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"A slightly different sense of time": palimpsestic time in Invisible Man
Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2003 by Marc Singer
He also offers one final commentary on the idea of destiny, in which he both rejects the concept and reappropriates it from Norton and the other scientists. On meeting Norton in the subway, the Invisible Man mockingly repeats the philanthropist's old claims, telling him, "I'm your destiny, I made you" (578), thus suggesting that Norton's attempts to control his fate through the fates of others will result only in the loss of his own agency. When the Invisible Man shouts that all trains go to the Golden Day (578), then, he implies that Norton can no longer deny that the bar's temporal chaos--to say nothing of its inverted racial power structure--has defeated his attempts to master fate and time.
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Having rejected the impulses to control fate, to direct history, or to sink back into familiar repetition, the Invisible Man acknowledges that, in a world of multifarious and mutable forms of temporality, he experiences time as a palimpsest. He perceives this palimpsest through the constant juxtaposition of past and present in African-American life; but he also perceives that he, too, is a composite of all his past experiences, both personal and cultural. And while this conflated, multilayered time originates from a racially specific experience, Ellison hints that the continuity implied by the palimpsest may ultimately transcend racial boundaries. The Invisible Man imagines, in his novel's final line, one last palimpsest that might connect his experiences to those of all his auditors, whether black or white: "Who know but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?" (581). (11)
While many of the individual layers of Ellison's literary and historical palimpsest have been well documented, their common examination of the intersections between time, experience, and subjectivity has gone largely unexplored. Yet Ellison's engagement with time and identity comprises one of the novel's most central arguments, one seemingly as fraught with contradictions and antitheses as the experiences of the Invisible Man himself. Invisible Man critiques dialectics while leading its protagonist through a dialectical progression; it shuns racially reductive ideologies while proposing that twentieth-century African-Americans are subject to their own distinct mode of time. On the surface, the novel appears to employ the same methodologies it most criticizes. But Ellison tells us that contradiction is how the world moves, and from these contradictions he has produced a novel that displays an astonishing narrative power over, and critical inquiry into, the dynamics of time. Through its temporal manipulations, Invisible Man demonstrates how both cultural history and individual identity are shaped by our diverse perceptions of time.
Notes
1. Robert G. O'Meally similarly observes this martial cast in the Invisible Man's historiographic symbols, and further notes that the boomerang is "made and thrown by human hands" ("Rules" 265), suggesting that history is a construct not of impartial theological or scientific forces but of human beings.
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