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An “Artful Juxtaposition on the Page”: Memory, Perception, and Cubist Technique in Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Elizabeth Yukins
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Abstract

While scholars have appreciated the influence of jazz on Ralph Ellison's compositional strategies, this essay examines how Ellison's interest in the visual idiom of modernism—namely, cubism—influenced the prose style of his posthumously published novel Juneteenth. Evidenced by his friendship with Romare Bearden and his expressed fascination with the visual arts, Ellison's knowledge of cubist practice informed his textual experiments with time, space, and the narrative rendering of memory. Cubist techniques such as fragmentation and the combining of multiple perspectives offered Ellison formal methods to configure the complex consciousness of his main characters and the vexed history of race relations in America. His literary and political visions meet in the mercurial relation between fragmentation and pluralism, for in his multifaceted, nonlinear prose one sees the fraught simultaneity of past and present, memory and vision, historical violence and continued democratic aspiration.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 119 , Issue 5 , October 2004 , pp. 1247 - 1263
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2004

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