Going to the Territory Book

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.