Invisible Man, and What Comes After...

In which we discuss the winner of the 1953 National Book Award for Fiction, and the impact it had moving forward...

Hi, Y’all! Glad You’re Here—

Throughout February, I discussed and reviewed all of the books longlisted for the 1953 National Book Award for Fiction, including such classics as The Old Man and The Sea and East of Eden, and hidden gems like A Shower of Summer Days and The Catherine Wheel. We’ve finally reached this year’s winner, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, which was considered a game changer for American literature, and continues to be one of the great American novels of our time. Today I wanted to take a look at how Invisible Man fit into this award year, how its monumental win affected Ellison’s career, and how its influence echoes throughout many of the other books that have appeared on the National Book Award longlists since.

Invisible Man is often described as a picaresque novel—these works typically follow a scrappy protagonist as they live by their wits in a corrupt society, with an episodic style, like you see in Huck Finn, or The Adventures of Augie March. But where Invisible Man diverges from the usual style of a picaresque novel is how it fluctuates between the grounded reality we’re so familiar with into something more surreal. Ellison openly rejected the strict boundaries of realism and naturalism, stating that they were too limiting for his unnamed protagonist, too limiting to capture the experience of Black Americans living under the power structures still being navigated to this day. And I think it’s this artistic choice that helps uplift and shape the novel into something greater than it might otherwise have been. There’s a clever use of symbolism throughout, with characters blindfolded, characters shut-eyed and sleeping, mentions of lobotomy, even a glass eye; this character is, yes, invisible because he is only seen through the preconceived lens of others, but also because of the more surreal mode of storytelling. And I haven’t even mentioned the fact that Ellison’s protagonist remains unnamed throughout the novel. By abandoning the ideas of how this type of novel should have been, it became high art.

When researching the novel, I noticed a common point of discussion surrounding Ellison and Invisible Man in comparison to works by other Black writers. In an interview with The New York Times not long after the novel was released, Ellison was quoted as saying:

“It is felt that there is something in the Negro experience that makes it not quite right for the novel. That’s not true. It becomes important to the novelist because it is in this problem, as Faulkner makes us aware, that the American human conflict is at its most intense and dramatic. That’s a rough way of putting it. What is exciting about it is that it hasn’t really been written about except in a sociological way. That which the sociologist presents as racial conflict becomes for the novelist the American form of the human drama. In Faulkner, Negro and white are catalyst for each other. If Faulkner could have found a more intense conflict, he would have used it.”

In many initial reviews of Invisible Man, the praise was always attempting to strip it of its creator’s identity—most of them stated that it was more than just a novel by a Black writer, or that it rose above it. People stated that it was the first novel by a Black author to have achieved this status as a complete novel, ultimately speaking disparagingly about an entire history of Black American literature in its comparisons. There were also several major Black critics who were critical of the novel and its success, with many asking the question of what Ellison had to sacrifice in order to win the National Book Award and achieve such mainstream success. It’s a conversation we still see about books depicting the experiences of marginalized people and asking who the audience is for.

Ellison was deeply fond of a particular aesthetic, was inspired by Euro- American writers, and pushed against the idea of his work being considered only sociological. It’s interesting when we consider how the unnamed narrator in this novel is invisible because of preconceived ideas of identity, when we think of how Ellison was perceived based on this novel. White critics praised it for thinking it transcended racial lines, while several Black critics felt that it abandoned the necessary form of protest that literature can take. This is a conversation we’re still having to this day, and was even a major conversation point in the latest National Book Award winner, Hell of a book.

I haven’t found any hard evidence of this, but most articles I read suggested that the reason why Ellison never completed his second novel—which he spent the next forty years writing, amassing thousands of pages—was due to the pressure of Invisible Man’s success. I could imagine feeling all sorts of anxiety over having your debut do so well, but also of not feeling like your work was considered by some in the way you wished it was.

Ellison’s win made him the first Black writer to win the National Book Award, but it would be several decades before we’d see this happen again. James Baldwin’s novel, Giovanni’s Room, was longlisted a few years later, but what initially appeared to be a watershed moment among literary awards turned out to be much like Halle Berry’s Oscar win for Best Actress for 2001’s Monster’s Ball…a brief recognition of excellence before settling back into the ‘familiar’ whiteness of it all.

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In 1983, Alice Walker became the first Black woman to win the National Book Award for Fiction (and the Pulitzer) with her epistolary novel, The Color Purple. This beautiful, devastating story is told through a young girls letters to God as she tries to understand the nature of her circumstances and where life will lead her. I read this one almost a decade ago and fell in love with it, and I don’t know many people who aren’t at least somewhat familiar with the story through the book or film.

While The Color Purple received significant critical acclaim, it was met with its own controversy, particularly from conservative readers who disapproved of the queer content, and from Black men who felt that its depiction of Black men as abusers was problematic and perpetuated stereotypes. I think what’s most interesting to consider with the reception of authors like Ellison, Baldwin and Walker is how so much of the criticism is in regards to their depictions of masculinity. Both Ellison and Baldwin disregard the measuring tape of white masculinity, considering what masculinity meant in its own terms and within the Black community—but both of their work was held up against Richard Wright, whose works explored masculinity in a different way. With Walker, she made a decision to speak on an experience that many felt made her a ‘race traitor’. The feminist scholar Salamishah Tillet writes about this in her book, In Search of The Color Purple—how Black women have often been asked to silence their own pain for a greater cause. But Walker chose to write what was important.¹

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One author who never won the National Book Award was Toni Morrison. She was a finalist for her novels Sula and Beloved, but somehow her work continued to be overlooked by works that are no longer even in conversation. When she lost the NBA back in 1988, forty-eight Black writers and critics penned an open letter regarding Morrison’s being overlooked for both the National Book Award and (at the time) the Pulitzer. There was a companion letter written for James Baldwin, who’d died only a month before, because they felt that both writers had been grossly overlooked. In the letter for Baldwin, they said, “we grieve…because we cannot yet assure that such shame, such national neglect, will not occur again, and then, again.” It was the following April that Morrison won the Pulitzer for Beloved.

In an interview with the New York Times, Morrison said that she “had no doubt about the value of the book and that it was really worth serious recognition. But I had some dark thoughts about whether the book’s merits would be allowed to be the only consideration of the Pulitzer committee. The book had begun to take on a responsibility, an extra-literary responsibility, that it was never designed for.”

While I think Beloved deserved to win, I can understand her fear of the win being about more than the work, but a symbol. We continue to see the expectations put on the works of Black writers, this idea that every work has to say something new about the Black experience, that it has to uphold certain ideas, that it has the ability to educate white readers. There’s a deeply flawed framework at play here. Even when looking at this brief history through the lens of the National Book Awards, it’s clear that over the last seventy years, Black writers have been dealing with the exact same issues. When considering Morrison’s work in the greater conversation, I can’t help but wonder if the critics of Ellison’s work were right in one respect—that his book, due to it’s specific influences and it’s prioritization of aesthetics over the sociological, might have made it more digestible to white readers. Was this why Morrison’s work was overlooked by the National Book Awards time and again? From the start, she wrote for Black readers, and took pride in being identified as a Black writer. Was it the lack of diversity in the National Book Foundation, the shared ideology of white writers in the judging panel? I can’t say. But I do think that what made Morrison’s work so successful in a lot of ways was that she was able to perfectly marry her artistry with the point she was trying to make.

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When we consider the most recent winner of the National Book Award, Jason Mott’s Hell of a Book feels like a culmination of everything that has come before it. More than anything, it feels like a work in direct conversation with Invisible Man, a mirror even. Both novels feature an unnamed protagonist, taking a look at the complicated nature of identity and the experience of being Black in America. They both examine acts of police brutality, and make us and the protagonist confront these issues. And Hell of a Book also has us consider the expectations put on Black writers to tell Black stories—specifically of race and racism—in their art. One could argue that Hell of a Book indirectly acts as a commentary on the experience of Ralph Ellison and everyone after him in this cycle of expectation.

Another similarity with these novels is how they stray from the more realist, grounded narratives that we’ve once again grown accustomed to. There are other authors who are doing this of course, like recent National Book Award winner Colson Whitehead, but due to how closely Hell of a Book aligns itself with Invisible Man, it’s hard not to note the connection.

Ellison’s novel seemed to ignite an ongoing conversation about what it meant to be a Black writer in America, what the responsibility was, the expectations. The reality is, the tenor of this conversation hasn’t shifted too much in the past seventy years. What Hell of a Book shows us is that Black writers still have numerous expectations forced upon them for what their work is supposed to be. I couldn’t help but notice the varied reception of Hell of a Book throughout the end of last year—there were many white readers who called it “eye-opening” and considered it an education in the ongoing struggles of Black Americans. There were many readers who called it trauma porn, due to some of the harmful acts depicted. Many reviews didn’t even consider the artistic merit of the book, or if they did, were dismissive of it in ways that I felt uncomfortably echoed the criticisms lodged at Black writers in the fifties.

Last week I wrote about the flawed nature of literary criticism—it’s something that continues to be on my mind as I write this newsletter—and I think in researching these books for this week’s post, it’s only further provided clarity to the necessity of a new approach, a rethinking and reframing of all literary works, but especially of those by marginalized writers. If literary criticism still suffers from the narrowness of the white gaze, then we aren’t gaining full access and understanding to the spectrum of brilliance by other writers outside of it. We aren’t considering why these works are being approached with a less traditional function, a less western aesthetic.

Ellison’s influence is undeniable, and his work continues to be part of a greater literary conversation. When we look at the three National Book Award winners before it, Invisible Man casts a shadow over them all. But I also think the reception of this book, paired with our deeper understanding of how the white gaze shaped the literary landscape, should have us considering many of the other books by Black authors at this time that might not have been given the consideration and respect they deserve. And also, for us as readers to be aware of our limited perspectives when entering these fictional worlds and dismantling certain archaic ideas of what we have been taught a great work should be.

Toward the end of Ellison’s novel, just after a tragic event, there’s a shift in form—it moves away from the stylistic choices we’ve seen prior into something less familiar, more of Ellison’s own making. There’s a commiseration among a small group of Black men as they reflect on the previous event and we begin to feel the necessity of a tragicomic lens in how we process certain atrocities of the world. It’s in this moment that Ellison rebukes any traditional ideas about where we thought his novel could go, and challenges the reader to rethink reality and how surreal the world could be. This, I think, is where true genius lies.

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As always, there are still many ideas here that I’m still considering—If you have any thoughts on the discussion presented here, please comment below so we can chat about it. I am always looking to deepen my understanding and perspective on books. And if you enjoyed this and want to follow along with my National Book Award reading project and haven’t already, you can sign up for the paid subscription—$5 a month for essays like this where I break down these books and some of their historical context. I think they’re pretty fun! Anyway, thanks so much for reading and I hope you enjoyed!

Until next time,

XOXO

1. (as a side note: while I admire Alice Walker’s work, I do think it’s important to mention that some of her comments and actions have been considered anti-Semetic in recent years. There’s some information in this New York Times Article —I don’t share this to discourage you from reading her work, but just to be aware of her comments when engaging in discussion. I also think there’s been criticism in how she wrote about Afrika as “dark” and backwards, in The Color Purple, which I wasn’t aware of until now.)