Ralph Ellison and the Raft of Hope: A Political Companion to Invisible Man (review)

If politics makes strange bedfellows, the project of reading for politics makes for useful estrangement. In this carefully constructed anthology, a raft of contributors—whose disciplines include classics, political theory, history, and law as well as English—argue for what editor Lucas Morel calls "the political artistry" of Ellison's landmark novel (1). That such recovery should be necessary may be surprising, but it responds to longstanding critique of Ellison as a political refusenik (he preferred not to enter into civil rights activism) and belated modernist (someone who valued the commitment to artistry above that to a community or people). In ten essays, with prologue and epilogue—a structure miming that of Invisible Man—the volume seeks to explore the full range of Ellison's commitments to individualism, liberation, and his chosen form, making his politics available for riffs and reconsiderations in the best Ellisonian fashion.

Some of these essays will interest literary scholars for the view from elsewhere they adopt. James Seaton's exploration of the mysterious "principle" affirmed at the end of Invisible Man and William Nash's reading of the evolution of Ellison's politics as an extension of Emerson's famous question "How shall I live?" frame the difficulties and benefits of reading across disciplinary boundaries. More extensively, Morel explores the meaning to Ellison of democratic (or what might be called Emersonian) individualism as a project inseparable from his struggle "to get the Negro into the written record of American history" (62). From the perspective of political theory, key incidents and tropes of Invisible Man—for example, the placement of Tod Clifton's funeral in Mt. Morris Park, in a nod toward Langston Hughes's "racial mountain," or the description of the funeral crowd as the "boil[ing]" contents of a fraught melting pot—attest to Ellison's investment in the democratic subject as such, and in the power of Invisible Man as "a book for citizens" (77). Likewise, Thomas Engeman's essay on the novel as a quest for racial justice begins with Ellison's investment in the productive conflicts of a democratic society, but argues for a sharp distinction between Invisible Man and the uncompleted Juneteenth; finally, for Engeman, Ellison comes to understand that "the kind of … social knowledge required to help liberate others" is possible only in the context of Christian belief (93). Here, as throughout, one might wish for discussion of the relations between the political and the social as informing categories; in any case, the argument for Ellison's conversion to Christian communitarianism is clearly at odds with both his private writings and the tenor of Juneteenth, whose brand of redemption, as personified by the Reverend A. Z. Hickman, is steeped in hard-fought social experience and culture rather than theology.

More convincing with respect to spirituality is Marc Conner's essay on sacrament and history in Invisible Man, which argues for Ellison's interest in material objects as transformative, capable of altering received notions of time, history, and political agency. Focusing on the "enchanting force" of objects in the novel as reflective of sacramental thinking, Conner succeeds in probing the force of Ellison's narrative form. Formally constructed around such key objects as the freedom papers of the eviction scene, the novel achieves the effect of Walter Benjamin's famously dialectical image ("image is dialectic at a standstill" [173]), creating for its readers the experience of oscillation between "a new sense of the past and a new sense of the present" (173)—a not unmeaningful act in the context of the novel's emergence and reception.

Another standout essay is Danielle Allen's reading of "the tragi-comedy of citizenship" (37), which begins not by taking politics as an interpretive category for granted but by raising the very problem of definition. Clearly, she notes, readers are "not meant to focus on events and institutions" as the source of meaningful...