Lineages of the Literary Left: Essays in Honor of Alan M. Wald

Left Antecedents of Invisible Man

The strategy of foregoing accurate or literal historical reference in order to expand rather than suppress radical critique was discussed in Communist Left literary debates after the publication of Richard Wright’s Native Son in 1940 and John Steinbeck’s The Moon Is Down in 1942. As a Communist writer and literary critic in the 1930s and early 1940s, Ellison followed each controversy, and these debates can be read as alternative antecedents for the political and aesthetic maneuvers of Invisible Man.

Leftist debates over Native Son often raised the issue of the novel’s referential accuracy. In a generally adulatory Sunday Worker review, Ben Davis, Jr. nevertheless found that Wright omits the “great historic fact” of black participation in Communist activism, whitewashing the CPUSA as “something ‘foreign’ to the Negro people.”[9] Furthermore, the Communist characters “are not typical” and “reflect distorted ideas” about the Party, Boris Max’s “distorted” courtroom speech does not reflect Communist legal strategy, Bigger Thomas’s mother is not “a strong woman typical of Negro womanhood of today,” and Bigger fails as “a symbol of the whole Negro people” because neither he nor any black character reflects the actual “constructive power of the Negro masses.”[10]

Wright’s defenders argued, however, that the novel should not be judged according to how accurately it references historical reality. Mike Gold defended Native Son with a certain sense of the relative autonomy of literary form. Because of literature’s concern with individual characters, Gold holds, proletarian literature cannot be referentially typical: “no one worker’s story can ever be the story of all of them—not if they are living characters. Each is an individual.” The whole truth of the proletariat and the class struggle emerges only from “the great total of proletarian literature.” In Native Son, Bigger’s “individual psychology” is less representative than conceptual, serving as a mechanism for analyzing, “in a masterly and universal manner,” the roles race and class play in shaping individual experience.[11] In a subsequent essay on Native Son, Gold compared literary form to painting. Painting and literature are not evaluated by “fidelity to the strict facts.” Rather, the painter or novelist “can invent, improvise, re-arrange reality” in order to “convey the emotion behind the facts,” an object underlying the empirical surfaces of reality. Facts may be distorted or occluded so as to bring this object of representation into focus.[12] Samuel Sillen made similar claims in the New Masses, writing that Bigger is a symbol of something archetypal: the revolutionary desire of the oppressed for action, “the deep urge to live and create which no exploitative society can permanently subdue.”[13]

Gold and Sillen imply that limiting oneself to accurate documentation of specific historical situations might constrict an author’s ability to think the underlying, general dynamics of such situations. A close friend of Wright’s in 1940, Ellison admired Native Son and defended it to other leftists.[14] The debate over Native Son raises a particular aesthetic dilemma relevant to Invisible Man: how can an author seeking to theorize transhistorical, sociopolitical processes avoid the appearance of documenting a discrete historical reality? Invisible Man’s withdrawal from historical objects (the CPUSA, Tuskegee) to fictional objects (the nameless narrator, the Brotherhood, the College) shifts focus from the historical to the archetypal, from chronologically specific black political experiences toward an examination of politics in general.

Invisible Man’s answer was predated by John Steinbeck. The Moon Is Down describes the occupation of a small town in an unspecified country by invaders from another unspecified country, governed by a dictator, in the course of an unspecified war. The invasion has no nationalist or ideological motive: the invaders compel the townspeople to extract needed coal from a local mine, and the occupation is only “a business venture,” according to their commander.[15] The townspeople, however, possess a commitment to democracy that cannot be suppressed and their covert resistance gradually erodes the psychological and martial strength of the invaders. Published in 1942, the novel is obviously applicable to the struggles of Nazi-occupied Europe: the invaders are also at war with Britain and America, and their nation fought two decades earlier in France and Belgium. But this is as much concrete detail as Steinbeck provides and the lack of literal reference expands the novel’s epistemological ambit, situating World War II as one instance of a historically recurring conflict between democracy and economic exploitation. Steinbeck is therefore able to theorize the dynamics of modern popular resistance itself, attributing it in the text to a triangulation of factors: irrepressible human agency, the decentered organization of the masses, and modern technological developments. The Moon Is Down thus explicates World War II and, potentially, other historical instances of mass struggle.

Because of the CPUSA’s support for the Allied cause after 1941, leftist critics were uneasy with the novel’s referential opacity. Louis Budenz argued that Steinbeck “[e]rrs [a]gainst [r]eality” by not literally or accurately depicting historical details, such as the facts of World War II, the specific contours of Nazism, and the working-class nature of anti-Nazi resistance. Therefore, Steinbeck’s invaders are “unrealistic,” and the town’s resistance is distorted, driven not by the specific “character of this war” but by a “vague and almost mystical desire for ‘freedom.’”[16] Stanley Edgar Hyman argued instead that such criteria—“Is the book true to Nazi conquest? and, Does it aid in the anti-Nazi struggle?”—neglect the specificity of Steinbeck’s intentions. Because few details are provided that would definitively link the novel’s world to the situation in contemporary Europe, Hyman argued that there is sufficient representational distance between the novel and World War II to direct critical attention away from matters of reference. Instead, Hyman reads the text for Steinbeck’s figurative suppression of the tendency of his earlier works to retreat from social engagement into apolitical individualism. As Sillen and Gold did with Native Son, Hyman treats the subject of Steinbeck’s novel as a general one: the problem of authorship and political responsibility itself.

Furthermore, Hyman’s attention to Steinbeck’s “naming and absence of naming” may illuminate Ellison’s creation of the College and Brotherhood. Noting that terms such as “German” and “Nazi” never appear in The Moon Is Down, Hyman compares this lack to how Steinbeck “never uses the word Communist” to name the strike leaders in In Dubious Battle (1936).[17] Hyman doesn’t develop this observation, but he nonetheless frames the mis- or nonnaming of historical agents as a potentially purposive literary strategy, letting us analyze Invisible Man’s own “absence of naming” as more than a curiously euphemistic style. Ellison admired Hyman’s essay and began corresponding with Hyman shortly after its publication; the two would become close friends.[18] Gold, Sillen, and Hyman offer hermeneutic grounds for an alternative understanding of Invisible Man, one derived from the Literary Left rather than from Cold War reaction.

Invisible Man: Politics, Institutions, and Utopia

Invisible Man theorizes the relationship of politics, institutions, and utopia through a symbolic design of rags, papers, and monuments. By alluding to the history of the production of paper from discarded cloth, rags and paper figure the manner in which political needs and energy are both given articulation by and controlled within institutions. The move from rags to paper—connoting the move from passive material destitution to active institutional leadership, from amorphous political desire to specific programs—figures the institutional appropriation of politics, which tends to betray the transformative, future-oriented trajectory of political desire and action. Papers thus operate in the novel as mechanisms not for political change but instead for the preservation of institutional authority.

By codifying the practical, situationally contingent work of politics into dogmatic truths—by turning the possibilities inherent in the materiality of the wornout rag into finalized papers—institutions monumentalize their place as durable features of the present. Ellison’s use of the monument to both conceptualize and figure the conservative dynamics of institutions is illustrated by the statue of the Founder at the College. By enshrining the Founder as either lifting the veil of ignorance from the slave or lowering it “more firmly in place,” the statue symbolizes the dialectic of institutional form in which the transformative vision of politics is preserved, but only as empty rhetoric in the service of calcifying, or monumentalizing, the institution.[19] This monument illustrates how the College’s ostensible goal—the education and civic empowerment of the black community—is subordinated to the College’s self-preservation within the racist power structures of the nation. When a political institution assumes monumental form, its discourse of a better sociopolitical order shifts in function from the task of transcending the present toward internal discipline and self-reinforcement within the present.

Invisible Man in this manner addresses what Alain Badiou identifies as “the great enigma of the century: why does the subsumption of politics . . . ultimately give rise to bureaucratic submission and the cult of the State?”[20] For Badiou, emergent, radically destabilizing political movements always risk being ordered by and contained within statist forms. The question of how transformative politics is possible in the face of this risk drives Invisible Man. The novel proceeds with the conviction that practical contingency and situated reinvention keep politics from institutional stasis. As invisible man puts it, “the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived.”[21] This conviction is not simply an accession to a Cold War liberalism that validated ambiguity as the antidote to politics. Rather, such improvisation is Ellison’s formulation of the strategic opportunism that Vladimir Lenin identifies with politics: “It is necessary to link the strictest devotion to the ideas of communism with the ability to effect all the necessary practical compromises, tacks, conciliatory manoeuvres, zigzags, retreats and so on.”[22]

The novel’s institutional critique is introduced in the College section. In invisible man’s dream, his scholarship is revealed as an “engraved document,” sent from the whites of his town, ordering the College to “Keep This Nigger-Boy Running.”[23] Despite its ideals of racial betterment, the College serves the present state of white rule. Dr. Bledsoe typifies this shift from future-directed progressive politics to present-directed institutional authority. He came to the College as “a barefoot boy who in his fervor for education had trudged with his bundle of ragged clothing across two states.”[24] In the symbolic patterning of Bledsoe, his initial raggedness—suggestive of the material destitution that the College claims to address—has been reproduced as the letters of recommendation he gives invisible man. The letters have a general significance as papers that purport to advance black needs but, below the surface, discipline black individuals. The College’s true purpose is to maintain itself by reinforcing racial and capitalist rule in America. “When you buck against me,” Bledsoe warns invisible man, “you’re bucking against power, rich white folk’s power, the nation’s power—which means government power!”[25] Bledsoe’s “old leg shackle from slavery,” which he calls a “symbol of our progress,” echoes the significance of the Founder’s statue: the College’s discourse of “progress” merely masks its efforts to reenslave African Americans.[26] Or, as Mr. Norton tells invisible man, the College is a “monument” to Norton’s daughter, herself a figure for the ideological sanctity of whiteness.[27]

Reverend Homer Barbee’s speech further explicates Ellison’s critique. Barbee recounts an incident when the Founder, speaking before a black audience and keeping his listeners “within the gentle palm of his eloquence,” was interrupted by “a snowy-headed man” who demanded action rather than rhetoric. “Tell us what is to be done, sir! For God’s sake, tell us! Tell us in the name of the son they snatched from me last week!” Unable to answer, “his eyes spilling his great emotion,” the Founder collapses. The elderly man (a likely former slave) testifies to the persistence of racial oppression that black institutional leadership has failed to change. Bledsoe steps in to preserve the authority of that leadership. Amid the “turmoil” in the audience, Bledsoe’s “voice ring[s] out whip-like with authority,” leading the crowd in “a song of hope” while the Founder is treated.[28] The Founder recognizes the desire for political action but is unable to speak to or for it, as the questioner has revealed the limits of the Founder’s vision for realizing structural change through nonradical means. The Founder thus has no answer to the paradigmatic Leninist political question “what is to be done?” Bledsoe embodies the institution’s simultaneous appropriation and suppression of politics. When the need for transformative politics is expressed, institutional authority reinforces the enslavement of the African American masses through the reiteration of a discourse that, despite its forward-looking and hopeful content, actually defuses politics. Barbee praises Bledsoe as he “who with his singing of the old familiar melodies soothed the doubts and fears of the multitude; he who had rallied the ignorant, the fearful and suspicious, those still wrapped in the rags of slavery.”[29] Those rags signify political desire stemming from historically persistent subjugation; Bledsoe co-opts that desire, and the “rags” of persistent slavery become the papers, texts, and codified rhetoric through which the College reproduces the status quo.

When invisible man encounters the Brotherhood in New York, he encounters a more intricate institutional undermining of politics. The Brotherhood is certainly inflected by Ellison’s experience with the CPUSA, but the novel obscures connections between the Brotherhood and the Party. Brother Jack offers invisible man only a general explanation of Brotherhood principles: “we are working for a better world for all people.” He adds that in this better world, “the joy of labor shall have been restored,” but that’s as close as the Brotherhood gets to any specific Marxist principle.[30] The Brotherhood privileges “history” but fetishizes it as a force beyond human control, and the leaders deploy this self-serving understanding of history to stifle politics. For the Brotherhood, history is not linked to the active transformation of reality but instead is an alienated ontology of reality that its leaders invoke against practical agency while disempowering the masses. Late in the novel when Brother Hambro justifies the Brotherhood’s “sacrifice” of the political needs of Harlem to its own institutional needs, he invokes such an ontology: “All of us must sacrifice for the good of the whole. Change is achieved through sacrifice. We follow the laws of reality, so we make sacrifices.”[31]

Ellison suggests that the Brotherhood’s theory of history is in fact anti-Marxist. At the Chthonian, Jack describes the Founder of the College as someone who “lies outside history.” He intends this pejoratively, adding that Booker T. Washington “is still a living force,” and when the masses revolt, they resurrect for inspiration “all the old heroes” of their history. Jack invites invisible man to consider himself as such a resurrection, “the new Booker T. Washington.”[32] Jack echoes Marx’s analysis of revolutions in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte but revises that analysis. For Marx, bourgeois revolutions resurrect the heroes of past revolutions in part because they’re limited as revolutions: they reinscribe the familiar rule of history—class exploitation—in new guises. But proletarian revolution rejects previous historical representations, because the terms of its transformation constitute a real break from history.[33] Invisible man similarly rejects Washington and opts for the Founder as his political role model, thus defining politics as the move beyond or “outside” history rather than as the reproduction of the same while resisting Brotherhood authority by resisting the full institutional submission that its theory of history works to ensure. “I would do the work but I would be no one except myself—whoever I was. I would pattern my life on that of the Founder.”[34] In this statement, he links dissent from institutional control to the “work” of a progressive politics keyed to moving beyond history into futurity. As we saw in Barbee’s speech, the death of the Founder marked the moment when political desire became captured and quelled by Bledsoe, the representative of institutional authority: Barbee describes the Founder’s corpse as “already a bronzed statue.”[35] The College, as a fixed monument to an unjust present, is erected on the death of the Founder’s transformative, if strategically flawed, vision. By modeling his leadership on the Founder’s, invisible man gestures toward a sense of politics exceeding finite historical location or institutional definition.

As for positive indications of the Brotherhood’s identity, we know that it claims to stand for brotherhood: universal fraternity freed from hierarchy and difference. Hence, it represents African Americans in nonracial terms as human brothers. Despite the progressive intent of this outlook and the critique of racism that it affords, it often leads the Brotherhood to downplay the significance of race in structuring both the present situation and the particular needs of the black community. At one point, Jack rails at invisible man, “Why do you fellows always talk in terms of race!”[36] Color blindness enables the Brotherhood to eventually abandon its Harlem activism on the grounds that “the interests of one group of brothers must be sacrificed to that of the whole.”[37] By distancing the Brotherhood from the CPUSA and its theory from Marxism, Ellison can measure the possibilities and limitations of any institution offering postracial radical solutions to black political needs.

Initially, invisible man is influenced by the Brotherhood to the extent that he correlates action and brotherhood as trans-racial needs. As he waits to take the stage at the arena where he will give his first speech for the Brotherhood, he recalls the ruins of an arena from his youth, a “hole” that “was used for dumping, and after a rain it stank with stagnant water.” This hole was located near “a Hooverville shanty” by the railroad tracks. He recalls a man “[s]tooped and dark and sprouting rags from his shoes, hat and sleeves,” “a syphilitic who lived alone in the shanty between the hole and the railroad yard, coming up to the street only to beg money for food and disinfectant with which to soak his rags.” In this memory, the syphilitic beckons to him: “I saw him stretching out a hand from which the fingers had been eaten away and I ran—back to the dark, and the cold and the present.”[38] The syphilitic’s socioeconomic nonlocation and abjection are figured through the transience of the Hooverville and the refuse of the hole. And while the Hooverville gestures toward the Depression period, the syphilitic’s organic destitution—he is “sprouting” rags—indicates the transhistorical persistence of the political need he embodies. As an unclassed and racially indeterminate embodiment of that need, he demands brotherhood.

Invisible man’s speech thus disregards “the correct words and phrases from the pamphlets” for “the old down-to-earth, I’m-sick-and-tired-of-the-way-they’ve-been-treating-us approach.”[39] His subsequent rebuke by the leaders for offering a “wild, hysterical, politically irresponsible and dangerous” and “incorrect” speech indicates the Brotherhood’s true commitment not to political action, not to achieving brotherhood, but to its own preservation and control over the masses.[40] Invisible man is then trained in the specifics of Brotherhood discourse, an architectonic “science” that “recognized no loose ends.”[41] He comes to believe that “[n]othing lay outside the scheme of our ideology, there was a policy on everything.”[42] Ellison critiques not the content of this discourse—that content is only sketchily described—but its claim to finality. The Brotherhood, possessed with “a policy on everything,” cannot discover new practices of politics and is thus calcified by its own “science.”

Invisible man discovers the political stasis of that finality after Tod Clifton’s murder, when he descends into the subway, encountering “[b]its of paper whirled up” by passing trains.[43] The trope indicates that his immersion in institutional discourse—the paper texts and pamphlets of the Brotherhood’s policies on everything—is about to be disrupted. On the platform, he encounters a group of zoot-suited black men who prompt him to consider that the specific political needs and resources of urban African Americans might not fit within the Brotherhood’s paradigm. The cultural style of the men—reflecting the abrupt transition that blacks have made from the rural South to the industrial North—offers a tenuous sense of possibility: “who knew but that they were the saviors, the true leaders, the bearers of something precious?” If these men offer some specific cultural resource for politics that the Brotherhood cannot access, then maybe there are limits to the Brotherhood’s epistemological certainty. Furthermore, they indicate that history might be not an objective force but rather an enabling ground for subjective action. “What if history was a gambler, instead of a force in a laboratory experiment, and the boys his ace in the hole?”[44] The Brotherhood, he realizes, fails to promote action and has thus done little to help Harlem: “no great change had been made.”[45] He is later rebuked by Jack, who reveals that strategically implementing black resources for a politics of brotherhood is not the Brotherhood’s purpose any more than it was the College’s. “We do not shape our policies to the mistaken and infantile notions of the man in the street. Our job is not to ask them what they think but to tell them!”[46]

In Rinehart, invisible man discovers a potential alternative model for politics. Rinehart plays multiple roles (pimp, preacher, numbers runner, etc.) because he grasps how his invisibility—the refusal of society to recognize and place him as an individual—cancels any restraints or responsibilities when it comes to performing identity. Unable to imagine “organizing a splinter movement” outside the Brotherhood, invisible man decides instead to exploit his own invisibility within the Brotherhood as “a means of destroying them.”[47] He adopts “Rinehart methods,” performing accession to institutional discipline while secretly working against it.[48] But by doing so, he appears to unwittingly advance a Brotherhood plan to abandon Harlem, leaving it at the mercy of racial and economic tensions that are sure to lead to rioting. Despite the practical opportunism suggested by Rinehart’s name and lifestyle, he is not a viable model for politics. His name indicates not an ability to strategically differentiate “rind” from “heart”—apparent conformity from actual subversion—but the identity of rind and heart: unguided by a plan for social change and a positive commitment to futurity, invisible man’s subversive actions end up conforming to the Brotherhood’s institutional needs in the present. Similarly, during the climactic riot, invisible man encounters rioters preparing to burn their tenement and thinks that he has found a spontaneous, mass alternative to institutions. Institutions invest in preserving themselves as part of the present, but the rioters are destroying their own home, not building monuments. But not only does this action destroy the present without creating a better future, it is neither mass nor spontaneous. The destruction of the tenement is organized by Dupre, whose name reiterates how institutional leadership “dupes” the masses. Phonetically (“do pray”), it mandates submission and Dupre uses a gun to quell any “arguments” from the tenement’s residents about the wisdom of burning their home.[49]

The novel’s solution to the problem of politics and institutions is ultimately a hermeneutic practice. Early in the New York section, invisible man encounters a black man who calls himself Peter Wheatstraw and is singing the blues while pushing a cart filled with architectural blueprints that have been discarded “to make place for the new plans.” “I got damn near enough to build me a house if I could live in a paper house like they do in Japan,” Wheatstraw boasts. When a still naive invisible man insists that “[y]ou have to stick to the plan,” Wheatstraw replies, “You kinda young.”[50] By not sticking to the plan, one avoids building it into a monument. In Wheatstraw’s salvaging, future-oriented potentialities, symbolized by the prospective status of the blueprint, are preserved without becoming concrete features of the present. Political action needs blueprints for transformation, and the political “plans” of various institutions need to be salvaged from those institutions and scrutinized for practical utility. Wheatstraw’s fantasy of building a house of blueprints suggests that this practice might yield an institution that does not betray politics by turning blueprints into fixities—an institution whose papers carry no self-serving motives but one that realizes transformation as its very substance. Rinehart and Dupre indicate how a plan is necessary for politics, and that necessity mandates evaluating institutions by measuring their adequacy to their utopian aims, salvaging those aims for implementation in other plans. Peetie Wheatstraw was the persona of the 1930s African American blues singer William Bunch, but Ellison invokes Wheatstraw as a folk archetype rather than a specific person: “Peter Wheatstraw is a mythological figure that any number of people are named because they possess certain qualities,” he explained in 1976.[51] Steven Tracy demonstrates how Bunch’s lyrics defined Wheatstraw as an agent against African American racial and economic oppression.[52] Hence, the Wheatstraw archetype is, for Ellison, a usable figure for politics.

Invisible man practices Wheatstraw’s hermeneutic in the epilogue, when he ventures to interpret his grandfather’s deathbed injunction to handle white America by “yessing them to death and destruction.”[53] He parses this advice as a style of reading: “he must have meant the principle, that we were to affirm the principle on which the country was built and not the men, or at least not the men who did the violence.”[54] Transformation involves extricating the possibility of utopia from institutional co-option. The utopian “principle” of the nation must be distinguished from its betrayal by the state; one must salvage the plan from its manifestation as a monument of the status quo.

The utopian principle that the novel affirms is best described as brotherhood: human collectivity itself, an ideal betrayed by institutions such as the Brotherhood, the College, and the state. In 1957, Ellison used “brotherhood” as one signifier—along with “love,” “democracy,” and “the good life”—for an abstract possibility of communal fulfillment.[55] The term’s utopianism also resonates within black political tradition: in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W. E. B. Du Bois identified “the ideal of human brotherhood” across racial lines as the goal of African American sociocultural aspiration.[56] Ellison anticipates Fredric Jameson’s argument about the dialectical imbrication of the ideological and the utopian. Jameson argues for a “positive hermeneutic” in Marxist dialectics, one that reads for the “Utopian impulse” within a text that otherwise “fulfills a demonstrably ideological function.” That impulse is “a universal value inconsistent with the narrower limits of class privilege” that structure a given text.[57] Jameson’s hermeneutic extricates this future-oriented impulse from the ideological (mis)definition in which it is packaged. To elaborate this argument, Jameson reverses Walter Benjamin’s axiom that “there is no document of civilization which is not at one and the same time a document of barbarism,” holding for a similar simultaneity of the “effectively ideological” and “necessarily Utopian.”[58] Invisible Man’s statue of the Founder, signaling the preservation of the utopian impulse within its institutional suppression, can be read as a riff on this Benjaminian-inflected dialectic. Like Ellison, Jameson assigns the utopian impulse little content in order to associate it figuratively with a social collectivity to come, one in excess of historical institutional definition.

Ellison likely abstracted this dialectical reading practice from black political history. Before writing Invisible Man, he had read historian Benjamin Quarles’s essay on the split between Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. Garrison held that the US Constitution enshrined slavery as a national principle, and Ellison noted that this caused Garrison and his fellow abolitionists to refuse to work within the nation’s political institutions. In 1851, Douglass argued that the progressive spirit of the Constitution’s preamble was not, in fact, wholly cancelled by the remainder of the document. Extracting that spirit was practically enabling, allowing Douglass to, in Quarles’s words, “use political as well as moral power for the overthrow of the slave system.”[59] Douglass grasped the need to engage both the nation’s ideological founding document and state institutions in order to extract and act on the utopian principle locked within yet betrayed by both. We can read Invisible Man similarly, extracting its theory of politics, institutions, and brotherhood from its institutionalization as a textual monument of Cold War ideology.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Paula Rabinowitz, Howard Brick, and Robbie Lieberman for their comments and suggestions on this essay; the College of Humanities Faculty Fellowship Program at California State University, Northridge; and Alan Wald, who supervised the dissertation from which this essay is derived and to whom I am greatly indebted for his guidance and encouragement.