In
another article by Richard Purcell titled “Did the Digital Age Kill the
Literary Star?” he explores the idea that Ellison’s purchase of a personal computer was a
major contributing factor to the status of‘Three Days Before the Shooting’. He refutes the
notion that Ellison was the very first author to use a word processor, citing
Len Deighton’s ‘Bomber’ in 1970 as the first novel written with the technology.
While Ellison did purchase the very first P.C. released in 1981 called the
Osborne 1 pre-installed with WordStar, Purcell asserts that many more factors
should be considered when speculating Ellison's unfinished novel.
Those reasons are better explored in his first article ‘The Enigma of Arrival’.
Could
changing from handwritten manuscripts or a typewriter to a word processing
program make a big enough difference in his writing process to cause Ellison to
fail? Purcell reports that Ellison had 489 files stored away with 423 of them
containing old scenes for Three Days Before the Shooting and some held edits
done a decade apart-- many of those edits were not significant ones. I am left
wondering if the easily saved files with endless opportunities to edit and
change the prose somehow stalled out Ellison’s creative project and left him
chasing his tale (misspelling and pun intended) in hopes of making his story
perfect. This limitless and easy editing
could lead to over-editing, lends itself to perfectionism, and ultimately could
cause a writer to become frozen in one story that would remain forever
unfinished.
Modern
writers often suggest switching to pen and paper to help cure writer’s block by
removing unnecessary distractions, and even go so far as to say it uses a
different part of our brain in order to ‘shake something loose.’ They argue
that writing on a computer gives one less time to think and that the writing
process itself becomes much more ‘sudden’. There is no way for me to know what
Ellison did in the quiet moments spent tapping away on his P.C., though I
think it’s safe to say in those days he didn’t have the same level of
distractibility as we do today with the long list of websites sucking away our
time. Nor can I say what his experience
of the two different modes of writing were or which one he found to be more
appealing. I can only stick to the facts: he produced a prodigious amount of
words (Three Days Before the Shooting is no small book, coming in at a hefty 1,101
pages) and he spent 42 years on his sequel to Invisible Man.
As a writer who
has had a pet project for more than ten years, I can speak with experience when
I say that perfectionism plays a large part with drawn-out stories. Add to that
the desire to have the story reflect the current times and I see a pitfall that
most anyone could fall into. The question remains, did the process of writing
change so drastically when using a P.C. that Ellison was unable to finish his
novel or would the result still be the same even if Ellison had ‘kept it old
school’ and stuck with pen and paper?
I agree with Purcell.
Ellison’s inability to finish his novel
is more nuanced than the purchase of a computer, however he does little to
explore this notion despite the title of his article (Did the Digital Age Kill
the Literary Star?). While this article
in particular was a review of Adam Bradley’s novel “Ralph Ellison In Progress;
From ‘Invisible Man’ to ‘Three Days before the Shooting”, the core question of
literary death by computer is left unanswered.
No. The laptop did
not kill Ellison’s novel but it didn’t help him either. The laptop enabled him
to fall into an over-editing trap simply by making it easier. The mode of
writing changed the feel of the process itself, made him compose his prose in
real time which gave him less time to think. However, these two issues on their
own do not stop a writer from completing a novel. Otherwise, we would have no
new novels to speak of in our modern times. Ellison may have simply run out of
time, for who among us can predict the day of our death? Many issues piled atop
Ellison and while he did his best, continuing to write up until weeks before
his death, he simply could not overcome them. Firstly, he missed the big moment
for his novel’s release with the Brown vs Board of Education decision in 1954 when the
United States overthrew segregation laws. His character’s reality in the story
no longer fit America’s narrative. Next, his changing style led him to go back
over his decades old work to nitpick and his perfectionism didn’t allow him to
declare it finished.
Ray Bradbury has a
short essay entitled ‘The Joys of Writing’ and in it he extols the virtues of
writing one’s passion and allowing that passion to lead the way to the end of
the story. He speaks of his process as being one that leaps onto the page with
a quickness that both delights him as an author but also allows him to finish
his work. Reading Bradbury’s take on the writing process and the way it is free
flowing speaks to the exact opposite style of Ellison who seems to deliberate and
put much emphasis on the deeper meaning of his stories. Perhaps on top of all
the other factors keeping Ellison from finishing, he had lost the joy and the
spark of excitement that would carry him through to the end of his novel.
Whatever Ellison’s
reasons might have been for leaving Three Days Before the Shooting unfinished,
there is no doubt that what he did accomplish has lasting impact on our culture
today. From Obama to addressing racism in its more insidious form in which it
strips individuality away and makes a man invisible, Ellison is a leading voice
and points toward what American can and should be.
Works Cited
Bradbury, Ray. Zen in the Art of Writing. New
York, NY: Bantam Book, 1992.
Bradley, Adam. Ralph Ellison in Progress: From Invisible
Man to Three Days before the Shooting. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2010.
(viii, 244 pp.).
Purcell, Richard. "Did the Digital Age Kill the
Literary Star?" Boundary 2: An International Journal of Literature and
Culture (2017 May): 241-256.
—. "The Enigma of Arrival, or, When Should We
Have Read Ralph Ellison's Three Days Before the Shooting?" Boundary 2:
An International Journal of Literature and Culture (BoundaryII) (2012
Fall: 39): 169-189.
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