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He speaks for whom?: inscription and reinscription of women in 'Invisible Man' and 'The Salt Eaters.' - Varieties of Ethnic Criticism
MELUS, Summer, 1993 by Ann Folwell Stanford
Through this interventionist, intertextual, and revisionary activity, black
women writers enter into dialogue with the discourses of the other(s).
Disruption -- the initial response to hegemonic and ambiguously
(non) hegemonic discourse -- and revision (rewriting or rereading) together
suggest a model for reading black and female literary expression.
(Henderson 131)
By inscribing in her main character, Velma Henry, the consequences of double invisibility and silencing, and by constructing a female healer who bears similarities with Ellison's major female character, but who stands in stark contrast to her, Bambara's text functions not only as a critique of and an argument with, but as a corrective to, Ellison's text.
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Particular signals, patterns of imagery, and thematic similarities suggest strong links between The Salt Eaters and Invisible Man, making an inquiry into the intertextual relationship between the two especially appropriate.(1) Many as yet unexplored suggestions of links between Invisible Man and The Salt Eaters exist. Bambara's use of bird imagery recalls Ellison's, where birds function as signals, warnings, or emblems within both texts, often signifying a character's shift of understanding or perception, or (in The Salt Eaters) a shift in space/ time relationships. Patterns of circles and cycles appear in both novels; indeed, the structure of The Salt Eaters, while a plot exists, is more circular than linear. This is much the same for Invisible Man, about which Kimberly Benston says, the "plot -- the soul of (hi)story, as Aristotle would have it -- is circular yet inconclusive, ordered yet open" 90).' Explorations of the role of memory are crucial to both; both novels make brilliant use of dream/fantasy narratives. Another striking resemblance to Ellison's text, as Eleanor Traylor points out, is Bambara's use of the jazz mode as a form. Both novels ultimately seek to map out a terrain in which, among other things, American myths of self-reliance and integrity are probed and challenged, and where "the liberating epiphany... can occur... only when the 'telos' of discovery is seen truly as a point of departure" (Benston 89).
2
Ellison's novel begins, "I am an invisible man," thus voicing the narrator's hard-won realization that his search for identity begins and ends in the paradox of invisibility. Indeed, invisibility becomes the trope Ellison uses to critique and explore what it means to be a black man in America. The narrator of the novel, rendered invisible because people refuse to see" him, searches for the answer to the questions, who am I, where did I come from, and "what did I do to be so black and blue?"
Written prior to the civil rights movement and the second wave of the women's movement, Ellison's novel predictably foregrounds race -- "blackness of blackness" -- in his character's search for identity, meaning, and place in American history. The novel insists, however, that this problem of origins and identity is not, of course, limited to blacks, but permeates the fabric of American society, and is shared by all Americans (albeit in quantitatively and qualitatively different ways). Critics have accordingly drawn attention to the novel's "universality," noting that Ellison's story reaches far beyond racial boundaries. Gene Bluestein argues that the protagonist of Invisible Man moves through various stages of acceptance and identity as a black man, as an American, and finally, to the stage which expresses the universal values of humanity" (604). While the impulse to come to terms with one's personal history (ethnic identity, folk heritage, family tradition) and to claim a national identity is no doubt shared by many, the very notion of "universal humanity," erases or at least blurs more political considerations about how a text is produced as well as about how it is received. J. Lee Greene notes that critics often had "strained to make the definition of 'universality' in Invisible Man synonymous with white"' (154).
