Misreading Ellison's Cartoons

[Nushra MohamedKhan]

Houston Alfred Baker Jr. is an American scholar specializing in
African American literature and currently serving as a Distinguished
University Professor at Vanderbilt University in the English
department. Baker served as president of the Modern Language
Association, editor of the journal American Literature, and has
authored several books.
Holding "an exceedingly pessimistic view of American social progress
where race is concerned," Baker has written numerous books on African
Americans in modern American society. In his book Turning South Again:
Rethinking Modernism/Rereading Booker T, he suggests that being a
black American, even a successful one, amounts to a kind of prison
sentence. Baker also harshly criticized US President Barack Obama's
widely praised race-centered speech ("A More Perfect Union") stemming
from controversial remarks given by his pastor: "Sen. Obama's 'race
speech' at the National Constitution Center, draped in American flags,
was reminiscent of the Parthenon concluding scene of Robert Altman's
Nashville: a bizarre moment of mimicry, aping Martin Luther King Jr.,
while even further distancing himself from the real, economic,
religious and political issues so courageously articulated by King
from a Birmingham jail. In brief, Obama's speech was a pandering
disaster that threw, once again, his pastor under the bus." (Wiki)

Following the glass string,  not a thread really,  of that kite that
shimmers under the red hot Native Son, Gates,  and that Son of
Daudalus, Wood, and their seperate but equal  critiques of White
America and Pynchon's Cartoons, I've excerpted an essay of HAB Jr.
It does and it must make us wonder if critics bother to read the works
they critique. Even the favorable ones of IV read like so much
Fanboy's fan mail; cheerleaders under the bleechers, pinching off a
bit of weed, tossing to the wind, a libation for OBA ...endless
speculations about what He mydadunandsaid, and shit, dude.


Of if the novel or work has been perused (i.e. Read by an active
reader), we must wonder if, even  Houstan Alfred Baker Jr., really
read the novel on its own terms or if some political blinders have not
whitewashed his reading of it.

Two National Book Awards for Cartoons cast as Invisible Men. Yes,
though Pynchon does, in SL, tip his hat to the author's and books he's
written on top of, to Ishmael Reed, to Jewish Fiction, to Jazz, to
Henry James and Mark Twain ...perhaps, as with Malcolm X, where the
parody and transfer is so obvious or as in 1984m Duh, or Moby-Dick,
double-Duh,  Pynchon sees no reason to Name Ellison as the muse of of
GR, but IM is the blueprint for a s much as the whiteness of the
rocket as Melville's Call Me Influential.


Ellison's novel is burdened by belief, overwhelmed by excessive
literary "smartness," afraid to breathe life into its potentially
revolutionary cartoons. For that, finally, is what so many figures on
Ellison's fictional landscape are: mere cartoons, ventriloquized in
the name of a certain species of "democratic eloquence." They carry no
black agential weight that might threaten anything or anybody
constituting—to quote DuBois—the "best white public opinion" in
America. But, surely, since Ralph Waldo Ellison has influenced the
intellectual strivings of so many American liberal spokesmen, the
foregoing assessment of Invisible Man must seem like dark, heretical
ingratitude. But I mean no disrespect. I think such critical judgments
as I have made must be supported by the novel's own weight of
evidence. Hence, a critical reading is in order to support my
critique.

Where "industry" and its white captains are concerned, need we look
farther than the Trustee Mr. Norton or the export mogul Mr. Emerson?
On "power" as the product—both beneficent and terrible—of industrial
"machines," need we search beyond that southern campus road in
Invisible Man "with its sloping and turning." On this road is the
"black powerhouse with its engines droning earth–shaking rhythms in
the dark, its windows red from the glow of the furnace" (34).4  This
uncanny scene of industrial power's dominance over black life reprises
itself in the "deep basement" of Lucius Brockway at the northern
Liberty Paints Factory. Here, machinery, furnaces, gauges lead the
protagonist to an earth–shaking encounter with mysteries of American
industry and industrialists alike. The hero's awe is palpable: "It's
tremendous. It [Liberty Paints] looks like a small city," he exclaims
(197). And in this "small city," he undergoes a machine–tooled rebirth
from an electronic gizmo that subjects him to an industrial lobotomy
(233, 243). The vagaries of black American life in the North come to
seem like one huge "industrial accident." Any benefits of industry
that trickle down to blacks seem like pure products of welfare
capitalism at its American worst.

Ellison's utter faith in industrial democracy is, in part, a function
of his dependence on the brilliant analysis of the transition of black
America from "folk consciousness" to industrial, participatory
democracy that appears in Richard Wright's 12 Million Black Voices.

http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/7-1/html/baker.html