Lucas E. Morel, ed. Ralph Ellison and the Raft of Hope: A Political Companion to Invisible Man

African American Review, Winter, 2007 by Robert Butler

Lucas E. Morel, ed. Ralph Ellison and the Raft

of Hope: A Political Companion to Invisible

Man. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 2006. 249

pp. $45.00 cloth/$24.95 paper.

Although Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man has been heavily praised for over 50 years by a wide variety of critics and scholars, there have been from the outset reservations and sharp criticisms concerning the novel's political vision. Lloyd Brown, for example, in an early review charged Ellison with aligning himself with white modernists such as T. S. Eliot and withdrawing into an irresponsible alienation rather than addressing, as Richard Wright had, the political issues affecting African American life. Irving Howe would later make a similar complaint, chiding Ellison for abandoning the protest tradition in black literature and describing Invisible Man as anti-political and "literary to a fault." Ernest Kaiser in 1967 agreed with Howe, calling Ellison "a denigrator of the great tradition of Negro protest writing" and labeling him not only "an establishment writer" but also an "Uncle Tom." From the mid-60s onward, Ellison has been faulted by some critics for not becoming involved in African American freedom movements and retreating into a comfortable isolation. Gerry Gaffio Watts put this case against Ellison most strongly when he accused him of suffering from what he called "a rather typical black intellectual disease," the "elitism of heroic individualism."

This view of Ellison as a politically disengaged writer who failed in his responsibilities to address important political issues is strongly challenged by the 12 essays that comprise Ralph Ellison and the Raft of Hope. Edited by Lucas E. Morel, the collection takes a close look at Ellison's political views from the late 1930s and early 1940s when he was deeply engaged in radically leftist activity to his later years when he adopted a more moderate political stance. Ellison emerges from Morel's volume as a writer who never abandoned politics and always rejected the excessive individualism and alienation of writers such as Ernest Hemingway and Marcel Proust. Each of the 12 essays in Morel's book establishes Ellison as a writer who, like the protagonist in Invisible Man, was seriously committed to a "socially responsible role" but who rejected both narrowly partisan politics and dogmatic political ideology. As Morel stresses, writing for Ellison was always "a morally and politically serious endeavor" designed to explore the important social and political issues of modern life. Ellison thus saw literature, especially the novel, as offering a "raft of hope" that would reinvigorate the ideals at the foundation of American democracy, ideals formulated by our sacred political texts, the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Constitution.

One of the great strengths of the collection is the diverse backgrounds of its 11 contributors. Only five are specialists in literature; the others come from areas as various as law, history, political science, classics, and American studies. As a result, their work is not marred by the narrow ideological concerns and theoretical biases that have often plagued literary debate over the past 40 years and have sometimes resulted in the most vociferous attacks on Ellison. As contributor Charles Banner-Haley rightly points out, these partisan attacks from both the right and the left always oversimplify Ellison's complex and nuanced political vision.

Several of the essays make important connections between Ellison's writing and the Civil Rights Movement, a political movement that his critics have accused him of being either indifferent to or hostile towards. Alfred Brophy's "Invisible Man as Literary Analog to Brown vs. Board of Education," for example, argues that Ellison's novel is consistent with the principles that guided the Supreme Court's decision to end racial segregation in US schools. Brophy declares that Invisible Man, like Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, was "a great popular novel that signaled--and perhaps propelled--the changes that were coming in American law and custom." Kenneth Warren's "Ralph Ellison and the Problem of Cultural Authority: The Lessons of Little Rock" explores Ellison's impassioned support of the nine black students who integrated Central High School and examines his public argument with Hannah Arendt, who believed "forced integration" was a violation of local rights. For Ellison, the actions of the Little Rock Nine constituted heroic activity in the main tradition of black freedom movements dating back to the slavery era. Several other essays touch briefly on Ellison's connection with the Freedom Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. John Callahan explores Ellison's "politics of love," stressing that Ellison's belief in Christian love, integration, and nonviolence were altogether consistent with Dr. King's principles and that both Invisible Man and Juneteenth envision a United States "on the cusp of the leap from segregation to integration." Morel points out that Ellison regarded himself as "a charter member of the Civil Rights Movement" but felt he could make a more valuable contribution to it as a writer than as an activist.