The American Century: Literature since 1945 653does Ellison. Just as the hero manages to extricate himself from a series of fixed
environments, so the author shows a comparable suppleness by avoiding getting
trapped in one idiom, one language. The style of Invisible Man mixes several verbal
forms and influences into one multicultural whole. The structure, in turn, offers a
crafty variation on several narrative forms. This is a picaresque novel, to an extent,
its wanderings allowing both author and hero to explore the pluralities of American
culture and identity. It is also a novel in the great tradition of American monologue:
a tradition of anecdote and tall tale, sermon and autobiography, journals and songs
of the self. It is the novel as epic and the novel as myth; it follows Ellison’s own
succinct definition of myth, “a narrative linked with a rite” that “celebrates a god’s
death, travels through the underworld, and eventual rebirth.” It also, in its
spellbinding mixture of naturalism and nightmare, recollects other great novels that
have explored American society and, in particular, the American racial divide:
Absalom, Absalom!, say, or Native Son. Speaking of himself and his fellow novelists,
Ellison observed once that their task was “always to challenge the apparent forms of
reality” and “to struggle with it until it reveals its mad, vari-implicated chaos, its false
faces, and on until it surrenders its insight, its truth.” It is a task that Ellison took on
boldly and amply fulfilled in Invisible Man; the result is that, “on the lower
frequencies,” the book has spoken and still speaks for more people, of any race, than
its author could ever have imagined.
Ellison died without completing another novel. Apart from Invisible Man, two
collections of his essays were published in his lifetime. When he died, he left behind
six unpublished short stories and an uncompleted novel. These appeared in,
respectively, 1996 and 1999: Flying Home and Other Stories and Juneteenth. By
contrast, the productivity of a comparable figure in African-American prose writing,
James Baldwin (1924–1987), was immense. Principally known as a novelist and
essayist, he was also a playwright, scriptwriter, poet, director, and filmmaker. His
novels and essays, and his play The Amen Corner (1955), revolve in particular around
the themes of racial and sexual identity. “The question of color, especially in this
country,” Baldwin wrote in Nobody Knows My Name: Notes of a Native Son (1961),
“operates to hide the great question of the self. That is precisely why what we like to
call ‘the Negro problem’ is so tenacious in American life.” And to the question of
color as a determinant of identity, he added the question of sexuality, since most of
his intimate relationships were homosexual – and at a time when homosexuality was
still criminalized. To these questions, in turn, he added those of family and religion.
Born in Harlem when his mother was single, Baldwin suffered at the hands of his
stepfather as he grew up. The stepfather, David Baldwin, an itinerant preacher,
insisted that James was ugly and bore the mark of the devil: the writer was later to
use this, and the shame such abuse of religious and parental power engendered, as
the material for his first novel. Isolated and alienated, Baldwin joined the church of
a black woman evangelist he encountered. “Whose little boy are you?” he remembered
her asking in The Fire Next Time (1962). The question so evoked a sense of belonging
in the 14-year-old youth that he simply replied, “Why yours.” For a while, Baldwin
served as a “young minister” in the Pentecostal Church. His earliest stories evenGGray_c05.indd 653ray_c 05 .indd 653 8 8/1/2011 7:31:37 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 37 PM