Colson Whitehead and Ralph Ellison

 Read anything you can find by Colson Whitehead. He is as good as the hype. I read a zombie novel by him, and I liked it.

As for Ralph Ellison, he wrote only one novel, and he managed to write a great one, Invisible Man.

Both have much to teach a would-be writer, and keep the attention of a reader.

So had to pay attention when I saw The Guardian's headline: Colson Whitehead: ‘When I read Invisible Man I thought maybe there’s room for a Black weirdo like me’:

The book that changed me as a teenager
I was 19 when I underwent my big Pynchon summer and dived into Gravity’s Rainbow. Systems, rebel forces, counter-histories, a little bit of hope – that you could cram so much of the world from page to page was exhilarating to discover.

The writer who changed my mind
In seventh grade English class we read the first chapter of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and I thought: here’s a Black weirdo who writes; maybe there’s room for a Black weirdo like me. I was 12.

The book that made me want to be a writer
Also in seventh grade, I read Stephen King’s Carrie and thought novels might be where it’s at. (I previously wanted to write Spider-Man.) I liked the chronological jumps, the inserts of news reports, interviews and scholarly texts. Novels could be oddball, form-wise, and also have a big body count.

The author I came back to
I dug Ursula K Le Guin’s Earthsea novels, but couldn’t hack The Lathe of Heaven at 11 years of age. I went back when I was researching short novels for The Nickel Boys, and was finally able to understand her flawed utopias. Plus I’m finding her Tao stuff pretty cool these days.

The book I reread
I rarely reread books. Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is such a bounty I can’t resist, though. I read a couple of chapters a year: spreading it out!

The book I could never read again
I liked Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird in junior high. Does it hold up to my current taste? Probably not. I’m curious … but not that curious. Rereading a book just to see if it holds up seems dumb, and I don’t care enough about it to read it for any other reason. I guess I’ll never know!

The book I discovered later in life
I read Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry 10 years ago and it was scrumptious. Sagebrush, water snakes ... Age 42 is later in life, right, if you’re 53?

And then, about the same time, The Paris Review released its interview of Ellison:

INTERVIEWERS

Then you consider your novel a purely literary work as opposed to one in the tradition of social protest.

ELLISON

Now, mind, I recognize no dichotomy between art and protest. Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground is, among other things, a protest against the limitations of nineteenth-century rationalism; Don Quixote, Man’s Fate, Oedipus Rex, The Trial—all these embody protest, even against the limitation of human life itself. If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain? One hears a lot of complaints about the so-called protest novel, especially when written by Negroes, but it seems to me that the critics could more accurately complain about the lack of craftsmanship and the provincialism which is typical of such works.

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.

INTERVIEWER

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. I suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance—but it must be acceptance on his own terms. Perhaps, though, this thing cuts both ways: the Negro novelist draws his blackness too tightly around him when he sits down to write—that’s what the antiprotest critics believe—but perhaps the white reader draws his whiteness around himself when he sits down to read. He doesn’t want to identify himself with Negro characters in terms of our immediate racial and social situation, though on the deeper human level identification can become compelling when the situation is revealed artistically. The white reader doesn’t want to get too close, not even in an imaginary recreation of society. Negro writers have felt this, and it has led to much of our failure.

Too many books by Negro writers are addressed to a white audience. By doing this the authors run the risk of limiting themselves to the audience’s presumptions of what a Negro is or should be; the tendency is to become involved in polemics, to plead the Negro’s humanity. You know, many white people question that humanity, but I don’t think that Negroes can afford to indulge in such a false issue. For us, the question should be, what are the specific forms of that humanity, and what in our background is worth preserving or abandoning. The clue to this can be found in folklore, which offers the first drawings of any group’s character. It preserves mainly those situations which have repeated themselves again and again in the history of any given group. It describes those rites, manners, customs, and so forth, which insure the good life, or destroy it; and it describes those boundaries of feeling, thought, and action which that particular group has found to be the limitation of the human condition. It projects this wisdom in symbols which express the group’s will to survive; it embodies those values by which the group lives and dies. These drawings may be crude, but they are nonetheless profound in that they represent the group’s attempt to humanize the world. It’s no accident that great literature, the product of individual artists, is erected upon this humble base. The hero of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground and the hero of Gogol’s “The Overcoat” appear in their rudimentary forms far back in Russian folklore. French literature has never ceased exploring the nature of the Frenchman. Or take Picasso—

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ELLISON

I think that’s a case of misreading. And I didn’t identify the Brotherhood as the C.P., but since you do, I’ll remind you that they too are white. The hero’s invisibility is not a matter of being seen, but a refusal to run the risk of his own humanity, which involves guilt. This is not an attack upon white society! It is what the hero refuses to do in each section which leads to further action. He must assert and achieve his own humanity; he cannot run with the pack and do this—this is the reason for all the reversals. The epilogue is the most final reversal of all; therefore it is a necessary statement.

sch 4/22