Sociology to the Scientists
Unlike Percy and Robinson, Ellison shows minimal interest in religious questions, and in this sense can be seen as part of a larger anticlerical project among some twentieth-century African-American writers. Unlike many other secular black intellectuals, however, he scorns the social sciences. His nonfiction repeatedly distinguishes meaning from matter, purposeful action from bodily motion, and continually highlights both “improvisation” and “black and white fraternity”—concepts that align him both with the pragmatism of his mentor Kenneth Burke and place him in a longstanding tradition of republican sociopolitical thought. His fiction, however, repeatedly emphasizes just how vexed such terms are in the context of modern American life. Invisible Man portrays a world governed unrelentingly by determinism and social–scientific theorizing, and his second novel went unfinished in part because he struggles to portray the mutual recognition that his essays insist is needed between black and white culture.