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"A slightly different sense of time": palimpsestic time in Invisible Man
Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2003 by Marc Singer
9. Ellison explicitly discusses the ambiguity and potential danger of the trickster figure in "Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke," where he observes that many tricksters are in fact white constructs who perform "a ritual of exorcism" (48) to purge racial anxieties. By connecting the Invisible Man's newfound tricksterism to Bledsoe, to Klansmen, and to "that old slave a scientist ... bowing and scraping in senile and obscene servility" (509), Ellison indicates that any distinction between Rinehartism and the novel's more openly deterministic "scientists" will prove illusory.
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10. The novel's climactic riot is itself a multivalent historical allusion. While most critics find the episode's antecedent in the Harlem riot of August 1943 (Bone 211, Blake 127), several key elements are also drawn from the riot of March 19, 1935. Fischer elaborates on several of the similarities between the 1935 and Invisible Man riots, including their proximate causes and the alleged involvement of the Communist Party (365-66). For a contemporary account of the 1935 riot, which also profiles the vaguely Ras-like figure of Sufi Abdul Hamid, see Claude McKay.
11. Ellison would later invoke the temporal continuity of the palimpsest to imply a lost racial intercontinuity at the 1973 Alain Locke Symposium, when he told a Harvard audience that "we live one upon the other; we follow, we climb upon the shoulders of those who have gone before" ("Alain Locke" 446).
Works cited
Albrecht, James M. "Saying Yes and Saying No: Individualist Ethics in Ellison, Burke, and Emerson." PMLA 114 (1999): 46-63.
Baker, Houston A., Jr. "To Move Without Moving: An Analysis of Creativity and Commerce in Ralph Ellison's Trueblood Episode." PMLA 98 (1983): 828-45. Rpt. in The Critical Response to Ralph Ellison, Ed. Robert J. Butler. Westport: Greenwood, 2000. 73-93.
Benston, Kimberly W. "Controlling the Dialectical Deacon: The Critique of Historicism in Invisible Man." Delta 18 (Apr. 1984): 89-103.
Blake, Susan L. "Ritual and Rationalization: Black Folklore in the Works of Ralph Ellison." PMLA 94 (1979): 121-36.
Bone, Robert A. The Negro Novel in America. New Haven: Yale UP, 1965.
Busby, Mark. Ralph Ellison. Boston: Hall, 1991.
Callahan, John F. "Chaos, Complexity, and Possibility: The Historical Frequencies of Ralph Waldo Ellison." 1979. Rpt. in Speaking for You: The Vision of Ralph Ellison. Ed. Kimberly W. Benston. Washington, DC: Howard UP, 1987. 125-43.
Cohn, Deborah. "To See or Not to See: Invisibility, Clairvoyance, and Re-visions of History in Invisible Man and La casa de los spiritos." Comparative Literature Studies 33.4 (1996): 372-95.
Dunn, Margaret M. "Altered Patterns and New Endings: Reflections of Change in Stein's Three Lives and H.D.'s Palimpsest." Frontiers 9.2 (1987): 54-59.
Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land. 1922. The Waste Land and Other Poems. New York: Harcourt, 1955.
