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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
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Ralph Ellison'S "Invisible Man" As A Repository Of Major Elements From Principal Western Literary Traditions
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Ralph Ellison'S "Invisible Man" As A Repository Of Major Elements From Principal Western Literary Traditions
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RALPH ELLISON'S INVISIBLE MAN AS A REPOSITORY OF MAJOR ELEMENTS FROM PRINCIPAL WESTERN LITERARY TRADITIONS by Dolores Anne Ruzicka A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (Comparative Literature) September 1973 INFORMATION TO USERS This material was produced from a microfilm copy of the original document. While the most advanced technological means to photograph and reproduce this document have been used, the quality is heavily dependent upon the quality of the original submitted. The following explanation of techniques is provided to help you understand markings or patterns which may appear on this reproduction. 1. The sign or "target" for pages apparently lacking from the document photographed is "Missing Page(s)". If it was possible to obtain the missing page(s) or section, they are spliced into the film along with adjacent pages. This may have necessitated cutting thru an image and duplicating adjacent pages to insure you complete continuity. 2. When an image on the film is obliterated with a large round black mark, it is an indication that the photographer suspected that the copy may have moved during exposure and thus cause a blurred image. You will find a good image of the page in the adjacent frame. 3. When a map, drawing or chart, etc., was part of the material being photographed the photographer followed a definite method in "sectioning" the material. It is customary to begin photoing at the upper left hand corner of a large sheet and to continue photoing from left to right in equal sections with a small overlap. If necessary, sectioning is continued again — beginning below the first row and continuing on until complete. 4. The majority of users indicate that the textual content is of greatest value, however, a somewhat higher quality reproduction could be made from "photographs" if essential to the understanding of the dissertation. Silver prints of "photographs" may be ordered at additional charge by writing the Order Department, giving the catalog number, title, author and specific pages you wish reproduced. 5. PLEASE NOTE: Some pages may have indistinct print. Filmed a s received. Xerox University Microfilms 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106 74-943 RUZICKA, Dolores Anne, 1946- RALPH ELLISON'S INVISIBLE MAN AS A REPOSITORY OF MAJOR ELEMENTS FROM PRINCIPAL WESTERN LITERARY TRADITIONS. University of Southern California, Ph.D., 1973 Language and Literature, modern | University Microfilms, A XEROX Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan © Copyright by DOLORES ANNE RUZICKA 1973 THIS DISSERTATION HAS BEEN MICROFILMED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED. UNIVERSITY O F S O U TH ER N CA LIFO R NIA T H E GRADUATE SCHO O L U N IV E R S IT Y PARK LOS ANG ELES, C A L IF O R N IA S 0 0 0 7 This dissertation, written by ......Dolores..Ann® ......... under the direction of h.SXl.. Dissertation Com mittee, and approved by a ll its members, has been presented to and accepted by The Graduate School, in partial fulfillm ent of requirements of the degree of D O C T O R O F P H IL O S O P H Y { j Dean No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his apprecia tion is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent" TABLE OF CONTENTS Page V I T A ..................................................... iv ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................................................ V INTRODUCTION .......................................... 1 Chapter I VARIATIONS ON THE MAJOR THEME: THE RELA TIONSHIP OF TRUEBLOOD AND THE INVISIBLE MAN TO THE NEGRO'S SEARCH FOR IDENTITY . . . 3 II THE METAPHOR OF THE UNDERGROUND IN DOSTOYEVSKY'S NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND, RICHARD WRIGHT'S "THE MAN WHO LIVED UNDERGROUND," AND INVISIBLE MAN ........... 30 III THE METAPHOR OF THE INFERNO....................61 IV A DUAL NATURE: PICARESQUE NOVEL AND BILDUNGSROMAN ............................... 85 CONCLUSION . . ....................................... 116 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................. 118 iii VITA DOLORES ANNE RUZICKA 1946 — Born in Chicago, Illinois 1963 — Graduated from Thomas Kelly High School, Chicago, Illinois 1967 — B.S. Honors English, Loyola University, Chicago, Illinois 1967-73— Graduate student, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 1967-70— NDEA Fellow, University of Southern California 1969 — M.A ., University of Southern California 1970-71--Teaching Assistant, English Department, University of Southern California 1971-72— Fulbright Fellow, University of Turin, Italy 1972-73— Ford Foundation Fellow, University of Southern California ABSTRACT RALPH ELLISON'S INVISIBLE MAN AS A REPOSITORY OF MAJOR ELEMENTS FROM PRINCIPAL WESTERN LITERARY TRADITIONS Dolores Anne Ruzicka, Ph.D. UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, 1973 Chairman: Dr. Rosario P. Armato The problem of identity is especially crucial in the twentieth-century United States, with its urban con gestion, increased geographical mobility, and religious and ethical confusion. In recent decades the struggle of the American Negro toward self-definition has become a subject much dealt with in literature. No writer has been more concerned with helping us to understand the Negro's search for identity than Ralph Ellison. In Invisible Man (1952), probably the most cele brated novel by an American Negro, he sheds light on this search through adaptation of several major elements from principal Western literary traditions. While I discuss his use of the American Negro blues because this artistic form is partly literary in nature, I concentrate on the adapta tion of elements from basic literary traditions. Ellison develops the metaphor of the underground, almost certainly v derived from Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground and Richard Wright's "The Man Who Lived Underground," to point up that his protagonist suffers under a tormenting condi tion of duality caused by limiting attitudes or beliefs which restrict the expression of his free will and thus the fulfillment of his individuality. In addition, Ellison projects the Negro experience in contemporary American so ciety primarily as a metaphorical inferno, a boomerang movement from hell to purgatory to hell again. This move ment finally ends when the protagonist recognizes that he has some identity in invisibility— a condition resulting from the failure of others to see him as an individual— and that he may be able to help others understand his individ uality and thus allow him to have an identity in visibil ity. Within the metaphor of the inferno Ellison adapts certain Dantean elements, an approach that contrasts the just and divinely ordered punishments endured by the inhab itants of Dante's hell with the unjust torments, particu larly confusion of identity, which the black protagonist must undergo because of the structure of American society. Furthermore, Invisible Man fulfills all the requirements of a genre definition of the traditional picaresque novel: it exhibits a spectrum of formal or technical devices aimed at projecting a sense of life as radical and essential chaos. However, the novel takes on the added dimension of a Bildungsroman because of strong emphasis on the protago nist's search for identity and his sense of personal moral responsibility to make others realize that social condi tions may be improved, that the pattern which they gave to chaos can be changed. Ellison's masterful adaptation of these major ele ments from principal Western literary traditions to il lumine our understanding of the Negro's search for identity will undoubtedly help Invisible Man to achieve an important place in American and world literature. vii INTRODUCTION The problem of identity seems particularly critical in the twentieth-century United States, with its greater geographical mobility, congested urban areas, and uncer tainty of faith and ethical principles. It especially con cerns the members of religious and ethnic groups who are seeking the freedom to achieve individual and group cultur al identity. Of the many struggles to achieve this identi ty, that of the American Negro has been the most prominent in recent decades and has found successful expression in literature. No writer has been more concerned with shedding light on the Negro's search for definition than Ralph Elli son. In Invisible Man/ perhaps the most highly regarded novel by an American Negro, he illumines our understanding of this search through adaptation of several important ele ments from various Western literary traditions. While I examine his use of the American Negro blues because this artistic form is partly literary in nature, I center on the adaptation of elements from fundamental literary traditions. Ellison uses the metaphor of the underground basically as "*"Signet Book (New York, 1952) . All further refer ences will be to this edition. 1 2 it is used by Dostoyevsky in Notes from Underground and Richard Wright in "The Man Who Lived Underground"; joins it with the metaphor of the inferno, based in part on Dante; and develops both within the general structure -of the picaresque novel, putting such emphasis on the search for definition that the novel takes on the added dimension of a Bildungsroman. His is a genuinely masterful accom plishment. To point up this accomplishment, I will examine in detail Ellison's adaptation of each of these elements, at the same time considering various traditional and modern uses which may illumine our understanding of his novel. I hope that the reader will conclude with me that this adap tation of major elements from principal Western literary traditions will help Invisible Man to attain a position of some prominence in American and world literature. V CHAPTER I VARIATIONS ON THE MAJOR THEME: THE RELATIONSHIP OF TRUEBLOOD AND THE INVISIBLE MAN TO THE NEGRO'S SEARCH FOR IDENTITY Ralph Ellison strongly believes that the blues plays an important role in the American Negro's move to ward self-definition. Emerging as a release of psychologi cal tension in the Negro both during and after slavery, it gives him some measure of group identity. The blues speaks "simultaneously of the tragic and the comic aspects of the human condition," Ellison says. It expresses "a profound sense of life shared by many Negro Americans precisely be cause their lives have combined these modes. This has been the heritage of people who for hundreds of years could not celebrate birth or dignify death and whose need to live despite the dehumanizing pressures of slavery developed an endless capacity for laughing at their painful experi ences."1 Ellison stresses that it is a group experience which must be studied as poetry and ritual— a form of folk lore. His view of how the folklore of a people functions lnThe Blues," The New York Review of Books, 6 Feb. 1964, p. 7. 3 4 gives us some idea of the importance which he ascribes to the blues in the formation of the Negro American identity. It provides: . . . the first drawings of any group's character. It preserves mainly those situations which have repeated themselves again and again in the his tory of any given group. It describes those rites, manners, customs, and so forth, which in sure the good life, or destroy it; and it de scribes those boundaries of feeling, thought and action which that particular group has found to be the limitation of the human condition. It projects this wisdom in symbols which express the group's will to survive; it embodies those values by which the group lives and dies. These draw ings may be crude but they are nonetheless pro found in that they represent the group's attempt to humanize the w o r l d .2 It should not surprise us, then, that Ellison gives the blues a central role in Invisible Man, which is a sym bolic representation of the history of the American Negro as well as one Negro's search for identity. As early as the prologue the narrator of the novel plays a Louis Arm strong record with the memorable refrain, "What did I do / To be so black / And blue?" (p. 15). The prologue, an in troduction to the protagonist's sufferings, ends: "But what did 1^ do to be so blue? Bear with me" (p. 17) . This haunting question— a blues refrain— certainly sets a tone for the novel, a mingling of suffering and humor. Indeed, Alfred Chester and Vilma Howard, "The Art of Fic tion VIII: Ralph Ellison," The Paris Review, No.. 8 (Spring 1955), 59. 5 the novel is an account of the protagonist's suffering and awareness of the comically absurd aspects of his life, per fectly in keeping with Ellison's view of the blues. Elli son's concept of jazz forms is particularly relevant td the development of the novel. He observes that there is a "delicate balance struck between strong individual person ality and the group," that the individual artist "must learn the best of the past, and add to it his personal vi sion." A basic affirmation occurs as the musicians reduce "the chaos of living to form."^ This view is reflected in the Invisible Man's narrative; he moves through a sym bolic history of the Negro— from South to North and from slavery through Reconstruction, philanthropy, World War I, the Depression, and various political movements— and adds to it not only his conclusion that he is "invisible" be cause he is seen simply as an object to be used, but also his basically affirmative belief that it is man who gives pattern to the chaos of life. This final belief further suggests a philosophy of history as enigmatic and indefin ably human, not based on predetermined patterns in which man is merely manipulated— a view expressed when the In visible Man wonders whether "history was a gambler, instead "Living with Music," High Fidelity (December 1955), rpt. in Shadow and Act (New York, 1964), pp. 189-90. 6 of a force in a laboratory experiment" (p. 3 81).^ All these manifestations of Ellison's understanding of the blues concept help to make the Invisible Man's story more than one Negro's search for identity. Ellison views the blues as an expression of Negro group identity, and he intentionally uses blues techniques and ideas to suggest that the individual Negro's search for definition can rep resent the search of the Negro Everyman. While the blues is an expression of the Negro experience in the United States, however, it has something to say to everyone. Each of us can sing the blues because it speaks, as Ellison says, of "the tragic and the comic aspects of the human condi tion." Insofar as it expresses the human experience, it gives added dimension to the Negro's search for identity. Rather than further investigate the uses of the blues which I have mentioned above, however, I would like to examine one ingenious use which may serve to illustrate Ellison's expertise. It is a vivid example of the tech nique of theme and variation: two intricately related variations on the central theme of the Negro's search for identity. The technique of theme and variation pervades ^Edward Margolies, Native Sons: A Critical Study of Twentieth-Century Necjro American Authors (Philadelphia, 1968) , pp. 130-48, discusses Ellison's use of the blues concept in more detail. I 7 Invisible Man, and we should understand it before moving on to the specific example of it which I have chosen to exam ine in detail. In his discussion of the technique, Edward Margolies observes that Armstrong's blues refrain: . . . implicitly follows each of the major epi sodes of the novel. As his attempts to play out the roles that whites have assigned him (each of them different, but all of them dehumanizing, like variations on a theme) meet with disaster, the hero in effect asks -himself Armstrong's pun ning question. He has tried to play the game ac cording to the rules but has each time discovered himself more bruised. Thus each episode serves almost as an extended blues verse, and the nar rator becomes the singer. The epilogue brings us back to the present; the reader is returned to the basement room, and the hero tells us that despite his psychic wounds (he has dreamt that he has been castrated), he has not yet given up on life. Hence the novel ends as it had begun, just as the last verse of a blues is frequently the same as the first. Margolies thus maintains that the major episodes are, in a sense, variations on the theme of dehumanizing role-play ing. Robert Bone has more to say on this technique of theme and variation: "Jazz forms have . . . influenced what might be called the composition of the novel. Some thing is always going on in the background of Ellison's prose— something not quite heard at first, but nevertheless insistent, which produces a feeling of depth and resonance ^Ibid., p. 133. 8 g when finally perceived." Bone mentions the pigeons whirl ing and diving in the interval in which Tod Clifton is shot as "a passage thoroughly characteristic of Ellison's tech nique: he writes a 'melody1 (thematic line) and then orchestrates it."^ The simulatneous movement of Clifton and the pigeons is admittedly a very minor illustration of the technique. But it helps us to understand Ellison's use of the technique on a larger scale: he is very skill ful at "orchestrating" an important thematic line through extended variations which reverberate and fortify that theme. Such is the technique effectively used with certain secondary themes. The battle royal, where Negro boys fight one another, and the "three shades of blackness" episode, where Clifton and the Invisible Man are ranged against Ras the Exhorter, are variations of the theme that Negroes are often in conflict with one another and thus re tard their progress as a group. The paint factory explo sion leads to a "rebirth" of the protagonist from the womb like hospital machine into a new Brotherhood identity; the theme of rebirth is then repeated in the explosive Harlem riot and the development of the protagonist, while under ground in his hole, into an identity in which he under- 6The Negro Novel in America, rev. ed. (New Haven, 1965) , p. 200. ^Ibid. 9 stands that the failure of others to see him as an individ ual makes him an invisible man. But no variations of a theme are more striking than Jim Trueblood's story and the Invisible Man's narrative— their experiences and discovery of an identity— as varia tions of the central theme of the novel: the Negro's search for identity. Of course, Trueblood's story might be seen as an interpolated narrative of a traditional pica resque novel; such a narrative often serves as a variation on a major-theme. But considering Ellison's extensive and lifelong interest in music, it seems more likely that his use of the technique of theme and variation reflects his familiarity with the blues. The variations of Trueblood and the Invisible Man are impressive largely because they are so intricately interrelated, joining forces to empha size the central theme. Indeed, the major similarity is that both Trueblood and the Invisible Man sing the blues; that is, they tell their stories of suffering and come to accept their true identities. This acceptance involves an awareness of their participation in the human guilt: True blood acquires his guilt by committing his "sin" during a real dream, while the Invisible Man acquires his through existing in a dreamlike misconception of reality. In addi tion, Trueblood's dream is a powerful symbolic summary of the Invisible Man's search for identity. Finally, Ellison 10 uses the same striking simile to describe each man and thereby connects the stories in a single stroke. These three similarities, in particular, establish a strong re lationship between the Invisible Man's narrative and True blood's story. As we have mentioned, the closest similarity be tween their stories is that both men are "dream-sinners" who come to recognize their partial guilt and accept it. Having committed a dream-sin of incest with his daughter, Trueblood finally accepts himself, along with whatever guilt may be his. The Invisible Man must struggle through the dream-sin of illusion to acceptance of some responsi bility for his invisibility, since his existence in a dream world of illusion, rather than a full understanding of how he was being "run," made such invisibility possible. He had done what others told him to do to attain an identity and he had been kept running. As Ellison says, the story of the Invisible Man is "about innocence and human error, a struggle through illusion to reality. . . . Before he could have some voice in his own destiny he had to discard these old identities and illusions; his enlightenment g couldn't come until then." The Invisible Man "must assert q and achieve his own humanity. ..." Trueblood's story is primarily an account of his O ....................................................... Chester and Howard, 65. 9Ibid.. 68. 11 dream-sin to the Invisible Man and Norton, a trustee of the college which the protagonist attends in the South. Since Norton has a repressed wish to commit incest with his daughter, his gift to Trueblood of a hundred-dollar bill indicates that he hopes to transfer his guilt to Trueblood, to lighten the burden of what he fears might be the evil in himself. But the lively Negro does not see his own action entirely as a sin. Though he at first intends to take his punishment in the form of a blow from an ax wielded by his wife, he cannot bring himself to remain still: "I sees it, Lawd, yes! I sees it and seein1 it I twists my head aside. Couldn't help it. . . . Though I meant to keep still, I moves! Anybody but Jesus Christ hisself woulda moved" (pp. 61-62). With a slash on one side of his face, he leaves home. Finally he sings the blues and accepts himself, ac cepts his own humanity; I thinks and thinks, until I thinks my brain go'n bust, 'bout how I'm guilty and how I ain't guilty. I don't eat nothin' and I don't drink nothin' and caint sleep at night. Finally, one night, way early in the mornin', I looks up and sees the stairs and I starts singin'. I don't mean to, I didn't think 'bout it, just start singin'. I don't know what it was, some kinda church song, I guess. All I know is I ends up singin' the blues. I sings me some blues that night ain't never been sang before, and while I'm singin' them blues I makes up my mind that I ain't nobody but myself and ain't nothin' I can do but let whatever is gonna happen, happen. I made up my mind that I was goin' back home and face Kate; yeah, and face Matty Lou too. (p. 63) At the close of his story, Trueblood is puzzled about his 12 experiences; "But what I don't understand is how I done the worse thing a man can do in his own family and 'stead of things gittin' bad, they got better. The nigguhs up at the school don't like me, but the white folks treats me fine" (p. 65). Unlike the Invisible Man who finally comes to understand the import of his experiences, Trueblood does not fully and consciously understand the meaning to be drawn from his own— that the whites treat him well because his incest testifies to the myth of Negro moral inferior ity. But the important point is that, after thinking "bout how I'm guilty and how I ain't guilty," he sings the blues and decides that "I ain't nobody but myself." Raymond M. Olderman puts it this way: Trueblood has looked upon what the world calls chaos, and in singing the Blues, he has intuitive ly recognized the ambivalences and contradictions both in himself and in his reality— a self that commits a sin that is a dream and not a sin, and a reality that calls that dream that is not a sin by the name of sin. He has accepted both the na ture of his own identity, his humanity, and the strangely similar nature of his reality, and has decided to have the courage to accept his respon sibility, face it and continue to act, and it turns out pretty well for him.^-0 As for the Invisible Man, we learn in the prologue that, after writing down his experiences, he has realized 10"Ralph Ellison's Blues and Invisible Man,” Wis consin Studies in Contemporary Lit., 7 (Summer 1966) , 146. 13 his participation in the guilt of contributing to a dis torted reality. He tells of almost killing a man whom he accidentally bumped and who then called him an insulting name. In trying to determine the guilty individual, the protagonist concludes that they share the responsibility: Take the man whom I almost killed: Who was re sponsible for that near murder— I? I don't think so, and I refuse it. I won't buy it. You can't give it to me. He bumped me, he insulted me. Shouldn't he, for his own personal safety, have recognized my hysteria, my "danger potential"? He, let us say, was lost in a dream world. But didn't he^ control that dream world— which, alas, is only too real!— and didn't he rule me out of it? And if he had yelled for a policeman, wouldn't 1^ have been taken for the offending one? Yes, yes, yes! Let me agree with you, I was the irresponsible one; for I should have used my knife to protect the higher interests of society. Some day that kind of foolishness will cause us tragic trouble. All dreamers and sleepwalkers must pay the price, and even the invisible vic tim is responsible for the fate of all. But I shirked that responsibility; I became too snarled in the incompatible notions that buzzed within my brain. I was a coward . . . (pp. 16-17) The Invisible Man comes to recognize the world of illusion in which he lived and for which he was partly responsible. Yet at the close of the novel he finds some identity in in visibility, and, clutching at the American dream of democ racy, wants to make others aware of the misconceptions which keep him invisible. Voltaire's Candide provides an interesting parallel. The Invisible Man is very much like the innocent Candide who learns that this is certainly not 14 the best of all possible worlds, yet still "cultivates his own garden" and uses what talents he has. Having been de ceived by misconceptions, the two protagonists do not suc cumb to pessimism, but instead believe, however unwarranted that belief may be, that life can be made more endurable. Throughout the central narrative, there are signs that the Invisible Man had indeed been living in a dream world of misconception. He speaks nostalgically of his ties to his Southern college, fearing dire punishment from Dr. Bledsoe, the president of the school, for the misman agement of a trustee's visit: "Here within this quiet greenness I possessed the only identity I had ever known, and I was losing it. In this brief moment of passage I became aware of the connection between these lawns and buildings and my hopes and dreams" (p. 91). In recalling the Reverend Homer Barbee's speech on the trials of the Founder of the college, the Invisible Man speaks depre- catingly of his own innocence, his mistaken belief in the "American dream:" Here upon this stage the black rite of Horatio Alger was performed to God's own acting script, with millionaires come down to portray themselves; not merely acting out the myth of their goodness, and wealth and success and power and benevolence and authority in cardboard masks, but themselves, these virtues concretely! Not the wafer and the wine, but the flesh and the blood, vibrant and alive, and vibrant even when stooped, ancient and withered. (And who, in face of this, would not believe? Could even doubt?) (p. 101) 15 His lack of perception continues in New York, where he goes to find a job with the help of Bledsoe's letters of recommendation— actually letters of betrayal: "For me this was n<bt a city of realities, but of dreams; perhaps because I had always thought of my life as being confined to the South" (p. 142). From time to time, the protagonist thinks that he has escaped his dream existence, when in reality he is only peeling off layers to get to the core of truth. With his discovery of the true Bledsoe and his "rebirth" from the hospital machine, he advances, but not as much as he be lieves. He joins the Brotherhood, a political organization which seems to allow him an opportunity to help his people and to attain an identity at the same time. Innocently, he thinks: "For the first time . . . I could glimpse the pos sibility of being more than a member of a race. It was no dream, the possibility existed. I had only to work and learn and survive in order to go to the top" (p. 308). During a confrontation with Wrestrum, a Brotherhood member, the protagonist begins to recognize his own lack of percep tion: "I wanted to punch that face. It no longer seemed real, but a mask behind which the real face was probably laughing. . ." (p. 348) . At the death of young Tod Clif ton, symbolic of the death he felt as a black puppet of the Brotherhood, the Invisible Man feels some responsibility 16 and realizes that he had been "asleep, dreaming" (p. 384). Jack, the leader of the Brotherhood, violently attacks the protagonist for his funeral oration in honor of Clifton. But in his anger his glass eye pops out, revealing that he is half-blind. The protagonist looks at him "with the feeling that I was just awakening from a dream" (p. 411). Though the Invisible Man may feel that he is awakening, the imagery of dream and illusion continues to be heavily employed. The protagonist begins to see his conception of the Brotherhood as incorrect, but he wants to return to the security of a distorted reality— he wants the reality to be illusion: "Outside the Brotherhood we were outside history; but inside of it they didn't see us. It was a hell of a state of affairs, we were nowhere. I wanted to back away from it, but still I wanted to discuss it, to consult someone who'd tell me it was only a brief, emotional illusion. I wanted the props put back beneath the world" (p. 432). Hambro discusses it with him and remarks that old methods must be changed to accommodate a larger plan, that Harlem must be sacrificed to new direc tives . The trick, he says, is to take advantage of the people in their own best interest, since it is impossible not to take advantage of them. The Invisible Man is "sud denly conscious of the unreality of the conversation" (p. 436). Now he decides to "yes" the Brotherhood, to 17 agree with their policies so that they will bring about their own destruction: he will "lull them to sleep" (p. 441). He thinks: "... if I hadn't been shifted" from Harlem to downtown, "I would still be living in a world of illusion. But now that I had found the thread of reality, how could I hold on?" (p. 442). Actually, he re mains in a dream world. He decides to fight the illusion of the Brotherhood with still another illusion— that their policies are correct: "An illusion was creating a counter illusion," he says, and akks in bewilderment, "Where would it end?" (p. 445). But an inchoate awareness of responsibility for his actions hovers in the background during the Harlem riot: "There was something I had to do and I knew that my forget fulness wasn't real, as one knows that the forgotten de tails of certain dreams are not truly forgotten but evaded. I knew, and in my mind I was trying to reach through the gray veil that now seemed to hang behind my eyes. . ." (pp. 464-65). He reaches through the veil when he real izes, though only momentarily, that by going along with Brotherhood policies, "by pretending to agree I had indeed agreed, had made myself responsible for that huddled form lighted by flame and gunfire in the street. . ." (p. 478). The militant black nationalist Ras the Destroyer appears in outlandish costume, urging the people to take up arms. 18 "Betrayer!" Ras screams at him, and he is not entirely wrong, for the Invisible Man is partially responsible for the riot. In that tortured moment the protagonist realizes "that all the months of illusion and the night of chaos re quired but a few simple words, a mild, even a meek, muted action to clear the air. To awaken them and me" (p. 482). But neither the word nor the action is forthcoming. He recognizes that he has been and is still being controlled and misled, but he does not yet fully accept his partial responsibility for this condition; I faced them knowing that the madman in a foreign costume was real and yet unreal, knowing that he wanted my life, that he held me responsible for all the nights and days and all the suffering and for all that which I was incapable of controlling, and I no hero, but short and dark with only a cer tain eloquence and a bottomless capacity for being a fool to mark me from the rest; saw them, recog nized them at last as those whom I had failed and of whom I was now, just now, a leader, though leading them, running ahead of them, only in the stripping away of my illusionment. (p. 483) With his fall underground and the burning of the items in his briefcase for light, the Invisible Man finds that the man who urged him to join the Brotherhood and who wrote his Brotherhood name on a slip of paper is the same man who sent him the anonymous note warning him to slow down his activities: . it is Jack. The result of this dis covery is the protagonist's dream of castration at the hands of those who have "run" him, symbolic of the total 19 stripping away of his illusionment. He dreams that he is held prisoner by a group including Bledsoe, Norton, Jack, and Ras. They cut off his genitals and ask him how it feels "to be free of illusion" (p. 493). VPainful and empty," he answers, and they laugh at the sight of his bloody parts hanging on a bridge. When the protagonist laughs in turn, Jack comes forward to ask why. "Because at a price I now see that which I couldn't see," the Invisible Man says. "That there hang not only my generations wasting upon the water— ," and he pauses in intense pain before he goes on: "... there's your universe. ..." Theirs is a universe made bloody by the drive of those in power who do not let truth interfere with the retention of that power. It is only after these experiences that the Invisi ble Man leaves the world of dreams and illusion to fully realize and freely admit his participation in the guilt of living in a distorted reality. Like Trueblood, who thinks "'bout how I'm guilty and how I ain't guilty," the Invisi ble Man says in the epilogue: "I'm not blaming anyone for this state of affairs, mind you; nor merely crying mea culpa. The fact is that you carry part of your sickness within you, at least I do as an invisible man. I carried my sickness and though for a long time I tried to place it in the outside world, the attempt to write it down shows me that at least half of it lay within me" (pp. 497-98). 20 Like Trueblood, who sings the blues and accepts his partial guilt in the dream-sin as part of his identity, the Invisi ble Man sings the blues and finds his identity by emerging from his dream world, perceiving his invisibility, and ac cepting his partial responsibility for it. Trueblood's dream provides another important point of. similarity between the Trueblood episode and the Invisi ble Man's narrative: The dream which the Negro farmer re counts to Norton1 and the protagonist seems almost to be a summary of the Invisible Man's experiences in his "dream" existence and his final perception of his identity. Es sentially, Trueblood's dream tells of his continual at tempts to reach a goal and symbolizes the striving of the Negro Everyman. The marked similarity between Trueblood's dream and the Invisible Man's story suggests that the pro tagonist, too, takes on the role of a Negro Everyman, es pecially since he is never given a name. That a singer of the blues in Ellison can claim the role of a Negro Every man is not startling. Edward Margolies observes: "Since the blues, according to Ellison, is by its very nature a record of past wrongs, pains:, and defeats, it serves to define the singer as one who has suffered, and in so doing it has provided him with a history. As the novel develops, the hero takes on the role of a Negro Everyman, whose ad ventures and cries of woe and laughter become the history 21 of a people. "H The end goal of Trueblood's dream is the "bright light," symbolic perhaps of the American dream. The two major phases of the dream— the plantation house and the tunnel of the machine-run clock— may symbolize the two major phases of Negro history in the United States, slavery and industrialization as well as the movements of the In visible Man's life in the South and North. In his dream (pp. 56-57) Trueblood first seeks some "fat meat," and the "white folks downtown" tell him that Mr. Broadnax will give it to him. (The name may be con nected with the punishment which Trueblood's wife metes out to him.) Broadnax lives on what seems to Trueblood to be the "highest hill in the world," for the more he climbs, "the farther away Mr. Broadnax's house seems to git." When he finally arrives at the house, he fears that he is tres passing on the social mores: "I goes through the front door! I knows it's wrong, but I can't help it." The house takes on the aura of a plantation mansion: "I goes in and I'm standin' in a big room full of lighted candles and shiny furniture and pictures on the walls, and soft stuff on the floor." This connection is emphasized by True blood' s comparison of the "big white bedroom" which he enters to one he "seen one time when I was a little ole boy •^Native Sons, p. 133. 22 and went to the big house with my Ma." Whiteness sur rounds him: "Everything in the room was white. ..." Then he looks in a corner and "sees one of them tall grand father clocks and I hears it strikin1 and the glass door is openin' and a white lady is steppin' out of it. She got on a nightgown of soft white silky stuff and nothin' else, and she looks straight at me." Trueblood "wants to run, but the only door I see is the one in the clock she's standin' in— and anyway, I can't move and this here clock is keepin' up a heapa racket. It's gittin' faster and faster all the time." The grandfather clock is reminiscent of the Invisible Man's recurring dream of his grandfather, in which the old man said that the successive envelopes in his grandson's briefcase were years and showed him that the final envelope held an engraved document with the mes sage, "To Whom It May Concern. . . .Keep This Nigger-Boy Running" (p. 35). The clock may also symbolize in part the potential progress of the Negro, for the white woman who steps down from the clock grabs Trueblood "around the neck and holds tight, tryin' to keep me out of the clock." He tries to get away, "but she's holdin' me and I'm scared to touch her cause she's white." The next major phase of the dream is Trueblood's entrance into the clock. He escapes from the woman's grasp and runs for the clock. At first he cannot open the 23 door, but eventually he moves inside, where "it's hot and dark." He goes "up a dark tunnel, up near where the ma chinery is making all that noise and heat. It's like the power plant they got up to the school." This phase of the dream seems to show the Negro as the base of white power as he enters the period after slavery. Earlier the Invisible Man had described his walk past the powerhouse at the college: "... on down past the small white Home Econom ics practice cottage, whiter still in the moonlight, and on down the road with its sloping and turning, paralleling the black powerhouse with its engines droning earth-shaking rhythms in the dark, its windows red from the glow of the furnace. . ." (p. 36). He reaches the phase of industri alization in the North with his experience in the paint factory, where he works with the pressure gauges in the basement. Trueblood "starts to runnin', tryin' to git out" of the tunnel: "I runs and runs till I should be tired but ain't tired but feelin' more rested as I runs, and runnin' so good it's like flyin' and I'm flyin' and sailin' and floatin'.right up over the town. Only I'm still in the tunnel." Trueblood later explains the physical predicament with his daughter which this passage of the dream symbol izes and compares it to his own life: "There I was, tryin' to git away with all my might, yet having to move without movin'. I flew in but I had to walk out. I had to move 24 without movin'. I done thought 'bout it since a heap, and when you think right hard you see that that's the way things is always been with me. That's just about been my life" (p. 58). The Invisible Man, too, continually feels that he has escaped the things and people that have kept him running, only to find that he is still running, and concludes in the epilogue that his whole life has been spent "underground:" "... I was clubbed into the cellar before I caught the hint" (p. 495). Until his running has come to an end, he has a dream of finding a secure identity in the society aboveground, a "promise," as Bledsoe wrote in his letter betraying the youthful protagonist, "which, like the horizon, recedes ever brightly and distantly be yond the hopeful traveler" (p. 168). Trueblood's dream has an interesting symbol for that "promise." As Trueblood puts it, "Then way up ahead I sees a bright light like a jack-o-lantern over a graveyard. It gets brighter and brighter and I know I got to catch up with it or else." The light is bright, but it is also like a jack-o-lantern; and a jack-o-lahtern, besides being a pumpkin hollowed and carved into a grotesque face, is a will-o'-the-wisp or ig nis fatuus, both terms having an alternate meaning of a deceptive attraction, a misleading objective or expectation. The simile best relates to the protagonist's unsuccessful search for identity through "Jack" and the Brotherhood: 25 ominously, and most appropriately, the "bright light" is over a graveyard. Trueblood goes on: "Then all at once I was right up with it and it burst like a great big elec tric light in my eyes and scalded me all over. Only it wasn't a scald, but like I was drownin' in a lake where the water was hot on the top and had cold numbin1 currents down under it. Then all at once I'm through it and I'm re lieved to be out and in the cool daylight agin." Because Trueblood must experience the bursting of the "big electric light" before he can emerge from the tunnel into the "cool daylight," that light seems a parallel to the 1,369 lights with which the Invisible Man illuminates his hole under ground— the light of truth which shows him that he has an identity in invisibility, but that he can move aboveground to work toward an identity in visibility where others see him as an individual. Another connection between Trueblood and the Invis ible Man is Ellison's use of one of the most striking simi les of the novel in relation to both men. Trueblood is ex plaining that his wife tried to strike him with an ax after he committed incest during his dream, and that he decided to take his punishment • But I sees there ain't no use reasonin' with her then. I makes up my mind that I'm goin' to take whatever she gimme. It seems to me that all I can do is take my punishment. I tell myself, Maybe if you suffer for it, it will be best. Maybe you owe it to Kate to let her beat you. You ain't guilty, but she thinks you is. You don't 26 want her to beat you, but she think she got to beat you. You want to git up, but you too weak to move. I was too. I was frozen to where I was like a youngun what done stuck his lip to a pump handle in the wintertime. I was just like a jay bird that the yellow jackets done stung *til he's paralyzed— but still alive in his eyes and he's watchin' 'em sting his body to death. (pp. 60-61) The Invisible Man, after learning that Jack "named me and set me running with one and the same stroke of the pen" (p. 491) , uses the same striking simile: But still whirling on in the blackness, knocking against the rough walls of a narrow passage, banging my head and cursing, I stumbled down and plunged against some kind of partition and sailed headlong, coughing and sneezing, into another di- mensionless room, where I continued to roll about the floor in my outrage. How long this kept up, I do not know. It might have been days, weeks; I lost all sense of time. And everytime I pauded to rest, the outrage revived and I went off again. Then, finally, when I could barely move, something seemed to say, "That's enough, don't kill your self. You've run enough, you're through with them at last," and I collapsed, face forward and lay there beyond the point of exhaustion, too tired to close my eyes. It was a state neither of dreaming nor of waking, but somewhere in be tween , in which I was caught like Trueblood's jaybird that yellow jackets had paralyzed in every part but his eyes. (p. 492) There is more of a relationship than the use of the simile alone, for its implications are strong. The very choice of words is significant. A "jay" can be a talkative person as well as a gullible or inexperienced person, while a "yellow jacket" is a wasp— figuratively, a 27 contemptible but irritating assailant, and perhaps not un intentionally the acronym for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. The connotations are all too appropriate. Both Trueblood and the Invisible Man are avid storytellers. Trueblood is a poor black farmer from the South and the Invisible Man is an innocent who must move through experience and illusion to understanding. Both come to realize that they have been controlled by the structure of a white-dominated society. The simile, then, primarily expresses the sense of victimi zation which both feel. But its implications go beyond those suggested by the suggestive words "jay" and "yellow jacket." The simile occurs at a crucial point in each man's story, a point at which each must determine to whom responsibility for the situation in which he finds himself should be attributed. Each eventually arrives at a reali zation of shared guilt— that society and the individual are both to blame. But at the point at which the simile is used, each man is caught between blaming himself and blam ing others. The men come to their realizations from op posite extremes. Trueblood, at one extreme, at first de cides to take full punishment for his action: he will ac cept an ax blow, even though he feels that he is not guilty. It is at this point that imagery reveals his position: he is "frozen" to his place like a youngster whose lip is stuck to a pump handle in winter; he is like a jaybird that 28 has been stung by yellow jackets until he is paralyzed in every part but the eyes, with which he is watching himself die. But at the last moment Trueblood moves aside and re ceives the blow only on the side of his face, a sign that he does not accept full blame. This act is an intuitive realization of the guilt of others; it is only after he has thought it over that he consciously realizes the truth im plicit in his action. At the other extreme, the Invisible Man blames others for his living in a distorted reality. Yet he has had a glimpse of his guilt during the Harlem riot for which he is partially responsible. This in-be tween state, the fact that he is still living under partial illusion, is revealed in the wording of the jaybird simile: "It was a state neither of dreaming nor of waking, but somewhere in between, in which I was caught like True- blood's jaybird. . ." (p. 492). Only by telling his story can the Invisible Man freely admit in the epilogue that the guilt for his situation is shared, just as it is by think ing about his experience that Trueblood consciously real izes that he alone is not to blame. Thus Trueblood's story and the Invisible Man's narrative are held together by the implications of a single simile. These three major similarities between the Invisi ble Man's story and Trueblood's— the dream-sin and final identity of one man reflected in the experiences of the ! 29 other, the protagonist's search for definition symbolized in Trueblood's dream, and the almost identically worded simile used in regard to both men— establish an intricate relationship between these variations of the Negro's search for identity. This interrelatedness emphasizes that the individual Negro's struggle for identity can represent that of the Negro Everyman. This particular example of the technique of theme and variation is only one aspect of Ellison's pervasive use of the blues concept, yet it is an aspect which adds much to our understanding of the Negro's search for definition. CHAPTER II THE METAPHOR OF THE UNDERGROUND IN DOSTOYEVSKY'S NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND, RICHARD WRIGHT'S "THE MAN WHO LIVED UNDERGROUND," AND INVISIBLE MAN A major element from our Western literary tradi tions is the metaphor of the underground. As a focal point of the Invisible Man's search for identity, this metaphor expresses the "underground" social and psychological condi tion of the protagonist by means of the underground hole in which he fully recognizes that condition. In terms of I. A. Richards' distinction between tenor and vehicle, which to gether form a metaphor, the suppression of the protago nist's individuality and his resultant psychological duality is the tenor or idea being expressed and the underground location is the vehicle or image by which this idea is com municated. Some years before the publication of Ellison's novel in 1952, Richard Wright used the metaphor of the underground experience and the underground sewer in his short story "The Man Who Lived Underground," published in 30 31 its final version in 1944.'*' Both authors almost certainly were familiar with the use of this metaphor in Fyodor 2 Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground (1864), the work which many critics consider to be a sort of prologue to the great novels of his maturity. Monroe Beardsley has, I think, correctly viewed the metaphor of the underground as extending throughout Dosto- 3 yevsky's work. However, it takes its most forceful form in Notes from Underground. The Russian title Zaplski iz podpolya (pod, "under;" pol, "floor") indicates the pro tagonist's residence in a wretched little room on the out skirts of Petersburg. At the same time it suggests the state of being suppressed, the basic condition of the underground man. There is also a suggestion of concealment, as if the underground man were engaged in subversion. In deed, he is trying to subvert a philosophical movement. He ■^A preliminary version is entitled "'The Man Who Lived Underground': Two Excerpts from a Novel," Accent, 2 (Spring 1942), 170-76. The enlarged version appears in Cross-Section 1944: A Collection of New American Writing (New York, 1944), pp. 58-102. The text is included in Black Voices: An Anthology of Afro-American Literature, ed. Abraham Chapman, Mentor Book (New York and London, 1968), pp. 114-60. The text is included in Notes from Underground & The Grand Inquisitor, trans. and ed. Ralph E. Matlaw, Dutton Paperback (New York, 1960), pp. 3-115. 3 "Dostoyevsky's Metaphor of the 'Underground,'" Journal of the History of Ideas, 3 (1942), 265. 32 objects to rationalist philosophies, popular in Russia dur ing the nineteenth century, that man is good and always seeks his own advantage: "... I boldly declare that all these fine systems— all these theories for explaining to mankind its real normal interests, so that inevitably striving to obtain these interests, it may at once become good and noble--are, in my opinion, so far, mere logical exercises! . . . But man is so fond of systems and ab stract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny what he can see and hear just to justify his logic" (pp. 20-21). From his own ex perience he believes rather that man is basically irration al and values freedom of will above a choice leading merely to his own advantage. He maintains, in fact, that man's true advantage is precisely the expression of his free will: . . . man everywhere and always, whoever he may be, has preferred to act as he wished and not in the least as his reason and advantage dictated. Why, one may choose what is contrary to one's own in terests, and sometimes one positively ought (that is my idea). One's own free unfettered choice, one's own fancy, however wild it may be, one's "most advantageous advantage" which we have over looked, which comes under no classification and through which all systems and theories are contin ually being sent to the devil. And how do these sages know that man must necessarily need a ration ally advantageous choice? What man needs is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. (p. 23) Dostoyevsky's protagonist cannot achieve an identity in the 33 underground because the movement of the human will toward complete freedom and individuality develops in him an ex tremely powerful duality. When he seeks freedom, he finds that his will can desire to be shocking and vengeful— in short, evil— just as much as it can desire to be good. He is aware of "goodness," the vague ideals which he calls the "sublime and the beautiful" (p. 7). He also has a dim con sciousness of something entirely different from underground for which he longs (p. 33), according to Dostoyevsky a be lief in Christ which censors deleted from the finished 4 work. Nevertheless, he commits evil and degrading acts in order to exhibit his individuality. In the second half of the Notes, the protagonist reveals this duality in his re lations with Liza, a young prostitute. He indulges in evil and hatred, humiliating her with bookish moralizing.' on the life of despair which lies ahead. Later, he feels some thing painful rise up in his soul, as though some crime were on his conscience. Nevertheless, when Liza gives her self to him in an expression of selfless love and pity, he humiliates her with a gesture which originates in his "evil brain" (p. 112): he pays her for her act of love. He is aware that he is incapable of real love; to him love means the exercise of power and the flaunting of moral superior- 4 Letter to his brother Michael, 26 March 1864, m Notes from Underground & The Grand Inquisitor, p. 195. 34 ity. Yet he feels a passing remorse for his vile action and follows her to beg forgiveness when she flees without the money. Turning back before he finds her, he is unable to embrace the love which Dostoyevsky sees as a means of escape from the underground duality. Instead, he develops his consciousness of his despicability to such a point that the anguish becomes a pleasure and a token of his individ uality. His indulgence in hatred and evil is an expression of the individuality which he said he was seeking in the first part. Thus the metaphor of the underground serves as a point of departure primarily for investigating the strug gle for individual identity in the face of rational systems which prevent the expression of absolute freedom of will and thereby the expression of absolute individuality. Similarly with Wright's short story "The Man Who Lived Underground," a dominant and supposedly rational system— the doctrine of "white is right"— controls the identity of the Negro. The predominant attitudes and be liefs of the white world have frustrated the Negro biologi cally, spiritually, and intellectually, thereby forcing him into the underground. There he has experienced a strong sense of duality— in this case, hate and love— while seek ing to assert his identity as an individual. Though Elli son's Invisible Man is much more complex in its treatment, its subject is essentially the same as that of Wright's 35 story. In both, however, the core of meaning which is centered on the Negro plight leads readily to a universal significance. In "The Man Who Lived Underground," the prevailing white attitudes toward the Negro are expressed by the law which accuses Fred Daniels of a crime he did not commit, the law which "had beaten him to extract the confession" (p. 152). Driven underground, Daniels attempts to realize his identity. He pecks out his name on a typewriter, perhaps significantly in lower-case letters slurred together, as if his ego has not yet manifested itself. He takes the type writer with him to his underground den and again tries to write his name. But he loses his already feeble hold on his identity: He inserted a piece of paper and poised his fingers to write. But what was his name? He stared, try ing to remember. He stood and glared about the dirt cave, his name on the tip of his lips. But it would not come to him. Why was he here? Yes, he had been running away from the police. But why? His mind was blank. He bit his lips and sat again, feeling a vague terror, (p. 138) Having gone aboveground to express his newfound feelings of love and fellowship, he is frantic to establish his indi viduality before the policemen who had forced him under ground : Panic filled him. Yes, they were indifferent to what he would say! They were waiting for him to 36 speak and they would laugh at him. He had to rescue himself from this bog; he had to force the reality of himself upon them. (p. 153) After being shot by the policeman Lawson— the representa tive of the "lawful" system which so often allows the Negro to be mistakenly deemed guilty— Fred Daniels completely loses any individuality he may have achieved and becomes an object floating in the murky sewer: "He sighed and closed his eyes, a whirling object rushing alone in the darkness, veering, tossing, lost in the heart of the earth" (p. 160). In keeping with his loss of identity in the under ground, the protagonist's chief trait is duality. This con cept of internal or psychological duality is reflected on an external level as the protagonist experiences physical movement between underground and aboveground. The primary distinction between the two poles of Daniels' internal duality is that, of his descent toward violence, deception, and injustice as against his attempt to communicate im pulses of love, fellowship, and pity. When communication proves impossible, he is thrust underground in death. Of course, the vehicle or image of the underground points up certain subsidiary meanings as well. As Edward Margolies indicates, it helps make clear the nature of man: For what the underground man has learned in his sewer is that all men carry about in their hearts an underground man who determines their behavior 37 and attitudes in the aboveground world. The under ground man is the essential nature of all men— and is composed of dread, terror, and guilt.^ And according to Robert Bone, Wright uses the underground sewer as a symbol of Negro life, the white attitude toward g the Negro, and the Negro feeling of rejection. But the most important use of the image of the underground is to bring out the protagonist's duality. While underground, Daniels' mental and emotional duality is revealed in very brief glimpses: Though he wanted to leave, an irrational impulse held him rooted, (p. 116) He had to leave this foul place, but leaving meant facing those policemen who had wrongly accused him. No, he could not go back aboveground, (p. 120) Some part of him was trying to remember the world he had left, and another part of him did not want to remember it. (p. 129) Emotionally he hovered between the world above ground and the world underground. He longed to go out, but sober judgment urged him to remain here. (p. 129) The first palpably dramatic embodiment of this struggle comes as Daniels tries to fling away a bloody cleaver which he has found in a meat locker. Unable to do so, but also 5 The Art of Richard Wright (Carbondale, 111., and London, 1969), p. 78. ^Richard Wright, Univ. of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers, No. 74 (Minneapolis, 1969), p. 28. 38 unable to determine for what purpose he wishes to keep it, he puts the cleaver into a sack which already holds a stolen radio. Later, after decorating his underground cave with money and diamonds that he has stolen, he comes to an important conclusion: Maybe anything1s right, he mumbled. Yes, if the world as men had made it was right, then anything else was right, any act a man took to satisfy him self, murder, theft, torture. He straightened with a start. What was happen ing to him? He was drawn to these crazy thoughts, yet they made him feel vaguely guilty. He would stretch out upon the ground, then get up; he would want to crawl again through the holes he had dug, but would restrain himself; he would think of going again up into the streets, but fear would hold him still. He stood in the middle of the cave, sur rounded by green walls and a laughing floor, trem bling. He was going to do something, but what? Yes, he was afraid of himself, afraid of doing some name less thing. To control himself, he turned on the radio, (p. 140) The amorality which characterizes Daniels' thoughts is strangely reminiscent of Kurtz's movement toward amorality in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, a symbolic journey to the underground of the mind. Wright uses the radio to symbol ize communication from the world above which is able to keep his protagonist from turning completely toward the violence symbolized by the bloody cleaver. The radio plays the role of the policeman that the character Marlow de scribes as a civilizing influence which is lacking in the 39 dark jungles of the Congo, a means by which the individual is kept in touch with the rest of humanity and shown the way to moral behavior. Daniels1 internal and external duality is further reflected in his double illusion while looking at the diamond-studded floor of his cave: Brooding over the diamonds on the floor was like looking up into a sky full of restless stars; then the illusion turned into its opposite: he was high up in the air looking down at the twinkling lights of a sprawling city. The music ended and a man re cited news events. In the same attitude in which he had contemplated the city, so now, as he heard the cultivated tone, he looked down upon land and sea as men fought, as cities were razed, as planes scattered death upon open towns, as long lines of trenches wavered and broke, (pp. 140-41) The vacillation between aboveground and underground is here temporarily shifted to the more universal level of heaven and earth, a move which adds considerable emphasis to the universal implications of Daniels' plight. By his very means of communication from the world aboveground, he is brought from a seeming contemplation of the stars to the violence behind the "cultivated tone"; he is returned to his previous conclusion that any act a man takes to satisfy himself— murder, theft, or torture— is right. His internal and external duality is made supremely explicit in one dream of going aboveground into a room of armed policemen and another of existing as two separate entities, a nude corpse and a guardian at its side (p. 142). The sensation 40 of duality remains as he awakens suddenly, one part of him asleep and the other aroused and tense. And just before he emerges from the underground, he feels "a cold dread at the thought of the actions he knew he would perform if he went out into that cruel sunshine." The dichotomy is heart breaking: "His mind said no; his body said yes; and his mind could not understand his feelings" (p. 147). But while underground, he has realized his partici pation in the general guilt which he has observed in every one. Others have been punished for acts which he has per formed, acts which have brought about suffering and suicide. With a sense of personal guilt and social responsibility, Daniels goes aboveground and tries to communicate his ex periences to the police, even though "his whole being was full of what he wanted to say to them, but he could not say it" (p. 149). Moved by love, a sense of fellowship, and pity, he is eager to communicate these feelings to others. He tries to explain his experience to the three policemen whose false accusation had forced him underground: "... when I looked through all of those holes and saw how people were living, I loved 'em . . ." (p. 156). He persuades them to go with him to see the underground: They did not believe him now, but they would. A mood of high selflessness throbbed in him. He could barely contain his rising spirits. They would see what he had seen; they would feel what he had 41 felt. He would lead them through all the holes he had dug and . . . He wanted to make a hymn, prance about in physical ecstasy, throw his arms about the policemen in fellowship, (p. 157) His purpose in showing them the cave is open and generous: "If he could show them what he had seen, then they would feel what he had felt and they in turn would show it to others and those others would feel as they had felt, and soon everybody would be governed by the same impulse of pity" (pp. 158-59). He goes aboveground to establish com munication, to resolve his duality and thereby to create his identity. But the restrictive system which sent him underground in the first place must protect itself, must hurl him underground again in order to perpetuate itself. The childlike impulse behind Daniels' feelings of love, fellowship, and pity may further link "The Man Who Lived Underground" to Dostoyevsky. For example, while the protagonist of the Notes exhibits neithfer selfless love nor childlike impulse, Liza is described as pure and childlike. But to better understand the importance of children and childlike qualities to the Russian author, it is first nec essary to investigate his overall concept of the under ground man. Monroe Beardsley suggests that, broadly speak ing, Dostoyevsky's works reveal three types of underground men. Having committed evil, the first comes to understand the suffering of mankind through the suffering of his own 42 conscience and finally attains a love of humanity through God. Such a character is Raskolnikov of Crime and Punish ment . The second type is violent and justifies that vio lence through an idea to which he clings, denying the nec essity of a suffering conscience and never coming to under stand that only suffering and selfless love will keep a man out of the underground. Such a man is Verhovensky of The Possessed. The protagonist of the Notes ultimately belongs to the second category as well, though he dimly realizes the possibility of escape from the underground. The third type, such as Prince Myshkin of The Idiot, is able to es cape the underground through simple love and humility. Thus the first achieves freedom through suffering, the sec- ond not at all, and the third without striving. Beardsley goes on to say that the innocence of ahildren in Dostoyev sky comes "from the fact that they have not yet entered into the bondage of the Underground and hence do not yet know evil," while "the childlike simplicity of the men of 0 the third metamorphosis comes from their direct escape." The Brothers Karamazov provides two particularly striking examples of the use of children. First the dream of a starving baby convinces Dmitri that he must suffer for 7 Beardsley, 272-74. 8Ibid., 275. 43 having willed evil— that he must complete the first meta morphosis, so to speak. He must suffer for the babe be cause everyone is responsible for everyone else. Secondly, there is a parallel between the stories of Dmitri and the 9 little child Ilusha. Since children do not know evil and have not entered the underground, this parallel might sug gest that Dmitri will soon be moving out of the under ground. The finest instance of childlike qualities in a man of the third metamorphosis is probably the simple Mysh kin, the meek and mild prince whose example cannot gnaw at the consciences of others once they have judged him to be an imbecile. For Dostoyevsky, it may well be that adults who are closely associated and even paralleled with chil dren, as is Dmitri, or who reveal distinct childlike quali ties, as does Prince Myshkin, can escape the underground. In "The Man Who Lived Underground," children and childlike qualities play an important part in the experience of Fred Daniels. The first major instance of children be ing used symbolically is the dead baby which Daniels finds floating in the sewer: Thinking that the baby was alive, he moved impul sively to save it, but his roused feelings told him that it was dead, cold, nothing, the same nothing ness he had felt while watching the men and women singing in the church. Water blossomed about the 9 Ibid., 276. 44 tiny legs, the tiny arms, the tiny head, and rushed onward. The eyes were closed, as though in sleep; the fists were clenched, as though in protest; and the mouth gaped black in a soundless cry. He straightened and drew in his breath, feeling that he had been staring for all eternity at the ripples of veined water skimming impersonally over the shriveled limbs. He felt as condemned as when the policemen had accused him. (p. 119) The next instance occurs shortly thereafter as Daniels sleeps and dreams: . . . he came upon a nude woman holding a nude baby in her arms and the woman was sinking into the water holding the baby above her head and screaming help and he ran over the water to the woman and he reached her just before she went down and he took the baby from her hands. . . . (pp. 124-25) He places the baby on the water, expecting it to sink, but it floats as he dives to try to save the mother. When he surfaces without the woman, the baby is gone. Later, in a far more abstract instance, Daniels questions why the sense of guilt he feels is "so seemingly innate, so easy to come by, to think, to feel, so verily physical" (p. 1$3). For Daniels, the answer seems to lie in the traumatic experi ence of birth: . . . it seemed that one was always trying to re member a gigantic shock that had left a haunting impression upon one's body which one could not for get or shake off, but which had been forgotten by the conscious mind, creating in one's life a state of eternal anxiety, (p. 143) i 45 Next appear several references to childlike qualities. While Daniels is trying to explain his newfound love and his realization that everyone shares in a general guilt, he is often described in terms of childlike tone of voice or behavior. He speaks of his underground experiences to the policemen: "It was a long time ago." He spoke like a child relating a dimly remembered dream. "It was a long time," he repeated, following the promptings of his emotions. "They beat me . . . I was scared . . . I ran away." (p. 150) "I was down in the basement," he began in a child like tone, as though repeating a lesson learned by heart; "and I went into a movie . . . " (p. 153) He explains that he just took the money and diamonds and other things to "play with" (p. 153) . And telling the policemen to follow him underground, he speaks "like a little boy playing a game" (p. 159). At the close of the story Daniels is shot while descending into the manhole, trying to explain to the po licemen how his experiences in the underground have brought about in him impulses of love, fellowship, and pity. He has indeed become childlike in his simplicity and aware of the significance of suffering and love. But he fails in his attempt to escape alive from the underground. Appro priately, then, the description of Daniels' body as it whirls in the current is strikingly similar to the descrip- 46 tion of the dead baby he encounters on first entering the sewer: "The water flowed past him, blossoming in foam about his arms, his legs, and his head. His jaw sagged and his mouth gaped soundless" (p. 160). The use of the strange verb "blossomed" in one instance and "blossoming" in the other; the mention of water flowing past legs, arms, and head in both cases; the similar references to a gaping but soundless mouth— all these parallels point to an identifi cation of the dead baby with Daniels as he floats dying in the blackness of the sewer. Robert Bone has suggested that the dead baby symbolizes the Negro as the "unwanted child of his culture," the destruction of "newborn hope, or pos sibility."^ Similarly, the murder of Daniels destroys the love, fellowship, and pity in him as well as his potential ity of communicating these impulses to others. The structure of the series of references to chil dren or to the childlike behavior of Daniels leads progres sively to his identification with the dead baby. The first reference to children is the discarded baby, an object out side Daniels which he tries to save but fails. Daniels' dream of a drowning mother and baby, both of whom he tries unsuccessfully to rescue, is the next. This baby is an image Within the mind of Daniels and therefore a part of “ ^ Richard Wright, p. 29. 47 him, not an object outside. The memory of the shock of birth, the "haunting impression" which has been forgotten by the conscious mind but remembered physically as a "state of eternal anxiety," is a somewhat more abstract reference to children. Nevertheless, the memory of his own birth is a far more integral part of Daniels1 experience than even the dream. Then the references to.Daniels' childlike speech and behavior begin to suggest his identification with a child. Finally, the description of Daniels' body as he floats down the sewer— a description almost parallel to that of the dead baby— is a virtual identification of the two. Thus Fred Daniels is identified primarily with poten tiality and in part with the goodness of children— both of which can be fulfilled through the feelings of love, fellow ship, and pity that he wishes to pass on to others. But the fact that he twice tries and fails to save potentiality and goodness, as represented by the two babies, prepares us for his failure to save himself from destruction. Ellison uses children and childlike qualities in Invisible Man for two major reasons: first, to illustrate the view of many whites that the Negro is a "child;" and secondly, to point up the innocence of the protagonist as he gradually awakens from illusion. The mad vet tells the young protagonist that Norton sees him as "a child, or even less-a black amorphous thing" (p. 87). With "unashamed 48 tears like those of a child before his parent" (p. 91), the Invisible Man begs pardon of Norton for having taken him to the Golden Day. When Jack refers to the "infantile notions of the man in the street, " the protagonist mocks him for being the "great white father" (p. 408). His innocence is best embodied in the scene in which he emerges from the hospital machine. His observations are made with childlike wonder: he sees a pair of eyes staring at him "through lenses as thick as the bottom of a Coca-Cola bottle" (p. 205). He reverts to childhood, remembering songs and rhymes and placing the nurse in a childhood scene. He is confronted with basic questions of identity, who he is and who his mother is, written on cards and a child's slate. When a doctor asks him about Buckeye the Rabbit and Brer Rabbit, he muses: "Anyone knew they were one and the same: 'Buckeye' when you were very young and hid yourself behind wide innocent eyes; 'Brer,' when you were older. But why was he playing around with these childish names? Did they think I was a child?" (p. 211). The doctors' habit of ad dressing him as "boy" suggests that they do indeed view him as simple and childlike. Later, -when he is about to give his first speech for the Brotherhood, the protagonist en visions himself as a child afraid to touch and trust Master, the bulldog, and suggests that Jack should be iden tified with old Master. Even during the visit with Hambro 49 to get new instructions, the protagonist's innocence is underlined by the childhood memories which he experiences as the Brother's child sings Mother Goose rhymes. When the Invisible Man learns that Harlem Negroes must be sacrificed, his innocence departs: "The distant child had stopped singing now, and it was dead quiet. . . . I could feel some deep change" (p. 433). The use of childlike qualities and children, then, is important to Dostoyevsky and the two American authors, though somewhat less so to Ellison. The three authors obviously show some similarity in their use of childlike qualities and children as indicators that an underground man should be judged favorably. The virtual identification of Daniels with a child does not indicate that he is with out guilt, like Dostoyevsky's children before they begin to understand the meaning of underground. Of course, it underlines his innocence of the murder charge against him; but primarily it emphasizes his awakening to the possibil ity of escape from the underground through suffering and love, as is the case with the child Ilusha and his adult parallel, Dmitri. When a watchman commits suicide because he has been falsely accused of a crime for which Daniels is partially responsible, Wright's protagonist becomes aware of the complicity of guilt among all humanity and tries to affirm his participation in that guilt. "The 50 watchman was guilty; although he was not guilty of the crime of which he had been accused, he was guilty, had al ways been guilty" (p. 145). Daniels himself had been falsely accused of murder. He had not killed the woman, but, as he says to the police: "... it doesn't make any difference. I'm guilty!" (p. 151). Daniels realizes that he must suffer for the guilt he shares with the watch man and with everyone else, just as Dmitri realizes that he must suffer for the murder of his father, even though he did not kill him, because he himself has willed evil and is indirectly responsible for the starving babes of the world and for everyone else. Like the underground man of the first metamorphosis, Fred Daniels suffers, understands the suffering of mankind, and achieves a love for humanity. While the Invisible Man, too, finally recognizes his par tial guilt for the condition of society and chooses love over hate, his decision is not associated with children or childlike qualities. That such an association is not made is in keeping with the relative restraint with which the protagonist declares his decision, in contrast with Daniels' childlike enthusiasm. Yet the pointed references to the Invisible Man's childlike innocence as he awakens from il lusion are more than enough to make us feel sympathy for him. Still another similarity among these authors is 51 their concern with existential themes. Dostoyevsky was no existentialist, but, as Walter Kaufmann points out, "Part One of Notes from Underground is the best overture for ex istentialism ever written.Here can be found the major themes— particularly the refusal to honor any body of sys- t • tematic beliefs and the insistence on freedom of will to realize one's individuality— which would later be developed in the so-called existentialist writers. The only marked disparity between existentialist concerns and those in the Notes seems to be the protagonist's longing for what we know from Dostoyevsky to be a belief in Christ. The vague Christian symbolism in Wright seems to be used to emphasize his protagonist's impulses toward love and fellowship, not as evidence of his belief in a higher power or a life after death, for Fred Daniels is an existential protagonist who seeks meaning and identity in a chaotic world. The "dim meaning" (p. 136) v/hich links together all that which Daniels has seen while underground is not actually stated, but all his experiences point to an existential interpreta tion. Russell Carl Brignano offers this explanation: Here Wright seems on the verge of pointing to the existential position that comprehends man free from meaning because there is no meaning, man free to shape his world because the fetters of past ficti- ■^Introd., Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, Meridian Book (Cleveland, 1956), p. 14 . 52 tious meanings based on meaninglessness are under stood for what they are. On this premise, though for him an unconscious one, Man plunges happily into the open air, intent on communicating his story and urgently hoping that other men will de tect the essence of his underground e x p e r i e n c e .12 But communication proves impossible and Daniels experiences a meaninglessness death in a world without meaning. As Brignano puts it, "the unconsciously existential materials are transported to the brink of an ebullient and optimistic vision of man's future and then are collapsed with a blast 13 of despair." Like Wright, Ellison uses Christian symbol ism primarily to underline his protagonist's move toward love and social responsibility. The thrust of the novel is clearly the Invisible Man's existential search for freedom from the underground of restriction and imposed systems so that he may establish his own identity out of the chaos. As with the protagonists of Dostoyevsky and Wright, the suppression which the Invisible Man undergoes gives rise to a powerful sense of duality. For him there are two major suppressive areas: the "white is right" doctrine and the Brotherhood. His duality in this lifelong "under ground" existence is manifested through his vacillation between the performance of mechanical actions, particularly 12 Richard Wright: An Introduction to the Man and His Works (Pittsburgh, 1970), pT 152. ^Ibid. , p. 153. 53 his "yessing" of the Brotherhood as a means of revenge against its refusal to see reality, and a recognition of his responsibility to others and to his own humanity. The protagonist's narrative begins with his grand father's telling him to be a "mechanical" man, that in his relations with whites he must "overcome 'em with yeses, undermine 'em with grins, agree 'em to death and destruc tion. . ." (pp. 19-20). He does not exactly know what the old man means, but he starts off on the path of affirmation by trying to show humility and industry as he makes his way through life. The mad veteran at the Golden Day tells him what he is during his college days: Already he is— well, bless my soul! Behold! a walk ing zombie! Already he's learned to repress not only his emotions but his humanity. He's invisible, a walking personification of the Negative. . . . The mechanical man! (p. 86), He also tells Norton just what the protagonist is to him: "To you he is a mark on the score-card of you achievement, a thing and not a man. . ." (p. 87). Even the powerful Dr. Bledsoe is a mechanical man within the system. When the protagonist inadvertently endangers the status of his race by complying with Norton's desire to speak with Trueblood, Bledsoe tells him: "Why, the dumbest black bastard in the cotton patch knows that the only way to please a white man is to tell him a lie!" (p. 124). He goes on to impress the 54 protagonist's plight upon him and to explain his own posi tion : You're nobody, son. You don't exist— can'.t you see that? The white folk tell everybody what to think— except men like me. I tell them; that's my life, telling white folk how to thinkabout the things I know about. Shocks you, doesn't it? Well, that's the way it is. It's a nasty deal and I don't always like it myself. But you listen to me: I didn't make it, and I know that I can't change it, (p. 128) In short, he helps perpetuate racial hypocrisy by pretend ing to believe that "white is right" while really maneuver ing matters to his own ends. In the paint factory where he gets a job in New York, the protagonist finds still another "mechanical" man: Lucius Brockway, an uneducated Negro janitor who is in charge of all the basement machinery. As a fiendish and stubborn boss of an underground department, he makes possi ble the dilution of Negro power into white power, as sym bolized by the protagonist's mixing ten drops of black dope into each can of pure white "Liberty" paint to enhance its whiteness. Not only does the underground janitor compose the slogan "If it's Optic White, It's the Right White" (p. 190), but he brags that "Liberty Paints wouldn't be worth a plugged nickel if they didn't have me here to see that it got a good strong base" (p. 188). The revelation of Clifton's mechanical black Sambo 55 doll leads the protagonist to suspect his role in the Brotherhood and finally to embrace the philosophy of B. P. Rinehart, a many-faceted character who represents deception, chaos, and an existence devoid of humanity. Rinehart very easily takes on deceptive roles as minister, numbers runner, lover, and briber. In other words, as one acquaintance re marks, he has "a smooth tongue, a heartless heatt" and is "ready to do anything" (p. 426) . The suggestion of outer and inner— of "rind" and "heart"— in his name is wonderful ly appropriate for a character who is a master of manipu lating appearance and reality through role-playing. His function as deceiver is also enhanced by the protagonist's frequent references to the "sinister" or "mysterious" qual ity of objects he sees through the dark glasses which, along with a wide-brimmed white hat, cause him to be mis taken for Rinehart (pp. 417, 418, 426, 430). Rinehart's function as master of chaos is clear from Ellison's inten tion to have the name stand for "the personification of 14 chaos." This aspect of Rinehart is emphasized by the fact that Ras the Exhorter decides to become Ras the De stroyer (p. 419) , and the Harlem riot breaks out. But his most important function is as bringer of a new "religion" of the mechanical man. The practical illustration of this 14 Ellison in Chester and Howard, "The Art of Fic tion," 70. 56 religion can be seen in his mechanical services held with electric guitar accompaniment (p. 430), in a "church" which has been converted from a store (p. 428). A more symbolic illustration of this religion of the mechanical man is the sign which hangs before this church: "Holy Way Station, Behold the Living God" (p. 427) . A handbill announcing the opportunity to "behold the Invisible" (p. 428) is signed by the Rev. B. P. Rinehart, Spiritual Technologist, as if he himself were the invisible-mechanical-living God. "I do what you want done!" Rinehart proclaims, and it is all to his own advantage that he satisfy everyone by taking so many different roles. In other words, Rinehart is the epitome of the mechanical man who "yeses" people while ma neuvering life to his own ends, the role forced upon the American Negro in his manipulation of the "white is right" doctrine. Though the protagonist decides to be a Rinehart in his relations with the Brotherhood, he soon realizes that he is also destroying his own humanity. He reaches for his dark glasses and finds that the lenses have been crushed; he cannot take on the identity of an amoral Rinehart. In the castration dream he looks at his bloody parts caught beneath the bridge arch and sees the bridge stride off "like a robot, an iron man, whose iron legs clanged doom- fully as it moved" (p. 493). But "full of sorrow and pain," 57 he cries: "No, no, we must stop him!" (p. 494). In the epilogue, the protagonist tries to explain his rejection of the role of mechanical man, that he "became ill of af firmation, of saying 'yes' against the nay-saying of my stomach— not to mention my brain" (p. 4 96). His decision not to be a Rinehart means that he understands the restric tive systems which limited him and can now begin to create his own identity. In the underground hole into which he has fallen, the symbolic representation of a lifetime of underground existence, he experiences the full impact of his condition: a condition of duality, of the ambivalence of hate and love that instills an impulse to seek revenge and an impulse to try to help his fellow man. He says: Here I've set out to throw my anger into the world's face, but now that I've tried to put it all down the old fascination with playing a role returns, and I'm drawn upward again. So that even before I finish I've failed (maybe my anger is too heavy; perhaps, being a talker, I've used too many words). But I've failed. The very act of trying to put it all down has confused me and negated some of the anger and some of the bitterness. So it is that now I denounce and defend, or feel prepared to defend. I condemn and affirm, say no and say yes, say yes and say no. I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abys mal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of all I find that I love. In order to get some of it down I have to love. I sell you no phony forgiveness, I'm a desperate man— but too much of your life will be lost, its meaning lost, unless you approach it as much through love as through hate. So I approach it through division. So I denounce and I defend and I hate and I love. (pp. 501-2) 58 Writing down his memoirs, however, enables him to make a final decision in favor of love: he will emerge from his hibernation, "since there's a possibility that even an in visible man has a socially responsible role to play" (p. 503). In the face of his experiences, the protagonist's expression of muted optimism may seem somewhat unwarranted. But the novel ends with the Invisible Man at least hoping to attain an identity in individuality, and feeling some responsibility for others. As we have seen, the underground serves as the ma jor metaphor of Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground and Wright's "The Man Who Lived Underground," and as one of the most important metaphors of Ellison's Invisible Man. In all three the underground is the condition in which a man finds himself when restrictive attitudes or beliefs limit the expression of his free will and thereby the attainment of his potentiality and his identity. It is a condition of duality which he can leave behind only when he escapes the restrictive systems which limit him and moves toward the fulfillment of his own individuality. In each work this condition, the tenor of the meta phor, is expressed on a psychological-intellectual level— the level on which ah:.account of a psychological "under ground" duality gives the reader a desire to thoughtfully examine the problem. Each tenor is joined by a vehicle 59 that varies in intensity on the physical-emotional level, the level on which a physical description of an underground location elicits a primarily emotional reaction in us. With Dostoyevsky the underground is not so much a place as a state of mind. The only strong reference to the under ground as a place in Notes from Underground, Dostoyevsky's most powerful embodiment of the condition, is as a "corner," a "room," a "wretched, horrid one" (p. 5) on the outskirts of civilized Petersburg. Our reaction to the work is pri marily a psychological-intellectual one. In "The Man Who Lived Underground," on the other hand, Wright gives such a powerful description of the physical repulsiveness of the sewer that the force of our emotional reaction is unduly carried over into our reaction to the protagonist's psycho- logical-intellectual plight. The metaphor of the under ground has its most balanced embodiment in Invisible Man, where the psychological-intellectual and physical-emotional aspects receive similar emphasis, thus producing an inte grated vision of the underground. This vision makes it possible for us to approach the problem of the underground experience with a greater appreciation of all its aspects. Physical descriptions of the underground sewer and den occur only in the prologue, the close of the central narrative, and the epilogue. But these are the most important points at which to employ 60 strong pictorial images of the underground. The prologue physically involves us in the underground experience, creates an emotional concern with the problem, before we move into the more intellectual examination of the central narrative. A strong pictorial image of the underground then impressively culminates the central narrative and con tinues into the epilogue. This major emotional climax is here joined by the major intellectual climax of the novel: the protagonist's realization of how and why he has lived an underground existence all his life. This union of the emotional and intellectual high points is largely responsi ble for the extraordinary impact of the close of the novel— the note of muted optimism for the protagonist's re lease from the underground and the possibility of an identity in which his individual humanity is recognized. In short, Invisible Man contains the most balanced repre sentation of the underground life, with the added distinc tion of at least considering the possibility of change in the face of a disheartening reality. CHAPTER III THE METAPHOR OF THE INFERNO Like the metaphor of the underground, the metaphor of the inferno is a traditional element which powerfully expresses the attempt of many Negroes to define themselves in contemporary American society. Suppressed by the pre dominantly white society around him, the Negro is often held back even by members of his own race. He may justi fiably feel a sense of hellish hopelessness, a vague guilt, and an urge toward violence. Ellison chooses to present the Invisible Man's search for definition in part through this metaphor. To set up a contrast between the plight of the American Negro and our traditional concept of hell, gained through our Western and decidedly Christian back ground, Ellison centers on the adaptation of elements from Dante in creating the particular hell of his protagonist. Thus the chaotic hell which a man-made society forces the Negro to endure is counterpointed by the divine order of Dante. Ellison, however, does not simply borrow Dantean elements without changing them in some way. Like Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, the two major poets of twentieth- 61 62 century American poetry, he transmutes Dantean elements into his own material. He thus illustrates Eliot's belief that The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.- * • Ellison began writing just at the height of Eliot's career. He was caught up early in this poet's work: In 1935 I discovered Eliot's The Waste Land which moved and intrigued me but defied my powers of analysis— such as they were— and I wondered why I had never read anything of equal intensity and sensibility by an American Negro writer.2 This work, Ellison points out, led him to subjects which 3 Eliot had drawn upon, and in turn to Pound and others. Without question, Pound and Eliot have adapted Dantean ele ments to their own works, transmuting the materials in the process. Critics have frequently compared Pound's Cantos with the Comedy. There is a division of the poem into cantos and a threefold grouping of the cantos themselves, ^"Tradition and the Individual Talent," in Criti cism: the Major Texts, ed. Walter Jackson Bate (New York, 1952), p. 528. 2 Chester and Howard, "The Art of Fiction," 56. 3 "Hidden Name and Complex Fate: A Writer's Experi ence in the U.S.," in The Writer's Experience: Ralph Elli son and Karl Shapiro (Washington, D.C., 1964), p. 11. 63 Pound's arrangement resembling Dante's Inferno-Purgatorio- Paradiso. Pound himself has spoken of a work of one hun dred cantos, the number in the Comedy. Furthermore, in a letter to his father on April 11, 1927, Pound mentioned three fugal elements to be interwoven in the Cantos: A. A. Live man goes down into the world of the Dead C. B. The "repeat in history" B. C. The "magic moment" or moment of metamorphosis, bust through from quotidien into "divine or permanent world." Gods, etc. Here a correspondence with Dante's three divisions seems to 4 exist. Then in 1953 Pound revealed to an exegeter "My Par- adiso will have no St. Dominic or Augustine, but it will be a Paradiso just the same, moving toward final coherence. I'm 5 getting at the building of the City, that whole tradition." Pound has also acknowledged a Dantean pattern of "people dominated by emotion, people struggling upwards, and those who have some part of the divine vision," although he added 4 Forrest Read, "A Man of No Fortune," m Motive and Method in "The Cantos" of Ezra Pound, ed. Lewis Leary (1954; rpt. New York, 1969), p. 102. Though Read feels that the Cantos "can best be read as a modern Odyssey" (p. 101), he does present as contrast the view of many critics that the pattern of the Cantos is similar to that of the Comedy. Guy Davenport, "Pound and Frobenius," in Motive and Method in "The Cantos" of Ezra Pound, p. 52. 64 that "one can't follow the Dantesquan cosmos in an age of g experiment." Similarly, T. S. Eliot has attributed to 7 Dante "the most persistent influence" on his own poetry. Eliot is particularly well-known for his borrowing of ex cerpts from the Comedy as epigraphs to some of his shorter poems and for his use of translated lines from the Inferno and Purgatorio in The Waste Land. Moreover, The Waste Land provides a view of a modern inferno, reflecting Dante's Ante-Inferno, the vestibule of the indecisive trimmers who are devoted to neither good nor evil, but only to them selves. Dantean influence also includes a strong stylistic g and formal influence on Eliot's poetry. In his essays on Dante, Eliot points to the philosophic poetry of the Comedy g Donald Hall, "Ezra Pound," in Writers at Work: The "Paris Review" Interviews, Second Series, ed. George Plimpton (New York, 1963) , p. 58. 7 "A Talk on Dante," The Kenyon Review, 14 (Spring 1952), 178-88, quoted in John J. Bullaro, ''The Dante of T. S. Eliot," A Dante Profile, ed. Franca Schettino (Los Angeles, 1967), 27. Among the references dealing with the relation between Eliot and Dante, Bullaro mentions Paget Toynbee, Homage to Dante in English Literature (London, 1921); Mario Praz, The Flaming Heart: Essays on Crashaw, Machiavelli, and Other Studies m the Relations between Italian and English Literature from Chaucer to T. S. Eliot (New York, 1958) , pp. 348-74; FI 0~ . Matthiessen, The Achievement of T. S'. Eliot (New York, 1958) ; Sister Mary Cleophus, "Ash Wednesday: The Purgatorio in a Modern Mode," Comparative Literature, 9 (Fall 1959) , 3/T9-39; and John V. Falconieri, "il Saggio di T. S. Eliot su Dante," Italica, 34 (June 1957) , 75-80. ^Bullaro, 34. 65 and tries to show that Dante unites the philosophic element and the poetic element by using an allegorical method which presents distinct visual images in a pattern of emotional states, a pattern which gives the poem its form. Eliot follows this procedure in Ash Wednesday and Four Quartets, offering a series of psychological or spiritual states through visual images experienced by the protagonist. The Waste Land, in contrast, is a series of objectively pre sented scenes intensified through historical and literary allusion. Only Tireisias, according to Eliot's note the "most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest"— the character whose experiences are those of the typist, the Phoenician sailor, and others— can make the poem his consciousness and the images thus a projection of 9 a single protagonist's experiences. Although this summary of Dante's influence on the poetry of Pound and Eliot is brief, it is nevertheless clear that they transmuted Dantean elements in incorporating them into their own works. Ellison's transmutation of elements from Dante is equally striking. He projects the Negro experience in mod ern American society primarily as a metaphorical hell. This projection includes an ascent from an infernal to a 9 . Ibid. 66 purgatorial atmosphere and an apocalyptic warning of civil war between Negroes and whites when the protagonist moves back into an infernal atmosphere during the Harlem riot. Thus the metaphorical pattern is a boomerang movement from hell to purgatory aid back to hell again, ending in the enlightenment that leads to the protagonist's realization of his identity as an invisible man, along with a muted hope for understanding and reform that will eliminate the hellish existence imposed on the Negro by the structure of society. Certainly, many elements which contribute to the metaphor of the inferno in Invisible Man may come from the mythology of hell which has developed through such works as the Odyssey and the Aeneid. Yet Ellison seems to adapt certain Dantean elements in particular. The prologue to Invisible Man gives us the first indication that the novel incorporates some elements of the Divine Comedy. Entering a marijuana dream while lis tening to the music of Louis Armstrong, the protagonist finds himself "hearing not only in time, but in space as well," and tells us that he "not only entered the music but descended, like Dante, into its depths" (p. 12). He sug gests that his story will be chiefly concerned with the infernal regions when he relates that "into my being has come a profound craving for tranquillity, for peace and quiet, a state I felt I could never achieve.1 ' ' Then, having 67 touched upon several thematic threads in the course of his dream, he "came out of it, ascending hastily from this underworld of sound. . ." (p. 15). These few references pertaining to the dream episode of the prologue prepare us for the free adaptation of elements from the Dantean in ferno . Dante's hell is divided into three main areas: that of the incontinent, that of the violent, and that of the fraudulent. The themes of these divisions recur, though not literally, in Ellison's treatment of the Invis ible Man's experiences in the South. Accordingly, the pro tagonist takes part in a battle royal in which blindfolded Negro youths do violence to their neighbors. Forced by whites to bloody violence in the prize ring, the boys soon become caught up in it and blindly lash out at one another, not really understanding what is happening. The protago nist begins to play one group against another and to push others into the midst of the blows. With his blindfold off, the biggest of the boys nevertheless remains "blind" as he refuses the protagonist's suggestion to fake the fight and bombards him with punches. Without his blind fold, even the Invisible Man remains blind because he wants to win or lose in accordance with the wishes of the whites around the ring. In Dante, those who have committed vio lence against their fellows are referred to as blind and 68 ignorant, and are kept immersed in a river of blood by vig ilant centaurs. While the bestiality of these centaurs is reflected in the lustful, drunken whites at the smoker, however, the whites do not guard the violent who are being justly punished for their sin, but rather cause innocents to engage in violence against one another. Although the theme of incontinence is treated ironically, it dominates the segment on Norton and Trueblood. The theme of fraudu- lence is illustrated by Bledsoe and the Founder, both evil counselors and hypocrites. Blind Homer A. Barbee in partic ular symbolizes the "blindness" of a "hell" in which real ity is distorted: in his poetic speech on the illustrious Founder and his successor, he is reminiscent of the blind Homer, "poeta sovrano," appearing in the fourth canto of the Inferno. We should note here that when the protagonist embraces the role of Rinehart, he helps bring on the infer no of the Harlem riot. Moving up to New York, the Invisible Man is warned of his blindness. But before he can move into a purgatori al atmosphere, he must first descend into the deepest part of hell, the basement furnaces of the Liberty Paint Factory. Lucius Brockway is clearly depicted as an infernal charac ter of the worst sort. Of the basement he remarks that "this here's the uproar department and I'm in charge. . ." (p. 186). He has "shrewd, reddish eyes" (p. 183), and his 69 overalls look "as though he had been dipped in pitch" (p. 182). Meeting him for the first time, the protagonist can- i not determine whether the old man "felt guilty about some thing himself, or thought I had committed some crime" (p. 181). In keeping with his devilish description, Lucius Brockway is an arch-traitor. It is fairly obvious that his first name resembles "Lucifer," the name of the arch-trai- tor of all time. Furthermore, his first name derives from the Latin for "light," and his surname sounds like "block way," as if he were blocking the way to the light of truth. Indeed, he is a "traitor" who submits to the control of whites and helps keep his people from achieving social equality. He even starts a fight in the belief that the protagonist has joined a union and thus betrayed the whites who gave him a job. Actually, the Invisible Man is not a traitor to the whites; instead, though he does not realize it, he is a traitor to his own people because he submits to an identity controlled by whites. A cleverly ironic scene ensues. In an action similar to that of the Dantean arch traitor who mangles more traitors of mankind in his three mouths, Lucius Brockway, as arch-traitor of the Negro peo ple, bites still another traitor to his own race. But Lucius bites the protagonist for a presumed betrayal of whites, not for the reason that we know he should be called traitor. That the old man's dentures finally skitter across 70 the floor, making it impossible for him to continue his attack, suggests that the Invisible Man is about to move to a new level of development. When an explosion rocks the basement, the protagonist suffers a "fall into space that seemed not a fall but a suspension" (p. 201), a sensation perhaps similar to that experienced by Virgil and Dante as they cling upside down to Lucifer's shaggy hide in their journey out of Hell. Like Virgil and Dante, who find them selves on a mountain in the sea after having moved through a lake of ice and past the center of the earth on their way up from the depths of the underworld, so the Invisible Man "seemed to sink to the center of a lake of heavy water. . . ." And like Virgil and Dante, who see the rising sun on Mt. Purgatory, so does the protagonist in a "clear instant of consciousness" see a "blinding flash." Immediately there after he finds himself in a hospital machine about to undergo a rebirth of sorts, a move from hell to a purgato rial atmosphere. It is perhaps significant that on entering Purga tory, Virgil speaks to Cato of Dante: "Now may his coming please you, for he goes / to win his freedom; and how dear that is / the man who gives his life for it best knows" (Purg., I, 70-72). Dante is seeking freedom from his sins so that he can attain a vision of the Divine. The analogy might be made that the Invisible Man is seeking to be free of hypocrisy and lies so that he can establish the truth of Negro-white relationships in his own mind and thereby set himself on the path to inner freedom. He moves into the purgatorial atmosphere initiated by his hospital rebirth when he meets Mary Rambo, a figure of warmth and mercy that vaguely reminds the reader of the Virgin Mary who helps Dante to view the light of the Divine Presence, or perhaps a little of Beatrice, warm yet never flinching from her duty to scold Dante for his sins and laxness in following the right path. As the protagonist falls to the sidewalk just before she appears, a "bright orange slant of sun seemed to boil up" (p. 219), and a big dark woman says, "You take it easy, I'll take care of you like I done a heap of others, my name1s Mary Rambo, everybody knows me round this part of Harlem, you heard of me, ain't you?" (p. 220). An observer remarks, "You in good hands, daddy, Miss Mary always helping somebody. ..." Indeed, in the original version of Invisible Man, in a section that was — "Liberta va cercando, ch'fe si cara, /Come sa chi, per lei, vita rifiuta." The English version is from The Purgatorio, trans. John Ciardi, Mentor Book (New York and London, 1957). The Italian text is from La divina commedia, ed. Francesco Torraca, 9th ed. (Milan, 1939). 72 eliminated because of the necessities of publication, Elli son had given Mary an even more important role: that of helping to release the protagonist from the hospital ma ll chine. Here she is clearly a major agent in allowing the protagonist to realize his identity. Already partly freed from the machine, the Invisible Man feels that he is strug gling through a dream and needs a "black" light which will enable him to see. Then, believing that he has heard a noise at the door, he articulates what he has long felt: Do I have to make you a speech? All right. Lincoln freed the slaves and I'm getting outl Say amenl You didn't cure me, you took my energy. That's it, you probably have a hospital full of us, using our energy to run your stupid machinery! What do you care about my name? How'd you get us in here, any way? With a cold pork chop and a loaf of bread? With a black snake ship, with handcuffs and a log chain? You see, I'm leaving, I'm remembering. Lincoln freed the slaves, I remember that. He freed the field niggers, and the house niggers, and the stud niggers; the red niggers and the white niggers, and the yellow niggers and the blue niggers— and I'm freeing me. . . .I'm climbing out. . . . ^ "Out of the Hospital and Under the Bar," in Soon, One Morning: New Writing by American Negroes 1940-1962, ed. Herbert Hill (New York, 1963), pp. 244-90. In an Author's Note, p. 243, Ellison locates the narrative in his novel: "For those who would care to fit it back into In visible Man let them start at the point where the explosion occurs in the paint factory, substitute the following hap penings, and leave them once the hero is living in Mary's hope. " 12Ibid., p. 265. 73 Ellison would perhaps have preferred to leave this narra tive section in the text of the published novel; he admits in a note to the excerpt, published some years later: "I am pleased for Mary's sake to see this version in print. She deserved more space in the novel and would, I think, have made it a better book. ..." He clarifies her sig nificance: "For those who desire more than the sheer nar rative ride, who hunger and thirst for 'meaning,1 let them imagine what this country would be without its Marys. Let them imagine, indeed, what the American Negro would be without the Marys of our ever-expanding Harlems."13 We can only speculate on what he would have made of her had con siderations of space allowed him to retain that section. At any rate, in the published novel, Mary has a similarly strong, though less emphatic role: while she does not help free the protagonist from the hospital machine, she does provide him with hope and purpose. When he recovers from his debilitating experience, Mary expects him to help others, too; he must be one of those who lead their people up from hell. She tells him: It's you young folks what's going to make the changes. . . . Y'all's the ones. You got to lead and you got to fight and move us all on up a little higher. And I tell you something else, it's the one's from the South that's got ^Author's Note, ibid., pp. 243-44. 74 to do it, them what knows the fire and ain't forgot how it burns. Up here too many forgits. They finds a place for theyselves and forgits the ones on the bottom. (p. 222) Soon after he has settled down at Mary's, the pro tagonist meets Brother Jack and is indeed offered the op portunity to become a leader of his people. That the Brotherhood philosophy is associated with the infernal is suggested by the name of its nightculb— the Chthonian— which is derived from the Greek chthonios meaning "under the earth" or "infernal." But the Invisible Man does not realize this and finally accepts $300 from Jack to leave Mary and join the Brotherhood. As if in mockery of his acceptance of the money and his betrayal of Mary, one morn ing before he leaves her the protagonist sees a bank in the form of a Negro that can raise a coin and flip it into his mouth. He picks it up and remarks: "In my hand its ex pression seemed more of a strangulation than a grin. It was choking, filled to the throat with coins" (p. 277). Under Mary's prodding, he tries to awaken himself with sink water, but is unable to respond to this trial baptism to change his materialistic direction. When the protagonist comes to see the Brotherhood for what it is, Mary will emerge for him as representative of the element of human concern which the Brotherhood lacks, just as the Mary of the Comedy represents mercy, sympathy, 75 and love for Dante the individual soul. But the Mary of Dante appears as a figure of divine grace at the close of the Paradiso, while Ellison's Mary has no formal religious meaning and is a very human figure from the "purgatory" following the protagonist's rebirth from the hospital ma chine. The human concern which Ellison's Mary exhibits is really tainted, for the protagonist will also conclude that to Mary as well he is essentially invisible. The seeds of this conclusion are sown early in his experience with her: . . . there are many things about people like Mary that I dislike. For one thing, they seldom know where their personalities end and yours begins; they usually think in terms of "we" while I have always tended to think in terms of "me"— and that has caused some friction, even with my own family. Brother Jack and the others talked in terms of "we," but it was a different, bigger "we." (p.274) After his nightmare of castration in the manhole, the pro tagonist will decide that, although he had been heading to ward Mary's before he fell into the underground hole, he could not return now. She, like the others, saw him not so much as an individual as a role to be played: in this case/ the leader who saves his people. Nevertheless, Mary's warm humanity is the trait that remains most important to her characterization and to the protagonist's final move toward social responsibility. In choosing to join the Brotherhood, the Invisible Man unknowingly takes the path that leads back to hell. 76 His descent toward the infernal chaos of the Harlem riot is prepared for by the hopelessness he feels at Clifton's death, but is formally initiated by his encounter with Sybil, the woman whom he plans to use as a channel of in formation about Brotherhood activities. Fortunately for his plan, she is a self-proclaimed nymphomaniac who wants a "big, black buck" to sexually assault her. She is clear-_ ly identified with the sibyl of Greek mythology, the pro phetess consulted by Aeneas before his descent into the underworld, and also mentioned in the thirty-third canto of the Paradiso. When the protagonist moves into riot-torn Harlem, Sybil is left behind in a Greek mythological set ting : We tottered before an ancient-looking building, its windows dark. Huge Greek medallions showed in spots of light upon its fagade, above a dark labyrinthine pattern in the stone, and I propped her against the stoop with its carved stone mon ster. She leaned there, her hair wild, looking at me in the street light, smiling, (p. 457) Indeed, she is a prophetess who might be said to foretell not only the Invisible Man's feelings of responsibility for having helped to cause the Harlem riot, but also his final decision to work toward social reform, just as it is the sibyl who guides Aeneas through the underworld journey which impresses him with his responsibility to work toward the future greatness of the Roman social order. When the 77 protagonist remorsefully wipes off the lipstick inscription which he placed on her stomach after a pretended seduction, he thinks: "What had I done to her, allowed her to do? Had all of it filtered down to me? My action . . . my— the painful word formed as disconnectedly as her wobbly smile— my responsibility?" (pp. 454-55). In the Harlem riot, Sybil is figuratively present when he begins to understand his partial responsibility for the destruction and uproar. He sees mannequins hanging down before a gutted store front and is struck with horror: "But are they unreal, I thought; are they? What if one, even one is real— is . . . Sybil? I hugged my brief case, backing away, and ran. . ." (p. 481). Just as Odysseus and Aeneas see the future during their descents into Hades, so the Invisible Man, in his descent into the Harlem hell and the underground, sees that continued violence may be the future of America unless each American realizes that he is partially responsible for the condition of society. The appearance of what may be considered "Harpies" also suggests that the protagonist is moving into the hell 14 of the Harlem riot. While these female bird-monsters in habit Virgil's underworld, Dante's use of them seems more relevant to Ellison's adaptation. In the Inferno the Har- 14 Glauco Cambon, "Ralph Ellison o dell'invisibil- ita," autaut, No. 14 (March 1953), 143. 78 pies punish the suicides, those who have brought about their own destruction. In Invisible Man, too, birds of punishment torment the protagonist who has helped bring about the "suicide" of his own people and of his own integ rity. As he moves beneath a huge bridge, the protagonist recounts: To my right and ahead the church spire towered high, crowned with a red light of warning. . . . Far ahead in the dark I saw the monumental bridge, ropes of lights across the dark river. . . . It came, a twitter, a coo, a subdued roar that seemed trying to tell me something, give me some message. I stopped, looking around me; the girders marched off rhythmi cally into the dark, over the cobblestones the red lights shone. Then I was beneath the bridge and it was as though they had been waiting for me and no one but me— dedicated and set aside for me— for an eternity. And I looked above toward the sound, my mind forming an image of wings, as something struck my face and streaked, and I could smell the foul air now, and see the encrusted barrage, feeling it streak my jacket and raising my brief case above my head and running, hearing it splattering around, falling like rain. I ran the gantlet, thinking, even the birds; even the pigeons and the sparrows and the goddam gulls! I ran blindly, boiling with outrage and despair and harsh laughter. Run ning from the birds to what, I didn't know. I ran. Why was I here at all? I ran through the night, ran within myself. Ran. (pp. 460-62) Another indication of the protagonist's moving into the hell of the Harlem riot is his encounter with Dupre, a figure reminiscent of Cerberus, the three-headed guardian 15 dog of the underworld. While Cerberus is mentioned in 15Ibid., 144. 79 the Odyssey and the Aeneidf he appears in the Inferno as guardian of the gluttons who wallow in putrefaction. The scene of looting, waste, and decay in Harlem shows at least a general similarity to Dante1s setting for the three-head ed dog. There are many signs that point to the identifica tion of Dupre with Cerberus. As one of a band of looters, Dupre wears "three hats upon his head" (p. 466) ; the phrase "thrice-hatted head" is tellingly repeated from time to time. Dupre's friend Scofield brings up the subject of "dog days" and explains to the protagonist that he means 16 "hot weather" (p. 468) . In a sense, Dupre stands guard over the destruction of the man-made hell of a tenement that claimed the life of his child, "that deathtrap" (p. 473) to which he helps set flames. When he finally flees the riot, the protagonist seeks Mary and the concern for individuals which she still represents for him. In a climactic scene the blindness of violence and an apocalyptic preview of civil war are coun terpointed with the hope of baptism and change to a new way of life. As water from a broken main strikes the protago nist, he begins to see more clearly and tries to get to Mary 1s: Ibid. 80 I was going for Mary's but I was moving downtown through the dripping street rather than up, and, as I started through, a mounted policeman charged through the spray, the horse black and dripping, charging through and looming huge and unreal, neighing and clopping across the pavement upon me now as I slipped to my knees and saw the huge puls ing bulk floating down upon and over me, the sound of hooves and screams and a rush of water coming through distantly as though I sat remote in a pad ded room, then over, almost past, the hair of the tail a fiery lash across my eyes. I stumbled about in circles, blindly swinging the brief case, the image of a fiery comet's tail burning my smart ing lids; turning and swinging blindly with brief case and leg chain and hearing the gallop begin as I floundered helplessly; and now moving straight into the full, naked force of the water, feeling its power like a blow, wet and thudding and cold, then through it and able partly to see just as another horse dashed up and through, a hunter taking a barrier, the rider slanting backward, the horse rising, then hit and swallowed by the rising spray. I stumbled down the street, the comet tail in my eyes, seeing a little better now and looking back to see the water spraying like a mad geyser in the moonlight. To Mary, I thought, to Mary. (p. 485) Particularly effective as an apocalyptic image of war is the black horse "charging through and looming huge and un real," whose tail is a "fiery lash" across the eyes of the protagonist, making him flounder about blindly and helpless ly. Fortunately, the possibility of a change to a new way of life engulfs the image of the horses of civil war— one horse is "swallowed by the rising spray"— and the protago nist stumbles down the street, the comet tail still in his eyes, to seek out salvation in Mary. Although he finally realizes that he cannot find salvation in her because she also sees him largely as a role to be played, the possibi.1- 81 ity of salvation which he can create for himself owes a great deal to her concern for individuals. Ellison clearly intends to end his novel on a note of affirmation. In speaking of his protagonist, he empha sizes that "his movement vertically downward (not into a 'sewer,1 Freud notwithstanding, but into a coal cellar, a source of heat, light, power and, through association with the character's motivation, self perception) is a process of rising to an understanding of his human condition. Elsewhere, in commenting on his use of certain themes, sym bols and images of color from Negro folk material, Ellison further explains the idea of "rising:" In my book this sort of thing was merged with the meanings which blackness and light have long had in Western mythology: evil and goodness, ig norance and knowledge, and so on. In my novel the narrator's development is one through blackness to light; that is, from ignorance to enlightenment: invisibility to visibility. He leaves the South and goes North; this, as you will notice in reading Negro folktales, is always the road to freedom— the movement upward. You have the same thing again when he leaves his underground cave for the open. However, this muted optimism seems somewhat forced on the substance of the novel. The Invisible Man has come up from hell to a brief purgatorial atmosphere only to be boomer- ■^"Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke," Partisan Review, 25 (1958), 221. ■^Chester and Howard, "The Art of Fiction," 62. 82 anged back into hell, for "that (by contradiction, I mean) is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomer ang." This is one of the lessons he stresses in the pro logue, and he adds, "I know; I have been boomeranged across my head so much that I now can see the darkness of light ness" (p. 10). The vision of a world made better through the efforts of the Invisible Man is a vague possibility glimpsed from the tentative sanctuary of an underground hole. The experiences of the protagonist are clearly cen tered in the infernal regions, with the rebirth from the hospital machine and the possibility of rebirth from the underground in part emphasizing the chaotic blindness of hell. Marcus Klein goes so far as to speak of "the desper ate, empty, unreasonable, and programmatic optimism of the last few pages of the novel. ..." He goes on: One asks this hero how he is to come out and be socially responsible? Upon what ground in reality can he affirm any positive principle? Just what is he going to do? Everything in the novel has clarified this point: that the bizarre accident that has led him to take up residence in an aban doned coal cellar is no accident at all, that the underworld is his inevitable home, that given the social facts of America, both invisibility and what he now calls his "hibernation" are his per manent condition. And really his only extension into the upper world can be in negative acts and fantasies of vengeance— which do indeed make up another ending to the novel.19 ^ After Alienation: American Novels in Mid-Century (Cleveland, 1964), p. 109. 83 Ezra Pound could have been speaking for Ellison when he said that "it is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse. It is obviously much easier to find inhabi- 20 tants for an inferno or even a purgatorio." Perhaps that is why Ellison can so successfully employ the metaphor of the inferno, and even bring in purgatorial elements through the metaphor of rebirth, but cannot completely convince the reader that the Invisible Man's "movement upward" will con tinue after he has reached the "enlightenment" of under standing his own invisibility. The reader's cautious acceptance of the affirmation at the close of the novel results largely from the ambiva lence of the protagonist himself. As we have noted in the last chapter, Ellison deftly employs the metaphor of the underground to emphasize his protagonist's strong ambiva lence between hate and love. One reason for his joining this metaphor with the metaphor of the inferno is to pro ject a powerful sense of unjust suppression. But he very probably joins these two metaphors for still another pur pose: it is a masterly means of combining a situation of hellish hopelessness with an ambiguous reaction of hate and love that allows the reader to accept a muted hope for re 20 Hall, "Ezra Pound," in Writers at Work, p. 56. 84 form and understanding. Nevertheless, the sense of suppression, pain, guilt, and hopelessness projected by the metaphor of the inferno remains powerful, particularly because of Ellison's adapta tion of Dantean elements to contrast the ordered and just punishments of the traditional hell with the chaotic and unjust suffering, especially confusion of identity, which our own society inflicts on some of its members. The Italian master, whose influence was strong in nineteenth and twentieth-century American literature and especially in Pound and Eliot, has thereby contributed to contemporary Negro American writing as well. It is to the credit of Ellison that, like Pound and Eliot before him, he did not seek to imitate Dante but rather to adapt Dantean elements to the particular vision of experience which he presented. CHAPTER IV A DUAL NATURE: PICARESQUE NOVEL AND BILDUNGSROMAN Invisible Man fulfills all the requirements of a comprehensive definition of the traditional picaresque novel, and its use of picaresque techniques considerably enhances its central theme of the Negro1s search for iden tity. This is not to say that the picaresque novel con cerns itself with the problem of definition except in the most peripheral way. It is simply that in our time pica resque techniques seem peculiarly suited to express the at tempt of the Negro to develop his personality from a state of pre-individuality in the South toward a sense of some individuality and identity in the North. Not only are they appropriate to the wandering involved in the journey toward identity, but they put the journey into stark relief, pointing up the world of chaos and deception which the pro tagonist must confront in his attempt to define himself. This existential journey forms the basis for what has cau tiously been called the neo-picaresque. Ihab Hassan has characterized the protagonist in each of several contempo rary American novels, including Invisible Man, as an anti- 85 86 hero whose primary trait is his awareness of himself and whose existential situation is defined by the difference between his innocence and the destructiveness of his ex perience. When accommodation between the self and the world outside seems no longer possible, the protagonist becomes a rebel-victim, the rebel who denies but does not say No to life, and the victim who surrenders but does not say Yes to oppression. Because both acts affirm the human against the nonhuman, there is finally an affirmation of life.l Invisible Man certainly fits into this concept, but the point is that while it exhibits the few isolated pica resque elements of the so-called neo-picaresque, it ful fills the genre definition of the traditional picaresque as well. At the same time, however. Invisible Man puts such emphasis on the protagonist's search for identity that it cannot be labeled simply a traditional picaresque novel, but rather a picaresque novel which takes on the added di mension of a Bildungsroman, or novel whose young protago nist attempts to discover the nature of the world, to dis cern its meaning and pattern, and thus to devise a philos ophy of life. This dual nature of the novel enables us to view its central theme from a broader perspective and is therefore worthy of close examination. After establishing Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary A m g r.jg .a n ,. Hovel (Princeton, 1961), pp. 6-7, 31, 327-29. 87 that Invisible Man is a picaresque novel, I intend to show that it takes on elements of the Bildungsroman because of Ellison's strong emphasis on his protagonist's attempt at self-definition, and particularly on his sense of moral re sponsibility. Stuart Miller has recently done a study of the picaresque novel which systematically tries to define an ideal genre type by distinguishing a number of formal or technical devices aimed at projecting a particular pica resque sense of life as essential and unending chaos.^ i agree with his genre definition in all respects but the omission of satire as one of the formal devices. In dis cussing twentieth-century novels, many of which have been called picaresque but which he feels may often more cor rectly be termed comic novels or novels of absurdity, Miller comprehensively attempts to establish that Invisible Man is picaresque in the traditional sense.^ Like the ^rhe Picaresque Novel (Cleveland, 1967). To de termine a genre definition of the picaresque novel, Miller examines novels generally deemed "picaresque" from about 1550 to 1750, a period after which there is disagreement as to what is picaresque. From the Spanish masterpieces Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), Aleman's Guzman de Alfarache (1599 and 1605), and Quevedo's La vida del Busc6n (1626) , he goes on to Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus (1669), Le Sage's Gil Bias (1715, 1724, 1735), Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), Defoe's Moll Flanders (1722), and Smol- lett's Roderick Random (1748). He concludes that Gil Bias is not a picaresque novel in the traditional sense. 3Ibid., pp. 134-35. 88 established examples of the picaresque, he points out, it is episodic in plot and exhibits a violent rush-of-events rhythm, a pattern of alternating tffood and bad fortune, and a series of accidental occurrences. In his character, too, the Invisible Man is like the traditional picaro: he is lacking in a self or definition. He cannot achieve a stable affection; his internal disorder symbolizes a cha otic external world and is at the same time a practical reaction to that chaos, for emotional attachment will sim ply lead to disillusionment. The Invisible Man is lonely, too, because no one really sees him. The protean changes of form that derive from the confusion of the picaro's per sonality are seen in the protagonist's assumption of many different roles, which he often views as "possibilities" that can offer some enjoyment. Finally, like the tradi tional picaro, the Invisible Man eventually becomes a kind of rogue; he begins to follow a deceptive course either for its own sake or as a protest against the chaos of the world again expressing some enjoyment in the very decision to practice deception. In interpretive devices such as style, narration, and ending, Invisible Man is also very similar to the tra ditional picaresque. It has a varied and kinetic style and id replete with short sentences and rhythmic repetition. It is written in the first person, in keeping with the tra- 89 ditional picaresque novel which usually restricts its point of view to the picaro, and which may or may not be auto biographical. This first person point of view forces us to undergo the experiences of the picaro and therefore to sympathize with and even identify ourselves with him. Furthermore, the narrative point of view is disordered in keeping with the narrator's experience of the world. Al though Miller limits himself to this statement in regard to the narrative point of view in Invisible Man, we may refer to his investigations into the picaresque novel for some explanation. He may have in mind that the Invisible Man as narrator resembles the narrator Jack Wilton in Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller. Jack Wilton's indulgence in drink as he tells his tale shows the consistency between his disordered character as narrator and his disordered character as picaro. In addition, his comments on his drinking offer a logical basis for the disorder of his story.^ Similarly, in the prologue the Invisible Man gives us a rationale for any disorder— digressions, comments, or whatever— which may interrupt the dramatic, continuous ac tion of the narrative: "Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you're never quite on the beat. Sometimes you're ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of ^Ibid., pp. 103-4. 90 time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around" (p. 11). Like Guzman de Alfarache, though much less intrusively, the Invisible Man makes numerous commentaries that enhance the meaning of the dramatic action, such as the extended comment on the many possible ways to attain success: "And that lie that suc cess was a rising upward. What a crummy lie they kept us dominated by. Not only could you travel upward toward suc cess but you could travel downward as well; up and down, in retreat as well as in advance, crabways and crossways and around in a circle, meeting your old selves coming and go ing and perhaps all at the same time" (pp. 440-41). As in Guzman de Alfarache, we feel a sense of tension and strain as the Invisible Man moves between trying to tell his story and trying to interpret it, to get some meaning out of the confusion. The intense word play in which the narrator en gages also points up the chaos which he has experienced. As Miller says in speaking of Pablos in El Buscon, "If the world is insane, it may be best to joke about it, to bury 5 xt under a barratfe of verbal wit." Last in the area of interpretive devices is the more or less open ending. Be cause universal disorder can be left behind only in death, the picaresque novel usually has an open ending through 5Ibid., p. 112. 91 which we have a sense of the final instability of the nar rator.® In Invisible Man the protagonist tells us of his decision to move out of his hole into the world above, where he will find still more of the chaos which forced him into the hold in the first place. Indeed, the protagonist warns that although he is moving up from underground be^ cause of the pattern which his mind finds in chaos, that chaos must not be forgotten:" . . . the mind that has con ceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern . was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals. Thus, having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge"(p. 502). I conclude with Miller that Invisible Man is a picaresque novel, that it expresses an essential and unending chaos in life. This chaos, he mentions, may be enhanced by various motifs which more properly belong under the heading of con tent.7 Such motifs as corrupt representatives of the law, charlatan physicians, and corrupt clerics emphasize the lack of order in the world. Since these motifs are fre quently used as elements of satire in the picaresque, I am ®Ibid., pp. 102, 132. 7Ibid., pp. 97-9 8. 92 inclined to speak of satire as a formal device which con tributes to the picaresque sense of life as chaotic. In deed, the picaresque condition clearly invites the use of satire. While the picaro does not have a fixed place in society, neither does he reject society or rebel against it. However, because he lives on the fringes of the social system and is not completely a part of it, he has a partic ularly good vantage point from which to criticize it. Of course, the less the struggle for survival concerns him, the more the protagonist is likely to take a satirical view of the self-deceptions and hypocrisies of mankind. Still another facet of the picaresque situation may urge the use of satire. Though an outcast, the picaro enjoys our sympathy largely because, as the protagonist, he usual ly tells his story in the first person. For the most part he is candid about his virtues and vices, while other men immerse themselves in hypocrisy. When he meets them, Q therefore, their moral integrity is often under scrutiny. The picaresque novel, which Northrop Frye calls "the story of the successful rogue who . . . makes conven tional society look foolish without setting up any positive s t a n d a r d , is representative of the satirical attitude in 8Robert Alter, Rogue's Progress: Studies in the Picaresque Novel (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), p. 95. 8Anatomy of Criticism; Four Essayg (Princeton, 1957), p. 229. 93 which a systematic view of life is criticized. It tends to break up patterns that men impose on life and to show this disintegration through the chaotic form of the satire. Some of the actions of disorder which contribute to this chaotic form are the magnifying, diminishing, and confusing tendencies which Alvin Kernan has developed from Pope's three classes of disordered rhetorical figures in Peri Bathous: or Martinus Scriblerus His Treatise of the Art of Sinking in Poetry.Each is really a necessary condition or result of the other two, and they must be considered to gether. The objects of satire have heroic images of them selves and construct monuments to their self-importance (the philanthropist Norton and the college which his money has built). To this end, they reduce spirit to matter and the vital to the mechanical. The mechanical takes such forms as the manipulation of one individual by another or by some force outside himself: Kernan mentions the image of the Dancing-Jack or puppet,^ and we are reminded of Clifton's black Sambo doll. The meaningful patterns in the world then become separate, disjunct objects and a series of mobs. This mob tendency, the tendency toward * 1 p confusion, may show itself in scenic elements: fantastic •^The Plot of Satire (New Haven, 1965) . •^Ibid. , p. 56 . •^Ibid. , p. 35. 94 clothing (Ras the Exhorter in his African garb), crowd and mob scenes (the Battle Royal, the Harlem riot), labyrinths and disordered buildings (the eviction scene, the burning tenement). Several structural devices used in satire are ironic techniques: the wise fool (the mad doctor at the Golden Day), the mock encomium (the eviction speech in which the praise of Negroes as "law-abiding" is really a mockery and a means of getting them to break the "law" by returning the goods of the evicted couple). A broader ironic technique reveals itself in the ironic movement of the true fools— the objects of satire: through their ac tions of folly, they achieve just the opposite of what they intend— what seems to be and what is are opposed in some way.~ Norton is singled out for particularly scathing irony. The Negro people are his "fate," his "destiny?1 ? what happened to them would be connected with what happened to him (p. 42). However, although he professes to see Negroes as individuals, he really uses them for his own purposes, without thought to their individuality. In the epilogue the Invisible Man tells Norton, now lost in a New York subway and asking directions, that he probably does not know who he is because he has no idea of where he is, and that he is asking directions because he is ashamed. Norton's denial shows that he is headed toward chaos, the 95 chaos of the Golden Day so dangerously near the college, the dream gone awry. The teachers and other skilled work ers whom he wants to create and upon whom he says his fate depends will become the mad vets of the Golden Day who have gained professional skills and found that their knowledge brings them not dignity, but abuse and degradation. In re fusing to recognize the individuality of blacks, Norton has helped to create an explosive situation that makes the attainment of his dream ultimately impossible. By dealing in his own distorted version of reality, he reveals him self as a fool worthy of satirical attack. Such structural techniques of irony, along with the previously mentioned magnifying, diminishing, and confusing actions of disorder, certainly attest to the use of satire as a formal device which contributes substantially to the major identity of Invisible Man as a picaresque novel. Of course, our genre definition shows what is uni form in the novels which are termed picaresque. Differen ces from one traditionally picaresque novel to another are determined by such elements as the stage in the development of literary traditions in which the work is created, speci fic social conditions, a certain prevailing view of life, and the author's individual genius. A picaresque novel may take on certain added dimensions because of any or all of these elements. Invisible Man, for example, was created in 96 the United States in the mid-twentieth century. More specifically, it was created in a period of "accommodation" following the pre-World War II years of alienation which had been characterized by a sense of separate identity that refused to reconcile itself to social circumstance. Marcus Klein defines his term in relation to the novel: By "accommodation" I mean to suggest that simul taneous engagement and disengagement which is the characteristic movement of the novel in these past years. The hero begins in freedom of the self and discovers that he is isolated. The hero chooses community— he assumes racial obligations, or he declares himself a patriot, or he makes love— and he discovers that he has sacrificed his identity, and his adventures begin all over again. The goal is the elimination of the distance between self and society, the perfect union of self and society, but the issue of this novel is at best a lesson in the perpetual necessity of killing adjustments. What is at best to be achieved in this necessary marriage is a caution ary, tentative accommodation, and that is the method, in this world, of social engagement.13 Certainly, Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie Marchl^ (1953) is a novel of accommodation. Augie willingly par ticipates in other people's visions of reality and of him, but at the same time he has a strong sense of his own sep arate identity, one which he is continually striving to achieve. In order to maintain his separateness, Augie can- •^After Alienation, p. 30. •^The text is a Compass Book (New York, 1960) . 97 not reconcile himself with the versions of reality which everyone around him is inventing. The individual's crea tion of his own version of reality to justify and protect himself is the inadequate solution. But true reconcilia tion is also unattainable. The possibility of reconcilia tion must simply be hoped for. Augie's final stance is one of hope: "Look at me, going everywhere! Why, I am a sort of Columbus of those near-at-hand and believe you can come to them in this immediate terra incognita that spreads out in every gaze."15 invisible Man, too, deals with the prob lem of individual identity within community, but accommoda tion is more difficult to achieve for the Negro writer. The assertion of love and social responsibility at the close of the novel may seem unwarranted, the desperate voice of a Negro unable to accept either a black or a white identity. Yet even the most skeptical reader must concede that unless Ellison ends on a note of some hope for accom modation, he will find himself at a dead end, the possibil ity of change blocked.^® This emphasis on the individual seeking to achieve his "self" within society provides The Adventures of Augie March and Invisible Man with elements of the Bildungsroman. •^Ibid. , p. 536. ■^Klein, p. 145. I 98 In fact, Augie March may essentially be defined as one. Although it has several characteristics of the picaresque novel, it is not a picaresque novel in the traditional sense because it does not project life as radical chaos. Bellow simply uses the picaresque wandering and varied ex perience to enhance a Bildungsroman. Invisible Man, on the other hand, is a picaresque novel in the traditional sense: employing a wide spectrum of formal devices, it forcefully projects radical chaos. Yet the protagonist is basically like Bellow's wanderer, ever in the process of discovering who he is. The opening paragraph of the central narrative seems to present a summary of a Bildungsroman: It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contra- dictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expecta tions to achieve a realization everyone else ap pears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man! (p. 19) At the close of the novel, the protagonist even hopes to move from this external condition of "invisibility" toward a "visibility" made possible by people who recognize his individuality. In other words, while Invisible Man is a picaresque novel, it takes on the added dimension of a 99 Bildungsroman. The search for identity is also the theme of the early twentieth-century Bildungsroman by James Joyce, the celebrated A Portrait of the Artist as a Y8ung Man. I n deed, both Invisible Man and Portrait exhibit not only the search for identity as their major theme, but also the creation of the artist and writer. An allusion to Joyce highlights the Invisible Man's consideration of identity and artistic creation. As he ponders the problem of be coming "more human," he remembers what his college pro fessor had told the class: "Stephen's 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" (p. 307). Like Stephen Dedalus, whose "soul had arisen from the grave of boyhood, spurning her graveclothes," allowing him to "create proudly out of 1 ft the freedom and power of his soul,"xo the Invisible Man ■^The text is a Compass Book (New York, 1964) . 18Ibid., p. 170. 100 undergoes a climactic rebirth, an assertion of his identi ty. In relating his memoirs, he has even begun to clarify an identity as an artist. Stephen Dedalus passes through several initiatory stages to reach that climactic rebirth: from de.voutness and conformity to rebellious sin, then to repentance, and finally to an apprehension of mortal beauty which fires his desire to create. The Invisible Man, too, undergoes sever al preparatory rebirths before achieving the final one. Significantly, the cyclical pattern of Ellison's novel re sembles the ritual cycle of man's mythical going down into the pit and emerging with the ability to prophesy, descend- 1 Q ing into symbolic death and being resurrected. J These re births in Invisible Man are often accompanied by flight and bird imagery similar to that in Joyce. Daedalus, the myth ical craftsman whose creation is his means of reaching freedom, is the central image of Portrait. Another out standing image is the girl who crystallizes Stephen's desire to be an artist, the wading girl whom he likens to a beautiful seabird. The image of a bird-girl appears in several impor tant scenes of rebirth in Invisible Man. One is the blonde ■^Ellin Horowitz, "The Rebirth of the Artist," On Contemporary Literature, ed. Richard Kostelanetz, expanded ed., Discus Book (New York, 1969), p. 330. 101 at the smoker— according to the protagonist, "like a fair bird-girl girdled in veils calling to me from the angry surface of some gray and threatening sea" (p. 23)— who is tossed into the air and spun around by her admiring tormen tors. The protagonist undergoes initiation in the bloody prize ring and emerges, in a parody of artistic creation, to spit out a speech on the virtue of humility. A more ob vious bird-girl image is the white girl who, after compli menting the protagonist on his eviction speech, directs him to the roof as he is fleeing from the police. In moving across the roofs he looks back to see what turns out to be Brother Jack scrambling after him, and he brushes against a cote of "frantic white birds" (p. 248). After descending to the street, he heads through a block of funeral parlors with funeral cars parked along the curb. But hurrying on, he is still able to see the girl's face below the flight of stairs he had ascended a short time before: her appearance foretells his rebirth into the Brotherhood. It is accompa nied by a related scene of real birth, as the protagonist suddenly sees a man leap out of a car with a physician's bag: "Hurry, Doctor," a man called from the stoop, "she's already in labor I" "Good," the doctor called. "That's what we've been waiting for, isn't it?" "Yeah, but it didn't start when we expected it." 102 I watched them disappear inside the hall. What a hell of a time to be born, I thought. (p. 249) Jack approaches him immediately thereafter, and the pro tagonist is born into his new life as orator and political activist. Flight imagery— but not the bird-girl— appears in another central scene of rebirth: Clifton's death and the Invisible Man's resulting change of attitude toward his role in the Brotherhood. The protagonist sees a flight of pigeons start up from the trees, and Clifton is shot "in the swift interval of their circling, very abruptly and in the noise of the traffic— yet seeming to unfold in my mind like a slow-motion movie run off with the sound track dead" (p. 376). Tod's flight is cut down: "He's a cooked pi geon," a policeman says (p. 378). But the Invisible Man moves into the subway, into the darkness from which he will emerge into a new birth. Significantly, he sees three black youths who "seemed to move like dancers in some kind of funeral ceremony" (p. 380), indicating the death of his old attitude. They portend what will eventually happen to him in his relation to the Brotherhood, for they are un touched by it and "perhaps like Clifton would mysteriously have rejected its mysteries" (p. 381). He expresses his new attitude of defying organization policy in his funeral oration at Tod's burial. 103 Jack's outburst over this defiance moves the In visible Man toward his initiation into the revelation of Rinehart. When Rinehart's girl friend mistakes the pro tagonist for her lover, he is enveloped in the scent of her "Christmas Night" perfume, an indication that another rebirth is near. Wearing the sunglasses which are Rine's trademark, he moves toward the underground subway, the scene taking on an appropriately mysterious atmosphere as his eyes adjust. Only after Rinehart's methods have been revealed to him does the image of the bird-girl return in the form of Rine's girl friend suggesting a way for the protagonist to gain information about the Brotherhood: " . . . she seemed to perch on the bed, a bright-eyed bird. . * * Then I was fully awake and the bird gone and the girl's image in my mind. . ." (p. 442). Sybil's role as prophetess, not as a source of information, emerges as the Invisible Man moves beneath the bridge which leads to Harlem and the bird imagery takes on the horror of the com ing revelation that he is partly responsible for the de^ struction. The rebellion of the son against the father-figure of authority is strong in Portrait. Stephen rebels against his own father as well as academic and religious authority, finally replacing these figures with that of Daedalus. The father-son struggle plays an equally important role in 104 Invisible Man. The "great white father" figures and the Negro surrogates are set against the Negro children who need help and protection and tofoo must keep their place to remain in favor. Like the god who must be slain so that the new life of the ritual can be attained, the father must be overcome so that the son may assert his identity. But the son is traditionally torn between submission and rebel lion, and this duality is especially marked in the Invisi ble Man. His ambivalence is embodied in his prologue dream of the Negro slave who poisoned her master so that he would not be killed by their sons. The slave both loved and hated her master; she loved him but she loved freedom more. In sympathy, the protagonist remarks that he, too, has be come "acquainted with ambivalence" (p. 13). Accordingly, although he starts by identifying with the father figures, this attitude becomes more and more undercut by a feeling of rebellion. When he pseudo-seduces Sybil, he acts out the final rebellion against family and racial restrictions, and the riot results. The final punishment for him is castration in the dream sequence. Here, as with the Fisher king of mythic ritual, reproductive powers are scattered on 20 the water so that new lxfe may be born. Though the Invisible Man does not take on a new 2QIbid., pp. 337-42, offers a more thorough treat ment of this topic. 105 father-figure, he is like Stephen Dedalus in emerging from a father-son struggle and a series of initiations to as sert his identity and to be born anew. His preparations for a final resurrection to the world above are undercut by his statements of doubt, a caution far from Stephen's exultation at the close of Portrait, though some critics interpret Joyce's ambiguous ending as an ironic presenta tion of the protagonist's immaturity and self-indulgence. Yet the common major theme, the central allusion to Por trait, the similar use of flight and bird imagery, and the treatment of the father-son struggle in Invisible Man all suggest that Ellison's study of Joyce may have helped him to shape his novel. The strong emphasis on the protagonist's search for identity, which makes Invisible Man more than a picaresque novel, may be even better appreciated if we compare its 4 ending with that of Lazarillo de Tormes, the prototype of the picaresque novel. The typical picaresque pattern is that of an innocent becoming a trickster because the world is full of trickery. In manipulating appearances and af firming the world's chaos, he gives up his personality and becomes an appearance h i m s e l f . Lazarillo de Tormes ^Miller, The Picaresque Novel, pp. 56-57, discus ses this pattern in some detail. 106 established the pattern: the protagonist is a relatively innocent boy who, by means of serving a series of masters, gradually learns to live by his wits and to act deceitfully and hypocritically. From the blind man and the cleric he learns greed and hypocrisy. With the squire, however, Lazarillo becomes compassionate and provides food for his own master. He now has in him the potential for trickery and the potential for goodness. At this point, too, the boy is at his height as a person and at the lowest point of his material fortunes. But he receives no reward for his compassion and hereafter, as Norma Louise Kutman says, "looks out for himself, so that, as he descends into com placent hypocrisy, he ascends in the order of material sat- 2 2 isfaction to the 'cumbre de toda buena fortuna"'— the height of all good fortune as a towncrier who makes an ex pedient union with the archpriest's mistress. Readily fol lowing the archpriest's advice to concern himself with his own advantage, Lazarillo joins the roguish world as a hyp ocrite who suspects his wife's conduct but silences his friends' remarks by telling them that there is no better woman in Toledo. The protagonist of Invisible Man, unlike Lazarillo, is not evading the truth at the close of the novel. Although he changes from innocent to trickster, his 22"universality and Unity in the Lazarillo de Tormes," PMLA, 76 (1961), 472. 107 realization that he is causing the suffering of his own people keeps him from remaining a hypocrite. His assertion of an identity in invisibility and a hope for something better is very unlike Lazarillo's hypocrisy and unwarranted self-complacency. In both works the basic picaresque pattern of in nocence joining up with the deceit and hypocrisy which it encounters is very appropriately enhanced by the symbolism of blindness and illumination. Actually, in Lazarillo illumination is not used as a symbol. Rather, the nature of the word alumbrar (to illuminate, to give light to, to enlighten) is metaphorical and suggests that Lazarillo is given light or understanding; that is, the word alumbrar evokes an image of light in order to illustrate the idea of understanding. The different functions of blindness and illumination are one expression of the contrast between Lazarillo's willing surrender of identity for material gain and the Invisible Man's assertion of an identity. In Lazarillo the symbolism of blindness and the metaphorical alumbrar are used primarily to create an atmosphere of irony, the blindness of deceit into which the protagonist is sinking being interpreted by him as illumination, both human and divine, toward a profitable path in life. When the blind man says that he can teach his servant much of the ways of the world, Lazarillo gives him credit for having 108 illuminated him: "And so it was, for after God, it was he who gave me life, and though blind himself, lighted my way and trained me for the race of life."22 Learning well from his teacher, Lazarillo begins to play tricks on the blind man and to take revenge for the beatings which he receives. He becomes self-deceitful: when he guides his master into a post, his betrayal of the blind man's trust takes place, he says, "above all, because God on that occasion blinded his understanding, so I could avenge myself on him. . . " (p. 18).2^ The final irony is Lazarillo's complacency in having obtained what he eloquently deems the "zenith of all good fortune" (p. 74) ,22 while shutting out the probable truth of his wife's relationship with the archpriest who has provided that good fortune. It is very forcefully em bodied in his reminiscence that "God was pleased to illumi- 23 The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes: His Fortunes and Adversities, trans. Harriet de Onis (Woodbury, N.Y., 1959), p. 6. All further translations will be from this text. La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes y de sus fortunas y adversidades, ed. Everett W. Hesse and Harry F. Williams (Madison, 1966), will serve as the Spanish text. It gives the Spanish original for the cited quotation: "Y fud asf; que despues de Dios, dste me did la vida y, siendo ciego, me alumbrd y adestro en la carrera de vivir" (p. 8). 2^" ... lo mds principal, porque Dios le cegd a aquella hora el entendimiento, fue por darme del vengan- za ... " (p. 17). " ... la cumbre de toda buena fortuna" (p. 57). 109 9 £ nate me and set my feet on a profitable path" (p. 71) . Invisible Man instead uses the symbolism of blindness to suggest deceit, hypocrisy, and distortions of reality, and the symbolism of illumination in particular to indicate the protagonist's final understanding and identity. As we have pointed out, this emphasis on the Invis ible Man's search for identity makes Ellison's work more than a picaresque novel. To further substantiate the new dimension which the novel acquires, we should recall the protagonist's sense of partial responsibility for the op pressive society around him. When we consider this aspect in particular, Ellison's trickster protagonist goes far beyond the characterization of the traditional picaro. While taking some pleasure in the society around them, picaros have no qualms about criticizing it. But they nevertheless accept it in the sense that they do not ac tively attempt to rectify it. They engage in trickery as a means of survival, certainly, and also perform gratui tous tricks. They may attempt to escape, as do Pablos to the Indies and Simplicissimus to the life of a hermit. But they seem not to feel any responsibility for the con dition of society or the desire to work actively toward re- 2 g " ... quiso Dios alumbrarme y ponerme en camino y manera provechosa" (p. 55). 110 form. As Frank Wadleigh Chandler says of the Spanish pi caro, "Life for him is a problem to avoid, not to solve."2^ If the Invisible Man does not owe his sense of moral responsibility for the condition of society to the picaro, he may owe it in part to the primitive rogue-hero, whose contribution to the modern type of trickster is em phasized by Raney Stanford. Coming down to us in episodic adventures, the first literary heroes display human quali ties and fears but are able to change into different shapes of animals or manifestations of nature— they bring together human qualities with demonic surges of nature. Perhaps be cause they are demonic as well as human, they come to be both tricksters and culture heroes,28 as with the mischie vous but medicinal Hermes. Though some folklorists and anthropologists have held that the anti-social trickster was given his culture-creating aspect by priests who wanted to use him for purposes of community indoctrination, Stan ford believes that the first literary hero had as his fun damental nature a certain moral ambiguity: because change involves bringing harm as well as good into the world, such a figure would have been a potential destroyer as well as 27 Romances of Roguery: An Episode in the History of the Novel. Part I. The Picaresque Novel in Spain (New York, 1899), p. 50. 28Paul Radin, The Trickster (London, 1956), pp. 166-69 in "The Return of Trickster: When a Not-a-Hero Is a Hero," Journal of Popular Culture, I (Winter 1967), 229. Ill a potential savior. He played his role as culture-bringer in a primitive world that called on him to display practi- 0 Q cal intelligence and timely cowardice as a trickster. The primitive unknown world of yesterday is today the society of man, able to control and dehumanize. The shifting of shapes has moved from the outside world to with in man himself. Invisible Man, for example, portrays the deceptive members of society and the trickster protagonist who finds himself adapting to them through changing roles and finally through deceit, through mechanical actions which block out his individual humanity. As society grows more powerful in controlling and dehumanizing our lives, so the trickster protagonist experiences a victimization and a loss of identity against which he protests, thus drama tizing our own conflicts in the modern world. This modern trickster hero is a hero precisely because he articulates and gives significance to our plight. He finds a literary progenitor in Dostoyevsky's man from underground, who takes on the role of trickster hero even though he refers to him self as an anti-hero.3® This characteristic is certainly the hallmark of Ellison's Invisible Man. We sympathize ^Stanford, 229. 30Ibid., 233-34. 112 with his decision to yes the Brotherhood to death, though it finally brings destruction on his own people. We ap plaud him as he lives rent-free and drains off power from Monopolated Light & Power, rather than pay outrageous rates. We feel some hope, though it is a flicker almost extinguished by doubt, as he plans action aboveground. He may say that he is "no hero, but short and dark with only a certain eloquence and a bottomless capacity for being a fool to mark me from the rest" (p. 483), but he more truly says, "Who knows but that/ on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?" (p. 503). Yet here it should be emphasized that the Invisible Man, in his final rejection of any exalted suffering which excludes actively working toward change, differs from Dostoyevsky's underground man. $he Russian protagonist refuses personal responsibility for the situation of soci ety; he does not try to change it: Even now, many years later, I somehow remember all this as very bad. I have many bad memories now, but— hadn't I better end my "Notes" here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write this story; so it's hardly literature so much as corrective punishment. After all, to tell long stories, for example, showing how I have ruined my life by morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting enfironment, through divorce from reality, and vainglorious spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits of an anti- hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant 113 impression, for we are all divorced from life, we are all cripples, every one of us, more or less. We are so far divorced from it that we immediate ly feel a sort- of loathing for actual "real life," and so cannot even stand to be reminded of it. 31 The Invisible Man, on the other hand, realizes that he must admit some degree of responsibility for the condition of society and work toward its reform. His sense of partial responsibility is the major factor which separates this trickster protagonist from the picaros who exploit society rather than agonize over it and the underground man who agonizes over its suppression of his individuality but fails to plan toward its reform. One indication of the importance of individual moral respon sibility to Ellison is his consideration of its treatment in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, a novel which, perhaps not surprisingly, exhibits a good many picaresque tech niques though it does not portray the chaos that would help to make it a picaresque novel in the traditional sense. The situation is this. Faced with the choice of returning the Widow Watson's runaway Negro slave, Jim, and collecting the reward, or "stealing" Jim into freedom from a new mas ter, Huck is uncertain. If he returns Jim to the Widow Watson, she might sell the slave into bondage down the river. He writes her a letter, but reconsiders: 31 Notes from Underground, p. 114. 114 I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a- trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: "All right, then, I'll go to hell"— and tore it up. It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head, and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn't. And for a starter I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again. . . .32 Ellison eloquently discusses the significance of this de cision: Huck Finn has struggled with the problem poised by the clash between property rights and human rights, between what the community considered to be the proper attitude toward an escaped slave and his knowledge of Jim's humanity, gained through their adventures as fugitives together. He has made his decision on the side of humanity. . . . when Huck makes his decision he identi fies himself with Jim and accepts the judgment of his super-ego— that internalized representative of the community— that his action is evil. Like Pro metheus, who for mankind stole fire from the gods, he embraces the evil implicit in his act in order to affirm his belief in humanity. Jim, therefore, is not simply a slave, he is a symbol of humanity, and in freeing Jim, Huck makes a bid to free him self of the conventionalized evil taken for civili zation by the town.32 22The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Signet Classic (New York, 1959), p. 210. 33"Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity," Confluence (December 1953), rpt. in Shadow and Act, pp. 31-32. 115 While we cannot say that Ellison received direction for his ^novel from Huck's struggle, we may point out that, like Huck, the Invisible Man finally embraces personal responsi bility— the high point of his search for definition and a prime factor in making Ellison's novel more than pica resque. Ellison has said that "the work of literature is at its best when it has processed the content into the form itself."3^ Indeed, the development of Invisible Man into a picaresque novel with elements of the Bildungsroman is fully appropriate to the story of a youth whose picaresque wanderings in a chaotic world finally lead him to an under standing of his situation and thus to some identity in invisibility, as well as to an acceptance of his partial responsibility for the condition of society and a desire to work toward its reform. What is more, the picaresque tech niques which point to a chaotic and deceitful world make this outcome much more poignant, for it is reached against seemingly insuperable odds. 3^Allen Geller, "An Interview with Ralph Ellison," The Tamarack Review, No. 32 (Summer 1964), 5. CONCLUSION The search for identity has been called the predom inant theme of American literature. It is both to the credit and the benefit of the American literary tradition that Ralph Ellison, a Negro American writing about the Negro's search for identity, could so skillfully bring to gether such varied elements as the blues, the metaphors of the underground and the inferno, and the techniques of the picaresque novel and Bildungsroman, all to enhance his treatment of that theme. Perhaps the reason behind the successful adaptation and blending of these elements can be found in a statement by Ellison on fictional techniques: . . . I made a most perplexing discovery; namely, that for all his conscious concern with technique, a writer did not so much create the novel as he was created b^ the novel. That is, one did not make an arbitrary gesture when one sought to write. And when I say that the novelist is created by the novel, I mean to remind you that fictional tech niques are not a mere set of objective tools, but something much more intimate: a way of feeling, of seeing and of expressing one's sense of life. Whatever the reason for his success in adapting such varied elements, the source of that adaptation lies in his belief that "for the novelist, of any cultural or racial identity, his form is his greatest freedom and his insights are where ^■"Hidden Name and Complex Fate," p. 12. 116 he finds them." That Ellison followed this belief in Invisible Man will help to make his novel live in American and world literature. 2 "Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke," 222. BIBLIOGRAPHY 118 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Alighieri, Dante. La divina commedia. Ed. Francesco Torraca. 9th ed. Milan: Societa anonima editrice Dante Alighieri, 1939. ________ . The Purqatorio. Trans. John Ciardi. Mentor Book. New York: New American Library, and London: New English Library, 1957. Alter, Robert. Rogue's Progress: Studies in the Pica resque Novel. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1964. Beardsley, Monroe. "Dostoyevsky's Metaphor of the, 'Under ground.'" Journal of the History of Ideas, 3 (1942) , 265-9Tn ; Bellow, Saul. The Adventures of Augie March. Compass Book. New York: Viking, 1960. Bone, Robert. The Negro Novel in America. Rev. ed. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1965. _________. Richard Wright. Univ. of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers, No. 74. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 19 69. Brignano, Russell Carl. Richard Wright: An Introduction to the Man and His Works. Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1970. Bullaro, John J. "The Dante of T. S. Eliot." A Dante Pro file . Ed. Franca Schettino. Los Angeles: Univ. of Southern California Press, 1967. Cambon, Glauco, "Ralph Ellison o dell'invisibilita." aut aut, No. 14 (March 1953), 135-44. Chandler, Frank Wadleigh. Romances of Roguery: An Episode in the History of the Novel. Part I. The Pica- resque Novel in Spain. New York: Macmillan, 1899. Chester, Alfred, and Vilma Howard. "The Art of Fiction VIII: Ralph Ellison." The Paris Review, No. 8 (Spring 1955), 54-71. 119 120 BIBLIOGRAPHY (Continued) Davenport, Guy. "Pound and Frobenius." Motive and Method in "The Cantos" of Ezra Pound. Ed. Lewis Leary. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1954; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1969. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes from Underground & The Grand Inquisitor. Ed. and trans. Ralph E. Matlaw. Dut ton Paperback. New York: Dutton, 1960. Eliot, T. S. "Tradition and the Individual Talent." Criticism: the Major Texts. Ed. Walter Jackson Bate. New York: Harcourt, 1952. Ellison, Ralph. "Hidden Name and Complex Fate: A Writer's Experience in the U. S." The Writer1s Experience: Ralph Ellison and Karl Shapiro. Washington, D. C.: Gertrude Clarke Whittall Poetry and Literature Fund for the Library of Congress, 1964. _________. "The Blues." The New York Review of Books, 6 Feb. 1964, pp. 5-7*1 "Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke." Partisan Review, 25 (1958), 212-22. _________. Invisible Man. Signet Book. New York: New American Library, 1952. _________. "Living with Music." High Fidelity (December 1955) . Rpt. in Shadow and Act. New York: Random, 1964. _________. "Out of the Hospital and Under the Bar." Soon, One Morning: New Writing by American Negroes 1940- 19^2. Ed. Herbert Hill. New York: Knopf, 1963. _________. "Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity." Confluence (December 1953). Rpt. in Shadow and Act. New York: Random, 1964. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton! Princeton Univ. Press, 1957. 121 BIBLIOGRAPHY (Continued) Geller, Allen. "An Interview with Ralph Ellison." The Tamarack Review, No. 32 (Summer 1964), 3-24. Hall, Donald. "Ezra Pound." Writers at Work: The "Paris Review" Interviews, Second Series. Ed. George Plimpton. New York: Viking, 1963. Hassan, Ihab. Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contem porary American NoveTT Princeton: Rrinceton Univ. Press, 1961. Horowitz, Ellin. "The Rebirth of the Artist." On Contem porary Literature. Ed. Richard Kostelanetz. Ex panded ed. Discus Book. New York: Avon, 1969. Hutman, Norma Louise. "Universality and Unity in the Lazarillo de Tormes." PMLA, 76 (1961), 469-73. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Compass Book. New York: Viking, 1964. Kaufmann, Walter, ed. Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre. Meridian Book. Cleveland: World, 1936. Kernan, Alvin B. The Plot of Satire. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1965. Klein, Marcus. After Alienation: American Novels in Mid- Century . Cleveland: World, 1934. La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes y de sus fortunas y adver- sidadesT Ed. Everett W. Hesse and Harry F. Williams. Madison: Univ. of Wisocnsin Press, 1966. The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes: His Fortunes and Adver- sities Trans. Harriet de Onis. Woodbury N. Y. : Barron's Educational Series, 1959. Margo1ies, Edward. The Art of Richard Wright. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, and London: Feffer & Simons, 1969. ________ . Native Sons: A Critical Study of Twentieth- Century Negro American Authors. Philadelphia: Lippinco tt-, 1968 . 122 BIBLIOGRAPHY (Continued) Miller, Stuart. The Picaresque Novel. Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve Univ., 1967. Olderman, Raymond M. "Ralph Ellison's Blues and Invisible Man." Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Litera~ ture, 7 (Summer 1966), 142-59. Read, Forrest, "A Man of No Fortune." Motive and Method in "The Cantos" of Ezra Pound. Ed. Lewis Leary. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1954; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1969. Stanford, Raney. "The Return of Trickster: When a Not-a- Hero Is a Hero." Journal of Popular Culture (Winter 1967), 228-42. Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Signet Classic*! New York: New American Library, 1959. Wright, Richard. "The Man Who Lived Underground." Black Voices: An Anthology of Afro-American Literature. Ed. Abraham Chapman. Mentor Book. New York: New American Library, and London: New English Library, 1968.
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Ruzicka, Dolores Anne
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Ralph Ellison'S "Invisible Man" As A Repository Of Major Elements From Principal Western Literary Traditions
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