Man Oh Invisible Man!

When Ann and I first started this project two and half years ago, we looked through the list and noted which books we had already read.  When I got to Invisible Man, I hesitated.  I thought I had read the book, but I wasn't sure.  If I had read it, I thought I liked it.  If I hadn't, then it was something I always wanted to read.

I know for certain now that I had not read it, because if I had, I would have remembered such an incredible novel.  Holy moly!  Like Grapes of Wrath, this is a perfect novel in my eyes.  Even though the book is nearly 600 pages long, it never once sags or drags.  It comes out firing with a riveting and poetic prologue, introducing us to the narrator, smart, angry, and possibly a little bit crazy, living in his secret hole beneath New York City. We are instantly aware that this is a book about character, about politics, about race, about the relationship between individuals and organizations.  And like Orwell, Ellison never lets his political art become more political than art.  This is first and foremost a work of imaginative fiction, beautifully written and constructed with the tightness of a drum skin.

In an ideal work of fiction, character is plot and plot is character.  What happens is decided by the character we follow and the decisions he makes (as well as the decisions that are made for him).  Similarly, the character is constructed by the events that unfold around him and batter him about.  In Invisible Man, plot and character are inseparable.  On the one hand, it is an intricate character piece, and on the other hand, it is a heavily and tightly plotted story.  Moreover, it is the very specific story of one specific character, but the novel resonates because it is simultaneously the story of a generation of American black men in the 1940s and '50s, and beyond that it is also simultaneously the story of all Americans.  In the end, Invisible Man is a story about the individual and his place in society.  (I use the male pronoun there purposefully, since the novel is not overly concerned with the struggle of women.)  The Brotherhood is a specific organization, but the narrator's experiences with the Brotherhood are laden with meaning beyond that specific relationship.  The narrator is on a search for self-discovery, because "if I discover who I am, I'll be free," and like one of his professors said of Stephen Dedalus,

[his] problem, like ours, was not actually one of creating the uncreated conscience of his race, but of creating the uncreated features of his face.  Our task is that of making ourselves individuals.  The conscience of a race is the gift of its individuals who see, evaluate, record . . .  We create the race by creating ourselves and then to our great astonishment we will have created something far more important:  We will have created a culture.

Ralph Ellison tackles exactly how difficult it is to create "the uncreated features of our face" in a world where we are not seen for who we are, in a world where people don't see beyond your clothes or the color of your skin.  We are all invisible to each other when our inner eye tells our physical eye what to see.  And on top of that, the organizations and groups that exert their forces upon us don't care at all who we are.

That problem, the problem of discovering who we are, sounds airy and philosophical, but Ellison keeps his novel grounded in details and the specific world that scrapes against the narrator.  But the theoretical, the philosophical, hovers right behind the physical in all things in this novel.  Every description does double duty, both anchoring us in the physical moment of the scene and alluding to the meaning of the image.  Take this passage, in which the narrator finds himself alone with a beautiful white woman who has designs on our protagonist.  She is on the phone and they are standing in her bedroom:

I nodded, seeing her turn without a word and go toward a vanity with a large oval mirror, taking up an ivory telephone.   And in the mirrored instant I saw myself standing between her eager form and a huge white bed, myself caught in a guilty stance, my face taut, tie dangling; and behind the bed another mirror which now like a surge of the sea tossed our images back and forth, back and forth, furiously multiplying the time and the place and the circumstance.

Ellison wastes not a single moment, not a single image, and not a single word.  It is truly stunning to read, and I found myself wanting to read slower and slower to feel each word and image move between the fingers of my mind just to admire their texture and power.

Finally, this book, perfect in its execution and elocution, would fall flat were it not for its unflinching honesty.  This novel tackles so much about our world, and it does so with a crazy sense of control.  I never once doubted that Ellison had thought this novel and its subject matter through down to every detail.  But for all that confidence and deft handling of his material, Ellison has no pat answers to the dilemmas his narrator faces.  The mystery of life is perfectly articulated and poignantly unsolved.

If you are only going to read a handful of books from this list of 100, Invisible Man should be at the top of your list.