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Ritual and Rationalization: Black Folklore in the Works of Ralph Ellison

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Susan L. Blake
Susan L. Blake*
Affiliation:
Lafayette College Easton, Pennsylvania
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Abstract

From his early short stories through his as yet unpublished second novel, Ralph Ellison pursues the theme of the quest for black self-definition by reference to black folklore. “In the folklore,” he says, “we tell what Negro experience really is.” Ellison adapts black folklore to fiction by fitting it into the forms of American and Western myth. As he enlarges the context of black folk tradition, he reduces the importance of its basis in racial oppression and conflict and transforms its social meaning into the metaphysical meanings of the framing myths. Thus black identity becomes indistinguishable from American identity or the human condition, and the effort to define it from within results instead in continued definition by the enslaving society.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 94 , Issue 1 , January 1979 , pp. 121 - 136
Copyright
Copyright © 1979 by The Modern Language Association of America

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References

Notes

1 “A Very Stern Discipline,” Harper's, March 1967, p. 78.

2 “The Art of Fiction: An Interview,” Shadow and Act (New York: NAL, 1964), p. 173.

3 “Brave Words for a Startling Occasion,” Shadow and Act, p. 114.

4 “Travels with Ralph Ellison through Time and Thought,” interview with Hollie I. West, Washington Post, 20 Aug. 1973, Sec. B, p. 3.

5 See, e.g., Gertrude P. Kurath, “Folklore,” and Erminie W. Vogelin, “Myth,” in Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend (New York: Funk, 1950), pp. 401, 778; David Bidney, “Myth, Symbolism, and Truth,” Lord Raglan, “Myth and Ritual,” and Stith Thompson, “Myths and Folktales,” in Myth: A Symposium, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1958), pp. 1–14, 77, 106; William Bascom, “The Forms of Folklore: Prose Narratives,” Journal of American Folklore, 78 (1965), 4; Joseph Fontenrose, The Ritual Theory of Myth (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1966), p. 55.

6 For three variants of this tale see Richard M. Dorson, American Negro Folktales (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1967), pp. 132–35.

7 Direction, 2, No. 5 (1939), 10, 11, 14, 16.

8 New Masses, 2 July 1940, pp. 16–17.

9 “Mister Toussan,” New Masses, 4 Nov. 1941, pp. 19–20; “That I Had the Wings,” Common Ground, 3, No. 4 (1943), 30–37; “A Coupla Scalped Indians,” New World Writing, No. 9 (New York: NAL, 1956), pp. 225–36.

10 Cross-Section, ed. Edwin Seaver (New York: L. B. Fischer, 1944), pp. 469–85; rpt. in The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers, ed. Langston Hughes (Boston: Little, 1967), pp. 151–70. Page references in the text refer to the reprinted edition.

11 Reiterated throughout Drums and Shadows, Georgia Writers Project (Garden City, N.Y.: Double-day, 1972).

12 Dorson, Folktales, p. 174; Portia Smiley, “Folk-Lore from Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Florida,” Journal of American Folklore, 32 (1919), 365, 373–74; J. Mason Brewer, The Word on the Brazos: Negro Preacher Tales from the Brazos Bottoms of Texas (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1953), pp. 81–82.

13 Recorded by Richard M. Dorson in “Negro Tales from Bolivar County, Mississippi,” Southern Folklore Quarterly, 19 (1955), 107.

14 “Ralph Ellison's ‘Flying Home,‘ ” Studies in Short Fiction, 9 (1972), 175–82.

15 Ellison discusses the relationship between Sambo and John in answer to a question about the possibility of a black writer's using Sambo-like stereotypes in the Harper's interview, p. 83.

16 This paragraph and the next reflect my debt to Marcus Klein's interpretation of Invisible Man in “Ralph Ellison,” After Alienation (New York: World, 1964), pp. 71–146.

17 Invisible Man (1952; rpt. New York: Random, 1972), pp. 384, 357, 422. All further references are to this edition.

18 B. A. Botkin, ed., Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1945), pp. 6–7.

19 Floyd Ross Horowitz identifies Trueblood and Brockway as Brer Rabbit figures who foil the bearlike narrator (“Ralph Ellison's Modern Version of Brer Bear and Brer Rabbit in Invisible Man,” Midcontinent American Studies Journal, 4 [Fall 1963], 21–27).

20 Published in Soon, One Morning, ed. Herbert Hill (New York: Knopf, 1963), pp. 242–90. Mary Rambo (who knows who she is) is the main character in one other story, “Did You Ever Dream Lucky?” New World Writing, No. 5 (New York: NAL, 1954), pp. 134–45. This story-within-a-story in the folk mode—about greed, gullibility, and the impossibility of getting something for nothing—seems to be the only one of Ellison's stories not fundamentally concerned with identity.

21 “And Hickman Arrives,” The Noble Savage, 1 (1960), 5–49; rpt. in Black Writers of America, ed. Richard Barksdale and Keneth Kinnamon (New York: Macmillan, 1972), pp. 693–712. “The Roof, the Steeple and the People,” Quarterly Review of Literature, 10, No. 3 (1960), 115–28. “It Always Breaks Out,” Partisan Review, 30 (1963), 13–28. “Juneteenth,” Quarterly Review of Literature, 13, Nos. 3–4 (1965), 262–76. “A Song of Innocence,” Iowa Review, 1 (Spring 1970), 30–40. “Cadillac Flambé,” American Review, No. 16 (New York: Bantam, 1973), 249–69. “Backwacking: A Plea to the Senator,” Massachusetts Review, 18 (1977), 411–16.

22 “Cultural Nationalism and Black Theatre,” Black Theatre, No. 1 (1969), p. 10.

23 “Ralph Ellison and Afro-American Folk and Cultural Tradition,” College Language Association Journal, 13 (1970), 275.

24 Clyde Kluckhohn, “Myths and Rituals: A General Theory,” Harvard Theological Review, 35 (1942), 68.