DoVeanna Fulton
Associate Professor
English
Department
Arizona State University
Eleven years after his death and fifty-three years after the publication of his only novel, Ralph Ellison and Invisible Man continue to provoke debate and raise questions surrounding African American identity and race in America. “Ralph Ellison: An American Journey” explores the complexity of the man, his work, and their place in American letters. Ellison is praised for creating a reflective, intellectual character that learns to identify his subject position within the larger American socio-political landscape as opposed to the socially determined, stunted intellect of Bigger Thomas, the main character in Native Son by Richard Wright, Ellison’s literary mentor. Drawing on still photographs and filmed interviews with Ellison and his intimates as well as commentary by literary scholars and writers and archival footage representing African America, the documentary works double time to contextualize the writer’s life within significant moments of African American history and highlight the novel’s major themes with dramatization of key scenes. Although the vignettes fall short in conveying the richness of Ellison’s text—for example, the Battle Royal scene excludes the white female figure that highlights the conflated racial and sexual politics Black men experience—these scenes are the first ever authorized dramatic performances of novel on film, and therefore, distinguish this documentary. The interviews, still photos and video recordings bring to life the Black community in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Ellison’s youth, the improvisational energy and vitality of jazz music that inspired his art and life, his curricular and extra-curricular activities at Tuskegee Institute, and the literary and political scenes in New York during the post- Harlem Renaissance era.
Born Ralph Waldo Ellison, the writer’s parents laid a portentous foundation in name and example: his father named young Ellison after his favorite author, saying, “That boy’s going to be a poet;” and on her Sundays free from her job as a domestic servant, his mother took him for walks through wealthy white neighborhoods and brought home discarded Vanity Fair magazines so that he would understand that his horizons were not limited by race or economics. His parents’ aspirations and actions parallel the theory and practice embodied both by Ellison and in his great American novel.
Invisible Man. Jack-the-Bear. Thinker-tinker. The protagonist. In the absence of a formal name, these are the phrases readers of Invisible Man use to refer to the central character. They signify the dehumanization and invisibility Blacks experience as a result of American racism and are monikers for the every-Black-man experience. While each of these markers has its functions—the objectivity of “the protagonist,” the uncertainty and expectation of the hibernating “Jack-the-Bear,” the (non)imagery and titular “Invisible Man”—the “thinker-tinker” more aptly imparts ontology and experience as thought and lived by character as well as author. The practice of living the life of a Black man, with the attendant experiences of humiliation and frustration, is no less powerful than the theory found in the character’s intellectual considerations of those experiences as evidence of racism’s ability to render Blacks invisible, and thus inhuman. Similarly, the theory found in Ellison’s writings—fiction and non-fiction—examining the promise and failure of American democracy is equal to Ellison’s practice of authorship that produced the brilliance of Invisible Man and numerous short stories and essays and the deferment of the long awaited but never fully realized second novel, Juneteenth. As an American thinker-tinker Ellison contemplated the great paradox of race in America and forever altered how we understand American individualism.
Suggested Reading
Ellison, Ralph. Shadow and Act. NY: Vintage, 1995.
-----. Flying Home and Other Stories. NY: Random House, 1996.
-----. Juneteenth: A Novel. NY: Vintage, 2000.
Grandt, Jurgen. Kinds Of Blue: The Jazz Aesthetic In African American Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005.
O’Meally, Robert G. The Craft of Ralph Ellison. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980.
Warren, Kenneth W. So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
American Masters "Ralph Ellison: An American Journey"airs Wednesday, August 24 at 9 p.m. on Channel 8.
