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Invisible Man and African American radicalism in World War II
African American Review, Fall, 2005 by Christopher Z. Hobson
(5.) See Morel's edited collection (2004) for excellent general essays by Seaton and Engeman and for Brophy's discussion of parallels between Invisible Man (hereafter IM) and the legal background to the 1954 Brown decision.
(6.) Jackson reuses portions of his discussion in his Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius (2002), but for his full argument one should consult the original.
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(7.) Time cues provide an ostensible chronology for the Harlem sections covering about 16 months, probably in 1933-34. With a fictitious present "about eighty-five years" after the end of slavery and an action commencing at his high school graduation "some twenty years" earlier (15), IM brings its protagonist to New York in the spring of his junior year in college, perhaps 1933. We can trace a detailed chronology through chapters 8 (about two months); 9-10 (two days); 11 (indefinite); 12 (his "first northern winter"); 13-16 (two days); 17 (four months later, commencing 1 Apr.); 18-20 (which bring us to "summer"); 21-23 (a week); and 24-25 (two days), climaxing on a "hot dry August night" in the protagonist's second year in New York (169, 260, 356, 358, 423, 516). It should now be about 1934, but references to Joe Louis, government production, and riots in Harlem (1935 and 1943) stretch the implicit time scheme into the next decade.
(8.) However, note Bison's repeated denials that the Brotherhood represents any specific party, such as his assertion in his 1969 West Point speech that it exemplifies "patterns which still exist and of which our two major political parties are guilty" (GT 59, CE 538). For some other discussions of Communist parallels, see Fischer, Mills, and Reed. Busby typifies several general writers in noting vaguely that the Brotherhood "suggests the Communist Party and other left-wing groups" (54).
(9.) On the CP and African Americans in the 1930s, see Naison and Record; in relation to writers, see Maxwell, who focuses on 1920-1937 and covers Wright's and Ellison's breaks with the CP very briefly (200-01). The "third period" policy, based on the view that capitalism had entered its third phase since World War I, one of increasing revolutionary crisis, was mandatory for Communist parties from 1928 to 1934-35.
(10.) Wright's account of his CP experiences was originally published as "I Tried to Be a Communist" in two issues of the Atlantic Monthly in 1944, which I quote because Ellison read and discussed it on publication (Ellison, Letters, 29 Aug. and 5 Sept. 1944). The longer text from which "I Tried" was excerpted includes a lengthy passage following the first quoted sentence whose phrasing also anticipates Ellison's: "I felt that without a common bond uniting men ... there could be no living worthy of being called human" (Black Boy 374; my emphasis). Other parallels include descriptions of and reflections on party discipline and characterizations of the organization and its members as "blind" (IM 398-408, 462-78, 500-510; "I Tried" 2:53-56). Wright's articles, condensed from ultimately deleted sections of his 1945 autobiography, were reprinted in the 1949 anthology The God That Failed; the whole deleted section was published as American Hunger in 1977 and reincorporated into the now-standard autobiography text, Black Boy (American Hunger) from 1991 on; for the sections used here, see 434-42, 450-53, and quotations on 374, 438, 450. Ellison may also have seen the deleted chapters in ms. or when Constance Webb privately circulated them in 1946. For the textual history see Hobson. Wright did not actually break with the party in the manner described in his works; he resigned or dropped out in Chicago but rejoined in New York in 1937 and remained a member there until 1942, through the first several years of his friendship with Ellison.
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