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.

“A Piece of Early Americana”

Chapter 15 of Invisible Man opens with the narrator being rudely awakened by the clanging of pipes in Mary’s apartment. In a rage to try to get the “ignorant fool” doing the banging to knock it off, the narrator looks around for something to bang back with. He spots something on the floor that, incredibly, he’s never noticed before: “the cast-iron figure of a very black, red-lipped and wide-mouthed Negro, whose white eyes stared up at me from the floor, his face an enormous grin, his single large black hand held palm up before his chest. It was a bank, a piece of early Americana, the kind of bank which, if a coin is placed in the hand and a lever pressed upon the back, will raise its arm and flip the coin into a grinning mouth” (319). The narrator has never seen this particular bank in this particular spot before (in the room he’s occupied for months now!), but he’s clearly familiar with the genre. He casually identifies it, with a trace of bitter irony, as a “piece of early Americana” and implores his reader, too, to recognize this “kind of bank.” It’s a type, and he assumes his reader has seen them before.

The narrator is shocked and confused that Mary Rambo would keep such a “self-mocking image” (319) in her home (even if it’s somehow been invisible to him up to now), but such items were a fairly commonplace category of bric-a-brac decorating respectable, middle-class (white) homes throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To our eyes, they are a jarring reminder of how commonplace and generally unquestioned such poisonous racial stereotypes used to be (although we can see a direct descendant in the grinning caricature of a Native American, “Chief Wahoo,” seen until very recently on the [former] Cleveland Indians’ hats and uniforms). It’s a powerful symbol for Ellison to deploy at this point in the novel, where the narrator feels like he’s about to become visible as a spokesman for Brother Jack’s organization. The bank doesn’t represent who or what the narrator is—it’s a stark, visible embodiment of a racist caricature being imposed on him and anyone who looks like him. Can we doubt that having such items on mantles and shelves in white homes contributed in no small way to the perpetuation of racism?

There’s still a market for these things, apparently—a subcategory of the antique market. Until recently, eBay abounded with "black Americana" items, with various euphemisms for the bank Ellison is citing in the novel. I found the following image among a dozen or so “Jolly N****r Banks” (yes, this was their common commercial name, although euphemisms and abbreviation abound online, to get around policies about racist language) recently available for auction on eBay, before they apparently removed this stuff from the site:

While eBay is no longer in the business of auctioning racist antiques, the interested consumer can still find such items through multiple online auctions and sellers: just Google "black Americana coin bank" and see what comes up. According to the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University, the more extremely racist the caricature, the higher price such “Americana” will fetch. I’ll point you to the Jim Crow Museum’s website as a valuable resource on this shameful corner of early American popular culture—see especially the section on “Caricatures and Stereotypes,” for a detailed taxonomy of the range of recurring images and stock characters. The museum’s motto is “Using Objects of Intolerance to Teach Tolerance and Promote Social Justice,” and while the images contained on the site inspire unease (as does the casual preponderance of the N-word as part of daily commercial discourse), this is a crucial part of American cultural history that must be preserved in order to understand why racism has endured so strongly in this country. The dehumanization, infantilization, demonization, and marginalization of black people was taking place in the realm of everyday objects—children’s toys, games, piggy banks, and food products. When the narrator of Invisible Man talks about how people never actually see him because of the accumulation of crap in their own minds, these sorts of things, by virtue of their commonplace everydayness, have played a big role in distorting their vision.

Group Discussion Prompt (September 9 and 10)

 In chapter 9, the narrator is feeling optimistic and confident as he goes to his meeting with Mr. Emerson, one of the "important people" to whom Dr. Bledsoe has written a letter on his behalf. He meets with the younger Mr. Emerson, the "important" guy's son, and the meeting does not go as the narrator had hoped. By the end of the chapter, the narrator is vowing to kill Bledsoe as an act of revenge.

Discuss your impressions of the younger Mr. Emerson in your group: What do you make of this guy? What does the narrator make of him? In the end, do you see him as an ally of the narrator, or an antagonist/obstacle to his development? Does Emerson's intervention advance the narrator's development of critical consciousness at all?

“A Revelation or a More Efficient Blinding?”

The anonymous narrator of Invisible Man never specifies the state he grows up in—all we know is that it’s deep in the Jim Crow South—and he never names “the state college for Negroes” to which he wins a scholarship. Ellison himself grew up in racially segregated Oklahoma City and attended Tuskegee University in Tuskegee, Alabama, a historically black college that was founded by the famous educator and former slave Booker T. Washington. As I mentioned in class, the young narrator models his graduation speech closely on Washington’s ideas of pragmatism and accommodationism. The narrator tells us that he “visualized [himself] as a potential Booker T. Washington” in those “pre-invisible days” (18), and he quotes “the great leader and educator” at the start of his speech: “‘To those of my race who depend upon bettering their condition in a foreign land, or who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the southern white man, who is his next-door neighbor, I would say: “Cast down your bucket where you are”—cast it down in making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded’” (30).

Ellison undermines Washington’s message of “humility as the essence of progress” considerably, by having the narrator endure humilation and degradation in the battle royal leading up to his speech, and even during the speech itself. His “fervor” as he quotes Washington prevents him from noticing “that the men were still talking and laughing until my dry mouth, filling up with blood from the cut, almost strangled me” (30). Washington’s faith in the essential goodness and generosity of southern whites is treated with irony throughout this chapter, as the narrator’s humility spills over into humiliation.

The “progress” with which his humility is rewarded, at the conclusion of this harrowing, nightmarish episode, takes the form of a scholarship to a school that resembles Washington’s Tuskegee in a number of general—and specific—respects. The most specific, perhaps, comes in the form of a statue the narrator describes near the start of chapter 2: "[I]n my mind’s eye I see the bronze statue of the college Founder, the cold Father symbol, his hands outstretched in the breathtaking gesture of lifting a veil that flutters in hard, metallic folds above the face of a kneeling slave” (36). Readers may note a conspicuous resemblance to a famous statue of Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee:

The sculptor’s intent is easy to read, and indeed the gesture is “breathtaking”: education is freedom, knowledge is power. The promise of Emancipation depends on the education and literacy of the newly freed population of the South. Washington is justly revered to this day as an eloquent spokesman for the liberational potential of education, and his own life story is a powerful testament to his ideas. The sculpture’s inscription captures these ideals beautifully (although what the narrator means by the “cold Father symbol” is evident, too):

But just as the narrator’s laughing grandfather undermines his pride in his “triumph” at the battle royal in his unnerving dream (thereby undermining the narrator’s naïve faith in the Washingtonian principles he so earnestly espouses before an audience that seems anything but “friendly”), here again Ellison’s underground narrator throws a wrench of irony into this apparently straightforwardly allegorical statue: “I am standing puzzled, unable to decide whether the veil is really being lifted, or lowered more firmly into place; whether I am witnessing a revelation or a more efficient blinding. And as I gaze, there is a rustle of wings and I see a flock of starlings flighting before me and, when I look again, the bronze face, whose empty eyes look upon a world I have never seen, runs with liquid chalk” (36). I love how this simple insight complicates the straightforward interpretation of the statue’s meaning: indeed, we can see it either as a veil being raised or lowered. And look again: the eyes do appear empty, dead, smeared with weathering and (it’s easy to imagine) birdcrap. (Bronze is not the ideal medium for capturing the spark of life in a human eyeball.) 

And it’s not as if the narrator’s education will simply either enlighten him or leave him as he was (we can agree that he sure needs some veils raised at this point in his life). Ellison suggests, provocatively, that education can have a blinding effect. What do you see, in chapter 2, as the narrator-as-collegian serves as a chauffeur (just like Bigger Thomas!), driving a rich white philanthropist around and trying to show him only the face of the college and the “community” that the higher-ups have approved for public consumption? Does he seem enlightened, or blinded? Is the veil being lifted, or lowered into place?