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Invisible Man and African American radicalism in World War II
African American Review, Fall, 2005 by Christopher Z. Hobson
This three-part political meditation finds a metaphoric, quasi-mythic language for the "double V" conception of struggling for African American rights on the basis of US political beliefs and as an independent social movement, while taking this idea out of its wartime context and universalizing it as a response to oppression. In so doing, Ellison achieves a philosophic political coherence and social prescience rare among novelists. In its very lack of specific reference to the 1940s and 50s, the protagonist's rumination connects its view of "the principle"--as one dishonored in practice but powerfully valid as a fulcrum for struggle--to long-standing debates on African Americans' relation to the US, particularly to Frederick Douglass's claim, following his break with Garrison, that "interpreted as it ought to be, the Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT" ("What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" 385). In social reality, some version of this conception of affirming and using what Ellison calls "the principle" because "no other fitted our needs" has probably been the dominant African American attitude to the US political system for the last century and a half. Moreover, the protagonist's reflections point to the actual form--an effort to realize US democratic promises in spite of the practice of the US--that, for better or worse, adequately or not, the majority of those struggling for racial justice in the half-century after the novel's publication would adopt; regardless, too, of criticism of Ellison in the decades of greatest struggle.
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Further, by presenting the protagonist's reflection as a response to his grandfather's words, Ellison ties his conception to ongoing plebeian African American tradition, which Jack had indirectly scorned in his dismissal of the "old ones" as history's "dead limbs that must be pruned away" (291). Ellison is claiming that his protagonist--and others with similar ideas back to Douglass, a self-educated ex-slave--are only discovering what, contrary to ideas of vanguard leadership, the African American common people have known all along. Finally, Ellison is asserting, as he later would in essays, that African Americans, because of their history and relation to the US's claimed democratic principles, are uniquely fitted to lead a struggle for democracy and equality for all, in the US and elsewhere. In all of these ways, Invisible Man's later chapters and epilogue distill and crystallize, into both political concept and myth, specific concepts of African American radicalism in the 1940s.
In addition to allowing more historically specific readings of the Brotherhood chapters and the grandfather's speech, Invisible Man's historical roots help to explain some ambiguities of the novel's conclusion--between art and politics as modes of confronting the world, between goals of personal and social freedom, and between competing political and social blueprints for change. As those who follow critical discussions know, Invisible Man is often read as ending in confusion and exhaustion: "[T]he next step I couldn't make, so I've remained in the hole" (575). What is sometimes wished away or seen as a formally unsatisfactory close can instead be viewed as an effort within a particular historical situation to see divergent potentialities for social activity and at least a possible future
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