WAYS OF WRITING ABOUT ONESELF
85
disillusionment with the Communist Party in the North. After all, big–
otry is as much a n ideology as an yth ing based on the thoughts of Karl
Marx, and communism is equally bigoted against the individual.
Wright's memoir shows him learning this in Chicago and Ellison's
novel sets the tale in New York. Each of the writers does a marvelous
job of showing how wrongheaded and patronizing the white commu–
nists were, but I think Wright's picture is more telling in certain ways
because of the brilliance with which he assesses what they saw and what
they did and why his exprcssions of individuality estranged him from
his fellow radicals. One of the most horrifying moments is when he sees
a man confess
to
crimes that he did not commit because he had com–
pletely given his consciousness over to the Party, which allowed Wright
to understand the confessions made by certain Russians during Stalin's
purges in the
1930S.
Yet we cannot fail
to
miss the power with which
Ellison brings his version of ideological bigotry
to
the surface as he dis–
covers, over and over, that the Communist leadership does not see him
any more clearly than those Southern whites who refused
to
acknowl–
edge black humanity. Each book,
American Hunger
and
Invisible Man,
end with the narrator committed
to
going forward and making his voice
heard. Ellison has his narrator say, after all of his adventures have been
lived, "Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?"
Wright, having decided
to
leave the Communist Party and seek his free–
dom as a writer, concludes with an allusion
to
Tennyson's "Ulysses": "}
would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if that
echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell,
to
march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in
us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human."
Ellison never finished another novel, which is one of the great tragedies
of American literature. Had he been able to put three or four more nov–
els out here on the level of
Invisible Man,
he might well have provided an
influential alternative
to
our condition of literary segregation in which
ethnicity, color, sex, class, religion, and region are parcelled off franchises
devoted to avoiding the epic complexities of the many kinds of interplay
that give our society its dimcnsions, its blues, and its hope. He might have
gotten the Nobel Prize and his model vision of American life and ethnic
culture would stand in opposition to what glowers before us. But he did
write two books of essays,
Shadow and Act
and
Going to the Territory,
in which he spoke with great eloquence of the interwoven nature and his–
tory of American life, offering something far richer than the narrow cul–
tural obsessions and sexual politics that have had such bad effects on our
universities and thinking about each other.
