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MORRIS DICKSTEIN
phallus, for Brown he
is
limp and inadequate. He says of
his
own
hero that "he could relate to Julien Sorel, to Tom Jones; he could
relate to the nigger in Malcolm X, LeRoi Jones, James Baldwin, and
Eldridge Cleaver. . . . But he could not relate to Bigger. He could
not relate to stupidity, fear, and demoralization."
Who is Mr. Jiveass Nigger that he is so far beyond the demora–
lization of the ghetto, so exempt from human weakness? The book
worries that question, taking us back eircuitously to the problems of
identity that plague other black writers. Brown's hero
is
an Ameri–
can expatriate in Copenhagen with the mock-patriotic name of
George Washington, which is as good as having no name at all. He
rarely uses the name though, for he lies compulsively and assumes a
variety of spontaneous identities through which he puts on and cons
almost everyone he meets, especially white women. This is his "jive,"
about which he theorizes endlessly, insisting that "there was nothing
under the sun that was really phony
if
it was functional. " George
is a Portnoy in reverse, burdened not by excessive moral feelings but
by their absence, not by sexual inhibition but by utter sexual facility.
He
is
the Julien Sorel of the color line, a Tom Jones who exploits
his
anonymity. His solution to the problem of identity is to live with–
out one, or with many, which turns out to be the same thing. George
is another version of a figure that has long flourished in black writing,
in Jewish writing, in the folklore of many beleaguered cultures: the
trickster-hero, confidenae man, king of schnorrers, the virtuoso of
survival. He is the antitype of Bigger Thomas, the victim-aggressor of
protest literature, the alienated hero who confronts society head on
and conquers or
is
destroyed. The trickster is everywhere at home,
always able to land on his feet, as different from Bigger as Falstaff
is from Hotspur. Probably the best such figure is Rinehart, the man
of many roles whose brilliant nonappearance all over Harlem clinches
the argument of
Invisible Man.
But Ellison finally judges against
Rinehart, and would later call him "the personification of chaos ...
who has lived so long with chaos he knows how to manipulate it."
Manipulate it but not change it, or himself. And Brown's hero finally
judges against himself and renounces his game, discovering at the
end that "everybody in this town, every black person, seems to
be
living off someone or something else. Everything but their insides.
Black men fancy themselves potent when they can flatter themselves
