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Oratorical Splendor: The Voice of Ralph Ellison
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10329 |
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Book World
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12 / 1986 |
3,712 Words |
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Liza Mundy
Liza Mundy is a freelance writer living in Charlottesville,
Virginia. |
GOING TO THE TERRITORY
Ralph Ellison
New York: Random House, 1986
338 pp., $19.95
Some things are worth waiting for. In 1964, twelve years after his novel Invisible Man first appeared, Ralph Ellison published a set of essays entitled Shadow and Act, which proved him to be not only a novelist but a genuine and complete man of letters, as vivid and profound an essayist as he is a fiction writer. Now, while no new work of fiction has been forthcoming, a second set of essays has finally come out. Going to the Territory is a collection of articles Ellison has written over the past twenty years or so for magazines and literary reviews, and lectures delivered at colleges and seminars around the country.
The breadth of the audience whom Ellison has endeavored to reach in his writing and speeches, and the consistent threads of concern running through them, shows that for all his various roles as novelist, lecturer, essayist, and teacher Ellison remains one thing first and foremost: a rhetorician. His is a classical art which originated with the Greek and Roman orators, and which lingers today in the preachers and lawyers of the American South--and which is, simply put, the art of swaying a crowd. It is an art that does not linger so much today among the literary folk, and this is what makes Ellison such a novelty of a twentieth-century novelist. And such an extraordinary man.
Ellison seems to be one of the few writers of intellectual fiction who remains conscious of the fact that he has an audience, and
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