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American Literary History 13.2 (2001) 393-404



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Ralph Ellison and the American Canon

Alan Nadel

The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison. Edited by John Callahan. Random House, 1995
Juneteenth. By Ralph Ellison. Random House, 1999
Flying Home and Other Stories. Edited by John Callahan. Random House, 1996

Reading (and rereading) the 855-page The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, perfectly assembled and organized by editor John Callahan, facilitates a remarkably incisive and coherent sense of Ellison's artistic goals that is invaluable in understanding his recently published, posthumous novel, Juneteenth. The essays make clear how central for Ellison is the concept of "integration." It represents an aesthetic and philosophical approach to historical realities, one that consciously interweaves moral and political imperatives. Those imperatives, moreover, require engaging a repression so widespread and protean, so pervasive and perverse, so much an unacknowledged principle of white American art, literature, music, social policy, and political history as to require a phantasmagoric imagination mastered by a hyper-vigilant discipline.

In the US, Ellison wrote, "when traditions are juxtaposed they tend, regardless of what we do to prevent it, irresistibly to merge" (Collected Essays 236). Although he was speaking in this instance about musical traditions, he was also reflecting his general view on the peculiarities of American "integration." As he has pointed out repeatedly, his education and upbringing was always integrated, even though it took place in segregated Oklahoma and at Tuskegee Institute in segregated Alabama, and at a time, moreover, when American tolerance for segregation seemed unassailable. Nevertheless, he grew up seeing, albeit from a different part of the movie theater, the same Hollywood images as did white Americans, and he listened to, studied, the same classical music. As he matured, he claimed as literary ancestors the white modernists James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and the white continental writers André Malraux and Fyodor Dostoevski. Mark Twain, Stephan Crane, William Faulkner, and Henry James also loomed large in his consciousness. Throughout his career, in other words, Ellison has emphasized the extent to which he emerged from an integrated cultural heritage [End Page 393]

Had this not been the case, he could not have been named "Ralph Waldo Ellison," his father's allusion not only to the author of "Self-Reliance" (1841) but also to the nineteenth-century New England literary tradition that Ellison described as "that stream of New England education which had been brought to Negroes by the young and enthusiastic white teachers who staffed the schools set up for the freedmen after the Civil War" (Collected Essays 200). But attached to the last name Ellison, Ralph Waldo was more than an allusion; it was a pun, that is, an allusion distorted, revised, adapted. If puns, like metaphors or symbols, evoke two simultaneous meanings, they do so to create dissonance rather than resonance; they foreground the subversive, revisionist power of language; they reveal connections that have to be repressed so as to expedite the "normal" flow of information. In this way, Ellison's father was playing a joke on the American literary canon at the same time as he was revering it. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has identified this critically joking mode, or "signifying," in jazz saxophonist John Coltrane's adaptation of a Richard Rogers melody: "Another example of formal parody is to suggest a given structure precisely by failing to coincide with it--that is, to suggest it by dissemblance. . . . A stellar example is John Coltrane's rendition of 'My Favorite Things' compared to Julie Andrews's vapid original" (243).

Gates is correct, as far as he goes, but in addition to "signifying," Coltrane was rehistoricizing; he was connecting the pristine orchestration of the mid-century Broadway musical to its antecedents in nineteenth-century African-American performance, and the genre of the show tune to the work of people such as George Gershwin who reinvented popular music by adapting the rhythms and harmonics of Negro America. 1 Coltrane was, in other words, returning Rogers to his roots. Those were ersatz roots, of course, because, as Ellison well knew, anything claiming to be the pure...

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