Reading post: Invisible Man

Well, for me, the Classics Challenge is now over: I have read my 12th book. And it was something of an anticlimax. For category #2, "20th Century Classic," I read Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, which was published in 1952, and is truly a classic, having won the National Book Award a year later. According to Wikipedia, the Modern Library ranked Invisible Man 19th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century and Time magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. And I'm sure it's on other "best" lists as well.

But I didn't like it. In fact, I actively hated it. It took me about a week to read it, and I had to force myself. Each night when I went to bed, I thought, oh no, I have to read that book. I counted pages, I made deals with myself involving cookies ("if you read 50 more pages you can have a cookie"), I sighed deep sighs of relief when I closed the book each night and prepared to sleep.

So why did I hate it so much? And why is it a classic?

First, some positive notes.

• The novel is extremely well written. Although I did not enjoy its content, I made my way through its 581 pages with some ease, because the language flows so smoothly and beautifully, and with such intense forward movement. 
• I liked the main character a lot. This was true despite the fact that we do not learn his name and he claims to be invisible. We don't meet his family, he has no close friends, he has no real romantic relationships during the book (just a couple of icky dalliances with older white women). He is very much alone. But still, he is appealing. A smart guy, a thoughtful guy, a guy you can trust. I wanted to know him better.
  
• The novel is very intelligent and raises a lot of questions. I enjoyed the sections where the narrator muses about complex ideas.
• The novel is sometimes funny. The spots of humor help to relieve the misery. Not enough, but I appreciated what there was.
  

And now, what didn't I like?

• Everything that can go wrong for the narrator, goes wrong. I understand that this was meant to represent the Black experience in America, especially in the 1930s and 40s (Ellison was born in 1913). I did not see it as unrealistic. Maybe a little exaggerated, but not much. But unrelieved misery is hard to read about. Even when the narrator is having some success, such as when he works for the Brotherhood (the Communist party), you can feel the other shoe out there, waiting to drop. I found it agonizing. Just kill him already, I wanted to scream. But he doesn't die. He lives on, in a world that is constructed to destroy him.
• There is never a way out. It isn't that he makes the same mistake over and over. He tries different approaches. None of them work. He tries to follow the rules, he tries to stand up for himself, he tries to be a good person, he tries to connive. Everything leads to the same place: a hole in the ground (a pit toilet? a grave?).
• The narrator calls himself an invisible man because he is invisible to white people. This is amply demonstrated throughout the book. But because of certain choices Ellison makes -- not giving the narrator a name or a personal life -- he is too invisible. Yes, I liked him very much. But in the end, where was the rest of him?
  

Invisible Man is beautifully written, full of complexity. It is art. It is also a protest novel. It is a long, complicated, intelligent, literary novel that protests against the appalling reality of Black life in America. Ellison argues, rightly I think, that that there is "no dichotomy between art and protest." A successful novel can embrace both. For me, this one doesn't. There's too much protest, not enough art -- beautiful writing isn't enough.

I don't want to summarize the novel, even though a "review" usually contains a summary. There are summaries of this novel all over the web. OK, here's my summary: the narrator tries to do the right thing; he gets expelled from college. The narrator tries to do the right thing; he is injured and loses his job. The narrator tries to do the right thing.... and that's enough of that. I can't stand stories like this.

At the very very end, page 581 in my copy, the narrator says he's tired of his hole, he's coming out. I don't buy it for a second. What's he going to do if he comes out? The world he's shown us is unremittingly horrible. Why get all perky all of a sudden, on the very last page?

I'd leave things there except for something I read about the novel that really bothered me. Beginning in the 1950s, the literary journal The Paris Review began to conduct and publish fascinating interviews with novelists. I used to own a few collections of these interviews, which served as my introduction to a number of authors. Anyway, Ralph Ellison was interviewed in 1955, and the interview was reprinted in a book I have called The Black Novelist, edited by Robert Hemenway (Charles E. Merrill Literary Texts, 1970). So I read it, expecting something marvelous.

And it was awful. In 1955, even The Paris Review was racist and stupid. Here are a few exchanges:

Idiot Interviewers: But isn't it going to be difficult for the Negro writer to escape provincialism when his literature is concerned with a minority?
Ellison: All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel--and isn't that what we're all clamoring for these days?--is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.
Idiot Interviewers: But still, how is the Negro writer, in terms of what is expected of him by critics and readers, going to escape his particular need for social protest and reach the "universal" you speak of?
Ellison: If the Negro, or any other writer, is going to do what is expected of him, he's lost the battle before he takes the field....

 ....

Idiot Interviewers: But these are examples from homogeneous cultures. How representative of the American nation would you say Negro folklore is? 
Ellison: The history of the American Negro is a most intimate part of American history. Through the very process of slavery came the building of the United States. Negro folklore, evolving within a larger culture which regarded it as inferior, was an especially courageous expression.... We can view it narrowly as something exotic, folksy, or "low-down," or we may identify ourselves with it and recognize it as an important segment of the larger American experience--not lying at the bottom of it, but intertwined, diffused in its very texture. I can't take this lightly or be impressed by those who cannot see its importance; it is important to me....

All the interviewers' questions were so dumb, so white-centric, so 1955, and all Ellison's answers were so brilliant, so nuanced. I found myself starting to change my mind about the novel in protest against those interviewers.

But I didn't really change my mind. I did not like this novel. And yet, it's amazing. It's truly a classic. I'm glad I read it and I never want to read it again.