reading

Introduction

Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man arrived on the scene in 1952 at a time of flux. Its author, the society it explored, and the American novel all hovered on the cusp of change. Despite Ellison’s comment, thirty years later, that his expectations for Invisible Man were modest, his correspondence at the time suggests more than a little anxiety about its reception. ‘Good things are being said and publishers’ hopes are high,’ he wrote to Albert Murray in February, two months before publication, ‘but I’m playing it cool with my stomach pitching a bitch and my dream life most embarrassing.’ Reminiscent of his narrator, whose dreams contradicted his apparent easy transition from a down-and-out, banished college student to an eloquent spokesman for the Brotherhood, Ellison confessed to Murray that ‘I keep dreaming about Tuskegee and high school, all the scenes of test and judgment.’ Ellison’s tension was not surprising. As he tells us in his 1981 introduction to the 30th Anniversary Edition of Invisible Man – a fascinating meditation and tall tale about the novel’s conception and seven-year gestation – he and his wife, Fanny, had staked everything on ‘the desperate gamble involved in [his] becoming a novelist’. If the book had failed critically or commercially, the toll on its 38-year-old author’s emotional and material resources would have been considerable, perhaps even devastating.

American society, too, was a house divided in April of 1952. The country’s rhetoric of democratic opposition to Soviet Communism after the Second World War was undermined by its denial of citizenship and opportunity to black people, and by lynching and other outbreaks of racial violence. Segregation was the law of the land and Jim Crow customs still prevailed in the South and, for that matter, officially or unofficially, in most of the rest of the country. The Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision mandating integration in the public schools was two years away, its outcome very much in the balance. Emmett Till had not been lynched nor had seamstress Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Martin Luther King, Jr was a first-year divinity student in Boston. Nationally, as Ellison’s metaphor of invisibility implied, in life as well as fiction, the ‘high visibility’ of African-Americans rendered them vulnerable as a group, and invisible as individuals.

Nor was the form and idiom of the American novel exempt from the throes of change and the impulse toward re-examination and experimentation. Shortly after beginning Invisible Man, Ellison wrote ‘Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity’ (1946). The essay’s first words boldly expressed the young writer’s sense of ominous connection between American literature and the larger society: ‘Perhaps the most insidious and least understood form of segregation is that of the word.’ Seven years later, in his 1953 speech accepting the National Book Award, Ellison, referring to ‘a crisis in the American novel’, declared that ‘though I was only vaguely aware of it, it was this growing crisis which shaped the writing of Invisible Man’. Setting out to become a novelist, Ellison found that neither the novel of manners, ‘the tight, well-made Jamesian novel’ nor the ‘ “hard-boiled” novel, with its dedication to physical violence, social cynicism and understatement’ met his needs. Neither of the two then dominant traditions left much room for improvisation or free-flowing riffs on the continuing theme of identity and change within American society and the individual personality, or for Ellison to express his growing sense, which Invisible Man would come to share, that ‘freedom was not only the recognition of necessity, it was the recognition of possibility’. Ellison’s experience together with his awareness and appreciation of ‘an alive language swirling with over three hundred years of American living, a mixture of the folk, the biblical, the scientific and the political’, led him to try ‘to burst such neatly understated forms of the novel asunder’. Remarkably, as the writing progressed, Ellison, though a first-time novelist, put into Invisible Man the immense energy, ambition and craft of a master.

In hindsight it is not surprising that Invisible Man burst upon the American scene in April of 1952 with the sudden explosive velocity of a prairie fire. The book was reviewed everywhere that mattered by some of the country’s most formidable literary lions. In Commentary, Saul Bellow called the novel ‘a brilliant individual victory’, an achievement ‘proving that a truly heroic quality can exist among our contemporaries’. Paying homage to Ellison’s theme of ‘conscientious consciousness’, Wright Morris wrote in The New York Times that Invisible Man ‘belongs on the shelf with classical efforts to chart the river Lethe from its mouth to its source’, and in Partisan Review, Delmore Schwartz confessed that ‘the language of literary criticism seems shallow and patronizing when one has to speak of a book like this’. Not all reviewers were so positive. Some, mostly defenders of the Communist Party and Black Nationalism – two ideologies which took a beating in the novel – considered Ellison’s book the work of the devil’s own son-in-law, masquerading as fiction. In the Daily Worker, Abner Berry characterized the book as ‘439 pages of contempt for humanity, written in an affected, pretentious and otherwordly style to suit the king-pins of white supremacy’, while John Oliver Killens, in Freedom, called it ‘a vicious distortion of Negro life’.

Interestingly, in 1955, when the hullabaloo of publicity from reviews, the best-seller list, and the National Book Award had worn off, Ellison offhandedly wondered if his book would be around in twenty years. ‘I doubt it,’ he told the editors of the Paris Review. ‘It’s not an important novel. I failed of eloquence.’ Ellison had the great good fortune to be gloriously wrong. In fact, his novel turned out to possess extraordinary staying power; like a fire in a peatbog, it would smolder intensely and deeply, long after its flame had burned off the surface of public consciousness. A Book Week poll in 1965 of 200 eminent authors, critics and editors named Invisible Man ‘the most distinguished single work’ published in the previous twenty years. At about the same time, F. W. Dupee characterized the novel as ‘one of the most thoroughly read, really read novels of the time, thumbed to pieces in libraries, passed from hand to impatient hand among friends of just about every race, place and every age beyond the first stages of literacy’.

Dupee had it right. I know because I am one of those who, as a college student, first heard of Invisible Man on the underground, word-of-mouth literary frequency of must reading that went unassigned in classes.

… On an indigo spring evening in 1960 when the lunch counter sit-ins in the South were stirring my generation’s roots, a friend pressed a beat-up copy of the Signet paperback edition of Invisible Man into my hands. With only the light from an antiquated gooseneck lamp between me and the deep New England dark, I sat by a dormer window at the College of the Holy Cross and read Invisible Man till dawn; in fact, till mid-morning, cutting a Tacitus class in which I was holding on for dear life to a passing grade.

That’s me, I felt in a sudden rush when I had finished. And I was surprised at the depth of my feeling. For I had grown up in New Haven, on the Irish Catholic side of the tracks. I had identified with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s protagonist in This Side of Paradise and Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. But now, I found Ellison’s Invisible Man a closer kinsman; like me at my father’s college, Holy Cross, he had become an outsider at the black college where he was supposed to feel at home. From the other side of the still palpable and painful American colour line, I was touched to the quick by Ellison’s rendering of his character’s experience as a Negro in the South, in Harlem, and sometimes in drawing-rooms and even a posh bedroom in downtown Manhattan. A self-styled orator and would-be leader myself, I felt exposed by the ambition of his ‘speechifying’ and his naïve, unreflective pursuit of eloquence.

Yet I did not put down Invisible Man in a kinship of alienation, that fashionable, oh so easy, provincial reflex of the time. Rather, I was exhilarated then, as I am now, forty years later, by Invisible Man’s self-mocking, ironic, qualified, and, therefore, all the more convincing resolve to emerge from hibernation and re-engage with the world. I found his tentative embrace of action – ‘Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled “file and forget” ’ – more than a personal gesture. If he, ‘hurt to the point of abysmal pain’, hurt more than I, if he can do it, I thought, so can I. ‘And it is this which frightens me’, he mused before asking his concluding question: ‘Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?’ I do, I answered – fiercely, reflexively, joyfully, silently, urgently, at once – observing the bright morning’s hustle and bustle on the walks below my window at Holy Cross. But perhaps I answered too quickly, for it had yet to dawn on me that throwing in my lot with the likes of Invisible Man, I was also affirming the frightening, unfathomable reality of the human condition, and my own. It would take years and many more readings for that complexity to sink in. And, in my case, eerily, it would take the isomorphic experience of being suspended from Holy Cross, mysteriously, by cryptic letter, without explanation or appeal, not two months after reading Ellison’s novel …

Once seized and held fast by Invisible Man, readers are likely to return again and again as if, whatever the lag between readings, the narrator is an old friend and the book, though familiar, a new, yet to be discovered work of art. Charles Johnson, the African-American novelist, tells of finding Invisible Man ‘snubbed by those under the spell of black cultural nationalism’ when, as a college student, he went looking for Ellison’s work in the late sixties. Nevertheless, he persisted; he ‘stumbled upon Invisible Man and spent three memorable nights not so much reading as dreaming, absorbing, and being altered by [Ellison’s] remarkable adventure of ideas and artistic possibility, though I knew – at age twenty – I was missing far more than I grasped.’ (Which of us has not been altered in a sea change rich and strange – frightening, too – by reading Invisible Man?)

At about the same time, Larry Neal, a leading figure in the Black Arts Movement, who had quarreled with Ellison and his work earlier in the 1960s, revisited Invisible Man, and declared in the Black World, a journal repeatedly hostile to Ellison, that ‘if anyone has been concerned with a “black aesthetic” it has certainly got to be Ralph Ellison’. Neal’s choice of an example from the novel shrewdly illustrates how deeply Ellison etched his scenes and idiom in the African-American grain. ‘Ellison’s protagonist,’ Neal notes with glad, vernacular vindication, ‘transforms an “ordinary” housemother into a ritual goddess. Dig. Here is your black aesthetic at its best.’

But perhaps no one put the aesthetic case for Invisible Man more trenchantly than Ellison’s old friend, Albert Murray. Remembering Ellison’s 1945 definition of the blues as ‘an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism’, Murray hailed Invisible Man as ‘par excellence the literary extension of the blues. It was as if Ellison had taken an everyday twelve bar blues tune (by a man from down South sitting in a manhole up north in New York singing and signifying about how he got there) and scored it for full orchestra.’

Lecturing on Ellison at the University of the District of Columbia a few years ago, I was reminded of Henry Louis Gates, Jr’s celebration of Invisible Man as a living ‘encyclopedia of black culture’. Afterwards, in the shimmering noontime heat, several young black men, reminiscent of the zoot-suiters in Invisible Man adrift ‘outside the grooves of history’, approached me, and soon chimed in that they belonged to Generation X. They felt more invisible than their fathers, they told me, and after reading Invisible Man, they thought Ellison might be their generation’s voice. And more than a few times during the late seventies, eighties, and early nineties, taking the A train from midtown Manhattan uptown to visit Ellison, I found myself sitting across from someone, typically a young person, often but not always black, so transfixed by the prose of Invisible Man as to be oblivious to the roar of the train.

Unquestionably, about Invisible Man ‘[a] whole unrecorded history [has been] spoken’ which confirms that there are indeed, in Ellison’s words, ‘things going on in its depth that are of more permanent interest than on its surface’. The book’s appeal to generation after generation of readers calls to mind Charles Johnson’s view that Americans especially, given the novel’s challenge to ‘the principle’ behind the nation, ‘are obligated to check our cultural progress and failure against its admonitions’. Yet, as a novel, Invisible Man is exactly that – a fiction and as such the projection of its author’s imagination. Fond of paying homage to the mystery of art, Ellison believed that luck was an element of a novel’s longevity. ‘If you’re lucky,’ he told the editors of the Paris Review, in 1955, ‘if you splice into one of the deeper currents of life, then you have a chance of having your work last a little bit longer.’

Ellison’s metaphor of the artist splicing into the ‘deeper currents of life’ is a clue to his novel’s appeal to the depths of consciousness. Indeed, Ellison long held that currents of meaning flow back and forth between a work of art and its audience. ‘Once introduced into society,’ he wrote in 1946, ‘the work of art begins to pulsate with those meanings, emotions, ideas brought to it by its audience and over which the artist has but limited control.’ Invisible Man is a stunning enactment of Ellison’s axiom, for through his metaphor of invisibility he created another guise for what he called ‘the American theme’.

Invisibility, he tells us in the novel’s second paragraph, ‘occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of their inner eyes.’ It is a contingent condition, reductive of human personality, yet, in a stunning Ellisonian reversal, invisibility also invites those unseen or falsely seen to create their own versions of identity and experience. African-Americans, for instance, learned to use invisibility as the occasion to put on a mask of subservience behind which they slipped the racial yoke and turned the American joke back on white folks. As developed by Ellison, invisibility, though brilliantly expressive of racial (and racist) blindness, extends far beyond the dimension of race. In an extraordinary imaginative leap, he hit upon a single word for the different yet shared condition of African-Americans, Americans, and, for that matter, the human individual in the twentieth century, and beyond. As Albert Murray has written in The Omni-Americans, Ellison’s novel tells ‘a prototypical story about being not only a twentieth-century American but also a twentieth-century man, the Negro’s obvious predicament symbolizing everybody’s essential predicament’. Which of us is truly visible to those who look at us? How many of us truly see ourselves, let alone know who we are, especially as Americans since, for Ellison, ‘[t]he nature of our society is such that we are prevented from knowing who we are’? And is Ralph Waldo Emerson’s self-reliant individual possible in Ellison’s time or our own?

Bringing a modern irony to Emerson’s pursuit of heroic individualism, Ellison sees complex connections between history and consciousness, and the ‘task of making ourselves individuals’. Throughout Invisible Man, however veiled his narrator’s recapitulation of the past, Ellison links consciousness to a definite historical chronology. Though sometimes definite and explicit, the references are also indefinite and inexplicit; it is left for the reader to fill in the contextual gaps. In the very first chapter, Invisible Man’s grandfather challenges his grandson (and the rest of us) to decode history when he claims to have been ‘a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction’. And that’s not all. Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington; the Civil War, Emancipation, Reconstruction, the First World War, the black exodus from the rural South to the urban North, the Great Depression; Harlem race riots: all are fluid, yet to be comprehended, images flashing across Invisible Man’s historical radar screen.

There is also a prescient dimension to Ellison’s use of history. ‘Literary truth amounts to prophecy’, Murray remembers him observing during the late 1940s. ‘[T]elling is not only a matter of retelling but also of foretelling.’ Incubating in the surreal cauldron of Invisible Man are fictional children prophetic of history to come. The narrator’s experience and reflections anticipate the accelerating changes in American life: the Brown v. Board of Education integration decision of 1954; the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s; the subsequent divisive emergence of Black Power; the fierce opposition to conformity of self and culture that came to pass in the sixties – an opposition which sometimes led to a counter-conformity; the transformation of the ‘Woman Question’ into the far-reaching yet sometimes confusing Women’s Rights Movement; ambitious, ambiguous attempts to create a multiracial, multicultural Rainbow coalition in the 1980s; even the hallucinatory descent into trackless reaches of consciousness under the spell of drugs; and, not least, the extreme, contingent, post-modern conceptions of self played out in the fractious arena of identity politics.

Invisible Man is a novel of eerily familiar reversals. In its pages the cherished American motto, E pluribus unum, oscillates chaotically toward Ex uno, plures before boomeranging back toward more complex affirmation of a single nation. Like the leader of a great jazz ensemble, Duke Ellington perhaps, Ellison leads his narrator, his characters – often spellbinding soloists with the spoken word – and his readers through a picaresque American labyrinth. Although rooted in time, the narrative escapes the limiting clutches of history, and, through timeliness, becomes timeless. Throughout Ellison’s ‘portrait of the artist as a rabble-rouser’, Invisible Man forges his passage from failed orator to desperate writer by keeping faith with an uproarious medley of American characters and incidents including his self-yielding, purging, transforming descent into layers of the past during which an old slave woman tells him that freedom ‘ain’t nothing but knowing how to say what I got up in my head’; the Southern battle royal with its enactment of racial rituals and taboos more powerful than any law; Jim Trueblood’s outrageous, ambivalent yet manly tale of incest and the blues; the riotous confusion and chaos of the Golden Day where the vet dispenses a bitter, unheeded wisdom; blind Reverend Homer Barbee’s trickster’s mix of history and myth in his Founder’s Day sermon; President Bledsoe’s ruthless politics of self-interest and racial accommodation; Invisible Man’s journey north and his unsettling witness of black male and white female passengers pressed against each other’s flesh on a crowded subway; his encounters with bluesman Peter Wheatstraw, who combines traits of the Devil’s son-in-law with those of Saint Peter; old Lucius Brockway, a black man, who picks up the white man’s burden in the boiler room of Liberty Paints; the yam vendor whose luscious wares inspire Invisible Man’s lovely pun, ‘I yam what I am’; the free papers of old Primus Provo tossed in the icy street like chitterlings during his and his wife’s eviction; Mary Rambo, everybody’s mama, whose lesson – ‘I’m in New York, but New York ain’t in me’ – long goes unlearned by Invisible Man; the Brotherhood’s machinations and manipulations – ‘You were not hired to think,’ Brother Jack declares at a moment of truth; Ras the Exhorter turned Ras the Destroyer’s riotous ride, more suggestive of the Lone Ranger than of any African chief; Invisible Man’s unlikely flight to freedom down a manhole to an underground lair of hibernation that he wires for sight and sound, and, finally, his brooding on the American ‘principle’ as prologue to his emergence, like Jack the Bear, into the ‘loud, clamoring, semi-visible world’.

In place of the classical Minotaur, in Ellison’s vernacular labyrinth we encounter unforgettable walk-on characters like Mr Norton, Brother Jack, Brothers Tobitt (Twobit) and Wrestrum (Restroom); Brother Tarp, whose dark, oily twisted leg iron tells the story of his courageous resistance and cunning escape from the chain gang; the white woman in red who insists on ‘confusing the class struggle with the ass struggle’; Sybil, whose fantasies of ‘Anonymous brute ’n’ boo’ful buck’ lead Invisible Man to write on her belly in lipstick, SYBIL, YOU WERE RAPED BY SANTA CLAUS, SURPRISE; Dupre and Scofield, two black men who, ‘capable of their own action’, burn down their miserable tenement under cover of the riot; and old ‘Bad Air’, bad ass, black and blue, old funky butt himself, Louis Armstrong.

Threading through the narrative are the novel’s principals: Invisible Man’s grandfather with his deathbed acknowledgment and reversal of the infamous grandfather clause; handsome Tod Clifton, whose ‘head of Persian lamb’s wool had never known a straightener’, and his eventual, despairing, ironic, minstrel-borne ‘plunge outside history’; Ras’s off-kilter but powerful and troubling Afrocentric rants; and (who could forget him?) Rinehart, that master of a ‘vast seething, hot world of fluidity’ (B. P. Rinehart, ‘the P. is for “Proteus”, the B. for “Bliss” ’, Ellison wrote slyly in 1957 just after naming one of the protagonists in his novel-in-progress Bliss). Issuing from the deep waters of imagination, Ellison’s characters and episodes put fictional meat on the bones of his conviction that there are countless articulate but invisible men and women in the complex American underground who profess ‘a certain necessary faith in human possibility before the next unknown’. In this spirit, Ellison prods Invisible Man to tell of his efforts at eloquence in and against the grain of his different American audiences, black and white, southern and northern, optimistic or cynical, confused, knowing or ignorant about the workings of individual and institutional power. In his own speeches, Invisible Man underestimates the dynamic, mutual awareness required between performer and audience for an improvision to become eloquent. But gradually, too late for a career as an orator, in time for his new vocation as a writer, he learns to challenge his audience’s skills as well as his own.

None of that happens until the novel’s epilogue. In the prologue Invisible Man does not seek conversation: he can’t – not yet. Responsive voices might talk back to him, question his motives, undermine his vulnerable, shifting, evolving self. Between the prologue and epilogue, during the 25 chapters that tell the story of Invisible Man’s life in the world, he fails of eloquence and political leadership because he is out of touch, too much an isolated, solitary traveler, too much in the grip of illusion (his own and others’), and because he does not yet understand that he and his words are variables in the American equation of power and possibility. Only in the epilogue, having made an ironic, conditional peace with who he is and his humanity, is he ready for response, for conversation, ready to risk verbal acts of intimacy, ready, in short, for eloquence. In the epilogue, Invisible Man emerges as a writer. And the visibility on the page of his just completed narrative hastens his decision to re-enter the world. In keeping with his new craft and hard-won knowledge of self and the world, he does not exaggerate the pleasure or the power of the written word. Instead, he pauses, and answers a searing question: ‘So why do I write, torturing myself to put it down? Because in spite of myself I’ve learned some things. Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled “file and forget,” and I can neither file nor forget.’ Throughout his time as an orator, he used acts of speech to restrain his audience’s urge to action; now the act of writing commits him to action.

The first consequence of his new vocation is a continuing resolve ‘to at least tell a few people about it’ – about his journey to experience and knowledge, about the possibility and necessity of action. In the novel’s last words, Invisible Man asserts the indivisibility and interconnectedness of American experience, an attitude that follows from his earlier grasp, while in danger of violent death from Ras’s band of Nationalists, of American identity’s ‘beautiful absurdity’. But first, before he implicates the rest of us, he acknowledges the frightening condition of the human heart, with special reference to the evasion of identity Ellison felt characteristic of the American experience. Having told us what we are in for, in a stunning boomerang of a question – ‘Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?’ – Invisible Man makes a powerful appeal for our participation. Though his medium is now the written word, his language has the offhand, offbeat, vernacular quality of speech which, together with his story, has kept generations of readers having their say, talking back to him and to Ellison about ‘the principle’ and about ‘the beautiful absurdity of their American identity’, which press on in ways ‘just as concrete, ornery, vile and sublimely wonderful as before, only now [we] better understand [our] relation to it and it to [us]’.

More than forty years ago, when Invisible Man was a lad of just five summers, Ellison wrote to Albert Murray that he had ‘picked up a book of criticism published in England under the title, Catastrophe and the Imagination, which gives Invisible lots of space and picks it for a short list of novels which that wild stud thinks will be of interest a century from now’. Although Ellison followed up with a quick, deflating joke – ‘Surely the man must be on the weed’ – that wag of a critic has had the last laugh. Now well into middle age and yet, more than ever, showing, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s words, the look of ‘a fiery, wiry, eagle-eyed stranger’, Invisible Man shows every sign of outlasting another century.

To account for Invisible Man’s place in American (and world) literature, it should be remembered that Ellison’s own life spanned most of the twentieth century – 1914–94. As a writer, he was blessed with an elastic sense of time. Always alert to the changes and shifting complexities of his epoch, he kept one eye on the nineteenth century through the prism of the Civil War, while, fascinated by the accelerating impact of technology on human personality, he looked ahead to the twenty-first century with the other.

For all of his modesty, Ellison aimed high. From the beginning he looked to the nineteenth-century novel for his contemporary imagination’s enactment of ‘the moral imperatives of American life that are implicit in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights’. In Moby-Dick, which, remarkably and characteristically, he gave Fanny, his wife to be, as a gift in 1944, and Huck Finn, the other of what he considered ‘our two great nineteenth-century novels’, Ellison found confirmation of the arduous proposition that the ‘novel is bound up with nationhood’. For his part, writing his novel and his narrator’s memoir, Ellison was consciously aware of working in a tradition. More drawn to society than Ishmael, who ‘escaped alone to tell thee’, or Huck, who, apparently forgets Jim, ‘the true father, but black, black’, in his adolescent urge to ‘light out for the Territory [later to become Ellison’s Oklahoma] ahead of the rest’, Invisible Man prepares to emerge, however tentatively. Unlike his nineteenth-century brothers, he is buoyed, though no longer to the point of illusion, by the ‘possibility that even an invisible man has a socially responsible role to play’ (my italics).

Accepting the National Book Award in 1953, in an address with the wonderfully charged title, ‘Brave Words For a Startling Occasion’, Ellison identified the ‘chief significance of Invisible Man as a fiction’, as ‘its experimental attitude and its attempt to return to the mood of personal moral responsibility for democracy which typified the best of our nineteenth-century fiction’. Almost forty years later, Charles Johnson dedicated his National Book Award acceptance speech to Ellison in homage to his example, his achievement, and his inspiration to him and, he foretold, to other novelists to come. Looking back to Invisible Man, Johnson also looked forward to ‘the emergence of a black American fiction that is Ellisonesque in spirit, of increasing intellectual and artistic generosity, one that enables us as a people – as a culture – to move from narrow complaint to broad celebration’. In the spirit of his novel, Middle Passage, Johnson praised Ellison for charting a passage from the shores of America to the interior beyond, that territory Ellison once described as ‘an ideal place – ever to be sought, ever to be missed, but always there’. As eagerly thumbed, hashed, rehashed, and argued over in the wee hours now as it was in the 1950s, Invisible Man continues to set a standard for eloquence and experiment. It is a standard that I predict will become more and more compelling in the new century, as the United States fully becomes, literally as well as metaphorically, a nation of color in which, as Ellison claimed was already the case, ‘the true American, whatever else he is, is also somehow black’.

John Callahan

Ralph Ellison

INVISIBLE MAN

With an Introduction by John Callahan

PENGUIN CLASSICS

Contents

INVISIBLE MAN

THE BEGINNING

Introduction