"Jack-the-Bear" Dreaming: Ellison's Spiritual Technologies

The year following the 1952 publication of Invisible Man, at the presentation ceremony for the National Book Award he had just won, Ralph Ellison told his audience that if he were asked in all seriousness what he considered to be the chief significance of Invisible Man as a fiction, he would reply, first, "its experimental attitude," and, second, "its attempt to return to the mood of personal moral responsibility for democracy which typified the best of our nineteenth century fiction." ¹ That his first novel had won such an award he acknowledged as a clear sign of crisis in the American novel, a sense of crisis that he and the other "younger novelists" of the time shared.

On the aesthetic level, Ellison's experimental novel had developed out of his own reaction to a growing uncertainty about the formal possibilities of the novel—an uncertainty that led him to reject both the forms of the "tight, well-made Jamesian novel" and the "hard-boiled novel" of Hemingway, which had been a center of literary revolt among apprentice writers of the 1930s. ² The narrative experiment that Ellison created to fill the void moved consciously from naturalism to expressionism to surrealism, from the world of "facts" to the world of dream and nightmare, from the determined to the disordered.

Over the past half century since its publication, successive generations of scholars engaged in interpreting Invisible Man have devoted no small measure of attention to the musical sources of the book's experimental attitude—to jazz and blues, in particular—in part because of the manifest autobiographical impress of musical experience on Ellison's sensibility. Those of us who have approached the novel in that vein have searched out, with great industry, the vernacular folk traditions and shape-shifting trickster archetypes that, along with jazz and blues players, seem to embody improvisational and experimental stances toward life and art. And we have betrayed no sign of shyness in excavating the eclectic mosaic of literary models and movements, "ancestors" and "relatives," that demonstrably helped expand Ellison's sense of aesthetic possibility.

In this context, however, Ellison's own frequent, almost incantatory allusions to the primacy of technique have perhaps helped reinforce narrowly aestheticist readings of the sources of his experimental attitude. For those of us who have cultivated with determined seriousness such readings of Ellison's technique, there may be a joke in this, precisely that kind of wry disjunction between illusion and reality that Ellison routinely turns to comic effect in his fiction and essays.

For if technique is, in Kenneth Burke's phrase, a kind of "God-term" in Ralph Ellison's critical vocabulary, this is not, I want to suggest, because of any implied superhuman powers in the how and the what of literary method, style, or manner. To rephrase one of the resonant scriptural texts of black sermonic traditions, it is not literary technique alone whose "ways are mysterious, their wonders to perform." Rather it may be because, in Ellison's use, the concept of technique routinely suggests both the literal, organizational, procedural part of executing a work of fiction and that much broader system of applied sciences and practical arts by which any society provides its members with those things needed or desired—technology, in other words. Over the course of his career—in critical essays and reviews, in short stories and interviews, in his novel and his novel-in-progress—Ellison used technique as a synthesizing term, referring to a way of making connections between the world of art and the world of our mechanized material civilization. He used it in this sense more insistently than as a reference to a set of operations peculiar to literary text making. In tracking Ellison's allegiances as an artist and a man, then, we should not be surprised to find his notions of technique having less to do with the sense of the term...