Ralph Ellison’s Computer Memory

In late October 1987, Ralph Ellison wrote a letter to his friend John Kouwenhoven with a complaint about the way black people might be blamed for the stock market crash and the hidden role that Ronald Reagan and computers played in it: “one of the worst things that could have happened to increase the panic on Wall Street was naming the day of its onset ‘Black Monday.’ Why not ‘Reagan Monday’? Or democratize it and call it ‘S. H. F. Day’? Or they could substitute ‘computer’ for ‘F,’ as in fan” (“To John Kouwenhoven” 937). Written following an unusually hot summer when his “writing reached a point that I dared not interrupt,” Ellison’s letter articulates a problem of racial representation in terms of a surprising pair of determinants: the labor-saving device of the computer and a president whose deregulatory schemes the author blamed for the Wall Street crash (“To John Kouwenhoven” 938–39). Ellison’s protracted work on his second novel had involved questions about the relationship between his fiction and its historical context. As he said in a now-famous letter, written shortly after Brown v. Board of Education, “I could see the whole road stretched out and it got all mixed up with this book I’m trying to write and it left me twisted with joy and a sense of inadequacy. Why did I have to be a writer during a time when events sneer openly at your efforts defying consciousness and form?” (“To Morteza Sprague” 360). Thirty years later, Ellison was still at work coupling history and form, using technology that did not exist when he began his novel.

That Ellison worked on some of the earliest consumer-level computers is well documented.¹ We also know that Ellison worked on three devices: an Osborne 1, purchased in 1982; an Osborne EXECUTIVE, purchased in 1984; and his last, an IBM computer, which he purchased in 1988 and used until his death.² But if his decision to move from paper to screen in 1982 is typically acknowledged as an inflection point in the author’s forty years of work on the novel, surprisingly little about the material features of the Osborne 1, which sported 64K of memory and could only display five pages of text at a time, has informed the criticism on the work he produced on computers. Discussions of Ellison’s computers tend to privilege the features of later-generation devices that would enable an “uninterrupted flow of expression” (Bradley 38–39). Under this analysis, Ellison’s computer experiments become subjugated to the bigger story of the unfinished novel, with digital technologies understood largely for their “complicated and certainly not always positive” role in Ellison’s revision process (Bradley 33). At the level of theme, the novel fragments that Ellison produced on the computer tend to be considered for what they can reveal about his 1950s–1970s type-scripts, and thus through a historical frame implicitly centered on the civil rights era.³ As a result, much of the historical and formal specificities of Ellison’s computer period have become lost inside the story of the unfinished novel.

This essay uncovers Ellison’s computer work from the tortuous history of the unfinished novel. It brackets questions concerning his work on the novel from the 1950s to 1982 to clarify his process on the computer and the formal and thematic problems posed in the thousands of pages he produced on digital devices. Considered as a distinctive corpus with its own organizational logic, Ellison’s late-period fiction reveals a writer leveraging new technological possibilities to describe the emergent racial management regimes of the early 1980s. The dominant features of the computer writings that critics identify as impediments to Ellison’s completion of a novel become the formal correlative of the historical moment the author turns to the computer. Organized around ”code words” such as color-blindness and reverse racism, a neoconservative racial ideology had developed out of the rhetorical innovations of the new right (Omi and Winant 120). Ellison’s engagement with this discourse was mediated by his...