The Rites of Identity by Eddy Beth;

Author:Eddy, Beth;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2008-04-09T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

RALPH ELLISONANDTHE VERNACULAR

PIETIES OF AMERICAN IDENTITY

[H]umiliation was when you could never be simply yourself, when you were always a part of this old black ignorant man.

Sure, he’s all right. Nice and kind and helpful. But he’s not you.

. . . With all I’ve learned I’m dependent upon this “peasant’s” sense of time and space.

—Ralph Ellison, Todd in “Flying Home”

“You start Saul, and end up Paul,” my grandfather had often said. “When you’re a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul—though you still Sauls around on the side.”

—Ralph Ellison, grandfather in Invisible Man

RALPH ELLISON WAS ONE of the most prolific beneficiaries of Kenneth Burke’s thought about the religious and ritual elements of identity construction, destruction, and transformation. The “both/and” antiessentialist thinking of Burke works itself out in Ellison’s writings as a tension between feeling both a part of and simultaneously apart from various identity groupings. Like Burke, Ellison rejects a conversion model of identity formation in favor of a confirmation model, which he takes to be more pious. Many of the same influences from Freud and Santayana found in Burke’s work show up in Ellison’s as well, as I will endeavor to show.

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