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boundary 2 30.2 (2003) 1-4



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Ralph Ellison:
The Next Fifty Years

Ronald A. T. Judy

When Jonathan Arac and I sat down in my dining room four years ago in July 1999—at his strong suggestion, I must say—we could have and perhaps dared to imagine much of what was to transpire in the imminent future of the world, particularly in the two months just prior to the November 2001 conference we were planning. That July dining room discussion was a moment in a continuing, albeit sporadic, conversation about Ralph Ellison that Jonathan and I had been having for some years since I first came to the University of Pittsburgh in 1993. Over time, the focus of our conversation became the significance of Ellison's work in the formation of American intelligence during the postwar period just after the Second World War.

"The formation of American intelligence during the postwar period." How absurd that phrase sounds today, and so appropriately American in its absurdity. An absurdity whose import is aptly articulated in the mercurial consolidation in the last five years of the past century of Ralph Ellison's stature as a novelist and essayist. Evidence of this was to be found in the 1993 New Yorker profile commemorating Ellison's eightieth birthday, and in the 1995 publication of the Modern Library Collected Essays. The culminating [End Page 1] event was the posthumous publication of his novel-in-progress, Juneteenth, in May 1999, with its attendant controversy initiated in the New York Times Magazine and carried on in the pages of the New Republic throughout that summer. In varying ways and degrees, all the spent ink and paper recalled that Ellison's thought and unwavering attention was on how expression, most pointedly for him literary expression, exhibited not only the history of our situation but its possibilities as well. As Ellison remarked in numerous moments in the last book of his essays to be published before his death in 1989, Going to the Territory (1986), expression is history. At certain points—"A Very Stern Discipline," for instance—his conception of expression is mythic. But myth is not to be understood as the antipode of truth—they are really unrelated to one another. Rather it is the marriage of the image—Ellison refers to the musical and the oral heroic image—and the novel. In this sense, the novel as myth is the antipode to the potentially fatal depictions of sociology—the too great dependence on which for presenting reality Ellison explicitly cites as a dominant factor in the demise of art's social function. In retrospect, it is now clear that Ellison was not only author of one of the most celebrated English-language North American novels of this century, Invisible Man, but he was also one of the major American intellectuals of the middle and later twentieth century. Indeed, his numerous essays and occasional papers exhibit a subtle and rigorous mind, whose attempts to theorize America in relation to the Negro and literary expression offer valuable insight into how we might understand the current association of "America" with what is at times now called "globality."

Among the numerous questions Ellison's work provokes is that of how to think about the historical problematics of art. A central aspect of his undertaking that task was his formation as a student of music—an area of his thinking that has yet to be adequately attended to. There are, of course, many references to Ellison's practice of "writing by riffing." Yet there is much more to learn from his exchanges with Kenneth Burke and Stanley Edgar Hyman on the issues of symbolic expression, entelechy, and the relationship between singular forms of musical expression and historical ways of thinking. Although not a systematic philosophy of music, Ellison's work with and on music exhibits the sort of seriousness and rigor commonly associated with the writings on music of Theodor Adorno and Edward Said, and has significantly informed the current received conception of the blues—a point from which Albert Murray does not...

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