Race, Ralph Ellison and American Cold War Intellectual Culture

R. Purcell

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349340439, 9780230321434
• eBook ISBN: 9781137313843
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

While the arms race of the post-war period has been widely discussed, Purcell explores the under-acknowledged but critical role another kind of 'race' – that is, race as a biological and sociological concept – played within the global and cultural Cold War.

1

Figura of a Negro Problem

The literal meaning or historical reality of a figure stands in no contradiction to its profounder meaning, but precisely “figures” it; the historical reality is not annulled but confirmed by the deeper meaning.¹

–Erich Auerbach, “Figura”

I

When Ralph Ellison’s short story “Invisible Man” was published in the British literary journal Horizon in 1947 it did not meet with much fanfare. This is not to say that critics who read Ellison’s story did not praise it.² However, it was not until “Invisible Man” appeared under the title we now associate with it – “Battle Royal” – in the January issue of 48’: The Magazine of the Year that Ellison made his first big literary splash. The success of “Battle Royal,” however, would soon be eclipsed by the publication of his novel in progress, Invisible Man, which would propel Ellison to literary stardom. Looking back on “Battle Royal,” the short fiction that preceded it, and Ellison’s book reviews and literary criticism, one can see that he was a writer in transition. In a letter to Karl Menninger about “Battle Royal” this transition is evident. For all its detail, Ellison concludes in his letter, “Battle Royal” is not naturalism but “realism – a realism dilated to deal with the almost surreal state of our everyday American life” (218). Ellison, like many of his peers, was re-evaluating his relationship to the literary styles and techniques as well as the cultural politics of the 1930s. More often than not reconsiderations of naturalism and realism were the avenues through which literary critics in the post-World War II period engaged those cultural politics.

Not that there was much consensus among American critics about these terms – especially realism. But a consensus concerning naturalism begins to emerge from disparate corners of American literary criticism during the 1940s. In The Philosophy of Literary Form Kenneth Burke sees naturalism as anti-poetic; the aesthetic equivalent of scientific “debunking” (126). According to Burke, Dos Passos and Steinbeck treat “group acts” as mere illusion and the “individualistic point of view” as “scientific truth” (126). At the end of On Native Grounds Alfred Kazin wonders if naturalism is able to “comprehend” the social forces it sets out to describe. While Lionel Trilling never uses the term “naturalism” in “Reality in America,” it is hard not to read his judgment of Theodore Dreiser’s prose as a critique of the “rough and ungangly … always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, and unpleasant” nature of naturalism (411). Even before the 1940s the New Humanists and New Critics equated naturalism with an unimaginative “animalism.”³

Ellison’s letter reveals what many literary critics and scholars have already said about the move away from naturalism on the eve of and after World War II. The critiques of naturalism among writers and critics have been read as an example of a growing rapprochement between culture, literary expression and Cold War ideological politics during the 1940s. Alan Wald, Lawrence Swartz, Georg Lukacs and many others have documented the radical transformation of literary modernism over and above those techniques that were associated with the proletariat fiction of the previous decade. Trilling’s attacks on F. O. Matthiessen, Howe’s trumpeting of Richard Wright, and Malcolm Cowley’s reverence for William Faulkner all document a battle over the formation of an American literary canon and the growing desire to forget the impact of mass, “cultural front” politics on American literature. The same goes for past and present literary criticism on the intersection of race and the cultural politics of the period. Irving Howe, Houston Baker, Barbara Foley, James Smethurst and others have suggested that we should read into these aesthetic transformations an allegory of radical politics abandonment.

There is more to Ellison’s letter though. His stated investment in realism is connected to an equally important and interconnected intervention within the literary, ideological and racial politics of the 1940s and beyond. Before his comments about naturalism, Ellison categorizes “Battle Royal” as “near allegory or an extended metaphor” (Ellison quoted in Rampersad, 218, italics mine). Menninger, who distributed Ellison’s short story to young psychiatrists at The Menninger Foundation, inquired whether Ellison’s story was based on facts. “The facts are of no moment,” Ellison wrote to Menninger, “the ‘truth’ lies precisely in its ‘allegory’ rather than in its ‘facts.’” (Ellison quoted in Rampersad, 218). What does Ellison mean by “near allegory?” Why is his second invocation of allegory given in scare quotes? Ellison’s language does not suggest a determined commitment to this mode of figuration but an approximating and hesitant relationship to it.

At the root of Ellison’s comments to Menninger is an implicit challenge as to what constitutes “literal” meaning. Facts are not necessarily truths. Nor does the factual-as-literal style of naturalism yield any greater truth. Both point to an understanding of meaning that places it beyond the literal nature of literary expression, which exists only as a husk to convey more truthful modes of signification and experience. Cast narrowly, critics and writers use allegory in the same way. Our most recent return to allegory – greatly influenced by the work of Fredric Jameson as well as the revival of Walter Benjamin’s writing – uses the allegorical mode as a way to argue for the value of history. But as Paul Bove writes in “Misprisions of Utopia: Messianism, Apocalypse, and Allegory,” the over-determined reliance on allegorical criticism – particularly Jamesonian utopianism – shuns the present and “declares the critical work of real analysis and possible imagination invalid and co-opted” (92). Auerbach’s quote at the beginning of this chapter speaks to the problems inherent in this mode of allegorical criticism and suggests that critics return to the “literal” nature of textual analysis. The literal nature of the literary is what Morton Bloomfield calls the “life and continuity of the text” (77). The “text” is not the endpoint of all analysis, like the New Critics would suggest. For Bloomfield the literal continually presents “a new possibility of interpretation” (77). Bloomfield wrote these words in 1977, in the midst of the post-structuralist and Marxist return to allegory. For now at least it is not Bloomfield’s but Auerbach’s invocation of the “literal” that has the most immediate relationship to Ellison’s commentary on “Battle Royal.”

“Figura” (1939/1944), along with Dante, Poet of the Secular World (1929) and “Passio as Passion” (1941), are generally understood as the works in which Auerbach developed his powerful analysis of literary realism. Auerbach’s opus, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), was published the same year as Ellison’s story and a year before his subsequent comments to Menninger about the “nearly” allegorical and its intersection with realism. Ellison never really elaborates this affiliation; it is his contemporary Auerbach who gives us the clearest critical connection between the two. For Auerbach, “figura” stands in counter-distinction to allegory because it captures concrete historical reality by presenting a figure simultaneously with its potential or what Auerbach calls “fulfillment.” In other words, the literal meaning of a figure corresponds with its “historical reality.” Unlike allegory and allegorical interpretive practices a figura stands in “no contradiction to its profounder meaning.” Historical reality “is not annulled but confirmed by the deeper meaning” (73).

Rarely do we connect Auerbach, his philological method and exploration of realism with Ellison’s own critical and artistic emergence. In the most fundamental way philology, as Martin Elsky describes Auerbach’s method, “proposes that the history of the changing contents of a word is the history of the changing values of a culture” (285). In the opening of “Twentieth Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity,” an essay he wrote in 1946 (the same year Auerbach publishes Mimesis), Ellison begins with a meditation on the “complex formulations” of “the word,” its “subtle power to suggest and foreshadow overt action” and “ambivalence” (81). Ellison is no philologist. However his investment in “the word” – something Ellison shared with a number of African-American writers and scholars of the period – echoes Auerbach’s own. It is through the figure of the Negro that Ellison sees the changing values of American culture since “the most powerful formulations of modern American fictional words have been so slanted towards him that when he approaches for a glimpse of himself he discovers an image drained of humanity” (81–82). In “Twentieth Century Fiction,” like in his letter to Menninger, Ellison meditates on the literalness of language, and returns to the question of realism. Unlike in his letter, however, in the essay realism is intimately tied to the problem of presenting the complex humanity of the Negro.

Both writers explore the question of realism through literary language. While Auerbach’s methods are more identifiably those of philology, Ellison’s engagement with idiomatic expression and style has to do with the American tradition of realism he is engaging; most notably of James and Twain – the two most influential American realists of the early twentieth century. In this chapter I will rely on Erich Auerbach’s discussion of the difference between allegory and figuration in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature and Mimesis. Understood through Auerbach’s notion of figura, Ellison’s early works reveal his attempt to read the figural significance of the Negro into the traditions of Western realism and modernism; a tradition writers and critics like Ernest Hemingway, Lionel Trilling and Malcolm Cowley excluded African Americans from. If “the Negro Problem” as understood by Du Bois is an expression of the central role that the ideology of racism has had in organizing social, political and cultural life in modernity, then for Ellison the lack of or critical engagement with “the Negro” in literary criticism means that American critics are evading one of the most important aspects of American life. In this sense Invisible Man is Ellison’s artistic as well as critical response to this evasion.

II

Ellison’s critique of naturalism in “Twentieth Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity” begins on a statistical note. Between Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck, Ellison counted no more than “five American Negroes” in their novels. For Ellison, however, the problem is more than statistical. He eventually identifies the roots of this literary shortfall in a tradition of “intellectual” evasion rooted in post-civil war America. In Henry James and particularly Ernest Hemingway, Ellison notices that American writers were distancing themselves from writing about African-American characters in literature, a problem that rests on a complex paradox.⁴ American fiction, according to Ellison, either ignored or misrepresented African-American characters. He also felt that the stereotypes that existed were not questioned forcefully enough. Despite his stylistic indebtedness to Ernest Hemingway, it is through him that Ellison elaborates the history of this literary problem.

Ellison begins his critique of Hemingway by pointing to an absence of what he calls the “American scene” in Hemingway’s fiction despite the fact that Hemingway saw himself falling neatly within the lineage of post-civil war American authors, and aligns himself specifically with Mark Twain (93). It is to Twain that Ellison tells us Hemingway owed the sardonic stance and meticulous attention to language evident in his minimalist, vernacular style. As Hemingway reads him, Twain’s satire, irony and language were not the product of a detached, disinterested stoicism, but rather of a tragic attitude. The pivotal moment in Huckleberry Finn (as well as American fiction) to Ellison is when Huck decides to go to hell and rescue Jim. This scene, which Hemingway called the moment Twain cheated, is for Ellison “a reversal as well as a recognition scene (like that in which Oedipus discovers his true identity), wherein a new definition of necessity is being formulated” (87). Huck’s recognition is not just a moral insight. This awareness is what Aristotle calls anagnorisis, the moment of “intelligent recognition” in classical tragedy, which he defines in the Poetics as a character’s transformation from ignorance to knowledge, which ultimately leads to self-knowledge as well as knowledge of one’s true situation (18). Recognition then is twofold for Huck: his desire to free Jim reveals to Huck who he is and simultaneously it allows Huck insight into the fundamental paradox defining American society, the paradox between “property rights and human rights” (Ellison 87).

Huck’s “low down business” is his awareness that acting morally, which is recognizing the humanity of Jim and other African-Americans, is an act of hubris against American de jure and de facto racism. Ellison’s point is that Hemingway’s use of Twain does not acknowledge the relationship between Twain’s writing and his historical situation. Huck’s “low down business” has its analog in Twain’s prose. Twain’s style metaphorically depended on a “free” Jim. Not only does he function as a dramatic necessity to Twain’s novel, he is also one of many vernacular muses for Twain. Jim is a figure through which Twain can hear American speech and modes of expression and at the same time contemplate the way slavery and racism determines his Gilded Age present. By describing Hemingway’s craft as “an end in itself,” Ellison understands naturalist prose as an instrument without this knowledge and intelligence behind it. Doing away with the ending of Huckleberry Finn misses the stylistic and intellectual import of Twain’s work. Between his citation of Henry James and Hemingway in “Twentieth Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity” and his later debate with Irving Howe, Ellison reveals a stylistic crisis as well as a critical one. After the Civil War, Ellison accuses both James and Hemingway of ignoring the fact that racism was the defining problem of American cultural and political life. Twain’s use of vernacular and dialect language, which was crucial to late-nineteenth-century concepts of realism in America, was the technical basis of Hemingway’s hard-boiled style. Hemingway’s technique did capture the tragic element of life. But for Ellison it also symbolized the abandonment of Twain’s critique of Gilded Age America. Hemingway was right to detect Twain’s irony and satire as a repudiation of Gilded Age materialism. What Hemingway missed was the crucial link between Twain’s irony and the fundamental paradox of American postbellum culture – America’s newfound sense of freedom and simultaneous denial of African-American humanity. Similarly, after World War II, Ellison sees in Howe and many other American literary critics an analogous evasion. While critics from Irving Howe, Lionel Trilling, Hannah Arendt, Arthur Schlesinger and later Mary McCarthy saw the USA as the world’s moral and ethical center, they all located literature’s contemplative sensibility in Europe rather in the USA.

One of the most important moments in “Twentieth Century Fiction” is Ellison’s use of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe as a way to begin his discussion of American literature and the history of criticism. For Ellison, a problematic feature of nineteenth-century American literature is the way writers “disguised” the conflict between “democratic beliefs” and “anti-democratic practices” by ignoring African-American characters or relying on stereotypical representations of them. Ellison traces the roots of this problem back to the eighteenth century and the absence of an American version of Defoe’s Friday. In this context, his identification of Robinson Crusoe as a romantic novel becomes a curious misreading. Defoe’s novel was published over 60 years before romanticism begins. As Ian Watt suggests, however, Defoe and other British novelists anticipate the concerns that would be picked up by the romantics in the late eighteenth century (309). Ellison’s reading of Defoe brings us to an understanding of the novel form’s origins in imperialism that anticipates the work of Nancy Armstrong and Edward Said. By reading Robinson Crusoe as an expression of romantic individualism Ellison presents us with a dilemma: where does one locate the novel’s expression of individualism – in its Protestantism or in Crusoe’s mercenary mercantilism? Ellison’s emphasis on racism and chattel slavery in Defoe allows us to see the complex nature in which the theological and commercial articulations of individualism are yoked to racism and coerced labor.

Ellison, following Du Bois, makes the case that, from their first appearance, African-American characters suggested the existence of a “tragic sense” at the heart of modern Western literature. Reading Defoe as a “romantic” reveals that “Friday,” who dwells at the nexus of racial slavery, Protestantism and mercantile individualism, is a beginning point for America’s literary responsibility to African-American characters. The connection between Friday and America occurs in “Twentieth Century Fiction” through Ellison’s “misidentification” of Friday as a “Negro” (Ellison 88). As Roxanne Wheeler writes, race as a category was in transition between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (804). This makes racial identification in early British novels difficult to pin down. Furthermore, as Wheeler points out, Friday’s racial identification shifts throughout Crusoe’s account, never settling on one signifier (840).

Ellison performs a powerful revision of Western literature and the problem of humanism within it when he reimages Friday as a “Negro” who then comes to represent the founding literary moment for contemplating “the Negro problem.” At the same time Defoe’s novel also represents the countervailing actions taken to deny Friday’s humanity. Read in Ellison’s way Robinson Crusoe is an archetypal literary example of the “Negro’s” figural importance in Western literary traditions. Defoe makes Friday both a worker and Christian. Through his attempts to humanize the savage Friday, Ellison sees Defoe’s attempts to lessen his own guilt for breaking with what Ellison calls “the institutions and authorities of the past” (89). As a fictional representative of the change towards bourgeois mercantile capitalism and propriety rights, Crusoe’s domination of Friday straddles the line between the managerial and sovereign, the secular and the providential. Ellison’s analysis of Robinson Crusoe reveals the conundrum Friday poses to Crusoe’s freedom. How does Crusoe exercise his freedom yet hold dominion over Friday? Tied to this process of change in Defoe’s novel are the swift changes occurring during the eighteenth century, a time during which the meaning of citizenship is connected to labor, the industrial revolution and the nation-state. Not only are these changes historical and social, but they also reverberate in the literature of the time.

When Ellison states that Crusoe takes to the desert isle “certain techniques, certain values, from whence he came …,” he is referring both to Crusoe’s complex relationship to the past and to how he tells his story (759). This later fact is borne out stylistically in Defoe’s novel. Crusoe’s account is a providential narrative yet it is cast in the confessional mode. It also contains a mix of prose forms, from dialogue to diary. Along with these more traditional prose styles is Crusoe’s literal accounting of his and Friday’s labor through extended bookkeeping sections in the novel. The combination of providential and propriety account is emblematic of the paradox appearing in Defoe and the romantic tradition.⁵ Crusoe’s Christian and propriety relationship to Friday is not one of equals. Friday, both pagan savage and slave laborer, is still Crusoe’s inferior. As Robert Marzec argues, these literary techniques become a synecdoche for Crusoe’s equation of Friday with the island’s raw ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: From Popular Fronts to Liberal Conspiracies
• 1. Figura of a Negro Problem
• 2. Ellison From the Heart of Europe
• 3. 1965 and the Battle Over Who Spoke for the Negro
• 4. An Integrative Vernacular
• Conclusion: Ellison, Obama and Post-Race Politics in the Twenty-First Century
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of Titles and Names