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Chapter 4: Invisible Man’s Political Vision: Ellison and King
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4 Invisible Man’s Political Vision Ellison and King It is in this fact that we must look for an explanation of the phenomenon of the last chapter: namely, that though the hero gains his throne by a victory, he never loses it by defeat. Lord Raglan, The Hero I have attempted to show that traditional narratives are never historical ; that they are myths, and that a myth is story told in connection with a rite. . . . Traditional narratives show, by their form and their content, that they are derived neither from historical fact nor from imaginative fiction, but from acted ritual, that is to say, ritual performed for the benefit, and in the presence of, a body of worshippers who either take no part in it, or a very small part. Lord Raglan, The Hero So on a farm in Vermont where I was reading The Hero by Lord Raglan and speculating on the nature of Negro leadership in the United States, I wrote the first paragraph of Invisible Man, and was soon involved in the struggle of creating the novel. Ralph Ellison Ellison’s work as a novelist and his career as a public intellectual emerged out of his conception of Negro history and its relationship to the fluid social processes of American democracy. In particular, Ellison understood the Negro’s quest for social equality to be the mechanism by which United States history would fulfill its utopian ideal of creating a society in which everyone enjoyed an equal stake. As Ellison often explained, Invisible Man was in part an attempt to define the limits and possibilities of Negro leadership in a society that seemed unable to accept any Negro leader who challenged the necessity of segregation. Invisible Man showed how American social structures worked to reinforce a status quo in which white and black Americans remained invisible to each other—an inevitable 174 Ellison and King 175 consequence of centuries of racial oppression.The narrator repeatedly challenges this status quo—he has “gone out into the world; he has gone out into it; and into it; and into it,” as Philip Roth says (Reading 191)—but can achieve only a limited success. Finding neither a constituency he can lead nor an institutional authority he can persuade, he is left to tell his story to himself and to anyone who might happen upon its telling. His act of leadership, which is also an act of revolt, is to turn his story into a ceremonial offer of his own self-enlightenment. This consummately Emersonian gesture evades solipsism insofar as its gesture is accepted and transformed by those who read or hear his story. The hero’s narrative act does not insist that others follow him so much as that they find themselves in his example. His tale of how he came to understand his “invisible” place in American society is also an invitation to his ideal readers to transform their invisible community into social reality. Significantly,the hero fails his quest to become an effective Negro leader; he succeeds only as the ironic messenger of his failure. Any immediate triumph that can be ascribed to this narrative performance may seem decidedly aesthetic rather than political. The narrator has mastered his self, and that mastery is expressed through the artistry of his narrative. Indeed, it may be more accurate to say that his literary mastery makes possible his self-mastery. From this perspective, Invisible Man follows the modernist narrative model established by Proust’s In Pursuit of Lost Time or Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist. Yet perhaps because Invisible Man is so embedded within the premises of a Negro and American history,it has rarely been seen as “merely”an aesthetic achievement.As John Hersey noticed in 1974,many years after the question of when Ellison would publish another novel had become tired,“the argument,as old as art itself,over the question:‘What use has art?’—hounds Ellison perhaps more than any other first-rank novelist of our time,unless it be Alexander Solzhenitsyn”(Collected 785).At the time of Hersey’s comparison, Solzhenitsyn was the world’s foremost political dissident, a living monument of revolt against the totalitarian regime of the Soviet Union and a champion of the individual artist’s moral obligation to be true to the dictates of his or her individual conscience. Ellison too championed the integrity of the individual,despite attacks from critics who mistakenly regarded his politics as a form of complacency. In...