PARTISAN REVIEW
395
woman naked and defenseless, just a man. Am ashamed I know
nothing of black women."
One can see that Cain, like Wright in
Black
Boy,
means to
shape his life into parable - a sermon to the ghetto kids against
junk, a preachment against interracial sex. We have long been told
that such didacticism
is
impure, an artistic flaw. Baldwin spoke for
what has since become a vast critical consensus when he insisted that
ideological purpose was inconsistent with art, that it was hostile to
the representation of full human realities. But here is Cain breaking
the rules, acknowledging no line between fiction and autobiography,
preaching and teaching, and in the end being neither myth nor
stereotype but "just a man."
Not long ago Ralph Ellison lashed out at "talented but mis–
guided writers of Negro American cultural background ... who
regard their social predicament as Negroes as exempting them from
the necessity of mastering the craft and forms of fiction." But surely
the author of
Invisible Man,
that wildly eclectic, impure and ram–
bunctious work, knows that blackness
is
more than a
"cultu~al
back–
ground" or a "social predicament," knows that the rules of fiction
can hardly be enumerated, let alone rigidly applied; that form does
not dwell majestically alone, like Shelley's Mont Blanc, apart from
immediate experience. In the sixties, literary form renewed itself un–
der the pressures of new experience, of fantasy, of verbal experiment,
of politics, and in the process became boldly impure. This new im–
purity, which some see as a liberating openness and others call form–
lessness and decadence, has apparently meshed well with the con–
tradictions of being a black American today. It has fostered an ex–
ceptionally interesting range of writers, who may help find a new
solution to the problem of literature and ideology, a solution in which
literature is by no means abolished, and ideology is humanized.
