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