America, in any case, was hardly a country without ruins, ruins that even Faulkner’s style, loaded with archaisms, evoked, along with the often-elusive narrative thread of his books, the story disappearing into questions about the story. Faulkner possessed a resounding, intricate, Latinate style—with James and Stein and Hemingway, he was one of the great masters of the American sentence, always driven by the outsize need to find a scale of its own. In his prose, the florid opulence of nineteenth-century public address—whether from the preacher’s pulpit or the politician’s podium—swells and spills into private mania and despair. Faulkner’s voice is often choral, one character reporting to another what he imagines another character said to himself, and all this in an elevated tone that is at the same time uniquely authorial: the effect is like a feedback loop, overloaded, hypnotic, discordant. Murky and splendid, his sentences, as well as the plots that they circuitously unfold, are full of booby traps and swamp holes. The reader flounders and is sucked in and down into who knows what depths.
This is America. It is a haunted place, a conflicted place, as is laid bare in Faulkner’s 1956 “Letter to a Northern Editor,” opposing the “compulsory integration” mandated by Brown v. Board of Education as a solution to the “compulsory segregation” he also opposed. The rediscovery of Faulkner was not only the rediscovery of a great twentieth-century novelist but a renewed recognition of the dark side of American exceptionalism that had been plain enough to the abolitionists of the antebellum Republic but had come to be seen as merely a Southern matter under Jim Crow.
The question the example of Faulkner (not so much his actual novels of the ’50s) posed to American readers—and it spoke to his Latin American readers too—relates to the central question of the post–World War II twentieth-century novel: How to go on after all that has gone on? In Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison takes this question on with a vengeance.
A race riot breaks out at the end of Invisible Man. Riots and riotousness have been routine from the start of the book, which begins with a group of black high school boys—among them the book’s narrator, who will remain as nameless as Carpentier’s composer—who are forced to fight blindfolded for the entertainment of a drunken pack of small-town white worthies. The narrator heads to college, a southern school for blacks, but after he gets mixed up (along with a white donor to the college) in a crazy carouse of shell-shocked black vets in a roadhouse brothel, he is expelled and heads north to New York. There he finds work in a paint factory—Liberty Paint, it’s called, and its prize product is a paint called Optic White—until an exploding boiler lays him low, the factory effectively blowing up in his face.
