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"A slightly different sense of time": palimpsestic time in Invisible Man
Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2003 by Marc Singer
2. Ellison also deflates Norton's egotistical fantasy by fashioning his own, considerably more acerbic connection between the millionaire and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. The Invisible Man calls his university "a flower-studded wasteland" and finishes his paean to it with a cry of "And oh, oh, oh, those multimillionaires!" (37), parodying Eliot's line "O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag" (2: 128). The comparison suggests that Norton is no Percival or Fisher King but rather a symbol of degraded modernity akin to the Rag--which would ironically contravene Norton's desires for temporal stasis and purity. (For another reading of how Norton evokes the Fisher King's narrative of rejuvenation but fails to live up to it, see Baker 85).
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3. The incest link was advanced most famously in Selma Fraiberg's "Two Modern Incest Heroes," but the reading has persisted into the present. Somewhat more recently, however, scholars have begun to examine the Trueblood-Norton relationship outside strictly psychoanalytical bounds. Most notably, Houston A. Baker Jr. argues in "To Move Without Moving" that Trueblood is a "master storyteller" (77) who has learned to construct "a supreme capitalist fantasy" (87) that appeals to the basest racial, sexual, and financial interests of white auditors such as Norton.
4. Nadel develops this argument at length in chapters 4 and 5. For one critical response to Nadel's book that also regards the Golden Day episode as a literary and literary-critical palimpsest, see James M. Albrecht.
5. This trope of building-as-palimpsest resurfaces in, among other places, Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, which features a structure whose three stories replicate the course of Western history from religion to commerce. "If Western History were a 3-story building located in downtown Manhattan in the 1920s," Reed writes, "it would resemble this little architectural number" (82). For more on the interplay between Reed's palimpsestic novel and Ellison's, see Henry Louis Gates Jr., chapter 6.
6. Some critics have disputed this characterization, however. Claudia Tate claims that Mary is not bound by the mammy stereotype (168), although Tate, like Stanford, also notes that Mary becomes a fully developed character only in the excised section of the Invisible Man manuscript published as "Out of the Hospital and Under the Bar."
7. See, for example, Blake 130 and Kent 273. For an extended discussion of Tarp's connections to and contrasts with other characters such as the grandfather and Bledsoe, see Robert B. Stepto.
8. Ellison himself implies that the novel progresses through a vaguely dialectical process in "The Art of Fiction," where he asserts that "The book is a series of reversals" (179) in its hero's developing consciousness. Callahan similarly hints at a dialectical series of reversals when he asserts that "The novel's trajectory follows the path of a boomerang," but he makes the important distinction that a boomerang's "precise point of return is unpredictable, erratic, uncyclical" (140), differentiating Ellison's reversals from the strict determinations of historical materialism. James Albrecht notes that Ellison derives his novel's ironic contradictions from Kenneth Burke's model of comic progression (57-59), an observation Ellison confirms in "The Art of Fiction" (176-77). Nondialectical models abound for Ellison's novel, though it is worth noting that Burke's model--"purpose being an act, passion the resistance or limitation the act meets, and perception the self-knowledge the actor gains in seeing the extent and limit of his or her act" (Albrecht 58)--itself follows a dialectical formula. Ellison's "boomerang" is thus more fundamentally dialectical than many critical accounts acknowledge.
