Juneteenth..."the celebration of a gaudy illusion," regarding Emancipation. And Lord knows Ellison's forty-year effort to complete this novel needed adept assistance from a good editor, John F. Callahan, Ellison's literary executor. But it's no "gaudy illusion."It's a wonderful, entrapping book, full of sermons and dreams and music and history and folktale and layers of dialog and plot and theme. Just an amazing work pared down from 2000 pages of text Ellison left, along with boxes of notes. By the way, the short Notes section at the end (not meant for scholars - that's another edition) is helpful as are Callahan's final words about his method of culling and including.As with "Invisible Man," I found myself going back and forth in my reading, looking back to track and connect passages. I didn't find that hard, but necessary because it captures the rhythm of the novel. A jazz rhythm and melody.Reverend Alonzo Hickman, Pastor and Musician Extraordinaire, raises Bliss, the supposed orphan boy of light skin, to be a pastor, even closing him in a casket during revivals in order to let him be reborn. Bliss takes off thrice in order to escape and eventually become Senator Adam Sunraider, he of penultimate racism. Hickman comes to Bliss in his hospital room as Bliss lays dying of a assassin's bullet.This is Hickman's story; this is Bliss' story. It is the story of a deep-seated need to find common humanity amid all the horror "we" inflict on each other in the name of race or religion or politics.Hickman says,"Keep, keep, keep to the rhythm and you won't get weary...you won't get lost. We're handicapped! Because the Lord wants us strong. We started out with nothing but The Word - just like the others, but they've forgotten it...We learned patience and to understand Job. Of all the animals, man's the only one not born knowing almost everything he'll ever know...We learned that all blessings come mixed with sorrow and all hardships have a streak of laughter...We learn to bounce back and to disregard the prizes of fools. And we must keep on learning."See the little in order to see the big. Don't give up. It's not all a gaudy illusion.
My rule with unfinished or abandoned novels is to leave them festering lonesome on shelves as embarrassing reminders of a writer’s all-too-human faffiness—Gogol’s Dead Souls II serving as the ur-example of what happens when an author fails to follow up a masterpiece and loses his sanity and reputation in the process. Whether Ellison lost his sanity trying to complete his Untitled Second Novel is unclear—forty years trying to follow up one of the Great American Novels Invisible Man suggests a lack of coherence and confidence in his vision—but the posthumous papers on his desk attest to a Gogolian faff-up of towering proportions. The exception to my rule is when brave, passionate editors can cut-and-paste satisfying works from the mess—Michael Pietsch’s heroic work on DFW’s The Pale King being the obvious example—and John F. Callahan has whittled down the 2000+ pages into a slim and satisfying whole from various pre-published fragments and a longer excerpt to make Juneteenth. As a novel, the work is at its most powerful during Reverend Hickman’s oratorical rampages, and the POV makes use of radical shifts, from straight third-person to first-person merging with internal monologue, and the unusual dropping of speech marks during conversations to create a distance between the white senator Sunraider (raised by Hickman) and the Rev. The central storyline is the upbringing of Sunraider and his parentage, interspersed with all manner of fascinating episodes intended to form part of a MUCH larger saga on Black America in the early 20thC. The Modern Library released a longer attempt to sculpt the intended masterpiece in 2010 as Three Days Before the Shooting . . .
What do You think about Juneteenth (2000)?
How does one follow up a masterpiece? Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is, in my humble say-so, one of the greatest works of fiction ever written. Genius. Perhaps Ellison should have stopped there, but he spent decades trying to put together his second novel. When he died in 1994, this still-not-published work was found to be more than 2,000 pages long without any clear conclusion or pathway. In an effort to get something out there, editor John Callahan had Juneteenth published, although this novel is only a fraction of the total work that Ellison had written.We seek out the warm seacoasts of leisure, the quiet cool caverns of forgetfulness...Ellison could write. Words and paragraphs that seem to justify their grandness regardless of subject. The two main characters in this book are Senator Sunraider and Reverend Hickman (better known as "God's Trombone"). Sunraider is a racist baiter who gets shot at the beginning of the tale. Hickman is the African-American man who raised Sunraider from birth. How the Senator changed is supposed to be the rest of the tale, but sometimes I had a difficult time following the overall outline. The section where Hickman narrates the child's upbringing was the most absorbing part, as I couldn't turn the pages fast enough.But there never seems to be a defined ending, so I never really learned about Sunraider as an adult. I get the idea that the whole concept is supposed to be about America and betrayal, but it just became a bit jumbled. Hickman was more interesting anyway. Mind you, the editor did a smash-up job just getting it to publication, but maybe Ellison never really had a finish in mind (the entire work is now published as Three Days Before the Shooting...). An epic tale needled down to a more serviceable edition is the easiest way to describe this book.Book Season = Summer (carnivals of memory)
—GoldGato
Ellison died before he completed this novel about a child preacher who later passes for white and becomes a segregationist politician. On his death bed, said politician finds that religion and his identity cannot be held at bay - and neither can the Black community, which though he has forsaken them, have not abandoned him.This is interesting. To me the book was a departure from Ellison's other work and had notes of Baldwin and Gaines (especially Gaines' Lesson Before Dying). It was nice to read a piece of history and see Ellison's evolution. Still it was sad to know that he never completed his novel - what really is a great story - wholeheartedly an American story.
—Izetta Autumn
I was surprised to find that slavery still existed in America even after the death of so many of our young countrymen in a divisive though ultimately decisive war. The title of this work derives from the day in the middle of June a town in the state of Texas finally complied with what had become federal law & formally ended the practice of slavery. The too-long-delayed celebration of newly-freed individuals becomes a backdrop for understanding contemporary politics.The other reviewers suggest that this work is somewhat different than Ellison's other novels. I agree. Perhaps a useful comparison would be to Kafka's Castle. Each of these books are unfinished masterpieces that illustrate the workings of the author's mind as much as the political atmosphere of the day.
—Jesus
