Ralph Ellison 8-16

 Credit prison with introducing me to Ralph Ellison. Ellison wrote one novel, Invisible Man. I think it was/is brilliant. Saul Bellow gave it a very good review back in 1952. Nathaniel Mills writes this in his review of Wrestling with the Left: The Making of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man by Barbara Foley, Wrestling with Ralph Ellison: 

HERE’S WHAT’S AT stake in any examination of Ralph Ellison: he published only one novel in his lifetime, yet no other African-American writer — indeed, no other writer — has played as large a role in shaping mainstream convictions about the role of the African-American artist, American society and culture, and the relation of both to politics.

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Invisible Man’s overriding theoretical project is to insist that American society is more complicated and unpredictable than most established epistemological and political paradigms allow, but the novel does not reject as hopeless the task of organizing new paradigms. As the narrator says at the end, “the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.”

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The “concrete” hierarchical structure of power is in tension with the fluid, creative efforts of those oppressed by that structure. One must recognize the struggles of these oppressed as both literally contained by power and exceeding the grasp of power. Invisibility is both delimiting and freeing, just as oppression also contains within it (dialectically, or what Ellison might call “chaotically”) the potential for freedom. Effective revolutionary politics in a globalized, post-Fordist era should be able to grasp and manipulate these social complexities of power and resistance. 

What I understand even less now is why in my senior high school English class we read not Ellison but Richard Wright's Native Son.  Long past getting an answer to that question.

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