet, my legs, the back of my neck, they were all nervous and could feel each little scrape Malone's heels made on the concrete as sure as if it was them and not the floor he was walking on. I wanted to jump up out of that bed and run to the toilet and piss until I had pissed out all my fear. Malone hadn't never done anything to me, I didn't even know that he knew my face, and that was what scared me. Sometimes, when I couldn't sleep for my dreams of running, and it seemed like I was the only one awake in the whole place, Malone would come and stand in front of our cell, not saying anything, just standing, and I could feel the hate he had for Butler coming off him the way you can feel the stink coming off a wet dog. It was too strong a thing to hate him back for, or get mad about: I wasn't a single thing to him except something to hate for sharing a cell with Butler. Every once in a while he'd suck a big gob of mucous and spit into his mouth and spit it into the middle of the cell, a present kind of, to let us know he'd been there. In the dark, that spit hitting the floor always sounded to me like a rifle shot.
205 Finally, Malone came on down to our cell and stared in at us. Ten years, and I ain't never seen his face, just the outline of his shoulders, the shape of his hat, and that billy club he twirls by its string the way the cops do in those old movies about New York. Burston moved a little bit to get a better look at Malone, and for a minute I was worried he was going to mess up and let Malone know we were awake. Malone stood there a long time, twirling his club around and around and smacking on his chewing gum; my shoulders and neck started hurting from being bunched up while I waited for him to spit. The whole block was quiet, like everybody had stopped snoring and was holding on to see how Malone was going to act. Somebody somewhere started coughing, and the sound of them hacking echoed all the way down the block in the silence. Malone stuck the end of his billy club through the bars and rattled it around a bit, not loud enough to make a racket, but loud enough to wake you up if you were in our cell and trying to sleep. Gutierrez grunted and rolled over without saying a word. Malone rattled his club again, a little harder than before. "Butler." Butler answered him so fast that I knew he had been awake all through Burston's story. "Is that you, Bo-Peep, knock, knock, knocking at my door?" Malone pulled his club from between the bars and stepped back until the light made the outlines of his hat and shoulders solid and heavy. He twirled his club back and forth until it made a whistling sound as it whipped through the air. "I can't reach you now, Butler," he said. "They got the doors locked automatically, and we can't get at you bastards. But one night something's going to happen, an emergency where they're going to have to open these doors. And when that happens, you're going to have an accident. A real bad one." Butler jumped down from his bunk and stood in the middle of the cell. We didn't have his shirt on, and I could see that he had been laying up there and listening for Malone by the way his muscles looked. They were all pumped up the way they usually were after he had been doing his pushups or incline lifts on the bench press. His shoulders were right next to my head, and the muscles on his chest looked like big slabs of black rock as they slid up and down and moved in and out while he stood there flexing. A lot of cats get big in the Joint: there ain't much else to do, and sooner or later damn near everybody ends up pumping iron in the weightroom. But there weren't too many people around as big as Butler; he spent more time in there than anybody else, lifting and pumping and grunting till his bald head was shiny with sweat and his skin was wet purple like a
206 grape. He walked down toward the bars until he was just past the end of the bunks and still out of reach of Malone's club. "Let me show you something, Malone." He got down on the floor and did a onehanded pushup, going down real slow, and coming back up even slower. After he did two with his right hand, he switched to his left and did two more. Malone just stood there watching him and chewing his gum; Butler did another set of four before he got up and brushed off his hands. "Just between you and me," he said, "don't you think that's gonna have to be some accident?" Malone didn't say anything, and Butler started laughing. Not the laughing you do at a good joke, but the way kids laugh at somebody who's funnylooking or don't talk right or something. All of a sudden Malone hawked something up out of his throat and spit it at Butler; from the noise it made leaving his mouth it sounded like he'd put his gum in it too. Everybody who plays basketball with Butler is always surprised because they don't expect somebody who weighs two fifty to be that fast. But I think even the ones that know because they played him and lost would have been surprised at how fast Butler got out of the way of that gob of spit. He went back across the cell on the tips of his toes like a ballet dancer. The spit made a wet plopping sound on the floor. Butler chuckled because he knew missing made Malone even madder. "Hope that wasn't your tongue," he said. "It'd make your old lady mad. She might even take up visiting me." Malone gave a disgusted snort and went on down the block. From the speed of his footsteps it seemed like he was trying to hurry up so he wouldn't be so far off schedule that he'd have to explain where he'd been. Burston got up and got some toilet paper to wipe up Malone's present. Just before he dropped the wad of paper into the john he said, "Who the hell was that?" I sat up and lit a cigarette. "That was Malone?" Burston came over and stood by my bunk, waiting for me to give him one of my smokes, I guess, and when I didn't, he went over and got one of his own. He was afraid of Malone too; he took a big drag of smoke and held it in his lungs for a long time before he let it out. "What's his problem?" Butler came out of the corner he'd been standing in. "After that longass story you just told, you don't know what his problem is?" "No. Cigarette?" He held the pack out to Butler. When he did that, I said to myself, there ain't no hope for this boy, still giving away smokes after he saw I wouldn't give him one of mine. While he was lighting Butler's smoke his hand trembled a little bit, and Butler put his on it to steady the light. Burston almost jerked away when Butler touched him, but then he got ahold of himself and held it steady till
207 Butler was done. "He does that all the time?" "No," I said, looking at Butler to see if he had noticed the way Burston had tried to pull away from him. "Only once in a while. Him and Butler, they don't get on too well." Butler was holding his butt like it was a joint and letting the smoke dribble out his nose. "I don't know what it is, he said. "Old Malone just doesn't love me like he should. I think maybe it's because I'm not as cute as I used to be." Burston slid back on his bunk until his back was up against the wall and his feet were hanging over the edge. He took another puff of his cigarette while he got ready to get in somebody else's business. He was going to get a schooling if he tried that with Butler 'cause Butler doesn't play that game at all. I suppose I should have said something to warn him off and let him know that he was walking down the wrong side of the street, but I was tired of him, tired of the way he held his cigarette, tired of the way he kept flipping his hair back, and tired of the way he kept trying to learn everything right away like he was some kind of schoolboy on a field trip. I leaned back on my wall, hung my feet over the edge of my bunk, and got real interested in blowing smoke rings. Burston said, "Well, you must have done something to make him that mean." " 'I must have done something to make him that mean'." Butler said, lisping like a queen. He pitched his butt into the John and came down between the bunks. His back was to me, and I couldn't see Burston at all because of where Butler was standing. I hoped Butler wasn't smiling. Whenever he's messing with people his smile gets bigger and bigger, until you don't know whether he's messing with you because he's smiling or smiling because he's messing with you. I hoped he wasn't smiling at Burston because Butler can fuck with folks for hours, and I was ready to go back to sleep. Butler said, "You still don't know, huh?" Burston must've shook his head; he sure didn't say nothing. "Well, I guess you think you right about what you did to your old lady, though. Right?" He dropped down on the floor and started doing pushups again, two handed ones this time. I laid down on my back and blew smoke at the ceiling. This was going to take a long time: Butler can do pushups till your arms hurt just watching him. His head bobbed up and down while he kept his eyes on Burston instead of looking at the floor. "I mean, you must think you right about dusting your old lady or you wouldn't have been bragging about it to Tarp." I turned my head from looking at the ceiling. All I could see of Burston was his feet drawn up away from Butler, and the hand that was holding his cigarette. The hand was nervous: it kept on trying to
208 flick ashes onto the floor even though there weren't no ashes, and the tip of the cigarette was a red dot that j umped every time Burston hit it with his thumb or tapped it on the iron rail at the end of the bunk. "I wasn't bragging about that. I loved her. How could I possibly brag about killing her?" His voice sounded like he knew there was something going down he couldn't figure out. Butler's head went down real slow, came up even slower, and then went down again. There were no sounds of strain in his voice. You would've thought, from the way it sounded, that he was sitting still, or laying on his bed. "Sure sounded like that to me. What about you, Gutierrez? Gutierrez, I know you awake." Gutierrez grunted to show that he heard, and then rolled over. "All men sound like this when they speak of things they have done to their women. It is only natural. Now, you will be quiet? I am trying very hard to sleep." Butler had started doing his pushups faster while Gutierrez was talking, and he finished doing however many he had decided he would do without saying anything. He plopped over on his back, pulling great big gulps of air down to his stomach. Burston said, "That's bullshit, what he just said. I wasn't proud, I was ashamed. That's what I was trying to tell Tarp, that I hadn't meant to kill her. You heard me." "Don't give me that shit, man. I heard you. You were telling old Tarp that because you thought he was going to tell you what he was in here for. Clue you in on what kind of motherfuckers you in here with. But Tarp ain't going to tell you. Old Tarp's ashamed. Ain't that right, Tarp?" I rolled over to face the wall, covered my head with my arms, and said, "Leave him be, Butler. He ain't did nothing to you. Go back to bed." "He ain't did nothing to me, huh? He done a lot to me. All those bastards done a lot to me. They done so much to me they're even in the way I pray." He brought his hands together with a big clap and held them up like he was praying. "Our Father, which art in heaven, white man owe me eleven and pay me seven. Thy Kingdom come; Thy will be done, and if I hadn't took that, I wouldn't got none." He put his hands down. "So don't tell me that he ain't done nothing to me." Burston said slowly, "You think I killed her because she was sleeping with a black man, don't you?" Butler spun around on his ass. "Hold my feet, white boy." "What?" Burston sounded confused, suspicious. "Hold my feet so I can do me some situps before I get back in bed."
209 Burston didn't want to do that, he didn't want to touch Butler at all. You could tell it by how slow he was getting out of his bunk. I wanted to warn him then that that was a mistake, wanted to say, be careful, but part of me was thinking that it was time this foolish white boy learned something about being in the Joint, another part of me was thinking, well, won't be long now. And then I was ashamed of myself, and I pulled my arms tighter around my head and made like I was Gutierrez, the Sleeping Man. But I couldn't keep from watching no more than a woman can keep from opening a package you tell her not to look in; I rolled over and rested my chin on the edge of my bunk. Burston didn't really have an idea of how big and strong Butler was until he got down on the floor and held his feet. The first two situps Butler did lifted him up off the floor, and he had to shake his hair out of his eyes and slide up on Butler's feet with his knees to keep from being bounced all over everywhere. Even then, he kept on rising up into the air a little bit everytime Butler's head went back; both their heads, Butler's and Burston's, rocked back and forth until they got to looking like some kind of human see-saw. Butler did about ten situps real fast, and then started doing slow inclines where he went backwards in little shifts so that he could talk at the same time. "So you," he said, stopped about halfway to the floor, "don't think you killed her for screwing a nigger, huh?" Burston moved up higher on Butler's feet so that he could throw all his weight on them and force them back down to the ground. "I told you, it was an accident. I didn't mean to kill her." Holding Butler's feet down is hard work, and he was a little out of breath. Butler's shoulders hit the ground and bounced back up as if they were made of rubber. "But you meant to kill the brother? You were running at him with the skillet, right?" Burston didn't say anything, but from the way he bent his head down and let the hair come down into his face you could see he was getting an idea of how trapped he was by holding Butler's feet. Butler knew he was trapped too because he went right on talking away: "Old Tarp, he doesn't want to tell you why he's here 'cause he's ashamed. I'm not, I'm proud." His head touched his knees and went down to the floor in one smooth move, and kept on going up and down until he looked like a pump priming itself to start gushing out water. "I used to have this woman, a white woman name Denise, and, man, you couldn't keep me and this woman out of bed. We used to screw until we were radioactive, I mean, we would glow, Jack. The minute I would get in her door she'd be pulling my clothes off." Butler laughed. "But I was like you, Burston. It took a long time for me to see how things were going
210 down. One night, I got over there a little tired, and I said, well, baby, let's go to the movies. She said, No. And I said, well, how about dinner? She said, No. And I kept coming up with things to do and she kept saying, Noyand we both got madder and madder, and then she said, well, if you're not man enough to do your duty then maybe you should go. And the next thing I know, I'm out on the street with my hat in my hand." Butler let his back slam down to the ground as though what Denise had dropped on him had been dropped on his chest. He stretched his arms out along the floor like they were wings and rocked his head from side to side. Burston started to let go of his feet and get back on his bunk; Butler sat up real quick to keep him there. "You just hold on. After a while it came to me that Denise didn't want me for nothing but jugging, and then it hit me that she wasn't even really jugging me so much as she was letting herself get done by what she thought was me. But I wasn't sure, didn't really want to see that, and when I got home I called her on the phone and asked her to tell me what color my eyes were. Do you know that bitch hung up on me? And I knew where she had got those ideas from, didn't I Tarp?" Butler had asked that question so many times that answering it wasn't even answering a question anymore. It was more like being in church and coming back with the answer the preacher wants to hear so that he can get on with the sermon. I sat up and swung my feet son over the edge of my bunk. "It all relates back to the white man." "That's right." Butler went back to doing situps, and each time he came back up to his knees he took one of his hands and tapped Burston in the face. "You see," tap, "it has to do," tap, "with what white men," tap, "tell their women," tap, "about black men." Burston wanted to let go of Butler's feet more thamhe wanted to do anything in the world then, but he was afraid, frozen the way cats are when they see a dog they know is going to chase them. "They tell them all these things, make us seem big, bad, and ugly to frighten them and make them stay away from us. But it's funny about some women — the more you tell 'em something ain't for them, the more they want it. Denise wanted something that wasn't me, wanted to be screwed by some big brute nigger who liked molesting white women almost as much as he liked picking cotton." When Butler said "picking cotton," he slapped Burston on both sides of the face, once with each hand. Burston's shoulders and head were starting to shake. "And that's when I said to myself, shoot, if white men are so scared of us that they got to tell lies, why don't I give them something to be really scared of. I took to grabbing little white boys and giving it to them in the ass so they'd have something to be scared of the rest of
211 their lives, the memory of me holding them by the feet and twirling them around on my cock like they were propellers blowing in the breeze." In the bunk below me, Gutierrez was sitting up with his legs crossed like he was a man waiting for a bus. "Do you hear me," Butler said. "Do you her me, Burston?" On his last situp Butler grabbed Burston by the hair on the top of his head and got up real slow, pulling Burston up with him. Burston was trembling so hard I thought he was going to start vibrating. It took him two tries before he could say anything, and his voice was soft and thin, the way it is when you have to give your name to somebody who's got a warrant for your arrest. "But that hasn't got anything to do with me." "It got everything in the world to do with you," Butler said, and punched him in the stomach so hard the wind shot out of him like he really was a burst balloon. He sagged until the only thing holding him up was Butler's hand tangled in his hair. Butler turned to Gutierrez. "Get his pants." Gutierrez hopped off his bed like he had been waiting all night for a reason to get up. He undid Burston's belt and yanked everything down to Burston's ankles with one hand. Butler started giggling a real nasty giggle. "Help me get him on the bed, and maybe we can find a way to help you with your insomnia." Gutierrez started giggling too. "Well, I have been having trouble sleeping." He bent down and grabbed him by the ankles. Burston hung down like a sack of grain while they carried him to his bed. Burston started thrashing around and wiggling up and down to get loose, but with Gutierrez holding onto his feet, and Butler hanging on to his head and shirt, he was flopping around like a big fish out of water. He whimpered a little and then he said, "Help me, Tarp. For God's sake, won't you help?" I didn't move. Then he started to cry. "I'll yell," he said. "I'll yell, and Malone will come back and make you stop." Butler yanked on his hair, hard. "You hush up all that noise or I'll snap your neck like a pencil." Burston gave up struggling when Butler yanked on his hair again and started crying for real. He cried loud sobbing gasps that seemed to echo all down the cell block. Butler put his hand over all the noise and turned to me. "How about it, Tarp? You want some of this cherry?" I hopped down and went over to the bunk. Gutierrez pulled Burston's legs apart and licked his mustache while he looked at me. His eyes were sleepy and bored. I reached down and tan my hand across Burston's ass. It was soft and smooth, just like I knew it would be, and I took my other hand and started squeezing his ass hard and regular, like I was checking melons. Burston gave one last buck like a
212 horse and then gave up altogether and got real still. The smell and stink of fear came rolling up off of him like a cheap perfume, and I could feel it the way I felt Malone's hate. That's when I knew what Butler wanted me to do. His smile was ear to ear, and he was rubbing Burston's head and having the time of his life. I looked back at Gutierrez, and his eyes were even more sleepy looking, and ready and waiting. He giggled and pulled Burston's legs even further apart. I squeezed up a big hunk of Burston's ass, and kissed it, and bit it hard. The sound of him pissing all over himself and the bed was like all the rivers in the world rushing into our cell. The stink of his fear and piss hit my nose like a punch, and I knew I couldn't do it, that if I climbed up on him we would be on his ass all night, doing him until he was never going to be able to get around what we had done to him. I stepped back. "Let him up." Butler looked at me and his smile got wider. "Good, Tarp, good. I didn't think you had it in you." He bent down till him and Burston was nose to nose. "Now you know what you was trying to kill when you dusted your old lady. That wasn't nowhere near as real as this fear, was it?" Burston just whimpered; Butler yanked on his hair. "Was it?" Burston nodded, finally, and Butler let his head drop down on the mattress. "And now you know what Malone hates. Not something made up, something real. He hates me 'cause he knows what you know. Me." He hopped up on his bunk and rolled over to face the wall. Then he rolled back again and hung his head down over the side. "Sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs bite." He rolled back to the wall. Gutierrez looked at me, sighed, and shook his head before he let Burston's feet go. Burston pulled his legs up so that he was curled up on the mattress in a ball, and rocked himself back and forth, crying. Gutierrez sighed again and got back in his bed. Burston didn't even bother to pull his pants up, and I started to say something to him, but there wasn't nothing to say, and I went and got in my own bed.
Real late that night, about two hours before what might've been sunup, I woke up because I heard someone making noises like they were strangling or drowning. It was Burston. He was halfway uncurled out of that ball, and flapping his arms around like he was fighting something off. I started to roll over and go back to sleep, and then I couldn't. I got down and went over and shook him. "Wake up, man, wake up." When he woke up and recognized me his eyes got real wide like he thought I'd changed my mind. He got real stiff under my hand. I shook him again. "Burst, the nights are real long here, you got to learn to get through them without that shit." He stared at me
213 some more before he nodded and rolled over. I climbed back in my bunk, started out again in my sleeper's stride and ran on into the dark.
Frank Mkalawile Chipasula
MZEE MAURICE
Ten drums could not contain his soaring spirit. His music had outgrown them now. In Osaka at the Expo '70, in a sudden trance, Mzee Maurice asked for two more, forcing The praise singers to adjust their lines. His wife, ever-faithful, produced them from her pouch. He divided his fingers equally among them. Images emerged from his skilled fingertips easily As he let a great invisible force move him; His drums spoke to each other and to us eloquently A pure poetry of the air in a symphony of many heartbeats. Now with twelve drums ranged before his blind eyes, He ordered them by his knowing touch and sharp ear, His fingers and palms caressing the taut skin Of each drum, feeling with his large heart the volume And shape of each tune as they comingled into The sigtune for Jioni njema on Radio Tanzania, Dar es Salaam, Leading the doves of peace between kinsmen. He sat in an incessant shower of hard-raining Coins from many nations: rupees, yens, shillings, dollars, pennies. People massed around him, their heads bowed by his music. When the note was false or had gone astray His fingers picked it out for remolding, His head shaking it away like an evil spirit From the rippling pulse of his calling and echoing drums. Because the strands came from his heart, he wove The disparate cords into a tapestry of sound lined With intense light, Tanzanian dust and water Or whipped up a storm from the roaring lion-skin. When a drum was slack he chose natural sun-heat From the electric heat offered to warm and stretch it. Those who listened carefully below the fuming machines Knew that it was their own hearts drumming — Now something deep in us still writhes with the sounds. For Ralph & Fanny Ellison, with respect.
214 John Wright
CHIMED CHANTS FROM DARK AND DUTIFUL DYELIS: A Review Essay
Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art, and Scholarship. Edited by Michael S. Harper and Robert B. Stepto. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1979, $10.00.
From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative. Robert B. Stepto. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1979, $12.50.
For those survivors and surveyors of the Age of Black Revolt, the disillusioned, the nostalgic, the tempered realists, who have come to view Afro-American cultural movements as captive to the historical rhythm of a spiral or a vortex or even a boomerang, these two volumes will offer more revisions than reinforcements. Cyclical views of cultural history, after all, thrive no less on a self-possessed search for sustaining traditions than on a despair of ever breaking the Sisyphean round of uncertain progress and uncheckable retro gression. And it is that confident quest for tradition — what Michael Harper, in a poetic meditation of the life and times of Ralph Ellison, calls "the hunt in books for quail" — which animates the two literary landmarks he and Robert Stepto have just unveiled. The cycles traced by the two books are those in the world of "the dark and dutiful dyelis" evoked in Jay Wright's long poem, Dimensions of History, where culture is a magic circle of life-giving myth, rite, and landscape, and where the dyeli — Mandinka poet- archivist, master of the Word, tribal historian — fecundates the circle with his gnostic syllables while "counting no clock time / but the blood time . . . and searching for the understanding of his deeds." The collaborative anthology, Chant of Saints, and Stepto's scholarly study, From Behind the Veil, present an expanding Afro-American universe of images and ideas and give a partial answer to those hopeful unravellers of Ralph Ellison's metahistorical riddles who would ask black artists and intellectuals, seemingly returned to hibernation and invisibility during the past decade, just what overt action the silent seventies were a covert preparation for. In Chant of Saints, editors Harper and Stepto have assembled a celebratory cornucopia of literature, art, and scholarship rich in range and technical dexterity, which stakes a claim for the constella tion of seventies Afro-Americanist artists and thinkers as one of the
215 most diversely innovative forces in contemporary American life. And it secures their place, as historian John Hope Franklin acknowledges in the foreword, at the cutting edge of "the most productive period in the history of Afro-American literature and culture." Franklin suggests that the volume may well be regarded as a yardstick by which to measure the evolution of Afro-American culture since the publi cation in 1925 of Alain Locke's movement-making anthology, The New Negro: An Interpretation. Like The New Negro, which began as the expanded version of a special "Harlem" number of Survey Graphic, Chant of Saints had its genesis in special issues of a major academic journal, in this instance the Massachusetts Review (Fall and Winter, 1977). Like The New Negro, Chant of Saints pays homage to newness even as it exhumes and consolidates traditions. In the dedicatory foreword to Sterling Brown in the first journal, the editors announced: "In the 1970's Afro-American art and scholarship have developed a new sense of order and commitment. Younger artists and scholars are willingly embracing the traditions of their crafts; established figures who survived the 1960's and its abuse of them are being honored and reassessed; poetry is far more artful than polemical; fiction is once again being written, which is cause enough for rejoicing." The intent of Chant of Saints is "to document this new spirit" as it documents the decade, studies the major Afro-American cultural achievements of the mid-century, and presents "a kind of Festschrift" honoring Sterling Brown, the man from whose blues canticles the collection takes its title. Brown, that redoubtable septuagenerian scholar-poet-raconteur whom Alain Locke singled out some forty years ago over Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Claude Mc Kay as the quintessential "New Negro Poet," is a living bridge between the Jazz Age Negro Renaissance and that second "renaissance" in progress; and his rapping, rambling, reminiscing homecoming speech to the students of Williams College opens the amplified book version of Chant of Saints on a note that both fuses the vernacular and academic traditions and gives a human scale to what follows. Classically trained at Williams and Harvard but drawn into the New Negro Movement and pulled inexorably South where he learned what he "could not learn at Williams" — "the strength of my people . . . the fortitude . . . the humor . . . the tragedy . . . the folkstuff," Sterling Brown turned away from T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and toward Paul Laurence Dunbar, Claude Mc Kay, Edward Arlington Robinson, and Robert Frost, creating the powerful blues- based poetry of Southern Road (1932) and using critical realism and
216 exegetical force to fight the literary wars against racial stereotypy. Recalling those battles now, and commenting obliquely on the generational tensions of the Black Power era, he quips, "I'm bringing out a book of poems, Thirty-Six Poems Thirty-Six Years Later, because friends of mine, like Stokely Carmichael and the rest, think that I wrote the poems after discussing these things with them." Squaring off again, playfully, he declares himself "an Old Negro, and proud of it ... as Du Bois [was] an Old Negro, Paul Robeson,. . . James Weldon Johnson." Sterling Brown, however, is no worshipper of the bourgeoisie", and he professes to be a man who has loved Africa since he was a child, but who is not going back to Africa now — though he's already there in spirit — because he knows how much he is needed here. An undiscouraged integrationist, because of his intimate experience with segregation, he has opted for "what the word means — an integer is a whole number." He embraces standards that, "in the best American tradition," reject racial myth for the palpably human; and he wants acceptance as a whole man, colored not by his skin but by his love of the blues and jazz and of black folk speech, whose essence, he admonishes the Black English brigade, "is not 'dis' and 'dat' and a split verb" but rather the metaphoric metaphysic of "been down so long that down don't worry me." As Brown's improvisatory remarks serve less to buttress an ideological stance than affirm an ethos, so Chant of Saints orches trates a group of performances set neither to a martial song or an anthem but to an upbeat exploratory riff that asks of the performers only a disciplined and intense sounding out of new aesthetic and critical possibilities, new techniques and modes of expression. Consciously interdisciplinary, international, interracial, Chant is more representative than comprehensive in its efforts to document an era, more committed to presenting its contributors "in a substantial and varied way" than to gathering all the major voices, more inclined to "suggest an artistic continuum" and to foster dialogue among the genres and disciplines than to construct a canon. The absence of James Baldwin, Imamu Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, or Ishmael Reed, for example, in no way vitiates the enterprise and in a sense testifies to an extant community of black writers now too rich in polarities, too diverse in sensibilities to be encompassed in any single anthology of lesser scope than Negro Caravan, the massive collection Sterling Brown co-edited in the forties. About the contemporary politics and pastework of anthologies, editor Stepto has much to say in his prefatory apologia for Chant, anticipating controversies and cautioning us repeatedly, in effect,
217 that despite its title the book is not a holy catalog of saints but just a joyful family gathering. The anthological past the editors of Chant are determined not to repeat is one rife with exclusions, token representations, and ideological straitjacketings of black artists. Here, Harper and Stepto have been so careful not to trumpet any "false sense of autonomy" about the cultural events the anthology celebrates, so aware that some of their materials "are in a sense occasional," that they claim perhaps too little for the literal and figurative world they have helped define. It is a world not of street scholars and gypsy artists but, as historian Franklin notes, one of college and university-based professionals — to an extent not possible in any previous period in Afro-American history. They are not yet, and not likely to become, a "Negro leisure class" of scholars and literati devoted to the arts, the pure love of learning, and the corollary influence of public opinion — the class whose absence sociologist Kelly Miller bemoaned in The New Negro. But the "air of security, if not solidarity and self-esteem, if not chauvinism" their work exhibits signals the death of the defensive posture and the move toward grandeur in Afro-American art that some of the prophets for the Black Seventies foresaw at the beginning of the decade. Devoid of the overweening optimism and manifesto mood which energized the insurgencies of the twenties and sixties, but armed with tough- minded skepticism, with a flexible cultural nationalism distilled from two decades of black intellectual ferment, and with the whole array of post-modern critical and creative techniques, the celebrants in Chant of Saints have, to borrow a trope from Ishmael Reed, put a contract out on "inferior quality" — that well-worn private dick the white art world dials when threatened by an invasion of creative gangsters — and they have made off with the prizes: Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards, NEH Fellowships, distinguished artists chairs, consultantships to the Library of Congress. The moveable feast they have spread before us in Chant showcases literature but honors the whole range of contemporary black cultural achievement. We are treated to short fiction from Trinidadian newcomer John Stewart and from James Alan Mc Pherson's Pulitzer- winning collection, Elbow Room; to excerpts from Ralph Ellison's long-awaited successor to Invisible Man and from novels by Leon Forrest, Toni Morrison, Ernest Gaines, and Gayl Jones; to poetry in ample offerings from Robert Hayden, Michael Harper, Derek Walcott, Jay Wright, and Sherley Williams; to sturdy critical studies on Ellison, Richard Wright, Hayden, Jay Wright, and Harper plus skilled interviews of Morrison, Forrest, Jones, Walcott, and Ellison — all of which offerings lend a "premeditated intertextuality" to the
218 volume's literary perspectives. Other essays detail the post-World War I coalescence of black literary internationalism in the New Negro and Francophone Negritude Movements, present Chinua Achebe's acerbic demystification of Joseph Conrad's imperialist charade in Heart of Darkness, and chronicle poet-novelist Alice Walker's poignant search for literary ancestry at the weed-shrouded, unmarked grave of Zora Neale Hurston. Wide-ranging musicological essays commemorate jazz and blues greats Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, and Big Jim Robinson and explore the blues roots of contemporary Afro-American poetry. Historians John Blassingame and Mary Berry trace the modern black cultural ethos back through slavery and the African past. Woven purposefully through the text, the visual arts are represented by Richard Yarde's historically inspired oil and watercolor canvases (of Paul Robeson's Emperor Jones, of Heavyweight Champion Jack Johnson, of Sweet Daddy Grace, of the Niagara Movement radicals); by photos of new works, on motifs from the spirituals, by internation ally renowned sculptor Richard Hunt; by the Haitian "conjur- graphs" and diaspora themes of photographer Lawrence Sykes; and by the jarring visual poetry of Romare Bearden's Odysseus collages. Complemented by art historian Robert Thompson's study of icono- logical Afr icanity in the Depression era sculpture of Tidewater folk artist Siras Bowens, and by Ralph Ellison's supple explication of Romare Bearden's compositional techniques and perceptual acuities, these curves of space and light and color articulate wordlessly a transfiguring social vision and lend what Ellison calls "ceremonial continuity" to the book's circle of art — through the palpable wizardry of design. The design of Chant of Saints — to be, finally, "an epic and familial poem" — defines its limits, its atmosphere, its audience. Its appeal for power is to the Muses, not the gods of war; its Machinery is the cabala of craft and critical method; its rhetoric one of elevation and exactitude; its action a consciously "heroic" movement out of the underworld and toward consolidation, reconciliation, expansion, exploration. Its homage to the elders — Brown, Ellison, Hurston, Hayden, Richard Wright, Bearden — is a step toward generational continuity and a step away from the ambivalent patricidal impulses evident a decade earlier, for example, in Imamu Baraka's and Larry Neal's ideological constructs for the Black Arts Movement and in their "New Breed" anthology, Black Fire (1968). For Baraka then, as his essay "The Myth of a Negro Literature" made clear, no viable ancestral tradition in literature existed. An "agonizing mediocrity" prevailed in which only Jean Toomer, Richard Wright, Ralph
219 Ellison and James Baldwin had produced works capable of "passing themselves off" as "serious" writing. And in Larry Neal's estimation then, Toomer's work had been part of the "surrealistic euphoria" of a fantasy era called the Harlem Renaissance; Wright's major work, Native Son, was committed but ideologically schizoid; Ellison's Invisible Man was somehow profound but "irrelevant" to the world as the New Breed saw it; and Baldwin's writing represented both "the moral substance" of the civil rights movement and "its ultimate sterility." The impulse to repudiate or to reclaim the artistic tendencies and achievements of the past is slave, of course, to the aspirations and standards of the present. Older artists, their styles and tastes, are rejected, embraced, overestimated, or ignored according to current aesthetic and social values, and are only rediscovered and reassessed if they are considered relevant to contemporary issues. The patterns of such reinterpretation, then, are characteristically pragmatic and ideological rather than empirical and logical. For the New Breed, who saw the Black Arts as the aesthetic sister of the Black Power Movement, the assessment of an artist, ancestor or peer, was indissolubly linked to his or her tangible contributions to a specific politics and psychology of liberation. For a post-Black Power generation of artists and scholars whose ideological orientation is less formulaic, if no less "committed," this functionalist critique has been largely supplanted by a kind of communalistic formalism which treats art not so much as experience or argument but as rite and craft inherently freighted with moral consciousness and social obligation — as a method or ontology for translating a culture's experience into enduring metaphors of human possibility and limitation. And so, as we discover, in the engrossing series of interviews that may be Chant of Saints' greatest contribution to the discussion of contemporary Afro-American literary process, black writers have moved beyond the artist-as-activist impasse of the sixties, have reconstituted personal and political struggles in the terms of their profession — through an agonistic coupling of the myths, modes, symbols, and idioms of racial tradition with the Goliathian tradition of the writer's craft. Here we see Leon Forrest, author of The Bloodworth Orphans and There Is a Tree More Ancient than Eden, arguing the black novelist's need to "reshape, purify, standardize, and sanctify language" in his own way and to develop an associative, highly reflective mind and a "fury for re-writing," to see the need for a "killer-instinct" in the competition with his literary peers and in "testing himself against the masters," and the need for an orientation
220 not so much to the immediate victories social activists seek but to "the long haul," to the "possibilities of institutional inner strength. . . a great book can continually give a people as they, generation after generation, read and re-read into its depths, and their depths." We meet National Book Award winner Toni Morrison describing her creative absorption, in The Bluest Eye, in Sula, and in Song of Solomon, with sense of place, with communities and neighborhoods as novelistic "characters," with the fabrication of wholly fictive worlds, and with exploring the impact of victimage and Social convention and social outlawry on. black female personality. Hers is a view of the black writer's "situation" that gives thanks when confronted with the despairing claim that white publishers' faddish promotion of black writers is now past: "I think part of that's right — that is, we're no longer fashionable . . . which I am so grateful for, absolutely relieved to find, because some brilliant writers, I think, can surface now. Once you get off the television screen, you can go home and do your work, because your responsibilities are different. Now I don't mean that there's any lessening of political awareness or political work, but I do think that one can be more fastidious, more discriminating. And it's open, it's just freer, that's all." We find poet-playwright Derek Walcott, part of the growing West Indian contingent in the Afro-American cultural nexus, struggling articulately toward a poetry that is "a kind of universal reasoning" and toward a theatre that recreates the ritualistic tragedy, satire, and comedy of the dramatic narratives in primal societies, combining, in his collection Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays, elements from classical Greek theatre, from Japanese Noh, from Trinidadian calypso and Carnival, from Brecht and Genet, and remarking how "ironic" is T.S. Eliot's concept of tradition as a simultaneous unbroken arc bridging the continents and the centuries — when applied to the Afro-American context. We find Gayl Jones, once a precocious student of Michael Harper and now a novelist- teacher herself, grappling with the problems of narration in her "blues novel," Corregidora, with the nuances of woman-woman relationships and with the ritual horror possible between men and women that her Eva's Man probes; mixing modes of reality and modes of language; experimenting with the form of oral storytelling in an effort to create a narrative perspective that obliterates the separation between storyteller and hearer; finding technical models in Chaucer and Joyce, N. Scott Momaday and Gabriel Marquez, Zora Neale Hurston and Ernest Gaines. And in what, unexpectedly, proves to be the most socially focused of the exchanges, we encounter Ralph Ellison, reluctant father figure
221 to a new generation of black writers, who assaults here, with customary eloquence and tenacity, literary truisms about the troubled parent-child relationships between writers of different generations. Probing the interfaces, past and present, between Afro-American literature and ideology, he sheds new light on the ambiguities of his friend Richard Wright's special outlook and responds at last, caustically, to the sixties Black Aestheticians' campaign against 'a hateful straw man whom they'd labeled 'Ellison'." His anger and pain are modulated, though, by the reflections of a man inclined less to dwell upon the wound than the bow; and his bitter experience in the trerich warfare of the recent past does not keep him from asserting the paradoxical triumph in America of culture over racist ideology, from reaffirming the pivotal creativity of black Americans in the initial formulation of a distinctive American idiom, or from pointing pridefully to the elegance he finds "in every aspect of Afro-American culture, from sermons to struts, pimp-walks, and dance steps." And Ellison's hopes for the literary future, undimmed and expansive, envision new research and writing that will employ "the integrative and analytical play of the imagination" to re-see the historical impact of geography, of social hierarchy, of America's peculiar folk- classical amalgam, on the still evolving national consciousness — hopes realized in part in Chant itself. What then, in sum, to say of this anthological event? A flight into hagiography? — in title only. A "watershed in black literary history"? — quite possibly. A ringing racial and cultural affirmation? — without a doubt. Though it denies our whetted appetites the added satisfaction of notes on the contributors and a compendium of their other work, Chant of Saints is nonetheless both feast and festival, a nourishing antidote for the notion that pandemic narcissism, apathy, and survivalism narcotized Afro-America after the marches and manifestoes, after the political murders and the politically inspired era of "benign neglect," after the urban upheavals ended and the urban ascension of hamstrung black elected officials began. For all who would understand the hiatus between the clamorous black activist sixties and the looming, uncertain eighties, its scats, soaring solos, and stylish hums will be indispensable. Robert Stepto's critical history, From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative, will be indispensable for different reasons. As a shift toward an historical criticism which explicitly eschews "writing yet another survey of Afro-American literature that systemat ically moves from texts to non-literary structures and passively allows those structures to become the literature's collective 'history'," it helps consolidate an emerging black critical movement concerned
222 with literary theory in and for itself. The book's allusive title calls up that famous passage in W.E.B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk which is both an evocation and a metaphorical portrait of the Afro- American as "a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, ami gifted with second sight in this American world." In fixing that "second sight" on the cycles of Afro-American narrative, Stepto's study takes a great leap forward past its most influential immediate predecessor — Stephen Henderson's energetic but ultimately unsuccessful theoret ical introduction to Understanding the New Black Poetry (1973), which attempted to create a critical vocabulary, referenced in black speech and black music, for analyzing all kinds of black poetry and for comprehending the continuity and wholeness of the black poetic tradition. Both of these efforts represent the ideological undercurrent of reassessment and revisionism that is a part of a maturing, stabilizing black literary culture's need to reformulate the basic problems and principles of art so that it might understand its own original artists. Alain Locke — cultural philosopher, aesthetician, movement "midwife" — with the then radical literary example of Van Wyck Brooks, Randolph Bourne, and H. L. Mencken immediately before him, had articulated the need for this missing "third dimension" of Afro-American culture during the New Negro era, had hoped the Negro Renaissance would become, in Emerson's sense, 'introspective' and in Brooks' terms, "self-critical." But in retrospect he conceded that the Renaissance had had "pride without poise, vision without true perspective, self-esteem without the necessary tempering of full self-understanding." At mid-century, though, he believed that, under the impetus of Richard Wright's fiction and essays, the crippling double provincialism of "cultural immaturity and a racial sense of subordination" was finally giving way to a long-awaited stage in black cultural development — that "new criticism" which, "so far as a body of sound criticism can point the way," would lead black writers out of their psychological bondage to outmoded technical, intellectual, and social conventions. Nonetheless, despite Locke's own long labors as a cultural historian (posthumously synthesized, but denatured, in Margaret Butcher's The Negro in American Culture (1956), the requisite corollary task of redefining the Afro- American cultural tradition remained uncompleted and the patterns of black critical practice merely reiterated those of liberal tradition literary history — an ingratiating mixture of anthology, reverential biography, social history, defensive racial propaganda, and impression istic critique.
223 With the urban rebellions and radicalism of the 1960's, with black nationalism resurgent and unprecedentedly diverse, with revolu tionism afoot in several guises atop a rising tide of identification with African cultures and the colonized non-Western world, the ensuing clash of ideas over the concept of racial integration magnified what Harold Cruse called the "crisis of the Negro intellectual" — the problem of forging a cultural philosophy and a sense of tradition upon which a politics of liberation and a systematic criticism of the arts could be erected. The search for a "black aesthetic" began in this context as a fragmentary critical movement grounded in separatist polemics, and coalesced outside the academy under the leadership of Imamu Baraka, Larry Neal, Hoyt Fuller, Addison Gayle, Don L. Lee, and Ron Karenga. Despairing of a "usable past" in its Afro- American bourgeois antecedents, the movement turned outward for models to the Francophone theoreticians of Negritude — Senghor of Senegal and Cesaire of Martinique — as well as to the opposing apocalyptic cultural ideology of Frantz Fanon, and then belatedly, to the literary proletarianism of Richard Wright. The Black Aestheti- cians came closest to discovering a viable indigeneous sense of cultural tradition in Baraka's "theoretical," ethnomusicologically focused social history, Blues People (1963), and in his cultural essays. But the movement foundered, in part, because its advocates were able to create no common aesthetic philosophy with which a critical movement could sustain itself, and no critical method by which it could proceed. An academic offshoot of the Black Aesthetic enclave, Henderson's work was rooted in the folkloric scholarship of Sterling Brown and in the theoretical "blueprints" left by Richard Wright; and it turned for its critical practice to a linguistic and exponential explication of poetic texts, to a musically oriented metrics, and to a terminologically troubled racial stylistics that had limited potential as a comprehensive method of criticism. In this context, Stepto's attempt to write "a history or fiction of the historical consciousness of an Afro-American art form — namely, the Afro-American written narrative," takes on special significance. In its reaction against the patronizing, impressionistic, sociological criticism of the Great White Fathers — of whom Robert Bone is a much targeted archetype — and in its divorce from the strident, content-directed critical polemicism of the Black Aestheticians — best represented by Addison Gayle — Stepto has helped launch Locke's "new criticism" on a platform of close textual readings, mythic and ritualist frameworks, and historical revisionism that, ironically, faintly echoes the agenda of the Southern Agrarians' "New Criticism" in the thirties. With a supporting, pedagogically-
224 oriented volume of complementary essays, Afro-American Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction (1978) (bearing a titular pun of clear historical import), Stepto has mounted a campaign for a history of Afro-American literary art written with critical insight, according to critical standards. Facile charges of narrow, "Fugitive" aestheticism and conser vatism, however, are unwarranted. The New Critical stress on the unity and peculiarity of a work of art, and on its comparative independence from its background in history, biography, and literary tradition, is largely counter to the thrust of From Behind the Veil. The refusal to reduce Afro-American literature to its causes is central to Stepto's approach; but the stress on the texts is more on their "intertextuality" than on their unity, more on their partici pation in, and contribution to, a tradition than on their peculiarity. And counter to the aesthete's characteristic devaluation of social and political values, Stepto locates the ends of literature not so much in aesthetic pleasure as in the enlargement of consciousness, discovers the preeminent dynamic of Afro-American literature in a struggle for freedom and literacy, and fixes his philosophical, political, and cultural points of reference in the radical democratic pluralism of W. E. B. Du Bois and Ralph Ellison. And it is to Ellison, to the essays of Shadow and Act and the tropes of Invisible Man, that Stepto turns, in building the foundation of his critical history, for a system of aesthetic principles, for a theory of cultural process and tradition and influence, and for a repository of the forms and values of Afro-American experience. To the legacy inscribed in Ellison's work, Stepto has added insights blended eclectically from a number of contemporary critical methods: North- rup Frye's morphology of genres, Claudio Guillen's structuralist views of literary "systems" and literary historicity, Geoffrey Hart- mann's phenomenological approach to literature as a form of consciousness, Raymond Williams' studies of "key words" and city/country motifs, and Victor Turner's dramatistic anthropological analysis of "ritual topographies" and "communitas." An admirably cogent preface guides us quickly to the book's controlling assumptions: first, that the Afro-American literary canon is rooted in a store of "canonical stories" or "pregeneric myths," the primary one being the quest for freedom and literacy; second, that a history of the consciousness underlying Afro-American narrative must examine how the pregeneric myth evolves into genre (autobio graphy, fiction, historigraphy) or into unique extra-generic forms; and finally, that Afro-American literary tradition has developed not from the simple proliferation of authors and texts, but from the
225 creation of distinctive literary forms — admixtures of genre — bound to a shared pregeneric myth. The study then proceeds to triangulate a course between literary theory, literary history, and criticism. Stepto, of course, has had to develop his theories about the principles and types of Afro-Americn narrative in contact with concrete texts which he has subjectively had to select, interpret, and evaluate — just as he has had to describe and distinguish the forms of historical consciousness in the narratives by extracting categories and concepts from the flow of textual material itself. The difficulties here are obvious and unavoidable, and he occasionally compounds them with that traditional American crit ical penchant for reformulating old aesthetic issues in improvised or borrowed terminology that is not always helpful or readily decoded — the result here of an understandable desire to employ critical terms compatible with the context and "expressive of the indivisibility of form and content." Based on the close study of nine narratives, Stepto's schematic history outlines two periods in Afro-American narrative develop ment, involving the rise of one convention — the "narrative of ascent" — whose decay occasions, or "calls" up, the rise of a second — the "narrative of immersion," and the subsequent development of that second convention until the exhaustion of its possibilities calls up a third — the "narrative of hibernation." In the first period, which primarily includes slave narratives from Briton Hammon to Booker T. Washington, a consciousness propelled by pregeneric myth creates a classic ascent narrative which "launches an 'enslaved' and semi-literate figure on a ritualized journey toa symbolic North." The journey moves the questing hero or heroine away from kin and community across a symbolic geography whose landscape of signs and ritual grounds he must learn to "read" in order to rise up a self-conscious "articulate survivor" in environs that are less oppres sive but where his freedom is qualified by solitude or alienation. In the second cycle of narratives, which includes autobiographies, novels and improvised forms, from Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk to Richard Wright's Black Boy and beyond, a nominally free hero in quest of "tribal literacy" and "communitas" journeys to a ritual immersion among kinfolk in a symbolic South, exchanging mobility and solitude for stasis and the mantle of a group-conscious "articulate kinsman" who inhabits a ritual middle ground pervaded by the "imagery of the tribe" (its genius loci) and tangent to the oppressive landscape. The history of Afro-American narrative forms, Stepto theorizes, is "at root, the chronicle of a dialectic between ascent and immersion expressions," a pattern of narrative thesis confronting
226 narrative antithesis, which must be "revoked" in the context of any narrative form striving for the synthesis that will inaugurate a new level of historical consciousness beyond the constraints inherent in each of the preceding, "prefiguring" cycles. Hazarding the determin istic fallacy that dialecticians inevitably confront, he then infers that an "epiloging text" was "called" for. Such a text would incorporate the history of the dialectic at the heart of its narrative form and would make a detached comprehension of the tribe's historical consciousness the potentially self-liberating progression beyond mere tribal literacy to a new self-consciousness outside the imprisoning space and time of the closed mythic circles. Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), he argues, was the response to this call, the breakthrough toa "narrative of hibernation," which enables its questing hero to retrace the tribe's ritual history of ascent and immersion but to move beyond mastering, that is, "reading," the world as given, to reconceiving and "writing" it anew — in a hole (a private ritual ground) outside the space and time the ascent and immersion mythologies call reality. The hibernation narrative's dialectical synthesis is its discovery of a new final posture for its hero in a framing prologue outside the tale itself, where he discovers the power to dominate through art the events of his own history. Its importance to the tradition, then, "is not its depiction of a pilgrim's progress, but its brave assertion that there is a self and form to be discovered beyond the lockstep of linear movement within imposed definitions of reality." The next period in the literary history of the Afro-Americn narrative, Stepto asserts parenthetically in the preface, will be created by narratives "that advance the historical conscious ness of the form beyond the posture of hibernation." In building this highly original model of Afro-American literary history, Stepto has pioneered solutions for some long-standing theoretical and critical problems. First, he has removed the study of Afro-American literary development from the crippling realm of "special case" constructs and placed it firmly within the corpus of general literary theory. And he has resisted the tendency of modern literary theoreticians to make overwrought urns of literary history, by grounding his ideas in pragmatic critical discernments derived from consistently intelligent and often brilliant analyses of specific texts: his readings of The Souls of Black Folk, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Black Boy, and Invisible Man will provoke re- readings of most of the other major texts in the tradition. Correlatively, his approach to the perennial historiographic problem of detecting the decay of one convention and the rise of another, and explaining why this change has taken place, is to
227 acknowledge the dialectical give-and-take between, art and society but nonetheless to posit a literary explanation rather than turn to outside pressures from the social milieu: the ascent narratives yield to the narratives of immersion, and the immersion narratives to the narrative of hibernation, not because an audience has wear ied of their repeated devices or because a new generation or social class of black writers is dominant, or even because of some stark or subterranean societal disjunction — though these may contribute — but primarily because the limitations on historical consciousness inherent in the form itself ultimately exhaust its creative possibilities. With similar scrupulousness, in delineating the improvisatory evolution of Afro- American generic types, Stepto has diagrammed the parallel shifts in both the narratives' inner form — the progressive reconstitutions of the pregeneric myth — and in their autobiographical and novelistic outer shells, where the quest dramatized in pregeneric myth has been transubstantiated at textual sites on which black author-narrators seeking "self-authentication" and full authorial control over their narratives struggle against white editors, publishers, guarantors, and patrons, whose voices in the texts characteristically constitute antagonistic fictions. Finally, Stepto's phenomenological "criticism of consciousness," though it tends to fragment the works it studies and to treat them as vehicles for myths, attitudes, and ideas, nonetheless helps clarify an issue as crucial in Afro-American literary history as elsewhere, that of originality — here among black writers who often aspire to be both self-conscious and group-conscious, or "folk" artists. From Behind the Veil makes originality in black narratives more than a matter of idiosyncrasy or pure novelty, so that the artistic value of merely original plots, or characters, or subject matter is minimized. Though Invisible Man, for example, ushers a "remarkable" new tale into the tradition, its originality, in this schema, lies ^elsewhere. Here, originality is ultimately linked to paradigmatic forwardings of the form's historical consciousness, which develop from one artist's transformation of the achievements of other artists, all of them, through "antagonistic cooperation" (an oxymoronic evocation of the "anxieties of influence," culled, once more, from Ellison's treasury) shaping and being shaped by a tradition. Undertaking so expansive a campaign, From Behind the Veil inevitably spreads its forces too thin on some fronts, exposes its flanks when it manuevers to face a pressing issue. Its framing theories about periodicity, for instance, are vulnerable to objections that they generalize from too few concrete examples while making little case for the examples' representativeness: Though five texts represent the
228 ascent narratives, only two immersion narratives are proferred, one of them "intentionally aborted," and Invisible Man is the sole instance of its ostensible type. And literary historians may well contend that the selection ignores otherwise important texts which might compli cate or conflict with the argument. For instance, despite its apparent pertinence to the problem of generic evolution, the relationships between the slave narratives and the three pioneering antebellum black novels, which appeared contemporaneously, are never broached save in scattered comments about William Wells Brown's Clotel; or the President's Daughter. The discussion of Washington's Up From Slavery elides the historical significance of that book's appearance as part of a veritable flood of post-Reconstuction ascent narratives with Horatio Alger motifs. And the discussion of immersion narratives between Du Bois and Ellison skips entirely the novels of Charles Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Sutton Griggs and nearly all the novelists of the New Negro Movement, including Du Bois himself. The logic in the book's abbreviations may simply have been to choose established "classics" of demonstrable literary and historical value, and to locate them in the tradition — the hitch, of course, being that, in Stepto's terms, no tradition has previously been defined. And because the restricted definition ventured here circum vents short fiction in its pursuit of the longer forms we miss, for example, the intertextually salient fact that Richard Wright, whose autobiography Stepto treats as a retrospective narrative of ascent, earlier launches the narrative of hibernation in his novelette, "The Man Who Lived Underground" (1944), a decade before Ellison's novel. Rejecting Wright's Dreiserian approach for the mythopoeic, Invisible Man actually demonstrates a transformative rather than an inaugurative originality, as Ellison's own laudatory review of Black Boy (1945), written in the year he began work on Invisible Man, conceded — acknowledging that Wright's "most important achieve ment" was that he had "converted the American Negro impulse toward self annihilation and 'going-under-ground' into a will to confront the world." If with its explicit disinclination to be a conventional survey of Afro-American narrative Stepto's critical "fiction" has provided its own release from the inclusive compulsions of the surveyor's art, its election to create a history of the form's historical consciousness alternatively compels it to chronicle systematically the crucial clashes in its subject's evolving dialectic. Unfailingly scholarly in spite of its professed counter-impulses, this study of an Afro- American genre is best seen as a provocative paraphrastic history that effectively meets this controlled objective. A more explicit statement
229 of its constraints could have disarmed most of the potential chal lenges, and a final chapter tracing key narrative developments during the quarter century since Ellison "grabbed all the marbles" could have lent even more weight and more closing grace to the book's already impressive arguments. Rendered in stylish, contemplative prose marred only occasionally by passages of unpurged dissertation argot, those arguments purposefully eschew footnotes (a serviceable index and bibliography provide scholarly compensation) even as they enthusiastically deliver the goods. The book's greatest gift is a methodological road map for the critical and historical scholars who will trek after Robert Stepto into what is still sketchily charted or mis-charted terrain. Though From Behind the Veil advocates an approach to Afro-American literature as a reading of landscapes rather than a reading of maps, it would be hard not to celebrate the artful cartography in this revisionary chant by a dark and most dutiful dyeli.
230 Michael S. Harper
REMEMBERING ROBERT E. HAYDEN
"I'd thought such gaiety could not die. Nor could our elegant avenger"
— Robert E. Hayden 1913-1980
Robert Hayden died on February 25 of an embolism in his lungs, one day after a tribute at the University of Michigan, a tribute he was too ill to attend. I had the honor of reading two of his last poems, one, "The Year of the Child," written for his grandson, Michael Ahman, which he had worked on with great industry to complete, for Hayden was always working against a deadline of sorts, educational, editorial, psychic, spiritual. He was a man of considered reserve, with an unsuppressible elegance, his bow-ties, watch-chain and old man's comforts giving him the glow of a courtly preacher who was summoned to give the word, and well he did, recalling his early childhood testifying days in Detroit's "Paradise Valley", scenes captured by the images of a sanctified Second Baptist Church Service in his "Witch Doctor" poem, which conjured up the high-falutin' church talk of a would-be savior in the tradition of a Daddy Grace. Hayden spent his early days in the 'save your sight' school program, sometimes playing the violin, and picking up the lore of his adopted parents, the Haydens; and when he was to 'finish' Detroit City College (later Wayne State University) as a Spanish major, and do research on the WPA's Federal Writers Project gathering the folk- stuff of his people, he spoke of the neighbors who slipped him book money, small coins and, on rare occasions, a dollar bill, to help him get through school — they made him proud as he made them sing in poetry. Hayden has been called a stellar poet of remembrance with a symbolist bent for mysticism and for the cryptic phrasings of the bizarre and the occult, but most folks saw him as a consummate storyteller who had the pace, coloration and detailed finish of a romantic, with an iconoclastic air. His poetic heroes, Dunbar and Keats, pushed him toward The Tempest and the ancestors: Pa
231 Hayden for one, whom Hayden memorialized in the sonnet, "Those Winter Sundays": Speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well. What did I know, what did I know of love's austere and lonely offices? Hayden said, in an interview, that he wrote "Frederick Douglass," his great accentual sonnet of religious American possibility, for the future, when 'man was permitted to be man.' He dreamed of freedom and literacy, a perennial dream of humane transformation. There is no lost Eden in Hayden's oeuvre; he was a most elegant prognosticator of the future — a Baha'i for almost forty years — and a craftsman par excellence. His knowledge of poetic traditions led him beyond many of the experiments steeped in a conscious modernism; his "Middle Passage," a poem in eight voices which borrowed from ships' logs and court testimony, slave and master, was written, in part, to answer Eliot's "The Waste Land" with the addition of a broad and pungent social reality — 'Voyage through death/to life upon these shores'. His recalling the schizoid past's brutalities was always shaped to light the future. He was a poet of the discovery of self as art, not a proponent of the confessional mode, but a poet of design who saw patterns of consciousness in the foibles and fascinations of the most public and private surfaces. These surfaces that Hayden polished always opened through a trapdoor to a 'striptease of reality' — no "deep image" for him but the deep pit, lest the poet — "squalored in that pit" — forget his wings. His last poems display utter candor and embossed technique, with no self-consciousness; the poems "A Letter From Phillis Wheatley": Alas, there is no Eden without its Serpent. Under the chiming Complaisance I hear him Hiss; and "Paul Laurence Dunbar": The happy look (subliminal of victim, dying man) a summer's tintypes hold. are talismans of his inheritance, and his possibility. The unknown visitor from elsewhere in his title poem, American Journal, is more than any observer ("must be more careful item learn to use 'okay'/their pass word 'okay'") and less than any spokesman for the
232 country, though his voice suggests the inner reexamination of that quiddity hidden in the word made flesh, those sacred documents that brought form and geography together:
fact and fantasy never twice the same.
Hayden's ballads reveal a story told, offhandedly, of a storytelling people, for he was a national poet in the voicings he could capture a phrase; he could also recall Wallace Stevens and take us into that hidden arena of transcendence:
(The Crystal Cave Elegy)
Floyd Collins oh I guess he's a goner, Pa Hayden sighed, the Extra trembling in his hands. Poor game loner trapped in the rock of Crystal Cave, as once in Kentucky coal mine dark (I taste the darkness yet) my greenhorn dream of life. Alive down there is his grave. Open for him, blue door.
Keats's 'negative capability' comes to mind:
"that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."
Hayden spoke of sitting next to Arna Bontemps at Fisk University, in Nashville, in the 60's, where both were teaching. Rosey Poole, a collector of folk sayings, talked about Belsen where the prisoners could not decide which songs to sing as they were liberated; "they sang the spirituals," Hayden said, "and Arna wept." Hayden has been working as a liberator in the only world he knew, ours. That
233 spiritual realm he refers to in his poems is glow and afterglow of rockets and science fiction. The poem he was working on, and to which he hoped to return, at the end, was for Josephine Baker; his notes and drafts might tell us one day whether he made that deadline. As a figure who, increasingly, will earn his rightful place in our hearts, in our minds and libraries and anthologies, his epitaph ought be the poems he gave us, ones such as this, "Homage for Paul Robeson," which he'd say he didn't finish:
Crossing Cadillac Square today, I suddenly thought — It's more than forty years since that afternoon when crowds of us with flags and cardboard signs gathered in the Square to hear magnificent Paul Robeson sing the Union cause, sing us, the poor, the marginal.
Call him deluded, say that he was dupe and by half-truths finally betrayed. I speak him fair, recalling in his hour the power and compassion of his art that day (all is blurred), the noble presence that exalted us.
I speak him fair, poet of the Union cause, Robert Hayden:
'. . . dying's not death. Do not grieve."
In his own magnificent voice:
Here space and time exist in light the eye like the eye of faith believes.
('Monet's "Waterlilies" ')
234 Michael S. Harper
BIRD OF PARADISE
'dying's not death: Do not grieve.' R.H. 1913-1980
Your eyes are longitudes of bodies broken in the potted plants of entry, jurisdictions of the infinite in a dank body, going blind in one eye, and sex, the last machine of resurrection, the surgery of cactus flower, cactus testicle and hormones in the bosom.
Mother of the herd of wildebeest amidst the short-aimed carnivores that made the Serengeti sacred, that brought Egypt, spiritual of the Sun, no matter what they say — to sacraments of Nashville, the dying pit of subluxations, bodacious at the gravesite, and finally calmed though not in Paradise Valley.
"I hear you put that Bird of Paradise in a giant mayonnaise jar at your home: your birthday, and so I asked your name and saw the blossom break its thick stalk. The feast of foxhole and charades of the flu though ever-deadly on bone marrow, on Fauntleroy, and your 'embrochures,' lovely word for Bessie dousing her soiled pearl dress with talcum powder:
enough light for finitudes, for flowers.
235 Notes on Contributors
Terri Barnes studied at Brown University, where she now works on publications for the Alumni Office when not writing poems. Barry Beckham, who teaches English at Brown, is the author of two novels, My Main Mother and Runner Mack, and a novelistic biography of Earl Manigault, Double-Dunk. John Callahan teaches English at Lewis and Clark College, has published a critical study of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novels, The Illusions of a Nation, and is presently at work on a book about "democracy and the pursuit of narrative." Frank Chipasula, a native of Malawi, is a graduate in the Brown Writing Program and has published one volume of poetry. Melvin Dixon, who teaches at Queens College, has published poems, critical essays, and translations from the French, and is finishing work on a novel. Ralph Waldo Ellison, recently retired from his post as Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities at NYU, took time off from editing a second collection of his essays and a second novel to provide a focus for the festival from which this issue is largely derived. Leon Forrest, former literary editor of Muhammad Speaks and currently teaching at Northwestern University, is the author of two novels, There is a Tree More Ancient Than Eden and The Bloodworth Orphans. Curtis Harnack, director of Yaddo, besides facilitating the work of others, has published several books of his own recently, including We Have All Gone Away, Limits of the Land, and Under My Wings Everything Prospers. Michael S. Harper, initiator of the Ellison Festival, directs the Graduate Writing Program at Brown, has authored seven volumes of poetry — the most recent, Images of Kin — and has edited The Collected Poems of Sterling Brown and, with Robert Stepto, the anthology Chant of Saints. R.W.B. Lewis directs the graduate program in American Studies at Yale and is the author of The American Adam, The Poetry of Hart Crane, The Picaresque Saint, The Trials of the Word, and a biography of Edith Wharton. Nathan A. Scott, Jr., Commonwealth Professor of Religious Studies and Professor of English at the University of Virginia, has written numerous critical studies, including The Poetry of Civic Virtue, Three American Moralists — Mailer, Bellow, Trilling, and The Wild Prayer of Longing: Poetry and the Sacred. Robert Stepto directs the Graduate Program in Afro-American Studies at Yale, is the author of From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative, and co-editor of Afro-American Literature: The Reconstruction of In struction and Chant of Saints. Photos for this issue were provided by Lawrence J. Sykes, who teaches in the art department at Rhode Island College and who has recently undertaken photographic studies of
236 Haiti and Ghana. Jack Winters, whose fiction makes its first appearance here, is a graduate of the Brown University Creative Writing Program. And John Wright, who teaches English at Carleton and directs its Black Studies Program, has come to the editorial effort for this issue fresh from a year's sabbatical, researching the works of Alain Locke and preparing a book on Afro-American intellectual history.
AND SAY OUR GLORY WAS WE HAD SUCH FRIENDS.'
The Editors
237 INDEX TO VOLUME XVIII
(First number is issue; second is page.)
Abramson, Gary. Story, Commuting I, 60 AH, Agha Shahid. Poem II, 94 Andrews, Marke. Story, Incidents in a Ferry II, 99 Archer, Nuala. Poems I, 155 Barnes, Terri. Poems Ill, 32 Beckham, Barry. Feature, Hoiv We Decided, Co With Richard HI, 26 Beckoff, Samuel. Essay Review II, 206 Bovey, John. Story, The Sign of the Horns II, 50 Broder, Gloria Kurian. Story, Careers and Marriages II, 144 Callahan, John. F. Article, Democracy and the Pursuit of Narratii'e Ill, 51 Careme, Maurice. Poem II 106 Carlin, Charles. Round Table, What Can Be Said About a Poem in 1980? I 17 Chipasula, Frank. Poem Ill 214 Clader, Linda. Review I 165 Clark, Clifford. Review II 217 Connell, Evan. Essay, The White Lantern I 109 Daniel, Judy. Round Table, What Can Be Said About A Poem in 1980? I 10 Davis, William V. Essay, I lair in a Baboon's Ear I 74 Ditsky, John. Poems I 54 Dixon, Melvin. Article, O, Mary Rambo, Don't You Weep Ill 98 34 Dorman, Peter John. Poem II 170 Driscoll, Jack. Poem II 36 Dunlop, Lane. Translation (Tatsuo) II 155 Duren, Francis. Poems I 72 Elliott, William. Poems I 9 Ellison, Ralph. Article, doing to the Territory Ill 69 Ellison, Ralph. Article, Perspective of Literature Ill 28 Ellison, Ralph. Feature, Portrait of Inman Page Ill Estroff, Nadine. Poems I 155 Forrest, Leon. Article, Luminosity from the Loioer 82 Frequencies Ill 47 Friebert, Stuart. Translation (Krolow) II 47 Friebert, Stuart. Translation (Suardiaz) II
238 Gerasimo, Dorothy. Round Table, What Can Be Done About a Poem in 1980? I 16 Gerberick, Marlene Ekola. Poem II 137 Gewertz, K.L. Story, A Man of Principle I 85 Gitlin, Todd. Poems I 143 Gordon, Donna. Poems I 155 Graff, Gerald. Round Table, What Can Be Said About a Poem in 1980? I 22 Green, Michael. Story, A Relating I 45 Grene, David. Round Table, Woman and Man in 23 A ncient Greece II 34 Gustafson, Lars. Poem II Guthrie, Peter. Round Table, What Can Be Said About 8 a Poem in 1980? I 132 Hallberg, William. Story, Beast in the Night II 38 Harnack, Curtis. Article, Out of the Mouths of Landladies Ill 231 Harper, Michael S. Feature, Remembering Robert Hayden Ill 105 Harper, Michael. Poems Ill 98 Harrison, Keith. Poem II 47 Harrison, Keith. Translation (Transtromer) II Hasse, Margaret. Round Table, What Can Be Done About 15 a Poem in 1980? I 49 Hawksworth, Marjorie. Poem II
Hinton, J. Michael. Article, Releasement from 68 Semantic Objects II 27 Howell, Christopher. Poems I 172 Johnson, Hank. Poem II 171 Johnson, Robin. Poem II 54 Katz, Susan. Poems I 104 Keep, W.C. Story, Alaskan Sketches I 54 Keizer, Garret. Poems I 19 Kelsey, Michael. Poem I 198 Kessler, Jascha. Review II 165 Kirby, Martin. Review I 155 Kramer, Aaron. Poems I 37 Krogfus, Miles. Poem I 155 Kroll, Judith. Poems I 47 Krolow, Karl. Poems II 146 Land, Susan. Story, The Simple Minded Son I 38 Larsen, Eric. Essay, Popular Anne Frank I 126 Larsen, Eric. Story, Gregory and Carlotta I
239 Lefkowitz, Mary R. Round Table, Woman and Man in Ancient Greece II, 26 Lewis, R.W.B. Feature, The Ceremonial Imagination of Ralph Ellison Ill, 34 Lott, Clarinda Harriss. Poem II, 155 Lyons, Richard. Poem II, 35 Magnusson, Richard. Round Table, What Can Be Said About a Poem in 1980? I, 12 Makuck, Peter. Poems I, 155 Martin, Philip. Poem II, 48 Martin, Philip. Translation (Gustafson) II, 34 McHugh, Heather. Poem I, 7 McHugh, Hether. Round Table, What Can Be Said About a Poem in 1980? I, 21 Meinke, Peter. Poem I, 28 Molland, Michael. Poems I, 54 Morford, Mark. Round Table, Woman and Man in Ancient Greece II, 20 Niles, Philip. Review II, 201 Noer, Richard. Review I, 165 O'Grady, Desmond. Story, Sterner's Double Vision II, 82 Olds, Sharon. Poem I, 192 Olsen, William. Poems I, 72 Parker, Thomas. Story, Liars I, 96 Porter, David. Review II, 219 Powell, Enid. Poems I, 72 Ramanujan, A.K. Translations (Classical Tamil) II, 64 Ras, Barbara. Poem II, 79 Rasmussen, Halfdan. Poem II, 5 Redfield, James. Round Table, Woman and Man in Ancient Greece II, 28 Reibstein, Regina. Poem II, 172 Reinhold, Lucinda. Review I, 165 Rowe, Sue. Story, Practice I, 129 Russell, R. Steven. Poems I, 155 Schier, Donald. Review I, 165 Schier, Donald. Review II, 175 Scott, Nathan A. Article, Ellison's Vision of Communitas Ill, 41 Shantiris, Kita. Poem II, 96 Spindel, Terry. Story, Here II, 159 Stepto, Robert. Article, Literacy and Hibernation Ill, 112
240 Stewart, Marie.1 Poems I, 54 Suardiz, Luis. Poem II, 97 Swann, Brian. Poems I, 54 Talarico, Ross. Poem I, 103 Tatsuo, Hori. Story, Winter II, 36 Taylor, Marcella. Poem I, 84 Taylor, Roselle. Review I, 165 Tool, Dennis. Translation (Careme) II, 106 Tracy, Robert. Review II, 180 Transtromer, Tomas. Poem II, 47 Tregebov, Rhea. Poems I, 155 Turco, Lewis. Article, Masculine and Feminine in American Poetry II, 107 Turgeon, Gregorie. Poems I, 143 Vellacott, Philip. Round Table, Woman and Man in Ancient Greece II, 7 Wain, John. Poem II, 123 Wallace-Crabbe, Chris. Poem II, 155 Waniek, Marilyn Nelson. Translation (Rasmussen) II, 5 Waterman, Charles. Poem II, 169 White, James. Poem II, 173 Whittemore, Reed. Review I, 165 Winters, Jack M. Story, In the Cell, Late at Night Ill, 200 Wojahn, David. Review I, 165 Wright, John. Article, Dedicated Dreamer, Consecrated Acts HI, 142 Wright, John. Review Essay Ill, 215 Zimmerman, Ulf. Review II, 210
BOOKS REVIEWED VOLUME XVIII
Deane, Seamus. Gradual Wars (Robert Tracy) II, 180 Dunn, Stephen. A Circus of Needs (David Wojahn) I, 184 Euripides. The Bakkhai, translated by Robert Bagg (Linda Clader) I, 172 Foucault, Michael. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Donald Schier) II, 175 Grass, Guner. The Flounder (Ulf Zimmerman) II, 210 Greene, Herb. Mind and Image (Lucinda Reinhold) I, 170 Hadas, Pamela White. Designing Women (Donald Schier) I, 178
241 Harper, Michael and Stepto, Robert B. Chant of Saints (J.S. Wright) Ill, 215 Heaney, Seamus. North (Robert Tracy) II, 180 Kamman, Michael. A Season of Youth (Clifford E. Clark, Jr.).... II, 217 Kanuik, Yoram. Adam Resurrected (Jascha Kessler) II, 198 Keveles, Daniel J. The Physicists (Richard L. Noer) I, 168 Ladurie, Emanuel Le Roy. Montaillou (Philip Niles) II, 201 Lehmann, Rosamond. A Sea-Grape Tree (Roselle Taylor) I, 177 Lorenz, Konrad. Behind the Mirror, translated by Ronald Taylor (Paul Jensen) II, 212 Mahon, Derek. Lives (Robert Tracy) II, 180 McPherson, Sandra. The Year of Our Birth (David Wojahn) I, 184 Montague, John. The Great Cloak (Robert Tracy) II, 180 Ober, William B. Bosivell's Clap and Other Essays (Reed Whittemore) I, 165 Richler, Mordecai. The Apprenticeship of Duddy Krai'itz (Samuel Beckoff) II, 206 Richler, Mordecai. St. Urbain's Horseman (Samuel Beckoff) II, 206 Ross, Mitchell S. The Literary Politicians (Martin Kirby) I, 181 Stepto, Robert B. From behind the Veil (J.S. Wright) Ill, 215 Tuchman, Barbara. A Distant Mirror (Philip Niles) II, 201 Waniek, Marilyn Nelson. For the Body (David Wojahn) I, 184 Wilder, Thornton. The Alcestiad, or a Life in theSun (David Porter) II, 219
242