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"A slightly different sense of time": palimpsestic time in Invisible Man
Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2003 by Marc Singer
Turning backward and going underground
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In the riot, the Invisible Man encounters Ras the Destroyer, one final, flawed mode of temporality and racial identity. While in earlier scenes Ras the Exhorter is a complex, morally ambiguous figure of black nationalism and pan-Africanism, the Ras of the riot is characterized by (and roundly criticized for) his futile desire to turn time backward. Ras the Destroyer leads his followers through Harlem "dressed in the costume of an Abyssinian chieftain" (556); the Invisible Man derides this "foreign costume" (558), but other details suggest that Ellison condemns Ras more for his ludicrous atavism than his theatrical ethnicity. Two anonymous observers joke about the anachronism of Ras's costume: the first remarks on Ras's "old lion skin" and "ole hoss" (562), while the second mocks his spear and "old shield" (563) and the spectacle of his fighting modern police with primitive weapons. Ras's attempt to reverse time proves dangerous, however, not only in the violence and destruction it wreaks in Harlem but also in its reductive model of racial-historical identity. By demanding that African-Americans return to an African past, Ras becomes every bit as deterministic as Jack and the Brotherhood; his temporal arrow simply points in the other direction.
When the Invisible Man runs from Ras, he runs from all of the false and domineering models of history he has encountered. Significantly, he is aided in his escape by Tarp's leg chain, the symbol of broken history. But he initially attempts to escape by fleeing back along the path of his own history to Mary Rambo's motherly care. The Invisible Man never considers that this step backward is no more productive than Ras's attempt to turn back time, although he does repeatedly notice he is moving in the wrong direction (561, 564). This regressive journey is physically thwarted, but psychically assisted, when he becomes trapped in a coal cellar. He calls his confinement there "a kind of death without hanging ... a death alive" (566-67), yet it also facilitates a birth in reverse. Lying in the dark tunnel, the Invisible Man decides "I would go now to Mary's in the only way that I could" and dreams that he moves "off over the black water, floating, sighing ... sleeping invisibly" (567). Thoughts of Mary turn his trip through these imagined, subterranean waters into a return to the womb as well as a voyage to the underworld.
This trip, however, also delivers the Invisible Man outside of time. Just as the novel's first half is punctuated by a ritual of death and rebirth at Liberty Paints, so does its second half end with a symbolic rebirth that apparently frees him from linear chronology. After awakening underground, the Invisible Man says, "Great invisible waves of time flowed over me" (567), yet because he has no way to measure them, their scale is impossible to determine. And although it is the underground setting that initially dislocates him from time, he performs the final dislocation himself by burning the contents of his briefcase and pockets: all the papers, diplomas, and dancing Sambo dolls that others have used to circumscribe his identity. Afterward the Invisible Man stumbles for what he says "might have been days, weeks; I lost all sense of time" (568).
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