Going to the Territory by Ralph Ellison

Going to the Territory Reviews

• 
  Ben Siems

  I concluded my summer of re-acquainting myself with the life and writings of Ralph Ellison by reading his last published book. As a collection of essays like SHADOW AND ACT, GOING TO THE TERRITORY is not that second novel that so many waited for, but that Ellison would never in the end deliver. (Although, I have learned, there is now available a 2000-page collection of manuscripts that Ellison always hoped would become that novel, THREE DAYS BEFORE THE SHOOTING. I cannot decide whether I would want to read it. Perhaps it is best to have experienced his one and only masterpiece of fiction and leave it at that.)
  
  Much of what I wrote of SHADOW AND ACT applies equally here. One is continually impressed by the breadth and depth of Ellison's knowledge and interests; one is constantly moved by the power of his rhetoric; one alternately loves and is dizzied by his ambitious sentence structures.
  
  Our national history is a checkered one, to say the least. Patiently but forcefully, Ellison repeatedly nudges us to see the whole truth of who we have been, who we are now, and who we may yet become. The whole of it makes for challenging but inspiring and engaging reading. Without doubt, these are the writings of one of the great American thinkers of the twentieth century.
  
  Fittingly given his themes, Ellison himself is a man of contradictions and even occasional hypocrisies. I certainly do not agree with him at all times. Among other things, he is actually considerably more socially conservative than I, and there is an unsavory chauvinism in the fact his lists of important American authors never include the likes of Alice Walker, Harper Lee, and Toni Morrison. I think, though, that this makes for a good reminder that we should not seek to read works that validate all of our own opinions, but rather, those that acknowledge truths we have known, yet challenge or beliefs and assumptions as well.
  
  Above all, there is something quintessentially American in the story of an Oklahoma boy who loved jazz but wished to compose symphonies, who hopped freight trains to get to college, who still considered himself a musician while writing an iconic American novel, and who then spent decades calling himself a novelist while giving the lie to his own claim.
• 
  B. P. Rinehart

  
  
  This book is a very nice conclusion of Ellison's observations of speech and culture in the second-half of the 20th century (1960s-1980s). I was very impress by Ralph Ellison's now iconic approach and wit & the maturity and hindsight that age had brought him. My favorite story is probably his recount of seeing
  Erskine Caldwell's
  Tobacco Road for the first time on Broadway.
• 
  Michael Bryson

  Hospital waiting rooms aren't good for much, but they are places to pick up miscellaneous magazines.
  
  And so it happened that in April 2012 past I acquired a copy of the January 12, 2012 New York Times Magazine, which includes an article by Garth Risk Hallberg titled "Why Write Novels at All?"
  
  The past few weeks I'd also been reading Ralph Ellison's essay collection, Going to the Territory, and the recent issue (#84) of Canadian Notes & Queries, which contains much of interest, but the essay I'm going to reference here is by Patricia Robertson and called "Against Domesticated Fiction, or The Need for Re-enchantment."
  
  Personally, I don't have a locked-in view that novels should be any one way or another. Except that they should not be simple; they should not be cliched; they should challenge the reader and provide evidence of an originality of style, voice, technique and/or point of view. We don't need novels that sound like other novels or stories that replicate other stories.
  
  In The Art of the Novel, Milan Kundera argues that novels should do what only novels should do. That is, now that we have TV, movies, radio and a host of other media, what is special to the novel?
  
  Ellison's view (from "The Novel as a Function of American Democracy") is that "the novel has always been tied up with the idea of nationhood. What are we? Who are we? What has the experience of the particular group been? How did it become this way? What is it that stopped us from attaining the ideal?"
  
  On Henry James, Stephen Crane and Mark Twain, Ellison says, "In the works of these men ... the novel was never used merely as a medium of entertainment. These writers suggested possibilities, courses of action, stances against chaos." "The novel functioned beyond entertainment in helping create the American conception of America."
  
  To Canadian readers, this mission might sound familiar; it might remind us of the nationalist mission of the 1970s, that the primary job of Canadian writers was to define Canada. That is, it might seem a corporate mission rather than an individual mandate.
  
  However, Ellison is at pains to repeatedly stress that writers ought to position themselves within the tradition of great writing first and foremost, and they need to avoid the swamp of the sociological "we." Ellison tells us he took his inspiration from Joyce, Eliot and Pound (as well as Twain, Hemingway, and Emerson) and claimed the pluralistic culture of America as his own well spring.
  
  Repeatedly, he says that Americans are both black and white, European and African, in their cultural influences and it is not race or blood that defines an individual's culture or talent. It is individual force of will and self-education of all of the best and broadest of all of the world's cultures. But, for him, there is also a signature document: The American Constitution. Ellison's narrative of the evolution of the novel is bound up with the 18th-century celebration of the individual and the break from the British Crown. It is also bound up in the failure of that promise in the form of ongoing slavery, leading to the Civil War, and then the failure of the Reconstruction.
  
  Ellison's claim is that it is the novel's job to help America complete its promise, and assist the creation of a new consciousness of the individual beyond the boundaries of race, social class, or other cliches. His essays make for stirring reading, and they remain surprisingly contemporary. One might say that they even foreshadow Obama, and also the failure post-2008 of a post-racial cultural revolution to take hold.
  
  In the NYT Magazine, Risk Hallberg writes about what he called the Franzen Generation and a literary conference in Italy in 2006 called Le Conservazioni, rich with YouTube links.
  
  The Franzen Generation consists of Jonathan Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides, Zadie Smith and David Foster Wallace, and their common element, says Risk Hallberg, is that these writers have made making us feel less alone the primary purpose of their fiction.
  
  The focus, in other words, has become hyper-individual as the post-modern experiments have taken away our ability to agree on a common, stabilizing reality.
  
  Risk Hallberg concludes that this approach "won't quite be enough" to ensure that "art is to endure."
  
  Patricia Robertson's excellent essay also plays for high stakes, and she also identifies what she calls a "downward and inward trend of contemporary fiction."She quotes Janet Burroway:
  
  The history of Western literature shows a movement downward through society from royalty to gentry to the middle classes to the lower classes to the dropouts; inward from heroic action to social drama to individual consciousness to the subconscious to the unconscious.
  
  And the problem, says Robertson, is that "we have nowhere further to go."
  
  At this point, I hear Ellison harking back to 1776 and the documents of the Founding Fathers. There were promises stated there that remain unfulfilled. There is an unfinished revolution that is still ripe with narrative. The financial collapse of 2008, for example, writ large the failure of American capitalism to deliver on the promise of a perpetually renewing middle-class dream. The poor got poorer and some of the rich went bankrupt, but very quickly the political and economic elites rushed not to fix the system, but return it to the status quo as much as possible.
  
  Going forward, the crash of 2008 may affect more lives and be a more defining early-21st century moment than even 9/11. And we need our writers to grasp that.
  
  Patterson echoes some of Ellison's moral vision. She calls on writers to "revivify old forms by using our imaginations in the service of new stories. In doing so," she says, "we will reclaim the essential role of the storyteller, the one who reminds us who we are and where we came from, and who restores the world through authentic story."
  
  Actually, that sounds a lot like Ellison, doesn't it?
• 
  Will

  "Why is it so often true that when critics confront the American as Negro they suddenly drop their advanced critical armament and revert with an air of confident superiority to quite primitive modes of analysis? Why is it that sociology-oriented critics seem to rate literature so far below politics and ideology that they would rather kill a novel than modify their presumptions concerning a given reality which it seeks in its own terms to project?"
• 
  Phillip

  I have mixed feelings about this collection of essays. I had high hopes when it came out. I had been an "Invisible Man" fan for awhile and was thrilled that the author had a new book. I was especially looking forward to it because I am an Oklahoman as was Ellison. The title refers to a moment of hope in our nation's history when African Americans went to Indian Territory (Oklahoma)after the Civil War, expecting to be treated with equality.
  
  Unfortunately, there isn't that much to the title essay. The rest of the book contains essays of arts appreciation, and a little bit of personal memoirs of his days in New York. I like Ellison. As long as you don't expect something great you might like this collection of essays.
• 
  RK Byers

  the part about the COLORED ONLY laughing barrels was so hilarious I'd have had to have stuck my head in one if I were in the deep south reading this during the time Ellison described.