The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Ralph Ellison · a book of essays, reviews, interviews and one speech, written between 1942 and 1964 and gathered in three parts under an introduction · Random House, New York, 1964 · scored as one book as published in 1964, on Ellison’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
The essay of criticism and memoir: literary and cultural argument, music criticism, social reportage and the interview, in one first-person voice that makes autobiography part of the proof
Mythos
Oklahoma as the frontier Territory; the jazzman as artist-hero, Charlie Christian and Jimmy Rushing raised into figures of an American possibility; the trickster and the minstrel mask; the boy who bears Emerson’s name
Phase
Written between 1942 and 1964, from a wartime report from Harlem in the Marxist register Ellison later left, through the years after Invisible Man, to the late quarrel over the protest novel
Presentation
Essays; some twenty-two pieces, essays, reviews, interviews, a question-and-answer piece and one speech, arranged in three parts, on literature, on music, and on society and its images, under Ellison’s introduction
Register
The long, poised sentence that holds irony and feeling together; the anecdote placed as proof; comic in the music pieces, controlled anger in polemic, a lecturer’s grace; thickening at times into the abstract
Scale
American culture argued through its Black vernacular: fiction, film, jazz, gospel and sociology, Oklahoma, Tuskegee and Harlem, the name, the mask and the nation
Governing Proposition
Some twenty-two pieces written over twenty-two years, on Richard Wright and the blues, the Negro figure in American fiction, the minstrel mask, a quarrel with a critic over what a Black writer owes to protest, a name taken from Emerson, Charlie Christian and Jimmy Rushing and Mahalia Jackson, a Harlem report of 1942 and a review of Myrdal, arranged by Ellison under an introduction into literature, music, and society and its images. The wager of the book is that American culture is of a piece, that Black and white Americans made each other, that Black American life is a culture and not a symptom, and that its truest art, the blues and jazz first among it, turns hard experience into form without denying either.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Shadow and Act was published by Random House, New York, in 1964: some twenty-two pieces, essays, reviews, interviews and one speech, written over twenty-two years, from 1942 to 1964, for magazines, prefaces, lectures and interviews. Ellison arranged them in three parts under an introduction: the first on literature, the second on music, the third on society and its images. The book is scored as he published it, and not as reprinted in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (1995), where it is reprinted whole.
The pieces that carry it are “Richard Wright’s Blues”, “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke”, “The World and the Jug”, “Hidden Name and Complex Fate”, “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity”, “The Charlie Christian Story”, “Harlem Is Nowhere” and the review of Myrdal’s An American Dilemma. The shorter music reviews and the two interviews restate positions argued better elsewhere in the book, and are weighed least.
The parts are a sorting, not a sequence. A reader can enter anywhere, and the introduction argues for an order the argument does not require. What holds the book together is not its arrangement but one voice and one argument about America, carried across fiction, film, jazz, gospel and sociology: that its culture is of a piece, and that the Black vernacular is its core.
Movement II
“Richard Wright’s Blues” builds one argument and could lose little. At its centre is a definition of the blues: an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in the aching consciousness, “to finger its jagged grain”, and to transcend it, by a “near-tragic, near-comic lyricism”. It is the height of the book, and a sentence a reader keeps for life.
The definition is the book’s law in small. Hard experience is neither denied nor merely suffered; it is turned into form, and the form keeps the pain while it masters it. Taken from the music and set to work on a writer’s autobiography, it makes the blues a way of knowing and not only a kind of song. Whether that is an aesthetic or a politics is one of the questions the book still leaves open to every generation that reads it.
It is also the book’s first measure of its inheritance. Wright stood above all for the protest and sociological tradition in Black American letters, the tradition this book turns from. The essay honours him by reading his life as art, which is the ground on which the later quarrel will be fought.
Movement III
“Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity” reads the American novel after Twain and finds the Negro figure turned into a mask for the nation’s moral evasion; as the figure ceases to be a full human presence, the fiction’s moral reach declines. “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke” begins from a thesis of Stanley Edgar Hyman’s and moves through Twain’s Jim, the trickster and the minstrel stage to the mask as an American ritual of identity, with no seam showing. It became a founding text in the study of minstrelsy and the vernacular, and Henry Louis Gates’s vernacular theory owes it a debt.
“The World and the Jug” answers Irving Howe, in the argument over what a Black novelist owes to protest. It is a reply in the first person, in controlled anger, and its form is its force: the polemic shows the freedom it claims. One cannot choose one’s relatives, it says, but one can choose one’s ancestors. Wright was a “relative”; Hemingway was an “ancestor”, with Eliot and Malraux beside him. The exchange became a fixed point in the argument over the protest novel, and the position cost Ellison his standing with the Black Arts generation, which treated him as an apostate.
“Hidden Name and Complex Fate” turns the choice of ancestors on Ellison himself, a boy named for Ralph Waldo Emerson, and makes of the name a myth of American inheritance. The interviews and “Some Questions and Some Answers” go over the same ground, the Black writer as American writer, the refusal of protest as a form, the vernacular as resource, with less force; one of the three could go with nothing lost.
Movement IV
The second part is on music, and its centre is Oklahoma City, the frontier Territory of Ellison’s youth. “The Charlie Christian Story” raises Christian into a figure of an American possibility, and reads jazz as individual assertion within and against the group. “Remembering Jimmy” lifts on the memory of Jimmy Rushing’s voice carrying over the Oklahoma City night. Out of these memories Ellison builds a myth of his own origins, boys on the frontier who meant to be accomplished in everything, and the jazz musician as artist-hero.
“As the Spirit Moves Mahalia” reaches toward the sacred through Mahalia Jackson. “Living with Music” has the comic grace of a writer at war with the singer upstairs. The music essays are standard in jazz criticism, and the line of Albert Murray and Stanley Crouch was built on their premises.
The part also shows the book’s looseness. “Remembering Jimmy” and “The Golden Age, Time Past” overlap in their Oklahoma and Minton’s materials, and the review of Blues People is a tributary of the Charlie Christian essay. The essays are improvised in the manner Ellison credits to jazz, a theme stated, departed from and returned to through anecdote and memory; the part that holds them is a sorting.
Movement V
The third part turns to society and its images. “The Way It Is”, a report from wartime Harlem in 1942, is the earliest piece in the book and is written in the Marxist register Ellison later left. The later pieces describe the same Harlem; a piece of 1949 takes up Home of the Brave and the race films of its year; and “Harlem Is Nowhere” is among the essays that carry the book. The book does not fully reconcile its early and late voices, and the introduction admits the change.
The review of Myrdal’s An American Dilemma answers the liberal social science of its day with a question: whether a people could live and develop for over three hundred years “simply by reacting”. Black American life, the book argues here and throughout, is a culture and not a symptom, and the “Negro problem” is a problem of American identity. The question still stands, and with it the charge the book cannot meet in full: the economy and the state are seen less fully than the culture.
The book stands beside the novel it explains. Invisible Man, at 9.0 on this desk, built what these essays argue; the essays are its argument made discursive, and stand below it on every axis. Their reach is real and contested, shared with Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, which made some of the same break first, and borrowed in part from the novel; but sixty-two years on, from Houston Baker’s quarrels to the reappraisals after Juneteenth, readers still ask whether Ellison’s pluralism is a truth or a refuge, and they ask it of this book.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test bites harder here than on a composed book, and it is what holds the axis at the foot of the twelve. The core essays are tight: “Richard Wright’s Blues” and “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke” each build one argument and could lose little. But the book was assembled, not compelled. The two interviews and “Some Questions and Some Answers” go over ground, the Negro writer as American writer, the refusal of protest as a form, the vernacular as resource, that “The World and the Jug” and “Hidden Name and Complex Fate” cover with more force; one of the three could go with nothing lost. In the music part “Remembering Jimmy” and “The Golden Age, Time Past” overlap, and the “Blues People” review is a tributary of the Charlie Christian essay. Assembly is not the charge; redundancy is. The three parts are a sorting, not a sequence the argument requires.
Score: 7.4 / 10
What the book brings into the open can be stated, and it holds. That American culture is of a piece: Black and white Americans made each other, and the “Negro problem” is a problem of American identity. That Black American life is a culture and not a symptom: the review of Myrdal asks whether a people could live and develop for over three hundred years “simply by reacting”, and the question still stands. “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity” shows the Negro figure in the American novel after Twain as a mask for the nation’s moral evasion, and the loss of that figure as a full human presence as a loss in the fiction’s moral reach. “Change the Joke” shows the minstrel mask as an American ritual of identity. These are disclosures argued from particulars, and they changed the terms of the debate. Held below the top because much is argued as counterposition, and the social causes, the economy and the state, are seen less fully than the culture.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Criticism rises seldom, and this book rises more often than most. The height is the definition of the blues in “Richard Wright’s Blues”: an impulse to keep the painful details of a brutal experience alive in the aching consciousness, “to finger its jagged grain”, and to transcend it, by a “near-tragic, near-comic lyricism”. “Remembering Jimmy” lifts on the memory of Jimmy Rushing’s voice carrying over the Oklahoma City night; “As the Spirit Moves Mahalia” reaches toward the sacred through Mahalia Jackson; “Living with Music” has the comic grace of a writer at war with the singer upstairs. But the heights are passages within argument, and long stretches, the interviews, the review of Myrdal, the essay on Stephen Crane, are discursive and level. The height is real; its frequency is low, as the form allows.
Score: 7.5 / 10
An essay analyses myth more than it builds it, and much of the book is analysis: the trickster and the minstrel mask in “Change the Joke”, the folk hero behind Twain’s Jim, the black mask of humanity. Two things lift it past evocation. Ellison builds a myth of his own origins that bears weight in the argument: Oklahoma as the frontier Territory, boys who meant to be men of every accomplishment, the jazz musician as artist-hero, Charlie Christian and Jimmy Rushing raised into figures of an American possibility. And “Hidden Name and Complex Fate”, on a boy named for Ralph Waldo Emerson, makes a myth of American inheritance out of a name. The construction is real but in the service of argument, and a reader can take the propositions without the figures; that is what holds the axis below the gate.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The inheritance was the protest and sociological tradition in Black American letters, Wright above all, and the Marxist criticism of the 1930s that Ellison himself wrote in, as “The Way It Is” shows; and the liberal social science of Myrdal. The swerve is away from both: the claim that the Black writer’s task is art, that his ancestors may be Hemingway, Eliot and Malraux as well as Wright, and that the vernacular is a high culture. “The World and the Jug” draws the distinction: one cannot choose one’s relatives but can choose one’s ancestors, and Wright was a “relative”, Hemingway an “ancestor”. The stake was paid: the Black Arts movement treated Ellison as an apostate, and the position cost him standing with a generation. Held below the gate by a tenth because the essay form and the New York intellectual milieu it entered were inherited, and the turn was argued in a tradition of the American essay already open to it.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Would another form change what the book knows? In the best essays, yes. Ellison’s essay is improvised in the manner he credits to jazz: it states a theme, departs, returns through anecdote and memory, and arrives where a treatise could not, because autobiography, Oklahoma, Tuskegee and Harlem, is part of the proof. “The World and the Jug” is a reply whose force is its form, a man answering a critic in the first person, the polemic itself showing the freedom it claims. But the book as a form is a collection, and the collection adds little. The three parts and the introduction could be rearranged with small loss, and the interviews hold their content as a container holds it. The pieces have living form; the book that holds them has less, and the axis stands between the two.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Evidence, over sixty-two years of return. The exchange with Irving Howe is reprinted and argued in every account of postwar Black American letters. “Change the Joke” is a founding text in the study of minstrelsy and the vernacular. The music essays are standard in jazz criticism. The book is a source text for the long debate over integration, nationalism and American identity, from Houston Baker’s quarrels with Ellison to the reappraisals that followed the posthumous Juneteenth (1999) and Three Days Before the Shooting (2010). Each generation reads it against its own politics and finds the questions still open: whether Ellison’s pluralism is a truth or a refuge, whether the definition of the blues is an aesthetic or a politics. Held below the higher figures because the yield is concentrated in a handful of essays, and the rest are read for context.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The field is American criticism and the essay at mid-century, and Black American letters within it. The intrinsic force is high: the book reorganised how Black American culture could be argued, as the vernacular core of an American culture rather than a deviation from it, judged by aesthetic as well as social standards. Charged: the reach is contested, the Black Arts generation reached past it, much of its authority is borrowed from Invisible Man, and Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son (1955) made some of the same break first and more widely. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the line of Albert Murray’s The Omni-Americans (1970) and Stanley Crouch, built on these premises; Henry Louis Gates’s vernacular theory, in debt to “Change the Joke”; the exchange with Howe as a fixed point of the argument over the protest novel; and the continuous use of the essays in American studies.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over sixty-two years. Form: the text survives whole as published in 1964, and lives on also in the Collected Essays of 1995; nothing to charge. Presence: the book is in print, taught, cited and anthologised essay by essay, and read by writers and by readers of jazz as well as in the academy; but it is read chiefly there, in American and African American studies, and far less by the general reader than the novel it stands beside. The surface is partly fixed to its moment, reviews of Myrdal and of Blues People, a piece of 1949 on Home of the Brave and the race films of its year, though the arguments have outlived their occasions. The figure sits a tenth above the row for a presence so charged and below the usual figure for its span: the presence is real and unbroken, but academic.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged on Ellison’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the long, poised sentence that holds irony and feeling together, of the anecdote placed as proof, and of tone: comic in “Living with Music”, controlled anger in “The World and the Jug”, a lecturer’s grace in “Hidden Name and Complex Fate”. The definition of the blues is a sentence a reader keeps for life. “Change the Joke” moves from Stanley Edgar Hyman’s thesis through Twain and the minstrel stage to American identity with no seam showing. Held below the top because the prose can thicken into the abstract, in “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity” and the essay on Crane; because the interviews were polished but are interviews; and because Ellison’s habitual moves, the qualifying “and yet”, the turn on “American”, recur across the book.
Score: 8.5 / 10
One law governs: American culture is a fusion, and its truest art turns hard experience into form without denying either; the vernacular is the ground of that art. Take the two most distant pieces, “The Way It Is”, a report from wartime Harlem in 1942, and “On Bird, Bird-Watching and Jazz”, of 1962; or the review of Myrdal and the essay on Mahalia Jackson. They obey the same law: the people who suffer also make, and the making is the truth of them. The range is wide, fiction, film, jazz, gospel, sociology and autobiography, and the law holds across it. Charged: the earliest piece is in a Marxist register Ellison later left, and the book does not fully reconcile its early and late voices, though the introduction admits the change. The law holds there with strain.
Score: 8.4 / 10
For a collection of essays, a wide reach. Consciousness and identity, in the name and the mask. The family, in memories of his mother in Oklahoma. Labour and poverty, in Harlem. The state and history, in the review of Myrdal and the account of segregation. Art, across fiction, film, jazz and gospel. The sacred, in Mahalia Jackson and the church. The nation, everywhere. They are integrated by one argument about American identity and by one consciousness, not merely listed. Held below eight because the essay form holds these orders as subjects of argument more than as lived orders, and the natural order and the inner lives of others are glimpsed rather than held. A short form is not punished for its form; what it holds is weighed as it is.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.1 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Unconcealment at 8.8, then The Imperishable at 8.6 and The Made at 8.5. A disclosure stated and held, that American culture is of a piece and that Black American life is a culture and not a symptom, argued from Twain’s Jim, the minstrel mask and a question put to Myrdal; a book whole and in print for sixty-two years; and an English of the long, poised sentence, with a definition of the blues a reader keeps for life.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.4: a collection assembled rather than compelled, in which two interviews and a question-and-answer piece go over ground the essays cover with more force, and music pieces overlap, so that one of the three could go with nothing lost. Next above it, The Sublime at 7.5, where the heights are passages within argument and the interviews and reviews run level; and The Living Form at 7.6, strong in the best essays and slight in the collection that holds them.
The Necessity Cap is unmet: The Inevitable at 7.4 falls a tenth short of the threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Made at 8.5, The Inner Law at 8.4, The Living Form at 7.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on three axes: The Unconcealment at 8.8 and The Imperishable at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.4 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.4 fall short by a tenth and The Archetypal Deep at 7.8 by seven. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Inevitable, 7.4, a tenth below 7.5, with The Sublime at 7.5 the next lowest; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.9. Two of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 8.1, in the band of Tier IV, below the 9.0 that the summit requires, and the Necessity Cap would close the summit to it at any aggregate.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Ralph Ellison’s Shadow and Act, published by Random House, New York, in 1964: some twenty-two essays, reviews, interviews and one speech, written between 1942 and 1964, arranged in three parts under an introduction, and scored as one book as published, as criticism in literary form. It is reprinted whole in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, edited by John F. Callahan (Modern Library, 1995); the unit is the book of 1964, not the Collected Essays and not Going to the Territory (1986). The pieces weighed most are “Richard Wright’s Blues”, “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke”, “The World and the Jug”, “Hidden Name and Complex Fate”, “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity”, “The Charlie Christian Story”, “Harlem Is Nowhere” and the review of An American Dilemma; the shorter music reviews and the interviews are weighed within the book, not apart. Every axis is judged on Ellison’s English, with no translation between. The book is in copyright and no text of it was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. English is quoted only where its words are certain: from “Richard Wright’s Blues”, “to finger its jagged grain” and “near-tragic, near-comic lyricism”; from “The World and the Jug”, “relative” and “ancestor”; from the review of Myrdal, “simply by reacting”. Everything else is paraphrase. Irving Howe, Stanley Edgar Hyman, Baldwin, Murray, Crouch, Gates and Houston Baker are named as the record of the book’s occasions and reception, and are not part of the work. Facts that could not be verified, among them the order of the pieces within each part, the magazines and dates of first printing of the several essays, the occasions of the speech and of the interviews, which pieces were first printed in this book, and the length of the book in pages, are not given. Citations are by essay.