“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 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 Ellison. 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 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.
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 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
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 resistance.”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 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.
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 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 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.
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 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 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.
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 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 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 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 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 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.
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 self-proclaimed American novelist and critic wielding African American vernacular to express, represent, contribute, and respond to longer Western aesthetic predicaments and legacies—might have received and processed them (whether consciously or not).
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 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.
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 factions 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 science, 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.
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 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 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 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 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.
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, 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 mysterious—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 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.
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. 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 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.
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 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 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 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. Evans-Pritchard (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.
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 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.
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 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 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.