Final Thoughts: I am the invisible man

Invisible Man reminds me of a Lucille Clifton poem: "she closed her eyes, afraid to look for her authenticity / but the light insists on itself in the world..."

Ellison creates this character who is kept in the dark, and who chooses to stay there.  He is strung along from one oppressor to the next as the try to dictate his identity for him, and he goes along with it--unknowingly, then knowingly.  Where does he finally find light? Ironically in the dark, when he falls through the manhole. He lights the last of his money on fire, and he realizes people have been using him to be who they want/need him to be. It's near the end of the book; he still doesn't know who he is.

It's the irony of identity. We need others to affirm who we are, or else we become invisible. IM needs people to acknowledge him, otherwise he is invisible.Yet affirmation can easily turn into definition.  As he is acknowledged, he becomes a clone for whatever institution is trying to use him. But I think light does insist on itself in the world; people don't stay in the dark forever, a la Parable of the Cave. I really believe that. It might take a long time, but it happens.

The journey he goes through to find out who he is and what it means to turn the eye inward is painstaking. People use him as the voice or the face of a movement, but organized movements sometimes forget the point of why they were trying to mobilize in the first place. Take for instance the Brotherhood. They started off with ideals of a more equal society, but by the end they had sucked the life out of the young people they used only for their symbolic value to the masses. This happens all the time today. Look at Miss California, who is now the bizarre spokesperson for the right wing's anti-gay campaign in the U.S. [WTF??]

I think of IM's plight to find who he is after experiencing great disillusion. He thinks he's a kid who's got a chance to do something big, but he finds himself confused, betrayed, hurt, misunderstood, unseen--that painful inner eye. Disillusionment may paint the perpetrator as evil, but it also brings light to your own foolishness for being duped. In lieu of facing the world, he goes into hiding. By the epilogue, he decides that he can no longer hide, hibernate, stew in his own revelations. 

I feel like this right now. I've been hibernating after being disillusioned by two big institutions that I really would have liked to believe were the answers to life: education and religion. I tried to do it their way, but their way wasn't me. And because of my personality, or my "showmanship" perhaps, I'm the one chosen to be paraded around. It's always been this way, i.e. put on a happy face in public, feel depressed about my identity in private. As IM says, "So after years of trying to adopt the opinions of others I finally rebelled."  My hibernation has been through my entire twenties. What do I do? Who am I, then? 

I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of all I find that I love. In order to get some of it down I have to love. I sell you no phony forgiveness, I'm a desperate man--but too much of your life will be lost, its meaning lost, unless you approach it as much through love as through hate. So I approach it through division. So I denounce and I defend and I hate and I love. 579-580

I don't rebel to a point where I give up those facets of my identity only because the institutions disappoint. But I'm a desperate woman--I fear that too much of my youth will be lost to hibernation.

Anyway, here are some cool quotes about the American Identity and conformity and all that. I just realized, that in the beginning of the book, Norton asks IM if he's read "Self-Reliance" and IM ashamedly replies, not yet. However, he is the very essence of self-reliance at the end- the realization of his own individuality, the ability to discern for himself, the anti-conformity rants in the epilogue. And he learns it all in a much harsher way than dear old Ralph., and I just realized it was "Emerson's son" who started him on his journey to utter disillusionment and self-reliance, non-conformity. Cool!!!

I had no longer to run for or from the Jacks and the Emersons and the Bledsoes and the Nortons, but only from their confusion, impatience, and refusal to recognize the beautiful absurdity of their American identity and mine. 559

Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway?--diversity is the word. Let man keep his many parts and you'll have no tyrant states... America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it remain so. 577

So long IM! I've learned much from you. 

Always keep them running

Invisible Man has always been a great read for two reasons.  It reminds me of 1995 and in 1995 I made the decision to change my life (that's another story) and attempt to become a teacher and writer; in addition, I came to realize I am a race traitor.  I'm likely to explain more of this in detail while writing about Ellison's novel.  Maybe not.  It's hard to write about.

It's safe to say that I see myself in this novel and what I see I don't like.  Not that I don't like myself.  I don't like what I am encouraged to inherit on behalf of all the other folks who look like me.  Moreover, I don't like feeling guilty of being white.  For some white men, this means bitching everyday about everyone who is not white always bitching about white folks.  I am not one to whine about being called white, though.  And really that is not getting at the heart of the matter at all.  It just scractches the surface.  Yet this introduction to my complex relationship with my own whiteness begins a story I have been attempting to tell since '95 about seeing myself as helplessly tied to something I have been vehemently rejecting since I was a child.

It wasn't that I thought it was wrong to call black kids in my East Tulsa neighborhood niggers, or brown people spics, or the Vietnamese refugee families, gooks.  I  did think it was wrong; I was taught it was wrong.  This is the simple way to tell the story of race:  talking about name-calling and finger-pointing.  More significantly, what I suffered was a pain in my gut and head, a real pain that often left me lying in bed writhing in real physical pain.  What pleasure is there in treating others in such a way?  Maybe I was naive and sensitive.  But I was affected when I was a kid.  Too smart for my own community, too creative and free-thinking for school, and too emotional for my own good.  In short, while genius, a total nutcase.  (It helps to have a good sense of humor.  You're supposed to smiling.)

I'm sure to write about this a little more.  But the difference I felt was always knowably not the difference the black kids endured.  For many folks in power, knowing about injustice absolves a person from guilt.  And that absolution then serves as a pass to participate in the unjust intstitutions anyway.  What I was upset about was that I was always encouraged to say yes to something others were never going to be allowed to access.  And that bargain has always made me sick to my stomach.

I never picked the fight against white.  It chose me.  Maybe it's genetic:  or maybe to support the white power structure is unnatural--a perspective I choose to support on my more optimistic days--and unnatural because it is at the core of some of the more grotesque social and cultural realities we confront everyday without thinking about them:  realities like "Capital is self-valorizing" and "Might makes Right."

I am not perfect.  It's hard to reject the allure of self-righteousness and Right.  I find no comfort in our Original Sin.  I do find that its mark--Whiteness--and its practice--Masculinity--and its economy--Capitalism--are quite easy targets actually.  But though the facility with which we can point to the visible errors in these institutions may suit a comedian's need for a quick, efficient and intelligent or timely joke, I think we need a dedicated fight to destroy each of these institutions and revise our work and common goals.

I am not patting myself on the back or trying to be eloquent.  And I am not saying anything new.  It's hardly shocking.  You may have every right to say, "Hey, here's another white guy who has discovered injustice!  Go figure."  I understand.  But I do believe that I have been tasked with overcoming the intellectual cynicism and smirk of educational professionalism and I ought to do something about it.  It's a vow.  I suppose this is why I am an Americanist.  This drive is written over and over again throughout our short history.  Yet, we go nowhere with the knowledge that we have sinned against humanity in a most severe way.  We are racists, sexist pigs; we hate the poor, the working class; we heap unearned ambition and morality on the wealthy.  It's almost as if because we know these things we feel we have done enough.  By the way, this is a problem I feel we have inherited from Europe and what we call Continental Philosophy is rife with smart bigots who we insist we cannot overcome because their innovative thoughts are so rich and complex:  for an example read Kant.

And this is what Ellison's Invisible Man is about.  And this is why I love it.  It reminds me that I should do something.  It's only that, at times, I wonder if a guy who looks like me can do anything other than betray his race?  (And you do realize that race is an illusion.  What we are talkign about is a social construction.  The biology is different thing altogether.  But the biology is about our similar mothers.  The sociology is about the sexist pig fathers and their attempt to find, by any means necessary, hoard all the material exploits our planet has to offer.)

But this should serve as a quick introduction to my reason for picking the novel to read.  I do have a simple reason, too:  Praise has not read it.  I loved the idea of reading it with her for her first time.

Ellison has two kinds of reader:  people who love his novel and cherish it, and folks who will admit the book is great but are upset at the subject matter.  It isn't that people don't know the truth (about white power in America,) it's just that some people don't want to do anything about.  It's hard work betraying the power structure:  it has benefits for everyone.

I had fits about one thing that nearly drove me crazy--and it did leave me in a deep depression from which I emerged 6 months after undergrad graduation, in 1997, with a bottle of pills in stomach, from which all the rest of my life has sprung.  The One Thing:  I am white and though I want to transform the power structure, I have had to learn to let go.  To betray my racist, unearned inheritance...well, it's not easy.  Ellison's novel is refreshing.  It is comic.  It is shocking.  It is revelatory.

The unnamed narrator of Invisible Man is the greatest Modern male protagonist in American literature.  There are a handful of these great, male protagonists:  Isaac McCaslin, Quentin Compson, Bigger Thomas.  Look I love Melville.  A lot.  Moby Dick is a great novel.  But some things happened to the American novel in the early twentieth century:  color, expressionism, surrealism, war, genocide, and psychoanalysis.  Maybe I should use the troubled term High Modern.  I really am superfocused on 1910-1960 when it comes to film, literature, theory, and art overall.

More to come.

Invisible Man

Our next read is Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Gary has read this already, but I haven't. It's always been on my list. I read Native Son last year and it rocked my world. I remember planning one Friday of silent reading with the juniors (I never do silent reading) because I couldn't stop thinking about Bigger Thomas and I wanted to silently read. I'm super-excited about Invisible Man.

Well, I read the author's note, the prologue, which felt sort of like Breakfast of Champions--can I trust the narrator?-- and chapter one. It seems like I've already met three main characters, and in a strange way, aren't they images of each other?

*The author, burdened by the task of creation, of deliberate manipulation of a character to reflect something bigger (the "something" that gets bigger almost in concentric circles, ripples of humanity, even as he ponders it)
*The "invisible" character of old age from the prologue, the product of what the author was able to find: the freedom to laugh the laugh of the blues- then write it down
*The "visible" character of youth from chapter one, the story begins...

All parts of the much larger, scarier, more lamentable picture. OH THE VULNERABILITY OF MAN!! OH THE DEPRAVITY!

Uh, who's being dramatic?

It's just that I am blown away so far. The scene with the whiskey&cigar higher-ups (which I can still picture in NYC--the old white boys club) becoming bellicose with drink; the blonde who sold her soul--naked body but wearing a mask of makeup--and the black boy-boxers trying to hide their erections and their guilt for looking at a white woman; the panicked and savage battle royal--blindfolded--who's fighting who, physically and metaphysically?; the inner-struggle/inner-monologue of our dear protagonist who only wants to prove that he is not savage by delivering a speech about humility--

That's all I've read so far. It's too much to bear for a morning commute to the office!

More to come.