Notebook prompt: Hurston's narrative voice

NOTEBOOK (5 min.): How would you describe Hurston’s narrative voice / style in the first chapters of Their Eyes Were Watching God? Who is telling this story, what seems to be their relation to the people and settings they narrate, and what do you make of the prose style or “voice” of this narrator?

Notebook prompt: "I speak for you"?

NOTEBOOK (5 min): The famous opening line of Invisible Man begins with the word “I” (3), and the novel ends with the word “you” (581). The text we have just read represents the narrator’s act of writing from his “hole,” his effort to make sense of his “above-ground” experience by crafting it into a narrative, “writing it all down.” What “arc” do you see reflected in these opening and closing lines? Have we arrived at somewhere new by the end of this long narrative? How do we get from a gesture of radical alienation and individualism (“I am an invisible man”) to a potentially “universal” claim (“Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you”)?

"He'll kill your depression, and your dispossession"

Some of the most surreal-seeming, hyperbolic, and symbolically laden details in Invisible Man turn out to be based in the historical reality of American popular culture. The "Dancing Sambo" dolls that Tod Clifton is found hawking on 43rd Street, which the narrator experiences as a personal and political "betrayal," with the mysterious mechanism that makes them dance and shimmy, seemingly on their own power? (The narrator is apparently unfamiliar with the technology of the marionette--one more example of him not seeing who's really pulling the strings!) Ellison isn't making this stuff up. There used to be not quite as many "Dancing Sambo" dolls on eBay as there were "Black Americana Banks," but they have now apparently banned sale of these items as well. They are still easily available on independent antiques web sites.

The packaging boasts that "It works by your magic," and it's pitched as a "magic trick"--so maybe we can forgive the narrator's failure to see the strings at first glance. Can you see what enrages the narrator about Clifton selling such an image, how it represents a "betrayal" of the Brotherhood's ideals? Clifton's dolls sound a bit cheaper--made of tissue paper and cardboard instead of wood--but the idea is the same. And once again, the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia has some useful background information on the "Sambo" caricature and its origins in the children's book Little Black Sambo, within its overview of the "Picaninny" stereotype.

The Woman Question

When the narrator is abruptly removed from his post in Harlem and relocated downtown to lecture on “the Woman Question,” it tidily reflects the Brotherhood’s compartmentalization of social issues and their “scientific” approach to human life more generally. As I've mentioned in class, in this novel we are glimpsing an era where intersectionality was not part of the discourse, and where progressive politics was defined more by compartmentalization and boundaries. The idea is that the proper location for talking about “the Race Question” is Harlem (and only Harlem), whereas the progressive/bohemian downtown scene (historically a hotbed for anarchism and other radical politics, including feminism and women’s suffrage and later, gay rights) is the proper venue for addressing gender issues (which, naturally, are only a “question” for “women”—men need not worry about gender, apparently). This is in fact the way such issues were compartmentalized in leftist political discourse at the time, as various capital-Q “Questions” to be addressed: the Woman Question, the Race Question, the Labor Question, the Irish Question. There’s an undeniably paternalistic “What are we going to do with these people?” quality to the formulation, with the wise white leaders working their way through a series of “questions” to be “solved.” Race would not be a relevant issue for the downtown crowd, according to the Brotherhood; nor would gender be a matter of concern for the narrator’s Harlem audience. The Brotherhood’s “ideology” neatly subdivides its membership according to the issues that presumably affect each sector of society. And they will take from one and give to the other arbitrarily, as suits the committee’s purposes for the moment.

The joke, of course, is that there’s no indication that the narrator has ever given a moment’s thought to gender equity. What qualifies him to lecture on this subject? The absurdity of his reassignment—and the degree to which the narrator is being treated as a pawn by the organization—is underscored when Brother Jack informs him that his own pamphlet (“On the Woman Question in the United States”) will be the narrator’s source text for his lectures. Just as the white Brother Hambro (who, the narrator notes, has an “almost Lincolnesque face” [503]) has to educate the narrator on the properly scientific approach to racism, it’s no surprise that a dude wrote the book on the Brotherhood’s women’s issues.

Is Ellison also making something of a joke at the expense of feminism here? The Brotherhood’s science is being lampooned, but doesn’t the novel itself treat “the Woman Question” as peripheral, a distraction for the narrator—and the reader—from the real business at hand? Ellison is deeply engaged in the issue of identity formation, and he explores how fundamentally the question of identity for an African American man in the United States is complicated and compromised by the history of racial oppression and the persistence of the stereotypes and segregation that is its legacy. A person’s potential is not defined by their race, Ellison insists, but coming of age in a culture that is obsessed with ideas about race and racial identity makes the process of self-realization bewilderingly complex. Racism renders individuals “invisible”; an individual raised in a racist society must find ways to navigate that culture-wide neurosis not only to survive but to achieve a significant degree of self-determination and an identity that is more than a reflection of others’ projections, fears, anxieties, and fantasies. Ellison and his protagonist aren’t obsessed with race by choice—the narrator would rather not “always talk in terms of race,” as Jack  puts it, but, as he responds, “What other terms do you know?” (292). The pathological obsession with color and its social significance is the condition that the narrator is born into; he merely reflects the prevailing anxieties of his time and place. The challenge is to try and somehow fashion an individual identity that isn’t shaped only by this aspect of his race-obsessed culture.

Gender is not as much of a concern for Ellison. The narrator’s “invisibility” is a result of his racial identity—the fact that he’s always subjected to others’ perceptions and expectations based on his appearance as a black man—but not, apparently, his gender identity. The novel is populated almost entirely by men, with women relegated to peripheral, supporting roles: there’s Mary, the maternal/race-conscious cultivator of new leaders for “the people” whom the narrator abandons at the Brotherhood’s request; there’s a fleeting reference to the narrator’s own mother; there are Trueblood’s poor wife and daughter, who are the subject of his harrowing tale but never speak themselves; there are the prostitutes at the Golden Day; there’s Emma, the unnervingly forthright Brotherhood member who worries whether the narrator is “not dark enough” for his prescribed role; there are the unhappily married Brotherhood women who attend the narrator’s feminist lectures mainly in the interests of racially charged sexual conquest; there’s Sybil, who frustrates the narrator’s efforts to sabotage the Brotherhood by insisting on casting him in her racially charged fantasies; there’s the breathless young women in the Harlem district who swoon over Tod Clifton and faint melodramatically at the news of his death. All of the important, consequential characters in the novel are men. The male-centric focus is reflected in the title (the story of an invisible man) and the quasi-communist organization (the Brotherhood), in which women all play subordinate, non-leadership roles.

This peculiar imbalance is reflected and foreshadowed in the Battle Royal scene: a group of black boys are compelled to fight one another for the entertainment of the town’s powerful white men. The only female on hand is the “magnificent blonde—stark naked” (19) in the middle of the ring: grotesquely painted with makeup in a parody of sexual allure (and with “an American flag tattooed upon her belly”), she exists solely as a sexual object, and her presence is calculated to confuse and shame the boys (which invests her sexuality with an added racial dimension—Jim Crow’s tortured racial and sexual politics acted out on stage before an audience of bigots). She dances and displays her body for the entertainment of the rowdy crowd, but the white men’s amusement seems equally born out of a delight at seeing the boys’ public shame and terror (“Some threatened us if we looked and others if we did not” [19-20]). When they are finished with this portion of the entertainment, the woman is literally manhandled as she crowd-surfs her way out of the room. This scene could be establishing some parallels between the position of the black boys and the sexualized dancer: they are both being used by the embodiments of the white power structure in this surreal scenario. The fact that the woman is not all that into her work is clear: she wears a grotesque “abstract mask” of makeup (19); her dancing is described as “[flinging] herself about with a detached expression on her face” (20), which calls to mind the narrator’s description of the Dancing Sambo doll later in the narrative. And as she’s “raised . . . from the floor, and tossed . . . as college boys are tossed at a hazing,” the narrator glimpses “the terror and disgust in her eyes, almost like my own terror” (20). There are suggestive connections to be pursued here: the white woman’s role in the allegory of the Jim Crow South is maybe analogous to the roles of the black young men. This woman’s role in this scene—and her role in her world, her ability to construct an identity for herself, to somehow be more than what her physical appearance seems to signify—is every bit as constrained by gender and sexuality as the narrator’s is by race. But she’s never heard from again—like all the women in this novel, she disappears offstage quickly, and “the Woman Question” is never explored by the author.

Ellison is depicting a man’s world, where race is a divisive and perpetually complicating factor, but where women exist mainly as a complication, a temptation, an unwelcome intrusion into the affairs of men of the world (“Why did they have to mix their women into everything? Between us and everything we wanted to change in the world they placed a woman: socially, politically, economically” [418]). Even Mary’s maternalistic encouragement for the narrator to become a “race leader” is met with impatience and annoyance, while Jack’s less idealistic recruitment (greased with a paycheck, of course) is given immediate consideration. Would it be going too far to suggest that the women in this novel are “invisible” to the narrator in much the same way he discovers he is “invisible” to others? Obviously, no novel can explore all aspects of any situation, and Ellison’s aims in this novel are momentously ambitious—to explore how racism complicates a black man’s identity formation. But is it unfair to complain about the persistently one-dimensional vapidity of his female characters? Could the novel’s interrogation of racial identity have been made more complex and compelling if it had explored gender as a part of this same dynamic? Maybe the Woman Question is just as relevant in Harlem as the Race Question is downtown. Maybe both neighborhoods need to be thinking about both Questions simultaneously.