Reaching for Ralph Ellison
I found myself the other day, and it is somewhat surprising to admit, rereading Ralph Ellison. It is a surprising admission insofar as I’ve confessed in Begin Again that Ellison helped me evade any serious grappling with my wounds. His mask fit perfectly. I enjoyed his cool pose and the sophistication of his ideas. He kept you at a distance while beneath the surface storms raged.
The attraction remains, even now. I know, although I did not write this on the page, that Ellison means more to me than a simple evasion of childhood wounds. After all, my son’s middle name derives from my love of the old man. Wounded attachments are nevertheless attachments. And I have come to see, as I return to his writings at this stage in my life, that Ralph Ellison has left his mark on me.
Ellison comes into view as I struggle to understand the current troubles in the country, where race continues to confound this democratic experiment. Since the beginning, race has threatened to swallow whole the entire experiment in a peculiar form of madness (a nation of Nortons in the Golden Day). Ellison haunts, as so many do these days, as I reach for language to offer a way finally to get out of “history’s ass pocket” in this god-soaked country. Not to escape history, mind you, but to orient myself more appropriately to its demands. Mine is not Joyce’s anxiety. History can be a nightmare. But it cannot be left behind.
Americans continue to stumble over and into the details of the past that made them who they are. Ellison offers several reasons for this. One has to do with the nature of the country’s founding and the pace of its development. As he put it, “Given the circumstances of our national origins, our vast geopolitical space and the improvised character of our society, and given the mind-boggling rapidity of our national growth, perhaps it is understandably difficult for Americans to keep in touch with what has happened to them.” No matter.
A lot has been overlooked or forgotten here. And the result of it all has been what Ellison describes as “two basic versions of American history: one which is written and as neatly stylized as ancient myth, and the other unwritten and as chaotic and full of contradictions, changes of pace and surprises as life itself.” Americans can be “notoriously selective in the exercise of historical memory.” This self-deceptive magic consists in something more than forgetfulness: it is an alchemy which transforms fears and hatreds into scapegoats and eases the pain and panic of a nation uncertain about who and what it is.
“Our unwritten history looms as [written history’s] obscure alter ego,” Ellison writes, “and although repressed from our general knowledge of ourselves, it is always active in the shaping of events. It is always with us, questioning even when not accusing its acclaimed double, and with the two locked in mute argument which is likely to shock us when it becomes visible during periods of national stress.” Willfully blind to the facts of our experience that would, if attended to, unmask the contradiction between “the details of the history we choose to remember and those which we ignore or leave unstated,” we find ourselves “in a constant state of debate and contention.”
Ellison reveals what is lost in our national insistence on burying the details of our experience: we lose sight “of where and who we are.” Outside the margins of written history and the neat and tidy legends lie the messiness of American life where democracy lives. Democracy lives in the cultural doings and sufferings of everyday people. Ellison calls this “the unconscious logic of the democratic process.” And he spends much of his time trying to get us to see that despite all the noise above ground, underneath democratic life is vibrant, subverting categories that constrain, and transforming old forms into new ones.
But we cannot forget the dangers that come with the written story – the violence that defends its plot and characters at all costs. I get what the old man is doing. But his belief in the spirit of the American founding allows him to have the faith that despite the “unceasing pressure on our American principles and beliefs by our equally American blindness and greed,” the American project stands and that we must honor it. That is the patriotism that grates the nerves, with its safety net that our unwritten history “is always at work in the background.”
To my mind, the battle over the written story is not resolved by pointing to the work of the unwritten one. Much more is required of us, especially if we are to do more than stumble about with the wobbly legs of a toddler.
If we are sincere, and the question of sincerity is always vexed in this country, we must face the insidious workings of the written version of American history. As I have said before, the time has come for us to examine ourselves for who we really are and in the full light of what we have done. And we must do so, even as we fight Trump and MAGA Republicans, without the crutch of myths and legends that protect our innocence.
Who we take ourselves to be, our commitments to the values that evidence our view of the good and the just are often bound up with the stories we tell about our doings and sufferings. We must fight for those values and stories. Losing sight of this leaves us not only in history’s ass pocket but makes asses of us all.
In his address upon receiving the National Book Award in 1953 Ellison noted that:
“[t]he way home we seek is the condition of man’s being at home in the world, which is called love, and which we term democracy. Our task then is always to challenge the apparent forms of reality—that is, the fixed manners and values of the few—and to struggle with it until it reveals its mad, vari-implicated chaos, its false faces, and on until it surrenders its insight, its truth.”
Ellison declared that America has yet to discover itself. He understood that we were not at home in the world – that there was something quite loveless about this place (and what would that mean for the idea of democracy).
But here I am yoking the old man too closely to that other figure who matters so much to me: James Baldwin. In No Name in the Street, Baldwin put it this way:
“I have always been struck, in America, by an emotional poverty so bottomless, and a terror of human life, of human touch, so deep, that virtually no American appears able to achieve any viable, organic connection between his public stance and his private life. This is what makes them so baffling, so moving, so exasperating, and so untrustworthy.”
Baldwin declared in 1964, “This is no place for love.” And Donald Trump’s scowl and mean-spiritedness and the millions who support him offer contemporary evidence for such a claim.
In the end, I suspect the old man knew that something more was required.
“Perhaps, if we learn more of what has happened and why it happened, we will learn more of who we really are, and perhaps if we learn more about our unwritten history, we won’t be so vulnerable to the capriciousness of events as we are today.”
To my mind, the safety and security of that unwritten history as Ellison understood it is not enough. We must tell ourselves a different story, write it down, and fight for the values it commends if we are to be released from this madness into a new creation with an honest love of country.
It seems to me that Ralph Ellison often expressed from a point of "sounds good" whereas James Baldwin often expressed from a point of principle. America is an Empire and has always been an Empire as founded on its genocide of the indigenous and its kidnapping and enslavement of Africans. Of course it grew out of the equally savage European Empires centuries prior. The conquest continues - in primetime, no less.
The US Senate is a white supremacist's dream, one of the most racist and anti-democracy institutions in the world, not least given the large overrepresentation of the white vote Constitutionally guaranteed. And if the arch supremacist KKK had morphed into an open political party, it might look all but indistinguishable from today's Republican Party with its resoundingly racist support for a police state America that slaughters, imprisons, and hounds people of color through the streets and in their homes, and into prison and at the borders, and not to mention in endless slaughter abroad.
And the carnage is not just people of color - it's plants and animals and women and children first, too, the elderly, the most vulnerable everywhere, including by now the whole planet. And it's not just the Republican Party, as the Democratic Party has gone hand-in-glove with Republicans on much of this, though the Republicans remain - astoundingly - worse.
So, America was founded as an Empire, a white and male Empire, and has long since transformed itself into a police state and a military behemoth to maintain the order of Empire at home and abroad. It's policy - economic, military, social and cultural... And it's all lied about. An Empire of Lies sustains the genocidal white Empire of Gun and Dollar, and vice versa. The officials' history the fraud, the peoples' history the reality. As far as I'm aware, James Baldwin spoke to this directly more so than Ralph Ellison. It seems their goals of expression were different, at the least. The Great American Novel, mythical creature, would spell it all out, blood dripping from every page, in a story that would be hard to bear, not least in the official realms of Empire.