Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

 Invisible Man was published in 1952 by Random House. It went on to win the year’s National Book Award and ranks high on many best English-language novel lists.

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).