اعظم 100 كتاب في التاريخ: ما سر هذه العظمة؟- دراسة بحثية - الصفحة 13

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Independent People

by Halldor K Laxness, Iceland, (1902-1998)

First published in 1946, this humane epic novel is set in rural Iceland in the early twentieth century. Bjartus is a sheep farmer determined to eke a living from a blighted patch of land. Nothing, not merciless weather, nor his family will come between him and his goal of financial independence. Only Asta Solillja, the child he brings up as his daughter, can pierce his stubborn heart. As she grows up, keen to make her own way in the world, Bjartus' obstinacy threatens to estrange them forever

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أناس مستقلون

هالدور كيليان لاكسنس

ترجمة و تعليق

رشا المالح

قال النقاد في الكاتب والروائي هالدور كيليان لاكسنس الآيسلندي الجنسية الذي فاز بجائزة نوبل للآداب عام 1955، بأنه روائي ذو روح شعرية ملحمية. إذ تضمن نسيج أعماله تاريخ حياة بلده وآدابها المحكية والمكتوبة، كما أكدوا بأن أهم أعماله تحمل روح تولستوي، وفي هذا الوصف كما يقولون الكثير من التواضع في حقه.
وعليه، فإن جميع أعماله تتمحور حول آيسلندا البلد الاسكندنافي الصغير الذي عانى من هيمنة واحتلال البلدان المجاورة وعلى رأسها النرويج، ولم يحظ باستقلاله إلا عام 1944. ولا يخلو أي بيت فيها من كتاب واحد للاكسنس على الأقل فمن المعروف عن شعب آيسلندا عشقه للأدب.ولد لاكسنس في بلدة ريكلافك عام 1902، ونشأ في مزرعة عائلته، وقد شجعته عزلة الحياة في تلك المزرعة النائية على المطالعة والكتابة منذ الطفولة. وتناول تلك المرحلة من حياته في أول رواية له «طفل الطبيعة» التي نشرها حينما كان في السابعة عشرة من عمره فقط.وقبل تحوله إلى الكتابة كان يخطط لمهنته في المستقبل كموسيقي، لإجادته العزف على الكمان الذي ورث حبه له من والده. وبعد تخرجه من المدرسة اللاتينية الآيسلندية ونظرا لتوفر المال لدى عائلته، فقد سافر إلى أوروبا. وعند انتهاء الحرب العالمية الأولى، أمضى زمنا طويلا في أوروبا والولايات المتحدة، وحاول أن يجد لنفسه عملا في هوليوود ككاتب سيناريو.
كرس في بداية سفره إلى أوروبا بضع سنوات، لدراسة الديانة المسيحية واللغات الأجنبية، وفي النهاية قرر عدم دخول سلك الرهبنة. وتجلت تلك المرحلة من حياته في مجموعة قصصه القصيرة وروايته «تحت الشلال» التي تعتبر بمثابة سيرة ذاتية له ونشرت عام 1923.
أما الرواية التي لفتت أنظار الأوساط الأدبية إليه كانت «النساج العظيم من كشمير» ونشرت عام 1929 حيث توجه بعدها لمدة عامين إلى شمال أميركا، وهناك ربطته صداقة متينة بالروائي الأميركي أبتون سينكلير.
وكان للأخير تأثير كبير على لاكسنس حيث أعاد صياغة العديد من أفكاره، إلى جانب تأثره بأزمة الركود الاقتصادي ومعاناة الشعب الأميركي خلالها.وفي عام 1930 عاد إلى وطنه.
وأعلن نفسه اشتراكيا وتفرغ للكتابة ورصد مجتمعه وكانت جميع شخصيات أعماله من الذين يكافحون لأجل البقاء على قيد الحياة، وبذلك ابتعد عن رومانسية الطبيعة والقدرية التي كانت شخصياته أسيرتها في المرحلة السابقة.
وتوج تلك المرحلة بروايته الشهيرة التي حققت شعبية واسعة «سالكا فالكا» ونشرت عام 1931، والبطولة فيها لامرأتين هما الأم ذات الشخصية الضعيفة الاتكالية والابنة المعتدة بنفسها المستقلة بذاتها والطموحة بعقلها. بعد هذه الرواية حصل على منحة من الدولة وتفرغ للكتابة. وأتت جميع أعماله حتى عام 1940 في ذات الإطار أو التوجه الفكري.
وجدير بالذكر أنه بعد زيارته للاتحاد السوفييتي عام 1932 وعام 1938 ورؤيته لفشل النظام الاقتصادي الذي أثمر عن فقر مدقع، صرح مع صديقه بيرتولت بريخت في برلين الشرقية عام 1955 فشل النظام الستاليني والماركسي المتطرف.
وفي عام 1935 حقق نقلة نوعية في نجاحه من خلال روايته الملحمية «أناس مستقلون» التي مهدت لفوزه لاحقا بجائزة نوبل، كما ازداد تألقه حينما نشر ثلاثيته «جرس آيسلندا» من عام 1943 إلى 1946 ويعرض من خلالها ثقافة وتاريخ بلده ابتداء من أوائل القرن الثامن عشر.
ويضم نتاجه 60 عملا مابين روايات ومسرحيات ومقالات وقصص قصيرة وأدب رحلات. وفي عام 1955 انتقل لاكسنس إلى دار للرعاية حيث عانى من مرض الزهايمر وتوفي في 1 فبراير عام 1980.
وفي روايته «أناس مستقلون» تجاوز لاكسنس نفسه على مختلف الأصعدة سواء في الإبداع الأدبي أو في نسيج السرد المتلاحم أو في الشخصيات أو في الحبكة والتوجه الفكري.
ويرسم في روايته هذه صورة حية لحضارة شبه بدائية تعتمد على معتقدات تراثية زاخرة بالماورائيات والأساطير. وهي ملحمة تغطي بشمولية نتاج تعاقب الأجيال وفي ذات الوقت دقات الساعة في ليالي الأرق ودقائق الأحداث العاصفة واللحظات الهادئة.
وهي رواية عن التناقضات سيما فيما يتعلق بالكشف عن نوازع ومكنونات أبطاله، التي تتباين ما بين الوحدة والأسرة، والأفكار الاشتراكية والإحساس بالذنب والخيانة ورموز الحكام التي تعكس الحقيقة المرة للطبقات الدنيا قبالتها إلى جانب مواجهتها لكوارث الطبيعة.وبطلا الرواية المحوريين هما بيارتور المزارع الذي يشتري قطعة أرض بعد خدمته لدى الغير لمدة 18 عاما.
والذي يصارع ويتحدى الأهوال للبقاء مستقلا في حياته وعلى أرضه وإن أدى ذلك إلى موته، أما الشخصية الثانية فهي ابنته أستا سوليليا من زوجته الأولى التي توفيت لدى ولادتها، والتي هي أقرب الناس إليه ويصفها بأنها الزهرة التي تنمو من أسفل الحجر الصلد.
وبينما بيارتور عصبي أناني وأحمق جميل وعنيد، فإن أستا غير عقلانية تقطر أحلاما ودموعا إلا أنها مثله تعتد باستقلاليتها. وعلى الرغم من ارتباطهما يفترق الاثنان حينما يطردها والدها بعد حملها من أحد زوار المنطقة، ولا تتردد أستيا في الرحيل لتبني حياتها مثله معتمدة على نفسها.
وفي النهاية حينما ينفض الجميع من حوله بعد وفاة زوجتيه الأولى والثانية ورحيل ابنه توني الشاب الحساس ذو الخيال الواسع الذي كان يتأرجح بن شخصيته كفنان وبين بقائه في ظل والده كضحية، إلى جانب خسارته لكل ما لديه سواء على صعيد الزراعة أو تربية المواشي، يلتقي بابنته ليتجدد رباطهما.
ويتجلى في هذا العمل رفض بيارتور للموروث والتطيرات ومنها اللعنة التي أشيع أن عجوزا ألقتها على أرضه، وعلى الرغم من جميع الكوارث التي تواجهه والضغوطات المستمرة سواء من المستثمرين أو البنوك أو الطبيعة إلا أنه يظل صامدا متمسكا بقناعته بأن استقلال الإنسان هو هدفه في الحياة وإن كلفه موته.

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رشا المالح

rmaleh57@hotmail.com

01-05-2013, 09:47 PM

المشاركة 122

ايوب صابر

مراقب عام سابقا



هالدور لاكسنس
هو أديب آيسلندي ولد في 23 افريل 1902 وتوفي في 8 فيفري 1998. تحصل على جائزة نوبل في الأدب لسنة 1955 و ايضا حصل على جائزة الاتحاد السوفيتي للسلام في الاعمال الادبيةو كان ذلك في سنة 1953 . تتمحور جميع أعماله حول بلده آيسلندا. نشر أول رواية له في سن السابعة عشرة من عمره تناول فيها مرحلة طفولته وأطلق على الرواية اسم «طفل الطبيعة». أما الرواية التي لفتت أنظار الأوساط الأدبية إليه كانت «النساج العظيم من كشمير» ونشرت عام 1929.
تخرج من المدرسة اللاتينية الآيسلندية وبعدها زار أرجاء أوروبا لدراسة الديانة المسيحية واللغات الأجنبية، وفي النهاية قرر عدم دخول سلك الرهبنة. وعند انتهاء الحرب العالمية الأولى، أمضى زمنا طويلا في أوروبا والولايات المتحدة، وحاول أن يجد لنفسه عملا في هوليوود ككاتب سيناريو بين 1927 و 1929

Halldór Kiljan Laxness (Icelandic: [ˈhaltour ˈcʰɪljan ˈlaxsnɛs] (listen); born Halldór Guðjónsson; 23 April 1902 – 8 February 1998) was a twentieth-century Icelandic writer. Throughout his career Laxness wrote poetry, newspaper articles, plays, travelogues, short stories, and novels. Major influences on his writings include August Strindberg, Sigmund Freud, Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair, Bertolt Brecht and Ernest Hemingway.[1] He received the 1955 Nobel Prize in Literature, and is the only Icelandic Nobel laureate.

Early life

Laxness was born under the name Halldór Guðjónsson (following the tradition of Icelandic patronymics) in Reykjavík in 1902, the son of Guðjón Helgason and Sigríður Halldórsdóttir. After spending his early years in Reykjavík, he moved with his family in 1905 to Laxnes near Mosfellsbær, a more rural area just north of the capital. He soon started to read books and write stories. At the age of 14 his first article was published in the newspaper Morgunblaðið under the name "H.G." His first book, the novel Barn náttúrunnar (translated Child of Nature), was published in 1919.[2] At the time of its publication he had already begun his travels on the European continent.[3]

1920s

In 1922, Laxness joined the Abbaye St. Maurice et St. Maur in Clervaux, Luxembourg. The monks followed the rules of Saint Benedict of Nursia. Laxness was baptized and confirmed in the Catholic Church early in 1923. Following his confirmation, he adopted the surname Laxness (in honor of the homestead where he had been raised) and added the name Kiljan (an Icelandic spelling of the Irish martyr Saint Killian).
Inside the walls of the abbey, he practiced self-study, read books, and studied French, Latin, theology and philosophy. While there, he composed the story Undir Helgahnjúk, published in 1924. Soon after his baptism, he became a member of a group which prayed for reversion of the Nordic countries back to Catholicism. Laxness wrote of his Catholicism in the book Vefarinn mikli frá Kasmír, published in 1927: "For a while he reached a safe haven in a Catholic monastery in Luxembourg, whence he sent home surrealistic poetry and gathered material for the great autobiographical novel recording his mental development, 'a witch brew of ideas presented in a stylistic furioso' (Peter Hallberg), Vefarinn mikli frá Kasmír. I have long thought that this work was marked by the chaos of German expressionism; at any rate it has the abandon advocated by André Breton, the master of French surrealism. It created a sensation in Iceland and was hailed by Kristjan Albertsson as the epoch-making book it really was. In the future Laxness was always in the vanguard of stylistic development..."[4]
"Laxness's religious period did not last long; during a visit to America he became attracted to socialism.".[5] Partly under the influence of Upton Sinclair, with whom he'd become friends in California, "With Alþydubókin (1929) Laxness... joined the socialist bandwagon... a book of brilliant burlesque and satirical essays... one of a long series in which he discussed his many travel impressions (Russia, western Europe, South America), unburdened himself of socialistic satire and propaganda, and wrote of the literature and the arts, essays of prime importance to an understanding of his own art..."[6] Laxness lived in the United States and attempted to write screenplays for Hollywood films between 1927 and 1929.[7]

1930s

By the 1930s he "had become the apostle of the younger generation" and was attacking "viciously" the Christian spiritualism of Einar Hjörleifsson Kvaran, an influential writer who had also been considered for the Nobel Prize.[8]
"... with "Salka Valka" (1931–32) began the great series of sociological novels, often coloured with socialist ideas, continuing almost without a break for nearly twenty years. This was probably the most brilliant period of his career, and it is the one which produced those of his works that have become most famous. But Laxness never attached himself permanently to a particular dogma."[9]
Other major works from this period include Sjálfstætt fólk (Independent People, 1934, 1935), and Heimsljós (World Light, 1937, 1938, 1939, 1940): "... which has been consistently regarded by many critics as his most important work.".[10]
He also traveled to the Soviet Union and wrote approvingly of the Soviet system and culture.[11]

[1940s

Laxness translated Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms into Icelandic in 1941, with controversial neologisms.[12]
Laxness published the sprawling three-part Íslandsklukkan (Iceland's Bell, 1943–46) a historical novel.
In 1946 Independent People was released as a book of the month club selection in the United States, selling over 450,000 copies.[13]
In response to the establishment of a permanent US military base in Keflavík, he wrote the satire Atómstöðin (The Atom Station), an action which, in part, may have caused his blacklisting in the United States.[14]
"The demoralization of the occupation period is described... nowhere as dramatically as in Halldor Kiljan Laxness' Atómstöðin (1948)... [where he portrays] postwar society in Reykjavík, completely torn from its moorings by the avalanche of foreign gold"[15]

01-05-2013, 09:47 PM

المشاركة 123

ايوب صابر

مراقب عام سابقا

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Icelandic writer, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1955. Laxness published his first book at the age of 17. He is best-known for his fiction depicting the hardships of the working fishermen and farmers, and historical novels combining the tradition of sagas and mythology with national and social issues. Along w ith Gunnar Gunnarsson (1889-1975) and Kristman Guðmundsson (1902-1983) Laxness was among the first internationally known Icelandic authors.

"I spent my entire childhood in an environment in which the mighty of the earth had no place outside story books and dreams. Love of, and respect for, the humble routine of everyday life and its creatures was the only moral commandment which carried conviction when I was a child." (from Laxness's Nobel acceptance speech)

Halldór Kiljan Laxness was born Halldór Gudjónsson in Reykjavík. When he was three, his parents Guðjón Helgason and Sigríður Halldórsdóttir moved to Laxnes, a farm in nearby Mosfellssveit parish, where the young Halldór spent his boyhood. His pen name Laxness took from the farm. Besides taking care of the farm, his father worked as a road construction foreman. An accomplished amateur violinist, he also taught his son to play the instrument.
Before turning to writing, Laxness planned a career as musician. Barn náttúrunnar (1919), the author's first book, came out when he was 17. Laxness was educated at the Icelandic Latin School and he attended the gymnasium in Reykjavík briefly, without graduating. His family had enough money to allow him to travel freely. After World War I Laxness spent much time in Europe and the United States, where he tried to find place in Hollywood film industry.
In 1923 Laxness turned to Catholicism and got the name Kiljan after Irish St Kilian. He spent some time at Saint-Maurice de Clervaux, a monastery in Luxemburg, studied in London at a Jesuit-run school, and continued his spiritual search at Lourdes and Rome. Laxness wrote several books with Catholic themes before arriving at a state of disillusionment. His controversial first major novel, Vefarinn mikli frá Kasmír (1927), was partly written under the influence of St Thomas à Kempis and the surrealist poet André Breton. Laxness also read Proust while writing the book. A number of publishers rejected the work before it appeared. Laxness's veiled autobiography broke with the epic realism traditional in Icelandic fiction. In the end of the novel, the young protagonist turns to God, but in his own life Laxness become less and less interested in metaphysical questions, and finally he abandoned the Catholic faith.
Returning to Iceland, Laxness spent several years traveling through the country. During a stay in the United States, he lectured among others about fishing at a IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) club, but was not enthusiastic by their anarchist activities and believed that they opposed as much Marx and Lenin as Rockefeller and Morgan. In San Francisco he read James Joyce's Ulysses – later he wondered why Joyce is not counted among the most important surrealist writers. German authors, such as Thomas Mann, did not inspire him – according to Laxness, Mann was too professor-like and Goethe overrated. Perhaps the most important novelist for him was Upton Sinclair, whom he considered primus inter pares and who influenced his novel Salka Valka (1931-32). Sinclair did not mention Laxness in his book of memoir, but Laxness's letters are included in My Lifetime in Letters, Upton Sinclair (1960).
In June 1929 the Los Angeles Record published news about an "Icelandic author who faces possible deportation" – immigration officers taken away Laxness's passport. After the intervention of Sinclair and Helen Crane, the niece of Stephen Crane, it was given back. In 1930 Laxness married Ingibjørg Einarsdóttir and settled in Reykjavík. His financial situation became stable when he started to receive the state writer's grant. Permanent residence Laxness found from the parish of his youth.
Salka Valka was Laxness's breakthrough novel and reflected his Socialistic views which marked his novels in the 1930s and 1940s. The story depicted a young woman, Salka, and a small fishing community. Evil enters into the community in the form of merchants and fishing entrepreneurs and is pitted against labor movement. The book gained a huge success in England. The Evening Standard wrote that Greta Garbo would be the perfect Salka in its film adaptation. Other early works include World Light (1937-40), about a sympathetic folk poet Ólafur Kárason. The book was based on the life of the minor poet Magnús Hjaltason and showed the influence of Knut Hamsun. The trilogy Iceland's Bell, published when the author was in his 40s, made him famous and a prominent spokesman for the Icelandic nation.

Halldór Kiljan Laxness was born in 1902 in Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland, but spent his youth in the country. From the age of seventeen on, he travelled and lived abroad, chiefly on the European continent. He was influenced by expressionism and other modern currents in Germany and France. In the mid-twenties he was converted to Catholicism; his spiritual experiences are reflected in several books of an autobiographical nature, chiefly Undir Helgahnúk (Under the Holy Mountain), 1924. In 1927, he published his first important novel, Vefarinn mikli frá Kasmír (The Great Weaver from Kashmir). Laxness's religious period did not last long; during a visit to America he became attracted to socialism. Alþydubókin (The Book of the People), 1929, is evidence of a change toward a socialist outlook. In 1930, Laxness settled in Iceland.

Laxness's main achievement consists of three novel cycles written during the thirties, dealing with the people of Iceland. Þú vínviður hreini, 1931, and Fuglinn í fjörunni, 1932, (both translated as Salka Valka), tell the story of a poor fisher girl; Sjálfstætt fólk (Independent People), 1934-35, treats the fortunes of small farmers, whereas the tetralogy Ljós heimsins (The Light of the World), 1937-40, has as its hero an Icelandic folk poet. Laxness's later works are frequently historical and influenced by the saga tradition: Íslandsklukkan (The Bell of Iceland), 1943-46, Gerpla (The Happy Warriors), 1952, and Paradísarheimt (Paradise Reclaimed), 1960. Laxness is also the author of the topical and sharply polemical Atómstöðin (The Atom Station), 1948.

From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969
This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and first published in the book series Les Prix Nobel. It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.

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01-05-2013, 09:48 PM

المشاركة 124

ايوب صابر

مراقب عام سابقا



هالدور لاكسنس

هو أديب آيسلندي ولد في 23 افريل 1902 وتوفي في 8 فيفري 1998. تحصل على جائزة نوبل في الأدب لسنة 1955 و ايضا حصل على جائزة الاتحادالسوفيتي للسلام في الاعمال الادبيةو كان ذلك في سنة 1953 . تتمحور جميع أعماله حولبلدهآيسلندا. نشر أولرواية له في سن السابعة عشرة من عمره تناول فيها مرحلة طفولته وأطلق على الروايةاسم «طفل الطبيعة». أما الرواية التي لفتت أنظار الأوساط الأدبية إليه كانت «النساجالعظيم من كشمير» ونشرت عام 1929.
تخرج منالمدرسة اللاتينية الآيسلندية وبعدها زار أرجاء أوروبا لدراسة الديانةالمسيحيةواللغاتالأجنبية، وفي النهاية قرر عدم دخول سلك الرهبنة. وعند انتهاءالحرب العالميةالأولى، أمضى زمنا طويلا في أوروباوالولايات المتحدة، وحاول أن يجد لنفسه عملا فيهوليوودككاتبسيناريو بين 1927 و 1929

Halldór Kiljan Laxness (Icelandic: [ˈhaltour ˈcʰɪljan ˈlaxsnɛs] (listen); born Halldór Guðjónsson; 23 April 1902 – 8 February 1998) was a twentieth-century Icelandic writer. Throughout his career Laxness wrote poetry, newspaper articles, plays, travelogues, short stories, and novels. Major influences on his writings include August Strindberg, Sigmund Freud, Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair, Bertolt Brecht and Ernest Hemingway. He received the 1955 Nobel Prize in Literature, and is the only Icelandic Nobel laureate.

Early life

Laxness was born under the name Halldór Guðjónsson (following the tradition of Icelandic patronymics) in Reykjavik in 1902, the son of Guðjón Helgason and Sigríður Halldórsdóttir. After spending his early years in Reykjavik, he moved with his family in 1905 to Laxnes near Mosfellsbær, a more rural area just north of the capital.

He soon started to read books and write stories. At the age of 14 his first article was published in the newspaper Morgunblaðið under the name "H.G." His first book, the novel Barn náttúrunnar (translated Child of Nature), was published in 1919.[2] At the time of its publication he had already begun his travels on the European continent.

1920s

In 1922, Laxness joined the Abbaye St. Maurice et St. Maur in Clervaux, Luxembourg. The monks followed the rules of Saint Benedict of Nursia. Laxness was baptized and confirmed in the Catholic Church early in 1923. Following his confirmation, he adopted the surname Laxness (in honor of the homestead where he had been raised) and added the name Kiljan (an Icelandic spelling of the Irish martyr Saint Killian).

Inside the walls of the abbeyدير , he practiced self-study, read books, and studied French, Latin, theology and philosophy. While there, he composed the story Undir Helgahnjúk, published in 1924. Soon after his baptism, he became a member of a group which prayed for reversion of the Nordic countries back to Catholicism. Laxness wrote of his Catholicism in the book Vefarinn mikli frá Kasmír, published in 1927: "For a while he reached a safe haven in a Catholic monastery in Luxembourg, whence he sent home surrealistic poetry and gathered material for the great autobiographical novel recording his mental development, 'a witch brew of ideas presented in a stylistic furioso' (Peter Hallberg), Vefarinn mikli frá Kasmír. I have long thought that this work was marked by the chaos of German expressionism; at any rate it has the abandon advocated by André Breton, the master of French surrealism. It created a sensation in Iceland and was hailed by Kristjan Albertsson as the epoch-making book it really was. In the future Laxness was always in the vanguard of stylistic development..."[4]

"Laxness's religious period did not last long; during a visit to America he became attracted to socialism." Partly under the influence of Upton Sinclair, with whom he'd become friends in California, "With Alþydubókin (1929) Laxness... joined the socialist bandwagon... a book of brilliant burlesque and satirical essays... one of a long series in which he discussed his many travel impressions (Russia, western Europe, South America), unburdened himself of socialistic satire and propaganda, and wrote of the literature and the arts, essays of prime importance to an understanding of his own art..." Laxness lived in the United States and attempted to write screenplays for Hollywood films between 1927 and 1929.

انتقل وعمرهثلاث سنوات مع عائلته إلى الريف حيث عاش في مزرعة والده. درس في المدرسة اللاتينية. سافر في أنحاء أوروبا وامريكا منذ كان في الـ 17. عاش في دير لفترة لكنه قرر عدم الانضمام إلى سلك الرهبنة. لا يوجد معلومات عن والديه.

مجهول الطفولة

01-05-2013, 09:50 PM

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Invisible Man

by Ralph Ellison, United States, (1914-1994)

The lives of countless millions are evoked in Ralph Ellison's superb portrait of a generation of black Americans, "Invisible Man". This "Penguin Modern Classics" edition includes an introduction by John F. Callahan, as well as an introduction by the author. Ralph Ellison's blistering and impassioned first novel tells the extraordinary story of a man invisible 'simply because people refuse to see me'. Published in 1952 when American society was in the cusp of immense change, the powerfully depicted adventures of Ellison's invisible man - from his expulsion from a Southern college to a terrifying Harlem race riot - go far beyond the story of one individual. As John Callahan says, 'In an extraordinary imaginative leap, he hit upon a single word for the different yet shared condition of African Americans, Americans, and, for that matter, the human individual in the twentieth century and beyond.' This edition includes Ralph Ellison's introduction to the thirtieth anniversary edition of "Invisible Man", a fascinating account of the novel's seven-year gestation. Ralph Waldo Ellison (1914-94), named for the poet Emerson, was born in Oklahoma.At the age of nineteen he won a scholarship to study music at Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute. In 1936 he went to New York, where he met the writers Langston Hughes and Richard Wright; shortly afterwards his stories and articles began to appear in magazines and journals. After the Second World War Ellison was awarded a Rosenwald Fellowship, allowing him to concentrate on the composition of "Invisible Man" (1952), which won the National Book Award and established Ellison as a major figure in twentieth-century fiction. If you enjoyed "Invisible Man", you might like E.L. Doctorow's "The Book of Daniel", also available in "Penguin Modern Classics".

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INVISIBLE MAN established Ralph Ellison as the author of one of the most important and influential American novels of the twentieth century. He is remembered as a writer who captured a true sense of the African-American experience. JUNETEENTH joins INVISIBLE MAN and FLYING HOME & OTHER STORIES on the Penguin Modern Classics list.

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Invisible Man is a 1952 novel written by Ralph Ellison. It addresses many of the social and intellectual issues facing African-Americans early in the twentieth century, including black nationalism, the relationship between black identity and Marxism, and the reformist racial policies of Booker T. Washington, as well as issues of individuality and personal identity.
Invisible Man won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction in 1953.[1] In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Invisible Man nineteenth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Time magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.[2] Critic Harold Bloom considers Invisible Man one of the finest American novels of the 20th century.[citation needed]

Historical background

Ellison says in his introduction to the 30th Anniversary Edition[3] that he started writing what would eventually become Invisible Man in a barn in Waitsfield, Vermont in the summer of 1945 while on sick leave from the Merchant Marine. The letters he wrote to fellow novelist Richard Wright as he started working on the novel provide evidence for its political context: the disillusion with the Communist Party that he and Wright shared. In a letter to Wright August 18, 1945, Ellison poured out his anger toward party leaders for betraying African Americans and Marxist class politics during the war years. "If they want to play ball with the bourgeoisie they needn't think they can get away with it.... Maybe we can't smash the atom, but we can, with a few well chosen, well written words, smash all that crummy filth to hell." In the wake of this disillusion, Ellison began writing Invisible Man, a novel that was, in part, his response to the party's betrayal.[4]
In an interview in The Paris Review 1955,[5] Ellison states that the book took five years to complete with one year off for what he termed an "ill-conceived short novel." Invisible Man was published as a whole in 1952; however, copyright dates show the initial publication date as 1947, 1948, indicating that Ellison had published a section of the book prior to full publication. That section was the famous "Battle Royal" scene, which had been shown to Cyril Connolly, the editor of Horizon magazine by Frank Taylor, one of Ellison's early supporters.
In his speech accepting the 1953 National Book Award,[6] Ellison says that he considered the novel's chief significance to be its experimental attitude. Rejecting the idea of social protest—as Ellison would later put it—he did not want to write another protest novel, and also seeing the highly regarded styles of Naturalism and Realism too limiting to speak to the broader issues of race and America, Ellison created an open style, one that did not restrict his ideas to a movement but was more free-flowing in its delivery. What Ellison finally settled on was a style based heavily upon modern symbolism. It was the kind of symbolism that Ellison first encountered in the poem, The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot.[7][not specific enough to verify] Ellison had read this poem as a freshman at the Tuskegee Institute and was immediately impressed by The Waste Land's ability to merge his two greatest passions, that of music and literature, for it was in The Waste Land that he first saw jazz set to words. When asked later what he had learned from the poem, Ellison responded: imagery, and also improvisation—techniques he had only before seen in jazz.
Ellison always believed that he would be a musician first and a writer second, and yet even so he had acknowledged that writing provided him a "growing satisfaction." It was a "covert process," according to Ellison: "a refusal of his right hand to let his left hand know what it was doing."[8]

Plot introduction

Invisible Man is autobiographically narrated in the first person by the protagonist, an unnamed African American man who considers himself socially invisible. Ellison conceived his narrator as a spokesman for black Americans of the time:

So my task was one of revealing the human universals hidden within the plight of one who was both black and American...[9]

Ellison struggled to find a style appropriate to his vision. Wanting to avoid writing "nothing more than another novel of racial protest," he settled on a narrator "who had been forged in the underground of American experience and yet managed to emerge less angry than ironic." To this end, he modeled his narrator after the nameless narrator of Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground, which similarly applies irony and paradox toward far-reaching social criticism.[10]
The story is told from the narrator's present, looking back into his past. Thus, the narrator has hindsight in how his story is told, as he is already aware of the outcome.
In the Prologue, Ellison's narrator tells readers, "I live rent-free in a building rented strictly to whites, in a section of the basement that was shut off and forgotten during the nineteenth century." In this secret place, the narrator creates surroundings that are symbolically illuminated with 1,369 lights from the electric company Monopolated Light & Power. He says, "My hole is warm and full of light. Yes, full of light. I doubt if there is a brighter spot in all New York than this hole of mine, and I do not exclude Broadway." The protagonist explains that light is an intellectual necessity for him since "the truth is the light and light is the truth." From this underground perspective, the narrator attempts to make sense out of his life, experiences, and position in American society.

Plot summary

The narrator begins telling his story with the claim that he is an “invisible man.” His invisibility, he says, is not a physical condition—he is not literally invisible—but is rather the result of the refusal of others to see him. He says that because of his invisibility, he has been hiding from the world, living underground and stealing electricity from the Monopolated Light & Power Company. He burns 1,369 light bulbs simultaneously and listens to Louis Armstrong’s “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue” on a phonograph. He says that he has gone underground in order to write the story of his life and invisibility.
As a young man, in the late 1920s or early 1930s, the narrator lived in the South. Because he is a gifted public speaker, he is invited to give a speech to a group of important white men in his town. The men reward him with a briefcase containing a scholarship to a prestigious black college, but only after humiliating him by forcing him to fight in a “battle royal” in which he is pitted against other young black men, all blindfolded, in a boxing ring. After the battle royal, the white men force the youths to scramble over an electrified rug in order to snatch at fake gold coins. The narrator has a dream that night in which he imagines that his scholarship is actually a piece of paper reading “To Whom It May Concern . . . Keep This Nigger-Boy Running.”
Three years later, the narrator is a student at the college. He is asked to drive a wealthy white trustee of the college, Mr. Norton, around the campus. Norton talks incessantly about his daughter, then shows an undue interest in the narrative of Jim Trueblood, a poor, uneducated black man who impregnated his own daughter. After hearing this story, Norton needs a drink, and the narrator takes him to the Golden Day, a saloon and brothel that normally serves black men. A fight breaks out among a group of mentally imbalanced black veterans at the bar, and Norton passes out during the chaos. He is tended by one of the veterans, who claims to be a doctor and who taunts both Norton and the narrator for their blindness regarding race relations.
Back at the college, the narrator listens to a long, impassioned sermon by the Reverend Homer A. Barbee on the subject of the college’s Founder, whom the blind Barbee glorifies with poetic language. After the sermon, the narrator is chastised by the college president, Dr. Bledsoe, who has learned of the narrator’s misadventures with Norton at the old slave quarters and the Golden Day. Bledsoe rebukes the narrator, saying that he should have shown the white man an idealized version of black life. He expels the narrator, giving him seven letters of recommendation addressed to the college’s white trustees in New York City, and sends him there in search of a job.
The narrator travels to the bright lights and bustle of 1930s Harlem, where he looks unsuccessfully for work. The letters of recommendation are of no help. At last, the narrator goes to the office of one of his letters’ addressees, a trustee named Mr. Emerson. There he meets Emerson’s son, who opens the letter and tells the narrator that he has been betrayed: the letters from Bledsoe actually portray the narrator as dishonorable and unreliable. The young Emerson helps the narrator to get a low-paying job at the Liberty Paints plant, whose trademark color is “Optic White.” The narrator briefly serves as an assistant to Lucius Brockway, the black man who makes this white paint, but Brockway suspects him of joining in union activities and turns on him. The two men fight, neglecting the paint-making; consequently, one of the unattended tanks explodes, and the narrator is knocked unconscious.
The narrator wakes in the paint factory’s hospital, having temporarily lost his memory and ability to speak. The white doctors seize the arrival of their unidentified black patient as an opportunity to conduct electric shock experiments. After the narrator recovers his memory and leaves the hospital, he collapses on the street. Some black community members take him to the home of Mary, a kind woman who lets him live with her for free in Harlem and nurtures his sense of black heritage. One day, the narrator witnesses the eviction of an elderly black couple from their Harlem apartment. Standing before the crowd of people gathered before the apartment, he gives an impassioned speech against the eviction. Brother Jack overhears his speech and offers him a position as a spokesman for the Brotherhood, a political organization that allegedly works to help the socially oppressed. After initially rejecting the offer, the narrator takes the job in order to pay Mary back for her hospitality. But the Brotherhood demands that the narrator take a new name, break with his past, and move to a new apartment. The narrator is inducted into the Brotherhood at a party at the Chthonian Hotel and is placed in charge of advancing the group’s goals in Harlem.
After being trained in rhetoric by a white member of the group named Brother Hambro, the narrator goes to his assigned branch in Harlem, where he meets the handsome, intelligent black youth leader Tod Clifton. He also becomes familiar with the black nationalist leader Ras the Exhorter, who opposes the interracial Brotherhood and believes that black Americans should fight for their rights over and against all whites. The narrator delivers speeches and becomes a high-profile figure in the Brotherhood, and he enjoys his work. One day, however, he receives an anonymous note warning him to remember his place as a black man in the Brotherhood. Not long after, the black Brotherhood member Brother Wrestrum accuses the narrator of trying to use the Brotherhood to advance a selfish desire for personal distinction. While a committee of the Brotherhood investigates the charges, the organization moves the narrator to another post, as an advocate of women’s rights. After giving a speech one evening, he is seduced by one of the white women at the gathering, who attempts to use him to play out her sexual fantasies about black men.
After a short time, the Brotherhood sends the narrator back to Harlem, where he discovers that Clifton has disappeared. Many other black members have left the group, as much of the Harlem community feels that the Brotherhood has betrayed their interests. The narrator finds Clifton on the street selling dancing “Sambo” dolls—dolls that invoke the stereotype of the lazy and obsequious slave. Clifton apparently does not have a permit to sell his wares on the street. White policemen accost him and, after a scuffle, shoot him dead as the narrator and others look on. On his own initiative, the narrator holds a funeral for Clifton and gives a speech in which he portrays his dead friend as a hero, galvanizing public sentiment in Clifton’s favor. The Brotherhood is furious with him for staging the funeral without permission, and Jack harshly castigates him. As Jack rants about the Brotherhood’s ideological stance, a glass eye falls from one of his eye sockets. The Brotherhood sends the narrator back to Brother Hambro to learn about the organization’s new strategies in Harlem.
The narrator leaves feeling furious and anxious to gain revenge on Jack and the Brotherhood. He arrives in Harlem to find the neighborhood in ever-increased agitation over race relations. Ras confronts him, deploring the Brotherhood’s failure to draw on the momentum generated by Clifton’s funeral. Ras sends his men to beat up the narrator, and the narrator is forced to disguise himself in dark glasses and a hat. In his dark glasses, many people on the streets mistake him for someone named Rinehart, who seems to be a pimp, bookie, lover, and reverend all at once. At last, the narrator goes to Brother Hambro’s apartment, where Hambro tells him that the Brotherhood has chosen not to emphasize Harlem and the black movement. He cynically declares that people are merely tools and that the larger interests of the Brotherhood are more important than any individual. Recalling advice given to him by his grandfather, the narrator determines to undermine the Brotherhood by seeming to go along with them completely. He decides to flatter and seduce a woman close to one of the party leaders in order to obtain secret information about the group.
But the woman he chooses, Sybil, knows nothing about the Brotherhood and attempts to use the narrator to fulfill her fantasy of being raped by a black man. While still with Sybil in his apartment, the narrator receives a call asking him to come to Harlem quickly. The narrator hears the sound of breaking glass, and the line goes dead. He arrives in Harlem to find the neighborhood in the midst of a full-fledged riot, which he learns was incited by Ras. The narrator becomes involved in setting fire to a tenement building. Running from the scene of the crime, he encounters Ras, dressed as an African chieftain. Ras calls for the narrator to be lynched. The narrator flees, only to encounter two policemen, who suspect that his briefcase contains loot from the riots. In his attempt to evade them, the narrator falls down a manhole. The police mock him and draw the cover over the manhole.
The narrator says that he has stayed underground ever since; the end of his story is also the beginning. He states that he finally has realized that he must honor his individual complexity and remain true to his own identity without sacrificing his responsibility to the community. He says that he finally feels ready to emerge from underground

01-05-2013, 09:52 PM

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الرجل الخفي

أدب الخيال الجيد منسوج من الواقع، ومن الصعب الوصول إلى احتمالات حقيقته. فالكثير منها يعتمد على مدى رغبة الفرد في اكتشاف نفسه الحقيقية عبر تعريفها استنادا على خلفيته»، تصريح للأديب الأميركي الإفريقي الأصل رالف والدو إليسون الذي اشتهر بروايته الخالدة «الرجل الخفي» التي نشرت عام 1952.
وُلد رالف والدو إليسون في 1 مارس عام 1914 في أوكلاهوما، والمعروف أن من أسباب قدرته على تجاوز مرارة التمييز العنصري ومشاعر النقمة هو تكريس نفسه للفن. وعلى الرغم من وفاة والده حينما كان في الثالثة من عمره، إلا أن والدته آيدا استطاعت بقوة إرادتها ومثابرتها منح طفلها حياة آمنة، كما شجعته على القراءة ووفرت له العديد من الكتب من بيوت مخدوميها. تعلم إليسون وأتقن العزف على البوق في الثانوية، وحينما أنهى دراسته نال منحة لدراسة الموسيقى في آلاباما عام 1933. بقي في المدينة الجديدة الأكثر تحفظا وعنصرية من بلدته، ثلاث سنوات. انتقل بعدها إلى نيويورك، وهناك التقى بالكاتب ريتشارد رايت الذي أمن له عملا في مشروع الكتّاب الفيدراليين، وساعده على تطوير موهبته في الكتابة.
وفي عام 1939 بدأ إليسون بنشر القصص القصيرة وعروض الكتب والمقالات، ومع انتهاء الحرب العالمية الثانية وبعد خدمته في بحرية الولايات المتحدة، حاز على زمالة روزنولد التي مكنته من التركيز على كتابة روايته الأولى «الرجل الخفي».
حققت له تلك الرواية نجاحا فوريا لدى نشرها، واختلفت آراء النقاد بشأن معالجة الأحداث بموضوعية. وبعد مضي ثلاثة عشر عاما، اختارت صحيفة نيويورك هيرالد تريبيون روايته تلك كأهم كتاب نشر خلال الفترة من عام 1945 إلى 1965.
وكان إليسون الذي حاز على العديد من الجوائز الأدبية يعمل على روايته الثانية بصبر وهدوء وعلى مدى عشر سنوات، حينما أصيب بمرض السرطان في البنكرياس وتوفي في نيويورك في 16 أبريل 1994، وعليه نشرت روايته «جونتينث» بعد وفاته.
وعلى الرغم من أن رواية «الرجل الخفي» تتحدث عن حياة ومجتمع الأميركيين الأفارقة، إلا أنها في الواقع أعم وأشمل بإنسانيتها فمعاناة أو واقع الحياة التي يعيشها بطل الرواية وهو شاب في مستهل حياته، يمكن أن يتشابه مع واقع الفوارق الطبقية والعائلية والعرقية والطائفية وغيرها.
ومن هذا المفهوم اكتسبت الرواية ديمومتها التي عززتها جماليات كل من اللغة والإيقاع الموسيقي، والمستمدة كما أوضح الكاتب من أغاني وموسيقى الجاز التي برع فيها الأفارقة الأميركان. إلى جانب الرمزية والشعرية.
كان البطل الشاب في بداية الرواية طالبا نموذجيا على كافة الأصعدة. ولا يتردد في إلقاء خطاب التخرج من المرحلة الثانوية أمام حشد كبير من الناس، مما يثير إعجاب أحد الأثرياء البيض. يدعو هذا الثري الشاب إلى حفل في قصره ليقرأ الخطاب أمام أصدقائه في الجامعة، يرى الشاب في عميد الجامعة الدكتور بليدسو مثلا أعلى له للارتقاء بمجتمعه من السود، ويسعى للسير على دربه.
بعد مضي زمن قصير على الدراسة، يطلب المدير من الشاب كبادرة اعتزاز به أن يأخذ الثري والمساهم في تمويل الجامعة في جولة في أرجاء المنطقة المحيطة بالمبنى. وتصل الأحداث إلى ذروتها الأولى حينما يحيد الطالب عن الطريق ليجد نفسه في منطقة يسكنها الفقراء من السود، وحينما يحاول العودة يصر الثري على المتابعة كنوع من المغامرة .
وفي حي هارلم الشعبي الخاص بالسود يستقر الشاب بعد أن وجد عملا أخيرا. وهنا تتصاعد ذروة الأحداث مجددا لدى عمله في معمل للطلاء وبعدها حينما ينضم لحزب ماركسي في ذات الحي، يقف في مواجهة حزب آخر، ويجد الشاب نفسه مركزا للصراع بين أفراد الحزبين.
ويدرك من خلال مجمل الأحداث أنه غير مرئي كإنسان بالنسبة للجميع، فمنحة الثري تشعر صاحبها بعظمته الإنسانية، وطرد العميد له دون اعتبار لمستقبله، وأصدقائه من أعضاء الحزبين كانوا يتناحرون مع بعضهم من خلاله.
ينتهي به الأمر باتخاذه القرار في العيش تحت الأرض غير مرئي، وكما ذكر في بداية الرواية يكتشف غرفة سرية في قبو مبنى مخصص للبيض كسكن له، ويزينها بما يزيد على 1369 مصباح كهربائي موزع بين السقف والأرض والجدران وذلك بعد أن مدد الكهرباء خلسة لغرفته، ليعيش قناعته في حقيقة أن النور هو الحقيقة وبالعكس.
رشا المالح
ralmaleh@albayan.ae
الكتاب: الرجل الخفي

01-05-2013, 09:53 PM

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Ralph Waldo Ellison (March 1, 1914[1] – April 16, 1994) was an American novelist, literary critic, scholar and writer. He was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Ellison is best known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953.[2] He also wrote Shadow and Act (1964), a collection of political, social and critical essays, and Going to the Territory (1986).

Early life

Ralph Ellison, named after Ralph Waldo Emerson,[3] was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, to Lewis Alfred Ellison and Ida Millsap. Research by Lawrence Jackson, one of Ellison's biographers, has established that he was born a year earlier than had been previously thought. He had one brother named Herbert Millsap Ellison, who was born in 1916. Lewis Alfred Ellison, a small-business owner and a construction foreman, died when Ralph was three years old from stomach ulcers he received from an ice-delivering accident.[3] Many years later, Ellison would find out that his father hoped he would grow up to be a poet.
In 1933, Ellison entered the Tuskegee Institute on a scholarship to study music. Tuskegee's music department was perhaps the most renowned department at the school, headed by the conductor William L. Dawson. Ellison also had the good fortune to come under the close tutelage of the piano instructor Hazel Harrison. While he studied music primarily in his classes, he spent increasing amounts of time in the library, reading up on modernist classics. He specifically cited reading T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land as a major awakening moment for him.

Writing career

After his third year, Ellison moved to New York City to study the visual arts. He studied sculpture and photography. He made acquaintance with the artist Romare Bearden. Perhaps Ellison's most important contact would be with the author Richard Wright, with whom he would have a long and complicated relationship. After Ellison wrote a book review for Wright, Wright encouraged Ellison to pursue a career in writing, specifically fiction. The first published story written by Ellison was a short story entitled "Hymie's Bull," a story inspired by Ellison's hoboing on a train with his uncle to get to Tuskegee. From 1937 to 1944 Ellison had over twenty book reviews as well as short stories and articles published in magazines such as New Challenge and New Masses.
Wright was then openly associated with the Communist Party and Ellison was publishing and editing for communist publications, although his "affiliation was quieter," according to historian Carol Polsgrove in Divided Minds.[4] Both Wright and Ellison lost their faith in the Communist Party during World War II when they felt the party had betrayed African Americans and replaced Marxist class politics with social reformism. In a letter to Wright, August 18, 1945, Ellison poured out his anger with party leaders: "If they want to play ball with the bourgeoisie they needn't think they can get away with it. ... Maybe we can't smash the atom, but we can, with a few well chosen, well written words, smash all that crummy filth to hell." In the wake of this disillusion, Ellison began writing Invisible Man, a novel that was, in part, his response to the party's betrayal.[5]
World War II was nearing its end when Ellison, reluctant to serve in the segregated army, chose merchant marine service over the draft.[6] In 1946 he married his second wife, Fanny McConnell. She worked as a photographer to help sustain Ellison. From 1947 to 1951 he earned some money writing book reviews, but spent most of his time working on Invisible Man. Fanny also helped type Ellison's longhand text and assisted her husband in editing the typescript as it progressed.
Published in 1952, Invisible Man explores the theme of man’s search for his identity and place in society, as seen from the perspective of an unnamed black man in the New York City of the 1930s. In contrast to his contemporaries such as Richard Wright and James Baldwin, Ellison created characters that are dispassionate, educated, articulate and self-aware. Through the protagonist, Ellison explores the contrasts between the Northern and Southern varieties of racism and their alienating effect. The narrator is "invisible" in a figurative sense, in that "people refuse to see" him, and also experiences a kind of dissociation. The novel, with its treatment of taboo issues such as incest and the controversial subject of communism, won the 1953 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.[2]
The award was his ticket into the American literary establishment. Disillusioned by his experience with the Communist Party, he used his new fame to speak out for literature as a moral instrument.[7] In 1955, Ellison went abroad to Europe to travel and lecture before settling for a time in Rome, Italy, where he wrote an essay that appeared in a Bantam anthology called A New Southern Harvest in 1957. Robert Penn Warren was in Rome during the same period and the two writers became close friends.[8] In 1958, Ellison returned to the United States to take a position teaching American and Russian literature at Bard College and to begin a second novel, Juneteenth. During the 1950s he corresponded with his lifelong friend, the writer Albert Murray. In their letters they commented on the development of their careers, the civil rights movement and other common interests including jazz. Much of this material was published in the collection Trading Twelves (2000).
In 1964, Ellison published Shadow and Act, a collection of essays, and began to teach at Rutgers University and Yale University, while continuing to work on his novel. The following year, a survey of 200 prominent literary figures was released that proclaimed Invisible Man the most important novel since World War II.
In 1967, Ellison experienced a major house fire at his home in Plainfield, Massachusetts, in which he claimed more than 300 pages of his second novel manuscript were lost. A perfectionist regarding the art of the novel, Ellison had said in accepting his National Book Award for Invisible Man that he felt he had made "an attempt at a major novel" and, despite the award, he was unsatisfied with the book.[9] Ellison ultimately wrote more than 2000 pages of this second novel but never finished it.
Writing essays about both the black experience and his love for jazz music, Ellison continued to receive major awards for his work. In 1969 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom; the following year, he was made a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France and became a permanent member of the faculty at New York University as the Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities, serving from 1970 to 1980.
In 1975, Ellison was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Letters and his hometown of Oklahoma City honored him with the dedication of the Ralph Waldo Ellison Library. Continuing to teach, Ellison published mostly essays, and in 1984, he received the New York City College's Langston Hughes Medal. In 1985, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. In 1986, his Going to the Territory was published. This is a collection of seventeen essays that included insight into southern novelist William Faulkner and Ellison's friend Rich Wright, as well as the music of Duke Ellington and the contributions of African Americans to America’s national identity.

Final years

In 1992, Ellison was awarded a special achievement award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. Ellison was also an accomplished sculptor, musician, photographer and college professor. He taught at Bard College, Rutgers University, the University of Chicago, and New York University. Ellison was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.
Ralph Ellison died on April 16, 1994, of pancreatic cancer, and was buried at Trinity Church Cemetery [10] in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City. He was survived by his wife, Fanny Ellison, who died on November 19, 2005.
After his death, more manuscripts were discovered in his home, resulting in the publication of Flying Home and Other Stories in 1996. In 1999, five years after his death, Ellison's second novel, Juneteenth, was published under the editorship of John F. Callahan, a professor at Lewis & Clark College and Ellison's literary executor. It was a 368-page condensation of more than 2000 pages written by Ellison over a period of forty years. All the manuscripts of this incomplete novel were published collectively on January 26, 2010, by Modern Library, under the title Three Days Before the Shooting.[11]

01-05-2013, 09:54 PM

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Ralph Waldo Ellison was born March 1, 1914 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma to Lewis Alfred and Ida Millsap Ellison. At the beginning of this century, Oklahoma had not been a state for very long and was still considered a part of the frontier. Lewis and Ida Ellison had each grown up in the South to parents who had been slaves. The couple moved out west to Oklahoma hoping the lives of their children would be fueled with a sense of possibility in this state that was reputed for its freedom. Though the prejudices of Texas and Arkansas soon encroached upon Oklahoma, the open spaces and fighting spirit of the people whom Ellison grew up among did provide him with a relatively unbiased atmosphere.
The death of Lewis Ellison in 1917 left Ida, Ralph, and his younger brother Herbert quite poor. To support the family, Ida worked as a domestic and stewardess at the Avery Chapel Afro-Methodist Episcopal Church. The family moved into the parsonage and Ellison was brought into close contact with the minister's library. Literature was a destined medium for Ellison, whose father named him after Ralph Waldo Emerson and hoped that he would be a poet. His enthusiasm for reading was encouraged over the years of his youth by his mother bringing books and magazines home for him from the houses she cleaned. In addition, a black episcopal priest in the city challenged the white custom of barring blacks from the public library and the custom was overturned. Ellison's horizons were broadened to a world outside his own sheltered life in Oklahoma City, by the many books now available to him in the library.
During his teenage years, Ellison and his friends imagined being the eclectic combination of frontiersmen and Renaissance Men. The ideal they created gave them the courage to expect anything out of life. They believed that they had the ability and power to do whatever they wanted in life as well as or better than men of any race. Ellison first used this credo when he attacked the medium of music, participating in an intense music program for twelve years at the Frederick Douglass School in Oklahoma City. Although he received musical training in many instruments as well as theory, he held a high preference for the trumpet and was talented enough to obtain training from the conductor of the Oklahoma City Orchestra. Ellison took part in playing at many concerts, marches, bands, and celebrations for the town. During the midst of this study, he did not lose sight of his desire to be a Renaissance Man, however, and spent time playing football, working at small jobs, and experimenting in electronics.
In 1933, Ellison left Oklahoma and headed to the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama to study music, with the help of a scholarship he had won from the state of Oklahoma. One of his music teachers at the school was Hazel Harrison who would later introduce Ellison to Alain Locke, a New Negro thinker, who would lead Ellison to his writing career years later through connections to Langston Hughes and Richard Wright. At Tuskegee, Ellison excelled in his music program as well as taking a particular liking to his sociology and sculpture classes and the outside classroom which Alabama provided. Though not pleased with the desire of the state's people, black and white, to categorize him as he had never experienced at home, he did appreciate the chance to raise his own consciousness concerning the rest of the country he lived in. Literature would also influence his say at Tuskegee as he again delved into the expansive libraries at his disposal. T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," with its elusive lyricism would particularly influence him. Disappointed in the limited capacity of African-American literature at this point, Ellison practiced playing with the force of words as he had found Eliot to do. He would later use the experiences from Tuskegee and the injustices he encountered in the South to structure his writing of Invisible Man.
Due to financial problems, Ellison left Tuskegee after his third year. Introduced to Augusta Savage, a black sculptor in Harlem who liked his work, Ellison moved to Harlem, New York in 1936, still hoping to be able to return to school. Ellison lived in New York for most of the rest of his life. One of New York's lures was its energy and reputation of energy and freedom. Ellison enjoyed living in Harlem as it was a tremendously vibrant cultural center in the 1930s and 1940s. After living there for a year, however, he was forced to leave for several months which he found very upsetting. His mother died, and he attended the funeral in Dayton, Ohio. The return to New York though was promising because of a meeting with Richard Wright, who would have a large literary influence on Ellison. This meeting along with his inability to find a steady job playing the trumpet led Ellison to immerse himself more in his writing. His first book review is published in New Challenge entitled "Creative and Cultural Lag." Soon after, as his literary style began to take form, he wrote his first short story, "Heine's Bull." It was not published.
Although Ellison had a few writing successes, finding jobs and money was still extremely difficult during the Depression. Finally in 1938, Wright aided him in getting a job with the Federal Writers' Project. During this time, Ellison came into contact with many interesting interviewees from which he gleaned an interest in folklore and the distinctly African-American collection of rhymes, games, stories, and so on. The glimpse into personal lives enriched his knowledge of American culture and added to his stock of experiences learned in Oklahoma and Alabama. Much of his time was employed by the Project, but Ellison still found ways to submit materials to radical periodicals of the day, as influenced by the leftist Wright, such as Negro Quarterly, New Challenge, and New Masses. Between 1937 and 1944, he published over twenty book reviews. His reviews were often touched by a criticism of the lack in a "conscious protagonist" in order to embrace a text's political significance. This belief of Ellison's later led to his break with his beloved mentor, Richard Wright, as Ellison criticized the character of Bigger Thomas in Wright's masterpiece, Native Son. Still, the time Ellison wrote his reviews was very much a growing time for him. He published his first short stories, such as "Slick Gonna Learn", "The Birthmark", "King of the Bingo Game", and Flying Home". The early War years also gave Ellison the chance to edit Negro Quarterly and begin Invisible Man. Moving away from leftist politics and their champion, Wright, he also joins the Merchant Marine and many of his stories take on a wartime flair. In 1946, he marries Fanny McConnell. The quality of his writing reached masterful proportions by the end of World War II, as he had learned to incorporate the likes of Twain, Faulkner, Dostoevsky, and Hemingway into his work. His own voice arose in full power and in 1952 he published Invisible Man.
The years following this great work are not as prolific as the ones preceding. Some even say that after the publication of Invisible Man, Ellison became nearly invisible himself. However, at the time of publication, Ellison was uncertain of its acceptance and said another novel was in the works in case the first was not a success. This novel was never needed to prove Ellison's skill and the only other one which he produces is left unfinished at the time of his death from cancer in 1994, partly because of a fire destroying over 300 pages of an earlier manuscript in 1967. However, Ellison was visible in certain arenas around the country during the many years between 1952 and 1994. He published two acclaimed books of essays, Shadow and Act and Going to the Territory. Ellison also received many awards for his masterpiece, Invisible Man, and for his overall career during the second half of his life. These honors include the National Book Award, Russwarm Award, and the election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Lastly, Ellison spent a great deal of time teaching in various colleges. In 1970, he became the Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at New York University. Ellison continued until the day he died spreading and cultivating his vision of America and art: the conscious protagonist and the use of blackness to break categories instead of sustaining them.

01-05-2013, 09:56 PM

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African-American writer, teacher, whose novel Invisible Man (1952) gained a wide critical success. Ellison has been compared to such writers as Melville and Hawthorne. He has used racial issues to express universal dilemmas of identity and self-discovery but avoided taking a straightforward political stand. "Literature is colorblind," he once said. Many artists of the Black Arts movement rejected Ellison for his insistence that America be a land of cultural exchange and synergy. Talented in many fields, Ellison also was an accomplished jazz trumpeter and a free-lance photographer.

"I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids – and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me." (from The Invisible Man, prologue)

Ralph Waldo Ellison was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Lewis Ellision, his father, named his son after the famous American poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, telling that he was "raising this boy up to be a poet." Lewis, who had spent his youth as a soldier and as an entrepreneur, was a vendor of ice and coal; he died accidentally. Ellison admired his father greatly, seeing him as a hero. His mother, Ida Ellison, supported herself and her children by working as a domestic. Ida, whom close friends called "Brownie," belived in Socialism and was arrested several times for violating the segregation orders.
While growing up, Ellison began performing on the trumpet during high school years. Among his friends were the blues singer Jimmy Rushing and trumpeter Hot Lips Page. With the help of a music scolarship, Ellision studied at the Tuskegee Institute in Macon County, Alabama (1933-1936). However, the atmospere in Tuskegee was conservative and jazz was considered primitive. Ellision dropped out to pursue a career in the visual arts.
Ellison moved to New York City to study sculpture, but again abandoned his plans when a change meetings with Langston Hughes and Richard Wright led him to join Federal Writers' Project. He had earlier read the works of Ernest Hemingway, George Bernard Shaw, and T.S. Eliot, which impressed him deeply. Encouraged by Richard Wright he started to write essays, reviews and short stories for various periodicals. Ellison's stories appeared in New Masses and other publications. He became an editor of the Negro Quaterly and started to work on his novel.
From 1943 to 1945 Ellison served from 1943 to 1945 in the Merchant Marines as a cook, and wrote the first line of Invisible Man after the war ended. In 1946 he married his live-in partner Fanny McConnell Buford. During the 1940s, she worked as a secretary at the Astoria Press, the Parish Press and the Liberal Press. Her steady income secured the creation of Invisible Man. The early version of the novel started with a story about a black American pilot who is in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp, but soon Ellison found a more complex theme. "Once the book was done, it was suggested that the title would be confused with H.G. Wells's old novel, The Invisible Man, but I fought to keep my title because that's what the book was about.'' (Ellison in The New York Times, March 1, 1982)
Invisible Man (1952) tells a story of a nameless Afro-American man, who is losing his sense of identity in a world of prejudice and hostility. He has an underground cellar to solve his relationship with the rest of the society. In the dark there is no colors and to fill the space with light he burns 1,369 bulbs. Before becoming free from all illusions, the narrator makes a feverish, Dantesque journey through his experiences in a segregated community in South to the North. With the prologue's theme song, 'What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue,' Ellison suggests that jazz might represent a fusion of different cultural influences in American society, but it also serves as a key to the mind of the narrator. Education and class consciousness do not help him in his despair but adds to his difficulties. Finally he is ready to enter the world and says: "Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?" Invisible Man was rewarded with National Book Award in 1953. It was considered in 1965 in an inquiry of 200 authors and critics among the most important works after World War II. Ellison insisted that he wrote the novel thinking not of its sociological insights into injustice, but strictly of the art of writing. He was deeply interested in the works of Russian authors, with the most obvious influence being Feodor Dostoevskii's Notes from the Underground, and its parallel 'The Man Who Lived Underground' by Richard Wright. But unlike Dostoevskii's protagonist, Ellison's hero is not ready to yield and retire, he is not an outsider and his retreat is only temporary.
After Invisible Man, Ellison never published another novel but two collections of essays, Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986). He had more and more trouble meeting deadlines for even small jobs. Drinking too much, he suffered often from hangovers. Around 1950, Ellison discovered a new passion in his life: building sound equipment. "He was always for anything new," one of his friends recalled, "and he loved gadgets and devices and machines. He would stop his writing in a second if there was something fresh to explore in science or technology." Ellison's pieces on jazz drew on his experience as a musician and advocated the idea that in modern society musical traditions blend rapidly with each other. In a writing published in High Fidelity (1955) Ellison remarked that "The step from the spirituality of the spirituals to that of the Beethoven of the symphonies or the Bach of the chorales is not as vast as it seems."
Ellison lectured widely at various American colleges and universities, including Bard, Columbia, Rutgers, Yale, Chicago, and New York University, where he was Albert Schweitzer professor in the Humanites. Among Ellison's several awards are the Medal of Freedom (1969), Chevalier de l'Ordre des Artes et Lettres (1970). He received a fellowship to the National American Academy of Arts and Letters in Rome (1955-57), and was elected a vice-president of the American P.E.N. (1964), and a vice-president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1967). Ellison received in 1985 National Medal of Arts for Invisible Man and for his teaching at numerous universities.
Ellison's second novel, Juneteenth (1999), was planned as a trilogy, but was left unfinished at his death. Ellison's short stories were collected in Flying Home and Other Stories (1996). In 'A Party Down at the Square,' which did not appear during his lifetime, Ellison tells about lynching, using a young white boy as the narrator. 'Flying Home' was an Icarus story about a black aviator, whose plane has crashed in Georgia. 'King of the Bingo Game' proved wrong the claim that an unemployed black can win the jacpot if he gets the lucky number In Shadow and Act Ellison stated that "one of the obligations I took when I committed myself to the art and form of the novel was that of striving for the broadest range, the discovery and articulation of the most exalted values." Ellison died in New York, on April 16, 1994, of pancreatic cancer.
The posthumously published Juneteenth focused on two opposite characters: Adam Sunraider, a white, bigoted New England senator, and Alonzo "Daddy" Hickman, a black Baptist minister, former jazzman. When Hickman first tries to meet Sunraider, the Senators secretary stops him: '"Knows you," she said indignantly. "I've heard Senator Sunraider state that the only colored he knows is the boy who shines shoes at his golf club."' However, the two opposites turn out to have a paternal relationship. When Sunraider is shot, he summons Hickman to his bedside, which starts an exploration of their shared past. Ellison spent years reconstructing the novel, after a large section of the original work burned in 1967. Ellison's manuscript, some 2,000 pages, was edited by John Callahan.

رالف إليسون

إليسون - رالف(1914م-1994م). كاتب أمريكي أسود، اسمه رالف والدو إليسون ، ولد في مدينة أوكلاهوما. واشتهر بروايته الرجل الخفي (1952م)، والتي يكشف من خلالها عن المشكلات التي كان يتعرض لها السود في بحثهم عن الكرامة والمساواة والمكانة اللائقة في الولايات المتحدة الأمريكية. وهي تحكي قصة أحد السود من الولايات الجنوبية، كان يسعى إلى مكانة لائقة في المجتمع. كان يسمح للآخرين بتحديد دوره ومكانته. وفي الجنوب كان يقوم بذلك جده ووالداه والقادة البيض فقط، ولكن بعد طرده من كلية السود، ذهب إلى الشمال. وهناك سمع عن مفاهيم جديدة تحدد دوره في المجتمع، من الوطنيين السود ودعاة الشيوعية. ولكن كل هذه المفاهيم والمبادئ خيبت أمله. وخلال أعمال شغب قرر التخلي عن ذلك كله، وأدرك أن عليه استعمال عقله وماورثه من ثقافة لكي يطور مفاهيمه الخاصة عن دوره في الحياة.

والرواية عمل معقد يستعمل فيه إليسون رموزاً لتدل على مفاهيم عديدة. أحد هذه المفاهيم أن الأمريكيين البيض يرفضون "النظر" إلى السود باعتبارهم أفرادًا رئيسيين في المجتمع الأمريكي، ولذا فإن السود يصبحون "غير مرئيين". ومن ناحية أخرى يقترح إليسون أن على كل الأمريكيين أن يناضلوا حتى لا تضيع إنسانيتهم.

تتضمن كتابات إليسون عددًا من القصص القصيرة. كما نشر مجموعتين من الروايات وأعمالاً أخرى منها: الظل والعمل (1964م)؛ في الطريق إلى الأقاليم (1986م).

رالف السون
- لا شك انه عانى من العنصرية لكن الاهم انه فقد والده وهو صغير.
- من مواليد عام 1914
- مات ابوه عام 1917 من حادث سقوط كوب ثلج كبير عليه وهو يعمل وكان حينها السون ينظر اليه .

يتيم الا ب في سن الثالثة.

01-06-2013, 11:21 AM

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Jacques the Fatalist and His Master

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by Denis Diderot, France, (1713-1784)

'Your Jacques is a tasteless mishmash of things that happen, some of them true, others made up, written without style and served up like a dog's breakfast.' Jacques the Fatalist is Diderot's answer to the problem of existence. If human beings are determined by their genes and their environment, how can they claim to be free to want or do anything? Where are Jacques and his Master going? Are they simply occupying space, living mechanically until they die, believing erroneously that they are in charge of their Destiny? Diderot intervenes to cheat our expectations of what fiction should be and do, and behaves like a provocative, ironic and unfailingly entertaining master of revels who finally show why Fate is not to be equated with doom. In the introduction to this brilliant new translation, David Coward explains the philosophical basis of Diderot's fascination with Fate and shows why Jacques the Fatalist pioneers techniques of fiction which, two centuries on, novelists still regard as experimental. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe.Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Jacques the Fatalist and his Master (French: Jacques le fataliste et son maître) is a novel by Denis Diderot, written during the period 1765-1780. The first French edition was published posthumously in 1796, but it was known earlier in Germany, thanks to Schiller's partial translation, which appeared in 1785 and was retranslated into French in 1793, as well as Mylius's complete German version of 1792.

Plot</SPAN>

The main subject of the book is the relationship between the valet Jacques and his master, who is never named. The two are traveling to a destination the narrator leaves vague, and to dispel the boredom of the journey Jacques is compelled by his master to recount the story of his loves. However, Jacques's story is continually interrupted by other characters and various comic mishaps. Other characters in the book tell their own stories and they, too, are continually interrupted. There is even a "reader" who periodically interrupts the narrator with questions, objections, and demands for more information or detail. The tales told are usually humorous, with romance or sex as their subject matter, and feature complex characters indulging in deception.
Jacques's key philosophy is that everything that everything that happens to us down here, whether for good or for evil, has been written up above" ("tout ce qui nous arrive de bien et de mal ici-bas était écrit là-haut"), on a "great scroll" that is unrolled a little bit at a time. Yet Jacques still places value on his actions and is not a passive character. Critics such as J. Robert Loy have characterized Jacques's philosophy as not fatalism but determinism.[1]
The book is full of contradictory characters and other dualities. One story tells of two men in the army who are so much alike that, though they are the best of friends, they cannot stop dueling and wounding each other. Another concerns Father Hudson, an intelligent and effective reformer of the church who is privately the most debauched character in the book. Even Jacques and his master transcend their apparent roles, as Jacques proves, in his insolence, that his master cannot live without him, and therefore it is Jacques who is the master and the master who is the servant.
The story of Jacques's loves is lifted directly from Tristram Shandy, which Diderot makes no secret of, as the narrator at the end announces the insertion of an entire passage from Tristram Shandy into the story. Throughout the work, the narrator refers derisively to sentimental novels and calls attention to the ways in which events develop more realistically in his book. At other times, the narrator tires of the tedium of narration altogether and obliges the reader to supply certain trivial details.

Literary significance & criticism

The critical reception of the book has been mixed. French critics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries dismissed it as derivative of Rabelais and Sterne, as well as unnecessarily bawdy. It made a better impression on the German Romantics, who had had the opportunity to read it before their French counterparts did (as outlined above). Schiller held it in high regard and recommended it strongly to Goethe, who also enjoyed it. Friedrich Schlegel referred to it positively in his critical fragments (3, 15) and in the Athaneum fragments (201). It formed something of an ideal of Schlegel's concept of wit. Stendhal, while acknowledging flaws in Jacques, nevertheless considered it a superior and exemplary work. In the twentieth century, critics such as Leo Spitzer and J. Robert Loy tended to see Jacques as a key work in the tradition of Cervantes and Rabelais, focused on celebrating diversity rather than providing clear answers to philosophical problems.

Denis Diderot (1713-1784) was among the greatest writers of the Enlightenment, and in "Jacques the Fatalist", he brilliantly challenged the artificialities of conventional French fiction of his age. Riding through France with his master, the servant Jacques appears to act as though he is truly free in a world of dizzying variety and unpredictability. Characters emerge and disappear as the pair travel across the country, and tales begin and are submerged by greater stories, to reveal a panoramic view of eighteenth-century society. But, while Jacques seems to choose his own path, he remains convinced of one philosophical belief: that every decision he makes, however whimsical, is wholly predetermined. Playful, picaresque and comic, Diderot's novelis a compelling exploration of Enlightment philosophy. Brilliantly original in style, it is one of the greatest precursors to post-modern literature.