boundary 2
In Global American Studies
Imperial Eclecticism in Moby-Dick and Invisible Man:
Literature in a Postcolonial Empire
Jonathan Arac
I write this essay thinking of Edward W. Said (1935–2003), the
American and Palestinian writer and teacher, whose work continues to animate critics and intellectuals around the world, and whose call for a “Return
to Philology” this special issue responds to.1 Said helped literary scholars
think analytically about imperialism, and he honored the value of powerful
artistic accomplishment. Said’s “contrapuntal” criticism respects the differences between culture and politics yet demands attention to both. This
practice allows criticism to act as “secular,” to acknowledge works of culture
as great but not transcendent. By recognizing the limits and imperfections
of human activities, Said opposes what he calls the “rhetoric of blame.” As
he explains in a strong, polemical moment:
It would be silly to expect Jane Austen to treat slavery with anything
like the passion of an abolitionist or a newly liberated slave. Yet what
I have called the rhetoric of blame so often now employed by sub1. Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2004), 57–84.
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altern, minority, or disadvantaged voices, attacks her and others like
her, retrospectively, for being white, privileged, insensitive, complicit.
Yes, Austen belonged to a slave-owning society, but do we therefore
jettison her novels as so many trivial exercises in aesthetic frumpery? Not at all, I would argue, if we take seriously our intellectual and
interpretative vocation to make connections, to deal with as much
of the evidence as possible . . . above all to see complementarity
and interdependence instead of isolated, venerated, or formalized
experience that excludes and forbids the hybridizing intrusions of
human history.2
In what follows, I try to characterize the great value of Herman Melville’s
and Ralph Ellison’s work without hyperboles of either outrage or defensiveness. Critics should not construct for our subjects a historically impossible
purity.
I aim to show common problems in the study of postcolonial literature and of the literature of the United States. Even though the United
States is an empire, I hope to suggest analytic perspectives useful for both
by exploring the processes by which a sense of authorizing tradition may
be established, especially through what I will call imperial eclecticism.
The United States originated as colonies but became an empire
immediately upon gaining independence. The United States may be postcolonial, but its history to date has taken place after Empire’s beginning,
with no end in sight,3 although the immense power of China in the world of
the twenty-first century has begun to define a new phase. From the start
the American people has been heterogeneous: the founding settlements
included colonists from several European nations who imposed themselves
upon a Native American indigenous population and who imported many
enslaved Africans. Through the nineteenth century, the new nation spread
across its continent, buying Louisiana and gaining Florida from Spain, and
then, by war against Mexico, conquering Texas and greater California. The
self-acknowledged imperial moment around 1900 marked by war against
2. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Pantheon, 1993), 96. On the contrapuntal and the secular, see especially the section “Connecting Empire to Secular Interpretation,” 43–61.
3. This line of thought was first drafted for an Institute on “Literature after Empire,” held at
National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan. Deep thanks to my hosts and to the dialogue with
many scholars and students, as also to those who later discussed this with me at Florida
Atlantic University, West Virginia University, Temple University, Rutgers University, and
the Columbia University Seminar on Theory of Literature.
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Spain in Cuba and the Philippines has yielded to a neo-imperialism, usually
officially unacknowledged. Since the middle of the twentieth century, the
United States has always been ready to manifest itself militarily, but has
preferred economic control to actual occupation of noncontiguous territory.
The ongoing catastrophe in Iraq suggests that this preference will resume
in the future.
Recent interpretive overviews by distinguished senior historians have
addressed this history: Charles S. Maier, Among Empires, and Thomas
Bender, A Nation among Nations. The among in both titles emphasizes a
salutary comparative perspective, in contrast to the usual exceptionalism
guiding U.S. historiography. Like these works, this essay addresses American materials in perspectives that are comparative and transnational.
The student, scholar, or critic of literature asks what this history has
to do with our subject. It is not just a question of writers putting the empire
down on paper and our reading it. Some of the most deep, complex, and
influential intelligences of recent literary study have devoted major work
to opening this question. The problem arises because the institution of literature, as it has emerged since the nineteenth century in the West, has
defined itself by its distance and difference from politics. This is what relative autonomy means. And yet literature is part of what we may call the
imperial culture complex. The structural relationship is part and whole, but
it is not a simple synecdoche. In my own work, I have analyzed the move in
the United States from James Fenimore Cooper’s early nineteenth-century
national narrative to the literary narrative inaugurated by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Melville around 1850. Fredric Jameson’s notions of the “political
unconscious” in modern Western literature and “national allegory” in third
world writing attempt to conceptualize a similar set of issues, as does in its
different way Said’s notion of “contrapuntal” criticism.4
I have chosen Moby-Dick and Invisible Man because I admire both
extremely. This very admiration—the deep engagement many readers have
with these works—points to a further problem: the problem of inequality.
Not all works, we believe, are equally worth our attention.5 Yet we also dis4. See Jonathan Arac, The Emergence of American Literary Narrative, 1820–1860 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005); Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981);
and Fredric Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Age of Multinational Capitalism,”
Social Text, no. 15 (Autumn 1986): 65–88.
5. For a strong recent assertion of hierarchies in attention, see Alexander Nehamas, Only
a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
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trust the hierarchy that underlies such judgments of the masterwork, the
classic, the great American novel. What we pay attention to, and how we
think about what we do not attend to—this larger problematic of classification conjoins the problem of literary evaluation and the problem of empire.
Walter Benjamin, the German Jewish critic fleeing Hitler’s domination of Europe in 1940, memorably addressed this problematic. To characterize the traditions of culture and the process by which they are made
known, he shockingly invoked the model of Roman imperial triumph, in
which the “victors” publicly displayed the “cultural treasures” they had
looted. Such treasures “owe their existence not only to the efforts of the
great geniuses who created them, but also to the anonymous toil of others.”
Because of this historical process of superordination—some people over
other people, some works over other works—Benjamin concludes, “[N]o
document of culture . . . is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”
This scandal at the heart of what as readers and teachers we cherish and
foster provokes the efforts of critical thought. Benjamin says this requires
us to “brush history against the grain.”6 Contrapuntal criticism, the political unconscious, the perspective of “planetarity” in Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak’s Death of a Discipline—all these are tools for cross-grained work.
From a very different tradition of inquiry from Benjamin’s, but to similar effect, Frank Kermode persuasively demonstrates the imperial basis of
the idea of the classic through a reading of T. S. Eliot on Vergil—the Roman
epic poet whose Latin words are inscribed on the dollar bill of the United
States.7 Kermode helps me articulate a notion I call “imperial eclecticism.”
In Culture and Imperialism, Said works to define what he calls structures
University Press, 2007): “The real opposition is not between the works of art one admires
and those one detests, but between those that stand out enough to be noticed at all, and
those that just pass by” (42). In contrast, Northrop Frye conceived the goal of literary
education to be “undiscriminating catholicity.” See Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1957), 25, and my discussion in “Babel and Vernacular in an
Empire of Immigrants: Howells and the Languages of American Fiction,” boundary 2 34,
no. 2 (Summer 2007): 20.
6. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” trans. Harry Zohn, in Selected Writings,
vol. 4 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 391–92, for all quotations. To
Benjamin’s emphasis on class and geopolitical hierarchies, one might add also Virginia
Woolf’s hypothesis that “Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was
often a woman.” See A Room of One’s Own (1929), ed. Susan Gubar (Orlando: Harcourt,
2005), 49.
7. Frank Kermode, The Classic: Literary Images of Permanence and Change (New York:
Viking, 1975).
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of “attitude and reference” that give shape to the way culture and empire
mutually inform each other.8 Consider the familiar idea that there exists an
enduring world of achievement from which one may draw inspiration, technique, and substance, and that this body of achievement does not exercise
compulsion over one, that one is free to choose where to draw from and
what to draw on. This commonplace notion of being the heir of the ages,
this privileged structure of attitude and reference, what Eliot called tradition, I call imperial eclecticism.
For Melville and Ellison, this structure of relationship to the dead
arises through mediation by the living.9 Melville dedicates Moby-Dick to his
older contemporary Hawthorne, but the actual literary character of MobyDick owes far more to an old British writer, William Shakespeare. Melville
interrelates these two figures in an essay, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,”
written while he was at work on Moby-Dick. This structure in Melville feels
recognizably postcolonial: Lacking a sustaining national literary culture, one
looks for support and inspiration elsewhere. Melville uses Shakespeare to
become American, as earlier the Romans used the Greeks, and as later
writers around the world have used James Joyce and William Faulkner to
write themselves and their nations into the world of literature.10 Ellison, writing a century after Melville, places two epigraphs at the start of his novel:
one from his older contemporary, the American poet T. S. Eliot, who had
recently won the Nobel Prize. Within a few pages of the book’s opening, the
unnamed narrator describes himself as descending “like Dante, into [the]
depths.”11 Dante Alighieri was the writer Eliot admired above all others, and
his major prose works included treatises both on empire (De Monarchia)
and on the new vernacular languages (De Vulgari Eloquentia). Ellison need
no longer rely only on the resources of world literature, because he also has
an American national tradition: the other epigraph is from “Benito Cereno,”
a novella by Melville.
Among my reasons for loving, and choosing to discuss, these two
8. See esp. Culture and Imperialism, 52.
9. On this pattern of mediation in Goethe and Keats, see Jonathan Arac, “The Impact of
Shakespeare,” in Impure Worlds: The Institution of Literature in the Age of the Novel (New
York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 7–9.
10. On the complex politics of world literature, see the discussion of Pascale Casanova,
The World Republic of Letters (1999), in Jonathan Arac, “Literary History in a Global Age,”
New Literary History 39, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 751–54.
11. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952; New York: Modern Library, 1992), 8. Hereafter, this
work is cited parenthetically.
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novels, they are both great torrents of language. Each is a first-person narrative—Melville’s Ishmael, Ellison’s unnamed figure, who once calls himself by an African American folk-name “Jack-the-Bear” (6)—and both are
extraordinarily rich in the quoted and appropriated discourses and genre
forms of others. Even in the narrative discourses, many voices make themselves heard. Both novels have therefore provoked much commentary in
relation to Mikhail Bakhtin’s critical thinking about the novel as a form that
makes its form by staging interplay among many social discourses. Both
these works thoroughly reward Bakhtinian analysis, but I find a version of
the “culture and barbarism” problem. Bakhtin’s ideology of the novel always
gives it the prestige of the underdog, while certainly by Ellison’s time, the
novel was the dominant literary form, at least in the West. But all the way
back in the history of the novel to Don Quixote, one may also find in the
novel’s relativizing power to take up and display the discourse of others
something very like the powers of state and discipline, something very like
hegemony.12
When Moby-Dick was published in 1851, it experimented with a form
that had barely begun to exist in the United States. The mode of literary
narrative depends on the enabling convention that literature is fiction and
will therefore always maintain an oblique relation to life. In contrast to Melville, the unprecedented best seller of the next year, Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
addressed the nation directly through sentiment and claimed for itself the
power of truth. It used the institution of literature as an alternative to politics—since women were at the time not franchised politically—and it aimed
at the heart, not at laws, but there was no obliquity.
Moby-Dick, in contrast, took the question of freedom to the high
seas, pushing away from the actualities of land to a realm of different laws.
(Sailors were the only free Americans who shared with slaves liability to
12. See, on Cervantes, Wlad Godzich and Nicholas Spadaccini, “Popular Culture and
Spanish Literary History,” in Literature among Discourses: The Spanish Golden Age, ed.
Wlad Godzich and Nicholas Spadaccini (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1986), 59–60. On hegemony, see Etienne Balibar’s recent paper on “Universalism”: “But
what does it mean to assert one’s domination? It means that one’s discourse ‘relativizes’
the other, or sets the standards, defines the norms after which the other can be granted
a limited value and function, qualified or disqualified—a hierarchical relationship which in
some cases will appear reversible” (“Sub Specie Universitatis,” Topoi 25, nos. 1–2 [September 2006]: 3–16). For Bakhtin, the great art of the novel is precisely this capacity to
cite and relativize any and all other discourses, even to stage the conflicts of all other
discourses between and among themselves, but only as subordinated within the novel’s
own artistic construction.
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being whipped legally.) Great American novelists are not ivory-tower aesthetes, but their work, at best, will be resonant, provocative, yet stirring
reflection more than action. Above all, in this case, I think, this happens
because the narrative voice of Moby-Dick is so remarkably mobile, even
more so than in Invisible Man. The narrative does not rest in any single
position or perspective but rather seeks constantly to generate change.13
In his great book of 1941, American Renaissance, F. O. Matthiessen praises Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman,
Hawthorne, and Melville for their devotion to the possibilities of democracy,
and there is no doubt that Moby-Dick is deeply concerned with questions
of democracy, but it is at least difficult, and perhaps impossible, to determine a position. Take, for example, two terse questions from early in our
acquaintances with the book’s two predominant characters: Ishmael, the
lowly sailor who narrates much of the novel, and Ahab, the ivory-legged
captain, whose quest to revenge himself on the whale mobilizes the book’s
plot. Ishmael, in the very first chapter, in considering the circumstances of
a sailor subject to commands, asks “Who aint a slave?”14 This question
emphasizes equality of condition. Ahab, in his first big scene, on the quarter
deck (chapter 36), in which he binds the crew to his mission, asks “Who’s
over me?” (197). This question emphasizes freedom of opportunity.
Together the two questions betoken a long and deep fault line in
the United States. In the realm of economics, this plays out as the choice
between socialism and the dream of success. The two questions also
engage very different realms of feeling. Ahab asserts himself. He denies
that his quest against the whale is blasphemous, because he denies that
there is any power with the authority to govern his will. Ishmael acknowledges that as a sailor he gets bossed around, but, he asks, “What does
that indignity amount to, weighed . . . in the scales of the New Testament?”
(28). Ishmael evokes not individuality in struggle but brotherhood in care:
“all hands should rub each other’s shoulder-blades” (28).
Yet Ishmael’s narrative, and Melville’s project, involves raising up
13. The most challenging characterization of this mobility remains Donald E. Pease, “Melville and Cultural Persuasion,” in Ideology and Classic American Literature, ed. Sacvan
Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 413–15.
Pease does not mention but his argument reminds me that Hannah Arendt identified
incessant change as a primary characteristic of totalitarianism in Origins of Totalitarianism (1951).
14. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851; New York: Vintage/Library of America, 1991), 28.
Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically.
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as well as setting equal. Chapter 26, which tells of the ship’s mates and
their harpooners, is entitled “Knights and Squires,” invoking the language
of medieval romance. His topic, Ishmael tells us, is “not the dignity of kings
and robes,” but rather “democratic dignity,” which can be seen “shining in
the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike.” This dignity “radiates” from
God, defined as “the centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!” This continues in a much-commented passage, whose opening phrase gave the title to an important book by the radical Trinidadian activist and intellectual C. L. R. James: “If, then, to meanest
mariners, and renegades and castaways, I shall hereafter ascribe high
qualities, though dark; weave round them tragic graces; . . . if I shall touch
that workman’s arm with some ethereal light; . . . then against all mortal
critics bear me out in it, thou just Spirit of Equality, which hast spread one
royal mantle of humanity over all my kind!” (146).
The chapter concludes in the next sentence, which brings together
diverse realms of history and experience, as do many sentences in this
book. It is a prayer, cast in archaic linguistic forms:
Bear me out in it, thou great Democratic God! who didst not refuse
to the swart convict, Bunyan, the pale poetic pearl; Thou who didst
clothe with doubly hammered leaves of finest gold, the stumped and
paupered arm of old Cervantes; Thou who didst pick up Andrew
Jackson from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a war-horse; who
didst thunder him higher than a throne! Thou who, in all Thy mighty,
earthly marchings, ever cullest Thy selectest champions from the
kingly commons; bear me out in it, O God! (146–47)
Here we have the stuff that filled out much of American national
narrative. The hero of the Democratic Party, which was known simply as
“the democracy,” was Andrew Jackson, a contradictory figure: a general
become president, yet champion of the “common man,” but also an American imperialist. Himself a slaveholder, he shaped the policy of dispossession for Native Americans that produced the terrible suffering of the “trail of
tears.”15 John Bunyan, the seventeenth-century English itinerant preacher
and visionary, was imprisoned for his religious independence and wrote Pil15. During the 1830s, at times in defiance of the Supreme Court, Jackson pursued a
policy of removing the “five civilized nations” of Native Americans from the lands they
held by treaty with the various states and resettling them in what was then far-distant
“Indian Territory.”
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grim’s Progress, a prose allegorical dream-vision of salvation that became
one of the most widely known and read books in the American colonies and
the United States. The “pale poetic pearl” alludes to a medieval British religious allegory and in its alliteration strikes a poetic note in Melville’s prose,
as well as setting light against “swart” in a color-contrast resonant for a
book about a white whale.
In many respects like Bunyan, only late in life and after disfigurement and imprisonment did Cervantes write Don Quixote, but this evocation doubly troubles what had seemed the tendency of this passage and
the whole chapter that it concludes. For Cervantes served the Catholic
majesty of Spain, the great antagonist of the English in the early colonization of the Americas (as well antagonist to the Ottomans—Cervantes was
injured in the Battle of Lepanto). Cervantes’ literary accomplishment—so
much like Melville’s in its breadth of cultural range and its manipulation
of different registers of discourse—satirically challenged the “Knights and
Squires” of chivalry. For Melville, only his place in the American Empire for
Liberty made it possible to appropriate as his own this conflictual heritage.
This is the power of imperial eclecticism.
Since I have been developing a contrast between Ishmael and Ahab,
it seems important to offer my take on a critical issue that has been important for as long as Moby-Dick has played an active part in critical discussion, roughly since Matthiessen’s American Renaissance. Does the book
require us to make a choice between Ishmael and Ahab? Is the novel
more Ishmael’s or Ahab’s? Is one the image of American hope, the other
of American fear? It is tempting to read in Ahab’s quest the deadly folly of
any self-ordained righteousness that hijacks the lives of others into its own
impossible agenda. (If George W. Bush added to his arrogance eloquence,
he might have seemed an Ahab.) It is tempting to read in Ishmael a generous capacity to enter lovingly the lives of others. Ahab cares for only one
thing and dies a tyrant; Ishmael cares for everything and lives a democrat.
These temptations produce a paradox. To embrace this radical contrast,
sheep against goat, is to think the way Ahab does. When you think you are
choosing Ishmael, you are instead choosing Ahab. Ishmael would say you
need both, as the book does.
No less than Melville’s novel, Invisible Man drives readers to thought
concerning representation and representativeness as possible relationships between the work’s reader and its characters or narrator. First published in 1952, and never out of print, Ellison’s novel ends by stating a pos-
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sibility that has continuously renewed its currency. The very last sentence
is: “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” (572).
Is this speaker, this writing voice that rhetorically engages us, a representative man? In some sense, yes, it seems, but only on “the lower frequencies,” recalling Dante’s “depths” from the beginning. What do we make
of this?
This phrase invites many glosses. The speaker, we well know by
this time, is African American, and the book’s normative readership is not
exclusively defined by race, so it makes sense that there is only a partial fit. Moreover, at least since the subtitle of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, black
experience in the United States has been coded as “life among the lowly.”
Literally, within the book’s fictional world, the narrator addresses us from
below, from underground, the brilliantly illuminated den of stolen electric
power that he has carved out for himself beneath Manhattan on the edge
of Harlem. In the American literary tradition vital to Ellison’s ambitions and
self-understanding, in Moby-Dick, what Ahab calls the “little lower layer”
(197) opens access to truths hidden behind the screening appearances of
everyday life, symbolized for him by the “wall” of the whale’s blank whiteness. And in the jazz milieu that Ellison evokes and draws from in the novel,
the lower frequencies of the double bass provide a ground, a base, for
brass and wind, or even move out themselves in such a piece as Duke
Ellington’s “Jack the Bear.”16 The title of this 1940 composition links the
nickname of the band’s new bassist Jimmie Blanton to an African American
folklore figure. This figure offers the only moniker provided for the novel’s
otherwise anonymous protagonist: “Call me Jack-the-Bear, for I am in a
state of hibernation” (6). This technique of multilayering cultural references,
his version of imperial eclecticism, Ellison takes from his deep engagement
with modernist writing.
One example of what the “lower frequencies” might mean comes
near the middle, when the protagonist is hospitalized after a serious industrial accident. The sequence is frightening, since the physicians seem to be
experimenting with the narrator more than helping him recover; they speak
of procedures such as prefrontal lobotomy and castration. The doctors hold
up cards to him asking “WHAT IS YOUR NAME?” (235) and even “WHAT
IS YOUR MOTHER’S NAME?” (236). He evidently suffers from amnesia,
16. See Steven C. Tracy, “A Delicate Ear, a Retentive Memory, and the Power to Weld the
Fragments,” in A Historical Guide to Ralph Ellison, ed. Steven C. Tracy (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2004), 89.
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since neither of these evokes an answer within him. The narrator anxiously
recognizes the disconnect. Then a new question makes him stare “in wide
eyed amazement”:
WHO WAS BUCKEYE THE RABBIT?
I was filled with turmoil. Why should he think of that ? He pointed to
the question, word by word. I laughed, deep, deep inside me, giddy
with the delight of self-discovery and the desire to hide it. Somehow I was Buckeye the Rabbit . . . or had been, when as children we
danced and sang barefoot in the dusty streets:
Buckeye the Rabbit
Shake it, shake it
Buckeye the rabbit
Break it, break it . . .
Yes, I could not bring myself to admit it, it was too ridiculous—and
somehow too dangerous. (237, ellipses in original)
Here we find the lower frequencies: they are “deep” and by their intimacy produce “delight,” but also, perhaps for that reason, they feel “dangerous.” This affirmative but troubled relationship to the lower frequencies
helps to explain why the book’s final question, which seems positive in its
hope of representativeness, is prefaced so ominously. The book’s next-tofinal sentence says: “And it is this which frightens me” (572). The narrator’s
personal lower frequencies link him to African American folk patterns—
Buckeye the Rabbit, Jack the Bear. What links him to the book’s wider readership would be what he calls in a key moment near the end “the beautiful
absurdity of their American identity and mine” (550). How the book maps
onto a larger world remains to be explored.
The narrator’s invisibility arises from the American way of life in the
earlier twentieth century, still the way when Ellison wrote. Invisible Man testifies to six decades of racial segregation, since the 1896 Supreme Court
decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. This was the world of the Negro, the term
by which African Americans affirmed their dignity against the sanctioned
racism that after Reconstruction compromised the long-awaited freedom.
Since 1954, in which Brown v. Board of Education heralded the end of segregation, the decades that separate us from Invisible Man have greatly
changed our cultural realities, despite residential and educational segregation persisting and even deepening. Ellison dedicated his last novel, Juneteenth, published only posthumously (1999) and thus far fragmentarily, to
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“that vanished tribe into which I was born, the American Negroes.” The
novel may still speak for or to us, but its world is history.17
In the world of Invisible Man, the legally asserted fiction of “separate
but equal” defined the limits of socially sanctioned vision. Ellison’s book
makes the positive case that there is much beauty and value hidden away,
helping to form America unbeknownst to many Americans. Part of the
book’s greatness is its imaginative representation of innumerable details
of everyday African American life, including many rhyme and song tags.
Part of the book’s greatness is the urgency with which it also demonstrates
that what you don’t see can hurt you: invisibility is a position that not only
receives pain but also can give it.
Ellison’s thinking as a literary critic and cultural theorist allows further reflection on a deep question: Since literature does not state explicitly all that it means, by what techniques or devices may we who read connect literature with the rest of life, especially politics, especially the politics
related to empire? The particular tension animating this exploration is
familiar to students of anticolonial resistance movements and postcolonial
states: the tension between internationalism and nationalism. Ellison was a
Popular Front internationalist in the 1930s, before his career as a writer had
really begun, but by the 1960s and 1970s, he was a national patriot, who
supported the American war in Vietnam and who accepted honors from
both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, the presidents leading the war.
Invisible Man comes at a midpoint. Elsewhere, I have charted the emergence of the patriotic position within that novel, although that is not the
whole story.18
Ellison made a fundamental commitment regarding the politics
and ethics of literary technique. He learned from his study of Eliot and
Joyce, and he brilliantly deployed the “hidden system of organization” of
the “mythic method” (as Eliot called it in his review of Ulysses).19 It is irresistible to quote Ellison on the moment he began his literary vocation, as
17. For the most powerfully elaborated statement of this view, see Kenneth W. Warren,
So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2003).
18. See Jonathan Arac, “Toward a Critical Genealogy of the U.S. Discourse of Identity:
Invisible Man after Fifty Years,” boundary 2 30, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 195–216.
19. Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (New York: Random House, 1994), 203. Further
references to this volume are cited parenthetically as CE. “Ulysses, Order, and Myth”
(1923), in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt and
Farrar, 1975), 178.
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a sophomore music major. Since trumpet was his instrument, the incomparable Louis Armstrong was his standard for excellence in the arts. Here
is his account of what happened when The Waste Land “seized my mind”:
I was intrigued by its power to move me while eluding my understanding. Somehow its rhythms were often closer to those of jazz
than were those of the Negro poets [whom he had been taught in
school], and even though I could not understand then, its range of
allusion was as mixed and as varied as that of Louis Armstrong. Yet
there were its discontinuities, its changes of pace and its hidden system of organization which escaped me.
There was nothing to do but look up the references in the footnotes to the poem, and thus began my conscious education in literature. (CE, 203)
Eliot and Joyce provided the structural principle that allows Ellison to hold
together the rich folkloric materials, which he draws from African American
life rather than from Christian theology or Greek epic.
At the same time, Ellison chooses against Ernest Hemingway and
the prose decorum made nearly compulsory for his generation in the
United States, and in much of the world. As Ellison explains in his speech
upon receiving the National Book Award, “understatement depends . . .
upon commonly held assumptions,” which are not necessarily available to
a writer of “minority status” (CE, 152). Therefore, he chooses for his fiction
a mode of eloquence for which his exemplars included the French André
Malraux and the Russian Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
In an essay from the late 1940s on liberal Hollywood movies about
American race problems, Ellison reveals a startling skill at opening horizons of time and space, an Eliotic modernist effect to make a point about
culture and barbarism. These flawed liberal films, he argues, at least acted
against the destructive power of The Birth of a Nation (1915). D. W. Griffith’s film counts as inaugurating classical Hollywood narrative, yet its racist
mythmaking helped relaunch the Ku Klux Klan. Ellison comments, “Usually
The Birth of a Nation is discussed in terms of its contribution to cinema
technique, but as with every other technical advance since the oceanic
sailing ship, it became a further instrument in the dehumanization of the
Negro” (CE, 304). Here we move in one giant step from Hollywood liberalism to the middle passage and the role of new European maritime technology in making possible the importation of millions of enslaved Africans to
the Americas. This reference requires that we think more deeply about the
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power of culture. Are compelling visions of racist ideology equally powerful
and dangerous as “instruments”?
Likewise, in reviewing in 1945 Richard Wright’s autobiographical
Black Boy, Ellison emphasizes not the primordial isolation of Mississippi,
where Wright began from, but rather its incorporation into the world economy: “the welfare of the most humble black Mississippi sharecropper is
affected less by the flow of the seasons and the rhythm of natural events
than by the fluctuations of the stock market” (CE, 139). (Faulkner shows
this from a ruling class perspective in The Sound and the Fury [1929] as
Jason Compson agonizes over the ticker reporting cotton prices.)
A 1957 essay, “Society, Morality, and the Novel,” offers Ellison’s most
astonishing revelation of a larger and more terrible world that must be considered if one is to do justice to cultural activity. Ellison is explicitly concerned with the responsibility, as he sees it, for the novelist to communicate to the reader as full a sense of reality as possible, and he is equally
concerned with the danger that novelists and readers may collaborate in
evading this obligation and taking poor satisfaction in inadequate work.
Consider this statement: “In the nineteenth century, during the
moment of greatest middle-class stability . . . the novel reached its first high
point of formal self-consciousness” (CE, 700). This is already a notable formulation. For the modernism that made “formal self-consciousness” a feature to be noted and valued generally failed to find this virtue in the literature of the nineteenth century. Ellison shows here a characteristic mixture:
he maintains a conservative humanist canon, such as might have been
associated with Popular Front criticism, and he combines it with the aesthetic principles of high modernism, more associated with Partisan Review.
Yet there is a further remarkable element in this sentence of Ellison’s, for I
have omitted a long interpolation. The sentence actually reads as follows:
In the nineteenth century, during the moment of greatest middleclass stability—a stability found actually only at the center, and there
only relatively, in England and not in the colonies; in Paris rather
than in Africa, for there the baser instincts, the violence and greed
could destroy and exploit non-European societies in the name of
humanism and culture, beauty and liberty, fraternity and equality
while protecting the humanity of those at home—the novel reached
its first high point of formal self-consciousness. (CE, 700)
Prefiguring Said, Ellison frames the culture of the novel around the
turbulence of imperialism, and he recognizes that even as the novel may
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be a form of truth-telling, novels could also “reconstruct an image of experience which would make it unnecessary for one to be aware of the true
reality upon which society rested” (CE, 701). We recognize again the problem of understatement that undergirds the obliquity of literary narrative:
what must be said explicitly in order to invoke awareness of a frame of
reference?
Later in Ellison’s career, he felt obligated to defend explicitly his political choices, such as in 1969 speaking at the U.S. Military Academy at West
Point, or his 1968 contribution to a volume celebrating Lyndon Johnson,
the president who committed the United States to war in Vietnam. Ellison
explains: “As a charter member of the National Council on the Arts, I felt
that governmental aid to the American arts and artists was of a more abiding importance than my hopes that the Vietnam War would be brought to a
swift conclusion” (CE, 554). I admire the frank self-explanation. Yet Ellison
here displays an imperial perspective, in which the gains of “our” people
count for more than the pains we cause to others elsewhere. This structure
of attitude and reference produces culture and barbarism together. Ellison
does not reckon that the economic cost of the Vietnam War might nullify
his political conviction that Johnson was “the greatest American President
for the poor and for Negroes” (CE, 562). Nevertheless, the war in Vietnam
undid the War on Poverty. It is a tragedy of American history that Ellison
proved so wrong, that Johnson could not sustain his progressive domestic
projects against the drag of a war that was also wrong in every way, as the
United States may have discovered again.
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