Content provided in partnership with
"A slightly different sense of time": palimpsestic time in Invisible Man
Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2003 by Marc Singer
These young men do not simply lead the Invisible Man to expand his definition of history; they also belie the Brotherhood's pretensions to scientific mastery over time, serving as living contradictions to its mechanistic teleology.
- 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...
- The critical response to Ralph Ellison. - book review
Suddenly left without any overarching temporal or historical framework, the Invisible Man attempts to invent or discover new ones that can rationalize his discoveries. First he wonders if he and the young men are ahistorical accidents or throwbacks, "like Douglass" (442), living proof of the Brotherhood's temporal folly because "by all historical logic we, I, should have disappeared around the first part of the nineteenth century, rationalized out of existence" (442). Then, less egotistically, he interprets the vernacular signals of Harlem's 125th Street as the site of a more inclusive history that he has previously disregarded. Characteristically, a palimpsest accompanies this moment of discovery as the Invisible Man reads his own past into the vernacular chronicle around him. Looking at the men and women, he finds "hardly a one that was unlike someone I'd known down South. Forgotten names sang through my head like forgotten scenes in dreams" (443). A blues record, "the only true history of the times," prompts the culmination of this latest temporal resurgence: "It was as though in this short block I was forced to walk past everyone I'd ever known" (443).
Typically, however, the Invisible Man initially misapplies this new wisdom. He first wishes to incorporate all of Harlem's residents into a formal historical model--"They were outside the groove of history, and it was my job to get them in, all of them" (443)--desiring only to build a larger and marginally more inclusive version of the Brotherhood's historical scheme. At Clifton's funeral, however, he grows visibly dissatisfied both with the possibility of remaining subject to deterministic historical forces and with Clifton's method of escaping them. He describes the mounted police as "men and horses of flesh imitating men and horses of stone. Tod Clifton's Tod, I thought" (460-61). Equating Clifton's first name with the German word for death identifies the police as Clifton's murderers, but it also demonstrates the Invisible Man's anxiety over being forced to choose between an inhospitable mode of history and a self-destructive response to it. As the Invisible Man delivers his bitter eulogy, he realizes he must seek out new strategies to slip outside the Brotherhood's and the policemen's model of history without also destroying himself in the process.
Scientists and tricksters
He believes he finds such a strategy in the multiple personae of the criminal, preacher, and all-around confidence artist B.P. Rinehart, whose schemes teach the Invisible Man that "The world in which we lived was without boundaries. A vast seething, hot world of fluidity" that evades the "proper political classification" of the Brotherhood (498). As with the three subway riders, the Invisible Man quickly turns this unrecorded world of the vernacular into a critique of the Brotherhood's theories. He wonders,
Find Research Guides for:
Find Featured Titles for: Health
- AAACN Viewpoint
- ABNF Journal, The
- AIDS Treatment News
- AMAA Journal
- Aboriginal Nurse, The
- Adolescence
- Adolescent Psychiatry
- Advances in Skin & Wound Care
- Age and Ageing
- Alabama Nurse
- Alberta RN
- Alcohol Research & Health
- Alternative Medicine Review
- American Family Physician
- American Fitness
- Men's Fitness
- Psychology Today
- Shape