Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology 9781479872589

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Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology

N ort h A m e ri c a n Re l i g i on s Series Editors: Tracy Fessenden (Religious Studies, Arizona State University), Laura Levitt (Religious Studies, Temple University), and David Harrington Watt (History, Temple University) In recent years a cadre of industrious, imaginative, and theoretically sophisticated scholars of religion have focused their attention on North America. As a result the field is far more subtle, expansive, and interdisciplinary than it was just two decades ago. The North American Religions series builds on this transformative momentum. Books in the series move among the discourses of ethnography, cultural analysis, and historical study to shed new light on a wide range of religious experiences, practices, and institutions. They explore topics such as lived religion, popular religious movements, religion and social power, religion and cultural reproduction, and the relationship between secular and religious institutions and practices. The series focus primarily, but not exclusively, on religion in the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Books in the series: Ava Chamberlain, The Notorious Elizabeth Tuttle: Marriage, Murder, and Madness in the Family of Jonathan Edwards Terry Rey and Alex Stepick, Crossing the Water and Keeping the Faith: Haitian Religion in Miami Jodi Eichler- Levine, Suffer the Little Children: Uses of the Past in Jewish and African American Children’s Literature Isaac Weiner, Religion Out Loud: Religious Sound, Public Space, and American Pluralism Hillary Kaell, Walking Where Jesus Walked: American Christians and Holy Land Pilgrimage

Brett Hendrickson, Border Medicine: A Transcultural History of Mexican American Curanderismo Annie Blazer, Playing for God: Evangelical Women and the Unintended Consequences of Sports Ministry Elizabeth Pérez, Religion in the Kitchen: Cooking, Talking, and the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions Kerry Mitchell, Spirituality and the State: Managing Nature and Experience in America’s National Parks Finbarr Curtis, The Economy of American Religious Freedom M. Cooper Harriss, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology

Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology M. Cooper Harriss

NEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y PRESS New York

NEW YORK UN IVERSIT Y PRESS New York www.nyupress.org © 2017 by New York University All rights reserved “(What Did I Do To Be So) Black And Blue,” words by Andy Razaf, music by Harry Brooks and Fats Waller. Copyright (c) 1929 by Chappell & Co., EMI Mills Music Inc. and Razaf Music. Copyright renewed. All rights for Razaf Music administered by BMG Rights Management (US), LLC. All rights reserved. Used by permission; reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation. Portions of the Introduction and Conclusion were previously published in Race and Secularism in America, edited by Jonathon S. Kahn and Vincent Lloyd. Copyright (c) 2016 Columbia University Press. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher. References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. ISBN: 978-1-4798-2301-7 For Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data, please contact the Library of Congress. New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books. Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Also available as an ebook

For Sarah

Contents

Acknowledgments

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Introduction: Four Ways of Looking at an Invisible Man

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1. From Harlem Renaissance to Harlem Apocalypse: Just Representations and the Epistemology of Race

39

2. 1952: Invisible Man’s Theological Occasion

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3. Above the Veil: Nathan A. Scott Jr. and the Theological Apprenticeship of Ralph Ellison

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4. Wrestling Proteus in the New Dispensation: Civil Rights, Civil Religion, and One Blues Invisible

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5. Conceived in Sin: Ralph Ellison’s Nineteenth Century

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Conclusion: Two More Ways of Looking at an Invisible Man

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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About the Author

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vii

Acknowledgments

I have grappled with Ellison for exactly two decades, profiting during that time from the tutelage of extraordinary teachers. From a first reading of Invisible Man with Heather Ross Miller and a formative independent study on Ellison and Albert Murray with Marc Conner at W&L to Robert Stepto’s “Ellison in Context” seminar at Yale, I have come by this obsession honestly and remain grateful for the passion they wrought. It was not until I began doctoral work in the Religion and Literature program at the University of Chicago Divinity School, however, that I found an appropriate organizing principle for shaping this enthusiasm and cultivating the pursuit of those things not seen through prior lenses. Rick Rosengarten, who both provided my first forays into “R&Lproper” (insofar as such a thing might be supposed to exist) and would later direct the research from which this volume has evolved, proved deft as an advisor and counselor as the project took shape and remains a friendly sage in the interim—one who often knows what I mean better than I, myself, can discern or say. The late Anthony C. Yu, who provided institutional context and first informed me of Ellison’s relationship with Nathan Scott, remains a presence of learnedness, rigor, and cultivation whenever I read, write, and rewrite. Clark Gilpin’s clarity in blending history, religious thought, and the close reading of texts inspired me to recognize new possibilities for thinking about an author whose critical legacy had become stagnant. Kenneth Warren, whose critical courage I ardently admire, proved open to and encouraging of this project, providing needed cross-disciplinary insight. I am also grateful to Gilbert Bond, Catherine Brekus, Jacqueline Goldsby, Dwight Hopkins, Kathryn KerbyFulton, Guy Martin, Carolyn Sharp, and Kathryn Tanner—teachers who have, at times and over time, encouraged and contributed to my religious and literary pursuits both in coursework and consultation. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology has remained in progress for many years and under a couple of guises, providing ample opportunities for preix

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sentation and feedback in various public fora. Special thanks go to audiences at the University of Chicago, Northwestern, Millsaps, the University of Minnesota, Syracuse, Manhattan College, the University of Pittsburgh, New York University, Virginia Tech, Indiana University, Notre Dame, CUNY Graduate Center, the American Academy of Religion, the Southern Humanities Council, and the American Literature Association for the opportunity to audition no small amount of the material contained in this book and for helpful feedback, challenges, and encouragement along the way. Along similar lines, a number of people have read drafts, listened to half-cocked ideas, supplied key points of information and suggested reading, and provided more insight than they can imagine. Special thanks go to Ed Blum, Jay Carter, Marc Conner, Spencer Dew, Marcus Harvey, Paul Harvey, John Howell, Jonathon Kahn, Pippa Koch, Mark Ledbetter, Vincent Lloyd, Caleb J. D. Maskell, Kristen Tobey, and several anonymous readers. My colleagues at Indiana, Pitt, and Virginia Tech have also shared their expertise and support. I remain grateful to them all, but would especially like to acknowledge Ananda Abeysekara, Brian Britt, Constance Furey, Matt Gabriele, Sarah Imhoff, Paula Kane, Elizabeth Struthers Malbon, Zhange Ni, Ben Sax, Jeremy Schott, Adam Shear, Winni Sullivan, and Michael Tillitson. Significant work on Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology was completed with the financial support and time afforded by a postdoctoral fellowship in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh. Tracy Fessenden was an early champion of this book’s premise and became my first contact at NYU Press. Many thanks go to her, to Jennifer Hammer, and to Laura Levitt and David Watt as coeditors of the North American Religions series. John Callahan graciously granted me access to restricted files in the Ralph Ellison Papers at the Library of Congress before they became public and gave permission to quote from unpublished materials therein. I also extend gratitude to the marvelous staff of the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress for making my trips to Washington, DC, a joy. Jennifer Geddes was extraordinarily kind to help me seek out rumored materials in the University of Virginia Library system and generously took the time to shepherd me through Nathan Scott’s library, then housed in the Department of Religious Studies at UVA. Larry Bouchard provided encouragement and planted the suspicion that such materials might be found.

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This volume contains revised editions of previously published material. Portions of the prologue and epilogue appear as “Two Ways of Looking at an Invisible Man: Race, the Secular, and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology,” in Race and Secularism in America (2016), edited by Jonathon Kahn and Vincent Lloyd, published by Columbia University Press. An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared as “From Harlem Renaissance to Harlem Apocalypse: Just Representations and the Epistemology of Race in the ‘Negro Novel,’” in Journal of Religion 93, no. 3 (July 2013): 259–90, and an earlier take on chapter 4 appeared as “One Blues Invisible: Civil Rights and Civil Religion in Ralph Ellison’s Second Novel,” in African American Review 47, no. 2–3 (Summer/Fall 2014): 247–66. I also draw on material from an unpublished short essay written with John Howell, titled “Unconventional Speech,” in my discussion of Clint Eastwood in the epilogue. All are used here with permission. Lyrics from “What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue,” written by Harry Brooks and Andy Razaf, appear by agreement with Alfred Music Publishing and Hal Leonard Corporation. May I never lose sight of the extraordinary privilege of having been born into a family that has loved me, cultivated my interests, tolerated my idiosyncrasies and obsessions, and insisted from the beginning that ninety-nine-and-a-half won’t do. My parents, Lee and Sylvia Harriss, and my brother Meader Harriss all provide strong, if diverse, examples of living meaningfully and making good by doing well with one’s craft. If this book succeeds on any level, it does so as an expression of the confidence and desire engendered by those who see much better in one they love than he might see in himself, and who have refused to allow him to settle for any less.  Finally—and in this end is my beginning—I wish to acknowledge the true fortune-teller of my soul, Sarah Anderson Harriss, to whom this volume is dedicated, and our daughters (my primary editors, annotators, and illuminators), Eva and Vivian, many of whose first pictures, numbers, and letters were drawn and written on repurposed draft pages of this volume’s manuscript. This book is as painfully yours as it is mine and I thank you for your patience as, together, we’ve seen it to completion. The academic life ain’t always the good life for everyone involved—as you know too well. But it’s our life, and the three of you make it so wonderful. 

Introduction Four Ways of Looking at an Invisible Man

The Problem with Invisibility “I am an invisible man,” begins Ralph Ellison’s first novel, calling into existence what has become a prominent and evocative metaphor for speaking of racial experience (and, indeed, the experiences of all socially marginalized people) since the volume’s publication in 1952.1 Invisibility, evolving over the course of sixty-five years, has come to hold primarily social and materialist intellectual currency, spawning a significant trend in academic book titles and serving as political shorthand for marginality or liminality, an identity and agency overlooked or ignored by more canonical or “official” versions of humanity.2 In the midst of this materialism invisibility, as it signifies prominent understandings of racial identity, remains a secular property. This book argues that invisibility, in fact, represents a great deal more. Consider the lines that follow Invisible Man’s opening declaration: “I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind.”3 Despite his denials—indeed, ironically through them—Ellison’s protagonist also invokes a second meaning for invisibility, a metaphysical one with a longer cultural history that cannot be ignored in the grander scheme of the novel, its framing of racial identity, and its larger arguments about the nature of such identity in American, Western, and global contexts. Ellison’s narrator, speaking from novel’s end “in the beginning,” is an ironist, a dissembler; he has already learned to wield his invisibility to his own advantage. In this way his protestations against “spooks” (a racially charged term also deployed to great effect by Philip Roth in The Human Stain [2000]) and ectoplasms as viable aspects of 1

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invisibility in fact invoke and register an acknowledgment of complicity among social, cultural, and political constructions of material and immaterial reality.4 Jenny Franchot wields invisibility in a similar (if less apophatic) way, lambasting “a studied neglect of religion” in American literary studies that renders religious concerns “invisible”—particularly in studies of “gender, race, and . . . class.” “We discuss these safer conditions as if they operate independently of ultimate questions of meaning and purpose. What were not so long ago the vibrant realities of the invisible domain have become invisible in quite another way: because academic orthodoxy has deemed them deviant, they have been ‘disappeared.’”5 Writing in the mid-1990s, Franchot describes a kind of inversion of nomenclature designed to obscure religious dimensions of literary and cultural study amid a materialist turn: “Religious questions are always bound up with the invisible and are therefore peculiarly subject to silencing— whether through an outright refusal to inquire or through translations of the invisible into the vocabularies of sexuality, race, or class.” Transforming the metaphysical into the material precludes a full range of critical imagination and, in Franchot’s phrase, “analytic power.”6 Religion’s relative invisibility within foundational vocabularies of race in the twentieth century warrants scrutiny. What we now recognize as African American cultural studies emerged in the midst of two intellectual turns during the second half of the twentieth century—one to the social sciences in the immediate postwar era, the other to cultural theory in the 1960s.7 Accordingly, the terms of blackness and its larger racial conceptualization bear the imprimatur of a distinct materialism that characterizes and informs political and aesthetic understandings of historical blackness and the diverse identities it has forged. What is more, such materialism self-identifies as “secular.” In this way the broader legacy of the concept of race has—surprisingly for a historical culture so nourished by religious organizations, practices, and identities—reflected Franchot’s “studied neglect of religion,” remaining virtually uncontested as a secular concept. What, then, does an unimpeachably metaphysical term like “invisible” have to do with a social and materialist concept such as race? Put differently, if the task of secular modernity is the disenchantment of the world, why invoke the supernatural? Consider especially the case of El-

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lison. Invisible Man is a secular novel written by a secular novelist who not only reflected little in the way of religious belief or practice (according to the standard accounts of Ellison’s biography) but also lacked even the distrust of religious institutions that one finds in the fiction, poetry, and autobiographies of his contemporary African American writers such as Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and Zora Neale Hurston (among many others). What lies behind Ellison’s authorial decision to denominate the experience—indeed, the existential condition—generated by racial identity and its social encounters as invisibility, if indeed the concept remains “bound up” with religious questions? What might it mean, furthermore, to suggest that a thoroughly secular novel such as Invisible Man offers a broadly metaphysical or religiously oriented representation of race as a property that in Ellison’s day was most prominently depicted naturalistically?8 Particularly fascinating aspects of these questions emerge in the implications that arise from recent shifts in conceptions of the secular. Whereas it has traditionally referred to the absence of religion, in the past decade “secular” has come to signify something entirely different. Theodore Ziolkowski, for instance, calls the secular a formal “surrogate” for religious faith that modernity has disenchanted. Tracy Fessenden refers to it as an “unmarked [religious] category.” According to Charles Taylor, it represents an “immanent frame,” a contemporary cosmology that functions much in the way religion did in pre-modern contexts. John Lardas Modern points to environments of unconscious religious understanding that “become matters of common sense” in his study of the American nineteenth century.9 In other words, to call Invisible Man a secular novel, to consider Ralph Ellison a secular novelist, and likewise to conceive of race as a secular property, is not to say necessarily that they lack religious dimensions, components, or interests. While this may prove true in the standard narratives surrounding Ellison and his work, this book seeks to clarify that understanding Invisible Man as a secular novel articulates a vision of race and its dynamic cultural, social, and political exigencies (frequently couched in materialist terms) in such a way that it reflects the religious and theological antecedents and environments for which race stands as a surrogate, modern cosmology. This introduction traces a religious genealogy of invisibility—four representative ways of “looking” at invisibility and, accordingly, four

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ways of “looking” at Invisible Man—that more standard interpretations of the term have ignored or obfuscated. These representative “ways” draw on antecedent readings and conceptions of invisibility as, if not an overtly religious concept, then certainly one “bound up” with (or even inextricable from) religion, as Franchot puts it. Highlighting these religious and theological precursors to Ellison’s invisibility—his signal metaphor for race—spotlights the status of race as a secular surrogate that draws liberally upon environments of religious and theological imagination to address a formidable epistemological problem encountered by modernity: If “all men” are truly created equal, then what might account for their lack of equivalence in the most empirical of aspects?10 Such an approach problematizes prominent racial orthodoxies that have heretofore found expression in both social scientific materialism and public discourse. Closer attention to the religious dimensions of Ellison’s concept of race as a secular concept framed by and predicated on this metaphysical metaphor thickens race’s conceptual capacity while simultaneously illuminating the political and cultural implications of more recent renovations of secularism. In service of such a goal, the forthcoming four ways of looking at invisibility include its biblical significances, its use in early modern sources (including Luther and Shakespeare), its meaning among American Puritans, and its significance in indigenous African traditions. In the process of looking, we observe diverse religious aspects and frameworks, unmarked though they may have been. Such observations not only offer fresh insight into Ellison’s novel and its racial orientation but also set in play the prospect that such historical relationships between race and religion may not only renovate the way we understand the concept of race but may also speak to present and future domestic and global political contexts involving race and secularism for which older visions of twentieth-century materialism simply prove inadequate.

No Dichotomy Before turning to the four ways of looking on invisibility, we should consider the problem Ellison sought to address in his first (and only completed) novel, and how we might justify claiming it to derive from a religious orientation. Invisible Man fired a shot across the proverbial

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bow of prevailing literary and cultural wisdom upon its publication in 1952 by framing race within a new double consciousness. At once concerned both with specific American social and political contexts and with broader expressive legacies and orientations toward the “great” Western novels to which Ellison aspired, Invisible Man troubled a number of pieties surrounding race at midcentury. It ran counter not only to general assumptions about canonical literature but also to conventions of “Negro literature.” Uncertain of precisely how to categorize Ellison’s novel, critics turned alternately to hyperbole and faint praise.11 Other reviewers found themselves bereft of adequate language to express their early impressions and assessments of Ellison’s achievement (or lack thereof), illustrating in no small way how widely Ellison diverged from the expectations confronting a so-called Negro novelist in the early 1950s. Saul Bellow’s review in Commentary argues vaguely that there is “a ‘way’ in which Negro novelists go at their problems,” one which, Bellow believes, Ellison largely avoids. For many (though not all) reviewers, this Negro “way” that Bellow discerns actually stunted more ambitious literary achievement. George Mayberry, for instance, agrees that Ellison’s work is “shorn of the racial and political clichés that have encumbered the Negro novel.” Most of the first critics agree, however, no matter the tenor of their reviews, that by authoring Invisible Man Ellison himself—in a phrase taken from Katherine Gauss Jackson’s assessment in Harper’s—ceased to be a “Negro novelist” and became an author who “happens to be a Negro.”12 There are at least two reasons—one literary, one historical—why such parsing of identities would emerge from the earliest attempts to discuss Invisible Man. The first stems from the ambiguity of Ellison’s anonymous, protean—invisible—protagonist, a character who, much like the book he inhabits, is rarely discussed on his own terms. The invisible man is a “Negro,” to be sure, but in attempting to assess him, to establish some fixity upon an elusive target, the first reviewers draw comparisons not to other Negro protagonists but to specific iconic figures from the Western canon: Dante’s Virgil, Bunyan’s Pilgrim, Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov and his likewise anonymous underground man. Other reviewers suggest a “dark Gulliver” or a “young, dark Ulysses”—likenesses that invoke, yet trouble and ambiguate, W. E. B. DuBois’s “color-line.”13

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Ellison addressed his own location within the conundrum of “Negro” and “author” in a New York Times interview that appeared in the weeks following Invisible Man’s publication: “It is felt that there is something in the Negro experience that makes it not quite right for the novel. That is not true. [Race] becomes important to the novelist because it is in this problem . . . that the American human conflict is at its most intense and dramatic.”14 For Ellison, in this context, “whiteness” and “blackness” matter not simply for the social ills they propagate (which are palpable), but also—and concurrently—for their dramatic function as racial identities engaged in cooperative-antagonistic relational struggle, generating the definitive tension of American culture.15 For Ellison, race stands as the signal problem of American literature. Rather than residing outside of the so-called “human” conflict that drives literary creation, race establishes the very cultural terms of expression that characterize such conflict in an American context. The second, historical reason why Ellison’s view stood in opposition to prevailing literary attitudes toward race at midcentury is that it emerged precisely at the moment when social and political understandings of race in America underwent significant change. While Jim Crow bound long-standing social customs to the law of the land, the prominent milieu of Negro literature engaged in overt, functional protest against the social injustice endemic of racist segregation that defined American civil, political, and cultural mores. Richard Wright’s landmark novel, the wildly popular Native Son (1940), legitimized for many readers the status of protest as a bellwether for the “authentic blackness” of African American fiction. Accordingly, Wright’s literary treatment of Bigger Thomas exemplified Saul Bellow’s “‘way’ in which Negro novelists go at their problems.” The archetypal Negro novel, in essence, chronicled the visceral realities of Negro life in terms of literary naturalism: the ugliness of poverty, hunger, exclusion, humiliation, and oppression. A certain moral simplicity characterized its representations of race, resistance, and their American exigencies at the time of Invisible Man’s publication, driving the critical response to Ellison’s novel and its idiosyncrasies. As Lawrence Jackson notes, “Nowhere in Ellison’s book did a black character directly confront and violently resist unambiguous white racism. The novel . . . divulged a world without virtue or integrity; it seemed incapable of admitting the value of principled black resis-

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tance.”16 In this way Ellison stepped out of Wright’s shadow and openly, even iconoclastically, defied the protest tradition, problematizing and rendering in bitingly satirical relief the political and epistemological pieties to which Native Son and its ilk adhered. In the historical and generic context detailed above, it would have made sense for readers to expect Ellison to follow Wright’s suit. Ellison was, after all, best known at the time of Invisible Man’s publication as Richard Wright’s protégé, and through the 1930s and 1940s he amassed a record of activities and publications in support of the political left (though he would later come to distance himself from them).17 Invisible Man’s reception registers most clearly in light of Ellison’s relationship with Richard Wright—especially its public valence. Its status as a “Negro novel” (or its inadequacy to carry such a mantle) relies in no small part upon a critical litmus test concerning its success as a recapitulation of Native Son, as a sequel to a novel that defined its genre by decrying and protesting overtly against the plight of African Americans marginalized by a racist American society in violation of its founding, democratic ideals.18 Ellison’s ironic, even absurd, reconfiguration of Wright’s literary naturalism recast the possibilities for a literary representation of race. It wedded a particular racial problematic with an ambitious aesthetic and intellectual agenda that eschewed moral clarity and embraced ambiguity.19 Most significantly, Ellison’s revisions emerged on the cusp of a new paradigm in African American identity. In 1954, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the culmination of several decades’ worth of legal challenges, would overturn Plessy v. Ferguson’s 1896 codification of “separate-but-equal” as acceptable under federal law. Ellison himself acknowledged the tenuous nature of Invisible Man, emerging as it did from this social and political interregnum. Despite his more confident public pronouncements, Ellison, in reflection upon the seismic ontological shift that he understood Brown to represent, appears to hedge on Invisible Man’s locus upon the “Negro novel”/“Novel that happens to be about a Negro” spectrum. On the one hand, he offers an occasional appraisal of Negro culture: “For me there is still the problem of making meaning out of the past and I guess I’m lucky I described Bledsoe [the “race man” president of the protagonist’s College for Negroes—a vestige of the long Jim Crow era] before he was checked out.”20 On the other

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hand, at later junctures in his career Ellison came to consider the novel more broadly to integrate the perspective of the so-called Negro novel with unprecedented thematic and aesthetic resonances drawn from a more canonical literary tradition. Is Invisible Man, then, a Negro novel or a novel that happens to be about a Negro? The answer from Ralph Ellison’s perspective, much to the chagrin of those on either side who would prescribe one or the other denomination, appears to be a resounding yes! For us, however, there still remains the problem of making meaning out of this past, and of deliberating what this meaning foretells for the present occasion of our own reading and political realities. Toward these ends, this book argues that Ellison’s conceptual schematic for the literary figuration of race (characterized as a tension between particulars and universals) must be understood according to a more capacious critical lens than we have previously imagined. Accordingly, it explores the religious dimensions of Ellison’s characterization of race as an invisible theology in a secular age. In this way it becomes a conceptual frame that functions much in the way religion did in pre-modern times.

“Black Is . . . and Black Ain’t” While certainly the question of whether a literary work qualifies as a Negro novel or a novel that happens to be about a Negro is no longer a primary concern of African American literary criticism, the legacy of this debate—an epistemological question about racial identity and its literary representation—remains prominent.21 This division historically has hinged on the question of protest or political activism. Ellison’s close friend (and fellow Tuskegee man) Albert Murray, for instance, suggests that “protest” fiction such as Native Son qualifies as “social science fiction”—more propaganda than literature.22 From Murray’s perspective, distinguishing between the “Negro novel” and the “Novel that happens to be about a Negro” seeks to liberate African American literature from boundedness to the racism that it decries, often at the expense of more “respectable” literary and aesthetic concerns. We may call this point of view “integrationist,” though Murray’s term, “Omni-American,” while more obscure, carries less political and historical baggage.23 This integrationist or Omni-American perspective is driven, its adherents

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aver, by a baseline understanding of fundamental human equality, a sense of common ground that thrives despite various pitfalls of socially constructed difference. In the end, many of Invisible Man’s first critics, intrigued by Ellison’s programmatic eschewal of “protest” (“I’m not complaining, nor am I protesting, either,” the protagonist declares at the outset) and its inherently Manichean worldview, deem the novel to consider not “what it means to be a Negro” but “what it means to be a human being.”24 For this reason Invisible Man’s champions instantly hailed it as a great novel, belonging to the ages, transcending what they considered to be the aesthetic, intellectual, and historically bounded limitations and racial prescriptions of the Negro novel. Ellison, who understood himself to split this difference, was always quick to balk at the suggestion that he did not write “protest” fiction. Every novel, he insisted, protests against the plight of one in a minority who is confronted with some form of injustice: “I recognize no dichotomy between art and protest!,” he writes. “Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground is, among other things, a protest against the limits of nineteenth-century rationalism; Don Quixote, Man’s Fate, Œdipus Rex, The Trial—all these embody protest, even against the limitation of human life itself. . . . All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.”25 Ellison’s mode of protest, then, does not stand in opposition to Western cultural traditions and forms; instead, it participates in them. He inscribes the specific forms of injustice endemic to his particular minority experience through the novel—a literary genre that has historically supported the meaningful articulation of any number of individuals living in the minority or as a minority. Even as the particulars of a given experience find expression, they join a broader context of what it means to be in the minority, to confront (and find oneself confronted by) injustice and the tyranny of the majority. This revision does not mitigate the legitimacy of one’s particular experience; it does, however, suggest that the framework for analogous understanding of Western and African American cultures in the context of broader historical and conceptual categories is possible—and even fruitful—in critical reflection.26 Ellison proceeds to observe that “The universal in the novel . . . is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.”27 Although a novel may very well be composed in the

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milieu of its author’s own cultural, social, historical, political, theological, even racial, ethnic, gendered, or sexually oriented identity, the act of inscribing such an identity, for Ellison, indicates an impulse toward a more universalized understanding of one’s particular identity and experience, one consummated by the act of composition, which presumes the broader communication of such identity to others and its sublimation to generic form (in this case “the novel”).28 Disparate elements and experiences find unity through the capacity for analogy that is driven by the stability of genre and its literary conventions. Novels, as Ellison noted later in his career, arrive at “universality, if at all . . . by amplifying and giving resonance to a specific complex of experience until . . . that specific part of life speaks metaphorically for the whole.”29 Antagonistic cooperation between particularity and universality permits the novel to generate common meaning among a diverse idiomatic field of novelists, their representative characters, and the readers who bring them to life. Every author must “finger the jagged grain” of his or her specific complaint, making a record of its particular analogous correspondence to a painful universal condition through literary aesthetic creation.30 Ellison understood experience—the “reality” of protest fiction—to undergo a process of literary transformation from the raw material of autobiography and experience to the stylistic, constructed contours of symbolic action. “Man, it is said, can stand reality in small doses only,” Ellison writes with a nod to T. S. Eliot, “and the novel, sometimes consciously, sometimes not, has measured out that dosage.”31 Thus, genre serves as an immanent literary frame upon which to hang experience in a way that is recognizable and sturdy enough to bear the weight of the substantive meaning with which it is imbued. Such a generic frame acts as an invisible theology that shapes the exigencies of secular literary expression.

“Ralph Ellison Is Not a Black Writer” In an age when the social sciences rose to prominence—especially to articulate race’s cultural and social impact—Ellison remained an ardent humanist. This humanistic point of view, sublimating the social significance of race, lost traction especially as emergent academic, artistic, and political movements of the 1960s turned to the particularity of black

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identity and culture, promoting black nationalism and eschewing any canon or tradition perceived to ignore or denigrate the particular meaning of black experience.32 Part of this broader ontological shift derived from the recognition that any dualism positing “Negro” and “human being” as mutually exclusive terms suggests, in essence, that “Negroes” are inhuman. The semantic nature of this dualism evolved as well. The term “Negro” became passé, replaced first by “black,” and eventually by “African American.” Blackness and its beauty developed a radical aesthetic. Ellison, by association, fell out of favor in this new cultural and political paradigm. A second point of contention between Ellison and the Black Power and Black Arts movements of the 1960s and 1970s was political. Arnold Rampersad recounts Ellison’s descent into mutual resentment and acrimony with an emerging generation of African Americans who took umbrage with what they perceived as his “soft” and “passive” contributions to the struggle. Ellison “continued to show little respect for most black students, professors and writers” whom he felt to be disinterested in or incapable of comprehending what he took to be the complexities of race in America.33 In October 1967 Ellison was reportedly accosted at Grinnell College in Iowa by a black “militant” who claimed to have ridden several hours from Chicago on his motorcycle in order to confront the author.34 Ellison and the younger man argued over Invisible Man. As the disagreement escalated, the younger man loudly declared Ellison an “Uncle Tom,” a charge that Ellison, reduced to tears, vehemently denied. Responding later to his host’s apologies, Ellison remarked, “I’ve heard that kind of thing for a long time. I’m used to it.”35 In another instructive anecdote, a black studies librarian at Southern Illinois University reportedly answered a patron’s query for Invisible Man by claiming that “Ralph Ellison is not a black writer.”36 These encounters reflect a broader conceptual rift growing between racial and humanistic concerns, one conceded by both sides of a cultural divide that gained prominence in American letters during what should have been the prime years of Ellison’s career. Embattled, stubborn, and the author of Invisible Man, Ellison found himself situated on the firing line.37 In subsequent years, social critical treatments of Ellison’s corpus have reflected general concord with Shelly Fisher Fishkin’s broader disciplinary observation in the mid-1990s of the emergence of a “more complex

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view of African-American culture.”38 A new generation of critics have made a good case for Invisible Man as more than simply “a novel that happens to be about a Negro,” not bereft of racial concerns but, in fact, infused with a remarkable and dynamic sense of racial specificity. Scholars still prove wary (and rightly so) of appropriating the implications that extend from the assumption—clumsily stated—that Invisible Man is not about African Americans but, rather, about human beings. Still, the racist implications of this simplistic historical dualism should not dictate programmatically against how broadly Ellison’s corpus may be read in the present and in future critical contexts. The terms of the Ellisonian critical divide, then, remain emblematic of an artificial demarcation that diminishes the rich potential inherent in understanding race as the dramatic American conflict par excellence, residing at the intersection—or at the crossroads—of the social and human sciences. Accordingly, Ellison’s concept of race, a social category, is freighted with humanistic intellectual significance that has remained essentially invisible. What might it mean to understand Invisible Man as (to employ, not unironically, the old and troublesome nomenclature) a novel concurrently about both what it means to be a Negro and what it means to be a human being? To what critical appeal may we turn? How might one think in universals without diminishing the integrity of particular experience and its meaningful expressions of identity and community? Is it possible to recast the terms of particularity so as not to engender unmindfulness of the broader cultural universe to which it belongs and in which it participates? To what ultimate concerns do social and material categories of race and identity point? These important questions drove Ellison as a novelist, critic, and public figure, and they offer an interpretive key for this volume’s critical reassessment of his corpus.

On Religion and Ellison’s Cultured Despisers In order to make sense of this impasse between particularity and universality regarding the nature and location of race in Western intellectual history (broadly) and Ralph Ellison’s corpus (in particular), the conceptual and practical exigencies of religion offer a critical template for interpreting the particular individual in analogous relationship to a broader historical and conceptual cosmos. Religions articulate

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universalizing cosmologies that gain interpretation through a variety of particular identities or orientations. In this way one finds at the heart of religiosity a cooperative antagonism between particularity and universality, one very much in keeping with both the Ellisonian vision of this relationship and the negotiations through which its constituent parts cohere. Numerous examples of these dual orientations apply. They include the Jewish Diaspora, the global scope and syncretistic histories of both the Roman Empire and the Roman Catholic Church, and the myriad experiences of oppression (sexual, political, economic, and so forth) that are grouped under the theological rubric of “liberation.” Other examples emerge in the violent competitions among religious traditions to assert themselves as the one “true” faith. Most directly apposite to Ellison and his literary and cultural milieu, African Americans have succeeded in transforming Christianity from the religion of their historical oppressors, wielded to justify their very enslavement, into—ironically—a sustaining expression of humanity, integrity, and cultural unity. Christianization, for better and worse, marks the Westernization of African American people and culture, transforming and uniting disparate pre-modern, non-Western people and cultures as they were violently thrust into the peculiar institutions of the West. In this way the genesis of what we might call an African American sensibility resides in the continued negotiation between an imposed, if oppressively unifying Western identity and an orientation of otherness to, or ironization of, that very identity rooted in the absence of one’s stolen African identity and culture. Whereas scholars have tended to focus more closely upon the sources of otherness that are inherent to the antagonistic cooperation of this cultural negotiation, the so-called universals to which such particularities correspond must bear equal importance. I tread dangerously here. As Susanne Zantop notes, a “colonial fantasy” undergirds certain legacies of the universal.39 My aim is not the reassertion of such a fantasy—indeed, the universal is no more real, no less fantastic, than race. Both qualify as socially constructed, artificial, and contingent. Yet, like race, universals bear very real historical consequences and therefore warrant serious examination. In part this is why I give them so much prominence: like invisibility, and indeed like the myriad problems associated with the concept and politics of race, presumptions of

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whiteness belie diversities of the modern world. Ellison was certainly no stranger to these problems. However, he viewed them as necessary, as cooperatively antagonistic with the ironically subversive nature of invisibility, which does not just accept the terms as power administers them but, rather, uses these terms to undermine power’s efficacy. The creative tension between particular and universal in Ellison’s writing, exploring the interstices between the Negro novel and a novel that happens to be about a Negro, draws upon a signal tension bearing prominence in a trajectory of theoretical treatments of religion spanning roughly from Schleiermacher to Geertz.40 Human beings seek to understand the location of their specific, local experiences within more infinite contexts.41 In the language of Paul Tillich, social and material concerns correspond to more ultimate concerns.42 This is not the first book to consider religious dimensions of Ellison’s corpus. Beth Eddy’s Rites of Identity (2004) focuses on religious naturalism in Ellison’s work (as well as Kenneth Burke’s), linking him to a larger pragmatic tradition extending back through Santayana to Emerson. Eddy’s vision of “religion” differs starkly from its deployment in this volume.43 Her naturalism—naturally—avoids metaphysics, keeping certain materialist assumptions firmly in place. The pages that follow, while agreeing with Eddy’s recognition of religion’s viability as a critical lens for assessing Ellison’s work, seek to expand her religious purview beyond the hills of naturalism, taking certain religious and theological dimensions seriously in their contention with what believers understand to emanate from invisible, supernatural realms (whatever our own, or Ellison’s own, opinions of their veracity). Invisibility is a metaphor, certainly, but that does not mean that we should not take its terms seriously. Metaphors are not “mere” qualifiers but dynamic correspondences that drive both metaphysical and material ecologies of signification. Much as Invisible Man flummoxed readers and critics who sought to understand it in terms of literary naturalism, invisibility as it is treated here offers a trope that confounds and requires pushing beyond the limits and intellectually “respectable” boundaries of religious naturalism. A second source, Laura Saunders’s “Ellison and the Black Church: The Gospel According to Ralph,” identifies specific, if disparate, examples of African American ecclesiology in Ellison’s work, establishing both the terms and limits of reading religion in and through Ellison’s

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corpus.44 She draws brief quotations from published interviews, letters, and essays, ostensibly to illustrate Ellison’s pronouncements on religion. However, these samples prove to be more fully indicative of the dearth of religious material that many perceive to be available among the primary sources: There is abundant evidence of [a debt to religion] throughout Ellison’s work, although readers may not notice it. . . . In addition to making hundreds of Biblical allusions, Ellison often uses theological words like “communion,” “temptation,” and “sin,” in ways that—if not quite orthodox—are never ironic. . . . Yet Ellison’s debt to the church is complex, as is often the case with his influences. He was skittish about owning it. . . . As an adult he claimed not to be a believer and told one interviewer that he didn’t pray and hadn’t been to church in years.45

Indeed, many of Ellison’s pronouncements on religion, as Saunders cites them, come from unpublished sources—legitimate sources, certainly, yet very much “off the record,” only available more recently, and thus extracanonical to the standard Ellisonian myths. Saunders performs a service by bringing these religious elements to light. The assertion that Ellison’s theological allusions “are never ironic,” however, is patently debatable if not outright wrong. Saunders becomes far more convincing when she shifts from concrete examples to more conceptual and inferential treatments of religion in Ellison’s writing. She locates Ellison’s strong individualism and his primary belief in “the power of language” in legacies of Protestant Christianity.46 Preachers and their preaching form a rhetorical and semiotic foundation in Ellison’s language, and he utilizes the figure of the preacher and the rhetoric of his sermon to great effect in both Invisible Man and the second novel. Finally, Saunders speaks convincingly about the religious orientation indispensible to Ellison’s cosmology and writes movingly of his use of conversion in Juneteenth (the edition of the second novel available to her), raising significant questions about his sources and their ultimate prioritization in his literary cosmos.47 In sum, Saunders has made a way where ostensibly there was no way, framing well the issues from which one should proceed in discerning the religious significance in and of Ellison’s work. Nevertheless, her essay limits

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its discussion to “the black church,” certainly a tremendously significant historical iteration of African American religion, and one to which I appeal. Still, religion occupies a far greater and more complex position in African American culture, as it does in Ellison’s corpus, than Saunders reflects. When I speak of “religion” and the “religious” in this volume, I refer less to specific things, institutions, or preconceptions and more to the processes through which antagonistic cooperation between universals and particulars generates human quests for meaning and significance. Such meaning-making may take intellectual, ritual, confessional, doctrinal, or institutional forms, and periodically we shall focus on specific ideas, rites, confessions, traditions, or organizations to lend coherence to Ellison’s particularity as an exemplar. For our purposes, however, religion and the religious derive critically from ongoing negotiations of these tensions among individuals and communities. Race and religion alike qualify as social constructions. On the one hand, neither exists in and of itself except as a cluster of cultural and social dimensions. On the other hand, no matter what scholars insist about race or religion, as constructs, both constructions have become naturalized in ways that bear real consequences. Therefore while both qualify as products of the scholar’s study, they also bear complicity in the lynching tree, in oppressive legislation, and other acts of malevolence (and benevolence) that shape material circumstances. In this way Ellison’s conception of race is not simply “religious” in this theoretical sense. I also refer to it as an “invisible theology.” A fuller accounting of invisibility and its religious legacy follows shortly; however, theology in this sense does not refer to prescriptive “God-talk.” Rather, it invokes the meanings and significances generated by religious negotiations of universals and particulars. Anselm’s well-trod definition of theology as “faith seeking understanding” is not an untenable model here. “Faith” represents a (particular) religious position that—in seeking understanding—navigates broader contextual universes. Accordingly, we might recast it critically as the espousal of meaning generated by negotiations of universal and particular antagonistic cooperation. Faith seeking understanding, then, represents significance in search of a suitable idiom for translation to a broader, more universalizing public. In this way Ellison’s concept of race qualifies as religious because it reflects

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a process that, among other things, generates conditions of meaning and significance. It is theological because such meaning and significance offer critical insight into practical matters of human life and experience (including the social and political, or material, dimensions often associated with invisibility and conceptions of race).48 Accordingly, we must recognize the religious and the theological as critically cofunctional— never segregated (as they have become in contemporary academic discourse) but absolutely dependent upon one another. Furthermore, such recourse to religion and theology may surprise some readers. Ellison, after all, was not an overtly religious or spiritual writer but a thoroughly secular one. Nevertheless, despite their critical invisibility, a number of historical theological problems in modernity resonate fully in Ellison’s attempts to navigate the complicated relationship between a rich sense of cultural tradition and the necessary innovations of this tradition that an artist must execute in the name of identity and craft. Furthermore, there remains ample evidence of religion’s significance in Ellison’s corpus, as the forthcoming chapters bear witness. These specific deployments of religious categories, tropes, and narratives constitute a vital—yet overlooked—aspect of Ellison’s work. At the same time, this book’s appeal to a religious sensibility is structural. Ellison’s concept of race is foundationally religious because it is rooted in the relational, systematic interplay between, and the consequent aggregation of, the particular and universal. Ellison’s religious contexts and the theologies they generate function both analogously to, and in service of, this structural argument.

A Genealogy of Invisibility Having established some theoretical grounds for understanding Ellison’s literary conception of race to bear religious and even functionally theological dimensions, we now turn to a genealogy of invisibility. The following selection of exemplars remains, of course, representative— aiming more to provoke than to offer an exhaustive accounting of invisibilities past.49 More importantly, it offers a series of alternative contextualizations for understanding invisibility as Ellison—a selfproclaimed American novelist and critic wielding African American vernacular to express, represent, contribute, and respond to longer

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Western aesthetic predicaments and legacies—might have received and processed them (whether consciously or not).

Way One: Biblical Sources In explicating invisibility in Ellison’s work against a biblical backdrop, I do not propose that Ellison sought explicitly to mine the biblical examples that follow in this section. Ellison’s invisibility is not an essentially biblical concept. Yet biblical invisibility and its later interpretive debates matter in terms of constructing a more expansive conception of Ellison’s metaphor for racial identity. Ellison was biblically literate and counted the King James Bible as part of a cultural unconscious upon which his broader worldview was built. In one interview he pairs the King James Bible with “British literature”—especially “Shakespeare or the great poets”—and “Negro folklore” as formative influences.50 Elsewhere he groups the Bible among “sources,” including “the spirituals and the blues,” literature, mythology, sermons, and the dozens.51 In this way the work of biblical excavation deals less with recovering and piecing together tiny potshards and more with exploring the cultural and political infrastructure of Ellison’s corpus and career. A second reason recourse to biblical invisibility matters is that Ellison in fact invokes the Bible categorically to characterize his effort to push beyond, or at least to mitigate in some way, his involvement with the secular leftist politics in vogue during the 1930s and 1940s—formative years to his development as a critic and fiction writer. In “A Very Stern Discipline,” an interview published in 1967, Ellison’s interlocutors encourage him to revisit his own literary origins in Harlem of the 1930s and 1940s—“the New Masses experience” they call it—when Ellison was enlisted in the New York Writers Project, spending time with Richard Wright and the “League of American Writers crowd.” Ellison notes that, while he “wrote what might be called propaganda having to do with the Negro struggle,” his fiction strove for different objectives. He continues, “I never accepted the ideology which the New Masses attempted to impose on writers. They hated Dostoevsky, but I was studying Dostoevsky. They felt that Henry James was a decadent snob who had nothing to teach a writer from the lower classes, and I was studying James. I was also reading Marx, Gorki, Sholokhov, and Isaac Babel. I was reading

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everything, including the Bible.”52 Ellison’s inclusion of the Bible here among pointed, even archetypal, alternatives to the political reading he undertook offers an intriguing juxtaposition of religious and literary aspirations (achieved through the Bible and Dostoevsky, if not James). Beyond the secular Left milieu that Ellison wrote out of and has been subsequently read through, there remains another valence—one that has always interacted with the political realm but has, at the same time, been held in tension with it. Biblical invisibility recovers this alternative reading to the politically informed one that coheres more intuitively with a standard characterization of racial identity.

New Testament The English word “invisible” appears in the Geneva Bible and the King James version (both of which offer English translations that date to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, respectively, proving foundational to an American biblical imagination vital to Ellison’s cultural lexicon) only in Pauline texts.53 For this reason we begin with New Testament sources before circling back to conceptual analogies in the Hebrew Bible. Romans 1:20 speaks of “invisible things of God”; Colossians 1:15 and 1:16 mention “the image of the invisible God”; 1 Timothy 1:17 also refers to an invisible God, and Hebrews 11:27 calls God “him which is invisible.” Another implicit construction of invisibility, “not seen,” yields a wider sample of passages but, again, the Pauline texts shine; for example, Hebrews 11:1: “Faith is the evidence of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”; 2 Corinthians 4:18: “We look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things that are seen are temporal; but the things that are not seen are eternal.”54 A clear line of demarcation distinguishes the invisible from its deficient analogue, the visible. The overall effect of this catalog of usages suggests that, in early Christian contexts, invisibility bespeaks a kind of theological authenticity that is characteristic of the Divine and therefore beyond ordinary human ken. In this way it bears a sense of religious privilege. The nature of invisibility occupied prominent theologians in the decades just prior to Invisible Man. A quick survey of readings by Karl Barth and Rudolph Bultmann—representatives of important (if disparate) Protestant fac-

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tions in the years before Invisible Man—helps to clarify the Ellisonian view. Writing on Romans 1:20 at the end of the Great War, Barth invokes a Platonic ideal as intrinsic to “the invisible things of God”: “Behind the visible things there lies the invisible universe which is the Origin of all concrete things.”55 On this reading God remains invisible because God (whether owing to God’s glory, nature, or reality) surpasses the limits of human perception, drawing on Job’s whirlwind (which Barth mentions) and especially resonant of the Divine statement to Moses in Exodus 33:20: “Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live.” In this way invisibility highlights an unbridgeable gulf between human (whose realm is the visible) and God (the realm of the invisible). Such an interpretation offers a primary theological resonance for the concept of invisibility, one that for our goal of illuminating the difference between Ellison’s concept of race and the more standard, “secular” conception of it distinguishes between the material (visible) and the immaterial (invisible). Already the religious legacy of invisibility stands at odds with the materialist conception that has characterized appeals to post–Invisible Man invisibility. A more “secular” reading of the visible/human/material and invisible/ supernatural/metaphysical divide may be found in Rudolph Bultmann’s attempts to “demythologize” the New Testament according to scientific modernism. In his 1941 essay “Theology as Science,” Bultmann characterizes the visible world as scientific in nature: objective, disinterested, observable. Theology, however, like the God it characterizes, presents a paradox because it tends toward the “otherworldly, invisible, incomprehensible, etc., the thought is expressed that God cannot be objectified.”56 This tension that Bultmann seeks to reconcile, or at least to problematize, mirrors the secular demarcation for social science that Ellison was beginning to challenge during this period.57 Invisibility defies objectification, which itself represents a form of materiality, of the secular management of identity. Consider Ellison’s yokel who challenges the prizefighter in Invisible Man’s prologue: “Once I saw a prizefighter boxing a yokel. The fighter was swift and amazingly scientific. His body was one violent flow of rapid rhythmic action. He hit the yokel a hundred times while the yokel held up his arms in stunned surprise. But suddenly the yokel, rolling about in the gale of boxing gloves, struck one blow and knocked sci-

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ence, speed, and footwork as cold as a well digger’s posterior. . . . The yokel had simply stepped inside of his opponent’s sense of time.”58 For all of science’s epistemological merit, such materiality is not foolproof. What remains fascinating about Bultmann’s demarcation (and Ellison’s destabilization of its terms) is that (1) it establishes a connection with the social scientific epistemology by which midcentury renovations of racial identity sought to distance African Americans from older, religious, superstitious, immaterial religious models,59 and (2) it emphasizes the audacity of Ellison’s decision to deploy invisibility as his governing metaphor for race as a secular property in a secular age. Barthean invisibility in a primary sense does not represent an authentic, Ellisonian invisible theology. The Ellisonian value of Barthean invisibility derives from its utility as a postmaterialist (or postsecular) rejoinder to Bultmann. Ellison’s ideal, we might say, resembles the prizefighter in his next fight after losing to the yokel: certainly still reliant upon speed and scientific elegance, yet also keenly aware of their limitations, of the fact that these advantages are not indomitable. To read it an iteration further: invisibility as Ellison’s metaphor for race acknowledges a kind of extant, baseline materialism (recall Ellison’s readings of Marx and Maxim Gorky and his association with New Masses), yet with the significant caveat (via Dostoevsky, James, Shakespeare, the Bible—and even the spirituals and the blues) that there is more in heaven and earth than can be dreamt of by the social scientific imagination.

Hebrew Bible The Old Testament (as the Hebrew Bible is known in the Geneva and King James translations) itself contains no specific instances of the English word “invisible,” though the “seen,” “unseen,” and “not seen” remain significant analogues. I would like to focus briefly on just one example of not seeing from the Hebrew Bible—Moses’s encounter with Yahweh in Exodus 33:20—as a trope that illuminates an “invisible theology” at play in the Hebrew Bible itself, the world that it depicts, and the process of creating religious coherence from a diversity of cultural and theological outlooks. Such a trope frames certain parallels between biblical attempts to deal with religious, cultural, and political diversities—representative tensions between one and many in the development of early Israelite

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religion and biblical theology—and Ellison’s democratic concern with American pluribus and unum as a racial political (and therefore invisible) theme in Invisible Man. In Exodus 33:20 Yahweh tells Moses, who desires to see God’s “glory” (33:18), “Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live.” Attendant details surrounding this exchange illuminate the point more fully. God offers a middle way between death and outright hiddenness: “Behold, there is a place by me, and thou shalt stand upon a rock: And it shall come to pass, while my glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a clift of the rock, and will cover thee with my hand while I pass by: And I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts; but my face shall not be seen” (33:21b–23). We locate here, in one sense, an antecedent for the Pauline view that Barth rightly connects to a sense of Platonic essences.60 On this reading Moses may not look on God’s face because the glory is too magnificent for frail humanity. The distinction remains unbridgeable. Another line of interpretation suggests, however, that the invisibility of God in the Hebrew Bible, symbolized in this instance by Yahweh’s compromise, renders human incapacity to “see” God’s full glory as less a mortal failing than a pragmatic reality. It introduces political implications that were important for the formation and survival of Israelite religion at a moment of radical rupture in the history of Israel. These political aspects, I suggest, align with specific themes in Invisible Man; in the process of exploring them we locate a deeper resonance of invisibility’s biblical depictions and what we might recognize as a religious antecedent to Ellison’s racial metaphor. I am less interested here in claiming a one-to-one correspondence between Ellison’s work and ancient Israelite religion than I am in offering a glimpse at how the latter might stand as an antecedent to Ellison’s invisibility and thereby establish it as an unmarked religious category. As scholars have gained a clearer sense of the messy and fragmentary nature of our present access to the history of Israel, a more thorough sense of social, political, and theological diversity within this history has emerged. Such diversity produces the multivocality of the Hebrew text, which represents a composite of authors, gods, theologies, and social and historical contexts joined into a larger “book.” The earliest, prehistoric religious orientations that would eventually contribute to the rise of Judaism were highly localized in nature, contributing to, if not a

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larger polytheism among these early groups, then certainly a plurality of local gods and practices for the preservation of a receding (if not forgotten) past.61 Erhard S. Gerstenberger traces the evolution of these various Old Testament theologies according to a progressive set of sociological units: family, town, tribe, and kingdom, emphasizing that these categories do not necessarily point to a whiggish procession of more perfect theologies but do excavate the diversities inherent to early Israel—many of which remain evident, if fragmentary, in biblical texts.62 The extreme duress of the Babylonian exile, beginning in 587 BCE, transformed Israel’s characteristic heterogeneity: “Within a community characterized by a considerable diversity, no group emerged from this period without experiencing considerable change, due in no small part to spiritual trauma that called into question some of the most fundamental principles of the Yahwistic faith.”63 Accordingly, a new emphasis emerged, one focusing on “the common legacy shared by all these groups,” offering a centripetal focus and fostering a stronger, more monotheistic character.64 It was in this exilic period and particularly during the postexilic one that the Hebrew Bible became recognizably “biblical,” canonized. People who lived under oppression, and who sought to retain a sense of affirmation for the suffering they had endured, codified their history according to the theological orientations of the exile. Prophetic and wisdom literature “enjoyed a heightened popularity” that synthesized extant traditions and practices.65 Older diversities did not disappear but, as Stephen Geller puts it, “biblical religion . . . insisted on comprehending the many aspects of God in a single image of divinity.”66 The God of this “emergent Judaism” (and particularly the textuality of this God) became singular yet variable, a universal entity containing diverse particular voices and visions of Divine characteristics and will.67 Yahweh’s face remains invisible, then, in order to manage Israelite diversity within the identity of Israel’s one true God. Understanding the God of Exodus 33:20, in Walter Brueggemann’s words, “hidden—indirect and not visible,” renders our representative trope as a figure of Ellisonian invisibility.68 In the epilogue to Invisible Man, Ellison reflects jokingly on whiteness as a cultural default setting (and in this way itself as a form of invisibility): “Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway?—diversity is the word. Let man keep his many parts and you’ll have no tyrant states. Why, if they follow this

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conformity business they’ll end up forcing me, an invisible man, to become white, which is not a color but the lack of one. Must I strive toward colorlessness?”69 Unconscious whiteness (a hallmark of whiteness as an object of contemporary academic study), like the invisibility of blackness that such whiteness imposes, obscures a larger tension in Ellison’s ideal American identity: “Think of what the world would lose if [colorlessness] should happen. America is woven of many strands; I would recognize it and let it so remain. . . . Our fate is to become one, and yet many—This is not prophecy, but description.”70 Such a tension becomes a prominent theme of the novel: the one and the many, the pluribus and the unum, centripetal hegemony and centrifugal fragmentation.71 In this way invisible theology itself becomes a question of pluribus and unum: the God of Sinai, a God of covenant, demands coherence, submerging particular diversities for the sake of the larger theological picture. Moses, like any human, may only glimpse parts of a God who, to appropriate Walt Whitman’s phrase, contains multitudes. The God of the Hebrew Bible embodies the paradox of one and many: Yahweh is, at once, universally significant of a common legacy shared by diverse factions of people (Gerstenberger’s families, towns, tribes, etc.), unified by historical suffering, experience, and covenant that joins them to a larger common identity.72 In this way it resists fragmentation. Such a multifaceted God may not be seen in full, however, only glimpsed in part, and so the imago encountered by particular factions corresponds to the specific identity that these representative factions bring to God. Other aspects remain hidden, “not-visible,” unseen. Still, they are present and must be accounted for. Accordingly, a certain theological reductionism—the draining of local “color” (to invoke Ellison’s term) for the sake of empty conformity that characterizes whiteness—may be avoided. A major proposition of Ellison’s concept of race insists upon antagonistic cooperation among various racial groups for the ongoing formation and re-formation of their respective identities. The protagonist’s concluding observation in the same paragraph discussed above asserts that “One of the greatest jokes in the world is the spectacle of the whites busy escaping blackness and becoming blacker every day, and the blacks striving toward whiteness, becoming quite dull and gray. None of us seems to know who he is or where he is going.”73 This sentiment echoes poignantly (and more hopefully) in the novel’s

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closing line: “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you.”74 This relationship resides at the heart of Ellison’s invisible theology. Most harrowingly its indeterminacy draws on a disciplinary gaze to enforce rigid, if artificial, boundaries among racial identities; at its best, however, we find a measure of symbiosis. This is Ellison’s democratic risk. Consider the common appeal of another biblical motif— Exodus—to both English Puritans and enslaved New World Africans.75 Particular differences should not be ignored, but the myth itself remains capacious enough to serve as an evocative singular touchstone that contains very different conceptions, experiences, and performances of “America.” By reflecting on a biblical “way” of looking on invisibility, this first section has introduced specifically religious antecedents that, whatever Ellison’s conscious appropriation of them may have been, nevertheless contribute ineluctably to the concept that he revises as he constructs his evocative and ironic metaphor for race. These biblical structures have inscribed Ellisonian invisibility and participate in the literary and cultural meaning that this secular novel generates toward understanding the conceptual, political, and secular exigencies of race as an invisible theology.

Way Two: Emergent Modernity Shifting our focus on invisibility ahead several centuries, we turn to the early modern period—among other things, an age of exploration, of transatlantic voyages from Old World Europe to the New World of the Americas. Vital to our present concerns, these early encounters between Europeans and natives set in motion the earliest stirrings of what would become the modern concept of race. By the seventeenth century, as the Enlightenment began to suggest a greater sense of human equality (if still woefully imperfect, according to contemporary preferences), certain discoveries and interactions precipitated a further crisis of subjective appearance and objective reality—namely, how should one account for the empirical unequivalence of fellow human beings who, if not absolute equals, were certainly more equal than they conceivably could have been at any point in human history? Seeking to emancipate the world from pre-modern political and class dynamics,

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this new modern discourse unwittingly “transformed into one which helped enslave half the world.”76 Inherent to this tack is the sublimation of visible difference into the invisible world. The othering of these new colonial humans—natives and, later, Africans—drew on differences of appearance to nullify the more invisible reality of common humanity. In this way the very foundations of the concept of race draw upon a signal epistemological problem of the early modern period: the tension between appearances and reality and how this tension framed human understanding of God and humankind. Susan Schreiner locates the emergence of a modern sensibility in the sixteenth-century recognition that “there was no identity or even correspondence between appearance and reality or being and seeming,” and she traces these problematic relationships in writings by Martin Luther, Michel de Montaigne, and William Shakespeare. Schreiner’s representative authors engage with an eminent sensibility that the particular experiences of human life bear little resemblance to the general explanations available to human discernment. Nor do these experiences correspond to interpretations offered by traditional ecclesiastical and intellectual sources of authority. Consequently, the task for Luther, Montaigne, and Shakespeare, according to Schreiner, became one of assessment; the determination of “the real” relies upon successful negotiation of appearances that are deceptive by design. Traditional cosmology effectively comes unmoored “in the midst of vertiginous change” from the authority to which it previously held fast.77 Concerning this same problem, Karsten Harries distinguishes between the “subjective appearance” that humans perceive and a sense of “actuality” or “objective reality” that is separate from the subjective nature of appearance. “Reality cannot, in principle,” he posits, “be seen as it is. Reality as it is, is invisible. Such distrust of the eye is one of the defining characteristics of the emerging modern understanding of reality.” Such “distrust of the eye” should be taken both concretely and conceptually—as perceptive and epistemological.78 The disjuncture between appearance and reality for Schreiner inspires a tragic sensibility that Luther and Shakespeare share especially, although with a theological caveat: whereas the invisibility of God grounds the tragic sense of life for both Luther and Shakespeare, Luther’s God is hidden, obscured from human perception yet still present, viable, and active—albeit mysteri-

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ous—in the course of human affairs.79 “Shakespeare’s character,” however, “had to negotiate reality in a world far from God, a world that was always shifting, uncertain, dissolving, and in confusion.”80 In both cases notions of “subjective appearance” and “objective reality” frame the terms by which the “tragic” or “invisible” God serves as a conceptual anchor who, whether hidden or altogether absent, offers an epistemological point of intellectual reckoning. On the vanguard of modernity, God resides within antagonistic cooperation between subjective appearance and objective reality—the troubled and troubling relationship between particular perception and the more universally applicable (if invisible) truth that it contradicts. Two problems here bear what we might call a particularly Ellisonian mien: the (in)visibility of God and the disjuncture of appearances and reality in the quest for epistemological stability. First, the concept of an “invisible man” essentially inverts, ironizes, and riffs on Luther’s notion of a Hidden God as a humanistic analogy.81 The Hidden God posits the potential of the deity that extends beyond the limits of human apprehension. Likewise, Ellison’s invisibility, charged with the limits of American racial understanding (itself the invisible “reality” of whiteness) that preclude a multivalent encounter with blackness, exposes severe limitations in the American social imagination. As the invisible man describes his condition in the novel’s prologue, “The invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality.”82 Note the similarity of this statement to Schreiner’s insistence that “distrust of the eye” should be taken both literally and figuratively. It is not simply a matter of the capacity to perceive but also of the will to perceive that precludes the protagonist’s visibility to the wider (and whiter) world. Ellison recognizes a form of disjuncture between appearance and reality to govern literary production. In “Society, Morality, and the Novel,” he writes, “As an art form the novel is obsessed by the relationship between illusion and reality as revealed in duration and process.”83 The prevalence of such “illusion” (a visual metaphor) owed to the fact that “social reality had cut loose from its base and . . . new possibilities of experience and new possibilities of personality had been born into the awfully expanded world. Old class lines were being liquidated, and new

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lines were being formed and broken and re-formed; new types of men were arising mysteriously out of whirling social reality which revealed itself protean in its ability to change its appearance and its alignments rapidly, ruthless in its impiety toward old images of order, toward traditional modes of behavior.”84 This shifting conceptual landscape finds articulation in the illusory nature of reality and its inability to correspond with empirical observation. An invisible realm troubles the discrete forms upon which human agents have previously relied to provide stable meaning in no small part because it illuminates the tenuousness of reality itself.

Way Three: American Puritanism These signal modern tensions between an invisible world and its visible analogue, inaugurating a crisis of certainty, prove uniquely rich in foundational American sources. In this way Ellison’s invocation of invisibility also resonates with a long tradition in American letters dating back to the 1630s—to the first decade of the Puritan “errand into the wilderness.” Invisibility signals resistance in Puritan culture, signifying a realm outside the determinations of political power inextricably linked with ecclesial authority. For people whose eternal fate (as Puritans believed) was sealed yet unknowable—itself largely invisible—the value of unseen properties could prove a blessing and a curse: “There is then something [in invisibility] to be Enquired after,” Cotton Mather writes. “What cause [is there] for such Things?”85 The unseen might reveal what lies beyond this world for the individual believer. Unchecked, however, invisibility’s power was illicit and dangerous, elusive of a political and social order predicated on theocratic assumptions. Before taking up Cotton Mather’s Wonders of the Invisible World (1693), we should briefly visit the case of Anne Hutchinson. Brilliant, literate, and at heart a Puritan’s Puritan, Hutchinson found trouble for offering unsanctioned religious instruction to her fellow Puritan women and—probably more germane to her eventual court appearance—to men. She stood trial in 1638, accused of harboring Antinomian beliefs that stemmed from her willingness to deem Massachusetts Bay clergy as overly Arminian, concerned with law instead of grace and therefore excessively legalistic and incommensurate with ideal Puritan Calvinism.

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In the transcripts of her trial, she answers the specific charge of falsely claiming a direct revelation from God by citing verses of Scripture— including Hebrews 11:27: “But now having seen him which is invisible I fear not what man can do unto me.”86 Hutchinson’s immediate revelation subverts not only the gender hierarchy of colonial New England but also the very social structure of a community whose spatial and geographical orientation placed churches at the center of town, with pulpits as the focal points of those churches.87 By moving such revelation to the periphery, outside of the gaze of colonial (male) authority, Hutchinson contends creatively with the exclusions that she herself confronts. In this way her own invisibility enters the equation. By reading her own subversive experience into Scripture—for Puritans the highest authority—Hutchinson’s apprehension, quite literally, of the invisible man (“having seen him which is invisible,” which refers to God) stakes an inexorable claim to authenticity and insight that sets her distinctly apart from her “visible” accusers. Ultimately banished from Massachusetts Bay Colony, Hutchinson is sent into her own metaphorical underground in Providence and later in New Amsterdam. Her banishment, then, reifies her invisibility, subverting the power of the state (which is, of course, seated in the church) while simultaneously ascribing a decidedly deficient “temporal” nature (devalued to an even greater extent by her own eternal nature) to the power of Governor Winthrop and others to control her. In this way a gendered liminality does characterize Hutchinson’s invisibility, but it is in fact a material marginality cast in theological terms. Invisibility, for all its social and political guises, remains next to—and inextricable from—godliness. Nearly six decades later, Cotton Mather would title his accounts of the Salem witch trials Wonders of the Invisible World. Inherent in his treatment of these events is the way invisibility conveys the methods of the “other,” the misfit, the outsider, the despised among the community, endowed not with Christian authenticity, as Hutchinson claims, but with demonic capability. Such invisibility, tinged with evil, carries what we might now recognize as racial implications—shot through with metaphysical significance. Consider the case of Reverend George Burroughs, whom Mather depicts torturing his victims with “Invisible Hands.”88 Mather continues: “But the Court began to think . . . only that by the assistance of the Black Man, he might put on his Invisibility, and in that

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Fascinating Mist, gratifie his own Jealous humour, to hear what they said of him. Which trick of rendring themselves Invisible, our Witches do in their confessions pretend that they sometimes are Masters of; and it is the more credible, because there is Demonstration that they often render many other things utterly Invisible.”89 This invisible world offers a dimension of alternative power—one in which human beings might discern recognizable forms, but one also in which the ordinary determinations of law and custom—both natural and social—have lost the capacity to control its invisible analogue. Accordingly, Mather wields invisibility, quite literally, to demonize an other rendered in terms of darkness, blackness even, obfuscating the models and motivations of Christian charity. “Without light,” Ellison’s protagonist proclaims from the underground, “I am not only invisible, but formless as well; and to be unaware of this form is to live a death. I myself, after existing some twenty years, did not become alive until I discovered my invisibility.”90 To gain one’s life, one must lose it; to recognize one’s form necessitates invisibility. What both Hutchinson’s rebellious declaration and Mather’s anxious transcriptions bear in common, of course, is a religious foundation rooted in a worldview that presumes a viable spirit world, which vaguely mirrors this world, to interact with present reality. But even beyond such speculative characterizations, this religious orientation toward invisibility bespeaks an understanding of the unknown to reflect a seething (and more perfect) chaos that resides beyond the grasp of human apprehension. It becomes a locus of appeal from which the marginalized, those marked by otherness, are able to draw ironic subversions of power, as in Hutchinson’s highly Ellisonian feat of luring the very ministers that she accuses of being overly legalistic into trying her in a court of law. Invisibility becomes the imaginary and ironic terrain upon which material social battles over local arguments and misapprehensions aspire to more ultimate consequence. It stands for the chaotic void—the nihilo—out of which creation finds its creative order.

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Way Four: Indigenous African Sources and the Specter of Racecraft To consider religious dimensions of Ellison’s invisibility in concert with indigenous African traditions proves as counterintuitive as denominating his “invisible theology.” Rampersad notes that Ellison was “bothered” by “growing worship of Africa as the motherland of black America.”91 Along such lines, Ellison told an interviewer in 1965—as cultural Afrocentrism was in ascent—“I don’t believe that my form of expression springs from Africa, although it might be easier for me as an artist if it did.” Still, he remained quick to acknowledge that the Negro or Negro American culture that he claimed as birthright consisted of an amalgam of “African, European, and indigenous American blood” as integral components of one another.92 As would become more frequently the case, however, tendentious commentators cast Ellison’s demurral from singular categories as outright denial. The religious dimensions of invisibility in Kongo culture offer unique and complementary insight into the significance that invisibility as a metaphor for racial identity carries beyond its usual materialism, reflecting an interesting analogy for the relationship between sacred and secular.93 The move from Western to indigenous African sources, then, does more than simply diversify our representative sample of invisibilities (although it certainly does this as well). It also frames something important about claiming that Ellison possesses an invisible theology as a kind of rejoinder to social-scientific materialities that have come to characterize conceptions of race both in the second half of the twentieth century and as the legacies of these characterizations continue. More than two decades on, Simon Bockie’s Death and the Invisible Powers (1993) still offers the most comprehensive treatment of invisibility in any indigenous African tradition. The tenor of Bockie’s study, which focuses on Kongo invisibility, is corrective in its insistence on particularity: “Until today, the West has done most of the explaining of African existence,” he writes. “The time has come for Africans to set forth their values and identities as only they are capable of doing.”94 Such values and identities, he contends, derive from a “community of invisible powers, grounded in social relationship both with one another as invisible entities but also in community with the visible world.”95

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Consequently, while Bockie’s communitarian cosmology relies upon a strong rhetorical antagonism toward what he considers Western notions of individuality, his historiographical subtext aligns with Ellison’s thought in fascinating ways, negotiating borders of sacred and secular, pluribus and unum, and categories of the material and the metaphysical. In turn, these three broader categories map conceptually onto specific concerns associated with the first three ways of looking at invisibility in this introduction. Kongo spirituality recognizes no distinction between sacred and secular. Human beings, rather, embody spiritual reality, manifesting materially what is not seen. Human nature, then, becomes realized “through relationship with others in the community rather than through transcendence.”96 These relationships span the visible and invisible realms, uniting dimensions of spirit and matter. While emphasizing, contra Western assumptions, the absence of a definitive boundary between sacred and secular, an undercurrent of Bockie’s description charts the visible and invisible worlds as models for one another. On the one hand, human potential in the visible world corresponds with and strives to emulate ideals of the invisible world. On the other hand, the invisible world, while not seen, shares with the visible world a certain vitality of life, casting “life here and life in the realm beyond death” as “a fundamental value of existence.”97 In this way the spiritual and the secular, as iterations of the invisible and visible, respectively, dwell not in conflict but, rather, as distinct yet related dimensions of living united in community as well as by analogy. The nature of such an analogy suggests a certain coherence with the new secularism promoted by Fessenden’s categorical reading, Charles Taylor’s structural argument, Ziolkowski’s notion of surrogacy, and Modern’s atmospheric conception: the secular (Bockie’s human or visible world) remains inextricable from a sacred (spiritual or invisible, according to Bockie) cosmos through which it is inflected. Consider Bockie’s characterization of sacrifice as a “rendezvous . . . between visible and invisible worlds.” Such offerings as a goat or palm wine function to repair broken covenant between “human and spiritual beings.”98 Put differently, such rites reestablish a ruptured relationship between visible and invisible realms. Bockie’s rhetorical emphasis on

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denying distinction bears some scrutiny. These categories, in fact, are not indistinct. Dimensions of the human and spiritual, the visible and invisible remain demarcated by the nature of life as both worldly and otherworldly. Even as collective expressions of living, these dimensions remain in tension. Rooted in what Bockie calls the “dependency” of the “human world” upon the other, invisible world.99 Distinction and otherness must negotiate set terms of relationality that mirror the nature of individual and group identity. Bockie writes of Kongo society: “Any goal an individual sets up, any activity he or she undertakes, is done in the context of the whole group. The individual is to be aware of what the group expects from him or her; he or she acts according to that expectation, that will, those needs. Although the society acknowledges each person as a unique individual with unique qualities, talents, and personality, that does not make him or her independent from others. His or her uniqueness, personality, and ambitions are meaningful only when seen in the framework of the whole.”100 From this meaningful tension, cast in social (and thus material, visible, worldly) terms, we might derive (drawing from Schleiermacher’s particulars and universals) a religious analogy—one that extends as well to the relationship between visible and invisible dimensions.101 Also embedded in the relational metaphor and the “dependency” of the visible world upon the invisible is an inherent epistemological inequality between the two realms. The divide between material and spiritual dimensions in Kongo understanding is death. In some ways (old age, for instance, or natural causes), death remains a cooperative aspect of the common life shared by the visible and invisible realms. In other ways, death becomes antagonistic, “the great disrupter,” an “interruption.” Note Bockie’s use of the language of rupture here. These instances include untimely or unnatural death.102 Such antagonism, framed by the complex epistemological inscrutability of invisibility, remains—though related to and cooperative with visible life—mysterious. Visible beings lack material answers for invisible uncertainty. Kongo culture attributes such invisible complexity to “kindoki,” which Bockie defines as the “invisible power to do harm.” “Invisible spirits,” he continues, “are most often credited as the causes of illness and death when they seem complex and unidentifiable. . . . The more

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complicated the disaster, the more suspected [kindoki] are.”103 Absent reliable, visible theodicies, Kongo traditions invoke invisibility through kindoki. While kindoki bears material—even embodied—consequences (illness, death, loss of property and other resources), it primarily offers invisible, obscure rationales that belie such materiality. Understandably, Bockie prefers the indigenous term to its usual English translation as “witchcraft” because he wishes to retain a neutral, ambivalent tone when discussing the term for Western audiences, who may fetishize exotic irrationality. While I certainly wish to honor the distinction and his motivation, acknowledging witchcraft as an invisible power offers a valuable opportunity for exploring invisibility’s broader connection to constructions of racial identity—whose phenotypical marking remains largely visible. Barbara and Karen Fields argue compellingly that an “invisible ontology” unites witchcraft with what they call “racecraft.”104 Contrary to popular (and abiding) historical beliefs concerning the biological origins of race and its capacity to determine aspects of human identity, health, and culture, the Fieldses turn to the work of E. E. EvansPritchard (whom Bockie also cites) on belief in traditional African witchcraft practices among the Azande people of the Kongo in Central Africa. In Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande (1937), Evans-Pritchard shows “how Africa’s traditional beliefs about an invisible ontology of spirits can be rationally held, even if false—and even if held onto in the presence of countervailing evidence.”105 The upshot of Evans-Pritchard’s findings holds that it matters little that witchcraft (kindoki) is not real or true. On a certain level, the Azande understand it to be untrue in a literal sense. The point remains, however, that witchcraft’s invisible ontology is so intrinsic to their belief system and the culture it generates that, despite its so-called falseness, it verifies cultural logic. An invisible ontology rationalizes witchcraft even as adherents understand witchcraft as utterly irrational from a scientific perspective. This invisible ontology bears a protosecular quality in keeping with Charles Taylor’s notion of an immanent frame, giving structure to reality. At the same time, such witchcraft defies religious naturalism because while supernatural properties qualify as literally untrue from this perspective, they remain viable and inextricable from the reality to which they contribute.

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Witchcraft parallels what the Fieldses call “racecraft” because, like witchcraft, race persists as a mythical, irrational presence in Western societies whose own cultural logic persists as a rationalization of reality despite the fact that its scientific premises hold no merit. Race is empirically invisible, yet its material consequences prove real. As the Fieldses aver, despite the fact that race bears no biological validity, such rationalizations persist in the form of social-scientific materialisms that gained traction at midcentury and so bedeviled Ellison throughout his life. An interesting paradox remains, however. The Fieldses note that “we approach witchcraft and racecraft as if they belonged to two different orders of phenomena: as if one were a compelling belief and the other, a bad choice in matters of belief; one, truth of a different order and the other, false beliefs destructible through the propagation of truth; one, an element of human diversity the other, an ugly reaction to that diversity.”106 Despite their coherences, race remains a secular property in popular currency while witchcraft is relegated to supernatural belief. The former mirrors what we might call “good” theology, the latter, “bad” theology.107 The Fieldses are quick to note that this correspondence does not represent a direct concordance between witchcraft and racecraft, but their common status as cultural manifestations of an invisible ontology certainly marks their similarities. It also offers a fascinating model for our own invisible theology. Comparing witchcraft and racecraft draws together elements ordinarily understood as oppositional. Witchcraft deals in the supernatural; it is irrational. Yet, invisibly, it participates inextricably in the broader cultural logic of Azande people. Conversely, racecraft, also mythical and ascientific, rationalizes Western and particularly American orders of reality. Terms of secular and sacred begin to break down much as they do in Bockie’s account. They retain functional differences, but with Bockie—as with New Secularists such as Fessenden, Taylor, Ziolkowski, and Modern—we do well to emphasize the collapse of these distinctions. Invisible ontology prefigures what we call Ellison’s invisible theology. By using Ellison as an exemplar for what it might mean to remove the concept of race from its social-scientific and materialist contexts that seek to rationalize structures of reality for a secular age, we at once honor race’s irrationality while simultaneously recovering (and making

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visible) the ways such irrational myths have become rationalized, naturalized, and violently inscribed on material bodies. By re-mythologizing invisibility through the recovery of an obscured cultural history on which Ellison draws, we establish terms for recognizing in our own era (as well as future situations) the risks that come from rationalization and humankind’s tendency to pursue it at stringent costs. There is nothing inherently wrong with social and materialist rationalizations as such. We should, however, understand them as they truly are: invisible theologies. On a final note, observe how Bockie’s system, representing the fourth way of looking at an invisible man, reinforces aspects of the first three ways we have encountered. As in Hebrew biblical accounts we find political theology that negotiates individual and community, what we draw parallel to pluribus and unum. Like the Pauline definition of invisibility, Bockie’s invisible world, while unknown and mysterious, carries a proto-Platonic essentialist authenticity. In keeping with early modern sources—particularly the deus absconditis—a certain epistemological gulf decenters worldly authority within a crisis of certainty. Like Mather’s account of the Salem witch trials, the invisible world ruptures visible reality through an invasion much like Bockie’s kindoki and the Fieldses’ racecraft. Despite the considerable temporal, geographical, and cultural distances that these exemplars span, invisibility carries stable significations that, on the lower frequencies, offer a useful counternarrative to invisibility’s more recent materialist turn.

Conclusion The four ways of looking at an invisible man we have explored remain impressionistic, suggestive, provocative exemplars of the rich antecedent legacies of invisibility as Ralph Ellison’s signal metaphor for racial identity and its political implications. The proceeding narrative digs more deeply into the specific religious dimensions that form the broader invisible theology characterizing Ellison’s fiction and criticism. These readings offer evidence of Ellison’s understanding of his own racial reality (and the reality he both inherited and would cede to future generations) as incapable of rationalization. Such reality is absurd. It is ironic. It lacks reason and reflects the lengths human beings will go in order to construct myths and cosmologies to account for the way things are, and

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the way things might be. What more appropriate critical lens might we deploy, then, than a religious one? The five chapters comprising this book move chronologically across five representative moments in Ellison’s career, deploying diverse iterations of religious study to illuminate new elements and insights into his work—particularly its conceptions of racial identity—and its broader cultural and historical contexts. We open in the wake of the Harlem Renaissance, when Ellison, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and Alain Locke, among others, wrangle with what it means to depict African American life—as it is, or as it should be? These questions map onto long-eighteenth-century questions of Providence and representation in the English novel that cast the twentieth-century debates in a new light. Chapter 2 reads Invisible Man in tandem with representative works by Reinhold Niebuhr, Perry Miller, and Paul Tillich that were also published or produced in 1952. The third chapter draws on archival research to detail Ellison’s close friendship with Nathan A. Scott Jr., an Episcopal priest who taught theology and literature at Chicago and, later, Virginia, and recognized and even cultivated a theological sensibility in Ellison’s work. In chapter 4 we consider how changing dynamics in American civil religion affected Ellison’s composition of (and his ultimate failure to complete) the long-wrought second novel. Chapter 5 considers Ellison’s recourse to nineteenth-century American literature as a reservoir of post-Calvinist influence that later informs his pronouncement of slavery and racism as the “American original sin.” This trajectory reflects consistent and evolving appeals to intellectual, cultural, and performative religious elements at play in Ellison’s career from the time of his arrival in Harlem in 1936 until his death in 1994. The conclusion moves into the twenty-first century, building on this introduction’s historical genealogy to assess two recent instances of invisibility in American and global contexts: (1) It reads Clint Eastwood’s “empty chair” address at the 2012 Republican National Convention (and its aftermath) as a point of embarkation for thinking about questions of the alleged “postracial” character of Obama’s America. (2) It considers invisibility in terms of drone warfare and the late “war on terror” as a new iteration for which Ellison’s mid-twentieth-century concept offers arresting insight. The conclusion suggests that, far from being passé, Ellison’s metaphor and its implications for negotiating racial identity and

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its cultural productions was in fact prescient and offers a conceptual way forward for understanding twenty-first-century global and American realities for which late-twentieth-century materialism proves insufficient. Having traced invisibility back far before Ellison, and having considered the present tense of his life and work (and their contexts), the conclusion speaks to the abiding and future vitality of Ellison’s work, his concept of race, and the necessity for a more capacious and ironic critical understanding of it facilitated by recognizing its religious dimensions as an invisible theology.

1

From Harlem Renaissance to Harlem Apocalypse Just Representations and the Epistemology of Race

On July 5 or 6, 1936, Ralph Ellison, having just completed three years’ study at Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute, arrived in New York City following the general route taken by millions of migrants from the rural South to the urban North during the interwar period. He quickly settled into Harlem. On only his second day in the city (or so the story goes), Ellison happened upon Alain Locke, whom he had met earlier at Tuskegee, in the lobby of the Harlem YMCA. Locke, who was speaking with Langston Hughes, welcomed Ellison and introduced him to Hughes before soon departing and leaving the new arrival to make an immediate impression upon the poet. Hughes quickly hired Ellison as a personal assistant and effectively fostered his transition to the city, making introductions and affording him an entrée to Harlem’s intellectual, cultural, and political opportunities.1 We begin with this tableau in the lobby of the Harlem YMCA because it frames the context of Ellison’s arrival within currents that moved Harlem’s intellectual and artistic scenes in the 1930s. By 1936 Locke and Hughes represented a pivot in the African American vanguard. A decade earlier Locke, as editor of The New Negro (1925), oversaw the documentation of emergent cultural modernization in African American life that flowered before economic crisis withered the opportunity that generated it. Hughes, already a respected poet, was fast becoming a public intellectual and man of letters, emphasizing leftist political influence in his literary and journalistic writing— most evident, perhaps, in his controversial 1935 poem “Goodbye Christ,” which encourages Jesus to “beat it on away from here” to make room for a “real” alternative: “Marx Communist Lenin Peasant Stalin Worker ME.”2 Together Locke and Hughes reflect a state of flux in African American letters as older migrants settled into new lives and newer migrants (like Ellison) entered communities that, for all of 39

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their fluidity, bore established reputations. As Ellison observes in his autobiographical essay “An Extravagance of Laughter,” Harlem proved both familiar and strange: “Familiar because of my racial and cultural identification with the majority of its people and the lingering spell that had been cast nationwide by . . . the so-called Harlem Renaissance—I viewed New Yorkers through the overlay of my Alabama experience. Contrasting the whites I encountered with those I had observed in the South, I weighed class against class and compared Southern styles with their Northern counterparts. I listened to diction and noted dress, and searched for attitudes in inflections, carriage, and manners.”3 The process of migration involves the negotiation of seemingly familiar and unfamiliar epistemes. Navigation of these poles comes with tremendous risk as individuals and communities alike reinvent themselves, applying their own imaginations and circumstances to a variety of competing templates for modernity.4 Literature rates as a singular, highly effective template among these options—certainly not available to all (though definitely available to more than at any time up to that point in African American history), yet especially compelling for young Ralph Ellison and the company he kept. This chapter contextualizes literature surrounding the urban struggle of African American migrants in the first half of the twentieth century with the problem of poetic justice in the novels of longeighteenth-century England—especially concerning matters of race and its representation in the development of the twentieth-century African American novel. Taken together, these examples represent progressive iterations of a crisis of certainty that frames Ellison’s intellectual and writerly development. Both examples address, in their own way, questions of epistemology—the problem of knowledge—in the wake of dynamic cultural and social shifts that unmoor populations from traditional sources of certainty, authority, and identity. In this way they reflect a trajectory, from the Enlightenment to twentieth-century African American modernism, of post-Christian attempts to gain coherence and meaning while being set adrift from traditional religious authority. In the process, these eighteenth-century sources reframe race and its literary representation in the first half of the twentieth century, effectively revising the terms of Ellison’s own emergence and evolution as a literary figure and novelist during this time. The terms of comparison hinge on

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the novel’s prescriptive authority as a literary genre to address a crisis of certainty at the heart of migration itself: how should migrants square dynamic modes of individual and collective identity and culture with those cultures and identities left behind? African American literature of the migration era consistently invokes this epistemological crisis: what does it mean to be a “Negro” in a strange land? Such questions pursue what we might call the “just representation” (to use Samuel Johnson’s phrase) of African American identity and culture, pointing to a parallel set of concerns among migrants from rural to urban contexts in long-eighteenth-century England. This historical template provides critical background for a reading in Zora Neale Hurston’s early novels (especially Jonah’s Gourd Vine [1934] and Their Eyes Were Watching God [1937]) and their reception among critics such as Wright, Locke, and Ellison. Pairing these disputes reflects a crisis of certainty framing racial identity as a novelistic problem that participates nonetheless in increasingly secular debates concerning the identity and representation of racial justice in modernity. What is, as one critic outlines the eighteenth-century dispute, “the proper artistic representation” of blackness, given “the real condition of the world” in the early twentieth century that constructed it?5 How might a materialist concept like race reflect a theological sensibility even among post-Christian writers and critics engaged with a presumably secular (or secularizing) modernity? The social and epistemological conditions that led to the rise of the novel in long-eighteenth-century England reflect in African American expression what Willie James Jennings calls “the deep architecture that patterned early modern visions of peoples, places, and societies,” what Tracy Fessenden calls an “unmarked [religious] category” that we may trace in these twentieth-century analogues.6 The terms of this comparison recast African American modernity as grappling despite (or even through) its secular aims with epistemological issues that bear religious and theological significance. Toward these ends this chapter culminates with a reading in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) that charts Ellison’s eventual shift in the imagination of racial representation away from his earlier postulations against Hurston to a more mature vision as reflected in Invisible Man. The eschatological, even apocalyptic destruction that Ellison’s narrative wreaks upon Harlem—which had undergone a “renaissance” a quarter-century earlier—in the novel’s closing chapters signals

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Ellison’s assertion of a new aesthetic in the literary representation of race, crafted in the rhetorical and generic conventions of apocalypticism— itself an administration of justice couched in religious terms.

New Negroes and Older Reformations Black modernism emerged in the wake of migration as people of African descent from rural, provincial origins (such as the Caribbean and the American South) began moving to northern US urban centers around the time of the Great War.7 In New York’s Harlem a group of artists, comprised primarily of recent migrants, dedicated themselves to the aesthetic task of redefining blackness in American and global contexts amid shifting ontologies of dynamic identity. The result expressed a fluid sensibility of newness and cosmopolitanism that ran counter to repressive pre-modern origins in the rural South. They were “New Negroes,” and so their literary concerns turned to representing what they understood to constitute the reality of this new identity. The New Negro heralded the emergence of the self-consciously modern cultural movement that has come to be known as the Harlem Renaissance.8 Lured by opportunities foreign to the Jim Crow conditions from which they had fled, these migrants became urbanized. New York’s African American population of 23,601 in 1890 would balloon to 152,467 in 1920, and to nearly 328,000 in 1930—overall growth of just under 1,400 percent during an era spanning roughly from Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) to the beginning of the Great Depression.9 Chicago, whose own rich “renaissance” movement flourished in the South Side’s Bronzeville neighborhood, witnessed similar growth.10 According to Black Metropolis, the African American population in Chicago grew from 30,150 in 1900 and 44,103 in 1910 to more than 236,000 in 1934 and 337,000 before the end of World War II, with the rate of African Americans in Chicago’s city population, below 2 percent between 1890 and just before World War I, growing to more than 10 percent by 1944.11 In the wake of stringent and drastic change, The New Negro and related renaissance movements in Harlem and Bronzeville served practically to codify new, urban, modern terms of blackness as a significant and transformed identity in American culture.12 This literary transformation bears a striking resemblance to the rise of the English novel in the long eighteenth century, which reflexively

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sheds new light on the literary transformations afoot during the urban renaissance movements of the Great Migration period. Between 1600 and 1750 London’s population more than tripled, while the percentage of the English population living there rose precipitously from 4.9 percent to 11.6 percent.13 This expansion and its subsequent crowding of the urban landscape facilitated at least two significant changes that could also apply to Harlem and Bronzeville: (1) A previously rural people, unmoored from the formative communities, customs, and lifestyles to which they had been accustomed, found themselves thrust into disorienting environments. (2) This new urban landscape compromised older spatial and social orientations, affecting the retention and preservation of former identities. Solitude, too, came at a premium, altering the politics of individual identity and its human interactions with classes and varieties of people one might never have encountered otherwise. Simply put, former realities no longer pertained in these novel contexts. Emerging in the midst of such transition, the English novel responded didactically to urbanization and diversification by instructing a population largely unfamiliar with urban mores in both the dangers and best practices of urban life, reinforcing necessary tools for social, moral, and physical survival in a frequently perilous environment. It also unified the epistemological concerns of a broader reading public confronted to an unprecedented extent by strangers from across Britain and the British empire who held foreign social and moral customs. Adrift from traditional authorities and narratives that would have previously contextualized such changes in individual and corporate experience, J. Paul Hunter suggests that the novel permitted a reader to traverse a diversity of exclusive and contradictory perspectives.14 Not everyone would agree. One prominent eighteenth-century criticism of the novel held that many readers could not successfully navigate such a diversity of perspectives. Samuel Johnson, for instance, argued that literature (ideally embodied by Shakespeare’s “just representations of general nature”) should, alternatively, illustrate and instruct readers in traditional modes of certainty amid the vagaries of modernity.15 In Johnson’s view, any representation qualifies as unjust that does not contribute to the edification of its reader. Excepting incidences in which the historical record makes it impossible to do so, novels should represent “the most perfect ideal of virtue.”16 Vice should disgust. Here Johnson’s

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“justice” comes into focus. As it represents “general nature,” justice is not necessarily verisimilar. Novelistic realism reflects the world as it is, which may corrupt or confuse vulnerable audiences. Johnson’s “just representation of general nature” reflects the world as it should be. It represents an ordered, cohesive accounting of reality that might not cohere with the limits of human experience, but it offers a more general appraisal of reality’s grander scheme as perceived in the mind of a providential and omniscient God. Similar issues reside at the heart of Ian Watt’s generic understanding of the novel, which holds “realism” and the problem of the correspondence between reality and novelistic representation to be epistemological problems.17 How do the inventions of fiction reflect truths of human experience? The question of realism also occupies the dispute between Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding during the 1740s, through which Michael McKeon suggests that in addition to Watt’s attention to realism as a mode of truth telling, the epistemological quandary of the novel also concerns the relationship of such truth to virtue.18 Where does a novel’s virtue reside? Should it aspire to realism or to “just representations”? Richardson’s Pamela (1741) (aptly subtitled Or, Virtue Rewarded) exemplifies Johnson’s “just representations of general nature” in its depiction of the dogged pursuit of young Pamela Andrews, a maidservant, by one Mr. B, the master of the house, narrated by Pamela in a series of letters ostensibly intended for her parents.19 Incongruous for presentday readers (rape looms large as a viable threat for much of the novel; Mr. B essentially has Pamela kidnapped and confined in a cottage at one point), Pamela’s virtue, preserved by her steadfast refusal to yield sexually to Mr. B’s pursuits, is rewarded in the end by marriage to her once tormentor, and thereby through her ascent from lower-class servitude to lady of the house. Despite Pamela’s popularity as a best seller in mideighteenth-century England, it also met with ridicule for its outlandish plot twists, the troubling implications it casts (whether intentionally or not) upon class dynamics, and its utter failure to recognize that Pamela’s narrative bears little if any relationship to what one might have considered to be the reality of human affairs. Henry Fielding was among the primary figures to take exception to Richardson’s work in Pamela, going so far as to publish a parody (An

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Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews [1741]) and to enter into a protracted debate with Richardson over the function of the novel for representing truth as it relates to virtue. Fielding espouses a realism more attuned to representing human life as it is—not as it should be. His narrator appears to address Richardson and Pamela at least indirectly in the opening to book 15 of his novel Tom Jones (1749): “There are a set of religious, or rather moral writers, who teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery, in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.”20 Fielding’s claim casts the terms of Richardson’s novelistic solution in doubt (and indeed, through Shamela, in ridicule), untethering literary representation from the certainties of justice that many (including Johnson) would have it reflect. Jill Campbell suggests that, in contrast to Richardson, Fielding’s representations are “never singular or monolithic.” Fielding explores “the contradictions, gaps, and disjunctions within a society’s system of practices and beliefs at any one time.”21 Specifics of such epistemological disjuncture vary over the course of Fielding’s career, yet he remained dedicated to the just representation of a complexity that eschewed generality and epistemological simplification. In Fielding’s Shamela, for instance, the title itself subverts certainty by labeling Pamela (both the character and the novel) as a “sham,” as false or misleading. Furthermore, the reader learns at the outset that Pamela’s narrative, in which virtue is rewarded, is neither what it seems nor true because the very nature of the narrative has been altered (as Shamela writes to her mother) to “make my Husband [Mr. Booby—Fielding’s take on Mr. B], and me, and Parson Williams [Shamela’s lover], to be all great People; for he can make black white, it seems.”22 Implicating Richardson, Fielding casts Pamela as a lie. And yet, while such a characterization may displease Richardson, or Samuel Johnson (who admired Richardson’s just representations of general nature), this “lie” for Fielding signifies the generic power of the novel—as a work of fiction—to explore the complexity of human motivations.23 In response to Richardson’s novelistic orthodoxy, Fielding posits a heterodox network of human designs that, though disavowing correspondences between human experience and providential design, effectively invokes the very crisis of certainty at the heart of the novel’s generic epistemological function.24

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Consider a troubling episode in Pamela, when Mr. B disguises himself as one of Pamela’s attendants and climbs into bed with her: “O sir,” exclaimed I, “leave me, do but leave me, and I will do anything I ought to do.” “Swear then to me,” said he, “that you will accept my proposals!” And then . . . he put his hand in my bosom. With struggling, fright, terror, I quite fainted away, and did not come to myself soon; so that they both . . . thought me dying. And I remember no more, than that, when, with great difficulty, they brought me to myself.25

Contrast Richardson’s helpless, hysterical Pamela’s reaction with that of Fielding’s hellcat, Shamela: Mrs. Jervis and I are just in Bed, and the Door unlocked. . . . I hear [Booby] just coming in at the Door. . . . Well, he is in Bed between us, we both shamming a Sleep, he steals his Hand into my Bosom, which I, as if in my Sleep, press close to me with mine, and then pretend to awake.—I no sooner see him, but I scream out to Mrs. Jervis, she feigns likewise but just to come to herself; we both begin, she to becall, and I to bescratch very liberally. After having made a pretty free Use of my fingers, without any great Regard to the Parts that I attack’d, I counterfeit a Swoon.26

For Pamela, virtue resides in her chastity. Her ability to preserve this chastity, to “do anything [she] ought to do” (emphasis mine), leads to her nuptial reward. For Shamela, virtue resides in preserving the illusion of chastity (which she has in fact lost, and continues to surrender, to Parson Williams—even after marrying Booby), leading to her reward of wedded bliss—of which she quickly grows weary. Pamela’s and Shamela’s respective relationships with the truth prove telling and significant. If Pamela offers a just representation of general nature, of the way things ought to be, then Shamela draws the curtain back to expose the mechanisms that would be necessary to orchestrate such nature as it is. Fielding, then, differentiates between appearance (Pamela as novel) and reality (Shamela as the “true story” behind Richardson’s artifice). In this way he interrogates and nullifies, if not the possibility of some general nature in which virtue finds providential reward, then certainly

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the literary capacity to align human agency and epistemology in a successful, and just, representation. These eighteenth-century disputes raise a number of questions visà-vis twentieth-century black renaissance movements: In what way did the Negro novel as a just representation of a general, racial nature for African Americans on the vanguard of modernity represent something along the lines of a commensurate epistemological crisis to that reflected in eighteenth-century English novels and their criticism? How could the novels of Afro-America in the 1930s supply a cultural lexicon chronicling (and thereby teaching) survival in an unfamiliar and perilous environment? What were the religious and theological aspects of such didacticism (or lack thereof)? What was the “general nature” of reality? What distinguishes a “just representation” from realism? The New Negro offers some background to these debates. An anthology, The New Negro includes poetry and short fiction as well as essays assessing the state of Negro music, visual art, drama, economics, and folkways in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Conspicuously absent from this list is any meaningful discussion of either Christianity (which most migrants knew at least nominally, and many practiced) or religion more broadly construed, thus qualifying The New Negro—on the surface, at least—as a “secular” document.27 This proves especially surprising when one considers the centrality of religious organizations (at the very least) to the social and political survival of African Americans after slavery. Church communities in particular were vital in organizing the first great period of black migration both during and after World War I and migrant communities also proved fertile ground for new religious movements.28 Instead, a reader interested in religion quickly discovers from The New Negro’s rhetoric that the structures, beliefs, and practices of religions and religious people seem to find no place in the Harlem Renaissance’s modern “metamorphosis” into “the progressive phases of contemporary Negro life.”29 For those who had become truly “new,” these modes of religion disappeared. Thus, “new” Negroes, situated on the vanguard, literally wrote the old stragglers and other outliers out of their new cultural canon. In his introductory essay, The New Negro’s editor, Alain Locke, articulates implicitly this separation of religion from the renaissance project. He establishes a division between what is new and old, using language

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that signals the Negro’s move away from the old “myth” of the past, evolving instead into a transformed, self-determining new creature with “idols of the tribe to smash” en route to a thoroughly modern sensibility.30 The emerging worldview is “scientific,” not “sentimental.”31 It looks away from the domestic rural sphere of “down-home” and toward a sensibility of industrial urban progress. Such a transformation is fueled in Locke by a Marxist conception of the relationship between class and history, including the requisite limitations that such systems of thought impose upon religion: “For generations the Negro has been the peasant matrix of that section of America which has most undervalued him, and here he has contributed not only materially in labor and in social patience, but spiritually as well.”32 The symbolic move northward to industrial technology, to self-determination, to urban sophistication—to modernity—necessitates for Alain Locke (as it did for John Locke more than two centuries before) a new rationalization, a different constitution of religion and its irrational spiritual elements. In this way the “new” Negro undergoes a “spiritual Coming of Age.”33 Declaring such a “coming of age,” Alain Locke implies the need for spiritual “maturation,” a progression away from pious religiosity and toward a modern revision of its beliefs and expressions. It is no mere coincidence, then, that The New Negro and its scientific worldview announced the Harlem Renaissance—a movement immersed in, among other things, the emergence of social science—in the same year that the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee, galvanized a popular understanding of incompatibility between scientific modernism and the “fundamentals” of the Christian faith.34 Both the Harlem Renaissance and a modernist tack such as the appropriation of Darwinism carry a secularizing impulse at the core of their individual missions. Both serve as touchstones for a larger modernist cultural transformation in the early decades of the twentieth century. They move away from a status quo organized broadly in religious terms, articulated most frequently through the residual cultural memory of rural origins, and toward a post-Christian just representation of general nature grounded in the secular principles and methods of science that bespeak a rational and cohesive sense of urbane sophistication, untethered from previous conceptual moorings for virtue and justice. This shift, as depicted in The New Negro, proved a wholesome and comfortable doctrine to which some novelists (includ-

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ing Zora Neale Hurston) had but one objection: namely, that it was not entirely true. Others, as we shall see, would disagree.

Zora Neale Hurston: “Just Representations” or “Just Folks”? Zora Neale Hurston spent decades in literary limbo before Robert Hemenway’s biography and the efforts of Alice Walker, among others, resurrected her reputation and secured her deserved status among canonical American, African American, and women authors of the twentieth century.35 A variety of circumstances contributed to Hurston’s fall from favor, including scandal and Hurston’s tendency for intemperate, even reactionary political commentary.36 Yet, despite her more recent ascent as an “authentic” voice in African American and women’s letters, Hurston’s fall from literary grace between the late 1940s and the late 1970s was hastened by her iconoclastic approach to writing race— especially in her novels. Critical receptions of Jonah’s Gourd Vine and Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Hurston’s own subsequent assessments of Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children (1938) and Native Son (1940), stage a debate among significant African American literary figures set in the aftermath of the urban renaissance movements’ struggles to come to terms with race, its epistemological implications for identity, and how such identity should find representation in literature written by, for, and about, African Americans. In other words, Hurston, Wright, Alain Locke, Ellison, and others were concerned with articulating a cosmology to which a stable understanding of race and its exigencies contributed. Therefore—in the spirit of their eighteenth-century predecessors—their wranglings with race (both internally and with one another in print) denote a strident concern with the ethical implications of its just representation in literature. Their disputes rehash the spirit, if not the letter, of that earlier period of urbanization and the implications that such cultural transformations carry.37 Initially circulating among the Harlem Renaissance “establishment,” Hurston’s early short story “Spunk” appeared in The New Negro. She studied at Howard University under Alain Locke before moving on to Barnard College, where she trained (along with fellow student Margaret Mead) with the cultural anthropologist Franz Boas.38 Hurston’s immersion in anthropology transformed her literary sensibility. A native of

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Eatonville, Florida, a town founded and inhabited entirely by African Americans, Hurston’s anthropological training helped her understand people and their folkways as “natural phenomena who should be studied as closely as any textbook.”39 Following a decade away spent studying in Washington and New York, among other locales, she returned to Eatonville determined to ply her ethnographic craft as an outsider, maintaining an air of detached, social-scientific “objectivity”—an approach she soon discovered would not fly among Eatonvillians, who did not know any “folk tales.” With some prodding from Boas, Hurston altered her tactics, approaching her subjects instead as an “insider”—as “Zora”—rather than a collector or observer. This renewed approach proved fruitful. Townspeople who had not known folk tales knew plenty of “stories.”40 Implicit in Hurston’s strategic revision is a reassessment of the modernist African American sensibility toward which the renaissance project and Locke’s New Negro clearly aspired. Her fieldwork in Eatonville and other research undertaken throughout the Caribbean and the American South reoriented her understanding of African American culture as one rooted, among other things, in rural and pre-modern sensibilities. Having migrated north and become modernized, Hurston recognized the ways rural folklife oriented her negotiations of race and culture. Her research spotlighted the unscientific myths through which she organized and translated the world, its people, and the rituals through which they ordered their lives. Hurston’s first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, carries the evident mark of her fieldwork even as it resists rationalizations of its findings. Its protagonist is John Pearson, a black preacher modeled roughly after Hurston’s own father. Eatonville serves as a primary setting and the narrative incorporates significant elements of Hurston’s fieldwork, some of which she renders verbatim.41 The novel is written almost exclusively in dialect and, paired with its rural setting and bawdy vernacular humor, many contemporary black critics read Jonah’s Gourd Vine as a regressive contribution to Negro literature, an unwelcome return to the farm, as it were, from an author who ought to know better. Still, the reviews were largely positive, at times very strong, among white readers—a fact not lost on Hurston’s detractors.42 Margaret Wallace, in the New York Times,

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deemed it “without fear of exaggeration the most vital and original novel about the American Negro that has yet been written by a member of the Negro race,” locating its “charm” in “its language: rich, expressive, and lacking in self-conscious artifice.”43 Andrew Burris disagrees in the Crisis, published by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), noting that while Hurston “was in the vanguard” of the New Negro movement, she disappoints with Jonah’s Gourd Vine: “[Hurston] has used her characters and the very situations created for them as mere pegs upon which to hang their dialect and their folkways.”44 To the detriment of her novelistic craft and, moreover, to her broader responsibilities as a Negro novelist, she proves “unequal to the demands of her conception.”45 The gap between Wallace and Burris’s assessments, one from white America’s paper of record in praise of Hurston’s “vital” depiction of the American Negro and the other from the mouthpiece of the NAACP decrying her failure to do justice to her race by presenting “backward Negro people,” is clear.46 Critics divided along racial lines. With the 1937 publication of Hurston’s second novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, more vociferous resistance to Hurston’s representation of race emerged, particularly from three representative critics. One, Hurston’s teacher at Howard, Alain Locke, was an established literary figure. Two others were up-and-comers: Richard Wright (who had issued his “Blueprint for Negro Literature” in 1937, calling for a break from Harlem Renaissance modes of writing, and would publish a collection of short stories, Uncle Tom’s Children, in 1938 and the acclaimed novel Native Son in 1940), and Ralph Ellison, an essayist and short story writer whose Invisible Man would arrive in 1952.47 Narrated by Janie, a woman returning to Eatonville after burying her third husband, Their Eyes chronicles the events of her lifelong search for love and human authenticity, rendered richly with biblical and eirobiblical citation and imagery as she finds herself at odds with the expectations of the community and the traditional mores that she must navigate. Finally finding “true love” in Tea Cake, her blues-singer third husband twenty years her junior, Janie is forced to kill him in self-defense when he contracts rabies and attacks her with a pistol. Put on trial, she finds herself unable to testify in her own defense before a jury of white men. Nonetheless, she is acquitted

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and returns home to Eatonville, where she enters the frame that began the novel and tells her story—in fact, the novel’s narrative—to Phoeby Watson on the back porch of her house. Locke, Wright, and Ellison’s complaints against Their Eyes resonate across their respective reviews. Locke inquires, “when will the Negro novelist of maturity, who knows how to tell a story convincingly—which is Miss Hurston’s cradle gift, come to grips with motive fiction and social document fiction? Progressive southern fiction has already banished the legend of these entertaining pseudo-primitives whom the reading public still loves to laugh with, weap [sic] over and envy. Having gotten rid of condescension, let us now get over oversimplication!”48 Wright echoes Locke’s sentiments about Hurston’s simplification of matters, and adds: Miss Hurston voluntarily continues in her novel the tradition which was forced upon the Negro in the theatre, that is, the minstrel technique that makes the “white folks” laugh. Her characters eat and laugh and cry and work and kill; they swing like a pendulum eternally in that safe and narrow orbit in which America likes to see the Negro live: between laughter and tears. . . . The sensory sweep of her novel carries no theme, no message, no thought. In the main, her novel is not addressed to the Negro, but to a white audience whose chauvinistic tastes she knows how to satisfy. She exploits that phase of Negro life which is “quaint,” the phase which evokes a piteous smile on the lips of the “superior” race.49

Indeed, Wright’s critiques resound—albeit with more nuance—in “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” published two months later, in which he argues that “Negro writing on the whole has been the voice of the educated Negro pleading with white America.” Such a dynamic emerged from the Christianization of American slaves, which initially fostered struggle but eventually “began to ameliorate and assuage suffering and denial.” This legacy begs the question, “Shall Negro writing be for the lives and consciousness of the Negro masses, moulding [sic] those lives and consciousness toward new goals, or shall it continue begging the question of the Negroes’ humanity?”50 In Their Eyes, Wright clearly understands Hurston to focus on the latter (which he connects with a

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Christian legacy), while ignoring Negro literature’s properly materialist outlook and objectives. Ellison’s sentiments resonate with Wright’s, and even establish the traditional dyad (active to this day) that projects Hurston and Wright as antipathetic trajectories in African American letters.51 Assessing Their Eyes and Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939)—a novelization of the life of Moses composed in dialect and based on both biblical and Africana folkloric traditions—Ellison notes that “Zora Neil [sic] Hurston’s latest work, though possessing technical competence, retains the blight of calculated burlesque that has marred most of her writing.” Their Eyes “tells the story of a Southern Negro woman’s love-life against the background of an all-Negro town into which the casual brutalities of the South seldom intrude.”52 Instead, Ellison calls for a new, politically oriented Negro fiction written in the tradition of Native Son, rooted “in the mastery of life through the mastery of the intense ways of thinking and feeling that are artistic techniques.”53 In this way, Ellison proposes, the Negro can overcome oppression, “become conditioned in working class methods of organized struggle,” and “possess the conscious meaning of their lives” by effectively owning the means of his or her own production.54 Locke, then, emphasizes Hurston’s inability to create “motive fiction” and “social document fiction” which, presumably, would offer just representations of the general nature of Negro life and experience (according to Locke) instead of the “oversimplifications” evident in her work. Wright’s invocation of minstrelsy amplifies this criticism, aiming at Hurston’s lack of “serious” engagement with social ills at the expense of “immature,” sensual narrative—dismissive code words, incidentally (along with Ellison’s reference to Janie’s “love-life” in Their Eyes), for a feminine sensibility.55 Hurston’s novel lacks an appropriately scientific grounding, ignoring rational justifications for a love story rooted in apish minstrelsy and burlesque—neither of which reflect the “reality” of Negro life as it should be calibrated, according to the legacies of the renaissance movements. Alternatively, by attending here to the burlesque, to Hurston’s myths offered in defiance of scientific reductions, we locate an alternative reading that highlights the complexity of Hurston’s conception of blackness: a broad, vigorous, and profound engagement with race

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as a component of an epistemological crisis that has characterized the novelistic genre for centuries. Hurston posed a direct challenge to this “general nature,” and for her crime, this “unjust representation,” she was dismissed and pilloried by orthodox defenders of the racial faith.

Go There to Know There: Hurston’s Epistemology of Race Their Eyes Were Watching God is a book about knowing, evident from its opening paragraphs, which distinguish men’s dreams from women’s acknowledged necessities, to Janie’s closing observation that “It’s uh known fact, Pheoby, you got tuh go there tuh know there. Yo’ papa and yo’ mama and nobody else can’t tell yuh and show yuh. Two things everybody’s got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin’ fuh theyselves.”56 The novel’s epistemological orientation is ultimately sealed, however, by its engagement of the book of Job, a biblical text that contrasts human knowledge with God’s knowledge. Job, of course, has weathered a series of unmerited calamities in his life. Bereft of family and fortune he must endure the further injury of his friends’ justifications for his misfortune.57 At their insistence Job approaches God, asking the reasons behind his fate. God responds out of the “whirlwind” with a series of questions, not answers: “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? . . . Where wast thou when I laid the foundation of the earth? / declare, if thou hast understanding. / Who hath laid the measurements thereof, if thou knowest?”58 Hurston’s characters likewise confront God, whom they speak of in racialized nomenclature. “Ol’ Massa is doin’ His work now,” says Janie as the hurricane grows in intensity.59 With the lights finally extinguished by the height of the storm’s fury, Janie, Tea Cake, and the others sit, “their eyes straining against crude walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.”60 It is tempting (and simple) to focus on God as slave master and to dismiss the scene, if not the novel entirely, as perpetuating a kind of racial colonialism. Yet we should not overlook Job’s affliction, which parallels not only the historical plight confronted by African Americans but also for which any number of justifications were consistently rationalized (as if by Job’s

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friends). Job goes to God, as Hurston suggests, but the truth remains that in the end, with his property and family restored, he had to find out about living for himself. No one, not his wife, not his friends—those ersatz critics and theologians—and harrowingly, not even his God could tell him. This is Hurston’s racial epistemology: that one must go there to know there. Pious or even rational incantations of received wisdom ring hollow compared to the vagaries of experience.61 Hurston fired back at her critical detractors—especially at Wright. Reviewing Uncle Tom’s Children, she called it “a book of hatreds,” one in which “not one act of understanding or sympathy comes to pass.”62 She chides Wright for trumpeting the party line—“the reader sees the picture of the South that the communists have been passing around of late.”63 Hurston concludes with stinging half-praise, noteworthy for its outright dismissal of any merit in the work under review. Criticizing Wright’s own dialect (“Certainly he does not write by ear, unless he is tone-deaf ”), she allows that “the book contains some beautiful writing. One hopes that Mr. Wright will find in Negro life a vehicle for his talents.”64 Wright’s just representations, she claims, ignore the complexities of Negro life. He needs to “go there” in order to improve upon his deficiencies. As it stands, he knows nothing of the there of which he writes. Hurston would prove equally critical in her private assessments of Native Son, though a public review is not on the record.65 Introducing Alain Locke’s critiques to the Hurston-Wright dispute enables us to connect the issue back to The New Negro, situating it within core concerns that drove Locke’s agenda to represent the Negro as modern, respectable, plucked out of the superstitious and rural past, and, yes, extracted from the harshest legacies of slavery and Jim Crow—the very racial structures that, for many, violently defined black identity and the social locations of African American people.66 This is not to suggest, of course, that migrants to New York, Chicago, or other cities confronted no limitations or prejudices; clearly they did, evidenced by their physical and cultural ghettoization in their new urban environs.67 It is to say that given the relative freedom that the North provided, and that modernization afforded, African American culture found itself untethered from, or less (or perhaps differently) tethered to, the determinations of official authority—the white establishment—that both hegemonically defined African Americans within the larger society, and served simultaneously as a foil against

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which African Americans defiantly defined themselves. As Ellison’s protagonist contemplates this epistemological unmooring near the end of Invisible Man, he observes, “In the South everyone knew you, but coming North was a jump into the unknown.”68 Ellison himself remembers a similar epiphany of his own during his early days in New York, as depicted in “An Extravagance of Laughter”: “I missed . . . a sense of certainty which the South imposed in the forms of signs and symbols that marked the dividing lines of racial segregation.”69 The power of the Jim Crow order proved definitive in the formation of African American literature.70 Migrants’ experiences became more amorphous than they had previously been—less stark and determined but, oddly, perhaps even more sinister. Southern white racism in the early twentieth century was many things, but it was not ambiguous. On the contrary, Wright’s protagonist Bigger Thomas finds himself confronted with young whites who claim a commitment to him—but only as a cause, not as a person; they want to “help” him, and in so doing essentially seek to objectify, to commoditize him through their materialist understanding of social progress.71 Under such circumstances, identity becomes more difficult to navigate, generating a crisis of certainty. In Native Son, Bigger drives Mary Dalton, his employer’s daughter, into downtown Chicago (she has lied to her father of plans to attend a function at the university, near their house) to pick up Jan, a white communist and her boyfriend. Here Jan initiates the first of many ruptures in the rituals to which Bigger has become accustomed in navigating the realities of race relations: Jan smiled broadly, then extended an open palm toward him. Bigger’s entire body tightened with suspense and dread. “How are you, Bigger?” Bigger’s right hand gripped the steering wheel and he wondered if he ought to shake hands with this white man. “I’m fine,” he mumbled. Jan’s hand was still extended. Bigger’s right hand raised itself about three inches, then stopped in mid-air. “Come on and shake,” Jan said. Bigger extended a limp palm, his mouth open in astonishment. He felt Jan’s fingers tighten around his own. He tried to pull his hand away, ever so gently, but Jan held on, firmly smiling.

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“We may as well get to know each other,” Jan said. “I’m a friend of Mary’s.” “Yessuh,” he mumbled. “First of all,” Jan continued, putting his foot upon the running board, “don’t say sir to me. I’ll call you Bigger, and you’ll call me Jan. That’s the way it’ll be between us. How’s that?”72

This interaction troubles Bigger because it diverges widely from what he has been taught to expect.73 We learn that his father was killed in a Mississippi race riot, so no doubt an acute sense of caution toward white motives has been drilled into him as a consequence.74 He tries to register his thoughts: “What was it they wanted? Why didn’t they leave him alone? . . . Yes, anything could happen with people like these. His entire mind and body were painfully concentrated into a single sharp point of attention. He was trying desperately to understand.”75 By novel’s end, Bigger is in no better position. With his last appeal for killing Mary exhausted, he asks Max, the socialist attorney in Native Son who enlists himself in Bigger’s cause, “Mr. Max, I know the folks who sent me here to die hated me; I know that. B-b-but you reckon th-they was like m-me, trying to g-get something like I was, and when I’m dead and gone they’ll be saying like I’m saying now that they didn’t mean to hurt nobody . . . th-that they was t-trying to get something, too?” Max hedges at answering Bigger’s question until Bigger demands epistemological satisfaction: “But I want to know!”76 In response, Max points to buildings in the distance: “You know what . . . keeps them from tumbling down?” “It’s the belief of men,” he continues. “If men stopped believing, stopped having faith, they’d come tumbling down. . . . When millions of men are desiring and longing, those buildings grow and unfold. But, Bigger, those buildings aren’t growing anymore. . . . The men on the inside of those buildings have begun to doubt, just as you did. They don’t believe any more.” The argument is convoluted (perhaps deliberately so), but Max’s rhetoric proves intriguing. Given evidence of declining “faith” among the general population, Max implies that Bigger offers an opportunity to bolster what is disappearing. Bigger asserts himself, noting that since he is about to die, he can speak freely: “‘What I killed for must’ve been good!’ Bigger’s voice was full of frenzied anguish. ‘It must have been good! When a man kills, it’s for something. . . . I didn’t

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know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for ’em. . . . It’s the truth, Mr. Max. . . . I know what I’m saying real good and I know how it sounds. But I’m all right. I feel all right when I look at it that way.’”77 Bigger locates a sense of individual agency, a realistic and passionate impulse that contradicts Max’s justly theoretical representations. Max shushes the man who is his cause: “No; no; no. . . . Bigger, not that. . . .”78 Having stifled Bigger’s moment of self-discovery, his having “gone there,” to appropriate Hurston’s phrase, Max departs, but not before Bigger returns to his senses, echoing the encounter with Jan earlier, cited above: “‘Tell. . . . Tell Mister. . . . Tell Jan hello,” he calls after Max.79 Bigger’s value resides not in his feeling, knowledge, and discovery—however we may ultimately judge them. He must fulfill the “just representation of general nature” that his migration story embodies for the perpetuation of others’ social agenda, and his pronouncements must be voiced accordingly (by Max and Wright). In the end it is fascinating to recognize the disparate locations from which authority derives in the writing and representation of migration experiences, seeking to resolve this crisis of certainty. A recently discovered short story by Zora Neale Hurston, “Monkey Junk,” first published in 1927, chronicles in “a mock biblical mode” the experiences and misadventures of a recent arrival to Harlem from the rural South who is “undone not by urban life but by feminine guile.”80 Over the course of sixty-two verses Hurston spins a tale of a man “who dwelt in the land of the Harlemites.” Epistemically, he “thought that he knew all the law and the prophets.” “I knoweth all about women,” he claims, “I know all that there is about the females.”81 He resolves not to marry, “persuaded that merry maidens were like unto death for love of him.” He proved misguided when “in that same year a maiden gazeth upon his checkbook and she coveted it. Then became she coy and sweet with flattery and he swalloweth the bait.” She proceeds to spend money indiscriminately before the couple wind up in divorce court, where she is awarded “Alimony (which being interpreted means all his jack) aplenty!” Undone in the end, he returns to Alabama “to pick cotton.”82 “Monkey Junk,” which is not a novel but illuminates the biblical modes of Hurston’s novels, offers a satirical reframing of the migrant’s plight. The man, assured of his wisdom (but sorely mistaken) finds himself at the mercy of indeterminacy in the form of a woman whose

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lovely appearance is belied by an ugly reality. Narrating this tale in a mock-biblical mode suggests that it may also represent the migrant’s interpretation of events once he returns to Alabama. Beneath the humor resides an implicitly (though certainly satirical) cautionary tale, no less a didactic and exemplary warning of the vagaries confronting modern man “in the land of the Harlemites” than Native Son’s social science is of Bronzeville—though it is much funnier. How should one behave? How should one understand and navigate one’s place in this new social context? Whatever the source of authority, the tendency of African American novels and their criticism to grapple with such questions bears a distinct antecedent. Mid-eighteenth-century English novels addressed analogous problems within an unfamiliar urban environment that considered the best practice for living, grounding uncertainty within textual authority and generating cultural identity in the process. If virtue was rewarded in the eighteenth century, as Pamela’s subtitle claims, twentieth-century black virtue was continually frustrated. The distinction is important because this is precisely what a just representation of the general nature of race would mean for moderns, urbanists, and social-scientific realists such as Wright, Locke, and (for the time being) Ellison: the general nature of race matters cast African Americans into a new, gritty, visceral existence. Within the political framework of their thought, Hurston’s biblical burlesques obfuscated the rational epistemological structure of their racial cosmos, grounded in dialectical progress and concerned with the materialist aspects of culture, its inscription and interpretation. We might understand this old saw in a new way, however. The debates among Locke, Wright, Ellison (who would essentially switch sides in the second half of his career), and Hurston, emblematic of ongoing debates on race, representation, and culture are not sui generis, as the academic paper trail might suggest, but participate in a narrative that extends back at least to the eighteenth century (and almost certainly before it). Literature and its criticism, though moving away from overtly religious pronouncements regarding the troubling situations confronted by modernizing subjects, continue to dwell upon problems analogical to these situations. In this way, secularization, the demythologizing impulse of modernity, might participate in negotiations with authority over the epistemological limits of human empiricism. In the process a

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new critical approach for understanding the legacy of race, the contours of its disputes, and especially its representation in African American literature emerges. This approach descends not solely from the materialist legacies of the twentieth century but also from the Western intellectual antecedents to which these legacies responded. Such approaches may only deepen our conception of race and its contributions to culture, offering a more just representation of the intellectual construction of African American identity and the politics of its narrative reconstitution.

Ellison’s About Face: From Harlem Renaissance to Harlem Apocalypse Ralph Ellison would come to repudiate, or at least nuance, his critical positions of the 1930s and early 1940s. Indeed, his first novel Invisible Man (1952) represents a corrective statement against that era and the influence of its critical and artistic legacy, one through which Ellison declares his independence from Wright and the broader legacy of African American letters represented by Locke, Langston Hughes, and the Harlem Renaissance tradition.83 Perhaps ironically, among this cluster of black authors, Ellison’s critical and artistic vision would come most closely to resemble Zora Neale Hurston’s—despite the fact that he never fully embraced Hurston and her corpus. R. W. B. Lewis found Ellison’s stubborn lack of appreciation for Hurston’s folk idiom perplexing, telling Arnold Rampersad, “I would have thought they were made to get along.”84 Alongside Invisible Man, Ellison’s criticism sought to establish a number of differences between his own sense of craft and literary vision and those of authors such as Wright—a relationship discussed at length elsewhere.85 Ellison’s creative and personal relationship with Wright served as a link to Ellison’s past activism that after a certain point needed to be severed, or at least reinscribed, in order for him to fashion himself as something more than a “Negro writer”—an important moniker, in his estimation, to transcend. Distancing himself from Locke proved a different matter since Ellison and Locke were not especially close. Still, Ellison appears most specifically to refer to Locke and The New Negro in his introduction to Shadow and Act (1964), discussing the revisions he sought to bring

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to an understanding of “Negro American” culture and the background against which he cast them: “[Avoiding racial reductionism] was quite complex, involving as it does a ceaseless questioning of those formulas through which historians, politicians, sociologists, and an older generation of Negro leaders and writers—those of the so-called ‘Negro Renaissance’—had evolved to describe my group’s identity, its predicament, its fate and its relation to the larger society and the culture which we share.”86 Two further instances reveal more specific ways in which Ellison sought to distance himself from Locke and his legacy. The first, in Invisible Man, places signal rhetorical cadences from The New Negro in the protagonist’s speech after the battle royal. This speech, of course, was the protagonist’s high school graduation oration, showing that “humility was the secret, indeed, the very essence of progress”—a truism he finds questionable, but one whose utility he calls helpful.87 Invited to “a gathering of the town’s leading white citizens” to deliver the speech, he finds himself conscripted to fight in the battle royal, the evening’s entertainment before a drunken and profane audience.88 The invisible man fights, comes close to winning, but is pummeled just the same, and scrapes his pay in coins (some counterfeit) from an electric rug. Only then, after reminding the emcee that he has been invited to deliver his speech, is he permitted to speak. He stands, “my mouth dry, my eye throbbing,” and begins his speech: “We of the younger generation extol the wisdom of that great leader and educator . . . who first spoke these flaming words of wisdom.”89 He cites Booker T. Washington’s address from the 1895 Cotton States and International Exhibition in Atlanta, which suggests that whites and blacks should be separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand.90 Interestingly Ellison’s choice of the construction “the younger generation” echoes Locke’s dedication for The New Negro: “This volume is dedicated to the Younger Generation.” Furthermore, Locke’s introductory essay also remarks on attempts by elders to codify this New Negro: “He simply cannot be swathed in their formulae. For the younger generation is vibrant with a new psychology.”91 “Younger generation” appears four times over the course of six pages in Locke’s essay “Negro Youth Speaks,” and once more each in essays by William Stanley Braithwaite and W. A. Domingo.92 Two important implications arise from Ellison’s inclusion of this construction. First, it serves as a rhetorical link associating the

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protagonist’s marked naïveté with the New Negro movement. By placing this invocation in the bloodied, dry mouth of the protagonist, Ellison registers his own critique of the broader New Negro legacy—a critique that becomes increasingly systematic as the novel progresses. Second, he reinforces this critical assessment by depicting his protagonist, in the rhetorical voice of The New Negro, espousing Booker T. Washington’s position. For Locke the very concept of New Negro was modern and left the rural, accommodationist model frequently associated with Washington far behind. Locke, in fact, studied with and, in many (if not most) instances, was sympathetic to Washington’s historical rival, W. E. B. DuBois.93 Furthermore, despite the protagonist’s attempts to distance himself from unsophisticated cultural relics—the blues of Petie Wheatstraw, the pork chops in the diner—he only attains some measure of self-assurance in his short-lived capacity to embrace baked yams, eating them on the street (“I yam what I yam!”)—a worthy resurrection of Hurston’s “mock-biblical mode” in “Monkey Junk.”94 These instances reverse the transformative capacities of northward migration that enable Negroes to become “new.” They remain, of course, in keeping with the burlesque attributes that Ellison, just over a decade before Invisible Man’s publication, attributed to Hurston’s fiction, serving as down-home reminders of the protagonist’s origins. A second location where Ellison creates separation between his own legacy and Alain Locke’s is in an address Ellison delivered to a Harvard symposium on Locke in 1973—an odd occasion in which Ellison expresses gratitude to Locke for inspiring him to greatness, but then proceeds to enumerate the various ways in which Locke is decidedly unEllisonian before recouping him for Ellison’s own purposes. He recounts meeting Locke at Tuskegee in 1935 and again upon his own arrival in Harlem the following year. He claims, “What Locke did for me . . . was to act as a guide. He stood for a conscious approach to American culture.”95 He continues, “I didn’t always agree with him, and I don’t today, but he did point a direction, he did act as a role model.”96 He proceeds to outline an aesthetic vision of American culture that, ironically, paints Locke as a prototypical post-Invisible Man Ellisonian. Ellison cites cultural example upon cultural example, which he then follows with the observation “Locke sensed this.”97 By the conclusion Ellison has completely subsumed Locke’s identity into his own. Noting the difficulty that

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minorities (especially African Americans) had historically found in attending Harvard (as Locke did) and other universities of its ilk, Ellison remarks, “Now it seems to me a certain faith has been fulfilled, because at this moment we can stand here on this campus and discuss an important American figure who for so many years has been thought of as simply a spokesman for a minor aesthetic position mainly of interest to minority people.”98 Remarkably, Ellison implicitly paints himself as rescuing Locke from the provinces of literary and academic irrelevance, recasting him as an Ellisonian model of Albert Murray’s Omni-Americanism. Ellison delivers the final cut in his essay’s concluding sentence, in which he transfigures Locke as the invisible man, resonating Invisible Man’s final statement (“Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you”). “Don’t kid yourself,” Ellison says about Locke, “he was talking about all of us.”99 Ellison annihilates Locke’s position, reading Locke’s significance through his, Ellison’s, own legacy. How, then, might we understand Ellison’s more mature vision to fit into the broader trajectory of the crisis of certainty illuminated earlier? Invisible Man casts the protagonist into the cultural and intellectual maelstrom of twentieth-century African American culture. We find the inheritance of slavery manifest in the spectral memory of his grandfather, “a traitor all [his] born days,” who establishes the historical template of invisibility.100 We find it in passages depicting the college that denote Booker T. Washington, and yet undercut these nods with wry DuBoisian connotations: “I see the bronze statue of the college founder . . . his hand outstretched in the breathtaking gesture of a veil that flutters in hard, metallic folds above the face of the kneeling slave; and I stand puzzled, unable to decide whether the veil is really being lifted, or lowered more firmly in place; whether I am witnessing a revelation or a more efficient blinding.”101 We traverse the migratory path from South to North and confront an eviction scene that exhibits a veritable museum of objects from the African American past—manumission papers, a family Bible, blues records, and other ephemera.102 We confront the political puppetry of the Brotherhood, Ellison’s edition of the Communist Party, and an organization he depicts as only too willing to dictate certainty and to prescribe with evangelical zeal its epistemological worldview. We collect a series of talismans—the leg chain, the cast-iron bank, Tod Clifton’s Sambo doll—that all serve what Marc Conner calls a “sacramental” function.103

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At the end of the novel, however, as the protagonist encounters a riot in Harlem, Ellison most resolutely responds to the cultural inheritance that he takes from the Harlem Renaissance by invoking a Harlem apocalypse, calling forth the end of an era and thereby inaugurating a new age. Invisible Man’s apocalypticism has not gone unnoticed by scholars. Maxine Lavon Montgomery suggests that the novel’s apocalypse “is a tragicomic event. . . . It is the last and greatest in a long line of narrative ruptures in the chaos underlying American race relations.” She characterizes these relations as “Manichean tensions between black and white” that feed the broader conflicts and social struggles that drive Ellison’s narrative.104 Similarly, David J. Leigh writes that Invisible Man “consciously creates a new form of apocalyptic pattern from the past of the narrator’s life which reveals the chaos of racial conflict in the United States: the pattern of final battles, false prophets and Antichrist figures, the loosing of Satan, and an ambiguous ending that leads to something ‘new’ but invisible.”105

Eschaton in Blue In the end, not unlike Hurston, Ellison’s epistemology of race as reflected in Invisible Man is rooted in myth and articulated through a religiously inflected vernacular. He describes a similar impulse in “Society, Morality, and the Novel,” in a passage arguing that novels themselves function generically as new (novel) myths that “deal with man’s growing awareness” of “post-Christian chaos.” They are “our most rational art for dealing with the irrational.” Novels affirm “our humanity” by “aid[ing] us in our ceaseless quest for certainty.”106 In this way they do not lose sight of the irrational reality of human existence and experience, but they do conjure ways, patterns, and forms that ascribe an imperfect yet encouraging orderliness to the vagaries of post-Christian humanity. Also in accordance with Hurston, Ellison draws on a biblical mode. As Invisible Man finds its creation myth in The New Negro (among other sources), pointing therefore to the genesis of a Harlem renaissance, so Ellison closes his novel with Harlem’s eschatological destruction—a Harlem apocalypse. Montgomery and Leigh situate the novel well within a broader apocalyptic understanding, yet Ellison’s apocalypticism extends even deeper than they claim. First, although I am not interested in iso-

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lating a discrete “apocalypse” within the novel, we can observe Ellison, from very early on, establishing the groundwork for the coming apocalyptic finale. In this way, without claiming a one-to-one generic correspondence, we might call Invisible Man an apocalyptic text in that it bears apocalyptic elements, alluding clearly to a number of conventions identifiable in apocalyptic texts of the Hebrew and Christian Bibles.107 Second, if Invisible Man qualifies as an apocalyptic text, then Ellison (a thoroughly post-Christian modernist) situates his contribution to the midcentury crisis of racial certainty in a religious context. Modern, secular epistemologies draw on mythical, religious templates to invoke and inscribe a sense of order. Whereas Hurston mines the book of Job, Ellison turns to the book of Revelation. Revelation’s epistemological mechanism relies in part upon the opening of seven seals, all of which communicate some form of insight or revelation conveyed by supernatural figures to John of Patmos, who narrates accounts of the invisible powers reigning over the heavens and earth. While I stress my disinterest in constructing an overwrought set of correspondences between biblical apocalypse and Invisible Man, two important details mark a significant convergence between the two texts. Ellison’s protagonist carries in his briefcase a number of important papers that he accumulates as the novel’s plot progresses. The process of accumulation begins when, following the battle royal, he opens his gift of a new briefcase (effectively breaking a seal) and finds his scholarship notification.108 It continues with Bledsoe’s letters, his identities supplied by the Brotherhood, the anonymous warnings he receives as a Brotherhood operative, the dancing Sambo doll, and so forth. Furthermore, looking closer at Bledsoe’s letters of recommendation, we note that there are in fact seven letters, and Ellison goes to great lengths to belabor their “seal.” As he leaves Bledsoe’s office, for instance, immediately upon learning of his expulsion, the protagonist arranges to return and pick up his letters before leaving. Bledsoe stops him: “These letters will be sealed; don’t open them if you want help” (149). Upon arriving in Harlem the protagonist checks into Men’s House and settles into his room. Finding little comfort in a Gideon Bible, “I took off my coat and hat and took my packet of letters and lay back upon the bed, drawing a feeling of importance from reading the important names. What was inside and how could I open them undetected? They were tightly sealed. I

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had read that letters were sometimes steamed open, but I had no steam. I gave it up. I really didn’t need to know their contents and it would not be honorable or safe to tamper with Dr. Bledsoe” (163; emphasis mine). Finally, young Emerson shows the contents of the letter to the protagonist, effectively unsealing it for him. This revelation effects irrevocable ontological change (190–91). The opening of each of the seven seals in Revelation leads to a vision, the first four of which include a figure on horseback: And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying, Come and see. And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer. And when he had opened the second seal, I heard the second beast say, Come and see. And there went out another horse that was red: and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another: and there was given unto him a great sword. And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, Come and see. And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand. And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine. And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see. And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.109

Ellison echoes this series of visions with the appearance of Ras, newly named “The Destroyer,” on horseback. He rides “upon a great black horse” (556), making him the third horseman—Famine, connoting deprivation in Harlem, an inversion of the bounty implicit in the term “renaissance” and an instigating factor in the riot’s unrest. Furthermore,

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although the reading functions better by simply signaling apocalyptic valences within the novel’s setting in the 1930s, these valences contribute to a sensibility rooted in Ellison’s own specific time and space: Harlem of the mid-twentieth century. The act of retreating underground at midcentury bore another apocalyptic aspect: that of nuclear apocalypse—a reading that might predate Ellison’s composition of the riot passages, but surely one that the first readers of Invisible Man would have recognized by the early 1950s.110 Through this resonance Ellison succeeds in uniting specific interpretations of more generally articulated senses of crisis and their destructive potential. Finally, this religiously inflected destruction of Harlem, and thereby of the Harlem Renaissance’s scientific modernity, is colored by another influence—the blues—that shares a similar investment in vernacular wisdom but runs counter to the practical exigencies of religiosity. The blues offers a folk idiom that measures the blackness of blackness and acknowledges intuitive complexities of human experience. In this way it is unscientific—the yokel rather than the boxer in the novel’s prologue (8–9). Chapter 25 of Invisible Man, which contains the climactic riot, opens with a flurry of references to the color blue. Bullets hitting the third rail of trolley tracks send up sparks that ignite “like a blue dream” (536). The protagonist is aided by men with “blue-tinted faces” and surveys the escalating chaos in the “blue mysteriousness of the dark” (537). The area is enveloped in a “blue glow” (538). As buildings begin to burn, the protagonist looks “toward the curtain of blue fire” (539). Finally, in a vision worthy of John the Revelator himself (or Zora Neale Hurston, for that matter), “a huge woman in a gingham pinafore” sits atop a milk wagon with a barrel of beer, drinking and singing “in the voice of a blues singer’s timbre” (544). By consistently casting these eschatological events through the articulated lens of blueness, Ellison conflates idiomatic representations of irrational general nature in human experience. He melds sacred and secular vernacular rituals in such a way that exposes the commensurability of presumably oppositional cultural forms. Whereas blues is frequently understood as a secular category (in contrast to a sacred category such as gospel music—James Cone calls blues songs “secular spirituals”), Ellison conflates biblical forms and allusions with these symbolic articulations of the blues.111 They inform one another in their capacity to generate meaning through the expressiveness of literary form.

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More generally I would like to suggest that, throughout Ellison’s secularized novelistic expressions, there remains a continuity that bears a residual religious influence as an unmarked category in the attempt to represent the contours of human experience as it confronts a modern crisis of knowing. By highlighting the apocalyptic and eschatological elements of the climactic Harlem riot in Invisible Man, cast in a shade of blue, we might begin to see through an exemplary reversal how, even by the midpoint of the twentieth century, an author as thoroughly modern and secularized as Ralph Ellison may rely upon these traces of a theological-epistemological vernacular, which extends from the long eighteenth century to Ellison’s historical moment, in order to distinguish things seen from unseen, known from unknown—or at least to find troubling, ironic implications in the interstices.

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Kenneth Warren laments that Invisible Man too frequently finds critical attention that dislocates it from its historical moment, reading Ellison’s first novel as one “for the ages” rather than addressed to the “occasion” or the particular context of its own age. Such historical extraction deflects attention from “the way that ascribed racial status reflects and is refracted through some of the central issues of particular historical moments.”1 Ellison’s initial reviewers drew parallels between his invisible protagonist and selected figures from the Western literary canon—including Ulysses and Gulliver, as well as representative protagonists from Dante, Bunyan, and Dostoevsky.2 On Warren’s reading, such emphasis upon timelessness undermines Invisible Man’s timeliness—the complex nexus of debates, points of reference, and other contingencies that construct its cosmos—mitigating the capacity to recognize that Ellison’s “effort to speak to and for the larger human condition remains overshadowed by a particular time-bound social problem.”3 He means, specifically, the social problem of ascribed racial status and the way that historical change demands a revision of readers’ attitudes and interpretations. By jumping to historical conclusions, critics circumlocute Ellison’s racial problematique (as Warren calls it) and the currency it retains in the present tense. Timelessness offers a critical means for passing the ethical buck, for eschewing our enduring complicity as inheritors, beneficiaries, and citizens of a world gone wrong. While Warren’s frustrations are not unfounded in the longer view, early critical impulses toward timelessness actually stemmed from the invisible man’s uniqueness to his critical occasion. Consequently, one common point among Invisible Man’s first reviewers measures how greatly Ellison’s protagonist diverged from other prominent African American protagonists, especially Bigger Thomas from Richard Wright’s 69

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Native Son (1940)—by far the major Negro novel in occasional memory. Such distinctiveness between lead characters fostered the perception of a gulf (be it real or imagined) between Wright’s Marxist realism and Ellison’s democratic classicism—an occasional distance split perhaps by James Baldwin, whose eloquence blends a sense of Ellisonian humanism and Wrightean temperament in the prophetic service of a civil rights agenda that Ellison distrusted and Wright neither embraced nor saw to fruition, dying an expatriate in Paris in 1960.4 Nevertheless, Warren’s occasional mandate also illuminates the need to reimagine the critical occasions that we explore, to look beyond wellworn templates such as the one established by Irving Howe’s 1963 essay, “Black Boys and Native Sons,” an early, comprehensive, and perhaps the most memorably significant attempt to situate Ellison and his literary legacy within a contemporary context of African American letters. Howe argues that Ellison and Baldwin, seeking to fracture a tradition of black protest literature, dishonored Wright’s legacy as a literary ancestor: “If such younger novelists as Baldwin and Ralph Ellison were to move beyond Wright’s harsh naturalism and toward more supple modes of fiction, that was possible only because Wright had been there first, courageous enough to release the full weight of his anger.”5 Howe clearly touched a nerve in Ellison, who responded with caustic sarcasm in his now classic essay “The World and the Jug”: “Irving, [my Negro friends] recognize what you have not allowed yourself to see: namely that my reply to your essay is in itself a small though necessary action in the Negro struggle for freedom.”6 Ellison argues that Wright and Baldwin (in addition to Langston Hughes, whose connection to Ellison predates even Wright’s)—whatever their similarities to him—are not (as Howe claims) his literary “ancestors.” They are his relatives; he can neither choose nor disavow them. Ellison, in response, claims James Joyce and T. S. Eliot as ancestors and casts himself as much an American writer, in keeping with Twain and Faulkner, as a Negro writer.7 One benefit of Warren’s “occasional” lens is that it does not necessarily preclude the possibility for timelessness so much as it insists upon recognizing the timeless as a mutable property, one conditioned by unique contingencies that directly affect how human beings apply conceptual frames to inconceivable concepts such as “the universal,” “the infinite,” or—we might add—“God.” Similarly, the occasional method,

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despite Warren’s direct concern with the racial problematique of Invisible Man, need not be limited narrowly to racial concerns. The occasion represents a snapshot, a fleeting yet captured and layered moment that the historical critic must excavate, exploring any number of contexts and contingencies—all of which contribute to the occasion’s identity and its textual formation of the problem under consideration. Any given occasion, then, proves complex and multivalent. The contingencies to which this chapter turns have been historically overlooked in critical assessments of Ellison and his work: a number of central religious and theological contexts in circulation during Invisible Man’s occasion that, I argue, may be understood to foster the novel’s timely religious and theological formulations of race at midcentury. They should not supplant other occasional concerns (such as those raised by Warren) but do certainly complement them in innovative ways. Ellison’s essays, occasional writings, and public appearances mark him as not only a novelist but a public intellectual as well, finding purchase not simply in his inheritance of Western literary and cultural traditions but also in their utility for understanding the present tense. Therefore the question Warren raises concerning the relative value of “timely” and “timeless” readings becomes less of an either/or prospect and more of a dialectical negotiation. The same holds true for the division of sacred and secular. Despite Ellison’s status as a thoroughly secularized novelist, his work reflects a theological sensibility derived from the religious tendency to aggregate matters of universal (timeless) and particular (timely) significance. In this way we shall observe concretely how this timeless/timely tension reflects for Ellison a grappling with our own abiding explorations of the theological nature of the secular, and the secularization of the theological, that pervades Invisible Man. In the process this chapter turns to three major ethical (Reinhold Niebuhr), literary critical (Perry Miller), and theological (Paul Tillich) statements from 1952—the very year (and occasion) of Invisible Man’s publication—that reflect this refraction. That is, it considers the novel’s place within its time-bound (or “timely”) wrangling with more timeless (or eternal) concerns. A brief word about these comparative exemplars: Niebuhr, Miller, and Tillich share a common interest in the cultural iterations of religious and theological systems. Moreover, they do so in a manner that we might, in retrospect, claim to be Ellisonian. As Protestants (or, in Miller’s case,

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a scholar of foundational American Protestantism), they cohere with the nominal Protestantism that characterizes Invisible Man’s religious frames of reference—the Negro sermon in the prologue, the college’s (Booker T.) Washingtonian Protestant work ethic (funded by the liberal Protestant benevolence of the White Man’s Burden), reinforced by Homer Barbee’s sermonic hagiography and Rinehart’s Harlem storefront church. Ellison clearly bears a great deal in common on intellectual and even aesthetic levels with the cluster of thinkers under consideration in this chapter—as much as or more so than he does with Baldwin and Wright, the other members of Howe’s triumvirate. Two of them (Miller and Niebuhr) concern themselves specifically with theological assessments and diagnoses of American experience, past and present, as participant in a broader trajectory of historical significance. Tillich’s correlative theological method anticipates the analogies between diverse senses of crisis in divergent traditional, national, and historical contexts that Ellison understands to imply a universality that his own particular African American experience negotiates. This represents the theoretical grounding of a religious sensibility in his literary conception of race as a secular concept. In this way we challenge Warren’s occasional mandate through careful attention to what we might call Ellison’s relative ancestors and their timebound concern with what they take to be more infinite implications.

Reinhold Niebuhr and the Theology of History Alignments of Theology and Literature Reinhold Niebuhr published The Irony of American History on April 7, 1952, one week to the day before Invisible Man’s publication on April 14. Niebuhr’s book considers the precarious global position of the United States in an escalating Cold War, and a number of its themes resonate with Ellison’s novel, including distrust of communism coupled with a measured belief in the virtue of democracy and a willingness to embrace absurdity and complexity over certainty and immutability in human affairs.8 Niebuhr’s theological language and the problems that he engaged (especially later in his career) bear a particularly Ellisonian outlook (as Ellison’s worldview might also appropriately be called “Niebuhrian”).9

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Three decades into his career as a preacher, teacher, scholar, and activist, questions demanded by World War II induced Niebuhr to break from his earlier allegiance to theological liberalism and the political Left.10 Like many liberal theologians, the horrors of World War I made him a pacifist, which he would remain through the rise of Hitler and German assaults on Poland and Great Britain.11 Emerging details about the Holocaust, Hitler’s persecution of German theologians, and the burgeoning “crisis theology” of thinkers such as Karl Barth hastened Niebuhr’s break with his pacifist colleagues. Niebuhr grew frustrated by liberal claims of moral equivalence, holding Nazi Germany to be no worse in the grander scheme than the British Empire had been in its recent world domination, a view he found relativistic and naïve. Langdon Gilkey explains Niebuhr’s position in this way: What many saw as relative in the comparative hegemonies of the British Empire (then on the wane) and the Third Reich, Niebuhr understood to be ambiguous. The distinction resides in a transcendent God who arbitrates such problems, even as they remain murky to imperfect human perception. He understood God not as “the projection of human ideals and nothing more,” which approximated the liberal view, but as “transcendent to all historical relativity.”12 God’s transcendence qualifies as nothing less than “the meaning of history, of obligation and responsibility, and so of moral action in history even if history repeatedly failed that meaning and those morals. Thus one could remain morally responsible even if oneself or the historical situation in which one had to act was saturated in the deepest ambiguity.”13 In this way relativity, framing the contingencies of human experience, must correspond to—and is beholden to—a sense of ultimacy. Niebuhr expands upon his wartime discoveries in Faith and History (1949), casting doubt upon growing faith in social scientific “objectivity,” which “obscures the ambiguity of the human self.”14 Such ambiguity resides in a tension between two concepts of history. The first, “memory,” concerns “the construction of human reality.” It encompasses the specific and relative identity of a person engaged in the necessary process of living within history: “It gives meaning to historical events without reducing them to natural necessity and recurrence.”15 The second concept of history is a Christian one, which “comprehends the whole of history.”16 The relationship of memory to Niebuhr’s Christian understanding of

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history makes possible the negotiation between a specific, imminent, and limited experience of history and one that is ultimate, transcendent, and beyond the limits of human comprehension. Niebuhr’s Christian history discloses “the whole panorama of history” and in so doing ascribes meaning and broader context to “give . . . events a place in a comprehensive story.”17 Memory classifies history and grounds it in human categories; the panorama of history amplifies memory as significant to historical and cultural forces transcendent of the boundaries of a specific human experience. Niebuhr’s theology of history aligns with the Ellisonian conception of antagonistic cooperation that we have observed between Schleiermacherian notions of particularity (analogous to Niebuhr’s “memory”) and universality (Niebuhr’s transcendent or “Christian” history). The connection strengthens with their common fondness for “ambiguity” and the complexity of human motivations. Dogmatic thought, be it theological or social scientific, glosses over the ambivalence that characterizes peoples’ decisions and actions, breeding fundamentalisms that cannot adequately account for the graceful improvisations that exemplify the best of human potential. Take, for instance, Niebuhr and Ellison’s respective critiques of the “spiral” of history. Niebuhr writes: Most of the explanations of contemporary catastrophe are derived from . . . modern man’s inability to anticipate the experiences which he now seeks to comprehend. A culture, rooted in historical optimism, naturally turns first of all to the concepts of “retrogression” and “reversion” to explain its present experience. Thus Nazism is interpreted as a “reversion to barbarism.” . . . We are assured that mankind has no right to expect an uninterrupted ascent toward happiness and perfection. Comfort is drawn from the figure of a “spiral” development. This is usually accompanied by the assurance that no recession ever reaches the depth of the previous ones and that each new “peak” achieves a height beyond those of the past.18

Ellison’s protagonist expresses a similar sentiment in the prologue to Invisible Man: My hole is warm and full of light. Yes, full of light. I doubt there is a brighter spot in all New York than this hole of mine, and I do not ex-

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clude Broadway. Or the Empire State Building on a photographer’s dream night. But that is taking advantage of you. Those two spots are among the darkest of our whole civilization—pardon me, our whole culture (an important distinction, I’ve heard)—which might sound like a hoax, or a contradiction, but that . . . is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang. (Beware of those who speak of the spiral of history; they are preparing a boomerang. Keep a steel helmet handy.) I know; I have been boomeranged across my head so much that I now see the darkness of lightness. And I love light.19

“Progress,” we might say, depends on invisible stepping-stones. The passages above elucidate the most significant correspondence between Niebuhr and Ellison’s intellectual projects: a unique distrust in the sufficiency of social science to account for human motivations. Given these foregoing concurrences between Ellison and Niebuhr, we now turn to The Irony of American History as it contributes to Invisible Man’s theological occasion. Both texts posit chilling implications for blind faith in the rational diagnoses and treatments of social maladies that would become preoccupations in the United States over the next several decades: nuclear escalation (for Niebuhr) and racial oppression (for Ellison). Niebuhr specifically assesses the Cold War—especially the complicity of the United States in perpetuating such a monumental dalliance with atomic annihilation. One might assume a tragic or inevitable aspect to the Cold War because Niebuhr believes the cause against the Soviets and communism to be just. The stakes of the nuclear threat would leave two possible outcomes on the tragic view: (1) “Victory” could simultaneously mean destruction because of the devastating implications of nuclear weapons, or (2) presciently, the defense of democracy and liberty could necessitate the rise of American imperialism executed in the name of freedom.20 Niebuhr takes a different tack, however, settling on the “ironic”: Pure tragedy elicits tears of admiration and pity for the hero who is willing to brave death or incur guilt for the sake of some great good. Irony, however, prompts some laughter and a nod of comprehension beyond the laughter; for irony involves comic absurdities which cease to be altogether absurd when fully understood. Our age is involved

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in irony because so many dreams have been so cruelly refuted by history. Our dreams of a pure virtue are dissolved in a situation in which it is possible to exercise the virtue of responsibility toward a community of nations only by courting the prospective guilt of the atomic bomb.21

There is complicity inherent in Niebuhr’s account of the struggle between democracy and communism. In the very arenas where the hero supposedly excels against or overcomes his adversary, he too falls short and causes harm. Tragedy suggests that he is always doomed to fail. Irony, however, offers possibility—the freedom to hope for a different result, for the noble outcome, no matter how unlikely it may be. Niebuhrian irony characterizes Ellison’s broader critiques of America—particularly in terms of race and the nation’s ability to live up to the promise of its founding documents. In unpublished lecture notes from a 1954 American studies seminar in Salzburg (itself a product of Cold War mobilization), Ellison expands upon the twin ironies of race and the bomb, drawing them parallel: The United States was launched on the technological expansion . . . which has reached its highest point in the invention of the Atom Bomb. . . . Yet it was achieved at a price. The problem of personal and democratic integrity symbolized by the Negro was pushed into the underground of the American conscience and . . . ignored. Americans still spoke in terms of profound moral concepts but now there was an obvious hypocrisey [sic] involved. For the so-called race issue became like a stave driven into the American system of values . . . so deeply imbedded in our ethos as to render America a nation of ethical schizopherenics [sic]. Believing in democracy, professing it, on one hand, the American acted on the other hand in violation of their most sacred principles; holding that all men are created equal, they treated the members of America[’]s minority peoples as though they were neither human nor equal.22

Echoing Niebuhr, Ellison discusses contradictions he finds inherent to American identity and their ironic applications to moral problems that characterize the United States at home and abroad in the first half of the 1950s.

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Despite this line of critique, Ellison, like Niebuhr, maintained strong faith in the viability of American ideals. His continued allegiance— against the African American political current—was rooted not in any delusional belief that the United States does always live up to the ideals of its founding documents but, rather, that the founding documents always serve as ironic reminders of what the nation has to live up to. Ellison’s irony of American history, in this sense, mirrors the narrative of the life of Ralph Ellison: the grandson of slaves who grew up poor and fatherless, hopped freight trains from Oklahoma to Alabama to attend college on a music scholarship, became an award-winning novelist and distinguished professor, and yet for all of this remains unable to escape cruel reductions from both sides of a racial divide. To white supremacists he remained a black man.23 Black nationalists called him an “Uncle Tom.”24 The tension between these twin denominations and the hope that Ellison maintained in its face encapsulate as well as anything the Niebuhrian irony at the core of Ellison’s work, public identity, and reputation. Cultural traces of racism as America’s “original sin” persist here in ways that cohere with Niebuhr’s neo-orthodoxy. Ellison’s fate might have become tragic, but precisely as Niebuhr’s irony differs from tragedy in that it leads to “laughter” or “comprehension” as insight that helps one to recognize “cosmic absurdity,” Ellison manipulates the irony, transforming his novel and its protagonist into “someone who had been forged in the underground of American experience and yet managed to emerge less angry than ironic. . . . [A] blues-toned laugher-at-wounds who included himself in his indictment of the human condition.”25 Through such irony, oppositive forces (Niebuhr juxtaposes “virtue” and “guilt” while Ellison turns to “tragedy” and “comedy”) do not necessarily find resolution but do maintain an existential tension in keeping with antagonistic cooperation. The preservation of American virtue, for Niebuhr, might require nuclear annihilation (thus holding virtue in check). Ellison’s corollary holds that the stresses of blackness in American society in fact provide the conditions for heroic action and the opportunity for affirmative, creative response on behalf of the excluded, oppressed, and violated. Conversely, and equally important, neither American virtue nor the realities of hegemonic oppression exempt one from complicity in “the human condition,” which Niebuhr would call “sin.”

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Antagonistic cooperation, as a form of Niebuhrian irony, informs Ellison’s blues sensibility. Reviewing Richard Wright’s Black Boy in 1945, Ellison wrote of the blues: “Their attraction lies in this, that they at once express both the agony of life and the possibility of conquering it through sheer toughness of spirit. They fall short of tragedy only in that they provide no scapegoat but the self.”26 Blues mines this ironic tension between limitation and possibility—cooperatively antagonistic forces that one must navigate, never conquering, neither fracturing nor synthesizing the dialectic, but instead by inhabiting such an existence, never losing sight of the notion that without a sense of complicity in American identity (for good and ill), one might never hope for freedom or retain a modicum of humanity. As Ellison puts it earlier in the same essay, “The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.”27 Here, again, this time in an essay that predates The Irony of American History by roughly seven years, we observe Niebuhr’s own terms held by Ellison in antagonistic cooperation—tragic and comic, the blues sensibility suspended within Niebuhrian irony. While any number of episodes in Invisible Man illustrate the Niebuhrian irony of Ellison’s blues, the Jim Trueblood sequence offers the most vivid example. Trueblood, a sharecropper in the rural vicinity of the “college for Negroes” that Ellison’s protagonist attends, is also a singer—known for spirituals, field songs, and other vernacular forms of the African American musical tradition that he is called upon to perform before distinguished guests of the college (much to the chagrin of the student body, who find such outmoded performances embarrassing). The protagonist and Mr. Norton, a wealthy Northern white benefactor of the college, happen upon Trueblood; his pregnant wife, Kate; and their pregnant daughter, Matty Lou. The visitors quickly learn that Trueblood is the father of both children. As Trueblood narrates his tale to Norton and the invisible man, the reader encounters the more absurd and troubling details of Trueblood’s specific, if unconscious, violations of a profound cultural taboo: incest. Trueblood describes a cold night with no resources for heating fuel. To stave off the chill, Matty Lou has joined her parents in bed. She sleeps

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in the middle, between them. Trueblood hears Matty Lou dreaming; she whispers “daddy” softly, bringing to Trueblood’s mind his own younger days, when “gals” would call him in a similar way. “Daddy” is Matty Lou’s lover, and Trueblood drifts off to sleep as he thinks about the young man he has seen hanging around his daughter, and the young woman he himself hung around as a young man.28 Asleep, he dreams about another taboo for a black man in the Deep South of the 1930s— intercourse with a white woman.29 Trueblood wakes up, “intending to tell the ole lady ’bout my crazy dream,” only to find himself mid-coitus with Matty Lou: “She’s beatin’ me and scratchin’ and tremblin’ and shakin’ and cryin’ all at the same time like she’s havin’ a fit. I’m too surprised to move. She’s cryin’, ‘Daddy, Daddy, oh Daddy,’ just like that.”30 “Daddy” takes on an entirely new meaning. He tries to think of a way out, of not alerting Kate, in bed just beside them, to the situation, even as he searches for some justification for his actions: “I can’t move ’cause I figgers if I moved it would be a sin. And I figgers too, that if I don’t move maybe it ain’t no sin, ’cause it happened while I was asleep. . . . I realizes that if I don’t move the ole lady will see me. . . . That would be worse than sin. I’m whisperin’ to Matty Lou, tryin’ to keep her quiet and I’m figurin’ how to get myself out of the fix I’m in without sinnin’.”31 Of course, despite the innocence he claims from being asleep, he cannot escape sin. His complicity grows heavy in his own daughter’s womb. Trueblood arrives at a Niebuhrian realization: “Once a man gets hisself in a tight spot like that there ain’t much he can do. It ain’t up to him no longer. There I was, tryin’ to git away with all my might, yet having to move without movin’. I flew in but had to walk out. I had to move without movin’. I done thought ’bout it since a heap, and when you think right hard you see that that’s the way things is always been with me. That’s just about been my life.”32 Moving without moving becomes an ironic aphorism for the tension, the impossible possibility embodied by the antagonistic cooperation that Trueblood—who later only finds solace in singing a blues song—represents for Invisible Man. What separates the episode from tragedy is the insight Trueblood gains, signaled by Ellison through a darkly comedic reversal (oh Daddy!) that illustrates the ironic suspension of sin within ethical restraint and tragic compulsion: “Then if that ain’t bad enough, Matty Lou can’t hold out no longer and gits to movin’ herself. First she was tryin’ to push me

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away and I’m tryin’ to hold her down to keep from sinnin’. Then I’m pullin’ away and shushin’ her . . . when she grabs holt to me and holds tight. She didn’t want me to go then—and to tell the honest-to-God truth I found out that I didn’t want to go neither.” Trueblood realizes that the only way “out” that would forestall sin requires a knife, which he pragmatically resolves “was too much to pay to keep from sinnin’.”33 In this remark we find Trueblood’s “insight” and “recognition.” Continued recourse to innocence will destroy him. Irony is no panacea, but it extends hope—even where it seems no hope may be found. Ellison’s blues predicament embodies antagonistic cooperation, reflecting Ellison’s own Niebuhrian irony of American history: true virtue is impossible and may only be preserved through the acknowledgment not of strident ideology but of fluid complexity, of the complicities that human beings carry through broken relationships. Without the possibility for and, indeed, the reality of sin, virtue and humanity remain hollow prospects. These notions of antagonistic cooperation and the vagaries of experience were not new, of course—neither to the twentieth century nor to Invisible Man’s occasion, though their lethal nature would only then become so prolifically evident. Indeed, the ambiguity of America that Niebuhr and Ellison recognized was present among early English settlers who found improvisation necessary to settle the so-called New World, according to a second source who also represents an occasional contemporary of Ellison.

Perry Miller: The Wilderness, the Territory, the Underground In the mid-1950s American literary historian Perry Miller composed a brief retrospective introduction to his essay “Errand into the Wilderness,” a paper first presented at Brown University on May 16, 1952—one month after the publication of Invisible Man. Uniting his own purposes with Reverend Samuel Danforth’s in 1670, Miller declares his goal “to make out some deeper configuration in the [early American] story than a mere modification, by obvious and natural necessity, of an imported European culture in adjustment to a frontier.” Whereas this frontier was vital, he adds, “the achievement of a personality is not so much the presence of this or that environmental element—no matter how pressing, how terrifying—as the way in which a given personality responds.”34

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While the frontier, Miller’s “wilderness,” shapes ineluctably the errand in which seventeenth-century New English Puritan colonists found themselves engaged, the wilderness itself is not America. It represents, rather, the crucible in which America is forged. Ellison was no stranger to wilderness or frontier but a self-proclaimed product of “the Territory,” born in Oklahoma—as he was quick to point out—only a few years after the former Indian Territory (as it was called) became a state in 1907. Under the governance of the Five Tribes, Indian Territory became a haven for runaway slaves and, post-Reconstruction, a destination for African Americans who, like Ellison’s family (originally from South Carolina), sought harbor from the brutalities of an emerging Jim Crow South.35 In “Going to the Territory,” also originally delivered at Brown (in 1979), Ellison reflects upon the significance of the frontier, the wilderness, to shaping American identity and, by extension, his own literary figures of speech. Ellison’s territory, like Miller’s wilderness, becomes a locus of transformation. “Geography is fate,” Ellison claims (with a nod to Heraclitus), “but it is important to remember that it is not geography alone which determines the quality of life and culture. These depend upon the courage and personal culture of the individuals who make their homes in any given locality.”36 He echoes Miller’s statements that a personality—individual or cultural—is determined less by the stress placed upon it, less by circumstantial fate such as wilderness geography, and more by how agents create meaning from these antagonisms, responding to and shaping themselves according to their geographical wilderness fate. Ellison’s hypothetical Americans, like Miller’s colonists—“left alone,” as they were, “with America”—continually stumble “into (as well as over) details of their history.”37 For both Miller and Ellison such history concerns disjunctures and coherences between past and present. “Errand into the Wilderness,” a consummate postwar meditation on American identity, hearkens to past transformations in order to contend with present realities. Miller begins in an Ellisonian mode, invoking “the ambiguity concealed in [Danforth’s 1670] word ‘errand.’”38 He settles on two separate meanings. The first represents a “short journey,” the conveyance of a message or some other temporary task. The second grows more encompassing: “the actual business on which the actor goes, the purpose itself, the conscious intention in his mind.”39 “Errand into the Wilderness” depicts the generational

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ontological transformation of the Massachusetts Bay Colony from an errand of the first variety to one of the second. Within this shift, Miller argues, lies “the process of Americanization.”40 Becoming American, as a wilderness project, thus emerged less from a triumphal position and more from one of flummoxed hope: “New England . . . made good on everything Winthrop demanded— wonderfully good—and then found that its lesson was rejected by those choice spirits for whom the exertion had been made.”41 Later generations of seventeenth-century New Englanders (and beyond) inherited this legacy. Miller points to ways such perceived failures to live up to the first generation—the pragmatic, improvisatory negotiations of the Halfway Covenant, for instance—in fact cultivate new identities.42 He also strikes a Niebuhrian pose, noting (in an example that could practically spring from the pages of The Irony of American History) that “Oliver Cromwell . . . became a dictator . . . in order to impose toleration by force!”43 Such irony undermines the historical mandate claimed by the first generation and inherited by later generations of New Englanders— shot through, as such worldviews were, with the urgency of biblical justification. The problem of identity—that uniquely American concern, in Miller’s estimation—consumed later generations: “these citizens found they had no other place to search but within themselves.”44 In this way Miller does not simply refer to historical events but diagnoses a crisis of certainty in the midst of postwar prosperity. He finds, like Niebuhr, ambiguity in the Cold War certitudes of American virtue, and much like the “method” of identity foisted upon the Puritan forebears (who were Miller’s prototypical Americans), he implicitly advocates a more measured, ironic understanding of American identity and its origins. As we observed in Ellison’s concurrences with Niebuhr, it would be fair to speculate no small sympathy in the novelist for the thrust of Miller’s argument. I would, however, like to shift the emphasis in this reading of Invisible Man to the ways in which Ellison (as did Wright and Baldwin) responded to a crisis of expectation in African American history during the first half of the twentieth century. While “optimism” should remain a measured term when discussing African American history and culture, there are tangible ways in which a sense of modernization, encapsulated by the Negro Renaissance movements (observed in chapter 1), appeared to point to better days ahead. Migration expanded

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opportunity. African Americans served abroad in World War I, hopeful that valor would beget acceptance, and experienced a world beyond American prejudice. As late as World War II, the Negro press promoted a “Double Victory” campaign, encouraging African Americans to serve their country for victory abroad (for the nation) and victory at home (in terms, it was hoped, of postwar citizenship in full measure).45 Many noted that in the wake of bitter warfare against an enemy grounded as the Nazis were in white supremacist ideology, the United States could have no choice but to reconsider the error of its ways. Reality proved otherwise. The United States, as Niebuhr discusses and Miller engages, enforced stringent codes of American identity as a matter of Cold War ideology. Despite the myriad cases that, by the early 1950s, were making their way through the courts and would eventually become Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, political and social realities for African Americans changed little by 1952—and none for the better. Consequently, between World War II and Brown the terms of African American identity, though certainly shored up by the stresses of life under Jim Crow, on the one hand, and the necessities of survival, on the other, were thrown into question. Political Marxism, embraced by many prominent prewar African American intellectuals and artists (including Ellison, Wright, Hughes, Alain Locke, and Paul Robeson, among countless others), lost its public viability during the era of the Red Scare.46 Wright would expatriate to France; Hughes would live out his days under a cloud of suspicion.47 Ellison would write Invisible Man—a novel that casts profound ambivalence toward the leftist ideology and political circles he once embraced, if never quite officially joined.48 In this way the crisis driving Americanization in Miller’s account resonates with Ellison’s novelistic project. Miller writes in the last paragraph of “Errand into the Wilderness” that the younger generation of New Englanders “looked in vain to history for an explanation of themselves; more and more it appeared that meaning was not to be found in theology, even with the help of covenantal dialectic. Thereupon, these citizens found that they had no other place to search but within themselves.”49 If one substitutes the word “ideology” for Miller’s “theology” (and—as the broader thrust of this volume holds—such ideology carried a commensurate significance for African American modernity), we arrive at a mission statement for Ellison in Invisible Man. Freedom, like democ-

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racy, requires participation, yet there is no prescription for what such participation entails. Two separate themes in Invisible Man reflect especial coherence with Miller’s essay. The first concerns anxiety over one’s ability to live up to the legacies and accomplishments of past generations. Second, having come somewhat to terms with these anxieties and the failures to live up to the past, the “underground” to which Ellison’s anonymous protagonist retreats and the invisibility that he embraces as “wilderness” locations represent errands into the heart of darkness. Ellison’s underground, like Miller’s wilderness, is not America itself but the locus where America is forged. Turning first to intergenerational anxiety, we find in Invisible Man ambivalence toward the “newness” of modern Negro identity. As observed in chapter 1, Ellison satirizes The New Negro’s embrace of a “younger generation’s” mantle for change and improvement by placing that phrase and its associated rhetoric in the protagonist’s graduation speech, spoken after the battle royal.50 Ellison’s protagonist is also haunted by history’s ghosts and myths. The question of generational legacies appears on the first page of the novel’s first chapter, where the invisible man declares, “I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time been ashamed.”51 His grandfather (“I am told I take after him”) on his deathbed makes a lasting impression upon the young protagonist, however, breaking his notoriously pacific character with these instructions: “He called my father to him and said, ‘Son, after I’m gone I want you to keep up the good fight. I never told you, but our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction. Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I want you to overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and destruction, let ’em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open. . . . Learn it to the younguns,’ he whispered fiercely; then he died.”52 Through this deathbed confession and commission the grandfather gains an immortality: “It was as though he had not died at all, his words caused so much anxiety,” and this episode becomes foundational to the protagonist’s wranglings with identity. The laughing grandfather time and again subverts his grandson’s delusions of comfort.53 He thrusts his grandson’s head back into the lion’s mouth.

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Forged by the experience of slavery, he becomes, like Miller’s characterization of the “greatest” Puritan generation—including John Winthrop, Thomas Hooker, and John Cotton, an impossible ideal the invisible man must live up to. The counterpoise to the protagonist’s grandfather is his college’s public legacy, which a careful reader quickly discovers to be ambivalent despite the protagonist’s desire to believe otherwise. Having identified his grandparents (pre-deathbed confession) with Booker T. Washington (“they were told that they were free, united with others of our country in everything pertaining to the common good, and, in everything social, separate like the fingers of the hand. And they believed it”), the college, suggestive of Washington’s Tuskegee, carries its own compelling inheritance over the invisible man, establishing one of the novel’s ideological conflicts: should he emulate his grandfather or mold his image to the example of Dr. Bledsoe, the college’s prominent and formidable president?54 Ellison mythologizes the college’s legacy by placing the recitation of the founder’s odyssey from slavery to prominence in the oracular mouth of one Homer A. Barbee—a blind Chicago preacher who recounts the tale in an epic chapel service.55 The protagonist, having placed his status at the college in jeopardy by exposing Mr. Norton to Jim Trueblood’s dirty secret, feels the weight of responsibility to the college, its mission, and his misplaced ambition someday to perpetuate it himself, through his own ascent to a position of leadership: “I could not look at Dr. Bledsoe now, because old Barbee had made me both feel my guilt and accept it. For although I had not intended it, any act that endangered the continuity of the [founder’s] dream was an act of treason.”56 Sent North into exile and pursued by the warring legacies that struggle for the soul of his identity, the invisible man enters a process of discovery; having failed to live up to others’ expectations (and, indeed, finding such expectations bereft), he is left alone with himself. The problem of misplaced and unfulfilled expectations in modern Negro aspirations during the first half of the twentieth century finds a striking presentation through the veterans that the protagonist and Norton encounter at the Golden Day.57 To wit, the veterans (described to Norton by the protagonist as “a little shellshocked”) live in an asylum down the road from the college.58 Most of them had been professionals, with careers the protagonist recognizes he, as a student of the college,

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should aspire to. Though by some measure beneficiaries of the past, the frustration of unfulfilled aspirations colors their conduct. They are veterans, former soldiers, “ruined” in the service of ideals and opportunities in World War I that were presumed to lead to some improvement of status, some guarantee of fuller citizenship and the recognition of African American humanity. Instead, as with the award-winning doctor who first foists the mantle of “invisibility” upon the protagonist, they are caught in Jim Crow limbo, heroes of a grand illusion, rendered insane by an insane social order and thus, absurdly, observing the world with a clarity that proves all the more insightfully sane. Such recognition remains a long time coming for Ellison’s protagonist. Turning to the second illustration of Miller’s place in the theological occasion of Invisible Man, we observe that only by going “underground,” into his subterranean den with 1,369 lights, does the invisible man reconcile himself to any self-assertion of identity. The underground, learning to embrace one’s invisibility and to wield its attendant ambiguity for one’s own purposes, emerges as an iteration of the wilderness experience. Like Miller’s Puritans, Ellison’s representative African American character must contend with expectations, unfulfilled promises, and in the process—left to himself—discover his own America by improvising upon the available materials. These materials reside underground.59 In order to address the question of what America the protagonist discovers in his underground wilderness, we should first acknowledge that the nature of this “errand” reflects Miller’s second definition of the word: “the actual business on which the actor goes, the purpose itself.”60 Ellison’s protagonist, relieved of the errand as short journey (“I realized that I couldn’t return to Mary [Rambo]’s, or to any part of my old life),” finds himself, in Miller’s words, “required to fill [the errand] with meaning by [him]self and out of [him]self.”61 Underground, trying “to think things out,” he discovers that “my problem was that I always tried to go everyone’s way but my own. . . . So after years of trying to adopt the opinions of others I finally rebelled. I am an invisible man.”62 The underground offers an ironic inversion (or, quite literally, a “subversion”) of the Puritan “city upon a hill,” articulated by John Winthrop and used by Miller to mark the anxiety of younger generations of Puritans who, like Ellison’s protagonist does with his grandfather, struggled

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to live up to their cultural and familial inheritance.63 Down from the Puritan mountaintop, Ellison’s protagonist remains subterranean. Rather than shining as “the light of the world,” as Matthew 5:14 (Winthrop’s source) suggests, noting that “a city that is set on a hill cannot be hid” (KJV), that it, as Winthrop warns, attracts “the eyes of all people,” the protagonist resides within his underground lair, relying upon 1,369 light bulbs (“the light of the [under]world”) to assure himself of his own existence. In this way Ellison marks a move from high visibility to an invisible man, incubating underground as he contends with what he has come to recognize as the inescapable reality of his (African) American existence: the errand he has inherited from his grandparents, as former slaves, has ceased to represent a temporary voyage, a “short journey.” He is, and remains, like his grandfather, “a spy in the enemy country,” covert, hidden, invisible.64 Geography is fate. Fundamental transformation— achieved by endurance, or by the pieties of the college, its leadership and benefactors, or as posited by the Brotherhood—proves impossible. To believe otherwise sends one down the very road that leads from the college to the asylum. Miller’s second characterization of the errand has taken effect. Invisibility, as a metaphor for the underground reality of the African American wilderness, becomes the fateful terrain, the geography that flesh is heir to. In this way we might understand Invisible Man to represent Ellison’s own accounting of a representative man in a representative circumstance, embarking upon an errand into the wilderness, discovering in the process his own America—in himself.

Paul Tillich: Race, Idolatry, and Ultimate Concern Systematic Boundaries Much as these regions of correspondence between Ellison and Miller— wilderness, territory, and underground—prove fruitful for articulating Invisible Man’s religious and theological occasion, the thought of Paul Tillich (which galvanized the organized study of theology and literature around midcentury) also utilizes a geographical metaphor to occupy another liminal region of ontic existence: what he calls the “boundary.” As Tillich writes in an autobiographical sketch titled On the Boundary, “I thought the concept of the boundary might be the fitting symbol for the whole of my personal and intellectual development. At almost every

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point, I have had to stand between alternative possibilities of existence, to be completely at home in neither and to take no definitive stand against either. . . . This disposition and its tension have determined both my destiny and my work.”65 While a certain Tillichian orientation may undergird this study, Invisible Man also resonates in specific ways. Ellison suggests that geography is fate. One boundary occupied by Tillich and his theology that bears especial relevance for Ellison is the boundary that joins—even in the act of demarcation—religion and culture. Tillich’s unique contribution to understanding this relationship resides in his insistence that religion represents not simply a cultural property but, in fact, that culture itself is religious.66 Such a distinction characterizes this project’s own assessment of Ellison’s concept of race: that the very agonistic struggle to formulate meaning and significance from the detritus of humankind’s broken relationships—both political and personal—represents in itself a religious impulse. Upon the publication of Invisible Man in 1952, critics registered an ambivalent response to Ellison at the beginning of his career as a novelist who ranged the literary borderlands between a Negro novelist and a novelist who happens to be a Negro; Invisible Man, along these same lines, discomfited attempts to qualify it as a Negro novel or a novel that happens to be about a Negro.67 In this way Ellison, in Tillichian terms, occupied and even flourished upon these categorical boundaries. Tillich himself met with similar ambivalence from respective audiences who found his attempts to consider Christian doctrine and dogma in dialectical connection with its social and cultural context to be problematic on both ends of this dialectic. According to Langdon Gilkey, “To most theologians, [Tillich’s] analysis is too concerned with culture and too dominated by philosophical procedures and categories to be legitimate. To almost all philosophers, while this analysis is comprehensible philosophically, still it is not quite acceptable: its premises are neither those of cultural common sense nor are they demonstrable; it is far too religious, too dependent on strange religious myths; and it is unquestionably too gloomy.”68 For theologians, because of Tillich’s insistence upon the particular context through which Ultimate Concern (a property we shall discuss momentarily) must be understood, Tillich’s method occasioned consternation for its tendency to “humanize” theology. Cultural critics, however, resisted Tillich’s theological orientation for his insistent

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anchoring of culture to what they presumed were dogmatic systems of ultimacy.69 Tillich would respond in Theology of Culture (1959) by articulating a middle way, a territorial region where theology contributes a depth to humanity, and culture humanizes what might otherwise become purely “spiritual.”70 Dogmatic adherence to either faction diminishes the “depth” of human existence, “out of which it gives substance, ultimate meaning, judgment, and creative courage.”71 The very qualities that alienated Tillich and his thought from Christian theology at midcentury, including Karl Barth’s kerygmatic neo-orthodoxy and even, to a certain (though lesser) extent, from Reinhold Niebuhr, endeared him to countless intellectuals and thoughtful laypeople across a myriad of disciplines and schools of thought.72 Like Niebuhr, Tillich taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, where he landed—with Niebuhr’s assistance—as an expatriate from Frankfurt (and the storied Frankfurt School), an enemy of the Third Reich fleeing Germany for exile in the United States. Though he remained strongly German in discipline and disposition, Tillich’s time in America, where he would remain until his death in 1965, transformed his work.73 His years in New York corresponded roughly with Ellison’s composition of Invisible Man.74 The first volume of Tillich’s Systematic Theology appeared in 1951 (placing it in Invisible Man’s intellectual orbit), and The Courage to Be, a revision of Tillich’s Phelps lectures, was published in 1952. What we might call Tillich’s “Ellisonian” problem (is he a philosopher of religion or a theologian who happens to be philosophical?) emerges in the introduction to the first volume of his Systematic Theology, where he attempts to establish correspondences between apparently oppositional realities. As Schleiermacher claims that religion navigates between the universal and the particular, Tillich claims that theology75 “moves back and forth between two poles, the eternal truth of its foundation and the temporal situation in which the eternal truth must be received.”76 The object of theology, according to Tillich, is “ultimate concern,” which he defines as “that which determines our being or not-being,” constituting “the whole of human reality, the structure, the meaning, and the aim of existence.”77 Tillich’s system is existential, and yet it values uniquely the contributions and conditions established by social reality as an inescapable cultural aspect of human life. Being without culture lacks definition;

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culture without being bears no depth, no grounding, no significance. Indeed, it proves idolatrous. Ellison’s Tillichian theology of culture emerges in his harsh criticism of authors and cultural pundits who ascribe to blackness—as a socially conditioned or even constructed mode of identity—a sense of ultimacy. This was Irving Howe’s mistake, accusing Ellison and James Baldwin of racial apostasy for their attempts to “move beyond” the generic conventions of Negro literature as it had been defined especially by the fiction of Richard Wright, particularly in Native Son. Endemic to Howe’s charge is an assumption of ontological blackness: that race and an author’s racial identity essentially condition his or her literary production.78 In terms of a theology of culture, Howe suggests that race constitutes (or should constitute) Negro literature’s ultimate concern. In Tillich’s words, “it excludes all other concerns from ultimate significance.”79 Ellison’s demurral from Howe’s racial fundamentalism registers in Ellison’s recognition of the priorities of race and racial identity as they correspond to ultimate concern. He eschews Wright and Baldwin’s influence, calling them “relatives” and relegating them (perhaps hyperbolically) to an inferior status of correspondence when compared to “ancestors” like Eliot, Joyce, and Faulkner. These ancestors compare favorably in profile to another catalog of influences that Ellison mentions in his “Art of Fiction” interview with the Paris Review—Malraux, Cervantes, Sophocles, Dostoevsky, among others.80 In this context race occupies for Ellison what Tillich calls a “preliminary concern to ultimacy.” Ellison understands Howe’s suggestion to be idolatrous on this Tillichian reading because, as Tillich puts it, “Idolatry is the elevation of a preliminary concern to ultimacy.”81 Ellison’s conception of race as the American iteration of what drives the search for ultimate concern through literary creation fulfills Tillich’s acceptable method of correspondence between preliminary and ultimate concern: “That which is a finite concern is not elevated to infinite significance,” as was the case with Howe’s assessment of Negro literature, “nor is it beside the infinite, but in and through it the infinite becomes real.”82 For Ellison, then, we might understand analogous correspondences among his ancestors (Sophocles, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dostoevsky, Eliot, Joyce, Faulkner, and others)—what they share and the telos of their literary aspirations—to be occupied with ultimate concern. For the American

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and especially for the African American author, on Ellison’s view, race should represent the preliminary, culturally contextual concern through which one enters a pursuit for ultimate literary concern.

The Courage to Be Invisible The implications for this conceptualization of race gain another dimension when understood in terms of The Courage to Be, Tillich’s engagement with the idea of courage in historical and contemporary contexts. Tillich defines such courage as “the ethical act in which man affirms his own being in spite of those elements of his existence which conflict with his essential self-affirmation.” It represents, Tillich notes, a universal impulse to navigate particular “elements of . . . existence.”83 In modern people discouragement arises in the form of despair from an existential crisis that is common to modern humanity: the anxiety of meaninglessness, the acknowledgment that existence may bear no evident significance beyond the pervasive absurdity that marks one’s works and days. Consequently, many may (and do) fall prey to a variety of distractions, yet the authentic response, the courage to be, represents a willingness to continue, to persevere in spite of evidence to the contrary, within the self-affirmation of one’s existence, one’s being in the face of nonbeing. As Gilkey explains, “This self-affirmation in courage is the primal mode of what we might call spiritual participation in the ground of being; self-affirmation is, in a sense, self-constitution, and thus it represents the prius of all that the finite culture is and does.”84 The particular affirmation (and thereby the constitution) of the self serves to unite one’s own being with a more unified sense of being—with the culture and, by extension, with humanity. Within this outline of the modern predicament, Invisible Man’s symbolic action reflects upon the nature of courage in an existential context. Ellison’s concept of invisibility in particular wrangles with the implications of race and racism as a specific, culturally representative form of nonbeing. Like nonbeing, invisibility denotes negation, the contradiction of an affirmative condition: being and nonbeing, visibility and invisibility, serve as oppositional properties but rely upon one another through their respective antagonistic cooperation that, in the process, renews mutual relevance and dependence. Ellison’s protagonist diag-

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noses his own invisible condition, ironically significant because of the highly visible nature of the root cause of his invisibility: his phenotypical blackness. In this way the implications of racial identity in Ellison’s novel may be understood to bear existential ramifications. Blackness stands as a precondition to invisibility, the negation of the racialized subject from existence in a visible cultural landscape, the annihilation into nonbeing according to “a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I may come into contact.”85 Therefore, as “the courage to be is the self-affirmation of being in spite of the fact of nonbeing” (according to Tillich), in spite of “often doubt[ing] if you really exist” (as the invisible man puts it), we must first recognize that invisibility, like nonbeing, qualifies as an anxious property.86 Nonetheless, precisely within such anxiety is where Ellison suggests that invisibility, as it becomes recognized and understood by the invisible agent, may invigorate the potential for Tillich’s “courage to be.” Invisibility, once diagnosed, becomes the negative grounds of affirmation. It represents a courageous willingness to inhabit the inevitability of nonbeing—the certain annihilation of identity that attends American racism—and to transform it. “I am an invisible man,” the protagonist proclaims in the novel’s first sentence, offering a defiantly ironic declaration of being (“I am”) amid the particular imposition of negation (“an invisible man”). Invisibility establishes the affirmation of self, a constitution that emerges creatively as a preliminary concern, articulated through racial identity, and thereby inaugurates the quest for ultimate concern. Ellison’s prologue and epilogue, which discuss invisibility most overtly, together reveal the narrator to be in the process of struggling with despair that is at once endemic to the human condition (as nonbeing) and particularly reified in specifically racial terms (such as invisibility). Tillich’s act of affirmation takes the form of a leap of faith. Such a leap does not offer a “solution,” or provide an “answer [to] the question” outside of “its precondition, the state of nothingness.” Instead, the leap of faith stands as the acceptance of despair: “The faith which makes the courage of despair possible is the acceptance of the power of being even in the grip of nonbeing. . . . The act of accepting meaninglessness is itself a meaningful act.”87 Significantly, at novel’s end, Ellison’s protagonist takes a literal “leap of faith” through an open manhole into Harlem’s

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underground, which signals his metaphorical leap into invisibility. Fleeing Ras the Destroyer (whom he has wounded) during Invisible Man’s climactic Harlem riot, the protagonist encounters two men discussing Ras’s earlier actions: “They were laughing outside the hedge and leaving and I lay in a cramp, wanting to laugh and yet knowing that Ras was not funny, or not only funny but dangerous as well, wrong but justified, crazy and yet coldly sane. . . . Why did they make it seem funny, only funny? I thought. And yet knowing that it was. It was funny and dangerous and sad.” Discovered, he flees, falling down through an open manhole cover: “But I was in a strange territory now and someone, for some reason, had removed the manhole cover and I felt myself plunge down, down; a long drop that ended upon a load of coal that sent up a cloud of dust, and I lay in the black dark upon the black coal no longer running, hiding, or concerned, hearing the shifting of the coal.”88 He falls into invisibility. A black man “in the black dark upon the black coal,” his camouflage is complete: “Nigger in the coal pile, eh Joe?”89 In the quest for light in this “strange territory” (note the geographical language), the quest for definition and emplotment, he burns his papers, destroys the evidence of his being, and steps into a world of “infinite possibilities.”90 He exists in a liminal state, “neither dreaming nor waking but somewhere in between.”91 He inhabits the boundary. In this state the invisible man has a dream vision. Held prisoner by a collective of his antagonists (Jack, Emerson, Bledsoe, Norton, Ras, and co.), he denies their attempts to lure him back into their world: “I’m through with all your illusions and lies,” he says. They castrate him and throw his “two bloody blobs” over the side of the bridge on which he stands. “HOW DOES IT FEEL TO BE FREE OF ILLUSION,” they ask. “Painful and empty,” answers the protagonist, acknowledging nonbeing, his procreative absence, his vital despair.92 By laughing, he embraces absurdity: “Why do you laugh?” [Jack] said. “Because at a price I now see that which I couldn’t see,” I said. “What does he think he sees?” they said. And Jack came closer, threatening, and I laughed. “I’m not afraid now,” I said. “But if you’ll look, you’ll see . . . It’s not invisible . . .” “See what?” they said.

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“That there hang not only my generations wasting upon the water—” And now the pain welled up and I could no longer see them. “But what? Go on,” they said. “But your sun . . .” “Yes? ” “And your moon . . .” “He’s crazy!” “Your world . . .” “I knew he was a mystic idealist!” Tobitt said. “Still,” I said, “there’s your universe, and that drip-drop upon the water you hear is all the history you’ve made, all you’re going to make. Now laugh, you scientists. Let me hear you laugh!” And high above me now the bridge seemed to move off to where I could not see, striding like a robot, an iron man, whose iron legs clanged doomfully as it moved. And then I struggled up, full of sorrow and pain, shouting, “No, no, we must stop him!”93

This section of text offers a curious turn, and no doubt speaks to Ellison’s anxiety over social science and the annihilating machinations of racial fundamentalism. Furthermore we see how—in the context of the dream itself—the invisible man, despite no future to speak of (his link to it having been severed) persists in expressing a desire to press on. He “struggled,” endured “sorrow and pain,” and still offers courageous affirmation amid the threat of nonbeing: “No, no, we must stop him!” Such an expression finds recapitulation in the novel’s epilogue: “Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.”94 Despite the pressure of nonbeing, life and humanity reside in the courage to be, regardless; they persist in the acceptance of despair, in the courage to be invisible.

To the Dark Tower Nineteen fifty-two does not represent an isolated occasion for religious and theological reading in Ellison’s corpus. Indeed, it is only the beginning. By the end of the 1950s he would make the acquaintance of and forge an intimate friendship with a former student of Niebuhr’s and Tillich’s whose own first book (Rehearsals of Discomposure) had also

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appeared in 1952. Certain religious and theological sensibilities in Invisible Man and, indeed, across Ellison’s corpus would not surprise Nathan A. Scott Jr., canon theologian and Episcopal priest, professor of theology and literature, and the first African American faculty member at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Scott sought to foster these elements in Ellison’s reading and writing and, whatever his misgivings may have been as a thoroughly “secular” writer, Ellison took notice. Likewise, Scott shared Ellison’s ambivalence about the requisite ways in which African American scholars and writers were expected to ply their craft. Like Ellison, he read deeply in and continued to engage with the Western canon well past its expiration date in an academy that bore little conception of what drove a Ralph Ellison or a Nathan Scott to such treason. Unlike Ellison, Scott’s recourse to religious and theological rationales behind this position was less than invisible. Indeed, they remained prominent in a way that intrigued and inspired Ellison to seek a renewed sense of depth and resonance in his writing during an age when such concerns, like his protagonist, had moved underground.

3

Above the Veil Nathan A. Scott Jr. and the Theological Apprenticeship of Ralph Ellison

In November 1964 Ralph Ellison wrote a revealing letter of thanks to his friend Nathan A. Scott Jr. for sending a copy of his most recent volume, The Climate of Faith in Modern Literature (1964). According to Ellison, “Sometime ago, I became concerned with the relationship of modern theology to literature but really had no way of approaching it systematically, and I find that your book is providing the necessary orientation, and between it and the ‘New Orpheus’ [Scott’s New Orpheus from the same year] I am getting quite an education. . . . Altogether I am being forced to think in different channels and I find it to my advantage.”1 Ellison’s letter proves remarkable for a number of reasons. First, it offers a kind of “smoking gun,” linking him specifically with certain intellectual correspondences between “modern theology and literature” that we have, thus far, dealt with in a largely interpretive, even speculative fashion. The letter brings to light a version of the novelist that has remained invisible to scholars: namely, Ellison as religious thinker. Second, this passage introduces a new wrinkle concerning the way, and the terms by which, Ellison sought to manage the discourse surrounding his career as he ceased to be a “new” novelist and confronted head-on his difficulties in completing the long-awaited second novel. “Theology”—taken for our purposes here as a category of “religiosity”—would provide not only a way forward for Ellison via his second novel, but also a retrospective way back as he assessed and curated the terms of his literary legacy in the midst of turbulent times. Seven years later, in 1971, Ellison thanked Scott again—this time for dedicating his most recent book, The Wild Prayer of Longing, to Ralph and Fanny Ellison. Here he doubles down on his earlier expressed interests regarding literature and modern theology, paraphrasing Kenneth 96

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Burke to claim that contemporary fiction writers have “lost a sense of a Word lying beyond their words,” before allowing that “I sense more than I can say, perceive more than I’ve been able to reduce to form. Yet I reject any sense of easy [religious] alienation. . . . I read your book . . . and I felt most poignantly the loss of depth and resonance that occurred when a concern with the sacred went underground (if not completely out of the window) of modern literature. How our efforts to depict the grandeur, [and] moral breath of human assertion are muted.”2 Seven years on, Ellison sounds more at ease, even as he defers modestly, or politely, to Scott’s expertise (sensing more than he can say). He wields Burke’s argument about words and the Word—taken from The Rhetoric of Religion (1960)—effectively, aligning his own literary ventures with Scott’s theological program (“our efforts . . . are muted”; emphasis mine) over and against a literary declension narrative caused, in part, by the enforced invisibility of “the sacred” as it moves underground.3 Ellison may sense more than he can say, but he also implies a great deal more than he fesses up to. In 1979 Nathan Scott took up Ellison’s mantle in print, writing glowingly of Invisible Man in a long article on African American literature in the Harvard Guide to Contemporary Writing: “The book is packed full of the acutest observations of the manners and idioms and human styles that constitute the ethos of Black life in America, and it gives us such a sense of social fact as can be come by nowhere in the manuals of academic sociology—all this being done with the ease that comes from enormous expertness of craft, from deep intimacy of knowledge, and from love.”4 Such love emerges from “subtle alternations between outrage and hilarity,” “minglings of comic and tragic modalities” that, in the words of Cleanth Brooks, “step out into the universal only by first going through the narrow door of the particular.”5 Scott transforms Ellison’s existential irony, at odds with “sociological”—and thus scientific— interpretations of humanity, through the unacknowledged New Critical terms of Schleiermacher’s religious dialectic of universal and particular, which he also identifies with Christian agape.6 At the core of Invisible Man, then, for Scott, resides a theological quality that—inflected against the sociological determinations that (especially as Ellison and Scott saw things) too frequently, and insufficiently, qualify African American literature of this era—conspires to offer what Scott feels is a more nuanced

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and insightful representation of “Black life in America” predicated on the terms of Schleiermacher’s “religion.” In this way Scott also anticipates the premise, if not the thesis, of this book. Who is Nathan Scott? What was the nature of his more than thirtyyear friendship with Ellison? How might his legacy—as a largely overlooked element of Ellison’s biography and cultural lexicon—transform the way we read Ellison and understand his work, and even contribute to a sense of invisible theology?7 This chapter addresses such questions in three ways, narrating, first, an account of Ellison and Scott’s friendship as gleaned from their correspondence in Ellison’s papers in the Library of Congress and amplified by those who, perhaps, knew Scott best. What did they share as intellectuals—indeed prominent African American intellectuals who moved among elite institutions and colleagues at a time of changing, challenging racial dynamics in political, cultural, and academic arenas? What theological or religious influence might we detect rubbing off on Ellison, or reforming literary and cultural principles that were already at play in his imagination? Second, and at the same time, how did Scott and Ellison’s racial sensibilities contribute to their relationship and work? Both men stood outside of the predominant racial orthodoxies of their day and suffered for it, having their racial bonafides and political commitments called into question. What insight do Scott’s outlooks and his experiences shed on Ellison’s as both men brought African American sensibilities to classically canonical conceptions of culture? Does Scott’s theological vocation and “instruction” of Ellison deepen the novelist’s understanding of race as an invisible theology? Third, building on such evidence of religion and race, this chapter closes by arguing that, just as many people draw on Ellison’s friendship with Richard Wright as an organizing principle for understanding the first half of Ellison’s career, Scott provides a similar organizational figure for the second half. Scott’s influence reframed Ellison’s past, present, and future “in the middest,” informing the way Ellison interpreted his own career and the lexicon he developed to reimagine the changing terms of his own legacy. Through Scott, a turn to certain religiously—and theologically—inflected discourses of race and nation contributed to a vital center that (as chapters 4 and 5 bear out) would characterize Ellison’s writing, teaching, public activities, and reassessments of his literary legacies for the remainder of his life. Religion became a viable shorthand

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for the “depth and resonance” that Ellison believed to be absent from his contemporary literature, casting new light on his decision, for instance, to write a second novel about the centrality of black preachers and preaching to an American prospect amid the annihilation of classic American civil religious models, and his decision to teach university courses concerned—even if obliquely—with post-Calvinist conceptions of sin in American literature of the nineteenth century—amid an era that believed itself ensconced in rapid secularization.

Literature in the Divinity School? An article in the December 22, 1967, issue of Time magazine considers what is for us a familiar problem: “Is William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury a religious novel? Faulkner himself was a somewhat cynical agnostic, and few readers would find much spiritual comfort in his dour chronicle of the Compson family. But to Professor Nathan Scott of the University of Chicago Divinity School, the answer is clearly yes. Behind the novel’s secular façade, he argues, lies a poetic expression of what theology calls kairos—the divine gift of time span in which man exists on earth.” Whatever incredulity this lede may register (and if nothing else it offers evidence that middlebrow media have long butchered religion reportage), it provides a cogent account of Scott’s governing paradigm: a classic Tillichian correspondence between cultural forms and theological language and ideas.8 As Giles Gunn notes, even as Western modernity severed ties with Victorian spirituality, moving simultaneously away from overt expressions of belief in and belonging to religious institutions and their ordinances, its literary output as Scott saw it drew on forms and structures of reality that words succeed in sacramentalizing, even incarnating, as a sign of modernity’s struggle against meaninglessness.9 From the 1950s to the 1990s, Scott—not without controversy—consolidated earlier excursions of theological “dialectics” into a formidable, if marginal, subfield of theological studies and its emerging counterpart, religious studies.10 Scott was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1925, making him more than a decade Ellison’s junior.11 With “immediate roots . . . not quite a generation removed from chattel slavery” (like Ellison, his grandparents were enslaved), Scott finished public school in Detroit, graduated from

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the University of Michigan in 1944, and earned the BD and PhD from Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University in New York, where he studied under Tillich, Niebuhr, and Lionel Trilling, among others.12 Early ministerial and academic appointments included stints at Virginia Union and Howard University. His first book, Rehearsals of Discomposure, appeared in 1952—in the midst of Invisible Man’s theological occasion highlighted (through Scott’s teachers Tillich and Niebuhr) in chapter 2, occasioning the first of many convergences between Ellison and the scholar who “echoed Ellison’s comparatist and anti-chauvinist speculative concerns perhaps more than any of Ellison’s other intellectual peers,” drawing on “easy communion between classical and vernacular influences” that remained so at odds in the intellectual culture of the day.13 Scott was called to the faculty of the Divinity School at the University of Chicago in 1955 where he remained until his final move to the University of Virginia in 1976. Not long after arriving in Chicago, Scott pursued ordination in the Episcopal Church, leaving his native Presbyterianism only after his father’s death. Named canon theologian at St. James Cathedral in Chicago during the late 1960s, he served nearly a decade in this capacity, regularly preaching, presiding, and performing other duties such as conducting a continuing education literary group for what he called “the reading clergy.”14 Scott remained active in church affairs at St. Paul’s in Charlottesville, Virginia, though never in the official capacity he served in Chicago.15 He retired from teaching in 1994 and died in 2006. While Ellison first met Scott briefly in 1959, their friendship blossomed in the autumn of 1961 when Ellison spent the quarter as Alexander C. White Visiting Professor of Humanities at the University of Chicago, forging an intimate friendship that would endure for the rest of their lives. This friendship extended as well to their wives, Fanny Ellison and Charlotte Scott (a Federal Reserve banker in Chicago who later held a prestigious chair in economics at Virginia), whose correspondence continued after Ellison’s death.16 While Scott was a priest, and took seriously this clerical office, his friendship with Ellison developed primarily from their mutual literary interests and a shared (if uniquely embattled) racial sensibility in what Scott called a “late, bad time.”17 Scott also clearly recognized and sought to cultivate from the beginning a religious sensibility in Ellison’s writing and thought. Archival materi-

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als reflect Scott as a tireless advocate in theological circles, promoting Ellison and his writing to colleagues and relevant organizations alike, while working at the same time to maximize Ellison’s opportunities for reflection upon these dynamics of his own fiction and criticism. Such efforts were never overt or pointed. No record survives of any specific arrangement or acknowledgment between them, yet Scott’s agenda begins to emerge through venues both official and personal in Chicago and beyond. A few weeks into the fall quarter of 1961, the Scotts hosted a dinner in Ellison’s honor at their Greenwood Avenue home on “Professor’s Row” in Hyde Park, where Ellison, Richard Stern, and a number of Scott’s Divinity School colleagues argued late into the night about the relationship between “Christianity and tragedy.”18 By the end of Ellison’s quarter at Chicago that autumn he had discussed his work at a Divinity School Wednesday lunch gathering and found himself nominated to the governing board of the Society of Arts, Religion, and Contemporary Culture, a board on which Scott also served.19 By the summer of 1962, Ellison and Scott were busy soliciting manuscripts for a volume they intended to coedit, a never-completed project with the working title The Dark Tower: Perspectives on the American Experience—a volume of essays by prominent African Americans (James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Vincent Harding, Charles Long, William Ming, and Benjamin Quarles were among those invited to submit articles) that sought to circumvent what Scott called “the bitter exigencies of racial politics”—sponsored jointly by the Foundation for the Arts, Religion, and Culture and the American Missionary Association.20 Over the next three decades (until Ellison’s death in 1994), Ellison and Scott’s correspondence reflects a continued and concerted effort by Scott to foster Ellison’s theological orientation and to promote him as a viable literary religionist. When Robert C. Johnson, dean of Yale Divinity School, asked Scott for the names of potential Phelps Lecturers in religion and literature, Scott suggested Ellison. Yale issued an invitation through R. W. B. Lewis, but Ellison declined.21 Ellison’s files and bookshelves were filled with offprints of Scott’s articles and pamphlets, typescripts of his sermons and public lectures, copies of his monographs, almost all of them sent by Scott and personally inscribed to Ellison.22 Scott also urged the search committee for the Reinhold Niebuhr Award to consider Ellison in 1973, citing mutual regard between his friend and

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his late teacher, as well as Ellison’s “lively sense” of Niebuhr’s “greatness” as a public theologian.23 Beyond these professional documents, one also finds in Ellison’s files the Scotts’ annual Christmas letters and family photographs, the odd note between Fanny Ellison and Charlotte Scott, Ellison’s brokering of the Scotts’ purchase of at least two works by artist Romare Bearden, and evidence of friendly visits with one another when passing through New York, Chicago, and Charlottesville. While Scott appears to have been the more prolific and enthusiastic correspondent, this was no one-sided relationship. Particularly moving is the Ellisons’ appreciation for the Scotts’ children (the Ellisons had no children of their own, but proved to be warm parental and grandparental figures to a number of young friends), with Fanny Ellison writing about the Scotts’ daughter Leslie at one point, “Ever[y] now and then I meet a little girl whom I would have liked for my own. Forgive me if this is coveting.”24 Charlotte Scott— the Federal Reserve banker and distinguished professor of economics— offered the Ellisons occasional investment advice, sending articles from the Wall Street Journal accompanied by pamphlets and financial strategies.25 In 1994 the Scotts flew to New York to comfort Fanny Ellison upon her husband’s death, and Nathan Scott himself officiated from The Book of Common Prayer at Ralph Ellison’s memorial service in the chapel of Trinity Church Cemetery.26 Ellison’s drafts and letters also reveal fascinating nuggets unparsed by earlier biographers and commentators that hint at deeper than expected theological engagement, historical study, and general knowledge about matters religious. For instance, the draft of his letter of thanks to Scott for The Wild Prayer of Longing rehearses across its mutations Ellison’s recognition of the Georgia Sea Island (Ossabow Island), where he first read the book on vacation, as among the islands “where the Wesleys preached,” lending a special “resonance to [Scott’s] argument” and his concern for the sacred.27 Elsewhere in the same November 1964 letter in which he acknowledges his interest in “literature and modern theology,” Ellison also mentions renewing his studies—or at least his reading—in the work of Teilhard de Chardin and “his phenomenon of man” that he had abandoned “while living up at Tivoli” (rooming with Saul Bellow while teaching at Bard College) several years before. “I don’t know what’s happening to me,” he concludes.28 Again, and also as with Ellison’s inter-

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sections with Reinhold Niebuhr, a popular theological figure in a period when such figures appeared on the cover of Time magazine (as Scott appears in its pages), Ellison registers that such intellectual points of religious and theological interest matter even among middlebrow culture in ways that prove difficult to imagine now. In some ways Scott and Ellison remained an odd pairing. Scott was exquisitely credentialed, Ellison a college dropout. While both men published first books in 1952, Ellison would never finish a second novel and released just two collections of essays (in addition to his occasional writing) over the next four decades. In that same period of time the prolific Scott would author or edit twenty-five books and, according to one estimate, “a couple hundred substantive essays and articles in numerous books and journals.”29 Their admiration was mutual, yet precisely what they saw in and gained from one another proves illuminating. Scott recognized in Ellison’s fiction and thought an outstanding, living exemplar of his own intellectual vision of Paul Tillich’s “form” and “substance” in Theology of Culture: a religious unconscious, an artistic worldview ineluctably charged with the intellectual intuition of culture as inherently religious, and its artistic expression as a theological reflection of such a religious orientation.30 Ellison, in Scott, found a kind of academic validation of his work and persona that not only carried the prestige that he coveted but also (and especially) found a black intellectual who “got” Ellison’s racial perspective (and vice versa). John S. Wright compares the relationship between Scott and Ellison to Ellison’s friendship with Albert Murray, and one can observe in the latter pair’s correspondence in Trading Twelves (2000), for instance, a kind of iconoclastic political and aesthetic kinship as black literary men working outside of the materialist vanguard.31 While the tone and language of the Ellison/Scott correspondence differs—it is decidedly less vernacular on both sides, for instance—a similar level of frankness and mutually implicit understanding emerges from the political and literary aesthetics that they discuss, and the confidences surrounding the colleagues, friends, and enemies that they share. Thus, as Scott’s efforts bring to light a number of religious antecedents and problems that characterize Ellison’s fiction—even as a thoroughly secularized artist and intellectual, it remains instructive to observe precisely how Ellison couches Scott and his contributions to an interested public. As he wrote in a 1972 letter of reference on Scott’s behalf,

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[Scott’s] has been an effort to make us aware of the many ways in which current literature is locked in an agonizing struggle to give new formal structuring to insights and intuitions which have long been regarded as the sole province of religious thinkers. In this it is my interpretation that he views the artist as moving toward reassuming under a new guise a role long ago rejected: . . . a role in which worldly secular manipulators of artistic forms struggle painfully toward creating a new vision of the sacramental dimension of human existence.32

While he may have lacked the formal capacity of a religious commentator or theologian, Ellison clearly possessed no small measure of insight into Scott’s thought, and into the deeper implications of the craft that he, himself, wrought. Ellison’s Scott struggled mightily to convey, to obviate, what remained for many as invisibly theological dimensions of secular cultural properties that people no longer recognized as religious in any capacity. In other words, Ellison recommends in Scott something of the religious dimensions that we have traced thus far in Ellison’s own conception of race.

Race Such tremendous empathy stems from a shared racial sensibility that thrust both Scott and Ellison outside of the prevailing attitudes of their time (and much of the interim, for that matter). We have already considered in earlier chapters Ellison’s difficulty as “not a black writer” or an “Uncle Tom.” Scott, too, proved ambivalent toward materialist interpretations of racial identity. He was harshly criticized for daring, as a black scholar, to write primarily about European writers and, as we have observed with Ellison, he confronted vicious, scarring antipathy from a racial vanguard patrolling such borders of identity. As with Ellison in other ways, however, one should neither overlook nor minimize the serious racism that Scott did, in fact, endure. Anthony Yu writes that Scott’s “childhood was haunted by terrifying tales of the Detroit lynching,” that he suffered the indignities of segregated dormitories “far from campus” at the University of Michigan, and was “mistaken for a janitor when he walked into John Herman Randall’s class at Columbia,” to name but a few experiences.33 Others who only

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knew Scott’s published work registered “astonishment,” as Ralph Wood puts it, upon learning that Scott was black.34 Despite the gentler tenor of Wood’s suggestion (significantly, Wood confesses himself to have numbered among those surprised), such astonishment often carried a much more sinister quality. Charles Long recounts a colleague who dismissed Scott simply because, this unnamed friend claimed, Scott “was not his kind of black man.”35 These troubles stemmed primarily from Scott’s impatience with emerging racial sensibilities and the sense that he was unwelcoming or unhelpful to other black academics.36 They only escalated in the second half of his career. In a 1993 speech to the Conference on Christianity and Literature at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association (MLA), Scott noted that “within my own ancestral community there are those who think of me as a kind of trahaison . . . . I have not specialized in what is spoken of as ‘the Black Experience,’ and thus some of my black confreres are eager to declare that . . . I am, so far as they are concerned, beyond the pale.”37 This was, in Scott’s words, an era of “hermeneutical terrorism” in critical theory. A black theologian who was no Black Theologian, he became an attractive target for his racial apostasy. As he wrote to Ellison two months earlier, in what must have been his last, or one of his last letters to his old friend who died five months later, “Nobody, I sometimes think, handles black folks with such cruelty as that with which they handle one another.”38 By sympathetic contrast, Kimberly Rae Connor suggests that Scott’s aims as an African American scholar might more appropriately be paraphrased by Scott’s own description of Melvin Tolson: “[A] Negro writer who asks to be considered as something other than merely a special case of ethnic ferment.”39 Stubbornly and determinedly, Scott refused to waver, and he paid bitterly for his defiance. In 1986 his presidency of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) raised ire among critics of his scholarly and political positions, and more than two decades later the pronounced lack of distinction accorded a posthumous celebration of Scott’s life at the 2008 AAR annual meeting in Chicago infuriated at least one participant.40 Scott’s “treason” has, it would seem, become his most abiding characteristic. His remarkable, if now somewhat dated, intellectual program has been overshadowed by the many difficulties surrounding the political orientation and performance of his racial identity.

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In no small way the divide that Scott occupied reflects a more contemporary version of the “just representations” problem of racial epistemology as discussed along with the Negro novel in chapter 1. Need he be a “Negro scholar,” or does it suffice to be a scholar who “happens to be a Negro”? Is one more legitimate than the other, and who decides? In March 1969, upon reading a report that Lake Forest College, north of Chicago, intended to “grant . . . ‘black students an effective veto power over the hiring of black professors,’” Scott fired off an angry screed to the college’s president (and Scott’s erstwhile friend), William G. Cole. After claiming bafflement that any administration would “transfer its custodianship of the academic enterprise to some other group,” Scott arrives at the crux of the matter: For what you and your colleagues are saying, when you declare that you’ll not accept a black scholar as a colleague who hasn’t been approved by the black students, is that a Negro scholar who is not a “good” Negro doesn’t deserve enfranchisement in the academic community at large. (He must prove, in other words, just how “black” he really is.) And I wonder if this isn’t the last condescension that the American white man can practice upon me (and the pronoun, I trust you to understand, is collective and not personal). For a long time, though I was practicing the disciplines of scholarship in my field of inquiry as assiduously as any of my other contemporaries, I was told that I simply couldn’t “come in”—period; and now I’m being told that I can come in only if I’m approved by my ancestral community. Which is simply the last refinement of disesteem!41

Here we glimpse Scott the racial Anglo-Catholic. The problem is epistemological, of course, reflected by notions of the “good Negro”— remember Long’s unnamed colleague who claimed Scott was “not his kind of black man.” At the root of Scott’s critique, however, is hierarchy. No Congregationalist (indeed, he elected to leave Presbyterianism in the 1950s), Scott favored canons of authority which, establishing order, work their way down to the laity. Matters of such importance cannot be left to those not ordained a certain authority. No matter how ridiculous it might be, the proposed Lake Forest policy disturbs Scott first as a position of governance (and few could argue sensibly that Scott is wrong in the abstract—the plan smacks of weak leadership). The personal sting of

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“disesteem” that follows stems from Scott’s disappointment with institutions that abandon authority to those less prepared to wield it. After all, for what other purpose does hierarchy exist? His bitter disappointment is palpable. “It’s a bad time,” he writes to Ellison in a cover letter that accompanies a copy of his remarks to Cole.42 Though it remains, perhaps, difficult to imagine Ellison quite so concerned with hierarchies, a shared position emerges if we consider the relative relationships that both men bore to canons of authority and their vernacular others. Ellison recognized elements of the vernacular in high culture and so conflated them—reading “Ulysses in black” (to borrow the title of Patrice Rankine’s book about Ellison and classicism) as a way of spanning what David Chinitz, writing about T. S. Eliot, calls “the cultural divide.”43 Scott also recognized this divide. We know he was highly conversant in jazz and other forms of black vernacular expression.44 Rather than (like Ellison) honoring high culture by rendering it in the vernacular, Scott—much like Eliot (and the Anglo-Catholic connection here proves apposite)—worked in the opposite way. Like pub talk or dance hall music in Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), Scott wanted to elevate worthy vernacular figures to the realm of high culture. Furthermore, this elevation depicts his own emergence as a prominent Anglican, a black intellectual who rose from the ranks of Negro colleges to a post at the University of Chicago, and later became, with his wife, Charlotte, the first African Americans hired as tenured professors at the University of Virginia. Scott took tremendous pride in these accomplishments and sincerely believed that he achieved them on his own merit, an attitude that many find problematic in its individualistic orientation. Nevertheless, Scott’s singular abilities and tenacity as an inconvenient trailblazer remains undeniable. It also clarifies why the Lake Forest affair angered him so profoundly: for true integration of elites to take place, utterly exceptional individuals must rise according to the terms of authority to which they aspire. Part of doing so requires a letting go of “vulgar” material and communitarian concerns in the interest of more profound and singular ambitions, a point where Scott and Ellison reunite in their respective positions across the cultural divide. Consider the contents of a letter Scott sent Benjamin Quarles in June 1962, inviting a submission to The Dark Tower, the volume he planned to coedit with Ellison in commemoration of the centennial of the Emanci-

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pation Proclamation. Working against the notion that “American society and culture have never been informed by any really profound historical consciousness,” which he wants Quarles to assess in his contributed essay, Scott notes, It is our intention that this book shall have a character somewhat different from similar efforts that have been undertaken in the past. For they have tended to be almost exclusively concerned with racial experience and with all the bitter exigencies of racial politics. And though it is by no means our purpose rigidly to extrude this whole dimension of things from our canvas, it is a part of our intention to provide a kind of evidence of how deeply Negro intellectuals have come to be concerned with the whole gamut of thought and experience that claims the interest of the intellectual community at large on the American scene in our time.45

This larger claim, in boilerplate prose sent to all prospective contributors, establishes tension between the politics of racial experience and a broader range of intellectual concerns. On the one hand, such a division makes little sense taken in the abstract—especially to contemporary readers. Politics simply cannot be extruded from African American intellectual concerns. This was historically true at the moment Scott wrote and today represents a point further vindicated by more than a half-century of empirical historical evidence in the interim (never mind matters of current events), which give it an even more troubling register, rating the political as inferior to or lesser than intellectual pursuits. Certainly we see where Scott’s detractors might have derived their displeasure. To deal with Scott’s work, however, requires a different set of assumptions. An honest appraisal, without apologetics or apology, must acknowledge and even insist that while he approached his experience of being African American in ways that simply did not align with contemporary (or current) accounts and attitudes does not mean that such an approach lacks depth, conviction, or even fidelity to his “ancestral community.” Here we locate Scott’s shared racial sensibility with Ellison: certain terms of metaphor, interpretation, and experience exist and function outside of the conceptual shorthand that developed roughly midcentury and that we inherit from this age of Scott and Ellison’s

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friendship. Like invisibility, the metaphysical trope that has become a materialist paradigm, Scott is due for reappraisal as a brilliant and pugnacious critic who in many ways invented and codified precursors to our present “religious turn” in the study of culture and texts. Toward such ends Scott does not separate the political from broader cultural concerns; rather, the diminishment of political action and rhetoric that Scott recognizes oversimplifies and proves inadequate to the scope of human endeavor that Scott recognizes more broadly to be in play. Such actions and rhetoric could not find elevation to Scott’s high critical position. A year after his letter to Quarles and less than one week before Medgar Evers’s assassination, Scott wrote to Ellison, “Events in the South are keeping an incredibly swift and unpredictable pace these days, and one wonders toward what conclusion they’re moving.”46 He expresses surprise at the organization and vehemence of the movement, with a caveat: As I talk to Negro students on campuses in the region, though I am sometimes thrilled by their courage and resoluteness, I cannot help but be occasionally saddened a little by how coarsening of sensibility much of this agitation seems to be. And this may be a new dimension of the racial tragedy in this country—that not only are evil men coarsened by the intransigence of their evil, but so too is there a coarsening in the act of what Camus spoke of as “rebellion,” coarsening in the slogans and the epithets that furnish the rebel with his armory of rhetoric, and most especially when that rhetoric insists, with a furious self-righteousness, upon its humility and its “Christ-cum-Ghandi” non-violence. The stupid, cruel violence of the white segregationist naturally makes any real “sweetness and light” on the other side a most difficult achievement indeed—but, even so, I could be far more hopeful than I am about the possibility of a genuinely prophetic movement arising out of the Negro community in this country, a movement capable of projecting a truly radical critique of the whole gamut of American culture. I could be far more hopeful about the possibility of this, if I could see any indication that this new leadership in the “freedom movement” was not only concerned with immediate tactical maneuvers but was also attempting, through these bitter experiences in the South today, in some really deep and authentic way to face the full truth about the human City, in the special way that it’s disclosed

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by the whole American experiment. But all we hear is the dreary, SundaySchool moralisms of Luther King. . . . And, as I say, in all the mutations which this has undergone by the time it’s mouthed by the Negro college students whom I meet, one’s final impression is of a coarsening of mental sensibility and a blunting of political perception.47

This letter proves a remarkable statement for a number of reasons. A first reading registers displeasure with King, which certainly sounds odd in our hagiographic age but actually presents a fairly common critique of Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)—explored more deeply in conjunction with Ellison in the next chapter. Reading it in tandem with The Dark Tower letter, however, as a precursor to the Lake Forest letter, and with a sense of Scott’s broader corpus, opens up a sophisticated and lucid appeal to a common mission for aesthetic, intellectual, pedagogical, and even political arenas of African American life. Scott was not apolitical, of course, nor was he allergic to protest (as some have deemed Ellison). Two years later, in 1965, he would answer King’s call to march at Selma and, whatever his earlier assessment, also compared King and Ellison favorably in 1973, writing of Ellison, “In quite the same large sort of way represented by the career of Martin Luther King, he has been . . . one of the great directeurs de conscience in the life of American culture over these past troubled years.”48 Furthermore, a number of his public addresses not only tackle head-on various problems of his “late, bad time,” but also take a rather unflinching prophetic stance against systematic racial oppression in American and Western colonialism (also the intellectual sources of Scott’s métier) and the evil it inflicts upon the world. On June 9, 1968, the Sunday after Robert Kennedy’s assassination, Scott preached a Trinity Sunday sermon at the Cathedral of St. James in Chicago. Beginning with an invocation of lines by Yeats—“We had fed the heart on fantasies, / The Heart’s grown brutal from the fare”—he launches into legacies of war and violence that cause “the civilized world”—“in Europe and in Asia and in Africa”—to deem Americans “a monstrous people.” Contrary to Independence Day fictions of “fundamental decency,” “the inordinate faith . . . that we have traditionally kept in our innocence” and that (as in Vietnam) sends the United States “in search of monsters to destroy,” Scott arrives at an ironic

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Niebuhrian conclusion: “In the process of playing God to the rest of mankind we become ourselves a kind of monster.”49 Such tragedy also bears a racial component rooted in sin: “Ours is a nation which . . . is very nearly marked by a kind of primal curse which may have become effective on the day when men began to be enslaved and lynched and deemed inferior because the color of their skin was dark rather than white.” Slavery and racial violence become “the central evil in our national history,” yet “so invincible is our . . . selfrighteousness and . . . so sluggish is the moral imagination controlling the seats of social and political power that the black ghettos . . . have become a terrible wasteland of the human spirit where faith and hope are murdered and where men . . . turn to the last resort—of holocaust.” “I do not like the invective that black militants now fling out at the country,” he continues, “but I know the anxiety and despair from which it comes.”50 Such invective was not an isolated incident for Scott. In a 1972 “oration” delivered to a crowd of three thousand at the Chicago Historical Society’s “Old Fashioned Fourth of July Celebration” in Lincoln Park, Scott rehearsed this same jeremiad (indeed, he clearly revised portions of the 1968 text): American shortcomings pervade “this late, bad time.” Presumptions of innocence mask “the central [racial] evil in our national history from which spring many of the dark, intolerable tensions that today tear so violently at the fabric of our common life.” Only the acknowledgment and confession of these shortcomings (through “relentless” self-criticism) “may permit us to begin the work of renovation which so desperately needs to begin in America today.” “At least I wasn’t lynched,” he jokes blackly to Ellison in his cover letter.51 Interestingly, whatever Scott’s private misgivings with King in 1963, his public pronouncements on these occasions resound with a kind of prophetic mode that King, himself well versed in Niebuhr’s irony and the jeremiad form, would certainly recognize and, in fact, utilized himself. The larger problem seemed to stem from two sources: the “immediate tactical maneuvers” mentioned in the letter to Ellison that obscure prophetic response with recourse to “the full truth about the human City, in the special way that it’s disclosed by the whole American experiment,” and from sloganeering rooted in frustration that Scott understands— even as he does not endorse it—“coarsening” the sensibilities of those who engage in it.

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As for sloganeering, Scott returned to Camus at least three times in the 1960s—twice in his own books and again in an edited volume.52 Camus was of particular interest to Scott because “the literature that he produced is a literature drenched in ideas.”53 The Rebel (1951—another qualifier for Invisible Man’s occasion), sought “some principle by means of which the absolute ethical relativism of an ‘absurd’ metaphysic might be modified toward a more genuinely humane end.” Accordingly (and note the sacramental language), “Camus appears as the celebrant of the human communion, and a communion that is itself established by and in ‘rebellion.’”54 This occurs by refusing to obey, thus revealing “some essential respect in which the human individual is involved in the family of mankind. ‘I rebel, therefore we are,’” Scott claims in a striking revision of the Cogito that balances pluribus and unum.55 Significantly, Camus’s rebellion also requires “moderation,” “balance”—mésure in the French; “rebellion can never be in behalf of total freedom.”56 This deficiency of mésure appears to be what strikes Scott as the “coarsening” among the protests in 1963. There are many ways in which Scott stands entirely outside of conventional wisdom surrounding protest movements and political action. Indeed, King mentions several examples of “Godly” extremism in his Birmingham jail epistle—Amos, Paul, Jesus, and so forth.57 While certainly one may likely disagree with Scott, the more interesting aspect of his appeal to Camus throughout the 1960s, illuminated by his remarks to Ellison about King, is the attempt he makes to work through tensions between certain tactical and intellectual or aesthetic aspects—we might say “media,” echoing mésure—of protest. Scott remains fundamentally concerned with political issues of identity. Unlike the usual ways of addressing these issues— whether as a matter of taste, method, or nonconformity (remember that T. S. Eliot’s Tory sensibility created stringent rules for Eliot the modernist poet to break)—his approach proved oblique. Certainly it is a pity that he refused to make this aspect of his work more obvious, but it is also perhaps especially shameful that few have bothered to read below the surface to encounter, ironically, these things not seen. The trouble with “immediate tactical maneuvers”—which, again, were always contentious—derives most likely from an interesting source of frustration, yielding a fascinating and incisive allusion. The clue resides in the oddly rendered phrase “human City” in the 1963

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letter. Scott laments that no one “confronts” the human city “in the way it’s disclosed by the whole American experiment.” Scott almost certainly derives the idea of a human city, sometimes translated as “earthly city,” from Augustine’s The City of God—which holds the human city in a kind of friction with a “divine city,” sometimes translated as the invisible city.58 Indeed, in Craters of the Spirit Scott invokes it again, if obliquely, during his discussion of Camus’s The Rebel: “The ultimate exigency which man faces in our time is an exigency arising out of a great abdication, a terrible collapse, a tragic death, in the City of God himself.”59 While it proves difficult to know precisely how Scott’s point of view works and changes over the several years between the private letter and the public intellectual statement, it does remain clear that a coarsening of sensibility restricts the ability to aspire and achieve beyond materiality. Symbolically, and ironically, Scott invokes Ellisonian invisibility in his critique of civil rights strategies through reference to an African bishop—Augustine of Hippo—who holds foundational significance as a preconditional figure for the intellectual and cultural development of the West. He does so by reading Camus—an Algerian. Whatever may prove disagreeable in the details, such moves qualify as exquisitely Ellisonian. Furthermore, he does so ultimately in the sermon and Independence Day address through recourse to a prophetic mode. Prophets, of course, work on the margins, but a prophetic mode, ironically, derives from canons of biblical literature. By speaking prophetically, Scott elevates marginal, material concerns to the stature of canonical authority—“Thus sayeth the Lord!” Material concerns of “the human City” take on more stridently ambitious, metaphysical urgency as it confronts the invisible city. Like Ellison, Scott understood social history and its critical cultural dimensions as participant in and inflected by the grander narratives to which he attended. Consider Carolyn Medine’s observation that “Scott sought to articulate the contribution of the African American to the American and human experience. How, he asks . . . do they illuminate their age and its ‘big questions?’ Their capacity to do so is a contribution to culture, not just a sociological analysis of the ‘black condition.’ . . . Scott . . . continually exercised his right and championed the right of others to speak not just to culture but of culture.”60 What is more, he insisted upon the political imperative to inhabit culture—not to proph-

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esy but to stand as a witness to prophecy as an authoritative genre and phenomenon. Such a demand registers especially well through Schleiermacher’s definition of religion as the negotiation of particulars and universals that function cooperatively, yet in tension, as specifics of identity navigate broader corporations or traditions from which they draw meaning and to which they contribute. Recall that Scott himself deploys these terms to discuss Invisible Man. These are individual/group dynamics, faction and nation; we might even think in terms of unum and pluribus. Ellison’s critical and creative notion of racially articulated literary statement deals in similar navigations. As noted in earlier chapters, when asked by the Paris Review about Invisible Man’s status as a protest novel, he argued that all of literature protests particular injustices—invoking Sophocles, Cervantes, and Dostoevsky before situating his own work in that broader continuum of Western literary tradition.61 The grievances and traumas remain particular—culturally and historically conditioned— yet the tradition these particularities contribute to also informs certain more universal customs and formal expectations for negotiating diverse particularities. Such common fealty between rootedness in a particular vernacular identity and a broader tradition must have appealed to Scott as an African American Anglican writing primarily out of European theological and modernist literary traditions, and who suffered daily racial indignities not only despite but also because of his relatively privileged position. Ellison helped to ground Scott in a black vernacular that he did not so easily access or reference at first, yet which he sought to transform across a cultural divide. Similarly, Scott’s influence reinforced in Ellison’s particular vernacular what Schleiermacher calls “a taste for the infinite.”62

A Relative Ancestor A common trope—made famous but by no means invented by Irving Howe—holds Richard Wright as a benchmark, even an interpretive key for understanding Ellison as he variably aligns with or revolts away from Wright as a Howean “ancestor” (Ellison argued that he was a “relative”). It remains a reasonable view. Wright encouraged Ellison as a young writer, commissioning his first book review, introducing him

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to other writers in 1930s Harlem, and offering him a political platform in the Marxist journal New Masses. They were, for a time, outstanding friends, with Ellison serving as best man at Wright’s wedding. Later, as they drifted apart, Ellison still relied on Wright as a sounding board against which he articulated what he saw as his own unique positions.63 A key way to be Ralph Ellison became emphatically not to be Richard Wright—or at least Ellison’s construct of “Richard Wright.” Both deliberately and in Ellison’s own mind, “Wright” pushed him in new directions as a writer, critic, and persona. Such claims also characterize Ellison’s relationship with Nathan Scott and a kind of theological apprenticeship that Scott, most likely unconsciously, devised even amid a mutually beneficial relationship between ostensible equals. I want to close this chapter with a thought experiment: What if, much as the early parts of Ellison’s career find articulation through a Wrightean lens, we turn to Scott as an organizing principle for understanding the second half of Ellison’s career? Put differently, Ellison met Scott and they became friends within months on either side of Wright’s death. If Ellison’s career through the 1950s consists of just representations, epistemologies of race, and the attempt to problematize certain cultural materialities, what changes in our understanding of Ellison in the 1960s and beyond when we amplify Ellison through Scott as Wright’s foil?64 Too much can be made of the chronological coincidence, of course, but the milestones remain serendipitous. Furthermore, like Wright, Scott provided Ellison with writing opportunities and ideological guidance. He made important introductions and cultivated a new theological sensibility derived from notions of particulars, universals, and their antagonistic cooperation in the midst of a rising tide of identity politics that also flummoxed Ellison. Finally, we should not forget that it was during this period that Ellison’s most substantial work on his second novel—a novel about a bluesman-cum-preacher and his preacher-cum-politician protégé—took shape. In this way, like Wright, Scott too influenced Ellison to articulate and redefine fundamental cultural assumptions in a specific way at a critical moment in his career, adjusting to his role as an authoritative literary voice and trying desperately to manage a second novel spiraling out of control, all while confronting attacks and accusations of Uncle Tomism from an ascendant Black Arts faction and realizing that his first novel might well become his only novel. Scott af-

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firmed in Ellison a different mode for conceiving of race in Western contexts—as an invisible theology amid otherwise overtly secular concerns that colored the excitement and terror of such cultural and personal dynamism. How then do these circulating preconditions shape the contours of Ellison’s work after the 1950s? Primarily through a newly urgent concern for “depth” in literature—a recessive moral component that avoids overt proclamations of virtue but serves, rather, as a grounding precondition that particulars of plot and narrative might work with or even ironize through textual play. Recall Ellison’s 1971 letter, which claims specifically that Scott’s work in The Wild Prayer of Longing obviates “the loss of depth and resonance” in modern literature, a loss he attributes to “concern for the sacred” going “underground (if not completely out of the window).” Such a loss of depth characterizes the cultural view that Ellison witnesses in his present tense. In the same letter draft he rhapsodizes about “a tragic sense . . . sorely needed if for no other reason than to allow us to view our petty, media-inflated rebels in a truer scale.” He registers “a sense of incompleteness and an agony manifest in the form of the novel itself as a reduction in scale and as a timidity before the complexity of lived life.” “Literary banality” rules the day, and “novelists have lost that ambition to create forms commensurate with . . . increasing complexity,” a “fashion[able]” trend “concern[ed] with the picknosed and smartalecky.”65 Here Ellison rehearses, in a draft and thus for his eyes only (we do not know what he eventually sent), frustrations not only with the literary scene of the early 1970s but also, no doubt, with his own place in it, and his ongoing struggle to complete the long-awaited second novel. On this reading Ellison’s wrangling with the unfinished novel (which posits preachers and preaching as central dynamics of American political identity) gains a sacramental dimension (as he calls Scott’s critical vision) that attempts to rectify such banality through a statement of religious “depth.” No doubt such “complexity” soothed his difficulties—if only briefly. Depth, of course, is not a new property for Ellison. Invisibility offers a kind of depth in the first novel (though certainly a less determined one) through recourse to various conceptual antecedents—the Bible, Luther, Kongo spirituality, and so forth. In the second novel preachers and preaching take on this role, providing depth through concep-

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tual grounding in performances of words as Burkean “Word.” In a book about nation, identity, politics, and culture, the one point of unity, of grounding, remains Hickman and the voice he imparts to Bliss (who himself wields it as betrayal)—for the performance of words as Word.66 Religious depth remains immaterial, intangible. It is rhetorical, semiotic, and even embodied (if literarily so) through homiletical performance, yet this immateriality amplifies material economies of race, nation, and identity in the second novel. Trouble remains on the horizon, however, and the next chapter tells that story—even if not with continual reference to Nathan Scott. A second view of “depth” stems from a common appeal to race as original sin found in both Scott (as we have observed) and Ellison (as we shall explore in much greater depth in chapter 5). Scott, amid the turbulent late 1960s and in their aftermath (his “late, bad time”), wrote of American racism as “a kind of primal curse” and, by extension, “the central evil in our national history” that compromises any cause for optimism. Drawing on a sense of what I call Ellison’s theological “apprenticeship” to mark a pivot in his career, chapter 5 reflects on and enlarges what we might consider to be the cross-pollination of Ellison and Scott. This early sensibility is cultivated over time and grows into a fuller racial schematic in Ellison’s fiction and criticism. It becomes perfected perhaps in his teaching, where we observe through his syllabi and lecture notes a more stringent appeal to a kind of depth that amplifies the themes and concerns of nineteenth-century American literature in the guise of post-Calvinist conceptions of American sin and its correlations with racism. Such an appeal marks an exception to American exceptionalism in an age, just before the Civil War, when novelists—or at least the good ones—put away childish things, stopped picking their noses, and became theologians.

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Wrestling Proteus in the New Dispensation Civil Rights, Civil Religion, and One Blues Invisible

The problem that Ralph Ellison would seek to render in terms of depth and resonance over the second half of his career was firmly in place before he met Nathan Scott, and in many ways it outlives him. In the immediate wake of the US Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision, Ellison wrote to his friend and former teacher Morteza Sprague, reflecting upon the momentous ruling: “Well, so now the judges have found and Negroes must be individuals and that is hopeful and good. What a wonderful world of possibilities are unfolded for the children! For me there is still the problem of making meaning out of the past and I guess I’m lucky I described Bledsoe [the president of the protagonist’s Negro college] before he was checked out. Now I’m writing about the evasion of identity which is another characteristically American problem which must be about to change. I hope so, it’s giving me enough trouble.”1 Ellison expresses relief, of course. The broader implications of an in-road to the legal end of Jim Crow laws, supported broadly by the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 that Brown overturned, spoke to Ellison as an integrationist, a novelist and critic who sought ambitiously to situate African American culture firmly within the traditions and canons of the West. Yet Ellison exhibited anxieties about what integration would come to mean for a historically marginalized segment of the American population that had devised systematic networks and mores designed specifically to facilitate survival, endurance, and the defiant expression of humanity in the face of dehumanizing conditions imposed upon African Americans by Plessy’s “separate but equal” mandate. Relieved that he had published Invisible Man (1952) just prior to this social metamorphosis, Ellison understood that, within this new racial dispensation, parts of his novel—if not the book itself—would become relics of a former age. 118

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Kenneth Warren makes the compelling case that what we know as “African American literature” (in a broad, historical sense), belongs to this former age. Indeed, it was dismantled amid the exigencies of Brown and its judicial facilitation of a legal end to Jim Crow.2 According to Warren, “African American literature took shape in the context of . . . racial subordination and exploitation represented by Jim Crow. Accordingly, . . . with the demise of Jim Crow, the coherence of African American literature has been correspondingly . . . eroded as well.”3 Intrinsic to this sea change is a sense of unmooring from a system that, for all of the injustice it propagated, also held together out of necessity a relatively stable sense of African American identity. Resistance, endurance, and survival simultaneously relied upon and forged a complex and multivalent cosmos that fractured in the wake of Brown, leaving African Americans and the broader American public grasping for new ways to order social relationships and their political organizations, turning to larger questions of anthropology, citizenship, and civil religion. This chapter explores how Ellison’s second novel reflects the erosion of coherence that Warren locates in the post-Brown era—a period of vertiginous social upheaval in American and African American public life. Given that the second novel remained unfinished over the last four decades of Ellison’s life, how might it address propositions that were infeasible or unimaginable prior to 1954? To what extent does Brown, as a line of demarcation, inaugurate a new occasion in the literary representation of race? In what specific ways does Ellison’s second novel reflect the tenor of this new occasion, wrangling over theologies and ideologies of racial identity, and thereby characterizing resonances between readers and a nation “in progress”?4 Finally, given Ellison’s stated desire to resurrect a sense of “depth and resonance” inspired by his understanding of Nathan Scott’s “sacramental vision,” how do such aims play out in a novel about the vagaries of American political identity? This chapter deploys as a critical lens a specifically historicized understanding of American civil religion that dovetailed with certain social, political, and cultural exigencies in the wake of Brown. In the process we shall chart the relationship between civil rights and civil religion in the era of Ellison’s second novel’s composition, marking convergences of race, nation, and religion in Ellison’s Sisyphean literary struggle to reduce experience to symbolic action in his second novel. Attention to Ellison’s coherences

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with the figure and vision of Martin Luther King Jr., paired with his involvement in the 1970s and 1980s with the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, offer fresh insight into Ellison’s responses to the vagaries of race and nation that he navigated as he sought to complete his second novel.

Brown v. Black Cohesion During this era, Ellison was not the only author of color to express anxiety about Brown’s implications. Zora Neale Hurston vociferously opposed the decision, ascribing African American support for integration to what Andrew Delbanco characterizes as “a form of race embarrassment.”5 In a letter to the editor of the Orlando Sentinel, Hurston asks, “How much satisfaction can I get from a court order for somebody to associate with me who does not wish me near them?”6 For Hurston integration stemmed from the assumption among whites (and many blacks) that African Americans aspired to be white—a position that “insult[ed] rather than honor[ed] [her] race” and disparaged black institutions.7 Beyond other somewhat paranoid extrapolations, Hurston registers defiance against the institutional legitimacy of white domination, a mindset doubtlessly nurtured by her rearing in all-black Eatonville, Florida—itself an interesting subversion of the white supremacist paradigm.8 Thus, by insisting, “I see no tragedy in being too dark to be invited to a white school social affair,” Hurston effectively defies the logic of Jim Crow.9 Brown “sought to bring about change in the wrong way.” It “assumed the inferiority of black culture and life, imposing a supposedly more developed white culture on black people.”10 Indeed, Hurston’s perpetual return to Eatonville’s example represents in some respects the deliberate inversion of the segregation model, responding to imposed exclusion with agency of ambivalent dissociation. Ellison’s correspondence with Sprague lacks Hurston’s outright opposition to integration. Rather, it presupposes two related outcomes. First, Negroes would become individuals, liberated from group identity and presumably free to function according to their own agency. Second, this individuality would stem from Brown’s inevitable fracturing of the relatively stable modes of identity established through slavery and both the customary and legal forms of Jim Crow. Such systems enforced official limits of black identity and managed the diurnal realities of segregated

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life. They were determinations not necessarily assimilated by their victims to be true, but the consequences of failing to abide within them were violent, final, and real. And so they abided. In this way Ellison understood African Americans to improvise, manipulating law and social custom to facilitate endurance and self-sufficiency where—within the vacuum of the Jim Crow order—none was supposed to exist.11 Segregated communities developed their own domestic, social, and political institutions, including newspapers, businesses, churches, and civic organizations. Accordingly, limitations imposed upon black identity in the United States fostered a creative response that asserted humanity in the face of enforced dehumanization. Hurston’s dismay and Ellison’s anxiety toward Brown concerned the potential cost and longterm implications of losing such segregated institutions and affirmative orientations to the vagaries of integration. The older modes were far from perfect, but certainly for Ellison and others the prospect of equal rights and responsibilities of free citizenship for African Americans made the gamble hopeful, one worth wagering. One month after Ellison composed his letter to Sprague, he traveled to Tuskegee to teach a summer seminar for the English department. He delivered a public address on June 23, 1954, speaking on “The Role of the Negro Teacher in Preparing for a Non-Segregated Way of Life in the United States.” This talk enumerated—in the pulpit of the very college for Negroes that Ellison attended—implications for a post-Brown America. It will become necessary, he argues, for southern blacks to shift to a more cosmopolitan cultural and social outlook than Jim Crow has heretofore permitted. African American educators, long the standardbearers of “respectable” black culture, authority, and social standing (consider Ellison’s reverence later in his life for Inman Page and Zelia Breaux at Oklahoma City’s Douglass High School), would necessarily occupy the integrating vanguard: “The Negro teacher is responsible to and for the total American society, not to any one small section of it.” In the midst of “transition,” “the Negro teacher’s responsibility . . . is to consciously explore those areas of American life which have been denied Negroes and evaluate them for the younger generation which will inherit an unsegregated way of American life.”12 As Ellison’s integrationist rhetoric reflects, the tenor of this new existence remained uncertain, his prescriptions impressionistic. Vexing questions remained: What would

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it mean ultimately to abandon these institutions and mores, these authority figures who had proved invaluable to shoring up and affirming a collective identity confronted with radical exclusion (by custom and law) for more than three centuries? What would, or should, it mean “to live in a world in which peoples of diverse cultural and racial backgrounds are being thrown into increasingly close contact”?13 Answers to this question have yet to find consensus. On the one hand, Charles M. Payne marked Brown’s fiftieth anniversary by pointing to the broader infeasibility of substantial integration, suggesting that the decision “is becoming a milestone in search of something to signify.” He is not alone in his estimation.14 Danielle Allen, on the other hand, speaks of Brown as the impetus for the desegregation of Little Rock’s Central High School, which “rendered visible democracy’s ‘public sphere,’ as it existed in 1957.”15 Thus, she argues, Brown reconstituted American social order by seeking “to articulate new accounts of democratic citizenship,” a citizenship characterized by new rights and responsibilities inaugurated by a newly requisite sphere of public interactions.16 In this way Allen’s reconstitution (riffing on both the documentary and corporeal valences of “constitution”), much like Warren’s denomination of Brown as a “sea change,” speaks to a broader sense of uncertainty in the wake of Brown, a perilous course that required imaginative and intrepid navigation simply because no one knew, in the interim, where it would lead. Significantly, Allen locates this period of reconstitution, the renegotiation of the terms of American citizenship in the public sphere, as falling between 1954 and 1965—a decade extending from Brown to the Voting Rights Act, spanning the era of targeted activism in the American South by a number of organizations we now refer to collectively as the civil rights movement. Payne and others are correct to warn against overprivileging Brown and its legacy in the civil rights era.17 Nevertheless, Brown drove the golden spike that ended federally sanctioned, legal segregation of public schools in the United States. Brown ignited Hurston’s ire and rendered Ellison reflective upon his own experiences with Jim Crow. Brown ended, as C. Vann Woodward notes, the longest period of racial status quo in the history of the American South (if not the United States).18 Brown, using Allen’s term, “reconstituted” conceptions of citizenship and the public sphere. Brown galvanized black frustrations across the South and the United States that empowered a freedom movement dedi-

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cated to the establishment and enforcement of new, and more just, laws. Brown, as Payne contends, might not live up to the hopes that Americans have historically invested in its symbolism. It did not usher in utopia. It necessitated the destruction of powerful structures of support and affirmation among African Americans and in their communities. Yet it remains for many—and tangibly so—the best, most profound and poignant statement of what the United States might yet become, and it established an uncertain, messy future that required vociferous, even bloody struggles to decide a forward course that yet remains unclear. In this way Brown marks a significant cultural and ontological unmooring for African Americans and, indeed, the nation at large. Ironically, though a moral stain, Jim Crow held together diverse factions of African American politics, society, and culture as a relatively unified front against radical and systematic oppression. The move toward legal integration fractured this tenuous unity and, in an unprecedented way, rendered the authoritative definitions and stakes of blackness and its identity negotiable, open to debate. In the decades during which this process took place, any number of interpretations of blackness would enter the fray: nonviolence versus black power, Malcolm X versus Martin Luther King—indeed, 1955 King versus 1967 King and 1961 Malcolm versus 1965 Malcolm.19 The drive of African Americans toward acknowledgment of their integral place in American society and cultural canons, the unique identity politics of African American arts and culture as somehow distinct, even unconcerned with “traditional” (read: “white”) creative modes and methods of aesthetic judgment, and the emergence of social movements and structures that mirrored and even challenged the viability and authority of black churches and other religious organizations all marked the signal tension of this identity crisis. For Ralph Ellison, digging into his second novel at this cultural moment, the problem became one of corralling the diversities and complexities of race in the United States—which had always been in play but were newly awash in vertiginous change in the wake of Brown—into a coherent narrative concerning “the evasion of identity.” While Payne’s skepticism toward Brown proves valuable, the signal problem of Ellison’s second novel is occupied with Allen’s task of reconstitution, of imagining new connections between racial and national identities amid the frequently disorienting contradictions of the post-Brown era.

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Brown v. Ellison’s Second Novel Ellison’s second novel, still in its nascent stages when the Brown decision was handed down, would remain unfinished. Excerpts did appear in literary journals, an edition of it would find posthumous publication as Juneteenth in 1999, and an unexpurgated edition of the manuscript appeared in 2010 under the title Three Days Before the Shooting . . . . For more than four decades—between 1952 and his death in 199420—Ellison labored to complete a project that became insurmountable. Through the mid-1960s, during a timeframe roughly commensurate with Allen’s reconstitution (1954–65), Ellison plausibly projected the book’s completion to be on the horizon. A fire at his Berkshires summer home in 1967 gave him a serviceable excuse for the novel’s delay, a myth that survived until very recently when Arnold Rampersad hypothesized that the fire likely contributed only a minor setback to his progress.21 For some reason Ellison simply could not finish the book. A number of plausible explanations may characterize Ellison’s difficulty. First, producing a sophomore effort after Invisible Man must have proven daunting. Even if, as Warren suggests, we understand Invisible Man to be a novel grounded in its historical era, it remains a stunningly good novel within this (or any) era.22 Second, whereas the pressure to live up to or even to surpass Invisible Man might constrict some authors’ creativity, this clearly was not the case for Ellison. His more vexing problem lay in his inability to stop writing. According to one commentator, “He was a man drowning in his own words.”23 Ellison’s truly difficult task became to give final and coherent shape to the manuscript at the very moment a world of possibilities for revision opened to him. Such new latitude rendered it nearly impossible to overcome the uncertainty that Ellison felt toward his narrative even until his final days.24 The foregoing explanations, however, remain primarily psychological in nature, reflecting Ellison’s anxieties in managing creativity, ambition, and pride. A third explanation derives from an intellectual historical problem: Ellison’s inability to complete the second novel stemmed from his acute sensitivity to the dynamic trajectory of postwar African American history and culture at the time he wrote. Begun in 1952 amid stirrings that augured the Brown decision, and unfinished at the time of Ellison’s death in 1994, the writing process spans a remarkable survey

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of African American history in the second half of the twentieth century: Montgomery, Little Rock, Birmingham, the March on Washington, Selma, and Malcolm X and Martin Luther King’s respective assassinations. It continues through the 1970s and the 1980s and on to 1994—just after the Los Angeles riots of 1992, and just before 1995’s Million Man March. Unlike the relative stability that Woodward ascribes to the long Jim Crow era, the occasions of Ellison’s second novel exhibit remarkable fluidity. History would not sit still for Ellison, an author engaged in “the seemingly impossible task of rendering in fiction the American experience in the second half of the twentieth century.”25 “Why did I have to be a writer,” he asks Morteza Sprague in his letter written upon learning of Brown, “at a time when events sneer at your efforts?”26 As Bradley notes, “This sense of writing on the verge of dramatic change, or perhaps even contributing to that change, freighted Ellison’s second novel with the heavy burden of history.”27 Timothy Parrish moves it to the present tense: “Ellison was forever addressing an America that is still unrealized.”28 Finally, as discussed in the last chapter, by the mid-1960s the novel carried added burdens of depth and resonance amid a literary context that Ellison believed no longer valued such properties. To appropriate an image from Barbara Foley, with the second novel Ellison wrestled with Proteus until time expired.29 The second novel offers a morality tale, told in subtle and ironic strokes that subvert the pieties of racial determination. It opens in Washington, DC, with Alonzo Hickman, a black preacher visiting from Georgia with his congregation, seeking an audience with the racebaiting New England senator, Adam Sunraider. Sunraider, who avoids his visitors, is subsequently shot and mortally wounded while speaking on the Senate floor. Hickman visits Sunraider while the senator is on his deathbed, and through the course of the novel—much of which consists of their conversations and individual memories delivered in a rich, frequently stunning stream-of-consciousness—we learn that Sunraider, the white supremacist, was once Bliss—a five-year-old child preacher of indeterminate racial origins (though he clearly can pass for white) who was adopted and raised by Reverend Hickman and his congregation, steeped in the rhetoric and semiotics of black preaching. Such semiotics, rhetoric, and homiletics have led many critics to address religious dimensions of the second novel with recourse to black churches or even,

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as in Laura Saunders’s essay, subtitled “The Gospel according to Ralph,” “the Black Church.” The text is rich, and significant work on its religious and theological dimensions remains to be done—especially in terms of Ellison’s own deployment of preacherly voices as a kind of “homiletics of literature.” However, this volume remains concerned less with matters ecclesial and more with religious intellectual relationships between Ellison’s work and his concept of race as an invisible theology. Thus we focus on the second novel’s civil religious dimensions as they correspond to wranglings over racial identity at the height of the civil rights movements of the 1950s, 1960s, and beyond. Through Bliss/Sunraider, Ellison achieves a domestic intimacy between black and white, a connection that he calls “some cord of kinship stronger than blood, hate or heartbreak.”30 Bliss eventually leaves Hickman and the congregation, lighting out for the West to find his mother and to pursue a career in movies, recasting his identity in the process. In doing so he draws upon the tools entrusted to him by the community who loved and harbored him as a child. He transforms these tools into implements of betrayal, beats his plowshares into a sword through his self-invention as Sunraider, whose race-baiting rhetorical skill derives directly from Bliss’s childhood training as a black preacher in Hickman’s church. The substance of his rhetoric weds an idiomatic appeal to American idealism with religious fervor, as studied as it is effective. This is Ellison’s ironic kinship between black and white Americans, a nascent love that Hickman accuses the white supremacist Sunraider (whom he calls by his childhood name, Bliss), on his deathbed, of betraying: [White folk] just don’t recognize no continuance of anything after [childhood, when many are loved and watched after by black caregivers]: not love, not remembrance, not understanding, sacrifice, compassion, nothing. . . . So self-castrated of their love they pass us by, boy, they pass us by. Then as far as we’re concerned it’s “Put your heart on ice, put your conscience in pawn.” Even their beloved black tit becomes an empty bag to laugh at and they grow deaf to their mammy’s lullabyes. What’s wrong with these folks, Bliss, is they can’t stand continuity, not the true kind that binds man to man and Jesus to God. . . . They can’t stand continuity because if they could everything would have to be changed; there’d be more

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love among us, boy. But the first step in their growing up is to learn how to spurn love. They have to deny it by law, boy. Then begins the season of hate and SHAMEFACEDNESS. Confusion leaps like a fire in the bowels and false faces bloom like jimsonweed. They put on a mask, boy, and life’s turned plumb upside down.31

Such love (and its betrayal) is not an unbridgeable separation but a difficult, ambivalent intimacy that defies facile categories. Brown does not seek to integrate but to reintegrate what political and social custom, fear, and hate have driven apart. As an African American author working in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, Ellison strives to reconstitute the concept of race in African American literature—the terms of which became irrevocably altered by the 1954 ruling—according to this new dispensation. Whereas Invisible Man explores race as the signal American literary tension par excellence, in the second novel Ellison engages American social, political, religious, and cultural customs and institutions as they undergo radical transformations during a time of strenuous change.32 The integrations of such customs and institutions require an ironic, democratic acknowledgment of intimacy at the heart of Ellison’s second novel. Such an integrated, yet problematic vision of democratic racial identity becomes more auspicious in an age that witnessed the rise to international prominence of an African American preacher from Georgia such as Martin Luther King, who finds an analogue in Hickman (himself an African American preacher from Georgia). Even more radically, Ellison reverses the moral trajectory that King embodies. Here, through Hickman and the homiletical lessons of Bliss/Sunraider’s youth, the voice of the black preacher also forms the rhetorical and substantive basis for the political discourse and performance of Bliss/Sunraider’s white supremacy, his symbolic betrayal of the past. The Ellisonian cord of common kinship frequently strangles with its embrace.

Martin Luther King Jr. and Ellison’s Second Novel Ellison’s plot navigates vacillations of love and betrayal that reside at the core of the southern campaign pursued by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) during the height of the modern civil

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rights movement. While King is never named specifically, his legacy remains inextricable to the second novel’s narrative even as it becomes one that Nathan Scott draws parallel to Ellison’s own cultural aspirations.33 Despite Ellison’s givenness to ambivalence about protest, his own conspicuous absence (unlike Scott) from the front lines of the freedom movement, and a measure of consternation about King’s tactics, Ellison and King also hold a great deal in common through their respective understandings of “America,” its founding documents, and the central integrity of African Americans to American culture and society.34 Both men were integrationists, ambitious strivers of a certain African American social class, erudite and proud of it—yet deriving meaning and inspiration from African American vernacular traditions (black preaching for King, folklore and the blues idiom for Ellison).35 Furthermore, on certain levels they remain commonly misunderstood— and, at times, co-opted—for their willingness to entertain more broadly inclusive conceptions of American identity in the face of an increasingly fractured consensus.36 Ellison and King’s respective attempts to grapple with the exigencies of a post-Brown world for African American culture and society bear a striking, if undertreated, coherence.37 The most intriguing correspondence between Ellison and King resides in their semiotics—their respective understandings of dramatic symbolic action, its capacity for creative tension, and such tension’s essential function for generating meaning in literary, religious, and social contexts. King discusses his tactics explicitly in his “Letter from Birmingham City Jail” (1963): Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. I just referred to the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister. This may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word tension. I have earnestly worked and preached against violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth. . . . So the purpose of the direct action is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.38

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In Ellisonian terms we might call King’s “constructive tension” by the name “antagonistic cooperation.”39 Nonviolent direct action relies upon an antagonist to cooperate with its goal to establish a dramatic crisis that offers a symbolic ritualization of social dynamics, projecting diurnal reality in terms of confrontational performances designed strategically to represent in broad, mythological (and therefore universal and translatable) terms the particular or local realities endured by ordinary citizens. King, deemed an outsider, assumes the epistolary mantle of the Apostle Paul (himself, as King notes, “an extremist of the Gospel of Jesus Christ”) to reinforce the urgency of the Birmingham situation.40 He maps present issues onto a series of biblical and historical antecedents. Ellison, who understood race to constitute the central tension of “the American human conflict,” drew upon then-canonical literary sources to represent this central tension in broader terms, according to forms that carry a wider appeal than race might otherwise have attained.41 For King, in 1963 Birmingham, strategic public protest elicited an antagonistic response from Bull Connor and the Birmingham police force that served King’s broader aims: the construction of a public drama encapsulating Birmingham’s racial dynamics. With dogs and fire hoses, the police actions offered compelling imagery, with symbolism rooted in biblical and other religious sources (such as Deutero-Isaiah’s suffering servant or the massacre of the innocents in Matthew 2:16–18), that dramatized the reality of African Americans’ lives under Birmingham’s especially vicious segregated social order. This performance amplified the urgency by which such reality might be understood, broadcasting it on television to stir outrage in the nation and the world. Ellison’s resonance with King is not simply structural. His second novel’s quest for viability mirrors King’s own career and echoes not only the expansive scope of King’s civil rights campaign, but more specific incidents along the way.42 One of the more stirring episodes in Ellison’s unfinished and imperfect (yet frequently gorgeous) second novel, finds Hickman—like King in the March on Washington—at the Lincoln Memorial, in Lincoln’s shadow, contemplating Bliss’s perfidy, ruminating upon a representative white man’s promise and the sense of hope that Hickman remains unwilling to yield even in the face of Bliss’s betrayal as Sunraider. Hickman locates such a promise in Lincoln and, by exten-

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sion, in the founding documents of the United States (to which Lincoln frequently referred) that offer liberty and citizenship continually promised, yet consistently denied: “He’s one of us,” says Hickman, speaking simultaneously of Lincoln’s visage and Bliss’s betrayal.43 Parrish suggests that a central question of the second novel asks whether “whites can merit the love and forgiveness of blacks.”44 Hickman’s meditations on Lincoln imply that it is indeed possible. With his reverie interrupted by members of his own congregation, Hickman affirms their queries of the statue’s identity: “Ain’t that him, Revern’? Ain’t that Father Abraham?” His response captures the thrust of Ellison’s ambition to narrate the ambivalence of identity: “Yes, with all I know about him and his contradictions, yes. And with all I know about men and the world, yes. And with all I know about white men and politicians of all colors and guises and intentions, yes. And with all I know about the things you had to do to be you and stay yourself—yes!”45 Lincoln’s contradictions and his humanity suggest democratic fluidity while retaining a fidelity to the mission that Hickman admires (and Ellison strives to narrate). He is, at once and evasively, Negro and American. In 1984 James Alan McPherson recounted to the first Langston Hughes festival at the City College of New York an occasion in 1969 when, one evening, his friend Ralph Ellison read aloud to him from his eagerly anticipated novel in progress: The prose was unlike anything I had ever heard before, a combination of Count Basie’s sense of time and early American minstrelsy and Negro Baptist preaching. . . . I have been thinking about those five or ten minutes for many years now, and what I think is that, in his novel, Ellison was trying to solve the central problem of American literature. He was trying to find forms invested with enough familiarity to reinvent a broader and much more diverse world for those who take their provisional identities from groups. I think he was trying to Negro-Americanize the novel form, at the same time he was attempting to move beyond it.46

McPherson’s description is apt, and his final denomination of Ellison’s second novel as “Negro-Americanize[d]” proves telling not only for exposing Ellison’s ambitions, but for diagnosing a signal problematic aspect that well could have hindered Ellison’s, and the second novel’s,

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progress—even as King struggled to find coherence in the widening gyre of his religiously grounded campaign for civil justice. According to Ellison, King “embodied a tradition of eloquence from the mainstream of American literature. In him we have no difficulty in discerning the intricate ways in which his thinking, his acting and his ways of expressing himself were simultaneously Negro American in idiom and yet a living part of what is fashionable [sic] refered [sic] to as the mainstream.”47 The coherence of McPherson’s term for Ellison’s second-novel aspirations with Ellison’s term for King—“Negro American” and its verbal form “Negro-Americanize”—offer a compelling proximity for King and Ellison and especially for the rhetoric of their respective contributions to the broader freedom movements of their day. Clearly Ellison recognizes something of King’s performance in his own literary attempts to revivify what he calls “courageous and self-sacrificial individualism” and his longing for coherence and meaning within a chaotic era of social strife.48 By 1969, according to Danielle Allen’s model, the period of reconstitution was over. But recent legislative victories including the Civil Rights Act (1964) and Voting Rights Act (1965) augured no Pax AfroAmericana. With tangible goals achieved, other questions, newer problems, and vexing realities emerged. King turned to poverty, labor, and Vietnam, and found his older nonviolent methods, generally effective in the South, of limited use in northern cities such as Chicago. “Where Do We Go from Here?” he asked in his final presidential address to the SCLC in 1967—a question posed constructively, yet rhetorically significant of the uncertainty confronting his movement and its forward trajectory.49 King’s assassination in 1968 dealt a decisive blow that completed a transition, in progress since the mid-1960s, away from nonviolence for the sake of integration and toward a more militant expression of black power and racial particularity that gained momentum and began to vex Ellison in his public appearances—particularly at colleges and universities. Ellison and King’s modes and methods of civil engagement, galling to a younger generation of artists and activists (as were Nathan Scott’s), lost traction and efficacy in the late 1960s. Interestingly, it is precisely this moment of transition, close on the heels of reconstitution’s demise yet also in the wake of more than a decade of rich contingency that fostered the central tension of an Ameri-

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can racial narrative, when Ellison’s second novel came closest to a final, coherent shape. According to Bradley, in the aftermath of the 1967 fire Ellison pushed forward with revisions, completing typescripts of Books I and II, and—by 1972—“was talking about publishing the novel.”50 If Ellison’s goal for the second novel was, in McPherson’s phrase, to NegroAmericanize the novel form (and we also hear echoes of Nathan Scott here), he had begun by inflecting the unstable nature of African American identity post-Brown against what he understood to be a stable and abiding sense of American identity. Doing so echoed King’s strategy. In his “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington in August 1963, King speaks of cashing a check that the nation had written: When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was the promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note in so far as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check; a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.” We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity in this nation. And so we’ve come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.51

Significantly, the United States still possesses currency in King’s metaphor; it remains, despite centuries of evidence to the contrary (and the violence of its own reluctant protestations), morally solvent by virtue of its founding documents, a bulwark-never-failing upon which King reconstitutes African American identity. Ellison brings Hickman to this same monument, investing his minister’s ruminations upon American racial symbiosis with the strong civilreligious orientation that augments King’s use of the setting.52 In his working notes for the second novel, Ellison suggests that Hickman and his congregation’s aim was nothing less than to raise Bliss to be a second

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Lincoln: “Bliss symbolizes for Hickman an American solution as well as a religious possibility. Hickman thinks of Negroes as the embodiment of American democratic promises, as the last who are fated to become the first, the downtrodden who shall be exalted.”53 Bliss, as the passably white visage of African American locution, embodies an American ideal, a democratic promise invested by Ellison’s Georgia minister with a similarly religious valence to King’s dream, as proclaimed in his “Sermon on the Mall.” The civil rights era, implicitly embodied by King through Ellison’s use of the Lincoln Memorial, seeks the reconstitution that was promised in the wake of the Civil War, yet betrayed by the failures of Reconstruction. Hickman says to Lincoln’s marble visage: “Yes, that’s right, it’s you; just sitting and waiting while taking your well-earned ease. Just getting your second wind before arising up to do all over again that which has been undone throughout all the long betrayed years.”54 Such promises rarely accord with the grandeur of expectations. The betrayal is political, yet it is also personal. It is born of the democratic intimacy that Bliss/ Sunraider embodies. He is the dream and the nightmare, the promise and its revocation.

American Civil Religion In a broader sense, according to the same theoretical trajectory ranging from Schleiermacher to Geertz outlined in this volume’s introduction (and that we have traced throughout Ellison’s career), the very nature of negotiating the relationship of one’s particular identity to a greater, more universalizing sense of belonging is, by definition, religious. When this so-called universal involves nationalism it becomes civil religion. Robert Bellah first codified the concept of American civil religion in 1967 (the same year that Ellison’s novel, according to Bradley, came the closest it ever would to publication before spiraling out of control) as “a genuine apprehension of universal and transcendent religious reality as seen in or . . . as revealed through the experience of the American people.”55 Bellah suggests that, whereas all countries tend to conflate nation with a sense of transcendence, the United States represents a unique example because the ontology of its very origins reflects a transcendentally redemptive mission. John Winthrop spoke of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, even before disembarking the Arbella, as “A City Upon a

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Hill.” Presidents and prominent figures of all political persuasions have invoked this sense of America as beacon for the world ever since. Furthermore, Abraham Lincoln (so vital to Ellison’s second novel) has become the patron saint of American civil religion, and speeches such as the Gettysburg Address and his second inaugural address (which one commentator has denominated “the American Sermon on the Mount”) have entered the national litany.56 Through such instances one already encounters strong and well-developed connections between this historicized conception of American civil religion and Ellison’s literary worldview—especially in the “progress” of his second novel. Bliss, the erstwhile second Lincoln, clearly took this lesson to heart, for despite (or perhaps because of) Sunraider’s benighted racial attitudes, his language fairly drips with American civil religious rhetoric. Before he is shot on the Senate floor, Sunraider ruminates: So let us not falter before our complexity. Nor become confused by the mighty, reciprocal, enginelike stroking of our national ambiguities. We are by no means a perfect people—nor do we desire to be so. . . . We seek not perfection, but coordination. Not sterile stability but creative momentum. Ours is a youthful nation. . . . It was designed to solve those vast problems before which all other nations have been proved wanting. Born in diversity and fired by determination, our society was endowed with a flexibility designed to contain the most fractious contentions of an ambitious, individualistic, and adventurous breed. Therefore, as we go about confronting our national ambiguities let us remember the purposes of our built-in checks and balances. . . . “E pluribus unum,” the Senator shouted.57

Sunraider, drawing upon his homiletical training in the performance of a civil sermon from the pulpit of one of the nation’s most powerful and influential sanctuaries, invokes the mystery of faith for American democracy and civil religion: the one and the many. This paradox of e pluribus unum—“one out of many”—was not a new concept for Ellison in the second novel. The formulation appears in Ellison’s lecture notes for teaching and speaking engagements.58 He also explored its significance through Invisible Man’s definitive tensions between individuals and the groups to which they both bear responsi-

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bility and risk losing their integrity as autonomous agents.59 The unnamed protagonist navigates his own ambitions and a sense of cultural tradition and responsibility that he ostensibly must both choose and have chosen for him. The Brotherhood, as an erstwhile Communist Party, seeks to submerge the invisible man’s individuality to the will of the collective. They rebuke him for exercising autonomy, for speaking of himself (as a representative of the Brotherhood) in the first-person singular as opposed to reflecting the collective will of the group— sloganeering, Scott might call it—through the first-person plural.60 Later, Rinehart, “both rind and heart,” serves as a protean character through whom one man becomes all things to all people: “Rine the runner and Rine the gambler and Rine the briber and Rine the lover and Rinehart the reverend. . . . What is real, anyway?”61 Rinehart’s full name? Proteus Bliss Rinehart.62 Finally, in Invisible Man’s epilogue, the protagonist arrives at this epiphany: It’s “winner take nothing” that is the great truth of our country or of any country. Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat. Our fate is to become one, and yet many—This is not prophecy, but description. Thus one of the greatest jokes in the world is the spectacle of the whites busy escaping blackness and becoming blacker every day, and the blacks striving toward whiteness, becoming quite dull and gray. None of us seems to know who he is or where he’s going.63

Such ambiguity fuels the protagonist’s descent underground, into invisibility. The struggle of invisibility—particularly for one who recognizes the condition in himself—becomes the treacherous navigation of an ironic position between nihilism and naïve hope. For Ellison the one and the many bear a mysterious, paradoxical relationship that effectively models his own understanding of how race functions in American society and culture—within the antagonistically cooperative negotiations of a particular sense of identity that both complicates and augments a singular, unified, integrated understanding of nation. In the introduction to Shadow and Act (1964), Ellison, as McPherson would do two decades later, denominates one aspect of his own

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critical project to concern “the complex relationship between the Negro American subculture and North American culture as a whole.”64 This complexity (one of Ellison’s favorite words) facilitates recognition of the simultaneity of “Negro” and “American” identities, an acknowledgment of DuBoisian double consciousness that Ellison’s integrating self synthesizes: “I consider myself both and I don’t see a dichotomy.”65 In this way Ellison codifies the emerging location of African Americans in American society and culture in the wake of Brown and its requisite reorientations: “What part of Negro life has been foisted on us by Jim Crow and must be gotten rid of; what part of Negro life, expression, culture, do we want to keep? We will need more true self-consciousness. I don’t know what values, what new tragic sense must emerge. . . . Up to now it has been a matter of throwing things off. But now we have to get conscious of what we do not want to throw off.”66 Ellison’s literary and critical “complexity” refers to the post-Brown conundrum of African American identity in the United States—in its many social, political, and religious valences. The process of discerning what should be cast off and what should remain mirrors Ellison’s writing process for the belabored second novel. He felt compelled to exercise at once a disciplined restraint and a discerning willingness to cast things into the discard pile, struggling with precisely who Bliss—a protean Rinehart unleashed in a post-Brown world—may come to be. Unfortunately for Ellison, and especially for the completion of the second novel, even as he sought to articulate this emerging understanding of race and the relationship of one and many in narrative fiction, two shifts took place—one in the pluribus, the other in the unum. First, by the late 1960s the Black Power and Black Arts movements codified their own vision of blackness—one rooted in a particular identity politics; one which in many ways reestablished and enforced a hard line of racial determinism not out of keeping with pre-Brown separatism, grounded not in exclusion but dissociation. This cohesive understanding of race became a majority report among intellectual commentators and political actors who proved antagonistic toward Ellison (who certainly gave as good as he got). One black studies librarian, you may remember, answered a patron query for Invisible Man with the pronouncement that “Ralph Ellison is not a black writer.”67 King’s perceived accommodationism found echoes in Ellison’s aesthetics. Black Power sought to cash no

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promissory note. It knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that the nation was morally bankrupt.68 The second major transformation Ellison confronted in the composition of his second novel is that at roughly the same time he sought refuge from the instability of racial identity in a fortified sense of unum, these unified conceptions and their relatively stable understanding of America fractured. By the late 1960s, any sense of postwar cohesion—real or imagined—had dissipated.69 Social upheaval precipitated by changing mores, political dissent against a controversial war, rioting over race and class inequalities, substantial religious discord, shifting gender roles, and the devastating assassinations of dynamic leaders shredded what national cohesion emerged from World War II and the postwar prosperity.

“A Remarkably Stalwart Patriot”: Ellison in Williamsburg It is not accidental that Bellah codifies his specific version of American civil religion in the manner, and at the moment, that he does. In fact, Martin Marty suggests that it became a relic in the wake of this turmoil, a historical concept no longer tenable in the present tense.70 While American civil religion continues to evolve, Marty’s historicization frames significant questions emerging in this postwar era that find interesting resonance in an overlooked (or otherwise maligned) aspect of the second half of Ellison’s life: his involvement with the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation (CWF), which Ellison served as a trustee from 1971 (at the end of Allen’s “reconstitution”) to 1984.71 Rampersad approaches Ellison’s participation in CWF with suspicion, suggesting that Ellison was simply gratified by his inclusion among “wealthy, powerful, educated whites” despite contributing little toward the diversification of the foundation and its leadership.72 While such criticism may be fair, it also oversimplifies matters. Ellison’s participation in CWF reflects an abiding interest in reconstitution as we observed it in Ellison’s civil rights–era work, and as it runs headlong into transitions in public-historical pedagogy and historiography during the 1970s, when the approaching bicentennial celebration (another public cause with which Ellison involved himself) met the rise of social history, focusing less upon singular, heroic, ideological understandings of nation and history and more upon aspects of race, class, and gender.

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Rampersad uses Ellison’s participation in CWF to spotlight certain foibles of his character.73 Nevertheless, there remains more to Ellison’s involvement than Rampersad acknowledges. Specifically, the Williamsburg project itself offers a compelling model for the civil religious problems that confronted the completion of his second novel. To understand the significance of this connection, it helps to reflect upon Colonial Williamsburg’s own history, the context into which (and because of which) Ellison became involved, and possible motivations (beyond Rampersad’s characteristic diagnosis of Ellison’s fragile ego) for his continued participation during this period in his career. The transformation of Williamsburg, Virginia, from a backwater former colonial capital into a “living museum” of eighteenth-century Americana began in 1926 as a pet project of John D. Rockefeller Jr., his son John D. Rockefeller III, and W. A. R. Goodwin, former rector of Williamsburg’s Bruton Parish Church. Intended to hearken to a glorious past that modernization and industrialization had undercut, Williamsburg symbolized “the cornerstones of American values that promoted a respect for the past in an ever-changing world.”74 These values shored up national identity and sentiment during the perceived threats to the American way of life presented by World War II and the Cold War era. Things changed, however. By the 1960s and certainly the 1970s, when Ellison became a trustee, Colonial Williamsburg faced scrutiny and condemnation for obscuring social history, ignoring the roughly half of its historical population that would have been African American, rendering women largely invisible, and focusing on matters of state and war at the expense of the domos.75 Such trends reflected broader social and cultural shifts, of course, and the disputes registered against CWF and its timeline mirror controversies in other institutions—academic and otherwise. Thus Ellison’s time with CWF provides a specific historiographical moment of Ellison’s involvement with American civil religion: “In its role as a shrine that was conceived by a cleric and the heir to the nation’s great industrial fortune and that has become one of the nation’s leading centers for the study of colonial life, the restoration [of Colonial Williamsburg] serves as a useful conduit for understanding the changing nature of twentieth-century American society.”76 The implications of this changing American nature, as we have observed in detail, occupied

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the second half of Ellison’s life and career as he struggled to represent and contain them with depth and resonance in novel form. In seeking to highlight the roles of African Americans (both free and enslaved), women, and others who had been historically (and historiographically) excluded, the problem became one of reconciling conflicting narratives on “America” and the emphases placed upon diverse aspects of national identity.77 This was the challenge confronting CWF during Ellison’s tenure as a trustee. While he was ahead of the curve in understanding pluribus and unum and was an advocate of the old “Negro-American” vision that James Alan McPherson discussed, the issues that Colonial Williamsburg presented, and the myriad controversies it raised, remained civil religious in nature and occupied Ellison as primary concerns in the later stages of his life. Indeed, the issues reflected the more stable unum that the broader American scene denied to Ellison during this time. In 1986 he reflected on his involvement in a letter to Robert C. Birney, the foundation’s head of education: “My main interest in CW (and whatever contribution I might have made as a trustee) has always found focus in its potential for dramatizing the cultural, industrial, and political processes through which this nation was formed and gradually became, through dream, struggle, and self-assessment, even more conscious of the mystery and challenge of its ‘Americanness.’”78 Part of Colonial Williamsburg’s educational value resides in its dramatic impact, its capacity to mythologize (not unlike King did—notice the King-like rhetoric of “dream,” “struggle,” and “self-assessment” that Ellison wields above) the mundane and thereby to transcend it. This sense of American “mystery” is pointedly civil religious. Whatever propensity or responsibility Ellison may have felt toward the advancement of social historical learning, his foundational understanding of particular identity always pointed toward a cooperative-antagonistic relationship of such particularity with universals, which are “reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.”79 Absent stable unum, Ellison’s sense of pluribus became obscure. According to Marty’s historicization, the pluribus and the unum— once understood as antagonistically cooperative co-conspirators— divided into factions during the late twentieth century. One faction accused the other of “impos[ing] a single national identity,” the other

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decried a tendency toward “promoting . . . mutually exclusive subcultures at the expense of the common weal.”80 This impasse inaugurated a changing paradigm in the concept of America. By codifying American civil religion as he did in 1967, Bellah described it, as Ellison did with Bledsoe, “before [it] was checked out,” just before it receded into the past. Furthermore, he did so at the very moment that Ellison’s second novel, according to Bradley, came the closest it ever would to publication before spiraling irrevocably out of control. In Williamsburg the problem became how to balance the curricular and historiographical demands of emerging social history with the market demands for popular, more outmoded history. Marty characterizes such an ontological shift as moving from a “centripetal” understanding of pluribus (which means that all outlying properties are thrust toward a central point of identity) to a “centrifugal” one (wherein a central point of identification is fractured, thrusting common elements toward the periphery, multivalent).81 He marks a transition from emphasis upon oneness to emphasis upon multiplicity. Thus, on a centripetal reading of American culture, the emphasis on diverse communities, identities, and influences moves toward a unified whole, a totalizing American identity rooted in what common elements may pertain. Conversely, a centrifugal reading of American identity privileges the multiplicity of voices, acknowledges the diverse communities and influences that constitute a national character and, indeed, imposes a common good only insofar as there may be concord in the validity of American pluralism. The result of these “contrasting motions” is a “shock to the civil body, a trauma in the cultural system, and a paralysis in the neural web of social interactions.”82 It is precisely in the midst of this shock, trauma, and paralysis that Ellison encountered problems containing his second novel. Having historically relied upon the antagonistic cooperation of one-and-many, pluribus and unum, to drive his ironic conception of African American identity as a function of a broader, stable American identity, cultural transformations from the late 1960s forward undercut the vital sense of cooperation in which the Ellisonian worldview was grounded.83 Absent an authoritative racial autonomy in this new dispensation—unmoored by Brown—Ellison sought to relate his specific pluralistic identity to a unified, integrated American sensibility,

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to a centripetal unum. Yet this unum proved unstable, moving toward centrifugal pluralism that afforded no steadfast intellectual or conceptual antagonist. As an author who generated symbolic action through such tension, the result was crippling. The subversion of this tension so inherent to a healthy sense of civil religion contributed inextricably to Ellison’s failure to complete his second novel. Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s famous observation of the late-twentieth-century United States held true for Ellison’s struggle: pluribus abounded while unum grew scarce. For authors working in the Black Arts tradition, the concept of race had become relatively stabilized. Thus the fracturing of America (for which most representatives of this tradition held little faith in the first place) simply did not matter. For Ellison, however, things fell apart. Both race and nation were compromised, offering stability on neither side against which he could inflect the other in his writing, nothing firm upon which tension between the two might become “constructive,” as Martin Luther King would have it; no cooperative stability useful for grounding the antagonism between race and nation as modes of identity; little concern for the depth and resonance reinforced by Nathan Scott that civil religion accords Ellison’s political vision. What remains fascinating about Ellison’s involvement with CWF is the manner in which it offered a strong unum for which Ellison supplied (and embodied) the pluribus in an era when reliable intellectual formulations of an American unum (aside from late–Cold War jingoism) grew increasingly rare. Perhaps Ellison recognized that his second novel, long imagined to represent a kind of definitive statement on America’s integrated nature, a sense of “Negro Americanness,” was slipping irretrievably beyond both his creative grasp and the very occasion—begun two or three decades earlier—during which it was conceived. In this context his involvement with CWF both reflected the transitions that bedeviled him and, yet, offered him the greater sense of stability that was lacking in the centrifugality of these latter decades.

Coda: One Blues Invisible Around 1981, as he worked on his memoirs—a project that, like his second novel, he would never complete—Ellison scribbled the words to the Pledge of Allegiance in pencil on a one-quarter-filled typescript

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page: “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the USA,” he wrote, “and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God” (this “under God,” a later edition he inserts with a caret, suggesting Ellison never grew accustomed to it) “indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”84 Directly below this official version one finds Ellison’s own rendition of the pledge, written in words that pun in meter and rhyme on the American credo’s pieties: “one nation, . . . indivisible” becomes “one blues invisible, with sorrowful laughter for all.”85 Such a statement—indeed, his own faithful pledge—nicely encapsulates what we might call Ellison’s civil religious orientation. He begins with a simple proclamation of American identity—what we might denominate as the unum—rendered straight (though not unambivalently, as he belatedly remembers the clause “under God,” added by Congress in the 1950s in the attempt to differentiate the United States from, and to stem the spread of, “godless communism”). Next he revises it, restates it, vamping on it and stamping it with his own signature concepts derived from the pluribus that his African American identity represented in the integrated culture and society that was his ideal. The blues, invisibility, the tragicomic (“sorrowful laughter”)—Ellisonian keywords all—plunge this American affirmation of faith into a sense of ambiguity that resides between and effectively unites the unum (“one blues invisible”) with the pluribus (“with sorrowful laughter for all” [emphasis mine]) in the constructive tension of their antagonistic cooperation and civil religious depth. Ellison’s ideal unity of “one blues invisible,” however ambiguous, grew increasingly impossible as the legacies of the 1960s and 1970s evolved into moral majorities and oppositional factions, solidifying the centrifugal fragmentation of American identity into static postulations that would hold for the remainder of Ellison’s life (and beyond), undermining aspirations toward depth and resonance that had seemed so hopeful only a few years prior. Social and cultural antagonism grew increasingly uncooperative, a common good untenable not simply for its erosion of what illusions of commonality may have persisted but also for an escalating ambivalence regarding the nature and identity of good itself. It would be more than twenty-five years from the day of Ralph Ellison’s “Pledge” until Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee in 2008, would invoke Ellisonian ambiguity, negotiating the perilous proximity of the pluribus and the unum in American society and culture,

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drawing upon Ellisonian conceptions of race in game-saving political speeches and, indeed, campaigning as an invisible candidate en route to becoming the first African American president of the United States.86 In the meantime, Ellison was left virtually alone—nursing one blues, invisible: the America he signified out of his “ancestral” traditions (including Twain, Joyce, Eliot, Faulkner, and even Nathan Scott) and their intersections with the historical peculiarity of African American experience— with sorrowful laughter for all.

5

Conceived in Sin Ralph Ellison’s Nineteenth Century “I tole ’em these here young Nineteen-Hundred boys ain’t no good for the job. They ain’t got the nerves. Naw, sir, they just ain’t got the nerves.” —Lucius Brockway in Invisible Man “By 1860 all the tunnels led to one clearing.” —Alan Nadel

“This Black Conceit Pervades Him Through and Through” As his star ascended in the years following Invisible Man’s publication, Ralph Ellison began a sporadically regular career in college and university teaching that would both offer vital supplemental income as he wrote (and rewrote) his novel-in-progress and helped to bolster this college dropout’s own self-image as an intellectual and man of letters. Ellison’s teaching career began with a summer seminar in 1954 at Tuskegee and continued periodically from the mid-1950s through 1961 at Bard College in upstate New York. It later included visiting posts at the University of Chicago and Rutgers, and ended with a prestigious Schweitzer Chair in Humanities at New York University, which Ellison held between 1970 and 1979.1 His teaching also coincided almost precisely with the first quarter-century of work on his unfinished second novel, prompting in his correspondence the occasional expression of resentment at the mental and physical energy that teaching and other lecture commitments consumed while he could have been writing.2 Anecdotal and archival evidence both suggest that, as a teacher, Ellison was certainly a famous novelist.3 Whatever Ellison may have inflicted upon his students, he also offered them a cogent, if programmatic version of his considerable vision 144

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of American and Western literature and the cultural inheritances from which they emerge. If every syllabus makes an argument, then Ellison’s syllabi construct his own American canon, assembling texts that measure qualities of “depth and resonance” that Ellison believed had gone out of literature (see chapter 3). His teaching materials also provide a record of Ellison’s reading, documenting certain topics to which he devoted his thought and attention during the second half of his life. His lecture notes leave working outlines for the legacies of American literature he contended with while struggling with the second novel, writing the essays and addresses what would comprise Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986), and while he began to grapple with the notion that Invisible Man might not stand simply as his first novel, but an ever expanding portion of his legacy.4 Accordingly, resources devoted to Ellison’s teaching serve less as the ephemera of his “day job” and more to frame the groundwork from which a working novelist and critic consumed by excesses and limitations of civil religion might create, or pass judgment.5 Typically subverting the pieties of his era’s racial expectations, Ellison tended not to teach on African American literature, despite his status as a prominent and sought-after African American novelist.6 Instead, his course topics addressed a variety of archetypical study in the relationships between America, democracy, and the rituals of literary representation, with special attention to work written in the nineteenth century. Records survive for courses in nineteenth-century American and Russian literature at Bard, and one titled “Influence of the Civil War on American Literature” at the University of Chicago.7 At New York University he taught “Fiction and Democracy,” “Literature and Democracy,” and “The American Vernacular as Symbolic Action,” among others, at the undergraduate and graduate levels—all with heavy emphasis upon the American nineteenth century.8 Many of the same texts appear with regularity on Ellison’s syllabi: titles by Constance Rourke, Kenneth Burke, and Richard Bridgeman; literary works by Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Whitman, Twain, Crane, Henry James, Hemingway, and Faulkner—writers active almost exclusively during the nineteenth century, with the exception of the latter two (both of whom represent, for Ellison, culminations of the themes addressed by their elders).9 In both the 1950s at Tuskegee and

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the 1970s at NYU, Ellison assigned foundational American documents such as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the Bill of Rights—in addition to, and as background reading for, his regular literary fare. In a class lecture at NYU he asserted that “the American Constitution may be seen as a documentation of an ideal society, or the imaginative, symbolic, projection of such a society. In the beginning, again, was the word. The structuring of its terms may be seen as a bureaucratization of its principles.”10 Ellison thrived on understanding the American nineteenth century as an era when the founding promises of a democratic prospect were forged in the early republic, tested by antebellum debates and ritual violence over the very nature of freedom and national identity, and in the years of reckoning that followed the failures of Reconstruction, fulfilled a tragic mode. For Ellison the 1800s represented the most fecund period of American history and mythology, one that the remarkable democratic struggles of his own century (the contours of which he strained mightily to contain novelistically) could neither escape nor find adequate comprehension in its absence. In his acceptance speech for the National Book Award in 1953, Ellison claimed, “I came to believe that the writers of [the nineteenth century] period took a much greater responsibility for the condition of democracy and, indeed, their works were imaginative projections of the conflicts within the human heart when the sacred principles of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights clashed with the practical exigencies of human greed and fear, hate and love.”11 Ellison’s creative and critical efforts must be understood as inextricable from certain legacies that he perceived himself to inherit from this period—and that he saw as inextricable from his own racial context in the mid-twentieth century. His career in many respects navigates the trajectory from Civil War to civil rights, the century span that separated him from this legacy and the parallel historical, political, and literary resonances that joined the two eras. In his essays, speeches, and interviews following the publication of Invisible Man and during this protracted period of the second novel’s composition, Ellison refers time and again not simply to race but to legacies wrought by racism that have haunted American identity from the beginning. As early as his 1954 interview with the Paris Review, Ellison refers to a “moral core” for which “the Negro and his status have

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always stood” in American literature. The Negro not only “symbolizes . . . the human and social possibility of equality,” but also symbolizes its denial—tensions central to Ellison’s readings of Moby-Dick and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.12 Such characterizations depend upon the novel’s generic relationship to the idea of nation: “As I see it,” he writes in “The Novel as a Function of American Democracy,” from 1967, “the novel has always been bound up with the idea of nationhood. What are we? Who are we? . . . How did it become this way? What is it that stopped us from attaining the ideal?”13 This ideal, he continues, for the American nation and, by extension, the American novel, “is . . . dedicated to change through basic concepts stated in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.”14 Both of these texts and, one might add—as Ellison did in the classroom—the Declaration of Independence (he referred to all of these emphatically as “THE SACRED DOCUMENTS” in lecture notes from the 1950s) serve not simply as “founding” documents for the American ideal, but as scripture, proof-texts for the American civil religion—a crucial aspect of Ellison’s worldview that represents an exaction of the “depth and resonance” that he believes to be missing from the literature of his contemporaries.15

The Word and Its Contradiction Ellison’s nineteenth-century American literature depends paradoxically upon the racial contradiction of democratic freedoms established and sanctified in the founding documents. In lecture notes from NYU he refers to “the religious connotation of blackness as a sign of evil and original sin. . . . The mystery of blackness as a metaphor for the white man’s other, his mysterious shadow.”16 As blackness represents this underground potentiality, this shadow American apophasis, Ellison reconstructs Mark Twain’s assessment of postbellum America, the “distinctions between what we said we were (our ideals) and how we acted (our conduct),” Ellison restating the spirit of Twain’s critique elsewhere in biblical cadence: “In the beginning was not only the word but the contradiction of the word.”17 The contradiction becomes most evocatively evident in the figure of “the Negro” as embodiment of the nation’s moral failures. This black presence, representative of a Calvinistic “stain” on the American soul (though, ironically, Ellison troubled this notion

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in Invisible Man by having drops of black paint—Liberty Paint brand— make white paint even whiter: “optic white”) incorporates Ellison’s fundamental American irony.18 Specifically, Ellison’s constructive question becomes this: How can a nation predicated on the understanding that all men are created equal thrive for very long by systematically (and violently) denying such a foundational pronouncement? How can an ideal persist within its own contradiction? Taking Ellison’s biblical allusion a bit further, “In the beginning was the word” refers first to the opening phrase of the fourth Gospel (commonly known as John’s Gospel): “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”19 But it also resonates (as the Gospel does) with the (first) creation story that opens Genesis: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”20 Ellison’s noted contradiction, then, carries even deeper implications that extend to a denial of its national creative function, a betrayal of the nation’s created purpose. Just as the first humans disobey God’s only mandate, one finds in American origins a fundamental contradiction of—and disobedience against—a civil religious understanding of divine intent. Ellison, like his nineteenth-century forebears, assumes a contemporary Miltonian aspect, seeking to justify the ways of God—America’s God—to man, to a nation blinded by its own complicity in a certain fatal, fallen, contradiction. Ellison frames a similar point about the nation’s first disobedience in an essay published in 1976, the year of the American bicentennial, characterizing racism in American life and culture as carrying “the symbolic force of an American form of original sin.”21 The point itself is not unique to Ellison—indeed, Nathan Scott makes a similar point in his Independence Day address, as observed in chapter 3. Nevertheless, its American context usually characterizes the sentiment in a more familiar form, casting slavery as the American original sin.22 Two aspects make Ellison’s characterization remarkable. First, as Alan Jacobs observes, commentators who describe a national “original sin” tend erroneously to point to a discrete act, a single sin that sets in play tragic consequences.23 Ellison’s theological understanding fares better because he recognizes that original sin is not simply the act of slavery or racist policy (an original sin) but, rather, the fundamental, inescapable contradiction of ideal American democratic identity—constituted by slavery and racism—as

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defined in its founding documents. In this way it represents the exception to the myth of American exceptionalism. A second noteworthy aspect of Ellison’s characterization of original sin derives from the way it deepens his conscious alignment with the very “depth and resonance” of the authors and debates that he so deliberately denominates as fundamental to the American character and the ongoing evolution and democratic purpose of its literature. Original sin and, more broadly, a pronounced understanding of human sinfulness, permeates “the beginning” of the American experiment, characterizing the Puritan colonization of the North American continent and framing the legacy with which Ellison’s namesake (Ralph Waldo Emerson) and the novelists (including Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and the autobiographer Douglass) that Ellison taught and read continually as a teacher and lecturer during the second half of his life contended in their articulations of American identity. Indeed, Ellison’s representations of race in his American aspirations draw deeply from this genealogy of sin, linking him, his fiction, and his criticism with the American nineteenth century, founding revolutionary documents that he takes to articulate the United States’ democratic prospect, and the Calvinist origins of New England Puritanism with which all of these traditions, at least in part, wrangled. It also reflects in this way precisely how Ellison, cognizant of the precarious endangerment of such an invisible theology in his 1971 draft letter to Nathan Scott, mined these resources for his own pedagogical purposes. This chapter explores Ellison’s rhetorical and conceptual uses of sin and especially original sin—particularly as they refer to and give shape to the contours of race, including American racism—as a theologically constructive literary trope informed by residual Calvinism inherited from nineteenth-century American letters as a fundamental contradiction of US democratic prospects. First we shall derive a more systematic understanding of sin in nineteenth-century America and its role in Ellison’s fiction, criticism, and in selected archival materials before locating antecedents in extended readings of two representative nineteenthcentury American authors: Melville and Douglass. While the readings of Ellison in tandem with Melville offers fresh insight, it is Douglass who ultimately synthesizes the literary statements of the American Renaissance into an effective message that paints the United States—because of slavery and the racist machinations that undergird it—as Ellison sees

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it: fundamentally broken and yet capable of living up to its founding promise. How Ellison effectively translates nineteenth-century revisions and applications of early modern religious thought to his secularized twentieth-century context makes its best sense in light of Douglass’s example. What, we shall consider, do conceptualizations of race, racism, and the legacies of slavery that conflate national and theological anthropologies in Douglass’s words reflect about Ellison’s corpus, as well as our own present uses of and for it?

The American Adam and the Irony of (African) American Literature Andrew Delbanco argues that American literature “is characteristically committed to the restoration of what the Puritans had lost: a powerful, but privative sense of sin.”24 He marks this emergence in what has come to be called the “American Renaissance,” a period of antebellum literature that sought to rearticulate what it understood as founding ideals, while, necessarily—and at the same time—recoiling from the implications of the ideals as they came to be practiced.25 In this way we might understand Delbanco’s assertion to characterize American literature as (to appropriate nomenclature from chapter 2) both timeless and timely, forging new expressive statements while remaining—despite optimistic tendencies—mindful of and even haunted by the past. Furthermore, such negotiations stem from a dynamism located in Perry Miller’s transition from the first understanding of the “errand into the wilderness” to the second, where the errand transforms from a temporary occupation to a perpetual precondition of American identity. By seeking to restore a lost conception of sin, Delbanco’s American literature moves beyond measures of particular virtue and shortcoming, striving instead to understand a common element, a universal privation, to join, or at least to implicate, the many into a sense of oneness. This fulcrum of new and old, this paradox of manifest destiny, progress, and expansion achieved through harrowing human loss and at great moral expense requires some measure of accountability. Delbanco’s American literature, then, strives for a more just representation of a nation and a people who have tended to think well and highly—if uncritically—of themselves, to see themselves as exceptional. Having removed the proverbial specks from

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the eyes of the world that were focused upon them, they failed to attend to their own ocular logs. Ellison’s friend R. W. B. Lewis famously argues that terms of the Renaissance period in American culture find strong expression in the Adamic myth, which “saw life and history as just beginning. It described the world as starting up again under fresh initiative, in a divinely granted second chance for the human race, after the first chance had been so disastrously fumbled in the darkening Old World. It introduced a new kind of hero, the heroic embodiment of a new set of ideal human attributes.”26 This hero was the new Adam, the American Adam, “an individual emancipated from history, . . . bereft of ancestry, untroubled and undefiled by the usual inheritances of family and race; an individual standing alone, self-reliant and self-propelling.”27 To such a catalog one may add the bonds of original sin, whose very existence traces back to Adam (and to Eve). The American Adam embodies the supposed innocence and potential for progress that characterized the new republic. Lewis is also quick to note that the American Adam serves less as a diagnosis of American identity and more as the contentious metaphor over which the early republic wrestled and debated. Indeed, the immediate antebellum period reflected a historically optimistic mood in American culture. The nation was expanding—its destiny by all appearances manifestly ordained by a provident God. Revolutions of government and religion had unchained the practical involvement and improvement of individuals from tyrannical powers, endowing them with a sense of greater sovereignty in the cultivation of their citizenship and their souls. Indeed, the character of the American Protestant theology from which these new cultural figures descended had shifted overwhelmingly in nearly 250 years from one rooted in the tenets of a preordained Calvinism to a sense of Wesleyan perfectionism. For influential figures such as the revivalist Charles Grandison Finney, sin no longer derived from a nature imputed by or inherited from Adam, but consisted of “voluntary disobedience to moral law,” or even “choice.”28 In a broader sense, there emerged the feeling that people, like the social order and, indeed—as the Constitution suggests—the Union, could and would become improved, more perfect.29 The major casualty of such transitions, however, was a pronounced and pervasive sense of sin. Once foundational to Calvinism, its Augustinian inheritance and its innovative New England covenantal federal-

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ism,30 sin was transformed from an existential diagnosis of humankind’s inherent fallenness or separation from God (sin—as singular, originary, and all-encompassing) to a discrete act, or series of acts, of willful disobedience (sins—in the plural sense).31 This transition from sin to sins, from an existential nature to a contingent one, permits the possibility that such acts might be numbered, accounted for, and minimized: that a human agent may become more perfect (or at least less sinful) in the process.32 Whereas sin bespeaks inevitability and ascribes a universal human condition; sins are acts of the particular will in a particular circumstance.33 On myriad levels, of course, reports of the imminent perfection of the human or even the American condition were greatly exaggerated. Even without imposing our own twenty-first-century moral critiques upon late-antebellum America (or, for that matter, upon the interim), we find ample evidence in the historical record of a monumental stain upon the national character and identity. Slavery had become a theological crisis, endorsed by biblical sanction and, ironically, damned by biblical sanction—depending on which point of view one espoused.34 From a civil religious standpoint, slavery represented either (1) the birthright of owners, whose providential Christian guidance helped their dusky subjects atone for the curse of Ham (Gen. 9:20–27)—their ancestors’ first disobedience (and itself a kind of original sin)35—and aspire eventually to the salvation of their souls, or (2) a foundational contradiction, a mortal failure to live up to the spirit and letter of founding documents and ideals that proclaimed “all men are created equal.” Such critiques as the latter, so prominent in the spirit of the jeremiad that emerged from Puritan New England, fell out of mainstream discourse in the mid-nineteenth century.36 The most popular ministers of the age (including Lyman and, later, Henry Ward Beecher, Horace Bushnell, and Charles Finney) pronounced the end of sin, the capacity of humankind to overcome its bonds—especially among the limitless possibilities of the young nation.37 Others disagreed. According to Martin Marty, while many—if not most—prominent clergymen, evangelists, and theologians of the era enthusiastically abandoned the concept of a singular, originary aspect of sin, American novelists of the midnineteenth century retained and were left to contend with its implications: “Protestantism lived outside the churches, and many a colonial

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theme can best be revisited not in Beecher or Bushnell but in Hawthorne or Melville.”38 Such novelists clung to sin precisely as sin was waning from public consciousness, although, ironically, slavery—as “America’s original sin”—escalated the inevitability of civil war. Marty continues: While the revivalists gloried in their statistical successes and overlooked slavery and industrial victimage, and while evangelicalism turned optimistic in its glorification of the trivial, authors like these pondered the old Protestant witness to the tragic dimension of life. In the midst of progressivism, bravado, and boasting, these were the new Puritans who wrestled with the deep, dark underside of the human venture and the national experience. One might go so far as to say that one half of the Christian message about man’s nature had gone underground, to be neglected by evangelists who made conversion easy and who promised too much.39

Given this revised understanding of the American novelist’s role at the middle of the nineteenth century, and given Ellison’s devotion to these same authors, how might we understand American Calvinism and its literary legacy, what Marty calls “the cosmic themes which had animated the old Protestantism,” in Ellison’s corpus?40 In what ways does Ellison’s fiction exemplify Delbanco’s insistence upon a characteristic commitment to the restoration of a powerful and pervasive sense of sin? In what ways does Invisible Man, as a novel that transpires in (to appropriate Marty’s term) the “underground,” reflect the residual influence of original sin in its appropriations of Marty’s theological novelists who contended with the meaning and significance of African Americans in American democracy? Discussing the Adamic myth, Lewis divides nineteenth-century American culture as he understands it into three categories, three “parties,” of dispute—hope, memory, and irony—all of which characterize their adherents’ respective relationships with sin. Hope and memory derive from Emerson’s parties of “future” and “past.”41 Hope refers to forward-looking conceptions of American identity (in favor of Adam as original, a priori American liberated from inherited imputations of original sin). This is the party with which Emerson himself most readily identified.42 Memory, Lewis’s second category, looks to a real or imag-

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ined past, to the traditional depravity of humankind as, by implication, originally sinful, and pessimistically rebuffs the rosier implications of the American Adam. The third category, “irony,” represents a synthesis of hope and memory that tempers the excesses of one with the corrective imposition of the other. “The resources of tradition,” Lewis suggests, “dispensed with by one sort of theologian in the name of religious freedom, were re-established by another as the essential means of human redemption.”43 Irony measures the interactions between hope, or memory, and their respective contradictions as extensions of sin—the picture of what might be against the reality of what is, similar to Ellison’s rendition of Twain’s distinction between American ideals and conduct, discussed earlier—and characterizes the emergence from this tension of American narrative fiction: especially that of Melville and Hawthorne.44 It is important to note that the ironic category bears a democratic quality, characterized by “give and take,” a form of antagonistic cooperation rooted in pragmatic negotiation between rival factions aiming for a greater good. The tension generated by Lewis’s depiction of the American Adam also resonates with Delbanco’s invocation of sin as a central element of American literature, and with Marty’s recognition of Hawthorne and Melville—themselves neither theologians nor orthodox believers in any normative sense of either word—as the theologians of their age. In this way their ideals serve as antecedent exemplars for Ellison’s invisible theology. The idea of original sin for these nineteenth-century ancestors clarified the tension between a forward looking, progressive, manifest destiny (Lewis’s “hope”) and the broader, contradictory, insurmountable wages of such hope. It asserts that the growth and expansion of the American enterprise extends from the very contradiction of that freedom manifested: to expand the nation (as the Missouri Compromise and the Kansas-Nebraska Act, among other examples, illustrate) also expands slavery. To celebrate the vitality of the American prospect is not wrong or untenable, as pessimistic advocates of and more contemporary heirs to Lewis’s category of “memory” might suggest, but neither is it uncomplicated, necessitating anything less than a treacherous passage through the shallows of American exceptionalism. Ellison’s connection with Melville and Hawthorne as Marty’s literary theologians resides, I argue, in this ironic identity. In the context of post–World War II American prosperity and a newfound sense of

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righteousness grounded in innocence and framed against the “Godless communism” of Cold War enemies, Ellison hedges.45 Not unlike Reinhold Niebuhr, whose book The Irony of American History (published, we have noted, exactly one week before Invisible Man) resounds strongly with Ellison’s novel and whose mutual admiration Ellison shared, Ellison understood that fundamental contradictions of American identity precluded such simple, singularly oriented interpretations of American virtue in either a positive or negative sense. As witnessed in the previous chapter, such a point of view helped to sink any hope of finishing the second novel. Race and racism, descended from the legacy of slavery and evident in the spectacular ritual protests orchestrated in the civil rights demonstrations of the 1950s and 1960s, endemic to the earliest memories of a child in Oklahoma City (who witnessed firsthand the aftermath of the Tulsa race riots and risked lynching while riding freight trains from Oklahoma to Alabama to attend college in the perilous wake of the Scottsboro Boys incident) undermined any pretense to American virtue and innocence in their contradictions of democratic promise.46 Still, Ellison was no mere product of the past, irretrievably unwilling or unable to shake such “memory” (in Lewis’s nomenclature) as a pessimistic or even nihilistic reflection upon American identity and character. Indeed, he was, in a phrase from Lewis that strikes an Ellisonian chord, aware “of the heightened perception and humanity which suffering made possible (something unthinkable among the nostalgic).”47 Lewis continues in the same vein: The vision of innocence and the claim of newness were almost perilously misleading. But they managed nonetheless to provide occasions for reflection and invention, for a testing of moral and artistic possibilities. The illusion of freedom from the past led to a more real relation to the continuing tradition. The vision of innocence stimulated a positive and original sense of tragedy. Without the illusion, we are conscious, no longer of tradition, but simply and coldly of the burden of history. And without the vision, we are left, not with a mature tragic spirit, but merely with a sterile awareness of evil uninvigorated by a sense of loss.48

In this way Ellison navigates “the word and its contradiction”: innocence requires tradition, and neither quality may arrive at any sense of fullness

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or fruition absent the antagonistic cooperation of the other. African American literary expression in the mid- to late twentieth century tended—on Ellison’s reading—to focus upon the burden of history. The “protest” elements of social realism, especially those reified by the Black Power and Black Arts movements of the 1960s and 1970s that actively and publicly opposed Ellison as an accommodationist, even an Uncle Tom, dwelled upon the plight of African Americans in the American wilderness. Their outlook was pessimistic and one may interpret their broader view to hold that the United States was, and remains, beyond redemption. At the same time, Ellison eschewed the hyperpatriotism of his era. During the 1950s, with the rise of the Cold War, prominent evangelists such as Billy Graham began to reassert a sense of American chosenness on the global stage—particularly in the effort to combat “Godless communism.” Accordingly, Graham, in particular, recapitulated a national optimism that characterized the mid-nineteenth century, one hundred years earlier. This was not a precise correspondence. Unlike Finney, Beecher, and others, Graham did not assume that the eradication of original sin was imminent. Indeed, he maintained a fervent belief in sin as a personal inheritance.49 People were inherently sinful by nature, though atonement and repentance remained viable—and necessary— options and were encouraged at Graham’s “Crusades” in New York, Los Angeles, and elsewhere across the country. Still, an optimism in the role of the American nation as chosen and sanctified by God to overcome evil in the global struggle against Godless communism, thus redeeming the world, also characterized Graham’s preaching and thought.50 The mid-twentieth century accorded original sin a newfound “relevance” on the American scene.51 Such a context (as we have observed) may be understood to inform the rhetorical scheme of Ellison’s second novel, with the demagogue preacher cum Senator Bliss/Sunraider at its center, representing the jingoistic merger of American might with God’s will. Ellison’s broader literary vision, however, remained largely Niebuhrian. He was a quintessential ironist according to Lewis’s category: not given to pessimistic abandonment of hope, but neither willing to ascribe too much credit to cultural or political factions where it was not due. Here we locate yet another way in which Ellison represents a midtwentieth-century heir to Melville and Hawthorne as theologians, im-

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bued with what Lewis calls a “profound tragic understanding—bred out of cheerfulness,” a sensibility in keeping with the tragicomic sensibility we have observed Ellison to ascribe to the blues, and that remains foundational to his own literary and critical program so appreciated by a theologian such as Nathan Scott. The remainder of this chapter explores in greater depth a battery of resonances between two representative nineteenth-century American figures—Melville, as one of Marty’s theologian-novelists, and the African American abolitionist, orator, journalist, and diplomat Frederick Douglass—and how their continued emphasis upon the doctrine of original sin and its cultural implications despite waning favor and influence offers fresh insight into Ellison’s concept of race. Ellison’s appropriation of their wranglings with original sin distills his own conception from the traditions that he understood himself, as an American novelist, to inherit. Four of Melville’s works (Moby-Dick, The Confidence-Man, Benito Cereno, and Billy Budd) receive attention, while a reading of Douglass’s invisible-theological rhetoric highlights an antecedent of Ellison’s civil religious outlook and, despite his cameo appearance in Invisible Man and a civil-religious rhetorical legacy that exhibits interesting coherences with Ellison’s, retains a startling absence in recent critical treatments of Ellison and his corpus. These readings seek a broader sense of the rhetoric and symbolic action that Ellison utilizes to frame, give shape, and ascribe meaning to his contemporary organizing statements about race as an ironic property, and its location within a broader genealogy of sin in nineteenth-century American literature. Notably absent from this cadre of nineteenth-century figures is Ellison’s own namesake, Ralph Waldo Emerson. This omission is intentional, even deliberately provocative. In fact, I wish to assert that Ellison should be understood to rely less heavily upon an Emersonian mode than commentators (especially pragmatists) insist in their attempts to lay claim to an Ellisonian mantle.52 This is not a totalizing claim. Clearly Ellison did admire Emerson, and I neither aspire to dispel, nor suspect I could (or should) succeed in dispelling meaningful connections and influences between the elder Ralph Waldo and his nominal heir.53 The distinction I wish to draw emphasizes Ellison’s ironic view, marking an increasingly pronounced distinction from Emerson’s more generally “hopeful” orientation.

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Furthermore, in a more practical sense, Ellison, unlike Emerson (but in direct relation to Melville) was a novelist.54 While his essays, his tangible generic connections to Emerson, bear their own merit and prove helpful in the articulation (and proof-texting) of coherent literary, cultural, and intellectual positions (a practice in which, admittedly, I also indulge prodigiously in this volume), Ellison understood himself to be an essayist and lecturer in service (primarily economic service) of his fiction. Through the novel form he offered his most trenchant observations concerning democratic ideals and American conduct—not through the occasional statement or the aphorism, but by sustained and strategic subjection of such insights to symbolic action through the craft of fiction and the novel’s formal generic demands. Another aspect of Emerson’s thought (this one theological) disqualifies him from the more specific terms of this study. Perry Miller famously describes Emerson as a “[Jonathan] Edwards in whom the concept of original sin has evaporated,” an aphorism that reflects the intellectual trajectory I wish to illuminate in this chapter.55 While Emerson may bear ethical sympathies and convergences with Ellison and his broader project (though not without some measure of ambivalence), the fundamental claim of this chapter—that Ellison’s particular literary conceptions and rhetorics of race derive uniquely from an inheritance of original sin as foundational to American culture—stands as fundamentally contradictory to the broader contours of Emerson’s worldview.56

Melville: Turning the Cosmos Inside Out Herman Melville retains the distinction not simply of finding perpetual inclusion in Ellison’s teaching, but also of having several different titles (often as many as four) appear regularly on Ellison’s syllabi. Lewis noticed connections between the novelists early on, writing evocatively in The American Adam that “Ellison is specifically indebted to the circus vision of Melville”—a legacy that is evident, for instance, in the “Blackness of Blackness” sermon (alluding to Moby-Dick) and in the figure of Rinehart as a realization of Melville’s confidence man near the end of Invisible Man.57 In this section we shall observe how Melville’s Calvinistic inheritance participates in some measure as an antecedent for the

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construction of Invisible Man and the second novel’s contentions with race and the legacy of slavery as an American form of original sin. Given the ironic foundation that Melville and Ellison share (echoing Lewis), this examination turns first to how such irony functions by drawing resonant examples from Invisible Man and Moby-Dick (1851), before widening the focus to include Billy Budd (1924), The Confidence Man (1857), and Benito Cereno (1855) as novels whose depth and resonance derive from the very undermining of meaning and ultimacy as coherent and manageable in human understanding.

Moby-Dick There are clear moments in Invisible Man where Ellison works on refigurations and extensions of Melville’s project in Moby-Dick. Take, for instance, both novels’ opening lines. “Call Me Ishmael” intones Melville’s narrator, revealing through concealment an identity by which he is “called,” but never known. Ellison’s “I am an invisible man” asserts Invisible Man’s likewise (and otherwise) unnamed narrator, at once giving the reader a handle upon his identity—his being—but also, quite literally, obscuring or erasing himself from further definition. Both narrators proceed, then, through a series of wry perambulations, serving as tour guides of memory’s geographical terrain, and foreshadowing their respective fates. It is in the midst of such loomings that Ellison’s most overt appropriation of Moby-Dick, as related by his invisible narrator, plays on a sermon only glimpsed in Ishamel’s wanderings of New Bedford, elaborated and riffed upon in Invisible Man. Ishmael enters a door that he mistakenly believes leads to an inn called “the Trap”: “It seemed the great black parliament sitting in Tophet. A hundred black faces turned round in their rows to peer; and beyond a black angel of doom was beating a book in the pulpit. It was a negro church; and the preacher’s text was about the blackness of darkness, and the weeping and wailing and teeth-gnashing there. Ha, Ishmael, muttered I, backing out, Wretched entertainment at the sign of ‘The Trap!’”58 Ellison effectively resurrects this gathering in his protagonist’s reverie on “the blackness of blackness,” permitting the protagonist to step inside and linger for the homily that Melville renders invisible:

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And a congregation of voices answered: “That blackness is most black, brother, most black . . .” “In the beginning . . .” “At the very start,” they cried. “. . . there was blackness . . .” “Preach it . . .” “. . . and the sun . . .” “The sun, Lawd . . .” “. . . was bloody red . . .” “Red . . .” “Now black is . . .” the preacher shouted. “Bloody . . .” “I said black is . . .” “Preach it, brother . . .” “. . . an black ain’t . . .” “Red, Lawd, red: He said it’s red!” “Amen, brother . . .” “Black will git you . . .” “Yes, it will . . .” “Yes, it will . . .” “ . . . ’an black won’t . . .” [ . . . ] “. . . It’ll put you, glory, glory, Oh my Lawd, in the WHALE’S BELLY.”59

The invisible man may well be hallucinating. He has smoked “a reefer” and, consequently, finds himself caught within interstices of experience, stepping inside of time, syncopating it with temporal and spatial adjustments. It is from these margins that “the blackness of blackness” sermon emerges, signifying Melvillian sermonic eloquence as a rhetorical mode, one on which Ellison’s protagonist will rely as he navigates a middle way between Lewis’s hope and memory. There is a second, more broadly conceptual relationship between Invisible Man and Moby-Dick, one reflected in the coherences of their respective theological moods. Melville clearly draws upon Calvinistic antecedents.60 Yet he retains post-Calvinist cosmology (distinguishing him from a Jonathan Edwards, or that Edwards-without-original-sin, Emerson). We may call this cosmos “post-Calvinist” precisely because it understands physical reality to have come unmoored from any correspondence

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with the metaphysical. In this way “nature” (in the lowercase) has sprung free from Nature, which becomes precisely the problem this volume has traced through modernity from Luther and Shakespeare to Ellison and beyond: appearance belies the reality to which it once cohered; truth, assurance, verity, the very substances of reality become invisible, unknowable, and—even where they might be discerned—untrustworthy (if not outright sinister). As Ahab reflects upon the whale, All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the moulding of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can a prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate, and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. . . . Who’s over me? Truth hath no confines.61

Ahab points to metaphysical disjuncture. The mask signals distinction between internal and external identity, a ritual transformation not simply of the visage but of the external being that both obscures and augments a sensibility of otherness.62 He strikes outward like a prisoner, reaching beyond his own confinement for something, anything that may reside beyond the limitations of his own demarcated “truth.” Invisibility as Ellison’s governing paradigm resonates strongly with Ahab’s pasteboard mask precisely because it, too, untethers appearance from reality, truth from expectation. As Ellison describes it, invisibility represents a freedom from determination. On the surface, invisibility stems from peoples’ tendencies to see and to project precisely what they want to see upon a given subject.63 Invisibility, however, can empower as well. It offers freedom through its capacity to allow a subject to act without detection, and, thereby, when understood and wielded appropriately, to inhabit a realm of one’s own authentic existence external to the social custom that obscures it.

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Returning to Ellison’s elaboration upon Melville’s sermon, the blackness of blackness relates to the evil and uncivil otherness prescribed through the category of race, historically mapped onto African Americans—a racial determinism that Ellison, in this way, signifies by having his narrator listen to multiple recordings of Louis Armstrong singing “What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue?” as they play simultaneously.64 Interestingly, the song (in stanzas that Ellison does not supply) focuses upon the incoherencies between appearance implied by the racialized visage, and the reality behind the mask. Taking it from the bridge: I’m white inside But that don’t help my case. Cause I can’t hide What’s in my face. How will it end? Ain’t got a friend. My only sin is in my skin— What did I do to be so black and blue?65

Whereas Melville undermines, even fractures, the corresponding determinations of the physical and metaphysical realms, the natural and supernatural, Ellison ambiguates the determinative signifier of racial identity. Ironically, while referring to what may seem the most visible of human categories, invisibility relies upon the failure of sight. I am not what I seem. Nor am I what you say I am. Here Ellison turns the cosmos inside out: “My only sin is in my skin.” This is not a pious pronouncement by Armstrong, the protagonist, or even by Harry Brooks or Andy Razaf (the song’s lyricists, with the tune supplied by Fats Waller). It is, however, a profoundly ambiguous rumination upon the unstable structures that human beings erect to support the coherences they try, and yet fail, to impose upon the uncertainty of our respective realities. All is askew.

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Unstable Irony: Billy Budd and Invisible Man Taking this post-Calvinistic cue, understanding this fracture of the apparent and real to characterize the course of human events (and its existential grounding), the nature of Melville’s irony (which Lewis correctly locates in Ellison’s fiction) comes into perspective. It is exemplary of what Wayne Booth categorizes as infinite, unstable irony. Booth develops two broad categories of irony in A Rhetoric of Irony (1974): one rooted in relative stability, the other dependent upon the disjuncture. In stable irony a person or text transmits an ironic message that is received and understood as ironic by another party.66 Unstable irony, on the contrary, features a lapse in either transmission or interpretation, meaning that an ironic message is mistakenly understood as “straight,” or a straight one as ironic.67 Booth’s second category divides into “local” and “infinite” ironies. Local ironies are occasional, regional, rooted in discrete or limited frames of reference. Infinite ironies, on the other hand, concern a broader realm of existence. The most obvious context of infinite irony reflects a sense of cosmic or metaphysical irony, resonant beyond the physical and material scope of human experience, beyond the walls of Ahab’s prison, beyond the pasteboard mask.68 These ironies speak to the “depth and resonance” that Ellison believes have gone out of his contemporary literature. Ellison and Melville share a common ironic anatomy in that characters frequently find themselves ensnared by unstable ironies and therefore oblivious to the consequences their actions produce. Consider Billy Budd—a character lacking a “satirical turn,” who unwittingly dispatches a steady stream of “double meanings and insinuations . . . quite foreign to his nature.”69 An Adamic figure, marked by innocence, Melville’s narrative continually reinforces Billy’s ironic capacities: By his original constitution aided by the co-operating influences of his lot, Billy in many respects was little more than sort of an upright barbarian, much such perhaps as Adam might have been ere the urbane serpent wriggled himself into his company. And here be it submitted that apparently going to corroborate the doctrine of man’s Fall, a doctrine now popularly ignored, it is observable that where certain virtues pristine and unadulterated peculiarly characterize

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anybody in the external uniform of civilization, they will upon scrutiny seem not to be derived from custom or convention, but rather to be out of keeping with these, as if indeed exceptionally transmitted from a period prior to Cain’s city and citified man.70

In this Adamic mode, Billy’s innocence acquires sinister undertones imposed by external forces and figures who find such innocence incomprehensible, heightening the disjuncture that destabilizes the Melvillian irony. Such instability culminates with his dying pronouncement from the gallows: “God bless Captain Vere!,” he proclaims, offering a double meaning that neither his fellow sailors nor the reader understand quite how to interpret.71 Ellison’s invisible protagonist also inhabits this Adamic mode, reflecting a maddening obtuseness to the reality of the situations he encounters: his speech after the battle royal, his fervent belief in the mission of the college and his future role in its administration, his suitability for employment by the college’s benefactors in New York, and his future with the Brotherhood. On this reading Bledsoe becomes the protagonist’s own Claggert and Captain Vere, his prosecutor and executioner, who sends him into the world with sealed letters instructing the recipients, unbeknownst to the protagonist, to “Keep this nigger boy running”—even as “this . . . boy” recapitulates his faith in the college.72 That life is but a joke is a truth recognized by every character except the protagonist. The irony at play remains lost on him, and thus unstable in the broader narrative scheme.

Bliss Be the Tie: Rinehart and The Confidence-Man An alternative convergence of unstable irony resides in the figure of Rinehart (and his rebirth as Bliss in Ellison’s second novel)73 and Melville’s The Confidence-Man, which traverses the many faces of a protean figure, himself an embodiment of invisibility precisely because he inhabits ambiguity, reflects what others want him to be, and accordingly wields it for his own profit. Toward our present thesis, Elizabeth Hardwick argues that “the exaggerated patriotic claims of the country” in the 1850s “give a sharp kind of pseudorealism to the incidents in [The Confidence-Man].”74 This pronounced national faith destabilizes the

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moral decay of a dividing and divided nation. Again, we return to the quandary of appearance and reality (“Looks are one thing, and facts are another”),75 but through a figure such as the confidence man we recognize a foundational point of reference that Ellison refigures prominently in both Invisible Man and the second novel. First through Rinehart (in Invisible Man), and next through the figure of Bliss (who grows up to become the race-baiting white supremacist Senator Adam Sunraider), Ellison creates his own latter-day confidence men to highlight the ambiguity of the worlds his characters must navigate, and simultaneously to expose the pseudorealism of the exaggerated patriotic suppositions of his own occasion. Rinehart, Ellison claims, embodies chaos: “Rinehart is my name for the personification of chaos. He is also intended to represent America and change. He has lived so long with chaos that he knows how to manipulate it. It is the old theme of The Confidence Man. He is a figure in a country with no solid past or even stable class lines; therefore he is able to move about easily from one to another.”76 Rinehart’s confidence game depends upon Booth’s unstable irony. Specifically, Rinehart understands the ambiguity of urban existence in Harlem, Ellison’s metaphorical rendering of American wilderness (for which Melville utilizes the Mississippi River). While representing all things to all people (preacher, hustler, gambler, lover [of various women at the same time], antagonist, the list continues) he remains “a broad man, a man of parts” uniting these many aspects into one.77 His indeterminacy, the protean instability of his diffuse possibilities, marks his invisibility.78 Bliss, Rinehart’s archival doppelganger (Rinehart’s name is given in Invisible Man as B. P. Rinehart, which archival material reveals once to have been Proteus Bliss Rinehart), carries a similar mantle.79 His origins, learned in the end of the Juneteenth edition, remain ambiguous for much of the novel.80 While we witness the years that fall between and his eventual transformation into Sunraider, Bliss’s position on the borderlines of racial identity, his rootedness in the performative tradition of preaching (and especially of black preaching) and electoral politics, and again, as the preacher/hustler (and ladies’ man) that Rinehart was, resonates with Melville’s figure and predicament, as reliant upon Booth’s unstable irony. Bliss is a confidence man, as Sunraider becomes, his race-baiting and white supremacy a canard, or at least severely compro-

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mised on any number of levels by the tradition and home from which he comes, never mind the potent, yet ill-defined, possibilities of his own racial identity. Fundamental contradictions reside at the heart of who he is (Cudworth, Bliss, Mr. Movie Man, Sunraider), who he wants to be, who other people say he is. These identities represent the multifaceted Ellisonian complexity of a nation that holds dear to its founding documents while behaving in outright contradiction of them. This incoherence, at once self-contradictory and yet predictably so, evokes the central problem of “America’s original sin” as a fundamental distinction “between what we said we were . . . and how we acted.” It speaks to the confidence game at the heart of American democracy. Augmenting these postlapsarian overtones is Sunraider’s own identity as an “American Adam.” His name, self-invented of course, is Adam Sunraider. This denomination joins the innocence and the corruption, the belief in and the betrayal of American ideals that Ellison witnessed in the twentieth-century United States and understood to be inexorably in play during the years before the Civil War. Such contradictions, as they appear in the second novel (especially through Bliss/Sunraider) and in Invisible Man (through Rinehart), offer dramatic meditations upon the contradictions that inform and bolster the American original sin—the contradictions embodied by race and slavery. America itself becomes a Janus-faced idealist, a huckster, a jackleg preacher (in gold buttons) selling the Word—and the contradiction of the Word—from a gaudy showcase at the heart of that city, high upon a hill.

Benito Cereno In the context of such deception, and in the soteriological spirit of Melville’s age (to which he responded), Captain Delano’s words to Benito Cereno that Ellison employs as an epigraph for Invisible Man become exponentially more ironic: “‘You are saved,’ cried Captain Delano, more and more astonished and pained; ‘you are saved: what has cast such a shadow upon you?’” Benito Cereno’s answer, redacted (or implied) by Ellison’s epigraph (though it does appear in Melville’s text), is “the negro.”81 By “the negro” he means, of course, Babo, disembodied—“his brain, not body, had schemed and led to the revolt.”82 I would like to

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highlight the nature of Delano’s witness as a charade, a canard that he willfully embraces through his own innocent delusion, his desire to fall prey to the confidence game, to see precisely what he wishes to see, and thereby to obscure the actual circumstances upon which he gazes, rendering them invisible.83 Benito Cereno measures the distance between appearance and reality. Delano, aboard the San Dominick, Don Benito’s ship, judges matters to be acceptably under control—yet he does so precisely because he desires, even requires, for them to be so in the orderliness of his consciousness. As Bledsoe reminds the invisible man in the wake of Norton’s visit to the slave quarters, where he meets Jim Trueblood, “the only way to please a white man is to tell him a lie.”84 Delano is more than pleased to place his own confidence in the lie that he encounters on the San Dominick. Bledsoe’s mask (“As we approached a mirror Dr. Bledsoe stopped and composed his angry face like a sculptor, making it a bland mask, leaving only the sparkle of his eyes to betray the emotion that I had seen only a moment before”),85 his elaborate deferential rituals inform a façade reinforcing the New England innocence of a figure like Norton (from Boston) and Captain Delano (from Massachusetts). They are crafters and perpetrators of the myth; they place their unwavering faith in it, seemingly oblivious to the contradictions, to the artifice inherent to the cosmos they inhabit and in which they thrive. Try as it might, innocence cannot mitigate a compromised reality. Language becomes the ambivalent variable that drives Benito Cereno. Accordingly, it informs Ellison’s appropriations of Melville’s narrative. C. W. E. Bigsby notes, Captain Delano . . . uses language as an agent of power and control, albeit a language rendered ironic by his moral and intellectual blindness; while Benito Cereno, imprisoned by a cunning and dominant black crew, who for the most part remain potently silent, deploys a language which is willfully opaque, hinting at truths that language cannot be trusted to reveal. And yet language is the only medium through which the novelist can attempt to communicate his own truths. It was a familiar conundrum of nineteenth-century American writing and one to which Ellison was compulsively drawn.86

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The insufficiency of language to unite power and oral agency, and yet the necessity for literary expression to rely upon language as a compromised property (“the word and its contradiction”) marks the transition to Booth’s second category of irony. Accordingly we move from the ambiguities of interpretation to broader existential inconsistencies. If language or hagiographical political mythologies of nationhood cannot be trusted, then how may one rely upon the very conceptual stabilities in which they are grounded?

The Treadle of the Loom Returning to Booth’s second category, infinite irony, we note that while most of the foregoing examples refer to specific situational ironies, they also aspire to something more. Ahab’s attempt to break through his prison walls, to strike through the mask, seeks a realm beyond the limitations that restrain him. Billy Budd’s “imputed” qualities and his seeming unfitness for the world he inhabits represent a measure of incongruity between this world and whatever may reside beyond it. Furthermore, the more harrowing implications of the utter lack of correspondences between appearance and reality, particularity and universality, in Melville’s representative novels gesture toward a more infinite aspect in that they represent the limitations of human apprehension and understanding, as well as the capacity of human language and systems of signification to shore up, to offer a “just representation,” of such inconsistencies. The resonances that these aspects share with Ellison’s fiction, coupled with the various gestures toward ultimacy established in preceding chapters, mark Ellison’s work as responding in a similar way to these issues. Specifically it bears a similar longing for what Schleiermacher called a “sensibility and taste for the infinite” that irony facilitates.87 Infinite irony, for Booth, represents a precarious proposition, offering, and responding to, the possibility that “the universe . . . is absurd: no truth, no passion, no political commitment, no moral judgment, will stand up under ironic examination.”88 Yet, even within such diffusion, all need not necessarily be lost. Booth’s solution derives (albeit in an understated, barely acknowledged, “invisible” way) from the category of religion. If religions reside in the tension between particulars and

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universals, the finite and the infinite, then too much infinity can prove debilitating. Still, the constant destabilization and negation of meaning does not necessarily preclude a more ultimate possibility. Along these lines, Booth suggests, We can say that all truths can be undermined with the irony of contrary truths either because the universe is essentially absurd and there is no such thing as coherent truth or because man’s powers of knowing are inherently and incurably limited and partial. We can imagine, on the one hand, a chaos, a disjointed heap of absurdities impervious to man’s statements because finally meaningless to the non-core; and on the other hand a cosmos, an order of truth so far beyond man’s powers that any attempt at formulation is vulnerable to ironic discounting.89

The question for Booth, then, becomes one of “final clarity,” grounded in the degree to which “the ‘infinite’ underminings of irony are conducted in a genuine universe.”90 This represents a religious impulse because it seeks to anchor an untethered metaphysic to the particular sensibility that characterizes a tangible and physical world. These are not simple correspondences, of course. They are imperfect, baffling, contradictory, and beyond human ken. But they represent—even in these disjunctions—a bulwark against the seething nihilistic absurdity that remains a constant threat. If they may persist, “then differences in our interpretations make a difference; though no formulations will ever be fully adequate, some will be more nearly adequate than others, and the quest for truth and for truer interpretations will in itself be meaningful.”91 This “meaningful” quest resides at the marrow of Melville’s fiction, drawing to mind Hawthorne’s famous observation upon the occasion of their 1856 reunion in Liverpool and Chester: Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had “pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated”; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief. It is strange how he persists—and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before—in wondering

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to-and-fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other.92

Hawthorne’s assessment, understood in light of Booth’s infinite irony as a prospect for meaningfulness, suggests that Melville was occupied, even overwhelmed, by the problematic uncertainty inherent in the ironic tension between appearance and reality, in the question of how, and to what extent, one might understand a sense of ultimacy to reside beyond human ken, or whether annihilation, the incessant negation of meaning and significance unto absurdity, would carry the day. We have observed a similar impulse in our theological negotiation of Ellison’s concept of race. Irony, like invisibility, relies upon indeterminacy. However, both concepts resist nihilistic diffusion by prescribing a method to the chaotic madness of infinity. The contradiction of a compromised truth is problematic. But it also requires some stability in order to define the irony at play. Returning, then, to common aspects of original sin that pertain in both Melville and Ellison’s writing, I would like to suggest that such a state of being, the determination and inhabitation of such contradictions, and a willingness not simply to understand but to embrace the incommensurability of the physical and metaphysical realms, mark this literary convergence. To wit: the very notion of a human exceptionalism, that humankind in some way carries the image of God, and yet retains its radical otherness to God, is ironic, to be sure. Such irony, however, is what makes humankind human. By analogy, an ironized exceptionalism certainly compromises hyperpatriotic conceptions of national identity; yet it also allows for a tempered faith in the exceptionality of such identity and the promotion of democratic values that might otherwise risk annihilation or diffusion into meaninglessness. Irony rescues the proposition of improvement, of “more perfect” individuals and unions, from hubristic idolatry and, in this way, constitutes a meaningful and abiding convergence upon which Ellison’s conception of race, writ large, as invisible theology, builds upon Melville’s negotiation of sin. This represents one version of the depth and resonance that Ellison wishes to interject into his own contemporary literature.

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Douglass If Melville points to a metaphysical appeal that underlies the political materialities of the late-antebellum era, then Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist, orator, journalist, autobiographer, diplomat, and social activist, conversely tethers material specificity to this theological backdrop. Indeed, Douglass proves sufficiently Ellisonian that it is difficult to understand precisely why he has remained so invisible in Ellison studies. While Douglass’s own prominence, it should be granted, has become more pronounced in recent decades, scholarship on Ellison and Douglass has by no means held pace. Accordingly, most indices in recent volumes on Ellison contain one or two entries for Douglass, acknowledging a clear trajectory but rarely engaging it with any depth.93 While Ellison tended to acknowledge Douglass less than Melville, Hawthorne, and Twain and according to available evidence appears not to have taught his work, Douglass’s rhetorical and thematic significance to Ellison’s corpus deserves renewed and vigorous attention. Simply because Douglass is invisible does not mean he is absent. Of the prominent nineteenth-century figures (including names like Emerson or Norton) whose presence we may mark, to varying degrees, in Invisible Man, Douglass remains the only one who actually appears in the form of a portrait, a gift to the protagonist from Brother Tarp—what Marcellus Blount evocatively calls “a ‘present’ of past endurance.”94 Furthermore, Douglass represents a vital aspect of nineteenth-century American culture that has been historically obscured by former canonical formations, a reality that Ellison’s friend Albert Murray battled as a college instructor in the 1970s.95 His 1972 remark to Hollie West is as revealing as it is entertaining: Murray’s pet project these days is promoting Frederick Douglass, the 19th century black abolitionist, former slave, diplomat and writer, whom he thinks history has forgotten. Says Murray: “Frederick Douglass is a better illustration of the American story—the American as self-made man—than the founding fathers. Douglass invented freedom for himself. My Bondage and the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass should be required reading for students. “If we’re going to drop something out of the anthologies, we should drop Walden Pond. Thoreau was out there three miles from Emerson and

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the Alcotts in the most civilized part of the country, and at the same time fugitive slaves were dealing with nature in the most basic ways. Thoreau was playing boy scout games compared to slaves.”96

On this point we arrive at a fascinating tension: On the one hand, Murray claims Douglass to be forgotten. On the other hand, Douglass’s portrait hangs upon the Brotherhood’s Harlem office wall (and once played an even larger role) in Invisible Man, a novel composed more than twenty years prior to Murray’s remarks and broader corrective mission. Such a tension, however, typifies Douglass’s presence in Ellison’s corpus and, indeed, in his biography. We know, for instance, that Ellison attended the Douglass School while growing up in Oklahoma City. To what extent did its namesake register in the mind of the author as a young man?97 Blount claims that Ellison “slights” Douglass (among others) in his essays and interviews—especially when compared to the extended discussions of his self-appointed “ancestors” that he frequently indulges.98 In one sense historical canonical formations and reformations make such an observation inevitable, but in another sense a fascinating tension remains within Douglass’s relative visibility and invisibility in Ellison’s corpus that suggests no mere sin of omission but a deeper assimilation than may appear on the surface. Douglass resonates most especially with Ellison’s emphasis on oratory in Invisible Man. His rhetoric of slavery as a form of sin—even original sin—contributes to Ellison’s broader inheritance of a nineteenthcentury literary and rhetorical legacy. Accordingly, Ellison draws upon Douglass—like he does Melville—as a theologian, making special use of Douglass’s rhetoric of slavery as sin, and as representative of original sin—the foundational contradiction (as we have observed) of sacred documents and national promise—in America.99 This reading of Douglass alone is not without conceptual antecedents. David Blight claims, for instance, that Douglass “performed tirelessly as the preacher of black civil religion.”100 Reading this performance parallel to Ellison, however, suggests that the political connections that Herbert Rice, Gregory Stephens, and others establish between Douglass and Ellison in fact double as religious, even theological, ones. At the same time, Douglass’s presence in Invisible Man serves a rhetorical purpose related to the protago-

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nist’s oratory and in this way proves symbolic of his effort not to be co-opted by his activist brethren. The most significant commentary on Douglass that Ellison appears to have authored is his 1947 review of Edmund Fuller’s A Star Pointed North (1946), a novel that Ellison calls “an imaginative reconstruction of Frederick Douglass’ career.”101 Ellison approves of Fuller’s depiction, noting that Douglass occupied a precarious position, seeking “the bedrock of freedom beneath the chaos” (thus interposing a stability in Booth’s infinite irony) that characterized the Civil War era: “No longer a slave, and yet a Negro; no citizen, but a most controversial public figure, he was a man without recognized status. Thus all his life he had to fall back upon what was fundamental in his experience, remembering that the key to his basic identity lay neither in books, nor in white men’s minds, but in the slavery-scars on his back.”102 Though he would not publish Invisible Man for another five years, Ellison’s characterization of Fuller’s Douglass (which quickly becomes a vehicle for Ellison’s ruminations on Douglass himself) comes startlingly close to the concept of invisibility that Ellison had toyed with since he first wrote out the sentence “I am an invisible man” in 1944 or 1945.103 Not a slave and yet a Negro, lacking “recognized status”—invisible, we might say—he inhabits a liminal position. His “slavery-scars” serve as the wound, the jagged grain that Douglass must finger in order to retain a sense of identity that is his own, not one according to or dependent upon what others (in “books” or “white men’s minds”) want, or deem, him to be. Furthermore, just as the invisible man finds himself “useful” for the Brotherhood as a means to their political ends, Ellison’s Douglass struggles to “maintain his integrity—not against his enemies (which was easy) but against the unconscious condescension of his white friends” such as William Lloyd Garrison and John Brown—the latter of whom “mistakenly assumed that the slaves would spontaneously join the attack at Harper’s Ferry and risk death for the freedom they little understood.”104 Here emerges the oratorical link between Douglass and the invisible man: Precisely as the Brotherhood leadership exerts control over the protagonist and his words, happy for him (at least tacitly) to stand and represent the “Negro problem” as a Negro representative, disinterested ultimately in his individualization of the message wrought

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through the scars of his own experience, Douglass chafed against the influence of Garrison and the limitations imposed upon him by the abolitionist cause. As Douglass depicts it in his final of three autobiographies, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881), “Let us have the facts,” said the people. So also said Friend George Foster, who always wished to pin me down to my simple narrative. “Give us the facts” said Collins, “we will take care of the philosophy.” Just here arose some embarrassment. It was impossible for me to repeat the same old story month after month and keep up my interest in it. It was new to the people, it is true, but it was an old story to me; and to go through with it night after night, was a task altogether too mechanical for my nature. “Tell your story, Frederick,” would whisper my revered friend, Mr. Garrison, as I stepped upon the platform. I could not always follow the injunction, as I was now reading and thinking. New views of the subject were being presented to my mind. It did not entirely satisfy me to narrate wrongs; I felt like denouncing them. I could not always curb my moral indignation for the perpetrators of slaveholding villainy long enough for a circumstantial statement of the facts which I felt almost sure everybody must know. Besides, I was growing, and needed room.105

This representative passage reflects traces of the Brotherhood’s critiques of the invisible man. Ellison’s protagonist also gestures toward a sense of individuality in his first speech for the Brotherhood, during which he employs the first-person singular (referring to himself) and not the first-person plural (to refer to the group, the cause), the emphasis upon “telling” the people what they want to hear (in the same postmortem following his first speech for the Brotherhood), and the resentment that mirrors the problematic racial dynamics within the abolitionist movement.106 Garrison, Foster, and others, well-meaning individuals all, submerge the agency and individuality of their resident Negro according to a crypto-plantation dynamic. Similarly, when Brother Jack assumes a similar posture against the narrator in Ellison’s novel, the invisible man fires back: “Who are you, anyway, the great white father? . . . Wouldn’t it be better if they called you Marse Jack?”107 Ellison’s Douglass insists, as the invisible man does of the Brotherhood, that abolitionists “recognize

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his power to analyze his experience as well as articulate it dramatically as propaganda.”108 His is the problem of invisible men. In this way too we spy Ellison’s frustration with Irving Howe and others who insist upon a certain “way” in which Negro literature should be written without accounting for the novelist’s individual growth. Douglass resonates in other ways with our broader discussion of original sin in the American nineteenth century, particularly in the ways that Ellison’s work aligns itself roughly a century later with the residual implications of Douglass’s concerns surrounding slavery as a form of “American original sin.” Two examples bear mention: one in passing, with the other receiving closer scrutiny. The first considers Douglass’s own role as autobiographer (he authored three of them)—one not simply related to Ellison’s role as a novelist but also as a link to an American Puritan inheritance, thus facilitating the “imputation” of an understanding of America’s original sin. Historically, the cultivation of the narrative of one’s life served as a medium of self-assessment, probing the state of one’s soul, pondering one’s experiences, one’s feelings and desires, seeking some glimpse or a measure of hope for one’s election, according to God’s grace, despite the inherited depravity of original sin that so defined transatlantic Puritanism.109 Douglass’s narratives seek and articulate a quest for freedom and humanity (both of which, in the context of slavery, become soteriological analogies—the enslaved condition, after all, like original sin in this context, is an inherited one) despite his compromised position as slave, fugitive, and then, in Ellison’s word, a Negro. Robert Stepto problematizes the details as he understands Ellison, through Invisible Man, not simply to draw upon the themes of The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass but in fact to attend to its formal structure and its appeal to a “pre-generic myth.”110 Thus Ellison additionally responds in formal and mythical ways to Douglass as an antecedent. More directly to the point at hand, Douglass shares Ellison’s sense of a sinful contradiction at the heart of American civil religion in slavery’s violation of American sacred documents. His Independence Day oration, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” (1852), reflects (one hundred years earlier) what one might call an Ellisonian orientation toward slavery and its contradiction of the founders’ vision. Concomitant with Ellison’s understanding of the Declaration of Independence and

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other founding documents as scriptural, Douglass offers a twin appeal to the authority of biblical and foundational American texts. He immediately complicates the terms of his address, delivered in Rochester, New York on July 5, 1852: “This . . . is the 4th of July. It is the birthday of your National independence, and of your political freedom.”111 Douglass’s pronouns mark his otherness and preclude his own participation in the celebration. He also quickly establishes the civil religious theme to which he shall return: “This, to you, is what the Passover was to the emancipated people of God. It carries your minds back to the day, and to the act of your great deliverance; and to the signs, and to the wonders, associated with that act, and with that day.”112 The founding impulse bears religious significance—“signs” and “wonders”—and so Douglass’s sustained civil religious analogy is born. The rhetoric escalates: The blessings in which you, this day rejoice, are not enjoyed in common.— The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice. I must mourn. To drag a man of letters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony.113

In response to the invitation to celebrate a compromised Declaration of Independence, this ironic sacrilege, this fundamental contradiction of American and human justice, inherited by the present generation, Douglass refers to Psalm 137—a psalm of exile. He moves quickly and with great facility from founding documents to biblical texts and back again as he later speaks “in the name of the Constitution and the Bible” together and, in the same breath, denominates “slavery” as “the great sin and shame of America.”114 This sin, he concludes, in defiance of those who claim to find sanction and blessing for it in the Constitution, cannot define the document’s spirit: “I hold that there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of [slavery]; but interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT.”115

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Despite problematic aspects (such as the three-fifths provision for congressional representation in article 1, section 2, paragraph 3 of the Constitution), Douglass insists upon its liberational value, rooted in its just representations of general nature. He maps the political situation onto a theological and civil religious one. An ironic mode characterizes Douglass’s argument. On the one hand, for reasons discussed above, the Constitution remains compromised. On the other hand, despite these flaws, Douglass recognizes—much in the way Ellison does—that the document itself still frames the possibility for something greater. He disagrees with the constitutional sanction of slavery, and yet he relies upon a subtler ironization of the text that, at once, destabilizes rhetorically the presumptive determinacy of slavery while extending the prospect of its wickedness. While he falls short of wielding the phrase “original sin” here in the way that Ellison (and Nathan Scott, in his own Independence Day oration) would more than a century later, Douglass clearly understands and establishes the rhetorical reality of slavery as a fundamental contradiction of the American founding documents—in the spirit, if not the letter, of the Constitution. His own fugitive incapacity to join in the civil religious celebration of the Declaration of Independence, and its provision that “all men are created equal,” on its seventy-sixth birthday marks this irony to an even greater extent. Douglass, with Melville, inhabits Lewis’s ironic mode, as outlined in The American Adam. He exhibits a pessimism rooted in his awareness of American brokenness (in keeping with Lewis’s “memory”), of slavery as the monumental sin, the foundational contradiction at the heart of national identity—compromising it almost irreparably. His presence in Rochester and on thousands of Anglo-American stages registers this brokenness visibly. Yet Douglass retains a measure of hope. The very notion that contradiction is possible in fact appeals to the belief that the United States, ideally, can do better; that these antagonistic inconsistencies between words and actions (“the word and its contradiction”) bear a cooperative necessity, and deriving from this tension an appeal to Booth’s insistence that out of the infinite vagaries of such tensions (evocative of democracy) emerges an ultimate, radical, and necessary appeal to justice—to its depth and resonance.

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Between the Emotion and the Response Douglass’s appearance in Invisible Man represents, we have observed, “a ‘present’ of past endurance.” Adapting this play on words, the presence of the past occupied a number of influential figures among Ellison’s appointed “ancestors”—including William Faulkner, who famously declared the past to be neither dead, nor past. The grandfather in Invisible Man, Abraham Lincoln, and the Juneteenth ghosts that haunt the second novel all evince Ellison’s capacity, borrowed from jazz performance, to draw from extant sources, to reframe and recast them through improvisation, exploring the translatability of past endurances to the present tense as spirits rejoicing.116 In this sense a performative necessity resides at the heart of such translation (and vice versa). The formation and re-formation of identity through the ironic juxtapositions of discordant antecedent identities, according to the existential moment into which one is plunged, requires a fluid and dynamic creativity—an appeal to something more “universal” amid the deeply embedded contextual codes of the particular. As we prepare to run the final chorus, to bring it all back home, then, we consider Ellison’s own present endurance by focusing on what he may still contribute to a critical and political moment that sorely, even tragically, lacks the expansive and capacious ambivalence that remains the hallmark of Ellison at his best. What constitute the new valences of invisibility, and how might they help us to uncover new sensibilities of our present and future conditions? What might constitute the Ellisonian depth and resonance of these conditions? This is not, of course, an appeal to an unrecoverable or irredeemable past because Ellison’s version represents a minority report from the early stirrings of the socalled culture wars. What Ellison offers, instead, proves virtually new— both because it fell out of favor almost immediately amid the rise of black studies and also because Ellison’s improvisatory impulses permit fresh recognition of his old, old story in emerging twenty-first century contexts.

Conclusion Two More Ways of Looking at an Invisible Man

Concerning the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, and their aftermath, medievalist Valentin Groebner writes, “When the secretary of state of the most powerful country in the world painted a picture of the threat from invisible secret organizations whose members, running to the tens of thousands, are hiding everywhere—that is, are at once everywhere and nowhere—ready to do their worst, it may make sense to recall the historical circumstances of invisible enemies and faceless violence.”1 In chiasmic rejoinder to Groebner—having attended to certain “historical circumstances” and their implications—we now look ahead. This conclusion reflects on certain presences of the past reconstructed in the introduction and surveyed at some length in the interim. It particularly considers how the religious aspects of Ellisonian conceptions of race as a secular property—its invisible theology—may help us to make sense of ongoing post-Protestant realities and emerging contexts in the twentyfirst century. The preceding pages have largely explored (and reframed) Ralph Ellison’s literary, political, and social occasion according to historical genealogies of invisibility and select critical dynamics that mark his secular disposition as one not lacking religious dimensions but, in fact, drawing upon them to invoke and renovate the racial cosmology of emergent modernity across the twentieth century as an invisible theology. In this way we have read Ellison. A reader reaching the end of Invisible Man, however, confronts the protagonist’s famous reversal: “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you.”2 Critics frequently interpret this breaching of the literary fourth wall as a statement of racial transcendence, inviting a reader to empathetic imagination of himself or herself in place of the protagonist. Invisible Man, such a reading goes, is not a Negro novel but a novel that happens to be about a Negro—a distinction parsed in 179

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this volume’s introduction. Accordingly, it holds that the invisible protagonist in fact represents a diversity of potential identities, each one interchangeable because of the common, “universally human” themes taken up by Ellison’s great American novel. For reasons illuminated and dispensed with in the preceding pages, such a reading presents significant problems that need not find recapitulation here.3 In its stead I wish to present an alternative that emphasizes the abiding significance of Ellison’s novel (and indeed his broader corpus) and particularly of understanding his secular work to invoke an invisible theology, reflecting how Ellison’s religious dimensions continue to “speak for us” even in a world that has moved irretrievably beyond the specific conditions of his own literary, social, political, and even religious and theological occasion. Having read Ellison’s invisible theology, we might now consider how Ellison’s invisible theology reads us, or—more trenchantly—how it offers critical insight into emerging aspects of the twenty-first century we inhabit. In 1958 H. Richard Niebuhr eulogized the American theologian and clergyman Jonathan Edwards on the bicentennial of Edwards’s death. Turning first to Edwards’s popular reputation for fire and brimstone, best reflected through the chestnut “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” Niebuhr notes that such beliefs—surprisingly, perhaps, to his audience—do not differ greatly from present ones in an atomic age: “We have a mythology of our own. We see before us in social, if not in personal terms, the real possibility of a future hell. Of a state of existence in which surviving souls, condemned to live, crawl about scrofulously amid the radiations of insidious poison, among emanations of noxious gases, on a planet unfit for habitation on which they must nevertheless inhabit.”4 Later he summarizes the common view: “Edwards was a great man, but he was wrong on almost every issue for which he contended.”5 Against such understanding Niebuhr invokes Edwards as an anachronism—countering that he was not one behind the times, as many have supposed, but one, as I wish similarly to claim about Ellison, ahead of his time. Niebuhr notes, “A possibility presents itself to us as we remember Edwards and remember man’s remembrance of him. We have changed our minds about the truth of many things he said. Or rather, our minds have been changed by what has happened to us in our history. We have seen evil somewhat as he saw it, not because we de-

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sired to see it, but because it thrust itself upon us. If that has happened, why shall we not hope—and fear—that what has not yet happened will also occur.”6 Edwards’s anachronism, Niebuhr argues, holds that only at that point, in 1958, in the wake of global warfare, holocaust, genocide, dehumanization, and the threat of nuclear annihilation, could human beings truly understand that “man is as wicked as Edwards said.”7 “Total Depravity,” as the mnemonic characterization of Calvinism goes, found new realizations that enlightenment optimism, nineteenth-century romanticism, and twentieth-century liberalism simply could not muster. Edwards becomes a viable, if anachronistic, interpretive key, a resource out of time, offering fresh insight for making some sense of the harrowing realities in Niebuhr’s present despite Edward’s political and theological reputation as outmoded, old-fashioned, or déclassé. Ellison represents a figure similarly ahead of his time. Such an observation, of course, proves ironic for a novelist and critic who has consistently raised hackles in the racial dispensation that has emerged since the mid-twentieth century for being behind the times, out of step and sync with the cutting edge of critical race theory and its political vanguard. Still, what Ellison understood and represented in Invisible Man; what he chaffed against in the second half of his life while failing to complete his long-wrought second novel; what vexed him so about critics like Irving Howe (among others), and protesters who pegged him as accommodationist or an Uncle Tom, traitorous to the cause, was that he recognized and wrote for a context of ambiguity, indeterminacy, and irrationality—a sense of invisibility—for which the social scientific and materialist imaginations that reigned supreme in his own era have proved sorely ill equipped. While certainly addressed to occasional concerns, Ellison’s invisible-theological worldview—both in matters racial and through its broader political dimensions in the United States and globally—in fact corresponds in surprising ways with the terms of our own present occasion. Like Edwards, Ellison’s anachronism derives not, as many have claimed, from his failure to adapt to changing times but, indeed, because timely occasions reveal terrain he already understood to be in play. This survey of things not seen, of Ellison’s invisible theology, concludes with extended discussions of two more ways of looking at an invisible man; of two essentially Ellisonian dimensions of the contem-

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porary scene and its ongoing cultural, social, and political implications for Ellison’s concept of race as an invisible theology—discovering at the same time the religious and theological dimensions of our own occasional secular age. These two more ways include the problem of the postracial (examined through Clint Eastwood’s “empty chair” address aimed at Barack Obama at the 2012 Republican National Convention), and broader implications of drone warfare (as a mode of invisible death) and the racial exigencies of surveillance and hypervisibility in the global war on terror. Careful attention to both properties reveals fascinating ways in which Ellison, through his invisible protagonist, does not simply speak for us but has done so all along. These two examples by necessity serve as specific iterations through which broader and more up-to-date conclusions may be drawn. The final preparations of this volume have taken place in the shadow of remarkable political contexts both domestic and global, and it proves impossible to account conscientiously for the full range of dynamic social and cultural moments that attend them. Thus, I offer these exemplary sketches in faith, and with encouragement, that you may do good work with them as they may apply to what cannot now be seen, or foreseen.

One More Way: Clint Eastwood’s Postracial Empty Chair The idea of a postracial America gained prominence when Senator Barack Obama emerged as a viable candidate for president of the United States during the 2007–8 Democratic primaries.8 What might his rise mean for a nation historically characterized by violent racial oppression and division? Might the election of a self-identified black man signal the end of racism and its poisonous acrimony, affirming in the process “how far we’ve come”? From the vantage point of the waning months of Obama’s second term, such presumptions seem quaint. Yet they offer a common sense of the postracial narrative as whitewashed historical revision.9 At its best, the postracial impulse is naïve—even if it reflects a brand of benevolent wishful thinking. For many, a postracial America embodies something to be sought after, a laudable and attainable goal propagated by people whose experiences with such matters are sorely limited. While lacking deliberate guile or malice, naïve postraciality

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illuminates broader cultural ignorance and amnesia—and the general invisibility of racial others. In other critical contexts, the notion of a postracial cultural orientation has gained traction, proving (despite their critics’ complaints) less susceptible to the excesses of the naïve variety. Studies such as Kenneth Warren’s What Was African American Literature? (2011) and Eddie Glaude Jr.’s brief, yet provocative, article for the Huffington Post, “The Black Church Is Dead,” point to fundamental cultural and political shifts in recent decades extending back as far as Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 to suggest that the present tense differs substantially from the past.10 Warren’s and Glaude’s respective approaches have proven controversial.11 The difference between their positions and naïve postracialism, however, holds that such shifts do not necessarily reflect “improvement” or the end of older racial wrongs. They offer no panacea and inaugurate no golden age but reflect the inevitability of change over time. Despite the excesses prescribed by their respective critics, on a basic level Warren and Glaude guard against the worst risk of naïve postraciality: its susceptibility to appropriation as a conscientious smokescreen for the perpetuation of a racist social order. In this third category of the postracial, on which we shall dwell most fully, postracial rhetoric becomes a cloak of decency—studied in its capacity to hit the right talking points, to use the proper nomenclature, to nod in the appropriate directions, to invoke or even denounce shameful legacies of a racist past even as it obscures more sinister machinations to preserve a hegemonic racial status quo. In this way racism becomes invisible, obscured by a veneer of tolerance, goodwill, and even the appropriation of diverse “others” as signal representatives legitimizing social malevolence. Clint Eastwood deployed a postracial dynamic in his “surprise” appearance at the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida. Taking the stage to the musical theme from his 1966 film The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, with an image of himself depicting the title character from The Outlaw Josie Wales (1976) projected behind him, Eastwood’s speech took as its central conceit an address to the absent Obama, signified by an empty chair. Furthermore, he ventriloquized Obama’s alleged responses—at times deploying a roughly sexualized vernacular. On a literal reading, Eastwood’s performance is not overtly racist or

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even overtly racialized. He actively invokes no specific racial identity for either himself or Obama, and (especially given Eastwood’s own past efforts for racial justice) we might even speculate—if generously so—that he worked hard to avoid any specific invocations of the sort.12 On another reading, consider the implied context of Eastwood’s performance, which is haunted by an invisible specter of race: (1) Eastwood’s reenactment of an obfuscated black subject for political purposes borders on minstrelsy. (2) The implication of Obama as an invisible man conjures legacies of marginalization (via the common interpretation of invisibility) and, more directly germane to the discussion at hand in this volume, calls forth the problematic invisible theologies inherent to the racial identities Eastwood otherwise seems eager to avoid. (3) As John Howell has observed, the image of Eastwood as Josey Wales, paired with his mounting of the stage to the musical theme of The Man with No Name (Eastwood’s character in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and other “spaghetti westerns”), hearkens to the revisionist western—a film genre whose ex-Confederate heroes reconsolidate historical whiteness and Americanness against Reconstruction’s ruptured social order.13 Still, however obvious these examples, to insist that they give Eastwood’s performance a racial bent risks courting the censure of literalists who will quickly point out the absence of words like “black,” “white,” “race,” or “nigger.” Ambiguity leaves an open chair for more noble, or less maligned, intentions. Eastwood’s performance permits for plausible deniability, yet its invisible theology as a kind of secular frame suggests otherwise. A similar dynamic participates in the more troubling and heinous development of chair lynching—the conspicuous hanging of an empty chair from a tree branch—in Texas and Virginia in the days following Eastwood’s speech. In the Texas case (in Austin) Bud Johnson did not deny racial animus, though nor did he necessarily embrace it: “I don’t really give a damn if it disturbs you or not,” he said.14 Douglas Burger of Centreville, Virginia, denied that his spectacle signified lynching, referring to the hanging chairs as “Eastwooding.” They were tied up, he claimed, to prevent theft.15 Contrary to the hangmen’s claims—especially Burger’s—most commentators identified the ritual as “racist” and therefore “bad.” Simple censorship, however, forfeits the opportunity to engage with the subtle

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performance of race as invisible theology in this instance. What looks like an egregious misappropriation of the visual rhetoric of Eastwood’s performance becomes, instead, an important amplification. Both instances of Eastwooding invoke race—albeit in different registers— without ever saying its name. They play upon what David Eng describes as the prioritization of racial antipathy by pointing to formal, legal protections for various “others” while obscuring and sustaining deep-seated prejudices that can be leveraged for political gain.16 Howell notes that the chairs in Texas and Virginia simultaneously represent (a) chairs hanging from ropes, (b) material representations of Barack Obama hanging from ropes, (c) material representations of Barack Obama being lynched, and (d) generally potent evocations of America’s season of “strange fruit.” This overdetermination permits the executioner (or a sympathetic observer) to disavow specific racial animus even as other auditors recoil from the obvious implications. Ambiguity, however dubious, is the thing: the hanging chair may both be and not be racist at the same time. It may or may not constitute hate speech, depending on one’s awareness of certain cultural and historical antecedents. Absent Eastwood’s performance, the symbolic lynchings in Texas and Virginia may look like mere oddities. Admitting the Republican National Convention performance, however, catalyzes a quick, associative trip through the range of interpretive options enumerated above. Eastwooding frames the postracial as a racial secularism. The racial dynamic that it insists is no longer tenable in fact offers the conceptual scaffolding for the act of denial itself. Taken in sum, Eastwood’s empty chair performance and its response illuminate the sinister dynamics that underlie the presumptions of postracial progress. Outright racial denigration is destabilized by a sophisticated acknowledgment and manipulation of longer legacies that obviate racial animus while simultaneously obscuring it as circumstantial—purely in the eye of the beholder. As Ellison’s protagonist puts it, “When they approach me they see only their surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination— indeed, everything and anything except me.”17 Burger and, to a lesser extent, Johnson not only reflect this capacity not to see as an unconscious activity but have perfected its deployment as a deliberate excuse for why they could not—and should not—possibly be aware of their handiwork’s deeper implications. Simply to decry it, to name it for the

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wrong it clearly represents, however, permits the appropriation of invisibility to stand. Doing so elides the broader critical reflection necessary to expose the deeper ecologies of political discourse made visible by a more thorough reckoning with invisible theology. Lynching the invisible Obama serves a similar, if symbolic, purpose to executing witches or banishing Antinomian women—earlier responses to invisibility considered in the introduction: it reconsolidates the power of the visible world against what it takes to be perverse and illicit. Such reconsolidation is oppressive, yet it establishes the terms of dissent. Ever the Ellisonian, however, Obama (or his social media director) offered a fascinating rejoinder to Eastwood’s speech (and though it predated the chair lynchings, it responds effectively to—or even anticipates—those rituals as well). Not long after the end of Eastwood’s speech, Obama’s official Twitter account sent out a photo of a chair in a meeting room. On the chair is a plate engraved with the words “The President.” The chair is occupied, and the viewer sees Obama’s recognizable back profile. Accompanying the photo are the words, “This seat’s taken.” The tweet accomplishes a number of things. First, it does offer an occupant for the chair, and though we may recognize the back of Obama’s head (and, as he would likely note, his ears), he is not fully visible. Indeed, the chair itself obscures our view. Second, by obscuring Obama the chair no longer represents him, but a more generic category of the president—any president—rendering Obama invisible. Third, the tweet seizes control of the terms of invisibility and transfers the oppressive subtext to Eastwood’s speech and the eventual hanging chairs away from the invisible other (Obama) and to the generic office of the president. In this way it ironically transforms the reconsolidation of civil religious white power generated by a mode of hyperpatriotism onto the very office that this patriotism seeks to defend. The chair offers a scapegoat for the black man who violates the presidency. Obama’s tweet deflects the violence from the black man and substitutes the presidency itself as the object of violence enacted by those who seek, in their own minds, to defend it from violation.

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A Second “Other” Way: Drones and the War on Terror Invisibility gains new currency for helping to conceive of the dark and obscure significance of our recent “war on terror” and its various domestic and international tributaries, an exaction of power that—even as I write—brings the secular state to bear against religiously articulated terms of dispute, themselves political and economic motivations narrated in theological terms as a “clash of civilizations” between “secular” and “Muslim” worlds.18 The recent mode is one of hypervisibility, hypervigilance, which, like the hypervisible signifier of phenotype—of racial appearance—designates one as socially and politically disembodied, consigned to global underground networks marked by the ambivalence of invisible terror. Surveillance as a hegemonic exaction of power is not a new concept, of course,19 but its more recent and emerging implications both warrant renewed attention and benefit from Ellisonian conceptions of invisibility. Revelations offered by WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden’s exposure of National Security Agency (NSA) policies (among other federal agencies) highlight two related and paradoxical realities: (1) In service of the protection of certain freedoms and in the name of “security” fostered by 2001’s Patriot Act, the lives of individual citizens in the United States and abroad have become increasingly visible even as the government that observes them and the military operations performed in the name of their security have grown ever more invisible. (2) In the wake of 9/11, security operations have gone global. Accordingly, the disciplinary gaze that, looking inward, once ironically helped to cast African Americans and “others” as invisible in an Ellisonian sense now looks outward as well—and imperially so.20 Operations tend to be covert and focused; “justice”—such as it may be—travels not through transparent channels but, akin to the vigilante violence of another “Invisible Empire,” remains obscured, glimpsed only in shocking and ghostly fragments such as the haunting photographs that emerged from Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, published by the New Yorker in 2004.21 There is a protean quality both to the justifications for such invisibility in the war on terror and the political, industrial, and military organizations that propagate it that calls forth Ellison’s Rinehart character from Invisible Man, a figure for whom the protagonist is mistaken on a

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number of occasions representing, as he does, various guises to different people (“Could he be all of them: Rine the runner and Rine the gambler and Rine the briber and Rine the lover and Rinehart the Reverend? . . . What is real anyway?”).22 The neon sign for Rinehart’s Holy Way Station claims: “HOLY WAY STATION / BEHOLD THE LIVING GOD.”23 A flier passed to the protagonist reads: Behold the Invisible Thy will be done O Lord! I See all, Know all, Tell all, Cure all. You shall see the unknown wonders. —REV. B. P. RINEHART Spiritual Technologist The old is ever new Way Stations in New Orleans, the home of mystery, Birmingham, Chicago, Detroit, New York, and L. A. No Problem too Hard for God. Come to the Way Station BEHOLD THE INVISIBLE! Attend our services, prayer meetings Thrice weekly Join us in the NEW REVEL ATION of the OLD TIME RELIGION! BEHOLD THE SEEN UNSEEN BEHOLD THE INVISIBLE YE WHO ARE WEARY C OME HOME! I D O WHAT YOU WANT D ONE! D ON’ T WAIT! 24

Consider the varieties of invisibility that Ellison establishes through this characterization of Rinehart. (1) We encounter an invisible theology: the reader finds repetition drawing “THE INVISIBLE” parallel to “THE LIVING GOD.” (2) Invisibility characterizes materially both what one knows but keeps hidden (the secret) and what one does not

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know (the unknown wonders). In this way Rinehart’s promise (to see, know, tell, and cure “all”—a clause that nicely encapsulates the missions of the Department of Homeland Security, the National Security Agency, and US foreign policy writ large) offers help, yet also implies a certain encroachment of privacy, threatening exposure, and veiled threat that attends such insight. (3) Invisibility also refers to a metaphysical unknown: God’s will, certain wonders, the stuff of Revelation (which suggests visions and apocalypse). (4) Perhaps most significantly, Rinehart himself is invisible. This is true literally, of course, in that he never physically appears as himself in the novel—he is only referred to and instantiated secondhand through conversations, pieces of paper, recollections, and various characters’ misperceptions of the protagonist (the similarity of which the protagonist wields to his own advantage). Within these vagaries resides a nexus of presence and absence, blindness and insight, appearance and reality, violence and protection—even the material and immaterial (note the juxtaposition inherent in Rinehart’s title, “Spiritual Technologist”—which unites Bultmann’s factions of myth and science discussed in the introduction). Such indeterminacy also characterizes drones, the weapons associated with the war on terror that, while not entirely “invisible” or “inaudible,” do draw harrowingly on the terms of Ellison’s metaphor.25 Justification for the use of drones has relied in some measure on obfuscation. Much as Israelite theology, as discussed in the introduction, focused by necessity on a more centripetal conception of God in the face of widening theological diversity, the name “Al Qaeda” became in the early 2000s “an ill-defined shorthand . . . to describe a shifting movement” of “nations,” “Organizations,” and “persons” authorized by Congress as targets of force, themselves sufficiently indeterminate to warrant new methods of warcraft.26 In the wake of costly ground wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, coupled with eroding domestic will to endure US casualties generated by such exercises, the weapon of the war on terror—particularly under the Obama administration—has become the predator drone.27 Alex Rivera describes the drone in evocative terms in an interview with the New Inquiry, calling it “the most visceral and intense expression of the transnational/telepresent world we inhabit,” marking “every facet” of contemporary life, occupying a “nonplace,” a “transnational

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vortex” that is “ever present.” Furthermore, “The military drone is a . . . disembodied destroyer of bodies,” “the most beguiling expression of the transnational vortex.” It is “disembodied and disfigured in complex and fascinating ways.”28 It rains invisible death, and renders its victims, if ever actually seen, as remote pixels broadcast upon a screen from half the world away. “Warfare by remote control” has become a prominent metaphor in discussing drones—one deployed even by policy specialists.29 In this way both appearance and reality have become virtual iterations. The language of drones also deals in invisibility. For instance, drones’ primary benefit (according to both supporters and detractors) is their capacity to diminish “collateral damage”: a euphemism that obscures the human reality of killing innocents, of rendering their deaths invisible.30 Drone attacks stem from obscure, invisible sources, yet harm material bodies. Caroline Holmqvist, seeking to conceptualize drone warfare, highlights in the process what has become a central question of this volume: What do invisibility’s metaphysical qualities have to do with materialist critique? What is it about “terror” and declaring “war” on it that defies (or even augments) the scientific and material nature of warcraft and diplomacy? Holmqvist suggests that drones “induc[e] ‘embodied performances’ by virtue of their ‘superhuman’ qualities—the fact that hypervision provided by drone optics far extends human vision through an unblinking, all-seeing stare. Accordingly, the distinction between tangible and intangible is obliterated: under conditions of omnipresent war, the boundaries between the corporeal and incorporeal become irreversibly blurred.”31 We may recognize an impasse between the scientific, rational, material, and economic desire that characterizes US policy and the metaphysical qualities of the response. Such aims are liberal (or at least couched in the language of liberalism), yet the realities these liberal aims generate acknowledge something more: in Ellisonian terms the US military and diplomatic complex represents the prizefighter and Al Qaeda or, more recently, the Islamic State, for all their amorphous sophistication, remain the yokel. The irony of the war on terror, the punch(line) that may fell the prizefighter, the Niebuhrian twist (as it were), is that the preservation of liberalism requires the suspension or even the annihilation of liberalism’s core tenets. Such contradiction, of course, brings us back to the “high visibility” that, according to Ellison,

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renders African Americans invisible and suggests that the implications of twenty-first-century US global policy reflect—nearly two-thirds of a century later—a uniquely Ellisonian irony (much like race’s invisible theology) in the grander scheme.

Secularism’s Invisible Theology By way of conclusion I would like to emphasize three related points concerning the religious dimensions of race as a secular concept in Ralph Ellison’s work and the antecedents on which invisibility both explicitly and implicitly draws. (1) Despite its more recent materialist co-optations, the long conceptual legacy of invisibility is shot through with religious and theological significance. (2) Invisibility, through these religious and theological valences, characterizes the concept of race in the fiction and criticism of an indisputably “secular” writer and critic such as Ellison, suggesting that race itself draws inexorably on these religious antecedents not despite but precisely because it is a secular property. (3) This more expansive conception of race’s secularity offers a significant, ironic critical apparatus for more adequately negotiating the vagaries of present and future political issues even—or especially—at a time when the character of debates over race and its many tributaries reflects discourses of escalating ambiguity. Questions of the postracial character of the twenty-first-century United States, while frequently misguided, ill informed, or malignant in motivation, do point to a simple and apposite reality: the exigencies of race have changed dramatically in a longer view over the past several decades even as our conceptual, linguistic, political, legislative, and activist responses still derive largely from the same critical paradigms that have remained in vogue since the middle of the last century. Even so, black/white dualities, for instance, have yielded to the “browning” of American identities thanks to immigration and the growing prevalence of biracial and multiracial possibilities.32 New media and technologies create more nebulous and virtual communities, voluntary associations, and grassroots organizations. Other categories of identity, too—indeed, other invisibilities, including gender, sexuality, and ethnicity—have become politically less determined, more fluid. Kenneth Warren’s past-tense African American literature and Eddie Glaude’s black church postmortem offer further evidence of an exciting,

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if controversial, shift in the way race, its cultures and identities, may be understood and theorized—especially through newly articulated religious lenses in a secular age. This volume contributes to such a rising chorus by suggesting, ironically, that Ellison’s legacy—reframed through his invisible theology—bears the depth, resonance, and critical sophistication to help come to terms with these new challenges, and more that emerge daily within a culture of vexing, and more indeterminate, global invisibilities. From such ends emerges our beginning: “Ralph Ellison is not a black writer,” claimed the black studies librarian. This vignette has surfaced on a number of occasions in this book since it was first invoked in the introduction; it haunts this volume, really, in the midst of shifting implications for its broader significance.33 Despite (or perhaps because of) his canonical acceptance, appeal, and relative ubiquity in American letters since the publication of Invisible Man in 1952, Ralph Ellison has been dismissed by vocal factions as a sellout, an Uncle Tom, an anachronistic relic of a bygone age whose work failed to account for the various materialist and social scientific turns that became codified under the rise of black studies in the 1960s and beyond. “Ralph Ellison is not a black writer,” though in a number of ways he actively embraced this iconoclasm. Recasting the secularism that characterizes Ellison’s concept of race as neither the absence nor antithesis of religion but—conversely—a surrogate, if “unmarked,” category of invisible theology argues for a vastly different narrative both for Ellison and the broader implications of his influence. “Ralph Ellison is not a black writer,” and so his dissent from the twentieth-century racial episteme remains fresh, even if it seems we have heard it before in the reactions against it that have taken hold in the interim. Similarly, Ellison’s invisible theology identifies points of theological inquiry, resurrected and deployed as critical religious interventions engaging humanistically with a materialist and secular concept like race. In doing so we dislocate theology as “mere” belief, prescription, or data and refashion it as a critical apparatus. Recognizing that overemphasis on particulars risks idolatry, and that unfettered universalism leads to hegemony, it remains necessary to negotiate these conceptual poles shared by theoretical orientations of both race and religion. These negotiations— unmarked, indeterminate, ambivalent—generate invisible theology and

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mark certain cultural analogies between race and religion as matters of intellectual, cultural, and aesthetic concern. Whatever our estimation of Ellison’s shortcomings, warranted or not according to the more narrow assumptions that have characterized the past half-century or more, Ellison’s work and worldview (which is to say his humanism) proves far from deficient or behind the times. Indeed, as mid-to-late-twentieth-century racial contexts recede and more fluid and invisible challenges emerge, it has become clear that, like H. Richard Niebuhr’s Edwards, the religious dynamics of our present invisibilities are in fact every bit as ironic as Ellison’s humanistic interventions understood them to be. Ralph Ellison’s invisible theology conceives a more capacious racial imagination moving forward and makes a stronger humanistic case as a complementary, or even an antagonistically cooperative rejoinder, to materialist and social-scientific solutions in order to parse both the ghosts through which racial matters persist in haunting us from a fraught past, the certain terror of their present implications and vitality, and the evolving and more tenuous terms through which they must be engaged in the future tense.

Notes

Introduction

1 Ellison, Invisible Man, 3. 2 Consider, for instance, Sartain, Invisible Activists; Pye, Invisible Children; and Prats, Invisible Natives. A search for “invisible” in any university library catalog will yield a host of similar results. 3 Ellison, Invisible Man, 3. 4 The OED suggests that ectoplasm “is supposed to emanate from the body of a spiritualistic medium, and to develop into a human form or face.” OED Online, s.v. “ectoplasm,” www.oed.com. Philip Roth’s The Human Stain—a novel concerned with racial vagaries in America—famously explores “spook” as a supernatural/racial term, owing a clear debt to Ellison in its excavation of identity and its vagaries in America. 5 Franchot, “Invisible Doman,” 835, 837. 6 Ibid., 840. 7 See Rojas, From Black Power, esp. 1–21. 8 L. P. Jackson, Indignant Generation, 11–12. 9 Ziolkowski, Modes of Faith; Fessenden, Culture and Redemption, 6; C. Taylor, Secular Age, esp. chap. 15; and Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America, 7. For further discussions of secularity in religion and literature that specifically take Franchot’s “Invisible Doman” into account, see Fessenden, “Problem of the Postsecular,” 154–67; and Modern, “How to Read Literature,” 191–203. 10 Malik, Meaning of Race, traces the intellectual and political evolution of this problem. See especially his first three chapters. 11 See L. P. Jackson’s summary of the response to Invisible Man in Indignant Generation, 355–61. 12 Ottley, “Blazing Novel”; Martin, “Book Reviews”; Howe, “Negro in America,” 454; Barkham, “Ellison Manipulates His Wrath,” B6; Bellow, “Man Underground,” 608–9; Mayberry, “Underground Notes,” 19; K. G. Jackson, “Books in Brief,” 105. Bellow’s alternatives to “particular” Negro identity comprise a rather narrow universe: “Negro Harlem is at once primitive and sophisticated; it exhibits the extremes of instinct and civilization as few other American communities do. If a writer dwells on the peculiarity of this, he ends with an exotic effect. And Mr. Ellison is not exotic. For him this balance of instinct and culture is not a Harlem matter; it is the matter, German, French, Russian, American, universal, a matter

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very little understood” (609). For a more detailed discussion of Ellison and Bellow, see chapters 5–6 of Greif, Age of the Crisis of Man, 145–203. Morris, “World Below,” 5; Mayberry, “Underground Notes,” 19; Webster, “Inside a Dark Shell”; Hedden, “Objectively Vivid, Introspectively Sincere,” BR5; DuBois, Souls of Black Folk, 13. One Negro protagonist to whom several reviewers refer is Bigger Thomas from Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940). Significantly, the invisible man is almost always distinguished from Bigger Thomas in favor of these Western archetypes. Breit, “Talk with Ralph Ellison,” 26. “Antagonistic cooperation” (or, as I’ll sometimes phrase it, “cooperative antagonism” or “cooperative-antagonistic,” as I do here) appears in Ellison’s criticism as a way of highlighting the demanding mutual regard that adversaries must carry for one another. He holds out the prospect to Irving Howe in “The World and the Jug” (in Collected Essays, 188); he defines the role of an audience as antagonistically cooperative—that is, “acting, for better or worse, as both collaborator and judge”—in “The Little Man in Chehaw Station: The American Artist and His Audience” (ibid., 492). In “Going to the Territory” the term describes jazz’s democratic impulse, pitting stylistically particular artists against one another as they strive for a creative common good (ibid., 598). See also Ellison’s foreword to John Kouwenhoven’s The Beer Can by the Highway (ibid., 846). L. P. Jackson, Indignant Generation, 359–60. See esp. L. Jackson, Ralph Ellison, chaps. 7–10; and Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, chaps. 4–6. Foley, Wrestling with the Left, part 1, offers a thorough reading of Ellison’s leftist background prior to Invisible Man. Another reason Native Son served as such a gold standard for the Negro novel was its status as a best seller, due in no small part to its nomination as Book of the Month Club choice for March 1940. Consequently, Native Son became, in contrast to most other Negro novels, a national and international sensation, selling as many as two thousand copies a day at its peak. It very likely represented the only Negro novel that many, if not most, of its readers had read. In order to gain recognition by the club, Wright had to excise a number of scenes and depictions that were considered too controversial. See Rowley, Richard Wright, 180–84. Foley takes strong issue with language like I deploy here, arguing that it reflects a kind of circularity that privileges Ellison’s own terms for reading Invisible Man. I agree that for her purposes of “be-fogging” this lens, she offers a helpful—dare I say “corrective”—template to certain earlier rhetorical excesses (Wrestling with the Left, 1). Still, what Foley clarifies in her “reading forward” of Invisible Man remains a constructed literary perspective that draws on the underpinning of Cold War ideology to articulate political and cultural alternatives to leftist aesthetics (15). No small part of this impulse is a strategic annihilation of materiality—the “making invisible” of materialism—that invokes certain religious and theological sensibilities. In this way, as I elaborate in the coming pages, my goal is not simply to shout back in the face of Foley’s corrective (a provisional version of which I am

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willing to grant) but instead to offer an attempt to render her corrective “more perfect,” to offer a countercorrective to Foley’s corrective, as it were. Ralph Ellison, letter to Morteza D. Sprague, May 19, 1954. Rpt. in Ellison, “American Culture,” 24–49. See, for instance, the fascinating series of debates between William Julius Wilson and Kenneth Warren concerning the television serial The Wire: Wilson and Chaddha, “‘Way Down in the Hole,’” 164–88, and Warren’s response, “Sociology and The Wire,” 200–207. The debate continues online: Wilson, “Response”; Warren, “Response.” Murray, Hero and the Blues, 15. Murray’s phrase is “social science fiction fiction,” meaning fiction that is social science fiction. I’ve shortened the phrase here for the sake of clarity. Murray writes: “American culture, even in its most rigidly segregated precinct, is patently and irrevocably composite. It is . . . incontestably mulatto. Indeed, for all their traditional antagonisms and obvious differences, the so-called black and so-called white people of the United States resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble one another.” And what is more, even their most extreme and violent polarities represent nothing so much as the natural history of pluralism in an open society” (Omni-Americans, 22; italics in the original). Ellison, Invisible Man, 3. Of course, it remains entirely plausible that the invisible man pitches such a denial as the ironist and dissembler I depict him as in the opening pages of this introduction. As Ellison’s next paragraph illustrates, the question is not “whither protest,” but what manner of protest. For the Negro– human being dichotomy, see Schwartz, “Fiction Chronicle,” 358–59. Ellison, “Art of Fiction,” in Collected Essays, 212. He articulates a form of this sentiment later in “Society, Morality,” first published in 1957, by claiming that “All Americans are . . . members of minority groups, even Anglo-Saxons, whose image has from the beginning dominated all the rest, and one meaning of the social friction in American life is the struggle of each racial, cultural, and religious group to have its own contribution to the national image recognized and accepted” (Collected Essays, 703). It is vital to understand that Ellison does not mean that “black” experience should be translated as “white.” As he says in “The Art of Fiction,” If the Negro, or any other writer, is going to do what is expected of him, he’s lost the battle before he takes the field. I suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance—but it must be acceptance on his own terms. Perhaps, though, this thing cuts both ways: the Negro novelist draws his blackness too tightly around him when he sits down to write—that’s what the anti-protest critics believe—but perhaps the white reader draws his whiteness around himself when he sits down to read. He doesn’t want to identify himself with Negro characters in terms of our immediate racial and social situation, though on the deeper human level, identification can become compelling when the situation is

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revealed artistically. The white reader doesn’t want to get too close, not even in an imaginary re-creation of society. Negro writers have felt this and it has led to much of our failure. Too many books by Negro writers are addressed to a white audience. By doing this the authors run the risk of limiting themselves to the audience’s presumptions of what a Negro is or should be; the tendency is to become involved in polemics, to plead the Negro’s humanity. Ibid., 212–13. Ibid., 212. Universals prove tricky, as we’ll encounter again in the coming pages. Foley (see chapters 2 and 3 of Wrestling with the Left, 69–149), for instance, broadly dismisses them, and certainly a kind of violence has been exacted in their name. Yet I argue below that it is precisely in this violence that we must take them seriously as social constructs. Universals, like race, do not exist. But, like race, the fact that they have been understood to exist requires that we not dismiss them too quickly or easily. Ellison, “Society, Morality, and the Novel,” 696. Ellison, “Richard Wright’s Blues,” 129. Ellison, “Society, Morality,” in Collected Essays, 701. See, for instance, Baraka and Neal, Black Fire; Collins and Crawford, New Thoughts; J. H. Cone, Black Theology; Joseph, Black Power Movement and Waiting; Ogbar, Black Power; and Smithurst, Black Arts Movement. Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, 452–53. Interestingly, this incident resonates with an account in Perlstein’s Nixonland. In the 1966 midterm elections, Iowa Representative Fred Schmidhauser, a Democrat who won his seat on Lyndon Johnson’s coattails in 1964, “appeared at a farm bureau meeting, prepared for a grilling on the Democrats’ agricultural policies. The questions, though, were all on rumors that Chicago’s Negro rioters were about to engulf Iowa in waves, traveling, for some reason, ‘on motorcycles.’ . . . Now that farmers were afraid that Martin Luther King would send Negro biker gangs to rape their children, the Republican restoration was inevitable” (142). Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, 439–40. Graham and Singh, Conversations with Ralph Ellison, 397. There’s a fascinating way in which Ellison wields his authorship of Invisible Man as a trump card against detractors on the Right and Left. Consider Ralph Ellison’s (never mailed) response to S. D. Claghorn, who wrote a letter disparaging Ellison’s article “What America Would Be Like without Blacks,” in Time magazine: “My response is simple: I am quite willing to admit I [as an African American] am inferior if you are willing to admit I wrote Invisible Man.” As Adam Bradley summarizes Ellison’s point of view, “Black achievement in culture is the greatest defense” (Ralph Ellison in Progress, 70–72). Fishkin, “Interrogating ‘Whiteness,’” 447. Zantop, Colonial Fantasies.

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40 Schleiermacher’s second speech in On Religion (1799) denominates “the essence of religion” as “the universe and the relationship of humanity to it” (19), “the unifying principle . . . for . . . dissimilar material” (20). “Thus to accept everything individual as part of the whole and everything limited as a representation of the infinite” is religion (25). In this way religion becomes a dialectic between the part and the whole, the many and the one. Scholars have developed a shorthand for thinking of Schleiermacher’s dialectic of religion as consisting between the particular and the universal. This dialectic informs Schleiermacher’s understanding of hermeneutics as well: “As every utterance has a dual relationship, to the totality of language and to the whole thought of its originator, then all understanding also consists of the two moments, of understanding the utterance as derived from language, and as a fact in the thinker” (see Hermeneutics and Criticism, 8). In this way, “every person is on the one hand a location in which a given language forms itself in an individual manner, on the other their discourse can only be understood via the totality of the language.” Meaning depends upon successful navigation of both the particular concerns participant in the communicative exchange and their relation to the broader linguistic contours that they share (11–12). In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), Emile Durkheim argues that religion frequently functions analogically: “There is an aspect of every religion that transcends the realm of specifically religious ideas. . . . There is no religion that is not both a cosmology and a speculation about the divine” (8). Such cosmology and speculation, expressed through myths and rites that organize social structures, unify individuals who might otherwise share only a common location in time and space. “Mythologies,” Durkheim writes, “deal with beings that have the most contradictory attributes at the same time, that are one and many, material and spiritual, and capable of subdividing themselves indefinitely without losing that which makes them what they are” (12). This is to say, of course, that the function of religion in a basic sense serves to harmonize a diversity of perspectives, to relate the specific particularities of individual human experience through an authoritative narratival and structural collective assertion about what such particularities bear in common. Significantly, Ellison espouses a Durkheimian understanding of the relationship between religion (expressed through rite and myth) and literature. Literary forms ritualize and give expression to the authoritative unity inherent in the social experience of autonomous and diverse individuals. The social function of the artist is to articulate such religious expressions and, in a typically Ellisonian move, the utility of such myths and rites serve both to distinguish his particular African American expression from the ancient and modern classics (James Joyce’s use of The Odyssey, as the basis for Ulysses [1922] for example) and to situate such an expression functionally as analogous to canonical literary methods and achievements. For both Ellison and Durkheim, collective representations are not just shared symbols among individuals united by time and space—they serve as the

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construction of being, paying honor as a group to the sentiments that bind that group together. In this way Durkheim’s theoretical estimation of religion serves as a corollary to Ellison’s literary appropriations of ritual and myth as formally expressive of the universal orientation of particular experience. Human autonomy does not reside only in the particular self-interest of one’s identity but must also express an orientation beyond the limitations of time and space. Clifford Geertz argues in The Interpretation of Cultures that “Man is to be defined neither by his innate capacities alone, as the Enlightenment sought to do, nor by his actual behaviors alone, as much of contemporary social science seeks to do, but rather by the link between them, the way in which the first is transformed into the second, his generic potentialities focused into his specific performances. . . . As culture shaped us as a single species . . . so too it shapes us as separate individuals. This, neither an unchanging subcultural self nor an established cross-cultural consensus, is what we really have in common” (52). Schleiermacher’s theory of religion bears traces of Susanne Zantop’s “colonial fantasy” in ways that may prove problematic racially from a postcolonial perspective for some readers. I wish, again, to distinguish Zantop’s understanding of the universal from my own, which remains more provisional—neither elemental nor naturalized but a conceptual adjunct to particularity, no more “real” than race itself. For more expansive readings of the postcolonial limits of particulars and universals, see Chidester, Empire of Religion, and Masuzawa, Invention of World Religions, among others. Thanks to J. Kameron Carter for pushing me on this point. Tillich, Systematic Theology, 12, 14. Jeffrey Stout also offers a naturalistic reading of Ellison in his chapter “Race and Nation in Baldwin and Ellison,” in Democracy and Tradition, 42–60. Here Ellison becomes a pragmatist, which in and of itself is not problematic, though Stout’s assessment comes off as heavy-handed. One wishes to ask Stout, as Ellison (with some measure of exasperation) did his interviewers from the Paris Review: “Look, didn’t you find [Invisible Man] at all funny?” See Ellison, “The Art of Fiction,” in Collected Essays, 221. Saunders, “Gospel according to Ralph,” 35–55. Ibid., 36. Ibid., 37, 39. “Religion” registers as basically synonymous with “Christianity” for Saunders. Ibid., 48–51. Two works on race, religion, and theology whose goals inspire this book are Carter’s Race and Jennings’s Christian Imagination. Both seek to recover and trace theological trajectories that have shaped the evolution of race as a conceptual and political aspect of modernity. Carter contends that “modernity’s racial imagination is religious in nature” (5), “animated by a deep theological imagination” (7) rooted in “Christianity’s quest to sever itself from its Jewish roots” (4). In service of this broader argument, he tacks back and forth between early Christian sources

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(Irenaeus, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor) and African American ones (Frederick Douglass, Jarena Lee, James Cone, and others), locating older legacies in the political and cultural schematics of modern racism. Jennings argues that social and cultural divisions in contemporary theological inquiry stem both from “unfamiliarity with the deep theological architecture that patterned early modern visions of peoples, places, and societies.” Consequently, “Christian theology now operates inside this diseased social imagination without the ability to discern how its intellectual and pedagogical performances reflect and fuel the problem” (6–7). While symptoms may seem obvious to materialist interpretation, the limitations of such materialism are symptomatic of the very social disease it seeks to diagnose. To counter this problem, Jennings traces a broader historical and cosmopolitan genealogy of a “Christian imagination” from Gomes Eanes du Zurara to Olaudah Equiano to recent conceptions of Israel (as ancient biblical and contemporary political properties). The invisibilities profiled here and in the conclusion remain representative of a much larger catalog of exemplars—many of which just missed the cut for inclusion. In addition to biblical sources, early modern contexts, American Puritanism, and indigenous African sources, we might consider Augustine’s invisible church, detailed in his City of God; Emerson’s “transparent eyeball,” discussed especially in the essay “Nature”; the notion of “invisible religion” profiled in Luckmann’s sociological study Invisible Religion; Raboteau’s category of the “invisible institution” that characterizes religiosity among enslaved subjects, in Slave Religion; and, of course, an antecedent often overlooked by scholars: Wells’s The Invisible Man (1897). West, “Ellison,” 245. Ishmael Reed, Quincy Troupe, and Steve Cannon, “The Essential Ellison,” in Graham and Singh, Conversations with Ralph Ellison, 373. For more on the foundational nature of biblical language (especially as it is modeled on the King James Version), see also James Alan McPherson’s interview and overview from the Atlantic in Ellison, Collected Essays, 368–70. Ellison, Collected Essays, 742. This represents a retrospective statement, and Ellison could be cagy about his past political identities (see Foley, Wrestling with the Left). Still, Ellison sets up a clear distinction between literary heroes (Dostoevsky and James) and the politically oriented writers he was supposed to read. Interestingly, this is a similar tension pursued in Invisible Man, which offers a clear critique of political action and the New York Left of the 1930s. Similarly, Ellison frequently discusses his aims for Invisible Man by citing Dostoevsky (see “The Art of Fiction,” for instance, from the mid-1950s [in Collected Essays, 212]). “Invisible,” spelled “inuisible” in the Geneva Bible, appears a total of five times (in precisely the same places) in both the Geneva (1587) and King James Version (KJV, 1611) English translations: Romans 1:20, Colossians 1:15 and 16, 1 Timothy 1:17, and Hebrews 11:27, all of which are discussed in some detail above. Gutjahr (American Bible, 92) notes that Geneva was the primary English translation used

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by Protestants in colonial America through about 1640, at which point the KJV took over until the late nineteenth century, at least. These and all biblical quotations cited in this volume come from the KJV. Barth, Epistle to the Romans, 46. Bultmann, New Testament and Mythology, 49. Ellison’s most trenchant critique of social scientific methods may be found in his review of Myrdal’s An American Dilemma. Ellison takes special issue with what one commentator calls “Myrdal’s sterile ‘scientific’ approach as inadequate to capture the mercurial forces of myth and history that under-gird power and race in America” (Purcell, Race, 51). Note the disjuncture between clinical “sterility” and the resurrection of myth (also Bultmann’s chosen term—“mercurial” itself is also a term derived from Roman myth) that marks Ellison’s approach as distinct. For Ellison’s review, see “An American Dilemma: A Review,” in Collected Essays, 328–40. Ellison, Invisible Man, 8. We find evidence of this demythologizing impulse in Alain Locke’s introduction to The New Negro, in which he depicts modern African American subjects who have moved away from the “myth” of the past, becoming in the process modern and increasingly secularized people with “idols of the tribe to smash.” This new outlook is “scientific,” not “sentimental” (4, 8). W. Wesley Williams offers a helpful digest of debates concerning God’s (in) visibility in the Hebrew Bible over the past century. He suggests, citing Christi Dianne Bamford and Benyamin Uffenheimer, that such a view actually imposes Greek and later anxieties about corporeality upon the Hebrew Bible text. In fact, the more salient question is not whether one can but, in fact, if one may see God (Williams, Tajallī wa Ru’ya, 21–25). In addition to different names for God (Yahweh, Elohim, etc.), we see evidence of a divine council in sources such as the book of Job. Not one god but a sense of plurality. See M. S. Smith, Early History of God. See Gerstenberger, “Conflicting Theologies,” 120–34. He expands upon these typologies in Theologies. On this point, see esp. 19–24, though the entire volume discusses them in greater detail. Hanson, “Israelite Religion,” 485. Day, Yahweh, 233. See also Freedman, “‘Who Is Like Thee,” 334, which traces the submergence of El into Yahweh. Bright, History of Israel, 438. Geller, “God of the Covenant,” 286. “Emergent Judaism” is Bright’s phrase (History of Israel, 438). For the diversity/ singularity of God, see Geller, “God of the Covenant,” 286. Brueggemann, Theology, 333. Ellison, Invisible Man, 577. Ibid. Pluribus and unum also constitute a broader theme elsewhere in Ellison’s criticism—particularly for the democratic function of the novel, bringing together

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particulars and universals. See especially Senator Sunraider’s speech on the Senate floor in the second novel (Ellison, Three Days Before, 242) and the essays “Society, Morality, ” and “Novel as Function,” in Ellison, Collected Essays, 698–729, 759–69. See, e.g., Elazar, Covenant and Polity. Ellison, Invisible Man, 577. Ibid., 581. It is also important to recognize in exilic literature (and the postexilic literature that tells its story) a model for the development of Afro-America. New World Africans would resonate with biblical legacies of captivity, enslavement, and exile that unite—meaningfully, if not completely—culturally and politically diverse people, beliefs, and customs, forging a new and unique sense of theological identity. Such biblical legacies and identities proved familiar, appealing, and useful in the formation of African American identity in the midst of enslavement and exile. Malik, Meaning of Race, 42. Malik’s reading, on which I draw, is admittedly counterintuitive and not without a measure of controversy. He argues, after a Niebuhrian fashion, that equality invents inequality: “I want to argue here the opposite to the common-sense view: that it is not racial differentiation that has led to the denial of equality but the social constraints placed on the scope of equality that has led to the racial categorisation of humanity. In other words, it is not ‘race’ that gives rise to inequality but inequality that gives rise to ‘race.’ The nature of modern society has created inequalities between different social groups and these have come to be preserved in racial terms. The ambiguous attitude to race . . . arises from an ambivalent attitude to equality” (39). Our present context understandably has little patience for the imperfections of liberalism’s often hypocritical propensity toward the inequitable. Indeed, it would be absurd to hold sixteenthand seventeenth-century agents to twenty-first century expectations. On the cusp of modernity, however, we should remember how starkly radical even the prospect of equality would have been to people emerging from feudalism, whose world had expanded exponentially in the brief course of their own lifetimes. See especially Malik’s second chapter, “The Social Limits to Equality.” Schreiner, “Appearances and Reality,” 346. Ibid., 345. Cf. Harries, Infinity and Perspective. Gerrish, Old Protestantism and New, draws a helpful distinction between two types of the deus absconditus in Luther’s theology—what he calls Hiddenness I and Hiddenness II. In Hiddenness I God is hidden within revelation, meaning that God is veiled yet in this act of concealing is simultaneously revealed. This category qualifies what Schreiner (“Appearances and Reality”) ascribes to Luther in her article. Hiddenness II is a trickier prospect involving God outside of revelation and thus is, problematically for many, outside of the Incarnation: “faith cannot rest in the God who is hidden beyond his revelation” (140). I would suggest that Shakespeare’s God, which Schreiner qualifies as “far away,” inhabits Gerrish’s Hiddenness II. The payoff here is that God’s hiddenness forms a conceptual antecedent that unites the problem of emerging modernity and Ellison’s later

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appropriation of race as invisibility—a metaphor for discussing it. Cf. Gerrish’s chapter 4, “‘To the Unknown God’” (131–49). Schreiner, “Appearances and Reality,” 368. Luther’s Hidden God draws in part on the passages in Exodus 33 we have treated above. Brueggemann, Theology, offers an overview on 333. Ellison, Invisible Man, 3. Ellison, “Society, Morality,” in Collected Essays, 698. Ibid., 699. Mather, Wonders, 203–51. A transcript of Hutchinson’s trial appears in T. Hutchinson, History of the Colony, 509. For more on Hutchinson, the trial, and its context, see especially Battis, Saints and Sectaries; LaPlante, American Jezebel; and Winship, Times and Trials. H. Stout, New England Soul, especially the first chapter, “The Institutional Setting of the Sermon,” 13–31. Mather, Wonders, 71. Ibid., 77. Ellison, Invisible Man, 7. Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, 386. Ellison, Collected Essays, 750. As with the other ways of looking at invisibility in this introduction, I focus narrowly on the Kongo, though one could, with a different agenda, explore more widely. Bockie’s Death and Invisible Powers remains the best and most thorough examination on the topic. Thanks to Marcus Harvey for directing me to Bockie. Bockie, Death and Invisible Powers, ix. Ibid., x. Ibid., 1. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 18. Ibid. Ibid., 33. Returning to Schleiermacher, it is interesting to consider Bockie’s use of the word “dependency” in light of Schleiermacher’s denomination of religious essence as “being absolutely dependent” (Christian Faith, 12). Bockie, Death and Invisible Powers, 36; see also 40. Ibid., 40. Fields and Fields, Racecraft, 194. Ibid. See Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic. Fields and Fields use Evans-Pritchard to evince what they call “racecraft” in the work of Kwame Anthony Appiah. Fields and Fields, Racecraft, 195. For more on the distinctions between “good” and “bad” theology or religion, see Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth, 171.

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Chapter 1. From Harlem Renaissance to Harlem Apocalypse

1 For more on Ellison’s chance meeting with Locke and Hughes, see L. Jackson, Ralph Ellison, 163–64. Rampersad recounts it in his biography of Ellison (Ralph Ellison, 82), and in his biography of Hughes (Life of Langston Hughes, 1:329). Jackson says the day is July 5; Rampersad claims July 6. 2 Langston Hughes, “Goodbye Christ,” in his Collected Poems, 166. For more on the poem and its legacy, see Best, “Concerning ‘Goodbye Christ.’” 3 Ellison, “An Extravagance of Laughter,” 621. 4 There is overlap here with Tweed’s Crossing and Dwelling, which addresses three aspects of migration: movement, relation, and position (5). Relationality applies especially to Ellison’s account, as a new migrant, of trying to contextualize the people he met on the street. 5 Rosengarten, Henry Fielding, 30. 6 Jennings, Christian Imagination, 6; Fessenden, Culture and Redemption, 6. 7 See Adero, Up South; Goodwin, Black Migration; Gregory, Southern Diaspora; Grossman, Land of Hope; Harrison, Black Exodus; Marks, Farewell; Trotter, Great Migration. 8 A. Locke, New Negro. The Harlem Renaissance, of course, was no monolithic entity. Rather, the term groups various cultural phenomena and practitioners into a cohesive, albeit artificial, unit. 9 US Census Bureau, “Race and Hispanic Origin.” 10 See Bone and Courage, Muse in Bronzeville; Hine and McCluskey, Black Chicago Renaissance; Mullen, Popular Fronts; and Tracy, Writers of Black Chicago. For a “Guide to Black Chicago’s Hidden Archives,” please see the homepage for the Mapping the Stacks project, http://mts.lib.uchicago.edu. 11 Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 8–11. During a similar period in New York, African Americans jumped from 1.8 percent of the total city population in 1890 to 9.5 percent by 1950. 12 Weisenfeld also considers the cultural implications of these dynamic changes in Hollywood Be Thy Name; see especially her introduction. It is difficult to imagine the experiences of the new migrants from Mississippi or other neighboring states when they disembarked from the train in Chicago or Harlem. One anecdote from a train porter in Chicago suggests that migrants just off the train would ask redcaps to direct them to a friend or relative’s house by name only, “unaware that without an address the porter could be of little help in a city as huge as Chicago” (Spear, Black Chicago, 147). 13 Hunter, Before Novels, 112. 14 Ibid., 44–47. 15 S. Johnson, Samuel Johnson, 420. 16 Ibid., 178. 17 Watt, Rise of the Novel, 10–11. 18 McKeon, Origins of English Novel, 419.

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Richardson, Pamela. Fielding, Tom Jones, 637. Campbell, “Fielding and the Novel,” 107. Fielding, Shamela, 80. The italics appear in the text. Campbell quotes Johnson as stating that the difference between Richardson and Fielding was “as between a man who knew how a watch was made, and a man who could tell the hour by looking on the dial-plate” (“Fielding and the Novel,” 111). Campbell notes that readers who favor Fielding “have argued that in his choice of external characterization [depicting characters as they are observed outside of themselves, not as they see themselves] reflects not the superficiality of his vision, but the profundity of his philosophical recognition that in life itself, other people’s characters are always only experienced through external and often misleading evidence,” which contributes to Fielding’s own mode of verisimilar representation (ibid., 111). Richardson, Pamela, 242. Fielding, Shamela, 27. While I speak primarily of (Protestant) Christian churches here, this dearth of religions in The New Negro occludes a much broader diversity of religious beliefs and practices at play in Harlem during the early twentieth century. See Sernett, Bound for Promised Land and Weisenfeld, New World A-Coming. A. Locke, New Negro 3. To be fair, there are two ways in which one may find the situation not entirely as simple as I depict it here—one of these I shall address presently and the other I simply wish to name. First, The New Negro contains James Weldon Johnson’s poem “The Creation,” which is based on the old-time Negro sermonic form, and which Johnson would publish as part of God’s Trombones in 1927. Second, a certain historicism in The New Negro addresses, for example, the spirituals and other folk practices that are intrinsic in more contemporary understandings of non-Christian and/or syncretistic belief systems that were not then fully recognized as religious per se (voodoo, for instance). The New Negro authors treat them in decidedly “secularized” ways, failing to recognize with any real insight the religious nature of such cultural phenomena beyond their role as metaphysical and superstitious relics of bygone days. Ibid., 4, 8. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 16. See John Locke’s treatise The Reasonableness of Christianity, first published in 1695, which likewise modernizes certain “irrational” elements of Christianity—including miracles and other supernatural beings and phenomena. See Larson, Summer for the Gods. See Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, and Alice Walker’s essays on Hurston collected in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. Mary Helen Washington’s foreword to the 1990 edition of Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God gives a good back-

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ground of the re-emergence of the text at the 1979 Modern Language Association convention in San Francisco (vii–xiv). Delbanco, “Political Incorrectness,” 103–8. Carpio and Sollors (“Newly Complicated”) highlight the recent discovery of three short stories that, they purport, add nuance to Hurston’s work and biography— rendering her “cosmic Zora.” While I agree with the assessment of Hurston’s complexity, evidenced in the forthcoming discussion of Hurston, I remain unsure of whether these discoveries necessarily seal that identity in the way that Carpio and Sollors suggest. Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows, 90–91. Hurston is alleged to be the only female student who ever truly impressed Alain Locke, whose misogyny was legendary at Howard University. He was rumored to tell his female students on the first day of class that it would be nearly impossible for them to score better than a C from him. Ibid., 115. Hurston discusses Boas, objectivity, and relates her early attempts at fieldwork in her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road; see esp. 143–45. The most striking example is John Pearson’s climactic final sermon in Jonah’s Gourd Vine, which comes almost wholesale from a sermon by C. C. Lovelace that Hurston transcribed in Eau Galle, Florida, in May 1929. See Hurston, Sanctified Church, 95–102. Indeed, it is fair to say that the immaturity of craft in Jonah’s Gourd Vine (Hurston’s first novel) resides in no small part in Hurston’s inability to transform the raw data of her fieldwork into a cohesive literary statement. Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows, 256–59. Margaret Wallace, review of Jonah’s Gourd Vine, first published in New York Times, May 6, 1934, reprinted in Gates and Appiah, Zora Neale Hurston, 8–9. Andrew Burris, review of Jonah’s Gourd Vine, first published in Crisis, June 3, 1934, reprinted in Gates and Appiah, Zora Neale Hurston, 6. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 6–7. See L. P. Jackson, Indignant Generation, 76, and Rowley, Richard Wright, 137–38. Alain Locke, review of Their Eyes, first published in Opportunity, June 1, 1938, reprinted in Gates and Appiah, Zora Neale Hurston, 18. Wright, “Between Laughter and Tears,” 22–23. Hurston’s first biographer, Robert Hemenway, offers an important caveat for reading Wright’s review of Hurston in “Between Laughter and Tears”: “Wright’s conception of folkloric fiction was more complicated than his review suggests,” pointing the reader to Wright’s “Blueprint for Negro Writing” (Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, 244–45n30). Richard Wright, “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” New Challenge (December 1937), reprinted in Patton and Honey, Double-Take, 53. Interestingly, just before Hurston’s resurgence in the late 1970s, June Jordan sought to harmonize the division between Wright and Hurston, perhaps less to offer a synthetic reading and more to unify divergences in the African American

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literary tradition. See Jordan, “On Richard Wright,” 4–10. Conversely, Rowley makes this pithy observation (which bears unfortunately unrealized elaboration) in her treatment of the disputes between Wright and Hurston over the nature and representation of race in the United States: “The Hurston-Wright controversy continues to this day” (Richard Wright, 138). Scholars have recently (see Carpio and Sollors, “Newly Complicated”) sought to take issue with the Hurston-Wright dualism, though whatever justification they may ultimately conceive will face tremendous odds of undoing the divide in the face of the material I cite both here and above. It remains a stubborn myth. Ellison, “Recent Negro Fiction,” 24. Ibid., 26. Ibid., 24. There can be no doubt that Hurston’s gender is ineluctably related to her artistic rejection by Locke, Wright, and Ellison, all of whose biographies (for diverse reasons) bear strong misogynistic tendencies. Hurston, Their Eyes, 183. Job’s misfortune is made all the more perverse by the fact that, unbeknownst to him, the calamities he confronts stem from a wager between God and Satan. Thus, when God refuses to justify Godself to Job, there emerges a real sense that there is no humanly acceptable justification that God can offer—even if God would. Job 38:2, 4–5 (KJV). Hurston, Their Eyes, 150. Ibid., 151. Another interesting aspect of the correspondences between Their Eyes and Job is the way that the book of Job itself ends “happily” (with his wife, children, and fortune restored—though biblical scholars suspect that this restitution represents a later edition of the text). Hurston does not allow Janie this same comfort, and we may see a kind of reversal of Nahum Tate’s comedic vision of King Lear, the end of which sees Lear and Cordelia live happily into old age. Samuel Johnson favored this version of Lear as it offers just representations of general nature (Samuel Johnson, 463–65). Like Pamela, Job’s virtue is rewarded (if in an equally disconcerting manner). How, though, may we understand Janie’s virtue to be rewarded? Bigger Thomas’s reward, as we shall see, is martyrdom for the materialist cause. Zora Neale Hurston, review of Uncle Tom’s Children, first published in Saturday Review of Literature, April 2, 1938, reprinted in Gates and Appiah, Richard Wright, 3. Ibid., 4. Ibid. She writes in a letter to William Bradford Huie, himself something of a sensationalist, regarding the case of Ruby McCollum, who was accused of killing her lover—a white doctor—in 1952: “No matter what the Emancipation Proclamation

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says, we are still slaves in spirit, lousy with inferiority complex, and . . . see glory in [killing white people]. The success of . . . NATIVE SON [among others] . . . was due to this angle.” Hurston covered the McCollum trial for the Pittsburgh Courier (Kaplan, Life in Letters, 719). One interesting parallel that avoids association with slavery comes from the Nation of Islam—an urban religious group founded in the early 1930s in the midst of the Great Migration and thus a product of this same era in the wake of the renaissance movements. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad’s dietary guidelines discourage “slave food” diets (including what we commonly think of as “soul food”) while promoting foods not associated with slavery. See Curtis, Black Muslim Religion, 98–101. Remember that the southern campaign did not flummox Martin Luther King Jr. and the broader freedom movements nearly as much as Chicago’s did. See Branch’s three-volume history chronicling “America in the King Years,” Parting the Waters, Pillar of Fire, and At Canaan’s Edge. Of Chicago, King said, “I have never in my life seen such hate. Not in Mississippi or in Alabama. This is a terrible thing” (Branch, Canaan’s Edge, 511). As Branch later summarizes, “The violence against Northern demonstrations cracked a beguiling, cultivated conceit that bigotry was the province of backward Southerners, treatable by enlightened but firm instruction” (ibid., 522). Ellison, Invisible Man, 499. Ellison, “Extravagance of Laughter,” in Collected Essays, 616. Warren (What Was) argues that “African American literature” in fact relied upon a segregated social order in order to be defined as such. There’s a corollary in Invisible Man—young Emerson—who expresses clear disgust at his father’s racial politics (as a benefactor of the protagonist’s college for Negroes and an advisor to Bledsoe), and he both reveals Bledsoe’s deception to the protagonist and expresses the desire to help him: “you mustn’t believe that I’m against you . . . or your race. I’m your friend” (189). The protagonist, however, remains leery of him, and the reader suspects—even if the protagonist cannot express such a suspicion consciously—that the compulsion to help may derive as much from young Emerson’s own homoerotic desire for the protagonist as it does from well-meaning (if obsequious) white guilt: “Perhaps you’d like to be my valet?” (192). Wright, Native Son, 66. This brief episode also illustrates the impetus behind Ralph Ellison’s claim that “[Richard] Wright could imagine Bigger, but Bigger could not possibly imagine Richard Wright. Wright saw to that” (Ellison, “The World and the Jug,” in Collected Essays, 162). Wright, Native Son, 74. Ibid., 66–67. Ibid., 425, 426; emphasis in the original. Ibid., 426–27, 429.

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78 Ibid. There are interesting corollaries here between Max’s silencing of Bigger’s attempts at an individual articulation of motive and the Brotherhood’s responses to the protagonist’s going off script in his public speaking appearances in Invisible Man. 79 Ibid. 80 Carpio and Sollers, “Newly Complicated.” 81 Hurston, “Monkey Junk.” 82 Ibid. 83 Foley (Wrestling with the Left) takes issue with this reading in an important counternarrative that I don’t necessarily endorse, but that provides interesting inflections for my apocalyptic reading here. 84 Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, 452. 85 See especially L. P. Jackson, “Birth of the Critic,” 321–55. Rampersad (Ralph Ellison), Rowley (Richard Wright), and L. P. Jackson’s Emergence of Genius and Indignant Generation also provide insight, in addition to Ellison’s “The World and the Jug” (in Collected Essays, 155–88), “Richard Wright’s Blues” (128–44), and “Remembering Richard Wright” (659–75). 86 Ellison, Collected Essays, 57. 87 Ellison, Invisible Man, 17. 88 Ibid., 17–18. 89 Ibid., 29. 90 Two versions of this address may be found in Harlan, Booker T. Washington Papers. A manuscript version begins on 578, and the version printed in the press begins on 583. 91 A. Locke, New Negro, vii, 3. Ellison makes the rhetorical association with Locke in the introduction to Shadow and Act by invoking “an older generation of Negro leaders and writers—those of the so-called ‘Negro Renaissance’” (Ellison, Collected Essays, 57; emphasis mine). 92 A. Locke, New Negro, 47–48, 50, 52, 39, 342. 93 Carpio and Sollors (“Newly Complicated”) note that Hurston sided with Booker T. Washington over Du Bois. 94 Ellison, Invisible Man, 172–79, 262–67. 95 Ellison, Collected Essays, 441. Ellison’s italics signal his next move: “I stress American culture because I think we are in a great deal of confusion over our role in the creation of American culture. It is so easy to become unknowingly racist by simply stressing one part of our heritage, thus reducing the complexity of our cultural heritage to a generic reality which is only partially dealt with” (441). 96 Ibid., 442. 97 Ibid., 446. See also 444 for similar examples. 98 Ibid., 447. 99 Ibid. 100 Ellison, Invisible Man, 16.

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101 Ibid., 36. W. E. B. DuBois writes in The Souls of Black Folk, “Leaving, then, the world of the white man, I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may view its deep recessed,—the meaning of its religion, the passion of its human sorrow, and the struggle of its greater souls” (1–2). 102 Ellison, Invisible Man, 267–84. 103 Conner writes of the “things” in Invisible Man: “These objects . . . are not merely material. [They] do not simply exist in present time and space; rather, they are portals to a larger concept of time, history, and identity than is otherwise available to the Invisible Man. In short, they are sacramental: visible and material signs for the invisible and immaterial realm beyond” (Conner, “Litany of Things,” 171). 104 Montgomery, Apocalypse, 40. 105 Leigh, Apocalyptic Patterns, 192. 106 Ellison, “Society, Morality,” in Collected Essays, 699–700. 107 Apocalypticism remains one of the more popular and, concurrently, lesser understood biblical genres. Scholars have devised a rigid definition and criteria for nominating a text as an apocalypse. The standard definition, first published in the journal Semeia (and popularly referred to as the “Semeia 14” definition), specifies apocalypse as “a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial insofar as it involves another, supernatural world” (Collins, Apocalyptic Imagination, 4–5). A later addition notes that it usually emerges from an embattled community (ibid., 41). 108 Ellison, Invisible Man, 32; hereafter cited in the text by page number. 109 Rev. 6:1–8 (KJV). 110 Consider, too, that Invisible Man was published exactly one week after Reinhold Niebuhr’s Irony of American History, which deals with the broader implications of the atomic bomb. 111 J. H. Cone, Spirituals and the Blues.

Chapter 2. 1952

1 Warren, So Black and Blue, 23. 2 See Morris, “World Below”; Webster, “Inside a Dark Shell”; and Hedden, “Objectively Vivid.” See also L. P. Jackson’s summary of Invisible Man’s critical reception in Indignant Generation, 355–61. 3 Warren, So Black and Blue, 3. 4 Ellison’s civil rights legacy is complex. By the most simple of measures, other activists were (and in some cases remain) quick to note that he didn’t march (unlike Baldwin and even Nathan Scott). He did maintain a healthy skepticism regarding (if no small admiration for) Martin Luther King (which he shared with Scott; see chapter 3). See chapter 4 for a more constructive and nuanced argument about the impact of the civil rights era, its freedom movements and attendant anxieties

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on Ellison and his work—particularly in the unfinished second novel. For more information on Baldwin’s issues with protest literature, see Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” Baldwin, No One Knows, 13–23. Baker, “Black Boys,” 63–64. Ellison, “World and the Jug,” in Collected Essays, 188. Wellington, “Fighting at Cross-Purposes,” 101–6, notes perceptively that when a reader steeped in Ellison’s essay turns to Howe’s less-known instigative work for the first time, Ellison’s ire comes off as excessive. Ellison, Collected Essays, 172. Niebuhr, like Ellison, flirted with communism as a younger man, yet came to reject the broader practices and ideologies of the Communist Party for reasons similar to Ellison’s—especially what both men perceived as the party’s denigration of the individual and reliance upon social scientific data to address human problems, which, for Ellison and Niebuhr, were inadequate. L. Jackson places Ellison in an intellectual lineage of “new liberals” that points especially to Niebuhr’s legacy (Ralph Ellison, 403). Jesse Wolfe has written comparatively about Ellison and Niebuhr, but he relies more on their political connection than the appropriateness of Niebuhr’s theology to a common understanding between them (“‘Ambivalent Man,’” 621–38). Ellison would have been aware of Niebuhr by the 1940s, at the latest, when Niebuhr was famous enough to appear on the cover of Time (March 8, 1948). It is most likely that Niebuhr first learned of Ellison through the publicity generated by Invisible Man’s success. The most tangible personal connection between Ellison and Niebuhr was Nathan Scott, who probably mentioned Ellison on occasion to Niebuhr. Responding to a letter from Scott in which he mentions nominating Ellison for the Reinhold Niebuhr Memorial Prize in 1972, Niebuhr’s widow, Ursula Niebuhr, appears to know of Ellison and to approve of his Niebuhrian bonafides (see Reinhold Niebuhr Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, box 51, folder 21). See Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr, esp. 167–223. The second series of Niebuhr’s Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh (which would become The Nature and Destiny of Man) were in fact delivered as that city was bombed during the Blitz (ibid., 191). Gilkey, On Niebuhr, 13. Ibid. R. Niebuhr, Faith and History, 12. Ibid., 20. Ibid. Ibid., 22–23. Ibid., 9. Ellison, Invisible Man, 6. Note the phrase “darkness of lightness,” which resonates with another of Reinhold Niebuhr’s works—Children of Light, Children of Darkness—concerned with the impossibility of utopia, promoting democracy as the best system conceived by mere humans in a state of fallenness.

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R. Niebuhr, Irony of American History, 1–2. Ibid., 2. Ellison Papers, part I, box 173, folder 4. Bradley, Ralph Ellison in Progress, 67–73, discusses a fascinating 1970 exchange between Ellison and a Mr. S. D. Claghorn, who wrote to Ellison in response to the author’s “What Would America Be Like without Blacks?,” published in Time magazine (see Ellison, Collected Essays, 577–84). Claghorn’s letter contains a fairly standard racist screed; Ellison’s devastating response speaks volumes about Ellison’s basic assumptions about race, and his own place within its American context: “My response is simple,” Ellison writes in a letter he appears not to have mailed. “I am quite willing to admit that I am inferior if you are willing to admit that I wrote Invisible Man” (72). See, for instance, Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, 439–40. Ellison, Invisible Man, xviii. Ellison, “Richard Wright’s Blues,” in Collected Essays, 143. Ibid., 129. Ellison, Invisible Man, 54–55. The dream itself, which out of necessity I only gloss here, is remarkable in its own right and worthy of deeper engagement. See especially Baker’s Freudian analysis in Blues, Ideology, 173–99. Ellison, Invisible Man, 59. Ibid. Ibid., 59–60. Ibid., 60. Miller, Errand into the Wilderness, 1. Ellison perhaps understates or willfully misremembers how extreme circumstances were in the Oklahoma of his youth. As Rampersad discusses, eightyear-old Ralph and his family passed through Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood shortly before race riots destroyed it in May 1921, killing sixty-eight African Americans, nine whites, and leaving roughly nine thousand people homeless or otherwise dislocated (Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, 20–21, 24). See also L. Jackson, Emergence of Genius, 36–38. Ellison, “Going to the Territory,” in Collected Essays, 603. Miller, Errand into the Wilderness, 15; Ellison, Invisible Man, 593. Miller, Errand into the Wilderness, 3. Ibid. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 13. See Pope, Halfway Covenant. Miller, Errand into the Wilderness, 14. Ibid., 15. See Mullen, Popular Fronts, and Finkle, Forum for Protest. See, for instance, Woods, Black Struggle, Red Scare.

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Rowley, Richard Wright, esp. 330–73; Rampersad, Life of Langston Hughes. L. P. Jackson, Indignant Generation, 304. Miller, Errand into the Wilderness, 15. Ellison, Invisible Man, 29; A. Locke, New Negro, vii, 3. Ellison, Invisible Man, 15. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 147. See also the grandfather’s appearances on 32–33, 40, 170, 186, 315, 335, 354, 378–81, 384, 390, 462, 508, 556, 574–75, 580. The college’s founder is distinguished from Booker T. Washington in the protagonist’s initial interview with the Brotherhood (see esp. 305–7). Bledsoe, of course, like the grandfather and most figures of authority in Invisible Man, is not what he seems. His appearance belies his reality. Ellison, Invisible Man, 117–35. Ibid., 134. See Nadel’s chapter “Invisible Man in the Golden Day” for a thorough explication of this establishment’s symbolic resonances (Invisible Criticism, 85–103). Ellison, Invisible Man, 73. In this way we also inaugurate a more complicated sense of intertextuality between Ellison’s man underground and two antecedents that must remain merely acknowledged and set aside for the time being: Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and Wright’s “The Man Who Lived Underground.” For more on Dostoevsky, see Lyne, “Signifying Modernist,” 318–30. For more on Ellison, Wright, and “The Man Who Lived Underground,” see Bakish, “Underground,” 18–23; Goede, “On Lower Frequencies,” 483–501; and Ridenour, “‘Man Who Lived Underground,’” 54–57. Miller, Errand into the Wilderness, 3. Ellison, Invisible Man, 571; Miller, Errand into the Wilderness, 15. Ellison, Invisible Man, 571, 573. Miller, Errand into the Wilderness, 15. Ibid., 15. Tillich, On the Boundary, 13. Gilkey, Gilkey on Tillich, xiv. See K. G. Jackson, “Books in Brief,” 105. Gilkey, Gilkey on Tillich, 61. See M. K. Taylor, “The Theological Development and Contribution of Paul Tillich,” introduction to his Theologian of the Boundaries, 21–24. Tillich, Theology of Culture, 3–9. Ibid., 9. For more on Tillich and Barth’s relationship, see Mehta, New Theologian, esp. chapter 1, “Ecce Homo,” 1–66. Fox details strong disagreements between Tillich and Niebuhr, an account with which Gilkey takes issue in Gilkey on Tillich (204n4).

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73 See M. K. Taylor, Paul Tillich, 21–22. Tillich would later teach at Harvard and Chicago. 74 Ellison was certainly aware of Tillich as early as December 1952, when Lawrence Jackson places him in attendance at a series of lectures in Princeton in which Tillich participated (Emergence of Genius, 441). 75 The distinction here from Schleiermacher’s “religion” should be emphasized even as I draw these definitions parallel to, or in correspondence with, one another. 76 Tillich, Systematic Theology, 3. 77 Ibid., 12, 14; italics in original. 78 See Anderson, Beyond Ontological Blackness. 79 Tillich, Systematic Theology, 11. 80 Ellison, Collected Essays, 212. 81 Tillich, Systematic Theology, 13. 82 Ibid. This represents the third of Tillich’s three possible relations between preliminary and ultimate concern. 83 Tillich, Courage to Be, 3. 84 Gilkey, Gilkey on Tillich, 103. 85 Ellison, Invisible Man, 3. 86 Tillich, Courage to Be, 155; Ellison, Invisible Man, 4. 87 Tillich, Courage to Be, 175, 176. 88 Ellison, Invisible Man, 564, 565. 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid., 576. 91 Ibid., 568. 92 Ibid., 569; italics in original. 93 Ibid., 570; italics in original. 94 Ibid., 577.

Chapter 3. Above the Veil

1 Ellison Papers, part I, box 67, folder 6. 2 Ibid. 3 Kenneth Burke writes, “We are to be concerned with the analogy between ‘words’ (lower case) and The Word (Logos, Verbum) as it were in caps. ‘Words’ in the first sense have wholly naturalistic, empirical reference. But they may be used analogically, to designate a further dimension, the ‘supernatural.’ Whether or not there is a realm of the ‘supernatural,’ there are words for it. And in this state of linguistic affairs is a paradox.” Ordinary words may be used to describe the supernatural, and in doing so they take on supernatural significance, whereupon “we can borrow back the terms from the borrower, again secularizing to varying degrees the originally secular terms that had been given ‘supernatural’ connotations.” (Rhetoric of Religion, 7). For more on Ellison and Burke, see Eddy, Rites of Identity, and Crable, Ellison and Burke.

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4 Scott, “Black Literature,” 295–96. 5 Ibid., 297–98. Scott applies this quotation, from Cleanth Brooks’s essay “Irony as a Principle of Structure” to Ellison and James Baldwin alike. 6 Scott resurrects agape in a later valedictory essay, “Ellison’s Vision of Communitas,” 312. 7 Rampersad and John Wright, as best I can determine, were the first critics to take seriously the Ellison/Scott connection in print, though as we shall see it proves abundantly clear that Scott’s students and colleagues were very much aware of the connection. See Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, and Wright, Shadowing Ralph Ellison, esp. 167–71. 8 Around 1970 Scott turned to Heidegger as a way of flanking criticism against the limitations of his Tillichian worldview. 9 See Gunn, “Nathan Scott,” 104. 10 An oft-repeated anecdote Scott used to signal what he felt to be his intellectual marginality to his institutional home at the University of Chicago Divinity School (at least in the opinion of certain colleagues) is a friend’s remark that religion and literature are the “salad and dessert” of the curriculum—nice to set things up and finish them, but far from the substance of the matter (Scott, “Ramble on a Road,” 205–6). 11 A good biographical account, one on which my narrative here relies, may be found in the introduction to Buhrman’s Nathan Scott’s Literary Criticism. 12 Wood, “Interview,” 215. 13 Wright, Shadowing Ralph Ellison, 168, 169. 14 Wood, “Interview,” 226. 15 See Brittain, “Nathan A. Scott, Jr.,” 116. 16 Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, 381–82. Scott also sought to secure a more permanent post for Ellison at Chicago. See Ellison Papers part I, box 67, folder 9 for ongoing correspondence between Fanny Ellison and Charlotte Scott. 17 Scott, “Ramble on a Road,” 211. Interestingly, this formulation, “late, bad time,” appears in an essay title Scott devised and suggested upon inviting Gwendolyn Brooks to submit an essay for The Dark Tower—the volume Scott intended to coedit with Ellison: “I am the one who is responsible for the formulation ‘The Poet’s Aspiration in a Late, Bad Time.’ And it is meant only to be prompting and evocative” (Ellison Papers, part I, box 67, folder 6). Interestingly, it would become something of a catchphrase for Scott, closely identified with him. In the late 1970s, for instance, Robert Hayden offhandedly attributes the phrase to Scott in an interview, and it appears in several other sources, cited later in this chapter (Hayden, Collected Prose, 197). 18 Scott mentions this evening in an undated note to Ellison affixed to an offprint of his article “The Tragic Vision and the Christian Faith,” Anglican Theological Review (January 1963). The note reads: “Many months ago you and Dick Stern were at our house one night—and the two of you in the course of the evening’s conversation were flatly asserting that Christianity and tragedy represent utterly

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antithetical principles. Well, there were too many other people present that night for me to attempt the kind of measured reply that I wanted to make. But here it is” (Ellison Papers, part I, box 67, folder 6). A note from Divinity School student Herman Cole suggests that, in his Wednesday lunch talk, Ellison should speak on “How you as a novelist deals [sic] with religious themes in your work” (see Ellison Papers, part I, box 93, folder 4). Rampersad (Ralph Ellison, 393–94) notes that other early supporters of the Society of Arts, Religion, and Contemporary Culture included Paul Tillich, Louis Kahn, Joseph Campbell, and W. H. Auden. Interestingly, the society’s founder, Marvin Halverson, supported Ellison’s application for membership to Manhattan’s exclusive Century Club at roughly the same time he enlisted Ellison (perhaps through or at Nathan Scott’s suggestion) to this board. Ellison’s Society of Arts, Religion, and Contemporary Culture materials may be found in Ellison Papers, part 1, box 93, folder 6. Ellison Papers, part I, box 67 folder 6. Doubleday expressed interest in publishing the project. An intriguing prospective author was Martin Luther King Jr., who does not appear to have been invited, but was included on what is probably an early (though undated) list of prospective people to contact (part I, box 67, folder 9). While a number of manuscripts were collected (Scott claims in late July 1963 to have contributions in hand from Harding, Long, and four others), the volume never appeared, and I can find no trace of what happened to it. None of the Ellison biographies mention the book. Charles Long, who may be the lone surviving contributor, remembers the book but claims no knowledge or memory of what happened to it (personal e-mail, October 14, 2014). One gets the sense, reading though the correspondence, that Scott did the lion’s share of the work and grew frustrated with Ellison’s distractedness, but there is no specific mention of the book falling through. Ellison Papers, part I, box 94, folder 6. Ellison Papers, part I, box 195, folder 10. Ellison joked in a letter dated April 17, 1963, that “You [Scott] write and publish so frequently that this really should be a blanket thank you note” for essays on Beckett, tragedy, and Camus (part II, box 33, folder 1). Ellison Papers, part I, box 67, folder 7. Ibid. Ellison Papers, part I, box 67, folder 8. Conversation with Anthony C. Yu; Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, 566. Ellison Papers, part I, box 67, folder 7. Charles Wesley (but not John Wesley) preached on nearby St. Simons Island in the 1730s. In this draft Ellison calls it “Ossawba Island” and refers to Scott’s book as A Wild Prayer of Yearning— interesting mistakes, and one wonders whether they found correction. Here Ellison refers to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s volume The Phenomenon of Man (1955; published in English in 1959, around the time Ellison would have encountered it).

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29 See Fikes, “Nathan A. Scott, Jr.,” 10–12. For the estimate of essays and articles, see Schlueter, “Tribute to Scott,” 461. 30 Tillich famously writes, “Religion is the substance of culture, culture is the form of religion” (Theology of Culture, 42). Around 1966, Scott spoke of his research and teaching as focused on a “theological horizon” that proves “centrally important . . . in the literary landscape of our period. I have . . . become convinced not only that the literature of this century does itself most emphatically initiate theological inquiry but also that Christian theology, as a result of its dialogue with the literary imagination, will find itself more richly repaid (in terms of deepened awareness both of itself and of the age) than by way of any other similar transaction into which it may enter” (“Nathan A. Scott, Jr.,” Criterion, 30). 31 Murray and Callahan, Trading Twelves. 32 Ellison Papers, part I, box 17, folder 7. 33 Yu, “Enduring Lessons,” 97–98. Scott called Yu one of his “closest and dearest friends.” See Scott, “Tribute to Yu,” 20–21. Yu’s introduction to the Nathan Scott festschrift he coedited with Mary Gerhart is also remarkable in its clarity and comprehensiveness. See “Nathan A. Scott, Jr., an Appreciation,” in Gerhart and Yu, Morphologies of Faith, xi–xxix. 34 Wood, “Interview,” 213. 35 Long, “I Remember Nathan,” 92. As best I can discern, Long does not designate his colleague’s racial identity. 36 Note the resonance of this complaint with similar ones about Ellison. Scott could be notoriously difficult, and while—like Charles Long’s colleague—he held little patience for certain performances of blackness, few of his students seem unscathed by the experience of working with him. My own sense of the 2008 “Wildcard” session that memorialized Scott at the American Academy of Religion meeting in Chicago (which I attended) is that the speakers’ tones were in equal measure a tribute (to an admired, if enigmatic, teacher) and a support group for some common trauma they all had endured. 37 Scott, “Ramble on a Road,” 206. 38 Ellison Papers, part I, box 67, folder 9. 39 Connor, “Introduction to ‘Mystic Chords,’” 87, 90. 40 Yu, “Enduring Lessons,” esp. 93–94. 41 Ellison Papers, part I, box 67, folder 7. 42 Ibid. 43 See Rankine’s study of Ellison and classicism, Ulysses in Black, and Cook and Tatum’s African American Writers. Concerning the cultural divide, see Chinitz, T. S. Eliot. 44 Long writes, “[Scott] would have surprised many with his knowledge of black music, (he once gave me a short biographical lecture on Fats Waller). . . . He formed a part of a community brought together by Brown’s barbershop. Brown’s barbershop was owned by ‘Brown,’ a black man and the shop had become a place for community discussion and debate about events of the day. When this barber-

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shop was threatened by ‘urban development,’ Nathan became an active part of a committee that helped to keep the barbershop in the community as one of its vital assets” (“I Remember Nathan,” 92). Ellison Papers, part I, box 67, folder 6. Ibid. He continues, “Who would ever have thought a few short years ago that niggers could raise so much sand?” Here we see rare evidence of Scott in a vernacular mode, in keeping with Ellison’s correspondence with Murray, for instance. Ibid. Yu, “Enduring Lessons,” 97. See the photo as part of a posthumous tribute to Scott in “Tributes to Nathan Scott: 1925–2006,” 21. Selma bore special significance for Scott, whose father graduated from Selma University (See Wood, “Interview,” 214). For Scott’s comparison of Ellison and King, see Ellison Papers, part I, box 67, folder 7. Ellison Papers, part I, box 67, folder 7. Ibid. Ibid. See Scott, Albert Camus; Forms of Extremity; and Craters of the Spirit. Scott, Craters of the Spirit, 90. Ibid., 131. Ibid. Ibid., 132, 133. Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” 297–98. King also mentions Luther, Jefferson, Bunyan, and others. See, in addition to Augustine’s City of God, Sheldrake, Spiritual City. Scott, Craters of the Spirit, 90. Medine, “Nathan A. Scott, Jr,” 124. See Ellison, “The Art of Fiction,” in Collected Essays. Schleiermacher, On Religion, 23. See, for instance, “Richard Wright’s Blues” and “World and the Jug” (both in Collected Essays), among others. Ellison and Wright’s mutual regard had waned considerably long before Wright’s death in 1960. For a clear and nuanced account of their friendship, see esp. L. P. Jackson, “Birth of the Critic,” 321–55. This need not become a totalizing claim. One could, for instance, turn to Albert Murray, his concern with the blues and “Omni-American” identities, rather than Scott. My larger point is that Scott provides a key for interpreting a powerful trajectory in Ellison’s life post–1960. Ellison Papers, part I, box 67, folder 6. It remains puzzling that the two major commentators on Ellison and Burke (meaning Eddy, Rites of Identity, and Crable, Ellison and Burke) essentially ignore Burke’s Rhetoric of Religion.

Chapter 4. Wrestling Proteus in the New Dispensation 1 See “Letter to Sprague,” in Ellison, “‘American Culture,” 34–49. 2 Warren, What Was?, 1.

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Ibid., 2. See Bradley, Ralph Ellison in Progress. Delbanco, “Political Incorrectness,” 103–8. Hurston, Folklore, Memoirs, 958. Ibid., 956. She suggests, for instance, that Brown represents a “trial-balloon” for abolishing democracy in favor of “Govt by administrative decree” (ibid., 957). Ibid., 958. Carpio and Sollors, “Newly Complicated.” There is resonance here with the protagonist’s grandfather in Invisible Man. He is presumed to be quiet, but on his deathbed reveals himself as “a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction” (Ellison, Invisible Man, 16). Ellison Papers, part I, box 19, folder 3. Ibid. Payne, “‘Whole United States,’” 83. See also Ogletree, All Deliberate Speed, and Patterson, Brown v. Board. Allen, Talking to Strangers, 5. Ibid., 7, 8. Sarah Imhoff offers a strong reminder of why allegedly landmark court cases should not be accorded too much significance in interpreting history. See “The Creation Story.” See Woodward’s introduction and his first chapter, “Of Old Regimes and Reconstructions,” in Strange Career, 11–29. See Paris, Black Leaders. J. H. Cone (Malcolm and Martin) addresses some of the coherences between the two major figures and highlights how they even came to occupy reflexively inverse positions at the times of their respective assassinations. C. W. Cone (Identity Crisis) highlights a number of ideological inconsistencies and points of contention in the establishment of a coherent system of black theology. Bradley dates the origin of the second novel to before Invisible Man’s publication, claiming it was likely begun in 1950 or 1951. He notes that Ellison’s final “save” of revised materials on his computer dates to December 30, 1993 (Ralph Ellison in Progress, 22, 214). See chapters 17 and 18 in Rampersad, Ralph Ellison. Kenneth Warren asks of Invisible Man: “What might it mean to regard Ellison not as a writer for the ages but rather as simply an extraordinary writer for the particular era in which he lived a good portion of his life—the roughly six decades of a legally Jim Crow society?” (So Black and Blue, 2). Haygood, “Invisible Manuscript.” One possible explanation for Ellison’s logorrhea may stem from his 1982 move from composing on a typewriter (or in longhand) to writing on a computer and its impact on his rituals of writing (and rewriting— see Bradley’s first chapter, titled “1982”): “[He] became seduced by the new

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machine, by the way he could move paragraphs up and down the screen, insert new words and delete old ones instantaneously. As he transferred his earlier work to the new medium, the words exploded. The shifting and shaping of his second novel became a kind of mania. . . . He seemed like a man dizzied by technology, a NASA operator in the control room thrilled by the machinery who lost sight of the mission, of the rockets aloft” (ibid.). In Ellison’s case these rockets represent the trajectory of his second novel. In David Remnick’s New Yorker article “Visible Man,” published March 14, 1994—roughly a month before Ellison’s death on April 16—Ellison remarks, “‘Letting go of the book is difficult, because I’m so uncertain. I want it to be of quality’” (qtd. in Graham and Singh, Conversations with Ralph Ellison, 395). Bradley, Ralph Ellison in Progress, 212. Qtd. in ibid., 103. Ibid., 90. Parrish, Genius of America, x. Foley, Wrestling with the Left, 7. Ellison, Juneteenth, 302 Ellison, Three Days, 343. See Breit, “Talk with Ralph Ellison,” BR26. Ellison Papers, part I, box 67, folder 7. Parrish does an excellent job enumerating these commonalities. See chapter 4 in his Genius of America, titled “Invisible Man’s Political Vision: Ellison and King.” In an era when King’s birthday is a bank holiday, it can be difficult for many to imagine how controversial he was, especially before his martyrdom— even among figures like Ellison who were genuinely sympathetic to his broader goals. We have already considered a telling exchange in a letter from Nathan A. Scott Jr. to Ellison, written June 6, 1963—following April and May’s Birmingham campaign and less than a week before the assassination of Medgar Evers on June 12—encapsulates this ambivalent acceptance. Scott writes, I could be far more hopeful than I am about the possibility of a genuinely prophetic movement arising out of the Negro community in this country, a movement capable of projecting a truly radical critique of the whole gamut of American culture—I could be far more hopeful about the possibility of this, if I could see any indication that this new leadership in the “freedom movement” was not only concerned with immediate tactical maneuvers but was also attempting, through the bitter experiences in the South today, in some really deep and authentic way to face the full truth about the human City, in the special way that it’s disclosed by the whole American experiment. But all one hears is the dreary Sunday-School moralism of Luther King. . . . And, as I say, in all the mutations this has undergone by the time it’s mouthed by the Negro college students whom I meet, one’s final impression is of a coarsening of moral sensibility and a blunting of political perception.

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Ellison Papers, part I, box 67, folder 7. Rampersad (Ralph Ellison) depicts Ellison’s attitudes toward King’s action and legacy as generally favorable. Interesting reflections upon the man and his legacy are buried in Ellison’s papers. For instance, on the back of a reply card for contributions to Bella Abzug’s New York City mayoral campaign (which would place the jotting most likely in 1977, the year of Abzug’s candidacy), Ellison’s scrawled, barely legibly, “What would C Scott King do if by a [illegible] of the Christian miracle M. L. K. returned to earth if only in her dream? Grand Inquisitor[.] Why? Consequences. Womens[’] rights[.] Why destroy his myth? He sees outcome of his efforts and martyrdom” (Ellison Papers, part I, box 174, folder 4). Lischer’s Preacher King remains an outstanding resource exploring the rhetorical, performative, and theological antecedents that contributed to King’s powerful public image. King found conflict with the Black Power generation (for King this was frequently the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee [SNCC]) and has more recently been championed by conservative cultural groups such as the Republican Tea Party. A number of sources comment in passing on various connections between Ellison and King—including Laura Saunders’s astute recognition that Ellison, through Hickman, drew upon a common preacherly “heritage” as King (“Black Church,” 40), and Sundquist’s brief acknowledgements of a sustained reading of their common orientations toward race and nation in a civil-religious context (King’s Dream, 87, 89, 202). Washington, Testament of Hope, 291–92. For more on the historical and theological context of the letter, see Branch, Pillar of Fire, 47–49, and, more broadly, the first twelve chapters of that book. See Ellison, “The World and the Jug,” in Collected Essays, 188. Washington, Testament of Hope, 297. Breit, “Talk with Ralph Ellison,” BR 26. Ellison told John Hersey in 1974 that “The [second novel] was conceived before Martin Luther King became such a [religious] figure, but he, too, had to enter the realm of politics, while trying to stay outside it.” Something is off in Ellison’s memory (or in what he wishes to reveal). He claims to have begun work on the second novel in 1958—a good four to six years after the now-accepted range of 1952–54. In addition, by 1958 Ellison knew of King, writing approvingly of his actions in 1955’s Montgomery bus boycott in a September 28, 1958, letter to Albert Murray. See Murray and Callahan, Trading Twelves, 196. Ellison, Juneteenth, 280. Versions of this passage and the next one may also be found in Ellison’s Three Days (418–21, 574–78). The Juneteenth edition emphasizes Lincoln’s connection with Bliss. Parrish, Genius of America, 178. Ellison, Juneteenth, 281. See also Three Days, 419–20, 576. Benston, Speaking for You, 29.

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47 Ellison Papers, part I, box 173, folder 2; italics mine. This quotation comes from a single typewritten page, with handwritten corrections, (mis-)filed among extant papers for Ellison’s talks in the mid-1950s. The fact that Ellison refers to King in both the past and present tenses makes it harder to date, although given its elegiac tone it could come from around the time of King’s death. 48 Ibid. 49 Washington, Testament of Hope, 245–52. 50 Ibid. See the entire chapter “1970” for a nice encapsulation that supports the thrust of this argument. 51 Ibid., 217. 52 Ellison, “And Hickman Arrives,” 5–49, includes the Washington, DC, episodes and thus precludes the possibility that Ellison directly cites the “I Have a Dream” address. Still, this convergence, as it stands, with Ellison foretelling such an iconic scene, reinforces the symbolism and its power even more strongly. This specific treatment may also be found in Three Days, 1004–34. 53 Ellison, Juneteenth, 355 54 Ellison, Three Days, 577. For more on the correspondences between the Civil War and the civil rights movement, see Blight, American Oracle. 55 Richey and Jones, “Civil Religion Debate,” 3–18, elaborate on the emergence of American civil religion and its attendant debates. The historicization of American civil religion undertaken in this chapter does not take into account more recent (and one should add, more sophisticated) treatments of the concept, Manis, for instance, writes of American civil religion as “American exceptionalism in a religious mode,” a “system of mythic meanings, embedded and diffused through their culture, by which Americans interpret the ultimate meaning of the nation” (“Civil Religion,” 91). Note that Manis speaks from a more critical remove than Martin Marty, Robert Bellah, and others do historically. See also Beneke, Beyond Toleration; Cristi, Civil to Political Religion; Gerstle, American Crucible; Hammond, Porterfield, Mosely, and Sarna, “Forum”; Howard-Pittney, African American Jeremiad; and Porterfield, Transformation of American Religion, among others. 56 See Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg, and White, Lincoln’s Greatest Speech. 57 Ellison, Three Days, 242. A similar version may be found in Juneteenth (20–21). I share Bradley’s fascination with what appears to be counterintuitive in Sunraider’s rhetoric in this passage. It is ironic the extent to which Sunraider’s best speech, spoken as a race-baiting white senator, echoes authorally endorsed ideals of democracy, improvisation, and a sense of American character. See Bradley, Ralph Ellison in Progress, 126–27. 58 For instance, in the mid-1950s, he noted, “Lincoln and the problem of the one and the many[.] Love the binder” (Ellison Papers, part I, box 173, folder 2). 59 Charles Long invokes Invisible Man in his own contribution to Richey and Jones, American Civil Religion, “Civil Rights—Civil Religion: Visible People and Invisible Religion.” Long claims that within the myths of American civil religion, African Americans (and other marginalized groups) remain invisible, in no small part,

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as Mircea Eliade suggests, because myth is “the true story” (218). In this way the effacement of “others” from the American mythology signals the “true” nature of American civil religion as a transcendent projection of a national ideal. Long’s solution is the rupture of this mythology of the unum through moments of radical emphasis upon the pluribus that are occasioned by history (“the Nat Turners, Denmark Veseys, David Walkers, Du Boises, Marcus Garveys, Malcolm Xs, and Martin Luther Kings to the present day” [217]). While positing Ellisonian invisibility, Long does not pursue a reading of Ellison’s civil religion. Ellison would disagree with Long, noting that the aggregation of general and particular that American civil religion occasions approximates the establishment of identity among “others” in American culture. Invisibility is not the final consequence of exclusion but the creative method by which African Americans as Long’s “recalcitrant slaves” occasion “black struggle against the American myth” in their daily existences (217). Ellison, Invisible Man, 340–55. Allen goes to some lengths to dispel the connections between the Brotherhood and the Communist Party (Talking to Strangers, esp. 108 and 212n9). On the one hand, her instincts are correct: we shouldn’t assume uncritically that a one-to-one correspondence absolutely pertains between the two. On the other hand, Ellison clearly intends to invoke the Communist Party and to satirize it, or a leftist political organization like it. Ellison, Invisible Man, 498. Emphasis mine. Bradley offers a detailed archival discussion of the links between Rinehart and Bliss (Ralph Ellison in Progress; see esp. 125, though all of chapter 4 [“1952”] proves illuminating). Ellison, Invisible Man, 577. Ellison, Collected Essays, 55–56. Graham and Singh, Conversations with Ralph Ellison, 82. W. E. B. DuBois writes, It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two warring ideals in one dark body. . . . The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife—the longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. . . . He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American. The Souls of Black Folk, 5. Note that DuBois, too, utilizes a sense of NegroAmericanness that we have located earlier in Ellison and King. Graham and Singh, Conversations with Ralph Ellison, 68. Ibid., 397. The emergence of “Black Power” as a slogan was voiced in 1966 by Stokely Carmichael and Willie Ricks (Branch, At Canaan’s Edge, 485–87) in frustration over the younger men’s perceptions of King as accommodationist (218–33). Theologically

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speaking, Cone reintegrates King to Black Power in Black Theology, but does so by highlighting the more radical elements of his message (see esp. 108–9). Perlstein (Nixonland) refers to a period—this period—ranging roughly from the 1964 presidential election (coming as it did in the wake of John F. Kennedy’s assassination a year earlier) to Richard Nixon’s reelection in 1972 as a period that witnessed an “erosion of consensus” in the United States. Marty, One and Many. See also Bellah’s Broken Covenant. Ellison was named a Distinguished Research Associate of Colonial Williamsburg in 1986. It was largely an honorific title, though Ellison did express some hope of participating in ongoing attempts to “integrate” the “experience.” Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, 477. See ibid., 476–78 and 498–99, for a more detailed discussion of Ellison’s involvement with the CWF. Greenspan, Creating Colonial Williamsburg, 13. Another issue was Colonial Williamsburg’s need to generate revenue to remain viable, thus resurrecting the old, old story of conflict between creating a fun or comfortable environment for its customers versus its historical and pedagogical responsibilities as a museum. See ibid., 14–15. Ibid., 15. A 1977 document in Ellison’s files, “Teaching History at Colonial Williamsburg: A Plan of Education” diagnoses the problem, noting that “there was a remarkable unanimity in 1945 concerning the Williamsburg story,” “a consensus.” Writing a formal statement of purpose merely codified an unwritten, but already widely held, sense of purpose.” The document continues, “Today there is no consensus.” See Ellison Papers, part II, box 38, folder 4, p. iv. Note that “consensus” is Pearlstein’s word too. Harden and Gable chart the process (and progress) of this transition in New History. Ellison Papers, part II, box 38, folder 4. Ellison, Collected Essays, 212. In “Society, Morality,” Ellison argues that “universality” is achieved, “if at all . . . by amplifying and giving resonance to a specific complex of experience until . . . that specific part of life speaks metaphorically for the whole” (in Collected Essays, 696). Marty, One and Many, 3. Marty, Modern American Religion, 3:3. Ibid. Allen locates Ellisonian “antagonistic cooperation” in a tradition of Aristotelian reciprocity (Talking to Strangers, esp. 188 and 119–39). Ellison Papers, part I, box 110, folder 3. Ibid. See Harriss, “Let Us Not Falter,” 116–30.

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Chapter 5. Conceived in Sin

1 Ellison also served briefer stints at a number of colleges and universities in the United States and abroad as a lecturer or other contributor to campus organizations and events. 2 See, for instance, Ellison’s extended assessment of teaching at Bard in his letter to Albert Murray on June 27, 1959, in Murray and Callahan, Trading Twelves, 203–5. 3 The arc of Ellison’s teaching career shows definite decline in its quality as Rampersad represents it. Compare his depiction of Ellison’s Bard years (Ralph Ellison, 360–61) with New York University’s (481–83). 4 An interesting place to begin such a consideration is with the “Thirtieth Anniversary Preface” (1982) to Invisible Man. Also, Going to the Territory (1986) carries a similar mood. 5 In an August 17, 1959, letter to Ellison, speaking of his Bard appointment, Albert Murray reports that he is glad to hear that “old Hickman [a protagonist in the second novel] is thriving on it.” See Murray and Callahan, Trading Twelves, 210. 6 See Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, 471. 7 For materials on Ellison’s work at Bard College, see Ellison Papers, part I, box 17. His materials from Chicago may be found in part I, box 19, folder 4. For further evidence that Ellison taught courses in both the American and Russian novel at Bard during the 1959–60 academic year, see Murray and Callahan, Trading Twelves, 205. 8 For materials on Ellison’s work at Rutgers, see Ellison Papers, part I, box 19, folders 1–2. Materials from NYU may be found in part I, boxes 17–18. 9 For instance, in his acceptance of the National Book Award, “Brave Words for a Startling Occasion,” Ellison claims that with the exception of Faulkner, “something vital had gone out of American prose after Mark Twain” (in Collected Essays, 152). No small part of Faulkner’s work is, itself, set in the nineteenth century or its immediate aftermath, and thus reflects on significant themes that occupied the former authors listed above. With regard to Hemingway, recall his remarks on Twain’s Huckleberry Finn as the beginning of American literature (“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn ”) (Green Hills of Africa, 22)—an argument to which Ellison appeals on occasion (see, for instance, “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity,” in Collected Essays, 90). 10 Ellison Papers, part I, box 174, folder 8. 11 Ellison, “Brave Words for a Startling Occasion,” in Collected Essays, 152–53. 12 Ellison, “Art of Fiction,” in Collected Essays, 223. 13 Ellison, “Novel as a Function,” in Collected Essays, 756. Significantly, Ellison understands the novel as an ideal form for American expression. In “Society, Morality,” (in Collected Essays, 694–725), Ellison writes, “If the novel had not existed at the time the United States started becoming conscious of itself as a nation—a process still, fortunately, for ourselves and the world, unachieved—it would have been necessary for Americans to invent it” (701).

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14 Ellison, “Novel as a Function,” in Collected Essays, 757. 15 See the materials from Ellison’s lectures at the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies, August and September 1954. Ellison Papers, part I, box 173, folder 2. Materials from his seminar at Tuskegee in June 1954, contained in the same folder, also refer to “The Sacred Documents.” 16 Ellison Papers, part I, box 174, folder 2. Here we also detect traces of Toni Morrison’s argument in Playing in the Dark. 17 Ellison, “Novel as a Function,” in Collected Essays, 762; Ellison, “Society, Morality,” in Collected Essays, 697. Ellison reprises the phrase with a slight modification on 702: “In the beginning was not only the word, but its contradiction.” 18 Ellison, Invisible Man, 200–201, 217–18. 19 John 1:1 (KJV). 20 Genesis 1:1 (KJV). 21 Ellison, “Perspective of Literature,” in Collected Essays, 778. 22 In an American context original sin’s Calvinist emphasis accompanied the earlier Separatists and Puritans at Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. A letter from Peter Fontaine of Virginia to Moses Fontaine, dated March 30, 1757, reflects the institution of slavery as rooted in the inherently sinful nature of human beings and, especially, slaveholders: “[Purchasing slaves] of course draws us all into the original sin and curse of the country . . . and this is the reason we have no merchants, traders, or artificers of any sort but what become planters in short time” (Rodriguez, Slavery, 551). Jim Wallis’s article “America’s Original Sin: The Legacy of White Racism” offers a sense of the Ellisonian mode, but also refers to an originary set of actions (“The United States of America was established as a white society, founded upon the near genocide of another race and then the enslavement of yet another”) to establish the underdefined role of original sin itself (in Hulteen and Wallis, America’s Original Sin, 8). William Casey King (“Icarus Unbound,” 138–47) argues that the era of the American Revolution and the United States’ founding documents mark a shift in original sin, from justifying the enslavement of human beings to a view more in keeping with Ellison’s—that it represents a fundamental contradiction of human virtue. 23 Jacobs, Original Sin, 8. 24 Delbanco, Puritan Ordeal, 235. 25 See Matthiessen, American Renaissance. 26 Lewis, American Adam, 5. Note that American Adam’s publication date of 1955 places it firmly in Invisible Man’s contemporary orbit. It also coincides nicely with the outset of Ellison’s own teaching career and the point in time where work on his second novel began in earnest. 27 Ibid. 28 Holifield, Theology in America, 364. For an extended overview of this shift, see 341–69. See also Noll, America’s God, 293–329; and Hambrick-Stowe, Charles G. Finney. 29 See H. S. Smith, Changing Conceptions, and Jacobs, Original Sin.

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30 See Elazar, Covenant and Constitutionalism. 31 Noll calls this transition “the Americanization of Calvinism,” distinguishing newer innovations from “the traditionalist positions” (which he develops from the characterizations of Charles Hodge). In Noll’s words (America’s God, 266–67), the Old School held that: (a) Humans possessed a sinful nature that they inherited by Adam. (b) Humans were by nature free, but this was a freedom to do what they chose to do, not a freedom to act contrary to their character as sinners. (c) Thus, the great problem for humanity was its sinful state, from which came individual acts of sin. Theologians and groups (including “Unitarians, Finneyite revivalists, and sometimes New Haven theologians”) repudiated this position, which they deemed outmoded and Noll characterizes as out of tune with “American values.” Accordingly, and again in Noll’s words, (a) Humans did not have a sinful nature inherited from Adam but were influenced by . . . a fallen humanity to become sinners. (b) Humans were by nature free, which meant an ability to choose with liberty against powerful motives or personal character as it had developed. . . . (c) Thus the great problem for humanity was that people chose to sin and thus, because of these choices, were constituted as sinful. 32 Modern describes the management of sin among reformers at New York’s Sing Sing prison upon its opening in 1829 in this way: “They sought to chart and manage the ways, means, and expression of sin within a public setting. The motivation to contain ‘contaminating influences’ within the penitentiary reflected a particular orientation toward sin that drew from the epistemological and political fundaments of evangelical secularism—theistic Common Sense and republicanism. Sin was identifiable. It was containable. It was an opportunity for the individual criminal to convert him- or herself into a ‘republican machine’” (Secularism in Antebellum America, 256–57). Common Sense republicanism, of course, functions as a form of Noll’s American religious unconscious in America’s God. See Sonia Hazard, Dana Wiggins Logan, and Caleb J. D. Maskell’s respective contributions to the “Forum on Antebellum American Protestantism,” 608–24. 33 Elsewhere Noll depicts this migration of the identity of sin by noting more broadly an “ideological evolution.” In ethics this shifted from an Augustinian understanding to one rooted in the thought of Frances Hutcheson, “which considered virtue as a live possibility for all people on the basis of natural endowments from God.” Noll continues, “The movement was away from a conservative definition of human freedom as constrained by human character. . . . The movement was toward a belief . . . in moral choices,” which he exemplifies in Charles Finney, “the nineteenth-century’s best-known revivalist” (Noll, Civil War, 23–24). For a grassroots depiction of this transition in popular culture, see Hatch, Democratization of American Christianity, esp. 41–42 and 170–79. For more on the growing

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willfulness of sin—especially in New England—approaching the mid-nineteenth century, see Conforti, Jonathan Edwards, 122–23. Noll memorably describes this demarcation as “a deeply entrenched intellectual synthesis divided against itself ” (Civil War, 21). H. Stout (Upon the Altar) traces these divisions into theological justifications for the Civil War. Ellison spoke of this narrative in an undated class lecture at New York University: “The story of Ham appears in the Bible as a justification of color discrimination and of slavery, giving it divine sanction. Nor did all northern churches disapprove of slavery” (Ellison Papers, part I, box 174, folder 7). See S. A. Johnson, Myth of Ham. See Berkovich, American Jeremiad, and Murphy, Prodigal Nation. The jeremiad, of course, tends periodically to resurface. This chapter, in a sense, tracks two parallel accounts of its resurfacing. See Applegate, Most Famous Man, and Mullin, Puritan as Yankee, in addition to Hambrick-Stowe, Charles G. Finney, and Holifield, Theology in America. Marty, Righteous Empire, 117. Ibid. Ibid. Lewis, American Adam, 7. Lundin complicates Emerson’s identification with this category in From Nature to Experience. Ibid., 8. There is an interesting relationship between this irony and Alan Nadel’s characterization of roughly this same period—the “golden day” of Lewis Mumford’s The Golden Day (1926)—from which Ellison derives the name of the brothel to which the invisible man takes Norton. Nadel, who does not mention R. W. B. Lewis except obliquely in his introduction (Invisible Criticism, xiii), argues convincingly that a sense of irony qualifies the relationship between Norton and the invisible man—“their symbiotic blindness.” Nadel continues: “This is exactly what Ellison says the literature of the Golden Day [which Mumford claims to last from 1830 to 1860] contains, and what has been lost in the twentieth century. Norton’s illness and blindness are one and the same, both deriving from the fact that he lives in a world which insulates him from the moral consequences of his actions” (101). Lewis, American Adam, 9, 8. Lewis also argues that Ellison’s invisible protagonist (along with Salinger’s Holden Caufield and Bellow’s Augie March) represents a contemporary instance of the American Adam: “The newborn, or self-breeding, or orphaned hero is plunged again and again, for his own good and for ours, into the spurious, disruptive rituals of the active world” (American Adam, 197–98). I make this point in direct response to critics who see Ellison as overly sanguine in the Cold War period. There can be no doubt that Ellison’s outlook may prove more positive than many peers, yet he always maintains the alternative, ironic inflection. Failure to recognize this point stems fashionably from a stubborn,

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57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

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inverse nostalgia that, in the end, proves equally excessive to the straw position it seeks to redress. Though he would (and likely did) recognize racism as working in this way, Reinhold Niebuhr names the atomic bomb and its capacity for world annihilation as the “exception” to American innocence in Irony of American History. See especially Niebuhr’s first chapter, “The Ironic Element in the American Situation” for a good overview. Lewis, American Adam, 8. Ibid., 9. Finstuen, Original Sin, 70. See also Wacker, America’s Pastor, 41, and S. P. Miller, Billy Graham, 47. See Stevens, God-Fearing and Free. Finstuen, Original Sin, 189. See, for instance, Lee, “Ellison’s Invisible Man, 331–44, and Deutsch, “Ralph Waldo Ellison,” 159–78. Ellison explains the connections (and lack thereof) inherent in his own name’s resonance (Ralph Waldo Ellison) with Ralph Waldo Emerson in “Hidden Name and Complex Fate,” Collected Essays, 189–209; see esp. 194–97. Douglass, of course, was not a novelist, per se. However, in his compulsive writing and rewriting of the narrative of his life (he wrote three autobiographies), one recognizes a novelistic impulse—one particularly in keeping with the protonovelistic genres of narrative described by Hunter in Before Novels. Miller, Errand into the Wilderness, 185. Nadel’s treatment of Emerson as an Ellisonian figure, for instance, remains more ambivalent. Again, this distinction—indeed, the very character of Emerson’s Ellisonian depiction—is rooted in the capacity (or lack thereof) successfully to recognize, comprehend, and ultimately to confront evil. Nadel’s reading is impressive, and yet he could extend it beyond a “historical and political engagement with blackness and the problem of evil” and recognize these central issues as fundamentally theological (Invisible Criticism, 116). As Nadel puts it later, “Ellison is reiterating Melville’s rejection of Emerson—that he failed to confront evil” (122). Lewis, American Adam, 198. He offers a similar claim in his early review of Invisible Man. See Lewis, “Eccentric’s Pilgrimage,” 148–49. Melville, Moby-Dick, 18; hereafter cited in the text by page number. Ellison, Invisible Man, 9–10. See, for instance, Herbert, “Moby-Dick” and Calvinism. Melville, Moby-Dick, 144. See Grimes, “Masking,” 508–16. Ellison, Invisible Man, 3. Ibid., 8, 12–14. Singer, Black and Blue. Booth, Rhetoric of Irony, 3–7. For more on Melville and irony, see Seelye, Melville. Ibid., 240–45.

Notes

68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93

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Ibid., 253. Melville, Billy Budd, 298. Ibid., 301; emphasis mine. Ibid., 375. Ellison, Invisible Man, 33, 194. See Bradley’s fourth chapter (“1952”) in Ralph Ellison in Progress. Hardwick, Herman Melville, 116. Melville, Confidence-Man, 17. Ellison, “Art of Fiction,” in Collected Essays, 223. Ellison, Invisible Man, 498. Ibid. Bradley, Ralph Ellison in Progress, 121–44. Ellison, Juneteenth, 286–320. Melville, Billy Budd, 257. Ibid., 257–58. Nadel offers a superlative reading of the Golden Day episode as expressive of Benito Cereno (Invisible Criticism, 104–11). Ellison, Invisible Man, 139. Ibid., 102. Bigsby, “Improvising America, 175. Schleiermacher, On Religion, 23. Booth, Rhetoric of Irony, 253. Ibid., 267. Ibid. Ibid., 268. Hawthorne, English Notebooks, 432. There are two major exceptions to this trend. The first (which, interestingly enough, is now nearly four decades old), is Robert Stepto’s “Literacy and Hibernation,” which considers the relationship between Invisible Man and the generic form of Douglass’s first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), among other exemplary works in African American literature (see “Literacy and Hibernation: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man,” which is chapter 6 in Stepto’s From Behind the Veil [163–94]. John F. Callahan dwells on Douglass in “Chaos, Complexity, and Possibility,” 125–43). The second, Barbara Foley’s Wrestling with the Left, illuminates Douglass’s expanded role in earlier versions of Invisible Man as part of LeRoy’s journal—a subplot deleted from the final, canonical edition (Foley, Wrestling with the Left, esp. 230–34). Nadel and other critics concerned with Ellison’s nineteenth-century American inheritance expend far less time and energy reading Douglass than they do Melville, Emerson, Twain, Hawthorne, and the like. Otherwise, the most thorough assessments of Ellison and Douglass taken together tend to be authored by critics engaged with Ellison as a political figure (see Rice, Politics of the Novel, and Stephens, On Racial Frontiers. The exception here is Lucas Morel’s outstanding edited volume, Raft of Hope,

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98 99 100 101 102 103

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105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116

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which contains only two mentions of Douglass [5, 128]. See also Hardin, “Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man,” 96–120). Blount, “Certain Eloquence,” 684. It is interesting to consider Ellison’s remarks in the context of recent suggestions that scholars and teachers need to move beyond Douglass as an exemplar for studying slavery and, particularly, its narratives—precisely because he was not representative of more common experiences and attributes. Maguire, Conversations with Albert Murray, 2–3. As Ellison puts it, speaking more broadly—and yet, certainly from experience, “Negroes have been educated in schools named in [Douglass’s] honor without being told who he was or for what values he stood” (Ellison, “Great Day Coming”). Blount, “Certain Eloquence,” 682. And in this way we find further cause, perhaps, to deemphasize Emerson. For an interesting rejoinder, see J. Brooks, “From Edwards to Baldwin,” 425–40. Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War, 4–5. Ellison, “Great Day Coming.” Ibid. Ellison claims in his introduction to the 1982 edition of Invisible Man that the sentence dates to the summer of 1945, when he first wrote it longhand in a Vermont barn (Ellison, Invisible Man, vii). Rampersad’s research leads him to believe that the sentence could come from a year earlier, in 1944 (Ralph Ellison, 194–95). Ellison, “Great Day Coming.” It would be interesting to register Ellison’s reactions to the depictions of John Brown and Douglass in James McBride’s recent novel, The Good Lord Bird (2013), which clearly operates in an Ellisonian vein. Douglass, Autobiographies, 662–63. Ellison, Invisible Man, 345, 348–49. Ibid., 473. Ellison, “Great Day Coming.” See Caldwell, Puritan Conversion Narrative, and Hindmarsh, Evangelical Conversion Narrative. Robert Stepto, “Literacy and Hibernation,” in Benston, Speaking for You, 363. Andrews, Oxford Frederick Douglass Reader, 109–10. Recall, too, Nathan Scott’s own Independence Day address in Chicago, 1972. Ibid., 110. Ibid., 116. Ibid., 117. Ibid., 127. See Bivins, Spirits Rejoice!

Conclusion

1 Groebner, Defaced, 65. 2 Ellison, Invisible Man, 581.

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3 This is the critical tradition that Warren chafes against in So Black and Blue. For Warren, readings of Invisible Man that “speak to and for the larger human condition” deflect attention from “the way that ascribed racial status reflects and is refracted through some of the central issues of particular historical moments” (3, 23). 4 H. R. Niebuhr, “Anachronism of Jonathan Edwards,” in his Theology, History, Culture, 131. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 132. 7 Ibid. Niebuhr also makes a plea to understand God as big as Edwards’s God: “What we do not know—or do not yet know—is that God is as holy as Edwards knew him to be.” 8 The Oxford English Dictionary defines “postracial” as “designating a time period, society, etc., in which racism is no longer institutionalized or no longer exists” and lists a 1971 New York Times article as the earliest reference to “postracial,” referring to the emergence of a postracial era in the American South. The timing of this and other listings (1971, 1983, and 1997) as well as their geographical focus on the South mark the postracial as a post–civil rights phenomenon in many respects (see http://www.oed.com). A number of sources traced the evolution of the idea and its significance. In addition to a number of papers of record, see Ambinder, “Exchange on Obama” and “Race Over?”; Crowley, “Post-Racial”; Pinckney, “What He Really Said”; Sullivan, “Goodbye to All That; and Tolson, “Does Obama’s Winning Streak.” 9 An outstanding bibliography of sources on the postracial phenomenon, more broadly, and its specific significance in terms of the Obamas has begun to emerge in the past several years (and, no doubt, shall proliferate over the next decade). See, among others, Ikard and Teasly, Nation of Cowards; Jeter and Pierre, Day Late; Kinder and Dale-Riddle, End of Race?; King and Smith, Still a House Divided; Logan, “At This Defining Moment”; Sugrue, Not Even Past; Tesler and Sears, Obama’s Race; Touré, Who’s Afraid. 10 See Warren, What Was?, and Glaude, “Black Church Is Dead.” 11 Warren’s thesis has found criticism in venues like the Los Angeles Review of Books (see Edwards and Michaels, “African American Literature). For responses to Glaude, see, for instance, the responses cataloged by Religion Dispatches, http:// www.religiondispatches.org, and Columbia University’s roundtable co-sponsored by the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life and the Institute for Research in African American Studies: “Is the Black Church Dead?: A Roundtable on the Future of Black Churches,” available at http://www.youtube.com, which broadened the scope of the debate to venues like the New York Times (http://www. nytimes.com) and National Public Radio (http://www.npr.org). 12 Vaux offers a nice overview of Eastwood’s larger, and complicated, ethical dynamics in Ethical Vision, 1–9.

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13 On revisionist westerns, see Aquila, Sagebrush Trail, and Neibaur, Clint Eastwood Westerns. Ideas and prose in this section come from an unpublished short piece I coauthored with John Howell in 2012, titled “Unconventional Speech,” which I use here with permission. I have sought to credit Howell’s unique ideas and phrases where they may be discerned. In other instances I am grateful to him for his insights and observations that formed not only our collaboration but also the larger reflections it spurred. 14 Lavender, “Empty Chair ‘Lynched.’” 15 Lavender, “Obama Empty Chair.” 16 See Eng, Feeling of Kinship, esp. 1–57. Thanks to John Howell for suggesting this source. 17 Ellison, Invisible Man, 3. 18 We find an interesting illustration here of the religious and theological antecedents of secularism by noting that many understand this clash to remain one between not secularism and Islam, or competing political ideologies, but uniquely and overtly as an impasse and war between Christianity and Islam. For many, and not solely for evangelical Christians, the clash between secular civilization and theocracy invokes an invisible Christianity. 19 The best (and best-known) reading of surveillance in modernity is, of course, Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. 20 See, for instance, Bacevich’s American Empire. For more on the role of FBI surveillance in the management of African American individuals and institutions, see especially part 3 of Sylvester Johnson’s African American Religions. Also see Greenberg, Surveillance in America. 21 The long-standard account of the formation of the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction—Horn’s Invisible Empire—does not remain in favor today, yet the title is clearly significant for our purposes. I should note that I do not wish to invoke a one-to-one correspondence between US military initiatives and the KKK, though levels of secrecy, adjudication outside of legally recognized and sanctioned courts, and certain tendencies toward racial profiling make the comparison more apt than it should be. On Abu Ghraib, see Hersh, “Torture at Abu Ghraib.” Susan Sontag’s reading of the Abu Ghraib revelations argues that “the photographs are us,” and therefore “representative of the fundamental corruptions” at the root of foreign occupation, even as they are usually hidden or invisible. See Sontag, “Torture of Others.” 22 Ellison, Invisible Man, 498. 23 Ibid., 495. 24 Ibid., 495–96. 25 Literature on drones and their broader implications grows daily. Future historians will do very well to trace the evolution of thinking about and attitudes toward drones in essays from the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books since roughly 2005. Other assessments that have proved useful in my own thinking include Benjamin, Drone Warfare, and Boyle, “Costs and Conse-

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27

28 29 30 31 32 33

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quences,” 1–29. For a good point-counterpoint exchange concerning the various efficacies and shortcomings of drones, see Bynum, “Why Drones Work,” 32–43, and Cronin, “Why Drones Fail,” 44–54. Cronin, “Why Drones Fail,” 48. Al Qaeda signifies its invisibility deliberately, relying on ignorance and ambivalence to generate indeterminacy. On September 12, 2001, President George W. Bush claimed, “The American people need to know that we’re facing a different enemy than we have ever faced. This enemy hides in shadows, and has no regard for human life. This is an enemy who preys on innocent and unsuspecting people, then runs for cover. But it won’t be able to run for cover forever. This is an enemy that tries to hide. But it won’t be able to hide forever. This is an enemy that thinks its harbors are safe. But they won’t be safe forever” (http://www.pbs.org/newshour). Early assessments of the Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL) draw similarly on Islam as a blanket denomination for an organization comprised of stunning, inconsistent diversities among those who join. Its effectiveness in executing attacks in Europe derives from the invisibility of the Ellisonian “seen unseen” as a mode of invisibility. Similarly, as in the 2016 attacks on a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in the United States, a willingness to graft actors who pledge allegiance ex post facto yet have no discernible prior affiliations with the organization also points to indeterminacy in how, precisely, one “sees” such an organization and its membership in the grander scheme. According to Boyle, “During his first term, President Obama launched nearly six times as many drone strikes than President Bush did throughout his eight years in office” (“Costs and Consequences,” 2). Harris and Rivera, “Border Control,” 7, 9. In addition to Benjamin’s Drone Warfare, Cronin (“Why Drones Fail”) and others draw on this analogy. See both Bynum (“Why Drones Work”) and Cronin (“Why Drones Fail”). For more on collateral damage, see Nathanson, Terrorism, 247–87. Holmqvist, “Undoing War,” 545. See Sundstrom, Browning of America. Graham and Singh, Conversations with Ralph Ellison, 397.

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Index

Abu Ghraib, 187 Abzug, Bella, 222n34 Adamic myth, 150–51, 153–54, 163–64; in Ellison’s second novel, 165–66 Afghanistan, 189 Africa: as homeland or stolen identity/culture, 13, 31; indigenous African religious traditions, 4, 31–36, 201n49; in Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain, 53 African American literature: and “Negro novel(ist)s,” 5, 7, 8; and protest, 6–7, 8– 9, 10, 70, 110, 112, 114, 128, 156, 197n24, 197n26, 212n4 Al Qaeda, 189, 235n26 Alighieri, Dante, 5, 69 Allen, Danielle, 122–24, 131, 137, 224n60, 225n83; and Reconstitution, 122–24, 127, 131–33, 137 American Academy of Religion (AAR), 105, 218n36 American Adam, The. See Lewis, R. W. B. American civil religion. See civil religion” American Missionary Association, 101 Anselm, 16 antagonistic cooperation (includes 0cooperative antagonism and antagonistically cooperative), 6, 10, 13, 14, 16, 24, 27, 33, 74, 77, 78, 79–80, 91, 115, 129, 136, 139, 140, 141, 142, 154, 156, 177, 193, 196n15 Antinomian, 28, 186 apocalypticism, 41–42, 64–68, 210n83, 211n107 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 204n105 Arminian, 28 Armstrong, Louis, 162

Auden, W. H., 217n19 Augustine (of Hippo), 113, 201n49 Austin, Texas, 184 Azande, 34–35 Babel, Isaac, 18 Babylonian exile, 23 Baker, Houston A., Jr., 213n29 Baldwin, James, 3, 70, 72, 82, 90, 101, 200n43, 211–12n4, 216n5 Bard College, 102, 144–45, 226n2, 226n3, 226n5, 226n7 Barnard College, 49 Barth, Karl, 19–22, 73, 89, 214n72 Beckett, Samuel, 217n22 Beecher, Henry Ward, 152–53, 156 Beecher, Lyman, 152 Bellah, Robert, 133, 137, 140, 223n55 Bellow, Saul, 5, 6, 102, 196–96n12, 229n44 Bible, 15, 18–25, 36, 51, 53–54, 58–59, 62– 65, 67, 82, 113, 116, 129, 147, 148, 152, 176, 201n48, 201n49, 201n51, 201n53, 202n54, 202n60, 208n61, 211n107, 229n35; books referenced, Hebrew Bible: Amos, 112; Exodus, 21–23, 25, 204n81; Genesis, 148; Isaiah, 129; Job, 20, 54–55, 65, 202n61, 208n61; Psalms, 176; books referenced, New Testament: Colossians, 19; 2 Corinthians, 19; Hebrews, 19, 29; John (fourth gospel), 148; Matthew, 87, 129; Revelation, 65–67; Romans, 19–20; 1 Timothy, 19; Geneva translation, 19, 21, 201n53; KJV translation, 18, 19, 21, 87, 201n51, 201–2n53, 202n54 255

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Bigsby, C. W. E., 167 Bill of Rights (US), 146–47 Birmingham, Alabama, 112, 125, 129, 188, 221n34 Birney, Robert C., 139 Black Arts, 11, 115, 136, 141, 156 Black Church, 14, 16, 126, 183, 191, 233n11 Black Metropolis, 42 Black Power, as concept, 123, 131 Black Power movement, 11, 136, 156, 222n36, 224–25n68 Blight, David, 172 Boas, Franz, 49–50, 207n40 Bockie, Simon, 31–36, 204n93 Book of Common Prayer, The, 102 Booth, Wayne, 163, 165, 168–70, 173, 177 Bradley, Adam, 125, 132, 133, 140, 198n37, 223n57, 224n62 Braithwaite, William Stanley, 61 Breaux, Zelia, 121 Bridgeman, Richard, 145 Bronzeville, 42–43, 59 Brooks, Cleanth, 97, 216n5 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 101, 216n17 Brooks, Harry, 162 Brown, John, 173, 232n104 Brown University, 80–81 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 7, 83, 118, 119, 120, 123, 128, 132, 136, 140, 183, 220n8; and Ellison’s second novel, 125–27 “browning” of America, 191 Brueggemann, Walter, 23 Bultmann, Rudolph, 19–21, 189 Bunyan, John, 5, 69, 219n57 Burger, Douglas, 184–85 Burke, Kenneth, 14, 97, 117, 145, 215n3, 219n66 Burris, Andrew, 51 Burroughs, Reverend George, 29 Bushnell, Horace, 152–53

Calvinism, 28, 37, 99, 117, 144–78, 181, 227n22, 228n31 Campbell, Jill, 45, 206n23, 206n24 Campbell, Joseph, 217n19 Camus, Albert, 109, 112–13, 217n22 Carmichael, Stokely, 224n68 Carpio, Glenda R., 207n37, 208n51, 210n93 Carter, J. Kameron, 200n41, 200n48 Centreville, Virginia, 184 Century Club, 217n19 Cervantes, Miguel de, 90, 114 Charlottesville, Virginia, 100, 102 Chicago, Illinois, 11, 42, 55, 56, 85, 100, 101, 102, 105, 106, 110, 111, 131, 188, 198n34, 205n12, 209n67, 218n36, 232n111 Chinitz, David, 107 civil religion, 37, 119, 133–34, 137–41, 145, 147, 172, 175, 223n55, 223–24n59 Civil Rights Act (1964), 131 Civil War (US), 117, 133, 145–46, 153, 166, 173, 223n54, 229n34 Claghorn, S. D., 198n37, 213n23 Cold War, 72, 75–76, 82–83, 138, 141, 155– 56, 196n19, 229n45 Cole, Herman, 217n19 Cole, William G., 106–7 Colonial Williamsburg Foundation (CWF), 120, 137–41, 225n71, 225n73 Columbia University, 100, 104, 233n11 Commentary, 5 Communist Party, 63, 135, 212n8, 224n60 Cone, Cecil Wayne, 220n19 Cone, James H., 67, 201n48, 220n19, 225n68 Conference on Christianity and Literature, 105 Conner, Marc, 63, 211n103 Connor, Bull, 129 Connor, Kimberly Rae, 105 Constitution (US), 132–33, 146–47, 151, 176–77 Crable, Bryan, 219n66

Index

Crane, Stephen, 145 Cromwell, Oliver, 82 Danforth, Samuel, 80–81 Darwinism, 48 Declaration of Independence, 132, 146–47, 175–77 Delbanco, Andrew, 120, 150, 153–54 Detroit, Michigan, 99, 104, 188 Domingo, W. A., 61 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 5, 9, 18–19, 21, 69, 90, 114, 201n52, 214n59 Douglass, Frederick, 149–50, 157, 171–78, 201n48, 230n54, 231–32n93, 232n95, 232n97, 232n104; Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, 174–75; My Bondage and My Freedom, 171; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, 77, 171, 175, 231n93; “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” 175–77 Douglass High School, 121 drone warfare. See drones drones, 37, 182, 187–90, 234–35n25, 235n27 DuBois, W. E. B., 5, 62–63, 136, 211n101, 224n65 Durkheim, Emile, 199–200n40 E Pluribus Unum, 134 Eastwood, Clint, 37, 182–86, 233n12, 234n13 “Eastwooding,” as chair lynching, 184–86 Eatonville, Florida, 50, 51–52, 120 Eddy, Beth, 14, 219n66 Edwards, Jonathan, 158, 160, 180–81, 193, 233n7 Eliade, Mircea, 224n59 Eliot, T. S., 10, 70, 90, 107, 112, 143, 218n43 Ellison, Fanny McConnell, 96, 100, 102, 216n16 Ellison, Ralph: and apocalypse, 41–42, 64–65, 67–68; and Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 120, 137–40, 225n71;

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257

death of, 37, 101–02, 124, 221n24; early days in Harlem, 18, 37–40, 114–15; as humanist, 10, 11, 12, 192, 193; on Zora Neale Hurston, 53, 60; and Martin Luther King Jr., 127–32, 139, 211n4, 217n20, 221–22n34, 222n36, 222n37, 223n47, 224n65, 224n68, on Alain Locke, 60–63; “not a black writer,” 11, 104, 136, 192; and race in mid-century African American literature, 5–9, 88, 106, 179, religious background of, 3, 8, 14–17; as secular novelist, 3; teaching, 117, 121, 134, 144–47, 149, 158, 226n2, 226n3, 227n26 Ellison, Ralph, works of: Fiction: “And Hickman Arrives,” 223n52; Invisible Man, 1, 3–9, 11–12, 14, 19–20, 22–24, 27, 29, 36–37, 41, 56, 60–95, 97, 100, 112, 114, 118, 124, 127, 134–36, 144– 46, 148, 153, 155, 157, 169–60, 163, 165–67, 171–75, 178–79, 181, 184, 187, 192, 196n17, 196n19, 198n37, 200n43, 209n71, 210n78, 211n103, 211n110, 212n9, 214n54, 220n11, 212n9, 214n54, 220n11, 220n20, 220n22, 223n59, 227n26, 229n43, 231n93, 233n3; Juneteeth (1999 edition of second novel), 15, 124, 165, 222n43; Three Days Before the Shooting. . . , 124, 222n43; Non-Fiction: “The Art of Fiction,” 60, 201n52; “An Extravagance of Laughter,” 40, 56; Going to the Territory, 145, 196n15, 226n4; “Great Day Coming [review of Edmund Fuller],” 173; “The Novel as a Function of American Democracy,” 147; “Recent Negro Fiction,” 53; “Richard Wright’s Blues,” 78; Shadow and Act, 60, 135, 145, 210n91; “Society, Morality, and the Novel,” 27; “What Would America Be Like without Blacks?,” 198n37, 213n23; “The World and the Jug,” 70, 196n15

258

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Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 145, 149, 153, 157–58, 171, 201n49, 229n42, 230n53, 230n56, 231n93, 232n99 Eng, David, 185 Enlightenment, 25, 40, 181, 200n40 epistemology, 4, 7, 8, 21, 26–27, 33, 36, 39– 68, 106, 112, 129, 192, 228n32 Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 34, 204n105 Evers, Medgar, 109, 221n34 Faulkner, William, 70, 90, 99, 143, 145, 178, 226n9 Federal Reserve, 100, 102 Fessenden, Tracy, 3, 32, 35, 41 Fielding, Henry, 44–46, 208n23, 208n24; Shamela, 45–46; Tom Jones, 45 Fields, Barbara, 34–36, 204n105 Fields, Karen, 34–36, 204n105 Finney, Charles Grandison, 151–52, 156, 228n31 Fishkin, Shelly Fisher, 11 Foley, Barbara, 125, 196–97n19, 198n28, 201n52, 210n83, 231n93 Foster, George, 174 Foucault, Michel, 234n19 Foundation for the Arts, Religion, and Culture, 101 Franchot, Jenny, 2, 4, 195n9 Frankfurt School, 89 Fuller, Edmund, 173 Garrison, William Lloyd, 173–74 Garvey, Marcus, 224n59 Geertz, Clifford, 14, 133, 200n40 Geller, Stephen, 23 Gerrish, B. A., 203–4n79 Gerstenberger, Erhard S., 23–24, 202n62 Gilkey, Langdon, 73, 88, 91, 214n72 Glaude, Eddie, Jr., 183, 191, 233n11 Godless communism, 142, 155–56 Goodwin, W. A. R., 138 Gorky, Maxim, 21; as “Gorki,” 18 Graham, Billy, 156

Great Migration, 40–43, 47, 58, 62, 82, 205n4, 209n66 Grinnell College, 11 Groebner, Valentin, 179 Gulliver, 5 Gunn, Giles, 99 Haden, Robert, 216n17 Ham, Curse of, 152, 229n35 Harding, Vincent, 101, 217n20 Hardwick, Elizabeth, 164 Harlem, 18, 37, 39–68, 72, 92–93, 115, 165, 172, 195n12, 206n27 Harlem Renaissance, 37, 39–68, 205n8 Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, 173 Harries, Karsten, 26 Harvard University, 63, 97, 215n73 Harvey, Marcus, 204n93 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 145, 149, 153–54, 156, 169–71, 231n93 Hemingway, Ernest, 145, 226n9 Heraclitus, 81 hidden God (Deus absconditis), 26–27, 203n69, 204n81 Holmqvist, Caroline, 190 Homeland Security, Department of, 189 Howard University, 49, 51, 100, 207n38 Howe, Irving, 70, 72, 90, 114, 175, 181, 196n15, 212n6 Howell, John 184–85, 234n13, 234n16 Hughes, Langston, 3, 39, 60, 70, 83, 130, 205n1 Huie, William Bradford, 208n65 Human Stain, The, 1 Hunter, J. Paul, 43, 230n54 Hurston, Zora Neale, 3, 37, 41, 49–55, 58–60, 62, 64–65, 67, 120–22, 206n35, 207n37, 207n38, 207n40, 207n41, 207n49, 207–08n51, 208n55, 208n61, 209n65; Dust Tracks on a Road, 207n40; Jonah’s Gourd Vine, 41, 49–51, 207n41; Letter to The Orlando Sentinel, 120; “Monkey Junk,” 58, 62; Moses,

Index

Man of the Mountain, 53; “Spunk,” 49; Their Eyes Were Watching God, 41, 49, 51–54, 206n35, 208n61 Hutchinson, Anne, 28–30, 204n86 Imhoff, Sarah, 220n17 invisibility, 1, 17–36, 84, 86–87, 91–93, 97, 109, 113, 116, 135, 142, 161–62, 164–65, 170, 172, 178, 179, 181, 183, 184, 186, 187, 188–90, 191, 204n79, 204n93, 224n59, 235n26 Invisible Man, 1, 4, 5; as secular novel, 3; early critics on, 5, 9 invisible theology, 8, 10, 16, 21, 24–25, 31, 35, 36, 38, 98, 116, 126, 149, 154, 170, 179, 180, 181, 182, 184–86, 192–93 Iraq, 187, 189 irony, 1, 7, 12–15, 25, 30, 36, 38, 60, 62, 68, 72, 75–82, 86, 92, 97, 110–13, 125–27, 135, 140, 147, 148, 150, 152–5, 157, 159, 162– 70, 173, 176–78, 181, 186–87, 189–93, 211n110, 216n5, 223n57, 229n43, 229n45, 230n46 Islamic State (“ISIS” or “ISIL”), 190, 235n26 Israel (ancient), 21–23, 189, 201n48 Jackson, Katherine Gauss, 5 Jackson, Lawrence P., 6, 195n11, 205n1, 211n2, 212n9, 215n74 Jacobs, Alan, 148 James, Henry, 18–19, 145 Jennings, Willie James, 41, 200–201n48 Jim Crow, 6–7, 42, 55–56, 81, 83, 86, 118–23, 125, 136, 220n22 Johnson, Bud, 184–85 Johnson, James Weldon, 206n29 Johnson, Lyndon B., 198 Johnson, Robert C., 101 Johnson, Samuel, 41, 43–45, 206n23, 208n61 Johnson, Sylvester, 234n20 Jordan, June, 207–8n51

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259

Joyce, James, 70, 90, 143, 199n40; Ulysses, 199n40 Judaism, 13, 200n48; “emergent” Judaism, 22–23, 202n67 Juneteenth (holiday), 178; for the edition of Ellison’s second novel see Ellison, Ralph Kahn, Louis, 217n19 Kennedy, John F., 225n69 Kennedy, Robert F., 110 kindoki, 33–36, 204n105. See also witchcraft King, Coretta Scott, 221n34 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 110, 111, 112, 120, 123, 125, 127–33, 136, 139, 141, 198n34, 209n67, 211n4, 217n20, 219n48, 221n34, 222n35, 222n36, 222n37, 222n42, 223n47, 224n65, 224–25n68 Kongo, 31–35, 116, 204n93 Ku Klux Klan, 234n21 Lake Forest College, 106 Leigh, David J., 64 Lewis, R. W. B., 60, 101, 151, 153–60, 163, 177; The American Adam, 150–51, 154, 158, 168, 177, 227n26 Lincoln, Abraham, 129–30, 133–34, 178, 234n43 Lincoln Memorial, 129, 132–33 Little Rock, Arkansas, 122, 125 Locke, Alain, 37, 39, 41, 46–53, 55, 59–63, 83, 202n59, 205n1, 206n33, 207n38, 208n55, 210n91. See also New Negro, The Locke, John, 48, 206n33 Long, Charles, 101, 105, 217n20, 218n35, 218–19n44, 223–24n59 Luther, Martin, 4, 26–27, 116, 161, 203n79, 204n81 lynching, 16, 104, 111, 155, 184–86 Malcolm X, 123, 125, 220n19, 224n59 Malraux, André, 90

260

| Index

Marty, Martin, 137, 139–40, 152–54, 157, 223n55 Marx, Karl, 18, 21, 39 Massachusetts Bay Colony, 28–29, 82, 133, 227n22 Mather, Cotton, 28–30, 36 Mayberry, George, 5 McBride, James, 232n104 McCollum, Ruby, 208–09n65 McKeon, Michael, 44 McPherson, James Alan, 130–32, 139 Mead, Margaret, 49 Medine, Carolyn, 113 Melville, Herman, 145, 149, 153–54, 156–72, 177, 230n56, 231n93; Benito Cereno, 157, 159, 166–68; Billy Budd, 157, 159, 163–64, 168; The Confidence-Man, 157, 158–59, 164–66; Moby-Dick, 147, 157, 158–62, 163, 168 Miller, Perry, 37, 71–72, 80–87, 150, 158 Milton, John, 148 Ming, William, 101 Modern, John Lardas, 3, 32, 35, 228n32 Modern Language Association (MLA), 105, 207n36 modernism, 40, 42, 48, 65, 114 modernity, 2–4, 17, 25, 27, 40, 41, 43, 47–48, 59, 67, 83, 99, 161, 179, 200n48, 203n76, 203n79, 234n19 Montaigne, Michel de, 26 Montgomery, Alabama, 125, 222n42 Montgomery, Maxine Lavon, 64 Moses, 20–22, 24, 53 Muhammad, Elijah, 209n66 Mumford, Lewis, 229n43 Murray, Albert, 8, 63, 103, 171–72, 197n22, 197n23, 219n46, 219n64, 222n42, 226n2, 226n5 Myrdal, Gunnar, 202n57 Nadel, Alan, 144, 214n57, 229n43, 230n56, 231n83, 231n93 Nation of Islam, 209n66

National Security Agency (NSA), 187 Native Americans, 25–26, 31, 81 naturalism, literary and religious, 3, 6, 7, 14, 34, 70, 200n43, 215n3 Nazism. See Third Reich Negro literature. See African American literature Negro novel(ist)s. See African American literature New Masses, 18, 21, 115 New Negro, The, 39, 42, 47–51, 55, 60–62, 64, 84, 202n59, 206n27, 206n29, New York City, 18, 39, 42, 50, 55–56, 74, 89, 100, 102, 156, 164, 188, 201n52, 205n11, 222n34 New York Times, 6, 50, 233n8 New York University (NYU), 144, 146–47, 226n3, 226n8, 229n35 New Yorker, The, 187, 221n24 Niebuhr, H. Richard, 180–81, 193, 233n7 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 37, 71–80, 82–83, 89, 94, 100–03, 111, 155–56, 190, 203n76, 211n110, 212n8, 212n9, 212n11, 121n19, 214n72, 230n46 Niebuhr, Ursula, 212n9 Nixon, Richard, 225n69 Noll, Mark, 228n31, 228–29n33, 229n34 Obama, Barack, 37, 142, 182–86, 189, 223n8, 223n9, 235n27 original sin. See sin Page, Inman, 121 particularity, 8–10, 11–14, 16–17, 26–27, 31, 33, 71, 74, 88–89, 91–92, 97, 114–16, 129, 131, 133, 136, 139, 150, 152, 168, 169, 175, 178, 180, 192, 195n12, 199–200n40, 200n41, 203n71, 224n59 Patriot Act, 187 Paul (of Tarsus), 19, 22, 36, 112, 129. For attributed writings see Bible: books referenced, New Testament Payne, Charles M., 122–23

Index

Perlstein, Rick, 198n34, 225n69 Plessy v. Ferguson, 7, 42, 118 pluribus, 22, 24, 32, 36, 112, 114, 136, 139– 42, 202n71, 224n59. See also E Pluribus Unum; unum Poe, Edgar Allan, 1 postracial, 37, 182–85, 191, 233n8, 233n9 preachers, 15, 50, 73, 85, 99, 102, 110, 115, 116, 125–28, 130, 156, 159–60, 165–66, 172, 217n27, 222n35, 222n37 preaching, 15, 99, 100, 116, 125, 128, 130, 156, 165 protest, 7, 110, 128–29, 155, 156, 181; fiction as protest, 6, 8–10, 70, 114, 197n24, 212n4 Protestant(ism), 15, 19, 71–72, 151–53, 179, 202n53, 203n79, 206n27, 228n32 Puritans: American, 4, 28–30, 81, 82, 85, 86, 87, 149, 150, 152, 153, 175, 201n49, 227n22; English, 25 Quarles, Benjamin, 101, 107–8, 109 Raboteau, Albert, 201n49 race: and epistemological “crisis of certainty,” 36, 39–41, 45, 47, 56, 58, 63, 65, 67–68; as political orthodoxy, 4, 54, 98; relationship to religion, 16–17, 20–21; religious and theological dimensions, 16–17; as secular concept, 2–5; as signal problem of American literature, 6, 12. See also Ellison, Ralph; invisible theology; sin racecraft, 31, 34–36, 204n105 Rampersad, Arnold, 11, 31, 60, 124, 137, 138, 205n1, 216n7, 217n19, 222n35, 232n103 Randall, John Herman, 104 Razaf, Andy, 162 Reinhold Niebuhr Award, 101 religion, 12–17; Schleiermacher’s definition, 14, 199–200n40, 200n41; relationship to theology 16–17, 96, 102. See also Ellison, Ralph; race

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261

religion and literature, 19, 101, 195n9, 216n10. See also theology: and literature Remnick, David, 221n24 Republican National Convention (2012), 37, 182–85 Revelation, Book of, 65–66, 189 Revisionist westerns, 234n13 Revolutionary War (American Revolution), 149, 227n22 Rice, Herbert, 172 Richardson, Samuel, 44–46, 206n23; Pamela 44–46, 59, 208n61 Ricks, Willie, 224n68 Rivera, Alex, 189 Robeson, Paul, 83 Rochester, New York, 176–77 Rockefeller, John D., Jr., 138 Rockefeller, John D., III, 138 Roman Catholic Church, 13 Roman Empire, 13 Roth, Philip, 1 Rourke, Constance, 145 Rutgers University, 144, 226n8 Salem Witch Trials, 29, 36 Salinger, J. D., 229n44 Saunders, Laura, 14–16, 126, 200n46, 222n37 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 14, 33, 74, 89, 97–98, 114, 133, 168, 199–200n40, 200n41, 204n101, 215n75 Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr., 141 Schreiner, Susan, 26–27, 203n79 Scott, Charlotte, 100, 102, 107, 216n16 Scott, Leslie, 102 Scott, Nathan A., Jr., 37, 95, 96–117, 118–19, 128, 131–32, 135, 141, 143, 148–49, 155, 157, 177, 211n4, 212n9, 216n5, 216n6, 216n7, 216n8, 216n10, 216n11, 216n16, 216n17, 216n18, 217n19, 218n30, 218n30, 218n33, 218n36, 218n44, 218n46, 219n48, 219n64, 221n34, 232n111;

262

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Scott, Nathan A., Jr. (cont.) Albert Camus, 112; “Black Literature” (in Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing), 97; Craters of the Spirit, 113, “Ramble on a Road Not Taken,” 216n10, 216n18; Rehearsals of Discomposure, 94, 100; The Wild Prayer of Longing, 96, 102, 116,217n27; Works (as editor): The Climate of Faith in Modern Literature (editor), 96; The New Orpheus (editor), 96 secular, 1, 2–4, 8, 10, 18, 19, 20–21, 25, 31–32, 35, 41, 47–48, 65, 67–68, 71–72, 95, 99, 104, 116, 179–80, 184–85, 187, 191–92, 195n9, 215n3 secularism, 4, 32, 185, 191–92, 228n32, 234n18 secularization, 59, 99, 103, 150, 202n59, 206n29, 215n3 Selma, Alabama, 110, 125, 219n48 September 11 attacks, 179, 187 Shakespeare, William, 4, 18, 21, 26–27, 43, 90, 161, 203n79 Sholokhov, Mikhail, 18 sin, 15, 79–80, 99, 111, 144–78, 228n31, 228n32, 228–29n33; original sin, 148– 49, 151–52, 154, 156–58, 170, 175; race and/or slavery as American original sin, 37, 77, 111, 117, 147, 148–49, 150, 153, 159, 166, 175, 177, 227n22 social science, 2, 4, 8, 10, 20, 21, 31, 35, 48, 50, 59, 73, 74, 75, 94, 181, 192, 193, 197n22, 200n40, 202n57, 212n8 Society of Arts, Religion, and Contemporary Culture, 101, 217n19 Sollors, Werner, 207n37, 208n51, 210n93 Sophocles, 90, 114 Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), 110, 127, 131 Southern Illinois University, 11 Soviet Union, 75 Snowden, Edward, 187 Sprague, Morteza, 118, 120, 121, 125

St. James Cathedral (Chicago), 100, 110 Stephens, Gregory, 172 Stepto, Robert, 175, 231n93 Stern, Richard, 101, 216n18 Stout, Jeffrey, 200n43 surveillance, 182, 187, 232n19 Tampa, Florida, 183 Tate, Nahum, 208n61 Taylor, Charles, 3, 32, 34, 35 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 102, 217n28 theology, 20, 83, 88–89, 192, 200–201n48; biblical theology, 22; crisis theology, 73; and culture, 88–90, 218n30; “good” and “bad” theology, 35, 204n107; and history, 72, 74; Israelite, 189; and literature, 37, 72, 87, 95, 102; modern theology, 96, 102; political theology, 36; Protestant, 151; relationship with religion/religious studies, 16–17, 96, 192. See also invisible theology Third Reich, 73, 89 Thoreau, Henry David, 145, 171–72 Tillich, Paul, 14, 37, 71–72, 87–94, 99–100, 103, 214n72, 215n73, 215n74, 215n82, 216n8, 217n19, 218n30 Time (magazine), 99, 103, 198n37, 212n9, 213n23 Tolson, Melvin, 105 Tulsa, Oklahoma, 213n35 Turner, Nat, 224n59 Tuskegee Institute, 8, 39, 62, 85, 121, 144, 145 Twain, Mark, 70, 143, 145, 147, 149, 154, 171, 226n9, 231n93 Tweed, Thomas, 205n4 ultimate concern, 87–90, 215n82 Ulysses. See Joyce, James Ulysses (character), 5, 69, 107 Union Theological Seminary, 89, 100 universal, 9–10, 8, 9–10, 12–14, 16–17, 23– 24, 27, 33, 70–72, 74, 89, 91, 97, 114–15,

Index

129, 133, 139, 150, 168–69, 178, 180, 192, 195n12, 198n28, 199–200n40, 200n41, 203n71 University of Chicago 37, 95, 99–102, 107, 144, 145, 215n73, 216n10, 226n7 University of Michigan, 100, 104 University of Virginia, 37, 107 unum, 22, 24, 32, 36, 112, 114, 136–42,202n71, 224n59. See also E Pluribus Unum; pluribus Vesey, Denmark, 224n59 Vietnam War, 110, 131 Virginia Union University, 100 Voting Rights Act (1965), 122, 131 Walker, David, 224n59 Wall Street Journal, 102 Wallace, Margaret, 50–51 Waller, Fats, 162, 218n44 “war on terror,” 37, 182, 187, 189–90 Warren, Kenneth, 69–72, 119, 122, 124, 183, 191, 197n21, 209n70, 220n22, 233n3 Washington, Booker T., 61–63, 72, 85, 210n93, 214n54 Washington, DC, 50, 125, 223n52; March on Washington, 125, 129, 132 Watt, Ian, 44 Weisenfeld, Judith, 205n12 Wells, H. G., 201n49 Wesley, Charles, 102, 217n27 Wesley, John, 102, 217n27 Wesleyan, 151 West, Hollie, 171 Western canon, 5, 8, 69, 95, 145

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whiteness, 6, 14, 23–24, 27, 56–57, 120, 147– 48, 161–62, 184, 197n26 Whitman, Walt, 24, 145 WikiLeaks, 187 Williamsburg, Virginia,138–40, 225n76. See also Colonial Williamsburg Foundation (CWF) Winthrop, John, 29, 82, 85–87, 133 Wire, The, 197n21 witchcraft 34, 35 Wolfe, Jesse, 212n9 Wood, Ralph, 105 Woodward, C. Vann, 122, 125 World War I, 20, 42, 47, 73, 83, 86 World War II, 42, 73, 83, 137, 138, 154 Wright, John, 103, 216n7 Wright, Richard, 3, 6, 7, 18, 37, 49, 51, 52, 59, 60, 69–70, 72, 78, 82–83, 90, 98, 103, 114–15, 196n13, 198n18, 207–8n51, 208n55, 209n73, 214n59; Nathan Scott as foil for, 115; “Between Laughter and Tears,” 207n49; Black Boy, 78; “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” 51, 52; Ellison and, 7, 70, 72, 90, 115, 219n63; “The Man Who Lived Underground,” 214n59; Native Son, 7, 56, 58, 69–70, 90, 196n13, 196n18; Uncle Tom’s Children, 49, 51, 55 Yahweh, 21–24, 202n64 Yale Divinity School, 101 Yeats, William Butler, 110 Yu, Anthony C., 104, 218n33 Ziolkowski, Theodore, 3, 32, 35

About the Author

M. Cooper Harriss is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University.

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