Ralph Ellison: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 3)
- Ralph Ellison
The next set of interviews -- with Ralph Ellison, Georges Simenon, and Isak Dinesen -- takes place in the mid-1950s. The timing is something each writer considers. The 19th century still resonates -- as Isak Dinesen says, it is the time of "our" (her) grandparents, and so the time of "us." In the 1950s, a debate seems to have raged about whether to pull sharply away from the 19th century or not.
For Ralph Ellison, author of The Invisible Man, questions raised in the 19th century remain relevant . He speaks of course of the status and symbolic importance of the African American. The change he sees in 1950s is the role of literature in general, and he fights for art that wrestles with the deepest moral issues of our time. This fight is not new -- or old. Ellison's ambition finds echoes and reiterations throughout the 20th century and into the 21st. We have seen this in Salman Rushdie's interview, among others. My everyday conversations about writing and literature delve into this all the time. What is the purpose of literature?
Ellison:
You know, I'm still thinking of your question about the use of Negro experience as material for fiction. One function of serious literature is to deal with the moral core of a given society. Well, in the United States the Negro and his status have always stood for that moral concern. He symbolizes among other things the human and social possibility of equality. This is the moral question raised in our two great nineteenth-century novels, Moby-Dick and Huckleberry Finn. The very center of Twain's book revolves finally around the boy's relations with Nigger Jim and the question of what Huck should do about getting Jim free after the two scoundrels had sold him. There is a magic here worth conjuring, and that reaches to the very nerve of the American consciousness -- so why should I abandon it? Our so-called race problem has now lined up with the world problem of colonialism and the struggle of the West to gain the allegiance of the remaining non-white people who have thus far remained outside the communist sphere; thus its possibilities for art have increased rather than lessened. Looking at the novelist as manipulator and depictor of moral problems, I ask myself how much of the achievement of democratic ideals in the United States has been affected by the steady pressure of Negroes and those whites who were sensitive to the implications of our condition, and I know that without that pressure the position of our country before the world would be much more serious than it is even now. Here is part of the social dynamics of a great society. Perhaps the discomfort about protest in books by Negro authors comes because, since the nineteenth century, American literature has avoided moral searching. It was too painful and besides there were specific problems of language and form to which the writers could address themselves. They did wonderful things, but perhaps they left the real problems untouched. There are exceptions, of course, like Faulkner who has been working the great moral theme all along, taking it up where Mark Twain put it down.
Dealing with the moral code of America and depicting the status of the African American are no small ambitions. Ellison discusses the importance of African American folklore to his literary aims and his writing process. For him, "rites, manners, customs, and so forth" are the key for understanding and rendering not only African Americans, but any group's character.
It took me a long time to learn how to adapt such examples of myth into my work -- also ritual. The use of ritual is equally a vital part of the creative process. I learned a few things from Eliot, Joyce, and Hemingway, but not how to adapt them. When I started writing, I knew that in both The Waste Land and Ulysses, ancient myth and ritual were used to give form and significance to the material; but it took me a few years to realize that the myths and rites which we find functioning in our everyday lives could be used in the same way.... People rationalize what they shun or are incapable of dealing with; these superstitions and their rationalizations become ritual as they govern behavior. The rituals become social forms, and it is one of the functions of the artist to recognize them and raise them to the level of art.
The Paris Review interview with Ralph Ellison took place in 1955.
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