Ralph Ellison and the Genius of America by Timothy Parrish (review)

In this careful and complex study, Timothy Parrish undertakes the task of what he terms “rehistoricizing Ellison’s career” (6) in order to bring into relief an understanding of Ralph Ellison as the most significant American intellectual in the latter half of the twentieth century. He writes, “The true tragedy of Ralph Ellison is not that he never published another novel but that the scope of his extraordinary and arguably singular achievement as an American intellectual still goes unrecognized.” Parrish offers an alternative reading of Ellison’s career and influence to that of Arnold Rampersad in his controversial 2007 biography. Parrish announces in his introduction that he is responding to “the exhausted tradition of thinking about Ellison that Rampersad’s book embodied,” particularly the focus on Ellison’s black authenticity and the implication that “Ellison had failed of his promise because he did not publish a second novel” (xii). Instead of this view of Ellison as failed novelist and inauthentic black figure, Parrish asserts that Ellison embodies the civil rights movement and is a political visionary. He positions Ellison less as a modernist novelist in the Joycean vein, and more as a key figure “in the long battle for blacks’ equal rights and harbinger of imminent victory” (2). Parrish’s Ellison is highly politicized, but not in the same vein as Barbara Foley’s startling depiction of Ellison as a repressed Marxist. Rather, Parrish sees Ellison as the key imaginative figure of the civil rights movement that followed upon the publication of Invisible Man in 1952, whose extraordinary essays of the 1960’s and 1970’s articulated the civil rights message. He writes, “Ellison, perhaps more than any other American writer, was the essential visionary of post-Civil War America,” and further, “Ellison . . . was the black intellectual who could envision an America that would, within a generation of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s death, elect . . . a black president.” The scope of Ellison’s overall achievement offers “a legacy that is as complex and rich as any in the canon of American literature—as if the same mind had written Moby-Dick and ‘The American Scholar’ ” (5-6).

In four eloquent, historically informed chapters, Parrish places Ellison alongside an intriguing cast of his contemporary American intellectuals: Philip Roth, Richard Wright, Robert Penn Warren, C. Vann Woodward, Martin Luther King, Jr., and finally, Barack Obama. Focusing on Roth’s The Human Stain (2000), with its attention to the ambiguities and meanings of race, Parrish argues that the novel may well be literally about Ellison, or at least that its analysis and mode clearly derive from Ellison’s work. Roth, “like Ellison at the close of Invisible Man, insists that his reader must have the imaginative empathy to identify with a character who may be black or white or Jewish or none or all of the above” (47). The novel, he claims, is “the sequel to Invisible Man which Ellison could not finish” (48). This is a bold claim to make about Roth, yet Parrish shows in convincing detail that Roth identified with Ellison and his views of race, ethnicity, and Americanness as early as 1960, showing the pervasive effect of Ellison on Roth’s fiction. Parrish builds on this comparison by then rereading the overdetermined Ellison-Wright relationship; he rejects the simplistic Wright-vs.-Ellison model first championed by Irving Howe and implicitly affirmed by Rampersad. In its place, Parrish puts forth a more complex model of influence in which Wright inspired and enabled Ellison as a writer, particularly through Wright’s Twelve Million Black Voices, and asserts that Ellison’s work, including Invisible Man, constitutes Ellison’s effort to live up to that inspiration: “Wright inspired Ellison to write, and when Ellison did write, it was to add to the story Wright had told. Without Wright, there would be no Invisible Man, and in that sense no Ralph Ellison either” (98).

Parrish then details Ellison’s remarkable intellectual relationships with Robert Penn Warren and...