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Invisible Man and African American radicalism in World War II
African American Review, Fall, 2005 by Christopher Z. Hobson
However, if Invisible Man has already described an expansive perspective of communal, and possibly multicommunal, struggle for democratic amelioration, this perspective has its own difficulties and contradictions. These too are part of Invisible Man's reference to the specific situation of African American radicalism in the 1940s.
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In the political plot, both the protagonist's quasi-Jamesian spontaneist conceptions and his emerging democratic ideology lack present opportunities for organization and action. In this respect the protagonist's position in his "hole" imaginatively recreates the contemporary paralysis in US politics. Beyond these issues of goals and strategy, Invisible Man's epilogue also shows a tension between the conception of "affirm[ing] the principle" and the more utopian possibility that politics could be "an expression of love" (452). The two are not unrelated, but neither are they the same. The zoot suited youths' "heavy heel plates clicking remote, cryptic messages" (443), for example, communicate a self-defined group style rather than defined political attitudes--"an unstated, even noumenal set of values that exist beneath the surface of black American culture," which "manifest themselves in a characteristic manner, or an expressive style" (Neal 113). (28) These aspects of identity, as well as the youths' position "out of time" and their possible "ancient dreams" (441), go beyond the Brotherhood's and other reductively political belief systems. But nothing about the youths is merely individual, or transhistorical in the sense of existing without reference to historical time: theirs is a group identity, and they think "transitional" thoughts (441). Thus, their appearance in the novel reaffirms but also complicates the need for social action. Arguably, a society true to and based on the zoot-suiters' culture, style, and "ancient dreams," and on Clifton's humanity--each of these multiplied and generalized for "all the others in the loud, clamoring semi-visible world" (574)--would require a deep transformation of social purpose and structure, not simply achievement of democratic rights. The protagonist has already half-expressed this conception in his arena speech as a desire to create "the country of your vision" (346). The transformative quality of these goals is not easily encompassed by the epilogue's overt political strategy of struggling to realize the democratic possibilities inherent in the US Constitution. Hence, a substratum in the protagonist's outlook remains influenced by utopian hopes.
These alternatives--limited autonomy in a restrictive society, democratic ameliorative struggle for "the principle," utopian struggle for a world of "Brotherhood"--were all inherent in the position of African Americans at the end of the period of radicalization in the 1930s and 1940s, on the eve of the renewed struggle of the later 1950s. These were and are, in fact, alternative possibilities for social action, and Invisible Man does not so much choose among them as record their existence. But while expressing these contradictory possibilities and the social stasis that partly conditions them, the novel also forecasts--necessarily provisionally and prospectively--the end of stasis. The Prologue's apothegm, "A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action" (13), and the Epilogue's promise, "I must emerge.... I'm coming out" (581), prophesy--from darkness--what would appear in US social life only a few years later. Indeed, the change was already in the air. On 1 April 1952, just days before Invisible Man's 12 April publication, in one of four cases later consolidated as Brown v. Board of Education, Judge Collins J. Seitz ordered the integration of two Delaware schools, the first time any court had done so (Martin).
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