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

The Golden Day chapter therefore represents an important step in the Invisible Man's developing sense of time, as Ellison undoes all of the arguments his protagonist absorbs so unquestioningly from Norton in chapter 2. Time retains none of the orderly continuity that Norton wishes to impose on it, standing revealed instead as a turmoil, a constant conflation or resurgence of earlier periods. The Golden Day's time resists any attempts to preserve the purity of the past or to enforce a destiny on the future. This temporal conflation also enables Ellison's literary-critical refutation of Norton and Mumford, allowing him to confront twentieth-century blindness with the racial preoccupations of the nineteenth century. Nadel observes that such conflation "is only possible in the Golden Day. Although we cannot return to the past, per se, we can return to the literature of the period and find there the moral issues inherently linked to blacks and slavery" (101). But the Golden Day is more than just a literary palimpsest; as a site of confused and circular temporality it belies Norton's linear, telic view of time as well as his uncritical nostalgia for antebellum culture.

Modernity and the city

The Invisible Man encounters a new and equally chaotic temporal conflation when, expelled from the bucolic university, he arrives in New York City. There he soon encounters a living embodiment of this conflation of past and present in the cartman Peter Wheatstraw.

Although critics typically identify the cartman as a representative of African-American folk culture (Sundquist 123-24; O'Meally, Craft 87-88), Wheatstraw also alludes to modernism and modernist aesthetics. His banter begins with Joycean attention to verbal surface as he asks the Invisible Man "is you got the dog?", an anagram he decodes when he blurts, "Oh goddog, daddy-o" (173). The Invisible Man also interprets Wheatstraw's language as if it were an exercise in literary modernism; when he hears Wheatstraw sing the "Boogie Woogie Blues" (identified by O'Meally, Craft 87) about a woman with feet like a monkey, legs like a mad bulldog, he wonders if the song refers to "some strange sphinxlike animal" (177), reading the song as Yeatsian or Eliotian classicism rather than the blues humor of Count Basie and Jimmy Rushing. The Invisible Man twice comments on Wheatstraw's "Charlie Chaplin pants" (174), connecting the cartman to filmic modernism as well. Finally, in addition to Wheatstraw's effortless combination of black folk culture and modernist technique, the cartman is also marked with the signifiers of urbanization. He carries blueprints of

      Cities, towns, country clubs ... buildings and houses.... I asked
      the man why they getting rid of all this stuff and he said they
      get in the way so every once in a while they have to throw 'em out
      to make place for the new plans. (175)

In the face of this relentless obsolescence Wheatstraw maintains a strong connection to African-American folk culture, strong enough that the Invisible Man feels "a wave of homesickness" (174) and a powerful sense of deja vu in his presence (175). Wheatstraw therefore functions as a representative of African-American modernity: caught between the agrarian South and the urbanized North, between blues song and modernist art, he incarnates the telescoping of feudalism and industrialism that Ellison describes so pointedly in "Harlem Is Nowhere." Fittingly, he ushers the protagonist into the city that similarly conflates these eras.