Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual

2. Ralph Ellison’s Blues

2 Ralph Ellison’s Blues There is a Negro church, a Negro press, a Negro social world, a Negro sporting world, a Negro business world, a Negro school system, Negro professions; in short, a Negro way of life in America. The Negro people did not ask for this, and deep down, though they express themselves through their institutions and adhere to this special way of life, they do not want it now. This special existence was forced upon them from without by lynch ropes, bayonet and mob rule. They accepted these negative conditions with the inevitability of a tree which must live or perish in whatever soil it finds itself. —Richard Wright, “Blueprint for Negro Writing” There is a bit of the phony built into every American. —Ralph Ellison, Going to the Territory We have been continually reminded ever since that remarkable day in 1952 when Ralph Waldo Ellison first exploded onto the American literary scene that the genius which took hold of Ellison and made itself known through his writing was indistinct from the genius on display in the performances of the greatest of twentieth-century blues and jazz musicians. Indeed even at the beginning of the twenty-first century this idea of a black music-inflected modernist aesthetic embedded within Ellison’s work continues to function as a sort of pristine literary orthodoxy. And as Ellison himself celebrated his own early training as a trumpeter and often suggested that blues and jazz represented the apotheosis of Black American artistry, it is easy to understand why this idea has been left unchallenged. I will not be so rash then as to refute the contentions of either Ellison or his many students. Ellison was a man of music, both literally and figuratively. He was born, as his biographer , Lawrence Jackson, notes, at precisely that moment in American history when blues performance had seemingly reached its zenith with the help of sensational impresarios such as Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, while 68 jazz had been unleashed onto the general American public from its traditional breeding grounds in the New Orleans French Quarter.1 It follows then that his life’s work, the work exemplified by his greatest accomplishment, Invisible Man, was precisely to articulate the Black American experience of the sublime and the ridiculous through idioms developed in the high (literary) culture of nineteenth-century America. Like the jazz performer, he took traditional forms, infused them with the rhythms of black life, and then improvised his way out of the mess that he had created. In the process, he helped both to change the tenor of the Black American vernacular and to broaden the scope of the American novel. This, however, is where most analyses of Ellison’s “blues aesthetic” stop. I would suggest, therefore, that one of the cheap tricks that has been played on Ellison is that like grainy recordings of Walter Page or rare footage of Cab Calloway, Ellison and his works have become national artifacts, the difficult stuff given to ambitious high-school seniors as they attempt to master their first ten-page essays . Still, there is another question that haunts the oeuvre of Ralph Ellison. Literary and cultural critic Jerry Gafio Watts provides an invaluable service when he reminds us that the first concern of any intellectual, Ellison included , is self-reproduction. As Watts puts it, writers want to write; painters want to paint.2 Thus the knotty issue with which every serious student of Ellison must wrestle is the simple fact of the master’s inability to publish a second novel in his own lifetime. Though he was able to write the great Invisible Man in Harlem under the most difficult of circumstances, winning the National Book Award in the process, he was not able to repeat this performance , even as a distinguished fellow of the American Academy in Rome. Where I would suggest that those critics who still focus on the matter of how blues and jazz affected Ralph Ellison and his work have gone astray then is not in their will to bend the precepts of one discipline to meet the needs of another—that is to say, their mixing of apples and oranges—but instead in their failure to ask the simple question of how Ralph Ellison’s aesthetic, Ralph Ellison’s Blues, if you will, might have contributed to the spectacular display of what some would call writing block but I prefer to think of as publishing block, which dogged Ellison...