Ralph Ellison.

In recent years, the centrality of Ralph Ellison's place in African American literature has been documented by a number of important studies. Charles Johnson's Being and Race describes Invisible Man as "the Modern Ur-text for black fiction" (115), arguing that Ellison's novel, along with the Black Arts Movement, provided the two major artistic directions for the contemporary black writer. In a similar way, John Callahan's In the African-American Grain views Invisible Man as a seminal book which changed the course of African American literature, powerfully influencing a wide range of black writers that includes Ernest J. Gaines, James Alan McPherson, Ishmael Reed, and Sherley Anne Williams. Henry Louis Gates, likewise, in Figures in Black, credits Ellison with defining a new direction in black American fiction, freeing it from a narrowly mimetic tradition and providing contemporary black fictionists with "a new mode of seeing" and a "new manner of representation" (246). Keith Byerman, in Fingering the Jagged Grain, characterizes Invisible Man as a "paradigmatic work" (9) because it combined "traditional Afro-American themes" with "the stylistic and structural devices of modernist literature" (11).

Mark Busby's Ralph Ellison is in strong agreement with this high assessment of Ellison's achievement and influence, arguing that Invisible Man is "probably the most important post-1950 American novel" (141), a book which has had "a profound impact on American literature, both mainstream and African-American" (142). Busby's study makes an important contribution to Ellison scholarship because it carefully examines a crucial dimension of Ellison's work which is often alluded to by critics but never fully explored--the profound impact which Ellison's regional background had on the shaping of his imaginative vision. For Busby, Ellison's Oklahoma childhood provided him with a sense of American possibility which mingled dialectically with his subsequent experiences in the rural South and the urban North, producing an extremely rich and complex vision of African American life.

According to Busby, Geography influences Ellison's writing so completely that the symbolic values of the three primary locations where he spent his life provide a metaphor that permeates his work: thesis/antithesis = synthesis. His Southwestern background provided him with freedom and possibility; the South, antithetically, offered restriction and limitation; and the North allowed him a mature synthesis. Writing requires constant interaction with the shadow of the past--with one's geography and history--to produce the synthesis of art, which, Ellison emphasizes, imagination offers: "As I say, imagination itself is integrative, a matter of making symbolic wholes out of parts" (Going 1).

Busby sees Ellison's work therefore as dialectical and integrative, an active matrix in which many disparate cultural streams merge and enrich themselves with each other's energy.

Busby's book is coherently organized to explore what these streams are and how they mingle. His first chapter focuses on Ellison's biography, analyzing how Ellison's own experiences helped to shape his imagination. We do not get much new information about Ellison's life, but we do get fresh insights on how Ellison's life and art are vitally connected. The account of Ellison's WPA work as a collector of black folklore in New York is particularly eye-opening. Busby's discussion of Ellison's complex relationship with Richard Wright is also very useful in understanding not only how the two became very different writers in many ways but also how they remained strikingly similar in several other important ways, a fact ignored or obscured by most Ellison scholars.

The second chapter centers on Ellison's early fiction, the eight stories he wrote between 1939 to 1944. Busby traces Ellison's development from a doctrinaire "protest" writer intent on using literature as a form of propaganda to a mature artist writing stories like "Flying Home" and "King of the Bingo Game." Showing both remarkable continuity and development in Ellison's early stories, Busby argues convincingly that Ellison's apprentice work allowed him to "test his limits as a writer" and gave him "themes, images, and techniques" (38) which he would later use so masterfully in Invisible Man.

The next two chapters are devoted to a meticulous analysis of Invisible Man and the traditions out of which it grew. These clearly are the best chapters in the book because they not only place Invisible Man in a very revealing cultural context but also offer one of the freshest and most sensitive readings of his novel to appear in recent years. Busby makes a convincing case that one of the sources of Invisible Man's greatness is its ability to draw upon a rich variety of cultural traditions and amalgamate them into a vision of African American life which is both coherent and resonant. Unlike many readers of Ellison, who have chided him for swimming too deeply in the mainstream of European and American traditions and thus losing his distinctive qualities as a black writer, Busby stresses that it was Ellison's genius to use and transform his literary antecedents both inside and outside of the mainstream to give shape to a vision of life that was indeed African American, and richly so. Like Gates, Busby argues that Ellison did not flatly copy masterworks from the traditions he felt deeply related to but signified upon them; that is, he viewed them from his own unique black perspective, thus transfiguring them and incorporating them into a new vision. Busby understands that Ellison's response to his literary antecedents was never simple adulation or crude rejection. Even writers like Benjamin Franklin and Booker T. Washington, who on the surface seem simply to be parodied by Ellison, are in fact treated with both respect and criticism. (Invisible Man, after all, does pay homage to "thinker-tinkers" like Franklin and Washington, even as it ironically undercuts them with jokes that allow us to slip the yokes these mythic figures might otherwise impose upon us.) In the same way, Busby makes it clear that Ellison's response to European writers like Freud and Malraux and American writers such as Emerson, Melville, Twain, and Eliot was always complexly ambivalent. He thus could use their work without being dominated by it. Finally, Busby stresses that Ellison also made full use of African American folklore, music, religion, and music, harmonizing the demands of his individual talent with the potent demands of his black past.

Busby's expert contextualizing of Invisible Man allows us to see the novel as flowing from cultural streams which often clash on the surface, but on their deepest levels flow in a complex and often paradoxical harmony. He stresses that Ellison used the myth of the American frontier as a way of exploring both the jarring contradictions and discontinuities of African American life and also its points of continuity and harmony with other cultures. He argues convincingly that Ellison envisioned the frontier as a "border area" (Invisible Man 5), a liminal space where contraries meet, clash, and form new syntheses which in turn break down into new oppositions which are continually producing fresh ideas in an open-ended dialectical process. Ellison's frontier consciousness thus enabled him to "synthesize conflicting ideas into an operating whole that can account for the variety of American life." Centered in a richly dialectical vision of African American life which is inherently paradoxical and ironic, the novel stresses the ongoing tension of oppositions such as "freedom/restriction, black/white, positive/negative, good/evil, life/death, one/many, self/mask, visible/invisible" (41). Like Moby Dick and the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Ellison's novel envisions American in frontier terms as open space absorbing oppositions which are always interacting to produce fresh syntheses, which in turn break down into new oppositions. Ellsion's sense of American and African American life is liberatingly (and disturbingly) protean rather than reassuringly (but confiningly) static.

For these reasons, Busby claims that the power of Ellison's art is like the power of electricity, triggered by oppositions of "positive and negative" (41). He also emphasizes that the beauty of Ellison's art resembles the beauties of jazz, disrupting conventional harmonies with novel improvisations in such a way as to produce "new shapes" and "new sounds" (82). But this novelty, as both T. S. Eliot and black musicians like Louis Armstrong reminded Ellison, grows out of a dynamic response to tradition, an individual talent creatively reading and refashioning the past.

Busby's final three chapters address Ellison's nonfictional prose, his projected second novel, and his influence on subsequent black literature. The analysis of Ellison's second novel, variously titled Hickman Returns and Hickman Arrives, gives a clear sense of the main contours of the book and the various problems which made it difficult for Ellison to complete. Busby's discussions of Shadow and Act and Going to the Territory are very useful both to general readers and to scholars. This material, which has never received the critical attention it deserves, is carefully analyzed and intelligently related to the overall body of Ellison's work. Busby sees Ellison's critical writings as unified by a distinctive "voice of reason, concern, optimism, and intelligence" which contemplates "the unity and diversity of American life" (120). The vision of life emerging from Ellison's essays is fundamentally comic, probing the incongruities between democratic possibilities fostered by frontier ideals and the harsh restrictions deriving from the actualities of American history. For Ellison this comic vision has a crucial role to play in American cultural life, for it provides us with the humor, tolerance, and consciousness necessary for "transcending the divisions of our society" (Going 120).

To sum up, Busby's Ralph Ellison is highly recommended for all those interested in Ellison's work. Beginning students will find in it useful bibliographies and a clear, coherent account of Ellison's life and art. Scholars will find an intelligent and balanced reading of Ellison's major work which avoids ideological excesses and oversimplifications. Although the book is informed with a thesis, this central idea never becomes rigid or narrow. Because Busby's thesis arises naturally out of the materials he studies, it allows him to read Ellison's work in ways which are fair, lucid, and nuanced. Examining specific texts with considerable critical skill and background, Busby offers fresh understanding of Ellison's major work.

The book is not without flaws, however. For example, Busby mentions at several points how important it was for Ellison to assimilate African American folklore and religion into his fiction, but this crucial matter is not adequately explored. More discussion is needed of the Br'er Rabbit and Jack the Bear stories and how Ellison adapted them for his purposes. Ellison's masterful use of the black sermonic tradition should also have been given more attention, as should Ellison's artful signifying on the salve narratives.

Although Busby's linkage of Invisible Man with the frontier tradition is altogether sound and quite revealing, more could be done with this important matter as well. One very distinctive feature of the tall tales of the Old Southwest was their use of the framing device in which the testimony of a "literate" narrator surrounds and ironically comments upon the rough vernacular tale of an unlettered narrator. Although Busby does not mention this, Ellison cleverly signifies upon this technique in his Prologue and Epilogue, which surround the story of his victimized young protagonist with the sophisticated discourse of that same person after he has deepened his awareness of himself and American life through hard experience. As is the case with many frontier tales such as Longstreet's "Georgia Theatrics" and Thorpe's "The Big Bear of Arkansas," the net effect is richly ironic--the sharp clash of voices from the two narrators points up the great discrepancy between genteel ideals and harsh realities and creates what Louis Rubin has called "the great American joke" (3). Busby could also give more emphasis to Ellison's underground as a psychological frontier, a "border area" which was "shut off and forgotten during the nineteenth century" (Invisible Man 5-6) but which finally becomes the "dimensionless room" (568) that provides the protagonist with the inner "space" (567) he needs to undergo the spiritual metamorphosis which traditional Western heroes have experienced by moving to a physical frontier.

One wishes also that Busby's final chapter on Ellison's achievement and influence would provide a more substantial treatment of this important subject. Although his treatment of Ellison's literary ancestors is beautifully detailed, his treatment of the author's literary descendants is much too understated. He relies too heavily on what a few established critics have said on the subject, neglecting the more important direct testimony of writers like James Alan McPherson, Ernest J. Gaines, and Charles Johnson, each of whom has commented extensively on the strong influence which Ellison had on their work. More attention also needs to be given to the negative assessment of Ellison by recent black women novelists and critics.

These shortcomings aside, Mark Busby's Ralph Ellison is a solid achievement which not only contributes original insights on individual works such as Invisible Man, Shadow and Act, and Going to the Territory, but also puts these works in a solid biographical and cultural context. By grounding his reading of Ellison's fiction and criticism in the author's "regional background" (ix) and intelligently connecting this important dimension of Ellison's background with a great variety of other traditions which helped to fire his imagination and shape his art, Busby provides us with an unusually balanced and nuanced understanding of Ellison's work which will be extremely valuable to scholars and general readers for many years to come.

Works Cited

Byerman, Keith. Fingering the Jagged Grain: Tradition and Form in Recent Black Fiction. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1985.

Ellison, Ralph. Going to the Territory. New York: Random, 1986.

--. Invisible Man. New York: Random, 1989.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.

Johnson, Charles. Being and Race: Black Writing since 1970. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990.

Rubin, Louis. The Comic Imagination in American Literature. New Brunswick: Rutger UP, 1973.