To Move without Moving: An Analysis of Creativity and Commerce in Ralph Ellison's Trueblood Episode

Abstract

Ralph Ellison's critical formulations often suggest a radical dichotomy between lived experience and artistic representation. This dichotomy entails such antinomies in his critical canon as social and artistic, folklore and literature. Yet in the Trueblood episode of his novel Invisible Man literary art does not comprehensively transcend folklore. This episode, in fact, provides a metaexpressive commentary in which an agrarian folk storyteller par excellence inversively parodies Freudian and Christian myths and Anglo-American economic, philanthropic, and psychosocial practices. Trueblood emerges as a mediating blues site reconciling seemingly fixed distinctions between commercial and creative dimensions of Afro-American expression. The folk character's crafty realization reveals Ellison's Afro-American genius in brilliantly reflexive ways.