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Invisible Man and African American radicalism in World War II
African American Review, Fall, 2005 by Christopher Z. Hobson
"[A]ffirm the principle," though surely referring to the US idea of democracy, means nothing so bloodless as "common recognition of a set of ethico-political values" (Steele). Ellison's terms are insistently historical ("chaos and darkness of the feudal past") and start from the premise that "numbers" and "vicious power" have made the principle meaningless "even in [the rulers'] own corrupt minds." The protagonist is asking if it is possible to "overcome" this structure of entrenched power by affirming its face principles, and he understands for the first time that by "live with your head in the lion's mouth," his grandfather did not mean practicing a tricky accommodation but struggling for democratic principles so far as possible without self-destruction, as he had done in life. In sum, the protagonist's longstanding view of his grandfather's words has been wrong in substance; "overcome 'em with yeses" meant using "the principle" to overcome the oppressors.
The protagonist's second answer begins with a partial revision of the first:
Or did he mean that we had to take the responsibility for all of it, for the men as well as the principle, because we were the heirs who must use the principle because no other fitted our needs? Not for the power or for vindication, but because we, with the given circumstance of our origin, could only thus find transcendence? Was it that we of all, we, most of all, had to affirm the principle, the plan in whose name we had been brutalized and sacrificed--not because we would always be weak nor because we were afraid or opportunistic, but because we were older than they, in the sense of what it took to live in the world with others and because they had exhausted in us, some--not much, but some--of the human greed and smallness, yes, and the fear and superstition that had kept them running. (Oh, yes, they're running too, running all over themselves.) (574)
These comments go beyond the first response's idea of "personal responsibility for the country's principles." The protagonist now withdraws his proviso that we affirm the principle "and not the men, or at least not the men who did the violence," and insists on taking responsibility for "the men as well," in other words, for the history of slavery and race and class oppression as well as of struggle for freedom. Roughly, the idea is that only by accepting the past, US history in all its filth and violence, as it was, can one move ahead in practice--"use" the principle, not merely "affirm" it.
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