Shadowing Ralph Ellison (review)

More than fifty years after its publication, Invisible Man remains a monumental work of American literature: rich, provocative, complex, and demanding. Thoroughly steeped in the panoply of literary, historical, and intellectual traditions that informed the moment of its production, it perfectly exemplifies its period. As many critics have noted, it unites anxiety over alienation, conformity, and political subversion to themes that had great currency in the fifties: the American Adam, the machine and the garden, love and death in the American novel, and the return of the repressed implicit in the closing of the frontier. At the same time, Invisible Man has been recognized as a canonical work of African-American literature that consolidates the black and white literary, social, and cultural history that circumscribed mid-twentieth-century African-American life. Over the half-century since its publication, moreover, it has sustained its reputation as a modernist masterpiece, placing it in a rich, international literary tradition. William Faulkner’s 1949 Nobel Prize and Ralph Ellison’s 1952 National Book Award, therefore, clearly indicate the moment when modernist writing made its transition in the American academy from avant-garde to high art.

Because Ellison’s artistry was widely recognized as manifesting an extraordinary command of modernist technique and an encyclopedic archive of literature, art, and culture, his subsequent works were eagerly awaited, and over the years a few independently published pieces of short fiction, which promised to be excerpts from a forthcoming novel, continued to stir hope and interest among critics and readers. In the end, however, whether those excerpts might or might not have been destined for the final version of that novel, Ellison’s plethora of skill, knowledge, and insight produced a striking paucity of subsequent fiction: those short fictions and Juneteenth, a somewhat self-contained portion of the long, uncompleted novel.

Many critics similarly hoped that Ellison, so astute to the problematics of the American canon, so aware of aesthetic modulation and linguistic nuance, might have produced a monumental work—or even a series of works—of literary and cultural criticism. While nothing Ellison wrote explicitly accomplishes that task, Invisible Man had a literary-critical dimension, one profoundly germane to the currents of American literary criticism, and Ellison’s Collected Essays, published posthumously, establishes Ellison as a major social critic. Because Ellison’s criticism was topical rather than systematic, however, the originality and depth of his criticism, as well as its significance in the greater realm of postwar American thought, were not as readily apparent.

That is one reason John Wright’s astonishingly good book, Shadowing Ralph Ellison, is such an important piece of intellectual history. With an attention to detail, breadth of knowledge, and subtlety of thought all too rare in contemporary criticism, Wright establishes, in elegant prose, the distinctions and negotiations that comprised and distinguished Ellison’s critical perspective. Grounded heavily—but far from exclusively—in a vigorous, detailed reading of Ellison’s first published collection of essays, Shadow and Act, Wright identifies the cogent strains of Ellison’s thinking as they appear, sometimes unexpectedly, throughout the spectrum of his writing. Meticulously examining these strains against the complex intellectual terrain that they were crossing, Wright employs a Burkean methodology to clarify the action Ellison’s statements performed in their historically specific settings to their historically specific settings ends.

The idea of consciousness, Wright correctly demonstrates, is central to Ellison’s conceptualizations. While I had noted in a review of Ellison’s posthumous works the great importance of consciousness to Ellison’s conception of American democracy, I had no idea until I read Wright’s comprehensive discussion how pervasively conscious thought comprised a cornerstone of Ellison’s aesthetic. Wright sets out to prove, in consequence, that “the body of ‘conscious thought’ [Ellison] has erected since the late 1930s has been left in the shadow, artificially isolated from its intellectual roots in African American tradition and almost invariably denied a critical context as pluralistic in its techniques and cultural references as Ellison’s extraordinary eclecticism demands” (15–16).

Despite the fact that Ellison never attempted, in...