(Courtesy of Random House)

Man [sic] at his [sic] best, when he’s [sic] set in all the muck and confusion of life and continues to struggle for his [sic] ideals, is near sublime …

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

In response to the September 11 attacks, the figure of the hero has returned to all reaches of the political and intellectual spectrum. First canonized in the images of firefighters and New York cops, the post-9/11 hero has found its way into every varied aspect of the war on terror and even its opposition.

The conservative celebration of war heroes detailed in books like Senator John McCain’s Why Courage Matters: The Way to a Braver Life are mirrored in the volumes produced by leftist intellectuals and cultural critics. While heroism is a theme expected from former prisoner of war McCain, the left reclamation of heroic violence is more notable. Neo-Lacanians, such as Alenka Zupancic, and most commonly in non-academic circles, Slavoj Zizek, have entered the recent debate over ethics with a zeal for violent sacrifice that has been dismissed by many American leftists for being outdated and counterproductive because of its Leninist references.

Outdated or not, this rebellious work has found its way into everything from the Abercrombie & Fitch Fall Catalog to the publication Foreign Policy. Despite antagonism toward this scholarship as Leninist, Zupancic and Zizek are much more Kantian.

The fusion of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and German Idealist Immanuel Kant has developed into an ethical system that could only be called pathological deontology. In Zizek’s 9/11 treatise Welcome to the Desert of The Real, what he finds most admirable in the individuals that flew their planes into the Twin Towers was the undeniable courage to die for a cause (even if, as Zizek explicitly emphasizes, the cause was detestable).

In subsequent work on the subject, Zizek has described what he calls the ethical ‘Act’ as those choices that put the individual at significant risk, what he borrows from Sigmund Freud as being ‘beyond the reality principle,’ or quite literally suicidal. Drawing almost exclusively from pop culture, a stylistic choice that has made him infamous and highly sought after, Zizek isolates films like David Fincher’s Fight Club and other films that contain characters willing to mutilate themselves or even murder those that they love in the name of some ‘Thing’ that is ethical.

What Zizek and others drawing from psychoanalysis are not able to do is define or even hint at what this ethical ‘Thing’ is. A sort of tautology develops where by what is ethical is what you are willing to die for and what you are willing to die for is ethical.

This theoretical circularity not withstanding, it is easy to imagine the thrill of this kind of ethical action being romanticized and redeployed for nefarious purposes. Is not the Halliburton contractor who is so ‘committed’ to the American way of commerce and economic development that he is willing to risk his life rebuilding Iraq; no cost to themselves or others is too high — the very same ethical commitment ‘beyond the reality principle’ that Zizek and others champion?  

These rhetorical tactics have continuously circulated between the White House and those ‘private’ individuals involved in Iraqi reconstruction, calling into question how radical this system of ethics could possibly be. Even former counterterrorism advisor Richard Clarke is enamored with bravery, mentioning in his tell-all book Against All Enemies that he disagreed with Bush’s choice to use the term ‘coward’ to describe the 9/11 bombers during his first September 11 address from Barksdale Air Force base.

Traditionally leftist public intellectual Christopher Hitchens has also championed the war in Iraq as an opportunity for those committed to democracy and universal human rights to test the mettle of their convictions. According to Hitchens’ book, The Long Short War, any criticism of the war that does not support regime change and intervention is ethically indefensible.

What animates both sides of the aisle — intellectually, politically, or otherwise — is nostalgia for sacrifice that, well, ‘kicks ass.’ Predictably and not without reason, Noam Chomsky and other leftists committed to non-violence have pointed out how counterproductive any U.S.-led intervention is likely to be, and in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, has been so far. The imperialistic interests served by Bush’s use of metonymy when invoking ‘us as hero’ and ‘them as coward’ has not gone unnoticed.

As Arundhati Roy writes concerning the war in Iraq in her essay “Confronting Empire,” “Our strategy should be not only to confront empire but to lay siege to it.” For Roy and others, 9/11 and the Iraqi war represent a turning point for the left that must now reorient itself towards a complete overthrow of U.S.-led globalization.

What has developed from all of these disparate attempts to conjure an heroic ethical response is both a deadlock and a remarkable amount of agreement. Everyone seems to agree that there is a fight to be had, and violent or non-violent, it is definitely oppositional; the only question is whether to reinvigorate individuals to put it all on the line for democracy, anti-globalization, or American security in all of its forms — national security, economic security, food security, and even sexual security. In a more reflective response to the current fervor, philosopher Judith Butler asks in the preface to her new book The Precarious Life “… whether the experience of vulnerability and loss have to lead straight away to military violence and retribution … [and] what, politically, might be made of grief besides the call for war[?]”

Ralph Ellison (Courtesy of Random House)

Juneteenth as a moment for pause

The preacher’s job, his main job, Bliss, is to help folks find themselves and to keep reminding them to remember who they are. So you see, those pictures can go against our purposes. If they look at those shows too often they’ll get all mixed up with so many of those shadows that they’ll lose their way. They won’t know who they are is what I mean.

In a response to this sobering question, Ellison offers a radical democratic ethics that requires a different sense of heroism in Juneteenth. His is an ethics that emerges from a Christian tradition of forgiveness that does not start from the same necessity for retributive justice prefigured in forms of heroism emerging after 9/11. To my knowledge, forgiveness is not an option that any of the talking heads, left or right, have openly considered. There is a reason for this.

In The Precarious Life, Butler describes in detail the rigor with which public debate over 9/11 has been regulated through the personalized attack of anyone willing to “consider the grounds and causes of the current conflict.” But, even Butler’s much needed, as she says, return to Aeschylus as a model to refuse revenge and instead “take stock of how the world has become formed” is not willing to go the next step and consider forgiveness in the place of justice. Despite the serious questions she asks, there is still a disclaimer at the beginning of The Precarious Life, clarifying that “one can — and ought to — abhor the attacks on ethical grounds (and enumerate those grounds).”

Without dismissing the ‘right’ to condemn the events of September 11, 2001, or the importance of debating military intervention, to take seriously Juneteenth is to ask what is truly taboo: Should we forgive those whom have so gravely injured us, and should that forgiveness come at the expense of safety and our desire for justice? It is this question which Ellison explores through the character of A.Z. Hickman and his relationship to his lost son, Bliss.

Juneteenth is a novel about things that can only be forgotten for so long. The return of a repressed history is both the site for the novel’s most important conflict, an internal battle for identity and security, and its most important relationship, an adopted child and a ‘least likely’ father’s attempt to bridge the racial gap. The characters of Juneteenth are caught between the apparent freedom of American individualism as described in the reoccurring quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson and the ‘servitude’ of history described by T.S. Elliot at the beginning of the novel.

Taking its name from the commemoration of emancipation that is celebrated throughout black communities, Ellison’s work-in-progress novel charts an untimely critique of the current democratic order and the paucity of political options that Ellison did not live to experience but in may ways foresaw.  

The story of Juneteenth begins in the office of Sunraider, a race-baiting senator from an unnamed Northeastern state. A congregation of black Southern Baptists led by preacher A.Z. Hickman has made a trip to Washington, D.C., to speak to one of the most controversial men there. Mistaken as a group of protesters, the delegation is escorted out of the building. We come to find that the congregation is actually the surrogate family of Sunraider, who was once known by those who loved him as Bliss. Rebuked by Sunraider’s receptionist, the group goes to watch the senator deliver one of his infamous speeches. Before Hickman is able to make contact with his estranged son to warn him of a plot on his life, another man opens fire on the Senate floor.

The majority of the novel takes place in a series of flashbacks and bedside conversations between Hickman and Sunraider/Bliss at a hospital in the immediate aftermath of the gunshots. Mortally wounded, the senator is led by Hickman to confront his past, who he is, and who he has become.

As Ellison’s stream of consciousness style unfolds, we find three distinct chronological periods in the senator’s life: A distinctly black childhood spent as a preacher, an interim period of questions and running spent mostly as a conman filmmaker, and the internal investigations of his identity on his deathbed. In all three of the periods, Ellison returns to Hickman’s struggle to understand Bliss’s decision to leave the black community and Bliss’s own struggle to find peace in the fleeting moments of his life.

One of the earliest sources of conflict for Hickman and Bliss is the arrival of the moving picture to a small town they are preaching in. The initial teaser for this new magical process comes from Bliss’s friend and provocateur, aptly named Body. Body, who overhears a conversation between three white men about a box that can show moving pictures in the dark, comes to represent Bliss’s flesh, his earthly desires. In fact, even when Body attempts to turn their discussions toward other topics, Bliss brings the conversation back to the subject of this strange new technology. Driven to learn more and more about this device, Bliss begins to pester Hickman to take him to see the pictures.

Giving into Bliss’s persistence, Hickman ultimately takes him to the picture show. But as the reverend emphasizes, the purpose of their trip is not pure enjoyment; it is also an important educational experience. In a rendition of Jesus’s proclamation in Acts 17 about living in — but not of — the world, Hickman describes the importance of knowing temptation in order to empathize with the sinner. Ellison uses the film’s distant world of shadows and spectacle as a metaphor for the socio-political. Both in the spectacular political shows that Bliss’s alter-ego Senator Sunraider puts on to rally white racism and in Bliss’s personal loss of identity, the movies are a vehicle for Ellison to explore the alienation that so many feel towards their own self-image. What is at stake in Ellison’s critique of politics is the centrality of manipulation.

For Bliss, the first picture show becomes a traumatic reminder of his lost mother. Attempting to reground the young Bliss, Hickman reminds him, “They’re only shadows … They’re fun if you keep that in mind. They’re only dangerous if you believe in them …” Despite Hickman’s early warnings regarding the movie house and this second attempt to deny the power of the ‘shadows,’ Bliss becomes transfixed by the moving image. Hickman’s description of the film as only shadows speaks to Ellison’s difficult relationship to politics. In Hickman’s attempt to reflect upon the place Washington, D.C., the reader finds a tremendous disdain for the compromise inherent in political power. For Ellison, the safety of social power — whiteness — always comes at the sacrifice of the courageous fight for ‘Truth.’

This conflict plays out in Hickman’s reluctant, yet deep and abiding, faith in the memory of President Abraham Lincoln. Despite all of his failures and inconsistencies, Lincoln represents the true vision of democracy. Lincoln made the difficult decision to emancipate the slaves not because he had the moral purity or interest do so, but because it was right.

This romantic democratic vision occurs throughout Ellison’s work. In his essay entitled “What America Would Be Like Without Blacks,” Ellison describes that it is the ability to demand what is right in the face of civil war and insecurity that gives democracy its meaning. Ellison writes that what is lost in equating democracy with stability and security is “the need for that tragic knowledge which we try ceaselessly to evade: that the true subject of democracy is not material well being … Without the [pressure] of the Black American, something irrepressibly hopeful and creative would go out of the American spirit, and the nation might well succumb to the moral slobbism that has ever threatened its existence from within.”

It is in this view of democracy that the current political order in all of its exclusion — whether it be the detainees at Guantanamo or the contract on Baghdad — becomes the true threat to freedom. The choice to become part of this system of compromise is the ethical significance of Bliss’s turn to whiteness and politics.

As the narrative unfolds, we learn that Bliss ran away repeatedly to hide in movie theaters until his final disappearance and reappearance in the grand theatre — Washington, D.C. In the theatrical performance of race-baiting, Bliss believes he has found the sense of belonging that drew him to the movies. Bliss explains in a fevered conflation of his theater experience and his turn to whiteness that both were a search for security in the safety of being powerful. What is at stake for Bliss is a feeling of belonging. The love of the African American community is not enough because to accept his blackness would require a life that he could not control. Here we find Bliss’s moral decline as a warning for what America can expect at the end of security and justice at all costs.

Through Hickman’s prodding and guided remembering, Bliss comes to realize that what he found in the safety of white authority was as illusory as the moving image:

So I said: What is the meaning of this arrangement of time, place and circumstance that flames and dampens murder in my heart? And what is this desire to identify with others, this need to extend myself and test my farfetched possibilities with only the agency of shadows? Merely shadows. All shadowy they promised me my mother and denied me solid life.

The knowledge that he made the wrong choice grips Bliss towards the end of the guided journey through his past, but it is not enough to redeem him. Instead, it drives Bliss further into delirium. Confronted by so much failure and deceit, he calls out in a crazed declaration (potentially internal monologue): “If I had only known that what I came to know about the shape of horror and the smell of pride — I say, HOW THE HELL DO YOU GET LOVE INTO POLITICS OR COMPASSION INTO HISTORY?”

The fall of Bliss appears to be a double failure. A failure of Hickman to produce the white insider who can lead on behalf of black interests and Bliss’s failure of character to accept the love and humanity Hickman bequeathed to him. However, Ellison discourages this reading of Bliss through Hickman’s perseverance regarding Bliss’s spiritual fate. In these bleak moments, Hickman reiterates the role of the preacher to try to help in any way and bring understanding because, as Hickman says, “what else is there?” What seems like resignation on the part of Hickman becomes the context for Ellison to describe what is truly sublime about Emerson’s doomed struggle through the muck.

Sacrifice and the unlikely heroics of forgiveness

A man [sic] has to live in order to have a reason for dying as well as have a reason to be reborn — because if you don’t you’re already dead anyway.

It is in the fading and seemingly last moments of Bliss’s life that Ellison is able to develop the complexity of his ethical position as it relates to how to live in American democracy. Although Ellison describes in his notes that “the mind becomes the real scene for action,” the more overtly political import cannot be discounted. As signified by Bliss’s quickly declining health, the question of the ‘Truth’ is urgent for Ellison. From the moment Bliss is shot in the beginning of the novel, the search for the ‘truth of what happened’ is described as having an immediacy that exceeds the eminent biological threats to Bliss’s fate. As Ellison’s notes in the appendix to the novel indicate, Bliss’s black experience comes to represent the “embodiment of American democratic promises” as a last chance to confront the traumatic history that runs just below the “shaky foundation” of the nation.

In Bliss, Ellison explores the universal potential of the black experience, and more importantly, the already shared experience of black suffering. The discussion of Bliss’s ‘racial origin’ unfolds in an unexpected way regarding his connection to blackness. In the first confrontation over Bliss’s origin, the assumption is that Bliss must be half black since, as one of the Church sisters puts it, “Half the devilment in this country caint be located on account of it’s somewhere in between black and white and covered up with bedclothes in the dark.” Initially, it seems it is Bliss’s blood that connects him to both worlds, but Ellison’s democratic vision is much more radical than that. Bliss’s miscegenated past is not at the level of biology (we discover later his identity has no truth in that it is completely unknown), but at the level of experience.  

Hickman rediscovers the senator’s blackness in his ‘look,’ something from Bliss’s younger days that still shows through. This epiphany of recognition comes to Hickman when he sees Bliss’s anguish as he tries to remember his past:

Now I understand: That look, that’s us! It’s not in the features but in what that look, those eyes, have to say about what it means to be a man who tries to live and struggle against all troubles of the world with but the naked heart and mind, and who finds them more necessary than all the power of wealth and great armies. Yes, that look and what put it there made him one of us.

Distinct from most other accounts of race is the potential for sacrifice to transform one’s social, even racial, designation. For Ellison, as represented in Hickman’s personal exploration, the political potential of the black experience is not the possibility of justice but the potential of forgiveness. Ellison uses the endgame between Hickman and Bliss to elucidate the heroic potential of living in this state of sacrifice and marginality.

Ellison’s equation of truth and heroism sound remarkably similar, at least in form, to the Bush administration’s justifications for war. After all, what is the war on terrorism if not the rally of the U.S. populace behind the rhetoric to sacrifice our lives in the name of worldwide democracy? But what is markedly different here is the ethos of that commitment, what Ellison calls an ‘understated heroism.’ Rather than the triumphalist tenor of current U.S. military actions, Ellison’s hero, Hickman, carries the burden of a tragic fate. Through Hickman’s attempt to make ‘Truth’ out of Bliss’s demise, Ellison defines ethical individuals as those “who have had the power to stay awake and struggle.” However, unlike the U.S. drive to victory, Hickman’s struggle defines the value of living in terms of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘muck and confusion.’ Hickman gives up on certainty and redemption in favor of sacrifice and forgiveness.  

The most trying decision for Hickman is the moment he is first confronted by Bliss as a baby. The reader discovers at the end of the novel that Bliss was an offering on behalf of a white woman who wrongly accused Hickman’s brother of rape to explain her extramarital pregnancy. Hickman is filled with hate and revenge on behalf of his brother’s wrongful death and wants to kill both the mother and the unborn child, but something exceeds his desire for revenge. It is the moment when Hickman experiences something ‘more than himself’ that he vows both to raise Bliss in love and devote his life uncompromisingly to forgiveness. Given the cycle of revenge that drives the current conflicts throughout the globe, Ellison’s concept of the hero offers a very inviting — and at the same time humbling — critique of both left and right politics.

Butler makes a similar move in her development of an ethics that is in response to the call of the ‘Other.’ Relying heavily on the work of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, Butler attempts to find her ethical horizon in a commitment to those who have been written out of the Iraqi conflict and other violent actions at home and abroad — in her words, those at the “limits of what we can know.” But to what end? It is in her goals that Butler can be distinguished from Ellison. Butler dedicates her book to “an attempt to break the cycle of violence and revenge” while Ellison simply finds freedom in the sacrifice of justice and security that comes with forgiveness.

What should be clear is that Ellison qua Hickman makes no promises about the success that such a struggle for the truth of compassion will produce. Instead, he redefines the value structure for success, returning to the notion of love that motivates the acceptance of Bliss. Ellison elevates the pursuit of truth beyond the continuation of life:

That kind of man [sic] loves the truth even more than he loves his life, or his wife, or his children, because he’s been designated and set aside to the hard tasks that have to be done. That kind of man will do what he sees as justice even if the earth yawns and swallows him down, and even then his deeds will survive and persist in the land forever.

Thus the ethical force of Hickman’s character is his ability to turn against revenge to the point that it destroys everything he holds dear, even allowing his son to turn against the people he loved and still returning to save him with his forgiveness. It is in this impossible pursuit that Ellison defines freedom. In the selected notes to the Vintage edition of Juneteenth Ellison writes, “This society is not likely to become free of racism, thus it is necessary for Negroes to free themselves by becoming their idea of what a free people should be.”

In this commitment beyond life itself, Ellison would seem to swing toward the ‘pathological deontology’ of Zizek and others who call for sacrifice in the name of ethics. I would not argue that Zizek’s film examples or his historical examples of Jewish uprisings are devoid of ethical content, but they are quite different, at least in Zizek’s representation of these events, from the sacrificial act of forgiveness. The ‘understated’ view of Ellison’s hero militates against the leftists that are spoiling for a fight. Sacrifice in the character of Hickman is not grand or dramatic; it is grounded in humility.

In this way, Ellison’s ethics dissolve the opposition assumed by the spectrum of leftist strategies discussed earlier. Unlike the oppositional strategies of Zizek and others on both the left and the right, Ellison uses Hickman’s intimacy with Bliss to demonstrate the degree to which, in a sense, we are all invited to be ‘Negroes.’ Hickman reminds Bliss and the reader that what was offered was the option to turn against the manipulative institutions of white authority. Bliss literally had the opportunity to be black despite his obviously white appearance. This transformation was made possible because of Hickman’s decision to forgive Bliss and Bliss’s mother.  

It is hard not to see this as a broader invitation to all that read Juneteenth. What Ellison gives up in this formulation is any exclusive right to be black. It is, in a sense, the ultimate act of forgiveness and sacrifice: Those that have injured, white society, are invited to ‘live as if they were free.’ The possibility of justice or retribution is short-circuited by Ellison’s act of forgiveness because it is a form of forgiveness without expectation. Like the Christian tradition that informs Ellison’s ethics, it is an undeserved forgiveness.  

It would be easy to dismiss Ellison’s generosity on the grounds that it lets ‘the injurers’ off the hook. It is difficult to imagine that anyone would not accept Ellison’s forgiveness; it seems so easy. But an opportunity like this comes at a cost; living free requires the sacrifice of power and privilege, trading in safety for a meaningful life. Such a call becomes a new Juneteenth celebration.

The political ethos that comes from this appeal to a universal human trauma, or at least the ability to share that experience, harkens back to the closing words of Ellison’s first novel, Invisible Man. Again, it seems Ellison pins his art, his raison de etre, to the ability ‘on some lower frequency to speak for you.’ Again, this is not a simple solution; in spite of Ellison’s recurrent universalism, we are still left with a question regarding Bliss’s fate: Is it too late? Has Ellison’s provocation, like Hickman, arrived to find a deaf audience that cannot or will not be warned?

Even the state of Bliss’s soul, so to speak, is unclear; the closing moments of the book tell of a ghastly machine that continues to run despite its bastard, irreconcilable parts and a fading, paralyzed Bliss unable to reach out for Hickman’s fading voice. I would like to believe that Hickman’s fidelity to being a preacher ‘remind[ed]’ Bliss to ‘remember’ who he was. But leaving this question open embodies freedom as Ellison defines it; the incompleteness of history serves also as the point of ethical departure; in this tension lies a vision of democracy in stark contrast to the legalism and fear that define the will for revenge at the heart of the current political landscape.

It is difficult to imagine people taking the idea of forgiveness seriously in the context of 9/11 and the resulting obsession with national security, but at the same time, it is difficult to imagine the destruction that is continuing to occur if we were willing to commit ourselves to forgiveness above and beyond our own safety and security. A society without violence is as unlikely as a society without racism, but inevitability seems like a poor reason to not live like we are free. At the very least, it is a reason to seriously consider what Ellison’s work can contribute to the current search for new democratic strategies in an increasingly hostile nation.

Jairus