Ralph Ellison, Interviewed
by Alfred Chester & Vilma Howard
The Paris Review, The Art of Fiction No. 8
When Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison’s first novel, received
the National Book Award for 1953, the author in his acceptance speech noted
with dismay and gratification the conferring of the award to what he called an
“attempt at a major novel.” His gratification was understandable, so too his
dismay when one considers the amount of objectivity Mr. Ellison can display
toward his own work. He felt the state of United States fiction to be so
unhappy that it was an “attempt” rather than an achievement which received the
important award.
Many of us
will disagree with Mr. Ellison’s evaluation of his own work. Its crackling,
brilliant, sometimes wild, but always controlled prose warrants this; so does
the care and logic with which its form is revealed, and not least its theme: that
of a young negro who emerges from the South and—in the tradition of James’s
Hyacinth Robinson and Stendhal’s Julien Sorel—moves into the adventure of life
at large.
In the summer
of 1954, Mr. Ellison came abroad to travel and lecture. His visit ended in
Paris where for a very few weeks he mingled with the American expatriate group
to whom his work was known and of much interest. The day before he left he
talked to us in the Café de la Mairie du VIe about art and the novel.
Ralph Ellison
takes both art and the novel seriously. And the Café de la Mairie has a
tradition of seriousness behind it, for here was written Djuna Barnes’s
spectacular novel,Nightwood. There is a tradition, too,
of speech and eloquence, for Miss Barnes’s hero, Dr. O’Connor, often drew a
crowd of listeners to his mighty rhetoric. So here gravity is in the air, and
rhetoric too. While Mr. Ellison speaks, he rarely pauses, and although the
strain of organizing his thought is sometimes evident, his phraseology and the
quiet, steady flow and development of ideas are overwhelming. To listen to him
is rather like sitting in the back of a huge hall and feeling the lecturer’s
faraway eyes staring directly into your own. The highly emphatic, almost
professorial intonations, startle with their distance, self-confidence, and
warm undertones of humor.
RALPH ELLISON
Let me say
right now that my book is not an autobiographical work.
INTERVIEWER
You weren’t
thrown out of school like the boy in your novel?
ELLISON
No. Though,
like him, I went from one job to another.
INTERVIEWER
Why did you
give up music and begin writing?
ELLISON
I didn’t give
up music, but I became interested in writing through incessant reading. In 1935
I discovered Eliot’s The
Waste Land, which
moved and intrigued me but defied my powers of analysis—such as they were—and I
wondered why I had never read anything of equal intensity and sensibility by an
American Negro writer. Later on, in New York, I read a poem by Richard Wright,
who, as luck would have it, came to town the next week. He was editing a
magazine called New
Challenge and asked
me to try a book review of Waters E. Turpin’s These
Low Grounds. On the basis of this review, Wright suggested that I
try a short story, which I did. I tried to use my knowledge of riding freight
trains. He liked the story well enough to accept it, and it got as far as the
galley proofs when it was bumped from the issue because there was too much
material. Just after that the magazine failed.
INTERVIEWER
But you went
on writing—
ELLISON
With difficulty,
because this was the recession of 1937. I went to Dayton, Ohio, where my
brother and I hunted and sold game to earn a living. At night I practiced
writing and studied Joyce, Dostoyevsky, Stein, and Hemingway. Especially
Hemingway; I read him to learn his sentence structure and how to organize a
story. I guess many young writers were doing this, but I also used his
description of hunting when I went into the fields the next day. I had been
hunting since I was eleven, but no one had broken down the process of
wing-shooting for me, and it was from reading Hemingway that I learned to lead
a bird. When he describes something in print, believe him; believe him even
when he describes the process of art in terms of baseball or boxing; he’s been
there.
INTERVIEWER
Were you
affected by the social realism of the period?
ELLISON
I was seeking
to learn and social realism was a highly regarded theory, though I didn’t think
too much of the so-called proletarian fiction even when I was most impressed by
Marxism. I was intrigued by Malraux, who at that time was being claimed by the
Communists. I noticed, however, that whenever the heroes of Man’s Fate regarded their condition during
moments of heightened self-consciousness, their thinking was something other
than Marxist. Actually they were more profoundly intellectual than their
real-life counterparts. Of course, Malraux was more of a humanist than most of
the Marxist writers of that period—and also much more of an artist. He was the
artist-revolutionary rather than a politician when he wrote Man’s Fate, and the book lives not
because of a political position embraced at the time but because of its larger
concern with the tragic struggle of humanity. Most of the social realists of
the period were concerned less with tragedy than with injustice. I wasn’t, and
am not, primarily concerned with injustice, but with
art.
INTERVIEWER
Then you
consider your novel a purely literary work as opposed to one in the tradition
of social protest.
ELLISON
Now, mind, I
recognize no dichotomy between art and protest. Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground is, among other things, a protest
against the limitations of nineteenth-century rationalism; Don Quixote, Man’s Fate, Oedipus Rex, The Trial—all
these embody protest, even against the limitation of human life itself. If
social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya,
Dickens, and Twain? One hears a lot of complaints about the so-called protest
novel, especially when written by Negroes, but it seems to me that the critics could
more accurately complain about the lack of craftsmanship and the provincialism
which is typical of such works.
INTERVIEWER
But isn’t it
going to be difficult for the Negro writer to escape provincialism when his
literature is concerned with a minority?
ELLISON
All novels
are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in
the novel—and isn’t that what we’re all clamoring for these days?—is reached
only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.
INTERVIEWER
But still,
how is the Negro writer, in terms of what is expected of him by critics and
readers, going to escape his particular need for social protest and reach the
“universal” you speak of?
ELLISON
If the Negro,
or any other writer, is going to do what is expected of him, he’s lost the
battle before he takes the field. I suspect that all the agony that goes into
writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance—but it must
be acceptance on his own terms. Perhaps, though, this thing cuts both ways: the
Negro novelist draws his blackness too tightly around him when he sits down to
write—that’s what the antiprotest critics believe—but perhaps the white reader
draws his whiteness around himself when he sits down to read. He doesn’t want to
identify himself with Negro characters in terms of our immediate racial and
social situation, though on the deeper human level identification can become
compelling when the situation is revealed artistically. The white reader
doesn’t want to get too close, not even in an imaginary recreation of society.
Negro writers have felt this, and it has led to much of our failure.
Too many
books by Negro writers are addressed to a white audience. By doing this the
authors run the risk of limiting themselves to the audience’s presumptions of
what a Negro is or should be; the tendency is to become involved in polemics,
to plead the Negro’s humanity. You know, many white people question that
humanity, but I don’t think that Negroes can afford to indulge in such a false issue.
For us, the question should be, what are the specific forms of that humanity, and what in our
background is worth preserving or abandoning. The clue to this can be found in
folklore, which offers the first drawings of any group’s character. It preserves
mainly those situations which have repeated themselves again and again in the
history of any given group. It describes those rites, manners, customs, and so
forth, which insure the good life, or destroy it; and it describes those
boundaries of feeling, thought, and action which that particular group has
found to be the limitation of the human condition. It projects this wisdom in
symbols which express the group’s will to survive; it embodies those values by
which the group lives and dies. These drawings may be crude, but they are
nonetheless profound in that they represent the group’s attempt to humanize the
world. It’s no accident that great literature, the product of individual
artists, is erected upon this humble base. The hero of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground and the hero of Gogol’s “The Overcoat”
appear in their rudimentary forms far back in Russian folklore. French
literature has never ceased exploring the nature of the Frenchman. Or take
Picasso—
INTERVIEWER
How does
Picasso fit into all this?
ELLISON
Why, he’s the
greatest wrestler with forms and techniques of them all. Just the same, he’s
never abandoned the old symbolic forms of Spanish art: the guitar, the bull,
daggers, women, shawls, veils, mirrors. Such symbols serve a dual function: they
allow the artist to speak of complex experiences and to annihilate time with
simple lines and curves; and they allow the viewer an orientation, both
emotional and associative, which goes so deep that a total culture may resound
in a simple rhythm, an image. It has been said that Escudero could recapitulate
the history and spirit of the Spanish dance with a simple arabesque of his
fingers.
INTERVIEWER
But these are
examples from homogeneous cultures. How representative of the American nation
would you say Negro folklore is?
ELLISON
The history
of the American Negro is a most intimate part of American history. Through the
very process of slavery came the building of the United States. Negro folklore,
evolving within a larger culture which regarded it as inferior, was an
especially courageous expression. It announced the Negro’s willingness to trust
his own experience, his own sensibilities as to the definition of reality,
rather than allow his masters to define these crucial matters for him. His
experience is that of America and the West, and is as rich a body of experience
as one would find anywhere. We can view it narrowly as something exotic,
folksy, or “low-down,” or we may identify ourselves with it and recognize it as
an important segment of the larger American experience—not lying at the bottom
of it, but intertwined, diffused in its very texture. I can’t take this lightly
or be impressed by those who cannot see its importance; it is important to me. One ironic witness to the beauty
and the universality of this art is the fact that the descendants of the very
men who enslaved us can now sing the spirituals and find in the singing an
exaltation of their own humanity. Just take a look at some of the slave songs,
blues, folk ballads; their possibilities for the writer are infinitely
suggestive. Some of them have named human situations so well that a whole corps
of writers could not exhaust their universality. For instance, here’s an old
slave verse:
Ole Aunt Dinah, she’s just like me
She work so hard she want to be free
But ole Aunt Dinah’s gittin’ kinda ole
She’s afraid to go to Canada on account of the cold.
Ole Uncle Jack, now he’s a mighty “good nigger”
You tell him that you want to be free for a fac’
Next thing you know they done stripped the skin off your back.
Now ole Uncle Ned, he want to be free
He found his way north by the moss on the tree
He cross that river floating in a tub
The patateroller* give him a mighty close rub.
It’s crude,
but in it you have three universal attitudes toward the problem of freedom. You
can refine it and sketch in the psychological subtleties and historical and
philosophical allusions, action and whatnot, but I don’t think its basic
definition can be exhausted. Perhaps some genius could do as much with it as
Mann has done with the Joseph story.
INTERVIEWER
Can you give
us an example of the use of folklore in your own novel?
ELLISON
Well, there
are certain themes, symbols, and images which are based on folk material. For
example, there is the old saying among Negroes: If you’re black, stay back; if
you’re brown, stick around; if you’re white, you’re right. And there is the
joke Negroes tell on themselves about their being so black they can’t be seen
in the dark. In my book this sort of thing was merged with the meanings which
blackness and light have long had in Western mythology: evil and goodness,
ignorance and knowledge, and so on. In my novel the narrator’s development is
one through blackness to light; that is, from ignorance to enlightenment,
invisibility to visibility. He leaves the South and goes North; this, as you
will notice in reading Negro folk tales, is always the road to freedom—the
movement upward. You have the same thing again when he leaves his underground
cave for the open.
It took me a
long time to learn how to adapt such examples of myth into my work—also ritual.
The use of ritual is equally a vital part of the creative process. I learned a
few things from Eliot, Joyce and Hemingway, but not how to adapt them. When I
started writing, I knew that in both “The Waste Land” and Ulysses, ancient myth and ritual were used to
give form and significance to the material; but it took me a few years to
realize that the myths and rites which we find functioning in our everyday
lives could be used in the same way. In my first attempt at a novel, which I
was unable to complete, I began by trying to manipulate the simple structural
unities of beginning,
middle, and end, but when I attempted to deal with the
psychological strata—the images, symbols, and emotional configurations—of the
experience at hand, I discovered that the unities were simply cool points of
stability on which one could suspend the narrative line, and that beneath the
surface of apparently rational human relationships there seethed a chaos before
which I was helpless. People rationalize what they shun or are incapable of
dealing with; these superstitions and their rationalizations become ritual as
they govern behavior. The rituals become social forms, and it is one of the
functions of the artist to recognize them and raise them to the level of art.
I don’t know
whether I’m getting this over or not. Let’s put it this way: Take the “Battle
Royal” passage in my novel, where the boys are blindfolded and forced to fight
each other for the amusement of the white observers. This is a vital part of
behavior pattern in the South, which both Negroes and whites thoughtlessly
accept. It is a ritual in preservation of caste lines, a keeping of taboo to
appease the gods and ward off bad luck. It is also the initiation ritual to
which all greenhorns are subjected. This passage states what Negroes will see I
did not have to invent; the patterns were already there in society so that all
I had to do was present them in a broader context of meaning. In any society
there are many rituals of situation which, for the most part, go unquestioned.
They can be simple or elaborate, but they are the connective tissue between the
work of art and the audience.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think
a reader unacquainted with this folklore can properly understand your work?
ELLISON
Yes, I think
so. It’s like jazz; there’s no inherent problem which prohibits understanding
but the assumptions brought to it. We don’t all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even
“Little Red Riding Hood.” The understanding of art depends finally upon one’s
willingness to extend one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human life. I
noticed, incidentally, that the Germans, having no special caste assumptions
concerning American Negroes, dealt with my work simply as a novel. I think the
Americans will come to view it that way in twenty years—if it’s around that
long.
INTERVIEWER
Don’t you
think it will be?
ELLISON
I doubt it.
It’s not an important novel. I failed of eloquence and many of the immediate
issues are rapidly fading away. If it does last, it will be simply because
there are things going on in its depth that are of more permanent interest than
on its surface. I hope so, anyway.
INTERVIEWER
Have the
critics given you any constructive help in your writing, or changed in any way
your aims in fiction?
ELLISON
No, except
that I have a better idea of how the critics react, of what they see and fail
to see, of how their sense of life differs with mine and mine with theirs. In
some instances they were nice for the wrong reasons. In the U.S.—and I don’t
want this to sound like an apology for my own failures—some reviewers did not
see what was before them because of this nonsense about protest.
INTERVIEWER
Did the
critics change your view of yourself as a writer?
ELLISON
I can’t say
that they did. I’ve been seeing by my own candle too long for that. The critics
did give me a sharper sense of a larger audience, yes; and some convinced me
that they were willing to judge me in terms of my writing rather than in terms
of my racial identity. But there is one widely syndicated critical bankrupt who
made liberal noises during the thirties and has been frightened ever since. He
attacked my book as a “literary race riot.” By and large, the critics and
readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know
this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost
importance. Writing is, after all, a form of communication.
INTERVIEWER
When did you
begin Invisible Man?
ELLISON
In the summer
of 1945. I had returned from the sea, ill, with advice to get some rest. Part
of my illness was due, no doubt, to the fact that I had not been able to write
a novel for which I’d received a Rosenwald Fellowship the previous winter. So
on a farm in Vermont, where I was reading The
Hero by Lord Raglan
and speculating on the nature of Negro leadership in the U.S., I wrote the
first paragraph of Invisible
Man, and was soon
involved in the struggle of creating the novel.
INTERVIEWER
How long did
it take you to write it?
ELLISON
Five years
with one year out for a short novel which was unsatisfactory, ill-conceived,
and never submitted for publication.
INTERVIEWER
Did you have
everything thought out before you began to write Invisible Man?
ELLISON
The symbols
and their connections were known to me. I began it with a chart of the
three-part division. It was a conceptual frame with most of the ideas and some
incidents indicated. The three parts represent the narrator’s movement from,
using Kenneth Burke’s terms, purpose to passion to perception. These three
major sections are built up of smaller units of three which mark the course of
the action and which depend for their development upon what I hoped was a
consistent and developing motivation. However, you’ll note that the maximum
insight on the hero’s part isn’t reached until the final section. After all,
it’s a novel about innocence and human error, a struggle through illusion to
reality. Each section begins with a sheet of paper; each piece of paper is
exchanged for another and contains a definition of his identity, or the social
role he is to play as defined for him by others. But all say essentially the
same thing: “Keep this nigger boy running.” Before he could have some voice in
his own destiny, he had to discard these old identities and illusions; his
enlightenment couldn’t come until then. Once he recognizes the hole of darkness
into which these papers put him, he has to burn them. That’s the plan and the
intention; whether I achieved this is something else.
INTERVIEWER
Would you say
that the search for identity is primarily an American theme?
ELLISON
It is the American
theme. The nature of our society is such that we are prevented from knowing who
we are. It is still a young society, and this is an integral part of its
development.
INTERVIEWER
A common
criticism of first novels is that the central incident is either omitted or
weak.Invisible Man seems
to suffer here; shouldn’t we have been present at the scenes which are the
dividing lines in the book—namely, when the Brotherhood organization moves the
narrator downtown, then back uptown?
ELLISON
I think you
missed the point. The major flaw in the hero’s character is his unquestioning
willingness to do what is required of him by others as a way to success, and
this was the specific form of his “innocence.” He goes where he is told to go;
he does what he is told to do; he does not even choose his Brotherhood name. It
is chosen for him and he accepts it. He has accepted party discipline and thus
cannot be present at the scene since it is not the will of the Brotherhood
leaders. What is important is not the scene but his failure to question their
decision. There is also the fact that no single person can be everywhere at
once, nor can a single consciousness be aware of all the nuances of a large
social action. What happens uptown while he is downtown is part of his
darkness, both symbolic and actual. No, I don’t feel that any vital scenes have
been left out.
INTERVIEWER
Why did you
find it necessary to shift styles throughout the book; particularly in the
prologue and epilogue?
ELLISON
The prologue
was written afterwards, really—in terms of a shift in the hero’s point of view.
I wanted to throw the reader off balance—make him accept certain non-naturalistic
effects. It was really a memoir written underground, and I wanted a
foreshadowing through which I hoped the reader would view the actions which
took place in the main body of the book. For another thing, the styles of life
presented are different. In the South, where he was trying to fit into a
traditional pattern and where his sense of certainty had not yet been
challenged, I felt a more naturalistic treatment was adequate. The college
trustee’s speech to the students is really an echo of a certain kind of
Southern rhetoric and I enjoyed trying to recreate it. As the hero passes from
the South to the North, from the relatively stable to the swiftly changing, his
sense of certainty is lost and the style becomes expressionistic. Later on
during his fall from grace in the Brotherhood it becomes somewhat surrealistic.
The styles try to express both his state of consciousness and the state of
society. The epilogue was necessary to complete the action begun when he set
out to write his memoirs.
INTERVIEWER
After four
hundred pages you still felt the epilogue was necessary?
ELLISON
Yes. Look at
it this way. The book is a series of reversals. It is the portrait of the
artist as a rabble-rouser, thus the various mediums of expression. In the
epilogue the hero discovers what he had not discovered throughout the book: you
have to make your own decisions; you have to think for yourself. The hero comes
up from underground because the act of writing and thinking necessitated it. He
could not stay down there.
INTERVIEWER
You say that
the book is “a series of reversals.” It seemed to us that this was a weakness,
that it was built on a series of provocative situations which were canceled by
the calling up of conventional emotions.
ELLISON
I don’t quite
see what you mean.
INTERVIEWER
Well, for one
thing, you begin with a provocative situation of the American Negro’s status in
society. The responsibility for this is that of the white American citizen;
that’s where the guilt lies. Then you cancel it by introducing the Communist
Party, or the Brotherhood, so that the reader tends to say to himself, Ah,
they’re the guilty ones. They’re the ones who mistreat him,
not us.
ELLISON
I think
that’s a case of misreading. And I didn’t identify the Brotherhood as the C.P.,
but since you do, I’ll remind you that they too are white. The hero’s
invisibility is not a matter of being seen, but a refusal to run the risk of
his own humanity, which involves guilt. This is not an attack upon white
society! It is what the hero refuses to do in each section which leads to
further action. He must assert and achieve his own humanity; he cannot run with
the pack and do this—this is the reason for all the reversals. The epilogue is
the most final reversal of all; therefore it is a necessary statement.
INTERVIEWER
And the love
affairs—or almost love affairs—
ELLISON
I’m glad you
put it that way. The point is that when thrown into a situation which he thinks
he wants, the hero is sometimes thrown at a loss; he doesn’t know how to act.
After he had made this speech about the Place of the Woman in Our Society, for
example, and was approached by one of the women in the audience, he thought she
wanted to talk about the Brotherhood and found that she wanted to talk about
brother-and-sisterhood. Look, didn’t you find
the book at all funny?
I felt that such a man as this character would have been incapable of a love
affair; it would have been inconsistent with his personality.
INTERVIEWER
Do you have
any difficulty controlling your characters? E. M. Forster says that he
sometimes finds a character running away with him.
ELLISON
No, because I
find that a sense of the ritual understructure of the fiction helps to guide
the creation of characters. Action is the thing. We are what we do and do not
do. The problem for me is to get from A to B to C. My anxiety about transitions
greatly prolonged the writing of my book. The naturalists stick to case
histories and sociology and are willing to compete with the camera and the tape
recorder. I despise concreteness in writing, but when reality is deranged in
fiction, one must worry about the seams.
INTERVIEWER
Do you have
difficulty turning real characters into fiction?
ELLISON
Real
characters are just a limitation. It’s like turning your own life into fiction:
you have to be hindered by chronology and fact. A number of the characters just
jumped out, like Rinehart and Ras.
INTERVIEWER
Isn’t Ras
based on Marcus Garvey?
ELLISON
No. In 1950
my wife and I were staying at a vacation spot where we met some white liberals
who thought the best way to be friendly was to tell us what it was like to be
Negro. I got mad at hearing this from people who otherwise seemed very
intelligent. I had already sketched Ras, but the passion of his statement came
out after I went upstairs that night feeling that we needed to have this thing
out once and for all and get it done with; then we could go on living like
people and individuals. No conscious reference to Garvey is intended.
INTERVIEWER
What about
Rinehart? Is he related to Rinehart in the blues tradition, or Django
Reinhardt, the jazz musician?
ELLISON
There is a
peculiar set of circumstances connected with my choice of that name. My old
Oklahoma friend, Jimmy Rushing, the blues singer, used to sing one with a
refrain that went:
Rinehart,
Rinehart,
it’s so
lonesome up here
on Beacon
Hill,
which haunted
me, and as I was thinking of a character who was a master of disguise, of
coincidence, this name with its suggestion of inner and outer came to my mind.
Later I learned that it was a call used by Harvard students when they prepared
to riot, a call to chaos. Which is very interesting, because it is not long
after Rinehart appears in my novel that the riot breaks out in Harlem. Rinehart
is my name for the personification of chaos. He is also intended to represent
America and change. He has lived so long with chaos that he knows how to
manipulate it. It is the old theme of The
Confidence Man. He is a figure in a country with no solid past or
stable class lines; therefore he is able to move about easily from one to the
other. . . .
You know, I’m
still thinking of your question about the use of Negro experience as material
for fiction. One function of serious literature is to deal with the moral core
of a given society. Well, in the United States the Negro and his status have
always stood for that moral concern. He symbolizes among other things the human
and social possibility of equality. This is the moral question raised in our
two great nineteenth-century novels,Moby-Dick and Huckleberry
Finn. The very center of Twain’s book revolves finally around the
boy’s relations with Nigger Jim and the question of what Huck should do about
getting Jim free after the two scoundrels had sold him. There is a magic here
worth conjuring, and that reaches to the very nerve of the American
consciousness—so why should I abandon it? Our so-called race problem has now
lined up with the world problems of colonialism and the struggle of the West to
gain the allegiance of the remaining non-white people who have thus far remained
outside the communist sphere; thus its possibilities for art have increased
rather than lessened. Looking at the novelist as manipulator and depicter of
moral problems, I ask myself how much of the achievement of democratic ideals
in the U.S. has been affected by the steady pressure of Negroes and those
whites who were sensitive to the implications of our condition, and I know that
without that pressure the position of our country before the world would be
much more serious than it is even now. Here is part of the social dynamics of a
great society. Perhaps the discomfort about protest in books by Negro authors
comes because since the nineteenth century, American literature has avoided
profound moral searching. It was too painful and besides there were specific
problems of language and form to which the writers could address themselves.
They did wonderful things, but perhaps they left the real problems untouched.
There are exceptions, of course, like Faulkner who has been working the great
moral theme all along, taking it up where Mark Twain put it down.
I feel that
with my decision to devote myself to the novel I took on one of the
responsibilities inherited by those who practice the craft in the U.S.: that of
describing for all that fragment of the huge diverse American experience which
I know best, and which offers me the possibility of contributing not only to
the growth of the literature but to the shaping of the culture as I should like
it to be. The American novel is in this sense a conquest of the frontier; as it
describes our experience, it creates it.
THE PARIS REVIEW No. 8 - Spring 1955
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