But I guess I'm what I

In "Theme for English B," -- one of the poems we read at that the start of the semester -- Langston Hughes writes: "But I guess I'm what I feel and see and hear." Through Bigger, Wright agrees that to an extent, we are what we see and hear -- as Max tells Bigger -- but we are more than that, who we are lurks somewhere in-articulated in the depths of the nameless unique force that propels us to feel what we, as individuals, feel so strongly. In Invisible Man, Ellison says that we are still more than all of that. We are not what we see and hear nor are we what we feel because the reality we, as individuals, are currently living, believing, and trusting in may not be true reality but someone else's "reality." In that case, we cannot only be what we feel -- for instance, the contentedness in delivering a speech after being forced to participate in a battle royale, or the strong foolish humiliation in playing the caricature of a lumbering brute in the bedroom -- because our feelings are often deluded, we cannot always trust them, we are made to dance, inside and outside of ourselves, under someone else's strings. There is something in both Wright and Ellison's approach however, that resonates in the same way, suggesting that there is a not yet articulated something and a not quite yet discovered reality that gives us our identity, and in ever coming closer to articulating and discovering -- as Bigger and the narrator do but never fully carry through -- we get closer to the freedom that must be felt in a complete self-awareness that will allow for an enlightened awareness of society and ability to deal with those outside forces. We see Bigger's closeness to a full self discovery make him readier to accept death and the narrator's closeness make him ready to come out of hibernation and attempt to connect with the outside world.

It' s little surprise then that Ellison was so upset at Grinell -- saying, "I am not a Tom, I am not a Tom." After all it's quite possible that being misunderstood, invisible, unable to connect, may have been one of his greatest fears. How could he be a Tom when in writing Invisible Man, in "disillusionment" after "disillusionment," he tells us not to bow down to Bledsoe or Norton or Emerson, not even unions, Brockway, the Brotherhood, or Ras -- whom may be of good intentions or of similar struggles -- but to ultimately bow down to ourselves. I have to confess this is the reason the documentary we watched in class made me feel the slightest bit discouraged. Ellison and the narrator blurred together as one in my mind and I envisioned Ellison standing up after having finally composed his last line, having uncovered a bit more about his sense of reality through the act of writing the novel, and telling himself that it was time to go out, time to further increase his own awareness and attempt to share it with others -- poised to write his masterpiece. I felt a little bit of  hopelessness then, when the documentary said that in all those years and manuscripts, he "never figured it all out" (I'm aware that Juneteenth is still an impressive book I plan to read but this is all slightly irrational). I don't know how I imagined Ellison to go --  free and enlightened above all mankind? It's possible that in the process of reading Invisible Man, I came to subconsciously immortalize Ellison, almost believing that in some ways, he was immortalizing me.

For all my love of Ellison however, I am able to see where some of the criticism he received is coming from, although I still do not believe his critics fully understood him. I write all of this with the luxury of using "us" and "we" because of the universality of the existentialism in Ellison's novel yet also comfortably, perhaps misguided and all-assuming, with a very privileged and unbreachable distance from the oppressive environment of the narrator. Someone like Amiri Baraka would surely point this out and he would not be wrong in doing so. Ellison and Baraka wrote in a time where suffocation boiled to the point that immediate change was needed and called for. Survival, frustration, and much needed stability must have been so predominant on the mind that one might argue there was no time to "hibernate" or find a way to live in the world as it was with a sense of identity because -- with some shades of Wright -- they would say changing circumstance must be prioritized, that one should be participating in marches instead of being there in spirit, that one should fight now not "cope" first (perhaps Invisible Man as a protest novel is not so obvious as Native Son). Although Ellison criticized the Black Arts Movement for placing politics above creativity, it's possible that perhaps politics -- dealing with how we feel in what we see and hear -- needed to be prioritized if any change was to be brought about.

Still one can understand how as someone chronically ill does not want to be defined by their illness, though the effect of dealing with the illness cannot help but shape who they are, Ellison would not want African Americans to be defined by their imposed suffering, embodiment of caricatures, or disadvantage. I suppose that at the end of the day, I believe the approaches of artists in the Black Arts Movement and Ellison's to have resonated effectively in their own right.