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

College Literature, Fall 2002 by Mazurek, Raymond A

Central to Foley's argument is the claim that Ellison distorted the experience of the Communist Party in Harlem. Based on an analysis of the "archive" of historical accounts and interviews in which former CP members discuss their experience in the Party, Foley concludes that Ellison's account of the Communist Party is inaccurate. Further, she suggests that this distortion was intentional, arguing that "Ellison may have wittingly engaged in some degree of distortion when he wrote his novel" (1997, 532) and that "he may have been deliberately ascending-and helping to steer-the anticommunist bandwagon, possibly to advance his own career" (532). Foley finds that Ellison's novel distorts the CP's methods of recruiting, training, and paying its organizers, who were hardly as randomly recruited and well paid as the novel suggests. More important, she claims that Ellison exaggerates the extent of racism within the CP While admitting that some racism certainly existed and that there is anecdotal evidence of it found in texts such as Wright's American Hunger, Foley finds Ellison's (and Wright's) representation atypical, based on "a wider survey of memoirs and oral histories from members of the left in the 1930s and 1940s, both white and black" (536). Moreover, "whatever its weaknesses, the Communist Party (CP) forthrightly fought racism" (531). Based on her reading of the archive, Foley concludes that Ellison's characterization of the left "draws less upon any experience of his own during the years represented in the novel (1936-1943) than upon the discourse of the early Cold War" (531).2

Foley's suggestion that in the Brotherhood, Ellison drew some of his material from anticommunist images and sources current during the early Cold War seems convincing. Her argument that Ellison's portrayal of the Brotherhood, drawn largely from the historical CP, must be balanced against other accounts of the CP, is also valuable, as is her warning that students too easily accept anticommunist rhetoric at face value. After reading her essay, I doubt that I will teach Invisible Man without being more careful to delineate these problems in Ellison's portrayal of the CP than I have in the past. Nevertheless, her argument that Invisible Man reflects "anti-communism" (in the sense of "a generalized fear and hatred of the left") as well as "antiCommunism" (opposition to the CP) seems an oversimplification (1997, 531).All of Foley's examples of Ellison's "distortion" of history are of Ellison's faulty portrayal of the CP through the symbol of the Brotherhood-her essay conflates the Party and the Left. In Ellison's novel, however, there is a generally sympathetic attitude toward the protests against injustices such as police brutality and eviction by masses of black (and some white) working class people. In addition, Foley's focus on specific details (such as the techniques for recruiting and paying members of the Brotherhood) as if they were intended literally is problematic in a novel that uses exaggeration, satire, and surrealism. (And her suggestion that Ellison used anticommunist rhetoric and a distorted history "possibly to advance his own career" seems a gratuitous attack that weakens her argument.)