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“The Myth and Ritual Business”: Ralph Ellison, Stanley Edgar Hyman, and American Sacramentalism

In early 1961, Ralph Ellison closed a letter to his friend Stanley Edgar Hyman by quoting a bawdy “dog song” that “I’ve heard my mutt singing whenever we

approach the mountains as we come up the Throughway.” Ellison added that the verse “was sung with a great deal of howling malice and a dogged ambiguity . . . and he refuses to comment beyond saying that it’s a traditional dog song.” “Perhaps,” Ellison mused, “you can place its origin” (Letter to Hyman, 10 Mar. 1961).1

Ellison’s needling of Hyman offers more than a commentary on their lively friendship; his wry suggestion that Hyman identify the song’s “origin” echoes their famous debate over black American writers, folklore, and ritual, which had appeared in the literary magazine Partisan Review three years before. Ellison’s portion of the debate has been hailed as “[o]ne of his most influential essays” (Rampersad 351), but I believe that this work has been isolated from the relational and intellectual context that gave it life—which has led to incomplete accounts of its nature and significance for Ellison’s fiction and nonfiction. As a consequence, this essay draws on both published texts and unpublished archival materials to reinterpret this moment in African American literary history—the now-famous 1958 debate between Ellison and Hyman, which produced Ellison’s “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke”—to more precisely illuminate the exchange and its place within Ellison’s critical and artistic development.

This essay therefore advances two central, interrelated claims. First, when placed back in the context of the thirty-year friendship between Ellison and Hyman, their argument over race and the question of “origin” extends beyond one issue of a literary magazine; the exchange preserved in the pages of Partisan Review is only one moment in a decade-long conversation between the two friends on race, folklore, and ritual. Second, resituating the Hyman-Ellison debate within this relational con- text illuminates an important yet neglected thread running through it: the writings of Jane Ellen Harrison. The Partisan Review episode, I argue, is best read in light of Ellison’s deepening education in the nature of ritual, studies originally traceable to Hyman himself. “Change the Joke,” therefore, represents not simply a rebuttal to Hyman’s essay, but also Ellison’s first sustained attempt to articulate Harrison’s work on archaic Greece for twentieth-century America—and to thereby outline a ritual approach to white supremacy.

Thus, I would contest the interpretation that “Change the Joke” simply detailed Ellison’s (already cemented) intellectual differences from Hyman; their arguments over these matters should be seen as formative in Ellison’s thinking about race, ritual, and America. Read in this way, the published Hyman-Ellison debate becomes but one moment in their evolving conversation on race, culture, and literature—a con- versation that ultimately led Ellison to identify the sacramentalism working beneath the rational surface of American culture. To begin unpacking these twin claims, however, I would first return to and recontextualize this famous exchange, drawing upon both published and unpublished materials.

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“A Rather Contrived Debate”2

Alongside contributions by writers such as Bernard Malamud and Robert Penn Warren, the Spring 1958 issue of Partisan Review featured a special section

entitled “The Negro Writer in America: An Exchange.” The initial portion of the exchange, Hyman’s “I. The Folk Tradition,” was followed by Ellison’s reply, “II. Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke.” Hyman’s essay opened with the contention that “ ‘American Negro Literature’—by which I do not mean any special body of writing, but only that varied American literature produced by Negroes—has, or at least some of it has, a relation to a living folk tradition that is rare in American writing, and very much worth our study” (“Folk Tradition” 197). For Hyman, the characteristic protagonist of the black American folk tale is “the ‘darky’ entertainer,” the “smart man playing dumb,” whose “role is to parody the familiar stereotype of the Negro” (198).

Hyman identified Ellison’s Invisible Man as the “fullest development I know of the darky act in fiction” (“Folk Tradition” 200), since a host of the novel’s charac- ters use white Americans’ assumptions about blacks against them. Moreover, Hyman saw in Ellison’s nameless protagonist “the ultimate darky act, an invisible blackness that conceals a sentient human being.” Yet, according to Hyman, Ellison’s “darky” figure should be traced to its origins; for Hyman this means looking not simply to black folk sources (e.g., the tales of Brer Rabbit), but to “the prototype of the West African trickster hero,” itself similar to other figures in the Western canon (201). As Hyman explained,

when the Negro writer retreats furthest from white models and deepest into Negro folk tradition, back in fact to African myth, he is paradoxically not furthest from Western literature, but finds himself sharing a timeless archetype with Aristophanes, Shakespeare, and St. Paul, who in turn derived it from their folk sources in myth and ritual. (“Folk Tradition” 201-02; emphasis in original)

Although Ellison’s response began with a brief expression of gratitude to Hyman for complimentary references to his novel, it quickly shifted gears: “our conceptions of just what is Negro and what is American in Negro American folklore; and our conceptions of a Negro American writer’s environment—are at such odds that I must disagree with him all along the way” (“Change the Joke” 212; emphasis in original). Beyond sharply contesting Hyman’s reading of Invisible Man, Ellison’s essay argued that Hyman fundamentally erred by beginning a study of black American literature with the “darky” figure, insofar as “[t]he role with which [such performers] are identified is not, despite its ‘blackness,’ Negro American (indeed, Negroes are repelled by it); it does not find its popularity among Negroes but among whites.” Studies of black folklore must begin elsewhere, because “this ‘ “darky” entertainer’ is white,” not black (213). Ellison thus rejected Hyman’s tracing of the African origins of black folklore and literature, because “the figure in black face looks suspiciously homegrown, Western, and Calvinist to me” (217).

Given Ellison’s rebuttal of Hyman’s claims and the editorial framing of this “special section,” readers of Partisan Review surely interpreted these two pieces as written specifically for the magazine. Yet as Hyman explained in 1963, his contribu- tion was actually an abridged version of a lecture delivered at Brandeis: “When I finished the manuscript I sent it to my friend Ralph Ellison for an opinion. He replied with a long eloquent letter arguing the other half of the truth, the indebted- ness of American Negro literature to the European literary tradition” (Promised End 314-15).3 In 1964, when preparing his rejoinder for inclusion in Shadow and Act, Ellison corroborated Hyman’s account. The idea for the exchange in Partisan Review

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took shape, Ellison added, when “Hyman wrote back, suggesting that I work up my ideas as part of a publishable debate” (Collected Essays 100).4

Hyman characterized the entire episode as “a rather contrived debate” (Promised End 315), and Ellison described his now-canonical essay as “a piece which Hyman feinted me into doing” (Murray and Callahan 183), but scholarship over the past six decades has tended to take the Partisan Review exchange at face value, as a heated “literary skirmish” that Ellison clearly won (Rampersad 351). Ellison’s article is a “polemical text” (Parent) or “polemical essay” (Foley 82), as “the primary goal of ‘Change the Joke’ is to correct Stanley Edgar Hyman’s concept of Black folklore” (Kent 266). Julia Sun-Joo Lee calls it a devastating, pointed critique of “Hymanian oversimplification”: “Ellison cites and then rejects Hyman’s overzealous (mis)read- ings of Invisible Man, a section of the essay that would make any literary critic— including this one—flinch” (462).5

Yet I contend that an adequate interpretation of this exchange requires attend- ing to the context from which it emerged. As the above indicates, it is far from a simple polemic; after all, the idea for the exchange emerged from within the Hyman-Ellison friendship. Yet by returning to their correspondence and other archival materials, we see something more—that much of the substance of their published debate also originated in their informal exchanges, and specifically in their ongoing discussions of the relationship between ritual and race in American culture. As a result, in the next section of this essay, I turn to a 1948 exchange over folklore, race, and ritual, where the two men first grappled over the issues that would later animate their contrasting contributions to Partisan Review.

The Origin of “Origin”: “Some Bankrupt Treasuries”

In the summer of 1948 The Kenyon Review published an essay by Hyman entitled “Some Bankrupt Treasuries.” Nominally an extensive review of twelve newly

published collections on American folklore, Hyman used his criticism of these works to advance an original argument about the nature and study of American folklore. Hyman critiqued the books’ “sloppy use of folk terms”—especially impre- cise, ambiguous, and shifting conceptions of the “folk” and of “myth” (“Some Bankrupt” 496). He offered his corrective in the final section of the essay: “Folk criticism would have to concern itself equally with the three related problems (artificially divided for purposes of study): origin, structure, and function” (498). When introducing these “three related problems,” Hyman’s essay referred the reader to his own recently published book, The Armed Vision, and especially its treatment of “the ritual view developed by Sir James G. Frazer and his followers, exhaustively demonstrated in specific areas by Gilbert Murray, Jane Harrison and the Cambridge group” (498n2).

Hyman’s essay offered a shorthand version of the Ritualists’ central contention that “without exception folk art is of very ancient communal origin, that it is never the record of a historical personage or event, but is always a development out of primitive fertility ritual, with the rite then dropped or aborted and the narrative continued” (“Some Bankrupt” 498n2). As he explained, the Ritualists’ work is a direct rejection of the common assumption that a folk tale refers to an actual individual or historical event. Instead, the origin of such a tale lies in an archaic communal practice, tied to the survival of the group; for example, Robin Hood is not a fiction- alized version of a once-living folk hero, but the descendent of “the Sacrificial King of the ancient fertility rites” (499).

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In contrast to this theoretically driven study of origin, to engage the question of structure “folk criticism would have to study specific texts as works of art” (“Some Bankrupt” 498). Here, Hyman would have the critic engage with the text itself, analyzing it in its particularity by drawing upon the very best works in literary criticism. Finally, Hyman’s third dimension of folk criticism is the study of func- tion: “folk criticism must draw on history and all the social studies for specific and detailed knowledge of the groups originating, transmitting, and experiencing the work, and the shifting pattern of needs it fills.” His proposed study of function thus requires the identification of the particular archaic community for which a ritual originally performed vital work. By drawing together all three of these activi- ties, he contended, the ideal folk critic will “find in the successful work [of art] the archetypal experience that survives all transformation to unite the private symbolic action in such readers as ourselves with the original rite that made the crops grow” (498).

“I . . . Must Leave the Sharpening Until Later”6

After studying Hyman’s essay Ellison found himself disagreeing with the “three related problems” that his friend identified as the heart of folk criti-

cism—and took great care in crafting his response. Ellison’s archive contains a com- plete draft of a three-page, single-spaced letter to Hyman dated August 13, 1948, and Hyman’s papers include a nearly identical letter dated August 16. The letters differ little in substance, and vary only somewhat in their phrasing; since both present the same objections to Hyman’s essay, and in the same order, it appears that Ellison wanted to ensure that he was fully satisfied with his critique before launching it.7

Ellison first apologized for the delay in replying to Hyman’s queries about the essay, explaining, “I wanted to say something about your essay on folklore, and I wanted to say it with a certain exactness of statement.” Ellison called it “one of the most valuable pieces that I’ve seen from an American,” and predicted that it “should do a lot to bring about a serious approach to the subject” (Letter to Hyman, 16 Aug. 1948). Following these compliments, though, the letter proceeded to direct a number of criticisms at Hyman’s essay, two of which directly centered on matters of race.

First, Ellison pointed to a central problem with the existing scholarship on American folklore, which, he argued, Hyman had overlooked. For Ellison, the diffi- culty is that not only do scholars “know little of the nature of folklore”—Hyman’s complaint—but also that they “are themselves the carriers of the racialistic con- ceptions common to much of American folklore.” Drawing on Hyman’s own vocabulary, Ellison pointed out that folklore plays a racial function in American culture; by treating their subject matter only superficially, scholars tacitly reinforce the work done by folklore to maintain the American racial hierarchy. As Ellison wrote, “any delving into folklore that goes deeper than the sentimental level . . . brings the investigator into immediate contact with the painful and tragic elements which Americans have not been too anxious to confront” (Letter to Hyman, 16 Aug. 1948).

Ellison also offered a series of meditations on Hyman’s use of the Ritualists. “As for the triad itself,” he began, “I’d say that for me personally I am more inter- ested in structure and function than in origin.” However, Ellison immediately amended this statement, noting that “perhaps I’m just as interested [in origin], only under the headings of myth and ritual.”8 Differentiating his position from Hyman’s, Ellison contended that his own approach to the question of origin, unlike Hyman’s, did not

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“require me to waste time pinning origin down to a specific culture in a specific country” (Letter to Hyman, 16 Aug. 1948).

Although he would offer a more powerful version of this claim a decade later, Ellison argued that the origin of a specific work of art was a nonrational ritual process rather than a place or a people. As he wrote, “the core of folklore, myth and ritual, is with us always—if only we get the rational mud out of our eyes and see the prerational fleece.” As Ellison recognized, Hyman’s use of the Ritualists’ work led him to seek the archaic ritual that was the ancestor of any specific piece of literature as well as the specific cultural group that had enacted it. His own emphasis on nonrational processes, Ellison contended, avoided both this too-easy obsession with the primitive and its attendant racial implications: “too great a concern with origin degenerates too easily into a sterile concern with purity, while folklore is most impure” (Letter to Hyman, 16 Aug. 1948). The search for origin in Hyman’s sense, Ellison warned, was easily transformed into a genealogical, geographical quest for a work’s true (i.e., pure) ancestry.

Hyman wrote back almost immediately: “As far as I am concerned, you made up for a lifetime of non-letterwriting with this last masterwork.” That is not to say, however, that Hyman wholly agreed with Ellison’s objections; after thanking him “for your very kind words about my folksy piece, and for your trouble in writing out criticisms,” Hyman addressed each of Ellison’s points in turn. He acknowledged Ellison’s claim about the racial implications of existing American scholarship on folklore and admitted that the twelve collections’ “chauvinism and the chauvinism of American folklore are related, and that I should have mentioned that relation- ship when I mentioned them.” Hyman attributed this omission to a lack of space, forcing him to leave readers to fill in many blanks themselves: “I agree with your ‘whys’ but if I had followed them along it would just have been another essay.” Conceding the importance of Ellison’s point, Hyman suggested, “Why don’t you write it, a piece called ‘Folklore and the Tragic Sense,’ perhaps for The Kenyon?” (Letter to Ellison, 23 Aug. 1948).

Hyman was less convinced of the merit of Ellison’s other argument: “I agree with you, certainly, that the ‘origin’ problem is one of archetypal worldwide ritual, not any specific culture. I tried to say that, in insisting that specific cultures were a ‘function’ study, for Malinowski or Boas rather than Frazer.” Hyman maintained that Ellison’s critique was based on a misreading of the essay: “When you say ‘structure’ and ‘function’ interest you more than ‘origin,’ however, it seems to me as though you are falling into the trap of treating these artificial distinctions as though they were real, as though the problems could be dissociated more than temporarily, in a test-tube.” According to Hyman, Ellison had forgotten that the terms are only analytically, not actually, separable: “In your sense, ‘origin’ interests me most, but every time I try to get at it, it becomes a text (structure) and a process of alteration (function).” Drawing on this point, Hyman strongly disputed another of Ellison’s claims: “The charge that I want ‘purity,’ the pure original rite and myth, isn’t quite fair, since I only want it as a hypothetical point on my real continuum” (Letter to Ellison, 23 Aug. 1948).

Hyman ended his two-page, single-spaced reply by noting that he and Shirley Jackson would be in New York City within a week, and proposed that they “take you back with us” to Vermont (Letter to Ellison, 23 Aug. 1948), where, presumably, the two would discuss these matters face to face. Despite this visit Ellison did not convert his letter into the essay Hyman suggested; in part, this may have been because Ellison remained dissatisfied with his objections to Hyman’s piece. Ellison appeared reluctant to fully commit to the arguments he had made in response to Hyman’s essay: “Pardon this lack of precision in my language, I planned to take more time with this but now must leave the sharpening until later” (Letter to Hyman, 16 Aug. 1948).

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Although a more complete version of this argument would later appear in Partisan Review, in 1948 Ellison believed that his position on racial identity, folklore, and the tragic sense was still largely in flux. Indeed, we can see traces of his evolv- ing thought on these matters in one of the most significant points of contrast between the letters of August 13 and August 16. In his initial draft, Ellison wrote:

I like also your comments on the “craze for anything ‘folk’ or ‘folksy,’ ” with its implicit sanction of the negative conditions in which much of folklore was developed. I would not overlook, however, the yearning for a whole community which also marks this phenomenon; not the desire for the primitive mistakenly understood as simple and uncomplex, but for the development of a broad, close, community of human experience—otherwise, what lies behind your own interest in the material? (Letter to Hyman, 13 Aug. 1948)

In the version sent to Hyman, Ellison shifted tone considerably, introducing the dis- tinction between a simplistic (sentimental) and complex (tragic) approach to American culture:

I liked also your comments on the “craze for anything ‘folk’ or ‘folksy’ ” and its (the craze’s) implicit sanction of the negative conditions in which much of folklore is distilled. It occurred to me, however, that also implicit in the craze is the yearning for a whole community . . . a yearning which goes around because it mistakes the primitive for the simple, and prefers sentimentality to the tragic view. (Letter to Hyman, 16 Aug. 1948)

It is not enough to note the desire for community, Ellison’s revised passage sug- gests, as one must also engage with the role played by folklore in protecting that community from confronting its responsibility for the racialized nature of social reality.

Suggesting the provisional nature of this statement, however, Ellison ended this commentary with the verbal equivalent of a semicolon, rather than a period: “That’s about all. It’s probably too much until I’ve read more in the field” (Letter to Hyman, 16 Aug. 1948). Since “Change the Joke” would later deliver on this promise, I contend that Ellison’s reading of Jane Ellen Harrison—largely owing, again, to Hyman’s influence—ultimately provided the resources Ellison needed to sharpen and extend his position on American race ritual. In the remainder of this essay, as a consequence, I reconstruct Ellison’s studies of ritual as I trace their importance to the Partisan Review exchange—and to Ellison’s identification of the sacramental nature of white supremacy.

Ellison Encounters the Ritualists

Although their work is now dismissed by classicists interested in myth and ritual,9 the scholars collectively known as the “Cambridge Ritualists” or

“Cambridge School” (Jane Ellen Harrison, Gilbert Murray, A. B. Cook, and Francis Cornford) were uncommonly influential in the first half of the twentieth century, and especially in literary criticism.10 Further, Hyman was a central proponent of their work; some even attribute the coining of the term “Cambridge Ritualists” to Hyman himself (Beard 202-03n18). Hyman famously entreated friends and associates to read, absorb, and apply their insights (Gill 246)—but he especially encouraged Ellison to do so.

As early as 1945 Hyman was recommending that Ellison deepen his under- standing of myth and ritual by exploring this body of work.11 Responding to Ellison’s famous essay “Richard Wright’s Blues,” Hyman suggested that its treatment of identity would profit from an encounter with Harrison’s Ancient Art and Ritual (Letter to Ellison, 19 Oct. 1945). Ellison’s study of the Ritualists’ work began rather

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fitfully, though; a 1946 letter to Hyman referenced Harrison’s writings on ritual, but Ellison misidentified her as the author of From Ritual to Romance, a Harrison- influenced text written by Jessie Weston.12 Similarly, in early 1948, Ellison purchased a book heavily indebted to the Ritualists’ work—George Thomson’s Aeschylus and Athens—but does not appear to have studied it closely.13 Sparked by the exchange over “Some Bankrupt Treasuries,” however, Ellison’s studies of ritual began to accelerate—and Hyman, again, played a key role.

In early 1949 Ellison agreed to deliver a lecture for the Women’s Conference of the Society for Ethical Culture. Inviting Hyman to attend, he offered a brief preview: “I thought this as good an occasion as any to talk about Melville, Twain, Hemingway, and Faulkner, and what, to steer away from sociology, I term the ‘black mask of humanity.’ So if you come, don’t say I didn’t warn you” (Letter to Hyman, 21 Feb. 1949).14 Hyman attended the lecture, but mixed his applause with critical comments: “I agreed entirely with you on Melville, Twain, Faulkner, would quarrel about Hemingway as you would imagine. I think you miss several dimensions of the picture.” Ellison was planning a visit soon thereafter, so Hyman listed two racist moments in Hemingway, promising “[w]ill discuss these when I see you” (Letter to Ellison, 11 Mar. 1949). There is no additional record of their conversation on Ellison’s lecture, but Ellison called this trip to the Hyman-Jackson residence “probably the most valuable ever” (Letter to Hyman, 14 Apr. 1949).

It is important to note that during the period when Ellison was visiting, Hyman was also at work on a follow-up to his “folksy piece” from the previous year; the Summer 1949 issue of The Kenyon Review included an extended meditation by Hyman on the Ritualists’ work, entitled “Myth, Ritual, and Nonsense.” In the inter- vening year Hyman had reconsidered his origin-structure-function triad, apparently in light of his conversations with Ellison. In a passage echoing Ellison’s 1948 letter, Hyman defined “origin” as a process, not a search for a particular ritual in archaic culture: “[t]he ritual approach . . . need not argue any given case of origin or his- toricity, since it describes a process out of which myth develops, and a definition of what it is and how it functions in terms of that process” (“Myth” 471; emphasis in original). Later in the essay, Hyman drew on Kenneth Burke’s work to sketch out this revised theory of ritual origins: “The solution here, and the final dimension of the ritual view, would seem to be Burke’s extension of Freud’s concept of symbolic action, whereby we privately re-enact, in our individualist modern day, the lost collective rites that enabled the tribe to function” (474).

Ellison read Hyman’s essay when it was published, and it appears to have further encouraged him to connect ritual to matters of race. A few months later Ellison published a review of race and/in American cinema, “The Shadow and the Act.” Within it Ellison again returned to the theme of the “black mask of humanity,” but in terms of ritual. Not only did Ellison point out “the myth-making potential of the film form,” but also that works like The Birth of a Nation demonstrated that “[t]he Negro as scapegoat could be sold as entertainment” (“Shadow and the Act” 304). This point, Ellison contended, was vital: “The anti-Negro image is a ritual object of which Hollywood is not the creator, but the manipulator. Its role has been that of justifying the widely held myth of Negro unhumanness and inferiority by offering entertaining rituals through which that myth could be reaffirmed” (305).15

In many respects the emphasis on myth and ritual in “The Shadow and the Act” represents a suturing of his interest in the “black mask of humanity” to his conversations with Hyman about myth and ritual. Yet Ellison’s views had not yet fully matured into the statement that would be presented in “Change the Joke”; fittingly, Hyman provided the resources needed to complete Ellison’s ritual perspec- tive. In “Myth, Ritual, and Nonsense” Hyman identified the core text of the “Cambridge group,” its “collective manifesto,” as Jane Ellen Harrison’s Themis (464)—and in March 1950 he gave Ellison a copy.16 Testimony to its importance is

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preserved in the archives: Ellison’s copy is heavily annotated, marked in pencil and two different colors of ink, suggesting that he truly studied the text.17 Moreover, by challenging Ellison’s conceptions of ritual and of the hero, Themis thereby led him to identify the sacramentalism at work in American culture, a Harrisonian approach to whiteness that he would fully develop in his contribution to Partisan Review.

From Hero to Hero-Function

Ellison’s initial introduction to Themis reflected his focus on black leader- ship—what, given her leftist approach to Ellison, Barbara Foley calls “the

red line of heroic history,” or “the Negro rebel as an avatar of Prometheus” (88, 87). Indeed, while working on Invisible Man, secondary sources had drawn his attention to a portion of Themis written by Gilbert Murray, deriving tragedy from the stages of archaic ritual: “An Agon or Contest” is followed by “A Pathos of the Year-Daimon, generally a ritual or sacrificial death,” announced by “A Messenger,” which leads to “A Threnos or Lamentation”—followed by “An Anagnorisis—discovery or recogni- tion—of the slain and mutilated Daimon, followed by his Resurrection or Apotheosis” (Harrison 342-43).18 Ellison took special interest in “pathos,” which, according to Murray, often involves a character ritually “torn to pieces (σπαραγμός)” (342). Beyond copying this portion of Themis multiple times into his notebooks, Ellison used this term sparagmos to characterize Invisible Man’s narrator; he is described as “dedicated for leadership, and thus for sacrifice and ‘dismemberment’ ” (Notes, 1942-1950).19

Yet once Ellison received his own copy of Themis, he found that this tragic pattern was not what it seemed. In isolation, Murray’s account might help flesh out a black Prometheus, but the book as a whole actually critiques such a notion— which is why Murray uses “Year-Daimon,” not “the hero.” According to Harrison, in a passage marked by Ellison, “Homer’s conception of the hero as the gallant individual . . . is secondary and late” (335). Her text accordingly focuses less on Homeric or classical Greeks—or their gods and heroes—than on their predecessors, the archaic Greeks. Archaic Greeks, she asserts, simply did not distinguish self from other and thus did not see themselves as individuals: “man felt himself at first not as a personality separate from other persons, but as the warm excited centre of a group” (475). She claims as a consequence that “among primitive peoples, religion reflects collective feeling and collective thinking,” not an individual worshipper’s relationship to a deity (ix; emphasis in original).

Ellison, I believe, recognized two important dimensions of Harrison’s argument. First, “the hero” of archaic Greece must be deindividualized; archaic Greeks were not individuals, but neither were their heroes. In a striking passage, one that Ellison underlined, Harrison writes, “The ‘Hero’ is not a dead man with a known name and history commemorated by funeral games. His title stands not for a personality, but for an office, defined by its functions and capable of being filled by a series of representatives” (259). She shifts focus from the individualistic “hero” to the heroic office or function; to indicate the latter, she substitutes the term daimon. For Harrison, “the hero is a functionary-daimon, not a historic personality” (288; emphasis in original).20 By discussing the hero as an office or function Harrison emphasizes the group for whom the office is necessary, not the individual who occupies it; the daimon’s substance derives solely from the community it serves. In a passage that Ellison marked heavily, Harrison writes, “The daimon proper . . . was a collective representation expressing not a personality so much as a function” (315; emphasis

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in original).21 The daimon is a “collective representation” because it serves as “the product, the projection, the representation of collective emotion” (260).

Instead of focusing on sacrifices made to the Olympians, Harrison therefore explores a more primary, more communal form of religious activity: the sacrament. According to Harrison, “sacrifice is but a specialized form of sacrament. . . . Of the two, sacrifice and sacrament, sacrament is the more primitive” (134). We typically understand sacrifice as offering gifts to the gods, but originally it is a sacralizing; in a sentence Ellison underlined, she explains, “to make sacred is to bring into contact with any source of force and fear, with any vehicle of mana” (147; emphasis in orig- inal). Ellison marked a sentence explaining that mana, the nonhuman source of fear, is a product of the collective, not the individual: “it is fear felt together, fear . . . qualified, by a sort of social sanction” (64). Archaic religious practice attempts to capture this mana: “In the fruits of the earth which grow by some unseen power there is much mana; you want that mana. In the loud-roaring bull and the thunder is much mana; you want that mana” (137; emphasis in original). For Harrison, then, “Sacramentalism stands for the absorption by man of the mana of non-man” (xii; emphasis in original).

Here is the second dimension of Harrison’s argument that drew Ellison’s atten- tion; the hero-function, the daimon, can be understood only within the context of sacramentalism. Using the example of a bull serving not as “gift-sacrifice” but as daimon, Harrison notes, “[t]he bull has been solemnly designated, set apart. He is sacred now, charged with the mana of the coming year” (152; emphasis in original). The ritual process focuses mana in the daimon, amassing power to be harnessed by the collective. This is why sacramentalism often (but not always) involves dismem- berment and literal consumption: “eating is not the only means of communicating, though perhaps it is among the most effective” (137). Through the ritual process whereby the daimon is charged with power and consumed (literally or figuratively), the mana of the universe passes to the community, ensuring its survival and stability. As a functionary, the daimon is the object, not the subject, of ritual action. This is why the daimon is an office, not an individual. It can be filled by anyone, since its purpose is simply to release its stored mana to the collective, to render the group impervious to change; therefore, as Harrison asserts, “[t]he daimon-functionary represents the permanent life of the group” (xiv).

Further, Harrison insists that this religious practice outlived the archaic Greeks. Not only is sacramentalism more primordial than sacrifice, but it has also proved much more tenacious: “Sacrifice, as part of our normal religious ritual, is now-a- days dead and gone. Sacraments show no sign of dying, but rather of renewed life and vigour” (Harrison 134). Consequently, I contend, Ellison was inspired by Harrison’s work to identify the hidden presence of American sacramentalism—to attend not to the black hero, but to the black daimon, the ritual office created by and for the white community. Indeed, in the notebooks for Invisible Man, we see Ellison reflecting on his narrator in Harrisonian terms: “There is also [the] irony of his being dedicated also by whites, who fail to recognize that by making him [the] object of sacrifice, they also covertly name him their leader, one stronger than they” (Notes, 1942-1950). This passage and others like it in Ellison’s archives suggest the parallel he drew between archaic Greece and twentieth-century America; drawing on Harrison, Ellison depicted black Americans as appropriated by whites to serve a ritual function for the preservation of white supremacy. Assigned the role of daimon, black Americans are charged with mana, with fear and awe—and then consumed, the stored power distributed through the white community, ensuring its permanence.

Beyond the Harrisonian meditations in Ellison’s notebooks, readers of Invisible Man should also see this in the white audience for the Battle Royal, which devours the spectacle staged for it,22 or the narrator’s dream of his castration toward the

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novel’s end (569-71). Yet consider also (for example) that Trueblood’s story is eagerly, repeatedly, consumed by white men;23 the perfection of Liberty Paints’ “Optic White” is ensured through the absorption of ten drops of blackness (199-202); and Sibyl’s repeated phrase, “warm ebony against pure snow” (520), suggests that the purity of whiteness is ensured by the radiating presence of blackness.24

Yet this American sacramentalism lingered in Ellison’s consciousness long after the publication of Invisible Man, as a 1955 letter to Albert Murray attests:

At a table [at the American Academy in Rome] I hear the Classicists talking the stuff, who did what, when and why and where, and I feel lost in a world that I’ve got to get with or die of frustration. We’ve got one of the keys, though, for here is where the myth and ritual business operates in a context not of primitive culture but beneath the foundations of the West. (Murray and Callahan 99)

This quote indicates the importance Ellison saw in Harrison’s (and other Ritualists’) work. Through his studies of Themis, Ellison had achieved insight into the sacra- mental rites that operate below the surface of seemingly rational American life, the ritual function played by black Americans in the reinforcement of white supremacy. By the late 1950s, however, Ellison had offered only glimpses of this position in his published work;25 consumed first by Invisible Man and then its successor, Ellison had not carved out the time to unpack it entirely. At this point, Hyman again per- formed a vital service—providing the perfect foil for Ellison’s sharpened argument about American race ritual.

“I’ll Have You to Thank”26

Although they are not explicitly mentioned in the initial letter to Hyman that sparked their “debate,” archival materials and the published version alike

indicate that Ellison was thinking of Harrison and the Ritualists when writing his rejoinder.27 Using their work, Ellison labored over a statement that addressed the subject of ritual and literature without devolving into the “archetype-hunting” that he had critiqued in both “Some Bankrupt Treasuries” and Hyman’s lecture (Murray and Callahan 165-67). In 1948 Ellison had argued that Hyman’s emphasis on origin leads to an unproductive—at best, sterile, and at worst, racially problematic— critical genealogy, a search for the ancestral source from which a piece of literature is descended. A decade later, thanks to his readings of Harrison, Ellison was able to develop his alternative approach to origin—one that articulated Harrison’s text to fit the complexities of twentieth-century America.

In Harrisonian fashion, the premise of Ellison’s essay is that the only kind of origin worth pursuing is the ritual process that lies beneath the rational surface of American life: “ours is no archaic society (although its archaic elements exert far more influence in our lives than we care to admit)” (“Change the Joke” 217). Thus, rather than accompanying Hyman in a search for African origins, Ellison turns his gaze upon American culture; Hyman’s essay, he notes, “leads us eventually to . . . game which thrives in a psychological jungle right here at home” (Drafts). This is why, after receiving Hyman’s lecture, he told Albert Murray, “[h]e’s so busy looking for African myth in the U.S. that he can’t see what’s before his eyes” (Murray and Callahan 165). In short, although Hyman uses the “ ‘darky’ entertainer” as his start- ing point, Ellison finds that it “lead[s] us elsewhere, into a Cthonic [sic] labyrinth” (“Change the Joke” 213)—a clear reference to Harrison (xi).

Ellison’s essay further establishes the primacy of function over origin, in Hyman’s (problematic) sense; the “adjustment to the contours of ‘white’ symbolic

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needs is far more intriguing than [the] alleged origins” of Hyman’s “trickster” (“Change the Joke” 217). Yet by emphasizing the function that such figures carry out, Ellison’s essay points us not toward black folklore or black individuals performing in this role, but toward white Americans—toward, as Themis suggests, the commu- nity for whom this figure is necessary. Indeed, throughout the essay and its drafts we see Ellison making Harrisonian arguments about whites’ need for this kind of performer: “the figure which Hyman discusses is one of the main actors in an art of procrastination. Its function is to control the chaos which it is feared [is] released by the occurrence of change at the caste level of society.” He describes America as “a society in which the restraints of the past institutions and traditions slipped away, [and] there were many possibilities. Even the illusory possibility of controlling chaos through controlling the black man” (Drafts).

Here, in Ellison’s Harrisonian invocation of chaos, lies his argument for the function of this ritual process. As in the archaic communities that Themis describes, white Americans prevent the collapse of order through ritual enactment. As we have seen, what is required is the daimon—the functionary who “wears the mask and absorbs the ritual” (Harrison xiv); Ellison’s essay suggests that white Americans similarly crafted a role through which the sacred ritual could operate. Here Ellison depicts American race ritual in terms not of gift-sacrifice but of sacrament, com- munal ritual action focused on the daimon. Ellison emphasizes not the performer but the role, the mask that they are required to don: “These entertainers are, as Hyman explains, professionals, who in order to enact a symbolic role basic to the underlying drama of American society assume a ritual mask” (“Change the Joke” 213). This office, filled by whoever wore the proper mask, serves as the object (not subject) of ritual action. Again echoing Harrison, Ellison underscores the point that this role, this ritual mask, is one that can be occupied by anyone: “The racial identity of the performer was unimportant, the mask was the thing” (214).

Although Ellison here does not use the term daimon, this emphasis on role, on ritual mask, indicates Harrison’s influence on this argument. Ellison indicates that as in archaic ritual practice, American sacramentalism operates by investing this ritual office with mana: “there is a black magic associated with this mask as with the idea of blackness. Uncle Ben’s image makes the rice fluffier and whiter, as it were. There’s a power in it, a subdued power” (Drafts). Black Americans are charged with emotion, “shackled to almost everything [the white folk mind] would repress from conscience and consciousness” (“Change the Joke” 214). As a result, the ritual mask of blackness accumulates collective emotion, power: “Because these things are bound up with their notion of chaos it is almost impossible for many whites to consider questions of sex, women, economic opportunity, the national identity, historic change, social justice . . . without summoning malignant images of black men into consciousness” (214).

Since, as Ellison writes, white Americans adopt an “anti-tragic approach to experience,” they avoid—at all costs—a reckoning with the country’s violent past, or its continued protection of white supremacy (“Change the Joke” 213). Yet the stability of this structure is perpetually threatened; as he explains, “Those changes which Negroes see as a belated attainment of social justice the whites view as the threat of chaos compounded” (Drafts). To guard against such changes, and to diffuse the threat they pose, white Americans are driven to consume, again and again, the charged, mana-filled mask of blackness. This, Ellison contends, explains the wild popularity of entertainment based on the “counterfeiting of the black American’s identity” (“Change the Joke” 218). White Americans eagerly consume the ritual performance regardless of the performer’s race—although it is, in some respects, even more powerful when enacted by a black body, because that further “substantiates the audience’s belief in the ‘blackness’ of things black” (215).

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“Change the Joke” should therefore, I argue, be read as more than an argument about black folklore or literature, as more than a simple rejection of Hyman’s read- ing of Invisible Man. In this essay, Ellison delineates an American sacramentalism, a ritual practice whereby consumption of “blackness” symbolically guarantees the solidity of white American identity—its capacity to enjoy freedom, its absolute difference from blackness, and its permanence. This Harrisonian focus, not on the individual black American but on the hero-function played by black Americans, represents a unique and powerful approach to the critique of white supremacy and of white consciousness. “Feinted” into print by Hyman, Ellison’s work on this now-canonical essay allowed him to fully present his position on ritual in American culture; Hyman’s lecture thus afforded Ellison the opportunity, and the incentive, to demonstrate the proper application of Themis to matters of race—to turn Hyman’s gift, as it were, on the giver.

From Ellison’s perspective, despite the heated nature of his initial reaction to the lecture, this “rather contrived debate” with Hyman was both formative and productive. After finalizing his manuscript Ellison sent Hyman a copy, commenting: “Certainly it is looser than I’d like it to be, and there are a number of things missing from it which shouldn’t be, but this kind of thing requires all of one’s time and I don’t have it to give. I hope though that it starts some discussion.” After noting that “I’d like to take another crack at it,” Ellison further indicated the generative value of their exchange: “It occurred to me yesterday that perhaps I’ve got enough scattered pieces to make the start of a small book.” He added, “if so, I’ll have you to thank for getting this thing done” (Letter to Hyman, 9 Mar. 1958).

For some critics Ellison’s engagement with the Cambridge school was a dead end; Arnold Rampersad, for example, sees their work as a distraction from Ellison’s novelistic efforts: “Burke and Hyman encouraged in Ralph a reverence for the guid- ing power of myth, symbol, and allusion. Unfortunately, that reverence was becom- ing dogmatic” (312). Yet it is clear that Ellison saw his arguments with Hyman and his studies of myth and ritual in quite a different light. If Ellison is to be believed, Hyman not only spurred him to the completion of a now-classic essay in “Change the Joke,” but his influence and instigation also led Ellison to other works of fiction and nonfiction—most directly, perhaps, given the above quote, the publication of Shadow and Act.28 I contend further that his exchanges with Hyman and his reading of Harrison led him to develop an understanding of the ritual nature of American white supremacy—complementing his widely recognized treatments of black leader- ship with a critical focus on white consciousness and culture. I also suggest that this project still has much to offer; in a contemporary moment where white supremacy remains tragically persistent, we can profit from following in Ellison’s footsteps, tracing the ritual processes in popular culture and public life that fuel and preserve whiteness—at the expense of black Americans—so that we might begin to dispel their sacramental power.

1. The verse humorously accused Catskills-dwelling cats of incestuous relationships with their mothers. Ellison’s dogs were a longstanding source of irritation for Hyman, especially when they accompanied their master on an extended visit to the feline-oriented Hyman-Jackson household (e.g., Letter to Ellison, 27 Oct. 1945). Hyman’s reply a few days later thus included a rather brief riposte: “the cats say Phooey” (Letter to Ellison, 14 Mar. 1961). 2. Hyman, Promised End 315. 3. Hyman’s explanation of the genesis of the “debate” appears in the postscript to his republished essay,

anthologized under the title “American Negro Literature and the Folk Tradition” (Promised End 295-315). 4. The newly published collection of Ellison’s letters contains the text of his original letter to Hyman.

See The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison, John F. Callahan and Marc C. Conner, eds. (New York: Random House, 2019), 486-488. Although Hyman’s reply is not preserved, Ellison’s unpublished papers also

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include a letter from William Phillips, the editor at Partisan Review, soliciting (at Hyman’s suggestion) a formal essay of “reply” (cf. Phillips). Ellison provided a similar narrative of the “debate” and its origin to his friend Albert Murray (Murray and Callahan 165-67, 183-84). 5. For similar accounts of this debate, see, for example, Sara Marzioli, “Ralph Ellison’s Exceptional

Diaspora: The View from Rome,” Atlantic Studies 9.4 (2012): 451; and Rankine 128, 132. Other scholars, agreeing that the exchange constitutes a fiery quarrel between Ellison and Hyman, fit it within a broader pattern they identify in Ellison’s body of work. On their view, the Partisan Review “debate” is simply one of several published broadsides that Ellison launched against white Jewish critics. For more on Ellison’s relationship to Jewish critics, including (but not solely) Hyman, see Emily Miller Budick, Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998), 30-33; Keith E. Byerman, Fingering the Jagged Grain: Tradition and Form in Recent Black Fiction (Athens: U of Georgia P, 2010), 275; Stanley Crouch, Considering Genius: Writings on Jazz (New York: BasicCivitas, 2006), 18; Glen Anthony Harris, The Ocean Hill-Brownsville Conflict: Intellectual Struggles between Blacks and Jews at Mid-Century (Lanham: Lexington, 2012), 79-87; Michael Kreyling, Inventing Southern Literature (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1998), 82, 86; Andrew Levy, Huck Finn’s America: Mark Twain and the Era That Shaped His Masterpiece (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015), 286-88n185; Robert G. O’Meally The Craft of Ralph Ellison (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980), 164-66; Timothy Parrish Ralph Ellison and the Genius of America (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2012), 42-84; and Eric J. Sundquist, Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2005). 6. Ellison, Letter to Stanley Hyman, 16 Aug. 1948. 7. Given the two letters’ consistency in argument and structure I have chosen, with one important

exception (discussed below), to quote solely from the later (sent) version. 8. As both versions of Ellison’s letter state, and then immediately qualify, this claim about origin,

structure, and function, his position was far more rehearsed than his phrasing might suggest. Here, I also depart from Foley’s reading of this exchange, which is geared toward supporting her evaluation of Ellison’s leftist leanings (and failings) (82-85). As this quote suggests, Ellison did not in fact dismiss the question of origins; as I argue below, he instead redefined it in terms of the intersection of race and ritual in America. 9. For example, see Joseph Fontenrose, The Ritual View of Myth (Berkeley: U of California P, 1971);

and Robert A. Segal, Theorizing about Myth (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1999). 10. See, for example, Robert Ackerman, The Myth and Ritual School: J. G. Frazer and the Cambridge

Ritualists (New York: Routledge, 1991); and William M. Calder, ed., The Cambridge Ritualists Reconsidered (Atlanta: Scholars, 1991). 11. Ellison famously recalled reading Lord Raglan’s Ritualist-inspired book The Hero in the summer of

1945 as he started work on Invisible Man (“Art of Fiction” 218), although I think we have good reason to doubt his claim. The correspondence from this time is remarkably devoid of references to it—the earliest (and only) mention of Raglan in his correspondence with Hyman is in a letter from Rome, dated June 22, 1956—and there are no references to it in the notes and notebooks for Invisible Man. Similarly, Ellison’s library includes one (undated) copy of the volume, but the book’s sparse annotations do not support Ellison’s later claims of its importance. Consequently, I believe that the story about Raglan may reflect, as Rampersad suggests, more a novelist’s constructed “myth of origins” than an accurate account of past events (194-95). For more on this point, see Bryan Crable, “ ‘Who Invents Rituals?’: Ralph Ellison Reads Lord Raglan,” Literature of the Americas 5 (2018): 27-42, Web. 12. Although Ellison incorrectly identified the text’s author, Weston’s volume is so heavily indebted

to Harrison’s views on archaic Greek ritual that, I would suggest, the confusion is understandable. See Ackerman 181-83. 13. This volume, which includes Ellison’s receipt for its purchase, is preserved in the Ralph Ellison

Collection at the Library of Congress. Although Foley, reflecting her focus on Ellison’s leftist politics, makes much of Thomson’s Marxism and his influence on Ellison (85-86), the relatively sparse notations in the volume suggest that Ellison was primarily interested in the audience of classical tragedy and the drama of initiation. By contrast, and contra Foley, I would argue that Ellison’s notations in other Ritualist texts are much more extensive, and even in the Thomson the markings do not show a focus on the differ- ence between class and preclass societies (Foley 83-85). Developing a more complete argument regarding Ellison and Thomson lies outside the scope of this essay. 14. This phrase, familiar to readers of Ellison’s nonfiction, refers to the social function of stereotypes

of black Americans in literature. Ellison’s essay “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity” thus contrasts “the writers who stereotype or ignore the Negro and other minorities”—and thereby “stereotype and distort their own humanity”—with “Mark Twain [who] knew that in his America humanity masked its face with blackness” (99). Because this essay, Ellison indicates, was begun in 1946 (but only published in 1953), it appears that the lecture Ellison delivered in 1949 was drawn at least in part from this essay.

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15. Further, echoing Hyman’s argument in “Myth, Ritual, and Nonsense,” Ellison identified Burke’s work on form as vital to understanding “what is taking place in the American movie patron’s mind” during such films (“Shadow and the Act”). For more on Ellison’s engagement with Burke’s work—and his influence on Burke—see Bryan Crable, Ralph Ellison and Kenneth Burke: At the Roots of the Racial Divide (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2012). 16. The volume is preserved in the Ralph Ellison Collection at the Library of Congress, and is inscribed

“Gift from Stanley Hyman March 17, 1950.” 17. Throughout the 1950s, Ellison accumulated works by members of the “Cambridge group,” including

two more by Harrison, two by Gilbert Murray, and a collection of A. M. Hocart’s essays. None of these is inscribed with a date, but my estimation of the 1950s is based on the publication dates, references in Ellison’s essays, and circumstantial evidence (e.g., his use of green ink). Hence, I would agree with Rankine that “Ellison’s interest in the classics indeed increased after the [1953] publication of his watershed novel” (12). 18. Ellison’s notebooks for Invisible Man contain passages directly copied out of secondary sources,

including Fergusson’s The Idea of a Theater, which focus specifically on these stages of tragedy (Ellison, Notes, 1942-1950; Fergusson 45). The notebooks even contain a draft letter to LIFE, applying Murray’s terms to Babe Ruth’s funeral (Ellison, Notes, 1942-1950). Since Ruth’s funeral was in 1948—and since Ellison had encountered Fergusson and his book in 1947, through Hyman (Letter to Hyman, 17 June 1947)—it seems clear that such secondary sources directed Ellison’s reading of Themis prior to receiving his gift from Hyman in 1950. 19. Further, this was not an isolated use of the term by Ellison in his notebooks. For more on this point,

see Foley 188. As she also shows, Ellison also invokes sparagmos to describe the character LeRoy, who was ultimately removed from the final draft of the novel (Foley 223-24; Ellison, Notes, 1942-1950). 20. Here, I suggest, is where Foley’s leftist readings lead her astray; by reading Themis as a meditation

on preclass society (85, 223, 257), she fails to recognize that a daimon is not, in our contemporary sense, a hero—and thus cannot be treated as one, which is what she regularly does (188, 257). Further, Foley recognizes Harrison’s pre-Olympian focus, but lapses into discussion of deities and gods—that is, individual figures (85, 257). In these ways, although her reading of Ellison and the Cambridge School may shed light on Ellison’s move away from leftist politics, it obscures the pretheological, preindividualistic dimensions of Harrison’s text that, I contend, facilitated Ellison’s ritual analysis of white supremacy. 21. Not only did Ellison underline this entire passage, but he also circled the word “function” in addition

to underlining it—indicating the special attention he paid to this distinction. 22. They are described as “waiting, red faces swollen as though from apoplexy as they bent forward in

their chairs” (Ellison, Invisible Man 28). 23. Note how Trueblood describes his trip to the sheriff’s office:

I tole him and he called in some more men and they made me tell it again. They wanted to hear about the gal lots of times. . . . Why, I guess there ain’t a colored man in the county who ever got to take so much of the white folkses’ time as I did. (Ellison, Invisible Man 53)

24. I would also note that Sibyl’s symbolically and sexually charged fascination with the narrator is expressed in a Harrisonian directive: “Look at me like that; just like you want to tear me apart. I love for you to look at me like that” (Ellison, Invisible Man 520). 25. For example, Ellison’s essay on the “black mask of humanity”—begun years earlier, but revised

for publication—appeared in 1953, and included an explicit focus on “vital social myths,” “the rite of superstition,” lynching as a ritualistic process, and the function of stereotypes to protect whites from “the unorganized, irrational forces of American life” (“Twentieth-Century Fiction” 96, 97; cf. 93-97). Similarly, his 1954 essay “Flamenco” ends with a reflection on “the great human joke directed against the universe, that joke which is the secret of all folklore and myth: that though we be dismembered daily we shall always rise up again” (25). 26. Ellison, Letter to Stanley Hyman, 9 Mar. 1958. 27. In a passage directed at Hyman’s invocation of African (rather than American) sources, Ellison

commented, “[a]ctually Jack-the-Rabbit is only one aspect of a dual figure, the other half being Jack-the- Bear—just as, according to Jane Harrison Gilbert Murray, Pentheus and Dionysus are one” (Drafts). Similarly, his autobiographical claiming of non-African “ancestors,” familiar from the published essay, originally listed two Ritualist-associated authors: “I knew folk tales long before I started writing, but I came to them consciously after trying to read the sources of Eliot’s The Wasteland, Jessie Weston, [J. G.] Frazer, and Joyce” (Drafts). In a near-final draft of the essay, Ellison also offered a Themis-inspired meditation on literary archetypes:

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It would seem that whatever their origin, archetypal figures get into literary [works] through a process which takes them through a phase of dismemberment which takes them from the place of origin, a phase of transformation or partial rebirth through the process of diffusion and by way of fulfilling some vital need within a specific culture, and then from its vitality within the society it finds its way into the novel. (Drafts)

28. Although further consideration of this point must await a longer treatment of these issues, I would suggest that his posthumously published second novel, Three Days Before the Shooting. . . similarly displays an indebtedness to Harrison’s Themis. I would simply note here that the entirety of Book I is presented through the perspective of a white journalist, Welborn McIntyre; I read McIntyre’s struggles against chaos, through his responses to black Americans’ unexpected actions or presence, as Ellison’s attempt to present his critique of American sacramentalism in fictional form.

Beard, Mary. The Invention of Jane Harrison. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000. Ellison, Ralph. “The Art of Fiction: An Interview.” 1955. Ellison, Collected Essays 210-26. —-. “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke.” Partisan Review 25.2 (1958): 212-22. —-. The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison. Ed. John F. Callahan. New York: Modern Library, 1995. —-. Drafts. “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke.” 1957. Ts. Ellison, REP, box I: 95, folder 9. —-. “Flamenco.” 1954. Ellison, Collected Essays 19-26. —-. Invisible Man. 1952. New York: Vintage, 1980. —-. Letter to Stanley Edgar Hyman. 17 June 1947. Ts. Hyman, SEHP, box 6, folder 30. —-. Letter to Stanley Edgar Hyman. 13 Aug. 1948. Ts. Ellison, REP, box I: 51, folder 14. —-. Letter to Stanley Edgar Hyman. 16 Aug. 1948. Ts. Hyman, SEHP, box 6, folder 30. —-. Letter to Stanley Edgar Hyman. 21 Feb. 1949. Ts. Hyman, SEHP, box 6, folder 30. —-. Letter to Stanley Edgar Hyman. 14 Apr. 1949. Ts. Hyman, SEHP, box 6, folder 30. —-. Letter to Stanley Edgar Hyman. 22 June 1956. Ts. Hyman, SEHP, box 6, folder 30. —-. Letter to Stanley Edgar Hyman. 9 Mar. 1958. Ts. Hyman, SEHP, box 6, folder 30. —-. Letter to Stanley Edgar Hyman. 10 Mar. 1961. Ts. Hyman, SEHP, box 6, folder 30. —-. Notes, 1942-1950. MS. Ellison, REP, box I: 151, folder 10. —-. Ralph Ellison Papers. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. —-. “The Shadow and the Act.” 1948. Ellison, Collected Essays 302-08. —-. “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity.” 1953. Ellison, Collected Essays 81-99. Fergusson, Francis. The Idea of a Theater: The Art of Drama in Changing Perspective. Garden City: Doubleday, 1949.

Foley, Barbara. Wrestling with the Left: The Making of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Durham: Duke UP, 2010.

Gill, Brendan. Here at The New Yorker. New York: Random House, 1975. Harrison, Jane Ellen. Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1927.

Hyman, Stanley Edgar. The Armed Vision: A Study in the Methods of Modern Literary Criticism. New York: Vintage, 1955.

—-. “The Folk Tradition.” Partisan Review 25.2 (1958): 197-211. —-. Letter to Ralph Ellison. 19 Oct. 1945. Ts. Ellison, REP, box I: 51, folder 14. —-. Letter to Ralph Ellison. 23 Aug. 1948. Ts. Ellison, REP, box I: 51, folder 14. —-. Letter to Ralph Ellison. 11 Mar. 1949. Ts. Ellison, REP, box I: 51, folder 14. —-. Letter to Ralph Ellison. 14 Mar. 1961. Ts. Ellison, REP, box I: 51, folder 14. —-. “Myth, Ritual, and Nonsense.” Kenyon Review 11.3 (1949): 455-75. —-. The Promised End: Essays and Reviews, 1942-1962. New York: World, 1963. —-. “The Ritual View of Myth and the Mythic.” Journal of American Folklore 68.270 (1955): 462-72. —-. “Some Bankrupt Treasuries.” Kenyon Review 10.3 (1948): 484-500. —-. Stanley Edgar Hyman Papers. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Kent, George E. “Ralph Ellison and Afro-American Folk and Cultural Tradition.” Ralph Ellison. Spec. issue of CLA Journal 13.3 (1970): 265-76.

Lee, Julia Sun-Joo. “Knucklebones and Knocking-Bones: The Accidental Trickster in Ellison’s Invisible Man.” African American Review 40.3 (2006): 461-73.

Murray, Albert, and John F. Callahan, eds. Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray. New York: Modern Library, 2000.

Parent, Emmanuel. “Diaspora, Essentialism, and Black Humor: Echoes of Double Consciousness in Ralph Ellison.” L’Homme 203-204 (2012/2013): n. pag. Web.

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Phillips, William. Letter to Ralph Ellison. 31 Oct. 1957. Ts. Ellison, REP, box I: 95, folder 9. Rampersad, Arnold. Ralph Ellison: A Biography. New York: Vintage, 2008. Rankine, Patrice D. Ulysses in Black: Ralph Ellison, Classicism, and African American Literature. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2006.

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Reproduced with permission of copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.