Ralph Ellison (post 6): On the occasion of publication of his letters, here are five past posts on the multiple personality reflected in his writing

Here is the New York Times review of Ellison’s letters: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/02/books/review-ralph-ellison-selected-letters.html

Here are five past posts:

August 8, 2016

Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man”: Meaning of Title; Relation of Nameless, Unreliable Narrator and Rinehart to Dostoevsky, Melville, Multiple Personality

In the opening paragraph of Invisible Man (1952), the nameless narrator says he is invisible because people refuse to see him. But he is unreliable. Ellison calls him “the hero who is somewhat of a liar” and says “That’s what you have to be alert to whenever you read fiction in the first person” (1, p. 267). Also search “nameless” and “namelessness” in this blog for posts on its relation to multiple personality.

Ellison says, “The invisibility, there is a joke about that which is tied up with the sociological dictum that Negroes in the United States have a rough time because we have high visibility…High pigmentation…But the problem for the narrator of Invisible Man is that he creates his own invisibility to a certain extent by not asserting himself…” (1, p. 96).

“Ellison…modeled his narrator after the nameless narrator of Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground” (2). That’s the same Dostoevsky who wrote The Double, a classic multiple personality story (search “Dostoevsky” and “The Double” in this blog).

Regarding another character in Invisible Man, Rinehart, Ellison says, “I was thinking of a character who was a master of disguise…"(1, p. 18). “He’s a descendant of Melville’s Confidence Man” (1, p. 76). Search “Confidence Man” in this blog to read my post on Herman Melville’s novel about a man with multiple personality.

1. Maryemma Graham and Amritjit Singh (Editors). Conversations with Ralph Ellison. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1995.

2. Invisible Man. Wikipedia.

August 9, 2016

Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” (post 2): Is narrator incarnated but invisible, or a disembodied voice? Views of Prologue, Epilogue, Author's Introduction.

Prologue

“I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids…I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me” (1, p. 3).

Epilogue

“ ‘Ah,’ I can hear you say, ‘so it was all a build-up to bore us with his buggy jiving. He only wanted us to listen to him rave!’ But only partially true: Being invisible and without substance, a disembodied voice, as it were, what else could I do?” (1, p. 439).

Author’s Introduction

“For while I had structured my short stories out of familiar experiences and possessed concrete images of my characters and their backgrounds, now I was confronted by nothing more substantial than a taunting, disembodied voice…an ironic, down-home voice…the voice seemed well aware that a piece of science fiction was the last thing I aspired to write. In fact it seemed to tease me with allusions to that pseudoscientific sociological concept which held that most Afro-American difficulties sprang from our ‘high visibility’…But then as I listened to its taunting laughter and speculated as to what kind of individual would speak in such accents, I decided that it would be one who had been forged in the underground of American experience and yet managed to emerge less angry than ironic…And after coaxing him into revealing a bit more about himself, I concluded that he was without question a ‘character,’ and that in the dual meaning of the term…this has always been a most willful, most self-generating novel…” (1, pp. xiv-xxi).

Comment

As is true of many novelists, Ellison, intellectually, knew that he had imagined and thought up his narrator and main character. But that is not the way he experienced his creative process: His protagonist just seems to have arrived. He is confronted by it. He hears its voice. It has its own opinions and attitude. It seems to be self-generating, with a mind of its own. All of which describes the psychological experience of getting and having an alternate personality.

Although most characters and alternate personalities are embodied, it is not uncommon to have an alternate personality who is conceived of as a disembodied spirit of one sort or another.

1. Ralph Ellison. Invisible Man [1952]. New York, Random House, 1982.

August 11, 2016

Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” (post 3): He is invisible, because his true emotions and humanity, in the form of alternate personalities, are hidden.

A man is “invisible” when he has repressed, and buried inside him, his true self, his humanity, so that it is invisible from the outside.

“Behold! a walking zombie! Already he’s learned to repress not only his emotions but his humanity. He’s invisible, a walking personification of the Negative…The mechanical man! (1, p. 72).

But what if that repressed, true self were released, discovered, and became visible, so to speak? What form would it have?

Would it seem like an alien, alternate personality that had been lodged deep inside him? Would he hear its voice? Might he hear more than one voice: the voices of several, contradictory, alternate personalities, each singing its own tune inside his head?

“…I had the feeling that I had been talking beyond myself, had used words and expressed attitudes not my own, that I was in the grip of some alien personality lodged deep within me…” (1, p. 189).

“…but now a new, painful, contradictory voice had grown up within me…If only all the contradictory voices shouting inside my head would calm down and sing a song in unison…” (1, p. 197).

Clinically, the counterpart to what Ellison calls “invisible” is what some clinicians refer to as “depleted.” For example, a patient who is noted to have an absence of strong emotions is later found to have alternate personalities—an angry personality, etc.— who have these strong emotions, leaving the host personality emotionally depleted.

1. Ralph Ellison. Invisible Man [1952]. New York, Random House, 1982.

August 13, 2016

Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” (post 4): The title means man is invisible, especially to the extent that his alternate personalities remain hidden.

Neither Ellison’s interviews nor his introduction to this novel nor the novel itself gives a clear and consistent explanation of what he meant by “invisible man.” He is of two (or more) minds about it.

At some points, he says it means that men (especially blacks) are not seen by others (especially whites) for who they really are. But at one point, he says that some of the white characters are not seen for who they are, either. And so, since it is impossible to know what is in the heart of any other person, “Invisible Man” means that man is invisible.

However, at other points, cited in previous posts, Ellison says that his nameless, first-person narrator/protagonist is really only a disembodied voice that he heard. So that is the reason he is invisible.

And as I pointed out, a disembodied person-like entity is an alternate personality, which, not having its own separate body, and being, most of the time, on the inside, behind the scenes, is, usually, invisible. According to this view, a man is invisible to the extent that his alternate personalities remain hidden.

Is there any evidence that Ellison ever thought in terms of multiple personality, per se? Toward the end of this novel, the protagonist is repeatedly compared to Rinehart, a character who is described as having “multiple personalities” (1, p. 377). Indeed, the only apparent purpose for the existence of the Rinehart character is to make the issue of multiple personality explicit.

Ellison is intrigued, but doesn't pursue the issue, because he finds “the possibilities posed by Rinehart’s multiple personalities…too vast and confusing to contemplate” (1. p. 377).

1. Ralph Ellison. Invisible Man [1952]. New York, Random House, 1982.

August 19, 2016

Ralph Ellison (post 5): Multiple Personality character from Invisible Man became core of the novel Ellison worked on for the next forty years.

“Ellison’s Opus II composition book makes it clear that the second novel belongs to 'Rhinehart,' as he spells the name throughout. Bliss Proteus Rhinehart is the hidden name and complex fate of this transitional character belonging both to Invisible Man and to the second novel…

“As Ellison actually began writing the novel, Rhinehart would go by other names—first Bliss, the child evangelist of indeterminate race…then Movie Man, an itinerant scam artist…and finally Adam Sunraider, a ‘race-baiting New England Senator’…

“An agent of transformation, Bliss Proteus Rinehart is a metaphor for the second novel as a whole, a way of explaining how Ellison could write for forty years without finishing his novel…

“He is of indeterminate race, here specified as ‘Negro, white, Indian’; he is raised in the church by a black preacher; he runs away and reemerges as a movie man looking to exploit a small Oklahoma town…and he gains political office, serving in the United States Senate, where he is assassinated…

“Rhinehart emerges as an individual particularly trapped by his racial indeterminacy, his protean ability to shift shades as well as shapes…

“The novel’s central action, as Ellison conceives it in this embryonic form, concerns Rhinehart’s attempt to return to his neglected past, to embrace his blackness…” (1, pp. 125-134).

Professor Adam Bradley is the coeditor of Ralph Ellison’s unfinished second novel, Three Days Before the Shooting, which Ellison worked on for forty years following publication of Invisible Man. He does not raise the issue of multiple personality.

1. Adam Bradley. Ralph Ellison in Progress: From Invisible Man to Three Days Before the Shooting. New Haven, Yale University Press, 2010.