Democracy and Individualism in a Post-Colonial World

Prophets of Recognition: Ideology and the Individual in Novels by Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, and Eudora Welty. By Julia Eichelberger. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State UP, 1999. 192 pp. $49.95

Circles of Sorrow, Lines of Struggle: The Novels of Toni Morrison. By Gurleen Grewal. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State UP, 1998. 154 pp. $25.00

"This is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America--this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible."

--Langston Hughes, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain"

Julia Eichelberger and Gurleen Grewal end up asking many of the same questions: What constitutes true democracy and freedom? How might obeisance to an abstract notion of individualism actually prove harmful to individuals? How is individual memory linked to collective social
history, particularly for those who must reclaim their past from a marginalized position? Both of these writers are concerned with questions of individual dignity and the individual's diminished status in the face of certain totalizing "ideologies"--democracy, individualism, and "America"--and the institutions that they undergird.

At the outset of her study, Eichelberger suggests that post-structuralist theory of the last several decades has been too quick to dismiss the human(e) possibilities in the American novel since 1950. She does not dispute the dominance of political and social ideology at the expense of individuals in the social frameworks these novels discuss. However, Eichelberger identifies in Ellison, Morrison, Bellow, and Welty a subversive individuality. Eichelberger thus proposes to avoid "a humanism that naively minimizes the influence of an individual's material circumstances," all the while eschewing "the determinism or chaotic indeterminacy" that much contemporary theory has identified as a foregone conclusion in literature and life. In other words, Eichelberger offers a third way, as it were, whereby she argues for the promise of democratic and egalitarian principles in these novels even as she explains how each interrogates individualism, itself an ideology which Westerners, particularly Americans, often understand as being indispensable to any democratic enterprise. To the contrary, Eichelberger asserts, "individualism" can prove to be an abstraction that may well harm and diminish actual individuals. As prophets of recognition, these four post-World War II American novelists show how this specious individualism distracts their protagonists from conditions that are actually the result of an "ideology of domination" or "false consciousness." That is, the individuals in these novels unwittingly endorse and lend credence to ideologies that actually end up harming them.

Eichelberger offers readings of Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), Morrison's The Bluest Eye (1970), Bellow's Seize the Day (1956), and Welty's The Optimist's Daughter (1972) respectively. She anchors her argument in the work of Ellison and Morrison, finding in the lives of their black characters the starkest confrontation with the costs of "false consciousness." Indeed, she finds in these novels many instances where the American myth of social equality and individual dignity runs headlong into the social realities faced by Ellison's narrator and Morrison's cast of characters. In both instances, characters are tempted to embrace the prevailing cultural norm--i.e. "whiteness"--as the only viable standard against which to measure their lives. For instance, in the midst of the abuses he endures during the "Battle Royal," Ellison's narrator clings to his belief that the white men responsible for his misery are the only capable judges of his accommodationist graduation speech on "social responsibility": "I wanted to deliver my speech more than anything else in the world, because I felt that only these men could truly judge my ability." As the individual assents to the "ideology of domination," he or she automatically looks to the dominant culture for affirmation. But as Ellison's narrator's perilous circumstances immediately before, during, and after his speech demonstrate...