"A slightly different sense of time": palimpsestic time in Invisible Man. (2024)

Ralph Ellison once argued, in a panel discussion with William Styron and Robert Penn Warren on "The Uses of History in Fiction," that novels have the potential to rearrange time, a potential that grants novelists "a special, though difficult, freedom. Time is their enemy, and while chronology is the ally of the historian, for the novelist it is something to manipulate or even to destroy" (Ellison et al. 63). In these remarks, Ellison does not claim that novelists should disregard historical fact but rather that they are not bound to abide by any chronological record of events. They are instead free to reorder and analogize history, to combine events and elide them, as they try to "get at those abiding human predicaments which are ageless and timeless" and to "tell us ... the symbolic significance of what actually happened" (64).

Despite Ellison's claims for the agelessness and timelessness of the novel's concerns, however, Invisible Man is a novel deeply preoccupied with time and history. Scholars have long recognized its extensive historical engagements; as Eric Sundquist writes, "Through the first-person narrative of his anonymous protagonist, Ralph Ellison recapitulated the course of modern African-American history" (1). Yet Ellison also presents his protagonist with several conflicting models of history and, even more fundamentally, with several conflicting modes of time itself. While Invisible Man portrays a journey through a telescoped and allegorized African-American history, it also interrogates the diverse means by which people perceive time and attempt to impose competing narrative, historical, or political structures upon it. The novel manipulates time and abandons linear chronology to examine how variant temporal and historical structures can govern, circ*mscribe, or potentially empower the individuals who are subjected to them.

The role of history in Invisible Man is hardly a new subject in Ellison scholarship; the novel's historical allusions and parallels have been documented by numerous critics, beginning most notably with Russell G. Fischer and continuing with the work of Susan L. Blake, Richard Kostelanetz, and Eric Sundquist, among others. The earliest scholarly work in this area tended to regard the novel as a historical parable, in which "Each stage in the protagonist's personal history corresponds to an era in the social history" of African-Americans (Blake 126; see also Fischer 339). Other scholars, such as John Callahan, reversed this formulation, reading the novel's historical content as a reflection of or set of stages in the protagonist's intellectual development. More recently, critics such as Kimberly W. Benston, Robert G. O'Meally, and Deborah Cohn have examined the novel's presentation of various competing models of history, with a particular emphasis on the Brotherhood's quasi-Marxist dialectics; Cohn and O'Meally further argue that Ellison attempts to expand the boundaries of history to include the previously unacknowledged records of African-American and vernacular culture. But although these critics have devoted considerable attention to the forms of history on display in Invisible Man, few of them have addressed the novel's equally important examination of the forms of time, an examination that underwrites and informs Ellison's historical commentary.

The historical ideologies encountered by the Invisible Man are reflected in a Northern patriarch's belief in deterministic fate, a group of disaffected veterans' conviction that all history is chaos, a black nationalist's desire to return to African origins, and a heavily symbolic representation of Marxist teleology and Hegelian dialectics. Yet these competing ideologies are often predicated on--and sometimes indistinguishable from--conflicting modes of time. The characters' emphases on fate or chaos or national origin often stem from their convictions about, or their desires for, temporal stasis, repetition, or regression. But Ellison rejects each of these ideologies of history, and their attendant modes of time, usually because they project a reductive or deterministic model of African-American identity. In response he searches for other models of time and history, models that he hopes will reflect African-Americans' experiences without dictating their futures.

Ellison ultimately arrives at the form of the palimpsest: a synchronous conflation or superimposition of multiple historical periods upon the present. The term, originally denoting a parchment on which one text has been overwritten with another, has been used to refer to narrative conflations of time at least since H.D.'s novel Palimpsest. According to Margaret M. Dunn, the traces of past writing legible beneath the present text make the palimpsest "a symbol for recurring patterns of human experience" (55), and in this sense time in Invisible Man is also palimpsestic, as the novel constantly provides echoes of past eras within the narrative present.

Unlike H.D.'s novel, however, Invisible Man employs the palimpsest as the narrative representation of a distinct, racially specific mode of temporality. Ellison first outlines this temporality, and elaborates on its causes, in his essay "Harlem Is Nowhere." Written as Ellison worked on the manuscript for Invisible Man, "Harlem Is Nowhere" proposes that

 American Negroes are caught in a vast process of change that has swept them from slavery to the condition of industrial man in a space of time so telescoped (a bare eighty-five years) that it is possible literally for them to step from feudalism into the vortex of industrialism simply by moving across the Mason-Dixon line. (296)

This passage recalls Alain Locke's testimony in The New Negro that "The migrant masses, shifting from countryside to city, hurdle several generations of experience at a leap" (4) and that these urban migrations constitute "a deliberate flight not only from countryside to city, but from medieval America to modern" (6). As Ellison had first read The New Negro in high school and "was to reread it many times" ("Locke" 441), it is unsurprising that he expands upon Locke's observations in "Harlem Is Nowhere," arguing that African-Americans' prolonged feudal indenture and their drastic transition into industrial modernity have resulted in an accelerated sense of time. This new temporality demands "new definitions of terms like primitive and modern" ("Harlem" 297-98) precisely because the two are so immediately and incessantly juxtaposed in African-American life.

"Harlem Is Nowhere" serves as a precursor and companion to the temporal explorations of Invisible Man, clarifying the social and economic origins of the novel's presentation of time: the past is legible in the Invisible Man's world precisely because it has not yet vanished for African-Americans. Ellison thus represents a racialized perception of time by means of the palimpsest. For him, the palimpsest is the only temporal model that acknowledges the importance of the past in shaping African-American identity without condemning individual African-Americans to repeat it. Thus, the novel does not simply recapitulate the course of history; Invisible Man also attempts to dramatize a distinctly African-American experience of time.

Entering the palimpsest

The prologue initiates Ellison's temporal interrogations, framing Invisible Man within conflicting modes of perceiving and structuring time. On one level the prologue presents a highly fatalistic temporality, since it prefigures the chronologically earlier but narratively subsequent events of the rest of the novel. Since the novel unfolds toward a fixed end, an underground lair on the borders of Harlem, Ellison might seem to echo the conviction of characters such as Norton and Brother Jack that time follows a telic course to a predetermined end.

However, the prologue also introduces a radically different kind of temporality when the Invisible Man hints that his racial "invisibility" provides him with an alternative awareness of time:

 Invisibility ... 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 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. (8)

This possibility of stepping inside a relativistic time then fuels an explicit rejection of other, more mechanistic modes of temporality:

 Once I saw a prizefighter boxing a yokel. The fighter was swift and amazingly scientific.... But suddenly the yokel, rolling about in the gale of boxing gloves, struck one blow and knocked science, speed, and footwork as cold as a well-digger's posterior.... The yokel had simply stepped inside of his opponent's sense of time. (8)

By implication, the ability to perceive alternative modalities of time can similarly trump or at least challenge the deterministic modes of "scientists" such as Norton and Jack.

The Invisible Man also hints at the long, painful, and often contradictory development of his awareness of these alternative modes of time when he says, "that (by contradiction, I mean) is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang. (Beware of those who speak of the spiral of history; they are preparing a boomerang....)" (6). This passage concisely summarizes the evolution of his philosophy of time: he first believes in a unidirectional, diachronic model (the arrow) not unlike Norton's concept of fate, then discovers circular, potentially synchronic modes (the spiral) such as the frantic cyclicality of the Golden Day. But after the bitter lesson of the Brotherhood's dialectics, the Invisible Man discovers that circularity can be just as fatalistic as linearity, just as much an instrument for maintaining the status quo and a weapon for continuing the dispossession of those who are already dispossessed (the boomerang--a refinement of the spiral with movement that is similarly circular, but teleologically directed and applied toward violence). (1) Ellison's symbolic representations of time prove equally mutable throughout the rest of the novel, as the Invisible Man continually revises his beliefs and reverses his opinions until he finally discovers a nondeterministic mode of temporality in the form of the palimpsest.

The Invisible Man introduces the concept of the palimpsest when he describes his own experience of stepping inside time, as he narrates his descent into Louis Armstrong's "What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue." Listening to Armstrong's record with the assistance of some marijuana, a drug that "destroys one's sense of time completely" (13)--referring, presumably, to linear time--the Invisible Man hears multiple tempos that correspond to progressively descending levels of caves. Each cavern presents scenes from different periods in African-American history, forming a subterranean palimpsest within the song. Similarly, the Invisible Man's hurried climb back out of the caves, punctuated by a collision with "a speeding machine" (12), is an ascent back out of the past into a clash with a violent modernity. This metaphorical journey into and out of history is only possible because time, like Armstrong's song, is a palimpsest, a simultaneous copresence and conflation of multiple periods.

Before the Invisible Man can discover the form of the palimpsest, however, he must encounter a series of characters who articulate their own contradictory models of temporality. His exposure to these models, and their weaknesses, gradually teaches him how different concepts of time can inhibit or empower human agency and how the past exerts a continuing influence on the present. The university trustee Norton, for example, promotes a paternalistic view of fate, yet is also invested in returning to and preserving the past--a philosophy both deterministic and retrograde in its implications. Norton speaks incessantly of fate and destiny (39-42) and reveals that his "real life's work" is not finance or philanthropy but the "first-hand organizing of human life" (42). This controlling aspect of Norton's patronage becomes even more pronounced when he tells the Invisible Man, "You are important because if you fail I have failed by one individual, one defective cog" (45), and when he twice mentions his interest in training African-Americans to become mechanics (44, 45). Any mention of science or machinery always signals danger in Invisible Man, but Norton's figuration of black students as cogs in his machine--whether defective or not--is a more blatant signal than most. Norton proposes a mechanistic model of time in which African-Americans' political, social, and economic futures are not only strictly predetermined but are also important only as karmic guarantors of his fate, his destiny.

While the Invisible Man obligingly attempts to accept this temporal creed, he remains blind to its retrograde and reactionary consequences. Norton initially reminisces about visiting the campus grounds when "Slavery was just recently past" (39), when he "came down ... to see the barren land" (39) of the newly liberated freedmen. Given his obsessions with the campus's "trees ... flowers ... [and] fertile farmland" (38) and his annual returns "each spring" (39), Norton apparently envisions himself as a fertilizer and redeemer of the once-barren land. But for Norton to maintain this personal Waste Land narrative each spring, the land must remain in perpetual need of redemption; African-Americans must always linger in the ashes of slavery if they are to continue to receive his helping hand. (2) For all that Norton purports to be interested in fate and destiny, his paternalistic dream presupposes a kind of temporal stasis, preserving the misery of the past so that he might always alleviate it. Ellison hints at this temporal and cultural retardation by surrounding Norton with allusions to the culture of antebellum America, from his injunction to learn about Emerson (41) to a Golden Day veteran's disingenuously mistaking him for Thomas Jefferson--complete with a mocking reference to Jefferson's descendants "on the 'field-nigg*r' side" (78). The line not only ridicules Norton's own anxieties of familial purity, but it also confronts him with another truth that he has suppressed with equal vigor: it reminds him that the Jeffersonian America he nostalgically commemorates was built on slavery.

But Norton's interest in and connection to slavery is most apparent in his encounter with Jim Trueblood. This episode is one of the most heavily examined in Ellison scholarship, but its critical discussion has largely been dominated by a focus on incest as the sole link between Norton and Trueblood, to the neglect of other, more historicized and racialized connections between them. (3) Yet Norton is initially drawn to the share-cropper because of his retrograde historical philosophy; Trueblood's living evocation of slavery attracts the financier long before he hears of the incest scandal. Norton first commands the Invisible Man to stop the car when he sees the Truebloods' log cabins (46), his fascination increasing when the Invisible Man tells him they "were built during slavery times" (47). Norton comments, "I never would have believed that they were so enduring. Since slavery times!" (47)--yet while he nominally refers to the cabins, he is actually "looking across the bare, hard stretch of yard where two women ... moved with the weary, full-fronted motions of far-gone pregnancy" (47). He appears to be projecting the cabins' age and historical continuity onto their inhabitants--and effectively seeing the women as slaves.

Moreover, Norton's fearful fascination with degeneration and "the human stock" (47) suggests that he views conventional, exogamous reproduction as a vehicle of familial and historical decline, hence his interest in the pregnant women, whom he imagines are reproducing without losing their connection to the past. At this point, his obsessions with his dead daughter and his own familial purity begin to shade his interest in the Truebloods, but his initial attraction to them is based on historical as well as prurient desires. Ellison thus foregrounds not only the irony implicit in Norton's desire to keep his daughter and his family line pure through the taboo act of incest but also the racism implicit in the philanthropist's desire to preserve and reinscribe the past by suspending African-Americans in a state of perpetual indebtedness and slavery.

While Trueblood shocks Norton with the suggestion that he too might have successfully committed incest and survived (Baker 87), the next episode, in the chaotic and temporally confused Golden Day, unravels the industrialist even further. The bar's name evokes Lewis Mumford's The Golden Day, a treatise on the early nineteenth-century American literature that Norton cherishes, but the chaos of the bar drastically undermines Norton's and Mumford's rose-tinted views of the past. In Invisible Criticism, Alan Nadel roundly criticizes Mumford for ignoring the importance of slavery and race in antebellum America and argues that Ellison's Golden Day episode responds to Mumford's whitewashed literary history by confronting Norton with the racial obsessions of the antebellum period (85-103). The Golden Day thus comments on both antebellum literature and twentieth-century literary criticism. (4) But while the episode has received considerable critical attention for its literary palimpsest, it also serves as a temporal palimpsest, playing a crucial role in the Invisible Man's development by opposing Norton's models of time, fate, and history.

The veterans-turned-mental patients of the Golden Day reject Norton's telic view of time, instead proposing that time moves in circles; one veteran says, "I'm a student of history" and proclaims, "The world moves in a circle like a roulette wheel" (81). As if to demonstrate this theory, the wheel of time has spun madly out of control in the Golden Day, rendering different periods temporarily synchronous. The mental patients identify Norton as General Pershing (72), Thomas Jefferson (78), and John D. Rockefeller (78), conflating him with various historical predecessors. The building, too, is a palimpsest of different establishments. When Norton asks what it was used for in the past, the bartender--who is named Halley, like a comet that cycles past Earth with clockwork regularity--informs him that "It was a church, then a bank, then it was a restaurant and a fancy gambling house, and now we got it.... I think somebody said it used to be a jailhouse too" (80). (5)

The building's history recapitulates a fall from spirituality into crass commercialism and social anarchy, a fall not unlike the one Mumford hyperbolically describes in American history after the Civil War. But Ellison is no adherent of Mumford, and he demonstrates that the building's past roles persist into the present. The Golden Day still acts as a "sporting-and-gambling house" (80), albeit not a fancy one, and it serves as a jailhouse and madhouse on the days the veterans are permitted to run rampant. More significantly, the force of those institutions the building once embodied--particularly the rule of Jim Crow law--has consigned some of the veterans, like the doctor, to the asylum. The bar even retains a parodic trace of the building's original religious function in the millennialist zeal of one of its patrons, a detail Nadel connects to the spiritualist fervor of the American Renaissance (89-92, 95). The Golden Day does not supplant its predecessors; instead it represents an accretion and culmination of all of them. Its patrons understand, far better than the young Invisible Man does, that they live within a cyclical repetition and accumulation of all previous eras.

The inmates also contradict Norton through their belief that they have no control over either time or history. The veteran doctor even blames Norton for the bar's temporal chaos, telling him, "The clocks are all set back and the forces of destruction are rampant down below.... you are confusion come even into the Golden Day" (93). Certainly there are immediate causes for the Golden Day's chaos--the arrival of a white man, the toppling of Supercargo and the superego he implies--but the doctor suggests that Norton has agitated the Golden Day beyond its normal state of disorder through his foolhardy attempt to control fate and destiny, an attempt for which he mocks Norton several times (94, 95). In response to Norton's attempted mastery over time, the veterans present their own model of time as a chaotic circularity, a repetition that operates beyond human control without any teleological goal.

The Golden Day chapter therefore represents an important step in the Invisible Man's developing sense of time, as Ellison undoes all of the arguments his protagonist absorbs so unquestioningly from Norton in chapter 2. Time retains none of the orderly continuity that Norton wishes to impose on it, standing revealed instead as a turmoil, a constant conflation or resurgence of earlier periods. The Golden Day's time resists any attempts to preserve the purity of the past or to enforce a destiny on the future. This temporal conflation also enables Ellison's literary-critical refutation of Norton and Mumford, allowing him to confront twentieth-century blindness with the racial preoccupations of the nineteenth century. Nadel observes that such conflation "is only possible in the Golden Day. Although we cannot return to the past, per se, we can return to the literature of the period and find there the moral issues inherently linked to blacks and slavery" (101). But the Golden Day is more than just a literary palimpsest; as a site of confused and circular temporality it belies Norton's linear, telic view of time as well as his uncritical nostalgia for antebellum culture.

Modernity and the city

The Invisible Man encounters a new and equally chaotic temporal conflation when, expelled from the bucolic university, he arrives in New York City. There he soon encounters a living embodiment of this conflation of past and present in the cartman Peter Wheatstraw.

Although critics typically identify the cartman as a representative of African-American folk culture (Sundquist 123-24; O'Meally, Craft 87-88), Wheatstraw also alludes to modernism and modernist aesthetics. His banter begins with Joycean attention to verbal surface as he asks the Invisible Man "is you got the dog?", an anagram he decodes when he blurts, "Oh goddog, daddy-o" (173). The Invisible Man also interprets Wheatstraw's language as if it were an exercise in literary modernism; when he hears Wheatstraw sing the "Boogie Woogie Blues" (identified by O'Meally, Craft 87) about a woman with feet like a monkey, legs like a mad bulldog, he wonders if the song refers to "some strange sphinxlike animal" (177), reading the song as Yeatsian or Eliotian classicism rather than the blues humor of Count Basie and Jimmy Rushing. The Invisible Man twice comments on Wheatstraw's "Charlie Chaplin pants" (174), connecting the cartman to filmic modernism as well. Finally, in addition to Wheatstraw's effortless combination of black folk culture and modernist technique, the cartman is also marked with the signifiers of urbanization. He carries blueprints of

 Cities, towns, country clubs ... buildings and houses.... I asked the man why they getting rid of all this stuff and he said they get in the way so every once in a while they have to throw 'em out to make place for the new plans. (175)

In the face of this relentless obsolescence Wheatstraw maintains a strong connection to African-American folk culture, strong enough that the Invisible Man feels "a wave of homesickness" (174) and a powerful sense of deja vu in his presence (175). Wheatstraw therefore functions as a representative of African-American modernity: caught between the agrarian South and the urbanized North, between blues song and modernist art, he incarnates the telescoping of feudalism and industrialism that Ellison describes so pointedly in "Harlem Is Nowhere." Fittingly, he ushers the protagonist into the city that similarly conflates these eras.

The Invisible Man learns to perceive this conflation himself in the Liberty Paints factory, a major turning point in his developing awareness of the temporal palimpsest. While stirring buckets of paint he begins to wax nostalgic, recalling first the painted buildings on his campus, then other whitewashed buildings he has encountered:

 Like Trueblood's cabin, or the Golden Day ... Damn that Golden Day! But it was strange how life connected up; because I had carried Mr. Norton to the old rundown building with rotting paint, I was here. If, I thought, one could slow down his heart-beats and memory to the tempo of the black drops falling so slowly into the bucket yet reacting so swiftly, it would seem like a sequence in a feverish dream ... (201)

His words both prefigure and recall his dreamlike journey--later in his life, earlier in the novel--into the multilayered tempos of "What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue." Similarly, in this brief moment of temporal self-awareness at Liberty Paints, he starts to connect the separate moments of his life, to see how events in the past inform and resurface in his present, to perceive time as a palimpsest. This begins a practice that will persist throughout the rest of the novel as the Invisible Man repeatedly detects signs of the past in the present--his own personal palimpsests--whenever he is close to some major realization, particularly a realization about time.

Yet Ellison marks this turning point by nearly killing the Invisible Man in the explosion of Lucius Brockway's boilers. Brockway is another proponent of mechanistic fate, but unlike Norton, the old laborer knows that his mastery of the machines simply mechanizes him into one of their components; he proudly tells the Invisible Man, "we the machines inside the machine" (217). The Invisible Man's battle with Brockway is a struggle between past and present, old and new, mechanized fate and some other, as yet unarticulated, model of time and history. After the climactic explosion, an old man--possibly Brockway himself--says, "I tole 'em these here young Nineteen-Hundred boys ain't no good for the job" (230). The epithet "Nineteen-Hundred boys" brands the Invisible Man as a symbol of the twentieth century, highlighting the generational aspects of his clash with Brockway.

But the Invisible Man does not simply battle a prior generation in the Liberty Paints boiler room; he struggles against his enemies' model of mechanistic time itself. When he attempts to shut down the over-pressurized tanks, he reports, "All my movements seemed too slow, ran together" (229). Conversely, at the moment of the explosion he "seemed to run swiftly up an incline and shot forward with sudden acceleration" (230), experiencing a sudden alternation in the passage of time. Finally, as if Ellison wishes to remind readers that the Invisible Man has battled with time and failed, the protagonist finds himself "beneath a pile of broken machinery, my head pressed back against a huge wheel" (230). Wheels and circles signify time throughout Invisible Man, from the Golden Day historian's rant about roulette wheels to the Brotherhood's circular dialectics. Thus, while the Invisible Man has become aware of history's palimpsest, has battled with fate's chief mechanic, and has symbolically destroyed the machinery of time itself, he also finds himself trapped under time's central symbol. This metaphoric death in the boiler room is not a complete failure, however; it is merely the death of his old sense of time, creating the possibility for the birth of a new one.

After undergoing the factory hospital's mechanical parody of birth, however, the Invisible Man regresses to a second childhood of physical and emotional fragility. He is nurtured through this stage by Mary Rambo, who promotes a temporality of ambiguous value to the Invisible Man. On the one hand, she represents a vital and revitalizing connection to the past; George Kent classifies Mary as one of the novel's "folk figures" (268) who preserves "the warmth, wit, coping power, and humanity of the folk tradition as it survives in the modern industrial city" (270), while Susan Blake similarly identifies her as a "positive interpretation of the black folk perspective" and one of the novel's few "anchors against chaos" (130). Mary restores the Invisible Man to health, Robert G. O'Meally argues, by singing the blues to him, "As if to pass along the source of her strength to the hero" (Craft 89). In this respect she resembles other custodians of folk culture like Wheatstraw, although she exhibits few of Wheatstraw's modernist and modernizing traits. Under Mary's care, the Invisible Man finally stops denying his Southern heritage and gratefully eats hot yams in a rush of nostalgia (262-67); Mary's influence "contradicts the past-denying nature" (Busby 54) of his rush to modernity in the first half of the novel. The Invisible Man himself recognizes Mary as "a stable familiar force like something out of my past which kept me from whirling off into some unknown which I dared not face" (258).

But such stability exacts a heavy toll. Ellison provides an early cue to the dangers of living solely in the past when the Invisible Man, flush with the thrill of eating his first yam, bites into a second and finds "an unpleasant taste bloomed in my mouth ... it had been frostbitten" (267). While Mary anchors the Invisible Man to his past, she also prolongs his second childhood, and while she restores his affection for his cultural tradition, she also uncritically preserves some of that tradition's accommodations to racism. Anne Folwell Stanford notes that Mary is a "mammy" figure (117) who preserves the stereotype of the "self-effacing, maternal care-giver" (118). (6) Kent similarly argues that Mary represents "the integration of the bitter past with the present, as can be seen by her possession of ... the bank topped by a minstrel figure" (270). Her "stable familiar force" finds its negative counterpart and parodic reflection in that bank, which the Invisible Man cannot discard. He can no more shake himself of the cast-iron stereotype than he could earlier pull himself away from Mary's maternal care; they are two sides of the same coin. By anchoring the Invisible Man to the past, Mary also preserves the more racist elements of his historical tradition, elements he can neither deny nor forget.

By the time he discovers and attempts to discard the minstrel figure in chapter 15, however, the Invisible Man has already been jolted from the temptations of uncritical nostalgia and second childhood by a palimpsestic encounter on the streets of Harlem. The Provo family's belongings, jumbled in a heap along the sidewalk by an eviction, awaken the Invisible Man to the immediacy of the past. The piled belongings comprise a physical record of a hundred years of history, arranged without any respect to chronology and juxtaposing such items as "an oval frame portrait of the couple when young ... a small Ethiopian flag, a faded tintype of Abraham Lincoln, and the smiling image of a Hollywood star torn from a magazine" (271). The final item the Invisible Man sees is the fragile, yellowing paper announcing Primus Provo's release from slavery in 1859, and he thinks, "It has been longer than that, further removed in time, I told myself, and yet I knew that it hadn't been" (272). The Invisible Man discovers that the past is, if anything, even more immediate than Ellison describes in "Harlem Is Nowhere," for it is concretely realized in the Provos' belongings. Awareness of the palimpsest then replaces simple nostalgia as the Invisible Man begins to think "not so much of my own memory as of remembered words, of linked verbal echoes, images.... And it was as though I myself was being dispossessed of some painful yet precious thing" (273). This sense of synchronic time, of the past as immediately present, kindles his awareness of his race's dispossession and stirs him to action.

In addressing the crowd gathered at the eviction, the Invisible Man seizes on Brother Provo's age--"eighty-seven" (277), the number of years between the end of the Civil War and the publication of Invisible Man and, not coincidentally, the same number of years cited by Abraham Lincoln at the start of the Gettysburg Address. Provo's age suggests two spans of history, one terminating in the Civil War and used by Lincoln as a call for freedom, the other emanating from the Civil War and used by the Invisible Man to show how little freedom has been won: "Eighty-seven and look at all he's accumulated in eighty-seven years ... everything tossed out like junk whirled eighty-seven years in a cyclone" (277-78). The Invisible Man's new temporal awareness informs his diction as he implies that a cyclical time has created the synchronous palimpsest, for it is the circular motion of the cyclone that whirls the Provos' possessions into an anachronistic mess. The Invisible Man has attained a temporal consciousness roughly equivalent to that of the veterans at the Golden Day, who similarly believe that time moves in a cycle but see that cycle as sowing chaos and confusion, not order.

Finally, as the Invisible Man inadvertently moves the crowd to disrupt the eviction, he also voices his own doubts about his regressive second childhood. Pointing to Sister Provo, he says, "Look at that old woman, somebody's mother, somebody's grandmother maybe. We call them 'Big Mama' and they spoil us and--you know, you remember" (277). The Invisible Man reminds the crowd of the "stable familiar forces" out of their pasts which nurture them, yet he also calls attention to the restraints imposed by such stability. Far from inspiring nostalgia or respect for the history that lies piled on the street, the Invisible Man moves the crowd to rage against it--for it is American history itself that has whirled their possessions and memories in a cyclone of eighty-seven years, a figure that now connotes failure rather than freedom.

Breaking the chain

Of all the models of history on display in the novel, the vulgarly Marxist dialectics of the Brotherhood "present the most complete and seductive idea of the way the world turns" (O'Meally, "Rules" 264) to the Invisible Man and, consequently, they are the target of Ellison's "most prominent critique of the Western historical mystique" (Benston 92) of inevitable and teleological progress. As a result, the Brotherhood's concept of history has also received the most extensive critical attention, with most scholars concurring that the Brotherhood serves as the occasion for Ellison's criticism of the "limiting and domineering expressions" (Benston 92) of ideologies of historical inevitability. But the Brotherhood, most notably Brother Tarp, also presents the Invisible Man with a number of competing relationships to his past, a temporal competition that underlies the more apparent ideological dispute into which the Invisible Man is drawn.

Brother Jack first describes his organization's historical narrative to the Invisible Man in terms seemingly similar to Ellison's own analysis of African-American temporality. Jack identifies the Provos as

 agrarian types, you know. Being ground up by industrial conditions. Thrown on the dump heaps and cast aside.... It's sad, yes. But they're already dead, defunct. History has passed them by. (290-91)

But this account represents a distorted version of Ellison's observations about the feudal-to-industrial history and accelerated temporality of African-Americans. Rather than preserve the continuity with the past incarnated in Ellison's mode of the palimpsest, Jack implies that modernity creates a complete break from the past, and he therefore advocates a callous abandonment of those who are unable to change quickly enough. Most cruelly, he suggests that the Provos are "like dead limbs that must be pruned away so that the tree may bear young fruit or the storms of history will blow them down anyway. Better the storm should hit them--" (291). This florid speech culminates in the same storm metaphor the Invisible Man used earlier when speaking of history as a cyclone; Jack's rhetoric melds the deterministic philosophy of Norton with the chaotic circularity proposed by the historians at the Golden Day. This fusion of teleological and circular tropes constitutes Ellison's symbolic representation of a Marxist--or, more fundamentally, Hegelian--narrative of history.

The Invisible Man quickly and instinctively sees through these arguments, aptly calling Jack's dialectical tropes "double talk" (290). Yet despite this initial skepticism, he quickly internalizes the Brotherhood's philosophy; even his own erratic and unpredictable history does not jar his conviction that the world "could be controlled by science, and the Brotherhood had both science and history under its control" (381). He also overcompensates for his recent retreat into nostalgia, obeying Brother Jack's command to "put aside [his] past" (309) by breaking off all contact with Mary and his family, and by adopting a new name. This breach with the past isolates the Invisible Man from the revitalizing parts of his cultural tradition--an early incident at the Chthonian makes it clear that the singing of spirituals will not be tolerated (312-14)--yet it does not insulate him from the racist stereotypes of white culture. The Invisible Man still carries the smashed minstrel figurine in his briefcase even as he settles into his new, Brotherhood-purchased apartment, an early sign that the Brotherhood will do little to fight the evils of racism.

At the height of his subordination to the Brotherhood's doctrines, however, the Invisible Man is offered several opportunities to reconnect with his personal and cultural history by the Harlem chapter's Brother Tarp. Critics frequently classify Tarp as one of the novel's custodians of African-American culture, often grouping him along with other characters such as Mary Rambo and Peter Wheatstraw, largely because of the gifts he bequeaths to the Invisible Man and the traditions they invoke. (7) Tarp first provides him with a picture of Frederick Douglass, reminding him of his grandfather (378); he later bestows a broken link of chain, an act the Invisible Man compares to "a man passing on to his son his own father's watch" (389). Through one simple analogy, Ellison associates Tarp and the chain with grandfathers and with time itself, an association that grows even stronger when the Invisible Man remembers that he was in fact due to inherit his own grandfather's watch. This revelation triggers "A whole series of memories ... it seemed as though I'd plunged down a well of years" (390), and the Invisible Man nearly experiences another one of the palimpsestic reveries that accompany so many of his moments of enlightenment after his episode at Liberty Paints.

In this instance, the revelation is triggered not only because Tarp dredges up familial memories but also because his chain concretely refutes the Brotherhood's concept of history. Kimberly W. Benston notes that the link hypostatizes and embodies the "bonds ... to a cultural identity and collective past" (94) that connect the Invisible Man to his heritage, the same bonds the Brotherhood denies. Yet although the link serves "as a keepsake and a reminder" (388) of Tarp's past, its form of the broken circle also presents an implicit challenge to all the characters who have proposed cyclical or deterministic models of time, and particularly to Bledsoe's preservation of the unbroken circle of a slave shackle. Deterministic modes of time may nullify individual agency, and cyclical ones may repeat and preserve an oppressive status quo, but Tarp has symbolically severed the temporal continuity that enables both models. Thus, Tarp is one of the few temporal guides in the novel to offer the Invisible Man a complex and moderated approach to living in time, a synthesis of the more extreme methods of Mary and the Brotherhood: he maintains connections to the past, but he is also willing to break them when they support historical patterns of oppression. Or, as Brother Tarp says, his link has "a heap of signifying wrapped up in it and it might help you remember what we're really fighting against" (388).

However, the significations reified in Tarp's broken link also appear to contradict Ellison's earlier presentation of time. When the Golden Day veterans tell Norton that history moves in a circle, they undermine his linear and deterministic view of time, yet when Tarp bestows his chain, time's circularity itself has become an oppressive feature that must be resisted and escaped. This dramatic change reflects the Invisible Man's growing temporal consciousness: he must first learn to perceive time's circularity before he can discover its ill effects.

Ironically, given Ellison's critique of Marxist and Hegelian modes of history, the Invisible Man learns to comprehend time by means of a dialectical process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis much like the Marxist model Ellison rejects. However, the Invisible Man's dialectical education differs substantially from the metaphorical dialectics advocated by the Brotherhood. The Invisible Man's temporal consciousness does develop through the interplay of antithetical models of time, despite Ellison's derisive characterizations of such dialectics as Jack's "double talk" (290) or Hambro's "antiphonal game" (501). This development, however, evades the deterministic imperative of the Brotherhood's historiography, thus avoiding the teleological aspect of Marxist theory that Ellison directly associates with mechanization and oppression. Similarly, while the novel indicates that traces of the past constantly resurface in the present, Ellison's representations of this resurgence--the palimpsest and the accelerated modernity articulated in "Harlem Is Nowhere"--do not mandate that all time should follow a pattern of cyclical repetition; indeed, they suggest that what might appear to be a repetition is instead a continuity between past and present. Invisible Man does not reject all dialectics, simply that version of dialectical history that Ellison attributes to the Brotherhood. (8)

Clifton's leap

If Brother Tarp first plants the idea that the Brotherhood's view of history is flawed, then Tod Clifton nourishes it until the Invisible Man can think of little else. Clifton perceives the more sinister implications of the Brotherhood's philosophy earlier than the Invisible Man does, confiding in him, "I suppose sometimes a man has to plunge outside history" (377) in order to escape its influence. When Clifton later satirizes the Brotherhood's deterministic theories with his sale of the dancing Sambo dolls, the astonished Invisible Man calls his ironic protest a "plunge" and a "fall outside of history" (435, 434; Ellison's emphasis), later extending the plunge to include Clifton's death as well (439).

That death ultimately frees the Invisible Man's historical consciousness from the Brotherhood's narrow parameters. The Invisible Man's skepticism begins with his realization that history "is only the known, the seen, the heard and only those events that the recorder regards as important that are put down, those lies his keepers keep their power by" (439). In other words, he acknowledges that history is not an impartial, scientific process but a selective record maintained by institutions to preserve their power and authority. His contempt for this official history increases as he watches three young black men on the subway, men who are "outside of historical time" not only because they play no role in the Brotherhood's plans but also because they "didn't believe in Brotherhood, no doubt had never heard of it; or perhaps like Clifton would mysteriously have rejected its mysteries" (440). Robert G. O'Meally suggests that these three young men are representatives of

 the underground world of America's vernacular culture. Their speech, manner, conked hair, tapping shoes, and comic books all associate them with a level of society that history has not adequately recorded. ("On Burke" 256)

For O'Meally and other critics, this scene provides one of the clearest examples of Ellison's characterization of official history as an arbitrary and exclusive record. Eric Sundquist mentions the subway riders in his discussion of "Ellison's sense of history as a form of subjective temporality--a constructed story, not a set of objective facts" (11). However, this formulation threatens to conflate subjective temporality with history, while Ellison has shown that different modes of subjective time can generate entirely different forms of historiography. Deborah Cohn reads Ellison's use of time more broadly, connecting his depiction of the unrecorded history of African-Americans to his creation of alternative narrative temporalities; she argues that Ellison employs "non-realist discourses to bring the hidden past to light and restore experiences that have been elided from the historical record to visibility" (373). As part of this challenge to realistic narrative, Cohn maintains, Invisible Man "belies the notions of causality and history as linear progression" (376) and "undertakes to demonstrate the shortcomings of official institutions' rigid definitions of the past and present" (377). In other words, Ellison expands traditional historical accounts by fashioning nontraditional modes of time.

But while Cohn locates these alternative temporalities primarily in "subjective visions, hallucinations, and dreams which conflate time and space" (377), Ellison also provides numerous concrete examples of alternative modes of time, modes the novel regards as quite real. The three subway riders expose the Invisible Man to one such mode as they embody the accelerated, feudal-to-industrial temporality that Ellison finds characteristic of urbanized African-Americans; they "speak a jived-up transitional language full of country glamour, think transitional thoughts, though perhaps they dream the same old ancient dreams" (441) in the modern city. These young men remind the Invisible Man not only that some histories fall outside the Brotherhood's purview but also that some modes of temporality operate outside its dynamics.

As living subjects of this uncharted temporality, the young men prompt the Invisible Man to reject the Brotherhood's models of history and time. In a passage that O'Meally rightly says "may comprise, in a novel full of revelations and momentous psychic changes, the most potent epiphany" ("On Burke" 257), the Invisible Man not only admits that the Brotherhood has neglected the unrecorded world of black vernacular culture, he also spurns the group's entire historical-materialist mechanism:

 They were men out of time--unless they found Brotherhood. Men out of time, who would soon be gone and forgotten ... But who knew (and now I began to tremble so violently I had to lean against a refuse can)--who knew but that they were the saviors, the true leaders, the bearers of something precious? [...] What if Brother Jack were wrong? What if history was a gambler, instead of a force in a laboratory experiment, and the boys his ace in the hole? What if history was not a reasonable citizen, but a madman full of paranoid guile and these boys his agents, his big surprise! His own revenge? For they were outside, in the dark with Sambo, the dancing paper doll; taking it on the lambo with my fallen brother, Tod Clifton (Tod, Tod) running and dodging the forces of history instead of making a dominating stand. (441)

These young men do not simply lead the Invisible Man to expand his definition of history; they also belie the Brotherhood's pretensions to scientific mastery over time, serving as living contradictions to its mechanistic teleology.

Suddenly left without any overarching temporal or historical framework, the Invisible Man attempts to invent or discover new ones that can rationalize his discoveries. First he wonders if he and the young men are ahistorical accidents or throwbacks, "like Douglass" (442), living proof of the Brotherhood's temporal folly because "by all historical logic we, I, should have disappeared around the first part of the nineteenth century, rationalized out of existence" (442). Then, less egotistically, he interprets the vernacular signals of Harlem's 125th Street as the site of a more inclusive history that he has previously disregarded. Characteristically, a palimpsest accompanies this moment of discovery as the Invisible Man reads his own past into the vernacular chronicle around him. Looking at the men and women, he finds "hardly a one that was unlike someone I'd known down South. Forgotten names sang through my head like forgotten scenes in dreams" (443). A blues record, "the only true history of the times," prompts the culmination of this latest temporal resurgence: "It was as though in this short block I was forced to walk past everyone I'd ever known" (443).

Typically, however, the Invisible Man initially misapplies this new wisdom. He first wishes to incorporate all of Harlem's residents into a formal historical model--"They were outside the groove of history, and it was my job to get them in, all of them" (443)--desiring only to build a larger and marginally more inclusive version of the Brotherhood's historical scheme. At Clifton's funeral, however, he grows visibly dissatisfied both with the possibility of remaining subject to deterministic historical forces and with Clifton's method of escaping them. He describes the mounted police as "men and horses of flesh imitating men and horses of stone. Tod Clifton's Tod, I thought" (460-61). Equating Clifton's first name with the German word for death identifies the police as Clifton's murderers, but it also demonstrates the Invisible Man's anxiety over being forced to choose between an inhospitable mode of history and a self-destructive response to it. As the Invisible Man delivers his bitter eulogy, he realizes he must seek out new strategies to slip outside the Brotherhood's and the policemen's model of history without also destroying himself in the process.

Scientists and tricksters

He believes he finds such a strategy in the multiple personae of the criminal, preacher, and all-around confidence artist B.P. Rinehart, whose schemes teach the Invisible Man that "The world in which we lived was without boundaries. A vast seething, hot world of fluidity" that evades the "proper political classification" of the Brotherhood (498). As with the three subway riders, the Invisible Man quickly turns this unrecorded world of the vernacular into a critique of the Brotherhood's theories. He wonders,

 What would the committee say about that? What did their theory tell them of such a world? ... 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. (499-500)

This is the same "nowhere" described in "Harlem Is Nowhere"--a "nowhere" not of place but of identity, time, and historical agency.

The Invisible Man turns to Hambro, the Brotherhood's chief theorist, for reassurance, to have "the props put back beneath the world" (500). Yet the scene characterizes Hambro's theories as pointlessly circular, suggesting the Invisible Man's impending repudiation of the Brotherhood's model of time. From the moment the Invisible Man arrives, the encounter is fraught with absurd, ineffectual, and infantilizing images of circular temporality, like Hambro's child "singing Hickory Dickory Dock, very fast" (500), his rapid tempo accelerating the nursery rhyme's pointless repetition.

The circular images intensify as Hambro explains the Brotherhood's abandonment of its Harlem chapter. Not coincidentally, the Brotherhood's decision appears to be based in large part on a fear of African-Americans' accelerated historical progress: Hambro tells the Invisible Man that "we now have to slow them down for their own good. It's a scientific necessity" (503). The Invisible Man replies, "You mean the brakes must be put on the old wheel of history.... Or is it the little wheels within the wheel?" (504), acerbically converting the Brotherhood's theoretical language into metaphors of fruitless circularity. Other images stress the overall instability or ephemerality of a cyclical model of history: the Invisible Man traces a circle in the air in a moment of frustration (503), and Hambro blows "a smoke ring, the blue-gray circle rising up boiling within its own jetting form, hovering for an instant then disintegrating into a weaving strand" (503-04). Finally, the Invisible Man calls Hambro's plans "the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?" (505), turning the Brotherhood's teleological journey into a round trip to nowhere and voicing his desire to break loose from the cycle. He does not deliver his final criticism of their teleological drive, however, until after his next moment of revelation.

Once again, Ellison marks a new stage in the Invisible Man's temporal awareness with a palimpsest of memories. These memories form an undercurrent throughout the meeting with Hambro, beginning when the Invisible Man hears the child's nursery rhymes, "awakening humiliating memories of my first Easter program" (500). During the meeting the Invisible Man clutches Brother Tarp's leg iron as an artifact of history and a concretization of all his objections to the Brotherhood's philosophy. But the memories truly set in after he leaves Hambro, as he decides to "do a Rinehart" (507) and resist the Brotherhood through deception and dissembling:

 And now all past humiliations became precious parts of my experience, and for the first time, leaning against that stone wall in the sweltering night, I began to accept my past and, as I accepted it, I felt memories welling up within me. It was as though I'd learned suddenly to look around corners; images of past humiliations flickered through my head and I saw that they were more than separate experiences. They were me; they defined me. I was my experiences and my experiences were me.... (507-08)

He realizes he is a composite man comprised of his past experiences, a living palimpsest of his own history--which, through his many encounters with historical allegories throughout the novel, is also African-American history. As Ellison says in a 1973 interview, the Invisible Man must "create an individuality based upon an awareness of how it relates to his past and the values of the past" ("Ralph Ellison" 75). Ellison's protagonist also learns that the past is not a set of isolated moments but rather a continuity of events, merging with themselves and with the present to form a synchronic whole. He is a product and, in many ways, an incarnation of this eternally present, synchronic time, because Ellison posits that identity is an amalgamation of experiences over time and a constant negotiation with the past.

Having already rejected the cyclical aspect of the Brotherhood's temporality, the Invisible Man now uses these new, Rinehart-inspired discoveries to resist the Brotherhood's teleology. He first expresses disgust with the Brotherhood's historiography, calling it "that spiral business, that progress goo!" (509). He then toys with their theories, playing with their conceit of spiraling history and envisioning how his newfound awareness of identity as a polytemporal and synchronous phenomenon enables him to violate the Brotherhood's rigid temporal dynamics:

 Not only could you travel upward toward success 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 going and perhaps all at the same time. (510)

He deconstructs the Brotherhood's historical philosophy, using its own metaphors of circular alternation to contradict its presumptions of teleological progress. While Ellison engages historical materialism chiefly on this abstract, metaphorical level, criticizing only those metaphors that he assigns to the Brotherhood, he nevertheless attempts to undermine its model of temporality by pitting its dialectical framework against itself. Hegelian dialectics may provide a suitable narrative structure for the Invisible Man's education, but in the political sphere Ellison sees the system as "unreal, an antiphonal game" (501) because it supports unacceptable models of time, identity, and historical progression.

Despite his critique of the Brotherhood's precepts, however, the Invisible Man's quest for temporal consciousness--or a temporal conscience--is far from over. He follows Rinehart's strategy of adopting a contingent and deceptive identity, despite having just equated Rinehartism with "cynicism" and manipulation mere minutes earlier (504). The Invisible Man attempts to reverse the historical determination he has just uncovered, to work backward from his identity to affect history, yet he chooses to affect it through tactics of deception that are as suited to Bledsoe and to Klansmen (510) as they are to Rinehart. (9) He does not consider that if his identity and his history are so interdependent, then his willing adoption of a false, servile identity may have dire historical or material consequences. As a result he fosters--or at least fails to prevent--the Harlem riot that ends the novel. (10) Ironically, the neighborhood that has most expanded the Invisible Man's temporal awareness is set afire because he immediately misapplies his discovery that identity is an accumulation of time, experience, and history.

Turning backward and going underground

In the riot, the Invisible Man encounters Ras the Destroyer, one final, flawed mode of temporality and racial identity. While in earlier scenes Ras the Exhorter is a complex, morally ambiguous figure of black nationalism and pan-Africanism, the Ras of the riot is characterized by (and roundly criticized for) his futile desire to turn time backward. Ras the Destroyer leads his followers through Harlem "dressed in the costume of an Abyssinian chieftain" (556); the Invisible Man derides this "foreign costume" (558), but other details suggest that Ellison condemns Ras more for his ludicrous atavism than his theatrical ethnicity. Two anonymous observers joke about the anachronism of Ras's costume: the first remarks on Ras's "old lion skin" and "ole hoss" (562), while the second mocks his spear and "old shield" (563) and the spectacle of his fighting modern police with primitive weapons. Ras's attempt to reverse time proves dangerous, however, not only in the violence and destruction it wreaks in Harlem but also in its reductive model of racial-historical identity. By demanding that African-Americans return to an African past, Ras becomes every bit as deterministic as Jack and the Brotherhood; his temporal arrow simply points in the other direction.

When the Invisible Man runs from Ras, he runs from all of the false and domineering models of history he has encountered. Significantly, he is aided in his escape by Tarp's leg chain, the symbol of broken history. But he initially attempts to escape by fleeing back along the path of his own history to Mary Rambo's motherly care. The Invisible Man never considers that this step backward is no more productive than Ras's attempt to turn back time, although he does repeatedly notice he is moving in the wrong direction (561, 564). This regressive journey is physically thwarted, but psychically assisted, when he becomes trapped in a coal cellar. He calls his confinement there "a kind of death without hanging ... a death alive" (566-67), yet it also facilitates a birth in reverse. Lying in the dark tunnel, the Invisible Man decides "I would go now to Mary's in the only way that I could" and dreams that he moves "off over the black water, floating, sighing ... sleeping invisibly" (567). Thoughts of Mary turn his trip through these imagined, subterranean waters into a return to the womb as well as a voyage to the underworld.

This trip, however, also delivers the Invisible Man outside of time. Just as the novel's first half is punctuated by a ritual of death and rebirth at Liberty Paints, so does its second half end with a symbolic rebirth that apparently frees him from linear chronology. After awakening underground, the Invisible Man says, "Great invisible waves of time flowed over me" (567), yet because he has no way to measure them, their scale is impossible to determine. And although it is the underground setting that initially dislocates him from time, he performs the final dislocation himself by burning the contents of his briefcase and pockets: all the papers, diplomas, and dancing Sambo dolls that others have used to circ*mscribe his identity. Afterward the Invisible Man stumbles for what he says "might have been days, weeks; I lost all sense of time" (568).

After this final escape, the Invisible Man dreams that Jack and the other temporal "scientists" (570) attempt to reclaim him. Castrated and yet victorious in his refusal to resubmit to their control, he tells the scientists that his dripping testicl*s are "your sun ... your moon ... your universe, and that drip-drop upon the water you hear is all the history you've made, all you're going to make" (570). Given the practice of castration at lynchings, this dream suggests that the scientists have created a history of racial violence and oppression. Yet the dream also implies that the scientists' putative mastery over history depends entirely on their suppression of racial minorities. By scoffing at their control, the Invisible Man rejects their temporal authority and demonstrates that he will no longer allow them to dictate his past or his future. After this realization, the Invisible Man acknowledges that he can no longer "return to Mary's, or to any part of my old life.... I could only move ahead or stay here, underground" (571). And so he lingers underground, outside of time, until he is ready to end his hibernation and reenter the world.

Conclusion

In his underground lair, the Invisible Man finally codifies the hard-won understanding of time and history that he articulates in the novel's prologue. But he does not identify his own position within this palimpsestic temporality until the epilogue, where he defines himself against all the reductive and deterministic modes of time that he has fled.

The Invisible Man resoundingly rejects the Brotherhood's presumption of control over history, first saying he will leave the interpretation of history "to Jack and his ilk" (572) and then disparaging "the futile game of 'making history'" (575) practiced by Jack, Norton, and the other temporal scientists. Spurning their conceit that humans can control history by manipulating the destinies of others, he instead proposes to build a different kind of historical record that includes all experiences, all cultures. The Invisible Man has already applied this lesson on the cultural level, learning to view African-American vernacular culture as "the only true history of the times" (443), and he continues this practice with his citation of two Louis Armstrong songs in the prologue and epilogue (8, 581). But he also learns to apply this new inclusiveness to his own history, "to confront all aspects of his experience, even those previously shunned and repressed" (O'Meally, Craft 92). Because he now knows that his identity is a palimpsest of his experiences, he can no longer ignore the unpleasant parts of his past. Instead, he says, referring to his painful memories of the South, "Sometimes I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all of the things loved and unlovable in it, for all of it is part of me" (579).

He nevertheless refuses to return to that past, as he did after his last rebirth, acknowledging that he cannot "return to Mary's, or to the campus, or to the Brotherhood, or home" (571). Yet he also understands that by finally accepting his invisibility he has "come a long way and returned and boomeranged a long way from the point in society toward which I originally aspired" (573); in other words, as he says in the final page of the novel proper, "The end was in the beginning" (571). These words, however, do not indicate a true repetition but rather the kind of dialectical or "boomeranging" progression that has characterized his growth throughout the novel. Ellison would later distinguish this progress from simple repetition in a 1973 interview, where he stated that "Vico, whom Joyce used in his great novels, described history as circling. I described it as a boomerang because a boomerang moves in a parabola.... It is never the same thing" ("Ralph Ellison" 73). The Invisible Man has only boomeranged away from his old goals, not back to his old identity, and he continues to reject strictly circular modes of time. He has learned to accept his past, but he no longer works toward its perpetuation, repetition, or return.

He also offers one final commentary on the idea of destiny, in which he both rejects the concept and reappropriates it from Norton and the other scientists. On meeting Norton in the subway, the Invisible Man mockingly repeats the philanthropist's old claims, telling him, "I'm your destiny, I made you" (578), thus suggesting that Norton's attempts to control his fate through the fates of others will result only in the loss of his own agency. When the Invisible Man shouts that all trains go to the Golden Day (578), then, he implies that Norton can no longer deny that the bar's temporal chaos--to say nothing of its inverted racial power structure--has defeated his attempts to master fate and time.

Having rejected the impulses to control fate, to direct history, or to sink back into familiar repetition, the Invisible Man acknowledges that, in a world of multifarious and mutable forms of temporality, he experiences time as a palimpsest. He perceives this palimpsest through the constant juxtaposition of past and present in African-American life; but he also perceives that he, too, is a composite of all his past experiences, both personal and cultural. And while this conflated, multilayered time originates from a racially specific experience, Ellison hints that the continuity implied by the palimpsest may ultimately transcend racial boundaries. The Invisible Man imagines, in his novel's final line, one last palimpsest that might connect his experiences to those of all his auditors, whether black or white: "Who know but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?" (581). (11)

While many of the individual layers of Ellison's literary and historical palimpsest have been well documented, their common examination of the intersections between time, experience, and subjectivity has gone largely unexplored. Yet Ellison's engagement with time and identity comprises one of the novel's most central arguments, one seemingly as fraught with contradictions and antitheses as the experiences of the Invisible Man himself. Invisible Man critiques dialectics while leading its protagonist through a dialectical progression; it shuns racially reductive ideologies while proposing that twentieth-century African-Americans are subject to their own distinct mode of time. On the surface, the novel appears to employ the same methodologies it most criticizes. But Ellison tells us that contradiction is how the world moves, and from these contradictions he has produced a novel that displays an astonishing narrative power over, and critical inquiry into, the dynamics of time. Through its temporal manipulations, Invisible Man demonstrates how both cultural history and individual identity are shaped by our diverse perceptions of time.

Notes

1. Robert G. O'Meally similarly observes this martial cast in the Invisible Man's historiographic symbols, and further notes that the boomerang is "made and thrown by human hands" ("Rules" 265), suggesting that history is a construct not of impartial theological or scientific forces but of human beings.

2. Ellison also deflates Norton's egotistical fantasy by fashioning his own, considerably more acerbic connection between the millionaire and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. The Invisible Man calls his university "a flower-studded wasteland" and finishes his paean to it with a cry of "And oh, oh, oh, those multimillionaires!" (37), parodying Eliot's line "O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag" (2: 128). The comparison suggests that Norton is no Percival or Fisher King but rather a symbol of degraded modernity akin to the Rag--which would ironically contravene Norton's desires for temporal stasis and purity. (For another reading of how Norton evokes the Fisher King's narrative of rejuvenation but fails to live up to it, see Baker 85).

3. The incest link was advanced most famously in Selma Fraiberg's "Two Modern Incest Heroes," but the reading has persisted into the present. Somewhat more recently, however, scholars have begun to examine the Trueblood-Norton relationship outside strictly psychoanalytical bounds. Most notably, Houston A. Baker Jr. argues in "To Move Without Moving" that Trueblood is a "master storyteller" (77) who has learned to construct "a supreme capitalist fantasy" (87) that appeals to the basest racial, sexual, and financial interests of white auditors such as Norton.

4. Nadel develops this argument at length in chapters 4 and 5. For one critical response to Nadel's book that also regards the Golden Day episode as a literary and literary-critical palimpsest, see James M. Albrecht.

5. This trope of building-as-palimpsest resurfaces in, among other places, Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, which features a structure whose three stories replicate the course of Western history from religion to commerce. "If Western History were a 3-story building located in downtown Manhattan in the 1920s," Reed writes, "it would resemble this little architectural number" (82). For more on the interplay between Reed's palimpsestic novel and Ellison's, see Henry Louis Gates Jr., chapter 6.

6. Some critics have disputed this characterization, however. Claudia Tate claims that Mary is not bound by the mammy stereotype (168), although Tate, like Stanford, also notes that Mary becomes a fully developed character only in the excised section of the Invisible Man manuscript published as "Out of the Hospital and Under the Bar."

7. See, for example, Blake 130 and Kent 273. For an extended discussion of Tarp's connections to and contrasts with other characters such as the grandfather and Bledsoe, see Robert B. Stepto.

8. Ellison himself implies that the novel progresses through a vaguely dialectical process in "The Art of Fiction," where he asserts that "The book is a series of reversals" (179) in its hero's developing consciousness. Callahan similarly hints at a dialectical series of reversals when he asserts that "The novel's trajectory follows the path of a boomerang," but he makes the important distinction that a boomerang's "precise point of return is unpredictable, erratic, uncyclical" (140), differentiating Ellison's reversals from the strict determinations of historical materialism. James Albrecht notes that Ellison derives his novel's ironic contradictions from Kenneth Burke's model of comic progression (57-59), an observation Ellison confirms in "The Art of Fiction" (176-77). Nondialectical models abound for Ellison's novel, though it is worth noting that Burke's model--"purpose being an act, passion the resistance or limitation the act meets, and perception the self-knowledge the actor gains in seeing the extent and limit of his or her act" (Albrecht 58)--itself follows a dialectical formula. Ellison's "boomerang" is thus more fundamentally dialectical than many critical accounts acknowledge.

9. Ellison explicitly discusses the ambiguity and potential danger of the trickster figure in "Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke," where he observes that many tricksters are in fact white constructs who perform "a ritual of exorcism" (48) to purge racial anxieties. By connecting the Invisible Man's newfound tricksterism to Bledsoe, to Klansmen, and to "that old slave a scientist ... bowing and scraping in senile and obscene servility" (509), Ellison indicates that any distinction between Rinehartism and the novel's more openly deterministic "scientists" will prove illusory.

10. The novel's climactic riot is itself a multivalent historical allusion. While most critics find the episode's antecedent in the Harlem riot of August 1943 (Bone 211, Blake 127), several key elements are also drawn from the riot of March 19, 1935. Fischer elaborates on several of the similarities between the 1935 and Invisible Man riots, including their proximate causes and the alleged involvement of the Communist Party (365-66). For a contemporary account of the 1935 riot, which also profiles the vaguely Ras-like figure of Sufi Abdul Hamid, see Claude McKay.

11. Ellison would later invoke the temporal continuity of the palimpsest to imply a lost racial intercontinuity at the 1973 Alain Locke Symposium, when he told a Harvard audience that "we live one upon the other; we follow, we climb upon the shoulders of those who have gone before" ("Alain Locke" 446).

Works cited

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