Content provided in partnership with
"A slightly different sense of time": palimpsestic time in Invisible Man
Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2003 by Marc Singer
After undergoing the factory hospital's mechanical parody of birth, however, the Invisible Man regresses to a second childhood of physical and emotional fragility. He is nurtured through this stage by Mary Rambo, who promotes a temporality of ambiguous value to the Invisible Man. On the one hand, she represents a vital and revitalizing connection to the past; George Kent classifies Mary as one of the novel's "folk figures" (268) who preserves "the warmth, wit, coping power, and humanity of the folk tradition as it survives in the modern industrial city" (270), while Susan Blake similarly identifies her as a "positive interpretation of the black folk perspective" and one of the novel's few "anchors against chaos" (130). Mary restores the Invisible Man to health, Robert G. O'Meally argues, by singing the blues to him, "As if to pass along the source of her strength to the hero" (Craft 89). In this respect she resembles other custodians of folk culture like Wheatstraw, although she exhibits few of Wheatstraw's modernist and modernizing traits. Under Mary's care, the Invisible Man finally stops denying his Southern heritage and gratefully eats hot yams in a rush of nostalgia (262-67); Mary's influence "contradicts the past-denying nature" (Busby 54) of his rush to modernity in the first half of the novel. The Invisible Man himself recognizes Mary as "a stable familiar force like something out of my past which kept me from whirling off into some unknown which I dared not face" (258).
- 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
But such stability exacts a heavy toll. Ellison provides an early cue to the dangers of living solely in the past when the Invisible Man, flush with the thrill of eating his first yam, bites into a second and finds "an unpleasant taste bloomed in my mouth ... it had been frostbitten" (267). While Mary anchors the Invisible Man to his past, she also prolongs his second childhood, and while she restores his affection for his cultural tradition, she also uncritically preserves some of that tradition's accommodations to racism. Anne Folwell Stanford notes that Mary is a "mammy" figure (117) who preserves the stereotype of the "self-effacing, maternal care-giver" (118). (6) Kent similarly argues that Mary represents "the integration of the bitter past with the present, as can be seen by her possession of ... the bank topped by a minstrel figure" (270). Her "stable familiar force" finds its negative counterpart and parodic reflection in that bank, which the Invisible Man cannot discard. He can no more shake himself of the cast-iron stereotype than he could earlier pull himself away from Mary's maternal care; they are two sides of the same coin. By anchoring the Invisible Man to the past, Mary also preserves the more racist elements of his historical tradition, elements he can neither deny nor forget.
