Ralph Ellison and the Raft of Hope

A Political Companion to Invisible Man

Lucas E. Morel

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780813123127
• eBook ISBN: 9780813182643
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

An important new collection of original essays that examine how Ellison's landmark novel, Invisible Man (1952), addresses the social, cultural, political, economic, and racial contradictions of America. Commenting on the significance of Mark Twain's writings, Ralph Ellison wrote that "a novel could be fashioned as a raft of hope, perception and entertainment that might help keep us afloat as we tried to negotiate the snags and whirlpools that mark our nation's vacillating course toward and away from the democratic ideal." Ellison believed it was the contradiction between America's "noble ideals and the actualities of our conduct" that inspired the most profound literature—"the American novel at its best."

Drawing from the fields of literature, politics, law, and history, the contributors make visible the political and ethical terms of Invisible Man, while also illuminating Ellison's understanding of democracy and art. Ellison hoped that his novel, by providing a tragicomic look at American ideals and mores, would make better citizens of his readers. The contributors also explain Ellison's distinctive views on the political tasks and responsibilities of the novelist, an especially relevant topic as contemporary writers continue to confront the American incongruity between democratic faith and practice. Ralph Ellison and the Raft of Hope uniquely demonstrates why Invisible Man stands as a premier literary meditation on American democracy.

Chapter 1

Affirming the Principle

JAMES SEATON

A half century after the publication of Invisible Man there is very little controversy over its standing as one of the great literary works of the twentieth century, but the debate over the political implications of the novel and about Ralph Ellison’s politics in general has continued, even though some issues have become moot. The question as to whether Native Son or Invisible Man provides the right model for African-American writers is happily irrelevant, given the number and variety of black novelists who have attained prominence in the last 50 years, and few are interested in reviving the often vehement attacks on the novel and on Ellison himself launched in the sixties. Ellison’s opinions, however, still remain provocative. Indeed, the gulf between academic orthodoxy and the views expressed in the essays has only widened over the years, even as the reputation of Invisible Man has grown. A number of Ellison’s most influential critics acknowledge the greatness of Invisible Man but go out of their way to distance themselves—and Invisible Man—from the views expressed in Ellison’s essays. In addition, there are some new reasons why a study of the political implications of Invisible Man in the light of Ellison’s essays would be controversial even if Ellison’s own opinions had somehow lost their capacity to provoke. Assuming a continuity and coherence between the Ellison of the novel and the Ellison of the essays goes against the grain of prevailing theories about authorship, while the attempt to arrive at a reasonably accurate reading of the novel’s political implications by any means at all is at odds with the dominant theories of interpretation.

The notion that a literary work is the product of a specific author or authors seems obvious to common sense but has been rejected by some of the most influential contemporary theorists. Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” and Michel Foucault’s “What is an Author?” are the canonical statements on this theme. Neither attempts to refute the traditional conception of authorship by reasoned argument, but both speak with an oracular certainty that is surely one of the sources of their influence. Barthes writes about what “[w]e know now,” in fortunate contrast to the ignorant ages before us:

We know now that a text consists not of a line of words, releasing a single “theological” meaning (the “message” of the Author-God) but of a multidimensional space in which are married and contested several writings, none of which is original: the text is a fabric of quotations, resulting from a thousand sources of culture.¹

Echoing Barthes, Foucault announces that “criticism and philosophy took note of the disappearance—or death—of the author some time ago.”² E. D. Hirsch argues carefully and at length in Validity in Interpretation that any attempt to distinguish between more accurate and less accurate readings of a text must rely on a conception of meaning based on the author’s intention.³ Barthes and Foucault do not disagree; the difference is that they want to rule out the ability to make any distinction between more or less accurate readings. Once one rejects the notion of authorship, Barthes observes with approval, “the claim to ‘decipher’ a text becomes entirely futile.”⁴ Foucault finds it authoritarian to find one analysis better than another, since the effect is to discount some readings as “wrong.” The more readings, the better, no matter whether they are responsible or arbitrary, based on close reading or imposed from without. For him, then, to assert that the “author is the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning” is to justify the rejection of authorship as a concept. The notion of authorship warrants the strongest condemnation in Foucault’s vocabulary: it is “ideological”: “The author is therefore the ideological figure by which we fear the proliferation of meaning.”⁵ Today, however, partisans of “proliferation” are likely to find that it is precisely the hegemony of the postmodernist orthodoxy sponsored by figures like Barthes and Foucault that deters alternative views. My own study has the goal of discovering as accurately and fully as possible the political implications of Invisible Man. Contrary to the opinions of Barthes and Foucault, there is no need to worry that attempts like my own will discourage the “proliferation” of rival interpretations; it is rather the acceptance of theories that teach the impossibility of discovering the insights of authors like Ralph Ellison through reading their works that discourages reconsideration of texts like Invisible Man.

A number of critics express their admiration for Ellison’s first novel but distance themselves from Ellison’s stances in his essays.⁶ Houston Baker analyzes the Trueblood episode in Invisible Man hoping to demonstrate that “the distinction between folklore and literary art evident in Ellison’s critical practice collapses in his creative practice.”⁷ Alan Nadel, whose Invisible Criticism provides a perceptive and sympathetic study of Invisible Man, seems appalled by Ellison’s politics, commenting that “Only someone naively seduced by the propaganda of the American Dream and an essentialist notion of individualism could articulate some of the positions that Ellison held.”⁸ Jerry Gafio Watts notes that Ellison has been “subjected to uncivil and ad hominem attacks by critics” but then goes on to attack in “ad hominem” fashion himself, going so far as to speculate that an “unsatisfiable ‘great white master’ may have taken up residence in Ellison’s black superego”⁹ and suggesting that Ellison’s “phenomenal stature in American art and letters” is due not only to “the magnificent achievement of Invisible Man” but also to “Ellison’s willingness to assume the air of a senior statesman of American letters and his fondness for being celebrated.”¹⁰ Not content to merely disagree with Ellison’s allegiance to a “rather doctrinaire establishmentarian American ideology,”¹¹ Watts charges that Ellison adopted “an intensified elitist individuality as a social marginality facilitator.”¹² It is not clear what this means, but it appears that Watts is charging that Ellison hypocritically expressed views not because he thought they were true but because he could rise in society by identifying himself with such positions—an “ad hominem” criticism if there ever was one. Meanwhile, Kerry McSweeney finds it possible to admire Invisible Man once it is viewed as an “early postmodernist text,” but warns that Ellison’s adamantly humanistic belief in what is “basic in man beyond all differences of class, race, wealth, or formal education” cannot help but “seem mystifying to some readers”; he himself finds Ellison’s belief in a shared humanity “hardly either self-evident or universally accepted.”¹³ In contrast, this essay reconsiders the politics of Ellison’s first novel on Ellison’s terms, that is, by first looking closely at the novel itself and then turning to his Collected Essays for explication and confirmation. The hypotheses on which the study is based include the supposition that both Invisible Man and Ellison’s essays convey valuable insights and the belief that the former and the latter are mutually illuminating.

Another premise is that the meaning of the assertion of the narrator in the Epilogue that “we were to affirm the principle on which the country was built”¹⁴ is central to any study of the political implications of Invisible Man. By the end of the novel the narrator has come to believe both that his grandfather was a wise man whose advice should be followed and that this affirmation sums up the deeper meaning of his grandfather’s cryptic deathbed utterance. Throughout Invisible Man, the narrator puzzles over the meaning of his grandfather’s last words, which he had overheard as the old man spoke to his son, the narrator’s father. The old man had told the narrator’s father to “overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and destruction, let ’em swoller you till they vomit or bust open” (16). To the narrator, worrying that his youthful exemplary conduct will be taken as a sign of rebellion, “the old man’s words were like a curse” (17). No matter how properly he behaves, he cannot help thinking that he may be in some sense a “traitor” like his grandfather:

When I was praised for my conduct I felt a guilt that in some way I was doing something that was really against the wishes of the white folks, that if they had understood they would have desired me to act just the opposite, that I should have been sulky and mean, and that that really would have been what they wanted, even though they were fooled and thought they wanted me to act as I did. (17)

After brooding over his grandfather’s words throughout the novel, the narrator finally reaches in the Epilogue some tentative certainty about what the dying man meant: “Could he have meant—hell, he must have meant the principle, that we were to affirm the principle on which the country was built and not the men, or at least not the men who did the violence” (574). This conclusion, however, only leads to another set of questions:

Did he mean say “yes” because he knew that the principle was greater than the men? . . . Did he mean to affirm the principle? . . . Or did he mean that we had to take the responsibility for all of it, for the men as well as the principle? . . . Was it that we of all, we, most of all, had to affirm the principle, the plan in whose name we had been brutalized and sacrificed? . . . Or was it, did he mean that we should affirm the principle because we, through no fault of our own, were linked to all the others in the loud, clamoring semi-visible world, that world seen only as a fertile field for exploitation by Jack and his kind, and with condescension by Norton and his, who were tired of being the mere pawns in the futile game of “making history”? Had he seen that for these too we had to say “yes” to the principle, lest they turn upon us to destroy both it and us? (574–75)

These questions are important, but the narrator leaves unasked the prior question, what principle? The narrator tells us only that it is “the principle on which the country was built,” adding that “the men”—presumably the founders—“had dreamed [it] into being out of the chaos and darkness of the feudal past.” The narrator comments that the same men “had violated and compromised [the principle] to the point of absurdity even in their own corrupt minds” (574).

Perhaps the most likely candidate for the “the principle on which the country was built” is the assertion in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.” It would make sense to say that it was the principle of human equality that the founders “had violated and compromised to the point of absurdity even in their own corrupt minds” by their acceptance of slavery. But answering this question leads to another question. If the equality of human beings is the key notion to be affirmed, why is it not identified in some unmistakable way? Although there can be no certain answer to this question, if one rewrites the Epilogue by replacing “the principle” with “equality,” one begins to suspect at least one reason. Naming “equality” as the key value in all the contexts where the enigmatic phrase “the principle” appears in the Epilogue has the effect of turning the “equality” referred to repeatedly into a doctrine rather than a principle. Ellison’s “principle” is not only an idea but also the aspirations and possibilities with which the idea was associated at the founding and since. Ellison’s purposefully vague “principle” is broader than any doctrine. Similarly, by characterizing “the principle” as one “on which the country was built,” and also the principle “in whose name we had been brutalized and sacrificed,” Ellison ties the ideal he invokes to a specifically American context. The ideal he has in mind is not the Égalité of the French Revolution, nor the equality promised to the workers and peasants of Russia in 1917. It is the equality asserted by the Declaration of Independence, but it is also that equality as embodied in the Constitution and its amendments, not equality as a merely theoretical construction. Ellison’s “principle” is tied, for better and for worse, to the history of the United States.

Ellison’s essays rarely if ever invoke abstract concepts; repeatedly and emphatically he connects the ideals he affirms to the founding documents of the United States. Sometimes he gives first place to the Declaration’s assertion of human equality. Ellison declares in 1990 that “[t]he Declaration is the moral imperative to which all of us, black and white alike, are committed”—though he hastens to add that “our history has also been marked by endless attempts to evade our moral commitment to the ideal of social equality.”¹⁵ Typically, however, Ellison does not single out the Declaration and its assertion of equality as the uniquely valuable element in the founding. Instead, he cites the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as well as the Declaration, a practice implying that they are all manifestations of “the principle” whose affirmation, the narrator of Invisible Man finally decides, was the message of his grandfather’s last words. Thus Ellison’s essay “Society, Morality, and the Novel” refers to the “moral imperatives of American life that are implicit in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.”¹⁶ In his 1972 “Commencement Address at the College of William and Mary,” Ellison tells his audience that it is “the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights” that “I speak of as the ‘sacred documents’ of this nation.”¹⁷ Ellison’s moving tribute to Roscoe Dunjee, the editor of the Oklahoma City newspaper, The Black Dispatch, credits the paper’s editorials with instilling in him a faith that there was something in the Constitution and the other founding documents beyond their literal meaning, something that in this passage he calls “a mysterious binding force” and that in Invisible Man appears as “the principle”:

Roscoe Dunjee understood what it has taken me many years to understand. He understood that not only were the American people a revolutionary people, but that in the shedding of blood, sacrifice, agony, and anguish of establishing this nation, all Americans became bound in a covenant. Roscoe Du...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: Recovering the Political Artistry of Invisible Man
• Chapter 1: Affirming the Principle
• Chapter 2: Ralph Ellison on the Tragi-Comedy of Citizenship
• Chapter 3: Ralph Ellison’s American Democratic Individualism
• Chapter 4: Invisible Man and Juneteenth: Ralph Ellison’s Literary Pursuit of Racial Justice
• Chapter 5: Invisible Man as “a form of social power”: The Evolution of Ralph Ellison’s Politics
• Chapter 6: Invisible Man as Literary Analog to Brown v. Board of Education
• Chapter 7: Ralph Ellison and the Problem of Cultural Authority: The Lessons of Little Rock
• Chapter 8: Ralph Ellison and the Invisibility of the Black Intellectual: Historical Reflections on Invisible Man
• Chapter 9: The Litany of Things: Sacrament and History in Invisible Man
• Chapter 10: Documenting Turbulence: The Dialectics of Chaos in Invisible Man
• Epilogue: The Lingering Question of Personality and Nation in Invisible Man: “And could politics ever be an expression of love?”
• Works Cited
• Index