Content provided in partnership with
"A slightly different sense of time": palimpsestic time in Invisible Man
Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2003 by Marc Singer
By the time he discovers and attempts to discard the minstrel figure in chapter 15, however, the Invisible Man has already been jolted from the temptations of uncritical nostalgia and second childhood by a palimpsestic encounter on the streets of Harlem. The Provo family's belongings, jumbled in a heap along the sidewalk by an eviction, awaken the Invisible Man to the immediacy of the past. The piled belongings comprise a physical record of a hundred years of history, arranged without any respect to chronology and juxtaposing such items as "an oval frame portrait of the couple when young ... a small Ethiopian flag, a faded tintype of Abraham Lincoln, and the smiling image of a Hollywood star torn from a magazine" (271). The final item the Invisible Man sees is the fragile, yellowing paper announcing Primus Provo's release from slavery in 1859, and he thinks, "It has been longer than that, further removed in time, I told myself, and yet I knew that it hadn't been" (272). The Invisible Man discovers that the past is, if anything, even more immediate than Ellison describes in "Harlem Is Nowhere," for it is concretely realized in the Provos' belongings. Awareness of the palimpsest then replaces simple nostalgia as the Invisible Man begins to think "not so much of my own memory as of remembered words, of linked verbal echoes, images.... And it was as though I myself was being dispossessed of some painful yet precious thing" (273). This sense of synchronic time, of the past as immediately present, kindles his awareness of his race's dispossession and stirs him to action.
- More Articles of Interest
- Ralph Ellison: Critical Studies Of Invisible Man
- Masquerade, magic, and carnival in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man - Critical...
- Eloquence and Invisible Man
- Invisible desires: Homoerotic racism and its homophobic critique in Ralph...
- Invisible Man and African American radicalism in World War II
In addressing the crowd gathered at the eviction, the Invisible Man seizes on Brother Provo's age--"eighty-seven" (277), the number of years between the end of the Civil War and the publication of Invisible Man and, not coincidentally, the same number of years cited by Abraham Lincoln at the start of the Gettysburg Address. Provo's age suggests two spans of history, one terminating in the Civil War and used by Lincoln as a call for freedom, the other emanating from the Civil War and used by the Invisible Man to show how little freedom has been won: "Eighty-seven and look at all he's accumulated in eighty-seven years ... everything tossed out like junk whirled eighty-seven years in a cyclone" (277-78). The Invisible Man's new temporal awareness informs his diction as he implies that a cyclical time has created the synchronous palimpsest, for it is the circular motion of the cyclone that whirls the Provos' possessions into an anachronistic mess. The Invisible Man has attained a temporal consciousness roughly equivalent to that of the veterans at the Golden Day, who similarly believe that time moves in a cycle but see that cycle as sowing chaos and confusion, not order.
Finally, as the Invisible Man inadvertently moves the crowd to disrupt the eviction, he also voices his own doubts about his regressive second childhood. Pointing to Sister Provo, he says, "Look at that old woman, somebody's mother, somebody's grandmother maybe. We call them 'Big Mama' and they spoil us and--you know, you remember" (277). The Invisible Man reminds the crowd of the "stable familiar forces" out of their pasts which nurture them, yet he also calls attention to the restraints imposed by such stability. Far from inspiring nostalgia or respect for the history that lies piled on the street, the Invisible Man moves the crowd to rage against it--for it is American history itself that has whirled their possessions and memories in a cyclone of eighty-seven years, a figure that now connotes failure rather than freedom.
