"All music gotta be folk music; I ain't never heard no horse sing a song." Louis Armstrong's reply to a critic, who expected him to draw a line between popular folk music and high jazz, could have been Ellison's. His notorious irritation with critics who explained away the "low" comedy of folk forms in order to get at the deeper anthropological, political, or poetic significance of his work, springs from a similarly preliterate and inclusive understanding of the words "folk" or "folklore." Ellison's exchange of open letters with Irving Howe and Stanley Edgar Hyman marks his disagreement with two extreme but typical misreadings of his work, one anthropological and one radical. Hyman saw universal archetypes in Ellison's folk characters; in effect, he pulled their political teeth by integrating them into an a-political Parnassus of tricksters and confidence men. For Howe, on the other hand, there was too much latent ambivalence in the tangle of race, folk, and class—typical of folklore and folk types—to please a political activist with a preference for high-brow socialist realism. To avoid this type of misinterpretation Ellison's use of folk forms should be seen in the context of his aesthetics (a mixture of modernist and folk black), which assigns a key social function to literary form.

Ellison has repeatedly acknowledged his debt to Eliot, Faulkner, Hemingway, Conrad, Joyce, and Malraux. He shares their distrust of mimetic short cuts or easy ideological solutions which would treat aesthetic form as ancillary to the referential political content. This means that he will not provide the security of a political vision or a rational orientation outside or above the forms of communication which his culture has produced in reaction to a long history of contradictions. Like his modernist masters, Ellison has tried to recreate the "webs of significance," the symbolic structures, and patterns of behavior of his specific culture. In other words, he refuses to arrange the data of black culture, which are neither inherently progressive nor reactionary, to fit a current world view or a political platform. Instead he seeks out the ambiguities and conflicts which have gone into the making of the modern and particularly Afro-American identity and its social system of communication, that is, its folklore and everyday rituals. The reader is asked to decode the seemingly uninterpreted and therefore ambivalent experience by making his own political or moral choice.

Yet, Ellison's acknowledgement of his literary exemplars should not obscure an important difference. The modernist authors, in using universal or mythological "codes," encouraged readings which stressed the universal appeal and significance of their work. Inspired by T. S. Eliot's directives on reading Joyce, an entire generation of critics joined the exodus from the "nightmare of history" into mythic universality and spatial form. Ellison, though not denying the universal substratum of his folkloristic code, would insist on its historical singularity. Black folklore, which is an ironic commentary on some of the most cherished background assumptions or "myths" of American history, refuses to be reduced to purely archetypal or universal paradigms. To wit, Oedipus and Sambo represent paradigmatic patterns of behavior and ritual which are part of a larger cultural "web of significance," but the former is truly universal whereas the latter is rooted in Afro-American history. In other words, Sambo may well have oedipal features, but Oedipus lacks the specific historical wisdom of Sambo.

For Ellison black folklore represents a sedimentation of behavior and ritual developed in labor and perfected in play, "which both Negroes and whites thoughtlessly accept" [Shadow and Act.] The adverb is significant. It points to the rigorous social determination of the forms of black folklore. Indeed Lucien Goldman's notion of a "homology" between social structure and poetic form makes more sense for folklore than for art. Ever since the Greeks freed art from its mythical shackles its grammar of forms has become quasi-autonomous and has developed its own rhythm. The evolution of poetic and social forms of communication, though interdependent, has not been congruent. We should therefore insist that folklore, myth, and art, which so often are confused in American literary criticism on the basis of formal likeness, are worlds apart in historical genesis and social function, which means that they are also different in their specific poetic significance. Contrary to art, both folklore and myth are finite provinces of communally sanctioned behavior and meaning. They are not "private" forms. However, there is a significant difference between folklore and myth. Unlike myth, which is both archaic and archetypal enough to have acquired the appearance of universality, folklore is moored in the context and dynamism of a particular social reality. If myth corresponds to langue in the system of a cultural grammar, folklore is the specific parole. By comparison art is neither as universal as myth nor as specifically social as folklore. It enjoys a far greater freedom from social or archetypal constraint; a freedom to lie or to tell the truth. The ancients called it audacia, we call it poetic licence. Though the highest praise has been given to those Western artists who have become the "antennae" or "conscience" of their race, the individual artist has always been free to ransack the arsenal of formal and thematic archetypes and transform them into private systems of aesthetic communication. In contrast, neither the form nor content of myth or folklore may be changed at the whim of a creative individual. Aristotle warned his contemporary artists not to tamper with ancient myths since they already had a paradigmatic perfection. Folklore, far less venerable but equally public, is subject to what Jakobson called "die Präventivzensur der Gemeinschaft." It is an intersubjectively controlled sedimentation of "realité vecu" (Levy-Brühl) and therefore firmly bound to the social context. Consequently it exerts strong social control, a power which it loses as it becomes "poeticized" and turns into fiction. (One is reminded of Heraclitus' complaint that Homer destroyed the power of the Olympians by turning them into fiction). A member of a folk group may not treat the oral forms or traditions of his community lightly. In art the reader is in control of his response as much as the creator is in control of production. Neither freedom exists in folklore.

Within its social organization folklore promotes solidarity and in-group cohesion by providing a set of solutions to common, not individual, problems. It creates and maintains survival strategies and provides protection for the individual as long as he remains loyal to the group. But this protection may also turn into a trap. Unless made conscious, the patterns of behavior maintained by folklore tend to reproduce the pathology of sociopsychological bondage even after the material causes of this pathology have been changed or removed. This is the conservative and sedentary force of folklore. At the same time folklore may be liberating in another aspect. While restrictive in conceptual freedom, it emancipates the senses and liberates through rituals of catharsis. There is a potentially emancipatory force in folklore, which is often lacking in our Victorian notion of high cultural response. This is its unabashed delight in innocent carnality and its ability to squeeze a large measure of freedom from the enjoyment of the here and now. Though freedom of choice and poetic license, so typical of Western art, are lacking in folklore, it enjoys a wealth of collective rituals of catharsis.

Ellison's function as a writer—his social act—is to counteract the repressive force of ritualized behavior by lifting it from thoughtlessness into consciousness, from social habit into poetic form. At the same time Ellison has tried to salvage the affirmative power of folklore, its delight in histrionics, and its supple, jazz-like style. The importance of performance and style is evident in all forms of black folklore, and Ellison freely draws on these resources of his culture. In short, the function of folklore in Ellison's fiction is neither ornamental, nor comical, nor universal. Folklore is his semiotic cultural code, a system of shared meanings and a pragmatic charter of behavior. Its forms are sedimentations of historical consciousness and deeply rooted cultural mores. Characteristic of these forms is a persistent ambivalence toward white America. They teach a strategy of affirmation and rejection which turns badness into goodness. In consequence some folk stories cherished most by the black folk for their deep truth are told as "lies."

The short story "Flying Home" (1944) which is based on one such folk lie is an excellent vehicle to illustrate Ellison's use of black folklore. A close examination of this story will show why so much praise and criticism of his work, particularly of Invisible Man (1953) which is remarkably similar, is based on an inadequate and incomplete understanding of black folk forms. The title "Flying Home" is full of irony; it alludes to black history, myth, and current politics. "Flying" is an old metaphor of freedom, popularized by spirituals and politicized by the underground railway. Richard Wright picked this symbol as a metaphor of Bigger's crude aspirations, and Jesse B. Semple playfully links NASA and freedom. Flying also recalls the hope which blacks had placed in the air force as an agency of integration, and what became of that hope. The title is identical with that of a popular tune which Lionel Hampton wrote as a tribute to a largely white air force. Archetypal borrowers have come up with a number of mythological allusions, all of which are irreverently and ironically deflated by the folktale (the lie) within the story: Todd-Icarus, the black pilot, tries to reach the light, that is, whiteness. The hubris of his aspirations causes his downfall and he returns "home" as the prodigal son. But, as the folktale underlines, his homecoming is ambivalent. He returns to the repressed history of the "previous" (folk) tradition and to that class from which he had fled for the sake of a white bourgeois mirage. The very title unites various contexts of meaning under one multilayered symbol. "Flying Home" is meaningful in the context of mythology, black folklore, black history, current politics, psychology, and jazz. Of all these contexts folklore has the last word, for it comments and reflects upon every other possible analogy in an ironical manner. For example, the high seriousness of the mythological context is lampooned and denied by the folktale. Ellison's ironic stance thus mirrors the peculiar irony of black folklore, its ambivalence between rejection and affirmation. This does not make this short story a folk story. The folk story Ellison makes use of acquired shape and meaning through generations of shared experience. It was honed by the "Präventivzensur der Gemeinschaft." Thus its structure is the product of spontaneous social interaction; in Ellison's word a "thoughtless" process. Ellison's method of artistic composition is that of the modernist poets, that is, it is highly conscious.

Though his story is manifestly simple, it has a deliberate structure, a substratum of symbolic correspondances and parallelisms. But this deliberate structure stays close to the folk experience. Ellison merely parallels and thus concentrates folk forms by finding the appropriate connection in action, incident, and character. His story is folklore in poetically condensed form. His remarkable talent lies in making the right choice from black folk forms and themes and combining them into a new coherent symbolic system.

The episode and its prehistory are short. A black pilot named Todd is stationed in a training camp in Alabama impatiently waiting for his call to active duty. Caught between the "ignorant black men" of his past and the condescending white officers of his present situation, he expects to achieve his manhood and identity by meeting the enemy. (Todd seems to have internalized the practice of transferring inner-societal conflicts to an outside enemy.) On a practice run with an airplane which is appropriately called "advanced trainer," he pulls the plane into a steep climb and loses control. Before he can correct his error by going into a dive, a buzzard hits the propeller, blurs his vision, and he panicks into an emergency landing. All this is prehistory. The story begins as Todd regains consciousness. A black sharecropper with the historically significant name of Jefferson and his son find him and try to help him up, but his foot is broken. While the son runs for help, the old man helps Todd pass the time. A conversation ensues between this old, resigned, but eminently wise sharecropper and the achievementoriented Todd, a conversation which gradually unveils the repressed identity conflicts in Todd and his mindless overassimilation to a white world which rejects him. Todd feels the danger instinctively: "It came to him suddenly that there was something sinister about the conversation, that he was flying unwilling into unsafe and uncharted regions," namely into his repressed knowledge of racial reality which had anticipated the inevitable wreck of his ambitions. Todd believes that he is one hundred years ahead of Jefferson in terms of consciousness and civil liberties ("that buzzard knocked me back a hundred years") and he rationalizes this difference as a negative definition of his identity. "Sure he's all right. Nice and kind and helpful. But he's not you."

This social advancement, which has alienated him from the spontaneous racial solidarity of his group and which feeds his subconscious anxiety and panic, forbids him to accept Jefferson's rather relentless folk wisdom. Jefferson, to be sure, is proud of Todd's achievement, but he knows its limitations better than Todd. His rather naive attempt to kill time turns into a Freudian blunder, which triggers the conflict; for the tale of the "Flying Fool" is an allegory of the hopes generated by the Emancipation and the sobering experiences of Reconstruction which uses the concrete metaphors of flight to drive its point home. Todd is doubly affected by this tale: allegorically he is a member of that group whose aspiration the tale calls "foolish," concretely he is trying to fly into a higher class. Todd does not want to be reminded of the tale's moral which Jefferson specifies as "you have to come by the white folks, too." It is the "too" implied in the story which angers him, since he would like to be taken as an individual person with unalienable rights rather than as a member of a group, a class, or a race.

Todd's rage surprises Jefferson who had not intended any harm. The unresolved tension is then interrupted by the white landowner, Graves, accompanied by two attendants from a lunatic asylum who threaten to put him into a strait jacket. Now the presumptive threat to his identity by a member of his race turns into a real threat to his life by a racist; Todd's resistance to the moral of Jefferson's story explodes into hysteria, an indication that Todd has totally lost control of himself and his ambivalent situation. At the same time the confirmation of Jeff's wisdom by Graves' act forces Todd's repressed knowledge back into his consciousness: "And then a part of him stood behind it all, watching the surprise in Graves' red face and his own hysteria." The threat to identity and life is then resolved by Jefferson who becomes his "sole salvation in an insane world of outrage and humiliation." Jefferson's subtle act of Tomism deflects Graves' aggression by humoring his prejudice. The story ends with a scene, not quite convincing in its latent optimism, which takes the ironic return of the prodigal son seriously. Against the backdrop of harmonious nature, which has always been a hackneyed cipher of human peace and solidarity, Todd is carried away by Jefferson and his son. The structural necessity of having to put a story to bed seems to have gotten the better of reality.

MYTHOLOGICAL ARCHETYPE AND AFRO-AMERICAN SIGNATURE

A. The Fall

Todd's fall from heaven is an ironic version of the fortunate fall. Like the fall of Icarus and Adam it is a fall into knowledge, hitherto repressed. Todd's hubris is his desire to be accepted as a full human being. In a manner suggestive of the choir of Greek tragedy, the oral tradition of folklore maintains and preserves the collective treasure of experiences and survival rituals. This function carries a measure of authority and power, much to Todd's irritation, for it is Jefferson, as the spokesman of this tradition, who wields this power and control. Todd cannot explain why the old man should intimidate him so much. Todd, who suffers from that amnesia which the Greeks called hamartia and which modern psychology calls repression, stumbles into the peripeteia which is caused by folk wisdom. Todd's fall on Jefferson's land permits a host of analogies: mythologically it is a fall from self-deception into knowledge; psychologically from Ego into Id; socially from the achieved status (he can fly) into the ascribed status (he is not supposed to); geographically from North into South; and in imagery from white into black ("The closer I spin toward the earth the blacker I become"). It is significant that his fall should have been caused by a stimulus out of his childhood: he spots a kite and seeks the boy (himself) at the end of the line. This "unguarded" behavior then prompts him to go into a steep climb ("in exultation" at having come so far in this world) and he crashes. The unruly behavior points to a complex chain of motifs: hubris, freedom, madness, folly, and fall.

B. Hubris

As a child, Todd's dearest wish was to own a model airplane. In his naiveté he confused model planes (appearance) with real planes (reality) and tried to grab one as it flew overhead, assuming that a white boy had lost it. When this attempt failed he experienced his first fall into knowledge. His mother, he remembers, took this as a sign of incipient insanity. Later on in the story the racist Graves will connect flying and madness: "You all know you cain't let the nigguh get up that high without his going crazy. The nigguh brain ain't built right for high altitudes. . . . " This motif is picked up by Jefferson's tale: blacks who have made it to heaven (freedom) are so inordinately foolish in their flying that they become a danger to the heavenly community and have to be put into a harness. Likewise Graves intends to save the white South from Todd's folly by putting him into a "white" strait jacket. The strait jacket motif, which suggests oppression, is dialectically connected to Todd's idea of safety and protection. For Todd his plane is his shell and character armour, without which he loses his identity. Todd does not realize that the plane is his ideological strait jacket and a much more powerful harness because its control function escapes him. However, he senses that he may be flying blind according to the compass of white norms.

C. Flying, birds, bad luck

Another chain of motifs connects flying with bad luck. Black folklore calls bad luck "buzzard luck." A buzzard causes Todd's downfall. Jefferson's son has named these birds jimcrows which is also the folk term for racial discrimination. Thus a buzzard = jimcrow = racial discrimination causes his "fortunate" fall. Indeed Jefferson says, "the white folks round here don't like to see you boys up there in the sky," and Todd, who lamely replies "no one has bothered us" gives himself the lie, for the jimcrows already got him. Jefferson tells him a folk anecdote about buzzards:

They the damnedest birds. Once I seen a hoss all stretched out like he was sick, you know. So I hollers, "Gid up from there, suh!" Just to make sho! An' doggone, son, if I don't see two ole jimcrows come flying right up outa that hoss's insides! Yessuh! The sun was shinin' on 'em and they couldn't a been no greasier if they'd been eating barbecue.

This anecdote with its hyperbolic (and typical rural-black) twist turns his stomach. It also picks up a motif mentioned in a letter by Todd's girlfriend. For her the whites' strategy of keeping these pilots in permanent training by humoring their pride is a covert form of racism: they are "beating that dead horse." Todd picks this up: "Maybe we are a bunch of buzzards feeding on a dead horse, but we can hope to be eagles, can't we?" Graves kills this hope as he completes this particular chain of motifs by saying, "I want you to take this here black eagle over to that nigguh airfield. . . . " Ellison uses universal and mythical archetypes, but undermines their harmless meaning by contrasting them with a not so harmless black reality. This ironic demythification does not entirely deny the relevance of the myth of the fall, but its truth turns into mockery when placed in the specific black context.

EXPERIENCE, ROLE, AND IDENTITY

The donnée of the story is based on a controversial incident during World War II. Marcus Klein writes:

A Negro air school had been established at Tuskegee during the war, apparently as a sop to civil libertarians. Its pilots never got out of training. The school became sufficient issue for Judge Hastie to resign from the War Department in protest over it. . . . [After Alienation: American Novels in Mid-Century, 1964]

This political event, which neatly summarizes the structure of the conflict between American promise and black reality, is also the basic theme of the folktale. The backdrop of political reality and folk wisdom is the dramatic frame of reference for the development of character and of black role behavior. Todd, who carries the burden of the black bourgeoisie, hopes to achieve his social identity by accommodating himself to white authority and expectations. Jefferson has had to carve out a strategy for survival in a racist world, which may show signs of resignation but which has not dulled his real sense of self. His accommodation, though politically conservative, remains constant play whereas Todd, who seeks political advancement, is imprisoned in his frozen role. Ellison, speaking of the grandfather in Invisible Man, called his behavior a "kind of jiujitsu of the spirit, a denial and rejection through agreement." Indeed, "jeffing" in black English is a "low level con." Todd, on the other hand, has internalized what he assumes to be a higher social role, totally oblivious of its attendant anti-black prejudices. Thus he calls Jefferson a weak clown though he instinctively feels the black farmer's power over him. Indeed, Jefferson's weakness, his conscious role playing, will be Todd's salvation.

The very opening of the story hints at Todd's problem. The sun has blinded him and he can no longer distinguish whether the faces staring at him are white or black. It is typical that his vision should be impaired, since he had measured himself for too long "in the mirror of other men's appreciation." Indeed, color constitutes his particular stigma. While his vision has gone bourgeois, his sense of touch and his hearing have retained a measure of spontaneity. He dreads the touch of whites and relaxes only as he hears the comforting black idiom. Once he is fully conscious, his spontaneous reactions are overruled by his bourgeois role which now rejects Jefferson's touch. Jefferson is a strong representative of the previous condition; therefore Todd's body "refuses to laugh" when Jefferson tells his lie. Laughter would have documented his physical solidarity with Jefferson and therefore admission of his failure. On the other hand residual echoes of his black experience constantly invite him to laugh at Jefferson's excellent performance. Jefferson stimulates in him the memory of that particular mood created by the survival strategy of the blues. The blues not only catch the oppressive and painful "details and episodes of a brutal experience" in their "plots," they also externalize and overcome them by a hyperbolic and self-ironic performance [Ellison's definition of the blues in Shadow and Act]. In order for the blues or the folktale to be successful the listener has to be willing to "ratify" its experience (tell it like it is) and to share the moment of ritual catharsis. The performer draws a stronger identity from his performance, but only when his performance is appreciated. The bourgeois Todd has repressed this particular interaction ritual, for the physical acknowledgement of Jefferson's tale would bring into question his new identity. Should he affirm the tale by laughter he would give himself the bodily lie and at the same time acknowledge Jefferson's power over him. Thus he has to reject the very instinctive force of solidarity which invites him to laugh.

Todd feels this double bind quite intensely since Jefferson is an excellent raconteur. When asked, whether he is going to tell one of those lies of folklore, he answers with the sly disclaimer: "Well I ain't so sho', on account of it took place when I was dead." This is his story in partial paraphrase: "Well I went to heaven and right away started to sproutin' me some wings." Doubtful at first whether his freedom may not be another trick of whitey, he soon starts flying with foolish abandon. Other black angels convince him of the truth of his liberation, but they also warn him that he will have to wear a special harness over his wings. "That was how come they wasn't flyin'. Oh yes, an' you had to be extra strong for a black man even, to fly with one of them harnesses. . . . " He chooses to disregard this rule of white heaven for the moment. "I was raisin' hell. Not that I meant any harm, son. But I was just feeling good. It was so good to know I was free at last." Soon his behavior comes to the attention of Saint Peter, who reprimands him. Jefferson "cons" himself out of punishment and even solicits some praise about his ability to fly ("beating that dead horse"). Saint Peter will grant him permission to fly without a harness if he will stick to the rules of white heaven. Soon Jeff forgets his promise and raises enough hell to knock off the tips of some stars and—so it is alleged—to cause a race riot in Alabama. Saint Peter says:

"Jeff, you and that speedin' is a danger to the heavenly community. If I was to let you keep on flyin', heaven wouldn't be nothin' but uproar. Jeff, you got to go!" Son, I argued and pleaded with that old white man, but it didn't do a bit of good. They rushed me straight to them pearly gates and gimme a parachute and a map of the state of Alabama. . . .

(At this point Jefferson cracks up at his own performance). He is merely permitted a few parting words: "Well, you done took my wings. And you puttin' me out. You got charge of things so's I can't do nothin' about it. But you got to admit just this: While I was up here I was the flyinest sonofabitch that ever hit heaven!"

Jefferson is so caught up in his own narrative that the political dimension of its plot escapes him, but not Todd, in whom it provokes a rather violent reaction. The ironic movement both in the story and the act of narration is quite confusing. First there is the irony inherent in the story: behind the humorous and concrete facade of this lie there is a political folk wisdom which realizes its own negative potential by calling its truth a "lie." Heaven is the symbol of freedom and getting to heaven is an old formula for emancipation or flight. This new freedom, however, continues to be controlled by whites. The black man who indulges in this freedom in a manner unacceptable to whites is put into a harness—as happened during reconstruction. The irony deepens when Jefferson repeats the negative prejudices of whites against blacks in justifying his eviction: that blacks tend to exaggerate and that, like children, they will forget rules, that they are a danger when left to their own devices and that they are to be blamed for lynchings. This negative role expectancy is picked up by the final line and turned into its opposite: "While I was up there I was the flyinest sonofabitch that ever hit heaven!" (Other versions are "While I was up here in yo place I wuz the flyinest fool you had" or "Yeah they may not let no colored folks in, but while I was there I was a flyin' fool!"). Behind this punch line there is a dialectical folk consciousness which exposes white prejudice by exaggerating it (viz., "of all those who did not follow your racist laws I was the worst, the flyinest fool"). His "villany consists in desiring his freedom." It is playfully underlined by his lack of respect for proper grammar and his creation of a new form: the superlative participle.

Todd, who rejects his instinctive urge to participate in order to be able to consciously reject the truth of his story, does not understand the implicit rejection and mockery of white behavior. He fears that Jefferson is calling him a fool. This misinterpretation creates another level of irony, that of the situation. Jefferson would like to entertain Todd. His motives are naive and honest, but he "thoughtlessly" chooses the wrong story. Todd must harbor the suspicion that behind the objective and folkloristic front of the lie there lurks the subjective and conscious jive of the narrator. He feels that Jefferson wields an enormous power over him and he is annoyed that this man should make him feel as uncomfortable as white officers do. He then screams, "go tell your tales to the white folks," oblivious that this command has fulfilled itself, for Jefferson did tell his story to Todd's whitened identity.

Ellison shows a deep respect and appreciation for a black usable past which is stored in folklore. He does not want to minimize slavery by romantically praising its cultural results, but he points out an old truth that any form of oppression will breed survival strategies which permit a transcendence of its evil effects. Although Jefferson is caught in a pattern of behavior which is, to a certain degree, thoughtless and although the political wisdom of his folktale is so much a part of his "thoughtless" behavior that its present relevance escapes him, his accommodation has not unhinged his identity. Todd, on the other hand, is alienated from his group and color and clings to a pseudo-identity which he can only maintain at the cost of blindness and self-hatred. Not being himself he cannot laugh about himself, as can Jefferson who draws pleasure from narrating painful truths. Jefferson's power lies in his ability to create catharsis out of conflict and oppression.

This human power is a dialectical result of his political weakness. Todd, who is painfully aware of Jefferson's weakness, lost this power when he moved out of the group. His "fortunate fall" results in a new solidarity between Jefferson and himself and a deeper understanding of what his real buried self may be. Thus oral culture, particularly when it meets with false consciousness, may become an agent of de-alienation.

Ellison has explored the richness of the oral tradition of black folklore. Ironically this makes him a forerunner of the very cultural nationalism whose militant fringe now rejects him as an Uncle Tom. It should satisfy his sense of irony that his work has anticipated this state of affairs.