Ralph Ellison’s Computer Memory

© 2022 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System n late October 1987, Ralph Ellison wrote a letter to his friend John Kouwenhoven with a complaint about the way black people might be blamed for the stock market crash and the hidden role that Ronald Reagan and computers played in it: “one of the worst things that could have happened to increase the panic on Wall Street was naming the day of its onset ‘Black Monday.’ Why not ‘Reagan Monday’? Or democratize it and call it ‘S. H. F. Day’? Or they could substitute ‘computer’ for ‘F,’ as in fan” (“To John Kouwenhoven” 937). Written following an unusually hot summer when his “writing reached a point that I dared not interrupt,” Ellison’s letter articulates a problem of racial representation in terms of a surprising pair of determinants: the laborsaving device of the computer and a president whose deregulatory schemes the author blamed for the Wall Street crash (“To John Kouwenhoven” 938–39). Ellison’s protracted work on his second novel had involved questions about the relationship between his fiction and its historical context. As he said in a nowfamous letter, written shortly after Brown v. Board of Education, “I could see the whole road stretched out and it got all mixed up with this book I’m trying to write and it left me twisted with joy and a sense of inadequacy. Why did I J E F F N O H