The Uncreated Conscience of My Race/The Uncreated Features of His Face: The Strange Career of Ralph Ellison

Abstract

Ralph Ellison's career will undoubtedly provide students of American literature and biographers much to puzzle over in the coming years. He published his first novel, Invisible Man, in 1952 when he was 38, an age when Faulkner was in the midst of his great period and just poised to publish Absalom, Absalom! After the early 1950s, Ellison published two books of essays, Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986), and a few excerpts from an ever more mythical work-in-progress. That work-in-progress, or some truncated version of it, has now appeared with the intriguing title, Juneteenth, which refers to the day, 19 June 1865, when the slaves in Texas learned they were free, some two months after the end of the Civil War.Without a doubt, Ralph Ellison considered himself, above all, an American writer of the modernist persuasion; indeed, he was one of the most patriotic of writer-citizens in the republic of letters. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he was attacked by anti-war forces for his qualified support for the Johnson administration's prosecution of the Vietnam War, and black radicals for insufficient militance about his “blackness.” Through it all, Ellison resolutely resisted the obligation to make his art explicitly political. It was precisely that which was at issue in his famous polemical exchanges with Irving Howe.Yet, Ellison's writing always was political in at least two senses. First, as he asserted in 1964 before the civil rights movement gave way to Black Power and its cultural wing, the Black Arts movement: “protest is an element of all art, though it does not necessarily take the form of speaking for a political or social program.” In other words: art was political but not in the programmatic way demanded by others, whoever they might be.