Reflecting and Distorting Race- General Presentation of Invisible Man

CONTENTS

Foreword……………………………………………………………..
Redefining Historical Memory…………………………………......
Reflecting and Distorting Race- General Presentation of Invisible Man
Shaping One’s Identity: the Social and Political Background……..
Images of Blackness vs. Stereotyped Roles…………………………
Embracing One’s Culture- the Way to Freedom…………………..

Foreword

Throughout the years, America has been considered to be a place of struggle between ideals and reality, a place where there is a deep and abiding unanswered promise that in various forms has political, racial, religious, moral, economic, and cultural meaning. One way to look back on American history is as the struggle between binaries and complicated transgressions of those binaries: the struggle to resolve or complicate a bi-racial definition of black/white America; the struggle to resolve the tension between union and otherness; the premise of American progress built on the binary of civilization/savagery.Whether it is race anxieties, slavery, fears of cultural mixing and cultural erasure, genocide, segregation, interracial communion, or the entanglements of economic globalism and expansionism, themes of difference and intercultural tension are found throughout the American modernist and post-modernist novels, and manifest themselves in many different ways.

In this paper I have chosen to discuss the African-American other, black identity the way it appears in Ralph Ellison’s rewarding piece of literature, Invisible Man. Naturally, it may seem strange that I decided to focus my critical analysis exclusively on a single novel, but this choice was not made out of an attempt to simplify the work necessary for writing this paper. I feared that by choosing to compare Invisible Man with other African-American piece of writing the analysis of the novel would fail to be as thorough as I wished it to be, and certain aspects in the novel woudl get lost in the comparison, as I would have had to focus especially on the elements that can be the subject of a comparison.

Another reason I have decided to focus only on Invisible Man was the fact that the novel stands out among the works of Ellison’s contemporaries and is characterized by a vision that that is unique during the first half of the twentieth century. What Ellison did was bring onto the scene a new kind of black protagonist, one at odds with the characters of the leading black novelist at the time, Richard Wright. If Wright’s characters were uneducated, angry, and inarticulate- the consequences of a society that oppressed them- Ellison’s Invisible Man was educated, self- aware, articulate. For Ellison, unlike the protest writers, America did offer a context for discovering authentic personal identity, and it also created a space for African-Americans to invent their own culture.

Moreover, in his novel Ellison proved that he understood that the aim of art is not social comment, and he refused to exemplify the suffering of his own race in Invisible Man. In addition, he proved not to have a limited and prejudiced vision, and he emphasized not only the white people’s stereotypes about African Americans, but also the stereotypes that exist within the black community. This was the idea that attracted me most when reading the novel and made me understand that I was standing in front of a unique piece of writing.

In addition, another source of inspiration in writing this paper was a fragment from Invisible Man itself that I came across before even reading the novel, a fragment that I will reproduce below:

“All my life I had been looking for something and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction, and even self-contradictory. I was naïve. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer It took me a long time (…) to achieve a realization everyone else appeared too have been born with: That I am nobody myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man. ”

The fragment, that I later found that was taken from Chapter One, had such a powerful effect on me due to the fact that there is no mentioning of race, blackness, or racial conflict, the way we would have expected when confronted with a text belonging to a representative of a racial minority. The fragment gives no hint of having an African-American author, and if I had not known by whom it was written, I would have had no trouble in considering it belongs to a white author. The main idea behind this fragment is the fact that the quest for identity is universal, irrespective of skin colour. Ellison saw the predicament of blacks in America as a metaphor for the universal human challenge of finding a viable identity in a chaotic and sometimes indifferent world. Ellison understood that the task of every writer is “to tell us about the unity of American experience beyond all considerations of class, race, or religion”, the way he himself confessed, and in this Ellison was ahead of his time and out of step with the literary and political climates of both black and white America.

In fact, the idea that the reader is left with after reading Invisible Man is that in Ellison’s novel ethnicity is not separative, but it embraces the mutual flow of influences. In fact, after finishing the novel, I thought that to some extent Ellison’s novel is a literary expression of what Tzvetan Todorov wrote in Race, Writing and Culture:

“Racism is the name given to a type of behaviour which consists in the display of contempt or aggressiveness toward other people on the account of physical differences (other than those of sex) between them and oneself. It should be noted that this difference does not contain the word “race” and this observation leads to the first surprise in this area which contains many: whereas racism is a well-attested social phenomenon, race itself does not exist.”

Despite the fact that the focus of this paper is one single novel, I tried not to present it completely disrupted from the body of the African-American literary creation, as I considered that it was paramount to understand the place that the novel holds in history in order to grasp its true meaning. This is why Chapter One focuses on the very evolution of African-American fiction, from the slave narratives to present day fiction.

In writing this chapter I benefited from the help of various critical perspectives that allowed me to apprehend things that I would have otherwise failed to understand. The first step in writing this first chapter was getting acquainted with The Signifying Monkey by Henry Gates Jr, which proved to be extremely useful as it offered me an insight into the beginning of the black writing activity and the motivations that propped its emergence. Knowing that I was dealing with the literature of a racial minority I was aware of the fact that these writings were born out of a completely different motivation from that that gave birth to white fiction and I felt it was necessary to show this in my paper. This is why Gates’ book proved to be extremely useful and the trope of the Talking Book proved how subjected cultures develop a way of using the "masters'" language in order to retain or gain some independence, or voices of their own.

In addition to The Signifying Monkey, two very useful books proved to be The Cambridge Companion to the African-American Novel edited by Maryemma Graham and Race, Writing and Difference, edited by the same Henry Gates Jr. Although this present paper is by no means a historical account of facts, the first chapter attempted to render a certain chronological order of the stages in the development of African-American fiction, not precisely of a historical bias but because such an approach would better present the evolution of the perception of racial issues. Thus, from the Harlem Renaissance, to the Civil Rights Movement and finally to writers such as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker the role of racism in African-American novels changed. They began as essays that denounced slavery, but slowly they became novels about the universal themes of identity and love.

When writing Chapter One, I was helped by several works about African-American literature that gave me the opportunity to get as ample a picture of this fiction as possible. However, since the focus of my paper was not the general evolution of black literature, the next step in writing this paper was a general presentation of the novel that was under discussion. It was my firm belief that I could not speak about African-American identity in Invisible Man without presenting the background against which this issue is presented in the novel. Thus, the second chapter is a brief review of the techniques, themes, and symbols that Ellison employs in the novel, with special emphasis on the themes of invisibility and identity that are to be mentioned all throughout the present paper.

However, starting with this second chapter I was confronted with a difficulty that was to emerge when writing the following chapters as well, mainly the lack of critical sources. Although I believe that I have grasped the meaning of Invisible Man, reading critical opinions on the novel would have helped me in getting perhaps an even wider picture and transposing it in my paper. When writing these chapters I was always preoccupied that my view on the novel is to some extent narrowed by the lack of critical references. Moreover, I feared that my opinions lacked validity without the support of critical references. Yet, it was a risk I was willing to take and I hoped that despite losing critical references, my paper would gain in originality.

Thus, I went on with Chapter Three that aimed to achieve a presentation of the social and political background against which the events in Invisible Man are projected. Believing that every man is a victim of circumstances, I decided to provide an overall presentation of the Great Depression, the American labour movement and of communism. All these are issues that changed the face of America in the first decades of the twentieth century, and influenced the lives of all American citizens, including those of the Black minority.

All these general aspects being presented, I considered it was appropriate to pass to the actual analysis of the different images of blackness that appear throughout the novel. Chapter Four is a discussion on the instances of African-American individuality and of the conceptions about the right way to be a black man in America, conceptions that have their origins both inside and outside the black community. Focusing on the main character, I tried to present his odyssey to self-hood, his journey from ignorance to knowledge in order to grasp his true identity independently of the others’ beliefs. Once again I have to mention that since there was no critical biography available on this particular topic, I had to rely exclusively on the text itself, trying to make best use of every single sentence that was relevant for the subject under discussion.

Consequently, my analysis followed the narrator of Invisible Man observing the order of events the way it appears in the novel, emphasizing his innocence while still home in the South and his gradual questioning of himself and everyone else. Throughout the novel, the narrator finds himself passing through a series of communities, from the Liberty Paints plant to the Brotherhood, each being a microcosm that tried to endorse a different idea on how blacks should behave in society. Chapter Four tries to focus not only on the hero, but also on these communities that he goes through and their representatives, in order to accomplish a complete picture of all the different types of characters that the narrator comes in contact with, and thus with the different types of black identity.

I have chosen to lay emphasis on characters such as Bledsoe, or Ras the Exhorter as their identities were created on the basis of certain defense strategies for African-Americans, theories about the supposed right way to be black in America, trying to outline how blacks should act in accordance with this theory. Ultimately, however, Invisible Man finds that such theories only counter stereotype with stereotype, and replace one limiting role with another. The main idea that seemed to be the conclusion of almost every fact analyzed in Chapter Four seems to be that racial identity in multi-cultural America is damaged not so much by the prejudiced thinking of the dominant culture, but by the continuous effort of the minority cultures to try to establish for themselves a pattern of behaviour.

After finishing Chapter Four I was left with the inevitable feeling that there still was something left to say, the feeling that the picture of African-American individuality was not complete yet. Thinking about what was it that was missing, I came to realize that somebody’s identity is not shaped only by circumstances and other people’s behaviour and prejudiced thinking, but also by the baggage of traditions an folklore that one is born with.

Consequently, I decided that it was necessary to dedicate the last chapter of my paper to the analysis of the folk elements that Ellison introduces all throughout his novel. The novel Invisible Man is actually a living proof of the influence that black folklore had on Ellison, and moreover, a tribute that the writer brings to the African-American culture.What Ellison did was in fact establish the place of Black culture in American society and prove the prospects that accompany marginal life in the modern world.

Practically, this tradition includes the blues, spirituals, sermons of southern ministers, folktales, street language, colloquial speech of southern blacks like Jim Trueblood, the wisdom of Mary Rambo and the traditional play upon words. I considered it was paramount to lay emphasis on all these elements, as it was for the first time in the history of African-American fiction that a writer showed that black culture and sensibility was far from the down trodden, unsophisticated picture presented by writers, sociologists and politicians, both black and white. He proved instead that blacks had created their own traditions, rituals, and a history that formed a cohesive and complex culture that was the source of a full sense of identity.

On the whole, this paper I nothing more than a brief analysis of what I considered to be the African-American identity the way it is presented in by Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man, with all the elements that shape it: social and political context, stereotypes, ideologies, and folk traditions.

It is commonsensical that one cannot claim an exhaustive treatment of this challenging topic, especially as it would have been more interesting to see how the ideas found in the novel reflect in Ellison’s essays in Shadow and Act and Going to the Territory. However, as no other work by Ellison could be found in our country and in the absence of critical opinions on the novel itself, the paper closely observes the text of the novel, which I used as support and evidence for the statements I made.

Thus, this paper tried to show the different facets of what has been labeled as “racial identity” or “racial other”, with exclusive reference to Invisible Man. Half a century after the publication of this novel, I think we can all agree that Ellison’s view that the self- consciousness of a minority culture can be overcome, that such a culture can realize the opportunities foe greater fulfillment that exist in borderland experience still hold true.

1. Redefining Historical Memory

Until well after mid twentieth century, little attention was granted to the African- American novel by mainstream criticism. In fact, the way the editor of The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel, Maryemma Graham, noticed, the earliest studies of such novels laid emphasis on the historical and documentary evidence of the black community and “evaluated the novel in terms of the prevailing formalist paradigms” (Graham, 2). However, throughout the decades, due to the contribution of authors such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, or Toni Morrison the critics understood that the Afro-American novel is not only limited to portraying a certain community and its characteristics and aspirations, but that it is capable to represent general human concerns, multiple cultural issues and that it can engage readers across the economic and racial line.

But instead of simply enumerating the writers and their works, perhaps it would be better to take a closer look at each stage in the development of the African American literature and the changes it brought in the structure and thematic of the novel. What has been generally acknowledged as the starting point of the African American novel was the slave narrative, born out of an attempt to deliver the black man from the silence he was condemned to by his white master. Having in mind Hume’s statement that writing is the ultimate sign of difference between animal and human, we can undoubtedly understand that the narrative was the instrument by means of which the slave became the former slave, the brute became the human being. Thus the black writers were “implicitly signifying upon the figure of the chain itself” (Gates, Introduction, 12). The slavery the African Americans had to endure was even more profound than the mere physical bondage, and what the first slave narratives tried to do was “to write the slaves out of slavery”, the way Gates Jr. put it.