Writing the Nation and the Impossibility of Form: Reading the Nature of Genre in Ralph Ellison’s Unfinished Novel

In the contemporary world of rapid technological change and the resultant evolutions of literary form and content, the stability of more traditional genres comes into question. Already existing in its own hybrid category, as theorized by critics from Mikhail Bakhtin to Michael McKeon, the novel can reveal how literary forms change and adapt to the task of representation. But where, in the nature of the novel, do the limitations of the genre reach? An interesting test case for this question lies in Ralph Ellison’s second unfinished novel, Three Days Before the Shooting …, recently rereleased in a more complete—though finally incomplete—form. This work seems fitting since, after forty years of composition and many drafts and redrafts, the manuscript failed to achieve its aim of becoming a novel, instead remaining fragmentary. The self-conscious connections between Ellison’s views about the novel and the ways his unfinished novel attempts to answer them makes this an ideal text for considering the importance and limitations of the novel genre. Using the new, incomplete manuscript and the work of John Callahan and Adam Bradley on Ellison’s process of composition, the existing text of his unfinished attempt can help us answer questions about the nature and limits of the novel form. Specifically, I would like to argue that through a look at Book I of Ellison’s incomplete novel and his own thinking about the American novel, we can gain a clearer understanding of the limits of the novel form to live up to Ellison’s own idealized standards of embodying American experience internally towards social progress for democracy.

As a novelist and public intellectual, Ellison holds a central position in the history of the twentieth-century American novel—though he published only one in his lifetime, Invisible Man. Of course, a novel that wins the National Book Award (in 1953) and gets voted the “most important American novel since World War II” by a Wilson Quarterly poll (in 1978) possesses some cultural power (Posnock xiv). Ellison’s treatment of complex, controversial themes, specifically race, politics, and democratic promise, connects to his unnamed narrator’s final, famous assertion: “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” (581). Following the success of Invisible Man, however, we get many essays and public statements from Ellison—but no new novel.¹ And, while it would be easy to explain away Ellison’s inability to complete another novel as what is familiarly known as the problem of the second novel, his recently released manuscript calls this explanation into question. Considering briefly some of Ellison’s ideas about novels and America, alongside a look at a small part of this very long, complex, and unfinished text, can illuminate why, after forty years, it remained an incomplete attempt at what I will call “writing America.”

In a 1957 essay, titled “Society, Morality, and the Novel,” Ellison takes up directly the purpose of the American novel. He explains that the novel as a particular form has the ability both to frame and to overcome contradictions inherent in a constantly evolving national identity and to will America towards its promise. As he argues,

[T]his national need gives us a clue to one of the enduring functions of the American novel, which is that of defining the national type as it evolves in the turbulence of change, and of giving the American experience, as it unfolds in its diverse parts and regions, imaginative integration and moral continuity. Thus, it is bound up with our problem of nationhood.

(703–04)

How can the novel, in the face of conspiracy and cultural confusion, forge a path towards a synthesis? The form is key, for Ellison, as the novel is created for individual reading, a form that communicates to the citizen directly. This communication can take place because each citizen already carries within herself an understanding of American ideas and principles, which the novel then resonates with and challenges through the reading experience. Ellison explains this complex interaction:

[T]he major ideas of...