Who ain't a slave: Thomas F. Bertonneau on Ellison's IM

[alice wellintown]

Much has been written about Pynchon and Malcolm X, Toni Morrison, the
Herero, Watts...his slightly ambiguous statement in SL about Class &
Race, Twain's Jim, African American Jazz, the New Nego, the WHite
Negro....but Ellison, certainly the American Author Pynchon resembles
more than any other, has not been taken up by the Pynchon Industry.
Why not?

A brilliant analysis of IM.

Anthropoetics 7, no. 1 (Spring / Summer 2001)
The Acts of an Oedipus: Power, Language, and Sacrifice in Ralph
Ellison's Invisible Man
Thomas F. Bertonneau



[...]

Beginning in the mid-1940s, Ellison began the composition of a novel
based on his sense that ethical progress required the acknowledgment
above all of the individual, not exactly in the abstract, but outside
the categories that clamored to subsume him. And yet, in Ellison's
analysis, any awareness of the sanctity of discrete persons depended
(quite tragically, perhaps), on a prior historical experience of
domination. Before the new generation might be liberated from the
structures of bondage, those structures must have existed, and must
have produced, over a long period, the heightened contradictions that
throw injustice into relief and permit its abolition. The story of
freedom can only begin in the description of enslavement. But who is
enslaved? And how, before tasting liberty, does he grasp his
servitude?


Existence, according to Ellison, amounts to a great fatal labyrinth
whose purpose, nothing less than the sacrifice of dignity to power,
cannot be defeated by a contrary power, but only by guile, a kind of
casuistry, in combination with moral integrity and a clever tongue.
(And it would be hard to say which trumps which, morality or
cleverness. "Let not the left hand know what the right hand doeth"
seems to be the appropriate formula.) As the ultimate minority is the
minority of one, no one can avoid becoming enmeshed in one sacrificial
trap after another, so that survival (psychic survival, at least)
depends on the victim's discovery of how to overcome the particularly
devious sacrificial trap of unwitting collaboration with one's
persecutors. An individual's most insidious sacrificer, in the world
of Invisible Man, is invariably himself; and the "pulverized
individual" of the modern age does not salvage himself from sin,
Ellison writes, "through his identification with the guilty acts of an
Oedipus, a Macbeth or a Medea . . . but [rather] with those who are
indeed defeated" (Shadow and Act 40). Ellison invokes metaphors of the
bull in the arena or the fish on the line (40) to make his point.


http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0701/nellis.htm