January 1, 1995
Lives Well Lived: Ralph Ellison;
Prescience, In Black and White
By ROGER ROSENBLATT
he critic Cyril Connolly once defined a classic as a book still
read a decade after it is published. Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man,"
which won the National Book Award in 1953, was instantly
recognized as a masterpiece, a novel that captured the grim
realities of racial discrimination as no book had. Its reputation
grew as Ellison retreated into a mythic literary silence that made
his one achievement definitive.
Only the faintest tremor of warning prevented me from responding,
"And I am the King of Siam." The man on the telephone had
begun: "Mr. Rosenblatt? I'm Ralph Ellison." Friends of mine pull
pranks like that. As it happened, it was Ralph Ellison. He was
calling to correct something I had written about "Invisible Man" in
a book.
This was 1973. The book was called "Black Fiction," and my
publisher had sent Ellison an early copy. In my comments on
"Invisible Man," I had done my best to figure out the literary
values of the novel: theme, characters, images -- the conventional
stuff that is supposed to be noted by a dutiful young teacher of
literature. "But what you did not say, Mr. Rosenblatt," Ellison told
me with polite Southern severity, "is that the novel itself is a social
document. That the Invisible Man writes a story at all makes a
social statement."
I asked him: "But haven't you always argued that if black
American writing only made social statements, it wouldn't be taken
seriously as literature?"
"Sure," he said. "But in 'Invisible Man' the statement is the
literature. The protagonist's story is his social bequest. And I'll tell
you something else: The bequest is hopeful."
When Ellison died last year, I re-read "Invisible Man" to see if I
understood it any better as an older reader. What struck me first
was that a book published more than four decades ago could have
been written yesterday, for what it said about black-white relations.
And he was right about it being a hopeful bequest. The hope it
offers is not for black Americans alone.
The optimism of "Invisible Man" lies not in the events that befall
the protagonist, but in what he becomes. Up to that point, he is
Every Black Man in America; wherever he turns (to capitalism,
Communism, nationalism, nihilism), someone is trying to make
him disappear. White America, in its secret and bitter heart, wants
black America to go away. Isolation, assimilation, expulsion,
destruction: any means will do.
When Ellison invented his Invisible Man, he simply brought this
disappearance into the open. Color threatens to annihilate his
individuality, so he gets rid of it -- gets rid of appearance
altogether. He sets himself up in a hidden section of an apartmenthouse basement. He plays Louis Armstrong records. He strings
1,369 light bulbs around his room; the glare gives shape to his
invisibility. And from there he looks at the country that will not see
him.
Except for the outright madness of his circumstance, it is exactly
that of most African-American men and women today. Everything
that's happened to black America since Ellison's novel appeared -Brown v. Board of Education, Martin Luther King Jr., the civil
rights war -- improved race relations; but it did not eradicate raw
hatred, deliberate ignorance. Underclass crime and the recent
resurgence of poisonous phenomena like black anti-Semitism have
accomplished the seemingly impossible -- made black-white
relations worse.
Yet Ellison told me his novel was about a "yes." What he meant, I
think, is individuality counts and it works for the good of others.
Driving "Invisible Man" is an appeal for self-reliance; at his
journey's outset he is advised to read Emerson. (Ellison wasn't
named Ralph for nothing.) When Ellison troubled to phone a
young teacher who had written an academic book, he wanted to get
across the message: Nothing is possible means anything is
possible. When the hero asks his famous question -- "Who knows
but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?" -- he means
everybody.
All his life after "Invisible Man," Ellison was dogged by critics to
write a second novel. One version was said to have been in the
works when he died, another lost in a fire. But it's hard to imagine
Ellison having anything more valuable to say after exhorting
America to recognize the invisible.