MA thesis bakhtin and invisibility

MA-Thesis

Fooling Invisibility: A Bakhtinian Reading of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

LCM Summer Term 2009

Reviewer: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Mita Banerjee Dr. Richard J. Harvey

FB 3 Anglistik / Germanistik /Romanistik Universität Siegen

Anselm Maria Sellen Birkenweg 1, 57614 Ratzert Tel. 02684-956753 ahsellen@t-online.de Martikelnummer 725039

Contents

Introduction…………………………………………………………………………. 1

Chapter One Time-space and space-time: Consequences of the Chronotope in Invisible Man…… 14

Chapter Two The (Black) Grotesque Body………………………………………………………… 41

Chapter Three Memory and Identity Formation…………………………………………………….. 67

Conclusion………………………………………………………………………….. 93

Bibliography

Eidesstatliche Erklärung

Introduction

There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.

- Ralph Ellison

[…] the study of verbal art can and must overcome the divorce between an abstract "formal" approach and an equally abstract "ideological" approach. Form and content in discourse are one, once we understand that verbal discourse is a social phenomenon - social throughout its entire range and in each and every of its factors, from the sound image to the furthest reaches of abstract meaning.

- Mikhail Bakhtin

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In the process of preparation for this MA thesis I was on the verge of abandoning the project.

I was afraid Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man would become far too intimate for me, the subject too tense, the motifs too disturbing, the language too intrinsic. I feared that the novel would keep concealed and invisible the wealth I suspect between the lines. I did not, and I still don’t like Ellison’s Invisible Man. It felt uncomfortable and disturbing the first time I read it and with every additional reading the ambivalence I felt increased. I sympathize and fully share Ross Possnock’s sentiment on Ralph Ellison’s novel: “Ellison makes reading a ‘gymnast’s struggle’” (6). Despite all efforts, reading Invisible Man remained an uncomfortable and exhausting struggle until the very end. Eventually Invisible Man provided many experiences all adding up to some very disturbing revelations about my own “racialized” positionality. I began to scrutinize, my thought process pertaining to race, trying to expose any possible racist notions. The challenge was and still is painful and at times causes my mind to go blank in speechlessness. Words evaded me more than once.

It was an essay by Chris Cuomo that kept the project alive. Cuomo opens her paper with a powerful plea for help against her own whiteness.

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“Could somebody please help me with my whiteness – that elusive form […]

Whiteness is so fucking unfair, so boring, so overdetermined and fake, so tight, so ridiculous. I am sick of going to work where the professors are white and the custodians are black, […] most of the students are criminal justice majors, and everyone thinks that’s a big victory for diversity. I hate this racist world” (Cuomo in Yancy 27).

I will try to locate my own voice within Cuomo’s powerful plea as it challenges a racist world, which I am part of and that I have contributed to.

Locating my-“Self”

My reading of Ellison’s Invisible Man often left me perplexed, ridiculed and most certainly revealed to me my “fucking unfair” racist notions. The protagonist’s traumatic experiences are linked to whiteness - my own whiteness?! Ellison’s novel led me to scrutinize my thought process pertaining to race, trying to expose any possible racist notions.

This thesis is an extension of my scrutiny triggered by my desire to remain shaken in my “German-white-identity”. Chris Cuomo’s essay was an encouraging read, giving me reason to believe that my attitude would help me discern and encourage cracks in white supremacist identity and society. “When the foundation is cracking it’s best to avoid denial. […] Isn’t that what white folks need to allow? Must we not crack up in order to be something new?” (Cuomo in Yancy 30). By providing a Bakhtinian reading of Invisible Man I hope to conceptually disrupt white privileged identities and thereby deepen the cracks in supremacist structures.

Still, as a white person approaching Black-American culture and writing about it is fraught with white racist uncertainties. Thus, entering the African-American realm is problematic. Especially, since I am not socio-ontologically or existentially linked to any of the subaltern voices and bodies constituting the social environment of American (Black and White) society (I am German and I am white). Due to this fact, certain questions about my interest in the field of African-American studies arise and I am well aware of the fact that my interest in the field of African-American popular culture combined with my possible inner racist attitudes may arouse suspicion. However honorable my intentions, if one was to accuse me of being racist he may not be completely wrong. My interest in this field and my 2

fascination with something that differs so strongly from the cultural environment I grew up in could be racist in and of itself? Still, I hope not to be confused with those who show their admiration and interest in the subjects of African-American culture through emulation, perhaps better described by the term “Negrotarian” as coined by Zora Neal Hurston (qtd. in Strausbaugh 192).

White American writer Crispin Sartwell faced a problem very similar to mine. In his African-American studies Act Like You Know Sartwell cites Houston Baker: “For a white person to write about African-American life and popular culture would be colonializing and disingenuous” (7). This quote evoked in me feelings of guilt and apprehension – an anxiety that in the process of analyzing pieces of African-American (popular) culture, my white voice might eventually assume and exert oppressive powers over black Americans again. Thus, I want to be careful to put my voice into a place that processes, digests and exposes cultural phenomena like racism, supremacy and hegemony. I will follow Sartwell’s advice and try to remain visible in the text by fostering a rather autobiographical voice, instead of disguising it with a particularly divine academic tone (5-10).

Monique Roelofs argues vehemently against this approach stating that, “white selfdeclarations […] keep whites solidly ensconced in the center, causing pseudo-relationality and pseudo-reciprocity that must be analyzed and exposed” (Roelofs in Yancy 112). Roelofs’ doubts about white self-declaration, as reasonable as they may be, are in direct contradiction to their own subject. If it was no longer necessary to verify the color of voice in racial discourse, the discourse itself would be over. If color and descent would no longer matter then finally a liberating answer to W.E.B Du Bois’ crucial question to racialized identity, “How does it feel to be a problem?” could be an utterance of incomprehensiveness, a simple, profane “Huh?”!

Roelofs’ own contribution to George Yancy’s philosophical study on blackness and whiteness (white on white / black on black) proves that race discourse has not yet been received with disbelief and or incomprehensiveness. A “culturally neutral” etic account seems hardly possible (if not highly unsolicited), when it comes to entering the strenuous field of African-American studies from a white perspective. Hence, entering race discourse requires clarification of viewpoint and voice in order to level and create a common ground, on which exchange (scholarly and cultural) can be staged exhaustively by transparent (self-) identities.

Still, I hope to avoid passing off my whiteness as more critical than it can actually be.

I am in pursuit of a well-balanced approach that does justice to the subject. My thesis is equally dedicated to the “decentering of (my own) whiteness from the grounds of cultural 3

normativity” (Roelofs 112) on the one hand, and to extending critical self-reflection to my racial self.

Thesis statement

My aim is to create a text whereby readers will be able to compare and engage critically the intersections found within and between the extensive cadre of both Bakhtinian thought and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Aleida Assmann’s introduction to cultural studies (Einführung in die Kulturwissenschaft) will provide the conceptual framework of my intersectional analysis. I have chosen Assmann’s introduction not least because its particular focus is on the latest developments in Anglistics and American studies.

Kein Zweifel: die Kulturwissenschaften haben innerhalb […] der Anglistik Fuß gefasst […] dieser Band strebt eine enge Verbindung an zwischen der Einführung in theoretische Konzepte einerseits und der Einführung in die Literatur […] andererseits.

Ziel [des Einführungsbandes] ist es, einige Grundthemen zu identifizieren, in denen sich kulturwissenschaftliche Fragen verdichten, und diese mit literarischen Texten und Lektüren zu verbinden (Assmann 2006, 7-8).

From seven basic cultural issues (Zeichen (Signs), Medien (Media), Körper (Body), Zeit (Time), Raum (Space), Gedächtnis (Memory) und Identität (Identity)) Aleida Assmann derives fundamental questions around which all Anglistic and American cultural studies will evolve eventually.

Five of these seven basic issues will define the scope of this analysis: Time, space, body, memory and identity will be the vertices of this thesis. This framework sets out the leeway in which I hope to establish vivid dialogue and discussion between the Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin and the Afro-American novel Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison.

Since Bakhtin and Ellison worked in two entirely different cultural times and spaces, the question “Why should one attempt to read Ellison’s Invisible Man through the eyes of Bakhtin?” is quite pressing and needs to be posed. The answer to that question is of course closely linked to the works of both intellectuals. Both have exerted profound influence on literature and literates, on critics and on criticism and both were suffering under hegemonic oppression.

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Ralph Ellison and Mikhail Bakhtin were both born in 1913. Whereas Ralph Ellison was born into a racist society that would constantly despise him for who or what he was, Mikhail Bakhtin acquired scorn and condemnation for his revolutionary thoughts. Due to his unsolicited mindset and the vicissitudes of Stalinist repression Bakhtin was sentenced to exile in Siberia. “Some of Bakhtin’s writings were published under pseudonyms, many of his collaborators were persecuted or killed” (Stam 2). Needless to say, that Bakhtin was “facing great difficulties gaining access to key texts” (Stam 2). Hence, it all the more astonishes that “Bakhtin uncannily foreshadowed major poststructuralist topoi” and anticipated aspects of:

Lacan’s “linguistic” reading of Freud in Freudianism: A Marxist Critique (1927), aspects of contemporary sociolinguistics (Pêcheux, Halliday, Lakoff) in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929), and aspects of cultural anthropology (Victor Turner and Mary Douglas) and historical ethnography (Emmanuel le Roy Ladurie) in Rabelais and His World (written in 1940). (Stam 2)

Due to Bakhtin’s most comprehensive efforts in many human disciplines it does not seem too daring to apply some of his theory to Ellison’s Invisible Man. In his analysis of media and film Subversive Pleasures Robert Stam resolves all doubts about whether or not it is appropriate to apply Bakhtin to cultural phenomena profoundly different from the environment in which Bakhtin developed his theories.

In a very real sense Bakhtin’s ‘time’, […] is now, not only after structuralism but also after Stalin and after Bakhtin’s death, for his work addresses central issues of language, culture and politics and only now have the discourses emerged which, in dialogue with Bakhtin’s, can fully raise the ‘question of his questions.’ (Stam 3)

I will therefore take some of the concepts from Bakhtin’s works pertaining to the intersubjective constitution of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. I am going to explore, respectively, the chronotope, carnivalesque resistance, social identities and processes of memory and identity formation. It is not my aim to reify Bakhtinian concepts by adding comprehensive knowledge; neither will I attempt to discover philosophical sources of the Russian intellectual. It is rather that I want to render visible Bakhtinian concepts in unexpected theoretical (pop-)cultural perspectives.

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I am going to bring Bakhtinian thought into the fiercely contested realms between black and white culture. Since the depths of Bakhtin’s concepts delineate a future that reaches far beyond cultural boundaries I have reason to believe that applying them to Ellison’s novel is not simply justified but desirable. “Bakhtin’s work travels beyond its own borders to encounter […]” supplementary concepts (Peeren 8). Many of the interconnected concepts I will introduce, Bakhtin himself has not addressed explicitly. Still, they are implicitly promoted by Bakhtin’s notion of the dialogic confrontation: Bakhtin assumes that any literary work carries on a continual dialogue with other works of literature. Voices and ideas of authors interpenetrate literary fabrics. A text does not merely answer, correct, silence, or extend a previous work, but informs and is continually informed by other works. Dialogic literature is in steady communication with multiple works. This is not merely a matter of influence, for the dialogue is mutually extensive in both directions. Both, the previous work of literature as well as the present one are altered by the continuing dialogue.

The internal stratification of language is a prerequisite for the novel. ‘The novel orchestrates all its themes, the totality of the world of objects and ideas depicted and expressed in it, by means of the social diversity of speech types and by the differing individual voices that flourish under such conditions.’ The links and interrelations lead to the novel’s dialogization. (Bakhtin 1981, 263)

Bakhtin’s presumption about any text never being the result of just one mind but a literary process consisting of many intermingling voices, ideas and authors is also acknowledged by Ralph Ellison. “By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my multiple identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is, after all, a form of communication” (Ellison 274).

Thus, I will introduce aspects of intercultural theory, identity-formation-theory, the exploration of cultural memory and religious concepts that have contributed to understanding the cultural entities of black and white.

Many of the issues Bakhtin touches upon are of universal and atemporal quality. Some of Bakhtin’s theory does not only provide openings into the cultural realm of AfricanAmerica, but expands the spectrum of interpretation and reading of black cultural heritage.

Invisible Man, just as the title suggests, is a text that only hesitantly discloses its secrets - a novel full of “gnomic passages […] and unsettling riddles” (Possnock 4). With the help of Bakhtin’s theory I hope to educe some of these secrets, which according to a poll in the Wilson Quarterly was ranked the most important American novel published since World War 6

II by American Literature professors. I will refrain from, providing further facts or drawing more autobiographic parallels between Bakhtin and Ellison, their time(s) of change and upheaval (many more parallels, and facts will become self-evident in the course of my arguments). In the following section, I will define, consider and explain some terminology that will be essential for my analysis.

Bakhtinian Terminology

Mikhail Bakthin’s thoughts provide a vast armamentarium for my intersectional analysis of Invisible Man. I will place some of Bakthin’s most central concepts in the context of the African-American novel Invisible Man to draw out implications for the ongoing discourse on race, especially concentrating on the issues evolving around blackness and whiteness. Despite the most obvious links between Bakhtin’s theories and African-American reality - i.e. matters of power/ powerlessness, material relations, structured social relations, and valuation structures the Bakhtinian concept of Dialogism suggests transition and interchange between the seemingly extraneous ideas of the Russian thinker and the voice of Black American writer Ralph Ellison. Julian Wolfrey evaporates the concept of Dialogism, explaining it as an indicator of “the polyphonic play of different voices or discourses in a text, without the assumption of a dominant, monolithic authorial position or voice” (32). More extensively Stam adds, that “Dialogism refers to the relation between the text and its others not only in the relatively crude and obvious form of argument – polemics and parody – but also in much more diffuse and subtle forms that have to do with overtones, pauses implied attitude” (14).

Both definitions already hint at playfulness as a significant characteristic for Bakhtinian Dialogism. The dialogic vivacity fosters the “active social strategy for interacting with alterity”. This vivacity I would like to employ as a guiding principle for all my argumentations and observations throughout this thesis. Of all Bakhtin’s concepts the concept of Dialogism takes a key position:

Although there is no vertical hierarchy between Bakhtin’s interrelated conceptual categories, it is useful to regard “dialogism” as a category that “horizontally” embraces and comprehends the others. Bakhtin himself seems to authorize the impression that “dialogism” is central to all his work. “I hear voices everywhere,” Bakhtin was fond of saying, “and the dialogical relation between them.” (Stam 12-13) 7

Thus, this thesis is dedicated to creating a space where Bakhtin’s voice and the voices in Invisible Man can unfold and be heard. A space accounting for Bakhtin’s and Ellison’s discursive diversity, their broad conceptual scope and interrelated philosophical approaches vis-à-vis (racialized) power structures.

In that context I would like to stress that the boundaries of my framework are permeable in both directions; which means that voices leaking in from the outside will be just as welcome (if not desired), as a voice that resounds from within the demarcation lines.

Bakhtin’s statement “I hear voices everywhere” can therefore be understood as an obligation to not only hear, but to listen and respond to the voices that might rise in the course of this thesis. The space Assmann’s vertices provide will thus give room to the implementation of Bakhtin’s concept of Dialogism. In a way this entire thesis is an attempt to illuminate some aspects of Dialogism and its relevance to Invisible Man specifically and to cultural studies generally (Stam).

I want to introduce briefly two more transhistorical and transcultural Bakhtinian concepts beforehand. They are of vital importance and due to their interrelatedness will (re-)appear in my thesis quite constantly. The first concept is the concept of Carnival or the carnivalesque.

When Bakhtin speaks of Carnival in Rabelais and His World he does not refer to the few weeks of festivity that precede the Christian Lent as early modern Europe has come to know it.

As Bakhtin’s work shows Carnival is inextricably linked to popular culture and “exemplifies popular culture as a performative act or event that takes place in the public sphere” (Peeren 172). 1 Carnival for Bakhtin means a whole new perception of the constitution of social environment. According to Bakhtin, Carnival is “complete liberation from seriousness, the atmosphere of equality […]. It is the people as a whole, but organized in their own way. It is outside of and contrary to all existing forms of the coercive socioeconomic and political organization, which is suspended […]” (Rabelais and His World [RW] 255-256). Bakhtin’s concept of Carnival (especially when it is applied as a literary theory) is neither to be understood as anarchic proliferation (a connotation that might silently linger in the back of European minds), nor is Carnival a mode of guerilla warfare designed to overthrow existing power structures. “The Carnivalesque principle abolishes hierarchies, levels hierarchies” (Stam 86, Italics added). It is the notion of Carnival being a festive form flattening out all hierarchies to reinforce “joyful relativity of all structure and order, of all authority and all 1

I will assent to Hubert J.M. Hermans’ definition of culture. Hermans considers culture as “a set of independent

or contextual variables which affect the set basic characteristics common to all members of the species” (Hermans 24).

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position […]” for a limited period of time (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics [PDP] 124).

Carnival transcends political ambitions, since it (periodically) erupts from social disequilibrium. The freedom of Carnival is strongly dependent on the perseverance of a hierarchically structured environment. It even acknowledges the necessity of order, but mocks and parodies the absurd excesses “extravagating” from such strictly organized systems. Thus, Carnival is doubtlessly concerned with change only it does not achieve it by overpowering the gone-astray-system, but by immanently exposing its weaknesses.

The second concept I want to recover is that of the chronotope. Again, I will not be able to capture the many different notions lying therein. For now I will leave it at marking out the chronotope range for my project. The chronotope (literally, “time-space”) is a twodimensional concept describing the spatiotemporal matrix, governing the ways in which structures in the novel emerge. “The chronotope mediates between two orders of experience and discourse: the historical and the artistic, providing fictional environment where historically specific constellations of power are made visible” (Stam 11). The concept of the chronotope will help to analyze many of the episodic experiences the narrator in Ellison’s novel goes through. From the very beginning of the narrator’s story signature moments are in close connection to a world of transition, slipping back and forth in time, bending time, revealing to the reader a strange perception on action. In the prologue the narrator eases into a “slightly different sense of time,” one in which “you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead.

And you slip into the breaks and look around” (Invisible Man [IM] 8). Then the reefer smoking narrator recalls memory of how a prizefighting yokel takes out his opponent by “stepping into his sense of time” (ibid.).

This famous passage already implicates all of the aspects I will examine in the following chapters: Carnival and its protagonists (the (black) grotesque bodies of yokel, fool and prankster), the connection between time, space and memory as well as the effect all these aspects have on identity formation. Constantly related to these issues is the question of perception and projection of whiteness and blackness, which is why a few thoughts on color, diversity, race and ethnicity will be useful.

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On Race

This analysis partly concentrates on exploring racial implications, therefore it is necessary to evaluate the principal concepts of race, ethnicity and otherness and the way these concepts are related to processes of identity formation in Invisible Man In their sociological study of Ethnicity and Race Stephen Cornell and Douglas Hartman define race, ethnicity and otherness as social constructs. By doing so, they already cut the ground from under racist feet, who build their racist belief on the assumption that their white supremacy and superiority is justified by natural force, i.e. genetic and divine determination, and not by social processes. Cornell and Hartmann discredit the belief that “[…] races are genetically distinct subpopulations of a given species” (21). This opinion is supported by Robert Jensen who quotes the American Anthropological Association (AAA) to prove that race as a biological concept is mere myth.

With the vast expansion of scientific knowledge… it has become clear that human population are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups.

Evidence from the analysis of genetics indicates that most physical variation, about 94 percent, lies within so-called racial groups. Conventional geographic “racial” groupings differ from one another only in about 6 percent of their genes. This means that there is greater variation within “racial” groups than between them.” (15) Now the question is, in which concept of race and/or otherness does the story’s narrator believe? From the very beginning of the story the narrator is profoundly immersed in his struggle to explore his “Self”. The prologue offers the narrators account of his bumping into a white man on the street. This incident provides an astonishing insight into the construction of race and otherness in Invisible Man.

One night I accidentally bumped into a man […] he looked insolently out of his blue eyes and cursed me […] I yelled, “Apologize! Apologize!” But he continued to curse and struggle, and I butted him again and again until he went down heavily on his knees, profusely bleeding. I kicked him repeatedly, in a frenzy […] when it appeared to me that the man had not seen me, actually; that he, as far as he knew, was walking in midst of a walking nightmare […] a man almost killed by a phantom. (IM 4)

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This passage offers a striking yet enigmatic perception of the nature of both, blackness and whiteness. The incident itself reveals more layers of rather complicated questions about the difference of seeing and “being seen” in a racial encounter. From the narrator’s perspective, the reader has to ascribe the white man’s “insolence” to the loss of one of his foremost privileges. Being bumped into the white man has to face blackness, when in the past he was allowed to deny it. “The white man’s resistance to this presence reminds us that “black invisibility” grows out of dominant culture’s privilege to see or not to see, a privilege substantiated by a history of longstanding material, legal, and social discrimination” (Cheng 65). The metaphor of invisibility thus is a reminder of the long history of a thorough exclusion of blackness from culture, politics and social life.

At the same time, the encounter raises another question: Is the white man really the only one who ejected his vision? The writing is quite ambiguous at this point and Anne Cheng answers it by asking a counter-question: “If the narrator bumps into the white man, is not the white man invisible to the black man?” Cheng concludes:

If we do not take the narrator’s account at its surface value, it is conceivable that the white man cursed the black man for his clumsiness rather than for racist reasons, that masculine rather than racial privilege may be at stake, and that the narrator’s detection of white man’s insolence may itself be a projection […] The issue is […] the realization that because of the historic relation between whites and blacks in this country the possibility of a racist response haunts every racial encounter. A pre-written script compels, if not dictates, this confrontation. (66)

The insight that invisibility, may it be black or white or both, is urged into presence by mere projection of racist prejudices and stereotypes is tantamount to the assumption that concepts of diversity are depending utterly on social and historic construction. The narrator’s encounter with the insolent blue eyes of whiteness also hints at the strategy of forcing otherness into invisibility. In his essay Seeing Blackness from Within the Manichean Divide author George Yancy identifies the “white gaze” as a means by which whites establish blackness (or more generally, non-whiteness) as evil and bestial, and so on.

To say that when I open my eyes, I “see” the world unmediated and direct, would give credence to the following: “To see” a Black body as lascivious, sexually promiscuous, apelike, physiologically primitive, and criminal, would imply “seeing” the black body 11

as it is. What is seen is what is known, and what is seen and known is what there is. […] what the colonizer knows about the colonized constitutes what the colonized is. […] the colonialist logic is that what the colonizer/ white is, the colonized/ Black is not. […] (238-248)

The white gaze thus results from involving a series of negations into the process of “seeing”.

Very similar to the concept of the “white gaze” is that of Crispin Sartwell’s “ejected aestheticism”: “White Americans practice the purification or the mortification of the body by ejecting the body imaginatively into black persons, who become associated with the physical per se: sport, sex, violence, and dance, for instance” (11). The immediate effects of both concepts on blackness are very similar as well. “ The idea is to get the […] Black to conceptualize his/her identity/being as a bestial, hypersexual, criminal, violent, […]and as a problem” (Yancy 244). Blacks are forced to register the projected images and associations together with their meanings into their consciousnesses. A distinctive process is triggered and all the sudden Blacks have to come to terms with a body that has become unfamiliar, as if it “were taken outside [of them] and phenomenologically returned” as something “hampered and imprisoned by the myths of whiteness” (Yancy 250). Yancy goes on exposing the gaze and its effects as “white colonialist strategy […] to get the colonized Black to undergo a process of epistemic violence, a process whereby the Black begins to internalize all of the colonizer’s myth,” without having the slightest chance to escape it (244). Not even the struggle to self-centre perception, i.e. looking within oneself, would have preserved blackness from internalizing white mythmaking. Fjodor Michailowitsch Dostoevsky’s “Underground Man before the mirror” has to acknowledge the “impossibility of a direct relation with oneself, even in confession” (Dostoevsky qtd. in Stam 5). Bakhtin draws a parallel concluding that every person is suffering from the same phenomenon, that “one looks in and through the eyes of the other; one needs the other’s gaze to constitute oneself as self” (ibid.). The “white gaze” urges the African–American into an area of tension, where he/she is torn between internalizing white mythmaking and knowing about its falseness. In this dramatic situation the black consciousness splits. Or to put it in W.E.B. Du Bois’ terms the Black consciousness “doubles”.

“It is a peculiar situation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness – an American, A 12

Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled striving; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. ((Du Bois 168-169)

The colonizing strategies (the “white gaze” and “ejected aestheticism”) and their immediate effects on black self-construction reveal the colonizers perception of race and otherness as an artificial construct that has been reinforced and viciously altered over and over again - always in accordance to white needs. White images of blackness have cured over decades. By projecting and ejecting certain qualities to otherness (white and black) all interracial exchange has become “racial”, “not because a black man and a white man are involved per se, but because of the over-determined history between them” (Cheng 66). Therefore it is safe to assume that race, ethnicity and otherness do neither originate in genetic determination nor in divine force (manifests through selective quoting of scripture). In fact, both are attempts to justify hegemonic and supremacist constructs, which by implication means, that the process of “constructivity” is reciprocal. “The social construction of the Black is dialectically linked to the construction of white […]”. I will return to the effects of “mutual constructivity” on whiteness when I come to analyzing processes of identity formation.

For now it was important to reconsider the concepts of race, ethnicity and otherness in Invisible Man. Having exposed these patterns as historical constructs, results in the necessity to relocate them in spaces of past and present. In the next chapter I will therefore look at chronotope issues in Invisible Man.

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Chapter One

Time-space and space-time – Consequences of the Chronotope in Invisible Man

Human existence cannot have a relationship with being unless it remains in the midst of nothingness.

- Martin Heidegger

For he has set a difficult beginning over against a confused ending, things which strive with one another that it may be known that not one of them is true.

- Ephrem Syrus, The Second Discourse to Hypatius

_____________

Ralph

Ellison’s novel begins and ends in fictional present. From the Prologue the reader

learns that the narrator has found shelter in a coal cellar, which he has designed according to his needs. “The point now is that I found a home – or a hole in the ground, as you will. Now don’t jump to the conclusion that because I call my home a “hole” it is damp and cold like a grave; there are cold holes and warm holes. Mine is a warm hole” (IM 6). From this spatiotemporal matrix of the hole the narrator’s voice resounds.

In the narrator’s story time bends, contracts and becomes visible on artistic scale. “Der Raum gewinnt Intensität, er wird in die Bewegung der Zeit, des Sujets, der Geschichte hineingezogen“ (Bachtin [Choronotopos] 7). The concept of the “chronotopos” is one of indefinite semantic value. In his work Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel Bakhtin describes the chronotopos as “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (1996, 127). Signs which were thought to contain common meaning fissure and merge only to constitute an entirely new and unexpected nexus.

The chronotope is where the knots of narrative are tied and untied […]. Time becomes, in effect, palpable and visible; the chronotope makes narrative events concrete, makes 14

them take on flesh, causes blood to flow in their veins […]. Thus the chronotope, functioning as the primary means for materializing time in space, emerges as a center for concretizing representation, as a force giving body to the entire novel. All the novel’s abstract elements - philosophical and social generalizations, ideas, analyses of cause and effect - gravitate towards the chronotope and through it take on flesh and blood, permitting the imaging power of art to do its work. (Chronotopos 250)

“The chronotope can thus be said to take the form of what Clifford James calls ‘articulations of tradition,’ defined as ‘generative components of peoplehood, ways of belonging to some discrete social time and place in an interconnected world’” (Peeren 41).

A variety of spatial snapshots will help to examine the texture of different ‘topoi’. My freezing of images does not engender the absence of temporal paradigms. On the contrary, time and history are still very present in the stillstand of the literary picture. In fact, the creative powers of time and history have significantly contributed to bringing the ‘inbetween-space’ into existence. Esther Peeren hints that, “in denoting […] time and space as ‘time and space that belong inalienably to the subject, and to which the subject inalienably belongs,’ the narrative subjects and situations are ultimately produced by a particular timespace constellation (36). As a consequence of this reciprocal dependency, I conclude that it is simply impossible to separate time and space. However it is feasible to congeal literary scenery by ignoring the dynamics of time (the motion caused by temporal progression, not time itself). “Space begins to function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time” (Foucault). Thus, in the following I will approach text passages as if they were still images, in which time is captured but not intervening actively.

Within this world-on-hold I will be able to carefully examine the important spatial junctures inside the spatio-temporal matrix. I will focus on analyzing the space from where the narrator speaks and unveil its systematic function for the narrative. In order to seize additional meaning from the spatial consistencies in Invisible Man and its chronotope, ever spinning and rotating universe, it will be helpful to split up Bakhtin’s compound word ‘chronotopos’ into its components (chrono = time, topos = space) and look into the artistic dimensions of ‘time’ and ‘space’ in Invisible Man separately, i.e. is the deceleration of the narrative space in Invisible Man.

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Topos

The discussion of space in Invisible Man is inextricably linked to the anthropological discourse on the matter. Oneself orientates with the help of spatial paradigms. Man develops his senses, his imagination and his memory in accordance with space. Thus man is socialized within spatial structures (Assmann 150). A more particular form of the anthropological space discourse is that of the ‘space-in-between’. This variant discourse occupies an important strategic role within post-colonial studies. From a minority perspective the ‘space-in-between’ undermines the colonizers hegemonic structuring of spaces. In Ellison’s Invisible Man the narrator withdraws (is forced) into such an ‘in-between-space’. Chased by a gang of hoodlums he falls into a hole in the ground:

"What's in that brief case?" they said, and if they'd asked me anything else I might have stood still. But at the question a wave of shame and outrage shook me and I ran […]. But I was in strange territory now and someone, for some reason, had removed the manhole cover and I felt myself plunge down, down; a long drop that ended upon a load of coal that sent up a cloud of dust, and I lay in the black dark upon the black coal no longer running, hiding or concerned, hearing the shifting of the coal, as from somewhere above their voices came floating down. (IM 565)

In Ellison’s novel the narrator’s enforced refuge is located in the interstices of reality. The narrator’s entering into this world in between is therefore connected to his undergoing a change of perception, or more radically, a process of transition. Much like an ancient Greek hero, who at the discretion of some divine forces finds himself at the border struggling between life and death, Ellison’s narrator can not accept his fate. “I lay beside a river of black water, near where an armored bridge arched sharply away to where I could not see. And I was protesting their holding me and they were demanding that I return to them and were annoyed with my refusal.” (IM 569). The picture this passage evokes is reminiscent to that of River Styx, which in Greek mythology forms the boundary between earth and underworld (Hades).

As time goes by the narrator learns to appreciate his cellar and the freedom it offers. Finally, he has a room that allows him to reflect upon his Odyssey, without having to take into account imposed advice and its immediate consequences:

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And now I realized that I couldn't return […] to any part of my old life. I could approach it only from the outside. […] Once you get used to it, reality is as irresistible as a club, and I was clubbed into the cellar before I caught the hint. Perhaps that's the way it had to be; I don't know. Nor do I know whether accepting the lesson has placed me in the rear or in the avantgarde. That, perhaps, is a lesson for history […], I try belatedly to study the lesson of my own life. […] And I awoke in the blackness. Fully awake now, I simply lay there as though paralyzed. I could think of nothing else to do.

Later I would try to find my way out, but now I could only lie on the floor, reliving the dream. (IM 571-572)

Somewhere between heaven and earth, life and death, dark and light the narrator has found a shelter that can neither be colonized by white supremacy nor by black madness. What at first appears to be a place from which returning would not be possible has profoundly changed in the perception of the narrator. His refusing to cross the bridge into Hades (realm of the dead), as well as his refusing to return to the crude surface has created a “world in between”; a space where the two realms intersect without violating each other. “I could try to think things out in peace, or, if not in peace, in quiet. I would take up residence underground (IM 571). The coal cellar - to which the narrator refers as “a warm hole” - is a place in which the inconsistencies of celestial and terrestrial spaces are lingering in ambivalent harmony, while outside the hole they appeared violently displaced in unindebted warfare. Now the same irreconcilable inconsistencies find their natural ground and stability in the narrator’s retreat. All racial, social, cultural and political issues are present, waiting for the narrator to mold them. Finally, after having been betrayed by a variety of figures of authority, the narrator now discovers the freedom that lies beneath the ground in complete darkness. “I could only move ahead or stay here, underground. So I would stay here until I was chased out” (IM 571).

It is no wonder that the narrator’s change of perception goes hand in hand with himself taking in a new role. He becomes a hero in an astonishingly traditional sense. In his study The Hero with a Thousand Faces Joseph Campbell develops an analytic model, which he thinks is basic to most stories that evolve around the journey of a character. According to Campbell’s model we meet (prologue) and leave (epilogue) Ellison’s narrator at the climax of his narration, which is equivalent to the narrator’s existential low point. After a troublesome journey the hero has finally climbed down into the underworld where he has found - the magic potion, the trick, maybe he has even found himself - the solution to the great conflict

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that is raging in the world above. His hesitation to return should therefore not be interpreted as cowardice, but as a need for shelter and recreation.

The point now is that I found a home […]And remember, a bear retires to his hole for the winter and lives until spring; then he comes strolling out like the Easter chick breaking from its shell. […]Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action. Call me Jack-the-Bear, for I am in a state of hibernation. (IM 6)

In his digression about hibernation the narrator reveals that it is a temporary condition and that in fact he is preparing for more “overt action”, which implies that he will finally return to the surface and “[…] master the world above […],” just as he mastered the underworld (Campbell 197). It becomes obvious that the underworld, respectively the space-in-between serves as a test laboratory in which strategies for the final battle can be taken to the test. So, before returning to the white realms above, I will take a closer look at the space and the testing procedure at the rock bottom.

Heterotopia

In the context of analyzing Invisible Man’s narrative space as a test laboratory, another term offers auspicious access. In his essay Of Other Spaces Michel Foucault develops the concept of heterotopic spaces.

Foucault’s concept focuses on spatial issues entirely, while for the moment it dismisses the relevancy of time. Time as we keep (history) and measure (memory) it is not a prevailing entity for Foucault’s heterotopic space. In the following I will show that even though it is termed differently, the idea of heterotopic spaces is inherent to the concept of Bakhtin’s chronotopos.

Heterotopic spaces, Foucault argues, are spaces that contradict given norms and function in accordance to their own set of rules. The heterotopic space provides the opportunity to reflect, reconsider and contrast immediate reality. “Places of this kind [heterotopias] are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias” 18

(Foucault 52). From the several heterotopia Foucault articulates some bear resemblance to the hole into which the narrator has been chased. Thus, the narrator’s “warm hole” is by means of definition such an heterotopia, since it exhibits dual meanings by juxtaposing light and dark, life and death, reality and fiction.

The heterotopia is thus a term spatially specifying the postmodern in-between-space.

Both spaces originate from crisis-shaken circumstances which they counteract and circumvent.

In the so-called primitive societies, there is a certain form of heterotopia that I would call crisis heterotopias, i.e., there are privileged or sacred or forbidden places, reserved for individuals who are, in relation to society and to the human environment in which they live, in a state of crisis: adolescents, menstruating women, pregnant women. the elderly, etc. In our society, these crisis heterotopias are persistently disappearing, though a few remnants can still be found. (Foucault 12)

Foucault’s definition of crisis-heterotopia implies that this kind of heterotopia is only very seldom entered voluntarily, which obviously holds true for the narrator of Ellison’s novel.

Being black and therefore being unable to integrate into white supremacist society is what actually forced the narrator into his hole.

Within heterotopic spaces agents can roam freely, they can blur borders and even move them.

Laws (may they be written or unwritten) do not exist in these spaces. Inside the hole Officialdom and supremacy have no jurisdiction; this legal and social void defines the hole as “terra incognita” (unknown land). Although, through the narrator’s “invading” the hole, sets of internalized values and rules are introduced into the void with him, they do not have to be integrated into a given (white) system. The contrary is the case, the terra incognita will obey and function in accordance to the narrator’s notions and beliefs. The heterotopia, i.e. the void within the terra incognita, endows the narrator with creative powers. Seizing on Foucault’s idea that heterotopias enfold persistent effectiveness when time is subdued to individual (re-) definition, I will argue that inside the hole the narrator lays down the rules and even defines the course of time.

Inside heterotopic and ‘in-between-spaces’ time has coagulated into an abstract mass.

Inside the hole time has passed without notice, consequently time has never been a determining factor. Since the motion of time has not caused any effects on the texture of the

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hole, the hole is free of history.2 Thus time can be remodeled by the residents of such places.

The deadlock of time and history inside the hole is signified by what the narrator describes as the “darkness of lightness”. In his “underworld” it is he who is in charge of setting the paradigms that define time, i.e. day and night. Which is exactly what brings the heterotopia to function – The narrator breaks with time and inside the in-between, heterotopic place time progresses at his command.

That is why I fight my battle with Monopolated Light & Power. The deeper reason, I mean: It allows me to feel my vital aliveness. […] In my hole in the basement there are exactly 1,369 lights. I've wired the entire ceiling, every inch of it. And not with fluorescent bulbs, but with the older, more-expensive-to-operate kind, the filament type. An act of sabotage, you know. I've already begun to wire the wall. A junk man I know, a man of vision, has supplied me with wire and sockets. Nothing, storm or flood, must get in the way of our need for light and ever more and brighter light. The truth is the light and light is the truth. (IM 7)

In his hole the narrator has cloistered himself away from terrestrial computation of time and has instead assumed powers of divine proportions. In the in-between the narrator has light and dark at his command. The questions evolving around his identity also implied the question for divine guidance. Within the realm of white supremacy these questions and voids were answered deceptively. Instead of receiving advice the narrator is given false names or unsuitable identities throughout the novel. “[…] According to the dictates of others, he loses his autonomy” (Callahan 191). Inside the hole the narrator regains his “self” and fills his spiritual void by installing himself as a divine power that controls light and dark. The equivalent demonstration of creative force is to be found in Genesis 1: 3-5: “ 3And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. 4And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. 5And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day (King James Version). And even more, by saying “The truth is the light and light is the truth”, the narrator alludes to another famous passage from the Bible. Jesus speaks to his disciples: “As long as it is day, we must

2

In this case the term “history” is directly linked to the idea that historical events have immediate effects on the

development of social, cultural and political environment. The absence of history is synonymous with the power to “make” history by introducing events into the course of time and declaring them as more or less important than others; i.e. making time visible by distorting its even chronological flow.

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do the work of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the light of the world" (King James Version, John 9: 4-5).

The narrator, by exerting his divine powers by separating darkness from light, i.e. creating day and night he also shifts himself into the position of a Messiah - the Messiah who would rise to become a leader of the oppressed and who will finally free his people. Ellison’s narrator has become the black Christ Countee Cullen speaks about in his poem Heritage.

“Father, Son, and Holy Ghost”, So I make an idle boast; Jesus of the twice-turned cheek, Lamb of God, although I speak With my mouth thus, in my heart Do I play a double part.

Daring even to give You Dark despairing features where, Crowned with dark rebellious hair, Patience wavers just so much as Mortal grief compels, while touches Quick and hot, of anger, rise To smitten cheek and weary eyes.

(University of Virginia. Electronic Text Center)

Where Cullen imagines a black Jesus (“Daring even to give you dark despairing features […]”), Ellison boldly establishes his protagonist as Christian deity. Both writers embark on the strategy that by “coloring” the central figure of European-American religion the formerly god given supremacy (King James Version, Eph. 6,5: “Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ.”) is exposed as ‘whitewashed’ exegesis. By implication of the argument blacks regain authority over their previously determined lives and beliefs. Through these literary depictions of Jesus as a non-white Messiah Cullen and Ellison support Rev. Albert Cleage argument about Jesus’ non-white heritage. In an article by Alex Poinsett from 1969 (published in Ebony magazine) Cleage was quoted with the following provocative assumption: 21

When I say that Jesus was black, that Jesus was the black Messiah, I’m not saying “Wouldn’t it be nice if Jesus was black?’ I’m saying that Jesus WAS black. There never was a white Jesus. Now if you are white, you can accept him if you want to, and you can go through psychological gymnastics and pretend that he was white, but he was black. If you’re such a white racist that you’ve got to believe that he was white, then you’re going to distort history to preserve whiteness. (qtd. in Poinsett 174)

By inverting white Christian iconography and blackening sacred imagery Ellison and Cullen breach taboos and trigger dire consequences. The assumption that the space-in-between can provide creative powers to its inhabitants needs to be proved.

In the case of Ellison’s narrator, the question remains whether or not switching on and off light is enough to shift a person into a divine position from where the subversion of white exegesis would be possible? The answer is “yes”. An answer of captivating simplicity, yet the process behind that answer is complex and can only be given on a highly metaphorical plane (which is not to harm its actual relevance). The power behind that light switch, which by mere flipping creates two mutually exclusive realms needs to explored. Mutual exclusiveness requires a sharp distinction; a demarcation line that intercepts and prevents darkness and lightness to leak into one another. It is right here in the contrast of light and dark that a boundary line becomes visible. The construction of this demarcation line, that separates light from dark, suggests an allegorical reading that starts by reintroducing it with a different term.

The Manichean Frontier

The demarcation line that appears or disappears at the narrator’s flick of a switch on the wall is best described by Yancy’s concept of the “Manichean divide“: “The America that I know is an America that paints the world in white and black, good and evil, us and them, civilized and barbaric, peacekeepers and warmongering terrorists” (Yancy 4). Whiteness constitutes an epistemic regime of supremacy according to which whiteness is “good”, while black is “evil”.

So, while blackness/darkness becomes connected with instinctive behavior and nature, whiteness/lightness denies its instincts and associates itself with civilization and culture. The “race dichotomy” is therefore a continuation of Manichean division. Both, the dichotomous as well as the Manichaeist bias interpret reality from a polarized view, where each of the 22

opposite sides embodies positiveness or negativeness. Therefore both sides are absolute in nature.

However, the notion of Manichaeism in postcolonial studies is so much concerned with the disequilibrium between colonizer and colonized, that most authors fail to see that Manichaeism proceeds on the assumption that the relative strength between the opposite cores of dark and light is balanced.3 The Manichean religion believes in two gods of equal strength.

“The good god is the god of spirituality and light; the bad god is the god of matter and darkness, both equally eternal and powerful. They are the essence of power and destruction [Italics added]” (Herrera). Manichean belief identifies itself as a religion based on the assumption that both good and evil are equal in strength. This assumption requires further consequences. In the following, I will therefore refuse to read Manichaeism as concept that distributes roles of unbalanced power a priori. Instead, I will build my analysis on the assumption that the powers of light and dark are equally strong. I will unveil and discover the concealed strength of the oppressed/colonized and render it visible, i.e. to support the idea that within the heterotopic space darkness/blackness can regain strength, autonomy and authority and effectively transfer them into the outer white realms.

The strength inherent to the narrator’s spatial environment lies in the dynamic of separation. In the hands of Ellison’s narrator the frontier between light and dark becomes an agent. In his renowned study The Significance of the Frontier in American History Frederick Jackson Turner came up with the thesis that at the western border of the American country civilization and the wild would constantly collide. From the contested peripheries of this steadily westwards moving frontier the American emerges. “Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development” (Turner 1). Turner points out the peculiarity of America as, “[…] the fact that it has been compelled to adapt to the changes of expanding people” (2). Turner ends his thesis by pointing out what constitutes the American character:

3

At this point, I am not talking about the direction into which power structures achieve impact. I do not

challenge the fact that the colonizer exerts his power from a sublime position, which allows him to fight downhill. The colonizer usually has multiple channels of distribution at his disposal, thus it is much easier for him to spread his message of his own superiority and “their” inferiority. I simply want to stress that the powers of resistance are of equal quality, only not as overtly aggressive. Which is why sometimes (literary) non-white resistance needs to be deciphered, to make it speak to us anew.

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American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character. (3)

Turner’s definition of the frontier adds new meaning to the narrator’s pushing the demarcation line between light and dark. In his effort to exert the divine power of separating day and night, lies hidden his ambition to (re-)create man. By bringing light and dark into existence the narrator assumes power over the movement of the frontier divide that delineates civilization from wilderness. Due to the “Turneresque” mobility, which the Manichean divide has experienced inside the narrator’s heterotopia I would like to coin the term “Manichean frontier” in order to do justice to the dichotomous merging of both concepts (mobility, change and racial boundary).

By pushing the Manichean frontier further into the white realm Ellison’s narrator triggers a process of transition and change. “Its tempo of development […] is so rapid that it throws up personalities as fluid and changeable as molten metal rendered iridescent from the effect of cooling air” (CE 343).

Turner’s frontier is not only a place of change but also a point of no return. Neither can the colonizer establish his ideas, values and standards in the terra incognita, nor can he go back to re-assume his old European condition. The European colonizer will be changed inevitably: At the frontier he becomes an American.

In the settlement of America we have to observe how European life entered the continent, and how America modified and developed that life and reacted on Europe.

The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick, he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails. Little by little he transforms the wilderness, but the 24

outcome is not the old Europe, not simply the development of Germanic germs, any more than the first phenomenon was a case of reversion to the Germanic mark. The fact is, that here is a new product that is American. (Turner 4-5)

A similar process takes place inside the narrator’s microcosm. In his moving the Manichean divide black and white, wilderness and civilization are forced into contact. The narrator requires both sides of the frontier to affirm a national experience. An experience that will allow both sides to uproot from racially segregated spaces. A steady shifting of the Manichean frontier entails broadening the gap between the “what-has-been” and the “what-is-now”, which means that the historicity of white supremacy will become a silent memorial of injustice, instead of being social reality. “Each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past” (ibid. 38). In the ongoing trespassing of boundaries Turner sees nature and future of the American people. ”To the frontier”, Turner writes, “the American intellect owes its striking characteristics.” (37) The Manichean frontier is thus less of a stable entity, but a threshold that needs to be crossed again and again – the unknown land waiting to be discovered (not colonized). The myth of the Turner’s frontier is very present in the divine position of Ellison’s narrator. The Manichean frontier redesigns one side from two opposite realms. Turner states: “If one would understand why we are to-day one nation, rather than a collection of isolated states, he must study this economic and social consolidation of the country. In this progress from savage conditions lie topics for the evolutionist.” (16). Of course Turner’s self- and nation-perception is one founded on a supremacist mindset entirely. Turner dismisses the violent confrontation between indigenous people and white European colonizers by presenting the conquering of the continent as a necessary organic (predetermined and inevitable) process. The fact that the narrator makes use of a “white” concept can be read as a move of subversive resistance. He intrudes and colonizes the colonizers thought (white cultural territory) only to avail it and counter-use a familiar white argument for black purposes. 4 Ralph Ellison alludes to this dilemma when he writes that by “changing the joke, they [blacks] may slip the yoke” – through inversion an argument that preserved white dominion backfires.

The shifting of the Manichean frontier engenders new Americans. These Americans are unable to distinguish between white and non-white. What emerges from the heterotopic space at the Manichean frontier is a eutopic society, i.e. is a utopia: A society that actually 4

Such a counter-argument can not be contradicted without risking its original relevance and /or harming the

contextual message which it supported.

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exists, even though its existence was considered improbable. The world on this side of the frontier has turned upside down from white and black perspective. It has been unhinged at the frontier and the result is a world within an unknown land inside which we have good reason to suspect keys to reconciliation between cultures, the revision of prejudices and the removing of ethnic boundaries.

I have shown that inside his hole the narrator is able to create a universe according to his needs. Or to put it back into the picture: The test procedure inside his microcosm has been successful. The narrator has established his own spatial-system and thus has created his own world-experience. Now the test scores must be reviewed under the influence of time. So far I have analysed the narrative space in a temporal vacuum, “it is now time” to set the space back in motion and see how the topos reacts in accordance to its chronos.

Chronos

Just like the narrator designs the spatial conditions of his hole he also shapes time. The narrator slips into his opponent’s sense of time and the disturbing happens. Blackness messes with white “timekeeping”. “But that's getting too far ahead of the story, almost to the end, although the end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.” A statement like this may sound cryptic to those who are used to live and experience in strictly chronological patterns. For a culture that perceives time as a linear structure that leads from past to future Edward T. Hall has coined the term “monochrone”. Monochrone perception of time is subdivided into rigid segments in order to make it planable and its usage more efficient.

I am German and although I try not to believe in stereotypes I felt like I was caught red-handed when reading Hall’s description of monochrone societies. His account of monochrone societies sounds very much like the archetypical German character, but moreover it sounds white.

Of course Hall’s concept of monochrone societies conforms to Max Weber’s idea of pure types - deliberate exaggerations by which reality should be rendered verifiable. Possible accusations of the concept being a racist template are indefensible, since Hall’s concept ascribes certain characteristics to geo-cultural spaces and not to specific ethnic groups. When it comes to enlisting societies that fit Hall’s definition of the monochrone, it is striking that they are all located in what is generally known as the Western World. Whiteness again is an

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inherent part and dominating part of western societies.5 White “bifurcated and hierarchical epistemic regimes” are due in no small part to their ways of timekeeping (Yancy 233).

Monochrone societies are anxious to preserve the linear streaming of time since it grants controllability by making (historic) events predictable – maybe even governable in the Orwellian dystopic sense: “then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’” (Orwell 46). Thus, unidimensional trajectories promote and even “justify” (white) authority.

The narrative structure in Invisible Man challenges white monochrone strategies of timekeeping by introducing a polychrone conception of time. E.T. Hall locates polychrone societies on the African continent and in parts of Asia as well as in southern parts of Europe, thus polychroneity is strongly linked to non-whiteness. A key feature of polychrone persons is a high distractibility. Therefore polychrone speech acts are very often subject to interruptions and digression. According to Hall they consider time commitments an objective that is to be achieved - if possible.

In Invisible Man the narrator tells his story in a way typical for polychrone people. He clearly has not submitted to the white ways of timekeeping within his society. As I have pointed out, the narrator himself is in charge of determining day and night and his narrative style is characterized by digression and spontaneity.

It was a strange evening. Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you're never quite on the beat. Sometimes you're ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around. That's what you hear vaguely in Louis' music. (IM 8)

In this excerpt the narrator draws a parallel between his perception of time and Jazz music (Louis’ music = Jazz trumpeter and singer Louis Armstrong). “Sometimes you’re ahead and 5

I am aware that by narrowing Hall’s concept of the monochrone to whiteness I become a target of charged with

being accessory proliferating racist notions. I hope to confute this accusation by explaining my notion of stereotypes as a pattern of behaviour and thinking that eventually leads to an oversimplification of persons and situations (Reinhold 651). This means that the stereotype for itself does not lead to racism, as it is not motivated by vicious preconceptions. Speaking in sociological terms, the stereotype is more of a structure that helps the individual to orientate within society, although it is very likely that the application of stereotypes will result in racism.

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sometimes behind”. Comparing time and Jazz music renders visible the narrator’s embeddedness in polychroneity. One of the key elements of Jazz is improvisation, whereas in European classical music (the epitome of white music mode) the performer is mostly expected to play the composition as it was written. In Jazz, however, the performer is absolutely free to interpret and ornament the tune. The performer’s individuality is crucial for the composition.

“Depending upon the performer's mood and personal experience, interactions with fellow musicians, or even members of the audience, a jazz musician/performer may alter melodies, harmonies or time signature at will” (Jazzpedia). Whilst in Jazz music beat and pace vary, the (white) European listener is not used to the sudden altering of melodies and harmonies.

Herein the white listener and the white reader coincide – temporal construction should not be a variable but a constant. In this respect white monochrone reading expectations and polychrone time signature collide and bear witness to the temporal autonomy of Ellison’s narrator, who is free to stretch and lapse time according to his wishes. “(Time was as I was, but neither that time nor that "I" are any more.)” (IM 37). The narrator’s temporal autonomy is also mirrored in his narrative modes.

Throughout the novel the narrator is eager to reflect on incidents and events that have happened. He seeks to explore his individual point of view by giving the written equivalent of his own thought processes. In these moments the reader is drawn into the narrator’s stream of consciousness and is practically forced to overhear the narrator’s loose interior monologues.

He doesn't even see me. Am I about to strangle him? I do not know. He cannot possibly. I still do not know. See! Discipline is sacrifice. Yes, and blindness. Yes. And me sitting here while he tries to intimidate me. That's it, with his goddam blind glass eye . . . Should you show him you get it? Shouldn't you? Shouldn't he know it? Hurry!

Shouldn't you? Look at it there, a good job, an almost perfect imitation that seemed alive . . . Should you, shouldn't you? Maybe he got it where he learned that language he lapsed into. Shouldn't you? […] What's mattering with you? Discipline. Is learning, didn't he say? Is it? I stand? You're sitting here, ain't I? You're holding on, ain't I? He said you'd learn so you're learning, so he saw it all the time. He's a riddler, shouldn't we show him? So sit still is the way, and learn, never mind the eye, it's dead . . . All right now, look at him, see him turning now, left, right, coming short-legged toward you. See him, hep, hep! the one-eyed beacon. All right, all right . . . Hep, hep! The short-legged deacon. All right! Nail him! The short-changing dialectical deacon . . .

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All right. There, so now you're learning . . . Get it under control . . . Patience . . .

Yes… (IM 476)

The passages in which the narrator’s consciousness starts streaming are often indicated by associative leaps in syntax and punctuation (“What's mattering with you? Discipline. Is learning, didn't he say? Is it?”). Even though these ellipses can make the prose difficult to follow, the narrative is amazingly coherent. At this point the definitional line between interior and dramatic monologue grows hazy. From time to time the narrator addresses his readership directly (“pardon me”, “bear with me” etc.). The narrator obviously imagines a counterpart to listen to his story and thoughts, thus he implies both questions and answers from voices other than his own. Therefore his story turns out to be a dialogic product in a very Bakhtinian sense:

[…] this sense takes on its more precise characteristics, such as “the mixing of intentions of speaker and listener”, the creation of meaning out of past utterances, and the constant need for utterances to position themselves in relation to one another.

(Vice 45)

Bakhtin ousts both forms of the monologue (interior and dramatic monologue) by introducing a permanent addressee (fictional or real, implied or actual) for all utterances. Ellison’s narrator, even though he is alone in his hole, responds to the many voices he has heard during his journey – he mediates all voices to his audience, which is why he consciously structures his streaming thoughts, although he regulates in accordance to polychroneity.

The polychrone narrative space from which the story emerges seems to help the narrator tracing back his fragmentary thoughts and sensory feelings. Within his own spatiotemporal matrix the narrator is able to locate himself and his narrative becomes more legible as it proceeds. Thus, his journey of finding his “Self” is reflected in his increasing legibility.

Embedded between epilogue and prologue time seems to pass linearly. Events are narrated in a chronological order, but since the immediate temporal experience of epilogue and prologue suggests a non-linear perception of time, the narrator’s retrospective view on past events is harshly contradicted and subject to serious doubts. The narrator’s own distance to the alleged monochrome puts the reader on alert and the gap between narrator and reader widens. The progressive junction from polychrone to monochrone mirrors the narrator’s wish to observe also the rules of his (white) readership. The reader finds himself in between two worlds - a polychrone and a monochrone world. Being introduced to the in-between, the 29

reader is offered an exemplary glimpse into the narrator’s torn reality, his cultural incompatibility and his unfinished identity.

The polychromic is also indicated by the narrator’s designation of time. “Kein Tag wird in vollständiger Angabe von Jahr, Monat, Tag und Stunde datiert” (Dietz 193). The structure of time is of minor importance and - contrary to white perception - not a principle of arrangement. The calendrical scheme of time is replaced by what I would like to call “naturetime”: It is neither the beginning (or end) of semesters, nor year dates that indicate the progression of time, but seasons and the corresponding natural phenomena (“summer sun”, “winter snows”, “springtime”). Day times are rudimentarily subdivided into dark and light and not structured “clockwise” (inherent to this nature-time-structure is again the contrast of black and white – the Manichean divide). The chronometric of nature is a guiding principle that runs through the novel like a golden thread, whereby the term “thread” comprises a homonymic double meaning: Since monochrone audiences are used to time being a administrative feature that organizes narratives linearly, they will be intimidated by the narrator’s “tentative” perception of time. The narrator’s use of time becomes a golden “threat”, because the vagueness of nature-time challenges the predictability of events. The exact dating of past (history), present and future according to perceived seasonal changes (synchronized to the apparent motion of sun and moon) becomes impossible. The narrator’s bias to structure his story in accordance to nature-time undermines the chronometrical ground work of white hegemony. Past, present and future are no longer subject to monochrone strategies of locating, defining and interpreting.

The monochrone (white) reader has to subordinate to the black (polychrone) perception of time. To put the lid on it, his chronometric impotence is constantly mocked between epilogue and prologue.

Have I said before that the narrator’s scenic narrative is structured linearly, then that was only half the truth. In fact, all events that are taking place - as linearly as they might appear to be – are embedded into the narrator’s polychrone universe. Nature-time references are the only vertices the reader is given. Year-dates, months, week-days are temporal units of no importance. On the shaky basis of this temporal vagueness the reader will inevitably come to notice, that all events narrated are absolutely interchangeable. Narrative coherence and meaning do not depend on chronologic story telling. Still worse, if chronology is abandoned for means of improvisation (e.g. the narrative mode “stream of consciousness”) and natural phenomenon, then time virtually withers away. By replacing white chronometry with naturetime the narrator subverts the race dichotomy. White predictable, sterile environment is 30

interspersed with a seemingly anarchic and arbitrary way of black timekeeping - nature enters and redefines culture. Nature-time unhinges white power structures and the scenario gains Darwinian proportions: From a white perspective the elimination of white chronometry is equal to an ever-accelerating social change, an increasing threat to the self-confidence of the 'advanced' white American nation. What if social, historical and cultural dislocations disprove the myth of whiteness being the pinnacle of evolution? Questions like these are inherent to the narrator’s new computation of time.

By eliminating white timekeeping and introducing nature-time instead, the narrator alters space and its perception altogether. The narrator’s heterotopia (his in-between-space) fully unfolds at his introducing primitive clocking. About the interacting forces of time and the heterotopic space, i.e. the space in-between, Foucault writes:

Heterotopias are most often linked to slices in time - which is to say that they open onto what might be termed, for the sake of symmetry, heterochronies. The heterotopia begins to function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time. (Foucault)

Characteristics attributed to time are revealed in and through space, whereas space is dimensioned and filled with meaning by means of time. It is in this artistic relation between time and space that new worlds are created. Thus, Ellison’s Invisible Man constitutes a whole new chronotopos: A heterotopic space functioning “at full capacity”.

Closely related to the structure of any wholly new spatio-temporal matrix are observations evolving around the perennial questions of how power structures develop within complex social environments. In the case of Ellison’s novel, the question would be how the narrator’s chronotopos communicates and interacts with other spaces? How does the spatiotemporal matrix of pro- and epilogue respond to the scenic narration and vice versa?

The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at us, is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void that could be colored with diverse shades of light; we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another. (Foucault) 31

In the most immediate relation between black and white spaces power structures are rendered visible. The constituting powers that both realms exert on each other will reduce their alleged exclusiveness to absurdity. Dealing with the narrator’s chronotopos will help expose white supremacy and unveil the resistance behind black mockery. Thus, it is essential to conceive the “chronotopos” not as aesthetic pleasure, but as a concept to analyse political, social and cultural processes.

Until now, all considerations of chronos and topos have brought forth the notion of a world thrown out of joint: Mobile frontiers (spatial and temporal), confusion of powerstructures and racial boundaries. The question whether fact or fiction can be clearly assigned either to the assumed reality outside the narrator’s hole, or to the subjective perception of his outcast identity remains unanswered. Neither does the narrative claim to be reliable, nor is it subject to absolute confusion. The reader finds him-/herself levitating inside a highly uncomfortable epistemic vacuum. The world has turned upside down and welcomes the reader to the chronotopos of the absurd.

The Absurd The chronotopos of the absurd reveals twisted characteristics of time and space.6 Where space is usually dimensioned and filled with meaning by means of time, the absurd universe has no spare room for any entity whatsoever. Within the absurd the artistic relation between time and space erodes and is open to the redefining powers of Ellison’s narrator, i.e. black subversive power.

The idea of the absurd is inherent in Existentialist philosophy. The absurd mirrors the confusion of the era we live in: Shifting paradigms, the rise of (religious) spirituality interfering with western rationalism, political changes and terrorism; only to name a few., and all these different influences are leaking into our cultural and social spheres, creating more confusion with every solution or suggestion that brings the individual to another scratch

6

My making use of some pertinent existentialist terminology should be understood as gaining methodical

entrance to the absurd itself in regard to Ellison’s novel Invisible Man and not so much as defining the author’s oeuvre into certain theoretical spaces.

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(Esslin 12-17). Within the midst of this existentialist struggle Ellison’s narrator locates his “Self”.

But after I had laughed I was thrown back on my thoughts—how had it all happened?

And I asked myself if it were only a joke and I couldn't answer. Since then I've sometimes been overcome with a passion to return into that "heart of darkness" across the Mason-Dixon line, but then I remind myself that the true darkness lies within my own mind, and the idea loses itself in the gloom. Still the passion persists. Sometimes I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unlovable in it, for all of it is part of me. Till now, however, this is as far as I've ever gotten, for all life seen from the hole of invisibility is absurd. (IM 579)

As often as the narrator tries to locate meaning and sense in his environment, may it be material or social, he does not succeed. Ellison remarks about his narrator’s deplorable strive for meaning: “[…] he is a man born into a tragic irrational situation who attempts to respond to it as though it were completely logical” (Ellison 344).

[…] in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. (Camus 5)

Being involved in numerous irrational situations, the narrator can not help, but notice the feeling of absurdity: “Sometimes it appeared as though they played some vast and complicated game with me and the rest of the school folk, a game whose goal was laughter and whose rules and subtleties I could never grasp” (IM 74). Both, Ellison and his narrator apply the term “absurd” to the world order: “The absurd predicament in which Negroes find themselves upon the assumption that all is completely logical” (ibid.). John Cruickshank’s description of the individual being caught in the absurd comes closest to Ellison’s observations on his narrator. The absurd is “the conclusion arrived at by those who had assumed the possibility of a total explanation of existence by the mind but who discover instead an unbridgeable gulf between rationality and experience” (Cruickshank 49).

Drama professor Martin Esslin reveals the contemporary social notion behind the “absurd”: He asserts the absurd to be an attitude expressing that once imperturbable dogmas 33

and certainties are no longer valid. The genre of the absurd mirrors the confusion of eras of steady transition: Shifting paradigms, the rise of (religious) spirituality interfering with western rationalism, political and racial changes, terrorism etc., and all these different influences are leaking into (black and white) cultural and social spheres, creating more confusion with every solution or suggestion that brings the individual to another scratch (Esslin 12-17). Still, the absurd does not allude to the irrationality of social, political and cultural developments, but is to be found in the confrontation between our desire for clarity and our realizing of the world's irrationality. Neither the world nor the human minds is in itself absurd. Rather, absurdity finds itself in the confrontation between the two. “The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. It binds them one to the other as only hatred can weld two creatures together. “The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.” (Camus 20).

In accordance to this dazed and confused love-hate relationship between man and universe Eugène Ionesco realizes the absurd will never be heading for any destination. In the case of Ellison’s narrator, the absurd in general signifies his (existentialist) state: Detached from his social, metaphysical or transcendental roots, he becomes lost and his actions dissolve into the inept, arbitrary and inadequate.

And carrying this absurd logic to its conclusion, I must admit that that struggle implies a total absence of hope (which has nothing to do with despair), a continual rejection (which must not be compared to immature unrest). Everything that destroys, conjures away, or exercises these requirements (and, to begin with, consent which overthrows divorce) ruins the absurd and devaluates the attitude that may then be proposed. The absurd has meaning only in so far as it is not agreed to. (Camus 30)

Much like Camus - who stresses the absurd’s aim, i.e. to perish with style in a pointless universe - Ellison tends to construct his protagonist’s absurd world in dependence on continuing change and the absence of any guiding principles, hence Ellison’s narrator embarks on a journey only to discover that he will neither be able to adapt, nor comprehend the complex situations originating from race relations. “Was that a principle of hope […]?

Otherwise there was nothing but betrayal, and that meant going back to serve […] and jumping from the pot of absurdity to the fire of the ridiculous” (IM 506).

Nevertheless, Ellison’s approaching the absurd differs strongly from that of many convinced existentialists. Instead of inspiring his readership with awe on the evidence of the 34

absurd’s mechanic source, trivial existence, Ellison’s narrator approaches the absurdity of his surroundings with a grim sense of humor. “One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness… humor and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable.” (Camus 118). In between the many passages in which the narrator reflects upon the many disturbing encounters and events there are moments in which his humor flares up to pierce through the forlornness of the situation: Severely injured after a workplace accident the narrator has to undergo medical treatment. After his discharge from hospital he is confused and disoriented. While aimlessly wandering through the streets he buys yams from an old man:

I am what I am! I wolfed down the yam and ran back to the old man and handed him twenty cents, "Give me two more," I said.

"Sho, all you want, long as I got 'em. I can see you a serious yam eater, young fellow. You eating them right away?"

"As soon as you give them to me," I said.

"You want 'em buttered?"

"Please."

"Sho, that way you can get the most out of 'em. Yessuh," he said, handing over the yams, "I can see you one of these old-fashioned yam eaters."

"They're my birthmark," I said. "I yam what I am!"

(IM 266)

Wordplays like “I yam what I am”, or “[…] why confusing the class struggle with the ass struggle” are an integral part of narrator’s way of telling his story. Like a palimpsest enclosing many texts, the narrator’s puns reveal many messages and references. “I yam what I am” is an obvious allusion to Exodus 3:14. In this passage Moses asks God for his name: God said to Moses, "I AM WHO I AM." And he said, "Say this to the people of Israel, 'I AM has sent me to you’.” (King James Version). I will attend to the narrator’s namelessness, or respectively, his strive for identity in the third chapters.

The starkness and hopelessness behind the narrator’s humor is portrayed in Albert Camus’ essay The Myth of Sisyphus. Starting from existentialist foundational acceptation that with God’s vanishing from the scene the world is left without purpose, value and meaning, Camus concludes that such a world is most likely to provide its people with nightmarish prospects: In an absurd world, which is actually pointless and empty, there is no reason to do 35

anything, let alone continue living. The narrator’s futile struggle, the void of reason outside his hole has brought him to arrive at this existentialist conclusion:

I say all this to assure you that it is incorrect to assume that, because I'm invisible and live in a hole, I am dead. I am neither dead nor in a state of suspended animation. Call me Jack-the-Bear, for I am in a state of hibernation. So I took to the cellar; I hibernated. I got away from it all. (IM 6, 573)

Camus’ allegorical reading of the Greek myth of Sisyphus, by highlighting the absurd and the futility of meeting it rationally bears many similarities to Ellison’s narrator.

Sisyphus, due to his cheating the ancient gods and death itself, is condemned for eternity to roll a stone up a hill. Every time he is about to complete his task, the stone would roll free back down to the bottom of the hill. Sisyphus would then have to start all over again, even though the same thing would just happen again. Sisyphus is stuck in an eternally pointless task – his burden is the futility of his being. Now, if the world and everything in it was also pointless, the lesson is that the task of Sisyphus is identical to everything that Ellison’s narrator would ever be doing in life. He seems to be very similar to Sisyphus; and if Sisyphus’ punishment makes afterlife a hell for him, the narrator must already be living in existentialist hell. In order to make his fate endurable Sisyphus decides that his futile fate has to be meaningful. Sisyphus restores the value and purpose that objectively does not exist by an act of will. This decision is what struck people as liberating about Existentialism. In order to be happy Sisyphus must neglect eternal nothingness and provide meaning himself.

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises the rocks. He, too, concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. (Camus 119)

To live his life, the narrator exercises the freedom to create his life, his world, his task – he has to become his own god. Thus, the narrator’s state of hibernation is not signifying his submission to the world outside. On the contrary, the narrator rebelliously refuses to accept

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Ellison’s absolute perception of life as being unchangeably “tragic or absurd” (CE 344).

Instead he chooses to work towards chance and equality.

And, as I said before, a decision has been made. I'm shaking off the old skin and I'll leave it here in the hole. I'm coming out, no less invisible without it, but coming out nevertheless. And I suppose it's damn well time. Even hibernations can be overdone, come to think of it. Perhaps that's my greatest social crime, I've overstayed my hibernation, since there's a possibility that even an invisible man has a socially responsible role to play. (IM 581)

In the end the narrator comes to terms with the world being upside down. He even embraces the absurd. He becomes Sisyphus and acts in accordance to his maxime: ‘The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill the narrator’s heart. One must imagine him happy.’

It is this alleged happiness that allows the narrator to finally (re-)emerge from his shelter and face the absurd. He has found the magic potion, the trick that will help him to understand white supremacist society. Several times throughout the story the narrator is thunderstruck by “the tragic irrational situation”, to which he tries to respond as “though it were completely logical” (CE 344). The absurd and irrational situations are constituent parts of Bakhtin’s concept of carnival. Bakhtin’s carnival is a continuation, a completely different yet closely connected dimension of the (absurd) upside down world. “Der Karneval […] ist ein Lebe, das aus der Bahn des des Gewöhnlichen herausgetreten ist. Der Karneval ist die umgestülpte Welt“ (Bachtin 1969, 48).

Carnival

The Carnival Bakhtin transposes into a literary concept does not have much in common with the carnival of our days. The Bakhtinian Carnival is a festivity enrooted in medieval times.

Key carnivalesque topoi closely connected and constantly referred to are banquet imagery, marketplace speeches, the lower bodily stratum, the grotesque body and gay relativity or to put it more blatant: “carnival involves the ‘material bodily stratum’, those ‘organic’ aspects of human life that involve fucking, gorging, pissing, shitting, puking, menstruating and all the other ways in which the body can act in what [white] high cultural norms define as ‘disgusting’ fashions” (Inglis 106). By deploying these disgusting fashions in narrative forms 37

“social hierarchies and power structures oriented around positions of ‘high’ and ‘low’ are temporarily inverted, often through forms of parody, in order to destabilise and to make comic that which is taken seriously in social orders” (Wolfreys 20). Exemplary for the carnivalesque inversion of hierarchical structures in Invisible Man is the Golden Day episode.

In order to get an alcoholic “stimulant” for a dangerously upset benefactor (Mr. Norton) of his all-black state college, the narrator has to stop at a bar and whorehouse called the Golden Day. Together with Mr. Norton the narrator enters the bar at a rather inconvenient time. “As I drew nearer I recognized the loose gray shirts and pants worn by the veterans.

Damn! […] the disabled veterans visited the whores, hobbling down the tracks on crutches and canes; sometimes pushing the legless, thighless one in a red wheelchair” (IM 35, 71). And it is not too long before the narrator finds himself and Mr. Norton (now unconscious) being overmastered by degenerated bodies (and minds) brimming with anarchic mirth. When things are getting wilder Supercargo, the white-uniformed attendant who is in charge of the veterans and the mental incompetents, enters the scene.

"I want order down there," Supercargo boomed, "and if there's white folks down there, I wan's double order."

Suddenly there was an angry roar from the men back near the bar and I saw them rush the stairs.

"Get him!"

"Let's give him some order!"

Five men charged the stairs. I saw the giant bend and clutch the posts at the top of the stairs with both hands, bracing himself, his body gleaming bare in his white shorts. […] It was a narrow stair and only one man could get up at a time. As fast as they rushed up, the giant kicked them back. He swung his leg, kicking them down like a fungo-hitter batting out flies. The Golden Day was in an uproar. Half-dressed women appeared from the rooms off the balcony. Men hooted and yelled as at a football game.

"I WANT ORDER!" the giant shouted as he sent a man flying down the flight of stairs.

"THEY THROWING BOTTLES OF LIQUOR!" a woman screamed.

"REAL LIQUOR!" "That's a order he don't want," someone said.

(IM 82-83)

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The carnival crowd in the Golden Day enforces the debasement of the “king” - one of the key features of Bakhtinian carnival. Supercargo, king of a somewhat deranged clientele, is brought down from his throne and has to face “a order he don’t want”. Within carnival, all hierarchical distinctions, all barriers, all norms and prohibitions, are temporarily suspended, while a qualitatively different kind of communication, based on free and familiar contact, is established. The absence of formerly existing hierarchical distinctions is very vividly illustrated by Supercargo’s wearing only white shorts. “I hardly recognized him without his hard-starched white uniform. Usually he walked around threatening the men with a strait jacket which he always carried over his arm […]” (IM 82). Without the uniform his gleaming body is derived of all officialdom, thus equal and vulnerable. The narrator notes that the Supercargo’s patients were “usually quiet and submissive in his presence. But now they seemed not to recognize him and began shouting curses” (ibid.). Supercargo has changed from king to counterpart and as such his threatening attitude is exposed as pompous and out of proportion. Now, that Supercargo is one of their own, the veterans and traumatized will no longer passively accept the ideas and values Supercargo stands for (repression, fear, violent authority etc.). The liquor, signifier for an oppressive system that relies on Machiavellian principles to sustain power at all costs - “bread and circuses”, “the opium of the people” - , is thrown back at Supercargo. The bottles become actual objective correlatives, freeing critical consciousnesses that mock dogmatism and fanaticism. The moment the veterans bring down Supercargo, they regain their freedom of speech. Now in contrast to, “You can't speak your mind when he's on duty!”, they are releasing decentralizing energies by holding what Bakhtin refers to as marketplace speeches: “Bakhtin’s valorization of anarchizing vitality of parole against the ossified rigidities of langue” (Stam 85).

“With Supercargo lying helpless upon the bar, the men whirled about like maniacs.

The excitement seemed to have tilted some of the more delicately balanced ones too far. Some made hostile speeches at the top of their voices against the hospital, the state and the universe. (IM 85)

In this scene the hugeness of the decentralizing (dethroning) energies of carnival is revealed as they are directly opposed to the suffocating decorum of Supercargo’s official life and style.

Everything that was awe-inspiring outside the golden day now turns into “bugbearing”. Inside the Golden Day the carnivalesque mode, the debilitating sobriety of fear succumbs to the happy madness of the oppressed.

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The carnivalesque introduces the possibility of a different world, i.e. a new world order, a new life. The upside down world easily transgresses the borders of the outside world and shakes its imperturbability to the very foundations. “Der volkstümliche Karneval stellt immer die Rückkehr des Goldenen Zeitalters dar, er spielt die lebendige Möglichkeit dieser Wiederkehr vor.” (Bachtin 1969, 27). The following passage from Invisible Man may seem crude or cynical but it well illustrates how one Golden Day may trigger the dawn of a Golden Age

Somehow I got pushed away from Mr. Norton and found myself beside the man called Sylvester. "Watch this, school-boy," he said. "See there, where his ribs are bleeding?"

I nodded my head. "Now don't move your eyes." I watched the spot as though compelled, just beneath the lower rib and above the hip-bone, as Sylvester measured carefully with his toe and kicked as though he were punting a football. Supercargo let out a groan like an injured horse. "Try it, school-boy, it feels so good. It gives you relief," Sylvester said. "Sometimes I get so afraid of him I feel that he's inside my head.

There!" he said, giving Supercargo another kick. (IM 64)

In the opening passage of The Birth of Tragedy Friedrich Nietzsche offers an account Dionysian festivity, which applies to the Golden Day scenery, while once again it condenses the idea of Bakhtinian carnival. “Now the slave is a free man; now all the rigid, hostile barriers that necessity, caprice or ‘impudent convention’ have fixed between man and man are broken” (37). The long custom of crowning and de-crowning is a defining characteristic of the carnivalesque world-order: Change and alteration, birth, rebirth and death, the levelling of social classes and the abolishing of skin color related hierarchies are part of that jolly, sometimes crude, relativity that is Bakhtinian carnival.

In the following chapter I will turn to observing the narrator’s appearance and his key role in the upside down world. In preparation of the argument to come, it will be helpful to trace more of Bakhtin’s thoughts on the protagonist of carnival – the fool and his grotesque appearance, i.e. masking and physical characteristics.

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Chapter Two

The (Black) Grotesque Body

For he has the territory of harmonicas, the acres of flutes, the domain of violins. And God says, why did they put you in prison? What did you do to the people? ‘I made them dance and they put me in prison. The soot people hopped; and to twinkle like sparks on a chimney-back and I made 80 francs every dimanche, and beer and wine, and to eat well. Maitenant…c’est fini…Et toute suite’ (gesture of cutting himself in two) ‘la tete.’ And He says: O you who put the jerk into joys, come up hither. There’s a man up here called Christ who likes the violin.

- e e cummings

Blacks are men who are black; in other words, owing to a series of affective disorders they have settled into a universe from which we have to extricate them.

- Frantz Fanon

_____________

During my research for this chapter it was noticeable that the mere mentioning of the term “body” evoked many different associations among literary and cultural scholars. It seems that the term undergoes an inflationary conjuncture, leaving the “body” semantically gutted.

Clifford Geertz critically refers to this phenomenon as a “sudden vogue of such a grande idée”, which everyone tries to “apply and extend where it does not apply or cannot be extended” (35). Is the term “body” an “ignis fatuus”? Nothing more than a catchword, an incantation to beseech meaning rather than actually revealing it?

In order to discontinue terminological depletion I will resort to a body discourse that is predetermined by Bakhtinian thought. The “grotesque body” finds its element in parts of folk culture, i.e. carnival. In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin rigidly opposes popular folk culture/carnival to official culture. According to Bakhtin carnival establishes a “utopian realm of community, freedom, equality, and abundance” (RHW 9). Carnival is, consequently, an act of liberation from any form of officialdom. Thus, I will consider carnival as mode of 41

resistance - an approach that requires the reinterpretation of protagonists and bodies within such folk culture. Bodies will have to be defined in departure from official culture never in relation to it. My discussion of Ellison’s bodies in Bakhtinian terms, will therefore evolve around the relation between body and agency.

In this context the body gains significance in its resistance against colonization and imperial forms of governing. Since the bodies, on which my argument concentrates, are located in African-American contexts, my body-agency-context is broadened by issues of race and the mutual vis-à-vis construction of black and white. Or to put it differently, terms like colonization and hegemony have to be considered in the interdepending relations between oppressed black bodies and white supremacy. George Yancy describes the black body as an entity “that is to be feared, disciplined and relegated to those marginalized, imprisoned, and segregated spaces that restrict Black bodies from the tranquillity of white life, white comfort, white embodiment, and white being” (2008, xvi). Hence, all terminology is enhanced along racialized borders, hegemony becomes white hegemony, official culture becomes white official culture and so on ad nauseam.

Bakhtin’s concept of carnivalesque resistance provides the environment for a successful rediscovery of black and white cultural heritage and resurrection of the body, which will eventually lead to what Homi Bhabha refers to as the “Location of Culture”.

Namely, the reclamation of difference and concreteness that will equip the disenfranchised with voice, power and agency. Bakhtin’s carnival provides its protagonists with agency, while at the same time it reignites the “subject-debate”. It is within Bakhtin’s carnival that the “subject” regains body and physical expressiveness beyond formerly conceded cognitive abilities. Bakhtin goes even further and stresses the importance of the body above all other modes of resistance. He remarks “[…] it is precisely the material bodily image that is exaggerated to disproportionate dimensions” (RHW 312). It is precisely this hyperbolization endemic to Bakhtin’s carnival – that, by means of contrast, brings forth a new world. It is striking that Bakhtin speaks of the images of bodies rather than bringing in physical reality.

The term “image” here indicates the constructiveness of the body. What Bakhtin describes as the grotesque body is merely a construct consisting of ascribed features, figments of imagination shaped in accordance with cultural, political and social perception.

When invoking the term “body”, we tend to think at first of its materiality – its composition as flesh and bone, its outline and contours, its outgrowth of nail and hair.

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But the body, as we well know, is never simply matter, for it is never divorced from perception and interpretation. (Peterson 132)

When I talk about blackness and body I am referring to the black body that has been historically marked, disciplined and inscribed “to ensure both white supremacy and the illusory construction of the white subject as a self-contained substance. The following observations on none-white characteristics are directly derived from the iconographic, semiotic and existential battleground, that is, the black body (Yancy 2008, 1).

The Black Body

The black body has been and still is subject to white perception. White assumptions for what the black body is originate from conceptual thinking Sartwell calls “ejected aestheticism”: a concept that whites have (un-)consciously established “to keep the Nigger runnin’” (IM 15).

“White Americans practice the purification or the mortification of the body by ejecting the body imaginatively into black persons, who become associated with the physical per se: sport, sex, violence, and dance, for instance” (Sartwell 11). Or as Ralph Ellison puts it in his essay Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke: “[…] it was our Negro ‘misfortune’ to be caught up associatively in the negative side of this basic dualism of the white folk mind, and to be shackled to almost everything it would repress from conscience and consciousness […]

(Ellison 2003, 102). So, while Blacks become connected with instinctive behaviour and nature, whiteness denies its instincts and associates itself with civilization and culture. The “race dichotomy” therefore consists of the two mutually exclusive parts: (1) Black = Nature / (2) White = Mind, it is thus an extension of the Manichean divide I have discussed earlier. The black (male) body is by nature unlawful, dangerous, unruly, criminal and hypersexual (Yancy 2008, 13). As a quid pro quo whitness establishes itself within a relational dimension, from which it emerges as a transcendental entity: “Whiteness is that according to which what is nonwhite is rendered other, marginal, ersatz, strange, native, inferior, uncivilized, and ugly” (ibid., 3).

On many occasions Ellison’s narrator experiences the same phenomenological slippage between his own felt black body and how whites perceive, understand, and construct that very same body on the basis of “their” racialized acculturation. After his friend and

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fellow-campaigner Tod Clifton has been shot by a policeman the narrator takes to the subways where he watches the people around him.

It was as though I'd never seen their like before: Walking slowly, their shoulders swaying, their legs swinging from their hips in trousers that ballooned upward from cuffs fitting snug about their ankles; their coats long and hip-tight with shoulders far too broad to be those of natural western men. These fellows whose bodies seemed— what had one of my teachers said of me? —"You're like one of these African sculptures, distorted in the interest of a design." (IM 440)

These interests the narrator’s teacher speaks about are subject to change. Interests depend on situations. The shifting of political, cultural and social roles (active or passive, imposed or assumed) is inherent to any paradigmatic change. What resonates in his teachers words, puzzles the narrator, “Well, what design and whose?” (ibid.). The narrator finds his self and his body reduced to an amorphous, black seething mass a subject to confiscation and reconstruction through whites. Or, to use Judith Butler’s turn of phrase, “a racially saturated field of visibility” – the narrator’s black body: Distorted and blurry at first, it becomes visible through white ascription at last. The narrator is never in charge of what he means or intends, but he is utterly dependent on what the eye of the beholder - the white ”designer” - imagines him to be.

That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality [...]. You're constantly being bumped against by those of poor vision. Or again, you often doubt if you really exist. You wonder whether you aren't simply a phantom in other people's minds [...]. You ache with the need to convince yourself you do exist in the real world [...] and you swear to make them recognize you. And, alas, it's seldom successful. (IM 3-4) Yancy notes that the designer’s (the white man’s) perception, i.e. what he “’sees’ or ‘hears’ is governed by a racist epistemology of certitude, which renders the narrator invisible (87-123).

Only through not seeing the narrator is rendered visible; only through not hearing the narrator he is audible (2008, 13). The blackface minstrelsy movement illustrates this phenomenon vividly.

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During the minstrel years blacks were reduced to clumsy, exaggerated metonyms so that even colored performers - due to white gazes - had to darken their natural complexion to signify blackness "correctly”. Ellison writes, "The racial identity of the performer was unimportant, the mask was the thing (the 'thing' in more ways than one), and its function was to veil the humanity of Negroes thus reduced to a sign" (Ellison 103). Since then white audience controls signification; the white audience appends meaning to the sign; the white audience signifies (Caponi 123 – 137). In this way, the darky entertainer ultimately represents not blackness, but whiteness. Hence, Ellison observes in his essay Change the Joke an Slip the Yoke that the “role with which they [blacks] are identified is not, despite its ‘blackness’, Negro American (indeed, Negroes are repelled by it); it does not find its popularity among Negroes but among whites; […] In other words, this ‘darky entertainer’ is white (Ellison 101).

By implication of the argument the Sisyphean proportions of the narrator’s task becomes obvious. If he wants to be seen (or heard) as what and who he is, then whites – blinded by their own assertions about blackness – will fail to see (or hear) him altogether, whereas when he is seen he appears as an “African sculpture, distorted in the interest of a design”; invisible and voiceless. The white racist gaze (Yancy) applies to the black body (while it neglects a black mind altogether) racial constraints blacks are unable to overcome.

For the narrator these constraints mean exclusion from social, political and cultural life.

Together with his body the narrator is forced into the in-between. In his struggle against his being “outcasted” the narrator provisionally fails to see the potential to subvert white hegemonic structures, which lie within the grotesqueness of his black body.

The grotesque is an image of the eternal triumph of transformation; it expresses hope for the future, of always another chaotic beginning. This sense of time is quite different from a model which starts with an origin and moves in a procession, one which Bakhtin identifies with the "official" preoccupation with the past that renders life hierarchically pre-determined and unchangeable. (“Madeline”)

Thus, the narrator has at his disposal a weapon which, once it is gauged and adjusted properly will enable him to undercut white supremacist society. The Franz Fanon epigraph at the beginning of this chapter also points to a tactic that brings resistance within reach: The narrator is owing to a series of affective disorders which have settled him into a universe from which he has to extricate himself, i.e. in order to be seen and heard (without losing body and

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voice) the narrator has to reposition his grotesque black body in societal contexts and discourses.

The repositioning of the body

According to Peter Raggatt the positioning in dialogic exchange is defined as, “a metaphorical concept through reference to which a person’s moral and personal attributes as a speaker are compendiously collected” (19). Thus, in the flow and flux of interpersonal exchange dialogic, discursive etc. - the interlocutors can shift back and forth between “dominant or submissive, dependent or independent, comforting or threatening” positions (ibid.). This free availability of certain metaphorical positions within conversations is an illusion when contexts change. In the case of racialized contexts, “positioning is governed by societal expectations and prescriptions that, as it were, bear down on the person in all directions from the outside” (ibid.). Societal predetermination does leave the narrator with very constrained possibilities to position his black self anew. On his deathbed the narrator’s grandfather offers strange advice, about how (re-)positioning in a white supremacist society could become possible:

“Son, after I'm gone I want you to keep up the good fight. I never told you, but our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy's country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction. Live with your head in the lion's mouth. I want you to overcome 'em with yeses, undermine 'em with grins, agree 'em to death and destruction, let 'em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open”. (IM 16)

This advice to the narrator’s father suggests nothing less, than to slip into the role of the trickster. The trickster is a character who in minstrel shows and Trickster Tales manages to get the better of his situation; the better of his racialized position. In his essay Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke Ellison quotes Karl Kernyi, who interprets the trickster as a personification of the black body…

[…] which is […] never whole subdued, ruled by lust and hunger, forever running into pain and injury, cunning and stupid in action. Disorder belonging to the totality of life […] the spirit of this disorder is the trickster. His function in an anarchic society, or rather the function of his mythology, of the tales told about him, is to add disorder to 46

order and to make a whole, to render possible, within the fixed bounds of what is permitted, an experience of what is not permitted. (Kernyi in Ellison 106)

The similarities between the concept of the trickster and the concept of Bakhtin’s carnival protagonist, the fool, are evident. Both concepts are forces that challenge supremacy and hegemonic structures per se. By bringing these two concepts together, the tremendous effects of the repositioned black body on white presumptive superiority are disclosed. Both, the trickster as well as Bakhtin’s fool, are consistent images of a figure outside of the established socio-political and socio-cultural structure. Amidst a white society, that has thoroughly ejected its body decades ago, the black trickster playfully reinstalls the body. It is the disturbing presence of blackness that triggers disorder, flattens out hierarchical structures and turns the world upside down. On first the power of the grotesque body, which shapes the images of fool and trickster, seems to confirm white stereotypes of blackness. Applying Bakhtin’s idea of the fool to blackness is in fact a tightrope walk that might easily end in supporting stereotypes about African-Americans. On the other hand, the concept of the grotesque fool could open possibilities to (re-)position. In this context Bakhtin explains that the carnivalesque body of the fool: […] is not separated from the rest of the world. It is not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits. The stress is laid on those parts of the body that are open to the outside world, that is, the parts through which the world enters the body or emerges from it, or through which the body itself goes out to meet the world. This means that the emphasis is on ... the open mouth, the genital organs, the breasts, the phallus, the potbelly, the nose. The body discloses its essence as a principle of growth which exceeds its own limits only in copulation, pregnancy, childbirth, the throes of death, eating, drinking, or defecation. (RBW 26) These aspects of human life that involve fucking, pissing, shitting, puking, menstruating and all the other ways in which the body can act, are what [white] high cultural norms define as ‘disgusting’ fashions (Inglis 106). Disgusting as it might be, the openness of the grotesque body is a key to enter into new positions.

In Rabelais and His World Bakhtin points out that, the prime example of a carnivalized world, "the material bodily principle, plays a predominant role" (18). Emphasis lies on the corporeal, often in excessive and exaggerated forms and functions, which thereby highlights the defiance of the dominant white culture. Carnival celebrates those bodily 47

activities that must remain hidden for the sake of official culture. The grotesque body, by means of exaggeration, withdraws itself from white, normative realms. Instead of resisting officialdom from an immanent position, the grotesque body takes a stance from an external universe – the carnival. Enraptured from white reality the fool and/or trickster characters come into excessive positions through exaggeration and hyperbolization.

“Narr und Tölpel sind nicht von dieser Welt […]. Es ist ihre Eigentümlichkeit und ihr besonderes Recht, fremd auf dieser Welt zu sein. [Der Narr] fungiert fast immer dann als organisierendes Element, wenn es um die Entlarvung der schlechten Konventionalität geht. Eine solche – im Alltagsleben, in der Moral, Politik, Kunst usw.

– zu entlarvende Konventionalität wird gewöhnlich vom Standpunkt eines Menschen dargestellt, der an ihr keinen Anteil hat […]. (Bachtin 88-92).

From these positions they expose socio-cultural injustices without running the risk of being held responsible. It becomes obvious that, although the concept of Bakhtin’s fool is generally connected with appearance and grotesque physical features, it also relates to the voice that resounds from the exaggerated body. Being “spaced out” the fool/trickster enjoys special rights and privileges. He is allowed to mimic the limitations of white society. He reestablishes public and reflects upon conditions by disposing his assumed self. The fool temporarily arrests, contrasts, solidifies the ongoing earnest reverence for divine orders (Janik 1). Because the fool has positioned himself in a carnival world he acts out his mocking rituals from a sovereign territory, where he remains untouchable. From this place he can speak freely even the most outrageous truths. To support and broaden these preliminary thoughts I want to look at some of Ellison’s fools that reverse the ordering of high and low “.

“Fooling” – Jim Trueblood

I would like to introduce two types of fools which are decisive for my hypothesis that Ellison’s narrator resembles a form of the carnivalesque fool. In her work Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art and History Vicki Janik develops a categorization of fools that will help me to describe the characters and tactics of these two different fool-characters one of which is Jim Trueblood. My analysis of Jim Trueblood will eventually lead me to (re-)locate the narrator in a carnival universe.

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Jim Trueblood the poor sharecropper is an ambivalent figure, because despite his he ingenuous matter-of-fact account of incest with his daughter, he reveals basic integrity by refusing to stint on the details or to make excuses for himself. According to Vicki Janik’s categorization Jim Trueblood resembles the “innocent or holy fool”.

The “innocent or holy fool” does neither know (or is mostly indifferent) about his own weaknesses and desires, just like he does not (or is not able) to perceive the weaknesses and desires of others. Describing Jim Trueblood as either “holy” or “innocent” seems risky. Using two positively connoted (even sacred) adjectives to describe somebody who has indecently assaulted his own daughter might be regarded intolerable, ignorant, maybe even misogynous.

I am aware that my labelling Jim Trueblood as “innocent”, or even more daring “holy” is controversial at the first moment. However, these terms should not be mistaken for an indulgence of Jim Trueblood, as they do not refer to the actual rape-incident, but to the carnivalesque way in which it is delivered and leaks into the white realm. Even though it is not my task to function as a moral entity/judge, I should forestall that the abjection of the rape will not be inverted through the fool/carnival – In fact, the opposite will be the case.

Jim Trueblood incorporates many features of the “innocent or holy fool”. He is naïve and has trouble understanding his own feelings and actions, thus he can not see the “world of avarice and trickery” surrounding him (Janik 3). Speaking idiomatically, he is deaf and dumb, sensing only vaguely the world around him. In his literary analysis of the Jim Trueblood episode Houston Baker describes Trueblood as a fool “performing masterfully […] a bluesy, trickster discourse as a victorious paradigm”, squeezing a hundred Dollars out of Mr. Norton.

In this particular analysis Baker sets out to prove that “Jim Trueblood succeeds in gaining the sympathies of the white philanthropist Mr. Norton […], precisely because he tells his story as an implicit psycho-semantic dialogue with a wide range of white and black signifying systems, strategically dislodging "white" fears and desire within "black" images and projections”.

I will argue that this reading considers too narrowly (and wrongly) Trueblood’s effect on whiteness and thus fails to acknowledge the creative force behind “fooling”. In order to understand the consequences of the Jim Trueblood episode I will have to consider the immediate context carefully. Thus, I will rather turn to observing and interpreting the reactions of Mr. Norton and the narrator to Jim Trueblood’s story, instead of focussing on the account itself.

On their ride through the black quarters Jim Trueblood becomes object of a conversation between Mr. Norton and Ellison’s narrator. To the rumour’s evolving around Jim Trueblood’s foul deed Mr. Norton responds with “something like horror”.

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"It is said that the man took both his wife and his daughter?"

"Yes, sir."

"And that he is the father of both their children?"

"Yes, sir."

"No, no, no!"

He sounded as though he were in great pain. I looked at him anxiously. What had happened? What had I said?

"Not that! No . . ." (IM 50)

Mr. Norton’s shows this reaction to the alleged incestuous-relationship between father and daughter, shortly after he has told the narrator about his own early deceased daughter, who he thought had been "too pure and too good and too beautiful” for life. After he has ended his story, i.e. the story about the early death of his daughter, the narrator wonders to himself about “what in the world had made him open his heart to me”, and something about Mr. Norton’s story strikes the narrator as peculiar, “[…] it was dangerous. First, it was dangerous if you felt like that about anything, because then you'd never get it or […]; then it was dangerous because nobody would understand you and they'd only laugh and think you were crazy” (IM 48 – 49). The narrator is even more amazed when a little later Mr. Norton demands to speak to Jim Trueblood: ‘Get out!’ he cried. ‘I must talk with him.’ I felt surprise and a dread and resentment of what he might say to Trueblood and his women, the questions he might ask. Why couldn't he leave them alone! ‘Hurry!’ (ibid.). Mr. Norton is so eager to speak to Jim Trueblood that even the narrator can not help but wonder about the motivation of his entrusted benefactor. Finally, eye in eye with Jim Trueblood Mr. Norton’s starts interrogating the sharecropper:

"I, I —" Mr. Norton stammered, "I must talk with you!"

"All right, suh," Jim Trueblood said without surprise and waited.

"Is it true . . . I mean did you?"

"Suh?" Trueblood asked, as I looked away.

"You have survived," he blurted. "But is it true . . .?"

"Suh?" the farmer said, his brow wrinkling with bewilderment.

"I'm sorry, sir," I said, "but I don't think he understands you."

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He ignored me, staring into Trueblood's face as though reading a message there which I could not perceive.

"You did and are unharmed!" he shouted, his blue eyes blazing into the black face with something like envy and indignation. Trueblood looked helplessly at me. I looked away. I understood no more than he.

"You have looked upon chaos and are not destroyed!"

"No suh! I feels all right." (IM 52)

While the narrator’s puzzlement deepens, the reader is exposed to the idea that the tragic death of Mr. Norton’s daughter was not the inevitable effect of consumption after all, but that Mr. Norton had given in to the very same desire that had driven Jim Trueblood, that night he raped his daughter. Mr. Norton’s reactions suggest the assumption that he might have had a sexual relationship with his daughter, as a consequence of which she faded away. The envy the narrator has spotted in Mr. Norton is not triggered by Trueblood’s fulfilling a secret sexual fantasy he has long cherished himself, but the seeming implicitness with which the unspeakable has been received to light: “You have looked upon chaos and are not destroyed!”

Mr. Norton openly confesses that he will have to deal with the consequences of his aberration, turning the rest of his life into a pilgrimage for salvation. “I have never recovered. I have never forgiven myself. Everything I've done since her passing has been a monument to her memory.”

If it was true that Mr. Norton has had an incestuous relationship with his daughter, then this would shift his fascination with Jim Trueblood’s story into an entirely different light.

In the following I will assume that Mr. Norton broke the same taboo that Jim Trueblood has flouted. Under these new circumstances Mr. Norton’s philanthropist concern with black issues would come under serious suspicion. Baker’s reasoning about Jim Trueblood’s gaining the trustee’s sympathies because of his strategic dislodging of Mr. Norton’s "white" fears is indefensible in the new context. It is rather that Mr. Norton finds Jim Trueblood living out his own most secret desires without being punished for them. Mr. Norton envies Jim Trueblood: “[…] his [Mr. Norton’s] blue eyes blazing into the black face with something like envy and indignation […].” Trueblood’s freedom and the seeming casualness with which his breaking of a sexual taboo is met by white society amazes the white trustee and fills him with strange admiration. Mr. Norton’s (and also the narrator’s) admiration for the sharecropper deepens when he starts telling his story. Through Jim Trueblood’s vivid narrative style the iniquity of

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the sexual taboo fades away. The lurid details he put into such imaginative words that the whole horrible story behind them, gains a disturbing aesthetic.

[…] when you up in the second-story window and look down on a wagonful of watermelons, and you see one of them young juicy melons split wide open a-layin' all spread out and cool and sweet on top of all the striped green ones like it's waitin' just for you, so you can see how red and ripe and juicy it is and all the shiny black seeds it's got and all. (IM 56)

Jim Trueblood’s poetic use of the watermelon (the black archetypical fruit) as a means to describe the female genital organs is exemplary for his putting the unspeakable in words.7 Through his narration “[…] all absolute values are ridiculed and relativised – the word and the world are made strange by their very materiality” (“Madeline”). The unexpected primitive aestheticism has a shocking quality: The monstrous act of daughter-rape is transformed into many pictures of ambiguous beauty (e.g. a flock of flying white geese as a euphemism for ejaculation). The disturbing beauty of Jim Trueblood’s story puts emphasize on Mr. Norton’s dilemma. Trueblood is an inhabitant of a carnival universe that allows him to find peace even after he has broken a great social taboo. His story is a cruel black parable of Mr. Norton’s Sisyphean reality. The envy the narrator has spotted in Mr. Norton is not triggered by Trueblood’s fulfilling a secret sexual fantasy he has long cherished himself, but the seeming implicitness with which the unspeakable has been received into the light: “You have looked upon chaos and are not destroyed!” Earlier on Mr. Norton openly confesses to the narrator that he will have to deal with the consequences of his aberration for the rest of his life turning his existence into a pilgrimage for salvation. “I have never recovered. I have never forgiven myself. Everything I've done since her passing has been a monument to her memory” (IM 42). Mr. Norton is the white incarnation of Sisyphus who, due to his cheating the ancient Gods and Death itself, is condemned for eternity to roll a stone up a hill and just like Sisyphus who will have to move that rock for the rest of his life, Mr. Norton is stuck with an eternally pointless task – he never earn salvation for his sin. His burden is the futility of his being a white part of society. His challenging the gods and their “puritan” laws will be 7

Maybe these passages of black folkloristic narrative modes (“playing the dozens”, “broad talking” etc.) are the

reason for Houston Bakers assumption that Jim Trueblood is consciously tricking Mr. Norton into supporting financially, instead of just telling his story. But the narrator offers too many observations documenting Jim Trueblood’s naïveté and unawareness that make it hard to follow Bakers idea of Jim Trueblood being a bluesy trickster “selling out” his daughters traumatic experience turning it into a “victorious paradigm”.

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punished even if it remains hidden. Trueblood’s body and account of the gruesome events locate him outside white society. In his carnival universe he remains untouchable and indestructible. Jim Trueblood – while making a fortune from his daughter’s misfortune – becomes the black mirror image of Mr. Norton, leaving the latter to reflect upon his own action in the face of his black double. In his doppelganger all of Mr. Norton’s philanthropic efforts are condemned as untrustworthy, since they are exposed as a racist quest for redemption for his foul and depraved history. To Mr. Norton Jim Trueblood is an interruption, i.e. his black, bodily conscience through which his white double moral standards are subverted.

In disbelief the narrator and Mr. Norton learn that the black body, due to its ascribed materiality, is not affected or held liable for its actions. Whites have thoroughly constructed the black body as a signifier for the “lower bodily stratum” (Inglis 106), thus the black body is very much expected to break sexual taboos. In this respect Jim Trueblood appears to be a selfsame archetype simply outliving his “nature” – a nature that he has been given by whites.

In the eyes of Mr. Norton Jim Trueblood lives up to the stereotype of the black buck. When he questions the narrator about the parenthood of the children in Trueblood’s front yard, the narrator evades him and Mr. Norton almost instantly concludes: “Oh, I see. But that shouldn't be so strange. I understand that your people—Never mind!” (IM 49). Obviously, the myth of the oversexed black male has found entrance to Mr Norton’s self-acclaimed philanthropist mind. But when he comes to understand that Trueblood’s sexual appetite did not even spare his own daughter, his notion of the black buck (aka rapist) is broadened way beyond everything he has thought was possible. In this, what society has defined as a social taboo (a punishable offence) - the rape of a closely related person - Mr. Norton and Jim Trueblood meet at eye level. In the character and body of Jim Trueblood Mr. Norton spots his alter ego, through which his most secret desires can be fulfilled without having to fear the consequences of his actions (a binarized relationship comparable to that of Dorian Gray and his picture).

The sharecropper represents the hidden side of Mr. Norton’s nature, his untamed passion. In short, what Mr. Norton recognizes in the body of Jim Trueblood is his Freudian “id”: The dark (black), inaccessible part of his personality, a negative character that can be described only in contrast to his white ego. Call it a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations. Mr Norton’s id is filled with energy reaching from the instincts, only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principle (Freud 36).

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I would now like to put the idea of the fragile binary relationship between Jim Trueblood and Mr. Norton into the broader context of black and white relation. Mr. Norton’s admiration for Jim Trueblood’s delinquency (expressed in his giving Trueblood 100 Dollars) is not a feeling cherished by Mr. Norton exclusively. Many other whites who came to know Trueblood’s story react in ways very similar to Mr. Norton’s. Jim Trueblood reports on his experiences with local whites:

Sheriff Barbour […] ask me to tell him what happen, and I tole him and he called in some more men and they made me tell it again. They wanted to hear about the gal lots of times and they gimme somethin' to eat and drink and some tobacco. Surprised me, 'cause I was scared and spectin' somethin' different. Why, I guess there ain't a colored man in the county who ever got to take so much of the white folkses' time as I did. So finally they tell me not to worry. […] The white folks took up for me. And the white folks took to coming out here to see us and talk with us. Some of 'em was big white folks, too, from the big school way cross the State. Asked me lots 'bout what I thought 'bout things, and 'bout my folks and the kids, and wrote it all down in a book. But best of all, suh, I got more work now than I ever did have before. (IM 52 – 53)

The assumption that all the white people, who show inappropriate interest in Jim Trueblood’s story, indulge in fantasies evolving around daughter-rape, I will leave undecided. Maybe the wihte “folks” reason for giving Jim Trueblood “more help than they ever give any other colored man” lies within their wish to install Jim Trueblood as an exemplary black buck within the local black community. It is the black communities’ fear of being held in kin liability with Trueblood that leads them to oust him. No matter if, “keeping the nigger in place” was part of the motivation for white people to help Trueblood; it does not explain white fascination with Trueblood’s story itself. However, I want to point to the role of the black body in regard to the white mind.

Mr. Norton, Sheriff Barbour and the “white folkses’” are gazers along the black-rapedrama. They are re-enacting an erotic spectacle, which allows them to take pleasure in the black body. “The erotic ritual is designed to intensify white men’s pleasure as they imagine one of the Black men having [taboo] sex […]” (Yancy 2008, 77). The white man’s spectacularization of the stereotyped black body culminates in white self-debasement, which symbolically restores white coextensive reality as mind and body. Through the “innocent fool” whiteness is reintroduced to its own body. In the relation between Trueblood and Mr. 54

Norton, i.e. between black and white Sartwell’s concept of the ejected aestheticism is reversed.

In the overcoming of the dichotomous division between the black body, the white mind is exposed as a white construction asserting white hegemonic superiority. 8 Trueblood the “innocent or holy fool” has brought to the fore an unalterable, ineffable wholeness, a “heterogeneous inclusiveness” between black and white.

“Fooling” – The vet from the Golden Day

A different kind of fool, who is “up to mischief”, appears inside the Golden Day episode. The vet qualifies for Janik’s description of the “wise fool”, the most competent representative of his kind. The wise fool perceives and acknowledges his own weaknesses and desires as well as those weaknesses and desires others foster (Janik 3).

After having listened to Jim Trueblood telling his story Mr. Norton feels weak and faints. On his request for a stimulant the narrator heads for the Golden Day. When things inside the bar get rough a vet attends to the College’s white trustee. Together with the narrator the vet, who turns out to be a doctor, saves Mr. Norton to one of the prostitute’s rooms upstairs.

In the midst of carnivalesque anarchy the vet slips into the role of the fool. Although he sets himself apart from the raging mob of lunatics downstairs – “I am not like those down there” (IM 87) – he is only one of many vets who claim to be a doctor, thus the lunacy of the whole group also determines the way in which the vet’s mental capability is perceived.

Whether the vet is truly insane or just daft, as the reader is led to believe, is an altogether moot point. However, the vet becomes a fool not only by being suspicious and/or unreliable, but also through his appearance. The narrator speaks of the vet as “a fat man”. Next to the vet’s blackness (along with all the grotesque stereotypical features connected to it), his fatness is one of the predominant physical characteristic to shape his grotesque body in a strictly Bakhtinian sense.

Whereas the well-toned body proudly exhibits its clear silhouette to separate itself from the rest of the world, fatness melds body and world. While the well-toned body takes pride in austerity and asceticism, the fat body can not deny that it derives hedonistic pleasure 8

That the levelling of body and mind is revealed through a depraved sexual practice might be owed to the

author’s image of humanity. In the throes of passion man (black and white) can no longer condone the mutual dependency of his mind and body.

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from what the world has to offer. Thus, the vet is part of Bakhtin’s concept of the grotesque from which the fool emerges: The vet is not a closed, completed unit: instead he has outgrown himself and transgressed his own limits in the utmost Bakhtinian sense. The vet’s fatness is a signifier for the openness of his body. His obesity adds the human mass to his blackness.

Henceforth, the vet’s different physical features coagulate into the image of the carnivalesque fool. One must imagine him soft, fluid, undifferentiated and unstructured.

According to Sartwell’s “ejected aestheticism” the vet’s blackness excludes a priori the presence of a pure mind, while at the same time his fatness contains the “primitive” flesh of his own interior. Due to the appearance of his body eating, drinking, digesting and finally defecating are overt parts of the vet’s life.

From this grotesque body, which grants him his exceeding position, the vet speaks words of astonishing serenity. Back inside the prostitutes room Mr. Norton quickly regains his consciousness and after a long dialogue the vet rounds up the conversation.

"You will hardly recognize it, but it is very fitting that you came to the Golden Day with the young fellow," he said. […]

"What do you mean?" Mr. Norton said with irritation.

"A little child shall lead them," the vet said with a smile. "But seriously, because you both fail to understand what is happening to you. You cannot see or hear or smell the truth of what you see—and you, looking for destiny! It's classic! And the boy, this automaton, he was made of the very mud of the region and he sees far less than you.

Poor stumblers, neither of you can see the other. […] And you, for all your power, are not a man to him, but a God, a force — […]"No, listen. He believes in you as he believes in the beat of his heart. He believes in that great false wisdom taught slaves and pragmatists alike, that white is right. […] He's your man, friend. Your man and your destiny. Now the two of you descend the stairs into chaos and get the hell out of here. I'm sick of both of you pitiful obscenities! Get out before I do you both the favor of bashing in your heads!" I […] stepped between him and Mr. Norton, guiding Mr. Norton swiftly through the doorway. Looking back, I saw him leaning against the wall making a sound that was a blending of laughter and tears. (IM 95)

Mr. Norton “the force, the God” is decrowned and exposed as a “poor stumbler”, who believes in “false wisdom”. Somewhere in his divine madness the vet’s audience detects solid truth and the fat vet transforms himself into a deformed prophet. Once more, the fool has 56

established the “higher stratum” as low and has revealed Mr. Norton’s altruistic commitment to the all black college as a pharisaic, dishonest attempt to clean his consciousness from the early death of his daughter for which he feels responsible for. “She was too pure for life, […] too pure and too good and too beautiful. I have never forgiven myself. Everything I've done since her passing has been a monument to her memory” (IM 43). And now his attempt to make up for his daughter’s death is called into question by a lunatic, his noble efforts stained by a fool. Still, the truth is there, sharp as a razor and Mr. Norton realizes that somehow he is tangentially embroiled into it.

The narrator is also made a laughing stock by the vet. The vet is the first person to grasp the narrator’s dilemma: "You cannot see or hear or smell the truth of what you see […]”.

For the narrator the vet’s outburst is an initiation as it triggers trains of thoughts that eventually lead him to acknowledge white supremacist society has turned his world into an inverted absurd place. ”But that vet! He was so crazy that he corrupted sane men. He had tried to turn the world inside out, goddamn him!” (IM 106). It is striking that the vet’s findings about Mr. Norton and the narrator are absolutely precise and astute for someone presumably diagnosed with some kind of mental derangement. His awareness of the situation and its context, suggests the assumption, that he has been institutionalized for reasons other than combat stress reactions. Even Mr. Norton does not understand why a man with such abilities should need the same treatment like the madmen downstairs.

"Ulcers," the fat man said.

"That's terribly unfortunate, but why should ulcers stop your career?"

"Not really, but I learned along with the ulcers that my work could bring me no dignity," the vet said. (IM 92)

The vet has chosen a life in a mental institution over an undignified life as a black practitioner.

Instead of being perceived as an “ulcer” on the back of white society he retreats into a heterotopic carnival world. A world where he can speak his mind freely, where he is in charge of his self! It is striking that the vet has a totally different notion of what the carnival world is.

From his immanent viewpoint the carnivalesque is not a place where anarchic powers erupt arbitrarily. In fact, the opposite is the case. For the vet white reality is a disturbing universe, full of racialized relationships, i.e. the epitome of living hell: “Now the two of you descend the stairs into chaos and get the hell out of here” (IM 95).

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The vet has secluded his self to the carnival world not before he had gathered enough knowledge about the official culture determining reality. The vet fits Vicki Janik’s description of the “wise fool”, who knows as much about his own black acquisitiveness as he does about white weaknesses (“cannot see or hear or smell the truth” (ibid.)) and their fanciful desires (finding destiny).

I have now analyzed two of Ellison’s characters, who are located on opposite ends of the large spectrum of carnivalesque foolery. The vet on the one end embodies the conscious fool, who knows how to use and wield his weapons, while Jim Trueblood’s leaks into the white realm unintentionally and without realizing it. By reference to these two fools I have fathomed the spectrum from which the narrator will derive his “fool-identity”. I have also highlighted the demarcation lines that constitute bodies and minds (white and black). Along these lines I want to trace the development of the narrator right up to his “fool-identity”.

“Fooling” – the narrator

Categorizing the narrator as a certain kind of fool is just as impossible as undesirable. While all the other fools in the novel have located their selfs in carnival worlds which they have designed according to their own wishes, the narrator blunders into one episode after another.

Just as his self is constantly subject to various transitions, his aims move and alter at the same pace. Consequently, the narrator has to oscillate between diametrically opposed tactics and has to readjust his fooling in accordance to the constantly changing situations. At the beginning of his narration his prosperity and adversity depend on white authorities or black authorities acting on the behalf of white wishes. The story at this point bears many resemblances to the genre of the Bildungsroman as it is concerned with the psychological, moral and social transformation of the narrator. Processes of transformations towards adapting the role of a fool are caused through numerous encounters. On his way to the underground, i.e. the in-between carnival space, the narrator is frequently given enigmatic advice contributing to his final decision to inhabit and shape his own carnival persona. The first and presumable most influential advice the narrator receives comes from his grandfather.

The words he speaks from his deathbed reoccur steadily throughout the novel.

He was an odd old guy, my grandfather, and I am told I take after him. It was he who caused the trouble. On his deathbed he called my father to him and said, "Son, after 58

I'm gone I want you to keep up the good fight. I never told you, but our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy's country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction. Live with your head in the lion's mouth. I want you to overcome 'em with yeses, undermine 'em with grins, agree 'em to death and destruction, let 'em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open. (IM 16)

The grandfather’s words serve like a leitmotif within the narration. The grandfather “represents the ambiguity of the past for the hero, for whom his sphinxlike deathbed advice poses a riddle which points the plot in the dual direction which the hero will follow throughout the novel” (Ellison 110). The duality of which Ellison speaks starts forming the narrator’s personality which, in the end, will enable him to cunningly move into the interstices of white official culture. The narrator’s tropes of invisibility, identity formation, race and power intersect in fierce opposition that are brought together, and estranged, in his assuming the role of a fool inside a carnival world. For Ellison the duality of the fool, his leaking into the world from his carnival universe and his resulting invisibility becomes possible through his denial of a determining white gaze. Advice of how to resist external forces (gazes etc.) and imposed torn-ness, comes from the Golden-Day-vet who he meets again on a bus.

Because of the preceding events (Trueblood, Golden Day) college president Dr. Bledsoe heaps abuse upon the narrator and dismisses him from the college. Having been provided with letters of introduction by Dr. Bledsoe, the narrator takes the bus to New York.

It turns out that the vet from the Golden Day and his personal attendant are on the same bus.

Before the two transfer to a different bus, the vet again comments on the narrator’s situation and gives him the following advice.

“[…] for God's sake, learn to look beneath the surface," he said. "Come out of the fog, young man. And remember you don't have to be a complete fool in order to succeed.

Play the game, but don't believe in it—that much you owe yourself. Even if it lands you in a strait jacket or a padded cell. Play the game, but play it your own way—part of the time at least. Play the game, but raise the ante, my boy. […] We're an assbackward people, though. You might even beat the game. […] Really PreRenaissance—and that game has been analyzed, put down in books. But down here they've forgotten to take care of the books and that's your opportunity. You're hidden right out in the open—that is, you would be if you only realized it. They wouldn't see

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you because they don't expect you to know anything, since they believe they've taken care of that . . ." (IM 153 – 154)

Through the words of the vet an entrance into the carnival universe opens up. If the narrator is able to realize to step into the carnival realm, then he will be able to overturn white supremacy upholding the mutual exclusiveness of “whiteness” and “blackness”. It is in this passage that for the first time the narrator is personally summoned to retreat into the carnivalesque and assume the position of the fool. The riddle which remained in the grandfather’s words has become has become clearer through the vet’s words. The vet points to the narrator’s body which, he points out, is “hidden right out in the open” holding a great number of possibilities. The carnival tricks of the fool concretize in the body by means of destruction and recreating, i.e. “excreation”. “Excreation, if understood in its double sense, involves a sacrifice, an act that debases and dissolves for the sake of resurrection” (“Madeline”). The narrator’s black grotesque body puts him into dangerous situations; he can survive them by applying the fundamental pattern of the fool: material excess, contradiction and above all the ability to disturb signs and signifiers.

In drunken flirtation Sybil, the wife of a white leader, reveals to the narrator her predilection for interracial rape fantasies. Her wish for the narrator, whom she casts as “Brother Taboo-with-whom-all-things-are-possible”, to rape her remains unfulfilled. By neglecting Sybil’s white body the narrator positions his own black body to shake the forces of white stereotyping that have accorded great power to white people.

During his abortive sexual encounter with Sybil the narrator learns that his self is rendered invisible in her eyes. She is interested only in his black body to fulfill her sexual fantasies: ‘"Come on, beat me, daddy—you—you big black bruiser. What's taking you so long?" she said. "Hurry up, knock me down! Don't you want me?" (IM 522). All she sees in the narrator is her own perverse and stereotypical projection onto and into the black body. In the following words she openly tells him about her wish of being raped by a black man:

"You really mean it?"

"Yes," she said, "yes!"

"But, Sybil, you can see I'm not like that. You make me feel a tender, protective passion—Look, it's like an oven in here, why don't we get dressed and go for a walk in Central Park?"

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"But I need it," she said, uncrossing her thighs and sitting up eagerly. "You can do it, it'll be easy for you, beautiful. Threaten to kill me if I don't give in. (IM 523-524)

While in Sybil’s distorted notion of blackness the enormity of racial stereotyping manifests, the semiotic function of the narrator as a carnivalesque fool becomes obvious. Sybil is interested in literally internalizing the role of the white innocent beauty as the main target of black lust. Indeed, the narrator jokingly references D. W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation, invoking the memory of the cinematic narrative construction of the black male as a notorious rapist. The narrator asks: “What's happening here," I said, "a new birth of a nation?" (ibid.

524). In the following minutes the narrator merges into his role as a fool and consciously plays into her fantasies, he says, “I rapes real good when I’m drunk” (ibid. 521). This is the first and only time the narrator changes his language to what Mel Watkins refers to as broad talk – an African-American oral tradition, “which emphasizes joking and license, includes signifying and mother-rhyming, and brings the vernacular into stylized use […]” (Watkins 1994, 453). According to Watkins broad talking and signifying can be traced back to Derridean and Saussurean linguistic theories, which attach a particular “Signifié” to a particular “Signifiant” (also known as “sound-image”). In the black vernacular tradition, however, the Signifiant is emptied out--or opened up--to include a multiplicity of rhetorical figures. Thus, standard English is transmuted into black vernacular, a multivalent and multivocal trope that is skilfully wielded by the folkloric trickster/fool hero, such as Br’er Rabbit and Jack the Bear. “[…] elements of speech create a specific, free atmosphere. [They are] directly linked to the lower stratum; they lend a bodily character to objects and degrade them, fuse the body and the world, thus introducing the concluding theme: the transformation” (RW 311).

In conclusion, the narrator’s use of black vernacular thus resembles his permit to fooling, tricking and subverting – It is his ticket into the carnivalesque game. “The broad talker ‘is licensed to play the fool or clown’ and, in that capacity, he may portray the ‘high as low’ and reveal the virtuous ‘as lecherous and dishonest charlatans’” (ibid.). The roles in this tragic-comedic episode are inverted the moment Sybil discloses her sexual fantasies. The narrator initially planned to seduce Sybil in order to gain valuable information. His plan to seduce and use Sybil for his own purposes is his first serious attempt to free himself from imposed inactivity. And now it turns out that Sybil not only willingly submits her body but that she is “aggressively receptive” in her perverted desire. Once more the narrator is put on

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the verge between passivity (playing along) and active resistance (fooling). With resignation he acknowledges his dilemma: “So, I had set this trap for myself (IM 521).

In his sudden use of black vernacular it becomes clear that in this very moment he sees through the game which has constantly left him beaten and bruised. The pun behind his falling into black vernacular signifies his change of perception – his using black vernacular is his first act of fooling through exerting “excreating” powers. Along with his illusion of being seen as a gentle persuader (“But Sybil, you can see I'm not like that [a black rapist]” (IM 520521) the narrator symbolically sacrifices his hard trained verbal skills; debases and disguises his language in order to resurrect a new self – the fool. Finally, the narrator is able to make sense of the advice given to him by his grandfather and the vet from the Golden Day. He has “come out the fog” and now plays the game his own way by becoming the “fool in order to succeed”. In the end the “high has become low”; Sybil who has started out as the innocent white woman turns to be aggressively receptive – an attitude set aside for the narrator’s role as a rapist. In her becoming something like a “white female rapist” she debases herself, while the narrator assumes the “high position”. As a fool the narrator never rapes Sybil, but constructs the moment “with a different semiotic spin, writing on her belly with lipstick: “SYBIL YOU WERE RAPED BY SANTA CLAUS, SURPRISE” (Yancy 2008, 79). Just like Santa Claus the black rapist does not exist, both are illusions. It is not only the illusion of blacks naturally desiring white women that is exposed as false it is also the white men – the “bankers, lawyers, judges, doctors, fire chiefs, teachers, merchants” (IM 18) – who are again exposed as creators of an racialized erotic ritual designed for their own gazing pleasure. Just as Jim Trueblood’s account of his incestuous relationship fascinated white men, the rape of a white woman by a black man also intensifies white men’s pleasure in their own ejected bodies.

“Thus interracial sex has a very intense and particular erotic/specular power, an erotic power that draws the white men […] to stare obsessively at black men fucking white women” (Sartwell in Yancy 2008, 77). In his refusal to rape Sybil the narrator denies to receive back his black body which has been distorted by white gazes and minds. Santa is as much a myth as his black instinctive desire for white women. The narrator’s fooling includes an open refusal to reproduce stereotypical behaviour for white folks. It is the nicest twist of the carnivalesque fool that he makes the white woman offer what whites might desire and demand from black bodies – rape, sexual depravity and dark instinctive behaviour.

The inversion of roles is brought to a conclusion climactic in the extreme that follows white perverted white logic: “If you are black you are guilty!” For white folks blackness resembles the core state of always already being guilty. Black guilt is followed by the 62

“ritualistic lynching of black bodies” (Yancy 2005, 3). “White anger could not be propitiated until the ritual was complete, until the body had been, castrated, dismembered, burned and beaten. […] then the white mob could rest peacefully, knowing that it had preserved the white order of things” (ibid.). About the ritualistic lynching of black bodies W.E.B. Du Bois says:

We have seen, you and I, city after city drunk and furious with ungovernable lust of blood; mad with murder, destroying, killing and cursing; torturing human victims because somebody accused of crime happened to be of the same color as the mob’s innocent victims and because that color was not white! We have seen – Merciful God! in these wild days and in the name of civilization, Justice, and Motherhood - what have we not seen, right here in America, of orgy, cruelty, barbarism, and murder done to men and women of Negro descent. (544)

Ritual violence, however natured, is a vivid part of carnival culture, which is often triggered by the fool. Not for nothing many of Bakhtin’s analytic observations of Rabelais’ world evolve around violent and material imagery (slaughtering of men and women, mutilation and dismemberment etc.). “In the figure of the fool, man and nature, or humanity and bestiality, are reflected against each other, and the human nature so prone to error and disorder is seen as a natural albeit chaotic condition” (Korhonen). As I have pointed out in the first chapter, the “Manichean Frontier’s” shifting between the civilized and the uncivilized, between black and white is an inherent feature of the carnivalesque and its cast of characters. It is a physical law that whenever friction between two objects is generated calorific energy develops. On a metaphorical level this principle holds true also for the clashing of the realms of black and white. Sadly enough, the ritual act of lynching is the cruel effect (the calorific energy) of that friction between the antagonistic realms. This ritual represents the quintessential inversion of the roles which develops throughout the encounter between Sybil and the narrator.

The narrator has shifted himself into the position of the victim while Sybil’s desires have made her a white female rapist. The grotesque black body of the narrator “is a body in the act of becoming [being victimized]; it is continually built, created, and builds and creates another body” (RBW 317). Through the narrator’s black body Sybil’s white body is swallowed, digested and resurrected as a body that is thrown into black reality. Through the fool’s twists and turns Sybil has become inferior and heteronomous – her white body is suddenly busted wide open and transgresses into black experiences.

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Once again the narrator as a fool mirrors the world as once again turned upside down and the absurdity of the world and its consequences can not escape the carnivalesque end. Thus, in order to serve implicated justice to white legal interpretation the white female rapist Sybil will have to be ritually lynched by an angry black mob. And indeed, during a full – fledged riot in Harlem the narrator comes to halt in one of the streets where the riot has died down.

Exhausted and confused he makes a shocking discovery.

Ahead of me the body hung, white, naked, and horribly feminine from a lamppost. I felt myself spin around with horror and it was as though I had turned some nightmarish somersault. I whirled, still moving by reflex, back-tracking and stopped and now there was another and another, seven-all hanging before a gutted storefront. I stumbled, hearing the cracking of bones underfoot and saw a physician's skeleton shattered on the street, the skull rolling away from the backbone, as I steadied long enough to notice the unnatural stiffness of those hanging above me. They were mannequins —"Dummies!" I said aloud. Hairless, bald and sterilely feminine. And I recalled the boys in the blonde wigs, expecting the relief of laughter, but suddenly was more devastated by the humor than by the horror. But are they unreal, I thought; are they? What if one, even one is real— is . . . Sybil? (IM 556)

For the symbolic momentous the question whether it is the real or a fictitious Sybil hanging between the lynched dummies is of minor significance. What has started between Sybil and the narrator ends with the seven stringed (dummy) corpses on the lamppost. The semiotic function of the narrator and Sybil re-occur in the inversion meaning collapses, and the border that excludes black- from whiteness is no longer sacrosanct. The corpses hanging there function also as reminders to the white men that they are responsible for what Sybil has become and how she has ended (symbolically). When the narrator asks Sybil why she has developed interracial rape and sex fantasies she answers: "Repression, […] Men have repressed us too much. We're expected to pass up too many human things” (IM 519). I will not go into gender related details, but I think it is interesting that the (white and black) sexes make each other responsible for what they have become or how they are perceived.

From a moral point of view, the hanging of the dummies (and Sybil?) can hardly be considered a success of the narrator as a fool; however, it crudely visualizes the enormous effectiveness of carnivalesque resistance. In the course of carnival twists and turns the rigid oppositions of black and white have been confused and dismantled. The king and fool, body 64

and mind, sense and sound, wisdom and folly, the sinner and the angelic are all turned on their heads, “disrupting the contradiction of opposites. The punning of the fool, who holds up the materiality of the body as something devious, is testament to the tricks he plays on the hierarchies of high and low (“Madeline”). As a consequence the narrator decides to keep playing the game – assbackward as the vet has suggested. In fact, prologue and epilogue provide manifest evidence about the narrator’s future career as a fool. “Though invisible, I am in the great American tradition of tinkers. That makes me kin to Ford, Edison and Franklin.

Call me, since I have a theory and a concept, a ‘thinker-tinker’” (IM 7). It also part of his thinker-tinker identity to write down the curious incidents and experiences he has been going through. By doing so he accepts another advice from the vet / wise fool: “That game has been analyzed, put down in books […] they've forgotten to take care of the books and that's your opportunity”, the vet explains (IM 154). The narrator’s story can thus be located in the tradition of books that have been forgotten. These books intertextually mentioned by the vet presumably contain carnival instructions.

Many scholars on the subject have pointed to the numerous intertextual allusions in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Works that are frequently subject of literary studies in the context of Ellison’s novel range from classic works of fiction and nonfiction (e.g. Conrad, Emerson) to prose and poetry (e.g. Book of Psalms, T. S. Elliot), but the books that would be of help for a “thinker-tinker” to develop and cultivate carnival trickery are the folkloristic Trickster Lore stories evolving around Jack-the-Bear, Br’er Fox, and Br’er Rabbit. Br’er Rabbit was the central figure in Joel Chandler Harris’ famous Uncle Remus stories. Uncle Remus is a kindly old slave - who serves as a heterodiegetic storytelling device - passes on the folktales of Br’er Rabbit to the (white) children gathered around him. Although opinions are divided it seems reasonable to suppose that Br’er Rabbit represents the black slave who uses his wits to overcome circumstances and to exact revenge on his adversaries (Br’er Bear and Br’er Fox), representing whites. In addition to their entertainment and didactic purposes, these folktales represent a carnivalesque dimension of the blacks’ artistic expression (Watkins 74).

“In the animal tales they found the perfect vehicle to express those impulses, those often painful cultural truths, in an indirect, and thus less painful way. Such indirection goes to the heart of African concepts of eloquence” (ibid.).

However, Br’er Rabbit is a multi-dimensional character. Br’er Rabbit, Br’er Fox and Jack the Bear provide carnivalesque solutions to certain problems, by tricking and outwitting friend and foe. The narrator decides to incorporate these characters into his personality – In the end he has become the Rabbit, the Fox and Jack the bear. Jim Trueblood and the vet from 65

the Golden Day have merged into his fool-armamentarium. The way he starts his narration with a pun illustrates his new identity as a fool: “Bear with me!”

Since the process of “becoming” a fool, a bear, a fox, Jim Trueblood etc. is a very complex one, I will set out to trace the narrator’s memory and identity formation in the next chapter. I will address questions of narrative and identity. In particular, I will be looking at representations of Bakhtin’s concept of the dialogic self, comprising individual and collective identity.

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Chapter Three

Memory and Identity Formation

[…] wir lieben einander wie Mohn und Gedächtnis, […]

Es ist Zeit, dass der Stein sich zu blühen bequemt, dass der Unrast ein Herz schlägt.

Es ist Zeit, dass es Zeit wird.

Es ist Zeit.

- Corona (Paul Celan)

Meistens erinnere ich mich, weil die anderen mich dazu antreiben, weil ihr Gedächtnis dem meinen zu Hilfe kommt, weil meines sich auf ihres stützt.

- Maurice Halbwachs

_____________

The concepts of memory and identity have reached enormous popularity among international academic researchers and the general public. Memory and identity have become major topics of research in almost every humane discipline. When I skipped through the works that have been published in the field over the last few years it was striking that almost all of the disciplines have been influenced, one way or another, by subjects connected with memory and identity research activities. Memory and identity research has exerted inter- and transdisciplinary paradigmatic influence on humanities and arts (Assmann 2006, 179). In a strictly cultural context many research publications consider these two issues of memory and identity independently of each other.

However, since I want to look at the most immediate effects of the reciprocal processes between memory construction and identity formation on the narrator in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, it is imperative to analyze both issues in respect of their mutual dependence. I want to find out, how the telling of his story, i.e. a life-story influenced by 67

many other life-stories, creates the narrator’s self; his narrative identity. I argue that the telling of his story is inextricably linked to his creating a stable and coherent identity as a person.

The narrator’s identity as a fool, as I have sought to stress, should in this context be regarded as a temporal expedient not so much as a stable self.

Since the two concepts of memory and identity transgress into many disciplines of the social sciences an initially precise terminology has become rather ambiguous. “Social memory, cultural memory, sites of memory: historians, Egyptologists, English literature professors, psychologists – the "memory boom" of recent years has bred a multiplicity of approaches and concepts, and brought a wide array of disciplines together (Jansen). Thus, for reasons of coherence I am going to begin this chapter by briefly recounting the core concepts of Assmannian terminology, which I will stick to thoroughly.

Communicative and Cultural Memory / Identity

Since the late 1980s, Egyptologist Jan Assmann and his wife Aleida Assmann, professor of English and comparative literature, have been elaborating what has come to be the dominant theory of memory. It hinges on the distinction between two types of collective memory: "communicative" versus "cultural" memory.9 Back in the 1920s French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1877–1945) sought to describe memory as a strictly social phenomenon. His thesis implies that humans do not develop individual memory, but have to resort to memory-groups in order to form a memory of their own. Memory, he says, develops in communicative processes.

Meistens erinnere ich mich, weil die anderen mich dazu antreiben, weil ihr Gedächtnis dem meinen zu Hilfe kommt, weil meines sich auf ihres stützt. […] die Gruppen denen ich angehöre, bieten mir in jedem Augenblick die Mittel. [Erinnerungen] zu

9

In my introduction I have given a very brief definition for the term culture. In order to be able to work with

Assmannian terminology it is necessary to elucidate and broaden this definition. Culture performs two major functions that can be distinguished by means of tempora. “Kultur zum einen setzt natürlich voraus, dass die Teilnehmer selbiger einen „gemeinsamen Lebenshorizont“ haben, also in derselben zeitlichen Dimension leben und damit die Grundlage zur Speicherung von Wissen gegeben ist, ist Kultur auch über eine synchrone zeitliche Dimension hinaus vorhanden, da sie mittels des Gedächtnisses auch in anderen zeitlichen Dimensionen wiederabrufbar, rekonstruierbar und reproduktionsfähig ist“ (Assmann 1994, 114 – 140).

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rekonstruieren. Unter der Bedingung, dass ich mich ihnen zuwende und dass ich zumindest Zeitweise ihre Denkart annehme. (Halbwachs 20 – 21)

People collectively "remember" and "forget"; and Jan and Aleida Assmann re-emphasize: “Das Gedächtnis entsteht nicht nur in, sondern vor allem zwischen den Menschen“ (1994, 4).

According to Assmannian theory the communicative memory is not a self- contained, but a relationship based entity. Communicative memory is defined as recollections and life experiences – which have personal value and affective significance - of living generations that are shared and discussed in informal oral day-to-day communication. Because of its informal structure the communicative memory is not stable.

Unsere Erinnerungen sind alles andere als zuverlässig. Sie sind kein exakter Spiegel eines vormaligen Geschehens, sondern immer schon gebrochen durch die Beschränkungen unserer Perspektive, unserer Wahrnehmung, unserer Bedürfnisse und Emotionen. (Assmann 2006, 180).

In his philosophical study Das Gedächtnis und seine sozialen Bedingungen Halbwachs points out that reconstructing memory is always an approximative process that ultimately depends on the constitutions of framing groups and individuals. Thus, memories are instable and fragile constructs that are subjects to changes in time and space. It is the Bakhtinian chronotopos that sets the parameters for recollection and commemoration.

The complementary concept, cultural memory, is crucial for Assmannian theory. It concerns collective references to the past that are culturally determined and handed down from generation to generation through various media such as in writing, pictorial images, rites and oral history (Jansen). It is, compared to the communicative memory, a stable transcendental entity. Unlike the predominantly informal and unstructured communicative memory, cultural memory has an abstract, often sacral and solemn quality. Cultural memory is cultivated and transmitted through groups. Jansen points out that these groups, responsible for cultivation of our cultural memory are a “specially trained cast”, which consists of “society administers”. This implies the existence of hierarchical structures in the keeping and handing down of cultural information. Thus, cultural memory, which serves as a basic mental framework for interpreting day-to-day events and gives them meaning, is again a product of asymmetric power structures. After the violent death of his friend Tod Clifton Ellison’s narrator notes: 69

All things, it is said, are duly recorded--all things of importance, that is. But not quite, for actually it is only the known, the seen, the heard and only those events that the recorder regards as important that are put down, those lies his keepers keep their power by. (IM 439)

The further distinction between "functional memory" and "storage memory" serves to explain possible changes in cultural memory. While the "inhabited" functional memory stands for all the active components of cultural memory, the "uninhabited" storage memory also contains all the disordered elements of the past whose meaning has not (yet) been determined (Jansen).

The close connection between memory (may it be communicative or cultural) and identity reverberates in the struggle to vivisect the origin and function of memorizing processes. John Locke was one of the first to connect memory and identity by relating his lifeexperiences during The Thirty Years’ War to his personality (Assmann, 2006, 184). “Somit ist Identität […] nichts was wir vorfinden oder das uns übertragen wird, sondern etwas, das wir uns selbst erarbeiten müssen“ (ibid.). Thus, individual- as well as group-identity is a product of a dynamic process. This process, that leads to the building of identity and strongly influences modes of commemoration, Mikhail Bakhtin calls the “dialogic self”. Robert Stam describes the dialogic self as “a kind of echo chamber of socially orchestrated voices”, which resound within the individual and create synecdoche [pars pro toto – a part for the whole] cultural figures” (216). I am going to theorize about Ellison’s narrator and his dialogic self (the significance of his memory and its relevance for his identity) always in accordance to his cultural heritage. My challenge will be to explain how the narrator coordinates his narrative “I” (his self-as-a-knower) at the border between of black and white. I will be seeing into the strategies of negotiation the narrator uses to overcome his cultural dislocation and the resulting distortions in his identity.

(Re-)discovering the core-self

In their essay Locating the Dialogic Self in the Age of Transnational Migrations, Border Crossings and Diasporas Sunil Bhatia and Anjali Ram argue that due to the multiple voices, the shifting and mixing by which the self is steadily surrounded the, one can never develop a core-self, a place to resort to when it comes serious interruptions (e.g. traumata) in the “selfing-process” (298-300). On the basis of Assmannian memory theory I will argue against this assumption. I hope to prove that the narrator’s dialogic-self was able to develop and 70

sustain a core despite (or maybe because) the constant nagging of voices that in the course of the novel crescendos into a cacophony of advice and opinion. About the key-role of the Iposition in the “selfing-process” Jaan Valsiner writes:

The notion of I-position entails a core ‘I’ that is needed to assume an I-position. In any activity, there is an agent whose active role makes the activity possible. No matter how extensively socially embedded is an activity, or discourse—the stage for that is set by the existence of the person(s). The person—who constructs I-positions—does that from the starting point of some specific location within one’s psychological field. (6)

It is obvious that the starting point of some present performative action must lie in the past, in his history, i.e. his cultural memory. I will try to locate the narrator’s starting point by tracing performative elements of black cultural memory. The narrator’s starting point – his I-position – emerges from the history of Africans in America. The origin of his African-American “I” is located somewhere in the Middle Passage.10 He identifies with his family history. “And yet I am no freak of nature nor of history. I was in the cards, other things having been equal (or unequal) eighty-five years ago. I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves.

I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time been ashamed” (IM 15). The narrator can obviously relate to his forefathers having been slaves, and even though it is painful their past has become part of his core-self. In this respect his story could be read as a modern slave narrative (most certainly a piece of captivity literature) – a disparate memoir – extending and re-inscribing black cultural memory into present minds.

It is striking that the narrator has emerged from the in-between in the first place.

Somewhere in-between Africa and America (in the middle of nothingness) his core-self has been planted. His struggle for wholeness, his dilemma to adapt to a world that thinks of itself as being coherent and sound is doomed to failure from the very beginning. Only by reinhabiting the space in-between (the hole) he is finally able to discover the core of his self – his hybrid self consisting of African and American selfs.

The narrator’s dualistic core-self points to W.E.B Du Bois’ concepts of “the veil” and the connected “double consciousness” – two concepts quintessentially describing black experience in America. The veil is a metaphor for the separation and unseen life of black’s

10

The term “Middle Passage” refers to the forcible passage of African people from Africa to the New World, as

part of the Atlantic slave trade that lasted from the 16th century to the 19th century (Faragher).

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and their existence in America. Du Bois's veil metaphor plays a key role in all of his texts. In his cornerstone work The Souls of Black Folk we read about the veil: “In those sombre forests of his striving his own soul rose before him, and he saw himself, -darkly as though through a veil” (2007, 13). The Du Boisian veil refers to three things. First, the veil suggests to the literal darker skin of blacks, separating them from whiteness. Secondly, the veil suggests white people’s inability to see blacks. The veil renders blackness invisible. And lastly, the veil refers to blacks’ lack of clarity to see themselves outside of white American context, i.e. blacks perceive themselves and each other through the eyes of whites. This veiled view disables blacks to build consistent selfs. Being blinded both ways (seeing and being seen) blacks can not prevent the white gaze from leaking into their “private” space of mentality” (Sartwell 72). Consequently, blacks have to construct “their-selfs” with the help of white “gazing-eye dogs”. The narrator observes this Catch-22 situation when he looks at a sculpture of the founder of his college.

Then in my mind's eye I see the bronze statue of the college Founder, the cold Father symbol, his hands outstretched in the breathtaking gesture of lifting a veil that flutters in hard, metallic folds above the face of a kneeling slave; and I am standing puzzled, unable to decide whether the veil is really being lifted, or lowered more firmly in place; whether I am witnessing a revelation or a more efficient blinding. (IM 36)

The narrator’s observations ring true to the core and essence of what it means to be black by the grace of whites. Du Bois’s metaphorical reading of the veil is also an allusion to Saint Paul's words in 1. Corinthians 13,12: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known” (King James Version). From this bible passage not only the burden of wearing a veil becomes evident, but the infamous silver lining on the horizon starts shimmering through (“but then shall I know even as also I am known”). Indeed, Du Bois is far from being a “gloomster”. Hence, behind the veil he detects chances to re-enter the “selfing-processes” vigorously. Du Bois describes African-Americans as “a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world. — a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world” (167). Further, of the actual concept of the “double consciousness”, Du Bois goes on to say the following:

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It is a peculiar situation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness – an American, A Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled striving; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife – this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double into a better and truer self. […] He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. (2007, 9) Although there is a veil that keeps black and white from freely looking at each “other”, blacks have a better understanding of whites than vice versa, because of this “two-ness” lived and felt by Black Americans. Du Bois describes this phenomenon as double consciousness, which is the awareness of the “two-ness” of being an American and an African-American, and the largely unconscious, almost instinctive movement between these two selfs, as needed. Blacks have come to know whites through the merging of black and white selfs in their conscience.

Blacks have learned about their white oppressors by experiencing their tactics to force them into silence and concealment. Having been the target of white oppression has not only evoked the “twoness” in the minds of black people, but has also provided them with a deep knowledge about the oppressor himself. In other words, upon coming to the realization of being black and the according historical dimension, black people have learned how to operate in the two monochrome Americas. Being aware of black knowledge about whites, Crispin Sartwell reverses the argument and confesses: Really coming face to face with the reality of black lives could only proceed if we came face to face with ourselves….The only way to reveal to ourselves what disguises ourselves from ourselves is to hear you [the Black voice] speak […]. Black folks wouldn’t countenance the sort of stuff we white folks believe about ourselves, but we white folks can’t allow ourselves to know what black folks know about us. That is why our only hope for ceasing to be oppressors is to listen to what black folks are saying about us. (Sartwell 81- 83)

Not matter from which perspective one sees into the veil (black or white), only through transcending the veil can people achieve liberty and gain self-consciousness. The veil 73

metaphor is not only symbolic of the invisibility of blacks in America, but promotes the white gaze. In order to locate their core-selfs, lifting the veil is an essential requirement (sine qua non) for the oppressed blacks as well as for the oppressing whites.

One of Ellison’s characters who has “double-consciously” torn down the veil is black hobo Peter Wheatstraw. The narrator meets Wheatstraw carting around tons of blueprints on the streets of New, some of which have been used, while the others were discarded by their creators – “once in a while they have to throw 'em out to make place for the new plans Folks is always making plans and changing 'em” (IM 175). Wheatstraw’s collection of disused (presumably white) blueprints for “cities, towns, country clubs” hints at his matured self. “As the materialization of the future, blueprints represent the contingent nature of information; it can be rendered useless by ideological or political whim that can overload channels of discourse to the point of meaninglessness” (Morel 197). By contrasting these meaningless information with his own folkloristic schemes and plots Wheatstraw’s self gains tremendous significance. While the blueprints draft inflexible, artificially designed spaces, Wheatstraw apprehends and inhabits his life world through tangible experience the double consciousness provides him with.

All it takes to get along in this here man's town is a little shit, grit and mother-wit. And man, I was bawn with all three. In fact, I'maseventhsonofaseventhsonbawnwithacauloverbotheyesandraisedon blackcat-boneshighjohntheconquerorandgreasygreens —" he spieled with twinkling eyes, his lips working rapidly. "You dig me, daddy?"

"You're going too fast," I said, beginning to laugh.

"Okay, I'm slowing down. I'll verse you but I won't curse you—My name is Peter Wheatstraw, I'm the Devil's only son-in-law, so roll 'em! (IM 175)

Peter Wheatstraw is the personification of Du Bois’ seventh son “born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world”. He even claims to be the seventh son of a seventh son – the next generation of African-Americans that have come to fully understand the white oppressor. In this respect Wheatstraw’s carting white blueprints is yet provided with bold metaphorical meaning: Wheatsraw has collected white knowledge and intellectual capacity in just a shopping cart, which he is now able to push through the streets.11 He is now in complete 11

In this scene the race dichotomy again ruptures. The “superior” white mind is loaded into nothing but a

shopping cart and pushed around by the black body.

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possession of white thinking and planning and will eventually use this knowledge for his own benefit. "Well, git with it! My name's Blue and I'm coming at you with a pitchfork. Fe Fi Fo Fum” (ibid.).

However, within the novel, Wheatsraw functions as a “future self”. For the narrator he represents a cloudy outlook into the self his blackness indicates. Thus, the narrator is filled with discordant feelings about his encounter with Peter Wheatstraw: “He was the Devil's sonin-law, all right, and he was a man who could whistle a three-toned chord . . . God damn, I thought, they're a hell of a people! And I didn't know whether it was pride or disgust that suddenly flashed over me” (IM 178). His mixed feelings foreshadow the events to come – events that will add more stability to his core-self as well as bringing forth his dualistic self.

As I have pointed out before, black people have gained knowledge about their white oppressors by watching the white oppressive machinery closely. Only by experiencing and “unveiled” looking (which is the opposite of white gazing) blacks were able to create blueprints of white oppression tactics. To acknowledge his double-self the narrator must learn about his duality one by one.

Since, the terms “dualistic self” and “double consciousness” suggest “two-ness” I want to analyze how the narrator comes to acknowledge his selfs (white and black), starting with his black self. In chapter one I have already quoted Ralph Ellison’s observation about his narrator’s dilemma of being unable to adapt to the white world. I want to stress one aspect also inherent to this dilemma. In his struggle to adapt to whiteness the narrator denies his blackness. In other words, the narrator aims at becoming an equal part of white hegemonic society by “passing”12, i.e. he seeks to conceal his blackness with his intellectual giftedness to pass into white recognition. His effort to pass is only secondarily related to his physical appearance. He does not long for being perceived as a white man. The narrator strives for being acknowledged for his intellect, which he wants to prove is not second to none. This approval can only be given by whites, since they have monopolized the mind (vis-à-vis the concept of ejected aestheticism). The narrator’s passing strategy entails “[…] not only racial transcendence, but rather struggles for control over racial representation in a context of the radical unreliability of embodied appearances” (Wald 6). His efforts to appeal to the white mind fail miserably. He fails to pass. In the novel’s first chapter the narrator is supposed to

12

To pass is to transgress the social boundary of race, to “cross” or thwart the “line” of racial distinction that has

been a basis of racial oppression and exploitation. Passing entails, […] not only racial transcendence, but rather struggles for control over racial representation in a context of the radical unreliability of embodied appearances” (Wald 6)

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give a speech in a club, which is open to whites only. When finally he is commanded to speak he has already undergone a series of tremendous (physical and psychological) humiliations.

I spoke automatically and with such fervor that I did not realize that the men were still talking and laughing until my dry mouth, filling up with blood from the cut, almost strangled me. […] I gulped it down, blood, saliva and all, and continued. I spoke even louder in spite of the pain. But still they talked and still they laughed, as though deaf with cotton in dirty ears. So I spoke with greater emotional emphasis. I closed my ears and swallowed blood until I was nauseated. The speech seemed a hundred times as long as before, but I could not leave out a single word. All had to be said, each memorized nuance considered, rendered. Nor was that all. Whenever I uttered a word of three or more syllables a group of voices would yell for me to repeat it. (IM 30)

It is quiet obvious that the narrator was not invited because of the quality of his speech. His appearance is the climactic conclusion to a series of racist, degrading events (the infamous Battle Royal episode in which blindfolded black boys beat each other senseless, is one of them). In all the events the black body is once more exploited for the amusement of whites.

For their pleasure blacks are forced to behave in accordance with their own stereotypes. The narrator is so eager to give his speech and present his intellect to his white audience that he endures an evening of complete humiliation (“What powers of endurance I had during those days! What enthusiasm! What a belief in the rightness of things!” (ibid.)). But, instead of being praised for his powerful speech he is viewed as just another black “thing”, that is even more amusing because it eloquently speaks white language while it still looks brutish and… black. By delivering his speech the narrator achieves the exact opposite of what he wanted in the first place. He looks like a trained and tamed animal, which talks when it is told to. Like a funfair attraction, a mindless freak of nature he stands and speaks from behind the lectern, while his blackness compromises his words.

The narrators wish to pass into the white realm due to his great mind does not necessarily indicate his denial of blackness, or racial self-hatred. In fact, what lies hidden behind his intention to be acknowledged by whites is his wish to end the gaping asymmetries between black and white. Nevertheless, his efforts fail and in his shattering defeat he looses his self. The night after his performance he has a nightmare which reveals to him his great loss.

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I was at a circus with him [the grandfather] and he refused to laugh at the clowns no matter what they did. Then later he told me to open my brief case and read what was inside and I did, finding an official envelope stamped with the state seal; and inside the envelope I found another and another, endlessly, and I thought I would fall of weariness. "Them's years," he said. "Now open that one." And I did and in it I found an engraved document containing a short message in letters of gold. "Read it," my grandfather said. "Out loud." "To Whom It May Concern," I intoned. "Keep This Nigger-Boy Running." I awoke with the old man's laughter ringing in my ears. (IM 33)

His defeat in the club has reduced him again to a “Nigger-Boy”. This set back of his self into the dark times of slavery equals a verbal circumcision. Being a “Nigger-Boy” takes the narrator’s greatest talent – the eloquence by which he has sought to define his self – from him.

As paradox as it may sound, by delivering his speech he has been muzzled and devoiced. The reason for this fiasco he rightly assumes in his blackness. Henceforth, the narrator tries to distance his self from his blackness. In a drugstore the narrator wants to have lunch and when the counterman suggests a meal consisting basically of pork chops and eggs he decides for something different; for something not as archetypically black. “It was an act of discipline, a sign of the change that was coming over me and which would return me to college a more experienced man” (IM 178). By denying “black food” he tries to take on a self, a self that does not rely on blackness as heavily as his old one. In that respect, the narrator’s changing his eating habits functions as a (re-)invention of his self.

Since everyone must eat, what we eat becomes a most powerful symbol of who we are.

To set yourself apart from others by what you will and will not eat is a social barrier almost as powerful as the incest taboo, which tells us with whom we may or may not have sex. Some cultures equate the two taboos. (Fox)

Because, he no longer wants to be identified as being from the south (“Could everyone see that I was southern?”), i.e. being “one of them”, he tries not to act out Negro-stereotypes and deliberately orders non-black-food. By simply ordering food, the narrator has indicated his interest to change onto the other side.

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Receiving back blackness

The narrator’s efforts to defamiliarize his own self from blackness continue over the next few chapters and to some extend he succeeds. Thus, despite his blackness he is thrown out of a black union meeting, because they suspect him being a fink – A suspicion that might not be too far fetched, bearing in mind the narrator’s struggle to distance his self from blackness. But his strive for a non-black self comes to a sudden end eventually.

After an explosion at his workplace in a paint factory the narrator seems severely wounded. “Somewhere an engine ground in furious futility, grating loudly until a pain shot around the curve of my head and bounced me off into blackness. […] another pain that lobbed me back. […] I opened my eyes to a blinding flash” (IM 230). The explosion of the engine signifies the narrator’s painful experience of being thrown back and forth between darkness and lightness. The narrator’s accident provides a powerful metaphorical reading: With the explosion the narrator is thrown back into his black self, only that he does not know it yet. For a short moment the narrator descends into confusion that “stresses agent-less, chaotic transport over active, participatory self-transformation” (Neighbors).

Shortly before he loses his consciousness he sees a blinding flash. The effect of being blinded by a flash-(light) is a common experience – total brightness is followed by complete darkness. The narrator experiences this effect in reverse. He bounces off into darkness before he sees whiteness from an external/black point of view. The explosion has shifted the narrator back closer to his dualistic self, which is black and white, i.e. he knows and incorporates white selfs as non-concealed entities.

When the narrator regains consciousness he finds himself seized by a group of medical pragmatists and thrown into a mysterious experimental machine which achieves his cure by giving him electroshock therapy and flashing strobe lights in his eyes. Throughout his medical treatment the narrator is (deliberately) kept in ignorance about his condition. His unawareness about his state is emblematic for the instability of his self, i.e. his inability to respond adequately to the world around him.

When I emerged, the lights were still there. I lay beneath the slab of glass, feeling deflated. All my limbs seemed amputated. […] A dim white ceiling stretched far above me. […] Why, I didn't know. It worried me. I wanted to knock on the glass to attract attention, but I couldn't move. The slightest effort, hardly more than desire, tired me. […] I seemed to have lost all sense of proportion. Where did my body end 78

and the crystal and white world begin? Thoughts evaded me, hiding in the vast stretch of clinical whiteness to which I seemed connected only by a scale of receding grays.

No sounds beyond the sluggish inner roar of the blood. I couldn't open my eyes. I seemed to exist in some other dimension, utterly alone; […]. (IM 238)

A long period of “medical treatment” follows. A brief summary of the doctor’s practices will draw more parallels to the suffering blacks had to endure on behalf of whites. In their effort to get the narrator “started again” they squeeze him into a small case made of glass. The doctors claim that “the machine will produce the results of a prefrontal lobotomy”, meaning brain surgery on the basis of phrenological “knowledge”. The doctors lead a heated discourse about the possible effects of their treatment, while bending over their patient. The narrator is deeply concerned about his status as a human guinea pig, but unable to move he finds himself at the mercy of his “field researchers”. It becomes clear, that by “restarting” the doctors actually mean to change and conform the narrator’s mind and character: “our concept is Gestalt—and the result is as complete a change of personality as you'll find in your famous fairy-tale cases of criminals transformed into amiable fellows” (IM 236). By revealing the plans for the narrator the doctors also lay open their innermost fears and concerns about blackness. “He'll experience no major conflict of motives, and what is even better, society will suffer no traumata on his account,” and after a short pause another doctor asks, “Why not castration, doctor?” (IM 237). Again the black as the physical per se is the centre around which all fears evolve: The black penis, the alleged violent tendencies of blacks etc. “It is one of the ironies of black-white relations that, by means of what the white man imagines the black man to be, the black man is enabled to know who the white man is” (Baldwin 167).

The narrator as an oppressed person learns about the white oppressor by hearing him over, looking at him and by becoming the target of his violence. He derives cognitive knowledge about whites by simply paying attention – like a newborn. It is not a coincident that the whole episode is permeated with allusions to death and (re-)birth. The narrator’s account of how he has experienced his workplace accident alludes to near death experiences.

“Things whirled too fast around me. My mind went alternately bright and blank in slow rolling waves. We, he, him—my mind and I—were no longer getting around in the same circles” (IM 249). The “box of glass and nickel” into which the narrator is squeezed evokes the imagery of a foetus inside a mother’s womb. At the sound of Jazz music the narrator’s reincarnation begins. Motifs of labor and birth appear most obviously: “But now the music became a distinct wail of female pain. I opened my eyes. Glass and metal floated above me” 79

(IM 235). The starting of labor, the narrator’s passing through the birth canal, everything is accompanied by music. The scene’s surreal quality smoothes the way for the appearance of the grotesque corporeality of the newborn. The narrators reinvention – his rebirth – is an expression of his changed perception of his spatial and temporal (chronotope) surroundings.

As a newborn the narrator is able to experience his world anew. “In der Wechselbeziehung zur konkreten menschlichen Körperlichkeit erlangt auch die gesamte übrige Welt einen neuen Sinn und eine neue Realität und Materialität“ (Bachtin 2008, 99). In this new correlation between world and the narrator’s new corporeality lies the chance for him to gain first-handcognitive knowledge about whiteness.

As a newborn the narrator is safe from consciously enacting stereotypes, but he functions as sole projection surface. At this moment his memory is reset into a state of “tabula rasa”. While his communicative memory has been erased temporarily, his cultural memory (his core-self) reigns only subconsciously.

The otherwise, oppressive powers of white stereotypes on blackness develop no effects on the narrator’s self as they are not performed, thus only ascribed, instead of being internalized through performance. Since none of the dialogic information leaks into his “private space of mentality” the narrator is able to examine them thoroughly. The “tender surface of his body” works like a palimpsest screen. Undisturbed the narrator can analyze and sort out every projection and inscription. During his hospitalization the narrator the narrator experiences the creative powers of the dialogic self and consequently develops an “obsession with my identity” that causes him to “put into words feelings which I had hitherto suppressed” (IM 249).

In his doctors’ indirect dialogic activities the narrator learns about how he is perceived. In fact, it is here that his dialogic self starts working. In becoming aware of his black self, the narrator attempts to look at his self, as it is, through the eyes of white people.

Robert Stam elaborates on this thought: “Even when looking within oneself, one looks in and through the yes of the other; one needs the other’s gaze to constitute oneself as self” (5). This clearly shows that even the narrator’s simple acts of “looking at” (oneself or another) as well as (in-)direct communicative acts - due to their complex dialogic quality – promote his “selfing-process”. During his hospitalization the narrator conceives the second-sight of which hobo Peter Wheatstraw has been speaking earlier. Through the Bakhtinian concept of the dialogic self/communicative memorization the narrator becomes the Du Boisian seventh son.

Through another dialogic process the narrator is even provided with conclusive hints about his core-self, which after his incarnation has been put to sleep. After another series of 80

painful medical treatments the narrator is finally spoken to directly. It is in a short and rough interrogation that the narrator senses “vague impressions of memory” (IM 238). His cultural memory awakes and the narrator recognizes it more clearly than ever before. The narrator is shown some index cards with short questions scribbled onto them. Reading: “WHAT IS YOUR NAME?”, “WHO ARE YOU”, “THINK”, “WHO WAS BUCKEYE RABBIT?”, “BOY; WHO WAS BRER RABBIT?” (IM 239-242).

Once again the trickster lore character Buckeye/Brer Rabbit becomes of great significance for the narrator. This time Buckeye and Brer Rabbit are twofoldly efficacious.

Firstly, at the mentioning of Buckeye/Brer Rabbit the narrator remembers his spiritual roots that go over into black American folk tradition. “I laughed, deep, deep inside me, giddy with the delight of self-discovery and the desire to hide it” (ibid.). Much like Alice is lead into Wonderland by “The White Rabbit” Ellison’s narrator miraculously (re-)discovers his childhood memory, i.e. his core-self.

Buckeye and Brer Rabbit are of importance in yet another way. The narrator’s “selfing-process” is closely connected to that of Buckeye/Brer Rabbit. “Anyone knew they were one and the same: "Buckeye" when you were very young and hid yourself behind wide innocent eyes; "Brer," when you were older” (ibid.). Buckeye Rabbit as a trickster has taught the narrator to hide his carnivalesque powers behind innocent eyes. Now, the narrator is reminded of these powers and will subsequently rediscover and enact them.

These two aspects, inherent to the characters of Buckeye and Brer’ Rabbit, are cornerstones in the narrator’s transition to adulthood. Both provide him with fundamental certainty about his self(s), even in times of inner turmoil. At a different occasion the narrator is provided with further cultural memories. From a man called Brother Tarp the narrator receives a chain link - a result of Tarp's time spent on a chain gang for having told a White Man 'No'. The chain link is an historic item, a reminder of what the narrator actually struggles against and a material summary of black life-experience.

"I'd like to pass it on to you, son. There," he said, handing it to me. "Funny thing to give somebody, but I think it's got a heap of signifying wrapped up in it and it might help you remember what we're really fighting against. I don't think of it in terms of but two words, yes and no; but it signifies a heap more . . ." I saw him place his hand on the desk. "Brother," he said, calling me "Brother" for the first time, "I want you to take it. I guess it's a kind of luck piece. Anyway, it's the one I filed to get away." I took it in my hand, a thick, dark, oily piece of filed steel that had been twisted open and forced 81

partly back into place, on which I saw marks that might have been made by the blade of a hatchet. (IM 388)

The chain link serves as an “item of memory”. Pierre Nora’s concept of such écouter de mémoire is built upon Halbwachs’ thoughts and refers to: e.g. physical places, material items, persons, works of art, events, dates, institutions etc. (Jansen). Brother Tarp’s chain link draws up a gigantic inventory of African-American memories, running the gamut from the Middle Passage to the beginning of the black civil rights movement – cultural memories of fundamental importance to the African-American core-self. The link is a prosecutor of white transfiguring historiography and colonization. It helps the narrator to re-posses historic injustice which blacks had to endure and which had been distorted by American historiography. The narrator’s incoherence and his desperate search for cultural memory and identity, testifies against white historiography which has moulded blackness into a burden. By visualizing the struggle of blacks in-between the narrator serves as a silent prosecutor. In his invisibility a dilemma that mutually affects both, blacks and whites, renders visible: Being constantly torn between pride and shame, envy and the extrusion of the past. “…over the last several decades … Americans have become chronically embarrassed about their past. Any material from historical record that is now determined to be offensive to any minority group is… made ‘unhistory’” (Strausbaugh 30).

Holding the chain link in hands the narrator feels he has been provided with new power “I slipped the link over my knuckles and struck it sharply against the desk”, at seeing this Brother Tarp nods his approval, “Now there's a way I never thought of using […] It's pretty good. It's pretty good” (IM 389). It is the return of the knowledge about history that helps the narrator to turn the white weapon of oppression into a black weapon of resistance.13 The return of the narrator’s cultural memory in the shape of Buckeye and Brer Rabbit or Brother Tarp’s chain link is accompanied by the knowledge about white efforts to thwart all memorizing processes, i.e. “selfing-processes”. In this context I have pointed to role of white historiography (“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past”). Yet, I would like to elucidate this matter with two more powerful passages from Ellison’s novel that not only reveals white strategies to sustain supremacy, but also emphasizes the narrator’s newly acquired consciousness about his core-self and cultural memory. On his way through the streets of New York the narrator witnesses an eviction of an 13

Albeit clichéd, one of the most famous renaissance paradigms “scientia potentia est” (“For also knowledge

itself is power”) by philosopher Francis Bacon is well suited to support this argument.

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old black couple. In front of the house a crowd has gathered to protest against the proceedings.

Turned aside by the raging crowd the narrator stumbles over a clutter of household objects which have already been piled up on the walk.

I looked down to see looking out of an oval frame a portrait of the old couple when young, seeing the sad, stiff dignity of the faces there; feeling strange memories awakening that began an echoing in my head like that of a hysterical voice stuttering in a dark street. Seeing them look back at me as though even then in that nineteenthcentury day they had expected little, and this with a grim, unillusioned pride that suddenly seemed to me both a reproach and a warning. My eyes fell upon a pair of crudely carved and polished bones, "knocking bones," used to accompany music at country dances, used in black-face minstrels; the flat ribs of a cow, a steer or sheep, flat bones that gave off a sound, when struck, like heavy castanets (had he been a minstrel?). (IM 271)

In this context the minstrel serves as a metaphor for black degradation (the minstrel as a subtle trickster is not part of Ellison’s concept). In this short passage the narrator is horrified by the idea of a black man performing black stereotypes for the benefit of a white audience.

In the eyes of the narrator the minstrel is a constitutional part of the grotesque projection of the Negro image, which was substantially shaped by blackface popular culture. Indeed, both, before and after the Civil War whites insisted upon an image of the Negro that would fit him for a place in plantocracy. The buffoonish minstrel served that purpose. Culture (may it be popular or not) equals collective identity, and to reduce black culture to buffoonery, shuffling and watermelon eating is to design every black individual in accordance to that “historic” template. It is because of these causal relations the narrator abhors the idea behind the blackface minstrelsy phenomenon – it was just another vicious attempt to “keep the nigger runnin” in circles and in place (IM 33). After having confirmed to the black stereotype of the black buck Jim Trueblood offers an astute account of what it feels like being caught in the vicious circle of racialized identity: “I'm runnin' round in circles like a dog with his back broke, and back into that numbness with my tail tucked between my legs” (IM 63).

Throughout the novel the narrator is haunted by minstrel figures embodying part of his cultural memory. After his release from the factory hospital the narrator stays with an old lady for a few months. In his room he finds an early piece of discriminating Americana, a “castiron figure of a very black, red-lipped and widemouthed Negro, whose white eyes stared up at 83

me from the floor, his face an enormous grin” (IM 319). One night, in a rage, he smashes the Americana. The next day he finds it impossible to get rid of the broken figure. Whenever he tries to dispose of the pieces they are returned to him. The minstrel figure as a part of his black self and culture turns into a boomerang. “[…] our whole culture, which might sound like a hoax, or a contradiction, but that is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang” (IM 6).

The narrator continues his search and hits upon more memory material. In a drawer the narrator finds life insurances papers invalidated by the government and some newspaper articles about the deportation of “a huge black man”. Shortly afterwards the narrator comes across some “Free Papers”, which in the context of all the other documents read like purest cynism: “Be it known to all men that my negro, Primus Provo, has been freed by me this sixth day of August, 1859 (ibid.). Paper obviously does not blush and true freedom for blacks has evidently remained a myth. Seeing all these items and documents - telling about historic injustice and confirmed rights - evicted on the snowy streets the narrator is overcome by the realization that this evicted material concerns him since it represents part of his cultural memory.

[…] it was as though I myself was being dispossessed of some painful yet precious thing which I could not bear to lose; something confounding, like a rotted tooth that one would rather suffer indefinitely than endure the short, violent eruption of pain that would mark its removal. And with this sense of dispossession came a pang of vague recognition: this junk, these shabby chairs, these heavy, old fashioned pressing irons, zinc wash tubs with dented bottoms—all throbbed within me with more meaning […].

(IM 273)

Seeing the old black couple and his self being dispossessed of valuable memories, the narrator finally springs into action and holds his first speech on the door steps in front of the raging crowd. This event, his newly acquired knowledge about his self(s) being enrooted in cultural memory, heralds his most eminent change. Henceforward the narrator is no longer “a nigger kept running” but in charge of his actions and although most of his efforts fail miserably until the end he learns about the dualistic “game” and how it is played. At discovering the origin of his self(s) he learns to value his cultural heritage. He is no longer ashamed of his grandparents having been slaves. He has learned to embrace and suffer the “rotted tooth”, i.e. is his dualistic self. He knows now that his memories do not simply recall a 84

version of his self but actually recreate and rebuild his fixed core-self from the past “in the service of the present and the future” (Peeren 200). For his self(s) the narrator arrives at a very similar conclusion, when in the epilogue he concludes: “I have come a long way and returned and boomeranged a long way from the point in society toward which I originally aspired (IM 573). Subconsciously the narrator has sought to get acquainted with his own cultural past and memories. He has aspired to get in touch with his self and thus has to return to the points at which his self(s) have started to emerge.

I began to accept my past and, as I accepted it, I felt memories welling up within me. It was as though I'd learned suddenly to look around corners; images of past humiliations flickered through my head and I saw that they were more than separate experiences.

They were me; they defined me. I was my experiences and my experiences were me […]. (IM 506-507)

Having recognized the importance of his cultural memory and heritage the narrator starts fostering it. At the beginning of the chapter I have argued that the narrator loathes food that stereotypically signifies blackness. The most famous and oft-cited dictum of French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, “Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are”, highlights the ensuing culinary panic connected to the consumption of certain dishes.

As if these “black dishes” were bewitched and their consumption would inevitably lead to the incorporation of blackness and all the negative associations connected to it – “Whoever eats from me will become a black person”. But now, after having found his self(s) the narrator does not have to avoid food that due to some prevailing binary racial logic is on the “forbidden list” and thus thought to be innately black (watermelon, pork chops, collard greens, fried chicken, chitterlings etc.). While walking the streets, the narrator finds a man selling yams from a cart. The moment the narrator bites into one yam documents how he has overcome symbolically charged food and his cultural condition.

I took a bite, finding it as sweet and hot as any I'd ever had, and was overcome with such a surge of homesickness that I turned away to keep my control. I walked along, munching the yam, just as suddenly overcome by an intense feeling of freedom […] simply because I was eating while walking along the street. It was exhilarating. I no longer had to worry about who saw me or about what was proper. To hell with all that, and as sweet as the yam actually was, it became like nectar with the thought. (IM 264) 85

Together with the yam the narrator he scraps manipulative advice to refrain from everything that might promote his blackness and would make him seem ignorant and common (food, language etc.). The narrator regains cultural sovereignty and thus he is on his way to merge his self(s) into one coherent identity. In order to restore his identity, the narrator is missing one last component – a name. The narrator’s namelessness and its consequences will be the last subject of this chapter.

Naming the invisible

Names are never empty catchwords but they are units of meaning charged with semiotic relevance. Thus, the literalizing of the narrator’s self/s) (any self in fact) is the process of naming, “of properly rendering into language what exists prior to language” (Neighbor.).

Receiving a name is a process of initiation. Within industrialized cultures it is usually the father bestowing his children with names. “In the baptismal ceremony, the priest meets the father, and the first thing he says is, ‘What name do you give your child?’” (Deluzain). After the father has responded to that question (the ceremony consists of more questions and answers, mostly referring to the Christian creed), the priest invites the father to trace the sign of the cross on the child's forehead (ibid.).

Throughout the novel the narrator receives different names from different father figures (none of these names are revealed to the reader). For the reasons mentioned above, the naming process is a demonstration of power.

The narrator’s name is precisely never given; “he ranks as one of the most wellrecognized anonymous characters in American literature” (Neighbor). In almost all publications about Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man the narrator is referred to by the same name – “invisible man”. In my paper I have studiously avoided this “form of address”, precisley because the narrator’s anonimity emphasizes the promise of an eventual fulfilling of identity claims. Referring to the narrator as “invisible man” would at best have been a leap ahead into the unknown; at worst, it is the further appropriation, cooptation, and colonization of the narrator.

On several occasions the narrator is given a name by others. At his entering the organisation of the Brotherhood, the narrator accepts a new name and a “new identity” and resolves once again to “leave the old behind”. The narrator is obviously aware about the 86

influence of naming in the “selfing-process”. Through naming the self something utterly new begins and a new self is brought into existence. “A person's proper name, in this way, is the literal--and, so, most proper--figure of the extralinguistic Self behind the name” (Neighbor).

The narrator’s cultural self(s) are stable referents that extend them-/their self(s) to their proper name; “the proper name thus consists of a transference, a carrying over, from the stable referent of the Self (ibid.). The effectiveness works in dichotomic relation. While the self motivates the proper name, the name suggests the definition of the self a priori.

Receiving or giving names establishes and reinforces power- structures and hierachies.

According to the scripture man’s government over the earth and evrything in it started with the process of naming. In Genesis 2, 19 it says:

And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. (King James Version)

A name brings a person into existence, in fact it creates a person in many respects. “[…] a name […] requires that the society recognizes and provides for the needs of individuals, at least in a general way” (Deluzian). Thus, a name resembles an informal contract that comprises rights and obligations. To gain the status as a legal person one is obliged to have a name. By receiving a name the individual implicitly accepts to follow the rules of society. In the United States convicts are forced to exchange their names for prison numbers. “In doing this, society says […] that the convicts have separated themselves from the community by breaking the rules; thus, they are no longer entitled to the identity and social privileges their names give them” (ibid.). Thus, naming is a process that involves a plenitude of power on the side of the father. By naming the father brings his son/daughter into legal existence – the mastery of the father brings the individual to materialize as part of society.

In the case of Ellison’s narrator many father figures try to exert their defining powers to create in accordance to their own wishes, needs and desires. One of his many names he receives at his entering into the organization of the Brotherhood.

I watched her reach into the bosom of her taffeta hostess gown and remove a white envelope. “This is your new identity,” Brother Jack said. “Open it.” Inside I found a name written on a slip of paper. “That is your new name,” Brother Jack said. “Start 87

thinking of yourself by that name from this moment. Get it down so that even if you are called in the middle of the night you will respond. Very soon you shall be known by it all over the country. You are to answer to no other, understand?” (IM

Just like all the other names this one, given to him by the Brotherhood, displays ersatz self.

After having been named several times by different father figures the narrator begins to see through the relevance of naming-processes. After having been confronted with a series of father figures - starting with Booker T. Washington, evoked in the narrator’s speech at the Battle Royal and continuing through Mr. Norton, Reverend Homer Barbee, Dr. Bledsoe, Mr. Emerson, Lucius Brockway and Brother Jack and the Brotherhood - the narrator starts to understand, rebel and escape their influence and mastery. “They were very much the same, each attempting to force his picture of reality upon me and neither giving a hoot in hell for how things looked to me. I was simply a material, a natural resource to be used” (IM 508).

Ras the exhorter / Ras the destroyer is the last of these father figures, “the representative of African nationalism who stalks the narrator through the streets of Harlem as a rival speaker, seeking to align him with the ultimate father/mother symbol: Africa” (Rice 9).

So when Ras yelled, "Hang him!" I let fly the spear and it was as though for a moment I had surrendered my life and begun to live again, watching it catch him as he turned his head to shout, ripping through both cheeks, and saw the surprised pause of the crowd as Ras wrestled with the spear that locked his jaws. (IM 559)

By “locking the jaws” of his spokesman rival Ras, the narrator has silenced the last father figure that was about to give him a name and cast an identity onto the narrator. In the silence that follows the narrator emancipates his self(s) from all external ascriptions. With the rise of his self the narrator undercuts Ras’ dignity and (on a metaphoric plane) downplays the regality of every father figure in the novel. The narrator’s consciousness of his self(s) (dialogicly brought into presence through the reversioning of cultural and communicative memories) can now be seen as an “I for his self” in contrast to the “I through another”.

In this revelation of the narrator’s self(s) the vet’s last “advice” reverberates: "Now is the time for offering fatherly advice, but I'll have to spare you that—since I guess I'm nobody's father except my own. Perhaps that's the advice to give you: Be your own father […]” (IM 156). Against the background of his cultural and personal memories he takes on the vet’s advice and becomes his own father and gives a name to his self(s). In the prologue,

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which is a chronological follow up to the actual narration, the narrator already gives away two names, only then the reader does not realize they are actual names. The narrator starts his narration with by introducing himself: “I am an invisible man” (3). This disclosure might not qualify for a name in the traditional western sense, but it surely literalizes the narrator’s self.

“I am an invisible man”, admittedly, is not a totalizing name, i.e. it does not lend the kind of stability to the named which we would expect from a name. Thus, “I am and invisible man” is a metaphysical description of identity lending to its bearer a stability of a different quality.

The emphasize in this utterance is not on the “invisible man” entirely, but on the “I am”. In fact, it is the narrator’s assumption (“I am”) that “he is” that adds meaning to invisibility. The narrator’s invisibility does not indicate his wish for ceasing to exist (a reading that, in connection to his retreat into the dark hole, is certainly possible). On the contrary, “he is”, thus the narrator does exist in a state of divinity. In Exodus 3, 14 Moses asks God for his name and gets an answer that reflects utmost self-consciousness “I AM THAT I AM”. This same divine certainty the narrator demonstrates in his giving his self(s) a name. On the analogy of Exodus 3, 14 the narrator once again daringly assumes creative powers by playfully altering God’s alias: I YAM WHAT I AM (IM 266).

However, “I am an invisible man” is a logic consequence a name that unlike any other makes complete sense to the narrator. “I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer”. And in the end he concludes that he is nobody but himself: “I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind” (IM 1-15). The invisible man’s last remark (“I might even be said to posses a mind”) contains an allusion to René Descartes’ famous “Cogito” argument. “Cogito ergo sum”, (Usually translated: “I think, therefore I am”). The simple meaning of the phrase, holds true for the narrator as well (Hatfield 3–20). Since people refuse to see him he constantly doubt his existence. By assuring his self of possessing an “I” and mind he finds ample proof for his existence (because, at the very least, there is an "I" operating his mind and vice versa).

By giving his self(s) a name he becomes a coherent being with a specific identity. The narrator locates himself in society and enters a contract that is not dictated by white supremacist proclivities. Henceforth, I will not have to speak of his self(s), instead I am going indicate this emancipative change by using the reflexive pronoun “himself” – as finally under his new name his self(s), on the basis of commemoration, have merged into one-self (which is still in the state of Du Boisian two-ness/double-ness but has ceased to suffer from it). In fact the “dualistic whole” that constitutes the narrator’s identity has gained the strength Du Bois 89

has said to be inherent to the double-consciousness and about which I have spoken in my analysis of the hospital episode: The double consciousness becomes a source of strength.

Being “A Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body” also means that black people are able to look at a situation with two different sets of eyes – white eyes and black eyes. The black person suffering from a double consciousness is able to observe from two, not only different, but completely opposite perspectives.

By naming himself the narrator has conjured his self(s) by means of narration. His narrative now primarily (if not exclusively) exists to reflects its master, i.e. HIMSELF.

Master storytellers use words as tools to manipulate their situation, to achieve Selfpossession. In this way, language is mimetic: It re-presents (expresses, describes, illustrates) its referent--it carries over the essence of the referent to the term--as a mirror reflects its image. (Neighbor)

Now, that he has defined/narrated and repossesed himself his words, spoken at a gathering of the Brotherhood, ring through:

"SISTERS! BROTHERS! "WE ARE THE TRUE PATRIOTS! THE CITIZENS OF TOMORROW'S WORLD! "WE'LL BE DISPOSSESSED NO MORE!"

His new name is a confirmation of having found something that whites have been taken from him. The narrator’s name expresses dignity and location, performance and self. “[…] names we are given and which we also put to our own uses – have histories that are not anchored in identities but rather secure them” (Wald 6).

The narrator’s naming himself “invisible man” is also a confession to his identity as a fool. Double-consciously the invisible man has worked to a concept for himself - a template that would allow him to move freely and help him achieve freedom by bringing back cultural memory. As an invisible man he has the power to overcome whiteness without being known.

Interestingly enough, he gives himself a second name that confirms his fool-identity: “Call me Jack the Bear” (6). Like all the other trickster figures Jack the Bear is an ambiguous character.

In the black folklore tradition (e.g. Uncle Remus stories, Jack Johnson etc.), every trickster is 90

incarnated as a clever, mischievous creature, who tries to survive the dangers and challenges of the world using trickery and deceit as a defence. Jack the Bear is always prone to evade or fool his enemies and villains and dangers with unorthodox manners like creating a sticky tarbaby to catch a rabbit. In Ellison’s novel one character incorporates trickery and deceit more than any other: Bliss Proteus Rinehart, “a con artist who takes his middle name from the Greek deity who had the power to assume many different shapes, disguises in order to elude those who would capture him and compel him to answer their questions” (Andrews 348). The invisible man/Jack the Bear is eager to learn about the tactics of Rinehart.

Well, I was and yet I was invisible, that was the fundamental contradiction. I was and yet I was unseen. […] For now I saw that I could agree with Jack without agreeing.

And I could tell Harlem to have hope when there was no hope. […] I would have to move them without myself being moved . . . I'd have to do a Rinehart. (IM 506)

Along these lines, no one seems more invisible and adept at masking in the tradition of the folkloric trickster than B. P. Rinehart, who, despite always being referred to and “spotted”, never actually appears (Shinn). He embodies the master of carnival disguise and, in one of his many masquerades, functions as a self-avowed “spiritual technologist” (IM 495). He claims to be a man of multifarious parts, a preacher who is ready to “behold the invisible” (IM 495). At one and the same time Rinehart represents a multiplicity of persons and roles. Rinehart, so the Harlem-rumor professes, is all knowing omnipresent and through his flexibility omnipotent – he is the god of carnival; an important momentum for the invisible man, who by “doing the Rinehart” enters into a capsule that evokes a metamorphose: “Narr und Tölpel sind eine Metamorphose von Kaiser und Gott“ (Bachtin 2008, 90). The invisible man is overwhelmed by the possibilities that in the character of Rinehart open up to him. Suddenly everything (divine powers, authority, and freedom) seems to be within reach and at disposal.

Can it be, I thought, can it actually be? And I knew that it was. I had heard of it before but I'd never come so close. Still, could he be all of them: Rine the runner and Rine the gambler and Rine the briber and Rine the lover and Rinehart the Reverend? Could he himself be both rind and heart? What is real anyway? But how could I doubt it? He was a broad man, a man of parts who got around. Rinehart the rounder. It was true as I was true. His world was possibility and he knew it. He was years ahead of me and I was a fool. (IM 498) 91

With the invisible man’s slipping into the roles of Rinehart the novel expands into the genre of the picaresque, featuring the invisible man as a roguish hero almost like Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Rinehart symbolizes the picaresque “jumping from the pot of absurdity to the fire of the ridiculous” (IM 506). He is a promise to good to be true, that at second glance reveals a flawed black future. Whereas Rinehart is described as a “confidencing sonofabitch”, whose ingenuity crosses moral boundaries and openly disdains human loyalties, the invisible man/Jack the Bear commits himself to community (Wright 158). Unlike Rinehart’s notion of community, invisible man’s understanding of society is not limited to any Manichean exclusion. “If by projecting himself as “thinker-tinker” akin to Ford, Edison and Franklin the narrator leads us to presume that community to be something other than his own race […]”

(Wright 158). This observation is in accordance with Ralph Ellison’s judgment about his invisible man. In contrast to the figure of Rinehart who "would seem a perfect example of [the] trickster figure,” the invisible man is a character of astonishing complexity that evades archetypal disruption. Ellison notes: “He certainly is not a smart man playing dumb. For the novel his memoir is one long, loud rant, howl and laugh. Confession, not concealment, is his mode” (Callahan 111). Therefore it is no wonder that the invisible man discards pure “Rinehartism”: “I felt that somewhere between Rinehart and invisibility there were great potentialities” (510). Again he locates his self, his cultural and communicative memories, his identity in the interstices of society and absurdity (“somewhere between”), only this time his voice sounds content and assertive. Having escaped the last father figure that wanted to drag him into the open and into the beam of his own light, the invisible man senses the universal applicability of his quest for identity.

I looked at Ras on his horse and at their handful of guns and recognized the absurdity of the whole night and of the simple yet confoundingly complex arrangement of hope and desire, fear and hate, that had brought me here still running, and knowing now who I was and where I was and knowing too that I had no longer to run for or from the Jacks and the Emersons and the Bledsoes and Nortons, but only from their confusion, impatience, and refusal to recognize the beautiful absurdity of their American identity and mine. (IM 559)

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Conclusion

There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.

- Ralph Ellison

[…] the study of verbal art can and must overcome the divorce between an abstract "formal" approach and an equally abstract "ideological" approach. Form and content in discourse are one, once we understand that verbal discourse is a social phenomenon - social throughout its entire range and in each and every of its factors, from the sound image to the furthest reaches of abstract meaning.’

- Mikhail Bakhtin

_____________

“So there you have all of it that's important. Or at least you almost have it” (IM 572). I have explored the pertinences of Bakhtinian conceptualizations to a problematic Bakhtin himself never directly addressed: The socio-cultural politics in-between black and white relations.

Thereby I have emphasized the processuality of the invisible man’s experiences. My analysis of the Bakhtinian entities time and space, body, memory and identity within Ellison’s novel has proven to be an extremely dynamic proposition. By pointing to Bakhtinian reversal twists I have rendered visible the many nested scopes on which the invisible man has to orient himself, i.e. his self(s).

Within the chronotope reality of the absurd Bakhtin’s philosophy of dialogue and the dialogic “selfing-process” comes to function at individual, historical, and generic levels. The folk ideals of "the many" and "openness" that Bakhtin has developed in his study Rabelais and His World become the operative structures of the invisible man’s struggle for freedom and identity.

Black folklore traditions provide the invisible man with many strategies for reversal twists that help him to celebrate his role as the poor fool who becomes king and condemns the powerful to ruin. Bakhtinian thought contributes immensely to our understanding for such reversals and their expression of the creative energy of “a carnival sense of the world” (RW 93

12). In the chronotops of the carnivalesque world the border between black and white becomes the Manichean frontier at which the hierarchies, seriousness and white officialdom are pushed aside. Carnival shakes up the white supremacist version of language and values, making room for a multiplicity of voices and meanings. In this environment the many fools in Invisible Man playfully reintroduce the “lower bodily stratum” to the white mind. It his at this point, that Ellison’s novel draws closer to the European poetry form of Grobianism. Through the characters of Jim Trueblood, the vet from the Golden Day, Ras and Rinehart (all of which become dialogic parts of the invisible man) Ellison modifies the early form of European parody that was especially concerned with forms of excretion and artistically wields it against white “scientific racism”. The Ellisonian form of Primitivism resists the concept of ejected aestheticism by reacquainting the white mind (higher bodily stratum) to its own body (“lower bodily stratum) whose disgusting fashions whites had ascribed to blackness. In the form of the grotesque black body Primitivism illustrates whiteness as an abstract form of self-inflicted castration. “The essence of the grotesque is precisely to present a contradictory and doublefaced fullness of life. Negation and destruction […] are inseparable from affirmation, from the birth of something new and better” (RW 62). The grotesque body mediates the between higher and lower stratum and reifies their mutual dependence. African-American variety frequently juxtaposes primitiveness and “modernity”, the mind and the body to divulge and display the hidden secrets of bodily origin (Shinn). Thus the grotesque body is a “device to make visible what has been hidden, even unconsciouss” (Ibid.).

The grotesque body is the material of which the carnivalesque fool is made. In a world that has been turned upside-down the fool represents the hero. In Ellison’s novel the fools are the only characters who fully comprehend the racist processes. Being enraptured from the spheres of that “tragic irrational situation”, i.e. the absurd, the fool is provided with an unobstructed view on the upside-down world. Thus “Seeing”, “gazing” and “blindness” are reoccurring tropes in Ellison’s novel. In contrast to the invisible man whose development makes him a Du Boisian “seventh son” with the second sight (perfect vision), many of his father figures are exposed as single eyed Cyclopes. Their physical limitation allows for a metaphoric reading. Their perception of the world is narrowed and one-dimensional. Even though they frequently claim to see through the systemic structure that upholds white hegemony they are struck with blindness. Reverend Homer A. Barbee is the first one in a row of blind or single-eyed men whose advice and observations are led ad absurdum by his inability to see.

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After having delivered his speech about the black founder of the invisible man’s college Reverend Homer A Barbee stumbles over his own feet and falls to the floor:

The old man slid forward upon his hands and knees as the two white men took his arms I saw one of them reach for something on the floor and place it in his hands. It was when he raised his head that I saw it. For a swift instant, between the gesture and the opaque glitter of his glasses, I saw the blinking of sightless eyes. Homer A. Barbee was blind. (IM 133)

Most father figures and leaders in the novel, or those who claim to be leaders, carry the Cyclopean birthmark - instead of being “second-sighted” they turn out to be single-eyed.

Homer A. Barbee’s appearance is especially tragic as he utterly depends on white people to guide him and as if this was not enough he receives back his glass eye, i.e. his blindness, from white hands. On other occasions Cyclopes enter the scenery. In the factory hospital a doctor peers menacingly with a “bright third eye that glowed from the center of his forehead” at the invisible man. Another is Brother Jack (one of the leaders of the Brotherhood movement) in Harlem whose eye squints at the invisible man with “Cyclopean irritation”. Brother Jack reveals to the invisible man that he has lost his eye in the line of duty – he has sacrificed his sight (“So that is the meaning of discipline, I thought, sacrifice . . . yes, and blindness” (IM 475)). Again the invisible man feels betrayed and led astray. What the invisible man begins to learn figuratively and painfully, within the Cyclopean code, is the fascination of helplessness, his proneness to fall back into the Cyclopean nightmare others impose on him-- repulsive arts, exploited sciences, fake renascences (Harris 111). The Invisible Man comes to consciousness of his own victimization. He realizes his struggling with the asymmetrical positions of black and white and learns to distinguish the many voices involved in the political discourse of the Brotherhood. Consequently, the invisible man enters into dialogic negotiations on several fronts: past (memory), language, food etc. Within the different negotiation rounds the invisible man starts moving dynamically (once he knows his core-self being firmly rooted in cultural memory) back and forth between opposite I-positions. These negotiations are multilayered and complex because the voices of family, language, homeland and white American society are all represented in the dialogic discourse of the self (Bhatia 305). But having overheard a multitude of voices the invisible man has finally learned to discern the spirits and filter determining information from “multidirectional discourse”. In the end his knowledge enables him to “become his own father”. By silencing the voices around him he discovers his 95

self(s)/himself and merges them into an identity that functions in accordance with his cultural memories. This does not mean that his cacophonic surroundings would cease to create “symbiotic relationships of ambivalence” (push and pull phenomena). Still, having double – consciously repossessed his identity will enable him to function in opposing dialogic processes. The ambivalence of the many voices, inherent to the cacophonic, will help the invisible man to constitute a dialogic process of Bakhtinian “polyphonization” – contrapuntal voices are merged into a whole. In other words, the invisible man becomes a figure of “coherent ambivalence”, i.e. the fool within the carnivalesque universe. In his prologue the invisible man tells about his first leaving of his hole and his re-encounter with Mr. Norton.

"Don't you know me?" I said.

"Should I?" he said.

"You see me?" I said, watching him tensely.

"Why, of course—Sir, do you know the way to Centre Street?"

"So. Last time it was the Golden Day, now it's Centre Street. You've retrenched, sir. But don't you know who I am?"

"Young man, I'm in a hurry," he said, cupping a hand to his ear.

"Why should I know you?"

"Because I'm your destiny."

"My destiny, did you say?" He gave me a puzzled stare, backing away. "Young man, are you well? Which train did you say I should take?"

"I didn't say," I said, shaking my head. "Now, aren't you ashamed?"

"Ashamed? ASHAMED!" he said indignantly.

I laughed, suddenly taken by the idea. "Because, Mr. Norton, if you don't know where you are, you probably don't know who you are. So you came to me out of shame. You are ashamed, now aren't you?"

"Young man, I've lived too long in this world to be ashamed of anything. Are you lightheaded from hunger? How do you know my name?"

"But I'm your destiny, I made you. Why shouldn't I know you?" I said, walking closer and seeing him back against a pillar. He looked around like a cornered animal. He thought I was mad. "Don't be afraid, Mr. Norton," I said. "There's a guard down the platform there. You're safe. Take any train; they all go to the Golden D—" (IM 578)

96

It becomes perfectly clear that, after his coming out of hibernation, the invisible man will return to “the world above” will function as what Margaret Bent refers to as a “dyadic counterpoint”. The invisible man forces the Mr. Norton to re-examine his ways of thinking about things. “Each object is evaluated in accord with its efficacy as a swab, completely apart from its original function, [the objects'] unexpected new function conjures up their visible, material outline” (RW 372). The invisible man’s “pitch-against-pitch” / “point-against-point” attitude illustrates vividly his fool identity, which in a large part consists of bringing together (“polyphonizing”) opposing voices. What others might experience as a disturbing accumulation of sound, is perfectly coherent to the invisible man. Due to carnival principal the invisible man works contrapuntal to white rationalism, speaking truths that do not easily reveal themselves to the untrained eye or ear.

Die Form des „Nichtverstehens“ […] fungiert fast immer dann als organisierendes Moment, wenn es um die Entlarvung der schlechten Konventionalität geht. Eine solche […] zu entlarvende Konventionalität wird gewöhnlich vom Standpunkt eines Menschen dargestellt, der sie nicht versteht. (Bachtin 2008, 92)

Mr. Norton’s incomprehension of what should be clearly visible and audible to him documents his narrow white-point-of-view. Even though he claims to see the invisible man, he does fail to recognize him. Mr. Norton’s inability to decipher his own dialogic self, as well as his unwillingness to question the voice(s) that speak to him, is sufficient explanation for his lack of understanding about his own identity. “I made you”, the invisible man tells Mr. Norton and points to the fact that whiteness has constituted itself in dichotomous relation to blackness – without blackness, without the black body, whiteness as it understands itself would cease to exist. Mr. Norton fails to realize his utter dependence on the invisible man.

By having developed into what Margaret Bent calls a “dyadic counterpoint” – a pointagainst-point conception as opposed to “successive composition” - the invisible man gives a first impression of his future agency. Within carnival the invisible man is going to construct dialogic spaces where white and black voices converge to produce a new understanding of selfs. For this kind of agency the Chrontopos of Bakhtinian carnival is of fundamental importance, “because, Mr. Norton, if you don't know where you are, you probably don't know who you are”. The chronotope of carnival is the place where the enigmatic voices that have entered into “dialogic discourse” can be deciphered. Thus, the ambivalent present of the fool

97

heralds a new chronotope context that will make accessible all selfs to all selfs. “Take any train; they all go to the Golden D—“, the invisible man prophecies.

98

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