Monopolated Light and Power

Visions, Voices, Turning points

 Turning points

• Social functions of African American art
• Cultural Cold War at home and abroad
• Civil Rights and the end of Jim Crow

Wright Morris, rev. of Invisible Man, The New York Times Book Review, 13 April 1953

Jeff Wall. After 'Invisible Man' by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue (1999–2000|MoMA)

Indeed, if i were asked in all seriousness just what I considered to be the chief significance of Invisible Man as a fiction, I would reply: Its experimental attitude, and its attempt to return to the mood of personal moral responsibility which typified the best of our nineteenth-century fiction. That my first novel should win this most coveted prize must certainly indicate that there is a crisis in the American novel.

Ralph Ellison, 'Brave Words for a Startling Occasion', Address for Presentation Ceremony, National Book Award, 17 January 1953

First, three questions: Why is it so often true that when critics confront the American as Negro they suddenly drop their advanced critical armament and revert with an air of confident superiority to quite primitive modes of analysis? Why is it that sociology-oriented critics seem to rate literature so far below politics and ideology that they would rather kill a novel than modify their presumptions concerning a given reality which it seeks in its own terms to project? Finally, why is it that so many of those who would tell us the meaning of Negro life never bother to learn how varied it really is? 

Ralph Ellison, 'The World and the Jug', The New Leader,
9 December 1963 and 3 February 1964

From the seventeenth century to the twentieth, the arguments resisting [the incursion of third-world or so-called minority literature into a Eurocentric stronghold] have marched in a predictable sequence: (1) there is no Afro-American (or third-world) art; (2) it exists but is inferior; (3) it exists and is superior when it measures up to the 'universal' criteria of Western art; (4) it is not so much 'art' as ore – rich ore – that requires a Western or Eurocentric smith to refine it from its 'natural' state into an aesthetically complex form.

Toni Morrison, Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,
University of Michigan, 7 October 1988

As there is only so much time, do we reread Elizabeth Bishop or Adrienne Rich? Do I again go in search of lost time with Marcel Proust, or am I to attempt yet another rereading of Alice Walker's stirring denunciation of all males, black and white? My former students, many of them now stars of the School of Resentment, proclaim that they teach social selflessness, which begins in learning how to read selflessly. [...] Shall we gather at the river with these generous ghosts, free of the guilt of past self-assertions, and be baptized in the waters of Lethe? What shall we do to be saved?  

Harold Bloom, 'An Elegy for the Canon',
The Western Canon (1994)

The 'public' of African American literature was the public, both black and white, defined by the assumptions and practices of the segregation era. Whether African American writers of the segregation era acquiesced in or kicked against the label, they knew what was at stake in accepting or contesting their identification as Negro writers. [...] Specifically, black writers knew that their work would in all likelihood be evaluated instrumentally, in terms of whether or not it could be added to the arsenal of arguments, achievements, and propositions needed to attack the justifications for, and counteract the effects of, Jim Crow.

Kenneth W. Warren, What Was African American Literature? (2011)

As James Weldon Johnson observed in 1928, 'I judge there is not a single Negro writer who is not, at least secondarily, impelled by the desire to make his work have some effect on the white world for the good of his race'. Writers also knew that their work would likely be viewed as constituting an index of racial progress, integrity or ability. 

Kenneth W. Warren, What Was African American Literature? (2011)

• Why do critics analyse Black American writing in simplified and paternalistic terms?
   
• Why do critics devalue Black aesthetics and revert to sociological analysis?
   
• Why do critics ignore the variety of Black experience and expression? 

Ellison's 3 questions

These questions are aroused by 'Black Boys and Native Sons' by Irving Howe [editor of Dissent] in the Autumn 1963 issue of that magazine. It is a lively piece, [...]. And, in addition to a hero, Richard Wright, it has two villains, James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, who are seen as 'black boys' masquerading as false, self-deceived 'native sons'. 

Ralph Ellison, 'The World and the Jug', The New Leader,
9 December 1963 and 3 February 1964

Wright himself is given a diversity of roles (all conceived by Howe): He is not only the archetypal and true-blue black boy – the 'honesty' of his famous autobiography established this for Howe – but the spiritual father of Ellison, Baldwin and all other Negroes of literary bent to come. Further, in the platonic sense he is his own father and the culture hero who freed Ellison and Baldwin to write more 'modulated' prose. 

Ralph Ellison, 'The World and the Jug', The New Leader,
9 December 1963 and 3 February 1964

Richard Wright. Carl Van Vechten, 1966

In Native Son, Bigger Thomas stands on a Chicago street corner watching airplanes flown by white men racing against the sun and 'Goddamn' he says, the bitterness bubbling up like blood, remembering a million indignities, the terrible, rat-infested house, the humiliation of home-relief, the intense, aimless, ugly bickering, hating it; hatred smoulders through these pages like sulphur fire. All of Bigger's life is controlled, defined by his hatred and his fear. [...] Below the surface of this novel there lies, it seems to me, a continuation, a complement of that monstrous legend it was written to destroy. 

James Baldwin, 'Everybody's Protest Novel'
Notes of a Native Son (1955)

In his effort to resuscitate Wright, Irving Howe would designate the role which Negro writers are to play more rigidly than the Southern politician – and for the best of reasons. We must express 'black' anger and 'clenched militancy'; most of all we should not become too interested in the problems of art and literature, even though it is through these that we seek our individual identities. And between writing well and being ideologically militant, we must choose militancy.

Ralph Ellison, 'The World and the Jug', The New Leader,
9 December 1963 and 3 February 1964

A page from James Baldwin's 1,884-page FBI file, discussing a never-finished 'FBI story' provisionally titled The Blood Counters

Richard Wright, 'FB Eye Blues' (1949)

An excerpt from Ellison's (considerably shorter than Baldwin's) FBI file detailing associations with Communist publications

• Cultural Cold Warriors saw Civil Rights as a key issue in the battle for 'hearts and minds' at home and abroad.
   
• The relationship of aesthetic production to politics was hotly debated among Black intellectuals and activists.  

'Son, after I'm gone I want you to keep up the good fight. I never told you, but our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy's country ever since I gave up my gun back in the Reconstruction. Live with your head in the lion's mouth. I want you to overcome 'em with yeses, undermine 'em with grins, agree 'em to death and destruction, let 'em swoller you till they vomit or burst wide open.' 

Invisible Man, p 16

On my graduation day I delivered an oration in which I showed that humility was the secret, indeed, the very essence of progress. (Not that I believed this – how could I, remembering my grandfather? – I only believed that it worked.) It was a great success. Everyone praised me and I was invited to give the speech at a gathering of the town's leading white citizens. It was a triumph for our whole community.

Invisible Man, p 17

I remembered the legend of how [Dr. Bledsoe] had come to the college, a barefoot boy who in his fervor for education had trudged with his bundle of ragged clothing across two states. And how he was given a job feeding slop to the hogs but had made himself the best slop dispenser in the history of the school; and how the Founder had been impressed and made him his office boy. Each of us knew of his rise over years of hard work to the presidency, and each of us at some time wished that he had walked to the school or pushed a wheelbarrow or performed some other act of determination and sacrifice to attest his eagerness for knowledge.

Invisible Man, p 115–6

'Power doesn't have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it. [...] The only ones I even pretend to please are big white folk, and even those I control more than they control me. This is a power set-up, son, and I'm at the controls.'

Invisible Man, p 142

Brother Jack [was] very authoritative, the others always respectful. He must be a powerful man, I thought, not a clown at all. But to hell with this Booker T.  Washington business. I would do the work but I would be no one except myself – whoever I was. I would pattern my life on that of the founder. They might think I was acting like Booker T. Washington; let them. Yes, I'd have to hide the fact that I'd actually been afraid when I made my speech. Suddently I felt laughter bubbling inside me. I'd have to catch up with this science of history business. 

Invisible Man, p 311

You my brother, mahn. Brothers are the same color; how the hell you call these white men brother? Shit, mahn. That's shit! Brother the same color. We sons of Mama Africa, you done forgot? You black, BLACK! You – Godahm, mahn! [...] Why you with them? Leave that shit, mahn. They sell you out. That shit is old-fashioned. They enslave us – you forget that? 

Invisible Man, p 371

So I took to the cellar; I hibernated. I got away from it all. But that wasn't enough. I couldn't be still even in hibernation. Because, damn it, there's the mind, the mind. It won't let me rest. Gin, jazz and dreams were not enough. Books were not enough. My belated appreciation of the crude joke that had kept me running, was not enough. And my mind revolved again and again back to my grandfather. and, despite the farce that ended in my attempt to say 'yes' to the Brotherhood, I'm still plagued by his deathbed advice . . . 

Invisible Man, p 574

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. [...] Did he mean to affirm the principle, which they themselves had dreamed into being out of the chaos and darkness of the feudal past, and which they had violated and compromised to the point of absurdity even in their own corrupt minds? 

Invisible Man, p 574

If Ellison is a Jim Crow author, then he’s a man of our moment, if we are to believe, as Michelle Alexander affirmed in her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colour-Blindness, that Jim Crow did not crumble under the assault of the civil rights victories of the 1950s and 1960s, but rather merely went underground. 

Kenneth W Warren, 'How Invisible Man eerily foreshadowed the events of today', BBC, 6 June 2018

The point here would not be to find in Ellison’s novel remedies for what currently ails us. Rather, his work might provide a goad for acknowledging and interrogating the material processes and practices that got us from where Ellison was in the early 1950s to where we are now. 

Kenneth W Warren, 'How Invisible Man eerily foreshadowed the events of today', BBC, 6 June 2018