ESC: English Studies in Canada

IDEOLOGY, THEORY, AND ELLISON’S INVISIBLE MAN TREVOR McNEELY Brandon University U NIVERSALLY lauded, from the date of its appearance, as a major liter­ ary achievement, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man still presents in many ways an enigmatic face to its American readers and critics. Problems of struc­ ture with the book were noted in its first reviews, and various other areas of difficulty have also from time to time been pointed out.1 Indeed, one need only stand back momentarily from the explosive impact that its most memorable moments will undoubtedly always have to recognize formal and generic problems with the book that make satisfactory critical assessment of it an elusive goal. The tendency of most of our critics to omit extended discussion of these problems may be due either to their being dazzled by that impact, or to traditional criticism’s lacking the vocabulary to resolve the subtle issues these problems at their deepest levels present.2 An unresolved question at the very outset, for example, is whether the term novel is legitimately even applied to such a work, echoing as it does in its tone the protest literature of the 1930s and peopled by characters of the same stamp — as ideologically unidimensional and constrained as Steinbeck’s Okies and their oppressors in The Grapes of Wrath. Particularly challenging to the “novelizing” critics of this work, if a novel is supposed to depict a “real” world, must be the main character’s lacking any name, a device that may indeed owe something to Dostoevsky, as Ellison himself has noted, but closer probably to Everyman, in the blatancy of the allegorizing implications that it forces on both book and reader. An obvious problematic effect of this central device is of course to erase the line that normally separates “character” from “author” : the only name to which the “I” in this book can be attached then becomes the one on the cover, Ralph Ellison, a disturbing, if only subliminally so, awareness for the reader, whose expectations of a clear separation between the realms of fact and fiction are subtly undermined. Ambiguity in these and other areas is further reinforced by the sermon­ like framing of the tale: with Prologue, Epilogue, and the narrative voice throughout all set in the character/author’s “invisible” present — this is the “boomerang” effect, closing the ends of the narrative circle, of which the Prologue speaks — nothing that can be called “development” anywhere in the text, in either character or story, can finally be traced. English Stu d ie s in C a n a d a , 22, 2, June 1996 In suggesting that traditional criticism may have been handicapped by the lack of an adequate vocabulary to explore the deepest formal and even thematic levels in Ellison, an implied corollary is that recent critical the­ ory perhaps makes up that lack. As much an aid as vocabulary in this regard, of course, may be the consciousness-raising effect post-structuralist theory has also had on contemporary criticism, such seminal theorists as Althusser, Barthes, Foucault, and Bakhtin having tuned us in to the ide­ ological implications in all uses of language to an extent that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. Indeed it is hardly an exaggeration to say that in some academic quarters ideology is now accepted as the control­ ling force of thought itself, we humans its slaves, pawns on an intellectual chessboard whose dimensions and rules of play are ideology’s creation. A point not always noted, at the same time, particularly in the USA, in this broadened conception of the place of ideology in culture and thought, is the extent to which the phenomenon has Marxist roots. It is a significant point, and worth a brief digression. As background, few, I suspect, would quarrel today with a philosophic distinction made between the two main lines of post-structuralist critical theory, a pure nihilist/existentialist branch, exem­ plified in Derrida and his adherents, and a Marxist/anarchist revolutionary political branch whose principal beacon light for several years has probably been Foucault. It would be this latter to which both the radical feminist and the various anti-imperialist movements in criticism principally...