Still on the Lower Frequencies: Invisible Man at Fifty
Ellison chronicled the painful, sometimes humorous journey of a young southern black man going north to 1930s Harlem at a time when respectable scholars could give due consideration to the possibility of innate black inferiority. The novel thoroughly dismantled such ideas. It succeeded as an enduring and powerful artistic brief on behalf of Negro humanity (Ellison generally used the term Negro even through the 1970s and 1980s), grounded in Ellison’s first-rate artistry and informed by the best aspects of literary modernism. Ellison’s philosophical ambition and political acumen signaled that Negro fiction, and perhaps the Negro himself, had come of age.
What made the novel so effective was that it did not plead, cajole, or harangue its audience on behalf of that humanity. Instead, Ellison took his people’s humanity for granted and derived the lineaments of the common human condition from the particulars of Negro experience. The novel’s concluding, and perhaps most memorable, words—“Who know but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”—were, in reality, its starting point.
Yet however much Invisible Man had spoken for me over the years since I’d first read it as a senior in high school, I had not actually heard Ellison speak until earlier this past spring, when scholars and writers gathered at a Washington and Lee University symposium to commemorate Invisible Man’s fiftieth anniversary. During a break, one of the conference organizers played an audiotape of Ellison reading. Largely as the result of having hundreds of pages of his second novel destroyed by a fire, Ellison had recorded himself reading from his incomplete second novel (published posthumously as Juneteenth in 1999), which he obsessively wrote and rewrote for over forty years.
Hearing Ellison’s voice caught me off-guard. It was dry and flat, not high, although more of a tenor than a baritone, with a timbre evoking the Oklahoma of Ellison’s youth. Because I was familiar with his life story, the sound of his voice should have come as no surprise. His essays and interviews consistently remind us that he grew up at a time and in a part of the country when the idea of the frontier was still meaningful, especially for blacks attempting to escape the hardships of white supremacy in the South, and for whom Oklahoma promised the freedom of the West. Yet, in part because of Ellison’s considerable skill at rendering the sonorous tones of southern black oratory in his fiction, it was easy to expect him to do vocally what his written words had done so well imaginatively. The difference between expectation and sound brought home to me the incongruity of the way that his own perfectly unremarkable voice had been dramatically amplified, deepened, and nuanced by the novel that had brought us together.
Incongruity is a word that Ellison often used to describe his understanding of an American society that sometimes seemed equally committed to democracy and racial hierarchy. If the idea of American equality could somehow accommodate the day-to-day practices of racial prejudice, then negotiating the strange terrain of the American psyche required a complex map with a legend warning the traveler to expect a surprise—and not necessarily a pleasant one—around every corner. Ellison found the pieces of that map in his family history, his encounter with modern American and European literature, his experiences with the American Left at midcentury, and his ongoing appreciation of Negro folk culture. On the upside, gruff-talking Negro coal-heavers working in the basement of the Metropolitan Opera could turn out to be expert in their knowledge of operatic performance, as they do in Ellison’s essay “The Little Man at Chehaw Station,” thus startling the observer schooled in American assumptions about racial difference. On the downside, as Ellison remarked in “The World and the Jug,” his sharp response to socialist editor and critic Irving Howe, the proper tones of one’s white, northern allies on the Left might suddenly deliver words of racial condescension.
In fact, so distressed was Ellison by Howe’s pronouncements in “Black Boys and Native Sons” that he claimed to find their implications more alarming than the social order of the state of Mississippi before 1964. This charge might have been hyperbolic, but not by much. What Ellison found most detestable in the social criticism of his era was any assumption that you could know a person simply by knowing how some sociologist might categorize that person. Reality, as Ellison knew by experience, was more fluid and unpredictable than the sociologist assumed. To recognize this truth, all one had to do was listen to the radio.
Perhaps no piece of technology was as formative of, or as representative of, Ellison’s political beliefs and cultural optimism as the radio, because of what it had meant to an intelligent, inquisitive, yet economically impoverished, young boy. Inexpensively available, the radio could bring the immense cultural riches of the world, whether Beethoven symphonies or the latest jazz innovation, into the poorest home or community. If whites in Oklahoma City were trying to bring the social order of the plantation to the southwestern frontier, the modern world was undermining their attempt. The radio, Ellison told Richard Stern in a 1961 interview, demonstrated that while it may have been possible to segregate human beings physically, it had always been impossible to restrict absolutely an entire group’s access to culture. Twentieth-century technology was only making plain what had been a cultural reality since the nation’s founding.
Even more personally, as Ellison told Stern, his interest in building crystal radio sets accounted for his first important friendship across the color line—an acquaintance with a white boy who shared Ellison’s passion for radios. Ellison met the youth, whom he knew at the time only by his nickname, Hoolie, while both were scouring the trash for ice cream cartons to use in making radios. Although his friendship with Hoolie was brief because Ellison soon moved away, it was nonetheless “a very meaningful experience” because “it had little to do with the race question as such,” and because it had prompted Ellison “to expect much more of myself and of the world.” As Ellison recalled this encounter, it had been a crucial source for his view of American life as defined by possibility rather than limits. Here was a bit of reality that sociology typically overlooked—a moment between individuals when the color line had hardly mattered. The brief friendship gave Ellison an important glimpse of white humanity behind the mask of race and predisposed him against accepting any of the easy stereotypes about whites or blacks.
And yet Ellison’s life and art never presumed that he or any honest American could proceed as if racial stereotypes did not exist. As painful as the racism of the past had been, it was part of us. Many of Ellison’s literary and musical heroes—Mark Twain, Louis Armstrong, William Faulkner—earned his admiration not because they avoided the demeaning masks of racial caricature, but rather because they had recognized the importance of manipulating those masks for ethical ends. In an essay titled “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity,” Ellison expressed qualified admiration for Faulkner’s willingness “to start with the stereotype, accept it as true, and then seek out the human truth which it hides.” Portraying humanity was an ongoing struggle against what the stereotype represented: those forces that sought to narrow and flatten individuals by compressing them within stock generalizations about group identity. Yet on the other hand, to run away from all aspects of group identity merely because some of them resembled dreaded stereotypes was to find yourself, like the nameless protagonist of Invisible Man, afraid even to order your favorite breakfast because doing so might betray what, if not who, you are.
What then did it mean to be a Negro? The question resounded throughout Ellison’s novel and his essays, gathering depth and volume because Ellison saw that in answering it he had to answer the same questions about American and human identity. In fact, because the Negro represented the intersection of the highest hope for human freedom and the most salient example of this freedom’s absence, resolving the riddle of humanity, of America, and of oneself required resolving the question of black identity in its many guises. And to see these guises for what they were, Ellison dedicated himself to canvassing the range of cultural expression from Negro folk and blues tunes to the great works of modernist literature for the truths they held. At either end of this spectrum were great works of art—great because they always acknowledged the constraint of the pattern before making it possible for the human voice or the democratic word to escape, if only by a hair’s breadth, the confines of the pattern.
Such an interplay of constraint and escape defines the narrative movement of Invisible Man. The novel’s shape has often been described as circular, perhaps even dialectical, although some scholars demur at the latter term because of Ellison’s well-known dissatisfactions with the American Communist party. These dissatisfactions, which were long in evidence before the novel’s publication, emerge in Invisible Man as the cold-hearted willingness of Brother Jack and the Brotherhood to sacrifice lives in Harlem for the presumed greater good of the party. The promise of brotherhood turned out to be no more noble than the promise of success offered by Mr. Bledsoe, the unscrupulous president of the college from which the protagonist gets expelled. In moving from southern black cronyism to New York scientific historicism, all the Invisible Man appears to have done is trace a circle. Yet it would be a mistake to see Ellison’s encounter with the American Left in the thirties and forties as a mere dalliance. Nor was it a headlong dive into uncritical advocacy that would later require an ignominious scramble back to shore. The true picture, like most of the important facts about Ellison, reveals not quite one thing and not quite the other, and what lies between tells us a lot about Ellison and the shape of the one triumphant novel he did manage to complete.
As Lawrence Patrick Jackson’s biography, Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius, confirms, in the summer of 1936, Ellison, much like the protagonist of his novel, arrived in New York City planning to earn enough to pay for another year at Tuskegee Institute, where he had been enrolled for three years as a music student. His ambitions to become a performer and composer, however, had been shaken by some less-than-stellar accomplishments in key classes, the uncertain status of the music program at Tuskegee, and a growing interest in literature, kindled in part by the various classes he had taken with Morteza Sprague, chair of the Tuskegee Institute’s English department. The difficulty of finding a decent-paying job in depression-era New York City—and the headiness of meeting, and impressing, Langston Hughes on only his second day in the city—further determined Ellison’s taking a course into left-wing literary circles that would cause him to abandon his previous career plans in favor of a life as a critic and writer of fiction. This new direction was initially enabled by the New York City Federal Writers’ Project, but was highlighted by an intense relationship with Richard Wright, who, at the time of their initial meeting, was still a few years away from publishing Native Son. According to Jackson, Marxism and literary criticism were so closely linked for Ellison during these early years of Ellison’s apprenticeship that he remained “loyal to the New Masses and the Communist-backed League [of American Writers] into the 1940s.”
In spite of the importance of these early left-wing intellectual connections for Ellison, their significance has often been downplayed. In fact, the largely negative cast of Ellison’s experiences on the Left derives from two sources: the depiction of the Brotherhood in Invisible Man and Ellison’s criticisms of Wright in his famous response to Howe’s “Black Boys and Native Sons.” Of the two, the response to Howe was the most definitive. Howe’s essay had taken issue with the attack James Baldwin, in articles like “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (1949) and “Many Thousands Gone” (1951), had mounted against Wright’s portrayal of black humanity as overly sociological. Wright’s novel, Baldwin charged, had merely presented a version of the Negro “as a social and not a personal or a human problem” defined by “statistics, slums, rapes, injustices, [and] remote violence.” Wright had failed, according to Baldwin, on both the political and aesthetic planes.
In countering Baldwin, Howe acknowledged some of Wright’s artistic shortcomings but insisted that while the narrowness, anger, and “militancy” of Native Son may have been aesthetic problems, they were nonetheless true to the experience of the Negro. Howe argued that if the more artistic novels by Ellison and Baldwin could afford to be more “American” and less racial, it was only because Wright had come before them and directly taken on the demons of Negro experience. As a result, he concluded, the younger writers had been freed to take on race more obliquely or perhaps not at all.
Howe’s remarks were aimed primarily at Baldwin. The appearance of Ellison and Invisible Man was necessary only to substantiate the clash-of-generations cast Howe had given to his argument. Even so, Ellison’s secondary role in Howe’s essay did not deter him from seizing the occasion to openly challenge Howe’s judgment. In “The World and the Jug,” Ellison offered definitive, if not exactly new, statements on the Negro’s undeniable connection to society as a whole, the responsibility of the novelist to be first and foremost an artist, his own place in the lineage of Western literature, the failure of liberal social science when it came to the Negro, and the inadequacy of Marxism as a tool for understanding the reality of Negro life. In making the final point, Ellison lamented, “How awful that Wright found the facile answers of Marxism before he learned to use literature as a means for discovering the forms of American Negro humanity.”
The clear implication was that for Ellison the sequence of events had been just the reverse, with the younger man enjoying the advantage of having known American Negro humanity before engaging Marxism. For Ellison, a childhood in which he recalls himself and his playmates aspiring to be Renaissance men was an effective inoculation against doctrinaire ideologues. Yet we must consider that Ellison’s mother, Ida, to whom he dedicated Invisible Man, was a socialist who supported Eugene Debs. She was also not at all shy in conveying her political views to her son. This being the case, the line between representing Negro humanity and deploying leftist social critique is not so easily asserted—certainly not in Ellison’s novel, the harsh portrait of Brother Jack notwithstanding.
The eviction scene that brings Invisible Man’s protagonist to the attention of the Brotherhood is a case in point. The sight of an old woman crying while the meager possessions she shares with her husband are ignominiously dumped in the street triggers in the protagonist an intensely, almost embarrassingly, personal response. He admits, “The old woman’s sobbing was having a strange effect upon me—as when a child, seeing the tears of its parents, is moved by both fear and sympathy to cry. I turned away, feeling myself being drawn to the old couple by a warm, dark, rising whirlpool of emotion which I feared.” The bits we know of the young man’s past, a personal history that Ellison makes available to his reader only in glimpses, does not explain fully the intensity of his reaction. In fact, for a time his reaction puzzles him almost as much as it does the rest of us, for, throughout the novel, the meaning of the Invisible Man’s past confronts him as a riddle. In this case, however, the depth of emotion welling up from this scene of dispossession might have found its source not only in the character’s past life but also in Ellison’s own life, which in the years after his father’s death (Ellison was just three years old) became, as Jackson describes it, a “ragtag pilgrimage . . . from house to house across Oklahoma City.” Jackson records no evictions, but the frequent carting in and out of one’s worldly possessions could only make apparent how little the Ellison family had—how little, after all her hopes and aspirations, Ida Ellison had. Likewise, the novel’s catalog of the old couple’s possessions strewn in the street—the knocking bones, High John the Conqueror nuggets, a tintype of Abraham Lincoln, and cracked china—were themselves evidence of Negro dispossession.
Ellison, as Jackson observes, generally maintained a reticence about his childhood poverty, but his silence makes sense: he was more interested in highlighting the possibilities and not the limitations of straitened circumstances. Against this code of Hemingwayesque grace under pressure, the eviction scene permitted an outpouring of feeling that reveals the anguish of a boy sympathetic and helpless before his mother’s struggles with day-to-day drudgery. The narrator—and perhaps Ellison himself—wonders, “And why did I, standing in the crowd, see like a vision my mother hanging wash on a cold windy day, so cold that the warm clothes froze even before the vapor thinned and hung stiff on the line, and her hands white and raw in the skirt-swirling wind and her gray head bare to the darkened sky. . . .”
The demands of the scene and its recollection require giving rein to individual feeling while not succumbing completely to it. And the partial control that the protagonist gains in the scene is effected through a Marxism-laced dialogue on dispossession. Speaking of the eighty-seven-year-old husband, who has told the crowd that he has worked all his life as a day laborer, the narrator asks, “Where has all his labor gone? Is he lying?” The crowd then responds to his call like a Baptist-church congregation offering up a profane rejoinder (“Hell, no he ain’t lying”) instead of the obligatory “Amen.” The narrator then repeats his question—“Then where did his labor go?”—before continuing his impromptu speech, never quite certain of what he’s trying to do, but inspiring the crowd nonetheless to protest the injustice of the eviction by moving the old couple’s possessions back inside. The strangers appear willing to see themselves and their own mothers and fathers in the evicted elderly couple. It is a response that seems to answer in the affirmative the question the Invisible Man asks himself later at the funeral for Tod Clifton: “could politics ever be an expression of love?”
What Marxism provided Ellison in the years of his apprenticeship was not merely conceptual rigidity or easy answers, but another way of fulfilling his intent to connect individuals to the larger society, the past, and the present, without sacrificing their individuality. Ellison and others grew keenly disappointed with the American Left because the promise of finding a politics that might be an expression of love had once seemed so real. Thus, the true virtue—aesthetic and ethical, even if not quite political—of the path that Ellison took with him from the late 1930s and early 1940s is measured by his capacity to transform the inevitability of disappointment into a saving grace. At the very least, to be disappointed is to have hoped in the first place. If anything makes the protagonist of Invisible Man better than the host of characters around him, it is his refusal to give up the possibility of hope.
From a distance of fifty years, the voice of democratic hope that still speaks from Invisible Man, especially from the novel’s epilogue, can sometimes sound tinny or naively patriotic. When I teach the novel and focus my students’ attention on the narrator’s concluding assertions that we must not only “affirm the principle on which the country was built,” but also take “responsibility” even for those who had violated the principle in pursuing inequality, I can see the impatience in their eyes. To them the words seem to keep the burden where it has always been—on those who have been the most victimized by this nation’s failures. Even though the world inhabited by my students offers greater possibilities than those that greeted Ellison’s southern migrant in the 1930s, they often respond to it as if the amplitude of human potential has been diminished rather than expanded. Perhaps to some degree they are right.
Once upon a time, a youthful Ellison and his compatriots felt no compunction in identifying themselves as Renaissance men and letting others deal with the incongruity of their gesture. If you were taken aback by the idea of a young black boy in Oklahoma envisioning himself as a composer of classical music, the problem was yours, not his. By contrast, recent terms of group identity that specify generational, sexual, racial, or other categories arguably constrict rather than multiply choices. This is not because they signal an unwillingness on the part of those who identify themselves in such terms to join broader movements; young people today seem as politically active as ever. Rather, these categories of identity suggest an inclination for individuals to make broader identifications only in terms of acceptable demographic intersections—not, say, as a Renaissance man, but as a straight, black, southwestern Renaissance man. If something is perhaps gained by way of precision, something also seems lost.
Ellison’s novel resists such pressure. Not merely adding new words, but making old words new was part of his aesthetic and political agenda. The title of his novel is a case in point: at the time of its publication the words invisible man were more likely to bring to mind H. G. Wells and science fiction than the plight of the Negro in America. Ellison’s success can be measured by the fact that it is his book, not Wells’s The Invisible Man, that modern literary types think about when they think about invisibility. In his 1981 preface to a reissue of the novel, Ellison recalled his attempt “to create forms in which acts, scenes and characters speak for more than their immediate selves.” Why else write a novel? Why read one?
Invisible Man is hardly the last word on the American experience, and today it is no longer clear that the novel as a medium can fulfill the democratic hopes that Ellison pinned to his own as he launched it into the world fifty years ago. It is good from time to time to be reminded that things were not always this way. To reread Invisible Man on its fiftieth anniversary is to feel how much the contemporary American novel once mattered to the way we understood ourselves. If it doesn’t quite speak for us as well as it once did, it reminds us how hard we must work to find the words and forms that do.
Copyright © 2002 The Common Review. Posted with permission from the author.
Kenneth Warren is a professor of English Language and Literature and the Deputy Provost for Research and Minority Issues at the University of Chicago. He specializes in African-American literature and 19th- and 20th-century American literature and critical theory. Warren is the author of So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism and Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism. He has been at Chicago since 1991
–By Kenneth Warren
