Ralph Ellison

From Philosopedia

Ellison, Ralph Waldo (1 March 1913 - 16 April 1994)

Ellison’s semi-autobiographical account of a young black intellectual’s search for identity, Invisible Man (1952), won him the National Book Award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a seat in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a position as the Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at New York University (1970 to 1980). The position netted him one of the largest salaries received by any English teacher at the time.

On the one hand, Invisible Man has been seen by some as showing a character that is only seen as an incarnation of his race, a person battered about by blacks as well as whites who impose their visions of racial identity on him, a person whom people physically but not humanistically see.

One critic, Edward Rothstein (The New York Times, 16 May 1999), saw Ellison as portraying and defending American ideals, as seeking some way “to reveal the nature of America’s racial trauma without being either political or prescriptive,” not as an “Uncle Tom” or careerist who produced “obsequious bleatings of white appeasement.”

His second novel was to have been the story of a “little boy of indefinite race who looks white and who, through a series of circumstances, comes to be reared by [a] Negro minister,” a person who eventually grew up to become a virulently racist United States senator. In 1967, however, a fire at his summer house burned the 360 pages he had finished - he had no duplicate copy. Ellison understandably was said to have been devastated.

However, in a 2007 biography Arnold Rampersad questions and debunks that assertion. In Ralph Ellison, A Biography, Rampersad describes his rise to fame followed by a descent that led him to be aloof from black reality and black artists. He was unable to produce a second novel as good as the first, he began to drink too much, he lacked young black disciples, students, and friends. "His inability to create an art that held a clean mirror up to 'Negro' life as blacks actually led it, especially at or near his own social level, was disabling him as a writer," Rampersad wrote. He was an idealistic artist betrayed by fame, and he was suspicious of other black strivers, knowing first-hand what he had done to exploit mentors like Richard Wright and Langston Hughes.

Juneteenth, a 2,000-page manuscript that Ellison left at the time of his death, was edited by his literary executor, John Callahan. A New Yorker excerpt (12 April 1999) told how the novel’s narrative

• alternates between the old minister’s lyrical recounting of the events of the past and the senator’s feverish, dreamlike reminiscences. . . . [T]he senator remembers his life in the late nineteen-twenties, the period between his black childhood and his white adulthood, during which he travelled through the Southwest, posing as a professional filmmaker, and had a brief but intense affair with an Oklahoma girl.

Below, a dreamlike scene in which the former minister is on a picnic date with “a teasing brown,” a light-skinned girl:

A bee danced by as on a thread. I felt a suspension of time. Standing still, my eyes in the tree of blossoms, I let it move through me. Eden, I thought, Eden is a lie that never was. And Adam? His name was Snake. And Eve’s? An aphrodisiac best served with raw fresh oysters on the half shell with a good white wine. The spirit’s there. . . . She arose she rose she rose up from the waves.

He died of pancreatic cancer and is buried in New York City's Washington Heights neighborhood. Ellison never did go clearly on record as to his belief or non-belief in any of the organized religions.