Ralph Ellison, Intertextuality, and Biographical Criticism: An Answer to Brian Roberts

Brian Roberts raises important criticisms of my argument that the leftist Ellison who in the winter of 1937-38 wrote "A Party Down at the Square" and the Cold Warrior Ellison who in 1952 published Invisible Man were "more significant for their break than for their continuity" (Foley, "Reading Redness" 326).¹ If Roberts is right in his counterclaim that the two texts exhibit a similar "conceptual dialectic" based upon a "synthesized intersubjectivity," rather than a polarization between class consciousness on the one hand and existential humanism on the other, he not only queries my analysis of Ellison's individual political and artistic odyssey but also raises a number of larger questions (Roberts 90). Implicated in our varying readings of Ellison's oeuvre, I shall argue, are not just different conceptions of the relationship of the U.S. organized left to African Americans. We also embrace quite different notions about the kinds of evidence—intertextual and biographical—that can legitimately be adduced in arguments about literary interpretation. I am grateful to both Roberts and the editors of JNT for giving me this opportunity to rethink some of my methodological premises.

Roberts summarizes some key points in three articles I have written about Ellison's politics between the late 1930s and the early 1950s; let me expand briefly. In "The Rhetoric of Anticommunism in Invisible Man," I speculated that anticommunism was central to the invisible man's famous closing proposition, "Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?" The narrator's ability to put in the background the preceding tale's harsh critique of U.S. racism and to assert his oneness with a reader at this point presumed to be white is premised, I suggested, upon a rhetorical loading of the dice; the "other" becomes not the white supremacists and their African-American henchmen who have denied the hero's visibility because of his race, but those enemies of patriotism who are "making the old eagle rock dangerously"—above all, Communists. In "Ralph Ellison as Proletarian Journalist," I argued that Ellison's connection with the left in the late 1930s and early 1940 was of significant strength and duration, since he evidently supported the various changes in line and practice of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) accompanying the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939 and subsequently the Nazi invasion of the USSR in 1941. This stance indicated that Ellison was, if not "zealous" (Roberts's word, not mine), at least in substantial agreement with CP policy well into the war. In "Reading Redness: Politics and Audience in Ralph Ellison's Early Short Fiction"—the article most central to Roberts's commentary—I proposed that a basic reason why discontinuity prevailed over continuity in the shift from the proletarian to the Cold War-era Ellison was that the bid for multiracial unity contained in the left-inflected early short stories was based upon a call for anti-capitalist class consciousness that precluded rather than celebrated trans-class conceptions of the human condition. Both explicit and implicit in these essays, then, is the proposition that the humanism voiced at the finale of the 1952 novel is premised upon a pseudouniversalism carrying fundamentally conservative implications. If, by contrast, Roberts is right in saying that from the outset of his career Ellison was "revis[ing] the Marxist dialectic" in such a way as to supersede the primacy of the class contradiction, and instead to construe "the sympathetic human body as a natural, material site of equality among human subjects" (90), then he is not, as he proposes, "building upon," but instead fundamentally rejecting, my analysis of Ellison's relationship with the left; Roberts's and my interpretations of Ellison's strategy of "speaking for you" are, finally, incompatible.²

As I'll indicate below, I find a number of Roberts's points, about both texts and...