After dinner we move back into the living room and continue the conversation. Tucka has been patient, waiting for his evening walk. Ellison puts on an army jacket and we go down in the elevator. This is an old building, just on the edge of Harlem, and most of the tenants are black.
The lobby has colored tiles, a high ceiling, and live flowers protected by glass. We shake hands, and he and the dog walk off into the Harlem night. There can be no soft-pedaling, no relaxation of intellect where he is involved.
At Brown University in November of , novelists and critics gathered at the annual Wetmore Lecture to discuss form, the future of the novel, and each other. Ellison chuckles. But someone should have said that all us old-fasioned Negroes are Jews. From what I have read of recent American fiction, I sense a shift in interest on the part of the reading public, and consequently in the focus of those who write the books which become popular. The trend seems to be a movement away from traditional forms the naturalism, for example, which has always been so convenient for black writers , and a change in content as well.
Science fiction, mythological experiences, journalistic accounts and pornography, for example, are very popular now. Do you see this as a passing trend, or is something more revolutionary at work? And if these present interests are only temporary, do you think that the more serious areas of the black cultural experience will still be of sufficient interest to sustain an audience for serious black writers?
But this country has a tendency to get fed up with any novelty very quickly, and then we tend to put things back into perspective. We like novelty. I think the tendency now is to feel that an interest in form is beside the point.
But I also note that those people who tell you this and who write in a supposed disregard of form are always trying to get a group of people who will accept their form.
There is no art without form. The form becomes a convention. And once you get enough people to accept that as a proper way of doing a novel or of writing a play, then you have imposed a new convention of form. So you can say that form is conventional on the one hand, but at the same time our sense of a beginning, middle, and end is built into human biology.
He was setting them up for a formal reception of a new form. There is a rhetoric of fiction, and in order to master the rhetoric of the form, you have to be aware of the people who are outside your immediate community. And the rhetoric depends upon not only a knowledge of human passion, but the specific situations in which that passion is expressed: the manners, the formal patterns, and so on, as well as the political issues around which they are clustered.
So that if our black writers are going to become more influential in the broader community, 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.
I think that this is the way it works. There is a lot of activity, and very often the people who make the breakthroughs are not the people who are doing a lot of talking and getting the attention. They are quietly trying to make something new out of their experience and out of their experience of literature.
I can just say that I hope that as we learn to translate and to interpret the intricacies of our experience as a group of people, we can do it with enough art and with an impact which will raise it from the specific to the universal.
Ellison is not only interested in the fiction written by young black writers; he is concerned about young black people in general: what they are thinking, what they are doing, what their ambitions are. But his knowledge of them is limited to sessions during speaking engagements, letters, and what he hears from the media. Yet Ellison worries that despite the increased educational opportunities available to them, young black people are becoming too involved in, and almost symbolic of, the campus reactions against intellectual discipline, the life of the mind.
And all of this is done with the mind. I was born doing this! But what are you going to do as a writer, or what are you going to do as a critic? Ellison looks out the window toward the Hudson, then continues in a lower tone.
And here I was with a dream of myself writing the symphony at twenty-six which would equal anything Wagner had done at twenty-six. This is where my ambitions were. So I can understand people getting turned off on that level. Ellison has a habit of pausing whenever the discussion begins to touch areas pregnant with emotion, as if careful of remaining within a certain context.
But on some subjects he is likely to continue. The duality of cultural experience which Ellison insists on in his writing is acted out in his professional and personal life. He is just as much at home, just as comfortable, in a Harlem barbershop as he is as a panelist before the Southern Historical Association exchanging arguments with C. He is a novelist well respected by his peers when is name is mentioned in almost any literary circle, there will invariably be an inquiry about his current project , and he brings to bear the same respect for craft in an introduction to the stories of Stephen Crane as he uses to evaluate the work of the black artist Romare Bearden.
Yet precisely because of his racial identity, he is also the leading black writer in American letters. It also seems to me that we can correct this limitation either by defining and affirming the values and cultural institutions of our people for their education, or by employing our own sense of reality and our own conception of what human life should be to explore, and perhaps help define, the cultural realities of contemporary American life.
In either case, do you think that naturalism is sufficient to deal adequately with the subtle complexities of contemporary black cultural experience?
Besides, the implicit mode of Negro-American culture is abstract, and this comes from the very nature of our relationship to this county. We had to learn English. We had, in other words, to create ourselves as a people—and this I take right down to the racial, the bloodlines, the mingling of African blood with bloodlines indigenous to the New World. This was an abstract process.
This was a creative process, one of the most wonderful things which ever happened on the face of the earth. This is one of the great strengths which now people seem to want to deny. But this was the reunification of a shattered group of people. It took Western melodic forms and modified them, took Western rhythmical forms and combined them, and produced a music.
American Negro dance is a result of abstracting the courtly dances which were danced in the manor houses. The jigs and flings which the Irish and Scotch had brought over from the British Isles were appropriated by the slaves and combined with African dance patterns.
And out of this abstraction and recombination you got the basis of the American choreography. This can be said about American culture in general: it was an extension of European culture. What is new about it is the presence of the African influence as projected by black Americans.
Irish folklore, English folklore, Scottish folklore, the music and so on all found a place in colonial America. Not only was there a conscious effort to preserve the forms of high European culture, but at the same time there was a vernacular stylethe speech which people spoke on the streets as they came to grips with the nature of the New World—the plants, the rivers, the climate, and so on. There was a modification of language necessary to communicate with the slaves and with people who came from other parts of Europe.
All of these created a tension which in turn created what we call the vernacular style. Our technology was vernacular. And it grew so fast precisely because they had to throw off the assumptions of European technology and create one which was in keeping with conditions in the New World: the availability of materials, the wide distances, the need to build things which could be quickly assembled and abandoned without much waste.
Nevertheless, on the level of the educated classes, there was an effort to preserve the European heritage which did not stop when we made a revolutionary break with England.
We had some of the same pressures to assert identity in another place at another time—which the Irish and the Germans had. But they could do it. And you had this fact too: these people came in waves, but many of them still spoke the brogue. So we had that to help us, and the Bible, the language of the King James version, to shape whatever literary or religious efforts we made.
And nothing else. Thus we see immediately that there was a vast difference between our options and the options of Americans of European background. Before he accepted the professorship at New York University, Ellison earned a good part of his income from college speaking engagements. He accepted around twenty each year. He tends to favor the East Coast or the Midwest and avoids the West Coast, partially because of the great distance and partially because of the political nature of the West.
Ellison takes pride in being able to deliver a ninety-minute speech without the aid of notes. He will make some few digressions to illuminate his points, but will always pick up the major thread and carry it through to its preconceived end. Ralph Ellison stands on a stage broad enough to seat a full symphony orchestra. Most of them are the beardless sons of farmers and girls whose ambitions extend only as far as engagement by the senior year.
The American Dream still lingers here, the simple living, the snow, the hamburgers and milk shakes, the country music and crickets and corn.
This is the breadbasket of the country, the middle of Middle America. And yet, ninety miles away in Iowa City, students torn from these same roots are about to burn buildings. Still, the students are quiet, respectful, attempting to digest. I hear a lot about black people passing for white, but remember, they first started passing for Indians. During the question-and-answer session afterwards, the students ask the usual things: the conflict between Richard Wright and James Baldwin, the order of symbols in Invisible Man.
One girl wants to know if racial miscegenation is a necessary ingredient of racial integration. This is anther thing which has been used to manipulate the society in terms of race.
Some few people might want to lose their identities; this has happened. And the proof is that in this period when there is absolutely more racial freedom than has ever existed before, you have the most militant rejection of integration. These are individual decisions which will be made by a few people. There is enough of a hold of tradition, of ways of cooking, of ways of just relaxing, which comes right out of the family circle, to keep us in certain groups.
At the reception after the speech, the whites dominate all three rooms; the few black students cluster together in one. Ellison moves between the two, sometimes almost tearing himself away from the whites. They do not say much. Ellison smiles and shifts back and forth on his feet like a boxer. Everyone is pleasantly high. The black students, still in a corner, are drinking Coke.
I am leaving, eager to be out in the Iowa snow. We shake hands. I tell white kids that instead of talking about black men in a white world or black men in white society, they should ask themselves how black they are because black men have been influencing the values of the society and the art forms of the society.
How many of their parents fell in love listening to Nat King Cole? We developed within a context of white people. Yes, we have a special awareness because our experience has, in certain ways, been uniquely different from that of white people, but it was not absolutely different. We are part of the scene. Constance Rourke [American cultural historian , author of The Roots of American Culture ] is right when she points out the role we have played as archetypal figures.
So the movement backwards to get a fuller sense of ourselves, to get a sense of the community and its needs, of the traditions and so on, is good. I mean just things you took for granted, things I assumed everybody knew. But you got that sense of a loss of continuity with has to be regained. No one has pointed this out, but there was a hell of a lot of condescension from this West Indian boy toward blacks.
And he did a lot of damage. That was reality. We have to come to grips with this. It has to be a part of our awareness of who we are. We have to learn why DuBois never became the same kind of power figure, no matter what we think of DuBois. We have to know what happened to those linkages with power after Washington left. And the next man who comes along will have to go beyond not only him but given will have to go beyond not only him but beyond Max Weber.
And out relationship to reality is such that, given the mind and the energy and industry, our social thinkers will go beyond. What is it that makes a year-old novel so engaging, especially one that is well over pages long? There are a few superficial explanations. It is also a carefully crafted work that repeats its own motifs like a symphony, allowing readers to sense its unity and gauge its development without having to struggle.
Its plot is engaging: the narrator is always in motion, or at least his mind is always racing, and the flow of his words carries the reader along. It was not well-received. It provides a good deal to think about, but no easy answers. Ace your assignments with our guide to Invisible Man! SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook. What happens to Tod Clifton after he leaves the Brotherhood? Who is Rinehart? Why does the narrator turn against the Brotherhood?
Previous section Movie Adaptations. Popular pages: Invisible Man. Take a Study Break.
0コメント