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"A slightly different sense of time": palimpsestic time in Invisible Man

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2003 by Marc Singer

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At the height of his subordination to the Brotherhood's doctrines, however, the Invisible Man is offered several opportunities to reconnect with his personal and cultural history by the Harlem chapter's Brother Tarp. Critics frequently classify Tarp as one of the novel's custodians of African-American culture, often grouping him along with other characters such as Mary Rambo and Peter Wheatstraw, largely because of the gifts he bequeaths to the Invisible Man and the traditions they invoke. (7) Tarp first provides him with a picture of Frederick Douglass, reminding him of his grandfather (378); he later bestows a broken link of chain, an act the Invisible Man compares to "a man passing on to his son his own father's watch" (389). Through one simple analogy, Ellison associates Tarp and the chain with grandfathers and with time itself, an association that grows even stronger when the Invisible Man remembers that he was in fact due to inherit his own grandfather's watch. This revelation triggers "A whole series of memories ... it seemed as though I'd plunged down a well of years" (390), and the Invisible Man nearly experiences another one of the palimpsestic reveries that accompany so many of his moments of enlightenment after his episode at Liberty Paints.

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In this instance, the revelation is triggered not only because Tarp dredges up familial memories but also because his chain concretely refutes the Brotherhood's concept of history. Kimberly W. Benston notes that the link hypostatizes and embodies the "bonds ... to a cultural identity and collective past" (94) that connect the Invisible Man to his heritage, the same bonds the Brotherhood denies. Yet although the link serves "as a keepsake and a reminder" (388) of Tarp's past, its form of the broken circle also presents an implicit challenge to all the characters who have proposed cyclical or deterministic models of time, and particularly to Bledsoe's preservation of the unbroken circle of a slave shackle. Deterministic modes of time may nullify individual agency, and cyclical ones may repeat and preserve an oppressive status quo, but Tarp has symbolically severed the temporal continuity that enables both models. Thus, Tarp is one of the few temporal guides in the novel to offer the Invisible Man a complex and moderated approach to living in time, a synthesis of the more extreme methods of Mary and the Brotherhood: he maintains connections to the past, but he is also willing to break them when they support historical patterns of oppression. Or, as Brother Tarp says, his link has "a heap of signifying wrapped up in it and it might help you remember what we're really fighting against" (388).

However, the significations reified in Tarp's broken link also appear to contradict Ellison's earlier presentation of time. When the Golden Day veterans tell Norton that history moves in a circle, they undermine his linear and deterministic view of time, yet when Tarp bestows his chain, time's circularity itself has become an oppressive feature that must be resisted and escaped. This dramatic change reflects the Invisible Man's growing temporal consciousness: he must first learn to perceive time's circularity before he can discover its ill effects.

"A slightly different sense of time": palimpsestic time in Invisible Man

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2003 by Marc Singer

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