Invisible Man: Somebody's Protest Novel

Abstract

With Hemingway and Faulkner both dead, this is not a time of recognized liter ary giants. The public, and critics too, are too easily preoccupied with literary giantism, with finding the next heir to the vacated throne. Publishers want their books to sell, and are not very timid about making claims. Readers want to feel that what they are reading is what they ought to be reading, in terms that can only be reached from the vantage point of a historical perspective. Our contem porary writers should, however, be looked on and cherished as partly-realized po tential, writers whose work should not be idolized too much, nor ignored, but read with the best awareness we can bring to them of their relationships to our own lives and to the traditions they continue. Melville seemed to be a distinctly minor writer to his own age. In 1945 all seventeen of Faulkner's books were out of print. We should be chastened and warned by examples like these, but not overly frightened in our attempts to find something of value in our contemporary writers. With the belated advent of Literature it has become even more difficult to find a long-term context in which to read or discuss a novel like Invisible Man. Its relevance to the contemporary social problems of Black citizens can be used to reduce it to the level of a documentary of the Black experience.1 On the other hand, its insistence on craft and analysis, its careful avoidance of the ex plicit advocation of action, can be passed off by the activists as the buggy jiv ing of a white middle-class sellout, or the ravings of a private ego trip. This latter trend is accurately prophesied at the every end of the novel.2 Most intol erable, perhaps, is the approach taken by some critics of both colors, that the novel is pure art, that a Negro writer has finally written his way into the main stream of some etherealized literary tradition.3