Prophets of Recognition: Ideology and the Individual in Novels by Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, and Eudora Welty. - Review - book review

African American Review, Winter, 2000 by Michael Kreyling

Julia Eichelberger. Prophets of Recognition: Ideology and the Individual in Novels by Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, and Eudora Welty. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1999. 192 pp. $49.95 cloth/$24.95 paper.

The subtitle of Julia Eichelberger's book clearly outlines its content: four chapters, one devoted to each of the authors herein named, bookended by a first chapter deploying the theoretical matrix and a conclusion reprising it. The "devil" in Prophets of Recognition is in the details of the author's theoretical stand.

Historically, Eichelberger has chosen post-1950 novels because, for her, this period in U.S. fiction and criticism harbors an ideological crisis. The crisis involves the cultural icon of U.S. individualism, which in the post-WWII years was purposely re-engineered to function as the free-world cultural armor against Communism. None of the literary history of the conceptual framework of individualism is part of Eichelberger's case, however. Nor are the contextualizing "events" of conformism, its political counterpart McCarthyism, massive resistance in response to Brown v. Board of Education, "the feminine mystique," material consumerism fostered by men in gray flannel suits, etc. Eichelberger's readings of these four novelists are splendidly context-free. The readings are not, however, purely formalist.

There is a context, and it is sincerely anti-constructionist. Eichelberger duly notes that the prevailing winds of contemporary literary criticism are Foucauldian, Derridean, Althusserian. The tribe worships the prophets of contructionism and the power of domineering ideologies that have robbed the individual of any claim to essential meaning. We are constructed moment-by-moment, context-by-context by the emplotted interests of ideological power. "Whether feminist, materialist, or linguistic in emphasis," Eichelberger writes in her introductory chapter, "most prominent literary theorists now appear to agree that the individual, autonomous, discrete self is the philosopher's stone of an earlier era, a chimera that we must now recognize as such." In opposition to Foucault and Derrida, named as the senior wizards of this dark force, Eichelberger places Bakhtin, Ricoeur, Cixous, and Houston Baker as yea-saying prophets of the self and its voices in fiction.

The sincerity in Eichelberger's position is crucial to her praxis:

The definition of the self that these novels offer is a postmodern humanism: it acknowledges material culture's tremendous power to shape the individual. This humanism avoids both a naively optimistic, insulated worldview, and a fatalistic reading of the world's human problems. We gloss over material circumstances when we assume that the world has always been and will always be deficient and blighted in some way, and that this eternally flawed world is somehow separate from the individual. There is no benign "invisible hand" shaping modern human societies; these novels reveal instead the individual human hands that form material circumstances. However, this postmodern humanism is not essentialist or determinist.

The quotation here is lengthy (and could indeed be extended, for this is the heart of Eichelberger's message), but this excerpt adequately captures the near-sermonic tone of her critical readings. It is not far-fetched to conclude, after reading Prophets of Recognition, that Eichelberger sees the literary faithful of readers, students, critics, and teachers as sinners in the hands of the angry gods of materialist theory, and that she has come to reconsecrate the chief novelists of high modernism to the mission of rescuing us from directionless despair.

The four novelists of her choosing are fairly compatible, but it will inevitably strike any reader of Prophets of Recognition that they are not indissolubly linked and that Eichelberger's readings are not free from objection. Ellison, for example, could just as comfortably have been partnered with Pynchon, Heller, and Vonnegut. The protagonist of Invisible Man runs through as many constructed masks or identities as the more absurdist anti-heroes of Pynchon, et al. Only Eichelberger's sincere insistence assures us that in his underground clean and well-lit place the Invisible Man is not also insubstantial but rather nurtures an essential self. In her reading of Ellison's novel, the Rinehart-ing of the naive college boy is not a hardening into trickster but a perfecting of the essential self. Likewise her reading of racism as ideology in Morrison's The Bluest Eye: "It is as if Morrison continues where Ellison left off, moving from an anatomy of ideology to an assertion of a positive alternative.... Not only is domineering behavior [white racism and black acquiescencel destructive and unsatisfying, it is also unnecessary, for even the most damaged among us longs instead for love and work, for affirmation of our intrinsic worth and for a harmonious, productive, nurturing relationship to our world." Rodney King's plaintive "Can't we all just get along?" echoes in Eichelberger's response to the representation of white racism in Ellison and Morrison.