國
立
交
通
大
學
外國語文學系外國文學與語言學碩士班
碩
士
論
文
從美學、政治到非裔美國表現文化：
雷夫‧艾利森《隱形人》批評之批判
From Aesthetics, Politics to Afro-American Expression:
A Critique of the Criticisms on Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man
研 究 生：王遠洋
指導教授：林建國 博士
李有成 博士
從美學、政治到非裔美國表現文化：
雷夫‧艾利森《隱形人》批評之批判
From Aesthetics, Politics to Afro-American Expression:
A Critique of the Criticisms on Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man
研 究 生：王遠洋 Student：Yuan-yang Wang
指導教授：林建國博士 Advisors：Dr. Kien Ket Lim
李有成博士 Dr. Yu-cheng Lee
國 立 交 通 大 學
外 國 語 文 學 系 外 國 文 學 與 語 言 學 碩 士 班
碩 士 論 文
A Thesis
Submitted to Graduate Institute of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics College of Humanities and Social Science
National Chiao Tung University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
for the Degree of Master of Arts
in
Literature
July 2009
Hsinchu, Taiwan, Republic of China
從美學、政治到非裔美國表現文化：
雷夫‧艾利森《隱形人》批評之批判
學生：王遠洋
指導教授
：林建國博士
李有成博士
國立交通大學外國語文學系外國文學與語言學碩士班
摘
要
本文
主旨在討論艾利森的《隱形人》與非裔美國表現文化之間的連結，並以此為主軸
回應六０年代黑人美學中傳承自哈林文藝復興以來美學與政治的難題。藝術與抗議是非裔
美國文學史中的重要議題，牽涉到黑人寫作的美學目的和政治目的。本文首先以堯 斯（
Hans
Robert Jauss
）的美學接受理論（
reception theory
）來定義艾利森作為一名強調讀者角色的
「生命世界現代主義作家」（
life-world modernist
）。從現代主義作家，到表意的現代主義
作家（
signifying modernist
），本文提出生命世界現代主義作家不標榜為藝術而藝術，而將
藝術釋交給普通讀者，這就是艾利森眼中非裔美國表現文化的特色之一。在此同時，本文
也集中評析赫歐（
Irving Howe
）、倪爾（
Larry Neal
）與蓋爾（
Addison Gayle
）三位批評
家對《隱形人》的負面批評說明他們的政治意圖掩蓋了《隱形人》中的「不明事物的諸形
式」（
the forms of things unknown
），也就是非裔美國表現文化，而其正是艾利森不願將
《隱形人》化約為抗議文學（
protest writing
）的首要因素。本文最後以分析《隱形人》來
強調艾利森透過他自身所經驗的表現文化形式在小說中體現了黑人獨特的生命世界，也抗
拒了美學與政治對非裔美國表現文化的物質化（materialize）。對艾利森而言，書寫的目的
在於向讀者訴說對生命世界的經驗本身，而非為藝術或為抗議。以非裔美國表現文化回歸
黑人的生命世界，《隱形人》跨越了六０年代黑人美學中美學與政治的二元對立。
關鍵詞：艾利森、《隱形人》、美學接受理論、黑人美學、藝術與抗議、非裔美國表現文
化
From Aesthetics, Politics to Afro-American Expression:
A Critique of the Criticisms on Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man
Student：Yuan-yang Wang
Advisors：Dr. Kien Ket Lim
Dr. Yu-cheng Lee
Graduate Institute of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics
National Chiao Tung University
ABSTRACT
This thesis mainly discusses the linkage between Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man
and Afro-American expression to explore the aporia of aesthetics and politics in the
Black Aesthetic of the 1960s since the Harlem renaissance. Art and protest in the
history of Afro-American literature is an inherent issue, and it engages the aesthetic
goal and political goal for the black writers. On the one hand, Ellison is defined as a
“life-world modernist” who emphasizes the role of the reader in a sense of Hans
Robert Jauss’s reception theory in this thesis. From a modernist, a signifying
modernist to a life-world modernist, Ellison does not recognize the label of art for
art’s sake. Instead, he releases the work of art to the common readers. This is one of
the features of Afro-American expressive culture in Ellison’s sense. On the other hand,
I situate the negative criticisms on Invisible Man, particularly that of Irving Howe,
Larry Neal, and Addison Gayle, to show that their political aims make them ignore
“the forms of things unknown,” the Afro-American expression. Reasonably, Ellison
disregards the novel as a piece of protest writing due to Afro-American expression.
The final part is the textual analysis of Invisible Man. Through his personal experience,
Ellison carries the life-world of the black people with writing and de-materializes the
Afro-American expression which is based on art and protest. From this point of view,
Invisible Man leads the readers to perceive the experience of experiencing of the
life-world and escape the binarism of aesthetics and politics in the Black Aesthetic
during the 1960s.
Keywords: Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, reception theory, the Black Aesthetic, art
and protest, Afro-American expression
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Title Page. . . ii
Chinese Abstract. . . iii
English Abstract. . . iv
Acknowledgment. . . v
Table of Contents. . . .vi
Chapter One:
The Trials of Ralph Ellison. . . .1
Chapter Two:
Mr. Ellison and Mrs. Brown: From Signifying to Life-World. . . .12
Chapter Three:
Unfolding the Forms of Things Unknown: The Negative Criticisms on Invisible
Man. . . .36
Chapter Four:
(De-)Materializing Afro-American Expression and Its Beyond. . . .52
Chapter Five:
Conclusion: Who’s Afraid of Ralph Ellison?. . . .76
Chapter One
The Trials of Ralph Ellison
It’s good for artists to get together
to eat and drink, but when they get
together in some sort of political
effort, it usually turns out that they
are being manipulated by a person
or a group who are not particularly
interested in art.
─Ralph Ellison, “A Very Stern Discipline” (746)
My thesis begins with the so-called “the trials of Ralph Ellison” in contemporary
Afro-American literary history. Traveling back to approximately two hundred years
ago in Boston in 1772, the first African American poet Phillis Wheatley went to a
meeting panel, which its eighteen gentlemen wanted to verify Wheatley’s authorship
of her poems and attempt to answer the question─“was a Negro capable of producing literature?” (Trials 5). Through his solid survey of the historical background of early
slavery, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. demonstrates how Wheatley was trialed in The Trials
of Phillis Wheatley (2003). “The details of the meeting have been lost,” Gates says,
“but I have often imagined how it might have happened” (5-6). Unlike Wheatley,
Ellison does not have to prove himself as a qualified as well as proficient African
American writer in front of the public in the twentieth century. By the same token,
however, he has to face a kind of new trials in the 1960s and 1970s─Is a Negro writer “black” enough to produce “black” literature? This question is no less sophisticated
happened since I decided to choose my thesis topic on Ellison and his Invisible Man
(1952).
Hence, in this thesis, there are roughly two kinds of overlapping arguments, and
their combination leads to my own reading of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. One is
Ellison’s response to the so-called “positive criticisms” that objectifies art in relation
to Invisible Man, and I will look at this through an interview in The Paris Review of
1955. The other is the intervention of the negative criticisms on Ellison and Invisible
Man through the ideology of Marxism and Black Nationalism, mainly arranging from
1963 to 1976. The two aspects will be infiltrated in Chapters Two and Three
respectively in different ways, but the main approach is based on the reception theory
of Hans Robert Jauss, one of the leading critics in the Constance School of reception
aesthetics. The major approach in Chapter Two is to compare Ellison’s theory of the
novel to the ideas of reception theory of Jauss. Jauss notices the absent place that the
readers should occupy both in Formalist and Marxist aesthetics in literary studies. In
my observation, Ellison coincidently confronts such an intersection as in New
Criticism and Marxism, both of which intervened in the Afro-American literary
production during the 1960s and 1970s.
In Chapter Two, my investigation will focus on the commentary of Invisible Man
which regards it as a “pure literary work” to examine its risk of objectifying black art
without considering its audience. This argument will be elaborated in detail by
Ellison’s idea of the “little man” later in Chapter Two, and this part also engages
Ellison’s theory of the novel and redefines him as a “life-world modernist.” Terry
Eagleton describes, “[t]he ‘world’ of a literary work is not an objective reality, but
what in German is called Lebenswelt, reality as actually organized and experienced by
analysis which discusses the life-world of African Americans that is associated with
Afro-American expression in Chapter Four, life-world modernist provides Ellison a
powerful writing position.
Chapter Three keeps Jauss’s reception theory and applies it to the negative
criticisms on Ellison and Invisible Man, mainly ranging from the mid-sixties to the
mid-seventies. In this chapter, my argument is that these criticisms are deeply
influenced by Marxism and Black Nationalism, and much research evidence also
support this point. By investigating the two kinds of criticisms, the aporia of
aesthetics and politics of the Black Aesthetic is clearly revealed. Let me begin with a
dispute in the United States within the realm of American studies. Observing the
historical development of American studies, Gene Wise mentions a debate between
Leo Marx and Gordon Kelly in “‘Paradigm Dramas’ in American Studies: A Cultural
and Institutional History of the Movement.” As one of the so-called “Americanists”
during the 1950s, Marx makes efforts to define American studies. Being in the stage
of emphasizing “social structures underlying intellectual and artistic expression”
(204-5), Wise singles out these words, “[n]o one can say exactly what American
Studies is…because scholars in the field are free to follow their own personal visions”
(qtd. in Wise 183; emphasis original). Unlike the difficulties of the Americanists such
as Vernon Louis Parrington and Perry Miller confront in early American studies, the
Americanists in the 1950s find the base in the fields of history or literature.
Not until the 1960s the Americanists do start to challenge Marx’s question.
According to Wise, Robert Merideth’s seminar “Culture Therapy 202” brings
American studies a new paradigm. Merideth is not satisfied with the American
Studies in the academy. What he desires from the American experiences is
popular culture studies, folklore studies, women’s studies, ecology studies, film
studies, material culture studies, ethnic studies, education studies, youth studies, Third
World studies, and Native American studies” (186), which are basically categorized
as “subcultural studies” (187). The political movements during the 1960s due to the
blossoming of these “subcultures” have a deep influence on American intellectuals.
To find an anchor for American studies, Leo Marx pays attention to the function
of literature. Wise mentions his 1969 article, “American Studies─A Defense of an Unscientific Method,” and points out that Marx “define[s] literature and culture in
transcendental language” (194) for its imaginative concepts. At the same time, the
impacts of anthropology and sociology keep the Americanists holding another point
of view of American Studies. Taking Gordon Kelly as an example, Wise finds that
Kelly believes that literature as an imaginative product is a human product that
“created and consumed by particular types of people in response to particular
experiences in their world” (194). Trying to make a conclusion, Wise comments on
this dispute, “[i]n contrast to Marx’s sense of literature as transcending everyday
reality, Kelly declared that literature must be deeply grounded in social reality before
it can be understood culturally” (194; emphasis original).
The debate between Marx and Kelly implies a universal question in literary
studies─the aporia of aesthetics and politics. Literature sometimes is an artistic product; whereas sometimes it becomes a political propaganda in a particular
historical condition. Approximately at the period the Marx-Kelly debate takes place, a
similar debate happens among the black intellectuals of the 1960s: the committed-art
school and the detached-art school of the Black Aesthetic. The black movement
activist Maulana Karenga defines the Black Aesthetic thus in Introduction to Black
First, [the Black Aesthetic] was used to mean a distinctive mode of aesthetic
expression by which Black art could be identified. Secondly, it meant a
criteria by which Black art could not only be judged in terms of its
creativity and beauty, but also in terms of its social relevance. (464)
It is clear that, according to Karenga, the Black Aesthetic is simultaneously
“aesthetic” and “political.” He observes the historical trends in African American
literature and culture, and demarcates two schools in the Black Aesthetic. “Writers
such as Ellison and Redding,” Karenga writes, “argued the primacy of art rather than
race or politics, suggesting art was universal and personal but not black” (464). This
idea is completely unpersuasive to Langston Hughes and Richard Wright. With a
historical examination from Larry Neal to Chestyn Everett, Karenga comes up with
his own articulation of the black art, “it had to be functional, collective and
committing” (467). This is the political side of Afro-American literature.
When recapturing the issue of politics and aesthetics in African American
literary history, Maryemma Graham points out,
If the Civil Rights Movement provided a catalyst for the novel in the social
and political realm, the demise of new criticism and the democratization of
the academy midwived its rebirth. The New Critics had eschewed any kind
of political intent in art, calling for the autonomy of art divorced from
politics… (2)
In Ralph Ellison’s pieces of writings and essays, it is clear that he intends to deal with
this aporia of politics and aesthetics by his own concept of literature and theory of the
novel. Except for a deliberate discussion of this topic in Chapter Two, several
theorists who analyze the related issues of aesthetics and politics also support my
in the following chapters of my thesis. Besides, the historical review of the opposition
of art and protest in African American literary history is also briefly summarized in
Chapter Two. From this perspective, the battle between Marx and Kelly, hence, is just
one of the like events in the 1960s.
However, the 1960s is not just the 1960s in George Lipsitz’s American Studies in
a Moment of Danger (2001). Like Ellison’s paying attention to how Marxism, Black
Nationlaism, and sociological theories intervene in the production of Afro-American
literature, Lipsitz claims that his goal of this book “explores the links between
American Studies and social movements” (xvi). Lipsitz also observes the influence
that Marx has made on American studies, having his own unique approaches.
Basically, Lipsitz examines the socio-historical conditions in the United States from
the 1930s to the 1960s, and his position is very critical to the developing of
industrialization and globalization. Therefore, his way to examine Marx is closely
related to this anchor, but at the same time he has also addressed the aporia of
aesthetics and politics:
Following Marx’s description of the American Studies scholars, he thinks
that, Both sides [of the “context”-oriented American studies scholars and
the “text”-oriented Southern Agrarian or New Critical opponents] knew that
the social contexts framed aesthetic choices and that textual content played
a large role in determining the effectiveness of any given work. (69)
What Lipsitz suggests is a possible method to explore the binary opposition of
aesthetics and politics in American literary and cultural studies, and his argument
could be regarded as a powerful insight for this thesis dealing with the committed-art
school and the detached-art school of the Black Aesthetic. This argument will be
both in Chapters Three and Four.
Before illustrating the aporia of aesthetics and politics in African American
context, let us trace this aporia back to a primary and serious topic ─ double
consciousness. W. E. B. Du Bois defines double consciousness by pondering over the
situation of African Americans in the following manner:
[T]he Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with
second-sight in this American world,─a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of
the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this
sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of
measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused
contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,─an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one
dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
(11)
Being granted such an idiosyncratic identity, African Americans are always on the
journey back and forth to identify with the American tradition and the African roots.
Ellison has to face this “two-ness” as well. In “A Very Stern Discipline,” he expresses
his being fond of Western thinkers, including Dostoevsky, Henry James, Karl Marx,
Gorki, Sholokhov, and Malraux (746). He embraces Western literary and cultural
nutrients, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. does in his critical project of The Signifying
Monkey (1988). Gates turns the direction of “two-ness” to Afro-American literature
and criticism. “The black Africans who survived the dreaded ‘Middle Passage,’”
Gates argues in The Signifying Monkey, “from the west coast to the New World did
interpretation and double-voiced utterance” (xxi) of African Americans. Exploring the
various figures of Esu/Esu-Elegbara, Gates intends to examine “the levels of linguistic
ascent” (6) in the unique development of Afro-American literature. Compared with
Karenga’s definition of “functional, collective and committing” (467), Gates suggests
an aesthetic angle to read Afro-American literature.
This thesis grasps the binary oppositions of the detached-art school and the
committed-art school of the Black Aesthetic to prove that aesthetics could be the other
side of politics, and vice versa. Furthermore, this thesis also treats Afro-American
literature as a case study to deconstruct the binary opposition. Russ Castronovo traces
the origin of the word “aesthetics” back to the German Romantic tradition of
Immanuel Kant and Friedrich von Schiller to Thomas Paine’s notion of common
sense (10-11). He emphasizes that even the narrow definition of aesthetics referring to
“formal criteria such as unity, proportion, and balance within the domain of art” (10),
the word still “resounds with expensive political and social possibility” (10). In
Chapter Two, this entangling knot could be partially perceived in Ellison’s theory of
the novel, and he is also defined as a “life-world modernist” whose position is more
than just a modernist as well as a “signifying modernist.”
At the same time, this thesis is also a study of a brilliant author whose insightful
observation of the racial issues in the United States changes my understanding of the
Afro-American literature. It is very fortunate for me to write a thesis on Ellison and
Invisible Man in the twentieth-first century. Ellison was attacked and praised
simultaneously since the decades after Invisible Man was published in 1952, which
was neither a pure literary work nor a work of protest writing by himself. As my
arguments in Chapters Two to Four will show, the novel is closely related to the
From Lipsitz’s point of view, “Ellison…fashioned works of art and criticism that
pointed to the obsolescence of old boundaries dividing popular culture from ‘high’
culture” (103). Like Lipsitz’s argument of refashioning of art, my emphasis focuses
on Afro-American expression as a discipline of art in Chapter Four. As Henry Yu’s
concern about the consumption by elite whites of the music and art of the Harlem
Renaissance in the 1920s, he argues that “[m]usical styles such as rhythm and blues,
rock and roll, soul, rap, and hip-hop were marketed through an association with their
black origins” (107). To Ellison, Afro-American expression is not merely a writing
tool that engages African American culture, as would be discussed in Chapter Four.
On the one hand, as Lipsitz states, Ellison “exposed an interaction between art and life
that refuted formalist assumptions about the autonomy of art” (104); on the other hand,
“American studies scholars read Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man but still know too little
about the Lindy-hop” (106). This thesis tries to discuss the novel by examining the
various forms of Afro-American expression.
Finally, this thesis, as the subtitle shows, is a critique of criticisms. Bruce Fink
once says, “[i]t is often believed that we human beings share many of the same
feelings and reactions to the world, which is what allows us to more or less
understand each other and constitutes the foundation of our shared humanity”
(Fundamentals 2). This assumption might be partial and not always true. Virginia
Woolf has said in “How It Strikes a Contemporary,” “[i]n the first place a
contemporary can scarcely fail to be struck by the fact that two critics at the same
table at the same moment will pronounce completely different opinions about the
same book” (231). Humanity is complicated and bewildering, though a critic could
always explore it by reading a literary piece of work.
in Taiwan, the task of reading Invisible Man is definitely fascinating and worthy of
challenging. Jacques Derrida quotes Montaigne’s words to start his task of
interpreting Claude Lévi-Strauss, “We need to interpret interpretations more than to
interpret things” (qtd. in “Structure” 278). Without any doubt, my reading will be
totally different from those who read the novel in the 1960s and 1970s. In this way,
my thesis becomes a critique of the interpretations of the novel in the past and
contains my own interpretations in my “now-ness” at the same time. Reading a
literary text could more than simply an issue in literary study. It engages a cultural
and political aims, and this point is exactly how the debate between Marx and Kelly
have when defining American studies with literary texts. To some degree, the
different positions that Karenga and Gates stand when defining Afro-American
literature could also be regarded as one of the points when discussing the critics’
reading of Invisible Man, what I call the trials of Ellison, during the Black Aesthetic
later in the following chapters.
As the binarism of aesthetics and politics in American studies by the Marx-Kelly
debate has revealed, the definition of Black art under the mapping of Afro-American
literature meets a similar dilemma. If literature, like Marx’s opinion shows, is
“transcending,” then it conflicts to Kelly’s emphasis of literature as “grounded” in
social reality. By this example in the field American studies, the committed-art school
and the detached-art school in the Black Aesthetic also penetrate this aporia in the
field of Afro-American literature. Hence, Ellison’s statement in “A Very Stern
Discipline” is adequately connected to his theory of the (Afro-American) novel. This
part, as I have mentioned, will be explained in detailed in Chapter Two later. In “A
Very Stern Discipline,” the interviewers ask Ellison about his opinion about herd
techniques and knowledge with each other, but only when the herd does not engage
with any political effort (746). Ellison is very aware of how political acts could have a
possible influence on the composition of art. I believe, by my arguments illustrating
from Chapters Two to Four, from discussing Ellison’s theory of the novel to the
textual analysis of Invisible Man, this fact will be luminously presented, and it is also
why Ellison is so unique among his contemporaries. This thesis examines the trials of
Ellison and reconsiders the question─Is a Negro writer “black” enough to produce “black” literature? When the invisible man firstly meets the members in Brotherhood
at Chthonian, Emma murmurs, “[b]ut don’t you think he should be a little blacker?”
(Invisible 303). Who could be more capable of representing, speaking for, or writing
about the black people is the central thinking direction of my arguments in the
Chapter Two
Mr. Ellison and Mrs. Brown: From Signifying to Life-World
A novel whose range was both
broader and deeper was needed.
─Ralph Ellison, “Brave Words for a Startling Occasion” (153)
The dichotomy of the committed-art school and the detached-art school, as my
observation has shown in Chapter One, is an arbitrary category for the unique
historical vicissitude of Afro-American literature. In this chapter and the following
chapters, my argument will stick to this point by taking Ellison as an example. Before
going into the textual analysis of the novel Invisible Man in Chapter Four, it is
necessary to discuss the intersection of the novel as a genre and Afro-American
literary disputes approximately from the 1960s to the 1970s. In the initial part of this
chapter, my argument will focus on a sketching map of the theory of the novel to
discuss the art of fiction in context: English novelists, American novelists, and
Afro-American novelists. The latter part of this chapter compares Ellison’s theory of
the novel and Hans Robert Jauss’s reception theory. Many of the kernel ideas in
Ellison’s “The Art of Fiction,” “Society, Morality and the Novel,” and “The Little
Man at Chehaw Station” parallel Jauss’s reception theory. There have been scholars
who for a long time have tried to define Ellison as a novelist, an essayist, or a literary
critic. This chapter attempts to come up with a critical study to define Ellison as a
life-world modernist. To distinguish him from his contemporaries by exploring
Ellison’s theory of the novel, the positive criticisms on Invisible Man seem to be
Eurocentric and Americentric, and become ambiguous judgments. Invisible Man is
its “little man”1
To adapt Martin Heidegger’s opening statement in Being and Time, here we
could say ─ for manifestly we have long been aware of what we mean when we use the expression “novel.” We, however, who used to think we understood it, have now
become perplexed. As Ian Watt points out in The Rise of the Novel, “[i]s the novel a
new literary form?” (9), which is still one of the questions anyone “interested in the
early eighteenth century novelists and their works is likely to ask” (9). To discuss
Ellison’s theory of the novel, Wlliam Lyne suggests that we start with Henry James.
In “The Signifying Modernist: Ralph Ellison and the Limits of the Double
Consciousness” in PMLA, Lyne notices that Ellison’s essay, “The Art of Fiction,” is
very similar to James’s book The Art of the Novel. Though he asserts “[i]n Ellison’s
pantheon of Euro-American ancestors, James’s place is secure” (321), he keeps being
alerted to the double consciousness anywhere and anytime.
***
2
Lyne’s research, according to himself, is based on Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s
concept of Signifyin(g). In The Signifying Monkey, Gates intends to articulate a
discourse of African-American theory. He claims that “[t]he Signifying Monkey...is
distinctly Afro-American” (xxi). African-American writers and critics read what
Gates calls “the canonical texts of the Western tradition” (xxii) with their unique
cultural roots of “the black English vernacular tradition” (xxiii) simultaneously. The of Ellison. He quotes Horace A. Porter’s words
and agrees with his argument that the relationship between Ellison and James is like
Frederick Douglass and his master: “write a hand very similar to that of [the] Master”
(qtd. in Lyne 321).
1 I will explain this idea on page 3 and page 14 to 15.
2 About the definition and serial discussion of the term “double consciousness,” please see Chapter
“two-tone heritage” (xxiii) of African-American writers and critics provides them a
“double-voiced” perspective to write and to comment. Gates believes that Ellison
belong to the double-voiced literary figure (xxiii). In Gates’s words, Signifyin(g)
penetrates the “English-language use of signification refers to the chain of signifiers”
(49; emphasis original) and reveals “the figures for black rhetorical figures” (51). He
argues that Ellison’s “little man” is the “trickster figure” of the Signifying Monkey.
Gates quotes a Yoruba poem starting with the line “Latopa, Esu little man” (qtd. in
Gates 65) to prove that Ellison puts himself at “a discursive crossroads which two
languages meet” (65), just as the Esu myth “The Two Friends” shows, “Esu’s hat is
neither black nor white; it is both black and white” (35). Tracing back to the divine
trickster figure of Yoruba mythology, Gates further discoveries the interposing figure
of the Signifying Monkey and links it to Ellison’s little man at Chehaw station.
Undoubtedly, Ellison’s theory of the novel needs a meticulous discussion. Watt
explores the rise of the novel by the term realism from the view of philosophy. The
novelists, especially the realists, desire to write about human experiences to gain “[the]
ideal of scientific objectivity” (11). Watt argues that the new literary form of the
novel is concomitant with “individual experience which is always unique and
therefore new” (13). Since the Renaissance period individual experience had replaced
collective tradition (14). Specifically speaking, nobody’s experience is likely to be the
same as that of another person, and even one’s single experience will never repeat
twice.3
3 Hans-Georg Gadamer’s tour de force, Truth and Method (1975), could probably provide Watt an
intensive discussion in the rise of the novel. Gadamer particularly focuses on experience in the domain of philosophy, starting from G. W. F. Hegel to Martin Heidegger in “The Concept of Experience (Erfahrung) and the Essence of the Hermeneutical Experience” (341-55).
Hence, Watt argues that “the novelist’s primary task [of conveying] the
conventions can only endanger his success” (13).
Realism is dominant in the nineteenth century. James in “The Art of Fiction,”
originally a lecture delivering at the Royal Institution, London, in 1884, strictly judges
that Anthony Trollope “is less occupied in looking for the truth (the truth, of course I
mean, that he assumes, the premises that we must grant him, whatever they may be),
than the historian, and in doing so it deprives him at a stroke of all his standing room”
(372). James writes his pieces of work with formal realism, and he suggests, “[a]
novel is in its broadest definition a personal, a direct impression of life: that, to begin
with, constitutes its value, which is greater or less according to the intensity of the
impression” (374).
Another novelist who believes in impression is Thomas Hardy. Hardy in the
preface to the fifth edition of Tess of D’Urbervilles defines novel in this way,
[T]hough the novel was intended to be neither didactic nor aggressive,
but in the scenic parts to be representative simply, and in the
contemplative to be oftener charged with impressions than with
convictions, there have been objectors both to the matter and to the
rendering. (4)
But the critics ignore their direct impression and begin to fight with the subtitle of
Tess of D’Urbervilles, “A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented by Thomas Hardy.” It
leads this novel to a controversy, for Tess is never presented faithfully except in the
eyes of Hardy. Virginia Woolf is a very careful reader of Hardy. In the second series
of The Common Reader she discusses Hardy’s Wessex Novels by illustrating that for
Hardy, a novel is “an impression, not an argument” (qtd. in “Novels” 254). To
differentiate an impression and an argument, Woolf suggests, “[i]t is for the reader,
aside the writer’s conscious intention in favour of some deeper intention of which
perhaps he may be unconscious (“Novels” 254). In Woolf’s opinion, Hardy’s greatest
novel gives the reader impressions; his weakest novel gives the reader arguments
(“Novels” 254).
Woolf’s criticism on Hardy’s should be traced back to her theory of the novel. In
“Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” she asks, “...what is reality? And who are the judges
of reality? A character may be real to Mr. Bennet and quite unreal to me” (97). Tess
Durbeyfield and Angel Clare may be real to Hardy himself and perhaps unreal to
Woolf. “How shall I begin to describe [Mrs. Brown’s] character?” (“Bennett” 105),
Woolf wonders. For her, the way the Edwardians, including Arnold Bennett, H. G.
Wells, and John Galthworthy, give the reader a “house” (“Bennett” 106), a Woolfean
term for the literary convention. By the Edwardian tools, they put Mrs. Brown in the
house by describing all “the fabric of things” (“Bennett” 106); the Georgians like
James Joyce and T. S. Eliot realize that “[t]here was Mrs. Brown protesting that she
was different, quite different, from what people made out” (“Bennett” 107) and they
are not sure what should they do to Mrs. Brown. In “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,”
Woolf ponders a complicated question, regarding “what novelists mean when they
talk about character, what the impulse is that urges them so powerfully every now and
then to embody their view in writing” (“Bennett” 93).
“Character-reading” (“Bennett” 91) is a crucial point in Woolf’s theory of the
novel. For Woolf, Mrs. Brown is much more than a character. She is human nature
under a historical transition which reveals “...the lack of convention, and how serious
a matter it is when the tools of one generation are useless for the next” (“Bennett”
105). As a result, Joyce and Eliot make their efforts to discover the Georgian tools,
inseparable, and old tools will never be suitable for a new age. In “Mr. Bennett and
Mrs. Brown” she describes the struggles of Joyce and T. S. Eliot,
For this state of things is, I think, inevitable whenever from hoar old age or
callow youth the convention ceases to be a means of communication
between writer and reader, and becomes instead an obstacle and an
impediment. (108)
Since “they do not know which to use, a fork or their fingers” (“Bennett” 108), Woolf
thinks that the reader will be struck by the indecency of Joyce and the obscurity of
Eliot (“Bennett” 108-9). There is no a single novelist who can immediately write a
piece of literary work which pleases the readership of a new age.
Woolf herself was experiencing a historical change in her own age as well. She
asserts, “to the effect that in or about December, 1910, human character changed”
(“Bennett” 91). As a female writer, she knows she must abandon the old tools of the
literary convention. In A Room of One’s Own she tells women, “...a book is not made
of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or
domes. And this shape too has been made by men out of their own needs for their own
uses” (100). Hence, the novel as a newly raising literary genre “was young enough to
be soft in [women’s] hands” (100). Woolf encourages women that do not dwell in the
house that men build for them. A woman has to build a house of her own by the new
tools in the new age.
Woolf elaborates this point of view in “The Narrow Bridge of Art.” She
reminds the novelists that “[y]ou cannot cross the narrow bridge of art carrying all its
tools in your hands. Some you must leave behind, or you will drop them in midstream
or, what is worse, overbalance and be drown yourself” (22). Intriguingly, she does not
praises Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy for its fluidity from poetry to prose and
then to the form as a novel itself (21). Woolf expects the novel as a genre can bring
not only a new literary form but also a new literary achievement by the influences of
the power of music, the stimulus of sight, etc (23). The only way to accomplish this
goal is to unfold your own envelope of life.
“Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged,” Woolf says in
“Modern Fiction,” “life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding
us from the beginning of consciousness to the end” (150). For a novelist, in order to
prevent life escaping in front of him or her, what he or she needs is just to unfold his
or her own envelope. Life is not what people tell you: “See, this is what life is all
about!” To unfold your own life in your own envelope; otherwise, you will become
the materialists whom Woolf defines. Their attitudes toward life are confined, and
they cannot unfold their own lives in the envelope. An “unscrupulous tyrant”
(“Modern” 149) provides them a plot, whether it is a comedy or tragedy (“Modern”
149). Hence she urges that “if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could
write what he choose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own
feeling and not upon convention, there would be no [literary convention of any kind]
in the accepted style...” (“Modern” 150). Shakespeare’s plays, in Woolf’s words, are
“the perfectly elastic envelope of his thought” (“Narrow” 14), so is Sterne’s Tristram
Shandy because it keeps distance from the so-called “what-life-is-all-about”
(“Narrow” 21).
Unfortunately, a critic usually does not care what a writer’s life is about in his
or her own envelope. What they care is not impression but argument. “The Art of
Fiction” is Woolf’s response to E. M. Foster’s criticism on George Meredith, Hardy,
is some failure in relation to life” (109) and reiterates Forster’s serious commentary
that “Henry James brought into the novel something besides human beings. He
created patterns which, though beautiful in themselves, are hostile to humanity. And
for his neglect of life, says Mr. Forster, he will perish” (109). Here comes the
argument between aesthetics and humanity in literature, but Woolf emphasizes that
“nobody knows anything about the laws of fiction; or what its relation to life; or to
what effects it can lend it self. We can only trust our instincts” (110). Amazingly,
Woolf deconstructs the house she herself builds for writing a novel, because there is
no theory for the novel after all. There are only instincts flowing in one’s
consciousness.
What consciousness is is a philosophical question. Some critics even point out
that “consciousness is always consciousness ‘of’ something present to but different
from consciousness itself” (“Deconstruction” 237). To Watt, consciousness is also a
vital point for the novelists in his articulation of the rise of the novel. Woolf has a
deep discussion about consciousness in “American Fiction.” In this essay she defines
what does being American means logically, “whatever the American man may be, he
is not English; whatever he may become, he will not become an English man. For that
is the first step in the process of being American─to be not English” (116). After comparing and contrasting Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis, Woolf discovers
being an American man is a complicated matter about consciousness. In her opinion,
“[w]omen writers have to meet many of the same problems that beset Americans”
(116) and the biggest one is self-consciousness,
They too are conscious of their own peculiarities as a sex; apt to suspect
insolence, quick to avenge grievances, eager to shape an art of their own. In
sex, of civilisation─which have nothing to do with art, have got between them and the paper, with results that are, on the surface at least, unfortunate.
(116)
As a result, both Anderson and Lewis suffer from being an American. Anderson
“must protest his pride” to claim that he is an American who is not an English; Lewis
“must conceal his bitterness” of admitting that he is an American man whom the
English men would call him typically. Woolf continues to argue,
For the more sensitive [the American] is, the more he must read English
literature; the more he reads English literature, the more alive he must
become to the puzzle and the perplexity of this great art which uses the
language on his own lips to express an experience which is not his and to
mirror a civilisation which he has never known. The choice has to be
made─whether to yield or to rebel. (124)
Hence, Mrs. Brown is not a target only between the Edwardians and the Georgians in
British empire anymore. She thus becomes a transatlantic figure between the English
novelists and the American novelists. In this way, Woolf actually deals with the same
issue that W. E. B. Du Bois calls double consciousness in The Souls of Black Folk.
In 1937, Richard Wright published “Blueprint for Negro Writing” in the
inaugural issue of New Challenge. In this essay Wright claims with the first sentence
saying, “[G]enerally speaking, Negro writing in the past has been confined to humble
novels, poems, and plays, prim and decorous ambassadors who went a-begging to
white America” (1380). Wright urges African American writers to write a collective
work that brings Negro nationalism (1387). To write the Negro life “in New York’s
Harlem or Chicago’s South side with the consciousness that one-sixth of the earth
manifesto, in the sense of representing life, is completely what Woolf is against to.
Hence, the “unscrupulous tyrant” interferes in Afro-American literature and
builds a house for African Americans: Black Nationalism and Marxism. “[F]or the
Negro writer, Marxism is but the starting point,” Wright asserts, “[n]o theory of life
can take the place of life. After Marxism has laid bare the skeleton of society, there
remains the task of the writer to plant flesh upon those bones out of his will to live”
(1384-85). As a novelist, Wright does not keep away from what Woolf says
“what-life-is-all-about.” He dwells in a house that had been built for him, or, for other
angry African American novelists and critics. The ultimate result is that they all
abandon Mrs. Brown.
Taking Wright’s own novel, Native Son, as an example, we would probably
wonder whether Bigger Thomas as an African American is presented faithfully by
Wright in such an insidious and painful way. Though Wright admits that he dresses
Native Son up with his childhood (506), and the statement seems to make this novel
more authentic, the fact is not everyone is Bigger. In “Everyone’s Protest Novel,”
James Baldwin expresses his dissatisfaction with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle
Tom’s Cabin and Wright’s Native Son. Baldwin asserts that Uncle Tom’s Cabin “is a
very bad novel” (1654) because “[the readers] have only the author's word that they
are Negro and they are, in all other respects, as white as she can make them”
(1655-56), and Bigger in Native Son is “Uncle Tom’s Descendant, flesh of his flesh”
(1659). Baldwin views the protest novel as “a mirror of our confusion, dishonesty,
panic, trapped and immobilized in the sunlit prison of the American dream (1657).
The mirror forces Bigger denies his life and “admits the possibility of his being
sub-human and feels constrained...” (1659).
she humorously says that if men like Napoleon and Mussolini do not enlarge
themselves with women as their mirror, “the earth would still be swamp and jungle.
The glories of all our wars would be unknown” (45-6). Woolf takes the issue of sex to
think about race in “American Fiction,” and Baldwin understands the issue of race by
juxtaposing the situations of the contemporary Negro novelists and the dead New
England woman (1659). They both keep one single belief: to unfold your own
envelope and throw “what-life-is-all-about” away.
By sketching a map of the theory of the novel by English novelists, American
novelists, and African American novelists, there are some common features among
them. As Woolf’s emphasis on life itself, Baldwin argues that “Bigger’s tragedy is not
that he is cold or black or hungry, not even that he is American, black; but that he has
accepted a theology that denies him life, that he admits the possibility of his being
sub-human and feels constrained...” (1659). Bennet, Wells, Galthworthy, Stowe, and
Wright, in Woolf’s definition, are the materialists who dwell in a house that is built by
an “unscrupulous tyrant” rupturing the envelope of life. How African American
novelists unfold this envelope to catch his or her life is a highly sophisticated task: he
or she needs to build a house and then deconstruct it. Ellison definitely is not an
exceptional literary figure.
***
After James wrote “The Art of Fiction” in 1884 and Woolf wrote “The Art of
Fiction” in 1927, Ellison’s interview with The Paris Review in 1955 keeps the same
title: “The Art of Fiction.” During the interview Ellison tells the interviewers of The
Paris Review that he is not like other social realists of the 1950s who are concerned
less with tragedy than with justice, and he is concerned with injustice with art (211).
[Invisible Man] a pure literary work as opposed to one in the tradition of social
protest” (211). Ellison replies, “I recognize no dichotomy between art and protest”
(212) to deny this binary opposition of art and protest. The binary opposition of art
and protest could be traced back to the historical background of the African American
intellectuals in the 1920s.
On the one hand, Du Bois delivered an address called “Criteria of Negro Art” at
the Chicago Conference of the NAACP in 1926. He says, “[t]hus all Art is
propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists” (854). In the 1960s
and 1970s, the legacy of Du Bois contrives to combine Black Nationalism and
Marxism. One of the representatives is Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, and his
“Marxism-Leninism-Mao-Tse-Tung-Thought” (qtd. in Baker Journey 104) has a deep
influence on his own creative writing. Although Baker pays careful attention to the
difference between Marxism and nationalism and reminds that “Marxism and
nationalism are incompatible at many levels” (104), he still agrees that they do
function in scientific socialism.
A. Robert Lee adapts the same pattern to explain the Brotherhood in Invisible
Man, “[i]n the Brotherhood, [the invisible man] becomes a member, and eventual
heretic, under the leadership of the ‘one-eyed,’ and so half-sighted, Jack, and a
neophyte believer in politics as Marxian ‘scientific explanation’ (p. 266)” (25).
Marxist thought is also concomitant with literary production, just as Baker points out,
“Baraka asserted that ‘Black Art’ had not been officially ushered into the world and
surely housed” (Journey 96), Baraka/Jones himself claims that “[t]here is no such
thing as art and politics, there is only life...THE LARGEST WORK OF ART IS THE
WORLD ITSELF” (qtd. in Baker 104). Baraka/Jones claims radically that there is no
to the black people, and this is the axial concept to the committed-art school. This part
will be illustrated in detailed with specific examples in Chapter Two of my thesis.
On the other hand, the members of the New Negro Movement moving from the
South to the North to launch a new literary trend: the Harlem Renaissance. Houston A.
Baker, Jr. sharply penetrates the whole project of the Harlem Renaissance in the very
beginning of Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance,4 “[t]he term ‘modernism’ has something of the character of Keat’s cold pastoral” (1). What Sterling Brown and
Ulysses Lee call “‘evolved’ forms of English and American literatures,” which is
opposed to “the form of things unknown,” might play the role of the cold pastoral.
Baker argues “[a] too optimistic faith in the potential of art may, in fact, be as signal a
mark of British and American modernism’s ‘failure’ as of the Harlem Renaissance”
(14). Undoubtedly, modernism, in Baker’s statement, “for Afro-America finds
impetus, empowerment, and inspiration in the black city (Harlem)” (“Modernism”
273), but just as Micheal Levenson in The Cambridge Companion to Modernism says,
“[n]o one should be surprised by the distortions and simplifications of Modernism,”
(1) since “the artistic rebels and rebellions of British and American modernism were
often decidedly puerile and undeniably transient” (Modernism 13). This is also the
deadlock of the detached-art school in the Black Aesthetic. Hence, the commentaries
to Invisible Man like that of the interviewers from The Paris Review calling the novel
“a pure literary work” is not only Eurocentric-Americentric but also vague, though it
seems to be a positive criticism to a novelist.5
4 “Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance” is a series of Baker’s Richard Wright Lecture delivering
for the English Institute in August 1985 and the Afro-American Studies Department in November 1985 at Yale University. In 1987 he published Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance by the University of Chicago Press. The quotations from the two different pieces of work are quoted separately.
As Robert O’Meally indicates, many
5 At this moment, “a pure literary work” is categorized into the “positive criticism” on Invisible Man
critics “who have considered Invisible Man not as some sort of demonstration but as a
work of art” (6). Ellison obviously is not satisfied with this kind of commentary.
The Black Aesthetic of the 1960s continues confronting the same dilemma of
the Harlem Renaissance. Baker comes up with a term “Renaissancism” to define the
Black Arts Movement during the 1960s and 1970s: “Renaissance II” (“Modernism”
273). The Black Aesthetic is the by-product of the Black Arts Movement. In the
development of modernism, the debate between art and protest is a crucial issue. Sara
Blair in “Modernism and the Politics of Culture” argues,
Black aesthetic achievement─and particularly literary achievement─was understood by these culture builders [including Langston Hughes, Jessie
Fauset, W. E. B Du Bois, Alain Locke, A Philip Randolph, James Weldon
Johnson] as the clearest sign of black fitness for the demands of modernity;
“pure” art would itself serve as a form of political activism, activity,
propaganda. (169)
As Blair indicates, “‘pure’ art would itself serve as a form of political activism,
activity, propaganda (169). Michael Levenson points out that the modernists including
Gertrude Stein, Picasso, Antonin Artaud, Woolf, and James Joyce attempt to
challenge the political and religious orthodoxy by form of creative violence (2). The
form of creative violence builds another house for African American writers, that is,
the language as a resistance per se to political orthodoxy.
Undeniably, Ellison does believe in the aesthetics of modernism as a resistance
to the orthodoxy, but he also keeps his African cultural heritage in mind. In a very
important piece of work, “The Little Man at Chehaw Station,” Ellison remembers
Actually, there are many kinds of positive criticisms on Invisible Man, but the focus in this chapter is aesthetic consideration of it. My arguments in Chapter Four will further problematize how aesthetic consideration is materialized by ideology.
when he still wants to be a musician and stays with Hazel Harrison in her basement
studio at Tuskegee Institute, Harrison tells him that “you must always play your best,
even if it’s only in the waiting room at Chehaw Station, because in this country
there’ll always be a little man hidden behind the stove” (494; emphasis original). The
little man is the reader. “In this country,” Ellison remarks, “the artist is free to choose,
but cannot limit, his audience” (501).
In Chehaw station, people come and go. You can never expect who your
audience might be. They are “people representing a wide diversity of tastes and styles
of living. Philanthropists, businessmen, sharecroppers, students and artistic types
passed through its doors” (503-4). This juncture point shows that “even the most
homogeneous gatherings of people are mixed and pluralistic” (504). By this metaphor,
Ellison says that American democracy “is not only a political collectivity of
individuals, but culturally a collectivity of styles, tastes and traditions” (504). Baker’s
idea of “blues translation at the juncture” is based on Ellison’s little man at Chehaw
station (Blues 12-3). Of course, the American artists are all under this umbrella of
influence, but the most important is the little man at Chehaw station.
Unfortunately, American society as a “melting pot” makes Europeans, African,
and Asian become Americans (504). It builds a house calling itself “Americanness” to
claim that “[Afro-American] music, poetic imagery and choreography were
grudgingly recognized as seminal sources of American art” (513). Ellison says that
“[t]he white took over any elememts of Afro-American culture that seemed useful,”
(515) but no matter how the form of art is adapted to change, the little man will still
recognize it. The little man knows his own aesthetic roots. He can tell “...music is
important as an artistic form of symbolic action” to manifest “transcendent forms of
essay is “the enigma of aesthetic communication in American democracy” (496).
Afro-American expression as an American art as well as African vernacular tradition
makes the dichotomy between art and protest invalid. The discussion of Ellison’s little
man at Chehaw station as a metaphor of the audience to Afro-American expression
and Baker’s “the matrix as blues” in Blues, Ideology and Afro-American Literature
will be major theoretical dimensions in Chapter Four of my thesis.
Ellison for sure agrees with those who believe that art itself is political activism,
activity, propaganda, but he continues to perplex his critics. In 1965, he expressed his
opinion in the interview with James Thompson, Lennox Raphael, and Steve Cannon,
“[b]ut if a Negro writer is going to listen to sociologists…who tell us that Negro life is
thus and so in keeping with certain sociological theories, he is in trouble he will
abandoned his task before he begins” (“Very” 730). As a result, he concludes, “…I
think style is more important than political ideologies” (“Very” 747). Baker notices
Ellison himself once believed in this formalist concept. In The Journey Back Baker
mentions, “[a]n exacting formalism was Ellison’s response to the turbulent social
climate of the sixties and seventies. Unlike Baldwin, he found artistic noninvolvement
a rather attractive status” (117). Unfortunately, “the artistic noninvolvement” is
controversial and not persuasive to some critics, either on the black side or on the
white side, and in Chapter Three there are three specific instances to elaborate my
argument. Ellison’s theory of the novel, let us assume, seems to be extremely
contradictory, but it is truly deconstructive.6
the “double movement”...of deconstruction involves both an inversion of As Niall Lucy puts,
6 In this way, Ellison’s theory of the novel, in Derrida’s words, is “X,” and the statement claiming that
“Ellison’s theory of the novel is deconstructive” actually misses the point immediately. See “Letter to a Japanese Friend” in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds (270-6). However, how Jacques Derrida argues about the essentialist thinking is not the main purpose of this thesis. Therefore, this statement is roughly supportable for the very moment.
the hierarchical relationship on whose occlusion or suppression the
“neutrality” of the difference between the terms of any binary pair depends,
and the “irruptive emergence of a new ‘concept,’”...which is not really a
“concept” at all inasmuch as the very concept of a concept depends on an
idea of difference-as-presence, allowing one to say of something that “it” is.
(13; emphasis original)
In the following argument my explanation of Ellison’s deconstructive thinking starts
with the discussion his theory of the novel and then illuminates Ellison’s being a
life-world modernist.
In “Society, Morality and the Novel” he says, “[b]y its nature the novel seeks to
communicate a vision of experience. Therefore whatever else it achieves artistically,
it is basically a form of communication” (700). The author writes; the reader reads.
Text, therefore, is a bridge between the author and the reader. In Ellison’s words,
[B]etween the novelist and his most receptive reader (really a most
necessary collaborator who must participate in bringing the fiction to life),
there must exist a body of shared assumptions concerning reality and
necessity, possibility and freedom, personality and value, along with a body
of feelings, both rational and irrational, which arise from the particular
circumstances of their mutual society. (701)
He pays attention to the interaction between the novelists and their readers. Such an
interaction, in Ellison’s words, “thrives on change and social turbulence” (703)
because the reader has to adjust his or her position when positing himself or herself
between the fictive illusion and his or her experiences. In Jonathan Arac’s words,
Ellison is explicitly concerned with the responsibility, as he sees it, for the
and he is equally concerned with the danger that novelists and readers may
collaborate in evading this obligation and taking poor satisfaction in
inadequate work. (21-2)
Arac reminds us of the interstices between the novelist and the reader. The protest
novel could neither provide African Americans nor even the white people so-called
reality, just as Jim Crow laws fail to provide American people the reality.7
Hence, he quotes Georg Gottfried Gervinus’s studies and to analyze the
fashioning of the history of German national literature is concomitant with “the wise
direction in which the Greeks had led humanity...” (6). Coming up with this
observation, Jauss argues that the concept of German national literature is based upon
“the literary myth that precisely the Germans were called to be the true successors of Ellison’s theory of the novel is coincidently similar to Hans Robert Jauss’s
reception theory which has risen with its challenging posture in the field of literary
theory in the 1960s. Jauss is one of the leading characters in the Constance School of
German. In his lecture-based essay “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary
Theory,” Jauss comes up with his methodology of reception theory and takes French
literature as his illustrative example. In part I Jauss argues that the patriarchs of the
discipline of literary history, especially the history of a national literature, are
inseparably associated with “Zeitgeist” (5; emphasis original), for “[t]he patriarchs of
the discipline [of literary history] saw works [Dichtwerke] the idea of national
individuality on its way to itself” (3). He mentions German Idealism in part II to
support his argument, “[German idealism] indicates the expectations under which the
literary history of the nineteenth century sought to fulfill the legacy of the idealist
philosophy of history in competition with general historiography (6).”
the Greeks” (6). Jauss’s case study of German national literature provides the
discipline of Afro-American studies a perfect example to explore not only the Harlem
Renaissance of the 1920s but also the Black Aesthetic of the 1960s.
And then Jauss comments on Marxist aesthetics and the Formalist school in part
III and IV respectively. In Jauss’s words, Marxist aesthetics emphasizes historical
consideration, because Marxist literary theorists like Lukács or Brecht are conditioned
by “the concepts of periods and genres,” and their debate mainly focuses on “literary
realism’s problem of imitation or reflection” (10). Jauss penetrates this Marxist task
which configures a dialectical-materialist literary history and explains its problematic
flaw,
The problem of the historical and processlike connection of literature and
society was put aside in an often reproving manner by the games of
Plechanov’s method: the reduction of cultural phenomena to economic,
social, or class equivalents that, as the given reality, are to determine the
origin of art and literature, and explain them as a merely reproduced reality.
(11)
In this point of view we also see the problem of the protest novels in Afro-American
literature. Jauss also examines the aesthetic consideration of the Formalist school.
Jauss indicates that the Formalist school abandons “the historicity of literature” (17)
but later rediscovers “the literariness of the literature” (17) in a synchronical method
to distinguish the “poetic” and “practical” language. At the same time, the Formalist
school discusses “the givens of the genre” in the past time through a newly preceding
literary form with a diachronical method (17). The formalist school needs to borrow
materials from history after all, so doing things with texts but without historical
In part V Jauss argues that the defect of Marxist aesthetics and the Formalist
school is the lack of the reader,
The social function of literature manifests itself in its genuine possibility
only where the literary experience of the reader enters into the horizon of
expectations of his lived praxis, performs his understanding of the world,
and thereby also has an effect on his social behavior. (39)
Ellison has a similar concept in “Society, Morality and the Novel,” and Jauss’s
theoretical analysis coincidently begins with a close examination in Marxist aesthetics
and Formalist school respectively and how they are interrelated with each other. Both
Ellison and Jauss pay attention to the social functions of a literary piece of work.
In “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory,” Jauss takes Marxist
aesthetics and Formalist school as two examples to develop his argument, and part VI
to part XII as his methodology of reception theory and its practice in the field of
French literature. He suggests that “the Marxist and the Formalist literary theories
finally arrived at an ‘aporia,’ the solution to which demanded that historical and
aesthetic considerations be brought into a new relationship” (10). Jauss sharply points
out that “[b]oth methods [of the Marxist aesthetics and Formalist school] lack the
reader in his genuine role, a role as unalterable for aesthetic as for historical
knowledge: as the addressee for whom the literary work is primarily destined” (19).
Taking the Black Aesthetic as an example to explain Jauss’s consideration, a new
relationship in literary history happens because of Ellison. Facing the aporia betwixt
and between the committed-art school and the detached-art school, Ellison regards the
reader as an indispensable role in the history of Afro-American literature.
Jauss argues that the role of the reader is extremely important because “[i]n the
reactions, but rather itself an energy formative of history” (“Literary” 19). Likewise,
Ellison explains in “Art of Fiction,” “the critics and readers gave me an affirmed
sense of my identity as a writer....Writing is, after all, a form of communication”
(218). Hence, his novel is an interlocutor between the reader and the author. Ellison’s
theory of the novel proves that his work is not merely for art’s sake itself, and those
who think of Invisible Man as a purely work of art judge his piece of work is not only
Eurocentric but also Americentric from the view point of aesthetics. In addition, his
emphasis on Afro-American expression, as Lyne indicates, “turn modernism back on
itself and show its blindness to the social and economic circumstances of oppression”
(329). Ellison’s theory of the novel is based on neither art nor protest but the life
which belongs to African Americans who are hidden in Chehaw Station. This
life-world modernist does not abandon Mrs. Brown, only that Mrs. Brown now
becomes a mulatto.
When Ellison refuses to describe Invisible Man as what the interviewers of The
Paris Review imply “a pure literary work,” he simultaneously refuses the
specialization of art. Jürgen Habermas pays much attention to the specialization of art
in the history of Western civilization. In 1979, he comments on Walter Benjamin’s
theory of art in “Consciousness-Raising or Redemptive Criticism─The
Contemporaneity of Walter Benjamin” in New German Critique. Habermas says that
“Benjamin’s theory of art is a theory of experience,” (47) and this particular
experience is a “secular illumination” (47) which makes art be separated from ritual.
Habermas positively believes that the “[c]orresponding to the changed structure of the
work of art, there is a change in the perception and reception of art” (34).
In “Modernity─An Incomplete Project,” his lecture-based essay of 1980, Habermas keeps observing the vicissitudes of the structure of the work of art. He
