Few artists have reputations that rest so squarely on a single work as does that of Ralph Ellison, author of the novel Invisible Man. Ellison also published an impressive number of essays and short stories, but he was arguably a victim of his own success. People just wouldn’t stop talking about Invisible Man (they’re still talking about it 50 years after it was published and eight years after the author’s death). Ellison couldn’t stop talking back to them about it, and the unresolved arguments about its meaning surely had something to do with his inability to complete a second novel.
The rap against Invisible Man was that it wasn’t " angry " enough — in other words, it wasn’t " black " enough, and Ellison didn’t endear himself to critics by calling himself " Negro " well into the 1960s. Much of the 90-minute Ralph Ellison: An American Journey (airing next Wednesday at 9 p.m. as part of the American Masters series on PBS) explores this controversy. The film, after all, cannot follow the usual path in which an artist follows an initial success with a series of ups and downs. Instead, the documentary is about an author who lost control over his life’s narrative, even suffering the clichéd tragedy of losing his only copy of a thick manuscript in a house fire.
An American Journey glides over Ellison’s childhood in Oklahoma — where a freak accident killed his father and knocked the family from the entrepreneurial class to rootless poverty — and settles on his early adulthood, when he attended a black college and set out to become a " renaissance man. " Attracted to Harlem by its jazz scene, Ellison found a mentor in novelist Richard Wright, who got him writing gigs at Communist and black-owned magazines. It took five years for Ellison to write Invisible Man, published in 1952, and this documentary drags only when it tries to dramatize brief scenes from the allegorical novel (which has never before been put on film). More successful is a segment in which Toni Morrison reads an excerpt from Juneteenth, the book that was stitched together from Ellison’s unfinished manuscript after his death.
Invisible Man, which is set in the South and in New York, follows its nameless protagonist as he discovers all the forces in America arrayed against him. It ends with the Invisible Man withdrawing from society — into a literal hole in the ground — in order to consider the meaning of his own flesh. The New York Times praised the novel for its " macabre humor " and for the author’s " detachment " in describing such events as a riot in Harlem. Ellison was the first black American to win the National Book Award, and he became one of the most sought-after figures in the literary circuit.
But Ellison, who was perhaps the most promising voice in American black literature in 1953, seemed thrown off balance by the " black arts movement " of the 1960s, which featured confrontational language and African, rather than European, influences. Amiri Baraka, then known as LeRoi Jones, epitomized this movement. His play Dutchman, about the murderous encounter between a black man and white woman on a subway car, was a cause célèbre while Ellison was still struggling with the novel he would never complete. Baraka’s assessment of Ellison hasn’t changed; in An American Journey, he says of the novelist, " The most dangerous thing in the world is a very skilled craftsman with very backward ideas. " It is not the most generous statement to make about someone who never fully utilized his skills after Baraka came on the scene.
" Liberal " whites could also be dismissive of a writer whose parents named him after Ralph Waldo Emerson. The literary critic Irving Howe said that Ellison failed the " only true role " for a black American writer, which is " to create protest literature. " In An American Journey, ubiquitous Harvard University professor Cornel West gleefully talks about how Ellison triumphed over such narrow ideas, but later in the program he comes close to endorsing the views of Baraka and Howe. If Ellison had expressed his " rage, " West says, " it would be uncontrollable, so you understand why he had to contain it. " Does that mean that Ellison secretly wanted to be a revolutionary but feared that he would become too violent for the Black Panthers? Isn’t that like saying anyone who doesn’t drink must be an alcoholic?
Ralph Ellison: An American Journey closes with the observation that a panel convened by the Modern Library picked Invisible Man as one of the best English-language novels of the 20th century. (It finished at No. 19, one slot above Wright’s Native Son.) It does not mention that the all-white, 10-member panel was widely criticized for its old-fashioned and obvious choices. But after the punches Ellison takes in this documentary, he’s entitled to a little valentine at the end.
