New means, when new means are necessary, will be found.

Ellison has set himself no more be performed? Nonsense. But what if it is so? Will such tasks as Mr. Let us only suppose it, for I donвЂ™t believe it. Can we wonder at the cruelty of dictators when even a literary critic, without turning a hair, announces the death of a hundred million people? Let us suppose that the novel is, as they say, played out. In all other parts of the country people live in a kind of vastly standardized cultural prairie, a sort of infinite Middle West, and that means that they donвЂ™t really live and they donвЂ™t really do anything. This is to say that these are the only places where there are any manners. вЂњ JohnВ Aldridge writes: There are only two cultural pockets left in America and they are the Deep South and that area of northeastern United States whose moral capital is Boston, Massachusetts. It is not by any means faultless I donвЂ™t think the heroвЂ™s experiences in the Communist party are as original in conception as other parts of the book, and his love affair with a white woman is all too brief, but it is an immensely moving novel and it has greatness. He must return to himself, learning self-acceptance and rejecting all that threatens to deprive him of his manhood. In our society man himself is idolized and publicly worshipped, but the single individual must hide himself underground and try to save his desires, his thoughts, his soul, in invisibility.

This imagined enjoyment provokes envious rage and murder and then it is a large portion of human nature itself which becomes the fugitive murderously pursued. It is thought that Negroes and other minority people, kept under in the great status battle, are in the instinct cellar of dark enjoyment. For him this balance of instinct and culture or civilization is not a Harlem matter it is the matter, German, French, Russian, American, universal, a matter very little understood. If a writer dwells on the peculiarity of this, he ends with an exotic effect. вЂњNegro Harlem is at once primitive and sophisticated it exhibits the extremes of instinct and civilization as few other American communities do. What language is it that we can all speak, and what is it that we can all recognize, burn at, weep over, what is the stature we can without exaggeration claim for ourselves what is the main address of consciousness? In a time of specialized intelligences, modern imaginative writers make the effort to maintain themselves as unspecialists, and their quest is for a true middle-of-consciousness for everyone.

This tone, in the best pages of Invisible Man, those pages, for instance, in which an incestuous Negro farmer tells his tale to a white New England philanthropist, comes through very powerfully it is tragi-comic, poetic, the tone of the very strongest sort of creative intelligence. Even when he is most bitter, he makes by his tone a declaration of values and he says, in effect: There is something nevertheless that a man may hope to be. From this harassment and threatened dissolution by details, a writer tries to rescue what is important. That can only be done by those who resist the heavy influences and make their own synthesis out of the vast mass of phenomena, the seething, swarming body of appearances, facts, and details. People too thoroughly determined and our institutions by their size and force too thoroughly determined canвЂ™t approach this quality. EllisonвЂ™s, proving that a truly heroic quality can exist among our contemporaries. вЂњвЂ¦what a great thing it is when a brilliant individual victory occurs, like Mr.

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