Black Writers, White Publishers: Marketplace Politics in Twentieth- Century African American Literature

CHAPTER FIVE: JUNETEENTH AS A TEXTUAL AND RACIAL FRAGMENT

[ 150 ] JUNETEENTH AS A TEXTUAL AND RACIAL FRAGMENT Juneteenth is a fragment that passes for a novel. Its first edition includes 380 pages of text, with introduction, notes, and an afterword, all elegantly printed on thick, ragged-edge paper. The front jacket presents Ellison’s name in large brown capitals, above the title in smaller white letters, and, in smaller white letters still, the legends “A Novel” below the title and “by the author of invisible man” beneath a photo of an African American band performing on a sidewalk. The back jacket consists entirely of a black-and-white photo of Ellison, the back of his head and neck fading into dark shadow, along with a white square for the ISBN number and bar code. The book’s surface appearance—its“skin”—creates the aura of a complete, coherent, continuous work of fiction. But Juneteenth is actually a small section of the more than 2,000 pages of the forty-year work-in-progress that Ellison left behind at his death in 1994. In this chapter I examine the rhetorical strategies employed by Ellison’s editor and literary executor, John F. Callahan, sometimes to acknowledge ,but more often to gloss over Juneteenth’s fragmentary state.More importantly , I argue that reading Juneteenth faithfully, as a fragment and nothing more, in fact produces a more accurate sense of both the text and of Ellison’s representations of race in America at the end of the twentieth century. Editing, as various textual scholars have maintained, is a form of interpretation . Responding to the presumed distinction between the “physical” documents on which the “immaterial” reading of a text is based, Steven CHAPTER FIVE JUNETEENTH AS A TEXTUAL AND RACIAL FRAGMENT [ 151 ] Mailloux writes: “Whether based on replicating a communally published artifact or on reconstructing the author’s final authorial intentions, the concrete text produced in editing exemplifies the materiality of all interpretation . To interpret is to translate materially one text into another”(586). In the argument that follows, I take up this broad point both to demonstrate the particular interpretive decisions made by Callahan in Juneteenth, and to offer my own editorial interpretation of this text in relation to the unpublished materials it represents metonymically. To edit—and thus interpret— Ellison’s manuscripts into Juneteenth, I will conclude, reveals a desire for a coherent, stable text, rather than a “disorderly” representation of Ellison’s unfinished work. The history of what would have been Ellison’s other novel(s) is wellknown by now, so I will recount it only briefly here. (See Callahan’s introduction for a more detailed discussion.) After beginning work in 1954, Ellison was near completion by 1967, with an original contract calling for the delivery of a complete draft by September 1 of that year (Juneteenth xii). In November, however, a nearly legendary fire at the Ellisons’ Berkshires home destroyed a substantial portion of the manuscript. As Callahan’s introduction notes, Ellison’s last public comment on this event, in 1994, estimated the loss at 360 pages,“a good part of the novel” (xiii). Beginning with the inclusion of “And Hickman Arrives” in Saul Bellow’s 1960 collection The Noble Savage, Ellison published several sections of the manuscript that would become Juneteenth and made various revisions to these printed stories that are included in the posthumous edition (366). Callahan does not include other manuscript sections published separately , such as“Cadillac Flambé,”which appeared in a 1973 issue of American Review. In a 1974 interview with John Hersey, Ellison refers to “Cadillac Flambé” as part of “this book” at which he was then at work (Essays 792), but Callahan includes only one paragraph in Juneteenth, presumably because the story would not“fit”with that book’s central focus on Hickman and Sunraider. As Callahan makes clear in the introduction and afterword, the published text of Juneteenth does not exactly correspond to any single manuscript, but is rather the result of various combinations and splicings. These include“And Hickman Arrives”; a set of manuscripts labeled“Book II” by Ellison, which “was retyped in 1972 and contains subsequent revisions and corrections made in Ellison’s hand up until at least 1986; a thirty-eight page manuscript referred to as‘Bliss’s Birth,’now Chapter 15; one paragraph from ‘Cadillac Flambé’ (American Review, 1973), inserted to give the Senator ’s speech in Chapter 2 greater continuity with the novel’s final scene...