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

Unlike H.D.'s novel, however, Invisible Man employs the palimpsest as the narrative representation of a distinct, racially specific mode of temporality. Ellison first outlines this temporality, and elaborates on its causes, in his essay "Harlem Is Nowhere." Written as Ellison worked on the manuscript for Invisible Man, "Harlem Is Nowhere" proposes that

      American Negroes are caught in a vast process of change that has
      swept them from slavery to the condition of industrial man in a
      space of time so telescoped (a bare eighty-five years) that it is
      possible literally for them to step from feudalism into the
      vortex of industrialism simply by moving across the Mason-Dixon
      line. (296)

This passage recalls Alain Locke's testimony in The New Negro that "The migrant masses, shifting from countryside to city, hurdle several generations of experience at a leap" (4) and that these urban migrations constitute "a deliberate flight not only from countryside to city, but from medieval America to modern" (6). As Ellison had first read The New Negro in high school and "was to reread it many times" ("Locke" 441), it is unsurprising that he expands upon Locke's observations in "Harlem Is Nowhere," arguing that African-Americans' prolonged feudal indenture and their drastic transition into industrial modernity have resulted in an accelerated sense of time. This new temporality demands "new definitions of terms like primitive and modern" ("Harlem" 297-98) precisely because the two are so immediately and incessantly juxtaposed in African-American life.

"Harlem Is Nowhere" serves as a precursor and companion to the temporal explorations of Invisible Man, clarifying the social and economic origins of the novel's presentation of time: the past is legible in the Invisible Man's world precisely because it has not yet vanished for African-Americans. Ellison thus represents a racialized perception of time by means of the palimpsest. For him, the palimpsest is the only temporal model that acknowledges the importance of the past in shaping African-American identity without condemning individual African-Americans to repeat it. Thus, the novel does not simply recapitulate the course of history; Invisible Man also attempts to dramatize a distinctly African-American experience of time.

Entering the palimpsest

The prologue initiates Ellison's temporal interrogations, framing Invisible Man within conflicting modes of perceiving and structuring time. On one level the prologue presents a highly fatalistic temporality, since it prefigures the chronologically earlier but narratively subsequent events of the rest of the novel. Since the novel unfolds toward a fixed end, an underground lair on the borders of Harlem, Ellison might seem to echo the conviction of characters such as Norton and Brother Jack that time follows a telic course to a predetermined end.