Ralph Ellison's Invisible Theology by M. Cooper Harriss (review)

M. Cooper Harriss's Ralph Ellison's Invisible Theology argues that Invisible Man is a secular novel that "articulates a vision of race and its dynamic cultural, social, and political exigencies (frequently couched in materialist terms) in such a way that it reflects the religious and theological antecedents and environments for which race stands as a surrogate, modern cosmology" (3). Harriss does not argue that Ellison was writing a "religious novel," but speaks in broader terms about an understanding of religion, in a more secular mode, as how human beings organize their worlds to make them intelligible. Harriss is in conversation with many scholars, including those in Arts, Literature, and Religion, a subdiscipline in religious studies. Through thinkers like Theodore Ziolkowski, Tracy Fessenden, and Charles Taylor, he establishes the secular as an "immanent frame" that manifests what Willie Jennings calls the "deep architecture" that patterns a culture (41), functioning as formal religious traditions did in the past. Through this frame, Harriss locates the religious in Ellison's work, not in a clunky way but as camouflaged in the secular, yet powerful in how it is used, culturally, to negotiate reality. In this frame, race becomes a mythic structure that not just informs, but organizes a reading of reality in the United States, one that Ellison, in his innovative novel, both makes transparent and critiques through the metaphor/metaphysic of invisibility.

Harriss, reading the reception of Ellison's work, shows us how Ellison upset the normative readings of race in African American and American literature. Ellison was "invisibly black," as reviewers could not "place" the novel in terms of current African American literature, particularly that of Ellison's mentor, Richard Wright. Ellison's work, Harriss argues, emerging in close proximity to the Brown v. Board decision, stands in a kind of liminal space of the possible-but-not-quite-yet, a space potentially transformative but also potentially apocalyptic. Ellison, as Harriss describes him, is a poet of the cusp.

Invisible Theology includes Ellison's biography; readings of Ellison's notion of invisibility through the Bible, Shakespeare, Luther, American Puritanism, and indigenous African traditions; and, a map of the literary landscape of Harlem in its Renaissance, engaging major characters like Zora Neale Hurston. In his last pages, Harriss turns to potential contemporary deployments of the trope of invisibility, in all the "posts": post-9/11 and postracial, and in America pre-, during, and post-Obama, invoking Clint Eastwood's "empty chair" speech at the Republican National Convention in 2012 and the subsequent "invisible" lynching of President Obama in Texas, among other places (182-86). Obama, as Harriss reminds us, responded by tweeting a picture of a chair with a sign that said "The President," which he occupied (186). Harriss also reads invisibility in drone warfare, quoting Alex Rivera's contention that the drone is a "disembodied destroyer of bodies" (190).

While these last two readings are beyond Ellison's lifetime, but apt—particularly in the case of Obama—the first readings point to the kind of intellectual Ellison was. Ellison majored in music at Tuskegee, with the desire to compose concert music, but he was also interested in literature. Albert Murray tells Xavier Nicholas in an interview that he and Ellison were reading a great variety of literature, including writers no one else at Tuskegee checked out of the library, such as Alexander Woollcott, writer for The New Yorker magazine and a member of The Algonquin Round Table. Ellison, therefore, placed his work in a Western lineage that included Herman Melville, whose work was being rediscovered in the 1920s, James Joyce, and T. S. Eliot, and saw himself not just as a Negro writer, but as an American writer (70). His work "reflects a theological sensibility derived from the religious tendency to aggregate matters of universal (timeless) and particular (timely) significance," a method that, Harriss argues, reflects Ellison's "grappling" with the "theological nature of the secular and the secularization of the theological" (71) that characterizes...