Knucklebones and Knocking-bones The Accidental Trickster in.pdfVIP

Knucklebones and Knocking-bones: The Accidental Trickster in Ellisons Invisible Man n Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke/ published in Partisan IReview in 1958, Ralph Ellison discusses with his friend Stanley Julia Sun-Joo Lee is a Edgar Hyman the relationship between African American litera- graduate student in the ture and African American folklore. In particular, Ellison finds department of English and Hymans conception of the trickster simplistic and even misguid- American Language and ed. Tricksters, EUison argues, are not unique to African American Literature at Harvard folklore; indeed, from a proper distance all archetypes would University. She is completing appear to be tricksters and confidence men (102), whether they a dissertation on the emerge in Ellisons own Invisible Man or Homers The Odyssey. American slave narrative and Ellison is not denying the influence of Negro American foUdore the Victorian novel . in his work, but he is questioning the reductive binary on which Hyman relies, a binary that designates certain archetypes as Negro (or African) and other archetypes as American (or European). As a writer who claimed both Negro and American literary ancestry, Ellison resists such easy categoriza- tion. More troubling to him, however, is Hymans contention that the darky entertainer or African American minstrel is descended from the folkloric trickster figure. To be sure, it is overly easy to make such an argument, to see the darky enter- tainer as a skilled man of intelligence .. . parodying a subhuman grotesque (112). But such a theory of appropriation and subver- sion is, in Ellisons words, all too kind. Minstrelsy, he argues, is an act of self-humiliation and symbolic self-maiming, reduc- ing the black