Invincible Man Ralph Ellison 1914-1994

By RICHARD CORLISS

The words still seep into the reader's marrow, 42 years after they were first ( published. "I am an invisible man," Ralph Ellison declared in the opening sentence of his only novel. "I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me." If they do register his presence, it is as "a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to destroy."

Invisible Man, in which a young black relates the surreal events leading to his ultimate isolation, earned best-novel-of-its-time raves from the college of critics. It established Ellison in the permanent firmament of American writers, a place he still occupied at his death last week from pancreatic cancer, six weeks after his 80th birthday. But Invisible Man was more than a gorgeously written piece of fiction. Because its phantasmagoric satire of mid- century life in Harlem and the American South proved prophetic, the book became a blueprint for inner-city discontent. Invisible Man taught two generations of readers, black and white, how to think about themselves.

If they had read more carefully, it might also have taught them to think for themselves. For this is not a self-help or self-hate book; it is a plea for common survival. It posed Rodney King's plea more subtly but no less potently: Can we all get along?

Most of the time, the dapper Ellison got along with blacks and whites. He was the precocious child of doting parents in Oklahoma City. "I'm raising this boy to be a poet," said Ellison's father, a small businessman who named him after Ralph Waldo Emerson and died when the child was three. Ralph's mother worked as a domestic and recruited blacks for the Socialist Party. There was no shortage of role models for Ralph; he attended a grammar school named for Frederick Douglass and won a scholarship to Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute. While in the Merchant Marines during World War II, he published several short stories. One day, just after the war, he found himself typing, "I am an invisible man." He spent seven years developing that sentence into the work that brought him instant fame.

Shuttling boldly between fable and philosophy, Invisible Man is the story of a Candide of color. Down home, our unnamed hero is given a scholarship by the white gentry, then forced by these same burghers to fight other blacks blindfolded. Up North, he works in a paint factory; its metaphorical function is to whitewash the American experience into the American dream. He is the guinea pig of medical sadists and firebrand communists. He is the wary friend of "Ras the Destroyer," a prototype of black militancy.

It is the burden of a pioneer to be the presumed spokesman for all "his people." Ellison, a sensible gent, declined this honor. He was not every black writer; he was a black writer -- or, as he might prefer, a writer. And, for some blacks, he was guilty of having allowed himself to be praised by white critics. In the '60s, when the civil rights sing-along gave way to Black Power shock therapy, Ellison found himself overshadowed by more urgent novelists, such as Richard Wright (Native Son), who played Malcolm X to Ellison's Martin Luther King Jr. Ellison compiled two volumes of trenchant essays but never finished his second novel, on which he worked for four decades. Joe Fox, his editor at Random House, says he was told neither the book's subject nor its title, only that it was "virtually finished." Fanny Ellison, Ralph's wife of 47 years, may know how close he came to completing the novel. But it is possible that he worried over it so long because he felt that changing fashion had made his complex take on race antique.

The unfashionable fact is that Ellison's writing was too refined, elaborate, to be spray painted on a tenement wall. He was a celebrator as much as a denouncer of the nation that bred him. In his multicolored vision, America was not just a violent jungle but a vibrant jumble of many cultures and temperaments; it mingled melody, harmony, dissonance and ad-lib genius, like the jazz that Ellison played, wrote about and loved.

Today's music is more anarchic -- a rap on the thick skull of an oppressive society -- and the street mood is rancid, desperate. It makes one wonder if Ellison's message ever got through to the larger public. As he declared in his 1963 essay "The World and the Jug," he wrote not from a belief that blacks can only suffer and rage, but from "an American Negro tradition which teaches one to deflect racial provocation and to master and contain pain. It is a tradition which abhors as obscene any trading on one's own anguish for gain and sympathy; which springs not from a desire to deny the harshness of existence but from a will to deal with it as men at their best have always done."

Through his writing, Ralph Ellison hoped to breed a race of heroes. Through his example, he was surely one of them.