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PARTISAN REVIEW
Independence and the Constitution. The pushcart bum tells Ellison's nar–
rator that "I asked the man why thcy getting rid of all this stuff and he
said they get in the way so cvcry oncc in a while they have
to
throw them
out
to
make place for the ncw plans. Plenty of thesc ain't ncver been used,
you know." As we know, the central battlc on the terrain of race was to
make those documcnts apply
to
everyonc, rcgardless of color. What Elli–
son is saying, howevcr, is quite complex because out therc in the streets of
Harlem that his alienated hero is bcginning to learn, with dusty pants like
Charlie Chaplin's, is a man who has a grip on the whole story. Those blue–
prints should provide the architecture of American democracy but they
have been handed over to him, which he pushes down thc street accom–
panying himself with a jaunty love song that is a blues full of surrealistic
images. He speaks
to
the narrator in street slang, in normal words, and in
chants that take the hero of the novcl back
to
his folk bcginnings. His
very being encompasses all of thc possibilitics of Ncgro culture; we rec–
ognize through the symbols cverything from its multi-layered mcanings
and its flexibilities to its willingncss to hold on to something that the
most ruthless and cynical have eithcr madc a mockery of or discarded.
Such a figure in Wright's cosmos would probably have bccn an example
of how c10sc to lunacy certain Negroes had bcen driven by racism and
how shallow bigotry had made this particular man's mind, so much so
that he actually belicved there was valuc
to
some blueprints thrown out
by white architects who had no use for them. Wright might also have
added that the only reason such a Ncgro would put any value on some
unused blue paper that hc could make neither heads nor tails of was
because white people had once considered them useful. InEil ison's view,
that would be another example of how Ncgroes took discarded things
like hog guts and ears and transformed thcm into cuisine, or scraped the
sentimentality away from popular songs and jazzed them into works of
art, so often making things work in new ways through improvisation. It
was not that Wright failed to recognize certain vital aspects of Negro
American culture but that his focus on social change and his reading of
experience through sociology limitcd the acsthetic grasp of his analysis.
The oppositional conceptions of Wright and Ellison do not date
either book beca use there is an epic scnse of Ii fc in each work and
because each is so well written. The thcmc of discovering the freedom
within the individual mind, soul, and heart while accepting and reject–
ing ideas, bcliefs, and attitudes that arrivc from ncar and from far is a
universal one. In our time, of course, the two vcrsions of the loss of
faith that Wright and Ellison give remain important, first the loss of
belief in the strategies of living undcr segrcgation in the South, then the
