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We Wear the Mask: Paul Laurence Dunbar and the Politics of Representative Reality (review)

Hickman himself. He learned his childishness, sinister charm, and diabolically brilliant ways of twisting words to denigrate and destroy from the very people he rejected. In a compelling sense, Sunraider is emblematic of American culture: obsessively Negrophobic, yet full of the high-octane energy and “gifts of improvisatory flight”—characterizing, in Ellison’s mind, American Democracy—which were culled, in crowning irony, from the Negro. The rest of the book is simply more detours and revisions meant to be fit into Ellison’s enormous puzzle. A few are earlier, less-overblown versions of the opening of Book Two. Many of these pieces are like a tour through a literary antique shop: fascinating, stimulating, ingenious, yet—like the text as a whole—decidedly anachronistic. My guess is that Ellison, in the four decades he spent toiling at this book, was unable to gain enough psychological distance from his material in order to handle it in a more coherent fashion. Whether this lack of distance was his aesthetic intent, or simply an artistic failure, is not entirely clear. It seems that Ellison attempted to cram everything that he ever learned about the art of fiction into one massive tome. Part of the way through, he seemed to learn something else concerning the art of fiction, paused, and began again, still more determined to make his book the Greatest of Great American Novels—yet merely creating a monument to literary self-indulgence.