从《无形人》到《六月庆典》——论拉尔夫·埃利森的文学创作

国内学术界对美国著名黑人作家拉尔夫*埃利森及其作品的了解尚不全面,多以为《无形人》是他一生中创作的惟一长篇.其实,拉尔夫*埃利森一生经历了一条漫长的创作道路, 在《无形人》之前和之后,他还创作了许多作品.他耗费近四十年精力创作且在身后方得以问世的第二部长篇《六月庆典》,尤其应予重视.思考和探索黑人的身份及黑人如何争取和捍卫自己的权利,同时又能与美国社会和谐共处,是回荡在拉尔夫·埃利森的整个创作道路中的主旋律.在一定程度上,拉尔夫·埃利森的思考和探索反映了20世纪下半叶美国黑人文学主导思想的发展倾向和演变轨迹.在语言和结构艺术等方面,拉尔夫*埃利森也一直在孜孜探索实验,力求吸收当代小说和其他文学艺术领域的新技巧,在不失自我本色的同时突破自我,展现新的艺术风貌.只有完整动态地把握拉尔夫·埃利森的整个创作道路,并把它放在美国黑人文学发展的总体背景中进行观照,才能对他的文学成就和地位给予准确评价.

Ralph Ellison's Creative Writing: From The Invisible Man to Juneteenth

Scholarly articles on Ralph Ellison and his works have not been perfectly understood by the Chinese readers, as reviewers believe that Ellison published no more than one novel in his lifetime. Before and after the publication of his The Invisible Man(1952), Ralph Ellison had in fact published two collections of essays, Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986), together with some short fictions and selected letters which were later collected and published in Flying Home and Other Stories (1996) and Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray (2000). Special focus should be put on Juneteenth (1999), a mystic sage of race and identity that for more than forty years Ralph Ellison labored to complete, but only left it as a posthumous work in which Ellison made a summary of his lifelong exploration of the complex fate and beautiful absurdity of the American identity. Compared with Richard Wright, who fails aesthetically and whose writing is too ideological, Ralph Ellison wishes his creation to be judged by the readers as art, and that his vision is broad enough to represent the black experiences in America. From The Invisible Man to Juneteenth, Ellison's ardent appeal for interracial understanding mirrors, in a sense, the mainstream trend and the development trajectory of African American literature in the second half of the 20th Century. In the meanwhile, without losing his own original language imagery and rhetorical canniness, Ralph Ellison experimented on a unique blending of realistic and surrealistic styles with av ant-garde writing techniques, trying to present the reader with an entirely new panorama of vernacular intelligence and style. Only if we know how Ralph Ellison, in his writing career, brilliantly explores the perennial American problem of how to define oneself in a new, evolving and culturally pluralistic society, can we have a more accurate review and a more complete understanding of this important American writer, who tried hard in his life to free African American literature from American literary colonialism and to bring it to national and international independence.