Invisible desires: Homoerotic racism and its homophobic critique in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

Daniel Y Kim

If Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man speaks to many readers of color, it is not only because the novel so eloquently records the feelings of rage and invisibility that are a consequence of living within a racist culture. It is also because this work gives voice to a particular intuition about the psychic motivations of white men: that they derive a specifically erotic gratification from their racist practices. It is this libidinal quality of white male racism-and specifically the erotic gratification derived from subordinating black men-which Ellison underscores in his novel. Through an attentive reading of several scenes from Invisible Man, this essay will bring into focus Ellison's account of white male racial psychology. In essence, Ellison's novel asserts that white men perceive and treat black men in roughly the same way that men characteristically perceive and treat women under patriarchy: as objects of erotic pleasure. By showing how white men consistently force black men to play a "feminine" role, moreover, Ellison attempts to explain a central feature of a view of the black race dominant at the time of his writing: a racial view that explicitly associated blackness with femininity. While I want to insist upon the importance of Ellison's far-ranging and subtle psychological account of white male racism, I also want to emphasize the presence of a disturbingly homophobic symbolism that undergirds it-for Ellison figures this homoerotically charged racial subordination, both directly and indirectly, as homosexuality.

I. The Sociology of Robert E. Park: The "Negro" as "The Lady Among the Races"

Before turning to the novel itself, I want to call attention to a certain polemical impulse animating Ellison's literary project. Discussing his original motivations and aspirations as a writer, Ellison insists that he set out to challenge a "humiliating" view of the black race codified by the sociological work of Robert E. Park. Ellison recounts in his Introduction to Shadow and Act how he "had undergone, not too many months before taking the path which led to writing, the humiliation of being taught in a class in sociology at a Negro college (from Park and Burgess, the leading textbook in the field) that Negroes represented the lady of the races"' (xx). Ellison refers here to the Introduction to the Science of Sociology (1919), which was co-edited by Park and Ernest W. Burgess and which Ellison had read as a student at Tuskegee. (Reading this work apparently had such a disturbing effect on the young Ellison, that he still recalled it vividly nearly three decades later.)' The phrase that Ellison alludes to here was actually written by Park alone, and it comes from a passage of this textbook that purports to offer a scientific definition of the innate "racial temperament" of the "Negro."

The temperament of the Negro, as I conceive it, consists in a few elementary but distinctive characteristics, determined by physical organizations and transmitted biologically. These characteristics manifest themselves in a genial, sunny, and social disposition, in an interest and attachment to external, physical things rather than to subjective states and objects of introspection, in a disposition for expression rather than enterprise and action.... The Negro is, by natural disposition, neither an intellectual nor an idealist, like the Jew; nor a brooding introspective, like the East Indian; nor a pioneer and frontiersman, like the Anglo-Saxon. He is primarily an artist, loving life for its own sake. His metier is expression rather than action. He is, so to speak, the lady among the races. (138-39)

Park begins his account by simply enumerating the various qualities that define the racial temperament of blacks.2 In his attempt to underscore the "distinctive[ness]" of these characteristics, however, he deploys two rhetorical strategies that work at cross purposes. On the one hand, he suggests the existence of a continuum of racial types; on the other, he invokes a series of binary oppositions, drawing most importantly on the familiar binary of gender difference. The clash of these rhetorical strategies produces some logical dissonance that Park nonetheless attempts to resolve by privileging the second: he tends, in other words, to collapse his continuum of racial types into a crude binary. Indeed his typology of the various races and their elemental "characteristics" is actually presented as a series of asymmetrical oppositions. The Jew and the East Indian are both characterized by an interest and attachment "to subjective states and objects of introspection" and thus defined in contradistinction to the "Negro," who evinces an "interest and attachment to external, physical things." Similarly, though contradictorily, Park asserts that the Anglo-Saxon possesses a native tendency toward "enterprise and action" that distinguishes him from the "Negro," who is interested in "expression." In his concluding summation, moreover, Park subsumes these two asymmetrical binaries (physical/mental and expressive/active) under a third (feminine/masculine). By singling out the "Negro" as "the lady among the races," Park suggests that racial traits can be logically categorized as feminine (those that blacks possess) or masculine (those they lack). The apparently masculine interest in "subjective states and objects of introspection" that define the Jew and the East Indian are lacking not only in the "Negro," but also in the action-oriented Anglo-Saxon. The latter, however, retains a masculine identity as a "frontiersman" (emphasis added). Likewise, the masculine tendency toward "enterprise and action" is apparently no more visible in the Jew or the East Indian than it is in the "Negro," and yet Park identifies only one of these races as feminine. What these logical inconsistencies suggest is that Park's assertion of the natural femininity of the "Negro" is less a conclusion that follows from his argumentation than a pre-existing assumption.

Ellison identifies the source of his "humiliation" as Park's ascription of femininity to the black race. But it is probable that this humiliation was redoubled by the sociologist's assertion that aesthetic expressivity came naturally to blacks and provided further evidence of their "lady"-like nature. For at the time Ellison confronted Park's views, he was an accomplished trumpeter who aspired to become a composer of jazz-symphonies; he was also beginning to devote increasing attention to the craft of writing. In recalling this experience, Ellison claims that it served primarily to fuel his literary aspirations: "Well, I had no intention of being bound by any such humiliating definition of my relationship to American literature" (Introduction, Shadow xx). Indeed, he quickly came to believe that one of his primary responsibilities as a writer was to project a more virile image of AfricanAmerican aesthetic agency.3 In order to meet this responsibility, however, he needed first to challenge the feminizing view of blacks to which Park's work had given a scientific veneer.

Ellison's first direct written engagement with Park's racial views comes in a 1944 review of Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma. In this piece, Ellison's attack on Park is couched in a larger critique of American social science. He argues that most white social scientists who study African Americans-including those who appear to be working on their behalf-end up "us[ing] their graphs, charts and other paraphernalia to prove the Negro's biological, psychological, intellectual and moral inferiority" ("American" 305). Ellison's polemical wrath is directed at men like Park who not only feign a scientific disinterestedness, but also profess a benevolent interest in the lives of African Americans. As Ellison himself acknowledges, Park was widely regarded as a racial progressive. He was an influential figure in American sociology as the founder of "Chicago School," and much of his research work focused on the plight of American minority groups. He also served as an assistant to Booker T. Washington. But while Ellison admits that "American Negroes have benefited greatly" as a result of the esteemed sociologist's endeavors, his overall intent in this piece is to emphasize the disastrous consequences of the view of blacks that Park disseminated as scientific fact ("American" 307). Ellison concludes his appraisal of Park's work by citing at length the passage from the Introduction to the Science of Sociology that I have examined above, and compares Park's racial science to "the preachings ... of Dr. [Joseph] Goebbels" ("American" 308).

In this 1944 essay, Ellison levels a polemical attack at the same kind of figure whom he later criticized in a more psychoanalytic register in his novel: a white man who is seen and sees himself as racially enlightened, and who nonetheless holds a denigrating and feminizing view of the black race. While Ellison's anger is evident in this early piece-most dramatically in his comparison of sociology to the racial science of the Nazis-he nonetheless refrains from impugning Park's altruistic motives. He simply calls attention to the discrepancy between the benign intent of men like Park and the insidious view of blacks that they hold. But, in the novel he began to write in the following year, Ellison expands and deepens his critique of such men by offering a series of case studies, as it were, in white male psychology.4 While he depicts a broad range of white male types in his novel (suggesting a certain taxonomical logic), he underscores a certain psychic uniformity shared by them all-a uniformity that is revealed by the consistency with which they align black men with femininity. He shows first of all that while they manifest a benevolent attitude toward blacks (and toward black men in particular), these white male characters are actually driven by a latent racist desire to place black men in a position analogous to the one conventionally occupied by women in a patriarchal culture. Secondly, Ellison asserts that by imposing a racist hierarchy, these white men seek to use black men much as men are inclined to use women: as objects to satisfy a whole spectrum of repressed erotic desires.

II. "The Battle Royal": Black Male Bodies and White Male Visual Pleasures

The novel's most harrowing account of such use of black men comes in its famous first chapter, which depicts a "smoker," an evening gathering of the influential white men of the small Southern town where the narrator has been raised (17).5 Because of the overt racial hatred the townsmen express in this scene, they would seem to differ, at least initially, from the other white male characters in the novel. But the narrator makes clear that, at least by light of day, they act kindly toward the black population of the town-or, more accurately, toward certain members of that community. They treat with apparent respect the narrator and his family for being models of decorum. Because the invisible man, in particular, fancies himself "a potential Booker T. Washington" and expresses the proper "meekness" in his social interactions, he finds himself "praised by the most lily-white men of the town" (18,16). Moreover, the townsmen invite the narrator to the smoker so that he may repeat a speech he gave at his graduation which "showed that humility was the secret, indeed, the very essence of progress" (17). At the conclusion of the evening's events, the white townsmen bestow upon the narrator a new briefcase and a college scholarship. In their everyday attitudes toward blacks, the "town's big shots" are, in other words, models of benign white Southern respectability (17).

In his account of the smoker, however, Ellison suggests that this respectability is born of a repression that finds release only at such events. When the narrator first sees them, he is "shocked to see some of the most important men of the town quite tipsy" (18). Indeed the gathering seems to provide these men with an opportunity for a number of sensual impulses that are ordinarily restrained. Some of these impulses are oral (they are "wolfing down the buffet foods, drinking beer and whiskey and smoking black cigars" [17]), but mostly they are scopic. The primary source of entertainment is a series of spectacles in which the bodies of young black men figure prominently. In the first, a group of black boys from the town (including the narrator) are forced to watch a nude white woman dance; in the second, they are made to fight each other blindfolded in the battle royal; and finally, they are made to scramble after counterfeit coins on an electrified rug.

The white male desire that is satisfied through the second and third of these spectacles-the battle royal and the scramble after the coins-is both sadistic and racist. The invisible man has been aware of this desire even while being praised for his "meekness" by the white townsmen; he senses that what they "really would have ... wanted" was that "I should have been sulky and mean" (17). What they secretly wished for was an excuse to inflict a disciplining violence upon a young black man who did not know his place. The narrator's "meekness" holds in check this desire for violence, a desire that is voiced during the battle royal when a spectator yells out, in reference to the narrator, "I want to get at that ginger-colored nigger. Tear him limb from limb" (21). While these men seem to refrain from acting out their desire for violence-they do not climb into the ring, for instance-they nonetheless demand satisfaction by watching. In this regard, the bodies of the black boys serve two distinct, though related functions: they serve as the objects of physical violence and also as its agents. This distinction suggests that there are two vicissitudes to the scopic desire that the townsmen satisfy in these spectacles, the first deriving from the sight of a black male body convulsed pain, and the second from the sight of a black male body itself inflicting that pain. The second of these implies that these white men experience an identificatory thrill in watching black male bodies do what they themselves wish to do. It suggests that white men see the black male body as an instrument that enables them to experience vicariously the gratification of a desire they must refrain from acting out themselves.

These spectacles of violence, moreover, seem imbued with an ambiguous homoeroticism. This effect is partially produced by their temporal placement in the first chapter. The battle royal and the scramble after the coins follow a prior spectacle that affects how the latter two are read. What Ellison describes first is a classically voyeuristic scenario (a group of white men watching a nude white woman dance) into which he inserts the group of black boys. These boys are positioned between the dancer and the white townsmen, as a kind of human scrim-a partially invisible screen of black male bodies-through which the movements of the nude dancer are still visible. Their intermediate positioning suggests that they are being made, on the one hand, to participate in the scopophilia of the townsmen (to look at the white woman as the white men do) and, on the other, to function as objects of the townsmen's vision (to be looked at by the white men as the white woman is). The dual role that the black body plays in the other two spectacles-as both vicarious agent and object of white male desire-is manifest first within the triangulated eroticism of this voyeuristic scenario.

As in the battle royal, the townsmen use the bodies of black men to give vicarious expression to desires that are ordinarily repressed. While these white men are clearly aroused by the sight of the nude female dancer, most of them refrain from physically expressing their state of excitation. A reason for their restraint is suggested by the narrator's account of what happens to them when they allow their bodies to express their arousal. He describes, for instance, a certain merchant who followed [the dancer] hungrily, his lips loose and drooling. He was a large man who wore diamond studs in a shirtfront which swelled with the ample paunch underneath, and each time the blonde swayed her undulating hips he ran his hand through the thin hair of his bald head and, with his arms upheld, his posture clumsy like that of an intoxicated panda, wound his belly in a slow and obscene grind. The creature was completely hypnotized. (20)

The body of this white man becomes increasingly grotesque and ridiculous as it becomes sexually excited, as if somehow inadequate to the desires that surge through it. Indeed as more of the white townsmen become excited, try to "[sink] their beefy fingers ... into the soft flesh" of the dancer, and chase her around the ballroom, she looks at them with "disgust" (20). Notably these men are restrained by the rest.

The townsmen apparently find a way of experiencing their sexual excitation, however, by making use of the black boys' bodies. They force these young black men to play a similar role to the one played, according to Laura Mulvey, by the cinematic male hero.6 Their black male bodies serve here as a sort of corporeal screen upon which the white men project a more idealized image of their own arousal. The narrator notes how the men force one boy to keep looking, even as he "began to plead to go home"; he was the "largest of the group, wearing dark red fighting trunks much too small to conceal the erection which projected from him" (20). These white men seem to experience their arousal more fully by vicariously sharing in the sexual arousal of these black boys. It is as if they look upon the erect black penis as a kind of prosthetic device that enhances their own sexual pleasure.

In order to function as identificatory objects, however, the bodies of these black boys must become a focus of visual interest; and as a result of figuring so prominently in the vision of highly aroused white men, those bodies would seem also to attain the status of erotic objects in and of themselves. Indeed, Ellison's physical descriptions draw attention to similarities between the black boys and the "magnificent blonde," which suggests that their bodies are being made to play a similar role. In their state of partial and sweaty undress-"We were a small tight group, clustered together, our bare upper bodies touching and shining with anticipatory sweat"-these young men resemble the dancer"beads of pearly perspiration glisten[ed] like dew around the pink and erected buds of her nipples" (18, 19). This likeness is further suggested by the almost cinematic way in which the narrator synchronizes the movements of the performers' bodies and the scene's diegetic "soundtrack." The body of the young man who tries to hide his erection is presented as moving in response to the same aural agency as the nude dancer. As she dances to the accompaniment of a "clarinet ... vibrating sensuously" (19), his erection "project[s] from him as though in answer to the insinuating low-registered moaning of the clarinet" (20).

The correspondence between the black boys and the "magnificent blonde" is also suggested by the complicated identification the narrator experiences as the townsmen force him to look closely at her naked body. While his response is extremely complex-mingling guilt, fear, desire, hatred, and sympathy-I want to focus here on how those elements suggest its fundamentally identificatory quality. These elements are all evident in the following passage:

I wanted at one and the same time to run from the room, to sink through the floor, or go to her and cover her from my eyes and the eyes of the others with my body; to feel the soft thighs, to caress her and destroy her, to love her and murder her, to hide from her, and yet to stroke where below the small American flag tattooed upon her belly her thighs formed a capital V. (19)

The first impulse is self-protective. He wishes literally to remove his body from the scene, apparently to shield it from the punishment that his own prohibited sexual desire may bring about, or to cease the looking that elicits his desire. The second impulse-to go to her and cover her with his body-is much more ambiguous. The gesture he imagines seems partially sexual, an expression of the same desire that leads him to imagine "feel[ing] the soft thighs," caressing, loving and stroking her. But it also suggests an underlying sympathy-an impulse to "cover her from my eyes and the eyes of others," to shield her from the scopophilic looking in which he is nonetheless participating. This sympathetic desire, moreover, casts a different light on the first impulse, in that his desire to protect her body from the scopic appetites of white men suggests that his wish to "sink through the floor" expresses a desire to protect his own body from an eroticized white male look. An awareness in the narrator begins to emerge here, in other words, that he and the woman are both being made to play a similarly debasing role. Both of them have been made to offer up their bodies for the visual enjoyment of white men.

The narrator's awareness of his identification with the nude white woman also produces a more disturbing response: a "desire to spit upon her," to "destroy her ... and murder her." What he thus seems to recognize in her body is his own experience of humiliation, the humiliation of being deprived of control over his body. The lack of control he experiences here seems to find an apt and infuriating emblem in the lack that is conventionally ascribed to women-an anatomical "lack" whose usual referent is initialed by the capital "V" he glimpses between the dancer's thighs. The misogyny of the narrator's response, in other words, is produced by his awareness of how the woman's "castration" mirrors his own.

Ellison rehearses in this scene the identification of black men with femininity that is the hallmark of the racial view of the black man he wishes to challenge. Through this staging, however, he seeks to reveal that this stereotype is stamped by force onto the bodies of black men-that it thus reflects the imposition of white male desires. The black boys in this scene are presented not as feminine but as feminized. Compelled to function both as objects and vicarious agents of white male desire, they play a role remarkably similar to that of the "magnificent blonde." The black male body achieves its value within the libidinal economy of racism, however, because that body serves as a catalyst for the release of white male impulses that are ordinarily repressed. In this first chapter of his novel, Ellison sets out to expose the seamy psychic underbelly of Southern white male respectability-to catalogue a range of prohibited pleasures that white men seek to experience through their instrumental use of black male bodies, pleasures that are sadistic, violent, and also homoerotic.

III. Norton: Incest, Narcissism, and White Male Philanthropic Desire

At first glance, the character of Norton, the Northern philanthropist who provides financial support for the College attended by the invisible man, appears to lack the eroticized interest in blacks so evident in the Southern townsmen. But Norton's psychic investment in the black students ultimately has its origins in a repressed erotic desire as well; his philanthropic work enables him to satisfy, through the mechanism of sublimation, an incestuous desire for his dead daughter. The sexual nature of Norton's paternal passions is suggested most dramatically by the intense fascination with which he listens to Trueblood's blues-toned narrative, as the black sharecropper recounts how he inadvertently had sex with his daughter. In his reading of this scene, Houston A. Baker, Jr. treats Norton's incestuous desire as largely symptomatic of underlying economic impulses.7 This interpretation, however persuasive, tends to obscure a simpler reason for Norton's interest. When he violated the taboo against incest and incurred no retribution for it, Trueblood thus successfully acted out a sexual desire that Norton has devoted his life to repressing. In passing, Baker makes another assertion that I will explore more fully here. He suggests that Norton's desire to assist the black students of the college contains "a carnal undercurrent" (327). What I want to examine is the relationship Ellison charts between the "carnal undercurrent" of Norton's philanthropy and his repressed sexual desire.

While the incestuous quality of Norton's paternal love is suggested most dramatically by the rapt attention he gives to Trueblood's story, it is also implied by the excessive sentimentality with which he describes his deceased daughter to the narrator.

She was a being more rare, more beautiful, purer, more perfect and more delicate than the wildest dream of a poet. I could never believe her to be my own flesh and blood. Her beauty was a well-spring of purest water-of-life, and to look upon her was to drink and drink and drink again.... She was rare, a perfect creation, a work of purest art. A delicate flower that bloomed in the liquid light of the moon. A nature not of this world, a personality like that of some biblical maiden, gracious and queenly. I found it difficult to believe her my own. (42)

While every sentence in this highly romanticized description is intended to emphasize the chasteness of both Norton's paternal love and its object, many of those same sentences simultaneously engage in the subtle disclosure of the incestuous desire they are desperately trying to repress. For instance, many of Norton's phrases underscore the otherworldly purity and delicacy of his daughter's beauty. But the simile he uses to capture her ethereal nature-he equates her with "a well-spring of purest water-of-life"-renders his own love for her as a desire to "look upon her" and to "drink and drink and drink again." These phrases call to mind the scopically and orally inflected carnality of the white townsmen described in the novel's first chapter. Similarly, Norton twice asserts that he found it difficult to believe that she was his daughter, which not only accentuates her otherworldliness and purity, but also implies, by way of contrast, that his own concerns are more worldly and less pure. Moreover, by expressing an uncertainty over her parentage, Norton imagines a condition in which the incest taboo would not hold sway, a condition in which his paternal passions, such as they are, would require no repression.

But repressed they have been: Norton has apparently refrained from directly acting out his incestuous desire. Furthermore, an insurmountable barrier to that desire has been put in place by her death. Norton suggests, however, that he has kept his paternal love alive by finding a substitute object in the black students of the College. Because the most "important," "passionate," and "sacred" "reason" for his philanthropy is his desire to "construct a living memorial to my daughter," he views the students as "a monument to her memory" (45, 43). He explains to the invisible man that the bond between them is, therefore, quite personal "So you see, young man, you are involved in my life quite intimately, even though you've never seen me before. You are bound to a great dream and to a beautiful monument" (43). It is also clear from the mixture of agricultural and financial metaphors that Norton uses to describe his relationship to the students of the College that he sees them as substitute objects of his paternal love. Norton reminisces about the time when he first saw the land on which the College was erected: "years ago, when all your beautiful campus was barren ground. There were no trees, no flowers, no fertile farmland" (38). The capital investment he made in the College was intended to make this "barren ground" capable of bearing fruit, to assist in its fertilization. The crops that his investment has yielded are the black students the College produces. Through these students, Norton explains, "I can observe in terms of living personalities to what extent my money, my time and my hopes have been fruitfully invested" (45). What his fertilizing investment has helped to produce-what his investiture of seed money has brought into existence-is a race of surrogate children: a black multitude who owe their existence to him, a crop of "living personalities" through which his own lives on. But since these students are also associated with the "barren ground" that has been rendered so fertile as a result of his skillful husbandry, they would also appear to play the role of substitute wife. Norton's relationship to the students of the College has been modeled, in other words, on his relationship to his daughter-a would-be wife who was also his child.

If this substitution is possible-if the student body of the College can stand in for the body of a dead daughter-then it would seem that Norton is able to achieve some form of gratification through his philanthropic endeavors. But Ellison does not insinuate that Norton experiences a sexual attraction to the black students he assists. Rather, he suggests that the psychic gains that Norton enjoys through his philanthropic work are largely egoic. Norton takes pleasure in the feeling of mastery he experiences through the "first-hand organizing of human life" that his work on behalf of the College entails (42). He also derives a narcissistic pleasure from watching the students become model Washingtonian subjects. What he sees in them is an endless potential for self-replication: "Through you and your fellow students I become, let us say, three hundred teachers, seven hundred trained mechanics, eight hundred skilled farmers, and so on" (45). In this fantasy of self-reproduction, Norton identifies the form of gratification he seeks through his philanthropy. Rather than satisfying his body's carnal urges, he appeases the prodigious demands of his ever enlarging ego. All of this suggests that the project of uplift allows Norton to play out a narcissistic paternal fantasy in which blacks play an instrumental role. Norton's work on behalf of the College enables him to see himself as a benevolent father who has successfully sublimated his incestuous desire toward the production of a whole race of surrogate children. But while Ellison presents the racial fantasy that undergirds Norton's philanthropy as lacking a manifest sexual content, he nevertheless chooses to underscore its "carnal undercurrents."

IV. Young Emerson: Homosexuality, Fiedler's Raft, and White Male Philanthropic Desire

Through his depiction of Norton, Ellison levels a broadly Freudian critique of the tradition of white philanthropy that supported Southern black colleges like Tuskegee.8 In his homophobic description of Young Emerson, the homosexual liberal who describes himself as a modern-day Huck Finn, he criticizes in similar, though more explicitly sexual terms, another generation of white philanthropists: the wealthy patrons who sponsored the Harlem Renaissance. In the essays where he directly addresses that movement, Ellison attacks it for catering to the tastes of wealthy whites who, in the midst of their own sense of alienation and ennui, "sought in the Negro something primitive and exotic" ("Stormy" 20).9 Ellison argues that the relationships of patronage that developed between black artists and white patrons had a fatal effect on the work produced-that the art of the Harlem Renaissance was primarily shaped by the demands of "white faddists" who wished "to indulge their bohemian fancy for things Negroid" ("Stormy" 20).10 The character of Emerson is cast as one of these "white faddists," placed as he is firmly within the milieu of the Harlem Renaissance. Laboring under the oppressive influence of a domineering father, he seems to glimpse a kind of escape in the Harlem nightclub he frequents, a club which provides a "rendezvous for writers, artists and all kinds of celebrities" (182). He enjoys the company of "jazz musicians" and presents himself as wanting to help the socalled New Negroes who, like the invisible man, have recently arrived from the South (184). Though not an artist, the invisible man becomes the would-be object of Emerson's patronage. Through his account of Emerson's underlying motives, Ellison once again suggests that white men who purport to be working in the interests of black men are, in fact, furthering their own-interests that are, in this case, explicitly homosexual.ll

If Ellison discloses a self-serving paternal narcissism within Norton's altruism, he seems to present Emerson's desire to help black men as deriving, in contrast, from a more sympathetic identification. As a gay man who has read Freud's psycho-mythological account of primitive sons who gang up in order to murder an oppressive father (a copy of Totem and Taboo sits open on the table in his office), Emerson apparently sees himself and the narrator as brothers of a sort, bonded together in a common struggle against paternal "tyranny" (183). As he tells the narrator, "We're both frustrated, understand? Both of us, and I want to help you" (183). He insists, further,

I know many things about you-not you personally, but fellows like you. Not much, either, but still more than the average. With us it's still Jim and Huck Finn. A number of my friends are jazz musicians, and I've been around. know the conditions under which you live- (184)

But by and large, the narrative emphasis on Emerson's homosexuality works to undermine any sense that this sympathy is genuine. When Emerson admits to the narrator that "all our motives are impure," this comes as no surprise to the reader. Ellison's stereotypical descriptions of this neurotic and effete white man who enjoys the company of black men make clear what he is after (183).

Ellison's description is replete with literary allusions that leave no doubt as to Emerson's sexual orientation, and his "fancy for things Negroid." The nightclub "with a truly continental flavor" where he frequently meets his Harlem friends, the Club Calamus, is named after the section of Whitman's Leaves of Grass that celebrates the erotic love of man for man. When Emerson confesses to the narrator that "my father considers me one of the unspeakables," he casts himself as a devote of Oscar Wilde (184), and this confession leads to another: "I'm Huckleberry, you see" (184). The meaning of this admission would be particularly clear to scholarly readers of Ellison's novel, published as it was just four years after Leslie Fiedler's notorious essay, "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!" Emerson sees the Harlem nightclub as a latter-day equivalent of Huck and Jim's raft (or at least Fiedler's version of it). It represents for him a place far away from the oppressive and "sivilizing" influence of a sterile bourgeois culture of Victorian respectability, a wilderness where the love that reigns is, as Fiedler puts it, the "mutual love of a white man and a colored" (531). And if Emerson sees himself as a modern version of Fiedler's Huck, he not only seeks his own sexual freedom through liaisons with black men, he also wants to imitate his model by freeing the "Nigger Jims" he befriends from their bondage.

By revealing to the narrator the contents of the letter he carries, Emerson does emancipate the narrator from his dependence on the figures of paternal authority that have subjugated him: Norton and Bledsoe. But the narrative makes clear that the relationship Emerson himself wishes to form with the invisible man would simply institute other forms of bondage. Emerson's offer of friendship takes the form of an offer of employment; he invites the narrator to serve as his valet; thus to function not only as a domestic servant, but also as hired companion of his bedroom and closet. Apparently the only qualifications that make the narrator suited for this position are the contours of his body. Ellison notes that Emerson looks at the invisible man with "a strange interest in his eyes," an interest that focuses on his physique (177): "`You have the build [of an athlete],' he said, looking me up and down. 'You'd probably make an excellent runner, a sprinter" (179). The relationship that Emerson wishes to establish with the narrator is not only homosexual, then, but also defined by the inequality of power that structures the relationship of employer and employee.

This covert desire to place the invisible man in a subordinate role is also implied by the acquisitive interest that Emerson, as a collector of beautiful exotic objects, takes in the invisible man. Ellison suggests that by taking the position offered him, the narrator would become simply another exhibit in Emerson's "museum" of an office. Displayed prominently in this room are various objects from all over the world:

paintings, bronzes, tapestries, all beautifully arranged ... a teakwood chair with cushions of emerald-green silk ... a beautiful dwarf tree... a lighted case of Chinese design which held delicate-looking statutes of horses and birds, small vases and bowls, each set upon a carved wooden base ... land] an aviary of tropical birds set near one of the broad windows.... (176-78)

Indeed, Ellison suggests that the invisible man is in danger of becoming part of this display by linking him with one of the birds held captive in Emerson's aviary. The narrator watches as a "large bird began a song, drawing my eyes to the throbbing of its bright blue, red and yellow throat. It was startling and I watched the surge and flutter of the birds as their colors flared for an instant like an unfurled oriental fan" (177-78). This same bird seems to sound a note of warning as Emerson approaches the narrator in advance of his job offer: "I got up, dazed, and started toward the door. He came behind me into the reception room where the birds flamed in the cage, their squawks like screams in a nightmare" (188). To accept Emerson's invitation of employment would be tantamount to becoming, like the caged bird, part of a "museum" devoted to objects that gratify a taste for things exotic. And if the invisible man would come to resemble the bird by accepting this offer, he would also apparently come to resemble, once again, the nude dancer whose gaudy coloring matches that of the bird's iridescent throat: her hair is "yellow," her face "rouged," and her eyes "smeared a cool blue" (19). He would be made to function as the "feminine" object of an erotic, white male visual pleasure.

By presenting Emerson's benevolent interest in black men as motivated by both a homosexual attraction and an underlying racist impulse, Ellison introduces a latent homophobic logic into his novel. If the exploitative relationship that Emerson wishes to establish with the narrator is presented as mirroring the exploitative relationships that the other white men seek to forge with black men, then his homosexual desire is presented as analogous to the erotic desires that the other white male characters seek to satisfy through their subordination of black men. The erotic motivations of these supposedly benevolent white men, who are revealed as closeted racists, are thereby likened to the libidinal impulses of gay men. But it is important to note that this homophobic logic, while clearly present, does not exert a wholly cohesive force in the novel as it was finally published. Neither Emerson nor his homosexual desire assume a fully paradigmatic status vis-a-vis the other white male characters and their desires. While he, Norton, and the townsmen form a loose conspiracy to "Keep this Nigger Running," or make the actions of the narrator cater to their desires, they diverge in the kinds of pleasures they seek. Although the interest that Emerson and the townsmen take in black men seems saturated with homoeroticism, Norton's erotic interest does not focus on the bodies of black men and only manifests itself in a highly attenuated form. Moreover, this sexual element is initially missing from the Brotherhood, Ellison's literary representation of the Communist Party. Brother Jack and his cohort are not impelled by any force of libido. Rather, they appear as nearly robotic, devoid of any human emotion at all, driven as they are in their political machinations by an abstract and dehumanizing logic, by a "scientific" view of history in which black men appear merely as variables to be factored into a calculus of power.

All the white male characters are presented, in other words, as variations on a theme, but none of them emerges from the novel as the definitive articulation of that theme. In a moment of reflection upon the similarity of the white men he has known, however, the narrator does imagine the possibility of a figure that could symbolize all of them:

And now I looked around a corner of my mind and saw Jack and Norton and Emerson merge into one single white figure. They were very much the same, each attempting to force his picture of reality upon me and neither giving a hoot in hell for how things looked to me. I was simply a material, a natural resource to be used. I had switched from the arrogant absurdity of Norton and Emerson to that of Jack and the Brotherhood, and it all came out the same.... (497, emphasis added)

It is worth noting that while no such character is found in the final version of the novel, one does appear in an earlier version of the eleventh chapter. This white man-invisible in the published work-combines features of every other white male character. He is presented, in other words, as a kind of composite sketch. Moreover, not only is this "single white figure" depicted as homosexual, but his "impure" interest in the invisible man-which mixes together a sadistic racism and a homosexual desire-is also presented as paradigmatic of the interest that the other white men take in black men. The latent homophobic symbolism detectable in the final version of Invisible Man manifests itself, then, in a more cohesive and thus more disturbing form in Ellison's earlier conception.

V. A "Single White Figure"

In 1963, Ellison published a piece that he identifies as the novel's original eleventh chapter under the title, "Out of the Hospital and Under the Bar." In this text, Mary Rambo, who is a relatively minor character in the published novel, plays a much more significant role. She is working as a janitor in the factory hospital where the narrator has regained consciousness to find himself confined in an odd womb-like machine. The narrator has no memory of who he is or of how he got there. Mary discovers the invisible man in his state of incarceration and wishes to help free him. But she is put off and insulted by what she believes to be the narrator's lack of trust in her; she thinks his amnesia is only an act. Only when, with her prodding, he improvises a tale that explains his predicament, does Mary come to believe him. What concerns us here is the story he tells. The reason for his incarceration, as he explains it, is that he struck and possibly killed a white man who tried to assault him sexually.

This story, while it has a fictive status within the diegetic world of the novel, takes on a certain allegorical force in relation to the exchanges with white male characters that have been recounted earlier. In the midst of spinning this tale, the narrator finds himself "suddenly gripped by a feeling that I was relating an actual happening, something that had occurred sometime, somewhere, in my past" (254; my emphasis). This sense that the story is partially a reenactment of previous events is further suggested by the narrator's description of the white man who propositions him. This figure combines key features of the other white male characters who have appeared already in the novel. Even within his state of amnesia, the narrator seems to remember (if only unconsciously) certain details from each of his encounters with white men and draws upon them as he creates this character. He places this encounter in what would seem to be a Southern setting, and thus this invented character's regional identity connects him with the townsmen who orchestrate the battle royal.12 This invented character's homosexuality suggests that he is also partially derived from Young Emerson. The detail that connects him to Norton, moreover, connects him to each of the other white male characters. This white man tries to coerce the narrator into succumbing to his sexual advances by demanding: "Now nigger, I want you to stand still while I put this twenty-dollar bill in your pocket" (255). Every white man the narrator has thus far met made seemingly altruistic overtures through an offer of money.

Because of the confessional character of this invented narrative, the desires that he imputes to this figure represent the white male desires that narrator has been asked to satisfy in his earlier exchanges. What this imagined character wants, first of all, is for the invisible man to acknowledge verbally the hierarchy between them. He asks the question, "Look at me, black boy, what kind of man am I?" To which the narrator replies: "You're a white man" (254). He also demands that the invisible man specify his own racial identity:

"And he said, 'All right, all right, so I'm a white man, and what are you?"' "And what you say then, boy?" [Mary] asked. "I said, 'I'm colored, sir,' but it seemed it made him very angry.... His face changed while I was looking at it fast." "Yeah, he wanted you to call yourself a nigger." (254)

But the self-naming to which he wishes the invisible man to submit involves an acceptance of a very specific definition of what, exactly, a "nigger" is:

"Well he became very angry and said, 'That's right, you're a black, stinking, lowdown nigger bastard that's probably got the syph and I'm white and you're supposed to do whatever I say, understand?"' (254; emphasis added)

To be the "nigger" for the white man is not only to accept and acknowledge one's racially subordinate status, it is more precisely to relinquish authority over one's body-to allow one's body to do whatever the white man says it should do.

The white man's desire to impose his will upon the actions of the invisible man is presented, however, as merely a means by which he can achieve another end. After the narrator supplies the correct racial answer to the query, "Look at me, black boy, what kind of man am I?" the man quickly demands: "That's right, but what other kind of man am I?" (254). The narrator explains to Mary that though he was initially baffled by this question, he quickly came to understand its meaning:

I was thinking about trying to run past him, when all at once he jammed his hand in his pocket and brought out a big roll of bills. He said, "Now nigger, I want you to stand still while I put this twenty-dollar bill in your pocket." And I looked at him, and saw that the side of his mouth was twitching and his voice was shaky. I had never heard a man's voice sound like that. (254-55)

Eventually, the invisible man tells Mary, "he reached out and touched me and I swung the bottle at him and ran" (256).

What leads this imaginary white character-who is both a white man and "that other kind of man"-to coerce the invisible man into assuming the subordinate position of "nigger" is ultimately a homosexual desire to use his body as a source of erotic pleasure. Put more generally, this exchange suggests something like the following: white men seek to subordinate black men because that subordination enables them to use the black male body to gratify an erotic desire that is essentially homosexual. While the homophobic logic of this assertion is disturbing enough, what is even more disturbing is the cohesive force it exerts as a whole over the initial version of the novel. For this fabricated story is not only shadowed by the narrator's past encounters-it not only mirrors "actual happening[s] ... that had occurred sometime, somewhere in the past"-it also adumbrates the "happening" that will occur in the future: his seduction into the political machinery of the Brotherhood.

The connection between this imaginary white man and the members of the Brotherhood is suggested by a microscope he carries-a microscope with which he initially threatens to strike the narrator, and which he then offers as part of his payment. The narrator reveals to the reader that he has added this detail by "remembering the instruments pointed at me by the physicians" (253). But as an instrument designed to enhance the vision of scientifically-minded men, the microscope links this figure not only to the doctors but also to the men of the Brotherhood, who will, in subsequent chapters, attempt to bend his actions to their will by opening up to him their "scientific" view of history. This linkage is further suggested by Mary Rambo: "I heard them nurses talking `bout you. They say they even got one of the psychiatristses[sic] and a socialist or sociologist or something looking at you all the time" (247-48). Psychiatrist, socialist or sociologist-they are all about the same to Mary. Moreover, in Ellison's chapter as a whole they all resemble that other "kind" of white man: the racist homosexual conjured up by the narrator in order to explain his predicament. In other words, Ellison asserts that beneath the purportedly "scientific" and benign interest that Brother Jack and his cohort take in the black race is a racist desire that resembles this imaginary white man's desire to have the invisible man assume the subordinate position of "nigger." Moreover, Ellison insinuates another claim though he never fully fleshes it out, namely, that the members of the Brotherhood seek to impose control over the lives of black men in order to satisfy an erotic desire that remains largely closeted-an invisible desire, we might say-that resembles the homosexual desire of this "single white figure."

VI. Postscript

My analysis of Invisible Man raises some troubling issues, I believe, for a criticism that strives to be anti-homophobic as well as anti-racist in its commitments. For while this novel calls our attention to certain repressed sexual dynamics that operate in particular forms of white male racism, it does so through a symbolic vocabulary that is patently homophobic. I have thus sought in my readings to emphasize the complexity and subtlety of Ellison's psychological critique of racism while also underscoring the crudity with which it ultimately reanimates another and equally insidious form of hatred. In closing, I will offer some provisional assertions about how Ellison's racial and sexual politics might best be situated in larger contexts, and to suggest some directions for further critical and theoretical inquiry.

The source of the young Ellison's "humiliation" and anger-the sociological writings of Robert E. Park-raises some interesting questions about the relationship between ideologies of racial and sexual difference. Park gives scientific sanction to a demeaning view of blacks that recapitulates a demeaning view of women. Park's writings are thus deeply suggestive of how discourses of racial difference borrow from discourses of sexual difference in identifying and denigrating the "Other." That is to say, Park's writings suggest that modes of racial discrimination are perhaps modeled and dependent upon modes of sexual discrimination.13 As Ellison's work thus identifies a particular ideological structure in which racism and misogyny assume a kind of symbiotic relationship, that work suggests an object of study for critical and theoretical work that seeks to bridge anti-racist and feminist concerns.14

Confronting the racial ideology that elicited in Ellison a feeling of "humiliation" helps to render his rage understandable, even justifiable. But granting the legitimacy of Ellison's rage should not prevent us from calling attention to the homophobic form of its expression, as well as its implicit misogyny. For Ellison, in expressing an unbridled masculine anger at black feminization does not, in any substantial way, quarrel with the notion that what is feminine is also subordinate. While black and white women do not figure in his novel as the primary targets of his anger (they serve, rather, as objects of ambivalence), his portrayals of white male homosexuals express a loathing for a form of masculine subjectivity that is conventionally identified with femininity.

As a literary expression of a masculine racial rage that is directed at the feminine, Ellison's work is symptomatic of a larger pattern.ls Other male writers of color have likewise responded to a racism experienced as emasculating through a reactive demonizing of femininity, and it is important to place Ellison within that larger tradition.16

Although Ellison's novel should not be sanitized of its homophobia or implicit misogyny, its central psychological claim should be taken seriously: that white men seek to subordinate black men not only because the act of imposing their authority over black men is itself pleasurable, but also-and more specificallybecause that imposition of power enables them to use black male bodies as objects that gratify desires that are, at bottom, sexual. In his attempt to give literary expression to this insight, Ellison descends with disturbing ease into a homophobic symbolism. We need to call attention to how inadequate this symbolism is (both ethically and descriptively). It is equally imperative to recognize, however, that this symbolism serves the purpose of filling a certain gap-an analytic and terminological gap that is ours as well. For we, like Ellison, have no name for the thing he is trying to identify. We too lack a definitive term that adequately, and yet non-homophobically, identifies the sexual component of male-male racist aggression he has sought to describe. Those of us who wish to address this sexual dimension of racism must struggle to find a way of describing it that does not simply recirculate the homophobia through which Ellison attempted to render it visible.

1 Ellison's essays and interviews include other, largely dismissive references to Park which nonetheless indicate the extent of his influence. Indeed Ellison suggests that the central trope of his novel was intended as an ironic reversal of one of Park's assertions: that racially marked Americans are hindered from assimilating fully into larger culture primarily because of the high visibility of their racial difference. In his Introduction to the Thirtieth Anniversary Edition of his novel, Ellison refers to "that pseudoscientific sociological concept which held that most Afro-American difficulties sprang from our 'high visibility"' (xii). In a 1974 interview, he comments, "Sociologists used to say-for example Park and Burgess published right here in Chicago, you know, which is one of the centers for American sociology-used to say that the great problem of the American Negro is caused because of his high visibility. After all, we have more pigment than most people so if you put us in a crowd you can always pick us out" (Crewdson and Thomson 268).

2 Park's views exemplify what the historian Fredrickson has called the doctrine of "romantic racialism." In his analysis of this doctrine, Fredrickson argues that it ascribes to blacks a child-like quality, but judging from Park's comments, it would appear to ascribe to them a feminine quality as well

3 In another chapter of the larger project from which this article is drawn, I show how Ellison's writings on jazz and blues musicians are also templates of African-American manhood. This dimension of his work is also suggested by Pinckney's recent assertion that Ellison has attained the status of a vindicated father figure for a generation of formerly militant and postmilitant black writers who wanted folklore, blues, jazz and black literature to be brainy yet virile subjects" (52). In his own accounts of black creative expression, Ellison ascribes to the black artist many of the same masculine traits that Park assigns to the non-"lady"-like races. For instance, in his Introduction to Shadow and Act, Ellison describes the jazzmen he knew while growing up in Oklahoma as embodying the ideals of the frontier.

4 Ellison's representations of white male psychology reflect the fact that he, like many writers of his generation, was a serious reader of Freud. According to O'Meally, Ellison became interested in psychoanalysis during the late thirties, when he worked in the office of the psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan (29-30). During his short tenure in this position, he evidently read through Sullivan's case histories, which prompted his interest in Freud. In many of his early essays, Ellison makes explicit use of Freudian terminology, perhaps most famously in "Richard Wright's Blues," where he invokes the concept of hysteria in order to analyze the forms of physical expressivity characteristic of black Southern life.

5 Critics of the novel perennially confront the issue of how to refer to its protagonist and narrator. In this piece, I follow the convention of referring to him as both the narator"and "the invisible man." No interpretive distinction between these terms is intended.

6 I am referring, of course, to Mulvey's important essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," in which she identifies the cinematic screen with the Lacanian mirror.

7 According to Baker, Norton's fascination with Trueblood's narrative is prompted by its depiction of incest as a means of fulfilling aa capitalist dream" (339). What Norton glimpses in the incestuous structure of Trueblood's growing family (his daughter and wife are both pregnant with his children) is aa productive arrangement of life," one that is "eternally giving birth to new profits" (340).

8 It is worth noting some similarities between the fictional Norton and the historical figure of Robert E. Park that suggest the former was at least partially modeled on the latter. Park was connected to the same paternalistic structure of white benevolence with which the novel associates Norton-a structure that provided support for colleges like Tuskegee. Ellison refers to Park as "the man responsible for inflating Tuskegee into a national symboL and who is sometimes spoken of as the 'power behind Washington's throne'" ("American" 307). While the form of Norton's beneficence is primarily financial (whereas Park's was primarily political and ideological), Norton is also described in the novel as, like Park, a "skilled scientist" (37). Furthermore, Norton's own description of his philanthropic work-"my first-hand organizing of human life" (42)

echoes a fundamental conceptual term in Park's sociological writings: "social control.' The most significant parallel for my purposes, however, is that both figures hold a romantic racialist view of the black ram that identifies it with femininity.

9 See also Ellison, "Recent." His critique of this aesthetic movement prefigures the main argument in Huggins's account, which emphasizes the adverse effects of white patronage on the quality of the work produced.

10 Certain details in Ellison's depiction of Young Emerson suggest that this character is partially modeled on the figure of Charles Van Vechten, an influential sponsor of the artists of the Harlem Renaissance. Both figures are gay, share an erotic interest in black men, and are collectors of exotic objects. For accounts of Van Vechten's role in this literary movement, his writing and his overall flamboyance, see Huggins (93-136) and Douglas (28892

11 Critics have generally focused more on this character's name than his homosexuality. An exception to this pattern is NadeL who argues that Ellison, through his portrayal of Young Emerson, is engaging with and seeking to overturn Fiedler's interpretation of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. While Nadel thus addresses the homosexuality of Emerson, his main concern is with the intertextuality of Invisible Man.

12 While no locale is explicitly specified certain details suggest that this encounter takes place in the South. The narrator confirms Mary's assertion that that he had to "run a long ways" after this encounter, and adds that he Shopped them freight trains and everything^ in fleeing (256). The narrator is, moreover, seeking to explain to Mary how he got to this Northern hospital from "down homeS (247). Finally, the white man uses Southern phrases like "boy" or "mammy" (254-56)..

13 Edelman offers an extremely intriguing account of this conflation of blackness end femininity in racist de He notes that the epistemological machinery devoted to discerning racial difference pries the visual register. This suggests, according to Edelman, "a borrowing from-and a repositioning of-the scopic logic on which the prior on of sexual difference depends" (46). He thus concludes that "[r]acial" discrimination, in both sense of the word ... is propped up on or, as Freud might put it, occupies an anaclitic relation to, the privileging of the scopic drive in the psychic structuring of sexual difference" (46).

14 Another area for further inquiry would be to explore the relationship between the forms of white male violence that are directed at black men and those tat an directed et black women, For analyses of white male/black female sexualized violence and its representation, see Davis, hooks, and Spiller

15 Edelman offers an important theoretical analysis of the disturbing linkage of and-racist critique and homophobia in AfricanAmerican writing. My own work has been greatly aided by Edelman's. He offers (among other things) a highly sophisticated account of the various figural logics encoded within homophobic conceptions of the male homosexual, an account that helps to explain the disturbing ease with which the figure of the gay man can come to symbolize the "terrorizing force of white racism" (55).

16 In the large lar project from which this article is drawn, I compare Ellison's work with that of Frank Chin, an Asian-American writer whose rage finds mistic, homophobic, and sado-masochistic expression

Works Cited

Baker, Houston A., Jr. "To Move Without Moving: An Analysis of Creativity and Commerce in Ralph Ellison's Trueblood Episode." Speaking For You: The Vision of Ralph Ellison. Ed. Kimberly W. Benston. Washington: Howard UP, 1987. 32248.

Crewdson, Arlene, and Rita Thomson. "Interview with Ralph Ellison." Conversations with Ralph Ellison. Ed. Maryemma Graham and Amritjit Singh. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1995. 259-71.

Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race, and Class. New York Vintage, 1983.

Douglas, Ann. Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. New York Farrar, 1995.

Edelman, Lee. "The Part for the (W)hole: Baldwin, Homophobia, and the Fantasmatics of 'Race."' Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory. New York: Routledge, 1994. 42-75.

Ellison, Ralph "An American Dilemma: A Review." Shadow 30317.

________.Introduction. Shadow 77-94.

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________. "Out of the Hospital and Under the Bar." Soon, One Morning. Ed. Herbert Hill. New York: Knopf, 1963. 242-90.

________. "Recent Negro Fiction." New Masses 5 Aug. 1941: 22-26.

________."Richard Wright's Blues." Shadow 77-94.

________. Shadow and Act. New York: Vintage, 1964.

________. "Stormy Weather." New Masses 24 Sept. 1940: 20-21.

Fiedler, Leslie, "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!" Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Case Study in Critical Controversy. Ed. Gerald Graff and James Phelan. New York: Bedford, 1995. 528-34.

Fredrickson, George M. The Black Image in the White Mind; The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1987. hooks, belL Killing Rage: Ending Racism. New York: Holt, 1995.

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Huggins, Nathan Irvin. Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford UP, 1971.

Kim, Daniel Y. "The Strange Love of Frank Chin." Q & A: Queer in Asian America. Ed. David Eng and Alice Hom. Philadelphia: Temple UP, forthcoming.

Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989.

Nadel, Alan. Invisible Criticism: Ralph Ellison and the American Canon. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1988.

O'Meally, Robert G. The Craft of Ralph Ellison. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980. Park, Robert E., and Ernest W. Burgess. Introduction to the Science of Sociology. 3rd ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1969.

Pinckney, Darryl. "The Drama of Ralph Ellison." The New York Review of Books 44.8 (1997): 52-60.

Spillers, Hortense. "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book." Diacritics 17.2 (1987): 65-81.

I would like thank Alyson Bardsley, Seth Mogle, and the editors of NOVEL for their invaluable responses to eer draft$ of this essay.

Copyright Novel, Inc. Spring 1997
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