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Saying Yes and Saying No: Individualist Ethics in Ellison, Burke, and Emerson

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

James M. Albrecht
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Abstract

The allusions to Emerson in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man are usually read as a scathing indictment of Emersonian individualism. Yet even as Ellison satirizes the Emerson canonized in Lewis Mumford's The Golden Day, the career of Ellison's narrator extends a pragmatic tradition of individualism leading from Emerson through Kenneth Burke. Though often accused of ignoring tragic limits, Emerson describes the self as existing only within the material limitations of culture—and thus as always socially implicated and indebted. While Emerson claims that the pursuit of one's own most vital work is a moral end that fulfills one's social duties, Burke and Ellison demand more complex scrutiny of one's ethical connections to others. Burke insists that the social context of our individual acts requires a comic ethics of identification: we must identify with others across social conflicts and recognize how our individual acts may be identified with those conflicts. Ellison's narrator progresses toward this Burkean ethic: in his final confrontation with Mr. Norton (who has recommended Emerson to him), the narrator adopts a mode of communication that asserts the democratic connection of all Americans at the same time that it confronts the systemic discrimination that separates them.

Type
Special Topic: Ethics and Literary Study
Information
PMLA , Volume 114 , Issue 1: Special Topic Ethics and Literary Study Introduction by Lawrence Buell , January 1999 , pp. 46 - 63
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1999

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