Ralph Ellison In Our Time
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS & WRITING Ralph Ellison In Our Time By Stanley Edgar Hyman Ralph Ellison has always insisted that he is primarily a writer of fiction. Thus he offers this harvest of essays and...
...It leads to further social action in the real world by broadening the scope of possibility for its readers...
...The work of art," he writes, "is a social action in itself...
...They are all so unfashionable at present, in this country at least, that Ellison constitutes a unique voice, so that the least page of his essays could have been written by no one else...
...if it succeeds even partially in that great aim, no reader, Negro or white, remains unaltered by the book...
...He writes of the paradoxical necessity that the jazz musician learn "the fundamentals of his instrument and the traditional techniques of jazz," in order "to express his own unique ideas and his own unique voice.' Technique, Ellison informs LeRoi Jones, is "the key to creative freedom.' A recognition of necessity similarly brings freedom in life...
...The two occasions when Ellison is reduced to counting the Negro characters in the works of American writers are not on the level of sophistication of the rest of the book...
...But there is also an American Negro tradition,' Ellison reminds Howe, "which teaches one to deflect racial provocation and to master and contain pain...
...The second corollary that follows from Ellison's proposition is that fraternity in the world of the imagination is the necessary preparation for fraternity in society...
...the old chicken joke at the end of the piece about Charlie Parker is ruinous...
...If these essays do nothing else, he writes modestly in the introduction, they have saved him from cluttering up his fiction "with halfformed or outrageously wrong-headed ideas...
...By the nature of Howe's charges Ellison was forced to emphasize his esthetic differences with Wright, rather than his esthetic indebtedness to Wright...
...he is reluctant to recognize the African elements in American Negro culture...
...These essays and reviews are a mixed lot, not rewritten, and they vary considerably in quality...
...if his similes are at times effective, they are more often strained and far-fetched...
...His mind is unfailingly interesting, in addition to its interest to readers of his fiction...
...In response to Howe's statement that "there may of course be times when one's obligation as a human being supersedes one's obligation as a writer," Ellison replies: "I think that the writer's obligation is best carried out through his role as writer...
...The real question," Ellison observes in answering Howe, is: "How does the Negro writer participate as a writer in the struggle for human freedom...
...It is a tradition which abhors as obscene any trading on one's own anguish for gain or sympathy...
...The first corollary that follows from the proposition that freedom is the recognition of necessity is that consequently the writer's responsibility is to write...
...Ellison told Richard G. Stern in an interview in 1961 that American Negroes share "certain tragic attitudes toward experience and toward our situation as Americans...
...In his insight into the complexity of American experience, Ralph Ellison is the profoundest cultural critic that we have, and his hard doctrine of freedom, responsibility, and fraternity is a wisdom rare in our time...
...I could escape the reduction imposed by unjust laws and customs," Ellison tells Howe sternly, "but not that imposed by ideas which defined me as no more than the sum of those laws and customs...
...The aim of Invisible Man was "to explore the full range of American Negro humanity...
...Ultimately, Ellison's faults are insignificant weighed against his virtues...
...Ellison identifies art as "an instrument of freedom," and defines "the writer's greatest freedom" as "his possession of technique...
...The way home we seek," Ellison said when he received the National Book Award in 1953, "is that condition of man's being at home in the world, which is called love, and which we term democracy.' Jazz similarly creates "images of black and white fraternity," not only simply, in the mixed band and the unsegregated club, but more complexly in jazz's essential nature as a marriage of cultural traditions, and thus "the most authoritative rendering of America in music' Ellison and I have been friends for almost a quarter of a century...
...At other times the recognition seems closer to stoicism...
...which springs not from a desire to deny the harshness of existence but from a will to deal with it as men at their best have always done...
...As Moby-Dick and Huckleberry Finn are "great dramas of interracial fraternity," so are they social forces as real as sit-ins...
...This is, of course, Kenneth Burke's dramatistic concept of symbolic action, in which art is a naming that transforms attitudes, and attitudes in turn eventuate in actions...
...But these are the prices to be paid for the novelist's life, for what Ellison calls (in reference to Jimmy Rushing's blues style) the "romantic lyricism" of the Southwest, for the autodidact's fresh eye...
...a previously unpublished piece turns out to be a 1944 attack on Gunnar Myrdal for ignoring the class struggle and for taking essentially the line that Ellison himself now takes...
...Most characteristically, Ellison describes this consciousness as neither tragic nor stoic, but as "a tragicomic confrontation of life...
...Shadow and Act is a monument of integrity, a banner proclaiming "the need to keep literary standards high...
...In Shadow and Act he praises me once or twice, then in one essay identifies me as "an old friend and intellectual sparring partner" and does his best to beat my brains out...
...The proposition is that freedom is the recognition of necessity...
...I would be faithless to that friendship and tradition, and would earn my readers' distrust in addition, if I failed to point out that the great virtues of the book are accompanied by many faults...
...As a cultural critic, taking his examples mainly from literature and jazz, Ellison is first-rate...
...In the introduction to Shadow and Act, Ellison writes of the jazz musicians he grew up with in Oklahoma City as "artists who had stumbled upon the freedom lying within the restrictions of their musical tradition as within the limitations of their social background.' "Wright was able to free himself in Mississippi," Ellison points out, in a debate with Irving Howe that first appeared in these pages, "because he had the imagination and the will to do so...
...I learned very early," Ellison told Stern in the interview reprinted in Shadow and Act, "that in the realm of the imagination all people and their ambitions and interests could meet...
...but in other language it was early discovered by Ellison in the experience of American Negro life, and was confirmed by his later reading of writers as diverse as Emerson and Malraux...
...Thus he offers this harvest of essays and reviews, Shadow and Act (Random House, 317 pp., $5.95), as secondary gleanings from the novelist's life...
...I first discovered this truth for myself in the career of Henry Thoreau, and I argued the same unpopular view in "Henry Thoreau in Our Time" in 1946 (the essay is reprinted in The Promised End...
...In another essay Ellison talks of "the secular existentialism of the blues...
...Bosh...
...While we await the novel with which Ellison has been occupied for a dozen years, we can nourish ourselves very well on these gleanings...
...Negro American life," Ellison writes in his introduction, is "bearable and human and, when measured by our own terms, desirable...
...Ellison's vision is informed by three great truths: a proposition and its two corollaries...
...If American life contains "the very essence of the terrible," a Negro writer can assist the process of transforming it by "defining Negro humanity...
...In the closest he comes to self-justification, Ellison writes: "Understatement depends, after all, upon commonly held assumptions and my minority status rendered all such assumptions questionable...
...In this phrasing, by Engels out of Spinoza, it sounds alien and ideological...
...but an applier and extender, and a peculiarly sane and wise one...
...he was forced to talk about activism in the Freedom Movement, rather than the fact that art and the imagination inspired the Freedom Movement...
...It is true that he is not characteristically an original thinker (how many of us are...
...I lay no claim to being a thinker," Ellison writes with the same habitual modesty...
...A more important criticism is that these essays, by their occasional nature, their glancing references to books and authors, do not offer the full confrontation of Melville or Dostoevsky or Malraux in Ellison's terms that he owes us and that only he can do...
...Now I am delighted to see that Ellison not only supports Thoreau but often sounds like him...
...It is unfortunate that all this had to be stated in controversy with so limited an opponent as Howe (who is not really interested in literature, and has no dimmest understanding of symbolic action), since this resulted in defining the issues far too narrowly...
...Being initiates," Ellison writes, "Negroes express the joke of it in the blues...
...Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust, by an accident of journalism, is tackled only in the film version...
...If Ellison's prose sometimes has great beauty and eloquence, it sometimes has great clumsiness...
...The blues, he adds elsewhere, "are, perhaps, as close as Americans can come to expressing the spirit of tragedy...
...He sees this as best exemplified by the blues...
...They are the only consistent art in the United States," he writes, "which constantly remind us of our limitations while encouraging us to see how far we can actually go...
...The only change Thoreau would have made in that sentence would have been to italicize the "me...
...Ellison makes clear that the freedom he talks of is not an escape into the imagination, a flight from life, but a freedom in life...
...In art, the necessity that must be recognized to bring freedom is craft, technique...
...It is not necessary for even the most unimaginative of us to be consumed by flame in order to envision hellfire," Ellison writes in connection with Stephen Crane, "the hot head of a match against the fingernail suffices...
...Sometimes he defines this consciousness as a tragic vision...
...he is not at his best in polemic...
...Beyond that, Ellison has limits: he is too respectful of received opinion...
Vol. 47 • October 1964 • No. 22
