While scholars have appreciated the influence of jazz on Ralph Ellison's compositional strategies, this essay examines how Ellison's interest in the visual idiom of modernism—namely, cubism—influenced the prose style of his posthumously published novel Juneteenth. Evidenced by his friendship with Romare Bearden and his expressed fascination with the visual arts, Ellison's knowledge of cubist practice informed his textual experiments with time, space, and the narrative rendering of memory. Cubist techniques such as fragmentation and the combining of multiple perspectives offered Ellison formal methods to configure the complex consciousness of his main characters and the vexed history of race relations in America. His literary and political visions meet in the mercurial relation between fragmentation and pluralism, for in his multifaceted, nonlinear prose one sees the fraught simultaneity of past and present, memory and vision, historical violence and continued democratic aspiration.

In the posthumously published Three Days before the Shooting . . . (2010), Ralph Ellison’s protagonist spends years as a film actor and filmmaker, and cinematographic effects appear throughout the narrative. Sharply aware of what he called the “enormous myth-making potential of the film form,” Ellison sought in this second novel both to explore the artistic possibilities of film and to expose the dangers of this potent medium. This essay examines three interrelated ways that movies matter to Ellison’s literary experiments. First, it argues that Ellison’s ambivalence about the American movie industry correlates with both his technological savvy and his sociopolitical conservativism in the latter half of his writing career. Second, it shows how Ellison’s fascinations with cinematic effects shape the aesthetics and themes of his unfinished second novel. Finally, the article demonstrates how Ellison’s specific techniques in representing cinematic experience exemplify, ironically, his primary allegiance to literary narrative.

While scholars have appreciated the influence of jazz on Ralph Ellison's compositional strategies, this essay examines how Ellison's interest in the visual idiom of modernism—namely, cubism—influenced the prose style of his posthumously published novel Juneteenth. Evidenced by his friendship with Romare Bearden and his expressed fascination with the visual arts, Ellison's knowledge of cubist practice informed his textual experiments with time, space, and the narrative rendering of memory. Cubist techniques such as fragmentation and the combining of multiple perspectives offered Ellison formal methods to configure the complex consciousness of his main characters and the vexed history of race relations in America. His literary and political visions meet in the mercurial relation between fragmentation and pluralism, for in his multifaceted, nonlinear prose one sees the fraught simultaneity of past and present, memory and vision, historical violence and continued democratic aspiration.