Abstract
The common question in regard to Ralph Ellison and his corpus is whether he should be identified as a Negro novelist or a novelist who happened to be Negro. In Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology, M. Cooper Harriss avers the latter, while recognizing Ellison’s tendency to reside in the liminal. Harriss elects to begin the book by not only defining invisibility, but also by relaying its utterly religious connotations and Ellison’s use of invisibility being “‘bound up’ with (or even inextricable from) religion” (4). Subsequent to the thorough introduction, Harriss moves into five distinct chapters discussing subjects such as Ellison’s African American contemporaries; Ellison’s close friend in the second-half of his career, Nathan A. Scott Jr.; and his connection with the deep Calvinistic tradition of American’s New England. The conclusion of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology transitions the preceding content into an analysis of current issues: Clint Eastwood’s empty chair and America’s war on terror.
After offering a “genealogy of invisibility” (17), including the Hebrew Bible and Old Testament, Luther and Shakespeare, Puritans such as Anne Hutchinson, and various African sources in the introduction, Harriss utilizes chapter 1 to distinguish between Ellison and his contemporary African American writers—Hurston, Locke, and Wright. The issue of just/unjust representation in these authors’ novels seemingly became the tool for judging a work’s success as Harriss compares the moment to Richardson’s Pamela and Fielding’s Shamela. Harriss posits that the biblical character Job “parallels not only the historical plight confronted by African Americans, but also for which any number of justifications were consistently rationalized” (54), and, thus, the debate over simplifying this “plight” and whether the people struggling caused heated critiques from the four writers of each other. Chapter 1 concludes with an interesting comparison between Invisible Man and the Book of Revelation, which Harriss makes clear is not a “one-to-one generic correspondence” (65). Through this, Ellison situates his text into a religious setting—even though he is “a thoroughly post-Christian modernist” (65).
The second chapter opens up with an early remark that “Ellison…claims James Joyce and T.S. Eliot as ancestors and casts himself as much as an American writer…as a negro writer” (70). One cannot help but think of the Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic as Harriss gives Ellison’s choice of ancestors to be white. Interestingly, Ellison decides that race cannot be an excluding factor in this decision as Gilbert and Gubar feel gender should be. This progresses into one of Harriss’s major points of chapter 2: “the problem of identity—that uniquely American concern” (82). This concept of identity for Ellison shows its complications in his depiction of the protagonist of Invisible Man, as Harriss postulates, “he exists in a liminal space … he inhabits the boundary” (93). This moment stands on the shoulders of a comment Harriss makes just a page earlier as “blackness stands as precondition to invisibility” (92). A chapter loaded with exploring identity and invisibility in Ellison’s Invisible Man and its implicit arguments, the books moves into a more intimate aspect of Ellison’s life in chapter 3.
Nathan A. Scott Jr. and Ralph Ellison’s friendship stands as the focus of chapter 3. In the chapter, Harriss attempts to align the two even though their presumed religious belief systems vary drastically. Harriss does well to begin by showing that the two may be closer in thought than their religious affiliations signify, noting, “both men stood outside of the predominant racial orthodoxies of their day and suffered for it” (98). The two—along with their spouses—became incredibly close as their lives drew on and Harriss argues that one can see Scott’s theological influence on Ellison. Harriss does not present this as a one-sided relationship, acknowledging, “Scott invokes Ellisonian invisibility in his critique of civil rights strategies through reference to an African bishop—Augustine of Hippo … (and) Camus—an Algerian” (113). Chapter 3 culminates in an understanding—argued by Harriss—that Ellison’s writing career could be separated into two halves: one marked by Wright’s influence, the latter affected by Scott. Again, this seems to put Ellison in a liminal, seemingly invisible, space.
The fourth chapter explores many things, among them: the civil rights era and its impact on Ellison as an individual and a writer. In the nascence of the chapter, Harriss explicitly states something that he had been hinting at throughout the book: “[Ellison] sought ambitiously to situate African American culture firmly within the traditions and canons of the West” (118). With this desire and the ever-changing racial climate in America during Ellison’s writing career, it is no wonder he never finished his second novel—as Harriss thoroughly explains in the chapter. A statement of quasi-recapitulation of the entire book comes in the middle of the fourth chapter as Harriss remarks, “the very nature of negotiating the relationship of one’s particular identity to a greater, more universalizing sense of belonging is, by definition, religious. When this so-called universal involves nationalism it becomes civil religion” (133). The universal versus the individual, or unum and pluribus, is a common thread in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology. Harriss uses this—the connection to civil rights and religion—excellently as a transition into the final chapter in which America and its tenets are affirmed and challenged by Ellison in his corpus.
In the fifth and final chapter, Harriss seems to summarize Ellison’s views by his statement that “Ellison’s nineteenth-century American literature depends paradoxically upon the racial contradiction of democratic freedoms established and sanctified in the founding documents” (147). By the founding documents, Harriss of course means the Declaration of Independence and America’s other written statements of purpose. The previous chapter finishes with Ellison writing out the pledge of allegiance followed by his (Ellison) own rendition—an example of unum and pluribus. Harriss shows Ellison’s edition as “one blues invisible with sorrowful laughter for all” (142). Here, we see the distinction that Harriss aimed to exhibit in the final chapter, writing of the American Adam embodying “the supposed innocence and potential for progress that characterized the new republic” (151). Instead, as the chapter shows, America’s Original Sin—slavery—impeded these aspirations and created the debacle that America is still attempting to resolve and heal in the twenty-first century. The undeniable irony represented by these issues—and accepted by Ellison—is how Harriss continues the chapter, while it is through Mehlville and Frederick Douglass that Harriss decides to end the chapter, navigating through the consistencies between Ellison and Mehlville, the protagonist of Invisible Man, and Douglass.
Concluding the text, Harriss decides to situate Ellison and Invisible Man not only in its literary and historical space, but also in our current position in the twenty-first century. In this, Harriss makes the text relevant not only to Ellisonian—or the broader African American—scholars, but also to anyone with interest in literary, history, or social studies. By utilizing Clint Eastwood’s 2012 Republican National Convention of the empty chair, “an address to the absent Obama” (183) and America’s ongoing war on terror, Harriss locates specific moments in which Ellisonian irony and invisibility still have value politically. To Harriss, the idea of a postracial America is still naïve and “illuminates broader cultural ignorance and amnesia—and the general invisibility of racial others” (185).
M. Cooper Harriss does well to do exactly what Ralph Ellison’s own goals were by placing him amidst the greater western canon. Not only does Harriss do this with literary texts, but he also includes Jonathan Edwards and Reinhold Niebuhr as comparative figures to Ellison. The religious aspect created an intriguing view of how Ellison hoped to reside in the liminal—understanding racial tensions to be more complicated than many of his contemporaries. Unfortunately, Ellison at times, ironically, becomes invisible in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology. While this could have been an intentionally clever maneuver on M. Cooper Harriss’s part, it was maybe an insurmountable task to cover centuries of political, social, and literary history to frame Ellison’s invisible theology. The text could have extended to a length rivalling Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007) as Harriss discussed many of the same issues and even stood similarly as a commentary of western, specifically American, culture with an emphasis on race. Like James K.A. Smith’s How (Not) to Be Secular (2014), Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology interacts with Taylor’s lengthy text—albeit far more indirectly.
M. Cooper Harriss’s book creatively narrates invisibility’s history almost as an allegory through Ralph Ellison’s life and writings. When the main criticism of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology is for it to be lengthened, Harriss thoroughly succeeds in offering a compelling argument of Ellison’s invisible theology. His work interacts not only with other texts analyzing Ellison and his novel, such as Beth Eddy’s Rites of Identity (2004), but also with the larger cultural texts like Taylor’s. In our current racial and cultural climate, this text sheds light on issues much deeper than typical literary criticism and implicitly postulates that there lies a viable role for religion in the midst of working through them.