GOING TO THE TERRITORY
Ralph Ellison
New York: Random House, 1986
338 pp., $19.95
Some things are worth waiting for. In 1964, twelve years after his novel Invisible Man first appeared, Ralph Ellison published a set of essays entitled Shadow and Act, which proved him to be not only a novelist but a genuine and complete man of letters, as vivid and profound an essayist as he is a fiction writer. Now, while no new work of fiction has been forthcoming, a second set of essays has finally come out. Going to the Territory is a collection of articles Ellison has written over the past twenty years or so for magazines and literary reviews, and lectures delivered at colleges and seminars around the country.
The breadth of the audience whom Ellison has endeavored to reach in his writing and speeches, and the consistent threads of concern running through them, shows that for all his various roles as novelist, lecturer, essayist, and teacher Ellison remains one thing first and foremost: a rhetorician. His is a classical art which originated with the Greek and Roman orators, and which lingers today in the preachers and lawyers of the American South--and which is, simply put, the art of swaying a crowd. It is an art that does not linger so much today among the literary folk, and this is what makes Ellison such a novelty of a twentieth-century novelist. And such an extraordinary man.
Ellison seems to be one of the few writers of intellectual fiction who remains conscious of the fact that he has an audience, and whose work is more than simply talking to himself and/or to a small coterie of sympathetic intellectuals. He is one of the few writers who clings to the currently out-of-style notion that fiction can have an impact on people, and on how they conceive themselves and their world; that books are "socially useful acts" that have played, and continue to play an important role in the development of our society; that literature can broaden the mind, overcome narrow-minded thinking, and serve as a means of "transcending the divisions of our society." Remember the old concept of a liberal arts education?
It is not surprising, keeping in mind Ellison's polemical bent, that many of these pieces were originally lectures. The title piece, "Going to the Territory," was delivered at a Ralph Ellison Festiva1 held by Brown University in 1979.This is in itself a bit of delightful irony, for in Shadow and Act there is the transcript of an interview in which Ellison rather self-deprecatingly predicted that Invisible Man, which was published in 1952 and had, at the time of the interview, been out about three years, would not last another twenty. He said that it was "not an important novel"; that he had "failed of eloquence." And of course he proved quite wrong, for a mainstay of the Brown festival was discussion of Invisible Man, and Ellison says in "Going to the Territory" that he was delighted so many of the students seemed to get the message and meaning of the book. Clearly Ellison's eloquence has stood him in good stead over the years, and his novel of 1952 has made it safely into the canon of twentieth-century literature.
The Territory
The essay draws its name from an old song sung by Bessie Smith,
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