Brave Words for a Startling Occasion (1953). Summary and Description

In this address delivered when Ellison accepted the 1953 National Book Award, he locates his novel Invisible Man in relation to past and present fiction, especially in relation to the novel of manners, the naturalistic novel, and the great moral novels of the 19th century. In style, technique, dialogue, and subject manner, Ellison not only sought complexity himself but also recommended it to others, particularly in the treatment of black people, racial issues, and the American national experience.

Ellison begins by saying that if he were asked what he considered to be the most significant aspect of his novel Invisible Man, “I would reply: its experimental attitude, and its attempt to return to the mood of personal moral responsibility for democracy which typified the best of our nineteenth-century fiction” (Collected 151). In other words, he stresses the technical, structural, and stylistic innovations of his book, but he also emphasizes its old-fashioned concern with individual conduct and personal choices, particularly those of authors themselves. Writers of the so-called naturalistic school had emphasized that human beings were products of social forces and that they therefore had little control over their own lives.

In contrast, Ellison—while acknowledging the achievements of naturalism—favors the example set by earlier writers, who “took a much greater responsibility for the condition of democracy” and whose works were “imaginative projections of the conflicts within the human heart which arose when the sacred principles of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights clashed with the practical exigencies of human greed and fear, hate and love” (Collected 152-153). Unfortunately, the only earlier writer Ellison specifically mentions as an exemplar of the ideals he has in mind is Mark Twain, although he does also commend William Faulkner as a more recent example worth emulating.

In the course of embracing this earlier standard of fictional excellence, Ellison explains why he could not embrace other models—models that included not only naturalism but also the “well-made” fiction associated with Henry James (which seemed too limited in subject matter) and the “hard-boiled” prose style of such writers as Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway’s name is never explicitly mentioned in the essay, but when Ellison mentions such traits as understatement and “monosyllabic utterance,” it is clear that he has Hemingway in mind (Collected 152). Although Ellison felt enormous admiration for Hemingway and expresses regard for the author’s prose style both here and elsewhere, he considered such a style too limited, too “embarrassingly austere,” to be useful to him in Invisible Man (Collected 152).

Instead, he wanted to craft a kind of prose that would reflect the numerous complications of American speech—speech that Ellison calls “the rich babel of idiomatic expression around me, a language full ofimagery and gesture and rhetorical canniness” (Collected 152). As he recounts the numerous elements that typify American ways of talking, it is clear that what Ellison prizes most in fiction (both in its style and in its substance) is complexity.

He does not want his writing to be limited in any way—not in its subject, not in its phrasing, and certainly not by assumptions connected to the race of its author. He endorses a kind of fiction that takes ethical issues seriously and that rejects narrow or rigid prescriptions in either diction or topics. Paradoxically, the kind of writing he advocates is experimental and innovative in its stylistic range but traditional in its concern with moral issues.

For Discussion or Writing
1. Choose a particular chapter or a brief section from Invisible Man and discuss the ways it exemplifies the ideals Ellison champions in this essay How is the chosen section innovative and complex in style? How does it reflect a wide range of American speech? In what ways does it focus on basic ethical problems? How (if at all) does Ellison achieve his ideal of creating a truly complicated and morally responsible work?

2. In this essay, Ellison names Mark Twain as a writer he particularly admires. Using Twain’s novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a test case, explain as precisely as possible why you think Ellison might have valued that book. What is it about the style, dialogue, settings, plot, and subject matter of that book that would win Ellison’s respect? How does Invisible Man resemble Huckleberry Finn in any of those ways?