NOT ONE to tune into Rush Limbaugh, I decided to dust off Invisible Man for another reading after hearing Limbaugh poking at Barak Obama in yet another cheeky moment. Limbaugh is playing "Barack the Magic Negro" as part of his syndicated radio show, sung to the tune of "Puff the Magic Dragon." Time to read Ralph Ellison for balance. His work was in my home when I was growing up, the first work by an African-American to win a major literary award. In 1965, critics polled by Book List voted Invisible Man "the most distinguished single work" published in America since World War II.
Ellison wrote the single sentence, "I am an invisible man" in the summer of 1945. The 31-year-old Ellison had never written a novel. Nine years before he'd been studying music composition at the Tuskegee Institute when he visited New York. There, he met Richard Wright, who was soon to start on his monumental novel Native Son. Encouraged by Wright, Ellison began writing for leftist periodicals, the only magazines that would publish black authors. He never returned to Tuskegee. By 1945, Ellison had broken with Wright. Wright's Native Son, published in 1940 to unprecedented acclaim, was a furious indictment of American society, a realistic expose of racism. For liberal white critics, it became the model for all "authentic" black writing.
But while Ellison shared Wright's anger over racism, he had very different visions of America, race, and literature. He resented white critics' demands that African-American life be portrayed as "an abstract embodiment of living hell." He wanted to "explore the full range of American Negro humanity and to affirm those qualities which are of value beyond any question of segregation, economics, previous condition or servitude." Nor was he content to write protest propaganda rather than sophisticated literature.
Ellison spent seven years working on his novel. Narrated by an anonymous young black man, "one who had been forged in the underground of American experience and yet managed to emerge less angry than ironic....a blues-toned laugher-at-wounds who included himself in his indictment of the human condition," it is a surreal and dark comic odyssey. The naive youth encounters not only white racism, but also a variety of fraudulent black alternatives offered by "Uncle Toms" in Dixie and Communists and black nationalists in Harlem. Having discarded the identities and illusions that others, both white and black, want to force upon him, the young man prepares to create his own destiny.
Ellison died before he could publish his second novel, which was published posthumously in 1999 under the title Juneteenth. Today, Invisible Man remains astonishing as ever, a timeless landmark of American literature. I think it helps illuminate the quest of anyone searching for their own identity.
Ralph Ellison -- Invisible Man ISBN-13: 978-0375507915
