Black, WUTI ~ @ ) )

and in Color
ESSAYS ON
AM ERICAN LlTERATU RE
AND CULTURE
Hortense J. Spillers
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London
Hortensej. Spillers is the Frederickj. Whiton Professor of English ilt Cornell University. She is the
editor of Compamtive American lifentities: Race, Sex, and Nationality ill tile Modem Text and coeditor
of COl/jl/ring: Black Women, Fiction, (/111 Literary Tradition.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
2003 by Tbe University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2003
Printed In the United States of America
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ISBN (cloth): 0-226-76979-8
ISBN (paper): 0-226-76980-1
Credits for prior publication are induded with the notes to individual chapters .
. Library of Congress Cataloglng-in-Publication Data
Spillers, Hortense].
Black, white, and in color: essays on American literature and culture I Hortense]. Spillers.
p. cm.
Includes index.
IS.BN 0-226-76979-8 (doth) -ISIIN 0-226-76980-1 (pbk.)
I. American literature-African American authors-History and criticism. 2. American
literature-20th century-History and criticism. 3. African Americans in literature.
4. Human skin color in literature. 5. Race relations in literature. 6. Whites in literature.
7. Racism In literature. 8. Race in literature. I. Title.
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FOR I RA AN D "M ISS PETI E"
AN 0 ALL TH E LOST LOVES:
DAD, BROTHER, GRAYLING,
AND MICHAEL
(IN MEMORIAM)
Ellison's "Usable Past":
Toward a Theory of Myth
The occasion that invites this piece recalls for me certain decisive memo-
ries. Professor Elizabeth Phillips, my first instructor in American literature
at the University of Memphis, returned one of my student themes one af-
ternoon with this comment: "Why be content with the lightning bug when
you can have the lightning?1I I have no idea what I had written-lame, I
suppose, in any case-but I saved the comment, might have even stored it
in my dreams} and now, over three decades later, I know precisely what she
meant. These notes on an American theme are written with Professor Phil-
lips and the lightning in mind.
One of the critical strategies of that first course was to determine to what
extent the American idiom had been driven toward precision since Sister
Carrie. That nearly half a century separates Dreiser's first novel and Invisible
Man is not so impressive an observation, except that between Dreiser and
Ellison a radically new literary reality asserts itself, basically combative to-
ward the past. Gass's notes on Borges's prose-its leanness, excision, lack of
ornamental dress1-define in part the canon of taste that stamps modernist
practice with the perSistence of dogma. Accompanying these profound
changes in aesthetic surface was the broader implication of shifts of angle
in the very vision of art, or more precisely, the philosophical bases for a
technology of text (perhaps most eloquently expressed in Borges's fictions
of intangibility) conduced toward another kind of artistic performance
which Ortega y Gasset locates in the theme of alienation:
Analyzing the new style, one finds in it certain closely connected ten-
dencies: it tends toward the dehumanization of art; to an avoidance of
living forms ensuring that a work of art should be nothing but a work
of art; to considering art simply as play and nothing else: to an essen-
tial irony; to an avoidance of all falsehood; and ftnally, towards an art
which makes no spiritual or transcendental claims whatsoever.
2
6,
Chapter One 66
\Ve have no exact name yet for "dehumanization" as a systematic moue of
l'xprcssion; perhaps "modernism" is the best we can do, hut for sure, this
deviant attitude toward the human problematic-this flight from it that
Urtega determines as the goal of modernism-pursues a structural reality
even anticipates it, that consigns language itself to an area of the
enal, unprivileged among other things. (f language is an act of conceal-
ment, condemned to obfuscation, then we should not be surprised, even if
disappointed, that it talks to itself, about itself, imprisoned in an appropri-
ate logological
Ellison apparently saw what was coming at the end of the forties, when
he completed Invisible Man, and responded in his acceptance speech of
the National Book Award with characteristic rebellion. Wishing to avoid
the "hard-boiled" idiomatic understatement of Hemingway-its "clipped,
monosyllabic prose" -he found that, when compared to the rich babble of
idiomatic expression around [him], a language full of imagery, gesture, and
rhetorical canniness, it was embarrassingly austere . ..J. His decision, then, to
cast the grammar of the text in a mode contrastive to understatement is
complemented by his refusal of the naturalist disposition:
Thus to see America with an awareness of its rich diversity and its al-
most magical flUidity and freedom, I was forced to conceive of a novel
unburdened by the narrow naturalism which has led after so many tri-
umphs to the final and unrelieved despair which marks so much of our
current fiction. (NNA, 198)
In repudiating the doctrine of naturalism, Ellison turned away from the in-
tluence of Richard Wright, the dominating presence of his apprenticeship
(NNA, 198), and Dreiser, who had fathered the naturalist tradition among
U.S. writers.
While Ellison would be the last to deny that his own literary procedure
has influenced by the dogmatizers of European modernism, he would
also insist that his American experience, his Negroness, has mandated a
literary form virtually unique in its portrayal of pluralistic issues. In order
to capture the multiplicity of American experience, Ellison turned to the
nineteenth century, toward Melville and Twain's "imaginative economy,"
where "the Negro symbolized both the man lowest down and the mysteri-
ous, underground aspect of human personality" (NNA, 201). This turning,
which we view with unreJieved interest, is a remarkable decision because it
reinforces a notion of the dialectical at a time when it is all but being driven
out by theories of artistic objectivity. But Ellison feels too keenly, one imag-
ines, the requirements of his own imposed to raise it to an act of
Ellison's "Usable 67
lorm and chooses, instead, the "ancestral imperative":l as the eminent do-
(!\ain of his own creative concern. The upshot is Invisible lvlall that remains,
to my mind, one of the most influential American novels of the twentieth
century. I can say with confidence that it would constitute a "fust" on my
own list of teachable subjects for reasons which, though obvious., lllay bear
repeating: (1) Following a line of American fictions that had rendered
"black" an item of sociological data or the subject of exotic assumptions, or
yet, the gagline of white mischief, at best, its ambiguous "bi-play," I/lvisible
Mml addresses the issue as an exposition of modern consciousness. (2) Frus-
trating the tendency to perceive a coterminous relationship between the
symbolic boundaries of black and the physical, genetic manifestation
named black, IlIvisible Man recalls Moby Dick that stands Manichean orien-
tation on its head. (3) Insisting that black American experience is vulnera-
ble to mythic dilation, Ellison constructs a coherent system of signs that
brings into play the entire repertory of American cultural traits. In order to
do this, Ellison places the unnamed "agonist" on an historical line that
reaches back through the generations and extends forward into the fron-
tiers of the future. Thus, (4) the work withdraws from the modernist incli-
nation to isolate issues of craft from ethical considerations. For Ellison,
language does speak, and it clarifies selective experience under the auspices
of certain figures-of-thought, unexpectedly applied to received opinions.
My primary concern in these notes is to try to trace propositions three and
four to some tentative conclusions.
Northrop Frye defined myth as "the union of ritual and dream in a form
of verbal communication."6 The term, however, has achieved such flexibil-
ity that it is menaced by meaning everything and nothing in particular,
though Frye traces its origins and inflections from biblical and classical
sources through the modern period (131-223). Any contemporary usage is
haunted by the echo of specific mythic structures and Roland Barthes's car-
icature of contemporary mythologies in a dazzling display of linguistiC de-
mystification'? But Barthes's definition of myth as a "type of speech"
releases us, at least for the moment, from certain inherited or monolithic
notions of mythic form:
Myth is not defined by the object of its message, but by the way in
which it utters this message: there are formal limits to myth, there are
no '>ubstantial" ones. (109)
Myth, then, is a form of selective discourse since its life and death are gov-
erned by human history: "Ancient, or not, mythology can only have an his-
torical foundation, for myth is a type of speech chosen by history: it cannot
Chapter One
,,'
possibly evolve from the 'nature' of things" (110). Not confined to or;11
speech, myth can be constituted of other modes of signification, including
written discourse, photography, cinema, reporting, sports, shows, public-
ity. Myth as form does not only denote the sacred object or event, but may
also be viewed as the wider application of a certain linguistic status to a
erarchy of motives and mediations. Pursuing Saussure's well-known para-
digm of signification (ll5), Barthes differentiates the semiological and
ideological boundaries of myth in a way that can only be suggestive for our
immediate purposes, for I am primarily concerned with II/visible Man as tI
literary countermyth of good intentions. Though from my own point of
view, any countermyth is preferable to prevailing myth and is, therefore.
gOOd, I still emphasize the word to denote the particular difficulty there is.
in accepting Barthes's definition of myth as a type of speech, expressed by
its intentions. Inevitably. some intentions are "more good" than others to
the group wishing to appropriate them, and as Barthes's orientation leads
into the ideological category of myth as an impoverishment of history, its
nullification at the hands of the bourgeoisie, I would have to agree with
him. Recognizing, then, the high danger of applying a term laden, a priori.
with valuation that justifies it on the one hand and condemns it on the
other, I can only proceed with caution.
What I find most suggestive in Barthes's argument is the distinction hI!
enforces between the form of myth and the concept it borrows from particu-
lar historical order. We could say, following his lead, that mythiC form is iI-
kind of conceptual code, relying on the accretions of association that cling to
the concept-"a past, a memory, a comparative order of facts, ideas, deci-
sions" (117). A French army general, pinning a medal on a oneRarmed Sene-
galese, is not my idea of a joke, nor is it Barthes's, for that matter, and he uses
it to illustrate an act of attenuation wherein the subject has become an item
in the "store of mythical signifiers." In short, the visual image becomes"
code of French imperial procedure and the biographical/historical implica-
tions of its subjects. It is a mode of shorthand in that the mythical significr ..
conceals as much as it reveals. In fact, in Barthes's example, the signifll'r
cheats, for it tells far less than it shows. This spontaneous equation of form
and concept occurs also in the literary myth whose extension, like the oral
myth, is linear and successive. Barthes describes the process of identification:
The elements of the form ... are related as to place and proximity: the
mode of presence of the form is spatial. The concept, on the contrary,
appears in global fashion, it is a kind of nebula, the condensation,
more Or less hazy, of a certain knowledge. Its elements are linked byas-
sociative relations: it is supported not by an extension but by a depth
Ellison's "Usable Past"
L!lt hough this metaphor is perhaps still too spatial): its mode of pres-
,'IICC is memorial. (122)
69
It h this integrative paradigm of form and concept that is most interesting
for application.
!{l'lurning to an initial metaphor which I used in one of my four propo-
.. IOoJls-lnvisible Man standing on an historical line reaching back and
!. 1/ t 11-[ think we can establish the central reason why the novel qualifies as
1l1\'th. [n Ellison's case, I would suggest that myth becomes a tactic for eXR
pl.lIlation and that the novel may be considered a discourse on the bio-
Itl;q)hical uses of history. The preeminent element of form, Invisible Man's
Il'!l"ralive unfolds through a complicated scheme of conceptuai images that
It'll'r to particular historical order, but the order itself localizes in the meta-
II hysical/personal issues of the narrative, which is then empowered to re-
h',11 hath the envisioned structure of history and its fluid continuity. It
'\;l,'IllS to me that the themes of diachrony and synChrony properly apply
tWfC In that InviSible Man embodies the diachronous, spatial, continuing
\ublcct of particular historical depth or memory. In history, the individual
I,tlll' key to both procedures, for he can arrest time, as the form of the novel
ftm,'s, and examine its related details in leisurely detachment, but he cannot
tit'ape it, either personally or historically, and is, therefore, detached only
ht.a kind of suspended, temporary judgment. In short, through his activi-
Ile'l. he is an image of man talking, furiously, unto death, lifting the weight
t,1 his aging flesh by the power of his tongue. Invisible Man confesses:
So why do I write, torturing myself to put it down? Because in spite of
myself I've learned some things. Without the possibility of action, all
knowledge comes to one labeled "file and forget," and I can neither file
IIOf forget. Nor will certain ideas forget me; they keep filing away at my
lethargy, my complacency. Why should I be the one to dream this
nightmare? Why should I be dedicated and set aSide-yes, if not to at
1('lIst tell a few people about it? There seems to be no escape. Here I've
set out to throw my anger into the world's face, but now that I've tried
10 put it all down the old fascination with playing a role returns, and
l'm drawn upward again. So that even before I finish I've failed (maybe
my <Inger is too heavy, perhaps being a talker, I've used too many
words). But I've failed .... I have been hurt to the point of abysmal
p;t1n .... And I defend because in spite of all r find that I love,8
'hl'"Vm, out of an infant inevitability toward a final one, Invisible Man emR
,: history as an act of consciousness. Paradoxically, history is both given
_him and constructed by him, the emphatic identification of contemplaR
Chapter One 70
live and active modes. and his refusal of the historical commitment, to rek
member and go forward, is certain death. Invisible lv[all charts the adventures
of a black personality in the recovery of his own historical burden. This
restorative act, to get well and remember and reconstruct simultaneously, is
the dominating motif of the novel, and its various typological features
port this central decision.
As the subject of recovery, Invisible Man must assume all, must take
lipan himself the haunted, questioning, troubled, even self- subversive,
stance of one who insists on telling others. This telling fulfills a bardic task,
an oracular chore, and one would do well to refuse either, but pain compels
rnvisible Man to talk. He calls it {/nightmare" and essentially speaks to us
out of his own sustained bardic trance, while as an ignorant youth, he
spoke from the nightmare of others. We shall see shortly how these layers
or phases of speech work. In addition, Invisible Man is "on" to something
else in the quoted passages. The questions that he poses function on more
than one level: Rhetorically, they hustle on the ploys and motions of argu-
ment just as the interrogative formulation has done throughout the novel.
Then dramatically, the questions situate particular trouble. Uttered or held
back, they are often a symptom of pride and confusion, and Invisible Man
has had his share of both, but syntactically, the questions complement a
principle of iteration that distinguishes both the Prologue and the Epi-
logue, encircling the structure. This prinCiple of iteration, if we look closely,
ratifies a decisive ambiguity beneath the surface symmetry of the text. From
the Epilogue, this passage excerpted in the initial quotation is suggestive:
The very act of trying to put it all down has confused me and negated
some of the anger and some of the bitterness. So it is that now I de-
nounce and defend, or feel prepared to defend. I condemn and affirm,
say no and say yes, say yes and say no. I denounce because though im-
plicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt ... to the point of
invisibility. (lM, 437)
Each time a word or phrase is repeated, it comes back with a new twist of
meaning, an enhancement and echo, pursuing Its ambiguity with passion.
This repetitive activity is one of "destructing," a flight from certainty to-
ward systematic skepticism, in order to reconstruct the terrible complexity
of decision. But enhancement is an enrichment, even though it borders on
the tedious. Caring almost overmuch for linguistic entanglement, Invisible
Man threatens a vision of nausea and the love of detail as neurotic indul-
gence, but he recalls what he has said earlier about the "possibility of ac-
tionl! and determines to come out of his hole:
Ellison's "Usable
I lIus, having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within
[!attern of your certainties. I must come out. [ must emerge. (fA-/, 438)
7'
lillink we can take him at his literal word, though he is eloquently slippery,
'lr l'lH1CeptuaHy athletic, with formulations in this passage .. He
"I1\(,:rge: Spatially underground, he will come up into the light ot day agalO
With his dark-skinned self, a little more noble and fierce than when he en-
Sharp on punning, which has been called an "overpopulated pho-
nl'lic space,l! Ellison recreates the illusion of a mind ordering its space,
ddcrmining its motions, and this is the domain of invisibility.
The involvements of mind, its complicated calibrations in the heat of
\','(perience, point to the deeper structures of the text and, characteristically,
pursue a pattern of interlocking image-dusters which fron: the.
centrality of the underground. I would also impute to EllIson a clrculanty at
iniluence that I think is at work in the depths of the text. The privileged
version of modernist writers, circles have wrought
There are rivers still flowing and young homeless boys still thumbmg fIdes
on the open road. What startles even more is that critiCS are still startled by
these clever workings as though the repeat performance had imagined the
thing on its own. Ellison, however, is not as enamored of hiS. as
his critics. As I recall, he doesn't mention circles or depths m mtervlews
about the book, ') confining himself to articulating its broad objectives, but
Invisible Man cannily suggests how he wants his narrative readi reconciled
to the chaos against which his "plan of living" has been conceived, he ac-
quires a new sense of time:
Under the spell of the reefer I discovered a new analytical way of
tening to music. The unheard sounds came through, and each melodic
line existed in itself, stood out clearly from all the rest, said its piece,
and waited patiently for the other voices to speak. That night I found
myself hearing not only in time, but space as well. I not only entered
the music but descended, like Dante, into its depths. And beneath the
swiftness art/Ie hot tempo there was a slower tempo and a cave cmd I entered
it /lmllooked /lrol/rld alld heard all old woman Sillgillg a spiritual as full of
Weltsclunerz as flamenco. (lM, 7)
The italicized passage is unquestionably explicit about direction, and in the
event that anybody misses it the first time, Dante signalizes the pit as a re-
turn to traditional configurations of the underground, but the mentalloca-
tion of this geography of descent places these images out of public view and
restores them to their initial status of private madness. In Dante, spatial ap-
propriation is both visual and concealed, and the latter seems to be a re-
Chapter One
7'
pressed dimension. Invisible Man, by contrast, never allows us to forget
that he is dreaming, reefer-induced, and abandons himself to the irrespon-
sibility of the induced state. Playing on the notion of vision-in-dream-
brought-on-by-other-power, he expresses himself in a mode akin to the
and the enthusiast sees whatever fantasies are brought to him.
Thus, the dreaming mind is logically decentered as Invisible Man alludes to
being, but there is, of course, a mind controlling all the time. The passage
proliferates, foreshadowing the specific issues of heritage that come back to
the narrative in a form of discourse more suitable to linear continuity.
The dream passages are "amazing" and involved, worked around pat-
terns of transition and contrast that yoke disparate experience in contigu-
ous order. Since the image-tlow is both acoustical and visual, Invisible Man
is liberated up to a phenomenology of sensory impressions that restore the
state of innocence, like dreaming, a status of freedom. He is essentially dis-
embodied as his mind empathizes ancestral time and space. It is notable, as
well, that this entire passage takes place under the auspices of Louis Arm-
strong's music.
The architectonics at work here ensure that the points-of-transition in
the dream state relate to specific historical and symbolic detail whose over-
riding intluence is religious. The preacher's text on the "Blackness of Black-
ness" recalls the ritualistic patterns of enthusiastic worship. The call-and-
response rhythms of the black church service entangle with a dramatization
of unlocalized conflict that is in turn overtaken by a recent
scene of political challenge and revolt. What this mental survey shows are
the layers of conflict and renewal that Invisible Man must work through in
a reversed order of things. Above ground, the dreaming mind, intruded
upon by realityl does not dominate, except at peril to the individual. By
having subconscious forces confiscate, with impunitYI the normal order of
differentiation and succession, Elllson suggests that the "truth" for Invisi-
ble Man is mobilized in a return to racial and cultural sources. This psycho-
logical economy of motives differentiates the interlocking elements of
personality within a scene of temporal and spatial unfolding so that histor-
ical order or its illusion may be viewed as a survey of mental activity. But in
order to actuate these mental resources or to possess the dream material be-
yond individual isolation, Invisible Man must submit to the dream censor,
to gazing, quite consciously, at the crux of his motivations and their conse-
quences: "It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life 1 had been
looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me
what it was" (fM, 13) shows not only hypotactic order and the deliberate se-
lection of boundaries of experience that it implies. We are introduced,
Ellison's "Usable Past" 73
'IUlddy, to the apparent orientation of his biography, but the sentences also
<'Illorce a notion of ironic detachment. In order to justify it, Invisible Man
.Il-ploys the enriched details only implied from the opening lines in a sys-
rehearsal of completed events. Thereafter, each syntactiC gesture is
.1 Il'("ilH, increasingly full, of experience retailored in the guise of a wiser
mall. The first order of circularity, or return, is introduced here.
rhe second order is entirely memorial on the part of the "author," and
tend to forget that the place or situation of the narrative has not shifted
lrom underground. The occasion to occupy us has been seized in an act of
wdllction: We were not immediately there, as the illusion suggests} when
Ill' goes over particular groundi but, instead, we have never left the scene of
nmfessioni immediacy is, therefore, borrowed and imposed for the sake of
poetiC complicity.
The third order of circularity, articulated through certain figures of ar-
l'hetype, is imposed on the second and consists of commonly identifiable
of authority. Maud Bodkin provides a working definition of the ar-
dlctype: psychic residua inherited "in the structure of the brain, a priori, de-
terminants of individual experience."tO The specific application of Jungian
theory to literary types, Bodkin's study implies the valorization of a collec-
live unconscious which makes it possible to ascribe psychological motives
of filiation and kinship to widely dispersed ancestral groups. For mythiC
the archetype becomes an indispensable figure since the myth is or-
dained by a common ancestral meaning. For our immediate purposes, how-
ever, archetype may be surrounded by pairs of quotation marks, for it takes
place in the midst of contrasting issues in a complementary relationship
rather than a preponderant one. "Chaplain pants," Brockway, the yam-
man of Harlem, and Trueblood are among the characters who conform to
this general configuration, ami Ellison appears to intend these "old world
ll
characters to point to sources of a special racial gift. Even though these rep-
resentatives of the archetype have receded in the dominance of urbaniza-
tion and technological development, they are summoned in the narrative
with the greatest clarity. This projection of folk character against an urban
setting is significant: A syntheSiS of traditions, folk and urban, agrarian and
industrial, it suggests the strategic interlarding of idioms. This mix, how-
ever, accounts for the fusion of old and relatively new patterns of culture
and intellectual technologies which make up the fundamental content of
Invisible Mall.
This content is variously expressed and repeated, and one of its most
eloquent significations takes the form of phases of rhetoric itself, from In-
visible Man's mimicked speech as a young boy in the opening hotel scene,
Chapter One
74
to the wonderful, persistent rabble of Has in the pre-riot scenes of the end.
ing. Along with these patterns of rhetoric, Invisible Man assumes levels at
consciousness that he takes on and off as he would articles of clothing. It is
important to understand how these phases articulate moments of transi-
tion and contrast in the narrative, for it seems that Invisible Man ultimately
subverts these elements of former style in the acquisition of one more ap-
posite to his new "plan of living."
Recalling what he was like as an adolescent, he notes with ironic bitter-
ness: What powers of endurance he had. "What enthusiasm! What a belief in
the rightness of things!" (lM, 24). In the hotel scene that repeats an elabora-
tion of primitive consciousness, Ellison shows the spectacular array of sexual
fantasy in a perverted connection with bloodlust. As one of the victims of the
scene, Invisible Man determines to speak even louder when the time comes.
Whatever he said, "social equality" got into it, and he is made to apologize.
His audience is, by turn, uproariously amused by him and indifferent to his
trying to yell above their noise. In every particular of nuance and intention,
the scene is a replication of nightmare; at the of the ordeal, he is re-
warded for having been a good boy. The cowhide briefcase gift is his sendoff
to college and elsewhere. Its message, which he dreams that night, reads: "To
Whom It May Concern, Keep This Nigger-Boy Running" (lM, 26). The shade
of his grandfather had already told him as much, mocking his so-called tri-
umph. He will run, in fact, stumble, as it were, from one adventure to the
next, the victim of everybody else's notions of his own identity. His victim-
age is complete until he learns to manipulate various signs.
The initial college year is an extension of the naive phase, and there is a
lyrical insistence in its moving Barbee sermon, set in the college chapel,
and descriptions of campus landscape and iconography that expose Invisi-
ble Man's susceptibility to a rhetorical style to be fully appropriated by him
in Harlem. Already a student orator of considerable power, Invisible Man
the vesper speakers gather on the platform and recalls how, as a
student leader, he had II stridden and debated ... directing my voice at the
highest beams and farthest rafters, ringing them, the accents staccato upon
the ridgepole and echoing back with a tinkling, like words hurled to the
trees of a wilderness, or into a well of slate-gray water; more sound than
sense, a play upon the resonances of buildings, an assault upon the temple
of the ears" (1M, 87, 88). This particular quality of metaphorical speech be-
comes inherent in Invisible Man's logical and syntactical disposition. He
will lose the key to this impulse in the underground, but its motivation will
remain instructive for him, the urge that he checks in a new-found suspi-
cion of old affections.
::.!lison's "Usable 75
rhe master speech of this type is given by blind Homer Barbee in an
,<\'oc,Hion of the Founder, perhaps modeled, in its symbolic import, on
lIonkcr T. Washington:
rhis barren land after Emancipation ... this land of darkness and sor-
roW, of ignorance and degradation, where the hand of
1Jcen turned against brother, father against son, and son agamst t<l;ther,
where master had turned against slave and slave against master; where
,Ill was strife and darkness, an aching land. And into this land came a
humble prophet, lowly like the humble carpenter of Nazareth, a slave .
and a son of slaves, knowing only his mother. A slave born, but marke;!: ..:
from the beginning by a high intelligence and princely personality;
born in the lowest part of this barren, war-scarred land, yet somehow
shedding light upon it whcre'er he passed through. I'm sure you have
heard of his precarious infancy, his precious life by
an insane cousin who splashed the babe with lye and shrIveled hIS seed
and how, a mere babe, he Jay nine days in a death-like coma and then
suddenly and miraculously recovered. You might say it was as though
he had risen from the dead or been reborn. (iM, 92)
rhe suspension of predication in this narrative, its protracted modifiers,
unrelieved nominality and appOSition, are built on a principle of
Hon that anticipates the climactic moment of speech, and its internal agIta-
tion of feeling induces an enthusiastic response to the word. The of
!/IJrlcoiuthon, where the predicate is essentially dissolved or III the
stream of modifiers, seems appropriate to oral speech, or dramatIC utter-
ance, when the speaker pursues an exact identity between himself the
words he chooses. The lexis of the passage replicates both a generalIzed po-
etic diction and the prose of King James; Barbee selects it as a of
presentation that elevates its subject in importance. In its transcodatlOn of
one mode of figurative perception to another, Barbee's speech demon-
strates that a universe of figurative relationships and equivalences may be
described. The ground of the metaphors actually from Judaea. to the
American South and from Christ to the Founder. ThIS transfer of
from their original ground of reference to a space quite distant It
points to the specific genius of figural
1
as a mode of historical narrattv: and
explanation. But the key to the figurative mode is not the way.of Its
terance, but also the particular world view that generates It.. Essentially r:h-
gious, the figurative mind perceives human history.in a correlation
with destiny: Men in their time move in a way conSIstent WIth the stars of
heaven. .
The inaugural, transitional, and terministic motifs of the passage lfl-
Chapter One ,0
scribe a metaphorical order of language where contiguity in its passion to
resolve contradiction holds sway. Whether we call Barbee's performance a
speech or sermon doesn't matter, for the figures-ai-perception that inform
it are interchangeable along a hierarchy of forms:
I feel. I feel suddenly that 1 have become more human. Do you under-
stand? More human. Not that I have become a man, for I was born a
man. But that I am more human. I feel strong, I feel able to get things
done! I feel that I can see sharp and clear and far down the dim corridor
of history and in it I can hear the footsteps of militant fraternity! No,
wait, let me confess ... I feel the urge to affirm my feelings .... I feel
that here, after a long and desperate and uncommonly blind journey, I
have come home ... , Home! With your eyes upon me I feel that I've
found my true family! My true people! My true country! I am a new cit-
izen of the country of your vision, a native of your fraternal land. I feel
that here tonight, in this old arena, the new is being born and the vital
old reVived. In each of you, in me, in us all .... WE ARE THE TRUE
PATRIOTS! THE CITIZENS OF TOMORROW'S WORLD! WE'LL BE DIS-
POSSESSED NO MORE! (1M, 261-62)
The combination here of utopian images folded over a rhetoric of political
revolution changes the content of Invisible Man's speeches from any ap-
parent connection with a religious ground of feeling, but in their tenden-
cies toward a visual elaboration of ideas, we could say that the imagery
belongs to a figurative extension of reality. For a time, Invisible Man is con-
vinced that his role in the Brotherhood idea is the key to a new identity. The
shock, however, is that the answer for him lies in the "plunge outside his-
tory," at least to the extent that the Brotherhood attempts to define histor-
ical role for him. His final disillusionment comes with the death of his
comrade, Tad Clifton, followed by his resignation from the Brotherhood
and flight into the underground:
So there you have all of it that's important. Or at least you almost have
it. I'm an invisible man and it placed me in a hole-or showed me the
hole I was in, if you will-and I reluctantly accepted the fact. What else
could I have done? Once you get used to it, reality is as irresistible as a
club, and I was clubbed into the cellar before I caught the hint. Perhaps
that's the way it had to be; I don't know. Nor do I know whether ac-
cepting the lesson has placed me in the rear or in the avant-garde. That,
perhaps, is a lesson for history, and J'llieave such decisions to Jack and
his ilk while I try belatedly to study the lesson of my own life. (lM, 432)
Various features of exclamation and delay have disappeared from the dis-
course along with the immedi'ate rush and excitement of words. Less visu-
Ellison's Past"
77
lil\' "Ilergetic than earlier speeches, this belated discourse (from the Epi-
jl'f.;lle) argues its closure in a language not intent on celebrating itself. This
lIIovement from oral to written language inscribes, precisely, Invisible Man's
dl'liberate attempt to come into control of his own "symbol-making task,"
II It at the behest of others, but at his own command.
rile incidents that lead to perception are charted as an "analogy of ex-
IlI'rience," graced with the accoutrements of "fall." Having very little idea
why things turn out so badly for him, Invisible Man is virtually used by
t'veryone with whom he has any degree of sustained contact. He is prey,
then, to evil forces, or purely arbitrary ones, in the guise of moral and
institutional sanction. Having, therefore, no ego requirements of his own,
Llbeying no ambitions or passions that he himself has generated, he is em-
Ilarrassed by the least evidence of his own connection to a historical collec-
tive. Literally in the head in the basement of the paint factory, he
Is forced to consider the impoverishment of his chosen negation. Having
'iuppressed chitterlings and yams, for example, for the last time, he verges
on a new-found freedom as the panorama of Harlem spreads before him. III
yam what I am!" is not simply a humorous dislocating of Cartesian predi-
cation; it is a "re-cognitive" utterance of joy.
Invisible Man repeats the moves of the hero that Joseph Campbell illus-
trates in Hero ora Thollsand Faces. Campbell's hero inhabits the center of the
cycle of experience, the "nuclear unit of the monomyth," and returns to so-
ciety, like Invisible Man, with a message. The contemporary hero, however,
in returning with a stereo, introduces a dimension of "cool," hereafter
called irony, to his return that inscribes it with more than a touch of com-
plexity. Notably, the returned man lacks an affective dimension in the ab-
sence of women in his life, but embraces, instead, a love of people. As an
orator, Invisible Man engages as the anonymous entities of an audi-
ence. He loves them because they listen to him, but he also returns as a
lover of forms, oratory included-in fact, Invisible Man meets the daimon
of oratory at its source-and, somewhere along the way, he has managed to
get himself some music and wire his hole for sound. Analytically, concep-
tually involved, he entertains himself with elaborate mental constructs, the
most elaborate being the novel itself. Male, and just a little arrogant in its
clutches, he is exactly "self-centered" in his world, just as Campbell's re-
turning hero, contracted back into a status of ego.
The cycle of experience permits us to go back and forth, up and down its
intersecting axes; without this versatility of motion, travel would not be
possible on the globe or within the text. It is this shrewd knowledge of rela-
tionships that informs the speaker of the Prologue/Epilogue. The promise
Chapter One
,.
to end up somewhere other than the self compels the adventure that, for all
its variety and color, leads back to the point of departure. Against this
knowledge, the ideology of progression is fundamentally false and decep-
tive. But something does happen around the cycle of experience that lends
the theme of return its particular danger. Other than cynicism, or beyond
it, the return provokes an irretrievable distrust of one's own image thrown
back in the mirror of language. This distrust brings us to the fourth order of
circularity which introduces the ironic mode.
Invisible Man's persistent anonymity against the specifics of biographi-
cal detail is the crucial ingredient of ironic disclosure. He calls himself sim-
ply "I," and none of the other characters ever addresses him because he is,
he insists, emphatically invisible-people refuse to see him. This no-name
seems a contradiction at first, but Since he acknowledges invisibility-veri-
table disembodiment-why should he have a name that could confine him
to orders of affection and kinship, therefore, limitation? The novel almost
threatens to become an enormous hoax:
"Ah," you say, "so it was all a bUild-up to bore us with his buggy jiving.
He only wanted us to listen to him rave!" But only partially true: Being
inviSible and without substance, a disembodied voice, as it were, what
else could I do? What else but try to tell you what was really happening
when your eyes were looking through? And it is this which frightens
me. Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
(IM,439)
I think that there is a precedent for Invisible Man's disembodiment from
another cultural scene, and it is called the "subjectivity of freedom":
The subject stands freely above that which must be regarded as deter-
mining him; he stands freely above it not merely at the instant of
choice but at every moment, for the arbitrary will constitutes no law,
no constancy, no content. 12
Since Invisible Man's task of confession has mobilized a plenitude of
historical moments, laden with personal Significance, we can only view his
invisibility as a blazing contradiction that must stand as it is. It becomes the
"modified noun, II so to speak, in naming the persistently refined features of
modern consciousness: We can lay hold of such consciousness both in its
abstract form-the "subjectivity of freedom"-and in its concrete manifes-
tation in the living person. "Lower frequencies" belongs to the same order
of cases as invisibility. The very possibilities of the terms, their near-endless
procession of implicit modification, make it virtually certain that Invisible
Man's new position locates an unalterable disenchantment with words and
Ellison's "Usable Past
n
79
I heir capacity to mean simply what they say. This sense at the overlapping
contexts of meaning defies the "one-for-another" mode of expression and
goes along with Invisible Man's shifting sense of at least an iden-
tity that remains complicated by experience. The phases of rhetoric that he
()verthrows point, essentially, to fixed destiny, a notion of permanence that
asserts itself against the current of experience, its enemy, but disembodi-
ment as a way of being enters the doors of permanence by another route,
backs into it, in the achieving a central allegiance to the priorities of the
imagination, in directing its attention toward the theme of potentiality. In
this way, lived experience is always an embarkation, returning to the point
of departure. The metaphorical-order has folded into something else-the
double intention, spying its shadows of meaning.
The ironic twist of ending is that Invisible Man discourses on invisibility
as a paSSionately visible vocation, but more than that, he criticizes his effort
as a gesture of "destructing" and remaking. He poses an ethical paradox:
What is the good of talk if it finds no audience? But an audience is not bet-
ter than its speaker, and the other way around. In fact, the speaker creates
his audience in the remaking of their own tale, and without their consent,
the speaker would have no task. This gets fairly tedious as Invisible Man
knows, with his new-found sense of humor, and in irony, it appears that no-
body wins. There is a nastiness in irony, an eloquent hateful passion that
makes us prefer the disposition of metaphor. Ellison, however, chooses for
Invisible Man an assault on metaphor in the very guise of its own terms,
turning the underground and the theme of blackness into genuinely philo-
sophical propositions. For Invisible Man, the achievement of an ironic
voice-perhaps we could substitute inner for ironic-that is seen through
the density of struggle and error, proffers a countermyth against the
founders of "Sambo," the damaged humanity of an acquisitive culture, its
wealth transformed into the visible evidence of status. In the realm of let-
ters this century, Invisible Man insists upon the superior function of the
daimon-the instrumentality of conscience-in grasping the perSistently
ethical idea.
At one time, the giving up of oneself to the sway of intellectual power
led men to very dangerous acts; we call one of its symptoms "civil disobedi-
ence' and the victimage that flowed from it led, in all the cases we know, to
the doors of the prisonhouse. In the popular examples, the man who heeds
the dictates of conscience opposes to the known order a decisive threat
which he asserts as his own countermyth, and it usually takes the form of a
language that nobody recognizes at first, or at least doesn't admit recogni-
tion: "The indiVidual must no longer act out of respect for the law, but must
Chapter One 80
consciously know why he acts" (eI, 249). Invisible Man, seeking the why of
his acts, cuts loose from prevailing myth in a sequence of subversive moves
that conjoin him with other myths of conscience-the countermytholo-
gies. 'What other way is open to the one who is not seen? In his acceptance
of invisibility, he can only choose to undermine, systematically, all vestiges
of the established order that has driven him underground. In its articula-
tion of a figure of subversion, Invisible Man glitters with a notion of black
disobedience. In this case, the qualifier is no necessary illumination since
aU disobedience, in the very force of the language, is black. The book has
never called itself "revolutionary," but it begins and ends with a revolu-
tionist determination: If "I" am to be victimized, why not let it be for good
reason?