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"A slightly different sense of time": palimpsestic time in Invisible Man
Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2003 by Marc Singer
What would the committee say about that? What did their theory
tell them of such a world? ... Outside the Brotherhood we were
outside history; but inside of it they didn't see us. It was a
hell of a state of affairs, we were nowhere. (499-500)
This is the same "nowhere" described in "Harlem Is Nowhere"--a "nowhere" not of place but of identity, time, and historical agency.
The Invisible Man turns to Hambro, the Brotherhood's chief theorist, for reassurance, to have "the props put back beneath the world" (500). Yet the scene characterizes Hambro's theories as pointlessly circular, suggesting the Invisible Man's impending repudiation of the Brotherhood's model of time. From the moment the Invisible Man arrives, the encounter is fraught with absurd, ineffectual, and infantilizing images of circular temporality, like Hambro's child "singing Hickory Dickory Dock, very fast" (500), his rapid tempo accelerating the nursery rhyme's pointless repetition.
The circular images intensify as Hambro explains the Brotherhood's abandonment of its Harlem chapter. Not coincidentally, the Brotherhood's decision appears to be based in large part on a fear of African-Americans' accelerated historical progress: Hambro tells the Invisible Man that "we now have to slow them down for their own good. It's a scientific necessity" (503). The Invisible Man replies, "You mean the brakes must be put on the old wheel of history.... Or is it the little wheels within the wheel?" (504), acerbically converting the Brotherhood's theoretical language into metaphors of fruitless circularity. Other images stress the overall instability or ephemerality of a cyclical model of history: the Invisible Man traces a circle in the air in a moment of frustration (503), and Hambro blows "a smoke ring, the blue-gray circle rising up boiling within its own jetting form, hovering for an instant then disintegrating into a weaving strand" (503-04). Finally, the Invisible Man calls Hambro's plans "the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?" (505), turning the Brotherhood's teleological journey into a round trip to nowhere and voicing his desire to break loose from the cycle. He does not deliver his final criticism of their teleological drive, however, until after his next moment of revelation.
Once again, Ellison marks a new stage in the Invisible Man's temporal awareness with a palimpsest of memories. These memories form an undercurrent throughout the meeting with Hambro, beginning when the Invisible Man hears the child's nursery rhymes, "awakening humiliating memories of my first Easter program" (500). During the meeting the Invisible Man clutches Brother Tarp's leg iron as an artifact of history and a concretization of all his objections to the Brotherhood's philosophy. But the memories truly set in after he leaves Hambro, as he decides to "do a Rinehart" (507) and resist the Brotherhood through deception and dissembling:
