“Who Invents Rituals?”: Ralph Ellison Reads Lord Raglan

Abstract

Discussions of myth and ritual in Ralph Ellison’s work typically reference the Cambridge Ritualists as a whole, but focus specific attention on Lord Raglan’s book The Hero. As scholars of Ellison and of American literature well know, for decades after its publication Ellison invoked Raglan when telling the origin story of his famous, award-winning novel, Invisible Man. Yet, I suggest that the tale of Ralph Ellison’s appropriation of the Cambridge Ritualists and their work is one that has only partially been told. Although literary critics have long accepted Ellison’s articulation of Raglan’s text to his novel’s opening, archival evidence suggests that this account of Invisible Man’s birth may be more retrospective sensemaking than historical fact. In this essay—part of a book-length project on the Ritualists’ influence on Ellison’s fiction and nonfiction—I therefore raise anew the question of Ellison’s engagement with Lord Raglan. Rather than simply adopting Ellison’s oft-repeated “myth of origin,” this essay uses archival materials to craft a more nuanced portrait of Ellison’s reading of The Hero. Through examination of Ellison’s personal copy of Raglan’s book, I trace four central arguments that Ellison appears to have gained from it—only one of which involves the familiar archetypal hero. I contend that this project allows us to more carefully illuminate the book’s importance in Ellison’s thinking on the nature of ritual—and to indicate points where he both drew and departed from it in order to stake out his position on American culture and literature.

Keywords

• ralph ellison
• african american authors
• lord raglan
• cambridge ritualists
• myth
• ritual
• race in the u.s.
• stanley edgar hyman