“The Little Man at Chehaw Station” is Ralph Ellison’s most famous essay, and probably his best. Originally published in 1978 in The American Scholar, it became the lead essay in the Going to the Territory collection published in 1986 (all if its essays are also available in The Collected Essays.) To my mind it stands as a classic text of the American Canon, alongside the more explicitly political documents such as Madison’s “Memorial and Remonstrance,” Lincoln’s “Second Inaugural,” or FDR’s “Commonwealth Club Address (see here for the top 50 of such), and the shorter literary essays or works, such as Franklin’s “Way to Wealth,” Whitman’s “Preface to Leaves of Grass,” and Faulkner’s “The Bear.”
My friend Lucas Morel, a fine Lincoln and Ellison scholar, joined me in writing a paper about it for this year’s APSA; in this post and another, I’ll be sharing a bit of what we learned. The main thing was, “Wow! There is a lot more packed into this than we thought!”
The essay begins by introducing us to a parable about American artistry, and the figure of the Little Man, at the heart of it. The parable was the invention of Ellison’s classical music teacher at Tuskegee, Hazel Harrison, a musician impressive enough to have worked with Busoni, and to have been friends with Prokofiev, in pre-Nazi Berlin. Ellison’s initial ambition was to become a classical composer, although he already had a strong affinity for jazz, and a rapidly growing interest in American literature.
The subtitle of the essay is “The American Artist and His Audience,” and the key characteristic of the Little Man is that he is an audience member who is quite knowledgeable about the tradition the artist is working from. In presenting her parable to the young Ellison, who had just shamed himself with a poor recital performance on his trumpet, Harrison tells him,
[Y]ou must always play your best” because “in this country … [t]here’ll always be the little man whom you don’t expect, and he’ll know the music, and the tradition, and the standards of musicianship required for whatever you set out to perform!
As the essay proceeds, Ellison makes this point even more emphatic in his own voice, warning the artist that “the chances are … any American audience will conceal at least one individual whose knowledge and taste will complement, or surpass, his own.” Such individuals are typically hidden, anonymous, but they often are nonetheless there. So the artist, out of mere self-interest lest an audience turn against him, and out of his proper ambition to enrich the common democratic culture, must always aspire to the highest standards of the traditions he is working out of, and never seek to pass a fraudulent aping of those standards over an audience’s heads. I won’t spoil the fun for you, but essay concludes with a delightful anecdote about how a few years after Ellison received the Little Man lesson from Ms. Harrison, he came up against an example of his existence in reality, in one of the most unexpected places imaginable.
However, the essay is not all anecdote and parable, but in the bulk consists of several fairly abstract sections of argument, which (a) delineate the challenge America’s democratic nature poses to its artists, (b) defend the older ideal and metaphor of the melting pot from contemporary criticism, and (c) emphasize the non-exclusive character of American cultural transmission and guardianship. Ellison’s Kenneth Burke-derived understanding of the American Founding is also in there, and much else. In any case, the key to the essay would seem to be understanding all that the Little Man stands for, and his relation to the arguments presented thereafter. Such a reading, however, would ignore the presence in the essay of a second figural image.
The scene is a Sunday afternoon in the late 60s or early 70s, with Ellison and a number of other New Yorkers relaxing on the promenade along Riverside Park Drive. Suddenly, a young “light-skinned, blue-eyed, Afro-American featured” man raced up,
…in a shiny new blue Volkswagen Beetle decked out with a gleaming Rolls-Royce radiator. As the flow of strollers came to an abrupt halt, this man of parts emerged from his carriage with something of the magical cornucopian combustion by which a dozen circus clowns are exploded from an even more miniaturized automobile. Looming as tall as a professional basketball center, he unfolded himself and stretched to his full imposing height.
Clad in handsome black riding boots and fawn-colored riding breeches of English tailoring, he took the curb wielding—with an ultra-pukka-sahib haughtiness—a leather riding crop. A dashy dashiki (as bright and as many-colored as the coat that initiated poor Joseph’s troubles in biblical times) flowed from his broad shoulders down to the arrogant, military flare of his breeches top, while six feet six inches or so above his heels, a black Homburg hat, tilted at a jaunty angle, floated majestically on the crest of his huge Afro-coiffed head.
He proceeded to take photos of himself using an expensive camera with a timer, posing in all sorts of ways with the car and a “lengthy ebony cigarette holder.” All in all, a pretty clever instance of what we might call performance art, of course occurring well outside the credentialed art circles. Ellison points out that this fellow had a “complex sense of cultural identity,” one that simultaneously aligned itself with and playfully undermined the black-power fashion of the time, and had invited “all and sundry to admire and wonder in response to himself as his own sign and symbol, his own work of art.” His artistic sensibility seems akin to that of a collage artist taking bits and pieces from many traditions and fashions, so that
his essence lay, not in the somewhat comic clashing of styles, but in the mixture, the improvised form, the willful juxtaposition of modes… He [displayed] … an American compulsion to improvise on the given … [and to make a] … freewheeling assault upon traditional forms of the Western aesthetic.
In Ellison’s works, “improvisation” and “American” are generally positive terms, and here they are applied directly to the personage we are inevitably led to label, in the context of things, as the “Tall Man.” So he seems to endorse him.
Oh, that’s not the Tall Man, but the George Clinton/Funkadelic 70s stage-show character Funkenstein. Clinton’s funky music, and perhaps more importantly, his stoner, mocker, and TV-watcher aesthetic, influenced a number of hip-hop artists. For our purposes, Clinton’s music, which in its main groove was very solid, is less important than the antics he continually framed it with, if we are to see him as I think we should, a close yet less-attractive cousin to the Tall Man.
Anyhow, Morel and I felt Ellison must be inviting readers to compare the Tall Man character to the explicitly-named “Little Man.” Basically, we did two things in our paper. First, we explained why this Tall Man served as a symbol for Ellison’s overall defense of the melting pot—that is the more upfront reason he’s present in the essay, and one I’ll detail in another post. Second, we considered a basic problem: while Ellison clearly admired aspects of the Tall Man’s collage-like artistry, one had to wonder, given how he had just used the Little Man to praise the appreciation of existing fine arts traditions, just how far he did.
It is true that the Little Man’s cultivation is once-removed from that of the artist’s, as it is an appreciation of art made by another, whereas the Tall Man’s artistry is his own. But that does little to diminish our sense that the Tall Man’s is a lesser kind of cultivation, since it requires of his audience (those who see him on the street or in his photos) merely an understanding of the symbolic resonances of popular artifacts made by others: the Volkswagen, the homburg, the dashiki, etc. His artistry merely juxtaposes these. And those who “get” his message, do not do so with any cultivation beyond a basic attunement to fashion.
What we might call Tall Man artistry bears a strong resemblance to certain contemporary modes: in the visual arts, as already noted, to collage or performance art, and in the popular musical arts, to most “techno,” much hip-hop, and the briefly bally-hooed “mash-up” style, at least insofar as these are all dj/producer-centric pastiches of sampled or computer/studio-generated elements. An argument could be made that such styles are the cutting edge of a general movement of modern democratic artistry toward its inevitable future, labeled by certain critics “post-production,” “archival,” and “digimodernist.” My Carl’s Rock Songbook posts in which I analyzed Simon Reynolds’s book Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past dealt with these ideas(numbers 48-52, but especially 49). One could also go to my big disco post to see how I have some appreciation the dance-floor utility aspect of “mix-mastery”—hip-hop in particular began with and remains partly tied to the purpose of better dance parties, and with a particular community in mind. But insofar as it is the collage-like aspects of these genres that are being pushed, this does seem a development in the democratic approach to art that Ellison’s sensitive eye had advance glimpses of, and which he wanted to prod us to think about.
Let me see if I can make this more interesting for our more philosophy-tuned readers, by sketching the case for regarding “mix-masterish” Tall Man artistry as superior to traditional fine arts sorts, precisely because it is more democratic. As the democrats in Plato’s Republic say (557a-564a—compare the nearly identical things our contemporary “liberal neutrality theorists” say, at least in the presentation by William Galston in his Liberal Purposes) no one way of life is better than any other, and in a democratic situation, every individual must be free to choose any way of life they like, except one that seeks to tyrannize others. It turns out, however, that Plato is suggesting that the democratic regime actually does honor one way of life above all the others, namely, the one that most embodies change and possibility, that exhibits the most human variety within itself. Figures like the Walt Whitman of “contradictions,” or the David Bowie of “Changes,” or perhaps even the intriguingly protean Rinehart character in Ellison’s Invisible Man, are thus adopted as models of democratic character.
The same goes for art. Partisans of the democratic ideal are made uncomfortable by anyone who sticks to one set of “practices” of virtue education(557b), and by analogy, to one or only a few traditions of art that bring with them “standards.” Interpreted this way, the Tall Man does not value the homburg over the Afro or vice-versa, and the “Mixmaster” does not value, say, the U2 sample over the Tito Puente one or vice-versa: for the truly democratic artist, each element represents one aspect of who he is, and so he will never choose one to the exclusion of the other. This is far less bound and less judgmental than the connoisseurship of the Little Man. It is more democratic, free, and authentic to who we really are.
Morel and I show that Ellison would not accept such an argument. He is ready to welcome the Tall Man and his artistry as an instance of American humor, as evidence of the cultural mixing at the heart of his vision of America, and as possibly producing mixtures and juxtapositions that more serious artists could develop further. Put another way, it is not hard to prove that Ellison’s inspiration by the likes of Emerson and Whitman has more to do with their championing of new possibilities and wider audiences for fine art, than with any suggestion of developing art forms that aspire or pretend to encompass all aspects of human experience.
…the little man is a cautionary figure who challenges the artist to reach out for new heights of expressiveness. If we ignore his possible presence, violence might be done to that ideal of cultivated democratic sensibility which was the goal of the likes of Emerson and Whitman, and for which the man at Chehaw Station is a metaphor. Respect his presence and even the most avant-garde art may become an agency for raising the general level of artistic taste.
…To the extent that American literature is both an art of discovery and an artistic agency for creating a consciousness of cultural identity, it is of such crucial importance as to demand of the artist not only an eclectic resourcefulness of skill, but an act of democratic faith.
For Ellison, the correct democratic faith does not draw us outward to an embrace of everything, and downward to a common level (say, via our screens and search engines) of appreciating it, but instead should push us, as many of us as it can, upward. Into refinement, into “cultivated sensibility.” Truly democratic cultural work thus results, in an odd way, in more of the “aristocratic,” or more precisely, more of the naturally aristocratic. That is, the end result is more Americans who are like Harrison and Ellison, but also, more who are like the Little Man.
In my introductory post to Ellison, I indicated that the charge of elitism and arrogance was often leveled against him. I suppose I could have mentioned his (very Duke Ellington-like) saying that when he was a child he noticed there were two kinds of people, those who wore Sunday-morning clothes everyday, and those who wore their everyday clothes on Sunday-morning, and that he wanted to be the former. Or his speaking, in the context of discussing the novelist’s task, about the “arrogance of the artist” and of such being “very necessary.” Or in the midst of 1963 essay lamenting that so few Negroes attend the theater. Or in an interview titled “A Very Stern Discipline,” berating younger Negro writers for modelling themselves on other Negro writers rather than following the example of the best literary writers “regardless of race, class, or what have you.”
Now again, I’m not saying the issue of his purported arrogance is an illegitimate one, but it does seem that the possibility of a generous and in some way democratic motive for much of the behavior in question ought to be considered. For one, I’d guess that much of his fondness for the Little Man figure has to do with its likeness to who Ellison was himself prior to coming to Tuskegee, or at least, the sort of anonymous connoisseur he would have become had he not obtained the opportunities to explore his gifts. Ellison loves to talk about both the ingeniousness present in the rituals and folkways of various low-on-the-social-status-ladder persons, especially if they are Afro-American, and about the ways in which those from such backgrounds encountered and benefited from “higher culture.” He fondly recalls, for example, his reading his first Hemingway stories in magazines at barbershops. He writes similarly of shoeshine guys who actually go and read the books that the top businessmen they service only pretend to have read. With such examples in mind, let’s look at the Little Man once more:
…the mystifications of snobbery are of no avail against the little man’s art hunger. Having arrived at his interest in art through familiar and uncharted channels, he disdains its use either as a form of social climbing or of social exclusion. Democratically innocent of hierarchical striving, he takes his classics as he takes his tall tales or jazz—without frills. But while self-effacing, he is nevertheless given to a democratic touchiness, and is suspicious of all easy assumptions of superiority based upon appearances. …and what frets him utterly is any attitude that offends his quite human pieties by ignorance or disregard for his existence.
Democracy at its best allows you to become the anonymous and unpretentious aristocrat. Perhaps your refinement will be only autodidactic or “middlebrow,” but there’s something democratically beautiful in that. Now not everyone will want to or be capable of taking advantages of such opportunities. The Little Man is not everyman. Still, the American artist breaks faith with his democratic duty if he rules out or despairs of his existence. Yes, “frills,” “mystification,” and what we might call socio-cultural ranking are all out, but “high standards” and arts rooted in existing “traditions” must remain in. What is more, Ellison suggests that knowledge of those is what is required to move forward, to find whatever new forms of symbolic communication are best suited to the times. I’ve blogged before of his hoping that out of Duke Ellington’s music a new classical music more expressive of America’s true character would emerge, perhaps a hundred years hence. And given what’s been said above about the Tall Man, I should also mention his championship of the collage-employing visual artist Romare Bearden.
According to Ellison’s essay on him(also in Going to the Territory), Bearden turned to collage techniques not to suggest everyone’s democratic multiplicity, but to better represent the heritage American Negroes brought with them into the Northern cities. And he surely has the underlying discipline of painting’s composition. What also makes his art unlike that of the Tall Man, is that it cannot be immediately clear to any viewer what Bearden is up to—beyond careful study of the works, one needs some prior knowledge of contemporary art, and some prior reflection about the Afro-American situation and how it might be visually represented. One has to be something like a Little Man or a Ralph Ellison, and thus risk one’s “art hunger” getting one tagged as arrogant, if one is to fully connect. Admittedly, we have to note Ellison’s openness to artistic modernism in general, and especially to collage, lest we make him out to be more of a traditionalist than he was. But just as clearly, appreciation of Bearden-like art only has so much in common with a taste for “mash-ups” and other pop-culture versions of “Tall Man artistry.”
That’s the gist of what Morel and I found regarding the questions raised about artistic approach, although I’ll take full ownership of any faults in their presentation here. But let me close with the following.
Another of Ellison’s essays in Going to the Territory is “What America Would Be Like without Blacks.” The answer is we’d be poorer for sure—we would lack much of what is distinctive about our language, literature, and music, and much of what little “tragic sense” we do have. Huge topics, those, so read the essay. But in light of the topic of this post, do note that for Ellison, for myself, and for any lover of the hidden aristocratic possibilities and energies within democracy, as nightmarish a scenario is this one: “What America Would Be Like without The Little Man.”