Ralph Ellison (1914-1994)

Sources: Maynard Mack, Sarah Lawall, et al., Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, 6th ed. (W.W. Norton, 1992), pp. 1973-1984.

Main points from Sarah Lawall's introduction (pp. 1973-1977):

• Ralph Waldo Ellison, born March 1, 1914, Oklahoma City
• mother encouraged learning and social activism
• 1933 attended Tuskegee Institute in Alabama (founded by black educator Booker T. Washington as trade/industrial school, Washington emphasized need for economic independence before social equality), music scholarship, studied with composer William Dawson and concert pianist Hazel Harrison
• painting, sculpture, reading, influenced by Eliot's Waste Land
• inspired by Alain Locke's The New Negro (1925), "ideal of academic and artistic excellence," 'new psychology', 'new spirit', Harlem Renaissance
• eventual rejection of Locke's concept of the "New Negro" and of racial stereotypes; search for "a larger concept of the human ... civilization"
• went to New York in 1936, held a variety of jobs; met Langston Hughes, Richard Wright
• mother's death in 1937, return to Dayton; writing, Ernest , Hemingway as model; interest in social and political reality
• first story, "Slick Gonna Learn" (1939)
• returned to New York, work in historical research with Federal Writers' Project (1938-1942), oral history project, interviews, folklore of Harlem culture; combination of interest in literary technique and social/political concerns
• joined Merchant Marine (1943)
• rejection (by 1944) of "New Negro" aestheticism of Langston Hughes and "militant naturalism" of Richard Wright (Native Son, 1940)
• received Rosenwald Fellowship to write a novel in 1945
• Invisible Man (1952), Bildungsroman, "wounded belief that things can be changed if they are only seen for what they are" (Lawall); " a complex double vision, a fluid, ambivalent response to men and events" representing "the cost of being human in this modern world" (Ellison)
• National Book Award 1953; fellow at American Academy in Rome (1955-57); Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at New York University (1970- )

"King of the Bingo Game" (1944)

Discussion issues (Source: Fidel Fajardo-Acosta):

• issue of hunger, poverty, illness of wife Laura
• movie: seen repeatedly, entrapment in a pre-scripted role (and stage) imposed on the individual; movie theatre is prison-like environment, continuation of slavery; ideological chains stronger than iron; woman tied down, representation of condition of Laura and of protagonist himself; yearning for freedom leads to identification with the hero but only imaginary solution to real problem of subservience to invisible economic and social forces; control located in the "white beam," (cf. "a light so sharp and bright that for a moment it blinded him," "the spell of some strange, mysterious power," "a cold light") source of delusions; desire to change the film's storyline, to have control over one's own life and that of others; Bingo wheel is also a projected illusion related to the film; both the game and the film work toward the subjection of the individual; individual participating in a game and enacting a role which is fixed against him, "they had it all fixed. Everything was fixed"
• train nightmares, machine controlled by whites and representing the industrialized North victimizing the black 'freeman' in the same way as the agrarian Southerners did in the past; white people laughing at protagonist's terror
• power of the wheel (representing the forces in control of the social body): "he felf vaguely that his whole life was determined by the bingo wheel"; "the unlucky cards and numbers of his days"; "he felt that the man was making a fool of him"; "as the wheel increased its speed it seemed to draw him more and more into its power, as though it held his fate; and with it came a deep need to submit, to whirl, to lose himself in its swirl of color"; "This is God!"
• cheating to win the Bingo game, five cards, irony and ambiguity of 'winning'; "he's one of the chosen people," laughter of the audience
• "he had to have faith," clinging on to belief in the socioeconomic system and its ideologies (belief in the supposed efficacy of combined pluck and luck)
• symbolic numbers: $36.90, double zero; multiples of three, cf. anti-trinities of medieval theology, Dante, deceptive forms promising everything but delivering nothing; double zero as intensified signifier of loss and emptiness, individual and social loss, the protagonist's and Laura's sacrifice
• feeling "as though he'd crossed the slippery stage a million prize-winning times"; cf. identification with the hero in the movie; imaginary rewards
• feeling of isolation, aloneness of individual in modern, industrial societies, helplessness; paralysis, fainting, desire to retreat
• attempt to keep the wheel spinning (figure for revolution) , defiance of the game's rules, rebellion against social powers/hierarchies, refusal to allow the game to go on, preventing of personal losing or winning, blurring of (socioeconomic) distinctions related to entitlements, equalization of all sectors of the wheel in motion, end of socioeconomic inequality; continuous motion as symbol of life and being, continuation of life (as opposed to the static, death-like quality and symbolic charge of the double zero); under the influence of motion all points in the wheel are brought together (humanity united) and the double zero becomes the symbol of infinity (eternal life); gift of life to Laura and to humanity: "Live!"; "he would keep the Bingo wheel whirling forever, and Laura would be safe in the wheel"; "I'll show you how to win"; everybody wins when individual gain is not allowed; game of individual gain is transformed int game of collective gain; "he felt a certain power"; "he was running the show"
• new identity of protagonist: casting off of slave identity, "he had forgotten his name,"
• transfiguration into Christ crucified, Prometheus, Bacchus (drunken god) cosmic god sacrificing himself for the redemption of the world: "like a long thin black wire that was being stretched and wound upon the bingo wheel," "trickle of blood splashing the toe of his shoe," "he was their luck," a King; cosmic battle of Life-giving God against Mammon, god of wealth and possessions
• winning is losing; coincidence of victory and death; murder rather than accident; "slow wink"; killed by curtain intentionally dropped on his head; same curtain which conceals the game's operators suppresses the protagonist's subversive efforts and casts him into non-existence
• Bingo game as metaphor of capitalist, industrial, technological society; games and diversions as ideological tools of mass control and manipulation; exposure of ideology of capitalism