Abstract
While Ralph Ellison is recognized as a canonical writer of twentieth-century American literature, the question whether or not he can be considered a progressive Black author has remained a fundamental controversy in the field of literary criticism. Rather than focusing on Ellison’s political views, this chapter attempts to contribute to the debate by reading his major work, the novel Invisible Man (1952), as a radical expression of systemic anti-Black racism. By drawing hermeneutically on the conceptual tools of Pierre Bourdieu’s relational theory of power, this interpretation concentrates on his concept of symbolic violence. As an inconspicuous manner of exerting power that tends to confirm the established social order, symbolic violence is often misrecognized and thus apt to become a particularly efficient instrument of domination. On the basis of close readings of selected episodes, the chapter draws attention to Ellison’s perceptive depictions of the subtle mechanisms of nonphysical domination and their severe effects on both perpetrators and victims; simultaneously, it highlights the author’s astute deployment of various literary techniques of humor. The chapter argues, then, that notwithstanding the epilogue’s ostensible confirmation of American democracy and individualism the novel reveals a social criticism whose radicalness has often been overlooked.
This chapter goes back to a lecture I gave in July 2019 at the international symposium “(Re-) Reading Ralph Ellison” organized by Luvena Kopp, Stephan Kuhl, and Nicole Lindenberg. I am very grateful for the opportunity to present my thoughts to a wonderfully vibrant and knowledgeable group of Ellison scholars. I greatly benefited from their valuable feedback and from the animating discussions during the conference. I am especially grateful to the class of highly gifted graduate students of the MALS program of Dartmouth College whom I was fortunate and honored to teach as Harris Distinguished Professor in the summer term of 2019. Their intellectual commitment and inquisitiveness have greatly stimulated my thinking about Ellison’s Invisible Man. Special thanks to my most generous and inspiring host Donald Pease.
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Notes
- 1.
See Barbara Foley, who, on the basis of “the multiple drafts, outlines, and notes for the novel, as well as Ellison’s early journalism and fiction,” reads Invisible Man “as a conflicted and contradictory text bearing multiple traces of his struggle to repress and then abolish the ghost of his leftist consciousness and conscience” (2010, 6–7). As Foley claims, it is “these unpublished texts which contain the clearest evidence that Ellison not only took his Marxism seriously but also continued to think like a Marxist well past 1943” (2010, 17).
- 2.
For examples of such outspoken critique, especially in the early 1970s, see Bradley 2010, 57–61.
- 3.
See Bourdieu’s definition: “Any symbolic domination presupposes on the part of those who are subjected to it a form of complicity which is neither a passive submission to an external constraint nor a free adherence to values” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 168, n. 122). Cf. also the following passage: “This submission is in no way a ‘voluntary servitude’ and this complicity is not granted by a conscious, deliberate act; it is itself the effect of a power, which is durably inscribed in the bodies of the dominated, in the form of schemes of perception and dispositions” (Bourdieu 2000, 171).
- 4.
Ellison himself confirmed the connection: “I associated him [IM], ever so distantly, with the narrator of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, and with that I began to structure the movement of my plot, while he began to merge with my more specialized concerns with fictional form” (1995, xix; emphasis in original). For further aspects of the influence of Dostoevsky on Ellison, see Frank (1999).
- 5.
Not surprisingly, Invisible Man has been associated with Richard Wright’s Man Who Lived Underground; yet Ellison would insist on the decisive relevance of Dostoevsky’s narrator in the shaping of his protagonist; in a letter to Stanley Hyman (1957), he writes: “As for my narrator, he comes out of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, not Wright’s Man Who Lived Underground, who is incapable of simple thought much less of philosophical articulation” (Ellison 2019, 487; emphasis in original). In a later letter to Hyman (1970), Ellison persists: “My narrator, like Dostoevsky’s, is a thinker, and this is true despite the fact that my character does not think too clearly or too well. Nevertheless, my protagonist does possess a conscious philosophical dimension and is, since he lives by ideas, an intellectual” (2019, 680). Debating literary influence in his essay “The World and the Jug,” Ellison famously distinguishes between “relatives” and “ancestors” claiming that “while one can do nothing about choosing one’s relatives, one can, as artist, choose one’s ‘ancestors.’ Wright was in this sense, a ‘relative’ […] Dostoevsky and Faulkner[,] were ‘ancestors’” (2003, 185).
- 6.
As Pevear notes, “readers [got] the impression that they have to do here with a direct statement of Dostoevsky’s own ideological position, and much commentary has been written on the book in that light.” But whereas “Dostoevsky certainly put a lot of himself into the situations and emotions of his narrator; what distinguishes his book from the narrator’s is an extra dimension of laughter. Laughter creates the distance that allows for recognition, without which the book might be a tract, a case history, a cry of despair, anything you like, but not a work of art” (1994, ix). This characterization also fits Ellison’s novel, on whose “dimension of laughter” see below. In addition, Ellison stresses the distance between himself and IM by repeatedly pointing out the latter’s naïveté.
- 7.
“It is quite illusory to think that symbolic violence can be overcome solely with the weapons of consciousness and will” (Bourdieu 2000, 180).
- 8.
Parallel to his political reorientation, Ellison turns to studies of myth and ritual that allow him to reinterpret the Black experience anthropologically as “rites of initiation.” In a lecture at West Point “On Rites and Power” (1969), for example, he comments on the “battle royal” as follows: “It was a rite which could be used to project certain racial divisions into the society and reinforce the idea of white racial superiority. On the other hand, […] as one who was reading a lot about myth and the function of myth and ritual in literature, it was necessary that I see the ‘battle royal’ situation as something more than a group of white man having sadistic fun with a group of Negro boys. Indeed, I would have to see it for what it was beyond the question of the racial identities of the actors involved: a ritual through which important social values were projected and enforced” (2003, 533).
- 9.
“We have an investment in the game, illusio (from ludus, the game): players are taken in by the game, they oppose one another […] only to the extent that they concur in their belief (doxa) in the game and its stakes, they grant these a recognition that escapes questioning” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 98; emphasis in original).
- 10.
Cf. Bourdieu: “Belief is thus an inherent part of belonging to a field” (1990, 67).
- 11.
“The vocabulary of domination is full of bodily metaphors: ‘bowing’, ‘lying down’, ‘showing flexibility’, ‘bending’, ‘getting into bed with’, etc. Sexual metaphors also, of course. Words only express the political gymnastics of domination as well as they do because they are, along with the body itself, the support of deeply buried assemblages in which a social order is inscribed in the long term” (Bourdieu 2008, 134).
- 12.
In fact, Ellison himself was very much opposed to the discipline of sociology; he considered the social sciences incapable of analyzing Black life adequately; for example, he complains that “our knowledge of it [American Negro experience] has been distorted through the overemphasis of the sociological approach” (2003, 75). As he mentions in the introduction to Shadow and Act, his rejection originated in an act of symbolic violence exerted in the form of sociological doxa, namely “the humiliation of being taught in a class in sociology at a Negro college (from Park and Burgess, the leading textbook in the field) that Negroes represented the ‘lady of the races’” (2003, 57).
- 13.
See Mueller, for a discussion of Bourdieu’s contribution to the field of literary sociology in The Rules of Art as methodologically opposed to his reading of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse in his study Masculine Domination (Mueller 2013, 12–16). “Based on his concept of symbolic power,” Mueller explains, “he interprets Woolf’s style as one that specifically enables us to see the discrepancy between the male and female vision of the world and most importantly of the lucidity of the oppressed” (2013, 15).
- 14.
“While Bourdieu argues that ‘there is an inertia (or hysteresis) of habitus which has a spontaneous tendency (based in biology) to perpetuate structures corresponding to their conditions of production,’ (2000, 160; emphasis in original) he also underlines that habitus can ‘be practically transformed’ and even ‘controlled through awakening consciousness and socio-analysis’ (Bourdieu 1994, 116; emphasis in original)” (Buschendorf and Franke 2014, 79).
- 15.
As Bourdieu points out in this interview with Didier Éribon, (published in Libération, 19 October 1982) any claim of authority depends on its general acceptance: “After all, what is a pope, a president or a general secretary, if not someone who takes himself for pope or general secretary – or more exactly, takes himself for the church, the state, the party or the nation? The only thing distinguishing him from a stage character or a megalomaniac is that he is generally taken seriously” (Bourdieu 2008, 136).
- 16.
For example, in the interview “The Art of Fiction” (1955), Ellison contradicts the statement of the interviewers that “you begin with a provocative situation of the American Negro’s status in society” by reinterpreting the novel’s central metaphor of “invisibility” as a psychological struggle taking place within the protagonist: “The hero’s invisibility is not a matter of being seen, but a refusal to run the risk of his own humanity, which involves guilt. This is not an attack upon white society. It is what the hero refuses to do in each section which leads to further action. He must assert and achieve his own humanity” (2003, 221).
- 17.
“Originally, however, there was no epilogue at all” (Foley 2010, 336). Foley documents in detail the “process by which he radically transformed the ending of his novel” (336), not the least by changing the meaning of the central metaphor of invisibility: “Invisibility, the narrator now announces, is not the exclusive province of those who have endured the humiliation – and worse – of the racial rituals governing American life; it is a universal human condition” (346).
- 18.
However, it is important to note that in “The World and the Jug” (1963) Ellison repudiates Irving Howe’s critique that “Ellison also offends by having the narrator of Invisible Man speak of his life (Howe either missing the irony or assuming that I did) as one of ‘infinite possibilities’ while living in a hole in the ground” (2003, 157; emphasis in original).
- 19.
This article does not discuss the material side of structural racism that the novel displays in great detail. For example, Ellison points to the multiple effects of poverty in the Black population, from the insufficient care for traumatized veterans and horrific poverty among sharecroppers in the South to evictions and malnutrition as signs of poverty in Harlem. Nor does he neglect the physical violence that derives from systemic racism, for example police brutality and lynching (the latter in a nightmare, 2003, 569–570).
- 20.
Cf. Bourdieu’s reflection on the potential incoherence of habitus: “Habitus is not necessarily adapted to its situation nor necessarily coherent. It has degrees of integration […]. Thus it can be observed that to contradictory positions, which tend to exert structural ‘double binds’ on their occupants, there often correspond destabilized habitus, torn by contradiction and internal division, generating suffering” (2000, 161).
- 21.
Cf. Stephan Kuhl, who develops Bourdieu’s concept of “cleft habitus” by adding what he terms “oppositional habitus” that he ascribes to Richard Wright. Due to his mother’s “possession of a relatively high degree of cultural capital” (2018, 64), Wright “had socially inherited an intellectual disposition, but the limitations that opposed his acquisition and realization of this disposition were also inscribed into his habitus” (65). Yet both forms of habitus, Kuhl states, “describe […] the phenomenon that the upward social movement that both, Wright and Bourdieu, underwent usually entails internal tensions, contradictions, insecurities, and anxieties” (65 n.3). See also Kuhl (2021), for a Bourdieusian comparative analysis of Wright’s and Ellison’s positions in the field of African American literature
- 22.
“The passions of the dominated habitus […] are not of the kind that can be suspended by a simple effort of will, founded on a liberatory awakening of consciousness. If it is quite illusory to believe that symbolic violence can be overcome with the weapons of consciousness and will alone, this is because the effect and conditions of its efficacy are durably and deeply embedded in the body in the form of dispositions” (Bourdieu 2001, 39). As a consequence, “the relation of complicity that the victims of symbolic domination grant to the dominant can only be broken through a radical transformation of the social conditions of production of the dispositions that lead the dominated to take the point of view of the dominant on the dominant and on themselves” (41–42).
- 23.
Cf. “Richard Wright’s Blues” (1945), where Ellison emphasizes the form-giving aspect of art as follows: “Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life’s crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed into a chart.” And he quotes one of his favorite authors, Malraux, on “the organized significance of art,” which “alone enables man to conquer chaos” (1995, 133).
- 24.
For a differentiated and subtle analysis of the highly complex communication between Burke and Ellison, see Donald Pease’s pivotal study.
- 25.
According to Loïc Wacquant, it is Bourdieu’s relationalism that is at the core of “the structural causes of the recurrent misinterpretations that his writings have encountered in the course of their transfer across the Atlantic” (1993, 236): “Thus the first move of American scholars is often to try to read Bourdieu’s sociology into the dualistic alternatives – micro/macro, agency/structure, interpretive/positivist, structuralist/individualist, normative/rational, function/conflict, and so forth – that structure their national disciplinary space” (1993, 241).
- 26.
Cf. the comment by the sociologist William Julius Wilson on the widespread inclination of Americans to hold individuals responsible for their poverty: “It is an unavoidable fact that Americans tend to deemphasize the structural origins and social significance of poverty and welfare. In other words, the popular view is that people are poor or on welfare because of their own personal shortcomings. Perhaps this tendency is rooted in our tradition of ‘rugged individualism’” (Wilson 2009, 43).
- 27.
As Ellison states, he employed Burke’s understanding of Greek tragedy’s tripartite structure as a “conceptual frame” for his novel: “The three parts represent the narrator’s movement from, using Kenneth Burke’s terms, purpose to passion to perception.” As the term “perception” suggests, “the maximum insight on the hero’s part isn’t reached until the final section” (2003, 218–219). In this case, the hero’s “maximum insight” gains sanctity through his conversion. And yet, accepting it means reversing the metaphor of invisibility; rather than alluding to the oppressed, it now refers to the human condition in general (cf. Foley, 346).
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Buschendorf, C. (2022). Systemic Racism: Reading Ralph Ellison with Bourdieu’s Theory of Power. In: Franke, A., Mueller, S., Sarkowsky, K. (eds) Reading the Social in American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93551-1_5
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