Asks what the debate between Irving Howe and Ralph Ellison really meant
Wellington, Darryl Lorenzo
RECONSIDERATIONS Fighting at Cross-Purposes Irving Howe vs. Ralph Ellison Darryl Lorenzo Wellington 1N THE EARLY nineteen sixties, Irving Howe and Ralph Ellison crossed swords in an...
...liberal condescension...
...It is possible to believe that racism wounds, that society marks the artist, and that creativity isn't determined by the marking...
...and it is possible I have lived through and committed more violence than he," wrote Ellison, and countered the Wright myth—with its romance of opposition, its emphasis upon hunger and the necessity of struggle, however slim the chances of victory— with a myth of his own that emphasized education and self-actualization...
...The damage began with Baldwin's attack upon, and Ellison's subsequent disavowal of, Wright's influence...
...But it is possible to believe both that individual human potential is boundless and that group, racial, and class dynamics usually matter...
...He recast the issue of racial oppression: no longer a battle between blacks and whites hopelessly pitted against each other because of social and class ties, and more a non-race-specific battle of progressive Americans against ignorance and stupidity...
...The same writer might be a committed social realist one week, a satirist the next, and a postmodernist the week after...
...Whatever its excesses, the essay is usually read with deference to Ellison's accomplishment (as it should be) and appreciation that he bequeathed us this resounding credo, his paean to the only values that—for true artists—count...
...We do not make our circumstances," wrote Howe, "we can, at best, try to remake them, and the arena of choice always proves to be a little narrower than we supposed...
...Ellison put less emphasis on the battle scars suffered by the oppressed than on the fields of opportunity awaiting the self-empowered...
...The Howe-Ellison fireworks were preceded in the fifties by James Baldwin's eloquent "Everybody's Protest Novel...
...S HIFTS IN LITERARY reputation are a fact of life...
...Not entirely...
...He skates on thin ice indeed...
...And behind the debate stand two major works of literature that are their own best defenses...
...One can only hope these ubiquitous citations are matched by the in-depth study the book deserves...
...No wonder they argued at cross-purposes—it was in part a conflict of myths...
...Ellison could feel justified today in surveying a literary landscape where black writers roam freely through a variety of subjects, styles, and genres...
...Howe explicates the thematic significance of protest...
...What has changed...
...What could be more urgent than liberation from suffering...
...Ralph Ellison Darryl Lorenzo Wellington 1N THE EARLY nineteen sixties, Irving Howe and Ralph Ellison crossed swords in an exchange of vehemently argued essays...
...the Howe essay seems occasionally to slip into a thud-thud emphasis upon oppression, the Ellison essay into an easy glorification of American egalitarianism...
...to make identifications as to values and human quality"—to which Howe would likely agree and answer that his earlier remarks were in the interests of liberating the fullness of black humanity, by pointing up not the exclusive, but the most urgent, aspect of black experience...
...They entrapped whites in a guilty role, blacks in an angry, hostile corner...
...The circularity of the arguments bedevils me...
...It is difficult to know when a social category has lost its past significance, and when the pretense that it is no longer significant risks contributing to a less overt, but still real form of oppression...
...Ellison thought that Howe was slumming...
...Typically for projects this high-minded, the New Critics failed to see that "the evaluative terms offered by New Criticism—terms like coherence and complexity—were heavily freighted with associations drawn from history, psychology, morality...
...Howe suspected that the early Baldwin was too much under the influence of a fashionable Freudian-influenced critical method that "approached all ideal claims with a weary skepticism...
...He is a rough-and-ready artist-god, whose potential is unbound by race or class—because, despite Jim Crow, America is a land of opportunity...
...In terms occasionally similar to Ellison's later essay, Baldwin upbraided the social protest "School of [Richard] Wright...
...Ellison's half of the exchange remains handily available, "The World and the Jug," reprinted in his now canonical essay collection Shadow and Act...
...It is among artists who have already come to regard themselves as "committed" in one sense or another, I suspect, that disputes like the Howe-Ellison debate will retain the most significance...
...it could produce masterpieces...
...The question was never the extent to which Wright resembled Bigger Thomas, but rather the extent to which Bigger Thomas resembled the young, disenfranchised inhabitants of the nation's ghettos and represented in metaphor a legitimate aspect of the reality of urban poverty...
...Certain phrases and posturings surprise me—making me wonder whether I fully appreciate the sensitivities that led to the falling out as when Howe describes Ellison's accomplishment as "miraculous," a word that might smack of a patronizing liberalism...
...I suggest that my credentials are just 104 n DISSENT / Summer 2005 as valid as Wright's...
...Is it really so much easier to see this fortytwo years later...
...An echo of their debate occurs whenever one minority member accuses another of "forgetting his roots" or whenever shouting matches erupt over whether "the canon" consists predominantly of dead white European males...
...In Wright's case, as in Hemingway's, truth be told, the biography usually influences assessments of the work...
...But most of all, the exchange is indicative of the pressure of the early sixties, with Ellison welcoming a new frontier and liberation from the old pedagogy and Howe taking a cautionary stance...
...When Ellison writes of art, he will put in an aside to say, in effect, "but politics matter...
...it is preposterously semantically finicky, a difference in qualifiers...
...Times have changed...
...DISSENT / Summer 2005 n 105...
...In "Black Boys and Native Sons," Howe provides an overview thus far of the career of James Baldwin...
...Howe could point out that although the social pressures upon writers have changed, they still exist...
...Are these phrases presumptuous...
...The example of the major black writer of our day, Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, exposes the insufficiency of either/ or categories...
...DISSENT / Summer 2005 n I03 For some, Howe's emphasis upon social determinants will appear negative...
...This changed in the late nineties...
...The books reinforced the categories they hoped to deconstruct...
...It seems the Howe-Ellison quarrel was heavily constrained by the social dialectic of their times...
...His up-from-slavery memoir undoubtedly played a part in the Ellison-Howe squabble...
...His oratorical powers at full blast, with resounding indignation, he is asserting nothing less than the lasting significance of art...
...R EREADING THE exchange, the Howe essay strikes me for its insightful passages...
...Where does the paro 1 0 2 n DISSENT / Summer 2005 chial vision end and the universal vision begin...
...For several decades since the sixties, Richard Wright's reputation has been on the decline...
...It's almost a cliché for younger African American writers and novices to cite it as their inspiration, their turning point, their favorite novel...
...For example, in 1991 Mark Busby Twayne states that "Howe charged Ellison with insufficient anger and called for more protest against racism in his work...
...In 1963, Howe defended "committed" writing, and both essayists bandied the concept of black protest primarily in the context of writing engaged with racism...
...But the fact of racism justified protest literature...
...this must reflect either a historical memory or a contemporary reality...
...Ellison brandishes a vision of Art with a capital A. He holds up his accomplishment as a shining example of American Individualism...
...The Howe-Ellison essays retain intrinsic, historical interest, but at the same time they live in the shadows...
...He was simply too plainspoken a writer to satisfy postmodernist critical modes...
...Ellison, too, allows for the pressure upon blacks to write protest fiction, but indicts Howe for presumptively denying blacks the capacity for other avenues of expression: Howe has consistently used phrases that restrict black creativity to a one-dimensional, sociological category...
...It seems to me, however, that Ellison has personalized Howe's remarks in ways that widened their differences...
...Their words implied "that Wright could not see beyond the limitations of the character he created"—which was unbelievable...
...When is art exclusively the result of an individual will, and when is talent at least partially related to one's place and times...
...But the essays are full of brilliant flashes of writing, interesting asides, and qualifiers...
...He is defending his raison d'être...
...The World and the Jug" benefits from Invisible Man's reputation...
...I'm taken aback by the vitriol with which Ellison denies and denounces the influence of Wright...
...By the seventies his work had already withstood repeated and severe hammering...
...To understand the artistic merit of Wright's books, one must understand his roots and his America...
...From another perspective, the term expresses a position, an identity from which to initiate honest participation, rather than the exclusions of the steel jug...
...He has published essays and reviews in the Nation, Dissent, and the Washington Post Book World...
...Ellison is so blisteringly, so persuasively indignant that the Howe essay is often unjustly summarized...
...By the early sixties, Baldwin had become a much more polemical writer, a "clenched fist" author of essays and novels riddled with outrage...
...Is there any evaluative term not so freighted, and must not any attempt to find purely 'intrinsic' values wither into sterility...
...The nuances are so particular that readers should consult Howe's text themselves...
...his later excursions into existentialism remained characterized by directness...
...The biography renews appreciation for the awkwardness of his position as a black trailblazer...
...Have the arguments dated...
...The argument they began hinges upon one's opinion of Richard Wright's work...
...To what extent is art a matter of truth telling...
...Or, at least, it looks that way until one reads the somewhat less well-known Howe essay...
...It's not often noted that "The World and the Jug" ends with a slew of generalizations far more sweeping than any Howe penned...
...Tributaries such as these would complicate an analysis of the role of race...
...Ellison is rarely a hot-tempered essayist, but "The World and the Jug" bristles...
...There was a period in the eighties when (it seemed to me) Wright criticism generally implied that he was an influential writer, but overrated and spent as a force...
...And protest novels—straight out of the school of Wright—are still being written...
...It's uncertain whether Ellison is disclaiming any belief in the concept of an African American literature, but he steadfastly denounces comparison of his own work with Richard Wright's...
...If James Farrell showed the meanness of life in the Chicago slums, that was because he could not escape it...
...journey from a Mississippi sharecropping family, to hunger and poverty in Chicago, to fame as a novelist, to exile in Paris and acquaintanceship with Sartre and Beauvoir...
...In interesting ways, their exchange over protest literature resembles later arguments over the phrase "African American...
...Rather than assigning victory to one writer, I want to examine some passages and themes for the heft they've gained or lost forty years later...
...This influence was entirely negative in human terms...
...The quote is taken from a passage on Howe's student days, studying the tenets of the New Critics and their aspiration to substitute close analysis of a text for the study of background historical forces...
...Invisible Man's reputation has scaled the mountaintop...
...Today, the landscape of "protest and commitment" would include black artists involved in environmental, feminist, gay, and transgender movements...
...in literary terms, as I understand Howe, it was neither necessarily negative nor necessarily positive...
...The World and the Jug," then, looks like the definitive statement on artistic autonomy vs...
...This is flat-out incorrect...
...One man's sympathy for the anger of others is another man's smug, sentimental gesture of genuflection...
...It could produce shrill polemics...
...In his early writings, Wright held to concepts such as truth and justice, and sometimes without sufficiently selfconscious literary irony...
...W HEN THE DUST has settled, these arguments are still circular...
...To him the American racial protest novel—from Uncle Tom's Cabin to Native Son—had amounted to little more than a sentimental indulgence...
...Readers familiar with Baldwin's and Ellison's critiques will remember their discomfort with Bigger Thomas: Thomas highlighted the crude, murderous impulses of a disturbed individual rather than the everyday communal habits of the underprivileged...
...Many such artists struggle to negotiate the personal and the political, selfrealization and social obligation, and many will see that struggle mirrored in the argument of four decades ago...
...Stylistically, her books are highly DISSENT / Summer 2005• 101 refined, preciously composed, jewel-like, while her themes and public identity blend comfortably with racial and feminist activist agendas...
...He is reclaiming his artistic value and independence from easy political categories (especially those imposed by Marxist-influenced white critics...
...Ellison indulges himself in mocking Howe as ignorant of black culture...
...But I do think Howe's essay was forward-looking in its analysis of Wright...
...Ellison defends creative autonomy...
...But if we are in a jug it is transparent, not opaque, and one is allowed not only to see outside, but to read what is going on out there...
...RECONSIDERATIONS Fighting at Cross-Purposes Irving Howe vs...
...The essay to which Ellison is abrasively responding, Howe's "Black Boys and Native Sons," (Dissent, Autumn 1963) has gotten his dander up...
...From one perspective, African American enforces parochialism and self-segregation from full democratic participation—but only if the word is approached skeptically...
...In the fifties, Baldwin poeticized himself as "liberated" from bygone ideological stances, from the missionary zeal of Richard Wright...
...An understated theme throughout "Black Boys and Native Sons" is that it is difficult to know when one is "liberated," when one is paying lip service to fashionable ideals, or when one is under the influence of a subtler set of biases...
...Beneath thick veils of language, Baldwin and Ellison damned Thomas as an unprogressive image of black masculinity...
...its primary zone of liberation was the mind...
...One man's steel jug is another man's starting point...
...In short, the danger is that a collective vision such as Howe's erases the individual black artists' common humanity with all members of the human family...
...Howe defends Wright...
...Does privilege enter into the realm of the arts...
...Ellison's response to Howe's response picks at phrases taken out of context, "pain and anguish," one may doubt that any Negro writer can," "authentic," for their white man's bias...
...It is safe to say that Richard Wright is on the ascent again, especially since the release of Hazel Rowley's Richard Wright: His Life and Times, published in 2001...
...But to Howe, Wright was an artist, however flawed...
...An awareness of probabilities isn't inconsistent with a profound respect for possibility...
...Its gods stood on the pinnacles of Art...
...If Bigger Thomas lived inside a steel jug, that was the point...
...Ellison attacks Wright...
...DARRYL LORENZO WELLINGTON is a poet and literary critic...
...Whereas Ellison saw a danger in collective generalizations, Howe was attuned to the perils of erasing society...
...Hence Howe's continued emphasis upon the individual as part of the group...
...Howe was examining the pressures upon a Negro artist to make particular choices...
...Among the many "then" and "now" changes, this, too, eases the rigidity of the discussion...
...With his sensitivity to social and generational changes, Howe perceived, as is more evident today, how Native Son had been the victim of hidden agendas masquerading as aesthetics...
...He is an American writer, and his true godfathers are Stephen Crane, Mark Twain, and Ernest Hemingway...
...Rather than demanding anything of any black artist, it would be truer to say that Howe was defending Richard Wright's artistry and protest as a literary genre...
...How could a Negro put pen to paper, how could he so much as think or breathe, without some impulsion to protest, be it harsh or mild, political or private, released or buried...
...These arguments reflected the period's entrenchment in the politics of black images...
...the Ellison essay for its inspirational vigor...
...Baldwin's strictures cut deeper than a personal manifesto...
...I think it is interesting to look at these essays in that light...
...Rowley's book retells Wright's story for a new generation of readers...
...Wright was, after all, "Black Boy...
...S YMPTOMATIC OF an argument at cross purposes, it bogs down in minutia...
...The most powerful salvo launched by Ellison is that Howe's vision "leaves no room for the intensity of personal anguish which compels the artist to seek relief by projecting it into the world in conjunction with other things...
...Can art function in the political sphere and retain its integrity...
...This argument dovetailed into the criticism that Bigger Thomas lacked Richard Wright's perception and intelligence...
...It is no longer just a classic, but the classic of the African American literary canon...
...their fortunes are tied, irrevocably, to the general reputations of Native Son and Invisible Man...
...his (remarkable, improbable, is it too much to say, heroic...
...some will prefer Ellison's democratic idealism...
...In his autobiography, A Margin of Hope, Howe asks, "Since language has unbreakable ties to possible events in experience, can the meaning or value of a work be apprehended without some resort— be it as subtle and indirect as you wish—to social and moral categories...
...But insofar as the Howe-Ellison squabble pitted the values of the committed artist against the values of aesthetic purity, it appears hackneyed, largely because today minority artists feel much less pressure to view "commitment to the struggle" and aestheticism as oppositional...
...The circle goes round and round...
...The World and the Jug" takes its title from Ellison's stinging remark, "Howe seems to see segregation as a steel jug with the Negroes waiting for some black messiah to come along and blow the cork...
...Similarly, when Howe writes of the rage he feels must accompany black life in America, he will implicitly stipulate that rage is futile as diatribe, but meaningful as art...
...Occasionally the debate almost ceases to be an argument...
...For those of us who believe in Wright's literary merit and look forward to his literary restoration, Howe's essay is an early example of the same arguments positive evaluations offer today: that there are purely artistic values at the core of Wright's vision, among them ambiguity, that extend its interest beyond ideological concerns...
...In "Black Boys and Native Sons," he wrote about the "pressure" upon black writers, implying a seesawing motion between individual impulses and social weight...
...Have the Howe-Ellison essays become museum pieces...
...these weather changes influence how generously creative and critical texts are read, the sympathies we allot or refuse...
...Thus he believed criticism was best approached with a conscious awareness of historical forces, and in 1963, in the case of black writers, this meant the influence of racism...
...Because Wright never publicly responded to Baldwin's assertions—Howe's essay implied that Wright thought it beneath him to do so—Howe was, so to speak, coming to Wright's defense...
...Ellison interpreted him as limiting black artistry to crude, polemical works, and responded, "Twelve years ago a friend argued with me for hours that I could not possibly write a novel because my experience as a Negro had been too excruciating to allow me to achieve that psychological and emotional distance necessary to artistic creation...
...Certainly large numbers of black writers feel compelled to decry racial injustice...
...Ellison understood Howe as ghettoizing black writers...
...Should Madame Bovary have reflected Flaubert's cosmopolitanism...
...the broader questions they engage are infinitely worth speculating upon, but probably unanswerable...
...Round and round...
...Howe understood that this criticism, however well intended, avoided the sociological point that was the source of Thomas's literary power...
...wrote Howe...
...And it's trickier still when the man espousing empathy is a white man, making judgments about an experience that isn't his own...
...But this implies that Howe expressed himself much more deterministically and simplistically than was the case...
...This state of affairs worsened with the rise of structuralist and deconstructionist criticism after whose methods Wright's work looks stodgy and woodenly unambiguous...
...If Dreiser wrote about power-hunger and dreams of success corrupting American society, that was because he was really infatuated with them...
...Howe's original essay argues that given the social circumstances of the time (redoubled by American history), blacks will understandably feel a particular sympathy with protest themes, and that an intimate, necessary relationship exists between social circumstances and literary products, certainly a relationship that influences literary content, and a relationship that can be a consideration when assessing accomplishment...
...that anguish which might take the form of an acute sense of inferiority in another, an overwhelming sense of the absurdity of life for still another...
Vol. 52 • July 2005 • No. 3
