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Invisible Man and African American radicalism in World War II
African American Review, Fall, 2005 by Christopher Z. Hobson
To this perspective of limited autonomy corresponds the dedication to truth in art that some commentators have seen as Invisible Man's summative meaning. Those who believe the novel affirms artistic over political speech (John S. Wright), enacts self-liberation through narration (Valerie Smith), or projects public liberation through the medium of the artwork (Callahan) all employ some variant of this idea. This dedication to art is indeed evidenced both by the protagonist's prospective comment on the "urge to make music of invisibility"--the artistic task he will take on in his book--and his retrospective affirmation that he has "tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties," that is, to give artistic form to our lives (580-81).
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However, Invisible Man presents both personal autonomy in a restrictive world and the vocation of artistic witness as insufficient in themselves, parts of a complex mix of personal and social action that is needed for true freedom even if not readily available. Ellison himself has noted the "irony" in the protagonist's affirming limitless possibility "while living in a hole in the ground" ("The World and the Jug," 1964; SA 109; CE 157). The protagonist, reveling in his ability to do so, still reflects that "the freedom to eat yams on the street" (to affirm cultural identity) "was far less than I had expected upon coming to the city," while in the epilogue he comments that he wants "not the freedom of a Rinehart nor the power of a Jack, nor simply the freedom not to run"--that is, not the individual autonomy that has sometimes been seen as the novel's guiding conception (267, 575). Further, neither the framing prologue and epilogue nor the narrative chapters resolve the tension between artistic and political goals, but maintain and even insist on it. In the opening pages, as the protagonist speaks of making "music of invisibility," he adds, "But I am an orator, a rabble rouser--Am? I was, and perhaps shall be again" (14). This echo of the Lesser Doxology is no accident; the urgency of public action as well as artistic endeavor is given in the shape of US identity and history that the protagonist has already discovered. In the epilogue, as well, the protagonist affirms that having written his tale, he "must come out," not simply to speak but to act, for there is no meaningful life "[w]ithout the possibility of action" (581, 579). Most urgently, the protagonist's dream of the iron man of totalitarianism ends with the cry, "No, no, we must stop him!" (570). As in Blake's "Till we have built Jerusalem," the choice of pronoun is the most significant aspect of this passage. Even if, as Callahan astutely notes, these words are uttered in the dark with no audience (African-American 180), they cannot simply state the importance of artistic endeavor, but testify to the necessity of collective action.
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