The short answer is a qualified yes. Next month Random House will publish what it is calling Ralph Ellison’s second novel, “Juneteenth,” and because it has Ellison’s name on it, it is a bona fide literary event: the first novel-length fiction by one of our greatest writers in 47 years. But does this truncated, simplified work do justice to Ellison’s sprawling, complicated vision? As Callahan explains in his fine introduction, Ellison planned a saga, a multivolume edifice of Faulknerian proportion. He worked on it until he died at the age of 80. What he left behind amounted to several thousand pages of overlapping drafts and stories only tangentially related to the main narrative. What was finished, or at least existed in publishable form, was the core of the saga, a manuscript called “Juneteenth.” That’s what Random House is publishing.
Is it great? No, but it doesn’t miss by much and then only because too much of it is the self-conscious work of a man looking over his shoulder at a book called “Invisible Man.” And who can blame him? Published in 1952, “Invisible Man” was both the making and the unmaking of Ellison. In one stroke, this National Book Award-winning novel about a young man’s journey from innocence to experience established its 38-year-old author as the nation’s pre-eminent black writer. At the same time, it put him at odds with African-American intellectuals, who argued for a more deterministic interpretation of blacks as victims in white America. Born in Oklahoma, a territory uncursed by the legacy of slavery, Ellison was no less obsessed with questions of identity than peers like Richard Wright. But Ellison insisted on a vision of America where black and white are inextricably bound together.
To articulate his vision, he borrowed from writers as diverse as Twain and Joyce. At the same time, as critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. points out, he delved “deeper than anybody before him, into the fullest range of African-American culture: music, art, folklore, storytelling traditions, signifying humor. [“Invisible Man” is] an encyclopedia of black culture.” When you do all that in your first book, imagine the pressure to surpass yourself in the second novel. Stir in the fact that in 1967, Ellison saw his manuscript go up in flames when his house burned down. Rewriting took years, although, paradoxically, it was at this point that the novel became, in his mind, a saga.
“Juneteenth” could easily be subtitled “Portrait of a Man Trying to Outdo Himself.” It has big themes–race, America, religion, identity. It has big characters–a black revival preacher named Hickman and a racist senator named Sunraider. As a boy, Sunraider was named Bliss, and he toured with Hickman’s tent show, popping out of a coffin at the climax of the service to be reborn night after night. Set in the mid-’50s, the novel begins with an assassination attempt on Sunraider in the U.S. Senate. From his hospital bed he calls for Hickman, and the rest of the novel is a dialogue, with each man remembering parts of their shared past. The revival meetings with Bliss in his coffin are recalled with creepy vividness, as he lies there in the dark, “a soft silky pink blackness around his face, covering even his nostrils. Always the blackness. Inside everything became blackness, even the white Bible and Teddy, even his white suit.”
Having given voice to black Americans in “Invisible Man,” Ellison was seemingly bent on doing the same for the whole country in his second novel. The oddball blend of influences that distinguished “Invisible Man” (Dostoevsky, the blues, folk tales) is here again, but used less ostentatiously. The greatest thing about both these books–outside the fact that Ellison wrote better sentences than just about anybody–is that he marries high and low culture not because he should but because he digs it all. In Ellison’s cosmos, Br’er Rabbit and T. S. Eliot were soul brothers. Nothing was foreign to him. A very practical-minded genius, he taught himself to wing-shoot by reading Hemingway’s hunting stories.
At the same time, he obsessively complicated things. Hickman and Sunraider both come freighted with all sorts of ideological baggage. Hickman is not merely a preacher, he is also a former jazz musician. In the sampling of Ellison’s notes that follows the novel’s text, we see him working out Hickman’s role: “Proposition: A great religious leader is a ‘master of ecstasy.’ He evokes emotions that move beyond the rational onto the mystical. A jazz musician does something of the same.” This plot’s got all its schematic ribs in place; but sometimes the lack of fictional meat on these bones leaves you hungry.
It is astonishing to realize that since Ellison published “Invisible Man,” we have seen the entire civil-rights movement, we have seen jazz recognized as an American art form and we have seen the pyrotechnics of midcentury literary modernism that inspired “Invisible Man” yield to the uninflected dirty realism of today’s fiction. Modern readers may miss a lot of what this novel has to offer just because they aren’t trained to dig very deep in what they read. “Juneteenth” is good the first time, better the second. His meanings slip and slide, they are associative, like American culture, where nothing is ever quite what it seems, nor stays that way for long, and where absolutely nothing is purely black and white.
The best news is, there’s still more Ellison to look forward to. According to Callahan, an annotated critical edition of the manuscript is in the works, which will include variant narratives and offshoots from the main trunk. “Then everybody can build their own version of the novel,” Callahan says. “Juneteenth” is just a taste.
