The point to stress has to do with what Bliss learns from his scam, and this has to do with the relationship between the movies and politics, and the American’s uncertainty as to his identity as an area exploited by the movies and politics alike.… He ties this in with his seduction of Severen’s mother, which gives him a sense of creative potency. He realizes that he doesn’t have to know who his parents were, and that he can create a political identity out of racial prejudice, and that this will not be questioned because it is centered not in biology and class, but in social power.
Bliss is fascinated by moments of blackness between cinematic frames, and his life is hidden here much as his activities before becoming politician are hidden. “Look for me between the frames, in the dark …”
Consider possibility that there is an obligatory incident missing from his character.
There is the contradiction that he continued to love the old people but exchanges his obligation to them and to his past for the formal possibilities available to him through betrayal. The imposition of social hierarchy based upon color upon human values.
Bliss’s attacks on Negroes are a form of running away. He feels a guilt which he will not admit. His adventures with moving-making ditto. He is fascinated that the secret of film lies in the fact that most of the action which gives a movie movement lies between the frames, in the dark. Thus the viewer is manipulated in the dark and he is the manipulator. This carries into his politics, wherein his motives are hidden behind what appears as simple racial prejudice, but in his twisted way he sees himself as putting pressure on Negroes to become more powerful through political action. One of the implicit themes at work here is Hickman’s refusal to act politically, his refusal to use politics as an agency for effecting change. And at this point we enter the historical circumstances of the fifties wherein the Negro ministers became overtly political through the agency of passive resistance.
Hickman, are you a minister-man or a minstrel man?
I’m both, I’m afraid—But remember, the Word is tricky!
N.B. For Bliss the riddle of the Sphinx takes the form of his recognizing that Americans are actors, thus his manipulating the camera. But this leads to his further confusing his own basic confusion when he impregnates Severen’s mother; which, in a sense, returns him to and compounds the mystery of his own identity.
It is important to remember that Bliss’s denial of Hickman is a denial of himself. It is a denial which grants him a certain freedom, but it is a chaotic freedom and leads to an uncertain psychological balance. He becomes compulsive on the subject of race, Negroes and racial mixing. Thus his denial of Severen and his refusal to see him or to accept his role of father. (The old American refusal to recognize its racial diversity.)
If his flight is a night-journey, it is one through blazing lights wherein he remains in part unseen—Except to the Negroes who monitor his activities.
Bliss suffers because, as Hickman tells him, he has tried to be a total individual. In doing so, he runs away from those who have provided him with completion. By becoming “white” he tried to make himself part of a whole which rejects his essence, and in doing this he poisons his spirit. Bliss the Senator, remains incomplete, Hickman and the others are his missing part. He seeks power but he has detached himself from his true source of power and by doing so he has turned himself into a political demon.
When Bliss moves among Northerners he’s constantly surprised that he is aware of possibilities of which they seem unconscious—even though he realizes that they cannot see his background. Yet knows that this is also a matter of historical consciousness and that they have forgotten or have never known the real issues of American life. This is one reason that he enters politics. This is why he joins the Southerners; he realizes that they never stop playing their knowledge against the ignorance and disinterest of the Northerners. The strategy of the guerilla fighter transposed to the world of politics.
Account of how Bliss disciplines himself for the use of power. To master his facial expressions, to steel himself so as to hide any trace of his Negro past, his southernness except when he can use it to confuse. His adaptation of religious rhetoric for political ends. Perhaps this could delineate differences in attitude imposed by race. And draw out cultural traits that make for a shared cultural identity.
Sunraider knows that the question of his having Negro blood isn’t important, it is the fact that he himself can’t be sure whether he has or not. Because he knows that many who think they don’t, do. It is a matter flowing from the way society has been arranged, the power that flows from that arrangement. There is danger to his position because his own power depends upon his manipulation of race. As does the power of all politicians of any importance. That was the joke of it. The power was not biological or genetic, but man-made and political, economic … and immoral as far as the American ideal has a religious component.
Hickman asks Bliss, “Boy, why didn’t you stick to religion? You could have hustled people in the name of the Lord who has always been looking at you? But instead you go into politics—where people don’t ever know who you are! They don’t even care, as long as you tell them the lies they want to dream by. So you went into politics! You dared to trick the people in the one area that is where they really want to believe.”
Bliss, since you had to go the way you did, why didn’t you pattern after Abraham Lincoln?
That time is dead, he’s dead and they whipped him in the end.
But they had to kill him in order to stop him, Bliss. He had heart, boy. That was the man for you to follow. He was a big man, who had the mud between his toes. He knew pain and how to hold it and ride it out. He wasn’t simple, Bliss. He was one of the most complicated of all the great men. He had been baptized in many streams.
The Running of the Sun.… A summer day’s dying. Not long enough. The running of Sunraider is something else.
Hickman is “Jim” and Bliss is “Huck” who cut out for the Territory.
The Mississippi is not a “white” river, nor is it a Lady as Mark Twain knew, it is a muddy masculine son-of-a-bitch and marvelous.
C.L.R. James makes the point that it was slavery which helped release the eloquence of Abe Lincoln, which is true. It also released the eloquence of many who believed in the institution—but best of all, it was the source of Negro American art. This is not as paradoxical as it might first appear. Slavery has always been an institution which brought out the best as well as the worst in the human. It also produces some of that which was noblest in Northerners.
Nota Bene! This is not what I intended to write when I started. Therefore, there is something else to explore, to remember.
Albert and Anatole’s objections to proliferation of dreams misses their function of revelations of psychic states, just as they miss the nature of my characters. Incompletion of form allows the reader to impose his own imagination upon the material with too little control from the author. Thus I don’t like to show my work until it is near completion.
AFTERWORD: A NOTE TO SCHOLARS
At his death in 1994 Ralph Ellison left behind notes, typescripts, and computer printouts and disks: most likely, with one exception, everything he had done on the book, however fragmentary, over a forty-year period. That exception is what he called in a December 9, 1967, letter “a section of my work-in-progress” destroyed in the Plainfield, Massachusetts, fire that burned down the Ellisons’ summer home ten days earlier. As I tried to discern one coherent, inclusive sequence, I realized slowly, somewhat against my will, that although Ellison had hoped to write one big book, his saga, like William Faulkner’s, could not be contained within the pages of a single novel. Aiming, as Ellison had, at one complete volume, I proceeded to arrange his oft-revised, sometimes reconceived scenes and episodes according to their most probable development and progression. While doing so, I felt uneasily procrustean: Here and there limbs of the manuscript needed to be stretched, and elsewhere a protruding foot might be lopped off, if all th
e episodes were to be edited into a single, coherent, continuous work.
Now, the editor of a posthumously published novel should not use his own words to finish what the author left unfinished or unsaid. The state of the manuscript (or manuscripts) should determine editorial decisions, and, if all things are equal, the latest version of an author’s manuscript should carry special authority. Appropriately, the problem of an authentic reader’s edition was solved by the latest manuscripts of what Ellison had labeled Book II as early as 1958 or 1959. In it he had written a fiction whose action, characters, and prose show him in the prime of his imaginative, novelistic powers. Of the potential “three volumes” Ellison had referred to in 1970 but not yet finished, Book II had come to constitute an all but complete novel. Except for a very few, very brief passages written in the early 1990s, the novel is not Ellison’s most recent effort, but it is the most ambitious and latest, freestanding, compelling, extended fiction in the saga. Moreover, it contains the story and relationship of the two principal characters at the heart of the work Ellison had set his sights on and described over the years.
From this manuscript (and the Prologue to Book I), in 1959 Ellison culled, stitched together, revised, and carefully edited the first published piece from the novel-in-progress, which appeared in Saul Bellow’s The Noble Savage (1960) under the title “And Hickman Arrives.” Juneteenth, then, consists of the following: “And Hickman Arrives”; Book II, whose latest manuscript, according to Mrs. Ellison’s note, was retyped in 1972 and contains subsequent revisions and corrections made in Ellison’s hand up until at least 1986; a thirty-eight-page manuscript referred to as “Bliss’s Birth,” now Chapter 15; one paragraph from “Cadillac Flambé” (American Review, 1973), inserted to give the Senator’s speech in Chapter 2 greater continuity with the novel’s final scene; and several words and brief passages from later versions of the Lincoln Memorial scene in Chapter 14 inserted to clarify and intensify the action. I should note that in addition to “And Hickman Arrives,” Ellison published three other excerpts from Book II—“The Roof, the Steeple, and the People,” “Juneteenth,” and “Night-Talk.” All appeared in the Quarterly Review of Literature in 1960, 1965, and 1969, respectively, and now reappear in their appropriate places in this volume. Unlike “And Hickman Arrives,” each is a continuous part of Book II, and Ellison’s photocopies of these three published excerpts contain a few small corrections or additions in his hand. In cases of variation between the previously published version of an episode and the manuscript, I have opted for the former except in those instances when Ellison has clearly revised after publication or when restoration of passages deleted from the published version serves to heighten the meaning and continuity of the narrative as a whole.
Ellison’s entire manuscript has numerous space breaks, but within Book II he did not designate chapters as such. As editor, I have respected Ellison’s breaks; in addition, keeping the reader in mind, I have divided Juneteenth into chapters at appropriate points in the manuscript and the action. At times, divergence between manuscript pagination and certain of Ellison’s rather definitive notes indicates that he had not reached a state of certainty about the sequence of the action. Inevitably, in such matters much depends upon an editor’s taste and sense of the writer’s intentions. For my part, I have arranged Chapters 9 through 11 according to the sequence Ellison mapped out in an undated note outlining the narrative action from the time of the attempted kidnapping of Bliss to the point when Hickman “takes Bliss to see movie and it is here that Bliss begins to have fantasy that his mother is one of the movie stars.” Ellison also provided an important clue, this one silent, about how to end Juneteenth. In this instance he added a key passage in different, larger typeface to this page of the most recent manuscript of Book II. In a few words he brings the episode in question to climax and closure. The passage projects what Ellison called “that aura of a summing up, that pause for contemplation of the moral significance of the history we’ve been through,” and, therefore, it strengthened my impression of this scene as the most logical and emotional place to end the narrative that I think Ellison might have called Juneteenth.
Finally, there is the matter of editorial corrections to passages in the manuscripts that are the copy texts for this edition of Juneteenth. I have silently corrected matters of accidence, e.g., spelling “deification” for the typescript’s “diefication.” Occasionally, I have also made silent corrections on matters of substance, such as correcting erroneous quotation (“Full fathom five” for “Four fathom five”). For clarity’s sake and to avoid a redundancy I believe Ellison would have addressed before publication, I have slightly pruned several passages in Chapter 2. In Chapter 3 I deleted two brief passages referring to a different speech than the one the Senator gives in Chapter 2. Lastly, I have not included an intriguing but clearly unfinished, unrevised episode Ellison seems tentatively to have tacked on to the end of the typescript of Book II. Because this edition of Juneteenth is a reader’s edition, I have not encumbered its pages with lists of changes made for reasons of accidence or substance. A subsequent scholar’s edition will document my corrections and include sufficient manuscripts and drafts to enable scholars and readers alike to follow Ellison’s some forty years of work on his novel-in-progress. Upon publication of the scholarly edition, the notes and manuscripts in the Ellison papers at the Library of Congress will be available to those interested in working with them.
John F. Callahan
February 1999
Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth
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