Ralph Ellison and Kenneth Burke

Reviewed by: Ralph Ellison and Kenneth Burke: At the Roots of the Racial Divide by Bryan Crable Marc C. Conner (bio) Crable, Bryan. Ralph Ellison and Kenneth Burke: At the Roots of the Racial Divide. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2012. Ralph Ellison and Kenneth Burke have long been linked together, and Burke’s early influence on Ellison is well established. The Burkean formula for the hero’s progress of “purpose to passion to perception” was seminal to Ellison’s conception of Invisible Man. Beth Eddy’s intriguing book The Rites of Identity: The Religious Naturalism and Cultural Criticism of Kenneth Burke and Ralph Ellison (2003) explores the concepts of identity, rhetoric, and religion in the two authors, arguing that they share a commitment to the tradition of religious naturalism and that Burke is “the major, intellectual influence on Ralph Ellison” (3). Similarly, in his recent biography of Ellison Arnold Rampersad touches on the general importance of Burke’s ideas to Ellison’s writing of Invisible Man. But Bryan Crable, in this ambitious and carefully-researched study, has produced a marvelous examination of the [End Page 216] intellectual cross-influencing of these two major intellectuals. Ralph Ellison and Kenneth Burke: At the Roots of the Racial Divide sheds new light on the Ellison/Burke relationship and provides a definitive account of their cross-influence that has significant implications not only for our understanding of Ellison and Burke, but for explorations of race and culture in late-twentieth-century American letters as a whole. Crable is a true Burke scholar, having published multiple essays on Burke and receiving in 2011 the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Burke Society. Armed with this deep knowledge of Burke’s thought and work, Crable explores, in five impressively researched and eloquently written chapters, the biographical, historical, and philosophical influences and differences between him and Ellison. The biographical story here is quite intriguing: Crable shows the powerful ways in which Burke influenced the thought of the young Ellison of the 1940s as Ellison was composing Invisible Man: “Using the resources he found in Burke’s writings,” Crable argues, “Ellison crafted his perspective on race and identity in America” (3). Yet this Burkean influence was questioned by Burke himself, who sought to distance himself from Ellison in ways that reflect “a familiar reinscription of the divide between white and black Americans” (4). Crable argues that neither writer was able to escape what he terms “the American ‘racial divide,’” and nothing shows their quintessential Americanness more than this. Yet ultimately, Crable claims, Ellison sought to develop “an integrative theoretical framework, one that challenged the divide between white and black Americans,” and this reflects his desire to attain precisely “the ultimate vocabulary that Burke’s Rhetoric advocates” (6). In sum, Burke outlined the hopeful theory of language that could transcend race; Ellison sought to achieve this language in his writings; and although neither was wholly successful, the story of their joint efforts indicates “a different way of speaking (and thinking) about race and identity. By uniting these two figures . . . we suggest a new possibility: an ultimate vocabulary of race” (7). These are bold claims, and Crable works through his argument with compelling clarity and complexity. His use of the published and unpublished correspondence between the two is extremely insightful. He notes that just three months after composing the famous first sentence of Invisible Man in 1945, Ellison “fill[ed] eleven legal-sized pages with a letter to Burke” (10), continuing his fascination with Burke that began in 1937 when he heard Burke speak at the Second American Writers’ Congress in New York, and was intensified in 1939 at the Third Congress when Burke delivered his famous critique of fascist (and racist) thought, “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle,’” which fused Marx and Freud, writing and politics in ways that were immensely stimulating to the 25-year-old Ellison. Ellison immersed himself in Burke’s work, thoroughly underlining and notating his copies of such complex works as Counter-Statement (1931), Permanence and Change (1935), and Attitudes Toward History (1937). The result of these studies was two-fold: first, it enabled Ellison to see ways he could use language to meld

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