Ellison's Vision of Communitas

Abstract

From time of its first appearance in spring of 1952 Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man has been thrusting itself forward, ever more insistently with passage of each year, as a commanding masterpiece in literature of American fiction-and, now that it has had a career of more than forty years, its priority of place appears indeed to have been solidly consolidated. It stands today as one of preeminent American novels of past half-century, and all that I want here to try to do is to suggest something of what it is that accounts for kind of powerful claim that it continues to exert upon us. Surely a part of immense appeal that belongs to a figure like Ellison is an affair of his fidelity to ethic of classic modernism. For great masters of this centuryJoyce and Lawrence and Mann and Faulkner-were proposing to do what T.S. Eliot in his famous review of Ulysses (in issue of The Dial for November 1923) descried as Joyce's central intention: namely, to give a shape and . . . significance to immense panorama of . . . anarchy which is contemporary history. The Magic Mountain and The Death of Virgil, Women in Love and The Sun Also Rises, The Sound and Fury and Man's Fate are books that strike us today as having a remarkable kind of weight and contemporaneity, because they are, as it were, taking on age: with a fierce kind of audacity, they seem to be intending to displace a daunting world, to clear a space for human endeavor and thus to keep open door of future. In short, their rites and ceremonies and plots and arguments are organized toward end of envisaging new forms of life for soul, and it is just in this that one element of genius of twentieth-century modernism lies. Now it is in this line that Ralph Ellison stands. Immediately after Invisible Man appeared in 1952, astonishing authority of its art quickly brought it to forefront of literary scene, and this at a time when, under new influence of Henry James, so many representative American writers of moment-such as Jean Stafford and Frederick Buechner and Isabel Bolton and Monroe Engel-were choosing to seek their effects by unsaid and withheld, by dryly ironic analogy and muted voice. In early 1950s Ellison, like Faulkner and Penn Warren, was particularly notable for being unafraid to make his fiction howl and rage and hoot with laughter over the complex fate of homoAmericanus: indeed, uninhibited exhilaration and suppleness of his rhetoric were at once felt to be main source of