One of the funniest and saddest and strangest books I've read is Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. This book should be read for a million reasons, but if you write speculative fiction in any form, it’s one of the best examples of how to tell the truth but tell it slant. These truths are from the closed-off part of the heart where the lights and music are turned up as high as they can go, but you live there all alone.
In an introduction by the author, he notes that "...so much in this society is unnoticed and unrecorded." It's a good reminder to those who feel there are too many writers. How many stories have gone untold? And how many times do we find ourselves reading the same kind of story about the same kind of person over and over and over again?
Ellison goes on to say he'd planned to write a novel about World War II, but instead he was struck by a voice: "I was most annoyed to have my efforts interrupted by an ironic, down-home voice...all the more so because the voice seemed well-aware that a piece of science fiction was the last thing I aspired to write.” And yet, he found that "the voice was so persuasive with echoes of blues-toned laughter...as I listened to its taunting laughter and speculated as to what kind of individual would speak in such accents, I decided that it would be one who had been forged in the underground of American experience and yet managed to emerge less angry than ironic."
This is a protagonist who does everything he's told he's supposed to do, but it never works. The world is conspiring against him. Ellison compares his protagonist to the similarly unnamed protagonist from Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, and the society Ellison lives in is also pretty Kafkaesque in that you receive only injustices AND you have to wait in a long line for them.
When we meet the protagonist, we find him living rent-free in the basement of a whites-only building, stealing power from Monopolated Light & Power to keep his apartment bright bright bright with 1,369 lights. How did he get there? Well, I don’t want to give away the surprises, but let’s just say that he encounters every form of society, where almost everyone he meets claims to want to help him while doing everything they can to degrade him.
His adventures through college are heartbreaking, and they’re played for laughs, but they feel incredibly real. How many people go to colleges and graduate schools that don’t help them at all, and sometimes even hurt them? In many cases, people who follow the rules are punished for it. And under ubiquitous structures of white supremacy, the rules are all formed against the protagonist of Invisible Man.
In these pages, we find no salvation in work, or in friendship, or in politics. Almost everyone he encounters wants to exploit him in some way. What can a reasonable person do except hibernate?
It’s a beautifully absurd work, and yet it isn’t so absurd. As Ellison said in an interview with the NYT in 1952:
“Several reviews pointed out parts of the book they considered surrealistic. I’ll agree with that; however, I didn’t select the surrealism, the distortion, the intensity as an experimental technique but because reality is surreal. I used to get this same sense of a distorted reality years ago when I’d come every once in a while on a shellshocked veteran of World War I. It was up in Harlem and he used to stop traffic on a street by throwing imaginary bombs at the cars. Of course, the traffic flowed on quite normally. This fellow was reliving a trauma. But people were used to it and they went normally about their business.”
For a thorough and insightful analysis of this novel, please read the article Surreal Encounters in Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” by Adam Bradley. One illuminating inclusion:
During a 1955 interview with The Paris Review, Ellison responded with exasperation at his interviewers’ self-serious line of questioning about his novel. “Look,” he finally asks, “didn’t you find the book at all funny?”
Another:
Ellison recalls his own experience confronting Jim Crow racism as a college student in Alabama during the 1930s. “My problem,” he writes, “was that I couldn’t completely dismiss such experiences with laughter. I brooded and tried to make sense of it beyond that provided by our ancestral wisdom.”
Another:
Ellison demands two remarkable things: that he, and by extension that other Black writers, be granted the full and free exercise of their imaginations; and that realism must necessarily expand to contain the absurdity of everyday American life under segregation and white supremacy
Another:
Through his protagonist’s voice, Ellison was making the audacious claim that he, a young Black writer in segregated America, could conceive a young Black character with the capacity to speak to the universalities of human experience through the dogged particulars of his own.
This novel tells a specific story of oppression, and yet it’s universal. Most of us try to turn the gross, mismatched material of our lives into something that resembles a story arc. Something that makes sense. Strange things eventually become normal to us. Nothing is more normal than suffering and exploitation, and like the protagonist of Invisible Man, we often find ourselves laughing about it.
I read this back when I was a teenager. I'm sure a lot was lost on me at the time and I'm due for a re-read. I only recently found out that Ellison was an Okie and graduated from Frederick A. Douglass High, a segregated school. it's been remodeled in the past 5 years into luxury apartments. They even use the auditorium for hipster music concerts. But there's no statue of Ellison around. There should be.
I still remember a very specific line from the book after a sort of riot (maybe?) occurs and a character describes a scene of somebody riding past on a horse "looking like death eating a sandwich." Google tells me this:
"To look or to feel like “death eating a cracker” is not to look or to feel well at all. Death always looks like death, despite eating a cracker, a cookie, a sandwich, or anything else. The expression “like death eating a cracker” means the same as “like death on toast” and “like death warmed over.”
“Like death eating a cracker” has been cited in print since at least 1949. Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (1952) included the food variant “looking like death eating a sandwich.” The author Rita Mae Brown has used “like death eating a cracker” in several of her novels. “Like death eating a cracker” has been reported to be a Southern expression, especially in Kentucky."
I somehow never got assigned this in high school, sounds like yet another gap in my reading I need to fill!