Ellison’s Subterranean: the Multivalent Symbol as the Key to Possibility
Precursor: I read 87 pages of H.G Wells’ The Invisible Man before realising it was in fact Ellison’s Invisible Man I was supposed to be reading. A promising start. Anyway, my idiocy and brashness aside, onto an analysis of the correct novel….
Ellison’s Invisible Man is a ‘difficult’ text on three levels. Firstly, it traces the difficult life of a difficult character who has experienced immense and unimaginable hardship. Secondly, the novel’s use of irony, paradox, meta literary technique and circularity make it purposefully difficult to read and comprehend because irony, specifically, creates tension between what is said on the surface and what is being said implicitly under the surface. Finally, it is a novel that should be understood as politically difficult in the sense that it constantly refuses to conform to dominant conventions of every kind. I think it is this capacity to rupture pre-established stylistic, literary, epistemological, ontological and political conventions that makes this book truly mind-blowing.
I’m thinking now that it was out of masochism (general use..) that I decided to write my dissertation on the ‘impossible’ poetry of John Ashbery (and the gorgeous Mark Doty) but nonetheless I found the parallels between Ashbery’s critically labelled ‘difficult’ poetry and Ellison’s ‘difficult’ novel, fascinating. Both writers refuse to offer a literature that can be ‘known’, ‘diagnosed’ or understood through the conventional reader-text relationship that New Criticism is founded upon (more on this in ALG report, so much to be said here about invisibility, hyper-visibility, race and reading). Both writers also operate within ‘subterranean’ territories: Ashbery’s poetry contains a subterranean and encoded queer poetics which is buried under the surface of irony, humour and linguistic play whilst Ellison’s Invisible Man fixates on this notion of the subterranean making it a psychological space (the iceberg beneath the surface), an ontological space of ‘non-beingness’, an epistemological space of unknowability and a social space of marginality. We can also read the narrator’s oscillation between above and below ground as symbolic of the oscillation between North and South (keeping in mind the historical context of the Great Migration) as well as a psychological oscillation between the narrator’s sense of his American and African identities which lends to a reading of the novel in line with W.E.B DuBois’ notion of ‘double consciousness’. Then if we link these ideas to language, what we are actually being offered here is a novel that seeks to question the surface reality of discourse and its relationship to race, readability and truth. Essentially these difficult, obscure texts convey difficult, obscure lives, and so echoing Foucault, I suggest that making oneself and indeed a text, unknowable and unreadable, is fundamentally tied to issues of truth, freedom and power.
The twenty-five chapters of Invisible Man present us with the story of a life that unfolds progressively but which has already happened. So whilst the novel progresses forward through time what we are actually being presented with is a regressive reaching back or a tunnelling into the past stored within the Woolfian ‘cave’ of the narrator’s consciousness. Keeping this in mind, I want to focus on how this book is itself bookended. The narrator prefaces the story of his life from the position of invisibility in New York’s subterranean landscape only to re-preface another story’s beginning, again at the end of the novel and again underground. I argue that going back/beneath to his personal trauma and back to America’s broader social trauma of slavery, the narrator finds ground for constructing new understandings of self. Thus, only by going backwards (through the history of slavery and personal trauma), beneath (into the traumatised id and the south) and into darkness (accepting his racial ‘darkness’ and the moral darkness of those he has encountered) can the narrator go forwards (write a progressive narrative of his present/future self), rise (create a socialised ego capable of living above ground) and find light (vision and understanding of his own relationship to society). So whereas the novel opens with the narrator celebrating that his invisibility means he can ‘live rent free’ (5), with no attachment to society, the novel ends with him understanding that ‘there’s a possibility that even an invisible man has a socially responsible role to play’ (561). Given that the narrator declares that ‘when I discover who I am I will be free’ (235) we can see how he shifts from the negative freedom of ‘rent-free’ to finding possible positive freedom at the novel’s close, because by looking into what has been unsubstantial about his identity, or how he has been made unsubstantial through the white gaze, he finds what is substantial and true about his identity, thus offering him a capacity to break and self-actualise. Of course whether the narrator does achieve genuine freedom is left open. Why? I will come back to this at the end!
I now return to my comment on Ellison’s use of irony and the extent to which that functions as a mode of destabilising both the narrator’s own identity and the reader’s relationship to the text and by extension, the reader’s relationship to the narrator’s ‘readable’ representation of his subconscious mind. Essentially by writing in a predominantly ironic mode and by showing multiple times how the narrator’s own language breaks down in certain social contexts, I suggest we are being made to question how much we can really understand or read the experience of trauma, and how far language can account for such a ‘difficult’ (understatement) experience. Does a difficult and unreadable novel therefore become the truest expression of a difficult and unreadable trauma and is this alone a powerful statement requiring us to witness that which we cannot fully understand? I would suggest that by constructing a narrative that somewhat eludes the understanding of the (white) reader, Ellison rejects the situation in which black subjectivity is made object for a white consumer or reader and therefore also rejects the situation in which an individuated unconscious mind becomes an object for universal study. Similarly by explicitly making visible the invisible black subject ‘I am an invisible man’ Ellison begins to reflect back the ways in which black subjectivity is forged by white perception. So, let me ask the question, what is this novel trying to achieve or what it is trying to say and not say? I suggest the answer is right here:
“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” (36)
I think we as readers are also supposed to be left ‘standing puzzled’ or as Ashbery says in the beautiful ‘Some Trees’, ‘placed in a puzzling light’ (Ashbery, 26). Light, white, sight, and darkness – what do we make of it all? Firstly, what is not being achieved or said is a singular truth or an ending but rather this novel provides an ending which is a beginning as to give space to possibility. In a novel that deeply problematises power and singular narratives, maybe it is through the refusal to end or give a truth that Ellison offers the sincerest freedom and truth that there is: namely that there is no singular truth, and that we cannot fully know everything about anyone. I think this does have to be understood in the specific context of racism, and in relation to Lesley Larkin’s emphasis on projection vs readability as to consider how these ideas about light, sight and darkness may be used to counter white Enlightenment narratives that sought to pathologize black identity. What I suggest then is that this text draws attention to the blindness of those who project the black body as a way of ‘not seeing black people’ (Larkin 273) and yet by exposing this blindness and by making visible the process by which black individuals are made invisible, I suggest Ellison makes the veil ‘the light’ because it is the veil (the refusal to see black people) that is the problem he is trying to illuminate. Thus in making transparent or by bringing ‘to light’ the process by which we refute darkness, whether it be the darkness of the unconscious, the black subject or moral darkness, Ellison allows us to see beyond the projected surface of language, of skin colour and of entrenched epistemological beliefs to the subterranean that lies within us all. Perhaps then we begin to see how this connects to Woolf’s writing and the glimpses she gives us into the ‘wedge shaped core of darkness’ (Woolf, To the Lighthouse) that is the inner core of humanity that we all share, and that which we all suppress. Maybe it’s time to dig that up, bring that to light, make ‘darkness visible’ (Milton, 1.62) as Milton once said, because maybe by learning to see beneath the skin, beneath the surface, beneath the ‘I’m fine’ we might become kinder, more vulnerable and more sensitive people capable of exposing and accepting the subterranean currents that run under the selves we project and the projections of the self we produce for others.
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I was originally thinking of going for some Louis Armstrong (certainly a reading in line with his Black and Blue could be really powerful) but felt this song by Jamie Webster captures the novel’s emphasis on sight, discourse, perspective, alternative representations of subjectivity and how the novel investigates surface/reality/depth. I think we all ought to start taking a look outside of how people ‘say it is’ by opening our eyes to see what is really happening as to find actual vision rather than vision that sees the world through the lens of dominant discourse. Little sample below but the lyrics end to end are superb.
‘Take a look outside of how they say it is,
There’s a story to be told
…
Gained perspective from not what they say
but everything I’ve seen’
(Note on artwork: Javier Martin's work seeks to question understandings of light and blindness, echoing Ashbery's paradox of a 'puzzling light' and Ellison's interest in how we understand light and dark, visibility and invisibility, blindness and sight.Modelled on 'I'm invisible, not blind' (556).)
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