Ellison and the Twentieth-Century American Scholar

ELLISON AND THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN SCHOLAR Eleanor Lyons* Ralph Waldo Ellison once said about Emerson, "I could suppress the name of my namesake out of respect for the achievements of its original bearer but I cannot escape the obligation of attempting to achieve some of the things which he asked of the American writer."1 What Emerson sought, actually, was an affirmation of the individual and the democratic ideal that would help bring about a cultural awakening of the profoundest sort, or, as he insists in The American Scholar, "lead in a new age."2 Critics, however, have yet to acknowledge the full impact of Emersonian aims on Ellison's Invisible Man, the extent to which this address explains what has gone wrong for the narrator and how he plans to try to put it right. As Leonard Deutsch argues in the one article that explores Ellison's debt to Emerson, "the hard-earned realization of the Emersonian potential within the protagonist himself is one of the novel's major thematic concerns."3 Much as in The American Scholar, in fact, his story is an account of the forces that educate him, enabling him finally to fulfill both his primary obligation to himself and the "socially responsible role" that has been his aim since the outset. Like the address, too, the novel sets against an indictment of contemporary society the hope of change through action of the sort undertaken by the narrator. Denouncing the cowardice and conformity of his own times, Emerson calls on scholars—on "all thinking men," as Stephen Whicher puts it4—to come forth as spokesmen for values and possibilities that had given way to materialistic concerns. As if in answer to this call for a new leadership, Ellison's narrator takes his place among those scholars and, despite the sobering ironies in any such statement, joins them in what Emerson describes as the duty "to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances" (p. 100). But "the end is in the beginning,"5 and the narrator's development as Emersonian scholar merges with the playing out of forces established in the smoker episode. Although his performance that evening reveals a passionate commitment to the place assigned him by whites, his nightmare version of the reward indicates dissent from within. Mocked by his grandfather as he discovers that his scholarship has become an injunction to "Keep This Nigger-Boy Running" (p. 26), he admits at dream level of 'Eleanor Lyons is an Associate Professor of English at Indiana University at South Bend. Her work on Ellison also includes an essay that will appear in Approaches to Teaching Ellison's Invisible Man. 94Eleanor Lyons awareness the self-betrayal implicit in the goal he would pursue. As he persists against his own deepest instincts, his grandfather becomes the enemy he can neither afford to hear nor manage to ignore. Only after having been driven underground does he confront the truth about himself as well as society, acknowledging the enemy voice as his own and embracing the conduct it would dictate. In effect, he runs from the education Emerson advocates in The American Scholar until life, in the "boomerang" fashion he has come to distrust, cancels his plans and leads him to the selfrealization that is home. The Emersonian overtones of his journey remain unavailable to him but comment on the distance he must travel and the nature of his destination, which he reaches in the epilogue when he finally accepts his share of blame for the events that nearly obliterate him and continues his Emersonian action against them. The narrator's experiences at college establish him at the outset as ironic counterpart to the scholar Emerson envisions. Committed to an education that cultivates individual potential, this scholar earns the independence of a name and place that are unassailable. The narrator, on the other hand, must confess to an academic career that ends one afternoon in the absurdity of a trip to the Golden Day with Mr. Norton, leaving him with no further access to the identity he had worked so diligently to establish on campus. Moreover, his account of this defeat unfolds in...