![]() What language is it that we can all speak, and what is it that we can all recognize, burn at, weep over, what is the stature we can without exaggeration claim for ourselves what is the main address of consciousness? In a time of specialized intelligences, modern imaginative writers make the effort to maintain themselves as unspecialists, and their quest is for a true middle-of-consciousness for everyone. This tone, in the best pages of Invisible Man, those pages, for instance, in which an incestuous Negro farmer tells his tale to a white New England philanthropist, comes through very powerfully it is tragi-comic, poetic, the tone of the very strongest sort of creative intelligence. ![]() Even when he is most bitter, he makes by his tone a declaration of values and he says, in effect: There is something nevertheless that a man may hope to be. ![]() From this harassment and threatened dissolution by details, a writer tries to rescue what is important. That can only be done by those who resist the heavy influences and make their own synthesis out of the vast mass of phenomena, the seething, swarming body of appearances, facts, and details. People too thoroughly determined and our institutions by their size and force too thoroughly determined can’t approach this quality. Ellison’s, proving that a truly heroic quality can exist among our contemporaries. ![]() “…what a great thing it is when a brilliant individual victory occurs, like Mr. ![]()
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