Ralph Ellison's "Time-Haunted" Novel

Abstract

PHILIP GOULD Ralph Ellison's "Time-Haunted" Novel hen ralph ellison gave his acceptance speech for the 1952 National Book Award, he defined Invisible Man against a tradition of naturalistic fiction and, more importantly, set the terms for much Ellisonian scholarship to follow. Ellison maintained that Invisible Man embodied a form that reflected its maker's "more promising" view of reality. "Thus to see America," he concluded, "with an awareness of its rich diversity and its almost magical fluidity and freedom, I was forced to conceive of a novel unburdened by the narrow naturalism which has led after so many ttiumphs to the final and unrelieved despair which marks so much of our current fiction." Distinguishing Invisible Man from "sociology and case histories," Ellison managed to transform the African American from social victim to social-psychological archetype . In the best of nineteenth-century American fiction, from which Invisible Man in at least this one respect took its cue, "the Negro symbolized both the man lowest down and the mysterious, underground aspect of human personality." Hence Ellison's argument that, "as a Negro" and an artist, he had discovered a complex, non-mimetic form which transcended the limitations of historical time and place.1 Almost forty years of literary criticism of Invisible Man has taken Ellison at his word. In a textual landscape of nameless characters and places, of a Founder and a Brotherhood whose correspondence with Booker T Washington and the Communist Party is obfuscated,2 and a protagonist whose invisibility is not exclusively a function ofrace, Invisible Man's departure from social realism has been a bitterly contested artistic premise for the African-American writer. Much of the critical Arizona Quarter!} Volume 49 Number i, Spring 1993 Copyright © 1993 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-161 Philip Gould debate over the novel has revolved around the implications of Ellison's dichotomy between art and history/sociology—around an ideological axis in which the racial politics of literary form is at issue. Since its publication in 1952, the novel has offended what Harold Cruse calls "the left wing's literary religion of socialist realism" upheld by critics like John O. Killens, John^ienrik Clarke and Herbert Aptheker. The dispute over Invisible Man as a test-case for the African-American writer 's political responsibilities culminated with the exchange between Ellison and Irving Howe during the mid-t96os.3 In an early, landmark study of African-American fiction, Robert Bone praised Invisible Man's "mythic quality" as a "revolt against the naturalistic novel," while in the 1970s Addison Gayle, Jr. ranked Ellison's novel among the very best of African-American fiction, but in the same breath complained that its major flaw was attributable "more to Ellison's political beliefs than to artistic deficiency."4 A novel "rich in imagery, myth, and legend," in Gayle's view, Invisible Man's protagonist culpably chooses "the path of individualism instead of racial unity" (255, 257). Robert O'Meally's introductory essay to The American Novel Series' New Essays on Invisible Man (1988) reverses the terms of Gayle's objection in a manner that harkens back to Ellison's own words in 1953 and that typifies much of Ellison's most eloquent defenders: "Not only does this novel summarize , in artistic terms, so much Americana, but its allusions to world literature and its structural underpinnings in myth and ritual, transcending particular place and time, grant the work resounding depth and scope" (O'Meally 2).5 Much of the polarized critical debate surrounding Ellison thus maintains a common assumption that Invisible Man's form—for good or ill—resists the novel's easily discernible historicity of the naturalistic "protest novel." In an interview he gave soon after the novel's publication, however, Ellison himself admitted that Invisible Man originated in 1945 while he was "speculating on the nature ofNegro leadership in the United States" (Shadow and Act 176). Given his avowed aestheticism, Ellison's account of the novel's origins is somewhat troubling, for it implicitly grounds a self-consciously non-mimetic novel in the very real political problem of "Negro leadership." Invisible Man's subversion of three potential models of African-American leadership...