SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue 1 - Journal - Page 50
into a spectacular marvel. The protest novel, in its attempt to address racial inequity, reinforces
a symbolic framework that establishes a false dichotomy between Blackness (associated with
evil) and Whiteness (associated with grace). Like what I call “the white” and “the black,” the
white refers to the gracefully spoken and repented for, while the black refers to the vehemently
avoided and unaccounted for. The repentance of slavery and brutalization of the black figure
falls within the white. The explanatory mode of antiblackness as an inherent attribute of
the State, for example, falls within the black. The former fits the aesthetic order, the latter
does not. In Baldwin’s eyes, the Protest Novel’s failure lies in its treatment of human dignity.
Rather than acknowledging humanity as an inherent quality, it presents it as something that
must be earned “within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth; and yet
it is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed.”20
For Baldwin, feeding the aesthetic order accepted successes and failures of black brutality as a
means of inclusion fails because it lacks the depth of black being.
Although Baldwin critiques the Protest Novel for reinforcing the aesthetic regime that
depends on Black subjection, it is crucial to consider that works like Invisible Man may
strategically deploy the Protest Novel’s conventions of fantasy and sentimentality through
surrealism and spectrality. Baldwin is correct in noting that the brutalization of the Black
character often marks legibility within the American literary tradition, ensuring such works
are taken up and incorporated.
However, this reading would reduce Ellison’s Invisible Man to a superficial protest.
In Invisible Man, the depiction of brutalization functions as a kind of net, capturing the
aesthetic regime from within. The net is found in Ellison’s double-consciousness as a writer,
which allows him to wield a mastered craft of balancing “the white” and “the black” and
foregrounding “the white” to force-feed “the black” at some later point in time when its thenillegible stakes are undefined, become legible. As I later explore, by pairing physical blackness
with metaphysical Blackness, and foregrounding it with “the white,” Ellison pries open the
GAN category. This raises the question of whether classification as a 'Protest Novel' diminishes
a work's 'Greatness' and whether 'Greatness' as traditionally defined accommodates works
incorporating Blackness that expand and latently exceed the categorization. Being deemed
“Great” doesn’t preclude the possibility that work-centering Blackness within a rubric may
surpass the form’s traditional boundaries beyond the time it is strategically introduced.
Thus, while Baldwin critiques the protest tradition for its sentimentality and incapacity to
engage the intricacies of Blackness, Ellison strove to elevate the Black experience under the
rubric of the GAN. He challenged the idea that Blackness was at odds with the novel form,
insisting that literary tradition’s constraints, rather than black experiences, accounted for
such assumptions. Put differently, Baldwin sees the Protest Novel, a genre that necessitates a
reduction technique, as upholding racial flattening.
In his taxonomy mapping characteristics of the qualities of GANs, Lawrence Buell
offers four distinct categories through which GANs typically fit: “Made Classic by Retelling,”
Aspiration in America or “Up-From Narrative,” “Romancing the Divides,” and “Improbable
Communities”). Buell situates Invisible Man as fitting the category as an “Aspiration in
America” or “Up-From Narrative,” which engages the quest and pursuit of attaining the
“American Dream.”21 Within Invisible Man’s “Up-From” plot, Ellison interweaves surreality
and sentimentality, forging a syncretic style. He depicts blackness in brutal, even bestial
20
Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 20
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