Masthead Logo The Iowa Review Volume 1 Article 29 Issue 2 Spring 1970 Invisible Man: Somebody's Protest Novel Thomas A. Vogler Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.uiowa.edu/iowareview Part of the Creative Writing Commons Recommended Citation Vogler, Thomas A.. "Invisible Man: Somebody's Protest Novel." The Iowa Review 1.2 (1970): 64-82. Web. Available at: https://doi.org/10.17077/0021-065X.1062 This Contents is brought to you for free and open access by Iowa Research Online. It has been accepted for inclusion in The oI wa Review by an authorized administrator of Iowa Research Online. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Invisible Man: Somebody's Protest Novel Thomas A. Vogler a This simply because I had notion it somehow would be of help to that Kurtz at time I did not understand. He was a me. I whom the see?you just word for see did not the man in the name any more than you do. Do you see him? Do ? you see the story? Do you see anything? Conrad can see . Oh say you .? (National Anthem) a With Hemingway and Faulkner both dead, this is not time of recognized liter are ary giants. The public, and critics too, too easily preoccupied with literary giantism, with finding the next heir to the vacated throne. Publishers want their books to and are not timid about claims. Readers want to feel sell, very making that what are is what to be in terms that can they reading they ought reading, be reached from the of a historical Our contem only vantage point perspective. writers be looked on and cherished as porary should, however, partly-realized po writers whose work should not be idolized too nor but tential, much, ignored, read with the best awareness we can to them of their to our bring relationships own lives and to a the traditions they continue. Melville seemed to be distinctly own seventeen were minor writer to his age. In 1945 all of Faulkner's books out of print. We should be chastened and warned by examples like these, but not in our to find of value in our overly frightened attempts something contemporary writers. With the belated advent of "Black Literature" it has become even more difficult to find a context in which to read or discuss a novel like Invisible long-term Man. Its relevance to the social of Black citizens can be contemporary problems used to reduce it to the level of a documentary of the Black experience.1 On the its insistence on craft and its careful of the ex other hand, analysis, avoidance can as plicit advocation of action, be passed off by the activists the "buggy jiv of a white middle-class or the of a This ing" sellout, ravings private ego trip. latter trend is accurately prophesied at the every end of the novel.2 Most intol some erable, perhaps, is the approach taken by critics of both colors, that the a novel is "pure" art, that Negro writer has finally written his way into the main stream some of etherealized literary tradition.3 In the existence of what Time in the of spite of present magazine calls, jargon the a "modest these are not times for literary stockmarket, literary boom," good 64 University of Iowa is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve, and extend access to The Iowa Review ® www.jstor.org are as suicide available as there are writers. There many kinds of literary writers, and the hardest seems to not to write the first but to remain at thing be, novel, the for one's self and for the one reader who will under craft, writing imaginary rather than for the the the the the stand, publisher, editor, reviewer, agent, pub and the audience serve. But it is not of a licist, novelty-seeking they enough for the writer to be in an arena where relations men de problem public largely or more termine whether his book will sell less than 5,000 than 100,000 copies. There is also the of the who are committed in their own to problem critics, way Critics become obsessed with thinking of the literary stockmarket. quite easily to the writer's creative This is the desire what is for them the counterpart urge. is and it to find patterns comprehensive enough to include everything that good, is a reasonable when followed with discrimination. But too the enough urge easily lost or dis pattern becomes a definition of what is good, and good writers get writers is torted because they do not fit the mold. The critic of contemporary vulnerable to this mistake. As Norman Mailer out, it is "natu especially pointed wiser for the mind of the to masticate the themes of ten writers, rally expert rather than the difficulties of one." approach any a like Invisible Man in In many ways, then, to talk about contemporary novel volves different from those we face when a novelist like problems discussing Wharton or On the other no writer can be com Fitzgerald. hand, really good serious The kind of and pletely contemporary without limitations. synthesis of that we in a novel cannot be evaluation experience expect good contemporary with the experience itself. In addition, Ellison has roots in the 19th century that are at least as as those in the what he writes is as much influ important 20th; as seen enced by what he has read it is by what he has and lived through. even stories Though Ellison is close to Hemingway in many ways, and copied his hand in order to an of his he seems to bear an by develop understanding style, even more to Melville. Ellison uses two as important relationship quotations epi at Invisible Melville's Benito graphs the beginning of Man. One, from Cere?o, nature the the invisible man in the novel. The suggests the of change undergoes his which is an essential other, from Eliot, suggests the discovery of invisibility of the Before and I would part change. discussing invisibility change, however, like to suggest another passage, also from Melville, which will help to get at some more of the book?for like under of the negative aspects Ellison, Melville, stood that fiction must be negative in order to fulfill both its artistic and moral : obligations in There is the grand truth about Nathaniel Hawthorne. He says NO! thunder; but the devil himself cannot make him say yes. For all men all men are in the who say yes, lie; and who say no,?why they happy of unincumbered travellers in cross condition judicious, Europe; they a the frontiers into Eternity with nothing but carpetbag?that is to say, Ego. There is a nice here with the invisible who crosses his frontier comparison man, into the darkness with a briefcase containing all the clues to his identity or but the also the dark of resistance which con "Ego"; passage suggests impulse 65 Criticism tinues to in Invisible Man. The permeate contemporary fiction works like novel ists seem to that violence and distortion must be the means of a agree projecting is seem to vision to which society hostile. They further agree that the contempo world a to and his must rary presents continued affront man, that response therefore be at least in part that of the rebel. There is a standard known to neuroses and psychological experiment produce behavior in most domestic or trainable animals. In an ex psychopathic patterns environment that bears a resemblance to the world of the perimental striking novel, the animals are trained to react in certain ways to certain stimuli, and then in a situation in which the reactions are The animal then placed impossible. can on as makes what attempts it to go acting it has been trained to do, but a with continued frustration nervous collapse of some kind inevitably follows. the reaction is refuse to mix with other animals even With some, solipsistic?they for eating. Others react by batting their heads against the walls of their cages until die or are too exhausted to continue. The of they equivalent experience conflict between expectations and reality has produced what Ellison calls "the American toward self-annihilation and which Negro impulse going underground," can overcome "a will to the to evaluate his only be by confront world, experi ence honestly and throw his findings unashamedly into the guilty conscience of America."4 His Invisible Man is a record of that agony, and of the discovery of can the realities that must be faced before a genuine identity be achieved. But I think the memoir, which is titled Invisible Man, his memoir, is an to as it exists rather than in terms attempt describe reality really of what he had assumed it to be. Because it was the clash between his assumptions, his illusions about reality, and its actual shape which made for his agony.5 In the novel we see the kind of training the invisible man is subjected to most in the scene in 5. Here are Barbee's re clearly chapel Chapter concluding as marks, holding up Bledsoe the pattern for the hero to follow: His is a of of imitation. I to form greatness worthy your say you, him. each to follow pattern yourselves upon Aspire, of you, someday in his footsteps. In the next Bledsoe tries to to the invisible man what he calls chapter, explain are "the difference between the way things and the way they're supposed to be," a but it is lesson he is not yet prepared to learn.