Faulkner, Ellison - Out of the Past to the Future?

 Deciding that I needed to do something useful since I did not go off to make money, I read Edwin Frank's What the Novels of William Faulkner and Ralph Ellison Reveal About the Soul of America on LitHub. I am still working on "Chasing Ashes" in my mind, if not putting words on a page. The excursion was, I think, helpful. Please do not mind me sharing my notes.

But the deeper reason for Faulkner’s new prominence at this moment of triumphant American exceptionalism is that he spoke to America about something that America, if it aspired at all seriously to its role as world leader, could no longer afford not to consider, though it had long preferred not to: American racism. Faulkner’s South was a world defined not by victory, but by defeat, a world that had a history too complicated for simple reckoning, too dark to be put to rest, and as unforgivable as that of Europe. And this history was not just the history of the South—Faulkner made clear—it was America’s history.

It bore witness to the accommodation of slavery written into the American Constitution and to the racial and political division that had always afflicted the so-called United States, as well as to the devastation wrought by the Civil War, that first industrial war whose massive toll of death had so appalled Dostoevsky’s Underground Man in faraway Russia and had so inspired the generals of the world wars to come. America was the country of the future, ostensibly, but perhaps its only future, Faulkner’s work suggested, was one of degradation and destruction—this was the simple lesson of the enormously complex Absalom, Absalom!, in which the refusal of the self-made plantation owner Thomas Sutpen to acknowledge the darkness of his past and blackness of his progeny destroys both him and the generations to come. Perhaps the truth was that everything was already all over for the country that had dedicated itself from the start to the future; perhaps it always had been.

I read Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man while in prison. I do not know which is the best one-off American novelist - Ellison or Ross Lockridge, Jr. It may not matter. I will call them flip sides of the same coin. Therefore, I paid attention when I came to this paragraph:

 he question the example of Faulkner (not so much his actual novels of the ’50s) posed to American readers—and it spoke to his Latin American readers too—relates to the central question of the post–World War II twentieth-century novel: How to go on after all that has gone on? In Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison takes this question on with a vengeance.

I want to say this is a damned good synopsis of the novel:

Black and white are never simply descriptive of the look of things in Ellison’s novel; they are always charged, always symbolic, as everything in the world of the book reflects the crazy set of symbols that is American racism, under which lies the everyday reality of white violence, black oppression, and suppressed black rage. It is suicidal, we understand, when, at the critical turning point of the book, a young black political organizer punches out a cop and is promptly gunned down in front of the New York Public Library. That this should happen in front of a great, resplendent but also fortresslike repository of the world’s accumulated knowledge and wisdom is symbolic as well.

So the riot that breaks out at the end of the book (partly as a response to the killing) could seem like a long-awaited, necessary uprising, and yet, as it unfolds in the sweaty heat of a Harlem summer night, with the West Indian black nationalist Ras the Exhorter rallying the people from horseback and brandishing a lance like a medieval white knight, it becomes clear that even violence lacks authenticity in a world perverted through and through by racism. This is not an outbreak of restorative, revolutionary violence, but a “race riot,” a newsfeed, an event strategically connived by the so-called Brotherhood, as Ellison dubs the Communist Party, bent on exploiting the grievances of black Americans for its own, different priorities, not at all unlike a plantation master. And so it is at this point, with all the fury and falsity and futility the book has testified to now come to a head, that the narrator (disappearing with comic abruptness from the scene through a coalhole in the sidewalk) discovers the new role, the new reality, which he had announced in the book’s arresting first words: “I am an invisible man.” 

I have tried to promote the marginalized American writers - the women and the non-whites - for the different perspectives they give us white male Americans on our shared country. Ellison is a prime example of this, maybe he even made me see this idea for the first time.

he truth about America, Ellison knows, is unspeakable, which is why we need new forms of speech, new and different novels to begin to understand it, just as from its beginning the twentieth-century novel has shaped and reshaped itself in response to a world of ongoing violent change. Another word that recurs throughout Invisible Man is absurd, and in the riot at the end of the book it is none other than Ras the black nationalist who seeks to string up the protagonist from a Harlem lamppost, just another part of “the absurdity of the whole night,” but equally of the absurdity of “the simple yet confoundingly complex arrangement of hope and desire, fears and hates, that had brought me here still running.” Thanks to that, however, he at last knows “who I was and where I was and too that I no longer had to run” from the white and black preceptors and preempters who have driven him on his way, but “only from their confusion, impatience, and refusal to recognize”—and here we come full circle—“the beautiful absurdity of their American identity and mine.”

America as an absurdity pretty much undercuts the Trumpian slogan of Make America Great Again. Its greatness for good and evil has been intertwined since the slave owner Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence. Those who decry Jefferson's racism as undercutting the Declaration's equality of all persons run from America's absurdity as much as the MAGA crowd who ignore Jefferson's racism. White Americans lynched black Americans, and white Americans fought against lynching. 

he truth about America, Ellison knows, is unspeakable, which is why we need new forms of speech, new and different novels to begin to understand it, just as from its beginning the twentieth-century novel has shaped and reshaped itself in response to a world of ongoing violent change. Another word that recurs throughout Invisible Man is absurd, and in the riot at the end of the book it is none other than Ras the black nationalist who seeks to string up the protagonist from a Harlem lamppost, just another part of “the absurdity of the whole night,” but equally of the absurdity of “the simple yet confoundingly complex arrangement of hope and desire, fears and hates, that had brought me here still running.” Thanks to that, however, he at last knows “who I was and where I was and too that I no longer had to run” from the white and black preceptors and preempters who have driven him on his way, but “only from their confusion, impatience, and refusal to recognize”—and here we come full circle—“the beautiful absurdity of their American identity and mine.”

We should revel in our absurdity - it may be the root of American exceptionalism if not its apotheosis - but we do not. Americans want too simple a story - one in black and white, which is not a pun.

I had not thought of this, I did not get far in reading Emerson, but I did read Whitman. Walt Whitman (and, I have since learned, Poe to a certain extent) wanted us to have a native literature. Finding my own voice seems less formed in my mind than telling my own stories.

In writing Invisible Man, Ellison was as determined to escape the political and parochial slotting by which social exclusion, even as it is documented, is maintained; he was not going to write a “black novel,” much as D.H. Lawrence had no intention of being reduced to “a working-class writer.” He is not going to be put in his place. Or rather, the place of his novel will be to respond in his own way to the central imperative of the American novel, the Emersonian problem of fashioning an original voice, as much as his friend Bellow. He will respond to that legacy and redefine it by speaking in a voice that is original precisely because it is the American voice, the black voice, that America for most of its history not only silenced but has been premised on silencing. It will be a true American voice, which is to say a voice that is polyphonic, provisional, in communication with all the voices of literature near and far, while haunted too by all the voices that have not come through, epitomized by those silent stray objects strewn on the tar of the street. It will be a voice that respects their silence. 

I have to think on this. Polyphonic may be beyond me. I can think of too many voices that have not come through. I can also think of the voices I think that have faded - Steinbeck's Okies, Hurston's black Floridians, Sinclair Lewis' Wisconsinites, Cather's immigrants, Upton Sinclair's workers - in favor of Leave It To Beaver suburbia. Today's twenty-somethings might find Taxi Driver as foreign as my generation found La Dolce Vita. (Or to continue the American theme: Tobacco Road.) Americans are all of these things. 

As for the silence mentioned above, there are some things I can imagine left to themselves out of shame and others from reverence for noble causes that failed. Maybe I get a glimmer of meaning in Hemingway's dislike for talking too much. Talk cheapens some events.

Who knows what the future holds. I may be out of a job when my bank account can least afford it. We may be looking at the end of American democracy, or the fuel to refurbish it entirely. It seems to me that what Faulkner and Ellison teach us is that there has always been that danger of losing our freedom and the hope of fully gaining it. We can either run away from the danger or embrace the hope. I think both writers embraced hope. Otherwise, why would they have ever put a single word down on paper?

Consider this review from Public Books, A Novel of India’s Identity Crisis for what might done if Trump does become the authoritarian leader of America.

sch 11/20