358
PARTISAN REVIEW
is too little temptation, too little struggle, and too much acceptance
of rejection and desertion. And the reader cannot help but wonder
how, under many circumstances, one can distinguish between innocence
and ignorance, between purity of heart and stupidity. Moreover, as
the book goes forward, the author intervenes to underline and em–
phasize the meaning of situation and episode, and to make his hero
merely the mouthpiece of his own convictions: a voice from the sky,
a book about a trip to the moon, Ralph Henry Barbour's books for
boys, a trip to Hollywood, and Santa Claus are all introduced to
make possible formulations on the hero's part which are not so much
out of character as too conscious, too glib, and too fluent.
Nevertheless, the depth of sympathy and the love of experience–
of existence itself-throughout
The Works Of Love
make Miss
McCarthy's contempt, Brossard's self-righteousness, and Bowles's nalve
nihilism seem like systematic and mechanical evasions of reality.
Some books have so much actuality in them that the reader and
the critic is forced to say to himself: it is somehow dishonest or
hypocritical or irreverent to speak of such books merely in the lan–
guage of literary criticism. Ralph Ellison's first novel,
Invisible Man,
is
such a book, so that to say of it that it has an Elizabethan violence
of rhetoric and situation, or that, in a special and important way,
it resembles Djuna Barnes's
Nightwood
is true enough, but entirely
unsatisfactory. And though to summarize it in terms of the story is
superficial, perhaps a partial summary will help to characterize it
negatively (negatively, since it is really something other than a story).
Ellison's hero is a young and gifted intellectual who is a Negro
and who, by recounting episodes of his life, attempts to show how
he has really been "invisible" all his life: he has never been seen
as a human being and as a unique individual.
As
an adolescent in the
South, he is hired to go to a stag smoker at which, after a strip tease
act by a white girl, he and other colored boys are paid to beat each
other up in a battle royal for the entertainment of the white men.
Since he is gifted and well-behaved, he is given a scholarship to a
Negro college, but he gets into trouble by trying to behave himself
and by being obedient to the white man who has endowed the college.
After the Negro president advises him on how to get along in a white
man's world, he comes to Harlem with the president's letter of intro–
duction which turn out to be a complete betrayal and blackballing
of him. He becomes part of the radical movement and finds that
here too he is being exploited precisely because he is a Negro and
as
