To the Editor:

First, I would like to commend Norman Podhoretz for his essay, “What Happened to Ralph Ellison” [July-August], a passionate and highly personal—almost confessional—examination of his relationship to Ellison and his work. I wish to thank him as well for quoting from my essay, “The Singular Vision of Ralph Ellison,” though he failed to provide attribution for that citation. But I must, I am afraid, point out a few problems I have with this article, mistakes that white readers (and especially those on the Left) have made with respect to black America and its literature for most of this century.

For Mr. Podhoretz, Invisible Man does not pass the “acid test of greatness” because it does not deliver more to its readers on each revisiting, as (in his opinion) does Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina or George Eliot’s Middlemarch. True enough, Ellison’s characters are flat, symbolic, but no more so than those in Voltaire’s Candide. I would wager that the reason for Mr. Podhoretz’s reaction can be found in the simple fact that most white Americans (and many blacks) are blind (as Ellison might put it) to the history of countless contributions that black Americans have made to this country on all levels—economic, political, and cultural—since the time of the colonists.

In addition, Mr. Podhoretz claims that Invisible Man is dated because blacks in the post-civil-rights (and Black Power) period are so highly visible, “the most salient group in the American consciousness.” Some of the “visible” blacks Mr. Podhoretz mentions are Al Sharpton and those responsible for “black violence and criminality, the fear of which has spread even among the most sympathetic white liberals.” But he does not list black people making substantial contributions to this nation’s well-being such as the late astronaut Ron McNair, who died in the Challenger tragedy, or Joseph Marshall, a MacArthur fellow and founder of the Omega Boys Club, which is devoted to helping at-risk young black men. I could easily list others, but my point should be obvious: the media’s emphasis on black entertainers, gang-bangers, and athletes renders largely unseen the remarkable variations in living—and achievement—that can be found in the still mostly uncharted black world, past and present.

Furthermore, we do Ralph Ellison (and all black writing) a disservice if we read his text on the most pedestrian political, sociological, or surface level. Invisible Man is a multilayered book, one that delights in play and ambiguity. And Ellison’s central thesis is universal. While blacks may be more “visible” today, Hispanics, Asians, Pacific Islanders, new African immigrants to America, and Native Americans are not—they, as easily as blacks 50 years ago, can make a case for being “invisible” men and women in contemporary America.

Yet even this observation does not entirely clarify the issue Mr. Podhoretz raises, for we must go further and admit, honestly, that on some level we all remain invisible to one another. Men and women. Blacks and whites. We are all victims of attempts (from the Left and Right and Center) to define and categorize us, to use us as Dr. Bledsoe, the Brotherhood, and Ras the Exhorter attempt to shape the protagonist of Invisible Man.

In the face of this perennial problem, Ellison courageously called for the most demanding and (for some) frightening of freedoms:

[T]he thing that Americans have to learn over and over again is that they are individuals and they have the responsibility of individual vision. . . . We create the race by creating ourselves and then to our great astonishment we will have created something far more important: we will have created a culture.

Ellison’s statement underscores one of several points on which I agree completely with Mr. Podhoretz: in his nonfiction works Shadow and Act and Going to the Territory, Ellison delivers a crucial—and expansive—vision of traditional humanism that emphasizes the centrality of the individual in a democracy. Given the ahistorical, ideological, and postcultural character of American society in 1999, that vision, which is embodied no less in Invisible Man and Juneteenth than in his brilliant nonfiction, is one that we can ignore—as we enter the 21st century—only at our own risk.

Charles Johnson
University of Washington
Seattle, Washington

_____________

To the Editor:

Norman Podhoretz’s authority to pronounce Ralph Ellison’s literary reputation undeserved, Invisible Man overrated, and Juneteenth merely derivative is dubious. He admits that he is “not a good . . . scholar of black writing in America” and is unsure whether prior to Invisible Man any black authors had published works that were not protest novels. That he does not know Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God or James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man suggests a serious deficiency in his capacity to define the greatness of an African-American—indeed, any American—literary work.

Such ignorance explains why Mr. Podhoretz misses literary echoes of writers he has never read, and so once he finds Faulkner’s voice in Juneteenth, he hears it even more clearly than Ellison’s. Less understandable, though, is his failure to detect T.S. Eliot in the “Faulknerian” passage he quotes from Juneteenth (cf. “The Waste Land” and “Journey of the Magi”), and his dismissal of Ellison’s use of imitation and allusion as sheer “derivativeness.” Surely he is acquainted with the classic defenses of literary imitation.

Mr. Podhoretz’s poor opinion of Juneteenth has apparently led him to publish a revised opinion of Invisible Man. Out of several quarrels I have with him on this book, I will mention only his disparagement of the novel’s main theme—the invisibility of African-Americans—as irrelevant, “quaintly archaic,” as Mr. Podhoretz puts it. While he is right that discussions of prejudice today are more open and probing than in the 50’s, American whites are still as blind to blacks as ever because consciousness-raising has tended to make whites more self-conscious, not more aware of blacks as persons. Besides, Ellison’s book is a novel, not a societal analysis or polemic; its greatness is no more compromised by its theme than are Jane Austen’s novels, whose themes center on social relations that are as “quaintly archaic” as can be. Mr. Podhoretz’s criticism might make sense against fiction published today, but is irrelevant to Invisible Man.

In any case, Mr. Podhoretz seems more interested in talking about his personal interactions with Ralph Ellison, a man whom by his own account he never succeeded in knowing, than in extended literary analysis. It is hard not to suspect that this failure to get close to Ellison aroused in Mr. Podhoretz a sense of grievance. As his subtly nasty account unfolds, he earnestly recants his biased judgments against Ellison’s work during the 60’s, thereby creating an aura of objective reflection for his biases of the 90’s.

Judy Lightfoot
Seattle, Washington

_____________

To the Editor:

In his otherwise excellent reassessment of the career of Ralph Ellison, Norman Podhoretz makes of Irving Howe rather more of a straw man in his 1963-64 debate with Ellison than in fact he was. True, Howe’s essay, “Black Boys and Native Sons,” started from the assumption that black American writers form a distinct genre in American literature and are to be considered mainly in relation to one another rather than to, say, Thoreau and Emerson, Faulkner and Hemingway. But the essay’s few remarks about Ellison himself are mostly laudatory, its reservations about Invisible Man very few. Howe objected to Ellison’s depiction of his Stalinist figures, who are “so vicious and stupid that one cannot understand how they could ever have attracted him or any other Negro.” Given Howe’s loathing of Stalinists, this is more an aesthetic than a political criticism.

Far more troublesome to Howe was the “implausible assertion of unconditioned freedom with which the novel ends.” To these measured criticisms, which could fairly be called analytic rather than hortatory—and nowhere did Howe say that Negro writers should not become too interested in literary craft, or that they must choose between good writing and active, militant citizenship)—Ellison replied in a fierce and exaggerative (albeit often shrewd) essay in the New Leader. He accused Howe of offering up “the Northern white liberal version of the white Southern myth of absolute separation of the races” and declared that Howe stood for a social order more fearful than the state of Mississippi—a remark that brought Howe (in round two of the debate) close to challenging Ellison to a duel.

Ellison’s lengthy attack on Howe’s essay was followed by a short rejoinder by Howe, which in turn provoked another elaborate rejoinder by Ellison. Howe never really answered this, but he did, in 1969, offer a low-keyed, conciliatory addendum to the debate, in which he extended a friendly hand to his adversary:

[B]oth of us believe in the unity of experience and culture, both of us believe that the works of literature produced by black men should be judged by the same aesthetic criteria as those produced by white men, both of us resist attempts . . . to reinstitute a new version of social and cultural segregation.

In January 1990, Howe added a brief coda to the by-now epic saga of his dispute with Ellison. He described the new “black aesthetic” and rejected it because a distinctive black experience no more warranted the claim for a distinctive black aesthetic than a distinctive Jewish experience would warrant a special Jewish aesthetic. But he did finally (and graciously) concede a major point of the debate to Ellison: namely, “the charge that I underestimated the capacity of oppressed peoples like the American blacks to create a vital culture apart from social protest.”

Edward Alexander
Seattle, Washington

_____________

Norman Podhoretz writes:

I apologize to Charles Johnson for failing to identify him as the author of the passage I quoted from his essay on Ralph Ellison. I also thank him for his commendation of my own article. But just as he has “a few problems” with that article, so do I with his letter about it.

To begin with, it is hardly a matter of “opinion” or of an idiosyncratic literary taste that Anna Karenina and Middlemarch, like all great works of art, reveal new aspects of themselves whenever one revisits them. Secondly, with all due respect to Candide, it is not exactly a novel as that term has generally been used and understood. More to the point, it is not the kind of fictional work that Ellison was trying to produce. As he himself repeatedly stressed, he aspired to write a book that might, precisely, stand beside the 19th-century examples I mentioned and their successors in the 20th century. Of these, the last thing anyone (including, as is evident from his critical writings and interviews, Ellison himself) would say is that they feature “flat” characters. In other words, in expressing disappointment with Invisible Man after reading it for a third time, I was measuring it by his own beliefs and aspirations as a novelist, as well as my own critical judgment.

So much for the strictly literary problem I have with Mr. Johnson. But I also have a problem with the rest of his letter, which concerns itself with extra-literary matters. I am well aware of the many “black people making substantial contributions to this nation’s well-being,” and I only wish that more black leaders, or those who are accepted as such, not only by the media but by their own people (Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan are just two examples that come to mind), would show such an awareness themselves instead of harping incessantly on the failures and problems of the black community. The fear of black violence and criminality has become so salient because it is a far more pervasive reality in American life today than it was when Ellison wrote Invisible Man. But that salience is heightened by the exploitation of such violence by black leaders as a way of deflecting blame onto whites and attracting attention and other rewards for themselves. Ralph Ellison castigated this tendency “to trade on one’s anguish for gain or sympathy” as “obscene,” and I agree with him so wholeheartedly that I quoted those words twice in my essay.

Finally, while Mr. Johnson does not dispute my contention that blacks are no longer “invisible,” he claims that other groups now are, and that this gives continuing point to Ellison’s novel. But even if he were right, these groups could only be made “visible” through novels about them in which they were treated, precisely, as “individuals.” Yet the very politicization to which they have yielded in the hope of achieving social and economic progress exacts the very price that neither I nor Mr. Johnson (let alone Ralph Ellison) thinks is worth paying: they come to be regarded, by themselves no less than others, as members of a group rather than as individuals.

I have a few problems with Judy Lightfoot as well. First, in questioning my “authority” (or does she mean my right as a white man?) to write a critical essay about Ralph Ellison (something I am positive he himself would never have done), she uses ellipses and crude paraphrases to misrepresent my ideas. I did not say that I was “ ‘not a good . . . scholar of black writing in America.’ ” I said I was not a “good enough” one to assert “with full confidence” that Invisible Man was the first black novel “to free itself from the disabilities” of the protest novel. If Miss Lightfoot wants to go around questioning the credentials of other critics, she would do well to become a more careful reader and more scrupulous in argument. Be that as it may, I have, as it happens, read Zora Neale Hurston, but I would not place her in the same class as Ellison. I confess that I do not know the book by James Weldon Johnson Miss Lightfoot also mentions. But I have never believed that a critic has to have read everything ever written before earning the right to pronounce on a particular work. Does she?

I also confess that I did not hear echoes of T.S. Eliot in the passage I quoted from Juneteenth. If they were there at all, they were drowned out by the voice of Faulkner. And yes, I am acquainted with “the classic defenses of literary imitation,” one of which comes from Eliot himself. However, such imitation does indeed become derivative if the material in question is not creatively assimilated and transformed. This is the case in Juneteenth, though not—as I made clear in another passage Miss Lightfoot seems to have misread—in Invisible Man.

On the question of whether Invisible Man is dated, Miss Lightfoot invokes Jane Austen. Well, I specifically mentioned Jane Austen myself, and precisely in order to make the point that her novels transcend their archaic settings in a way and to a degree that Invisible Man does not. Taking another bite of the apple (one that has grown poisoned over the years), Miss Lightfoot goes on to claim that “American whites are still as blind to blacks as ever.” But if that were so, there would be nothing archaic about Ellison’s theme and no need to bring in Jane Austen. But, literary considerations aside, Miss Lightfoot’s assertion is simply not true, and to go on accusing whites of such blindness is itself a symptom of blindness and yet another way “to trade on one’s anguish for gain and sympathy.”

Finally, Miss Lightfoot talks about the personal part of my essay as though she has caught me out, when it was I who raised, and answered, the very question with which she triumphantly concludes. She also seems to think that to judge Invisible Man as less than truly great is to attack it. But let me remind her, and Mr. Johnson as well, of what I actually wrote: “If Invisible Man is not the great novel it has been taken to be, it still ranks among the best we have had in the past half-century.” Some attack.

Edward Alexander (whose opening words of praise I appreciate) is, as usual, a little too kind to Irving Howe. At the time he published “Black Boys and Native Sons,” Howe was caught up—as I myself was—in the special political fevers of the early 60’s with respect to “the Negro problem,” and Ellison was right in detecting the undertone that offended him beneath the praise that Howe was much too sophisticated a literary critic to omit. Later Howe cooled off—not as much as I did, to be sure, but enough to make the admission Mr. Alexander quotes at the end of his letter, and on which I rest my case.

_____________