Ellison Lecture

7/28/2019 Ellison Lecture

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Biography

Born in Oklahoma City in 1916o father was middle-class, a small business owner.

Middle-name is Waldo, Ralph Waldo Ellisonplay on Emerson.o Emblematic of Ellisons investment both in traditiono and in the kind of radical individualism described in Emersons self-

reliance a kind of individualism that is taken to be a typically Americantrait.

attended Tuskegee Institute in 1933o Tuskegee was founded by Booker T. Washingtono to study classical music, which produced a life-long interest in music,

evident in the selection you read today

o Also, at Tuskegee, he was exposed to literary modernism and describesencountering The WasteLand as a formative experience for him.

Moves to New York to pursue writing andlike many artists and intellectualsbecomes involved in the communist party.

IM published in 1952his ticket to the literary establishment. First and onlynovel

o Ellisons work was championed by a group of people called the New Yorkintellectualsincluded Lionel Trilling, Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt,

and others who wielded enormous cultural influence and played an

enormous role in the canonization and institutionalization of modernism.

o One of the reasons that they liked his novel was because of its modernistself-consciousnessyou are very aware that youre reading a story. Thenovel has a densely layered symbolic structure that needs to be chewed

over and unpacked and cant be easily summarized or reduced down to apolitical slogan.

This move to a very literary, allegorical mode was borne out of a distrust of whatwe would call social realism the work of John Steinbeck, or a moreappropriate touchstone for Ellison, Richard Wright.

o refers to the work of painters, printmakers, photographers and film makerswho draw attention to the everyday conditions of the working classes and

the poor, and who are critical of the social structures that maintain these

conditions.

He was opposed to these kinds of novels because they represented a kind ofepistemic closurethat it merely confirms the rightness of liberal progressiveviews and doesnt challenge them.

Here, Trilling is responding to the stultifying conditions of the postwar consensusthe commitment to anti-communism abroad, Keynesianism at home, etc. Indeed,


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Trilling asserts that In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the

dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that

nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.

Trilling was an internal critic of liberalismthough he was committed toliberalism as a political goal, in a way that OConnor was not, he was nonethelessequally suspicious of the overweening self-confidence of the various technocratsand experts who sought to social engineer all of our problems away. The problem

of with liberalism can be described in OConnor the idea that culture is in the

head rather than the heart.

liberalism stood in a paradoxical relation to the emotions. The paradox is that liberalism

is concerned with the emotions above all else, as proof of which the word happiness

stands at the very center of its thought, but in its effort to establish the emotions, or

certain among them, in some sort of freedom, liberalism somehow tends to deny them intheir full possibility.

So far as liberalism is active and positive, so far, that is, as it moves toward organization,it tends to select the emotions and qualities that are most susceptible of organization. As

it carries out its active and positive ends it unconsciously limits its view of the world

to what it can deal with, and it unconsciously tends to develop theories and principles,particularly in relation to the nature of the human mind, that justify its limitation. Its

characteristic paradox appears again, and in another form, for in the very interests of its

great primal act of imagination by which it establishes its essence and existencein theinterests, that is, of its vision of a general enlargement and freedom and rational direction

of human life-it drifts toward a denial of the emotions and the imagination. And in the

very interest of affirming its confidence in the power of the mind, it inclines to constrict

and make mechanical its conception of the nature of mind.

This should remind us of Marcher and his own solipsismnot only doesliberalism limit its view of the world to what it can deal with, it doesnt even

know that its doing so.

liberalism seems to be the pursuit of affective states, but there is also something inliberalism that kills these states. This occurs through bureaucratization, as

understood by Weber. Disenchantment, rationalization, science. Not associatingthese tendencies with the left or right, but in terms of liberalism. And everything

is liberalism for Trilling.

It is one of the tendencies of liberalism to simplify, and this tendency is natural in view ofthe effort which liberalism makes to organize the elements of life in a rational way. And

when we approach liberalism in a critical spirit, we shall fail in critical completeness if

we do not take into account the value and necessity of its organizational impulse. But atthe same time we must understand that organization means delegation, and agencies, and

bureaus, and technicians, and that the ideas that can survive delegation, that can be

passed on to agencies and bureaus and technicians, incline to be ideas of a certain kind


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and of a certain simplicity: they give up something of their largeness and modulation and

complexity in order to survive. The lively sense of contingency and possibility, and of

those exceptions to the rule which may be the beginning of the end of the rulethis sensedoes not suit well with the impulse to organization. So that when we come to look at

liberalism in a critical spirit, we have to expect that there will be a discrepancy between

what I have called the primal imagination of liberalism and its present particularmanifestations.

To the carrying out of the job of criticizing the liberal imagination, literature has a unique

relevance, not merely because so much of modern literature has explicitly directed itselfupon politics, but more importantly because literature is the human activity that takes the

fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.

The claim is that liberalism requires its own anti-liberalism, and the latter iscondition of liberalism that must be fulfilled; we further the liberal enterprise byrecalling to it those elements that seem recognizably to be antithetical to it. Takes

shape around modernist writing love the politics of the popular front but hate the art, they do not produce the

states of feeling that will recall liberalism to itself, that will dissipate or fight thelethal rationalizing bureaucratic strains of liberalism. It is all rationalized and

instrumental; rather than being organized around feelings or sentiments, they

reproduce at a doctrinal, or dogma the worst tendencies of liberalism.

The reason its paradoxical is that Trilling likes their social and politicalconvictions because theyre largely liberal but he doesnt like the emotional life

they produce.

This is also anti-communist So, one of the reasons that Ellisons work gets canonized and lauded by this groupis that his work is anti-ideological. In its first-person narration and commitment to

exploring the individual psyche of the narrator, the novel refuses the idea that mancan be apprehended in a formula.

can be found in the paragraph of Battle Royal, the narrators statementThat I am nobody but myself

Of course, such an affirmation of individualism is profoundly ideologicalits just ideological in a way thats acceptable to the NYIs.

Moreover, the novels formal difficulty its dense, symbolic structure insures thatit cannot be reduced to a political slogan

Assigned prologue because it offers a kind of blueprint for Ellisons aesthetics,his fusion of modernism with Af Am expressive forms.o Think back to ECMEllison, is in some ways, what ECM wanted to be

the person who could take African American cultural forms like jazz,spirituals, folklore and turn them into an art form that would be recognized

and feted by white society.

That fusion was central to Ellisons aesthetic and counter to Hughes, who insistson a purely black aesthetic


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o Ellison also identifies his own appropriation of folklore with those of othermodernists like Eliot and Joycehe identifies Ulysses as a trickster figure

just like Brer rabbit.

o This commitment to literary integration is mirrored in his broader politicalcommitments: (163). He argues that it is not skin color that makes a

Negro American but cultural heritage as shaped by the Americanexperience, the social and political predicament, a sharing of that concordof sensibilities which the group expresses through historical circumstance

and through which it has come to constitute a subdivision of the larger

American culture . . . More important, perhaps, being a Negro Americaninvolves a willedaffirmation of self as against all outside pressursan

identification with the group as extended through the individual self which

rejects all possibilities of escape that do not involve a basic resuscitation

of the original American ideals of social and political justice. And thosewhite Negroes are Negroes tooif they wish to be (177-8).

Prologue as an extended account of double-consciousness.

Prologue as articulation of Ellisons artistic project. Situate in relation to Hughes and

Johnson

-Eliots epitaph-alienation

-Dante allusion

-Interest in Tradition (?)

-image of illumination, of enlightenmentyet its purely a kind of self-knowledge?

Solipsism?

Invisiblity, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, youre never quite

on the beat. Sometimes youre ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and

imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time standsstill or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around. Thats

what you hear vaguely in Louis music. . . . So under the spell of the reefer I discovered a

new analytical way fo listening to music. The unheard sounds cam through, and eachmelodic line existed of itself, stood out clearly from all the rest, said its piece and waited

patiently for the other voices to speak. That night I found myself hearing not only in time,

bu tin space as well. I not only entered the music but descended, like Dante, into its

depths. 8-can find within art, the various contradictions and historical problems that

produced contemporary society (?)

you hear this music simply because music is heard and seldom seen, except by musicians.Could this compulsion to put invisibility down in black and white be thus an urge to

make music of invisibility? 13-14


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Booker T. Washington

Washington believed that blacks in the south should cast down their bucketswhere they are and not emigrate, believing that the South offered blacks the bestopportunities for economic advancement.

Washington also portrayed Reconstruction in terms similar to southern apologists,claiming that it moved to fast and was motivated by a spiteful desire to placeblacks in positions of political power over whites, and further claimed that blackswere not at that point capable of exercising their rights to suffrage.

He thus urged that blacks should pursue economic opportunities instead ofpolitical agitation as the latter merely incurred a white backlash.

Yet Washington did not perceive this as a surrender, but rather as a bargain. When he delivered the Atlanta Exposition address in 1895, he hoped that blacks

would renounce their quest for social integration and political power in exchange

for more resources devoted to black educational and economic opportunities.

This was, then, a compromise, that would for the time being resolve the problemof the status of blacks in the south.

Ellison Lecture

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