Scott's Lit

  • My Momster/My Self: The Question of Mothering, the Woman Writer, and Autobiography in Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”

    In her essay, “My Monster/My Self,” Barbara Johnson looks at Frankenstein and two unrelated critical texts with an emphasis on the different critiques each offer of the institution of parenthood. Johnson’s goal in the essay is to “read” the three texts “not as mere studies of the monstrousness of selfhood, . . . but as autobiographies . . . , textual dramatizations of the problems with which they deal” (242). This focus comes from three pressing contemporary issues at the time of her writing: “the question of mothering, the question of the woman writer, and the question of autobiography” (241). In related ways, these three questions and texts point to a troubling of the dominant cultural narrative, mainly a disagreement first in what mothering is expected to be or should be and secondly in how this ideal or opposition to it can be represented. In order to unpack the problems Johnson writes her essay around, it is helpful to look at two texts which deal with the origin of these problems of representation, John Fiske’s “Television Culture,” and Jacque Lacan’s “The Instance of the Letter of in the Unconscious.” Fiske’s work is relevant here for his dealing with the propensity of any cultural object to reinforce the norms of its culture, and Lacan’s, for his discussion of problems of signification inherent in language and more specifically, how language determines the idea of self and what this means for the question of autobiography.

    Before handling Nancy Friday’s “My Mother/My Self” and Dorthy Dinnerstein’s “The Mermaid and the Minotaur,” Johnson explains the “autobiographical impulse” that she sees running through these works and its application to Frankenstein. While she notes that upon first hearing, the idea of reading the novel, which is in fact three male autobiographies stacked within each other, as a woman’s autobiography may sound a bit “ludicrous,” she urges that we look a bit a closer into what “motivates” the three stories within the novel. This attention to motivation is exactly what I wish to look at in Johnson’s reading of the novel and her application of Dinnerstein and Friday.

    As Johnson explains, Walton, Victor, and the creature, seem to be motivated in their story-telling by the hope of persuasion, each relying “on a presupposition of resemblance between teller and addressee,” with each retelling “designed . . . so that somehow transgression can be eliminated” (243). For transgression on the part of the teller to be eliminated, he or she must through their telling “create a being like [his or her]self,” and this according to Johnson “is the autobiographical desire par excellence” (243). Thus, the motivation for autobiography seems to be vindication through the negation of difference.

    Despite his using different words and referring to a different medium, this justification through the process of removing difference sounds quite similar to John Fiske’s thesis that “television broadcasts programs that are replete with potential meanings, and . . . it attempts to control and focus this meaningfulness into a more singular preferred meaning that performs the work of the dominant ideology” (1274). While this comparison may be tenuous in its implying that the “dominant ideology” has committed some iniquity for which it must atone and the lending of agency to a system of ideas, it is not a stretch to say that each culturally constructed object or narrative is autobiographical of the culture from which it originates. A narrative flowing from the dominant culture seeks to reconcile the any differences between its source and its receiver, eliminating the transgression of presenting a differing ideology.

    As Fiske explains, anything we see on television “performs the work of the dominant ideology” by relaying its messages, telling its story, though “codes.” These codes and the act of coding are ubiquitous. Taking his definition almost directly from the semiologists, Fiske states that a code “is a rule-governed system of signs, whose rules and conventions are shared amongst the members of a culture, which are used to generate and circulate meanings in and for that culture” (1275) Though Fiske’s argument deals only with television, he does make a issue of pointing out that coding is a part of not only fictitious programs but also “news” programs and others that claim to be objective. For this reason, we can apply this issue of indoctrination not only to Shelly’s narrative, but also the non-fiction works Johnson works with, as well as Johnson’s essay itself.

    While each of the works which Johnson deals with are autobiographical, Shelley is not the immediate subject of her autobiographical text. Friday is most explicit in displaying her writing as autobiography, using the events of her life as the main evidence to “demonstrate her thesis” (244). Dinnerstein’s work is also somewhat autobiographical as her thesis is based in some life experience and “the book was written partially in mourning for her husband,” but as Johnson notes, “the remarks are more muted” (245). In contrast to this, as Johnson points out in citing an introduction to the 1831 edition, Shelley views herself as an appendage to the text, rather than the text as a reflection of herself (244). Johnson asks us in regards to the “problem of specifically feminine autobiography . . . in a humanistic tradition in which the man is the measure of all things, how does an appendage go about telling the story of her life” (244)?

    Mary Shelley tells the story of her life most effectively as an appendage. Or in the always abstruse words of Lacan, “I am not wherever I am the plaything of my thought, I think of what I am where I do not think to think” (457). If language precedes and structures our interpretation of and interactions with reality and functions similarly to dream images in their “distortions” and “transpositions” – “the sliding of the signified under the signifier” (Lacan 455) – it would seem the most effective way to short-circuit this short-circuiting would be to write with a different conscious goal in mind. If one is writing “unconsciously,” their “true” feelings and desires are going to spring up in their actions no matter what they do, why not write about something completely unrelated and invite them to show themselves?

    The texts of Dinnerstein and Friday, while seeking to deal outright with the problems of the culturally dominant parenting model, being thinly veiled autobiographies, actually seem to reinforce some of the ideologies they are explicitly writing against. Returning to Johnson’s above definition of the goals of autobiography and Fiske’s conception of the function of a narrative, if the women writing these autobiographies’ ideas were formed within a culture, then not only are they trying to make us more like themselves, but they are also perpetuating the dominant culture they are apparently writing against. For example, Dinnerstein writes to reduce and reverse “the types of imbalance and injustice the prevailing asymmetry in gender relations produces” (241). Though writing in a specifically feminist mode “in her gesture of rejecting more traditional forms of scholarship,” Dinnerstein undercuts herself in her execution of this argument by “plead[ing] not for the validity but for the urgency of her message” (245). Her reliance on pathos comfortably situates her in the easily recognizable dominant-cultural role of the woman who cannot rationalize, but instead hysterically raves. Friday’s work contains a number of contradictory messages even in its short treatment by Johnson as well. The text seeks to release the mother and daughter from “the myth of maternal love” which “creates a heritage of self-rejection, anger, and duplicity . . . that both mother and daughter continue to punish themselves for never having been able to achieve” (241). But, as Johnson herself points out, the “huge book” itself may be another lie (244), as revealed in an excerpt she has chosen for the article that shows this myth of “my mother’s love and approval” (Friday, qtd. in Johnson 245) is exactly what Friday still desires.

    While I cannot disagree that Frankenstein is a highly autobiographical novel, not only in relation to the characters’ stories inside, but in relation in to Shelley’s life as well, I do feel that through Shelley’s misdirection in the mode of her representation make it much more effective in terms of its critique of the questions posed at the beginning of her essay, those of mothering, the woman writer, and autobiography.

    Johnson reads Victor as creating two autobiographies, one being his monster, the other being the story he tells Walton to atone for his creation of that monster (243). In the same way, Shelley created one autobiography with her writing of Frankenstein, but spurned her chance to write a second in her abstinence in the 1831 introduction. If, as Johnson says, autobiography is indeed a “tale designed to reinforce the resemblance between the teller and the listener so that somehow transgression can be eliminated,” who is the creature a story for? and what did Victor do wrong? One can conjecture that the creature is a story for his dead mother and that he believed himself guilty any number of Freudian transgressions, but the story he tells Walton is surely not the same one. Then we must ask, who Shelley’s monster is for? and what she is guilty of? Shelley’s novel is just as unprecedented as the creature inside of it, but in the same way that Shelley’s novel is truer autobiography, so is Victor’s creation of the monster. Shelley can best tell her story as an appendage, because as Lacan points out “what does man find in metonymy if not the power to circumvent the obstacles of social censure” (454).

    Works Cited
    Fiske, John. “Television Culture.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Rivkin, Julie, and Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. 2004. 1274-84. Print.

    Johnson, Barbara. “My Monster/My Self.” Frankenstein. Ed. Hunter, J. Paul. New York: Norton. 1996. 241-251. Print.

    Lacan, Jacques. “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Rivkin, Julie, and Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. 2004. 447-61. Print.

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  • Sir Thomas Wyatt’s Embracing of Ambiguous Ambivalence

    In looking at poetry of the English Renaissance one is often confronted with an odd picture of love as the one emotion incomparable with the rest for its ability to take a person up to the highest plateau of affection and down into the lowest pits of despondency. This ambivalent attitude toward love is a theme often explored by Sir Thomas Wyatt. In his poem “My Lute, awake!” he treats the problem of unrequited love in a similar and indeterminate way, often cloaking his true meanings and negating what he actually means to say.
    The central rhetorical mechanism of the poem is a half-contradiction that we are reminded of in each stanza as a refrain. The incongruity comes as the speaker states over and over, “I have done,” but is obviously not wholly finished as he is singing this song to his beloved. If he were done there would be no song at all. The theme of his song is that though his beloved now spurns his advances, there will come a time when she will regret what she has done. This theme implies a moral message that can with some work be gleaned from the poem as if there were some sort of celestial evener the poet evokes by stating this eventual recompense.
    Another interesting strategy used by Wyatt to layer the possible meanings of his work is that though the poem is about/for a woman, the speaker only begins to address the beloved in the fourth stanza, conversing with his lute for the first three. The lute functions to for speaker in some ways as a shield but also lends a performing feature to the work, as if it is not just some private musing but a public renunciation of the beloved and her actions. The poem does not seem to be simply a statement of regret or despair for the ambiguities caused by love but also suggests that a moral or lesson is to be taken from it. The lute also adds to the general strategy of contravention as Wyatt sometimes stresses or seems preoccupied with what is less important to obliquely show what is most important. This is evidenced in the lyric form that comprises the poem. The rhymes, metaphors, and word-choices which are often simple, contrast the seriousness of the poem and therefore cause the reader to consider more earnestly the message and aim of the speaker.
    The first section of the poem is most filled with the ambivalence that eventually fades as the speaker begins to find his voice. Within the first five lines the confusion felt the speaker is made entirely clear, he begins by calling, “My lute, awake!” (1) then soon changes his mind saying “My lute be still” (5). He refers to the song they shall sing as “labor” that is a “waste” (2), ironically meaning that it is not rubbish or futile toiling at all but cherished obligation to which he happily applies himself. The device of the lute works to establish a distance between the speaker and his actions and also to illustrate that the situation is so significant as to cause a man to speak to an inanimate object and to cause the same inanimate thing to spring to life in contempt.
    Continuing his dialogue with his instrument, the speaker again muses on the apparent futility of what he and his lute are doing. The song is “to be heard where ear is none” (6) and he admonishes the lute that they should not “sing or sigh or moan” (9) at all, for the beloved will never be affected by it. Again contributing to the quality of the poem and its action as uncensorable, the notion that it must be heard. The impossible affectation of the beloved is described as a heart being pierced, an image that appears again in the poem though not as something hopeless “as lead to grave in marble stone” (7), but as an act that frequently occurs and will again. Wyatt’s constant use of contradiction, while it sometimes feels overdone, actually opens up the poem’s words and symbols for multiple meanings.
    In the first stanza that is not directly addressed to the lute, Wyatt uses the image of rocks “cruelly” (11) repulsing the waves to describe the manner of the beloved’s repulsing of the speaker and ending the stanza with a slight variation on the refrain, “So that I am past remedy/ Whereby my lute and I have done” (14-15). The image of the waves on rocks is noteworthy because of the never ending nature of such an action. The waves are still coming in: again the opposition of the words of the speaker, “I have done” (15), to his actions show his true intent.
    The ironic use of words and images is a characteristic of the poem throughout. When admonishing the beloved in the fourth stanza, the “hearts” that she has won are referred to as “simple” (17), while he actually means the opposite, that he is in fact not guileless and harmless but about to make very clear how complex he is. In this same stanza we are given the image of “Love’s shot” as piercing hearts, but with a commonality that refutes the images earlier mention.
    By the fifth stanza the speaker no longer addresses the lute at all and begins to rail directly against the beloved for her actions and attitude. The main rhetorical strategy switches at this point from veiled irony and metaphor to imagery as we are given scenes of the once beloved’s ruin. The most active of these images is that of the woman lying “withered and old/ The winter nights that are so cold/ Plaining in vain unto the moon” (26-28). This illustrates the degeneration which the speaker associates with the actions of the woman and leads to the first non-ironic refrain of the work: “Care then who list, for I have done.” Here we see the implied moral or ethical message of the work, an image easily relatable to some Christian idea’s on sin and depravity of the time. Using words such as “repent” (31) and calling the woman’s time with her “lovers” (33) “lost and spent” (32), we are given an image of repentance that comes too late and a sort of shameful finger-pointing that does not seem contradictory as most of the poem does.
    The final stanza of the work restates the words of the first but in the past tense returning to the ironic tone that characterizes its first half. The speaker again refers to his “labor” as “waste” (37), but instead of the contradiction coming between the first and last lines with “be still” (5) and “awake” (1), the lines are “now cease” (36) and “be still” (40).
    As said above, the most distinct aspect of the poem’s form is its refrain, given at the end of eight stanzas emphasizing that though the speaker may be “done,” his words and song must come out anyway. This contradiction imparts the poem with a sort of desperation, making it not only more relatable but also more authentic. The poem is rife with pointed inconsistencies that add to its meanings an ironic sense that is hard to ignore. Though much of the poem can be interpreted to a discernible end, one problem I reached was differentiating the voice of the speaker from that of Wyatt, more specifically if he himself believes the moral stance espoused in the poem and of wether or not the problem of the work was a product of his mind or based on a true experience in his life.

    The main theme of the poem seems to be that though the speaker’s beloved enjoys much affection from various suitors now, there will come a time when this will not be so, and they will turn away much as he has and be “done.”

  • Comments on Woolf’s “The Mark on the Wall”

    Gertrude Stein tells us that “the whole business of writing is the question of living in contemporariness.” The problem is that nobody knows exactly what contemporaneity is: “in other words, they don’t know where they are going, but they are on their way” (Stein 488). Describing her lived contemporaneity in her short story, “The Mark On the Wall,” Virginia Woolf comments that “if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour … Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked!” (Woolf 38). Modernity, as Woolf says and Stein would surely agree, seems an entirely “accidental affair” (Woolf 38). The premier texts that signify Modernism, Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s The Waste Land, illustrate this accidental nature of Modernity in their meandering, purposefully confused, perspective flooded, and many voiced works. In many of the same ways, Woolf’s Jacob’s Room is also an “accidental” novel, a seemingly loosely strung-together series of events, moving quickly (or slowly) past us that we are lucky to catch.

    Perhaps unaware of her own “contemporariness,” to use Stein’s word, Woolf narrates her novel in an almost filmic way. The novel is shown to us through the lenses of a number of poorly set-up cameras or like a movie sped up and slowed at random. Many of the people we meet seem to have simply walked in front of the cameras lying about, like “an old blind woman [who] sat on a camp-stool with her back to the stone wall of the Union of London…clasping a brown mongrel” (Woolf 56), or to have been placed there for a specific scene perhaps, where one is “lit up for a second” and “by a trick of the firelight she seem[s] to have no body” (Woolf 62). These seemingly random highly descriptive depictions that appear everywhere throughout the novel are saturated with details to the point where “in short, the observer is choked with observations” (Woolf 57). It is as if the person controlling the camera, our narrator, has no idea what she is doing. Woolf uses this technique of saturation to slow and break down the act of looking (for us as readers and for us as filmic viewers of the action of the text) to draw our attention to the importance of what Conor calls “appearing” and to give us an opportunity to recognize (and maybe reorient ourselves within) the various subjectivities within the text: at times that of Jacob, the women of Scarborough, the men at the Durrants’ dinner parties, Florinda, Sandra,

    Woolf describes us as spectators hanging over Jacob “vibrating” (Woolf 61), the language seeming to suggest the act of viewing a film in a theater where one forgets the seat they are situated in and views the film as a pair of disembodied eyes. For the modern emerging woman, “her engagement in the cinema was instrumental in the construction of a female gaze” (Conor 225), the act of gazing placing women in the role of “spectator” For Conor, the “correlation between spectatorship and modern subjectivity is crucial” (Conor 16). Because the novel is mediated through multiple perspectives, often the non-omniscient narrator, this narrator in indirect discourse with the characters, or what seems like a movie camera, we are able to experience spectatorship through multiple characters and feel the effects of the developing modern female gaze.

    The first perspective we are placed inside is that of Jacob as a child on the beach. Though it would seem to be ungendered as he is only a toddler, Jacob sees what he believes to be “a large black woman” who is “sitting on the beach” but as he approaches this woman who he believe to be his nanny, she transforms into a “rock” and “he [is] lost” (Woolf 5). This overturning of his gaze foreshadows the loss of his male objectifying gaze as the novel progresses. Jacob at this stage in the work is “profoundly unconscious” (Woolf 9), an attribute that follows him throughout the work and parallels the “invisibility” of the flaneur (Conor 15). As the novel progresses we see his ability to be constantly aloof diminish in respect to the women he encounters until Jacob eventually becomes conscious of himself in relation to the gaze of Sandra.
    Another example of a problematically gendered gaze comes in the passage where we are told to “fix [our] eyes upon the lady’s skirt” (Woolf 13). As the narrator goes on to describe the various fashions as they changed through the decades we are at once shown the objectifying power of the male gaze and the gaze of a woman who is “conscious of the gaze she appears before” and which she “actively seeks to captivate” (Conor 27). This object with the power of agency is termed by Conor, the “objectified subject” (32), a term that suggests the paradoxical reversal of the power structure in the object/subject and spectator/spectacle dichotomy. The spectator, the subject, is often imagined as a disembodied set of eyes, our film viewer and flaneur above, with their power originating from their lack of visibility, but in the case of the modern woman conscious of her visibility, the sexualized body becomes a source of subjectivity. This consciousness of one’s own sexuality and the agency associated with owning it is embodied partially in Florinda and more completely in Sandra.

    When we first meet Florinda, Woolf juxtaposes her instantly with the Durrant women who function for Woolf as the Edwardian foils to her more modern, visible, women. As Mrs. Durrant reads the Inferno and Clara sleeps in her parents’ home, “buried in her pillows,” we are told that Florinda is sick in a “bedroom [that] seemed fit for catastrophes” (Woolf 65), perhaps an ironic poke at her average male contemporaries who viewed the growing sexuality of young women as “dangerous” (Conor 217). Another example of a filmic scene over-full with detail, in her description of Florinda’s room, Woolf offers us the chance to experience Florinda’s subjectivity as she ruminates about the fate of her parents and her sexuality. We are told that “she talk[s] more about virginity than women mostly do” and that she “cherished” it more or less “according to the man she talked to” (Woolf 65). This consciousness of the power of her sexualized body is exactly what Conor means as she comments on “the significance of young women’s visibility and their deliberate designs to attract the heterosexual gaze” (211). We are shown Florinda’s intentional manipulation of the male gaze as she is willing take as her name, one “bestowed upon her by a painter who had wished it to signify that the flower of her maidenhood was still unplucked” (Woolf 65), to consciously control the way that men perceive her. As the narrator resumes her tentative focus on Jacob we see the control Florinda is able to exert, as Woolf tells us that “Jacob was restless when she left him” (Woolf 66).
    With the introduction of Sandra into the novel we are shown the full realization of the objectified-subject. Using her consciousness of “a panoptical male connoisseur” (Conor 33) Sandra is able “to court the gaze … of men, and to assert her modernity as a sexual subject by … constituting herself as an object within the new conditions of feminine visibility” (Conor 209). She is shown to be aware of her desirability, thinking, “I am very beautiful,” as she stares into a “looking glass” (Woolf 124). Then the perspective immediately switches as Woolf places us within the mind of her husband Evan, who despite his attempts to engage her attention, to seek out her gaze, notices “Sandra’s eyes wander” (Woolf 125). After he realizes that her gaze has left him he becomes aware of his lack of desirability, “with his height, his bulk” and “his inability to impose his own personality” (Woolf 125). Sandra is even able to make the perpetually aloof Jacob aware of his body and appearance, as the narrator tells us “the hook gave a great tug in his side as he lay in his bed … remembering Sandra Wentworth Williams” (Woolf 131), all this the day or so after she took the time to “arrange” herself on the terrace, again, causing Jacob to notice “the extreme shabbiness of his trousers” (Woolf 127).

    By constantly changing the lens through which the novel is mediated, Woolf situates her text in the perspective flood that is modernity and illustrates the emergence of the subjective female gaze. While Woolf tells us to “Detest [our] own age,” and to “Build a better one” (92), she seems pretty firmly entrenched in the defining characteristics of her own.

    Works Cited


    Conor, Liz. The Spectacular Modern Woman. Indiana University Press. Indianapolis: 2004.


    Woolf, Virginia. A Haunted House and Other Short Stories. “The Mark on the Wall.” p 37-46. Harcourt. New York: 1944.


    Woolf, Virginia. Jacob’s Room. Penguin. New York: 1992.

  • Invisibility Embraced: Dissecting Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

    In “Invisibility Embraced,” Shelly Jarenski looks at Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and dissects Ellison’s reconceptualization of various matrices of power, out of which comes his narrator’s eventual claiming of invisibility as a site of agency. But while Jarenski examines the work’s interrogations of notions of race, gender, and power, she overlooks the text’s examination of itself as a proper arena for these debates and as a viable avenue to actual resistance or change. There are many intersecting projects the novel seeks to explore, but behind each of these discussions there is the murmur of the work most critically in dialogue with itself. The rhyming events, the repetition and even redundancy of words and phrases, and Ellison’s often overt “play” with language, give the text a quality of reflexivity that handcuffs the reader to the narrator, at once contradictorily diminishes and multiplies the efficacy of the text, and does the actual work of the novel through showing the inconsistencies in the system of language, metonymically the various political and social ideologies scrutinized.

    Invisible Man is a sort of bildungsroman which tells the story of an African American young adult’s struggles to find his own identity and explores the various options for self-actualization open to Black youth in the post-war pre-Civil Rights era. The avenues explored include, sequentially, a trade college in the tradition of Booker T. Washington, a socialist “Brotherhood” which looks to exploit Black inequality in exchange for numerical support, and a revealingly myopic self-defeating Black nationalist movement. In the end, the invisible narrator spurns each of these channels of self-actualization in favor of a self-modeled individual resistance in a liminally situated basement from which the novel is supposedly a product as catalogue of why and how the narrator got to this disillusioned space and as an oblique act of resistance in itself. 

    Ellison’s first unmistakable cue for us to look at the text’s project questioningly comes as the narrator is sitting in chapel at the university before a guest preacher begins speaking and the narrator sinks into revery of a disembodied voice recursively echoing his own, that says:

    “listen to me, the bungling bungler of words, imitating the trumpet and trombone’s timbre. . . Hey! old connoisseur of voice sounds, of voices without messages, of newsless winds, listen to the vowel sounds . . . a river of word-sounds filled with drowned passions . . . wrecks of unachievable ambitions and stillborn revolts . . . blaring triumphant sounds empty of triumphs . . . [you,] who’ll never be fooled with the mere content of words” (113-4). 

     While this occasion induces us to question the meaning of the text and to question if we should be looking for any meaning at all, it also invites us to plunge into it and play with its ensconcing materiality. It encourages us to splash about in the “river of word sounds” in which we are submerged and warns us not to be beguiled by the work’s portent. The content of the novel reflects the description here as the narrative is essentially the telling of the narrator’s realization that certain ambitions are unachievable given his circumstances and the “stillborn revolt,” perhaps, his hibernation in the basement dwelling. The passage troublingly undergirds the invisible narrator’s voice with Ellison’s, multiplying possible meanings by minimizing the fictive quality of the work, removing the fourth wall and remaking the novel into a direct address by the author, while simultaneously diminishing possible meaning by its admonition. At the same time we are told that the words we are hearing/reading are empty sounds we are also told not to be fooled by “the mere content,” so are these words meaningful or meaningless; should we heed his advice to disregard the story or disregard his advice to disregard? While it may seem a little foolish to chase the text round in circles, I am arguing that the novel’s significance comes precisely from this recursive quality, the text’s constant expansion and contraction out-of and into itself. This constant collapsing upon itself for meaning forces us as readers to plunge as the narrator does, outside of the dominant discourse and attempt to find meaning within the resources we are given by the novel. 

    To illustrate the conscious level at which the text encourages us to play with its language and Ellison’s process of creation bleeding through the lines, attaching us to himself and thus the narrator, or the other way around, we can look at his almost constant “clowning” with words. For example, in the narrator’s semi-erotic encounter with drunken Sybil, a women within the socialist party of which the narrator acts as spokesman for a time, she calls him over and over “boo’ful, boo’ful,” and as we take the word-sounds and put them together meaningfully in our mind the narrator does as well, wondering, “was she calling me beautiful or boogieful, beautiful or sublime . . . what’d either mean?” (529). Not only are the meanings of certain words questioned here, we begin to see meaning in any words questioned. In the same manner, the pararhyme pairs of “hill, hell” (552); “homburg, humbug?” (315), and “Amen-Amen-Amen- Ah man” (527) push us to fool around with the words and the phrases and the meanings and to imagine our own pararhyme pairs and invent our own connotations. In this atmosphere of play, the words gain a disorienting amount of range and all meaning seems to become relational, decentralized, and thus, unstable. 

    The narrator, the one who is apparently relating this tale to us, is told by the son of a man who metonymically stands in for various intersecting systems of oppression that “some things are just too unjust for words . . . and too ambiguous for either speech of ideas” (185).  The narrator’s consciousness of this warning positions the book as valiant attempt to strike at those unreachable meanings, but it also forecloses the possibility of those deeper lessons being reached. With the same ethos we are told by the narrator that when he tells his story of the north to the people at his university he will try to camouflage its inherent vacuity with ambiguity, that “the thing to do, I thought with a smile was to give them hints that whatever you did or said was weighted with broad and mysterious meanings that lay just beneath the surface. They’d love that. And the vaguer you told things, the better. You had to keep them guessing” (178). Ostensibly, it seems he believes this not because there is some greater meaning to work towards but because there is no deeper meaning, and meaning comes only in a thing’s superficiality and not some hidden level underneath. But again, recursively, why then would the narrator, or Ellison behind him, even write the book? 

    As Robert Abrams argues about the nature and the meaning of Trueblood’s “dream-sin,”   an episode in which an impoverished share-cropper wakes from a dream/nightmare in mid-coitus with his daughter with whom he and his wife share their bed, I will argue can be applied to meaning on every level in the text, that “what is wished for but dreaded is paradoxically distanced and yet approached” (596). In this context, I will look at Jarenski’s argument and augment it to show how the novel’s questioning of itself lends legitimacy to its examination of race, gender, and inequality and how this legitimacy is reached through the text’s eventual positioning of itself as an “invisible” novel. 

    Looking at the intersections of the various discourses of power within which “invisibility [means] disempowerment” and “in which visibility was possible for Black bodies only when they performed the role of ‘other’ for white culture,” Jarenski looks at Ellison’s espousal of “invisibility as a powerful cultural space . . . from which the interrelated matrices of dominance and . . . the concept of the body are deconstructed” (85). But, the novel itself represents a thing within white culture and a potential performance of the “other.” This antimony is reconciled in the work as Ellison seeks not only to deconstruct the concept of the body, but to deconstruct the concept of language as well. To get back to the profound ambivalence of the novel as its source of potency, the writing of the novel by the narrator or Ellison is a simultaneous act of fitting-into and butting-against “visual commodification of blackness” (86) and as it works against itself, it approaches its meaning. 

    To look at it physically/literally in semiological terms, “invisibility” would mean a signified without a signifier and in Ellison’s system this is precisely what empowers the narrator in his position outside the entrenched hierarchy. Superficially, if a race cannot be assigned or seen then then one cannot be maltreated on its basis, but this power in invisibility comes not only from its position outside the system but its total short-circuiting resistance to it. So while the content of the novel leads to a circumvention of systems of inequality by removal of the signifier on which that inequality is based, the form mirrors this process and inverts it by removing the signified. If the text is simply a collection of word-sounds, signifiers, which point to nothing, the novel has removed itself from the discourse which could define, objectify, and thus denigrate it. In the same way that the “narrator’s embrace of invisibility constitutes an understanding and exposure of . . . matrices of power rather than a compliance with those structures” (Jarenski 87), the text’s refusal to stand for anything other than a collection of sounds places it outside the discourse which looks to contain it, outside “the domain of cultural intelligibility” (Jarenski 88). So, the novel is not actually there as such, but more as a relational system relying on “multiple texts super imposed one upon the other” (Abrams 595) for any meaning or visibility.

    Race, as it is seemingly constructed in the early parts of the text and is constructed in larger American society, is a binary system of relation, the novel works to deconstruct this binary in both its content and form. In the Prologue, we see the narrator as ostensibly aware of his invisibility but not yet aware of the potential that state holds. While speaking of “the darkness of lightness” (6) the ambiguity of color on a continuum he eventually embraces, he lapses into a dualistically opposed view which the novel works to unwind. Taking a cue to play from a nearby rhyme-pair, “thinker-tinker” (7), “Monopolated Light & Power” could almost sound like monopolated white power. To bolster this view, the narrator tells us that “light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form” (6), seeming to embrace a binary construction of race, one in which blackness is defined by and against whiteness and whiteness by and against blackness. Taken this way, the narrator’s “battle with Monopolated Light & Power” (7) seems to make sense as a racially retaliatory act, but the text resists such single-dimensional constructions of race and refuses such easily derived readings of itself. While it may not seem problematic for the narrator to “love light” (6), substituting in the words above, as it gives him “form” and “to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death,” he also tells us that “the truth is the light and light is the truth” (7), essentially rendering all symbolic readings moot or at least contradictory and breaking apart the systems of meaning it just worked to create. Riffing in biblical language, Ellison leans on another system of meaning to defuse the system he has just created, but, by the same measure he preempts the application of any meaning by keeping the signified floating, keeping us running after it, “running all over [our]selves” (574). 

    But, perhaps this is simply another example of the narrator making “more sound than sense” (Ellison 113). After many pages of  “the lulling movement of multisyllabic words to thrill and console us” (Ellison 111), the narrator addressing us muses on his grandfather’s deathbed advice, saying “perhaps he hid his meaning deeper than I thought, perhaps his anger threw me off – I can’t decide” (574). This question reflexively echoes our own questioning of the grandfather and even more Ellison, and in this wondering we may see the narrator-conflated-with-Ellison in earnest for just a moment. But as the possible meanings expand and swell and come pouring out we begin to feel again that perhaps “some things are just too unjust for words . . . and too ambiguous for either speech of ideas” (185) and that meaning is in many ways ungraspable until we realize that that is perhaps the meaning. That the reason meaning has seemed so illusory in the work is because there isn’t a single lesson to be be gleaned from it and the fact that “none of us seems to know who he is is or where he’s going” (Ellison 577) is really what the narrator/Ellison has been trying to show us and this ambivalence is okay. 

    In the novel’s closing lines, the narrator (again bound up with Ellison) can hear us saying, “it was all a build-up to bore us with this buggy jiving . . . he only wanted us to listen to him rave” (581), and with this line the text completes its work of erasing itself, of becoming an invisible novel. We are told this is “partially true” and that the meaningful part is largely inarticulate and apparently empty. In the same way that the narrator is “invisible and without substance, a disembodied voice” (581), the novel is the reverse, a signifier which points to nothing absolute. As a signifier without a signified, as an empty but visible novel, the text breaks down traditional systems of meaning, those which make the narrator invisible and demand the text’s visibility with a prefabricated tradition/box. 

    Works Cited

    Abrams, Robert E. “The Ambiguities of Dreaming in Ellison’s Invisible Man.” American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography49. 4 (1978 Jan): 592-603.

    Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. Vintage International. New York: 1995.

    Jarenski, Shelly. “Invisibility Embraced: The Abject as a Site of Agency in Ellison’s Invisible Man.” The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States35. 4 (2010 Winter): 85-109

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