…and a nice headline from mediabistro, at this link.
Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel “Invisible Man” has been called a classic of American literature.
But don’t just take my word for it. Here’s an excerpt from Irving Howe’s review:
This novel is a soaring and exalted record of a Negro’s journey through contemporary America in search of success, companionship, and, finally, himself; like all our fictions devoted to the idea of experience, it moves from province to city, from naive faith to disenchantment; and despite its structural incoherence and occasional pretentiousness of manner, it is one of the few remarkable first novels we have had in some years.
You can read Saul Bellow’s review of the book here.
And here’s a PBS page dedicated to him, here.
From a NYTimes book review of Ellison’s essays, written by Richard Bernstein for the Dec. 20, 1995 issue:
If truth be told, Ralph Ellison, whose novel “Invisible Man” is one of the indisputable classics of American literature, has faded from the public mind, occupying what might be called a highly respected position on the sidelines of the general consciousness. This is a shame, as any reader of this new and elegant collection of his nonfiction articles will immediately see. And yet, paradoxically, the collection serves contradictory purposes. It reminds us just how subtle, deeply cultivated and searching Mr. Ellison’s mind was. At the same time, it suggests why that mind seems, sadly, to be underappreciated these days.
Mr. Ellison, who was born in Oklahoma City in 1914 and died in New York in 1994, always identified himself as an “American Negro writer.” The essays in this collection represent a sustained, lifelong reflection on issues that are still so much with us: race, racism and African-American identity. But while Mr. Ellison clearly took the oppression of blacks as an essential and irreducible fact of American life, he also waged an untiring intellectual war against those “who regard blackness as an absolute, and who see in it a release from the complications of the real world.”
And this is from a recent Boston Globe op-ed piece comparing the character of the Invisible Man with Barak Obama:
The invisible man rises again
By Stephen Smith – Stephen Smith is a lawyer and businessman who has taught at Harvard University.
ALTHOUGH SEPARATED by more than 50 years, and the success of the civil rights movement, politician Barak Obama and Ralph Ellison’s existential hero of the “Invisible Man” have something in common.
Ellison’s classic novel was a profound exploration of how the struggle for black identity in America embodies the human struggle for authenticity and transcendence. When it was published in 1952, critic Irving Howe described it as “a searing and exalted record of a Negro’s journey though contemporary America in search of success, companionship, and finally himself.” Its protagonist begins his story by emerging from his hideout in his basement apartment – driven by the desire for recognition and meaning – to confront an often hostile and alien world. In the last chapter, he falls into the darkness of an uncovered manhole. He is guided by the light that emanates from the burning contents of his briefcase, which contains many remnants of his past.
Ellison’s unnamed hero is forced, like all who seek an authentic and committed life, to confront the many hazards and challenges of living and to light his way to the meaning of the present by letting go of and making good use of his past. In coming to terms with his blackness, he finds a set of values to live by and a way of connecting his own struggle to the human struggle and the American dream.
Like Ellison’s hero and Ellison himself, Obama is a black man on his own searing journey, in his case a presidential campaign. He, too, journeys in many different worlds and finds himself fully accepted in none of them. To whites he is still a black man, albeit one who is exciting and potentially electable. In the words of Senator Joseph Biden he is “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”
To blacks like Stanley Crouch and others he is not quite black enough to be real: “When black Americans refer to Obama as one of us, I do not know what they mean.” In fact, nobody seems to fully get a handle on him other than to say he is talented and they like him. Like Ellison’s hero, he is attempting to realize success while navigating the shoals of America’s many polarities, and he is attempting to use his diverse experience to articulate a narrative that will illuminate the universal shared struggle that is symbolized by the American dream.
Perhaps Obama has fired the public imagination because in a world that is multicultural, and in an America in which the 300-millionth American baby was born to Chinese immigrants, who better than a good-looking, articulate, black Hawaiian with a Kenyan father and a white mother to represent the American ideal.
Maybe Obama is proof that we are all in it together and that anyone can make it. And who better to speak to a divided nation than a man who has spent his life reconciling himself with divided worlds; someone who, like Ellison’s Invisible Man, does not fall fully into any category, and who, in a time rife with conflict, can mobilize the language of hope to activate dreams of a harmonious future.
Ralph Ellison’s hero was an outsider, not a politician. Ellison himself was a black intellectual and loner who read Dostoyevsky and the existentialists, dressed in a coat and tie, and was somewhat reclusive. Black intellectuals disavowed him as too white at the time his book was published. For Ellison, the great hazard was trying to be what other people thought he should be. At the end of the book he writes: “After years of trying to adopt the opinions of others I finally rebelled. I am the invisible man.”
It is easier to be authentic as an existential intellectual outsider than as a politician. Giving people the answers they wish to hear, and needing to be liked, are often necessities and occupational hazards of politics. The trick of a great person or a great leader is striking the balance between conflict and consensus, between compromise and principle, between bringing people together and standing up, even when it is unpopular, for the ideals that gave birth to the country. This is the trick that transformational leaders like Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt and to a certain extent Ronald Reagan managed, but they didn’t do it without some nasty confrontations and struggles along the way.
The irony of the Invisible Man is that in order to stand for everyone he had to choose where he stood first. He needed to stand apart and risk disapproval to affirm the principle that we are all in it together.
The challenge for Obama or any politician who aspires to greatness in these divided days is the same as the challenge of the “invisible man”: to take a stand as an individual with an authentic moral voice, and to conjure a vision of America where the thousand flowers of democracy can bloom without choking each other at their roots.
February 14, 2007
The previous authors and writings featured on this blog:
“The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano”
Gwendolyn Brooks
August Wilson
“Our Nig” by Harriet Wilson
“Twelve Years A Slave” by Solomon Northup
“The Souls of Black Folks” by W.E.B. Du Bois
Langston Hughes
“Cane” by Jean Toomer
“The Great Negro Plot” by Mat Johnson
“Passing” by Nella Larsen
“Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”
“The Autobiography of Malcolm X”
“I Have a Dream” speech”
“Sula” by Toni Morrison
“The Known World” by Edward P. Jones
“The Color Purple” by Alice Walker
“The Intuitionist” by Colson Whitehead
“Up From Slavery” by Booker T. Washington
From the Boston Phoenix:
Embarrassingly enough, my weakness for these sort of scenes led me to check out “The Joy of Learning To Write Sex Scenes” at Porter Square Books last Thursday night. The host, local author and Grub Street instructor Elizabeth Benedict, penned the classic resource, The Joy of Writing Sex: A Guide for Fiction Writers.
And with a mention of Russell Banks:
“Does anybody ever worry about what their husband or wife will think?” our host asked at one point. Head nods all around. “Ex-husband,” one woman called out. Benedict brought up the writer Russell Banks, whose mother skips over the dirty passages when reading his work. We’re told to give our loved ones the right to do that. Later Benedict remarked sternly that when writing “you have to silence those voices.” More head nods.
Kudos to Saratoga Springs Jennifer Armstrong, from Missouri:
President’s Day brings to mind our country’s history, patriotism, independence, democracy and of course, our Founding Fathers. Here is a list of books on this subject:
First is a book I believe every family should own. “The American Story: 100 True Tales From American History” by Jennifer Armstrong is one of the best timelines of our history that I’ve come across.
Here’s a previous story about her.
The Dallas Morning News has an interesting article, here, on Amy Stewart’s Flower Confidential:
The 306-page book is a journalistic behind-the-scenes account of the international floral industry – where flowers come from and insightful speculation, if you read between the lines, about where they are going.
Ms. Stewart traveled the world to learn about industry developments, to Amsterdam, Ecuador, Miami and up and down the coast of California, visiting flower factories as well as family farms established, in the case of California, by immigrants from Italy and Japan. There’s plenty of high-tech and history in her well-researched (and annotated) accounts. But embedded in the industry trends and headlines are the gems that make the book worth buying and reading.
Also of interest is the mention of Saratoga Springs resident Michele Owens, who blogs with Stewart on Garden Rant and who has her own blog here.
Check it out.
Booker T. Washington’s 1901 autobiography “Up From Slavery” was a best-seller and traced the educators rise from slavery, through the mines, to his education and, eventually, the establishment of the Tuskegee Institute.
Here’s an excerpt from the book (which can be found here and here):
ONE day, while at work in the coal-mine, I happened to overhear two miners talking about a great school for coloured people somewhere in Virginia. This was the first time that I had ever heard anything about any kind of school or college that was more pretentious than the little coloured school in our town.
In the darkness of the mine I noiselessly crept as close as I could to the two men who were talking. I heard one tell the other that not only was the school established for the members of my race, but that opportunities were provided by which poor but worthy students could work out all or a part of the cost of board, and at the same time be taught some trade or industry.
As they went on describing the school, it seemed to me that it must be the greatest place on earth, and not even Heaven presented more attractions for me at that time than did the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia, about which these men were talking. I resolved at once to go to that school, although I had no idea where it was, or how many miles away, or how I was going to reach it; I remembered only that I was on fire constantly with one ambition, and that was to go to Hampton. This thought was with me day and night.
The previous authors and writings featured on this blog:
“The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano”
Gwendolyn Brooks
August Wilson
“Our Nig” by Harriet Wilson
“Twelve Years A Slave” by Solomon Northup
“The Souls of Black Folks” by W.E.B. Du Bois
Langston Hughes
“Cane” by Jean Toomer
“The Great Negro Plot” by Mat Johnson
“Passing” by Nella Larsen
“Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”
“The Autobiography of Malcolm X”
“I Have a Dream” speech”
“Sula” by Toni Morrison
“The Known World” by Edward P. Jones
“The Color Purple” by Alice Walker
“The Intuitionist” by Colson Whitehead
Click “more” for a travel article about Tuskegee.
Story is here.
This 1999 novel by Colson Whitehead imagines a world in which a new style of elevator inspectors — those who inspect via intuition — are disrupting the mainstream inspectors — the empiricists — who work by checking everything out. And in this original, fully imagined world, which has in addition to its speculative fiction — or even sci-fi aspect to it — a 1940s or 1950s feel, the issues of race and gender still dominate.
With this first novel, Whitehead established himself as a fresh, vibrant voice in contemporary fiction.
Here’s an excerpt for a great interview he gave with Laura Miller at Salon.com:
Another unusual thing about your book is that often, when black writers are writing about race, they feel it needs to be very realistic. Do you feel you have more freedom than previous generations?
Yeah. Definitely, decades ago, there was the protest novel, and then there was “tell the untold story, find our unerased history.” Then there’s the militant novel of insurrection from the ’60s. There were two rigid camps in the ’60s: the Black Arts movement, denouncing James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison for being too white, and Ralph Ellison calling the Black Arts writers too militant and narrow, not universal enough. Now I think there are a lot more of us writing and a lot more different areas we’re exploring. It’s not as polemicized. I’m dealing with serious race issues, but I’m not handling them in a way that people expect.
You’re using elements of a style that people associate with white men — the Thomas Pynchons and Don DeLillos of this world. People who don’t like that kind of book tend to dismiss them for being white men. By writing these big novels that make big statements about society they’re supposedly showing a bogus sense of entitlement.
I love all those guys. And I certainly don’t feel that way. I think they’re great writers and I think they’re attacking, grappling with, the culture in a way that interests me. I think if it’s a good book, it’s a good book.
You are in this literary territory that isn’t usually associated with black writers, though.
I think Ishmael Reed has done it — “Mumbo Jumbo” and “Flight to Canada” are in the same sort of vein, I think he’s overlooked as a groundbreaking voice in black fiction. And Jean Toomer’s “Cane,” a ’20s novel. He’s a Harlem Renaissance guy. I think it’s always been there, it’s just that mainstream critics, maybe even readers, don’t see the linkages.
They don’t see that there’s a tradition of the black intellectual novel?
Yeah. This guy Charles Wright, not the poet, had some very crazy books that came out in the ’60s, and Clarence Majors, his book “All Night Visitors,” which came out in the early ’70s. You could say it’s been ghettoized. No one’s really picking up on experiments that were going on in the late ’60s.
The complete interview is here.
Listen to the author read an excerpt here.
The previous authors and writings featured on this blog:
“The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano”
Gwendolyn Brooks
August Wilson
“Our Nig” by Harriet Wilson
“Twelve Years A Slave” by Solomon Northup
“The Souls of Black Folks” by W.E.B. Du Bois
Langston Hughes
“Cane” by Jean Toomer
“The Great Negro Plot” by Mat Johnson
“Passing” by Nella Larsen
“Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”
“The Autobiography of Malcolm X”
“I Have a Dream” speech”
“Sula” by Toni Morrison
“The Known World” by Edward P. Jones
“The Color Purple” by Alice Walker
A Japanese publishing house won’t publish a book about Princess Masako.
An Australian journalist refused Wednesday to bow to the Japanese government’s demand that he apologize for “groundless claims” in a book he wrote about Crown Princess Masako.
Instead, Ben Hills, an award-winning investigative reporter, went on the attack, saying the government’s reaction to the book, which was released in Australia in November, has been “bizarre, unprofessional and bewildering.”
“I regard this as an attempt by the Japanese government to suppress and censor my book, and I think it is absolutely outrageous,” he said.
On Monday, diplomats from the Japanese Embassy in Canberra delivered letters to Hills and publisher Random House Australia, protesting the content of “Princess Masako, Prisoner of the Chrysanthemum Throne.”
The government’s letters said the book is defamatory and contains “disrespectful descriptions, distortion of facts and judgmental assertions . . . pertaining to the birth of Her Imperial Highness Princess Aiko and the physical conditions of Her Imperial Highness the Crown Princess Masako.”
The government has demanded an apology and corrections.
Hills said the letters had no details about which parts of his book are wrong or inaccurate.
“They (the letters) really didn’t specify anything in particular they were complaining about,” he said. “They were just a complete, widespread rave. It was most unprofessional.”
Hills said the diplomats told him one of the defamatory points was his claim that the Crown Princess’ daughter, Princess Aiko, was conceived by in vitro fertilization.
