Ellison’s Invisible West

M A R T I N B U C C O Colorado State University Ellison's Invisible West Ralph Ellison’s grandfather once led a group of Tennessee settlers to the Oklahoma Territory. Ellison’s parents moved from South Carolina to Oklahoma City shortly before he himself was born there in 1914, just seven years after the territory became a state. And although Ellison grew up in Oklahoma, no critic of Invisible Man has commented on a key passage — the Westward-Ho interlude — near the end of Chapter 8. In chronological retrospect and in language as pliant and racy as Local Color and Mark Twain, Ellison’s young protagonist narrates his picaresque misadventures. Unjustly expelled from a Southern Negro college, but with his faith still intact, the exile makes his odyssey to Harlem. Though pre-invisible during this stage of his education, he nevertheless is less seen than seeing, an Emersonian eyeball alive with visual impressions. Awaiting prospects, the unnamed “I” goes to a motion-picture theater — and his cinematic vision of Western myth kindles the novel as a whole: In the evening I went out to a movie, a picture of frontier life with heroic Indian fighting and struggles against flood, storm, and forest fire, with the out-numbered settlers winning each engage­ ment; an epic of wagon trains rolling ever westward. I forgot myself (although there was no one like me taking part in the adventure) and left the dark room in a lighter mood. This movement from dark to light, from sight to insight, is Invisible Man’s essential theme. The celluloid drama, “a movie, a picture,” is itself a metaphor for the novel’s rapid movement and pictorial quality. Like the “frontier life” Hollywood embodies in the film, Ellison embodies his pioneer-narrator’s contemporary frontier in the novel. Stampeding images of New York reality are as wild and shifting as the shapes on the silver screen. Reciprocal shaping, Ellison once declared, is the proper relationship between the artist and his culture: “The American novel is in this sense a conquest of the frontier; as it describes our experience, it creates it.” 238 Western American Literature The long string of frontier violences in Invisible Man indeed takes on qualities of Western melodrama — for example, the hoss-operatic police galloping around a corner, rising high in their saddles and shout­ ing. And in the final riot scene the black nationalist Ras (in the garb not of an Indian but of an Abyssinian chieftain) charges on horseback into the police, his shield and spear held high; out of jungle-cowboy flicks, Ras the Destroyer is the type of quixotic black culture hero ignorant of limits. Like old white imperialism, new black expansion springs from racial arrogance, economic realism, and deep idealism. Serious history or Grade “B” Western, the “epic of wagon trains rolling ever westward” is Ellison’s ironic allegory-within-allegory of the black man’s bloody pilgrimage and struggle upward. The Great Migra­ tion of the Negro masses, the bursting forth of black personality from Southern farm to Northen city, is as phantasmagoric as the earlier covered-wagon treks toward a freedom impossible under the old regime. Like the photoplay with its panoramic perspectives, like Whitman’s “Open Road” and “Passage to India,” Ellison’s epic novel treats the West as a state of mind. The springs of Ellison’s fluid attitudes, sense of freedom, and indi­ vidual possibility flow not from the Old South but from promises inherent in the Old West. One of the “out-numbered settlers” among the Oklahoma whites, Ellison experienced segregated schools; but roaming the streets and pool-halls of Oklahoma City, he also learned the folkways of that mythic trickster, the accomplished Western underdog. With his rich tragicomic sensibility, the black narrator suffers the painful difference between himself and the heterogeneous whites; but the pioneer “I” also experiences an illuminated private world, a state of mind, beyond the reach of mere geography or the claws of social conflict. As Ellison the artist learned to transcend restrictions through literature, music, and imagination, so he transfers to his coltish picaro the Myth of the West — thus emancipating him from a history strictly...