Ralph
Ellison, Interviewed by Alfred Chester & Vilma Howard
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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