"Some cord of kinship stronger and deeper than blood": An Interview with John F. Callahan, Editor of Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth - Interview

De Santis: But Sunraider fails, and he dies. Rinehart is a survivor.

Callahan: That's right. And Hickman is a survivor. Hell, it's hard to imagine Ellison getting very far inside any character and not endowing him with a certain bit of what he called Rinehartism--fluidity, protean energy.

De Santis: In my mind, Juneteenth is unlike any other novel in the African American literary tradition in terms of its multi-layered form, narrative technique, and multiple voices. In American literature, I would think it most closely resembles the Faulkner of Absalom, Absalom!

Callahan: Yes, and in this novel Ellison converses with Faulkner more intensely than with any other writer. And remember, Faulkner wrote the saga of Yoknapatawpha County, and couldn't get it all into one book; it took him five or six. And if you think about some of the themes here and in Faulkner, there's a more obvious connection to Light in August, to Joe Christmas and Hightower. But for me, the emotional feel and kick and charge of the book evokes Absalom, Absalom!, in which the father rejects his part-black son. In Juneteenth, the son rejects the father. But in one of his reveries or riffs, Sunraider comes to talk about Hickman as "the true father, but black, black." Later he thinks, "Oh, if only I could have ... accepted you as the dark daddy of flesh and Word." But he doesn't do it, much like Faulkner's Sutpen. So Ellison turns Faulkner's father-son motif upside down and inside-out. Certainly in Chapter 15, the episode of Bliss's birth, Ellison converses with Faulkner, and he comes right up to the edge in the sense of almost recapitulating Faulkner's voice at the risk of going astray from his own. But he keeps to his own voice and absorbs Faulkner into his own distinct idiom. Certainly Faulkner's the writer he's talking to, primarily. He's talking to others, to Joyce, to Hemingway, to Wright perhaps, to the early Ellison and the Ellison of Invisible Man, but he talks to Faulkner out of the special kinship they have as American writers who see race at the heart of the riddle of American identity.

De Santis: In what ways does Juneteenth do something different from Faulkner's work?

Callahan: First, in the way Ellison brings the improvisations of jazz (and black sermons) to the narrative. Second, because Ellison gets inside the heads of both characters. He gets inside the head of a black man, Hickman, and he gets in the head of Sunraider, who's white as well as black. And Ellison is able to do that from the inside out, with both men. I think that's a stunning thing for American literature. (Ole Brer Ralph, he was out there hibernating after Invisible Man.) In Juneteenth you really are inside Bliss, in the same way that Faulkner gives us the idiot Benjy, the psychopathic Quentin, the sociopathic Jason in The Sound and the Fury, and, somewhat, Joe Christmas in Light in August. In Juneteenth chapters will move along and all of a sudden you'll get, "I Bliss," and there it is, he's the little boy. It's stream-of-consciousness--we are in his consciousness; it's not Ellison, as it is elsewhere from the outside-in, third-person omniscient point of view. In the later versions Ellison went more an d more into the third person; perhaps he was more cautious as he grew older.