220
skilled statesman, and sophisticated lover allowed the French to
take him for Rousseau's Natural Man. Hemingway poses as a
literary sportsman, Faulkner as a farmer; Abe Lincoln allowed
self to be taken for a simple country lawyer-until the chips
down. Here the "darky" act makes brothers of us all. America
B
land of masking jokers. We wear the mask for purposes of
sion as well as for defense; when we are projecting the future
preserving the past. In short, the motives hidden behind the
are as numerous as the ambiguities the mask conceals.
My basic quarrel with Hyman is not over his belief
in
the
portance of the folk tradition; nor over his interest in
but that when he turns to specific works of literature he tends
distort their content to fit his theory. Since he refers so
CTP11pnm_
to my own novel, let us take it as a case in point. So intense is
man's search for archetypical forms that he doesn't see that the
rator's grandfather in
Invisible Man
is no more involved in a "
act than was Ulysses in Polyphemus' cave. Nor is he so much
"smart-man-playing-dumb" as a weak man who knows the
of his oppressor's weakness. There is a good deal of spite in the
man, as there comes to be in his grandson, and the strategy he
vises is a kind of jiu jitsu of the spirit, a denial and rejection
agreement. Samson, eyeless in Gaza, pulls the building down
his strength returns; politically weak, the grandfather has
that conformity leads to a similar end, and so advises his
Thus
his
mask of meekness conceals the wisdom of one who
learned the secret of saying the "yes" which accomplishes the
pressive "no." Here too is a rejection of a current code and a
become metaphysical. More important to the novel is the fact
he represents the ambiguity of the past for the hero, for whom
sphinx-like deathbed advice poses a riddle which points the plot
the dual direction which the hero will follow throughout the novel.
Certainly B. P. Rhinehart (the P. is for "Proteus," the B.
"Bliss") would seem the perfect example of Hyman's trickster
He is a cunning man who wins the admiration of those who
skulduggery and know-how; an American virtuoso of identity
thrives on chaos and swift change; he is greedy, in that his
is motivated by money as well as by the sheer bliss of
lI1.
np(~rscmaltJ.onl
he is god-like, in that he brings new techniques-electric guitars,
