Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-s2hrs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-13T01:47:38.805Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

To Move without Moving: An Analysis of Creativity and Commerce in Ralph Ellison's Trueblood Episode

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Houston A. Baker Jr.
Houston A. Baker Jr.*
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Ralph Ellison's critical formulations often suggest a radical dichotomy between lived experience and artistic representation. This dichotomy entails such antinomies in his critical canon as social and artistic, folklore and literature. Yet in the Trueblood episode of his novel Invisible Man literary art does not comprehensively transcend folklore. This episode, in fact, provides a metaexpressive commentary in which an agrarian folk storyteller par excellence inversively parodies Freudian and Christian myths and Anglo-American economic, philanthropic, and psychosocial practices. Trueblood emerges as a mediating blues site reconciling seemingly fixed distinctions between commercial and creative dimensions of Afro-American expression. The folk character's crafty realization reveals Ellison's Afro-American genius in brilliantly reflexive ways.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 98 , Issue 5 , October 1983 , pp. 828 - 845
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1983

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Babcock-Abrahams, Barbara. “The Novel and the Carnival World.” Modem Language Notes 89 (1974): 911–37.Google Scholar
Babcock-Abrahams, Barbara. “Reflexivity: Definitions and Discriminations.” Semiotica 30 (1980): 1–11.Google Scholar
Babcock-Abrahams, Barbara. “‘A Tolerated Margin of Mess’: The Trickster and His Tales Reconsidered.” Journal of the Folklore Institute 11 (1974): 147–86.Google Scholar
Charters, Samuel. The Legacy of the Blues. New York: Da Capo, 1977.Google Scholar
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. 1952; rpt. New York: Vintage-Random, 1972.Google Scholar
Ellison, Ralph. Shadow and Act. New York: Signet-NAL, 1966.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things. New York: Random, 1973.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo. Trans. Strachey, James. New York: Norton, 1950.Google Scholar
Gates, Henry Louis Jr. “The ‘Blackness of Blackness’: A Critique of the Sign and the Signifying Monkey.” MLA Convention, New York. 30 Dec. 1981.Google Scholar
Geertz, Clifford. “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.” In his The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic, 1973, 412–53.Google Scholar
Jameson, Fredric. “The Symbolic Inference; or, Kenneth Burke and Ideological Analysis.” Critical Inquiry 4 (1978): 507–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kent, George. Blackness and the Adventure of Western Culture. Chicago: Third World, 1972.Google Scholar
Lamming, George. Season of Adventure. London: Allison & Busby, 1979.Google Scholar
Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue. New York: Knopf, 1981.Google Scholar
Nicholas, A. S., ed. Woke Up This Morniri: Poetry of the Blues. New York: Bantam, 1973.Google Scholar
Oakley, Giles. The Devil's Music: A History of the Blues. New York: Harvest, 1976.Google Scholar
Radin, Paul. The Trickster. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955.Google Scholar
Rodgers, Carolyn. How I Got Ovah: New and Selected Poems. New York: Doubleday, 1975.Google Scholar
Ruby, Jay. Introd. A Crack in the Mirror: Reflexive Perspectives in Anthropology. Ed. Ruby, Jay. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1982, 1–35.Google Scholar
Turner, Victor. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1967.Google Scholar
Turner, Victor. “Myth and Symbol.” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. New York: Free, 1968, vol. 10.Google Scholar
White, Hayden. “Literature and Social Action: Reflections on the Reflection Theory of Literary Art.” New Literary History 12 (1980): 363–80.Google Scholar