The postwar moment of a brash, distinctive new American novel—Nabokov’s Lolita—coming to light is also the moment in which the work of a much older William Faulkner finally gained recognition in his own country. Faulkner’s great period as writer—the late 1920s into the middle ’30s, the years of The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Absalom, Absalom!, and Light in August—was long behind him, but it had earned him a European reputation: in France he was admired by Malraux and Sartre and translated by Jean Giono; in Italy, by Elio Vittorini and Cesare Pavese. In America, however, it took Malcolm Cowley’s omnium-gatherum The Portable Faulkner, part of a paperback series originally designed to swell soldiers’ gear with books—series that were even more in demand after the war, as the G.I. Bill swelled the ranks of college students—to gain him a real following.
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This was an episode in the larger paperback revolution that the war brought about, not just in America but throughout the world. (It was military consignments that made Allen Lane’s Penguin Books into the powerhouse of British publishing; it was in the wake of the war that Einaudi would start a line of elegantly packaged paperbacks featuring color reproductions of masterpieces of modern art on the covers, the better that, after Mussolini, dead art should rise again.) This paperback revolution didn’t simply make literature more widely available, it transformed it all around the world, not least by making literature from all over the world available all over the world, a dynamic that had been crucial to the novel’s spread as a genre, but that now picked up speed.
America was the country of the future, ostensibly, but perhaps its only future, Faulkner’s work suggested, was one of degradation and destruction.
But the deeper reason for Faulkner’s new prominence at this moment of triumphant American exceptionalism is that he spoke to America about something that America, if it aspired at all seriously to its role as world leader, could no longer afford not to consider, though it had long preferred not to: American racism. Faulkner’s South was a world defined not by victory, but by defeat, a world that had a history too complicated for simple reckoning, too dark to be put to rest, and as unforgivable as that of Europe. And this history was not just the history of the South—Faulkner made clear—it was America’s history.
It bore witness to the accommodation of slavery written into the American Constitution and to the racial and political division that had always afflicted the so-called United States, as well as to the devastation wrought by the Civil War, that first industrial war whose massive toll of death had so appalled Dostoevsky’s Underground Man in faraway Russia and had so inspired the generals of the world wars to come. America was the country of the future, ostensibly, but perhaps its only future, Faulkner’s work suggested, was one of degradation and destruction—this was the simple lesson of the enormously complex Absalom, Absalom!, in which the refusal of the self-made plantation owner Thomas Sutpen to acknowledge the darkness of his past and blackness of his progeny destroys both him and the generations to come. Perhaps the truth was that everything was already all over for the country that had dedicated itself from the start to the future; perhaps it always had been.
America, in any case, was hardly a country without ruins, ruins that even Faulkner’s style, loaded with archaisms, evoked, along with the often-elusive narrative thread of his books, the story disappearing into questions about the story. Faulkner possessed a resounding, intricate, Latinate style—with James and Stein and Hemingway, he was one of the great masters of the American sentence, always driven by the outsize need to find a scale of its own. In his prose, the florid opulence of nineteenth-century public address—whether from the preacher’s pulpit or the politician’s podium—swells and spills into private mania and despair. Faulkner’s voice is often choral, one character reporting to another what he imagines another character said to himself, and all this in an elevated tone that is at the same time uniquely authorial: the effect is like a feedback loop, overloaded, hypnotic, discordant. Murky and splendid, his sentences, as well as the plots that they circuitously unfold, are full of booby traps and swamp holes. The reader flounders and is sucked in and down into who knows what depths.
This is America. It is a haunted place, a conflicted place, as is laid bare in Faulkner’s 1956 “Letter to a Northern Editor,” opposing the “compulsory integration” mandated by Brown v. Board of Education as a solution to the “compulsory segregation” he also opposed. The rediscovery of Faulkner was not only the rediscovery of a great twentieth-century novelist but a renewed recognition of the dark side of American exceptionalism that had been plain enough to the abolitionists of the antebellum Republic but had come to be seen as merely a Southern matter under Jim Crow.
The question the example of Faulkner (not so much his actual novels of the ’50s) posed to American readers—and it spoke to his Latin American readers too—relates to the central question of the post–World War II twentieth-century novel: How to go on after all that has gone on? In Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison takes this question on with a vengeance.
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A race riot breaks out at the end of Invisible Man. Riots and riotousness have been routine from the start of the book, which begins with a group of black high school boys—among them the book’s narrator, who will remain as nameless as Carpentier’s composer—who are forced to fight blindfolded for the entertainment of a drunken pack of small-town white worthies. The narrator heads to college, a southern school for blacks, but after he gets mixed up (along with a white donor to the college) in a crazy carouse of shell-shocked black vets in a roadhouse brothel, he is expelled and heads north to New York. There he finds work in a paint factory—Liberty Paint, it’s called, and its prize product is a paint called Optic White—until an exploding boiler lays him low, the factory effectively blowing up in his face.
Black and white are never simply descriptive of the look of things in Ellison’s novel; they are always charged, always symbolic, as everything in the world of the book reflects the crazy set of symbols that is American racism, under which lies the everyday reality of white violence, black oppression, and suppressed black rage. It is suicidal, we understand, when, at the critical turning point of the book, a young black political organizer punches out a cop and is promptly gunned down in front of the New York Public Library. That this should happen in front of a great, resplendent but also fortresslike repository of the world’s accumulated knowledge and wisdom is symbolic as well.
So the riot that breaks out at the end of the book (partly as a response to the killing) could seem like a long-awaited, necessary uprising, and yet, as it unfolds in the sweaty heat of a Harlem summer night, with the West Indian black nationalist Ras the Exhorter rallying the people from horseback and brandishing a lance like a medieval white knight, it becomes clear that even violence lacks authenticity in a world perverted through and through by racism. This is not an outbreak of restorative, revolutionary violence, but a “race riot,” a newsfeed, an event strategically connived by the so-called Brotherhood, as Ellison dubs the Communist Party, bent on exploiting the grievances of black Americans for its own, different priorities, not at all unlike a plantation master. And so it is at this point, with all the fury and falsity and futility the book has testified to now come to a head, that the narrator (disappearing with comic abruptness from the scene through a coalhole in the sidewalk) discovers the new role, the new reality, which he had announced in the book’s arresting first words: “I am an invisible man.”
Not black, not white, not to be seen, he has stepped away from all the symbolic associations and assignments he has long sought to make sense of in vain, and now, at the end of the book (which marks the moment of his sitting down to write the book), a new understanding can begin, with the rejection of given identity, with the embrace of the radical uncertainty, the amazement out of which art springs. Invisibility, Flaubert claimed, is the proper condition of the writer, who disappears behind his work. Ellison would have had this in mind, but he is also making a very different claim from Flaubert’s, which is that the given identities we have, the common terms of our visibility, have made us invisible to one another and to ourselves. Invisibility is a precondition not only of good writing but also of community: you must know that you don’t know me, though what exactly that might mean remains to be discovered. And if it’s true that one thing an invisible man is for sure is an impossibility, perhaps, in an impossible world, only impossibility offers a new beginning.
For Ellison, as for his protagonist, finding a way to begin had been a problem from the first. Born in Oklahoma City, he lost his father to a worksite accident when he was still a child and then worked a whole slew of jobs—busboy, waiter, shoeshine boy, dental assistant—to help support his family while going to school. He developed an interest in jazz and a facility on the trumpet and saxophone, and he gained admission to Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, where he read Eliot, Joyce, Stein, and Dostoevsky. Thinking now of being a visual artist, he dropped out of college and moved to New York, where he befriended Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, both in the Communist orbit at that point, and began to write for Communist publications while also, with Wright’s encouragement, trying his hand at fiction.
Like Wright, Ellison came to feel betrayed by the Communists, and that sense of betrayal helped fuel Invisible Man, begun just after the war, though the book developed a bigger sense of purpose and range of references in the course of its long gestation. When it was published, in 1952, it was immediately recognized as having a scale and ambition of its own. There had never been anything like it in American literature, it was clear, unless it was MobyDick, and along the book’s way, Ellison draws parallels between his protagonist’s lurching voyage and Ishmael’s on the Pequod. The book won the National Book Award, putting Ellison at the center of the American literary world, where he wrote essays and delivered addresses and worked for many years on a second novel that he was never able to finish.
“I am an invisible man.” It is a very different beginning from the “I am an American, Chicago born” of Augie March, published a year later, which would also win the National Book Award. (Ellison and Bellow became good friends.) In Invisible Man, the revelation of invisibility is a long time coming. For most of the book, the narrator is hounded by nothing so much as identity, by his own admission a prime fool, sucker punched again and again as he sets out on his oblivious and merry way to make himself into a model for his people and a spokesman for his race. Throughout the horrible (but, like so many things in the book, horribly funny) battle royal at the start of the book, our hero goes on hoping it’s about time to deliver the uplifting speech he has prepared for the occasion.
Throughout the book, he goes on carrying the briefcase that is his reward for being such a good high school student, as he goes on carrying water for the powers that be, whether college administrators or the directors of the Brotherhood. Like a bucket, the briefcase fills up slowly and surely with symbols of racism: among them the letter of recommendation given to him by the president of the college on his expulsion (it is of course the opposite); a cast-iron piggybank in the guise of a black man inscribed feed me; a manacle given to him by one of the brothers; a paper puppet Sambo. The briefcase is given not only as a reward but as symbol of a future success, and success is a word that sounds throughout the book, the rip-roaring success and self-made man that every good American is exhorted to imagine himself as, whether in the crassly materialist gospel of Norman Vincent Peale, the transcendental one of Ralph Waldo Emerson, or Ras the Exhorter’s message of black power.
Our hero is certainly all too visibly American in wanting to live up to such expectations, and it takes him a long time, the whole book, to realize that making a success of himself has really been all about subjecting himself to others’ wishes. He is still dragging that briefcase around in the midst of a Harlem in flames when it comes to him at last that he, like his forebears, is not climbing the social ladder but running for his life. Down in the coalhole, he burns the papers in the briefcase for the little light they will cast, before, in a nightmare vignette, envisioning himself caught, castrated, lynched. “And I awoke in blackness”— a blackness that at this point I think we are to take as blackness plain and simple, free of the false identifications and illumination of the upper world. A primal blackness, free of identity. And here at last he finds “I was whole.”
In his letters, Ellison likes to quote Henry James’s statement that “being an American is a complex fate.” A sense of irreducible complexity gathers powerfully throughout Invisible Man, which is all about trying to describe what cannot be described, what cannot be seen, and making the reader, but equally the narrator of the book, see just that. If this is a matter of working toward a full vision of American life in all its incoherent cruelty, it is also, for Ellison, very much a literary matter. A good part of the work the book does involves the identification and transformation of literary forebears, a self-conscious placing of itself within the history of the twentieth-century novel, comparable to what goes on in The Lost Steps and Lolita. The Invisible Man is of course the title of one of Wells’s scientific romances, a grotesque comedy about a shameless scamp who concocts an invisibility serum in the hopes of taking advantage of his fellow human beings—the possibilities he supposes are endless—only to find every humiliation a man can imagine visited upon him, and this is much like Ellison’s protagonist’s brilliant career.
That brilliant career also bears comparison with that of Kafka’s Karl Rossmann, who, when we last see him, has been given the name Negro; and Ellison’s hero’s stay, after the explosion in the paint factory, in a hospital, perhaps a madhouse, under the scrutiny of a revolving array of doctors is deliberately Kafkaesque and surrealist in manner. Ellison also draws on Faulkner—the campus of the hero’s college is described with Faulknerian verbal luxuriance—and Joyce, too, likewise a master of literary pastiche. And then, explicitly, unmistakably present from the beginning of the book is that founding document of the twentieth-century novel, Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. Ellison in 1952, like Dostoevsky in 1863, is trying to find words in which to account for deranged and deranging social and personal realities.
The truth about America, Ellison knows, is unspeakable, which is why we need new forms of speech, new and different novels to begin to understand it.
This tissue of more or less visible allusions is woven into the fabric of this novel of lost illusions in a way that reflects the hero’s halting progress toward the discovery of what the influential American literary historian Van Wyck Brooks called a usable past. He must discard the baggage that is represented by his briefcase, but this will be possible only when he has come to his own understanding of both his personal history and black American history, which is to say of American history. In a key scene in the book—a scene dead at its center—he witnesses the eviction of an elderly couple from their Harlem apartment. The eviction agents carelessly spill the contents of a bureau drawer onto the snowy street; the protagonist stops to pick up the jumble of odds and ends. They range from “a bent Masonic emblem” to “a fragile paper, coming apart with age, written in black ink grown yellow: FREE PAPERS.” Black history and all the hopes and disappointments of daily life are both there. He is overwhelmed:
I turned and stared again at the jumble, no longer looking at what was before my eyes, but inwardly-outwardly, around a corner into the dark, far-away-and-long-ago, not so much of my own memory as of remembered words, of linked verbal echoes, images, heard even when not listening at home. And it was as though I myself was being dispossessed of some painful yet precious thing which I could not bear to lose; something confounding, like a rotted tooth that one would suffer indefinitely rather than endure the short, violent eruption of pain that would mark its removal. And with this sense of dispossession came a pang of vague recognition: this junk, these shabby chairs, these heavy, old-fashioned pressing irons, zinc wash tubes with dented bottoms—all throbbed within me with more meaning than there should have been Why did I see them now, as behind a veil that threatened to lift, stirred by the cold wind in the narrow street?
The passage is veiled, ambivalent and ambiguous through and through, as so much of this novel is, appalled and afraid and ashamed, words that crop up over and over in its pages, as does the image of seeing around a corner. At this point the narrator doesn’t know what to make of what he sees before him, though he is stirred by the occasion to make a speech whose ferocious eloquence brings him into the orbit of the Brotherhood. Seeing these things, he thinks, reasonably enough, that things have got to change. It will take him the rest of the novel to turn away from the false promise of revolution and to find the right response, which is to say the right kind of responsibility for the jumble of forlorn articles he saw on the ground on that cold day.
About the Brotherhood, he now thinks:
They had set themselves up to describe the world. What did they know of us?…And now all past humiliations became precious parts of my experience, and for the first time, leaning against that stone wall in the sweltering night, I began to accept my past and, as I accepted it, I felt memories welling up within me. It was as though I’d learned suddenly to look around corners; images of past humiliations flickered through my head and I saw that they were more than separate experiences. They were me; they defined me. I was my experiences and my experiences were me…And now I looked around the corner of my mind and saw…one single white figure…attempting to force his picture of reality upon me…I now recognized my invisibility.
Dispossessed for so long, he has at last taken possession of his past and so become his own person, just as Ellison’s novel creates a literary tradition for itself, the better that it may assume its distinctive place in that tradition, putting the black novel at the center not only of the American novel but of the twentieth-century novel. Ellison’s very American novel also succeeds as an ambitious international novel, marked by the disappointment with communism but also by the worldwide threat of destruction posed by the Cold War, as well as the same period’s ambition—we’ve already seen it in Banti, Achebe, and Carpentier—to tell new stories and found a new world.
In writing Invisible Man, Ellison was as determined to escape the political and parochial slotting by which social exclusion, even as it is documented, is maintained; he was not going to write a “black novel,” much as D.H. Lawrence had no intention of being reduced to “a working-class writer.” He is not going to be put in his place. Or rather, the place of his novel will be to respond in his own way to the central imperative of the American novel, the Emersonian problem of fashioning an original voice, as much as his friend Bellow. He will respond to that legacy and redefine it by speaking in a voice that is original precisely because it is the American voice, the black voice, that America for most of its history not only silenced but has been premised on silencing. It will be a true American voice, which is to say a voice that is polyphonic, provisional, in communication with all the voices of literature near and far, while haunted too by all the voices that have not come through, epitomized by those silent stray objects strewn on the tar of the street. It will be a voice that respects their silence.
The truth about America, Ellison knows, is unspeakable, which is why we need new forms of speech, new and different novels to begin to understand it, just as from its beginning the twentieth-century novel has shaped and reshaped itself in response to a world of ongoing violent change. Another word that recurs throughout Invisible Man is absurd, and in the riot at the end of the book it is none other than Ras the black nationalist who seeks to string up the protagonist from a Harlem lamppost, just another part of “the absurdity of the whole night,” but equally of the absurdity of “the simple yet confoundingly complex arrangement of hope and desire, fears and hates, that had brought me here still running.” Thanks to that, however, he at last knows “who I was and where I was and too that I no longer had to run” from the white and black preceptors and preempters who have driven him on his way, but “only from their confusion, impatience, and refusal to recognize”—and here we come full circle—“the beautiful absurdity of their American identity and mine.”
Unreal and real are two other words that ricochet through Invisible Man, which is after all about the unreal, though all too real, phenomenon that is American racism, but the real recognition the hero arrives at is, simply enough, “it was better to live out one’s own absurdity than to die for that of others.” This is not much, but it is something, and having come to this realization, he turns to speak not as he has been told to speak, and not—though it is important that he has finally learned to do that—for himself alone, but to the reader. He speaks for himself and for the possibility of community, even if that possible community still lies unseen around the corner. He speaks for the necessarily invisible entity that is us, at home and in the world at large, beyond the visible differences we can all all too easily tot up. “Who knows,” the book ends, “but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”
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Excerpted from Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel by Edwin Frank. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, a division of Macmillan. Copyright © 2024 by Edwin Frank. All rights reserved.
