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

College Literature, Fall 2002 by Mazurek, Raymond A

Foley's essay is itself driven by the sort of binary logic she finds in Ellison's novel, an opposition between the positive, radical, early Ellison and the suspect, anticommunist, later Ellison. However, Ellison's work can be read as more dialectically interconnected than this logic suggests. Despite its formidable sophistication, "Anti-communism in Invisible Man" echoes the dominant style of criticism of Ellison from the Left, apparent from the earliest reviews through the Black Arts movement. Her claim that Ellison may have been motivated by a desire to advance his own career echoes the early reviews by African-American Marxists such as John 0. Killens (1952), Abner Berry (1952), and Lloyd L. Brown (1970), for whom Ellison's publication of Invisible Man appeared an opportunistic betrayal of the Black race and of the Left. And these reviews were in turn echoed in the harsh criticism of Ellison produced during the Black Arts/Black Aesthetic movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

However, the criticism of Ellison by the Black Aesthetic critics was short-lived, and continued (at least in print) into the late 1970s and 1980s only in rare instances-most notably Amiri Baraka (1984, 316-26). Moreover, the nationalist critique of Ellison was directed primarily at his criticism rather than his fiction. For example, Ellison was criticized as an assimilationist by Addison Gayle in his important anthology, The Black Aesthetic, nevertheless, Gayle concedes Ellison's achievement in Invisible Man (1971, 413-17). Gayle would praise Ellison's novel more strongly in The Way of the New World (see Gayle, 1975, 204-13), although he frames his initial argument in that work by strongly contesting Ellison's insistence on the dichotomy between sociology and literature (ix-x). Similarly, in the special Black World issue on Ralph Ellison in 1970, only the Marxist critic Ernst Kaiser is unequivocally negative.4 Moreover, that issue also contains Larry Neal's famous essay, "Ellison's Zoot Suit," the only piece from the Black World special issue that has been widely remembered. Neal's essay is not only one of the first extended discussions of the Black vernacular in Invisible Man (see also Kent 1970), it is also an essay that reinforced the division between Ellison and critics from the left. Neal challenges the political attacks on Ellison directly, claiming that "much of the anti-Ellison criticism springs from a specific body of Marxian and Black neo-Marxian thought" (1970, 31). He echoes Harold Cruse's claim that "the radical left wing will never forgive Ellison for writing Invisible Man" (Qtd. in Neal 1970, 34) and expresses his agreement with Cruse's "clear analysis of the detrimental role that the left wing has played in ourt struggle for self-determination and liberation" (Neal 1970, 34).

Much of the Black Aesthetic criticism either explicitly or implicitly accuses writers such as Ellison of having become alienated from the Black working class. Houston Baker, whose own work is rooted in a critical appropriation and extension of the Black Aesthetic, has suggested that the Black Aesthetic was itself a form of"romantic Marxism" (1984, 81) which substituted race for class and relied on the intuition of the critic who was saturated in "blackness" (83). However, while wishing "to avoid a naive Marxism" (3), Baker has employed the insights of contemporary Marxist criticism, claiming that "there is always a historical, or ideological, subtext in a literary work of art" (191). Baker's own reading of Invisible Man as a "Blues Book Most Excellent" (113) argues that Ellison's black sharecropper and blues singer,Trueblood, is a trickster figure who concocts a story of incest to please his white audience and to obtain payment from them. In the process, Ellison's novel reveals both the blues matrix of African-American vernacular culture, grounded in the experience of unpaid labor, and the ironic position of the African American expressive tradition, which itself becomes a commodity for exchange in capitalist America. However, Baker observes that "in AfroAmerican culture, exchanging words for safety and profit is scarcely an alienating act. It is, instead, a defining act in expressive culture" (196-97). As a blues artist, Ellison's situation mirrors Trueblood's: Ellison creates his work out of African-American vernacular materials disguised in a Western mask, yet he knows his work, in relying on the vernacular, "derives from the `economics of slavery' that provided conditions of existence for Afro-American folklore" (197). Despite critical pronouncements that suggest he considers folklore a lesser form of art, Ellison both celebrates the vernacular tradition and indirectly reveals its situation in capitalist America.