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Maybe Ralph Ellison was a "one hit wonder," but allow me to briefly quote from the jacket of The Modern Library Commemorative Edition 1994:
"A milestone in American literature, Invisible Man has engaged readers since its appearance in 1952. A first novel by an unknown writer, it remained on the bestseller list 16 weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century."
To quote Marvel Comics honcho Stan Lee: "Nuff said!"
Invisible Man is a great novel. One of the best (if not the best) American of the second half of the 20th century. When people mention "the great American novel," this is one I think of.
Invisible Man was quite amazing there is no getting around that, but I don't think Ellison deserves his own thread, for what you said yourself "one hit wonder"
Besides Faulkner, Hemingway and Baldwin deserve one before Ellison.
The Invisible Man is one of the best books of the last 50 years, for sure.
As to the one-hit-wonder mantel, I believe he didn't consider himself a novelist, and so it is not really an insult. He was an intellectual and someone encouraged him to write the book. If anything, this makes the accomplishment even MORE amazing, not coming from someone who dedicated a life to fiction.
Accolades aside, I don't know how to take the novel. One critic says it amounts to a rejection of black identity, but I'm not entirely sure about that, just as I am not sure, in some cases, who Toni Morrison truly feels her audience to be, even though she is well within her bounds to reject Updike's suggestion that she level the playing field with an emotionally relevant white character--something that she apparently did in her latest historical-slavery novel.
If there is one debate I'd be interested in having with Obama, it is how he reads Ellison, because the novel is actually a difficult book.
The Invisible Man is in my opinion America's best novel on race precisely because it rejects so-called 'black' identity. Of course it doesn't buy in or suggest some sort of 'white' identity either. The novel is about the individual in a society that constructs identities and then forces people to choose between them, rather than to construct their own. Even the radical avant-gard is shown in the book to be nothing more than another party that one is asked to buy into.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jozanny
The reason the book is so great, and ironically the reason it is squinted at as not 'black' enough is because its author was trying to see past the simple, reductive politics of color. This is something that many people on both sides of the racial divide give lip service to but do not appear to actually want.
Mmm. I dol not know Modest. The book itself may not be Euro-centric, but I've seen/read enough on Ellison to suggest that he himself was, even though he may have had some affection for what Booker T. Washington represented/achieved--although you are probably right about his rejection of leftist ideology as a patronizing tokenism--something that Wright is seemingly all to happy to embrace in Native Son.
By the last page of the novel, our somewhat naive protagonist seems virtually disembodied. Is this a tragedy? A strength? Achebe, I think, would argue that African culture is better than Western culture, more spiritual, in harmony with our natural environment--despite his own Eurocentric polish--and yet Ellison virtually lampoons it, not that his Caucasians aren't subject to the same incisive irony.
In terms of what the novel itself drives home, I am not comfortable with any set placement. Morrison, for instance, insists that her reader not look *away*, not submerge what the horror of dehumanization amounts to, although by the time I finished Beloved, I had just about run my course on digesting the hard truth to then merge it with magical realism's transfiguration, because to me that lets everybody off, but Ellison is neither as graphic as Morrison, nor as ultimately willing to compromise as she is.
Social equality, even if we can one day truly free it of racialism, is thus far something of a fiction in human evolutionary terms, and I think Ellison realizes this even though his hero espouses it early. He is ultimately alienated from any segment of American society.