Writer on the left: Class and race in Ellison's early fiction

College Literature, Fall 2002 by Mazurek, Raymond A

Although Invisible Man embodies many of the values of the Cold War consensus, it can also be considered Ellison's elegy for the popular front of the 1930s and 1940s, which Michael Denning defines as the "radical socialdemocratic movement forged around anti-fascism, anti-lynching, and the industrial unionism of the CIO" (1998, xviii). Denning claims that too often, the culture of the 1930s is looked at in terms of the assumptions of the Cold War. Thus, too great an importance is given to the Communist Party, which is placed at the center of the Left. While admitting that the Party was an important institution, Denning suggests that the center/periphery, Party member/fellow traveler interpretation of the cultural front "is misleading; the periphery was in many cases the center, the fellow travelers were the Popular Front" (5). In the 1930s and 1940s, many radicals considered themselves small "c" communists, "the way later or earlier generations thought of themselves as generic 'socialists" 'feminists,' or 'radicals"' (xviii). In Denning's interpretation, the basis of the popular front was not its relation to the Communist Party-one of its most prominent components-but its material basis in the C.I.O. and the resurgent working class struggles of the 1930s.

Denning identifies Ellison as one of those spokespersons who participated in the cultural front, the cultural component of popular front politics. As has often been noted, Ellison wrote his first articles and stories for radical magazines such as the New Masses, and was the coeditor, with the communist intellectual Angelo Herndon, of The Negro Quarterly. Although "like most of the young people drawn to the cultural front, Ellison was not primarily a political activist" (Denning, 1998, 332), Ellison was a participant in the left circles of the 1930s and 1940s, and like other intellectuals who shared this background, he celebrated vernacular art forms jazz and blues) championed by the cultural front in his essays of the late1950s (332). In addition, although he only hints at an interpretation of Ellison's major novel, Denning suggests that Invisible Man is one of the many "major writings of the proletarian movement" which "did not appear until well after the proletarian movement was pronounced dead" (228).

In his suggestion that the proletarian movement remains inscribed in Invisible Man even after Ellison rejected Marxism, Denning provides a perspective on Ellison's relation to the Left which is different from that of much Marxist criticism. More typical is the response of Barbara Foley, who has become one of the most significant Marxist critics of twentieth century American literature. Because Foley has become Ellison's harshest contemporary critic on the left, I will examine her arguments in some detail. In "Ralph Ellison as Proletarian Journalist" (1998-99), Foley points out how closely connected the young Ellison was to the Communist Party. Although Ellison and his publisher carefully avoided mention of Ellison's leftist past when Invisible Man appeared, Ellison's journalistic contributions to The New Masses and other leftist publications in the 1930s and 1940s rarely deviated from the Party's official line. However, in "Anticommunism in Invisible Man," Foley argues that anticommunism is central to the rhetoric of Invisible Man, which distorts the experience of African-Americans in the Communist Party. Throughout Invisible Man, anti-communism appears as "an embedded rhetoric that operates largely on subliminal levels throughout the text" (1997, 530). Thus, despite the negative portrayal of all of the white characters in Ellison's novel, the white reader is located on the same side as the narrator because of Ellison's use of a "powerful binary logic, a logic that pits communism against humanity" (531). Generations of readers have acquiesced to this anticommunist rhetoric, according to Foley, because it is so common within the culture that it is accepted without conscious analysis.