WES:
Ralph Ellison’s book, Invisible
Man, was one I often heard talked about years ago when I was in college. It
was reputed to be a good descriptor of the black experience at that time in the
United States. I never read it until now and probably never would have had I
not picked it up at the “Buy two, get one free” table at Barnes and Noble when
selecting last month’s reading. I thought it might be a good sequitur to last
month’s book about black crime and punishment in the South. I also thought how
neat it might be to compare the recent black experience as expressed in Stevenson’s
book with what was going on in race relations in America shortly after World
War II. As I proceeded in reading this book, I must concede that I think that
little has really changed. Human nature, universal as it is, still effects
things in similar ways. The blacks see their condition as inhibited by real racial
hurdles while whites, predominant in numbers in this society, exploit their
status as a sort of natural order of things. These factors continually surface
in the conditions depicted in Ellison’s work.
The unnamed narrator of the novel, born in the Deep
South, begins with great idealism for learning and improving society while one always
accepts responsibility for personal failures. But he quickly finds that in the
white world, things are quite different and conditions are extensively stacked
against any black man who steps out of his expected role. This is seen
immediately when the youngster, just applauded for his scholarly high school
speech, is asked to repeat it at a local political party function. But since
he’s to be there anyway, he is inserted into a “battle royal” where, after
being beaten to a pulp in a gang fight on stage, is asked to make his speech to
the all-white city fathers while bloodied with sweat dripping down. Gaining approval
to enter a prestigious black university, he does well scholastically but trips
up severely in his school sponsored job when chauffeuring a rich northern
sponsor and taking him where the black folk “really live”. Dr. Bledsoe, the
black dean of the university casts him from the school for acceding to Mr.
Norton’s, the rich benefactor, requests. As Bledsoe sees it, the black man’s
role is, “Why, the dumbest black bastard in the cotton patch knows that the
only way to please the white man is to tell him a lie!” And that is exactly
what Dr. Bledsoe has done his whole career – tell lies and say yes at every
occasion until he was telling them what was what and masking anything hurtful
to maintain the status quo.
This theme of mistakenly doing the wrong thing is
constant throughout. The narrator moves to New York where he time after time is
thrown into situations where no one tells him what to do or what is expected
yet he is required to perform actions that constantly trip him up. It is almost
as if he is a cog in a machine where it is never worth the effort to tell him
what is really expected. Instead he fails each time believing something he did
was wrong when it is the failure of the white man to really see him as a
thinking, feeling being, worthy of mentorship or camaraderie or even the effort
to tell him how to do the task right. Even Lucius Brockway, the black
indispensable man working the critical machinery of the paint factory that everyone
depends on fails to instruct him properly and this lapse causes much pain when
the inevitable disaster occurs. Even after spending some time in what sounds
like an iron lung getting intermittent shock treatments, he’s fired from the
job after one day and no one tells him what’s happened and how his health might
be impacted. Instead, the remainder of the book, he experiences sort of a brain
fog at times that seems to affect his thinking and even what he is seeing,
especially at night.
Finally becoming desperate for work in order to return
and finish college, the narrator becomes a community organizer! Caught up in a
local elderly eviction process where he gives an extemporaneous speech that
moves people to action, he is hired by a group that calls itself “The
Brotherhood”. It is really a thinly veiled communist organization which seeks
to inspire events to bring about social change. What that consists of is never
made clear. Our narrator is given a pseudonym and becomes quite prominent in
the Harlem black community. Again, he is never told exactly what the score is –
he is only supposed to organize the black neighborhoods for whatever and
whenever the Brotherhood committee needs them to do something. Once again, he
screws up moving off to raise anger over a local black man’s murder by the
police and again is demoted for a failure that he never quite understands. This
time, however, the whole district erupts into a full scale riot beyond anyone’s
control except lots of police with guns.
Throughout these sundry experiences, our narrator
discovers that no one seems to really see him or really interact as if they
consider him a real human. He arrives at this conclusion one night when he
copies the zoot suit guys and dons some sun glasses and a wide-brimmed hat
while moving about. He finds himself able to go anywhere and interact with
people who should know him but see only his outfit. Beyond that he begins to
believe he really is the equivalent of being invisible. During the riots, he is
nicked by a bullet in the head and seems to go mad, literally disappearing down
a manhole into a blocked off abandoned basement which he makes his home.
Believing it to be the perfect hideaway for an invisible man, he moves about at
night and brags of stealing electricity from the city for the 1,369 lights he
has serendipitously installed on his ceiling.
The book also highlights some of the stereotypes of
blacks. We meet Jim Trueblood and hear his incest story where he is excoriated
by his own black society but “help” is lavished on him by the white society,
perhaps an evidence of white guilt. We see the black war veterans visiting the
brothel where the highly educated vet is at the same demeaning level as any
other farm hand veteran. He threatens violence to the white man and his
chauffeur as examples of white privilege. Homer Barbie, the black preacher,
extols the white founder of the University while Dr. Bledsoe lies to cover the
faults. Mary Rambo, the black mother figure, takes pity on our narrator when he
is down and out and, without question, presents her Christian charity. There’s
Rinehart, the zoot suit man who one minute is a drug dealer and pimp, the next
a preacher in a skid row church. Finally, there is “Ras the Exhorter” who
recognizes the Brotherhood as a user of the blacks and succeeds in causing a
real riot that costs him his life.
The final irony of the book is the discovery by the
narrator what his grandfather, an ex-slave, meant on his deathbed when he told
the narrator’s father, “Son, after I’m gone I want you to keep up the good
fight. I never told you, but our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my
born days, a spy in the enemy’s country ever since I gave up my gun back in the
Reconstruction. Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I want you to overcome
‘em with yesses. undermine ‘em with grins, agree ‘em to death and destruction,
let ‘em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open.” The black man hates
himself for what he has to do to survive but he finds that rage at his
circumstances is less productive than lies. Our narrator tries both and ends up
withdrawing, convinced it is easier to dwell in real invisibility away from
society in a lost basement.
I liked this book but it was hard going at first and difficult
to get into for the first 200 pages. Some of the narrative was a bit confusing,
lacking adequate description, but it was an early effort for the author. It
makes me see, mostly in the glass darkly, what the blacks have to face living in
white-dominated American culture. It also seems applicable to many other
cultures, maybe even the Muslim culture where their very scriptures tell them
to smile and lie when they are in the minority. I rate this book as a 3 on my
scale of 1-10 (1 as best).
ALLISON:
The lateness of the blog is due entirely to my inability
to get it together, but if I haven’t been writing about The Invisble Man over the past two months, I have been reading and rereading
and thinking and talking about it
nonstop. You can tell how much I care about a book by the amount devastation I
inflict on its form. The constant stuffing into my bag, or coat pocket, scribbling
into, eating over, and sleeping on top of has destroyed my book. It’s missing
half a jacket, splotched and stained to a shameful degree, with complicated
system of origami dog-ears bloating its girth. I’ve wrecked it, because it’s so
dang good.
Good
is not the word. Astonishing, really. There is much to be said about the
narrative, a tight first person point of view that catapults the action. The
narrator addresses the reader as a confidant, or perhaps more accurately, as a portion of the narrator’s own psyche. Ellison does something I’m hard pressed
to find comparison to within other novels I’ve read, although I am familiar
with the process happening in my own head: constant questioning. The questions
are often direct, and it is important to note they are rarely rhetorical—they
are in earnest, desiring response despite their impossible nature, sometimes dreadfully
implored, and mostly asking: “Why is this happening? What is happening?”
To me, this is a book about rules. All the
various spoken or unspoken, apparent or invisible rules that one must somehow anticipate,
incorporate, validate, mitigate, or rail against in order to win or lose in any
given situation. Even as I write this, I realize there could be no broader,
less explicit statement. What’s to be won? And don’t we all do this? Yes, we
do. But the rules are different for different groups of people based largely on
stratifying, yet otherwise arbitrary factors like skin color, gender,
socioeconomic and educational indicators like accents and modes of speech. In
order to navigate various situations involving different social groups requires
a special knowledge of what are the desirable traits depending on the scenario.
Linguists have a term that has become a catchall for this behavior: code
switching. Code switching, in its original linguistic use, is the practice of bi
or multilingual people switching between languages in the same speech event. In
America, we give code switching derogatory titles like Spanglish or Ebonics
(although African American Vernacular English has been argued as its own
distinct language), and misrepresent the practice as an inability to fully grasp Standard English. But linguists (and any
code switching individual) will tell you that code switching is not to be
confused with ignorance. Some words are more explicit, more expressive, more
accurate and untranslatable in one language over another. Those that code
switch are using a third language to communicate with precision, and have a wider
base from which to articulate ideas.
The
term code switching has been borrowed from other social science disciplines to
include adjusting one’s outward mannerism to navigate various cultural terrains.
The narrator of this book is constantly barraged with a hyperawareness of his
behavior/appearance juxtaposed against those he is surrounded by. Indeed, he
qualifies and questions the dynamics of every group, be they impoverished
“peasant” black versus the college-educated black, or southern black versus
northern urban black, the black of the Brotherhood versus those of Ras’ violent
uprising, the rich white wives of the Brotherhood versus the white Brotherhood
leaders, the old versus the young, and so on with infinite variations. In all
of these encounters, someone is explaining to the narrator how he must behave for whatever motivation, as
simple as existence, as profound as world upheaval. We could reverse those,
though, couldn’t we? As profound as existence, as simple as world upheaval. The
great success of this book is exposing the complex digestion and translation of
all this input. It seems a hopeless, maddening occupation, and most
importantly, one NOT DEMANDED of all of us. It is not important for whites to think
about how they are impacting and representing themselves across all the strata
the narrator of this book considers. Or, it absolutely should be important, but it doesn’t have the same stake.
Simple
example: When I was pregnant and throughout new motherhood, I would ride the
train through the city and look at all the people with near spiritual awe,
thinking of how all human life begins the same, and how every one of my fellow passengers
was incubated in a womb of another human. How complex and amazing this
assemblage of nucleotides into proteins into cells into consciousness is. If
every infant is born with a scaffolding of warmth, food, touch, and eye contact,
(which they are not) they should develop graced by the knowledge that who they
are is perfect. My son was brand new and perfect, yet I began to worry about raising
him into a “good man”. I defined “good man” as one who doesn’t rape or use his
strength to lord over those he views as weaker, someone who encounters women
with humanity and respect. My son’s father probably has different priorities
and the idea of his mother loading these concerns on our innocent infant would
likely horrify him. But these are the potentialities of men that I must guard against because I am
defined as a woman and it is important that I know how to navigate a world
where such violations prevail. However because I am white, and my son is white,
never did I imagine I should raise him to know he will be judged and feared for
the color of his skin (maybe I should?). Never did I think I must raise him how
to talk to police so that he doesn’t get shot, or how to fight against an
education, economic, and political system that works hard to exclude him, and
hundreds of other highly specific worries that seem looney when looking at a
fresh, unencumbered baby. But babies grow up and the world begins to tell them
things about themselves, begins to teach them the rules. I was walking down the
street with my now six-year-old and a man whispered something so violent and
evil and dehumanizing into my ear as I passed that I stopped, my hand still in my son’s, and I turned on
him, screeching, “You are a vile piece of shit. I am with my son. My son!” The
outburst was embarrassing and extreme, and not exactly what I wanted to say,
but I had had enough. This kind of threatening catcalling varies in degrees of
grossness, and happens to me on a weekly basis.
But in front of my kid, that was the last straw. I
said “I am with my son,” because
had I been alone, I might have attacked him, but also because this man had now forced
me to teach my son that I won’t be intimidated by monsters. I had a split
second to make a choice, and I decided I’d rather risk the potential physical
threat to both me and my child, than bear the successful landing of such
cowardly, ugly power that this person believed he possessed because he was a
man, and I was not. It was a scene not unlike the opening the book where our
narrator beats a man in the street for calling him an offensive name after an
innocent collision. I felt such rage and venom, that it certainly might have
progressed that way if my son hadn’t been there, or if the man had done
something other than stare through me, as I screamed and spit in his face. What
the narrator asks of that scene mirrors exactly the thoughts as they spilled
from my head:
“Who was responsible for that near murder—I? I don’t
think so, and I refuse it. I won’t buy it. You can’t give it to me. He bumped me, he insulted me. Shouldn’t he, for his own personal safety,
have recognized my hysteria, my ‘danger potential?’ He, let us say, was lost in
a dream world—which, alas, is only too real!—and didn’t he rule me out of it? And if he had yelled for a policeman,
wouldn’t I have been taken for the
offending one? Yes, yes, yes! Let me agree with you, I was the irresponsible
one; for I should have used my knife to protect the higher interests of
society. Some day that kind of foolishness will cause us tragic trouble. All
dreams and sleepwalkers must pay the price, and even the invisible victim is
responsible for the fate of all.”
This passage is a great
example of the interrogation the reader encounters with the text. All of the
questions compel us to weigh in. We cannot help it. A question triggers
something in our brains that a statement does not. It automatically inspires
our own inner debate, or insecurity, if even for a second. And in the case of
this narrator, we are joined to his perspective, which I believe is one of
bewilderment. The bewilderment I recognized in my son as he watched me scream
at that stranger. “Why? Why is this happening?” For some of us, this
bewilderment is not a state in which we are comfortable, because for white
America, systematic and institutional racism is not bewildering. The privileges gained by the white population are
so propagandized as natural “freedoms” and “human rights” that they are the
opposite of confusing, rendering the racist doctrines that build and maintain
the platform from which whites can feel so secure in our fundamental
entitlement invisible.
So
far I’ve avoided the most salient observation of this book because I feel inadequately
equipped to address it. Ellison began writing Invisible Man in 1947, but reading it today is like no time has
passed. This book exists completely in the present. And that is humbling and
disturbing and important to consider. In the book club we’ve read many “period”
novels thus far; The Moonstone, The
Beautiful and the Damned, and The
Thin Man, that have had racist, outdated sentiments that have disturbed me
to encounter. As a white woman, how frankly stupid I would be to think: “Well,
things must be better because I am offended by this language and we don’t
casually write racism like this anymore, thank goodness.” Meanwhile, all the unrest, the political
posturing, the manipulation and maddening rules of navigation of Invisible Man are as present as ever.
I loved this book. I will
probably return to it many, many times throughout my life. Thanks for choosing
it Dad! 1 out of 10 (1 being the highest).
