Copy Wright: What Is an (Invisible) Author?
Author(s): Frederick T. Griffiths
Reviewed work(s):
Source: New Literary History, Vol. 33, No. 2, Anonymity (Spring, 2002), pp. 315-341
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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Is an (Invisible) Author?
Copy Wright: What
Frederick
T. Griffiths
the
I am a negro and was born some time during
in Elbert County,
Ga., and I reckon by this
time I must
be a little over forty years old. My
was not married
mother
when
I was born, and I
war
never
father was or anything
knew who my
about
him.
"The New Slavery
?Anonymous,
South?An
Autobiography
Georgia
I am
near
which
white.
to be.
wanted
And
in the
a
by
Peon"1
Negro
be white
if I
[. . .] I might
therein
lies the anomaly
seems
to the uninitiated
strange
beyond
belief.
of a
"The Adventures
?Anonymous,
Near-White"2
My eyes are light blue, my hair is light brown, my
features are undeniably
Nordic, my skin iswhite;
yet in my veins run a few drops of negro blood.
in America,
I am a negro.
Therefore,
"White,
?Anonymous,
but Black:
on
I am
an
man.
invisible
?Ralph
TT
am
a
negro."
"I am
"I am
near
white."
Problem"3
. .] I am invisible,
refuse to see
people
Ellison,
Invisible Man4
Acts
Autobiographical
"
[.
simply because
understand,
me.
A Document
the Race
"Therefore,
in America,
I am
such
a
four
invisible." With
these
self-descriptions
introduced
their personal
histories
voices
by racially
a
the faces they did not show. They spoke from within
categorizing
continuous
that in the first half of the twentieth
practice of testimony
to authored
century moved from genuine anonymity
invisibility. Though
I negro."
JL nameless
New Literary History, 2002, 33: 315-341
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316
NEW
the
texts
anonymous
similar
enough
was
withheld]"
"I was
the
uncollected
to raise
and
successor
to
that "I am
the
the master
HISTORY
are
there
unstudied,
the possibility
twentieth-century
that
interrupted
one
but
born,"
remain
testimonies
LITERARY
ex-slave
narrative
[name
narrators'
of
emancipa
tion and racial progress. Titles such as "The New Slavery in the South"
(NS 409) and "More Slavery at the South" made no bones about the
such as Frederick Douglass
matter.5 Antebellum
and William
narrators,
names and formed the first well-known
Wells Brown, became household
of African
generation
American
In
authors.
these
later
the substitution
of "I am" for a signature marked
of
liberation
and uplift went underground
parables
deferred.
For
of
vestige
accounts
the
the
peon,
rather
than
and
nurse,
the underground
railroad
themselves
other
the
southerners,
was journalistic;
northward.
self-narratives,
the spot where
the
to lament the dream
they
two
The
sent
"white
only
their
Negroes"
as they all
are in the North, but dare not say where. Outspoken
as
to
once
historians
elude
the Klan.
continue
did
are, they
literary
they
From
1940 onwards
there came an emergence
of sorts in that
moment
of black authorship when Richard Wright, Ralph
breakthrough
above
both to sell books and to
James Baldwin, and others managed
as
it
in
for
the
voiceless
American
"to voice
or,
Wright put
speak
Hunger,
the words
in them that they could not say, to be a witness
for their
a living in the process,
itmight be added). But the
living"6 (and to make
Ellison,
loss
were
was
not
repaired.
A
distinction
easily
is
missed
that
the
voiceless
not
the anonymous,
who in fact did find words to witness for their
at
cost
of their names. To be considered
the
below is the
living, though
"I am"s play in this curious history of authorship's
role that the nameless
and
disappearance
African
question,
am!'"
within
reappearance
the
autobiographical
practice.7
not a hidden one. Ellison beckons
though
his
proclaims
narrator,
anonymous
continuities
strong
This
American
two
down
wolfing
of
is an unstudied
to it: "T am what
I
yams.
I said, T yam what I am!'" (IM 266).
"They're my birthmark,'
movement
from the anonymity
of "Negro Peon
1904" to the
The
crosses
authored
the line between
invisibility of Ellison's novel obviously
is
fact and fiction,
though this is not an easy line to find. Invisible Man
from Ellison's own
distance
fact-based fiction at a teasingly ambiguous
self-presentation.
autobiographical
narratives
excerpted
above,
we
must
About
trust
the
the
of
facticity
editors.
"It
the
is a
other
reliable
story, and we believe, a typical one," attest the editors of the Independent
account
of "Negro Peon
about the dictated
1904," though of course
a
to
in
it
form
for publication"
has
been
taken
suitable
(NS
"liberty"
"put
of this account,
the respective contributions
the authoring
409). Within
are hard to
of the "Negro Peon" (his term?) and his white amanuensis
determine.
The
Georgia
man
puts
a human
face
on
"the
new
slavery,"
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COPY
317
WRIGHT
that gradually
loses its features as bondage
strips him of family,
words
ambition,
(his choice?)
individuality, and hope. The concluding
not himself, as the subject of this "autobiography":
peonage,
foreground
but one
"I reckon
make
I'll
die
much
difference
camp. And a Georgia
thus that the human
some
In
able
or
we
cases,
in a coal
either
in an
iron
furnace.
It don't
than a Georgia
peon
peon camp is hell itself!" (NS 414). But itwas ever
are dispensable.
faces on social problems
Either
which.
must
the
forego
since
extraneous,
or
mine
is better
question
render
of
may
anonymity
as
factuality
the
boundary
imponder
between
fact and fiction no less shifty and notional
than the color line, especially
the narrator from the white
that line no longer reliably partitions
when
audience
that
or
he
she
In
addresses.
but
fuller,
self-contradictory,
identities are the writers of "The Adventures
of a
possession
Near-White"
and of "White,
(hereafter "Mr. Blank," as he styles himself)
but Black"
"Mr. Therefore,"
from his merely
local and
(hereafter
in America,
invisible racial identity, "Therefore,
I am a negro.").8 They
at the outset that the defining
both announce
fact of the life stories to
in white men's
follow is a racial illusion: namely, that they are Negroes
of
their
bodies, able to disappear
racially?"los[ing]
myself across the line," as
"Mr. Blank" puts it (ANW 373)?and
thereby to spy on white people who
racial masquerade,
have let down their guard. Their
enabled by the
and
of
white
the
bodies,
exposes
large
confusing
advantage
optically
"legal fiction" of the color line and the "one drop of
they can fight fire with fire, fiction with fiction,
themselves as factual reporters may be doubted. On
to
their masks before
shocked white
interlocutors
lesson,
to be
only
driven
as they here disclose
another
their
mask,
anonymity,
and
the
accounts
a
from
job,
a church,
their racial masks
of
the
occasion
they drop
teach an important
a railroad
car.
for "the uninitiated,"
as a warrant
almost
risks
or
blood" codes. That
and still establish
no-man's
of
land
But
even
they take up
the
dangerous
in which
truth
they
of
operate.
In public spaces each man is at the mercy of bystanders and authorities
who project whiteness
and blackness onto him at will, most dangerously
when the sight of a darker woman on his arm codes the black-identified
narrator
as
a white
In
miscegenator.
"White,
but
Black,"
however,
that
chosen blackness hangs by a "therefore" and resides not in Harlem but
on the "outskirts" (WB 492). Both on 145th Street and in midtown,
the
Nordic
and his darker wife draw stares that unsee their
"Mr. Therefore"
"she a colored woman,
and I her white
lover" (WB 493). A
marriage:
a
and
riots
of
the
Invisible
Man burrows
several
later,
quarter
century
"The joke, of course, is that I don't live in
below this collapsed boundary:
Harlem but in a border area" (IM 5).
a double
The combination
of textual and racial anonymity
constitutes
masking
even
for
narrators
less
perplexing
than
"Mr.
Therefore"
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and
318
NEW
"Mr. Blank":
in a manner
"I was,
one-time
"Southern
passer,
was
of
Man
raceless,"
speaking,
HISTORY
a much
says
two-week
whose
1959,"
LITERARY
later
into
foray
the
to
for Ebony magazine
model
by a professional
protect his anonymity.9 The raceless, faceless narrators of 1913 and 1925
were hard-pressed
a coherent
to present
self; the
autobiographical
liberal white readers of 1913 and 1925 may have felt the lack of their
accustomed
that
sympathetic distance, at least insofar as they recognized
South
re-enacted
the borderless
racial wilderness
from which
these
they too inhabited
misembodied
voices cried. They heard a racial discourse from within the
North and from within whiteness.
two men
The
offered
their
readers
contemporary
"real"
to
instances
put beside the fictions of black-to-white
passing in the novels of William
Pauline Hopkins,
Charles Chestnutt,
Wells Brown, Frank J. Webb,
and
were not contained
others. But their self-presentations
the
by
prevailing
that passing should be shown to end badly.10 They continued
convention
to pass
contrast
sometimes
sporadically,
unwillingly,
perhaps
to the sharp outlines of the "tragic mulattoes"
tales,
morality
"Mr.
Blank"
and
"Mr.
In
inescapably.
of the novelistic
were
Therefore"
and
protean
indeterminate.
They hid from the very readers with whom
they shared
In
in
the
African
American
the 1950s,
press
knowledge.
forbidden
accounts
of
still called
passing,
of
episodes
always
for anonymity.11
passing,
but
only
for
given
the
sake
and
episodes,
of
forever
in
the
context
it,
renouncing
race leaders would
In mid-century,
of
admit
to
established
authorial and political
identities.12 In "The Confessions
of an Unwilling
Nordic"
the distinguished
historian Rayford W. Logan drolly recounts
how in France inWorld War Iwhite people
insisted on reading his white
as his race lest his dark skin and fris?s locks unsettle
officer's uniform
their
vision
of
social
matter
reality?"a
of
the
construction
of
their
inner
eyes," as the Invisible Man puts it (IM 3). After the war, an American
matron
could not accept that a black man should be staying at a better
hotel in Dax than she and speaking better French. He was, she insisted,
a Polish prince pretendingto be a Negro. The more he protested,
the less
she believed him: "'That is the cleverest disguise I have ever heard in my
life. A Polish prince passing for a "nigger." That is too funny.'"13 However,
to base one
"Confessions"
end violently. Returning
Logan's bemused
'sacr?
sailors, crying "'sale Am?ricain/
night he was assaulted by French
that "I was not an
Am?ricain.'" He was reminded
by their blows
as much
to no avail. He
and protested
but only a Negro,"
American,
found
another
"Then,
expedient:
as
one
fist
sought
an
unbruised
spot
on my face, I grabbed
it and rubbed it over my hair." "'Millepardons, mon
ami'" they replied, "'We thought you were white'"
(1050). In the dark,
touch
Europe
trumps
uniform
transforms
and
race
his blackness
trumps
nationality.
into a badge
The
mirror-world
of safe passage
of
in an anti
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319
WRIGHT
COPY
of sorts with a "whites only" line for victims. Even by the
is played for high stakes. As Logan was
the game of passing
unwilling,
a professor
Phi
Beta
Kappa from Williams
College,
being graduated
lynching
warned
him
about
career
whatever
a
what
embark,
you
he
anomaly"
"dangerous
be
always
had
become.
cautioned
colored,'"
"'Upon
his mentor.
not
I looked at my hands and felt my hair. 'Why, that should
"'Why?,'
I concluded with a puzzled
be very difficult,'
laugh" (1043).
Nordicism
is only mock-transgression
bout
of
because
Logan's
(1) his respected
facts:
The
and,
transatlantic,
temporary,
unsought,
authorial
"Mr.
Nordic-featured
above
Therefore"
all,
by
(2) his palpably
and
name,
framed
a writer
is also
two
it is
crucial
black body.
can
but
offer
name
nor body to keep his authorship
from being drawn into
He
of
his
in the
has courageously
the contradictions
identity.
passed
on
race
to
not
relations but apparently has
this
South
report
explained
to a famous
with his introduction
fact in his writings. He concludes
neither
author
an
As
in London,
arbiter
who
of
me,'
he said,
man.
Instead
'but I expected
you
are
him at the door with obvious
identity,
the London
Here
advice.
unneeded,
greets
racial
a
Logan's
author
white
gets
from your writings
young
white
I
man.'
mentor
the
bafflement.
last word:
"'Pardon
to see an elderly
laughed
as
naturally
if
wise,
gave
colored
as
the
and assured him that though guilty of
would permit,
was
to tell me
I
innocent
of
'Do you mean
young,
being white.
being
as
so
was
in
I
I
assured
him
that
class
America?'
labeled.
you
negro
they
must be on the race question!'
he
'What damned
fools Americans
can view
in France, "Mr. Therefore"
exclaimed"
(WB 499). Like Logan
the race problem with irony from a vantage beyond America and outside
circumstances
of
his
American
race.
His
urbane
"innocent
rejoinder,
of
being
white,"
mirrors
the "guilty of being black" that his few drops of blood make him
texts that are
in America.
Yet his English
admirer has been reading
"innocent of being white" in quite another sense; he takes them for the
authoritative
of
testimony
a black
man
writing
about
race.
curious case of authorship
in
(black) framed and explained
discourse
("white, but black") lends itself to the influential
anonymous
in "What is an Author?"14 between
distinction
drawn by Michel Foucault
This
the
"writer,"
source
of
the
text,
and
the
"author"
as
a
secondary
to them so as to
from texts and then reapplied
derived
now
and
limit
of
what
become
the "author's
organize
interpretation
writer
of
Black"
is
works." The blue-eyed,
but
"White,
sandy-haired
as
a
black
received
the
black
author, though
internationally
visibly
body
formation
that is presumed
those works does not in fact
by readers to emanate
exist. Authorship
in
"the
of thrift in the
Foucault's
is,
words,
principle
masters
of
the
from the
(W 159), separating
proliferation
meaning"
and
the
and
random
scribblers,
keeping
laundry lists, letters,
jottings of
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320
NEW
"authors"
from
cluttering
rule
for African
one-at-a-time
the
coherence
perceived
American
LITERARY
of
authors
may
their
be
HISTORY
The
"works."
the
most
single
In Chester Himes's
famous
of economy.
such principle
"You
words:
know there is only one black writer. Just as soon as he makes
it, they tear
him down. [. . .]Whitey has always pitted one black against the other."15
is not in that league, but he rigorously anticipates
the
"Mr. Therefore"
that
from
black
authors
"authentic"
(that
experience
expectation
speak
is, black and their own). Inevitably he feels the contradictory
pulls of the
"double audience,"
and often opposite
black and white,
"with differing
and antagonistic
described
Johnson
points of view" that James Weldon
in "The Dilemma
of the Negro Author"
in 1928.16
as a professor
at Howard
and a
For Rayford
University
Logan
celebrated
a
historian,
of
range
cultural
contradictions?between
his
and his Phi Beta Kappa key, the white establishment
life and authorial
his writer's
constituency,
identity?were
skin color
black
to allow
resolved
ciently
Therefore,"
comment
witty,
contrast,
by
steps
on
anonymously
"confessions"
signed
the
aside
from
about
his
that
contradictions
"Mr.
passing.
authorial
create
and his
suffi
to
identity
and
that
beset
to be "authentically"
black or white by conventional
identity. Unable
to another
racial
level of analysis that questions
standards, he moves
in
of
of
the
dissolves
whiteness
"innocent
itself
and
irony
authenticity
is
bodies
but
detached
that
about
like
white"?an
his,
being
analysis
from
that
body
by
and to higher
from authorship
that
processes
Foucault
anonymity.
the
created
some
envisions
discursive
power
as
"author"
"the
such
as the final
away
step
stage in the
moment
privileged
of
the
individualizaron"
(W 141) in cultural history and that will uncreate
"author" as belief in individual subjectivity fades. There comes an epoch
of a murmur"
in the anonymity
when all discourses will "develop
(W
the reader asks, "'Who really spoke? Is it
160). In the age of authorship,
or originality?'"
else? With what authenticity
really he and not someone
is too
(W 160). The account to be given for "Mr. Therefore's"
authorship
to him are the
to be generally
absorbed. More manageable
for
the
of anonym
Foucault
that
age
imagines
post-authorial
questions
are
existence
of
the
this
discourse?
Where
has it
modes
of
"'What
ity:
can
it for
and who
been used, how can it circulate,
appropriate
eccentric
himself?'"
(W 160). Having
on
document
the
race
translated
problem,"
his personal
"Mr. Therefore"
experiences
poses
the
into "a
question
of
can appropriate
the discourse
of blackness
and how it circulates
To be sure,
in
for
from
in
America,
example).
Europe
(differently
and the
foresaw no such applications,
model
Foucault's monocultural
to cut
continues
of
the
Author
death
(Man, Subject)
poststructuralist
to
made
claims
cultural
the
minorities,
by
subjectivity being
against
who
feminists,
and third world
peoples.17
Nonetheless,
the points
of applica
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321
COPY WRIGHT
some attention,
model merit
espe
first major solution to the "dilemma
of Foucault's
bility and breakdown
cially since James Weldon Johnson's
of
the
Man,
answered
with
few
which
his
our
pages,
re title
his
own
double
up the Pandora's
an
was
author"
Negro
Coloured
"Mr.
box of authorship
memoir,
"Author,
an
about
masker,
of
1912
for autobiography
"passed"
novel
novel
anonymous
anonymous
Therefore,"
with
an
about
and which
autobiographer.
seems
to have
rich, anarchic
Ex
Ellison
In a
opened
results. We might
but Writer."
of "What Is an Author?" are particularly
striking
of a complete
disconnect
between writer and
a parable about
elucidates
little
author. Foucault's model
authorship
discussed by Ellison's critics. In his "days of certainty" with the Commu
nist-like Brotherhood,
the Invisible Man is an "author"?a
black face for
a white movement.
As "author" he is largely a fiction; his articles and
Ellison's anticipations
in the novel's depiction
letters come from other hands. Indeed, the name that he ismaking
for
himself
is one given him by the Brotherhood.
He is so disengaged
that
he is duped by a warning note written by one of his own ghostwriters,
an unnamed
Brother Jack, who ventriloquizes
but concerned
black
a portrait of Frederick
comrade. When
is
in
his
Brother
Douglass
hung
hood office by a truly loyal black comrade,
the Invisible Man is scarcely
aware that Douglass was an author, having heard of him
only from his
tales.
Black
has
been
reabsorbed
into orality.
grandfather's
authorship
come
to
how
he
has
been
realize
the
Brotherhood,
Having
exploited
by
a writer from the
the Invisible Man finally becomes
and
underground,
his
forestalls
the
of
white-controlled
mechanisms
name,
by withholding
author formation
that keep the "double audience" divided and antago
as a
nistic. Having
failed to control his authorial
presence
political
a
as
creates
text
he
that
itself
it
tells
the
governs
celebrity,
larger tale of
its own
and
creation,
one
whose
anonymity
expresses
and
his
protects
invisibility.
The
"I am"s
of
"Mr. Blank"
and
"Mr. Therefore"
simultaneously
make
contract with the reader by introducing
and break the autobiographical
and at once concealing
the subject who will recount
the paradoxes
of
to
a
racism.
white
white
Ellison
similar
rehearsed
becoming
fight
encounter
in Vermont
for the cadets at West Point
in 1974: "One
some words while sitting in an old barn
looking out on
and these words were T am an invisible man.'
the mountains,
I didn't
know quite what they meant,
and I didn't know where
the idea came
to
moment
the
I
started
abandon
from, but
them, I thought:
'Well,
I should try to discover exactly what it was that lay behind
the
maybe
statement. What
type of man would make that type of statement, would
conceive
of himself
in such terms? What
him?'"18 This
lay behind
could be taken as le degr? z?ro de Vautobiographie: the
existential moment
afternoon
Iwrote
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322
NEW
encounter
a
with
self
that
is
the
only
LITERARY
its own
of
presentation
HISTORY
mask
and
act. The
that does not exist outside of the unfolding
autobiographical
scene is almost theological
in its abstraction,
and indeed Ellison's date
call to authorship?while
with destiny?his
looking out at the mountains
a famous hillside encounter with the
may echo on the lower frequencies
i am that
i am" (Exodus 3.14);
invisible: "And God said unto Moses,
"I yam
recall
I am"
what
above.
in an
Later,
introduction
written
for
the
as "nothing
1980 edition of the novel, Ellison described
this emergence
more substantial than a taunting, disembodied
voice" (IMxiv) when the
intruded"
for invisibility
(IM xvi).
of this "I am" make the author-centered
The
and
anonymity
"Who
invisibility
question
really
and thereby kick the question
upstairs
spoke?" fruitfully unanswerable
to address the circulation
in the culture. In the novel this
of discourses
"spokesman
speaking
more
a
void,
"blues-toned
anonymous
a
so
narrator
hard
considered:
blues,
jazz,
creating Ellison as the Great American
Point). Trevor McNeely
argues that in
folklore, street talk (all the while
at West
Author being venerated
creating
channels
(/Mxviii),
laughter-at-wounds"
than
Foucault
discourses
to
from
disentangle
one
and
himself,
of the culture as
of as being spoken through by the discourses
conceived
as articulating
in
them himself, Ellison may anticipate
Foucault
much
own
of
his
authorial
that
the
is,
"fictionality"
position,
narrativizing
that the voice that speaks with his name is not 'his.'"19 In
"recognizing
the bounds of individual
the reader is also invited beyond
the Epilogue,
on
I speak for
but
the
lower
knows
"Who
that,
frequencies,
subjectivity:
to
Ellison's
call
question,
authorship
by the
you?" (IM 581). Beyond
"I am"
invisible
caught
that
his
a
similar
ear
evolved
way
to
Ellison
"near-white")
from
is
Harlem
that
"I am
in African
proceed
that is big enough
phrase
somewhat
literary and philosophical
however,
forgotten,
ordinary
"mulatto,"
("Negro,"
know
had
be
in these years. What
"I am invisible,"
position,
We
an
also
autobiography
gradations
to
Not
was
withheld]",
from highly
issued
self-consciousness.
has done
so
as
is to throw out the
to
create
to swallow America
street
[name
American
talk,
"I'm
non
one
whole.
nowhere,"
earlier.20
in more
it may be
these autobiographies
detail,
surveying
to
tease
out
in
of
tale
the
another
subtext
Ellison's
genesis of
helpful
an
answers
earlier emphatic
invisibility, for his voicing of anonymity
of African American
authorship,
rejection of it. In the automythology
"How 'Bigger' Was Born" (1940).21
the text to beat was Richard Wright's
to explain how a black author could create Bigger Thomas
Needing
to the violent
recalled all the objections
without
being Bigger, Wright
Before
from his Communist
that he anticipated
truth of Bigger Thomas
black middle
class. But Bigger
comrades and from the image-conscious
I felt with
made him do it: "What Bigger meant had claimed me because
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COPY
323
WRIGHT
all my being that he was more
important than what any person, white or
of him, more
than any
black, would
say or try to make
important
more
or
to
him,
deny
explain
important,
analysis designed
political
than my own sense of fear, shame,
Wright even had doubts about starting with
even,
Son:
"But
Ellison
course,
became
novel
the
on
rat would
the
not
mountain
leave
years
me
later,
and diffidence"
the rat in chapter
. . ."
(HB
it was
880).
an
Even
(HB 870).
1 of Native
more
intrusion.
than
Therein,
for
of
lies the heroic
tale of how Wright went out on a limb and
to buy his
the Great African American Author who got America
a
his
in
the
first
three
for
while,
and,
weeks)
(215,000 copies
politics.
By the early 1950s, however, that limb had broken. Wright was in Paris,
and Ellison,
the patient master of the lowered profile, was improvising
the last words of "How
the "music of invisibility." By no coincidence
in
the
first
o? Invisible Man. Wright
Born"
Was
reverberate
words
'Bigger'
as a subject fit to join the
the claims of the Negro
ends by touting
canon: The Negro,
he observes,
is tragic enough
American
for Henry
"And if Poe were alive,
James; gloomy enough for Nathaniel Hawthorne.
he would not have to invent horror; horror would
invent him" (HB
was
more
that
Poe
haunted
than
Ellison's
881). Agreeing
haunting,
to
narrator
from
the
cultural
coal
hole, Hollywood)
(a
speaks
depths
on
of
into
the
ranks
James, Hawthorne,
Wright's
signify
self-promotion
and Poe: "I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who
haunted
Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie
(IMS). Ellison rings other changes on Wright: With bone
ectoplasms"
like Bigger, Wright banished
the theme of passing;22
black protagonists
if no longer just passing, as a
Ellison brings back racial masquerade,
trope. With Bigger and others, Wright focused on those who
governing
could not speak for themselves. About one of his first real-life models
in
an
from
he
"I
the
would
make
his
life
South,
said,
Chicago,
immigrant
more intelligible
to others than itwas to himself"
In returning
(AHS16).
to the traditional forms of autobiography,
Ellison creates a subject who
makes sense of his life for himself?if
slowly and too late. Ellison makes
his own claims on canonical
the key of anonymity.
status, but they are double-voiced
claims
In what
in
the tendencies of the anonymous
follows, this paper considers
as a form, before
self-narratives
how they frame three
considering
acts of authored
historically
significant
James Weldon
autobiography:
an
The
Ex-Coloured
Man,23
anony
Johnson's
Autobiography of
published
in
first
"The
Ethics
of
1912;
self-narrative,
mously
Wright's
published
An
Crow:
and
Sketch"24
Ellison's
(1937);
Living Jim
Autobiographical
Invisible Man
(1952). This brief and impressionistic
survey ends with
on how Ellison's
reflections
novel
the
of
anticipates
archaeology
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324
NEW
and authorship
anonymity
texts
Both
conclude
"Who
know
the
leaving
suggests
call
might
rather
"secondary
form
of
to
of
once-and-future
to "still and always."
closer
from Anonymity
anonymity."
gradually
modifications
need
the wisdom
anxious
recommend
these early twentieth-century
Historically
folkloric
reader's
of Foucault's
place
something
Up
we
In
unanswered.
Ellison
anonymity,
(W 160)
spoke?"
question
and
HISTORY
"What is an Author?"
in Foucault's
the modern
addressing
by
really
sketched
LITERARY
are
They
into
emerging
an
self-narratives
not,
and
literacy
form
author-generating
manifest
what
is, an
that
but
authorship,
that
has
gone
or
oral
under
the substitution
of "Jim Crow" for "slavery," they continue
ground. With
the political work of antebellum
slave narrative. Before getting to "Iwas
born,"
these
witnesses?northerners
twentieth-century
and
southerners
"I am" on the map of
themselves
alike?locate
through an introductory
a
not
to
for
American
have
race,
they
escaped
place from which they can
names
their
proclaim
or
release
do
We
photographs.
not
at
"Free
expect
last!" from "Anonymous." They still work with a tripartite geography:
the
and an idealized Europe. But the circulation
South, the North,
among
no longer offers
these locales has stalled, for the North
refuge or
intervention.
promises
In
the conventions
anatomizing
of
the
"triangular
relationship
and
Between
the
slave narrator
and
als,
prefaces,
amaneuenses.
of
of
the white
introductions
Fugitives
written
found
who
and scripted by the abolitionists
more
property of the movement
As Olney
slave
narrative,
narrator,
audience,
audience
white
by
themselves
James
Olney
speaks
and
sponsors."25
stand
the
testimoni
abolitionist
friends
promoted,
protected,
could become
or
in effect
the intellectual
of their own texts.
than the proprietors
lives of the ex-slaves were as much
puts it, "the narrative
as their actual lives had been by
and used by the abolitionists
possessed
slaveholders"
suffered comparable
(SN 154). Having
entrapment
by the
That disappear
the Invisible Man escapes underground.
Brotherhood,
ance was well understood
by the twentieth-century
autobiographers,
in anonymity
rather than in white sponsors and
who found protection
and frankly.26 About her
who spoke to the audience without mediation
automatic
Woman
and
categorical
1902"
know."27 She
remarks,
is patronless
lack of
'You
"Southern
"respectability,"
cannot
and, behind
insult
a
the veil,
colored
Colored
woman,
cannot
be
insulted
you
or
patronized.
The
reformist
following
editor,
examples,
Hamilton
drawn mainly
Holt,
cannot
from
claim
the Independent under
to
be
a
representative
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its
COPY
325
WRIGHT
sample.
reversals
however,
show
conventions
of
do,
They
of
the
strong
slave
regularities
These
narrative.
in
echoes
their
and
of
revoicings
old
formulas can be tabularized by excerpting
James Olney's
aptly named
the italicized
rubric
from which
"Master Plan for Slave Narratives,"
texts are
below is quoted verbatim
(SN 152-53). Parallels from authored
noted.
also
A. An engraved portrait,
name
are
by
replaced
an
signed by the narrator. As noted,
but
ekphrastic
the picture
and
"I am."
concealing
C. A handful of testimonials and/or one or more prefaces or introductions
written either by a white abolitionist friend of the narrator . . . or a white
amanuensis/editor/author
sponsor
actually responsible for the text. Though
is narratively represented
in the
has
been
the function
eliminated,
ship
passing narratives by white arbiters of racial identity, who range from wise
to pernicious:
The Ex-Coloured Man's millionaire:
'"My boy, you are by
a white man.'"
tastes
and
blood, by appearance,
(TA
by education,
by
a
out
white
'"You
he
here, boy,'
said, 'and become a
144);
stay
physician:
white
London
author
(ANW 375); "Mr. Therefore's"
(above);
Emma
of
the
Williams
Brotherhood:
(above);
Rayford Logan's
professor
"'But don't you think he should be a little blacker?'"
(IM 303).
E.
man'"
The
actual
narrative:
1. afirst sentence beginning, "Iwas born . . .," then specifying a place but not
a date of birth. The "Negro Peon 1904" is uncertain
about date (NS 409).
are
details
"born
and reared in the
Otherwise,
identifying
suppressed;
south" (MS 196) is typical.
3. a description of a cruel, master, mistress, or overseer, details offirst observed
narrators
Male
whipping....
remain
close
to slave
narrative
here:
At
age
seventeen
the "Negro Peon 1904" is whipped
for trying to leave a farm
one
for
with
Others
job
get into a fight with white
higher pay (NS 409).
"Mr.
Communist
Blank" (ANW 373);
boys:
Angelo Herndon28; Wright
(EL225).
5. record of the barriers raised against slave literacy and the overwhelming
and
difficulties encountered in learning to read and write. The ineffectuality
reverse
effects
of
are
education
noted.
frequently
"Mr.
Therefore"
the belief that "education will solve the race problem"
498) and hears a pernicious
argument from a southern clergyman:
debunks
Negro
gets
an
he
education,
thing he'll want to do will
"Southern Colored Woman
more
and
more
the
educated
will
colored
of things our children will be better
accumulations
and their own. With
white
man,
I shudder
to
think
seek
"'social
to marry
1904" notes:
be
of
and
equality'"
a white
and,
next
"'the
woman'"
"The Southern
man";
(WB
If the
"In
the
(WB 496).
whites dislike
natural
order
than we, they will have our
educated
the added dislike and hatred of the
the
10. description of successful attempt(s)
outcome."29
to escape ....
"Negro Peon
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1904"
326
notes
how
NEW
LITERARY
HISTORY
the absence of this climactic event in his tale: "But I didn't tell you
I got out. I didn't get out?they
put me out" (NS 414). Other
narrators
lament
that
no
have
they
to
place
to. The
escape
"Southern
an immigrant
1904" envies a named autobiographer,
Colored Woman
from China: "Fortunate Lee Chew! You can go back to your village and
an outcast" (RP
enjoy your money. This ismy village, my home, yet I am
587).
11. taking a new last name (frequently one suggested by a white abolitionist) to
accord
the new
with
pathologies
narrator's
cally
only
and
class,
a
class
be
children
two weeks,
every
lets
ancestors:
their
social
theme.
The
into
self-effacement
by
tends white
afternoon
her
are the organizing
compounded
1912," who
one
. . . Entrenched
man.
free
identities
often
"Negro Nurse
daughters
be her
as
identity
is
anonymity
typicality.
own
social
than new
rather
but
herself
most
"The
sees her
rhetori
can
that
be
servants in the South?and
I speak as one of
said of us negro household
and faithful
them?is
that we are to the extent of our ability willing
she
has
been
slaves" (MS 197). To her successive
merely
employers
to
"Mammy";
the
she
reader,
is "A
The
Nurse."
Negro
of
tendency
these
into their "problem" is inscribed
subjects to disappear
autobiographical
in the two formulaic
elements of the titles: (1) "life story" or "autobiog
or "race problem." Wright
signifies on
raphy" and (2) "Negro problem"
in the title, "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobio
this yoking
Sketch."
graphical
To
dent,
slave
be
narrative
a
and
garnered
and
to
testimonials
which
attest
in these
celebrity
T. Washington's
slave"
American
all African
anonymous,
era: Booker
born
not
sure,
were
the most
for
in
famous
its author
and
the
Indepen
a new
proclaimed
begins,
news
articles,
numerous
status
the
letters,
and
patronage
that
of
adaptation
Up From Slavery (1901), which
embeds
to
even
narrators,
years
"Iwas
and
Washington
was a regular contributor
enjoys. Though Washington
of the former slaves' ascent narratives
his adaptation
to the Independent,
is countered
by the
not
tales
of
tell
and
anonymous
They
autobiographers.
patronless
liberation but of stagnation and forego the slave narrators' emphasis on
is dangerous,
but
and historical
Illiteracy
"development."
personal
can
not
white
These
is
and
education
liberation,
bring
reprisal.
literacy
accounts
show few traces of the abolitionists'
anecdotal
shaping of
slaves'
tales
into
conversion
that
narrative,
is,
the
The
embedding
and
subversion
of
the
conventions
account
of
northward
the veil,
of
inspiring
see a great light and come
how the children of darkness
told from behind
Instead we find accounts,
freedom.
the
and
darkness.
owning
surviving
of
slave
to
narrative
in The Autobiography and Invisible Man have been well analyzed by Robert
Valerie Smith, and other critics.30 Through
Stepto, Lucinda MacKethan,
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327
COPY WRIGHT
his
movements
north,
to
and
south,
Man
Ex-Coloured
the
Europe,
ulti
where
of stultifying whiteness,
"escapes" only into the bondage
mately
admirers and patrons. The Invisible
he ends up as one of Washington's
Man's
and
education
a coal hole
(Washington
are
references
ride"
"freedom
began
intended:
surely
north
the
of
to
promotion
a coal mine).
from
portrait
him
win
finally
his ascent
Those
incon
appears
Douglass
in a gambling
novel (hanging amid prizefighters
gruously
as
the
it
in
Ellison's.
does
above
also
However,
club)
survey
suggests that
was a dominant
theme in the
this stalling and reversal of "development"
in Johnson's
of
practice
anonymous
in
autobiography
these
The
years.
"I
nameless
am" is not likely to tell a Horatio Alger story about him- or herself.
of anonymity
and passing pushes
the rhetorical
The combination
to
situation
misembodied
strangely
as
crisis,
and
credible,
"Mr.
themselves.
"Mr.
and
Blank"
"Mr.
Therefore"
These
show.
are
unidentified
writers
suspect and yet
doubly
for as racial spies they have good reason not to "out"
is a
Blank"
college
has
graduate,
white
prominent
in his native South, and has lived in New York. Otherwise,
his
shift. At the beginning
narrative persona and message
and the end, he
or
as the anonymous
voice of an invisible population,
the million
speaks
more Americans
who could easily claim white privilege across the color
not
to. Yet the picaresque
choose
line but honorably
title, "The
reflects his own "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"
Adventures
of a Near-White"
relatives
I shall possibly decide
to be one or
the game is too interesting"
(ANW
that everyone
trickster, he twits white Americans
role of crossing the line. "Sometime
the other for all time, but just now
376). As the concealed
they
as white
accept
is not
of this population
other
Negroes:
"We
see
so. He
necessarily
of maskers,
them
but
and
we
does
not
estimate
they too are granted
see
them
not,
for
we
the
invisibility
size
by
understand"
(ANW 376). His associative
suggests that he cannot
string of anecdotes
in relation to the shifty and uncertain,
find a stable position
but fiercely
enforced,
color
line.
At
whichever
end
of
the
railroad
car
he
seats
to the other. After having a good breakfast
himself, he may get ushered
a
himself
in
York
he returns with some darker friends
New
restaurant,
by
for lunch and sits, having
turned black, as he realizes, for an hour
ever being visible to a waiter. On the other hand, dark women
without
turn him dangerously
white.
as he straddles the color
He savors the absurdity of what he witnesses
of racism collapse other social codes.
the contradictions
line, where
he registers to vote in the South, he finds that the white clerk is
When
tagging the cards "W" (white) or "C" (colored). Despite
surreptitiously
his "C" companion,
Mr. Blank is tagged "W" because
the clerk fears to
ask the race question of a (seeming) white man. White
chivalry for once
erases the lurking taint of black blood and permits
precisely what the
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328
NEW
LITERARY
HISTORY
to prevent:
the admission
of that blood to "W" franchise.
these "Adventures," white solidarity has only fallible eyes to
Throughout
the assumption
("He's white"; "He's black"),
protect itself and, whatever
clerk
is there
fears
to ask
When
the
question.
identity
social
is revealed,
In
relations.
itself can break down,
language
another
"Mr.
anecdote,
but finds at
druggist over the months,
others who wait on him. Again,
it is to be
has never been asked. Finally he returns
alone, will have to wait on him.
working
his business
were
you
elsewhere:
not
a white
"T didn't
man
until
know
a few
Blank"
buys
and with
cigars
it
a
from
a certain
point that it is always
assumed that the race question
at a moment
when the druggist,
The druggist asks him to take
or that
that you were a n_,
days
.
[.
ago.
.] You
have
always
a gentleman,
and
I found out that I tried
it. I don't think that I
Even the euphemized
I have always thought of you as Mr. Blank. Since
to dissociate
you from that term, and I can't do
could ever call you anything
else'" (ANW 375).
out
in the text,
elsewhere
"n_,"
spelled
own
in
the
conflict
irreconcilable
with his
suggests
druggist's
gentility,
cannot be served (though other Negroes
racism. The gentleman
are)
"Mr." (obligatory
because
he cannot be named,
for a
being neither
nor "not-Mr." (obligatory
for a Negro).
Better
than he
gentleman)
roots
"Mr.
Blank"
has
the
of
his
moniker
in
knows,
pulled up
being
effaced
(blank) by being white
(blanc).
been
"Mr.
a self-conscious
is not
Blank"
literary
but
artist,
can
connections
the name
that iswithheld
from the text and the name
as a
that keeps falling away from him in the events recounted. Working
at
"Mr.
recoils
called
the
Blank"
bellboy,
being
generic
"George" by a
white patron. The head bellman
tells him, "'Grin at him, kow-tow, and
be a nigger and you'll get the money.
I don't like itmyself, but I have to
do it'" (ANW 374). The Invisible Man's grandfather
gives similar advice
more mili tan tly on his deathbed:
"T want you to overcome
'em with
be made
between
yeses,
undermine
tion
. . . .'"
(IM
'em
16).
"Mr.
with
Blank"
agree
grins,
cannot
bear
to
'em
the
death
role
and
and
quits
destruc
the
job.
to his sense of self:
advice in the North
also does violence
a white
'and
become
'"You stay out here, boy," [the physician]
said,
man'"
Instead
he
south
he
(ANW 375).
goes
again, though
apparently
But white
does
not
"Mr.
remain
Blank"
there.
does
not
manage
to
organize
these
picaresque
"adven
tures," which also proclaim
"tragedy" (ANW 374), around an entirely
self. His heart lies with the black community,
coherent
but he cannot
the arbitrariness
and performativity
of race that he experi
reconcile
ences in daily life with the essentialism
of his sentiment
that he truly is a
or at least will be. He hears the "call of the blood"
(ANW 376),
Negro,
but still enjoys his Jekyll and Hyde
role. At the heart of these confessions,
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seems
he
not
329
WRIGHT
COPY
to
yet!"
"Mr. Therefore,"
avant
as we
black
la lettre. Both
have
and
a
suffers
seen,
white
me
"Make
St. Augustine,
paraphrase
stares
can
a
severe
unmake
o Lord,
Negro,
case
his
of
but
invisibility
"she
marriage:
a colored woman,
I her white
lover" (WB 493). The desiring gaze of
white women
poses dangers
they do not suspect. He knows that in
or
own complexions
his
would be read differently
his
wife's
and
Europe
not read at all. In a New York restaurant
found
themselves
they
being
started receiving
solicitous
snubbed by a haughty waiter, but suddenly
"It was Madame
the waiter heard them speaking French:
service when
..."
this and Madame
that
(WB 492). Though
appalled at the waiter's
of
combination
and
racism
he
snobbishness,
cosmo
the
foregrounds
he first saw his wife "of olive-brown
of his own gaze. When
politanism
skin, with lustrous black hair" he "thought instantly of a mantilla-clad
It is also in
in some lovely old Spanish
Castilian
town" (WB 492).
as we have seen, that he can "out" himself and put a face to his
Europe,
"works." But in America, whatever he does or does not do, he is left with
no
non-transgressive
no
position,
as he
to be,
place
"innocent
jests,
of
(WB 490).
being white"
The autobiographical
selves that "Mr. Blank" and "Mr. Therefore"
are
around
their protest against the fracturing of self
present
organized
in
racist
and
Their
that
America,
the
"anomaly
. . .
is,
the
strange
share
self-presentations
"dangerous
anomaly"
belief
beyond
proclaimed
two
propositions:
major
averted
by Logan
"Mr. Blank."
by
(1)
'You
see
can't
and (2) "I'm
(that is, "I am textually and racially anonymous");
is
in
and
That
writ
narrative
Johnson's
large
instability
trapped."
me"
Ellison's
novelizations
of
anonymous
Human
Like
spins
Invisible Man,
out
a
parable
which
about
autobiography.
Documents
pervasively
writing?writing
echoes
it,31 The Autobiography
music,
as well
as
writing
of a failed musician
the position
and failed
autobiography?from
also excludes himself from authorship.
colored man who by anonymity
The Invisible Man's final turn from political
ranting to jazz-inflected
a less defeatist,
if
of the same
offers
still
lonely, rendition
writing
so
I
of
"And
the
invisible
music
isolation"
(IM 13).
my
synaesthesis:
play
in 1912 and allowed
it to
the novel anonymously
Johnson
published
as William
L. Andrews
because,
"pass" for autobiography,32
perhaps
not
in
did
but
of slave
black
novels
sell
lives
did
the
wake
speculates,33
narrative and Washington's
As
for
African
mentioned,
Up from Slavery.
Americans
in
imperilled
or
embarrassed
positions?passers,
above
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all?
330
NEW
LITERARY
HISTORY
The Autobiography
anonymity was virtually a warrant of truth. Though
as
received
little in the way of reviews or sales, itwas generally accepted
as Johnson
"a human document,"
his hoax.34
later tactfully described
on hard fact," as Jessie Fauset
That it was "a work of fiction founded
in
her
in
The
Crisis
review
[November
1912], 38), became
(5
suspected
name. But the
it was reissued under Johnson's
clear in 1927 when
the writer
assumption?that
in the construction
autobiographical
its remarkable
of
power
writes
the
what
"black
he
author
is?showed
function."
Like Wright
later with Bigger
and Ellison with
the Invisible Man,
himself
confused
for
found
his
and tried
Johnson
habitually
protagonist
to set the record straight with his own life story, Along This Way. However,
to this day, it is not straight. Apart from the career of passing, based on
a friend of Johnson's,
so broadly echoes the percep
the autobiography
tions of The Autobiography that the question
still remains debated as if, in
a kind of loop, Along This Way were fiction-based
fact.35 For fact-checkers
of anonymity
and passing
tends to queer
the deal,
the combination
in this case was already thrown off kilter by Carl Van Vechten's
which
to
of the "facts" about The Autobiography in his introduction
clarification
in the matter
"The Autobiography,
of course,
of
own
to
do
Mr.
has
little
with
but
life,
enough
Johnson's
specific incident,
and feeling, his views of the subjects
it is imbued with his own personality
the
1927
edition:
so
discussed,
author's
own
to
that
a
history,
has
who
person
it reads
real
like
no
previous
autobiography.
the
of
knowledge
It would
be
truer,
to say that it reads like a composite
of the Negro
autobiography
perhaps,
race in the United
times" (TA xxxiii-xxxiv).
In other
States in modern
words,
though
is a man
Johnson
of
remarkable
attainment?a
famous
and poet in 1927 and executive
composer
secretary of the NAACP?if
not
not matter
him
life
in comparison
do
his
does
know
you
personally,
to his
his
representativeness,
to
ability
relate
"a
composite
autobiogra
a "real autobiography."
As Samira Kawash observes,
phy" that reads like
true history and fictional narrative is not in the
"The distinction
between
text but in the reader" (PB 60). Van Vechten's
logic is not so curious,
however,
for
a
of
generation
readers
for
whom
African
American
was often
that is, real
and self-authenticating,
anonymous
autobiography
to
do
the
with
writer's untraceable
life. As
by standards that had nothing
a
we
the editors of the Independent put it: "It is reliable story, and
believe,
a typical one"
faces on social problems
the human
(NS 409). That
was too
in the process
of presenting
themselves
should disappear
to miscegenation,
familiar to give pause. And in any proximity
where the
passers
always
not
to know.
Anonymous
are,
decency
writers
forbids
one
are disruptive
to ask
too many
autobiographical
Best
questions.
subjects.
They
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331
COPY WRIGHT
happily in the writing of the life,
report on lives that do not culminate
is tainted with self-denial. Their date
for this final act of self-fashioning
Critics
with anonymity.
turns out to be an appointment
with destiny
in the protagonists'
divide sharply in finding or not finding redemption
these two "human documents."36 The Invisible Man says
acts of writing
and emerge,
that he will end his "hibernation"
though still invisible. But
He has at least burned his false identity
Is this text his emergence?
name,
paper Sambo doll, and anonymous
party
diploma,
papers?the
to the
Man remains hostage
note from Brother Jack, The Ex-Coloured
"sacri
and
of
the
"yellowing manuscripts"
symbolisms
overwhelming
into
these pages about his descent
ficed talent" of his music. Might
for the yellowing
and memorial
be compensation
scores, the
whiteness
cowardice of his life, the high-yellow
body that has issued
yellowbellied
must never, never read his secrets in black
children
who
white
dazzling
and white? He comes by his anonymity honestly: The absent white father
enforce
did not give his name to his bastard, and the white children
how?
their
father's
in both
Redemption
suspects
are
here.
anonymity
cases seems
They
uncooperative.
to be in the eye of the critic, for these
won't
give
us
their
names.
even be serious, though they pose tragically. The prologue
show
like that of Invisible Man,
of The Autobiography,
narrator
who
mocks
even
as he
moans.
The
Ex-Coloured
They
won't
and epilogue
an anguished
Man
calls
his
(the Invisible Man's
(TA 117), which he despises
passing a "capitaljoke"
is a
And if passing
live in Harlem).
"joke" was that he doesn't
opening
"I think I find a sort of savage and diabolical
joke, so is this narrative:
desire to gather up all the little tragedies of my life, and turn them into
a practical joke on society" (TA 3). In his Epilogue,
the Invisible Man
Man's joke beyond passing and the
raises the stakes of the Ex-Coloured
account
of
it:
"Our
fate
is
to become
one,
and
yet
many?This
is not
Thus one of the greatest jokes in the world is
description.
and becoming
blackness
of the whites
busy escaping
becoming
day, and the blacks striving toward whiteness,
gray. No one of us seems to know who he is or where he's
unum: We are all lost together.
going" (IM 577). E pluribus
to
the white strings attached
Like Ellison, Johnson
closely observes
to become
the
and the tendency of free men
black artistic production
prophecy, but
the spectacle
blacker every
quite dull and
to the bad faith of white
property of their patrons. Thanks
a
Man
circles
series of false opportuni
the
Invisible
through
patronage,
a white patron, Mr. Norton,
until
ties: in his Tuskegee-like
college,
in carrying seven kill-the-bearer
job recommenda
proves his undoing;
in New York; and finally in letting the
tions to patrons of the college
Brotherhood
usurp his identity, "authorize" him, and send him out to
intellectual
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332
NEW
stump
for unity
escape
in a way
a nameless
into
that will
actually
cause
where
underground,
he
LITERARY
riots. He
see
"can
HISTORY
does
the
at least
darkness
of
the yellowness
of whiteness
(IM 6). In The Autobiography,
lightness"
haunts a protagonist
whose first patron was the absent father, his "white
master"
(SD 52), followed by a sugar daddy who "loaned" him to his
friends and took him to Europe
in place of his valet. The protagonist
is
so blind to his own
of
he
that
its
about
experience
neo-slavery
forgets
in the South and conceives
in Europe the ambition of going
persistence
back to appropriate,
and
ennoble,
commidify
ragtime and slave songs.
serve
to
his
he
black
let it serve him, fully
and
Thereby
hopes
heritage
aware
"I should
that
have
chances
greater
of
as
attention
attracting
a
than as a white one" (TA 147). He forsakes
that
composer
at a lynching, which
attention
induces a "shame" powerful
to drive him from the South, blackness,
and music. He is last
enough
seen
to
in
at a
Hall
T Washington
Booker
sitting
Carnegie
listening
benefit for Hampton
Institute. Rather
than flee the white patrons, he
becomes
like his father, to see market
value in
one, having
learned,
coloured
racialized
in the gambling
club has
property. The portrait of Douglass
value because
it is signed. The property
that defines
him
is not
as
a
as
a
narrator
slumlord and
intellectual but real. Both
he provides a
as
site for black life that he does not recognize
this
captivity. Through
human
autobiographer
the
Invisible Man,
marketplace
Johnson's
and
It is ironic
Vechten,
introduce
the
this
is his own patron
who
about
questions
who
or
found
Ellison's
own
that Johnson
famous
patron
extraordinary
servility." Wright made
in New Challenge, which
want
of
this
document.
As
with
the abuses of patronage
obscure the absence of the literary
from the narrative
and forestall dicey questions
about
of
appropriations
should
of
satire
a more militant
decade,
generation
came before white
these writers
for
in 1912 circumvented
Johnson
sponsored
racial
in 1927 choose
the
Harlem
on
white
tragedy.
his friend,
Renaissance
Carl Van
to
writers,
In
patronage.
the
next
look back scornfully at how
would
"in the knee pants of
audiences
that charge in his "Blueprint for Negro Writing,"
he co-edited.37 The journal folded after one issue
advertising,
subscribers,
and,
above
all,
the
hoped-for
support
Party (CPUSA).38 A patronage-free
position
was not easily found. Wright
of visible
the great model
provides
in this line of anonymous
and the exception
autobiogra
authorship
a subtler exception
in
the salad days of the late 1930s than
but
phers,
might be expected.
of the Communist
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COPY
333
WRIGHT
Copy Wright
In 1937, the reader of a Federal Writers'
(FWP) anthology,
Project
of
collection
American Stuff39 would find the usual "rainbow of America"
amateurs
aspiring
and
meaning
"folk"
anonymous
African
The
collectors.
artists
recorded
voices
are
American
well
by
mostly
anony
recorded
"Six Negro Market
mous,
by
Songs of Harlem,"
including
Frank Byrd; "Twenty-One Negro Spirituals," recorded by South Carolina
"AGullah Story," recorded by Genevi?ve W. Chandler;
Project Workers;
Convict Songs," recorded by John A. Lomax. The
and "Seven Negro
at
left Mississippi
"Notes on Contributors"
reveal that "richard wright
from washing dishes to function
fifteen on his own and did everything
secretary of the Chicago John Reed Club" (301). His
ing as executive
in New
is clear, as are his politics. He also claims pieces
class position
Masses, Anvil, and Left Front, but no titles. In 1937 he was availing himself
of the two major sources of patronage
available to aspiring writers, the
wrote far more
FWP and the organs of the CPUSA, and consequently
anonymous
emergence
than
signed
as a famous
pieces
Chicago
in that year.
author
while
Ironically
serving
as
he began
the
his
anonymous
in the FWP's New York Panorama
(1938) and New York
as
the
and
the
"Harlem
Bureau"
of
Guide
(1939)
City
Daily Worker (July to
was
The
Bureau"
in
"Harlem
fact the byline for
December,
1937).
or
on
items
of interest to
black
whatever
white,
reporter,
reported
a black "author" in the
and a way of establishing
African Americans,
voice
of Harlem
of the Worker.
symbolic geography
not
sit lightly on the future father of Bigger Thomas.
did
Anonymity
As he set off to New York to seek fame and fortune, waggish
friends
a
a
for
fictitious
The
"Dick
headline
View:
newspaper,
Chicago
printed
to
In
Author
Off
American
the
N.Y."40
Marxist
Noted
young
Stuff
Wright
self-consciousness
about the
steps forward from anonymity with marked
a
on
form that he is adapting,
with
riff
the
formulaic
starting
catchy
title: "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow [the race problem]: An
compound
Sketch
the
"Ethics" starts with
[autobiography]."
Autobiographical
a
was
of
first
child
he
motif:
As
small
(E.3)
equivalent
Olney's
whipping
beaten
into a fever for standing up to a gang of white boys?but
beaten
his
feared
for
his
life.
the
'barriers
who
Under
mother,
by
against
is largely unschooled
and finds that his
literacy' (E.5), the protagonist
are thwarted
to learn skills in an optical company
hopes
by resentful
white employees.
His "Jim Crow education"
is, instead, a course of
the writer has
learning silence, accommodation,
resignation.
Though
no narrative
to the North,
is given of 'successful
obviously migrated
(E.10); he ends as a uniformed
escape'
delivery boy in the South. The
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334
NEW
LITERARY
HISTORY
is his ruse in smuggling books out
a card from a
library by borrowing
sympathetic white
a note that effaces his own
literacy and individuality:
"'Please let this nigger boy have the following books'"
(EL 235). It is a
reminiscent
of
of
the
the anonymous
gesture
culminating
self-cancelling
and
"Ethics"
is
it
is
signed,
though
autobiographers,
rigorously generic.
of the future writer
only anticipation
of a whites-only
man and writing
In
the
nine
presented
Negro
the
vignettes
as typical:
"the
porters";
African
"a Negro
Negro
Americans
woman"
maids";
"the
remain
had
who
boy
nameless
into a store;
kicked
been
are
and
"my fellow
castrated."
The writer himself is called "boy" and "nigger," becoming
"Richard" only
in an account of being falsely accused of failing to say "Mister" to a white
man. Only the prizefighter
is named, who is listed at the
Jack Johnson
of topics that were "taboo from the white
end under a long catalogue
cannot be forgiven for beating a white
man's point of view." Johnson
is not forgiven for fighting back against
man, just as young protagonist
and naive "Richard" is nearly as generic
white boys. The well-intentioned
as the surrounding
characters
and, like them, created
by his class
is outstripped
horrors of the
by the unfolding
position. His development
world around him: "Iwas learning fast, but not quite fast enough"
(EL
231).
"Ethics"
re-enters
the
now
famous
world
of
terms. The Ex-Coloured
phy in more militant
of how he was spanked for digging up "a hedge
bottles stuck in the ground neck down" (TA
put around her flower beds. The art historian
argues that the bottles are an African survival,
The
Johnson's
Autobiogra
Man's earliest memory
is
of various coloured glass
had
4), which his mother
Robert Farris Thompson
the "flash of spirit."41 The
a resonant
his
image when, upon discovering
glass becomes
finds that "my thoughts were coloured"
the protagonist
African blood,
He describes
this "dwarfing, warping,
(TA 21) by that realization.
influence which operates upon each and every coloured man
distorting
in the United States" as the "narrow neck of this one funnel" (the upside
colored
down
must
bottles)
through
pass. Liberation
bookcase"
(TA 25) and
(TA 198) wife whom he
which colored people's
thoughts
in the
of sorts is soon found
and
energies
"glass-doored
in the "dazzling white"
ultimately, but anxiously,
courts "under false colours" (TA 200). The glass
and the consequent maternal
(now a traumatic beating) begin
spanking
to race war. Unlike
"Ethics" as well, but as the childhood
preliminaries
is typical
little "coloured" boy, the protagonist
the unique and pampered
and,
for
several
pages,
nameless.
On
the wrong
side
of
the
tracks,
he
and
are harmless
in the cinders, which
black
his pals stage mock
battles
a white gang attacks and wounds him with a broken milk
missiles. When
for comfort and gets
bottle
(white and cutting), he goes to his mother
as
in
the
he
will
very nearly
severely beaten,
optical company when he
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COPY
335
WRIGHT
for skills. He later gets hit on the head by a
stands out, hoping
as a
bottle
thrown
white
by
youths and finds security only when,
whisky
can
to
and
their
without
clients
he
white
deliver
whores
liquor
bellboy,
to look. The iridescent
of the
ironies of "colour" for Johnson
seeming
war of black and white for Wright
NAACP have become
the undeclared
again
of the CPUSA.
its anecdotes
"Ethics" is little analyzed because
have been reused,
famous 1945 autobiography,
Black Boy.
mixed with much else, inWright's
But Black Boy is a study in celebrity, based on what Margaret Walker
It is a portrait of the artist as a
called the "daemonic genius" of Wright.
version of the Horatio Alger
young man and a rough but unmistakable
This
is
but
"black
story.
boy"
anything
typical. In contrast, "Ethics" is a
a portrait
the
in
like
anonymous
study
obscurity and,
autobiographies,
are going nowhere,
of a world whose
inhabitants
but now one whose
are
pressures
ceeds?not
culture
to
building
but
upward,
revolutionary
sideways?in
of
and
eruption.
his
"Jim
"bitch"
is shown
narrator
the
As
Crow
pro
the
education,"
to be
increasingly
which is strained to
"boy," "nigger,"
an infrastructure
of black compliance,
supported by
starts
the breaking point. Like "Mr. Blank" and "Mr. Therefore," Wright
a
not
of racial identities,
with
"Therefore, in
puzzle about the construction
I am a negro," but "My first lesson in how to live as a Negro
America,
came when
I was quite small" (EL 225). White
readers who cannot
to
remember
live white may be puzzled
that a biological
learning
as conspicuous
as being born with a race (as Negroes
are)
phenomenon
was
should
in fact require
in
education
the
South"
tutoring.
"Negro
itself a familiar journalistic
else.
topic, but this is something
In tight vignettes,
"Richard" learns to recognize
and interpret
the
voices of resignation
of the stultifying culture that is enveloping
him.
This militant
folklore
auto-ethnography
plays against the patronizing
in American Stuff. As the anthology was in press,
collectors
elsewhere
Wright
Worker
went
after
article
on
one
the
of
Blues
his
artist
co-contributors,
"Lead
Belly."42
John
Lomax,
in
Lomax,
in
this
a
Daily
account,
the singer into helping
him gather
songs from southern
"beguiled"
and cheated him of money from a singing
prisons without remuneration
tour. In "Ethics" Wright
is both the recorder
of folk ways and the
recorded.
It is the whites who speak dialect, as "Richard" does for their
benefit only to lower his profile.
At
the end, Wright
naive white
meaning,
lifts, and does not lift, the curtain for the well
to the anonymous
reader. The Preface
1912
The Autobiography by "The Publishers,"
edition of Johnson's
but in fact
dictated by Johnson, makes a remarkable
claim with calculated naivete:
"In this these pages it is as though a veil had been drawn aside: the
reader is given a view of the inner life of the Negro
in America,
is
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336
NEW
LITERARY
HISTORY
as it were, of race" (xl). Wright
into the free-masonry,
goes
one
better
life to a "single sentence":
"How
Johnson
by reducing Negro
do Negroes
feel about the way they have to live? How do they discuss it
can be answered
I think this question
when alone among themselves?
in
initiated
a
sentence.
single
'Lawd,
A
friend
them
but uproar
as
wrought,
finely
of mine
itwuzn'tfer
be nothin'
wouldn't
are
Ef
man!
the
who
ran
an
elevator
'n'
them
ol'
polices
down here!'"
me:
told
there
lynch-mobs,
(EL 237). The
momentous,
single,
once
ironies here
sentence
veil-lifting
leads
to the first patch of black dialect
in "Ethics," which rumbles revolution
ears
to
it. Elevators go down, but they do
for
those
who
have
hear
only
not stay there, and uproar does not stay put. In Invisible Man, the black
run "uproar department"
(7M212) in the bowels of Liberty Paints finally
explodes.
star rose, "Ethics" was republished
As Wright's
in ways that virtually
reverse its humble
in
American
and subversive position
Stuff After the
success
of Native
Son,
was
"Ethics"
as an
incorporated
to an
introduction
were
edition of Uncle Tom's Children in 1940 and the incidents
enlarged
in Black Boy. The ^nti-Bildungsroman
and amplified
then incorporated
a
became
"Ethics"
of
portrait
the
a
as
artist
young
and
man,
a
of
not
study
of politically
(by an aspiring writer) but of celebrity
explosive obscurity
as published
in 1945 Black Boy
against all odds (by the black author). Yet
than Wright
in his
offered a cleaner ascent narrative
originally wrote
American
and
Hunger
the
northward
Ironically,
capitalist
uproar
to end?not
him
pressured
of
totalitarianism
on
went
which
manuscript,
the CPUSA.
unlike
the
to expose
The
slave
in
racism
Chicago
Book-of-the-Month
narrators?with
his
Club
escape
from Memphis
and to insert a final note of "hope."43
the tale of the bad Marxist
patrons was excised
by the
The
marketplace.
from
another
master
anonymous
of
narrative
was
progress
ripe
for
autobiographer.
Is an (Invisible) Author?
What
In evoking
the experience
the Red 1930s, Invisible Man incorporates
of Dick Wright and other strivers as they tried to use and mostly got used
arrived in New York in 1937 with his "Blueprint
by the CPUSA. Wright
on all of it,
for Negro Writing,"
though he did not follow through
for
Collective
its
last
"The
Need
Work."
section,
Margaret
especially
the ideas of "Blueprint" from
claims that Wright
Walker
appropriated
the South
own
name.44
York,
of
the
Side Writers
So much
the earnest
mysteriously
young
in Chicago
Group
for
collective
work.
Invisible Man,
unhelpful
patrons,
and published
Another
recent
it under
arrival
on his way to the seventh
runs
across
the
urban
his
in New
and last
bluesman,
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COPY
337
WRIGHT
Peter Wheatstraw,
blue
who pushes a cart piled high with discarded
"T
done
their
(IM
guess somebody
changed
plans'"
prints. Says Peter,
a young man in a hurry, does not
175). At the time the protagonist,
quite
is telling him. Yet in his mildness
and naivete,
grasp what the bluesman
resembles
the compliant,
the Invisible Man
endlessly well-meaning
"Richard" of "Ethics" far more
than he does the difficult and destined
"Richard" of Black Boy.
to his autobio
The rhythms of the Invisible Man's fitful progress
act
of
reflect
the
advance
and decline
wrenching
cycles
graphical
of sponsored
sketched
in this study: the emergence
in the
authorship
and
then
the
into
of
the
withdrawal
antislavery movement,
anonymity
lives
in
the
and
the
Independent (Douglass's portrait appears
disappears
in Brotherhood
; the brilliant zenith and quick end of the
headquarters)
as the patrons scattered in the crash of 1929; and
Harlem Renaissance,
no
voice
that the Communist
the voice and
Party gave to African
Americans.
The grandsons
of the human property of slave times remain
at risk of becoming
the intellectual
property of their latter-day "rescu
runs through his share of patrons,
ers." The Invisible Man
and he
a writer, but he finally knows enough
to keep the two things
becomes
Like
separate.
the
Ex-Coloured
he
Man,
does
as
not,
is often
noted,
to know himself,
and get better on the schedule
"develop,"
novel
readers.
The
nameless
"I am"s also did not expect to
expected
by
be saved by self-improvement.
As Wright put it in "Ethics," learn as fast as
come
you
can,
it won't
but
be
fast
You
enough.
can't
beat
history.
In the Epilogue
the Invisible Man baits and consoles his readers with
the unanswerability
of the question,
"Who really spoke?" Was it nobody?
seventeen
All
of
us?
That's
both
the
Foucauldian
Everybody?
question
years
and
early
signed,"
his
forgot
name;
an
quite
E. M.
observed
we
while
old
issue.
read,
"Literature
in 1925.
Forster
we
forget
not
does
"While
both
his
the author
name
and
to
want
wrote,
our
be
he
own."45
In their parallels and polarities,
Foucault and Ellison make an interest
is an Ellisonian
Foucault's
monoculturalism
ing pair.
target; designs on
canonical
own
Sean
such
standing,
authorship
is
the
as Ellison's,
deus
ex machina
are
Foucault's
of
the
target
Foucauldian
(though
cosmos,
his
as
Burke
witnessed
different
Foucault
has argued46). Both had graduated
from Marxism
and
tremors in late capitalism
that seemed revolutionary,
but of
sorts: in Harlem
in 1942 and on the Left Bank in 1968. Where
a subjectivity
the writing
debunks
subject, Ellison
depicts
itself in the act of writing?or
itself into an
perhaps unforming
so
not
be
far
from
that
the
self-erasure
that
Barthes
and
may
invisibility
Foucault find in Mallarm?,
The
and
others.
of
"music
invisibil
Proust,
calls it, is a jazz improvisation
that mocks
ity," as Ellison's protagonist
forming
and
transcends
the bugaboos
of originality,
individual
subjectivity,
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and
338
NEW
named
authorship.
Jazz
can
creators
of the architecture
Charlie
Christian
the
"leav[e]
LITERARY
as
originator
as
anonymous
as Ellison
called Gothic,"
name
and
(whose
genius
Story"
HISTORY
the
in "The
observes
he is trying to
memorialize).47
articulated
The phases
are
not
to
far
these
novel
own
in Ellison's
travesty
hero
blind
of
and Hermes
not
A.
as
particu
is present
Trismegistus,
Homer
Homer,
as well
corrupt
are
who
in
But
anonymity.
have
authors
and
patronage
orality;
and
reverse,
phase
of the "author"
the future
authorship;
such as Homer
lar individuals,
in his archaeology
parable:
intersect,
phases
Foucault's
oral
forms.
generative
Ellison's
commodified
criminalization;
the
by Foucault
in
seek
serves
who
Barbee,
by
the
at the Tuskegee-like
college. Literally fronting
who sit behind him on the podium,
this civilizer/
that apes the
the barbarian)
stages minstrelsy
cult of the Founder
for the white
bankers
uncivilizer
(Homer
of
heroics
an
earlier
of
age
minstrels.
The
oral
genuine
artist,
the
is fended off as a barbarian at the gates. The age
Trueblood,
and protection
of patronage
has been described
above. What follows is
and commodification,48
the current age of authorial ownership
though
to
Invisible Man has little to say about the literary market place. Central
era and its
the view of Wright,
Ellison, and others is that the modern
incestuous
are
predecessor
not
separated
but
centuries,
by
in
collide
the
of
lives
is a journey
in
northward
forward
Great Migration
the John Reed Club in Chicago was "my first contact
a leap
with the modern
world"
(AH 381). Ellison
similarly describes
"from the feudal folk forms of the South to the industrial urban forms of
as fluid and
the North
[that] is so rapid that it throws up personalities
as
metal
rendered
iridescent
from
molten
the
effect of
changeable
individuals. The
time. For Wright,
Foucault
air."49 What
cooling
over
Ellison
centuries,
depicts
to
vulnerable
regression,
always
cultural
Golden
collisions
Day were
sees
as
as
the
an
irreversible
experience
return,
and,
process
of
as
stretching
a
generation
single
in Foucault's
asylum,
the
The vets in the bedlam of the
that generate madness.
not shell-shocked
in France but by their return to
is a secondary construct beyond
the control
authorship
Alabama.50 That
is not news. Just look for the white
of the writer
strings attached. To
own
its
role
in the workings of
Man
Invisible
famous
cost,
played
Wright's
the
one-author-at-a-time
rule,
and
"copy
Ellison"
for
prevailed
still provided a living for a few, but authorship
Copyright
only partly black-owned.
Foucault's
contention
all of these differences,
Despite
a
rich
and
outside
of the
space
opens up
productive
can
find
it
be
does
added, patronage)
(and,
authorship
tion
in
He may
the
above
have
survey,
suspected
and
at more
as much,
cultural
levels
that anonymity
of
pathologies
some confirma
than
for in 1977 he wrote
a season.
itself remained
he
theorized.
an introduction
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339
COPY WRIGHT
a
for
never
I know
not
twentieth
beyond
visible
what
strange
uncountable
anonymous
strange,
the famous writers who both made
and
its "blackness."
problematized
des
have become,
In
poems."51
vie
"la
existences,"
lives, those which
"[s]ingular
accidents,
century
of
"anthology
published
inf?mes," to gather
the
first
lives
of
lay
the
behind
and
authorship
an
removed,
through
half
African American
Names
hommes
anthology
of existences
"Sometimes
it seems to me that I have
could be compiled:
am
near
never really been a Negro"
"I
in
white." "Therefore,
(TA 210).
I am
America,
that Wright
a
wrote
"I am
negro."
near
an
invisible
man."
is also
There
a haiku
the end of his life:
I am
A
red
Took
nobody
sinking
my name
autumn
sun
away.52
Amherst
College
NOTES
a
1
1904"], "The New Slavery in the South?An
["Negro Peon
Autobiography
by Georgia
cited in text as
Peon," Independent, 56 (25 February
1904), 409-14
(409); hereafter
Negro
as Told
Americans
NS; rpt. in The Life Stories of Undistinguished
by Themselves, ed. Hamilton
intro. Werner
Sollors
Holt,
(New York, 2000), pp. 114-23.
of a Near-White,"
"The Adventures
["Mr. Blank"],
cited in text as ANW.
373-76
(373); hereafter
3
["Mr. Therefore"],
"White, but Black: A Document
109 (February
1925), 492-99
(492); hereafter
Magazine,
2
Independent,
on
cited
lb
the Race
(14 August
Problem,"
in text as WB.
1913),
Century
cited in text as IM.
(1952)
(New York,
1980); hereafter
"More Slavery at the South by a Negro Nurse,"
72
Independent,
hereafter
cited in text as MS.
196-200;
(25 January
1912),
6 Richard Wright,
Black Boy (American Hunger)
in Later Works (New York, 1991 ), p.
(1945),
cited in text as AH.
322; hereafter
4
5
Ralph
Ellison,
Nurse
Invisible Man
["Negro
1912"],
are overlooked
7 The anonymous
in some standard
studies: Stephen
autobiographers
Black Autobiography
in America (Amherst, Mass.,
Butterfield,
Smith, Where I'm
1974); Sidonie
Bound: Patterns
(London,
1974); as
of Slavery and Freedom in Black American Autobiography
well as the anthology,
American
A
Collection
Critical
African
Autobiography:
of
Essays, ed.
William
8
9
Man
10
L. Andrews
See notes
2 and
See
Blackness
Cliffs,
N.J.,
1993).
to Pass: A Southerner
Lives as a White
"Why I Never Want
54-55
(50).
Ebony, 14 (June 1959), 49-51,
Valerie
the Intersection
of Race
and Gender
In
Smith,
especially
"Reading
of Passing,"
24
43-44;
diacritics,
Mullen,
(1994),
Harryette
"Optic White:
and the Production
of Whiteness,"
diacritics, 24 (1994), 73; and Susan Goldberg,
Man
["Southern
for Two Weeks,"
Narratives
(Englewood
3.
1959"],
to Read the Pass," theory@buffalo, 4 (1998),
12-13.
"Learning
11
See Gayle Wald,
in Twentieth-Century
U.S. Literature and
Crossing the Line: Racial Passing
Culture (Durham, N.C., 2000), pp. 116-51.
a
director
Walter White,
of the NAACP,
12 The
recounted
light-skinned
foray into the
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NEW
340
LITERARY
HISTORY
South
in his autobiography,
A Man
Called White: The Autobiography
(New
of Walter White
York, 1948).
13 Rayford W. Logan,
"The Confessions
of an Unwilling
in The Negro Caravan,
Nordic,"
ed. Sterling A. Brown, Arthur
P. David,
and Ulysses
Lee
(New York,
1941), pp. 1042-50
cited in text.
(1049); hereafter
tr. Josu?
14 Michel
"What Is an Author?",
Foucault,
in Post-Structuralist
Criticism, ed. Josu? V. Harari
Perspectives
hereafter
cited in text as W.
15 Charles Wright,
"Don Chester
Himes:
Chester Himes,
ed. Michel
Fabre and Robert
16 James Weldon
"The Dilemma
Johnson,
V. Harari,
in Textual
(Ithaca, N.Y.,
1979),
pp.
Strategies:
141-60;
with an Exile,"
in Conversations
with
Evening
E. Skinner
1995), p. 112.
(Jackson, Miss.,
of the Negro Author,"
American Mercury,
15
(1928), 477-81 (477).
17
See especially
and
Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak, "Can the Subaltern
Speak?" inMarxism
the Interpretation
and Lawrence
111., 1988),
(Urbana,
of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson
Grossberg
pp. 271-313;
Nancy Miller,
Subject to Change (New York, 1988); Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "The
Master's
Pieces: On Canon
Formation
and the African American
in The Politics
Tradition,"
of Liberal
ed. Darryl J.
Education,
1992), p. 111.
18 Ralph Ellison,
"On Initiation
Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed.
19 Trevor McNeely,
"Ideology,
Gless
and
Barbara
Rites
and Power:
John
F. Callahan
Herrnstein
A Lecture
Smith
atWest
(Durham,
N.C.,
Point"
(New York,
1995),
Invisible Man,"
Ellison's
in The
(1969)
p. 522.
Studies
in
English
and
Theory,
191.
(1996),
in a 1947 essay, "Harlem
is Nowhere":
Ellison
this phrase
in
discussed
20
"Significantly,
Harlem
the reply to the greeting,
'How are you?'
is often,
I'm nowhere'"
'Oh, man,
22
Canada,
as a precursor
to the novel by William
{Collected Essays, p. 323). This essay is analyzed
"On Lower Frequencies:
The Buried Men
inWright
and Ellison," Modern Fiction
Studies, 15 (1969), 492-501.
in Early Works (New York, 1991), pp. 853
"How 'Bigger' Was Born,"
Richard Wright,
21
Goede,
81; hereafter
22 Werner
cited
Sollors
the end
23
of passing
James Weldon
as HB.
1997], p. 284) attributes
{Neither Black Nor White Yet Both [New York,
as a theme
to the influence
of Wright
and Zora Neale Hurston.
The Autobiography
(1912)
(New York,
of an Ex-Coloured Man
Johnson,
cited as TA.
1989); hereafter
"The Ethics
Richard Wright,
24
hereafter
225-37;
Works,
pp.
Early
of Living Jim
cited as EL.
Crow:
'"I was born': Slave Narratives,
Their
Olney,
in The Slave's Narrative,
ed. Charles T. Davis
cited in text as SN.
1985), p. 154; hereafter
25 James
Literature,"
York,
Editorial
26
to the "culture
the risk
to the
introductions
and
are
infrequent
recognized
standing"
life of the writer.
An Autobiographical
Status
as Autobiography
Louis Gates,
and Henry
in
Sketch,"
and
Jr.
as
(New
and terse, indicating
dictated
texts, witnessing
of the writer, or justifying
because
of
anonymity
How
Woman
it Appeals
Problem:
1902," "The Negro
[sic] to a
54 (18 September
Woman,"
1902), 2221-23.
Independent,
Let Me Live (New York,
28 Angelo
Herndon,
1937), pp. 16-18.
a
"The Race Problem?An
Colored Woman
29
["Southern
1904"],
by
Autobiography
56
Southern
Colored Woman,"
March
586-89
hereafter
1904),
(589);
(17
Independent,
cited in text as RP; rpt. in Life Stories, ed. Holt,
pp. 217-24.
27
"Southern
Southern
Colored
Colored
the Veil: A Study of Afro-American
Robert
B. Stepto,
From Behind
2nd ed.
Narrative,
in Afro
and 163-94; Valerie
Smith, Self-Discovery and Authority
1991), pp. 95-127
(Chicago,
and
cited
in text
American Narrative
44-64
hereafter
Mass.,
88-121;
1987),
pp.
(Cambridge,
30
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COPY WRIGHT
341
as SD; and Lucinda MacKethan,
"Black Boy and Ex-Coloured
Man: Version
and Inversion
for Voice,"
CLA Journal,
of the Slave Narrator's
32 (1988),
123-47.
Quest
an Ex-Coloured Man
The Autobiography
A. Baker, Jr., "A Forgotten
31 Houston
Prototype:
of
and
Invisible Man,"
D.C.,
1974), pp. 17-31.
On
the connection
in Singers
of Daybreak:
Studies
in Black American
of the protagonist's
and the novel's
32
as
Goellnicht,
James Weldon
Autobiography:
Johnson's
"Passing
18.
Coloured Man," African American Review, 30 (1996),
Literature
(Washington,
see Donald
C.
"passing,"
The Autobiography
of an Ex
33 William
L. Andrews,
The Autobiography
"Introduction,"
(New York, 2000),
Johnson,
p. xvi.
34 James Weldon
(New York, 1990), p. 238.
Along This Way (1933)
Johnson,
see Samira Kawash,
35 On
the circularity
of copy and original,
for) Black
"(Passing
in Passing and the Fictions of Identity, ed. Elaine K. Ginsberg
for White,"
(London,
Passing
cited in text as PB.
1996), pp. 59-60; hereafter
on
see the recent
literature
irony in The Autobiography,
analysis of
and the Rise of the African American Novel
Fabi, Passing
2001), pp. 90
(Chicago,
cited in text.
105; hereafter
act of writing
as a step to another
Man's
36
Some critics see the Ex-Coloured
level of
to the
Fabi reads it parodically
Giula
For access
{Passing, pp. 98-99).
understanding;
For
the extensive
M. Giulia
controversies
Anticommunism
37
Richard
38
Michel
on
see Barbara
the Epilogue
of Invisible Man,
"The Rhetoric
of
Foley,
in Invisible Man," College English, 59 (1997), 530.
for Negro Writing,"
New Challenge, 2 (1937), 53-65.
Wright,
"Blueprint
tr. Isabel Barzun
The Unfinished
2nd ed.,
Fabre,
Quest of Richard Wright,
(Urbana,
1993), p. 146.
39
American Stuff: An Anthology of Prose & Verse byMembers of theFederal Writers' Project With
Sixteen Prints by the Federal Art Project (New York, 1937); hereafter
cited in text.
40
A Richard Wright Bibliography
Keneth
Kinnamon,
(New York, 1988), p. 5 [1937.3].
41
the Veil, p. 100.
Cited by Stepto, From Behind
Famous Negro
Folk Artist,
"Huddie Ledbetter,
Wright,
Sings the Songs of
and his People," Daily Worker, 12 August
1937, 7.
The fullest account
of the incident
43
is given by Hazel Rowley, Richard Wright: The Life
and Times
Most
of the excluded
(New York,
2001),
pp. 284-91.
parts of American
soon
in
and
Hungerwere
journals
anthologies.
published
separately
42
Richard
Scottsboro
44
45
46
Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius
(New York,
1988), p. 111.
Margaret Walker,
E. M. Forster,
136 (November
1925), 595.
"Anonymity: An Inquiry," Atlantic Monthly,
Sean Burke,
The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity
in Barthes,
Foucault
2nd ed. (Edinburgh,
andDerrida,
1998), pp. 62-115.
"The Charlie Christian
in Collected Essays, pp. 266-72.
Story" (1958)
Ralph Ellison,
48
That anonymity
did not disappear
with
the emergence
of a commercial
is
culture
and Authorship,"
New Literary History, 30 (1999),
argued by Robert J. Griffin,
"Anonymity
47
877-95.
49
in Collected Essays, p. 343.
for Invisible Man,"
"Working Notes
Ralph Ellison,
a
out
Alan Nadel
series
of
coincidences
of
between
Ellison's
points
striking
portrayal
and the description
in Madness
of madmen
and Civilization,
"who ultimately
invisibility
50
as the
internalized
their own
for ostensible
freedom."
See Invisible
invisibility
price
Criticism: Ralph Ellison and the American Canon
(Iowa City, Iowa, 1988), p. 15.
tr.Meaghan
51 Michel
"The Life of Infamous Men,"
and Paul Patton,
in
Morris
Foucault,
Michel Foucault: Power, Truth, Strategy, ed. Morris
and Patton
1979), pp. 76-91
(Sydney,
(76).
52
Ollie
Harrington,
"The Last Days
of Richard
Wright,"
Ebony,
16 (February
1961),
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