Presentation On Ellison Final.docx

Jan 1 Shama Jan Short Paper Of Race and Class Dr. Tapan Basu

The essay, “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke” which was published in 1958 is Ellison’s response to Hyman’s study of Negro folklore and Negro literature where he critiques Hyman for overlooking one, the historicity of the folklore and two, the historical specificity of literary works . He emphasizes the distinction between folklore and archetypes which he says Hyman had blurred and which for Ellison is crucial to the reading of folklore. For he says, folklore has a more or less stable identity while archetypes are ‘everywhere and nowhere’. He then analyses Hyman’s own example of the ‘darky entertainer’ who for him, does not have a history that traces back to the Negro American folklore, instead it leads one to the Anglo-Saxon folklore. While the figure produces a discursive field in the larger American cultural context, where the folklore gets translated, this field remains distinctly American. It is also this discursive field of what he would call “masking” that modulates the operation of American values. In the play suggested in the act of masking lies its own undoing, a critique of itself and the authenticity of “faces” themselves. The Negro American plays with faces and joins the game of faces, ‘for the sheer joy of the joke’ and thus attempts to undo “his” face as it is instantiated historically on the mask and in turn in the perceptive field of the American sociality. This attempt in itself and the laughter that ensues are potentially subversive to Ellison where the Negro American subject writes his self. For this reason and the same time his insistence on the interiority of this subject which produces the response to the received image, where the dialectic between the individual and the world outside is well alive and moving, modifying and adjusting itself within the texture of space, time, and circumstance, that one finds in Ellison a literary tendency which is tending towards autobiographicality.

Jan 2 As for the historical specificity of the literary work, he brings in the figure of the writer as a living human being in between the matrix of literature and archetypes who while being located within the “field of influences” is actively responding to the tradition through the act of writing. The novelist for him works within the formal institutions of the novel form as he does within a literary history. The form of the novel is of particular interest to Ellison. He says, “The Negro American writer is also an heir of the human experience which is literature, and this might well be more important to him than his living folk tradition”. And again, later in the essay “The World and Jug”, he would give his idea of a true novel, which according to him “arises out of an impulse to celebrate human life and therefore are ritualistic and ceremonial at their core”. Thus they would preserve as they destroy, affirm as they reject.” Literature therefore is both part of the lived experience as it is also a ritual that celebrates life. Writing comes closer to the play of faces (in its ritualistic aspect of exorcism) actualizing itself within the sphere of appearances. Here, the inside is not annihilated by the outside instead the inside and the outside are mutually derivative where it is in the response that lies between the two that has potentiality and is a possibility for Ellison. It is this aspect that gets developed in the next essay, The World and the Jug, written in 1964, where we find something like the move towards a certain Negro American aesthetic marked by fortitude and understanding of the potentiality of the response hinted at in the previous essay. Along with his idea that this aesthetic response is in itself political in nature. Here and also in his understanding of the form of naturalism, one could argue Ellison obliquely sides with Lukacs. Here I’d like to quote Lukacs indirectly from Jameson’s study of latter’s earlier works. This is Lukacs on naturalism, “only by way of naturalism can the abstract negativity of ‘pure’ form over against things themselves be overcome, only by way of naturalism’s vain struggle against every reality- constraining standpoint can every deeper and more unconscious relationship to the standpoint as such be revealed. Official naturalism takes us beyond standpoints and transforms them, and yet only by way of a transcended naturalism, a naturalism overcome, can standpoint as such be elevated to the very bearer and foundation of a totality that represents reality itself”.

Jan 3 Ellison and Baldwin therefore can be said to be affirming the transformed nature of the standpoint of the Negro American in the American literary ground where naturalism appears redundant Howe’s insistence of the negro experience as sociological and the need to persist in the form of Wrightesque naturalism then seem statements that tend to naturalize that experience, which is not one but many and plural. Ellison’s own response to Wright as a text that happens in his conversation with Howe can be read as reflections on the residues of a ‘form’ which as Lukacs says is “now overcome”, as a necessary critique of naturalism enabled by the form itself; “one does not overcome naturalism without first adopting it.” Writing for Ellison is an attempt at writing out of it. This attempt at getting out of form is itself an impossibility for Baldwin. That is, for Baldwin human predicament is one that is similar to that of Kafka’s Red Peter, who contemplates the escape while being confronted by the sheer impossibility of it. For Ellison on the other hand, since it constitutes an act of writing, responding, and writing the response, it has potentiality. A human potential. And it is the ritualistic act of writing that makes and unmakes the world, does and undoes the forms. The response therefore is an interruption and an intervention, a writing and the writing out of the self.