![]() ![]() I have sat at a most genial dinner of rich, powerful, old white alum of an Ivy League university where, apropos of nothing, except for the fact that I was the sole Asian American at the table-indeed, in the entire dining room-a ninety-six-year-old executive who flew in bombers during the Pacific War said that dropping the atomic bomb on Japan was the right thing to do. I am not Black but I have felt a small degree of simultaneous invisibility and hypervisibility, occasioned by a parallel history of war and anti-Asian racism. Ellison riffed on double-consciousness to arrive at the sense that a Black man was always invisible to white people-until the moment when he was too visible. This dark side, what scholar Paul Gilroy memorably calls the Black Atlantic, produced equally rich insight from the depths of slave ships and the plantation system’s concentration camps. Is there a better definition of modern consciousness? This one has been routed through Black history, injury, and perception, as well as the crucial conviction that the other side of Old World Enlightenment was New World slavery and colonialism. Du Bois’s insight in The Souls of Black Folk that the Negro was a person of double-consciousness, always seeing himself through his own eyes and the eyes of others. In Ellison’s case, if there was not quite the same degree of defiance, perhaps he made that defiance possible. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (Random House, 1952) Everyone else can listen in and follow along. He foreshadowed Toni Morrison, who unapologetically declares her intentions to write about Black people for Black people. I feel a debt to Ellison because Invisible Man performs the essential maneuver that I hope marks my own aesthetic, which is the treatment of marginalized experience as universal experience. You and I, we believe in the power of the word, of the book, of literature. ![]() For those that do get it, the name functions as a password. Most people do not get the allusion, never having read Ellison’s book. These references constitute part of my homage to Ellison, but my greatest gesture of respect has been to take his surname for my son’s first name. “No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.” A few lines later in my first paragraph, I continue to evoke Invisible Man with this sentence: “I am not some misunderstood mutant from a comic book or a horror movie, although some have treated me as such.” “I am an invisible man,” Ralph Ellison wrote. “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces.” This is the first line of my novel, The Sympathizer, and in it you can hear the echo of another novel. ![]() Writing in the New York Times Book Review, for instance, Philip Caputo called The Sympathizer “remarkable” and “gripping,” adding that Nguyen’s depiction of his double-agent narrator “compares favorably with masters like Conrad, Greene, and le Carré.”īelow, Nguyen discusses his novel’s debt to Ralph Ellison. Our newly-relaunched series of guest blog posts by writers of fiction, history, essays, and poetry continues today with a contribution by Viet Thanh Nguyen, whose debut novel The Sympathizer was recently published to wide acclaim. Viet Thanh Nguyen: We still live in Ralph Ellison’s moment The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Grove Press, 2015) ![]()
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