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Books by Ralph Ellison
Invisible Man: A Novel
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The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison /
Juneteenth: A Novel /
Shadow and Act /
Flying Home and Others Stories
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Going to The Territory /
Trading Twelves; The Selected Letters of Ralph
Ellison and Albert Murray
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A Brother Betrayed
Review
by T.E. Cassidy
You meet the hero of this novel in his
underground home. Then you go back to whence he came. He is the
offspring of a Southern college for Negroes. He has left there,
though he loved it, because he took Mr. Norton, a benevolent
white trustee, around the region and showed him that which he
should not have seen: the seamy, dreadful slums and bums of his
race. Dr. Bledsoe, the pious old fraud who is the president, is
enraged, and dismisses the boy (with letters of introduction to
other benevolent trustees) to find work up North. He finds
himself emerging from underground into Harlem. He distributes
the letters, finally, and nothing happens, save a further
introduction to a nightmare in a factory. Actually the truth is
that in the letters, Dr. Bledsoe, in righteous prose, has done
him in.
He is bewildered and befriended, in rapid
succession. Mary, a benign elderly lady, takes him in. When he
finds his work in the factory, he is set upon by his
surroundings and his fellow man. Then, one day, he witnesses an
eviction of some old people, his own black people. He finds out,
when he bursts out in angry speech at this outrage, that he is
powerful and persuasive; that people will listen, urge him to
talk further, and themselves be urged to action. He is pursued
by “Brother Jack” of the “Brotherhood,” signs up, goes
in training, and returns to the beginning of triumph and horror
as a member of the movement, a Brother in the Brotherhood, and a
leader who discovers that his power is an overwhelming,
obsessive tumult.
He is entangled beyond belief. He sees blacks
and whites versus blacks for the seizure of all the blacks. His
various brothers, both colors, and his enemies, both colors,
ride him and lead him and follow him and almost destroy him,
until, finally, he and “Ras the Exhorter” are throwing
spears at each other, literally, in one mad street scene where
Ras, the leader of the all-blacks-for-blacks, is astride a
horse, with shield, headgear, and lance, charging, raging, and
exhorting all the while.
Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man is
really many men. He is not only the embodiment of the Negro
race. He is the conscience of all races. He is the result of
both conscious and unconscious torture, one man to another. He
is the horror of history, the triumphant yell of bitter fate. He
is blasted hope, and he is also the revived spirit. He is the
mad leader and the blind follower. He is rampant, and his
rampage starts in the sky and ends in a coal pit. His light is
the light of God, and the light of 1,369 bulbs, stolen from
Monopolated Light and Power. He, himself, is pure power and
smashed power. And he is probably, in some way, you.
This is a novel of violence, to be sure. It
is a novel written with force and fire, but it is a novel, too,
that sputters sometimes, almost as if the author were unwilling
to write well when his invisible man shows signs of becoming
visible. It has surging scenes and fantastically detailed
characterizations. Even when the man leads in the Brotherhood, he
is the driven. In public meetings and in committee meetings, he
is the blisterer, but also the blistered. He drifts back and
forth, in an out of the movement—at its core and at its
fringes. He has great theories and insane practices. And the
violence erupts regularly, be it in the form of special
self-torture through the mind, or in the madness of the scene in
which the man is disgusted and degraded by an invitation to
rape, or in the almost epic proportions of the final riot in the
book.
One might select a continual underlying
theme: betrayal. The man is betrayed at the very beginning by
his own blacks and by whites, to whom he is an object to be
either eliminated or used for fun. He is betrayed by his college
president and by the trustee. He is betrayed by the factory
bosses and the workers, and, most blazingly, by his Brothers.
Yet all the time, he is the one who is accused of being the
betrayer—just as he has always been the driven. Perhaps this
is the greatest single moving feature of this sprawling work:
the invisible man’s inability to belong, visibly, on any level
of existence. He is always forced to dig in, to fight, to hide,
to pretend to be another, and finally to disappear. But despite,
everything that happens he is willing, at the end, to reappear.
Ellison stands somewhat alone as a novelist.
He is not a Richard Wright yet, but really he is quite
different. He is more diffuse, more introspective, but somehow
less powerful. He is more dramatic, perhaps, but less
compelling. He blends the weird and the warm, the grotesque and
the appealing, often with fine effect, so that if your attention
wanders, it always comes back. You must call him, finally and
simply, dynamic. Source: Commonweal (May 2, 1952)
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update 11 August 2008 |
