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"Some cord of kinship stronger and deeper than blood": An Interview with John F. Callahan, Editor of Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth - Interview
African American Review, Winter, 2000 by Christopher C. De Santis, John F. Callahan
De Santis: In a 1968 interview in which Mr. Ellison was asked to comment on the legitimacy of William Styron's attempt "to enter into the consciousness of a Negro revolutionary in The Confessions of Nat Turner," Ellison replied: "William Styron might fail, might have failed, but he has every bit as much right to project himself into the character of Nat Turner as I have the right to project myself into the dilemmas of Abraham Lincoln or the Jew who became Klansman, or as Leontine Price has a right to project herself into the roles of a heroine of Italian drama. This is not a racial matter; it is a matter of sensibility, of talent, and of willingness to become the other." I wonder if you might comment on--perhaps in anticipation of critics who would challenge the legitimacy of a white scholar editing the work of a black novelist--the role "racial" difference plays in the editorial process, if any.
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Callahan: Any editor of Ellison's work would need to be particularly sensitive to the complexities of his vernacular, African American and American, and, in the case of Juneteenth, his musical, biblical, and sermonic idioms. The fact is that an editor needs to be humble before the work he is editing, all the more so when the experience and the language belong centrally--centrally but not exclusively--to another group. But what excites me about Ellison's comment is its relationship to what he was trying to do in Juneteenth, especially what he was trying to do with Senator Sunraider and Bliss. At the end of Invisible Man, the narrator asks the question, "Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?" Ellison proceeds to pick up Invisible Man's challenge in Juneteenth. The latter book is a multi-layered narrative, multi-focused, multi-voiced, multi-toned. In Bliss/Sunraider, you have Ellison presenting a character "of indefinite race" from the inside out, a guy who sure as hell looks white, but talks black, or did as a boy because he was raised black. His mama is white, we know that, but we don't know about his daddy. We do know that Hickman's brother is not Bliss's father, but we don't know whether his father was white or black. Ellison's riffing on that, he's joking with that stuff. Race is profoundly cultural, it's not simply a genetic matter for Ellison. So here he crosses what we might call the narrative color line, just as he did in that early short story "A Party Down at the Square," when he told the story entirely through the voice of a white teenager from Cincinnati who comes down to Alabama to visit his uncle and witnesses a lynching.
In Juneteenth you have Ellison not content, say, as William Faulkner was content in The Sound and the Fury, to present a character from an omniscient, outside perspective. And here I want to say that the American writer Ellison is in most profound conversation with in Juneteenth, is Faulkner, no question about it. At the end of The Sound and the Fury Faulkner tries to tell Caddie Compson's story a fourth time. He says he failed when he tried to tell it through the three brothers--he's having fun with us--but he tells it a fourth time. He gives us Dilsey in rounded, third-person fashion. He doesn't do Dilsey from the inside out, as he did the three Compson brothers. Now, Ellison does Sunraider from the inside out, does Bliss from the inside out. So to get back to your question, Ellison grants Bill Styron's right to try to get inside Nat Turner. By the way, Ellison made that comment in 1968 at a time when he was already attempting to do a similar thing with Sunraider. However, he hadn't published any of that s tuff and was still revising; but as if to answer the question in fiction, a year later he published "Night-Talk," an episode with a complex interior monologue by Senator Sunraider.
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