In his 1944 review of Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944), Ralph Ellison initiated a lifelong polemic against the sociology of race.1 He took issue with Myrdal’s claim that black culture and psychology can be viewed as pathological by-products of white racism. “Can a people,” he asked, “live and develop for over three hundred years simply by reacting? Are American Negroes simply the creation of white men, or have they at least helped to create themselves out of what they found around them? Men have made a way of life in caves and upon cliffs; why cannot Negroes have made a life upon the horns of the white man’s dilemma?” (CE, 339, italics in original). The review established the framework for much of Ellison’s subsequent aesthetic. Echoing New York intellectuals such as Lionel Trilling, Ellison rejected simplistic forms of environmental determinism.2 In particular, he criticized the impact of sociology on naturalistic representations of race—including those found in the work of his friend and mentor Richard Wright. He instead developed an aesthetic that focused on the complexities of psychology and culture that transcend environmental causes. As he explained in a 1965 interview, responding to recent sociological surveys of the black ghetto, “there is something else in Harlem, something subjective, willful and complexly and compellingly human. It is that ‘something else’ that challenges the sociologists who ignore it, and the society which would deny its existence. It is that ‘something else’ which makes for our strength, endurance and promise. This is the proper subject for the Negro American writer” (CE, 731). This antinaturalist aesthetic was one that Ellison realized in Invisible Man (1952),3 probably the most successful novel of the immediate post–World War II period.
However, Ellison’s relationship to the sociology of race was more complex than his explicit arguments against it would suggest. As Kenneth Warren points out, Ellison sometimes reiterated the central claims of the damage theorists whose work he derided; to do otherwise would be to echo white segregationists who claimed that blacks were best off in their place. “Ellison,” Warren writes, “was seeking a dynamic, even dialectical account of the Negro that would acknowledge the history of racial repression but not characterize black people as merely prisoners of a repressive environment.”4 Andrew Hoberek similarly highlights the extent to which Ellison echoed a version of postwar sociology concerned with issues of class rather than with issues of race—the white-collar sociology of figures such as David Riesman, C. Wright Mills, and William H. Whyte Jr. “Ellison’s adoption of the organization-man narrative,” he argues, “allows him to transcend the ‘sociological vision of society’… even as it itself ironically reproduces another sociological vision.”5 More fundamentally, as I argue in this chapter, Ellison’s work was congruent with changes taking place within the sociology of race itself. During the 1940s and 1950s, as we have seen, consensus sociologists such as Talcott Parsons were eschewing simplistic forms of social determinism in order to focus on questions of psychology and culture. The same shift was occurring in the sociology of race largely due to the influence of An American Dilemma, the text that prompted Ellison’s critique of white sociology. Although Myrdal’s study offered a conventionally pathological portrait of black Americans, it also pushed sociologists to consider the cultural context and psychological intricacies of racial prejudice. The race problem, Myrdal argued, was the result of a struggle “in the heart of the American”6 between two conflicting value systems: the egalitarian American Creed and various racist prejudices. Myrdal believed that through the efforts of intellectuals such as himself, Americans would become aware of this conflict. In particular, he found hope in the expansion of U.S. higher education, which would disseminate universalist belief systems such as the American Creed to a broader audience. An American Dilemma thus helped establish the postwar liberal consensus on racial politics; the race problem was the product of prejudice, to be solved through educational programs aimed at reconditioning the racist psyche rather than through economic programs aimed at redistributing wealth to the black community. Far from eschewing this model of U.S. race relations, Ellison refashioned it into his central trope of black invisibility, which became the basis for his novel Invisible Man. He also adopted Myrdal’s therapeutic solution; the black novelist’s task, he argued, was to diagnose the collective neurosis generated by the clash between ideals and prejudice within the American psyche.
Both An American Dilemma and Invisible Man thus exemplify the turn toward cultural education that, I have argued, was central to the evolving intellectual politics and literary aesthetics of the 1940s and 1950s. Myrdal and Ellison envisaged sociologists and black writers, respectively, as members of a new-class saving remnant capable of refashioning the American psyche. However, both texts also exemplify the strains generated by this effort to extend new-class fantasy to American race relations. Myrdal and Ellison, in spite of their focus on educational solutions to the race problem, could not help but reflect the ways in which racial prejudices are shaped by a complex interplay between cultural attitudes and economic interests. In particular, this tension between Arnoldian cultural politics and economic insight is central to Invisible Man. The novel traces its protagonist’s transformation from a would-be black professional into an autonomous, humanistic intellectual capable of giving voice to the American Creed. However, the novel also explores the cynical opportunism bred by black professionals’ economic dependence on various kinds of white patronage, an opportunism that mirrors that of the new class as a whole. Ellison’s emphasis on the pervasiveness of this attitude calls into question the possibility that education projects of the kind that he envisages in his nonfiction can find much purchase within the expanded, educated middle class. Invisible Man thus undermines one of the central premises of new-class fantasy—the idea that humanistic cultural capital, which supposedly gives rise to non-pecuniary value systems such as the American Creed, can transcend the new class’s own economic interests.
INVISIBILITY AND THE AMERICAN DILEMMA
Ellison’s review of An American Dilemma marked a crucial turning point in his intellectual development. In Michel Fabre’s terms, the text registered a shift in his basic interests “away from the narrowly political and economic toward the cultural.”7 Before writing the essay, Ellison was known in New York circles as Richard Wright’s protégé and chief exegete. In this role, Ellison defended the sociological aesthetic that culminated in books such as Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945).8 Too many critics, he remarked in a review of the latter book, complained that Wright “omitted the development of his own sensibility” and presented “too little of what they consider attractive in Negro life.” “Whatever else the environment contained,” Ellison noted, “it had as little chance of prevailing against the overwhelming weight of the child’s unpleasant experiences as Beethoven’s quartets would have of destroying the stench of a Nazi prison” (CE, 133). As Warren notes, Ellison thus anticipated some of the more extreme claims of later damage theorists such as Stanley Elkins.9 Over the course of the late 1940s and 1950s, Ellison gradually distanced himself from this position; instead, he attacked Wright using almost the same terms that he had earlier attributed to his critics. Ellison found it “disturbing,” he explained in 1961, “that Bigger Thomas had none of the finer qualities of Richard Wright, none of the imagination, none of the sense of poetry, none of the gaiety” (CE, 74).
Ellison partially adumbrated this new position in his Myrdal review, which simultaneously looked forward to his mature aesthetic and backward to his 1930s commitments. On the one hand, the text laid out the antinaturalistic perspective that would dominate Ellison’s later work; it criticized in Myrdal many of the qualities that Ellison admired in texts such as Black Boy. Myrdal’s determinist view of black psychology, he complained, “demonstrates how many Negro personality traits, said to be ‘innate,’ are socially conditioned, even to types of Negro laughter and vocal intonation” (CE, 339). Echoing Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, Ellison instead called for black writers to create “the uncreated consciousness of their race” through a critical appropriation of black culture: “Much of black culture might be negative, but there is also much of great value and richness, which, because it has been secreted by living and has made their lives more meaningful, Negroes will not willingly disregard” (CE, 340). On the other hand, as Barbara Foley notes, the essay was largely contiguous with Ellison’s earlier proletarian journalism.10 Indeed, parts of it echo contemporaneous Communist polemics against Myrdal’s work, such as Herbert Aptheker’s The Negro People in America (1946).11 Hence, if the essay argued that An American Dilemma was too deterministic in relation to black culture, it also argued that the text was not determinist enough in relation to white prejudice. In thinking of racism as a psychological conflict in the minds of whites, Myrdal neglected “the economic motivation of anti-Negro prejudice which to an increasing number of Negro intellectuals correctly analyzes their situation” (CE, 337). What was needed was not just a change in white racist attitudes but rather, first and foremost, a “change of the basis of society” (CE, 340).
This contradictory stance was in part a response to the complications of An American Dilemma itself—a massive, one-thousand-page document put together over several years by a team of social scientists working under the direction of Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal.12 The text’s main tendency was to challenge Marxist and liberal positions on U.S. racism, which diagnosed the causes of race discrimination as essentially economic.13 For Myrdal, in contrast, the race problem was the result of a complex interplay between economic and psychological factors; the underlying mechanism of U.S. racism was a “principle of dynamic causation,” whereby “white prejudice and discrimination keep the Negro low in standards of living, health, education, manners and morals. This, in its turn, gives support to white prejudice. White prejudice and Negro standards thus mutually ‘cause’ one another.”14 Overlooking this dynamic interaction, Myrdal argued, led Marxists and liberals to develop oversimplified solutions to the race problem. Marxists believed that African Americans’ best ally was the white working class, thus downplaying the irrational prejudices that are sometimes most intense among members of this class. Liberals similarly believed that racism would be overcome through the gradual improvement of economic conditions among African Americans. Myrdal, in contrast, argued that any solution to the race problem must intervene at all points in racism’s vicious cycle, at once ameliorating conditions for blacks and challenging whites’ attitudes. At key points, An American Dilemma thus offered a useful corrective to the economic determinism of left-liberal social thought, which paralleled the dialectical understanding of the relationship between superstructure and base articulated by New York intellectuals such as William Phillips and Philip Rahv. This correction dovetailed with Ellison’s own efforts to develop a more complex account of U.S. race relations. “In our culture,” he argued in his review, “the problem of the irrational, that blind spot in our knowledge of society where Marx cries out for Freud and Freud for Marx, but where approaching, both grow wary and shout insults lest they actually meet, has taken the form of the Negro problem” (CE, 335).
However, although Myrdal tried to synthesize the economic and the psychopathological, this synthesis often fell apart in his specific accounts of black culture and white racism. Hence, in the study’s penultimate chapter, Myrdal described black culture as “distorted development, or a pathological condition, of the general American culture.” All of the seemingly distinctive aspects of black psychology and culture, from the “emotionalism in the Negro church” to the “provincialism of his political speculation,” were symptoms of social pathologies generated by the pressure of living in a racist society.15 This deterministic account of black social pathology was contiguous with older trends in sociology and influenced the further development of “damage sociology”—the strand of sociology that Ellison criticized throughout his career.16 Conversely, when Myrdal discussed white prejudice, he tended to downplay the environmental and economic causes of discrimination, instead emphasizing the priority of culture. Myrdal outlined his central thesis as follows:
The American Negro problem is a problem in the heart of the American. It is there that the interracial tension has its focus. It is there that the decisive struggle goes on.… The “American Dilemma,” referred to in the title of this book, is the ever-raging conflict between, on the one hand, the valuations preserved on the general plane which we shall call the “American Creed,” where the American thinks, talks, and acts under the influence of high national and Christian precepts, and, on the other hand, the valuations of specific planes of individual and group living, where personal and local interest, economic, social, and sexual jealousies; considerations of community prestige and conformity; group prejudices against particular persons or types of people; and all sorts of miscellaneous wants, impulses, and habits dominate his outlook.17
Myrdal conceived of the race problem in terms of two competing value systems: the Enlightenment ideals embodied in national rhetoric and the various prejudices rooted in local cultures. This conflict in turn gives rise to a psychopathological conflict within the mind of the individual racist between an egalitarian conscience and a racist id. According to Myrdal, most Americans try to repress this conflict. They do so through the use of rationalizations, stereotypes, and false beliefs; they distort the facts about black experience in order to assuage the American Creed. Through repetition, these false representations eventually become part of social reality itself. Nevertheless, Myrdal argued, at some level even the most racist southern supremacist ultimately believes in the antiracist assumptions of the American Creed.
This theory led Myrdal, in spite of his emphasis on dynamic causality, to privilege educational over structural solutions to the U.S. race problem. Myrdal was more sympathetic to social engineering than were most U.S. sociologists; in the 1930s, he was one of the legislative architects of the Swedish welfare state—the most ambitious European social democracy. In An American Dilemma, however, most of his policy recommendations were gradualist; he suggested enfranchising African Americans in stages and slowly desegregating the education system, starting with the graduate schools—both processes already under way in the 1940s. Instead, he cultivated a new-class fantasy of sociologists as national therapists, whose task would be to appeal to the moral authority of the American Creed and tear apart the spurious rationalizations that justify discrimination.18 He more broadly understood sociologists as engaged in a world-historical process whereby different value systems come into conversation with each other and whittle away the prejudices inherent in each. Value systems, Myrdal argued, come in two varieties. The American Creed is a higher value system, one that has become general, encompassing the nation’s many different cultural groups. Its ideals have taken on the character of the Kantian categorical imperative; they have become universalizable. American prejudices, in contrast, are lower valuations—a chaotic set of local demands rooted in the economic and biological needs of individuals and groups. The conflict between these two types of valuations is a world historical process that will culminate in the universal dissemination of liberal humanism: “The valuations on the higher and more general planes—referring to all human beings and not to specific small groups—are regularly invoked by one party or the other, simply because they are held in common among all groups in society, and also because of the supreme prestige they are traditionally awarded. By this democratic process of open discussion there is started a tendency which constantly forces a larger and larger part of the valuation sphere into conscious attention. More is made conscious than any single group would on his own initiative find it advantageous to bring forward at a particular moment.”19 Myrdal thus prefigured Gouldner’s account of the culture of critical discourse as giving rise to a perfected welfare state. He viewed his own project as a contribution to this process.
It is this model of white prejudice and educational reform that Ellison criticized as insufficiently materialistic in his 1944 review. However, at the same time he also absorbed Myrdal’s American Dilemma thesis into his evolving aesthetic, transforming it into his central trope of black invisibility. He began his review as follows: “In our society it is not unusual for a Negro to experience a sensation that he does not exist in the real world at all. He seems, rather, to exist in the nightmarish fantasy of the white American mind as a phantom that the white mind seeks unceasingly, by means both crude and subtle, to lay to rest. Myrdal proves this no idle Negro fantasy. He locates the Negro problem ‘in the heart of the [white] American… the conflict between his moral valuations on various levels of consciousness and generality’” (CE, 328). This paragraph gets recycled in Invisible Man as the narrator’s opening lament about his social condition: “you often doubt if you really exist. You wonder whether you aren’t simply a phantom in other people’s minds. Say, a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to destroy” (IM, 4). This idea established the basis for Ellison’s version of novelistic modernism. In contrast to Richard Wright, he wanted to avoid naturalistic representations of the damaging effects of social environment on the black psyche. Echoing Trilling’s “Reality in America,” Ellison argued elsewhere that this conception figures social reality as an inert, physical reality; in Native Son, “environment is all—and interestingly enough, environment conceived solely in terms of the physical, the non-conscious” (CE, 162). Ellison instead focused on the ways in which black social reality is invisible to whites because of the mediating presence of racist stereotypes; like other postwar writers, he sought to create a higher realism of the cultural apparatus. As he explained, “I would have to approach racial stereotypes as a given fact of the social process and proceed, while gambling with the reader’s capacity for fictional truth, to reveal the human complexity which stereotypes are intended to conceal” (CE, 488). The presence of this idea in the Myrdal essay complicates Ellison’s later account of the genesis of Invisible Man, which he presented as a reaction against sociological representations of American blacks. He arrived at the idea for the novel in 1945 in a moment of inspiration that he described as follows: “one afternoon, when my mind was still bent on its nutty wanderings, my fingers took over and typed what was to become the very first sentence of the present novel, ‘ I am an invisible man’” (CE, 354). He conceived of the phrase as “a play on words inspired by the then popular sociological formulation which held that black Americans saw dark days because of their ‘high visibility’” (CE 355). In fact, Ellison substituted one sociological account of racism for another—a Myrdalian account of racial invisibility for a more traditional account of high visibility.
In essays published after his review of An American Dilemma, Ellison thus echoed Myrdal in his efforts to develop the theory of fiction that would pave the way for Invisible Man. The black stereotype, Ellison argued in “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity” (1946), is a “key figure in a magic rite by which the white American seeks to resolve the dilemma arising between his democratic beliefs and certain antidemocratic practices, between his acceptance of the sacred democratic belief that all men are created equal and his treatment of every tenth man as though he were not” (CE, 85).20 According to Ellison, these stereotypes became central to U.S. fiction during the Jim Crow era, when Americans were trying to forget the failures of Reconstruction. Before this, major nineteenth-century fictions such as Moby Dick and Huckleberry Finn confronted the conflict between American ideals and practical prejudices in a more open, painful fashion: the “conception of the Negro as a symbol of man,” drawn with a full sense of human complexity, “was organic to nineteenth-century fiction” (CE, 88). The Negro stereotype in modern fiction, in contrast, signals American writers’ repression of this project; white Americans’ inability to resolve the conflict between the American Creed and racist practices compels them “to force the Negro down into the deeper levels of his consciousness, into the inner world, where reason and madness mingle with hope and memory and endlessly give birth to nightmare and dream; down into the province of the psychiatrist and artist, from whence spring the lunatic’s fancy and the work of art” (CE, 149). Like all such acts of repression, this one undermines that which it is supposed to protect—a social order ostensibly based on the ideals encoded in the Bill of Rights and the U.S. Constitution. The end result of this erosion of American ideals is the cynical fiction of U.S. modernists such as Ernest Hemingway, whose work “conditions the reader to accept the less-worthy values of society” and “to justify and absolve our sins of social irresponsibility” (CE, 95).
In contrast, Ellison envisaged black novelists as cultural educators and national therapists who would penetrate the black stereotypes that undermine U.S. democratic ideals. Echoing Myrdal’s account of the ongoing conversation between value systems, Ellison described American identity as a work in progress, one that was coming into being through a continual conflict between different races and cultures. “Far from being socially undesirable,” he argued, “this struggle between Americans as to what the American is to be is part of the democratic process through which the nation works to achieve itself. Out of this conflict the ideal American character—a type truly great enough to possess the greatness of the land, a delicately poised unity of divergencies—is slowly being born” (CE, 83). The privileged terrain of this democratic conflict is the novel itself: “if the ideal of achieving a true political equality eludes us in reality, there is still available that fictional vision of an ideal democracy in which the actual combines with the ideal and gives us representations of a state of things in which the highly placed and the lowly, the black and the white, the Northerner and the Southerner, the native born and the immigrant combine to tell us of transcendent truths and possibilities” (CE, 487, italics in original). Ellison thus conceived of black fiction as a crucible within which a new, post–Jim Crow national culture could be fashioned. In his 1953 acceptance speech for the National Book Award, he described Invisible Man as an “attempt to return to the mood of personal and moral responsibility for democracy which typified the best of our nineteenth-century fiction” (CE, 151). The novel’s unnamed hero narrates the story from within “a building strictly rented to whites, in a section of the basement that was shut off and forgotten during the nineteenth century” (IM, 6). Squatting within the dark recesses of the house of white American fiction, the invisible man brings to light the American Dilemma buried in the work of his contemporaries.
Ellison’s conflict with Myrdal had little to do with the former’s emphasis on the autonomy of culture versus the latter’s economic determinism; both prioritized questions of culture in their respective discussions of race. Indeed, Ellison’s understanding of culture tended to be more complexly materialist than Myrdal’s and other postwar sociologists’. Ellison sometimes took well-meaning liberals to task for their belief that racism could be eliminated through government-funded education programs or, more forcefully, through legal intervention. Commenting on Howard Zinn’s The Southern Mystique (1964),21 Ellison emphasized the intractability of white southern folkways: “while the myths and mysteries that form the Southern mystique are irrational and even primitive, they are nevertheless real, even as works of the imagination are ‘real.’ Like all mysteries and their attendant myths, they imply… a rite” (IM, 575–76, italics in original). Cultures, for Ellison, are materially grounded in customs and rituals; they cannot be reduced to bodiless values and ideas. At times, this position seemed to pull Ellison uncomfortably close to the work of nineteenth-century sociologist William Graham Sumner. For Sumner, whom Myrdal criticized throughout An American Dilemma, folkways are largely unconscious, rooted in local practices and customs, ritualistically performed rather than theoretically defined. Sumner thus established the theoretical foundation for both right- and left-wing versions of identity politics, including the Agrarian politics embraced by the early New Critics; he emphasized the extent to which cultural differences determine a people’s entire way of being. “Folkways,” Sumner wrote, “are not creations of human purpose and wit. They are like products of natural forces which men unconsciously set in operation, or they are like the instinctive ways of animals.”22
Warren, as we have seen, argues that Ellison evaded the deeply conservative implications of this Sumnerian position by strategically invoking the sociological determinism he elsewhere condemned. However, most of the determinist moments that Warren cites come from early essays influenced by Wright, such as Ellison’s review of Black Boy. Ellison more frequently called for the cultivation of new rituals and imaginative works that would materially embody and transform white and black experiences without reproducing the shallow interpretation of culture characteristic of postwar sociology. This is the point of Ellison’s early short story “In a Strange Country” (1944), about a black sailor beaten by white servicemen while on shore leave in Wales. Rescued by a group of Welshmen, the protagonist attends a concert in which they ritualistically enact their national unity, singing songs that bridge the performers’ class divisions. “When we sing, we are Welshmen,” one of them claims, explaining how union officials, mine owners, and miners can create harmony together. Later, when the Welshmen launch into a performance of the American national anthem, the protagonist viscerally experiences the sense of unity they describe, in ways that reveal his disturbing coidentity with the white soldiers who earlier attacked him. “It was as though,” he reflects, “he had been pushed into the horrible foreboding country of dreams and they were enticing him into some unwilled and degrading act, from which only his failure to remember the words would save him.”23
Because of this emphasis on the ritual enactment of value systems, Ellison’s teleological account of the development of American identity was much more dialectical than Myrdal’s. For Myrdal, modernization is a distillation process; local cultures interact with each other in order to give rise to a single, culturally transcendent value system. This value system subsumes and eliminates all of the local cultural variations that give rise to it. Hence, both white southern culture and African American culture are pathological distortions of the more general American culture and are slated for eventual assimilation. For Ellison, in contrast, the local variations persist. As the nation “works to achieve itself,” however, these variations acquire what might be called an aesthetic unity, which is perhaps why it can be glimpsed only in performances such as the black novel and the Welshmen’s song. Indeed, Ellison’s account of American identity as a “delicately poised unity of divergencies” (CE, 83) echoes the most prominent aesthetic theory available to him in the late 1940s—the New Critical definition of poetry. The poem, Cleanth Brooks argued in The Well-Wrought Urn (1947), “unites the like with the unlike. It does not unite them, however, by the simple process of allowing one connotation to cancel out another nor does it reduce the contradictory attitudes to harmony by a process of subtraction. The unity is not a unity of the sort to be achieved by the reduction and simplification appropriate to algebraic formula. It is a positive unity, not a negative; it represents not a residue but an achieved harmony.”24 The chief aesthetic sin for the New Critics is the heresy of paraphrase—the substitution of a prose approximation for the poem itself. Myrdal’s model of national development seems, from Ellison’s perspective, like a heresy of this sort, a prosaic paraphrase of the evolving national culture that Ellison hoped to delineate in his fiction.
PATHOLOGIES OF THE BLACK PROFESSIONAL
However, the novel that Ellison completed in his lifetime complicates this account of fiction as a textual enactment of an ideal democracy. Invisible Man concludes by invoking Myrdal’s American Creed. While hiding in his underground cellar, the invisible man affirms “the principle on which the country was built,” which Americans “had dreamed into being out of the chaos and darkness of the feudal past, and which they had violated and compromised to the point of absurdity even in their own corrupt minds” (IM, 574). This affirmation coincides with the invisible man’s transformation into a Trillingesque saving remnant who reveals the complexity and difficulty of American social experience. Through his written narrative, he explores the “beautiful absurdity of their American identity and mine” (IM, 559), which the novel’s Marxists, black nationalists, and other ideologues neglect. This patriotic affirmation of American pluralism, which adumbrates the major themes of Ellison’s nonfiction, has since divided the novel’s critics; in particular, literary intellectuals associated with the Black Arts movement in the 1960s defined their version of identity politics against Ellison’s universalism.25 What is most striking about Invisible Man’s affirmative conclusion, however, is its almost total disconnection from the narrative that precedes it.26 The conclusion evokes the humanist idealism that Ellison attributes to nineteenth-century American literature in “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity.” The rest of the narrative, however, explores the hard-boiled cynicism that he associates with Jim Crow–era writers such as Hemingway. This cynicism is summed up by the grandfather’s deathbed advice that haunts the invisible man throughout the novel: “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” (IM, 16). Until the last pages, the invisible man interprets this advice as a description of the trickster strategies that enable African Americans to survive in a racist society. As the mad veteran from the Golden Day counsels him, “Play the game, but play it your own way—part of the time at least. Play the game, but raise the ante, my boy. Learn how it operates, learn how you operate” (IM, 153–54, italics in original). As soon becomes apparent, this cynical ethos pervades all levels of U.S. society. Hence, in a disorienting moment, the invisible man reflects that Rinehart, a Harlem confidence man who seemingly embodies the grandfather’s advice, is little different from the respectable white bigots whom the invisible man remembers from his youth: “Hadn’t I grown up around gambler-politicians, bootlegger-judges and sheriffs who were burglars; yes, and Klansmen who were preachers and members of humanitarian societies?” (IM, 510).
This disconnect between the American Creed and the everyday texture of U.S. social life presents an obvious contrast with Gunnar Myrdal, for whom the creed was firmly grounded in U.S. culture and institutions. In particular, for Myrdal, the continued survival of the American Creed was guaranteed by the fact that it appealed to a particular class stratum: the most educated segments of the professional middle class. Differences in adherence to the American Creed, he argued, “can be observed today within our own society among the different social layers with varying degrees of education and communication with the larger society, stretching all the way from the tradition-bound, inarticulate, quasi-folk societies in backward regions to the intellectuals of the cultural centers.”27 One of the best solutions to the race problem was to produce more educated citizens; relations between African Americans and southern police officers, for instance, could be improved if all officers attended college.28 Myrdal thus prefigured some of the central ideas of later new-class theorists such as Alvin Gouldner; he imagined that educationally acquired, humanistic cultural capital would allow the new class to break free of the particularistic interests that dominate other classes in U.S. society and fuel racist prejudice. Hence, one of the reasons why Myrdal offered so few policy recommendations is that he believed that structural transformations were already taking place in U.S. society that would bring about the changes he desired. He lauded the “growing intellectualization” of America—the emergence within it of an expanding knowledge elite open to universalist value systems.29
For Ellison, in contrast, the educated middle class was the social stratum that most fully embodied the cynical opportunism that threatened to erode the American Creed. Invisible Man is, above all else, a middle-class bildungsroman that traces the education and disillusionment of a would-be black professional and that highlights the persistence of particularistic interests within new-class institutions. This dimension of the text is one that Hoberek helpfully illuminates in his reading of the novel’s connection to the “organization man” literature of the 1940s and 1950s. Invisible Man, he argues, “shares the plot of such popular treatments of white-collar angst as The Fountain-head and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit: a man, anxious to find creative and fulfilling mental labor, instead encounters mystified, conformist organizations that threaten to rob him of his individuality, agency, and autonomy.”30 In particular, this connection becomes obvious through the novel’s emphasis on role playing, which echoes accounts of white-collar alienation in texts such as David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd and C. Wright Mills’s White Collar. In Mills’s terms, “When white-collar people get jobs, they sell not only their time and energy but their personalities as well. They sell by the week or month their smiles and their kindly gestures.”31 As Hoberek points out, Invisible Man’s distinctiveness vis-à-vis other organization man narratives lies in its focus on the black bourgeoisie, a class stratum typically relegated to the lowest reaches of the white-collar world or excluded from it altogether. However, this exceptionality in fact transforms Invisible Man into a cannier novel about the dynamics of white-collar work than other organization man narratives from the same period. The black bourgeoisie, because of its marginal position, embodies anxieties about white-collar proletarianization that are invisible to the white middle class. As E. Franklin Frazier argued in Black Bourgeoisie (1955, France; 1957, United States), the first major sociological study of the black middle class, this stratum’s efforts to differentiate itself from other African American classes was typically hampered by its lack of economic capital. This lack gave rise to various kinds of make-believe as members of the black middle class tried to cultivate “status without substance” in an exaggerated parody of white middle-class behavior.32
In Invisible Man, this economic marginality short-circuits the cultural education project that Ellison outlines in his nonfiction. As represented in the novel, the black professional is a heteronomous being, forced into a psychologically crippling dependence on white patronage and incapable of embodying higher value systems such as the American Creed. Indeed, in spite of Ellison’s stated desire to transcend the economic determinism of naturalists such as Richard Wright, his novel relentlessly portrays the ways in which middle-class black psychology is shaped by economic factors. As we have seen, new-class fantasy was often facilitated by the illusion that educationally acquired capital transcends economic capital; this illusion was at the center of Myrdal’s cautiously optimistic assessment of the future of U.S. race relations. Invisible Man, in contrast, continually punctures this illusion through its focus on the special circumstances of black professionals; the novel is filled with images of educated blacks scrambling for white-owned resources. Moreover, as Hoberek notes, this desperate scramble parallels that of the white middle class. Hence, when the invisible man visits Wall Street after his arrival in Harlem, he identifies with the black couriers chained to briefcases full of their bosses’ money. Ellison equates the couriers with black chain-gang prisoners and thus with the race-specific legacy of slavery. However, the couriers’ lack of agency is also emblematic of Wall Street as a whole; the streets are “full of hurrying people who walked as though they had been wound up and were directed by some unseen control” (IM, 164).
This heteronomy first becomes evident in the battle royal that initiates the invisible man’s professional education. In this section, the white businessmen of the invisible man’s small southern town invite him to deliver a speech on social responsibility in exchange for a briefcase and a scholarship to Dr. Bledsoe’s college—the tokens of new-class identity that he carries with him throughout the novel. Prior to his speech, however, he must participate in a ritualistic, blindfolded boxing match that reinforces the cultural presuppositions of the southern caste system. This ritual pits the invisible man against the lower-class blacks whom he hopes to rise above. “I felt superior to them in my way,” the invisible man reflects, “and I didn’t like the manner in which we were all crowded together into the servant’s elevator” (IM, 18). There are nine of these youth, which literally makes the invisible man a member of W. E. B. Du Bois’s talented tenth. As the whites make clear, this class distinction is their own creation; the purpose of the invisible man’s participation in the battle is to drive home the fact that his hoped-for professional status depends on their patronage. “We mean to do right by you,” one of them explains, “but you’ve got to know your place at all times” (IM, 31). The battle royal is replete with reminders of the invisible man’s economic dependence, such as the electrocuted fake coins that he collects after the fight.
As a result of this dependence, the professional status that the invisible man seeks has little to do with the egalitarian national conscience that Myrdal associates with it in An American Dilemma. Indeed, the cost of the invisible man’s entry into this class is his renunciation of the claim for “social equality” that he accidentally sputters out in blood during his speech. This blood drips onto his new briefcase, forming “a shape like an undiscovered continent” (IM, 32)—one of many parodic symbols of the American Creed that Ellison associates with the invisible man’s career. Instead, the professional mindset that the invisible man cultivates is more like a racialized version of the tyrannical, Freudian superego. Freud, in describing the superego in The Ego and the Id (1923), explains that “its relation to the ego is not exhausted by the precept: ‘You ought to be like this (like your father).’ It also comprises the prohibition: ‘You may not be like this (like your father)—that is, you may not do all that he does; some things are his prerogative.”33 Black professional identity, for Ellison, embodies the same double bind. Black professionals must try to emulate the whites who fund them but must never become too much like them. They must yearn for the promise of social equality latent in their professional identity but realize that this promise will never be fulfilled. As a result, the would-be black professional is left in the position of the invisible man at the end of the chapter, when a dream reveals the true import of the day’s events: “Keep This Nigger-Boy Running” (IM, 33). As in the case of Freud’s scenario, at the center of this double bind is a sexual taboo; the black professional must not intermarry with whites and interfere with their monopoly over inherited capital and positions of power. The whites reinforce this taboo through their incorporation of the white stripper into the battle royal ritual. The American flag tattooed above her forbidden vagina functions as another parodic symbol of the creed, evoking both desire and terror.
Dr. Bledsoe’s college—Ellison’s portrait of Tuskegee Institute—similarly promotes a distorted model of professional development due to its dependence on white economic capital. Not coincidentally, the invisible man’s account of his experiences at the college focuses on events surrounding one of the annual ceremonies, “the black rite of Horatio Alger” (IM, 111), that the school enacts for the white multimillionaires who fund its operations. This ceremony is an institutionalized version of the ritual that the invisible man performs for his small-town benefactors. The blind orator, Homer T. Barbee, offers an extended paean to Booker T. Washington’s philosophy of responsibility, while Dr. Bledsoe adroitly negotiates the double bind imposed by the white philanthropists. This mastery of the double bind is evident in Dr. Bledsoe’s professional dress, which at once highlights his aspiration to imitate the trustees and the ineffaceable differences that remain between them: “Like some of the guests, he wore striped trousers and a swallow-tail coat with black-braided lapels topped by a rich ascot tie. It was his regular dress for such occasions, yet for all its elegance, he managed to make himself look humble. Somehow, his trousers inevitably bagged at the knees and the coat slouched in the shoulders” (IM, 114). This ritualistic self-degradation highlights the heteronomy of Bledsoe’s college, which was typical of segregated black colleges in the Jim Crow era. Although these colleges were beginning to change in the 1920s and 1930s, they still held on to vestiges of the missionary model of education instituted in the post–Civil War years, with its emphasis on moral reform and black humility. White trustees controlled what could and could not be taught and established Puritan codes of conduct more rigid than those found at most white colleges.34 As Ellison puts it, Bledsoe’s philanthropists are “trustees of consciousness” (IM, 89), charged with the moral discipline of the black race.35 Black colleges in the Jim Crow era could therefore be called “lumpen professional institutions”; they lacked the relative autonomy from the marketplace that supposedly characterizes higher education and bolsters its claims to embody enlightened value systems such as the American Creed.
Dr. Bledsoe’s college instead breeds two different responses to the professional double bind institutionalized on its campus. The first is the cynical pragmatism exemplified by Dr. Bledsoe. As becomes clear in his interview with the invisible man, Bledsoe himself has no illusions about his pseudo-professional status. “I had to be strong and purposeful to get where I am,” he explains; “I had to wait and plan and lick around.… Yes, I had to act the nigger!” (IM, 143). Bledsoe thus emerges as the first of several African Americans in the novel who adopt the role-playing strategies proposed by the invisible man’s grandfather. The second response is madness, which itself envelops a cynical awareness of the double bind. Hence, the road from the college leads directly to the black asylum where many of its graduates eventually find their home. As the invisible man reflects of the inmates, “many of the men had been doctors, lawyers, teachers, Civil Service workers.… They were supposed to be members of the professions toward which at various times I vaguely aspired myself” (IM, 74). The black veteran whom the invisible man encounters in the Golden Day exemplifies the fate they have suffered. Trained as a brain surgeon and then conscripted into a war ostensibly fought in defense of America’s egalitarian principles, he is nearly lynched when he tries to practice in America. He has been driven insane by the same set of injunctions that Dr. Bledsoe masters: “You must become a white professional. / You cannot become a white professional.”
These twin options, opportunism and madness, pursue the invisible man throughout the narrative. In particular, the long section devoted to the Brotherhood, the novel’s version of the Communist Party, recapitulates most of the institutional tensions of the invisible man’s college experience. As a revolutionary organization devoted to eradicating the various forms of dispossession experienced by blacks and other Americans, the Brotherhood seems to embody the American Creed excluded from conventional middle-class institutions. Hence, the promotional material that the invisible man designs for the Brotherhood—a subway poster depicting the interracial “Rainbow of America’s future” (IM, 385)—seems like a banalized version of Ellison’s pluralist model of U.S. identity. Moreover, as Hoberek notes, the invisible man at first conceives of the Brotherhood as an ideal professional workplace; it grants him an “anomalously managerial position”36 at odds with the menial work performed by most of the novel’s African American characters. The point of the section, however, is to show that the Brotherhood’s black members remain lumpen professionals, dependent on white economic capital and denied the capacity for autonomous decision making. The anonymous letter that the invisible man receives reminds him of the differences that remain between him and the white members: “Keep working for the people but remember that you are one of us and do not forget if you get too big they will cut you down. You are from the South and you know that this is a white man’s world” (IM, 383, italics in original). As in the case of the college chapters, Ellison explores both madness and opportunism as responses to this institutional subordination. Tod Clifton, the Brotherhood’s youth leader, chooses madness and futile protest; the invisible man tries to become a revolutionary incarnation of Dr. Bledsoe.
Given this pervasive double bind, the problem with sociology is not so much the fact that it reduces African Americans to their social environment. Ellison’s novel itself offers a complex sociological analysis of black professionals, one that prefigures many of the insights of Frazier’s Black Bourgeoisie. Rather, the problem with sociology is that it serves as an institutional reminder that blacks are typically the observed objects rather than the observing subjects of professional discourse. As Roderick Ferguson highlights in his reading of the college chapters of Invisible Man, Ellison originally incorporated a section in which a gay instructor reiterates Ellison’s critique of Robert Park and Ernest Burgess’s Introduction to the Science of Sociology (1921), which infamously characterized the Negro as the “lady among the races.”37 Ellison first encountered this textbook during his education at Tuskegee and subsequently commented on it in his Myrdal review. The presence of this textbook in the syllabus of a black college, Ferguson argues, reinforces the institution’s traditional, missionary purpose, which consists of both “locating African Americans outside of [white] heteropatriarchal norms”38 and reinforcing those norms more solidly among the student population. In the finished novel, Ellison displaces this reminder of African Americans’ status as pathologized objects of social scientific knowledge onto the figure of Jim Trueblood—the black sharecropper who impregnates his own daughter. After his disgrace, white professionals develop a fascination with Trueblood’s crime and transform him into a case study in sociological damage theory. “Some of ’em was big white folks, too,” Trueblood explains, “from the big school way cross the State. Asked me lots ’bout what I thought ’bout things and ’bout my folks and the kids, and wrote it all down in a book” (IM, 53). Trueblood, eager for white patronage, participates in their construction of him as a damaged victim of his environment, emphasizing the social and economic conditions that contributed to his crime: “You see, suh, it was cold and us didn’t have much fire. Nothin’ but wood, no coal. I tried to git help but wouldn’t nobody help us and I couldn’t find no work or nothin’. It was so cold all of us had to sleep together; me, the ole lady and the gal. That’s how it started, suh” (IM, 53). When the invisible man reaches the nadir of his own professional development—after he is injured in his proletarian job at the paint factory—he suffers a similar fate. Strapped inside a glass-and-metal box in the hospital factory, he too becomes an object of professional scrutiny; the doctors view the invisible man as a pathological “case” that “has been developing for some three hundred years” (IM, 237). One of Ellison’s chief complaints against the Brotherhood is that it similarly imposes this social scientific perspective on the black population it hopes to incorporate into its political program. Hence, Brotherhood theoreticians discuss Harlem’s black population as the product of broad historical forces. “The old ones,” Brother Jack explains, “they’re agrarian types, you know. Being ground up by industrial conditions” (IM, 290). Echoing Trilling’s conflation of Stalinism with U.S. social science, the invisible man reflects that such exercises in dialectical materialism make him feel as if he is trapped once again in the hospital machine (IM, 505).
Hence, in order to sustain the new-class fantasy that resonates throughout Invisible Man’s epilogue, Ellison must separate his intellectual hero from the institutions that have fashioned him—a separation dramatized by the invisible man’s retreat into his underground room at the novel’s end. Like many young black intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s, the invisible man evades the middle-class double bind by becoming a bohemian hipster, attuned to the black vernacular culture excluded from his college education.39 This attempt to differentiate black artists and intellectuals from black bourgeois society is a recurring theme in African American literature. It originated in the Harlem Renaissance, when younger black writers rebelled against the genteel Negritude promoted by NAACP intellectuals such as Du Bois. Publications such as the journal Fire!—edited by Wallace Thurman and featuring contributions by Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes—challenged bourgeois sensibilities by focusing on lower-class material deemed injurious to the black community’s public image: slang, rural folklore, representations of black sexuality and violence, and so on.40 Other writers, such as Nella Larsen, precisely anatomized the pathologies of the black bourgeoisie; Larsen’s Quicksand (1928),41 in particular, prefigures Ellison’s college chapters in its depiction of Tuskegee as “Naxos,” an institution oriented toward repressing its students’ individual ambitions and perpetuating a garbled version of Anglo-Saxon values. In Ellison’s case, he pushes this opposition to an exaggerated extreme. The invisible man’s underground room represents his complete disconnection from the white economic patronage that generates the cynical pragmatism of successful black professionals such as Dr. Bledsoe. In this room, the invisible man still performs intellectual labor—the writerly work that produces the narrative that we read. However, this work now depends on theft rather than on patronage; he lights his workspace with electricity stolen from Monopolated Light and Power. This newfound autonomy, the novel suggests, allows the invisible man to give voice to the democratic idealism and aesthetic sensibility blocked by his previous entrapment within new-class institutions.
This transformation contrasts with Ellison’s own development during the 1940s and 1950s. Whereas many black artists in this period were excluded from institutionalized forms of patronage, Ellison was not. Indeed, as Arnold Rampersad documents in his recent biography, the publication of Invisible Man transformed Ellison into the first black institutional writer who earned a generous living from various universities and foundations, in spite of the fact that he never completed his second novel.42 More fundamental, it is not clear in Invisible Man whether independent black artists can indeed separate themselves from the cynical ethos that affects the black bourgeoisie. Instead, all of the artists that we encounter in the novel are popular entertainers who, like Dr. Bledsoe, are not averse to “acting the nigger” (IM, 143) in order to sustain themselves. The best example of this tendency is Jim Trueblood. In Houston Baker’s famous reading of the Trueblood episode, Trueblood emerges as a figure for the commercial black artist who transforms his expressive folk culture into a commodity for white consumption: “What the farmer is ultimately merchandizing,” Baker notes, “is an image of himself that is itself a product.”43 This account of black artistic compromise also extends to the figure whom the invisible man associates with his own artistic agency: Louis Armstrong. As described by the invisible man, Armstrong’s music gives expression to the many-in-one identity that Ellison ascribes to the American novel. His performance embodies Ellison’s dialectical aesthetic; he refuses to throw “old Bad Air out, because it would have broken up the music and the dance, when it was the good music that came from the bell of old Bad Air’s horn that counted” (IM, 581). This aesthetic transforms Armstrong’s music into a nationalistic ritual that incorporates the entirety of U.S. national experience—evoked by the multilayered vision that the invisible man achieves while listening to “So Black and Blue.” However, through his well-known public persona as a commercial artist, Armstrong also exemplifies the trickster strategies first articulated by the invisible man’s grandfather: that of grinning one’s audience to death and destruction by self-consciously performing a minstrel act. In terms of the novel’s logic, the group that implements Ellison’s therapeutic project is potentially compromised by the same dependence on white patronage that elsewhere erodes the American Creed. If Myrdal, in other words, too easily identifies U.S. idealism with the experiences of a particular class stratum—the educated new class#8212;then Ellison locates it nowhere. The American Creed can be uttered only in an imaginary space, impossibly isolated from society.
Midway through the novel, in a scene that inaugurates the invisible man’s transformation into a political activist within the Brotherhood, he encounters an elderly black couple being evicted from their apartment. Echoing the antinaturalist turn first adumbrated in Ellison’s Myrdal review, the invisible man interprets their eviction in cultural terms, finding a parallel between their material dispossession and his own detachment from his racial heritage: “it was as though I myself was being dispossessed of some painful yet precious thing which I could not bear to lose; something confounding, like a rotted tooth that one would rather suffer indefinitely than endure the short, violent eruption of pain that would mark its removal” (IM, 273). What Invisible Man documents, however, are the psychological effects of a much more prosaic dispossession affecting black professionals and the new class as a whole. Because of this intense perception of middle-class dispossession, Ellison’s novel at once reinforces and undercuts the new-class fantasy that lay at the center of the civil rights era and that was inaugurated by An American Dilemma: the idea that writers and other intellectuals could reshape American race relations through a national project of cultural education. Echoing Ellison’s nonfiction, the novel imagines the black artist as an inventor of new rites and rituals that can synthesize black and white experiences in order to give voice to egalitarian principles at odds with the prevalent materialism of American social life. As such, the novel reiterates an Arnoldian theme that pervades the work of post–World War II literary intellectuals: the idea that artists cultivate forms of cultural capital that negate the instrumental rationality associated with technical expertise and economic wealth. At the same time, through its anatomization of black intellectuals’ dependence on white economic capital, the novel calls this cultural idealism into question.