Just finished reading Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and it ends with one of those great affirmations that has always been my kind of politics. It’s the politics of ecstasy, I guess.
Very near the end of the novel the Invisible Man says,
“Until some gang succeeds in putting the world in a strait jacket, its definition is possibility.”
Invisible Man appeared in 1952. The next year Saul Bellow published his Augie March, which ended with a similar American-style affirmation about Columbus’s failure at the end of his life, which “didn’t prove there was no America.”
Ellison and Bellow were friends and even roommates in the 1950s, and their great novels both seek to create a new America for themselves. But Ellison was ahead of Bellow in his understanding that America had to accept the black man as a black man, not just another vaguely identified American.
“Whence all the passion toward conformity anyway?—diversity is the word,” he says.
Augie felt the same way, but his Jewish identity is skirted in a way impossible for Ellison’s story about a black man. Augie’s first words are the novel’s first words, “I am an American.”
But is Augie March a Jewish-American?
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