I didn’t know about Juneteenth until Ralph Ellison’s novel was published in 1999. I bought the book right away but didn’t read it. Maybe I was put off by having to wonder: Was it really an Ellison novel or a publisher’s concoction? As is well known, Ellison began work on his second novel shortly after the publication of Invisible Man in 1952, sweating over it without conclusion until his death in 1994. Five years after that, his literary executor John F. Callahan brought Juneteenth to press—just a portion of what Ellison had admitted was a work “very long in progress,” but (in Callahan’s view) representing from within the mass of notes and drafts “the narrative that best stands alone as a single, self-contained volume.” Later, a more inclusive selection some 1100 pages long was published under the title Three Days Before the Shooting (2010). Now everyone knows Juneteenth—the president says he made it famous—and on that day (and before and after) I was reading Juneteenth. It begins with a kind of teasing precision that could mark Ellison as a disciple of Flaubert: “Two days before the shooting a chartered planeload of Southern Negroes swooped down upon the District of Columbia and attempted to see the Senator.” Adam Sunraider, the Senator a vicious (Northern) racist, yet there seems to be some connection between him and Alonzo Hickman, the preacher leading the group trying unsuccessfully to meet him. Then, on the Senate floor, as Hickman and his followers watch, a would-be assassin shoots the Senator—who calls for none other than the black minister to sit by his bedside as he struggles to survive. The book takes a turn: In hallucinatory chapters recalling the oneiric and word-drunk fantasias of Joyce, Faulkner, or even Ellison’s great Guyanese contemporary Wilson Harris, Hickman (better known as Daddy, also known as God’s Trombone) recalls to Sunraider their secret shared history—the bigoted politician was once a boy of indeterminate race named Bliss, who Hickman raised and trained for the pulpit—which seems to resonate in elusive fragments through the dying man’s semi-consciousness: We are no longer in the realm of modernist realism but of symbolic archetypes. But then this mode too is abandoned for a kind of lyrical third-person narration that seems to try to split the difference between the first two approaches, and then to the first-person voice of the child Bliss, as the text begins to veer becoming something like a bildungsroman…and so on. Ellison never decided on how to frame his story, which means also never decided to frame it as the multi-styled heap in which we find it. And worse still, because he never arrived at that decision, Ellison was never able to find what’s most important, the novel’s rhythm, its internal sense of time, of flow. Passages of extraordinary intensity sit alongside ones that struggle to find their shape, and the transformation of Bliss into Sunraider remains off-canvas and inexplicable. And yet this unfinished symphony contains fragments of music one would not have wanted to miss hearing, “the baritone timbre and voicelike phrasing of a muted trombone which would proclaim with broadly reverent mockery the lyrics of some ancient hymn,” conveying the grotesque beauty of the spirit’s representation in the flesh, “the words rising out of the Word like Ezekiel’s wheels.”
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Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth (1999), edited by John F. Callahan, was published by Random House, New York, and is now available as a Vintage paperback.
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BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.