Ralph Ellison, Temporal Technologist by Michael Germana (review)

Since its posthumous publication in 2010, Ralph Ellison’s unfinished novel Three Days Before the Shooting—so titled by its editors, John F. Callahan and Adam Bradley—has occasioned a number of scholarly essays and book chapters. Yet the only sustained, long-form analysis situating Three Days among the rest of Ellison’s oeuvre has been Bradley’s Ralph Ellison in Progress (2010). Until now, that is—thanks to the welcome appearance of Michael Germana’s Ralph Ellison, Temporal Technologist.

It’s about time. This new book, I mean, is all about time; and so is most everything Ellison wrote, according to Germana, from the early stories to “his most time-obsessed work,” Three Days (23). Ellison, we learn, quite deliberately combined Nietzsche’s insights on history with Bergson’s philosophy of time, in ways that anticipate not only the work of Deleuze and Guattari but also the nonlinear sciences of complexity. Together with Ellison’s fiction and essays, all of these texts and ideas affirm the “fundamentally creative nature of time” (156), the way order emerges from chaos even amid the ever-increasing complexity of unstable systems. For Ellison, the unstable system at issue was American democracy, its dreamlike chaos shot through with “vernacular lines of flight” of a kind that his own writings both explore and exemplify (11). Germana’s ambition is to show how, throughout those writings, Ellison “uses the temporal to interrogate the historical” (3), critiquing traditional historiographies “by reclaiming the very technologies through which historical time is formalized.” Put differently, Ellison “turns to visual and sonic technologies” (2)—photography, film, jazz and the blues—to imagine his and our way out of the hegemonic, deterministic “groove of history” (61).

Germana first takes up the visual technologies, detailing how Invisible Man “mimics the visual grammar of the antislavery panorama” (90) and then turning his attention to a truly enigmatic archive: the 1,261 Polaroid photographs Ellison took in the last thirty years of his life. What drew this skilled, knowledgeable photographer to the Polaroid camera? And why did he use it to capture such doggedly “rhopographic” (121), or trivial, images as a dead bird on a sidewalk, or a plateful of what looks like chicken, biscuits, and—according to Ellison’s proto-Instagrammer scrawl at bottom right—“our vegetables except potatoes” (149)? Germana’s answer is that, by foregrounding “the multiplicity of temporalities inherent in duration” (146), Ellison’s Polaroids complement the coincident temporal project he undertook in Three Days. Both the photos and the novel wage subtle war against the “ways of seeing” (123) codified by two media, still photography and film, that Three Days associates thematically with two main characters and with the two main sections of the novel. First, the white liberal narrator of Book I trains his “photographic gaze” on African Americans to freeze them as safely historical objects (120). (Germana’s ensuing defense of Book I’s “time-arresting” narrative pace [130]—on the grounds that such inertia is “the subject, not a shortcoming” of this part of the novel—is valiant if not wholly persuasive.) Second, the race-baiting Senator Sunraider of Book II is trapped not by the freeze-frame but by the restless temporality of the cinema: a medium whose “illusion of continuity” (125), its use of still images to simulate dynamic time, gave Ellison “an extended metaphor for progressive history.”

Fascinating as these visual investigations are, Germana’s book really finds its groove when it turns to that “mastery of rhythmic form” (163) which Ellison deployed to put historical determinism “into polyrhthmic relation” with Bergsonian duration (157). A jazz drummer himself, Germana delineates these methods through acoustically sensitive close readings of Ellison’s novels and short stories. He urges us to not just read but to listen to these fictions, to hear their polyrhythms and metric modulations. As for the nonfiction, including Ellison’s celebrated essays on jazz, Germana weighs in on a perennial question: just what, at bottom, was Ellison’s beef with bebop? It turns out that the reasons...