Storytelling, History, and the Postmodern South

Introduction: The Liars at the Jung Hotel

1 Introduction The Liars at the Jung Hotel jason phillips On November 5, 1968, the day after a tumultuous election ended with Richard Nixon as president, Ralph Ellison stood before the Southern Historical Association at the Jung Hotel, New Orleans, and called the members gathered there “respectable liars.” The time, place, and audience compelled Ellison to “be a little nasty” about how historians had obscured the “racial situation in the country.” On the subject of race, Ellison argued, “our written history has been as ‘official’ as any produced in any communist country—only in a democratic way: individuals write it instead of committees.” Ellison asserted that historians drew inspiration from “great tall tales” that promoted a romantic version of the past that masked the hypocrisy of America’s self-image. The historian claims to be “dedicated to chronology” and professional standards of inquiry, Ellison contended, but “he can suppress, he can emphasize, he can project, and he can carve out his artifact; and this helps us to imagine ourselves, to project ourselves, to achieve certain goals, certain identities.” For generations those goals and identities promoted white supremacy instead of the truth. Ellison thanked God that “there have been a few novelists who decided to tell the ‘truth’ in their own unique and devious ways.” If his audience wanted to learn about the South, Ellison told them, “don’t go to historians , not even to Negro historians”; instead, go to William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, and the Blues.1 2 jason phillips Ellison branded scholarship “official” history to expose its affiliation with a dominant consciousness, but I prefer a term that evokes the southern dimensions of this issue: master narratives. In the South master narratives are stories masquerading as knowledge or truth that promote the interests of white patriarchy past and present. Whether or not master narratives deliberately empower and oppress groups is a complex question about historical motive and authors’ intentions. Ellison deemed historians guilty of calculated censorship; he called them “liars.” While his fellow panelists, William Styron, Robert Penn Warren, and C. Vann Woodward, stuck to the advertised topic, “The Uses of History in Fiction ,” Ellison inverted the discussion to reveal the abuses of fiction in history. Announcing, “We have reached a great crisis in American history ,” Ellison alluded to more than the troubles of 1968; he meant that American historiography had lost its credibility. By excluding or marginalizing large populations within history, master narratives left many people with “a high sensitivity to the ironies of historical writing and . . . a profound skepticism concerning the validity of most reports about what the past was like.” Still, there was hope. While Ellison’s audience “altered” the story of the South “to justify racial attitudes and practices,” African American storytellers preserved censored aspects of American history in oral traditions : “Historical figures continued to live in stories of and theories about the human and social dynamics of slavery, and about the effects of political decisions rendered during Reconstruction. Assertions of freedom and revolts were recalled along with triumphs of labor in the fields and on the dance floor; feats of eating and drinking and fornication, or religious conversion and physical endurance, and of artistic and athletic achievements . In brief, the broad ramifications of human life as Negroes have experienced it were marked and passed along.” Ellison urged his audience to debunk official history by using these sources to write a richer story of the nation’s past, a narrative that interwove white tall tales and black folklore. Glaring at a thousand southern historians, Ellison prophesied, “We are now going to have a full American history.”2 I suspect that Ralph Ellison would have mixed feelings about the present condition of American historiography. As he foretold, historians have mined African American evidence, written about a host of subjects, and enriched our understanding of the United States’ past. Nonetheless, Introduction 3 Ellison’s “full American history” remains unrealized. For decades critics, including literary theorists, feminists, social historians, and linguists, have advanced Ellison’s argument that historical narratives privilege a dominant ideology. As a result, they have buried master narratives beneath monographic analysis instead of crafting new stories. But as Nathan Irvin Huggins has explained, “In an important way the story is what history is all about. We all need to be calling for a new narrative, a new synthesis taking into account the new history” of African Americans and other oppressed groups. Until...