Benjamin Stephen Haller (Virginia Wesleyan University)
I attempt to reconstruct how Ralph Ellison’s readings at Tuskegee and his work at the Federal Writers Project shaped the development of his understanding of the nature of Homeric orality, its relation to jazz and the blues, and ultimately his own role as author. I argue that his early poem “Basement Studio” and the transcripts of the interviews he conducted for the Federal Writers Project, both today located at the Library of Congress, represent distinct phases of Ellison’s understanding of Homer as he fumbled toward the model of Homeric improvisation-within-performance, resembling in many ways Parry and Lord’s, which appears in verbal-level allusions to Homer in Invisible Man.
My contribution builds on the work of Sanders 1970, Stark 1973, Rankine 2008, Looney 2011, and others who argue that features of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man owe a significant debt to the figure of Homer’s archetypally polytropic hero Odysseus.
Drawing on recent research in the Ellison Collection at the Library of Congress, I first briefly offer a reading of Ellison’s unpublished poem “Basement Studio” as a precursor to the Prologue of Invisible Man, demonstrating how the poem has its genesis in the Homeric image of the Sirens, with which Ellison experiments for the purpose of comparing the inspiration of the jazz musician to models of similar musically-induced enthousiasmos appropriated from Homer.
I next investigate how the model of vatic inspiration offered in “Basement Studio” evolves as Ellison’s Bekanntenkreis widens with his move to New York. During his Tuskegee years, references to aoidic enthousiasmos such as those implied in “Basement Studio” follow a relatively straightforward paradigm of Homer as divinely-inspired bard, familiar from Romantic models such as William Blake and the Tiresias of T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. Soon, however, Ellison’s views of Homer’s orality undergo a subtle shift from Romantic notions of vatic inspiration to a more scientific interest in folk traditions influenced by Ellison’s early encounters with the academic study of folklore.
Documents from the Ellison collection prove helpful in illuminating this distinct, more mature phase of Ellison’s reception of Homer. The second half of my paper offers a reading of several of Ellison’s interview transcripts for the Federal Writers Project as Ellison himself might have read them in the years of the first inklings of Invisible Man: as oral narratives which forge a bridge between the contemporary folk discourses Ellison encounters on the streets of New York and the similarly oral and improvisational Odyssey. Such an analogy between Homeric composition within performance, everyday dialogue, and musical improvisation in jazz and blues would prove revelatory in helping Ellison situate the adventures of the narrator of Invisible Man within prior literary traditions.