Content provided in partnership with
"A slightly different sense of time": palimpsestic time in Invisible Man
Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2003 by Marc Singer
But Norton's interest in and connection to slavery is most apparent in his encounter with Jim Trueblood. This episode is one of the most heavily examined in Ellison scholarship, but its critical discussion has largely been dominated by a focus on incest as the sole link between Norton and Trueblood, to the neglect of other, more historicized and racialized connections between them. (3) Yet Norton is initially drawn to the share-cropper because of his retrograde historical philosophy; Trueblood's living evocation of slavery attracts the financier long before he hears of the incest scandal. Norton first commands the Invisible Man to stop the car when he sees the Truebloods' log cabins (46), his fascination increasing when the Invisible Man tells him they "were built during slavery times" (47). Norton comments, "I never would have believed that they were so enduring. Since slavery times!" (47)--yet while he nominally refers to the cabins, he is actually "looking across the bare, hard stretch of yard where two women ... moved with the weary, full-fronted motions of far-gone pregnancy" (47). He appears to be projecting the cabins' age and historical continuity onto their inhabitants--and effectively seeing the women as slaves.
- More Articles of Interest
- Ralph Ellison: Critical Studies Of Invisible Man
- Masquerade, magic, and carnival in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man - Critical...
- Eloquence and Invisible Man
- Invisible desires: Homoerotic racism and its homophobic critique in Ralph...
- The critical response to Ralph Ellison. - book review
Moreover, Norton's fearful fascination with degeneration and "the human stock" (47) suggests that he views conventional, exogamous reproduction as a vehicle of familial and historical decline, hence his interest in the pregnant women, whom he imagines are reproducing without losing their connection to the past. At this point, his obsessions with his dead daughter and his own familial purity begin to shade his interest in the Truebloods, but his initial attraction to them is based on historical as well as prurient desires. Ellison thus foregrounds not only the irony implicit in Norton's desire to keep his daughter and his family line pure through the taboo act of incest but also the racism implicit in the philanthropist's desire to preserve and reinscribe the past by suspending African-Americans in a state of perpetual indebtedness and slavery.
While Trueblood shocks Norton with the suggestion that he too might have successfully committed incest and survived (Baker 87), the next episode, in the chaotic and temporally confused Golden Day, unravels the industrialist even further. The bar's name evokes Lewis Mumford's The Golden Day, a treatise on the early nineteenth-century American literature that Norton cherishes, but the chaos of the bar drastically undermines Norton's and Mumford's rose-tinted views of the past. In Invisible Criticism, Alan Nadel roundly criticizes Mumford for ignoring the importance of slavery and race in antebellum America and argues that Ellison's Golden Day episode responds to Mumford's whitewashed literary history by confronting Norton with the racial obsessions of the antebellum period (85-103). The Golden Day thus comments on both antebellum literature and twentieth-century literary criticism. (4) But while the episode has received considerable critical attention for its literary palimpsest, it also serves as a temporal palimpsest, playing a crucial role in the Invisible Man's development by opposing Norton's models of time, fate, and history.
