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

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2003 by Marc Singer

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      the underground world of America's vernacular culture. Their
      speech, manner, conked hair, tapping shoes, and comic books all
      associate them with a level of society that history has not
      adequately recorded. ("On Burke" 256)

For O'Meally and other critics, this scene provides one of the clearest examples of Ellison's characterization of official history as an arbitrary and exclusive record. Eric Sundquist mentions the subway riders in his discussion of "Ellison's sense of history as a form of subjective temporality--a constructed story, not a set of objective facts" (11). However, this formulation threatens to conflate subjective temporality with history, while Ellison has shown that different modes of subjective time can generate entirely different forms of historiography. Deborah Cohn reads Ellison's use of time more broadly, connecting his depiction of the unrecorded history of African-Americans to his creation of alternative narrative temporalities; she argues that Ellison employs "non-realist discourses to bring the hidden past to light and restore experiences that have been elided from the historical record to visibility" (373). As part of this challenge to realistic narrative, Cohn maintains, Invisible Man "belies the notions of causality and history as linear progression" (376) and "undertakes to demonstrate the shortcomings of official institutions' rigid definitions of the past and present" (377). In other words, Ellison expands traditional historical accounts by fashioning nontraditional modes of time.

But while Cohn locates these alternative temporalities primarily in "subjective visions, hallucinations, and dreams which conflate time and space" (377), Ellison also provides numerous concrete examples of alternative modes of time, modes the novel regards as quite real. The three subway riders expose the Invisible Man to one such mode as they embody the accelerated, feudal-to-industrial temporality that Ellison finds characteristic of urbanized African-Americans; they "speak a jived-up transitional language full of country glamour, think transitional thoughts, though perhaps they dream the same old ancient dreams" (441) in the modern city. These young men remind the Invisible Man not only that some histories fall outside the Brotherhood's purview but also that some modes of temporality operate outside its dynamics.

As living subjects of this uncharted temporality, the young men prompt the Invisible Man to reject the Brotherhood's models of history and time. In a passage that O'Meally rightly says "may comprise, in a novel full of revelations and momentous psychic changes, the most potent epiphany" ("On Burke" 257), the Invisible Man not only admits that the Brotherhood has neglected the unrecorded world of black vernacular culture, he also spurns the group's entire historical-materialist mechanism:

       They were men out of time--unless they found Brotherhood. Men out
       of time, who would soon be gone and forgotten ... But who knew
       (and now I began to tremble so violently I had to lean against a
       refuse can)--who knew but that they were the saviors, the true
       leaders, the bearers of something precious? [...] What if Brother
       Jack were wrong? What if history was a gambler, instead of a
       force in a laboratory experiment, and the boys his ace in the
       hole? What if history was not a reasonable citizen, but a madman
       full of paranoid guile and these boys his agents, his big
       surprise! His own revenge? For they were outside, in the dark
       with Sambo, the dancing paper doll; taking it on the lambo with
       my fallen brother, Tod Clifton (Tod, Tod) running and dodging the
       forces of history instead of making a dominating stand. (441)

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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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