In writing INVISIBLE MAN in the late 1940s, Ralph Ellison brought onto the scene a new kind of black protagonist, one at odds with the characters of the leading black novelist at the time, Richard Wright. If Wright’s characters were angry, uneducated, and inarticulate — the consequences of a society that oppressed them — Ellison’s Invisible Man was educated, articulate, and self-aware. Ellison’s view was that the African-American culture and sensibility was far from the downtrodden, unsophisticated picture presented by writers, sociologists and politicians, both black and white. He posited instead that blacks had created their own traditions, rituals, and a history that formed a cohesive and complex culture that was the source of a full sense of identity. When the protagonist in INVISIBLE MAN comes upon a yam seller (named Petie Wheatstraw, after the black folklore figure) on the streets of Harlem and remembers his childhood in a flood of emotion, his proclamation “I yam what I yam!” is Ellison’s expression of embracing one’s culture as the way to freedom.

If Wright’s protest literature was a natural outcome of a brutal childhood spent in the deep South, Ellison’s more affirming approach came out of a very different background in Oklahoma. A “frontier” state with no legacy of slavery, Oklahoma in the 1910s created the possibility of exploring a fluidity between the races not possible even in the North. Although a contemporary recalled that the Ellisons were “among the poorest” in Oklahoma City, Ralph still had the mobility to go to a good school, and the motivation to find mentors, both black and white, from among the most accomplished people in the city. Ellison would later say that as a child he observed that there were two kinds of people, those “who wore their everyday clothes on Sunday, and those who wore their Sunday clothes every day. I wanted to wear Sunday clothes every day.”

Ellison’s life-long receptivity to the variegated culture that surrounded him, beginning in Oklahoma City, served him well in creating a new take on literary modernism in INVISIBLE MAN. The novel references African-American folktales, songs, the blues, jazz, and black traditions like playing the dozens — much as T.S. Eliot and James Joyce had referenced classical Western and Eastern civilization in THE WASTELAND and ULYSSES. An added difference for Ellison was that his modernist narrative was also a vehicle for inscribing his own and the black identity — as well as a roadmap for anyone experiencing themselves as “invisible,” unseen. “Time” magazine essayist Roger Rosenblatt would say: “Ralph Ellison taught me what it is to be an American.”

For Ellison, unlike the protest writers and later black separatists, America did offer a context for discovering authentic personal identity; it also created a space for African-Americans to invent their own culture. And in Ellison’s view, black and white culture were inextricably linked, with almost every facet of American life influenced and impacted by the African-American presence — including music, language, folk mythology, clothing styles and sports. Moreover, he felt that the task of the writer is to “tell us about the unity of American experience beyond all considerations of class, of race, of religion.” In this Ellison was ahead of his time and out of step with the literary and political climates of both black and white America; his views would not gain full currency until the 1980s.

In his own life, Ellison’s interests were as far ranging as his “integrative” imagination. He was expert at fishing, hunting, repairing car engines, and assembling radios and stereo systems. His haberdasher in New York said that he “knew more about textiles than anyone I’ve ever met,” and his friend Saul Bellow called him a “thoroughgoing expert on the raising of African violets.” He was also an accomplished sculptor, musician, and photographer. The scope of Ellison’s mind and vision may have contributed to the growing unwieldiness of his much-awaited second novel, which he toiled over for forty years. He planned it as three books, a saga that would encompass the entire American experience. The book was still unfinished when Ellison died in New York in 1994 at the age of eighty.

INVISIBLE MAN and the essays in SHADOW AND ACT and GOING TO THE TERRITORY were transformative in our thinking about race, identity, and what it means to be American. On the power of three books, Ellison both accelerated America’s literary project and helped define and clarify arguments about race in this country. Ellison’s outlook was universal: he saw the predicament of blacks in America as a metaphor for the universal human challenge of finding a viable identity in a chaotic and sometimes indifferent world. The universality and accomplishment of Ellison’s writing can be seen in the breadth of his continuing influence on other writers, from Toni Morrison and Charles Johnson to Kurt Vonnegut and the late Joseph Heller. Fifty years after the publishing of INVISIBLE MAN, Ralph Ellison’s voice continues to speak to all of us.

Resources

Novels and Essays by Ralph Ellison

INVISIBLE MAN, 1952 (novel)
SHADOW AND ACT, 1964 (essays)
GOING TO THE TERRITORY, 1985 (anthology of interviews, essays, and more)
THE COLLECTED ESSAYS OF RALPH ELLISON, 1995 (John Callahan, ed.)
JUNETEENTH (1999) (novel)

Selected Essays and Reviews

Albert Murray, THE OMNI-AMERICANS (1970)
Robert G. O’Meally, THE CRAFT OF ELLISON (1980)
Benston, ed., SPEAKING FOR YOU: RALPH ELLISON’S CULTURAL VISION
Jerry Watts, HEROISM AND THE BLACK INTELLECTUAL: RALPH ELLISON, POLITICS, AND AFRO-AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL LIFE (1994)

A DVD of “Ralph Ellison: An American Journey”, containing an additional hour of video commentary and analysis can be purchased from California Newsreel.

Avon Kirkland

AMERICAN MASTERS Online presents an extended self-interview with “Ralph Ellison” filmmaker Avon Kirkland.

Avon Kirland: Do I really have to do this interview?

Q: Yes, you do. Your contractual agreement with AMERICAN MASTERS requires it.

AK: All right. Let’s get it over with.

Q: I have heard you asked several times why you chose Ralph Ellison as the subject for a major documentary. You’ve given several answers, sometimes stumbling as though you weren’t quite sure of the answer. Can you tell us now? Why did you do it?

AK: Why did I do it?! You make it sound like a crime. I hope you think more of the show than that!

Q: I do.

AK: Okay. Well, yes, I have stumbled sometimes. Devising any short but comprehensive answer about an author as complex as Ellison is difficult. Nevertheless, I chose Ellison for two reasons: First, although his work has been profoundly significant (scholars say “transformative”) in American culture, the general public knows little about it — or him. After Ellison died in 1994, the New York Times critic Richard Bernstein wrote in 1995 of Ellison’s masterful novel, INVISIBLE MAN, that it ” had faded from the public mind, occupying what might be called a highly respected position on the sidelines of the general consciousness.” Ellison deserves better than that…

Q: And second?

AK: I was able to raise the necessary funding.

Q: Can you tell us more about that?

AK: No. It’s too painful. Remember that we’re talking public television production.

Q: Was fundraising the most difficult challenge you faced in making the documentary?

AK: No. It was the second most difficult challenge that I faced. The most difficult challenge was to make the program that I had in mind without spending more than I had raised. That is, to not go over budget.

Q: And did you succeed?

AK: No. That too was very painful.

Q: Okay. Let’s move on. Tell me, in the course of your research, what did you learn about Ellison that surprised you the most?

AK: That he was no mere storyteller; he was also a first-class intellectual. INVISIBLE MAN stands out as an extraordinary work of fiction and it is all that most people have read by Ellison. But his essays in SHADOW AND ACT AND GOING TO THE TERRITORY are equally impressive in my opinion. He was a true man of letters whose reflections on race, literature, American and African-American identity were visionary, enlightening, and most of all, enduring.

Q: For example?

AK: One of his favorite topics was the contribution of African Americans to American culture. He was among the first to point out that much that is distinctive and vibrant in American culture grew (and still grows) out of the African American experience. That but for the original contributions by black Americans of the blues, jazz, various social dances, gospel music, language, and more, American culture might well be more like, say, Canada’s than our own.

Q: You have something against Canada?

AK: No. Some of my best friends are…

Q: (interrupting) Never mind…You and your staff were the first ever to adapt scenes from INVISIBLE MAN to film and excerpts are included in the documentary. Why wasn’t the entire book ever made into a movie?

AK: After seeing his friend Richard Wright’s great novel, NATIVE SON, so poorly adapted in an early 1950’s foreign production, Ellison apparently wanted to protect the integrity of his great work. He certainly received dozens of offers for the movie rights to the book. The celebrated director Sidney Lumet (The Pawnbroker, many others) was especially interested in optioning the book as early as the 1960’s, as was media mogul Quincy Jones around 1990. And even the well-known cinema verité documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman inquired about the rights in the 1970’s while he was still a practicing attorney in Boston.

Q: So how did you get approval to adapt the scenes that are in the documentary?

AK: It took two years of rather delicate negotiations. Although she is ninety years old and is not in the best of health, Mrs. Ellison remembers clearly that Mr. Ellison did not permit the book made into a movie, stage play, opera or anything else. And there the matter stood for awhile despite my argument that a documentary on one of America’s most important authors was overdue. I added that we wouldn’t be trying to do the show if Ellison hadn’t written INVISIBLE MAN and that it would be a boring program indeed if we talked about a book that, as it turns out, these days most people haven’t read. We needed to give the viewer at least at a taste of Ellison’s artistry and vision to make the case for his achievement.

Q: So that changed her mind?

AK: No, it didn’t. I began to make progress only after I remembered that I had tried in the late 1980’s to option the book myself and was told that although an option was available, Mr. Ellison would require script approval. Well, that was the turning point. I reminded Mr. Ellison’s agent, Owen Laster, of our conversation in the 80’s and stated that I would be delighted to give the Estate script approval for the few scenes (and the scenes only, mind you) that we wanted to adapt. Mr. Laster, as well as Ellison’s literary executor, John Callahan, strongly supported the idea and Mrs. Ellison gave her approval.

Q: Working within a documentary budget, you made some highly produced (i.e., expensive looking) dramatic scenes from INVISIBLE MAN that actually look like scenes from a big budget movie!

AK: Much of the credit for that goes to Elise Robertson who did a terrific job directing those scenes and working with Co-Producer Yanna Kroyt Brandt, Director of Photography Barry Stone, and Production Designer Don Day to achieve outstanding results on a miniscule budget. They deserve a lot of credit for making the scenes look like film even though they were shot on digi-Beta.

Q: Whatever that is…

AK: Videotape! It’s much cheaper.

Q: Right…. Do you think that Ralph Ellison, had he lived to see it, would have approved of your rendering of his life in the documentary?

AK: I doubt it. He was very careful about what went out to the public as representing his life, ideas, beliefs, and so on. So much so that when interviewed for print publications he would not infrequently ask to edit or polish transcripts of his responses to the questions asked.

Q: Well, how do you feel about the program?

AK: I’m very proud of our work, its failings notwithstanding.

Q: What do you mean by “failings.”

AK: I regard the program as a kind of “Ralph Ellison 101.” It introduces a rich, complex subject that certainly deserves further exploration. Fortunately, viewers can go directly to the source, his works, for further edification. But I also grieve for all of the wonderful commentary that we got from people like John Hope Franklin, Roger Rosenblatt, fiction writer James Alan McPherson, Amiri Baraka and others that we were forced to leave on the cutting room floor because of time constraints.

Q: You could make a DVD, a director’s cut or something like that couldn’t you?

AK: Yes. And I’d love to do that but I’d have to raise the money for it and…

Q/AK: (simultaneously) that would be too painful!

Q: Thank for your time. (unconvincing)This has been very, uh… quite “interesting.”

AK: The feeling is mutual, I’m sure. (under his breath) They promised me Roger Ebert or Elvis Mitchell would conduct the interview.

For More: An exended interview with Avon Kirkland at Jerry Jazz.