Cultural Contexts for Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.

Eric J. Sundquist. Cultural Contexts for Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Boston: Bedford Books, 1995. 258 pp. $6.95.

Teachers and students of Ralph Ellison's canonical anatomy of African American cultural experience will welcome this compilation as long overdue. The utility of the thirty-four selections for the classroom is unquestionable. Here, for example, are the complete lyrics to Andy Razaf's protesting song "(What Did I Do to be So) Black and Blue" played repeatedly on a recording by Louis Armstrong in Jack the Bear's hideaway, and a few pages before that is an excerpt from Charles S. Johnson's study The Shadow of the Plantation, accompanied by an editorial headnote directing attention to the ironic resonance Ellison gives the social science text in his anecdotal rendition of Jim Trueblood's famously dysfunctional family life. A number of selections are predictable, and for that reason necessary to include: Booker T. Washington's "Atlanta Exposition Address"; W. E. B. Du Bois's rhetorically oblique comment on the Tuskegee leadership, "Of Mr. Booker T. Washington"; Alain Locke's announcement of the arrival of "The New Negro"; and Marcus Garvey's "Africa for the Africans" and his speech given at Liberty Hall in August of 1921. Other items sample Marxist discourse on "The Negro Question" and "The Woman Question," excerpt An American Dilemma and Blacks in the Labor Movement by Sterling Spero and Abram L. Harris, and illustrate such influential utterances for Ellison as spirituals, Peetie Wheatstraw's "The Devil's Son-in-Law," and Richard Wright's preaching of a nation in 12 Million Black Voices. Keyed as they are to events in the life of Invisible Man's protagonist, the selections work in the manner of a reciprocating concordance. A reader may consult the selections for background, but then will return to the primary text with an amplified reference.

Yet neither utility nor economy entirely create the value of Sundquist's project. Its significance lies finally in conception. Source studies arguing for the influence of text A upon the writing of text B are perdurable elements of scholarly publication. With the currency of the theory of literary signifying they increase in number even as they become more sophisticated. Yet Sundquist disavows any propositions of literary or source discovery. Similarly he offers no suggestion that his assembly of reprinted texts constitute the "facts" behind the fiction, as, say, some classroom casebooks aver they do. Ellison's collage of fictions about education in the South, the left wing Brotherhood, labor unions, nationalism--all of these are laden with extra-textual reference, but the world and the text are no more equivalent than are the life of the author and his protagonist.

Sundquist makes the point by using a version of the durable comparison between the novel Invisible Man and jazz composition to declare that "Ellison's sense of history as a form of subjective temporality--a constructed story, not a set of objective facts--is perhaps the most profound" way in which the novel compares to jazz. In another place, commenting on the aural poetry of the novel, Sundquist quotes Ellison's own words about the technique of Romare Bearden to comment on the feel of fact. Bearden's juxtapositions on canvas, wrote Ellison, are "eloquent of the sharp breaks, leaps in consciousness, distortions, paradoxes, reversals, telescoping of time, and surreal blending of styles, values, hopes and dreams which characterize much of Negro American history."

In other words, the design of Sundquist's project, limned in the architecture of its subject novel, resembles a field of force(s), multi-vocal, multi-directional, impinging upon the text eclectically, locally random it may seem, but eventually coming together in a formation of writing that Sundquist terms "the novel of segregation par excellence."

A twenty-eight-page introduction exploring the "archaeology of African American identity" in the novel, briefly tracing the are of Ellison's life, discussing critical responses, and, most importantly, indicating the reach of the novel beyond documentary realism, offers an outline of Ellisonian aesthetics. The selections are then arranged into three sections that follow the course of the fictional narrative. Part One, "The Scaffolding of a Nation," takes its name from Homer Barbee's sermon and presents the context of the Black Belt; Part Two, taking its title from Brother Tarp," A Heap of Signifying," offers vernacular folk culture as context; and Part Three, "The City Within a City," brings together contextual references to the capital of segregated African America. Each selection carries a headnote suggesting how the contextual reference illuminates a part of the fictional design. Sundquist concludes his volume with a brief bibliography of secondary works either quoted, cited, or deemed indispensable for further study of Ellison.

Although this volume of cultural contexts is modest in accomplishment alongside Eric Sundquist's prize-winning study of American literatures To Wake the Nations, both works are equally informed by a field theory of literary creation; thus, each book--the slim classroom text and the major study--presents a mode of critical engagement worthy of the rich subject of African American expressive arts.