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Invisible Man and African American radicalism in World War II
African American Review, Fall, 2005 by Christopher Z. Hobson
The mood does not last. In compressed impressionistic moments, Ellison shows the protagonist reacting against one rioter's willingness to be martyred in a hopeless race struggle, against the impression (mistaken, in fact) that the looters have lynched a white woman, and against the realization that Ras and his organization are deeply involved in the uprising; an intuitive flash suggests that the Brotherhood itself has "planned" the outbreak by its very inaction, deliberately "surrender[ing] our influence to Ras" (552-53, 556). These scenes freely vary the roles of Communist groups in the Harlem outbreaks of 1935 and 1943; in the former, Communists and members of "front" groups tried to heighten the protests, while in the latter, in line with their general wartime support for social conciliation, they tried to damp the outbreak down. (21) Ellison's version, in which the Brotherhood's inaction clears the way for Ras, combines aspects of both situations and may additionally reflect the awareness of global politics that characterized Wright's and Ellison's milieu. Internationally, incidents such as the Warsaw partisan uprising of August and September 1944, which Soviet forces first appealed for and then allowed to the Nazis to crush, probably as a tactic to ease Polish Communists' way to power, bear some resemblance to the rebellion scenes in Invisible Man: both involve provoking an outbreak in unfavorable circumstances and sacrificing indigenous needs to an international strategy. Thus, rather than simply a response to US issues, the protagonist's charge against the Brotherhood may be read as dramatizing the role that anti-Stalinists of the time felt the Communist parties played in general. (22)
The realization that leadership groups may have set up the self-organized but losing street actions poses a second, larger problem. Earlier, musing on what he feels was his misguided role in the Brotherhood, the protagonist has had
an idea that shook me profoundly: You don't have to worry about the people. If they tolerate Rinehart, then they will forget it and even with them you are invisible. It lasted only the fraction of a second and I rejected it immediately; still it had flashed across the dark sky of my mind. It was just like that. It didn't matter because they didn't realize just what had happened, neither my hope nor my failure. My ambition and integrity were nothing to them and my failure was as meaningless as Clifton's. It had been that way all along. (506-07)
In this complex reflection the protagonist realizes that he can trust people to keep struggling on, like Steinbeck's turtle, but that they are not--as he has assumed--carefully judging him, the Brotherhood, or Ras. The underlying assumption that an actively rebellious people has been waiting for leadership, or working to organize itself, has also been wrong. The people are trying to get by, waiting for what the future will bring. The passage admits the deep irrelevance of politics, at least in the Brotherhood's sense, to most people's lives, the fact that most life simply proceeds on a different level. In addition, an unspoken logic ties these reflections to the rebellion scenes--if open and tolerant, people are also open to being fooled. It follows that they may act on race hatred and/or be goaded into useless sacrifice, and it follows that the Jamesian idea of spontaneous organization is not tenable. Hence, the specifically political problem of Invisible Man becomes what Ellison later said it was, one of finding or creating effective leadership ("On Initiation Rites and Power," West Point lecture, 1969; GT 44, CE 524-25). In sum, the first part of chapter 25 shows a failed effort to find and act on a mass-based, "spontaneist," and still revolutionary strategy for African American liberation; its failure leaves the protagonist, as Ellison's surrogate, groping for a new guiding viewpoint.
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