Thread by @thomaschattwill

I wrote about Viet Thanh Nguyen's op-ed calling on writers to take up overt activism in their work. Nguyen is a novelist who is often said to have been inspired by Ralph Ellison, but I show here where I think Ellison––and Baldwin––would vehemently disagree harpers.org/archive/2021/0…

Were this simply an idiosyncratic campaign by one decorated writer, it would be less disturbing. But Nguyen’s argument is related to a wider push to reset American literature entirely by conflating art with social science.

(In the April issue of @Harpers, out today.)

In fact, Ellison—the author of one of the greatest novels in American literature, Invisible Man, which is written from an exquisitely rendered black perspective—refuted exactly this line of thinking over a half-century ago

when he explained to Irving Howe that even as a student during segregation, he was able “to make identifications as to values and human quality.” While an undergraduate at the Tuskegee Institute, he immersed himself in books that “seldom or ever mentioned Negroes.” -->

Such a reading program, far from leaving him feeling unseen, as it might be phrased in today’s lingo, had the opposite effect, releasing him “from whatever ‘segregated’ idea I might have had of my human possibilities.”

Ellison: "I understand a bit more about myself as Negro because literature has taught me something of my identity as Western man, as political being.  It requires real poverty of the imagination to think that this can come to a Negro only through the example of other Negroes, -->

... especially after the performance of the slaves in re-creating themselves, in good part, out of the images and myths of the Old Testament Jews."