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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
African-American intellectuals are still criticizing Ralph Ellison for his refusal to make art serve politics. And they're still wrong.
May 7, 2002 | This year marks the 50th anniversary of Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man," a sophisticated, allusive novel that captured the perennial human search for personal identity through the prism of a nameless black American character. Ellison intentionally created and crafted his protagonist so that, in the author's own words, the young man's "curiosity and blundering ... transcend any narrow concepts of race and hit us all where we live."
This quote, from a 1971 interview, says in direct language what is posed more quizzically in "Invisible Man," when the narrator concludes the epilogue by asking the reader: "Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?" As we shall see, there are critics from the 1950s to the present who take exception to the notion of Ellison (or his fictional character) speaking for them. They, for various ideological reasons, claim that his vision is inadequate and that he was too politically disengaged or conservative.
In terms of widespread readership and critical acclaim, however, Ellison's first and only finished novel spoke with eloquence to many. "Invisible Man" was a national bestseller for 16 weeks after its publication in April 1952. It won the 1953 National Book Award for fiction, has been translated into 17 languages and has never been out of print. In 1999, a group of prominent writers and scholars placed "Invisible Man" in the top 20 list of the most influential fiction from the 20th century.
Yet from the start the novel and, later, its author attracted criticism from a wide variety of sources. In a recently aired documentary entitled "Ralph Ellison: An American Journey," broadcast nationally on PBS stations under the American Masters banner, writer-producer-director Avon Kirkland brings many of those complaints to light yet again. The poet and playwright Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones) appears in the film, calling Ellison a snob, a skilled artist with "backward" ideas. A clip from the documentary, of Baraka screeching, "Come on out, niggers, niggers, niggers, it's nation ti-i-iime, it's nation ti-ii-ii-im-e!" is perhaps enough to discredit him in the eyes (and ears!) of many viewers. Baraka's stances have, since the '50s, been as a beatnik, an anarchist, a black nationalist, a radical Marxist and God knows what else. More than a few backward ideas adhere to this miasma of ideologies.
Jerry Watts, an author of critical texts on Ellison and Baraka, repeats the claim that Ellison, by attempting to transcend American confines, divorced himself from the collective struggles of black Americans. Although in the film African-American scholar Cornel West praises Ellison, when I asked West what he thought of the author several years ago at a public forum, West dismissed Ellison as a "highbrow aesthete." In a recent book, literary scholar Houston Baker, former head of the Modern Library Association, calls "Invisible Man" "Disneyesque," "a novel of American local color in its comically best minstrel manifestation ... the panoramic, black dis-empowering, white-reassuring view of race matters that 'Invisible Man' offers is exactly what white America always welcomes."
As I mentioned above, such sniping isn't new. Upon the publication of "Invisible Man," Communists and fellow travelers objected to its depictions of the Brotherhood, a doctrinaire, utopian, Marxist-style organization that uses social unrest in Harlem and the protagonist's passion and naiveti to further their own cause. When orders come from the Brotherhood's party leadership to change strategy and tactics, those orders are to be followed, not questioned. As did his friend and colleague Richard Wright, Ellison had direct experience working with Marxist publications and organizations in the 1930s, though he, unlike Wright, never was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. Wright's "American Hunger" relates how the party "disciplined" those who were too "individual" in their thought. Likewise, Ellison's Brotherhood is interested only in the fulfillment of its political objectives, through blind loyalty if need be, and not in the Invisible Man's intellect, identity or culture.
Black nationalists were miffed at the character of Ras the "Exhorter/Destroyer," a rabble-rousing West Indian "community organizer" who views the world in "Invisible Man" almost exclusively through the lens of race. Ras is ready to resort to violence against his foes, black or white, to achieve his separatist goals. Even today, black nationalists are wary of Ellison's work; to them, it's too pro-American, and too inherently critical of their narrow or romantic preoccupations with Africa or with the blackness of blackness. Echoing Houston Baker above, Molefi Asante, perhaps the leading proponent of Afrocentricity, wrote in 1990 that Ellison's "aim is to write to a white audience, to show them the invisibility of the African -- if possible to create thought, guilt, understanding, liberation for the white man."
Others criticized Ellison himself for his seeming lack of active involvement in "the struggle." Few are aware that Ellison belonged to the Committee of One Hundred, an arm of the legal defense committee of the NAACP. He served for nine years on the Carnegie Commission on Educational Television, whose findings led to the formation of public television. He served as a charter member of the National Council of the Arts; he served as a witness at a Senate subcommittee hearing on urban issues in 1966. Yet even if these facts were not brought to bear, Ellison's true allegiance to the "struggle" remained a given, for the struggle includes and at the same time goes beyond the black American battle for justice. Ellison realized that the "struggle" is ultimately a fight over defining and improvising reality, and as such includes matters intellectual and aesthetic as well as political and economic.
