Tablet Magazine - a new read on Jewish life

“The information isn’t frozen, you are,” Michael Herr said in “Dispatches,” maybe the best book about the Vietnam War. Fifty years later, information keeps streaming through us, at a higher and higher velocity, and we are frozen. Our best writers can unfreeze us. They override the notion that we’re helpless, and sometimes they do it paradoxically, by depicting people who are paralyzed and stuck. In this final installment of my American literature series, I will focus on a few post-World War II writers who tell us about our information-addled, alienated selves, and assess the chances of finding refuge: Ralph Ellison, Joan Didion, Thomas Pynchon, Flannery O’Connor, and Elizabeth Bishop. The harbinger novel of post-World War II America is Ellison’s Invisible Man, published in 1952. Riffing on the familiar Balzacian story of a young man from the provinces who arrives in Paris to find his fortune, Ellison brings his nameless hero from the Deep South to New York, where he is thrown into the cauldron of left-wing politics: Ellison’s Brotherhood was a dead-on satire of the Communist Party, to which he had been briefly sympathetic. Every reader notices Ellison’s relish for jazz, African American folklore, and preacherly rhetoric, but these aspects of Black life are not sufficient to lend the invisible man substance. Both white and Black people project onto him whatever they want, and so he remains unseen. He ducks down a manhole to avoid a Harlem race riot spurred by a fire-breathing radical named Ras the Exhorter, and secures a basement lair illuminated by 1,369 electric lightbulbs (the number is the square of 37, Ellison’s age when he wrote the novel). Unlike his precursors—Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, Faulkner’s Joe Christmas, and Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas—the invisible man is never cruel. ...

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