Three—
Invisible Movements, Black Powers:
Double Vision and Trickster Politics in Invisible Man

I agree . . . that protest is an element of all art, though it does not necessarily take the form of speaking for a political or social program. It might appear in a novel as a technical assault against the styles that have gone before.
—Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act

[O]nly in division is there true health.
—Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

In 1965 a survey of more than two hundred prominent American authors voted Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man the finest American novel since World War II. Thirteen years later, a similar survey of professors of American literature yielded similar results, with Invisible Man judged the most important postwar novel published in the United States.^[1] Whatever else such surveys may prove, they add quantitative evidence to a more general impression that Ellison's novel is perhaps the literary work by an African-American that is most securely lodged in the canon of American letters.^[2] But if there has long been something approaching consensus on the aesthetic value of Invisible Man , political consensus on the value of the novel has been harder to come by. Like Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Invisible Man has been attacked on a number of occasions by left-wing critics who find it insufficiently "committed" or "political" in its treatment of black life in America. Some of these attacks have been reductive and self-justifying, others have been serious and thoughtful.^[3] Most have tended to extrapolate from Ellison's own allegedly aestheticist or formalist statements about his book or from his often seemingly moderate political statements in order to find grounds for attacking his novel. Although I will offer a more positive political analysis of Invisible Man ,

it is not my intent to refute these other critics, both because Ellison has already answered them himself and because I believe that from their strategic vantage points some of these critics, particularly the "black aesthetic" critics of the 1960s, made a number of valid critiques. But we are now in a different political context, one that requires different literary critical strategies, and new readings of Invisible Man are beginning to emerge that better serve the current historical moment.^[4] I want here to contribute to this process of making a new text of Invisible Man by viewing it through a set of lenses that upsets easy aesthetic/political dichotomies by looking both at the content of the novel's form and at forms of content sometimes overlooked by earlier critics.

Many of Ellison's critical remarks on his text have contributed to an undervaluing of some of the political richness in his novel, but even in Ellison the critic we can find at least two important observations that complicate charges of formalism leveled against him, comments that can help point us toward a more useful political reading of the text. First, Ellison has remarked that once written a book belongs to its audience, not its author; and second, he has observed that protest in a novel may take place as much at the level of form as content.^[5] When questions of form are woven into questions about the political content of the novel, Invisible Man can be shown to offer formidable radically democratic insights into the discursive and extradiscursive conditions of American racism and the movements that fight racism.

One reason that Invisible Man has been criticized for being politically conservative is that it seems to provide little overt political guidance to its readers; it does not, for example, end with an unambiguous call to action (although the "hibernating" narrator claims to be preparing for "overt action" and remarks that he believes in "nothing if not action"). But there are some very good political reasons for this ambiguity: the ambiguity of Invisible Man can be read as a far more radical rhetorical and political strategy than one that might have pointed more programmatically toward a "solution" to the "Negro question." Indeed, perhaps the most important element of the text's politics lies in the formal arrangements through which it questions such a programmatic approach to black liberation by putting into dialogue virtually the entire panoply of rhetorical strategies available to black liberation struggles.

The political position of Invisible Man could be termed a call for double vision as the necessary antidote to the double-consciousness imposed on African-Americans.^[6] I mean double vision to connote a number of destabilizing rhetorical and theoretical gestures in the text. At its most gen-

eral level, double vision could be conceived as a struggle between aesthetic and political imperatives, between a desire for expressive celebration (of an individual, of a culture) and a desire for effective resistance (to racism, to invisibility). But at a deeper level, double vision attacks all such easy dualisms, destabilizing them while acknowledging their continuing power. In double vision, visibility or identity (personal or cultural) is at once achieved and deferred, and political positions are at once embraced and challenged.

The term double vision as I intend it should also, however, suggest the difficulty of "having it both ways," that is, while a twofold vision is preferable to single-focused myopia, double vision also connotes a failure of vision, a blurring that is a diminution of visual acuity. The text's politics is thus torn between a shiftiness that may offer aesthetic richness at the cost of political decisiveness, and political decisiveness that may cut itself off from the (cultural) sources of its power. This double sense of doubleness is most succinctly symbolized by the statue on the grounds of invisible man's black college campus. The statue shows the college founder apparently lifting a veil from the eyes of the kneeling slave. But as invisible man notes, it is difficult to tell from the pose if the veil is being lifted or lowered, and further ambiguity is suggested by the kneeling, subservient pose of the slave. Moreover the very frozenness of the statue suggests a reification of enslavement as much as an overcoming of it. Clearly getting out from "behind the veil" is no simple task, and the dialectics of double vision are tricky.

The play of double vision and the search for a political voice with the flexibility of a trickster in Invisible Man at once looks back at a long history of black political and cultural resistance, and presciently anticipates the resurgence of that resistance in the fifties and sixties. Indeed, these two moments are in some sense one, since one of the points of the text is that old rhetorics seldom die, they are simply (or complexly) recycled into new historical (con)texts. Those new (con)texts significantly alter the meaning of old rhetorics, but much depends on understanding and redirecting recurring political tropes, forms that again and again become political traps. The text's rhetorical strategies are important to examine in detail because they suggest alternatives to the powerful and limited rhetorical strategies of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s, strategies that remain the primary discourses available to the struggle against American racism today.

In this chapter I examine three of the modes through which Invisible Man illuminates these formal constraints on black liberation struggles.

The first two of these modes could be said to begin with literary questions that become ineluctably political, while the third makes clear that political questions can be illuminated by literary, rhetorical analysis. First, I show how the text enacts a critique of the white male literary and critical canon of American letters, a critique that works primarily through allusion, and which by analogy challenges all simple notions of integrating blacks into a putatively white America. Second, I analyze how the text tries to liberate blacks from the ghetto of literary naturalism assigned them by white critics, a process that through analogy undercuts the basis of all ghettoization of African-Americans. Finally, moving from literary politics to political literature, I demonstrate how the text directly juxtaposes a variety of black political rhetorics/strategies, setting them side-by-side in such a way that their relative strengths and weaknesses can be seen as a step toward transcendence of their respective limits.

White Canons, Black Masks

The first key form of double-visionary critique proffered in Invisible Man is enacted through its weaving of a variety of canonical American literary texts into the texture of the novel in such a way as to re-interpret those texts. Recently critics have begun to elaborate the polemical intent in the thick web of allusion in Invisible Man , viewing these allusions as a subtext whose function may best be described as revisionist literary criticism.^[7] References to other literary works in Invisible Man can be seen as extensions of Ellison's critical writings, which have always displayed a keen polemical interest in the history of American literature and criticism. In "Twentieth Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity," written the year he began work on Invisible Man , for example, Ellison criticizes American writers since Mark Twain for eviscerating their work by failing to treat one of the key issues at the heart of American national identity: racism.^[8] In the same piece, he also criticizes critics for failing to recognize this absence at the heart of writers like Ernest Hemingway, and conversely, for failing to recognize race as a central topic in the great American writers of the nineteenth century, especially Twain and Melville. In Invisible Man this dialogue is continued at the level of allusion in the form of an elaborate network of references to Moby-Dick; Huckleberry Finn; Lewis Mumford's book of criticism, The Golden Day; and dozens of other works; a network of allusions that in effect attempts to rewrite the literary/critical canon.

Perhaps the best example of this is the scene between invisible man

and young Mr. Emerson (the neurotic rich boy with a copy of Totem and Taboo at his side who fancies himself Huck to invisible man's Jim). The scene criticizes at once paternalistic elements in Twain's treatment of Jim, the relative invisibility of Jim in Twain's account and in criticism about Twain's novel, and rewrites Leslie Fiedler's suggestive if reductive homoerotic reading of Twain's novel (along with a slap at reductive Freudian readings generally). The more immediate social and literary target of this scene is liberal patronizing of the Harlem or Negro Renaissance of the twenties, and the sexual dynamic that often shaped it—the search for sensual and sexual pleasures repressed by genteel culture but released in alleged Negro "primitivism" (Emerson wants to add invisible man to the aviary in his office alongside other exotic creatures). As the surface of the text proffers a homophobic, stereotyped parody of homosexuals, the allusive level evokes complex questions of literary and social engenderment through its references to Wait Whitman in addition to Twain. By attempting to "lure" invisible man to a rendezvous at "Club Calamus," young Emerson is made to embody a decline of Whitmanian critical primitivism through othering, through a projection onto blacks of re-pressed Euro-American desires. The scene dramatizes the way in which African-Americans (and Native Americans) as the political unconscious of the Euro-American literary tradition are used as a source of sexual and textual pleasure while being denied status as full co-creators of such texts. In turn, however, Ellison's reversal of this project is accomplished by a denigrating "feminization" of the "mainstream" tradition (much as later in the text invisible man is denigrated by the Brotherhood by being assigned to lecture on the "woman question").

The allusions to Twain and Whitman further historicize the othering of blacks by white literary figures, whether it be in the comic form of Jim's minstrelsy or the more openly erotic form found in the twenties. It also simultaneously revises Fiedler's insight about the arrested development of American literary males by (re)placing it into the context of black/white sexual and social relations. By exhibiting young Emerson in his barely restrained lust for invisible man, the text points toward the more deeply repressed issue of race in American literary criticism, and by extension, American social discourse and intercourse generally. It is homotextuality rather than homosexuality that is the key issue here—the inability of white "men of letters" to get outside the text of their selves, their inability to create nonwhite (or nonmale) others as anything but projections of some all-inclusive oversoul. My allusion here to Ralph Waldo Emerson is not gratuitous for he too is very much in this scene; indeed

it is the figure of Emerson that ties together the themes I've touched on thus far. For Ralph Waldo Ellison, like his character young Mr. Emerson, is heir to a legacy that has no place for his kind. Through the complex fate of a not-so-hidden naming, young Mr. Ellison is challenging the likes of old Mr. Emerson in part in order to find a place for his (black male) kind in the canon of American letters symbolized by that earlier Ralph Waldo.

This allusive revisionism works not only to reinterpret the canonized "great (white) works" in light of the issue of race, but also at the level of attempting to re-open the canon to include different works by weaving Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, and others into its textual web amidst the white literary "masters." I chose the word "amidst" rather than "alongside" to suggest that this is not an integrationist strategy, but a way of pointing to the always already intertextualized nature of black and white literary relations in America (Douglass in Melville or Thoreau, Melville or Thoreau in Douglass). This strategy, like the metaphor in the novel's title, means showing not only what was there, but also what was not. Ellison writes, "I felt that I would have to make some sort of closer identification with the tradition of American literature, if only by way of finding out why I was not there—or better, by way of finding how I could use that very powerful literary tradition by way of making it my own, and by way of using literature as a means of clarifying the peculiar and particular experience out of which I came."^[9] This passage succinctly characterizes the strategic difference between the first stage of canon reformation that we have just passed through and the new stage we are entering. The complex strategy of making "that very powerful literary tradition" a tradition that can be claimed by African-Americans is the next step beyond finding out why blacks and other Others have not been fully present in our literature and criticism. That process entails moving beyond mere integration of "minority" texts or of establishing parallel "ethnic" literary "sub"-traditions, to a total reshaping of the "majority" tradition in terms of and in the light of the other realities posited by critical rereadings, a move from recognizing or representing the margins to a reconceptualization of the putatively main-stream tradition itself.

In this regard, it is important to note that within the African-American "literary tradition" as constituted largely by white and black males, Ellison's novel itself and its criticism have played a hegemonic role, marginalizing until recently the major contributions of black women. The relative invisibility of strong black women in Invisible Man parallels

the erasure of African-American women writers that canonization of E1lison's novel itself perpetuated.^[10]

Viewed in the light of recent attempts to reconceive the mutual construction and reconstruction of whiteness and blackness, Invisible Man 's allusive strategy can be seen as more radical, more aimed at the roots of racist literary knowledge/power, than the (historically crucial) moment of the "Black Aesthetic" of the 1960s. While theorists of the Black Aesthetic were often apt in criticizing Ralph Ellison's public pronouncements, it is no longer necessary to give Invisible Man up to the interpretations given to it by its author. Yet if Invisible Man was "ahead of its time" in pointing toward the radical revisionism of the current moment, we can only get this point in the present, due in large part to the intervening political struggles (including Black Power) that have cleared the field of some of the racist tropes and practices that made it difficult even to conceive of undermining white male cultural and political hegemony. And as I show below with regard to Ellison's literary ambitions, in its own time Invisible Man was at points very much caught up in some of these hegemonic webs despite its iconoclastic power on other levels.

Invisible Man 's allusive exploration of and symbolic transformation of the Euro-American literary legacy no doubt also had a further, less selfless goal (one that my opening remarks about critical consensus on the novel's aesthetic worth suggests was successful): the goal of adding still another text to the canon—the text of Invisible Man itself. This latter goal is to some extent in (double-visionary) tension with the broader revisionary task—Invisible Man is torn between a desire to integrate itself into the American canon, and the desire to decenter that canon through deployment of its black powers. This double desire in Invisible Man to enter and to condemn Euro-American literature and society no doubt reflects Ellison's own ambiguous personal ambitions, but its wider importance lies in the fact that it is an analogue for the general strategic question facing the black liberation struggle at the time the novel was written in the late forties and early fifties. That strategic question, centered in the tension between integrationism and black nationalism, exploded in the 1960s and remains central to black politics today.

Invisible Man continues to speak to present concerns in part because it embodies that conflict, and, at its best, refuses the either/or of separatism versus integration, opting instead for a complex both/and strategy that, among other things, recognizes black and white culture in America as always already integrated, already predicated on occasionally cooperative but generally oppressive, unequal, and agonistic interrela-

tions. Indeed, the text suggests that what is most "American" about America, what most contributes to that long effort of America to escape the "old world," are forms of language, music, and cultural style generally that originate in African-American communities. From such a viewpoint, black nationalism actually underestimates, and undervalues, the blackness of America by insisting on a degree of purity in black experience that by implication leaves "white" culture untouched as well.^[11] (The most obvious symbol for this in the novel is the drops of black "dope" that are the key ingredient in making "Liberty Paint's" whitest white paint, the paint used to cover "the national monument.")^[12]

But the alternative, a premature, liberal celebration of colorlessness, is also inadequate; it too would render invisible the accomplishments of African-Americans by projecting a drab gray cultural fog. Such a move is challenged, for example, in the epilogue, which satirizes blacks becoming whiter by turning gray and suggests that whites are becoming blacker day by day in their flight from blackness. Such critical gestures qualify, undermine, the abstract, existential humanism much in evidence in Ellison's criticism and in the New Critical formalism forged during the early Cold War that shaped his criticism. Attempts in the novel to get to a "common humanity" are dashed again and again against the shoals of racism, and the cultural costs of such a commonness are constantly reckoned: who would want that pale culture represented by Norton's preRaphaelite daughter?

Against both integrationism and black and white versions of separatism, Invisible Man demonstrates the dialectical, dialogical production of American culture through the struggle between oppressors and oppressed, offering its highest implicit praise for those works of "black" culture that triumph in the face of oppression (the greatness of the blues and folk wisdom, for example), while acknowledging the irony that in some sense white oppression produced or necessitated the production of those cultural forms.

This particular double-visionary tack occurs also in the text in the form of numerous attempts to fuse and refuse certain classic binary oppositions that have structured social and literary discourse in the United States, including most dramatically black/white, but also aesthetic/political, blindness/insight, writer/speaker, individual/community, and tradition/innovation. Fallacious black/white dichotomies are assaulted most directly in this famous oration on the "blackness of blackness" in the prologue where, "In the beginning . . . there was blackness . . . and the sun," where "black is . . . an' black ain't," where "Black will git you

. . . an' black won't." And if black is and black ain't, so too white is and white ain't. In the American context, no social identity comes without a color-coding, and "whiteness" has always been dependent upon "blackness" as a source of its self-definition.^[13]

Given as a parody of a classic black literary form, the call-and-response sermon, the crowd's affirmation of paradox, "black is an' black ain't," at once expresses the subversive intent of the text and the difficulty of conveying that subversive message. Here Ellison codes his text's attack on Black Power/integration dichotomy in a classic form that at once roots his discourse in the particulars of African-American culture and undermines the given categories of race. At the same time, however, the seemingly automatic response of the preacher's audience suggests that they are attending only to the form of the sermon, and missing its paradoxical, subversive content. In this way the scene also foreshadows a deeper paradox in the text, the paradox of radical democratic authorship that asks: How do you preach the need to do away with preachers? How do you lead people to stand without leaders?

Just before the preacher begins his sermon we are given, in a perfect mess of cultural allusion, "an old woman singing a spiritual as full of Weltschrnerz as flamenco"; such an image is emblematic of the complex multicultural interweavings that make up life in the United States (and life in Invisible Man ). But such a strategy of pointing to such dialectical interweavings is in constant danger of obscuring the social ground of, in this example, the spiritual, of turning it into a kind of universal sign of suffering and enduring, detached from its particular context in the history of American slavery and its aftermath. Invisible Man , however, rather than attempting to isolate the purity of origins, attempts to illuminate the diversity of uses to which a cultural or political tradition may be put; rather than insisting on the purity or authenticity of an original context, it seeks to examine the politics of various contexts into which spirituals have been placed (including the context of the novel itself). At times the text offers black popular cultural forms as the root of resistance to racism, as a source of wisdom, survival, and solace; at other times these forms seem a source of political regression to quiescence. This argument is embodied in the novel in many ways, most particularly through the use of black music and folklore as artistic/political forms alongside and intertwined with Afro- and Euro-American "literary" forms. As Larry Neal has suggested, this strategy means that Invisible Man can be seen as far more radical in its attempt to understand the "black masses" and their political predicament than many more overtly

black nationalist or revolutionary works. Because it starts from and respects existing forms of black expressive culture rather than trying to cut a new black aesthetic out of whole cloth, the novel resists the desire to "paternally guide [the black masses] down the course of righteous blackness."^[14] This position conserves, builds upon, existing popular styles, but also suggests that they can be turned, troped, in new, liberating directions.

Such a position, however, must also acknowledge that often both literary and popular cultural forms can be conserving forces in the negative sense of providing a false, aesthetic resolution that leaves power relations unchanged, unchallenged (a trap that seems to have sometimes ensnared the author of Invisible Man , but from which the text can be "saved"). In Invisible Man this tension exists at the level of form as a conflict between what Berndt Ostendorf has called the "modernist" and the "anthropological" dimensions of Ellison's relation to African-American popular culture.^[15] On the one hand the text absorbs and assimilates these cultural forms into its aesthetic as "fresh" content; on the other hand it seeks to validate their usage as a cultural heritage at least as rich as if not richer than the pagan-Judeo-Christian tradition out of which, for example, T. S. Eliot built "The Waste Land" (a poem Ellison studied assiduously while at Tuskegee and in which he found numerous jazz influences).

The elitist side of Ellison as author and critic sometimes seems to want to "raise" folk forms like the blues to the level of "high" (i.e., literate European) culture,^[16] but the text parodies such attitudes when they emerge in the invisible man (as in his recoiling from Trueblood's vulgarity), and the better side of Ellison has spoken of the blues aesthetic as a form that keeps the memory of suffering alive "like fingering the jagged grain" of a scar, a specifically black aesthetic when contextualized as the form given to the historical suffering of African-Americans. These tensions between aestheticism and historical memory cannot be resolved fully in the text for they are precisely dependent upon the reception the text receives, the use made of it by various audiences. But as I have already suggested, and as I will show in more detail below, the text itself raises this question of audience reception precisely with regard to these issues of what to make of its "folkloric" elements.^[17]

Wearing White Face

The second level of protest through form carries on a number of the questions raised by the first level, especially questions about canonicity, while

intensifying scrutiny of the question of literary form itself. Critics have long realized that Invisible Man (re)presented a break with the protest naturalism of much thirties fiction, and of Richard Wright's work in particular. Ellison's numerous protestations to the effect that an artist's ultimate loyalty is to the craft of writing rather than the social world at large have been one source of the distrust toward his novel shown by some left critics. But these remarks themselves must be read in the political context of Ellison's debates within and against the official socialist realism espoused by the Communist party (to which Wright belonged and in which Ellison was deeply involved). And as Thomas Schaub details, they must be seen as well within and against the context of the rise of the anti-communist, Cold War "new liberalism" of the forties, with its aestheticist analogue, the New Criticism.^[18] Ellison's position (as critic, and to a lesser extent as novelist) partakes of the emerging Cold War anti-communism, but it is ineluctably different in that it carries within it a continuing critique of American racism in which the Cold War humanists themselves (and the Southern agrarian New Critics in particular) are implicated.

Ellison saw his friend and mentor Wright suffer under the constraints of Communist party discipline and felt those constraints himself as he began his apprenticeship under Wright. Both authors realized that these formal strictures were analogous to and partly productive of political strictures in the party that closed off vast realms of theory and experience that needed to be explored if politically effective forms of language and action were to be found. In particular, Communist party literary and other doctrines were dictating ways in which African-American experience could be treated in fiction, cutting short important explorations of that experience and thus largely cutting off debate on the left about black perspectives on their own oppression.

As Ellison put it, Wright encountered in the party a form of "intellectual racism . . . couched . . . in the form of insistence upon blind discipline and a constant pressure to follow unthinkingly a political line." Ellison adds that the point was not so much that only an African-American could know and "tell the truth about Afro-American experience, but that you had to at least get down into the mud and live with its basic realities to do so."^[19] And the further point is that Wright had not only been down in the mud but was also peculiarly gifted with the intellectual skills and literary talent needed to understand and express those realities, those forms of oppression. But literature was viewed by the party largely as a

tool for expressing already existing party positions, not as an independent tool for sociopolitical exploration.^[20]

In a letter to Wright in 1941 as both men were struggling to come to terms with their relation to the party, Ellison wrote that "all Marx and Engels, Lenin and Stalin won't help them unless they understand . . . the theoretical world made flesh" through literature.^[21] In general the WrightEllison correspondence makes clear that Ellison in the forties still wanted very much to be a leader of his people and that he believed the medium of fiction could serve that political and moral purpose even as he was developing his critique of what he called "ideological writing." He fashioned himself and Wright as the "conscience" of "American Negroes," and Invisible Man both embodies and parodies this desire through its riotous polypbony of voices, forms, and rhetorics that challenge the restricted languages of naturalism and its political equivalents.

As Michel Fabre and others have shown, the evolution of Ellison's political and literary ideas in the late forties and early fifties is very complex.^[22] But I think it can be captured succinctly under the rubric of two "anxieties." A certain "anxiety of influence" vis-à-vis Richard Wright is intimately tied to what one might call an "anxiety of affluence" vis-à-vis the white literary canon. For the break with naturalism is at once a protest against the political limitations of its conventions as he associates them with the party, and part of Ellison's authorial need to distance himself further from his mentor Wright (to do so he engaged in the classic act of misprision described by Harold Bloom, at times exaggerating the extent and bleakness of Wright's naturalism and at other times underplaying that naturalism by concentrating on Wright's more "literary" European ancestors in order to underline Ellison's own preferred genealogy).

At the same time, the turn away from naturalism seems to be part of the text/author's attempt to enter the canon whose higher reaches at the time of the novel's composition were largely reserved for the great modernists (to whom Ellison constantly refers in his nonfiction writing: Eliot, Joyce, Hemingway, Faulkner, and the like). Indeed the emergence of New Criticism during Ellison's formative period was further entrenching a narrowly formalist version of the modernist canon. That Ellison's double-edged strategies were well-targeted is borne out on the one hand by the fact that he became the first African-American writer (slowly) "integrated" into the canon as writer rather than "black writer," and on the other hand by a variety of left-wing attacks on Invisible Man for its lack

of naturalistic protest, attacks that in effect attempt to draw Ellison back into a literary ghetto.

Ellison perfectly understood that modernist literary critical values were being used to mark the difference between a great writer and a great Negro writer, or worse still the difference between literature and "mere" sociology. Harvey Webster, for example, wrote in the Saturday Review of Literature: "Mr. Ellison has achieved [a] difficult transcendence. Invisible Man is not a great Negro novel; it is a work of art that any contemporary writer could point to with pride."^[23] In other words, as Lawrence Hogue has argued, the normative racist critical discourse could not conceive of a novel being at once "great art" and "Negro."^[24] This is the context in which Ellison began claiming that he was a writer first and a "Negro" second. And this is still largely the context in which African-American writers struggle today against patronizing critics who continue to ghettoize their writing. (When is the last time you heard Norman Mailer described as "the important white novelist," or the last time you saw a review of Toni Morrison or Alice Walker that failed to mention their race?)

Such considerations also overdetermined the choice of the novel's ostensible form, autobiography, a form that since the first slave narrative (America's first, if not only, indigenous genre)^[25] has been central to African-American literary expression. I say the "ostensible" form of autobiography because the text defamiliarizes the life narrative, a defamiliarization that begins with the title as it dematerializes its subject, and continues through subversive moments of surrealism, picaresque, and black humor that distance the text from the realism of autobiographic form.^[26] By working a history of the "race" into invisible man's story, the text both evokes and parodies the "representative man/Negro" form of black autobiography, pointing to the constant underlying question: why must African-Americans continue to prove their humanity, their existence through autobiography? From Phyllis Wheatley to Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, to Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, to Wright and Ellison, a peculiar burden of self-justification has rested on black (auto)biographies, a burden related to attempts to deny the literariness of African-American writing, to lock it into sociological form.^[27] Ellison thus at once uses and critiques the notion of the "representative life," and uses and critiques a genre that has never been given full literary status, that has been another way of disciplining black writing into putatively subliterary forms. African-Americans have had to prove them-

selves human before they could prove themselves literary, or prove themselves literary only to prove themselves human.

To counteract this continuing process of literary (re)ghettoization, in Invisible Man Ellison seems to have set himself the great task of having his novel make its way into the canon on aesthetic terms largely set by Euro-American writers and critics without sacrificing his political intent to combat American racism. His dilemma was to find a way to do this without making blacks "whiter," without eliminating the positive and negative differences between African-American and Euro-American experience. And his way out was instead to try to blacken the face of white America, or rather to reveal the black skin beneath the white mask on the face of much of what passed for (white) "American" culture.

But as I have suggested, this was a fraught solution; the danger of aestheticizing racism seems present on most every page of the novel. For if realism/naturalism had become a trap for black writers, a way of rendering them invisible as writers or subservient to Marxian or liberal dogma, the formalist modernism that was its alternative led to the traps of literary critical tokenism that Invisible Man could not avoid (i.e., winning his personal battle but losing the collective war), as well as to aestheticist temptations to smooth over the "jagged grain" of racism with cosmetically beautiful words. Much of the text's power derives from its attempt to move between these twin dangers of dogmatic content and dogmatic formalism. Thus the text exhibits a kind of "anxiety of affluence" with regard to its ambitions toward literary upward mobility, suggesting that on some level Ellison recognized that the inclusion of a novel written by a black man into the canon could function as but one more form of tokenism with the liberal message: see, a black writer can move into our literary neighborhood, we are not racists, Ralph Ellison is a friend of ours.

Indeed, the entire text of Invisible Man can be read as a series of anxious reflections on the power and limits of authorship in that the narrator's search for autonomy and authenticity is inextricably tied to his attempt to tell, to narrate his experience. The truth of the invisible character as passive victim is constantly set against the truth of the narrator as active teller and (re)shaper of the character's experience.^[28] But contrary to some readings, I would argue that by the end of the story the reader should be asking if this latest incarnation, invisible man as narrator, is any more free, any less subject to the delusions of self-creation than has been the character who has again and again become trapped in

someone else's design, plan, blueprint, or vision that he has mistaken as his own. What surely has changed by the end, however, is that the narrator has become aware of how deeply his story has been scarred and shaped by racism, how the particularities of American racism reinflect the more general philosophical and political problem of autonomy, of authorship of one's experience.

An anxiety of affluence manifests itself as well through a number of smaller allegories of authorship presented in the text. One example now can suggest what I mean; I will return to the theme in the next section. The complexities of black authorship in white America are explored through the scene in which a wraithlike young black girl rises from the college choir to sing a spiritual. The scene has been set carefully by Dr. Bledsoe for the white philanthropists to appreciate black musical piety. But the act of ventriloquism is imperfect because meanings other than those intended by Bledsoe are derived by other auditors, including the invisible man. The girl herself is transformed as the music takes her over until she has become an instrument, a "pipe of contained, controlled and sublimated anguish" (115). She is at once an instrument manipulated by Bledsoe and the white fathers, and the true vehicle of a black spiritual heritage larger than she. Her voice is at once a recorder of the history of black anguish at oppression, and an aesthetic sublimation of that anguish. And her authorship of the performance is doubly, dialectically questioned as the meaning of the text is split into the tradition that speaks through her and the audiences that variously interpret her.

Double vision is thus also the text's attempt to overcome, as well as express, the double-consciousness of being a "black" "American" writer. And the central irony of the text is surely that one of the most fully visible black characters in American fiction is an invisible man, that the palpable "presence" of a character is created through repeated efforts to show how he is not seen. This allows for the very emptiness of the character as a sign to be at once richly full of the legacy of black oppression and an open sign of future possibility, future "signifyin(g)" possibilities for African-Americans after the long hibernation is fully over. Like Malcolm's "X," invisible man's invisibility manages both to show the legacy of slavery and racism, and to point toward the possibility of new identities achievable in the future.^[29]

But as narrators, neither Ellison nor invisible man are willing simply to wait upon that future. Instead they must at once show forth the full richness of black culture, in music, in folk tales, in language—all forms inextricably entwined with oppression, all scarred with the history of

American racism—and do so in a way that transcends simplistic black/white dichotomies. Double vision must constantly play between the universalizing element in literature (as Ellison's existential humanism conceived it) and the local, particular, historical conditions in which it is always rooted. In particular here it must avoid both creating blacks as wholly other (in an ironic, incomplete reversal of the racist othering they receive from whites), and the emptiness, empty mess of abstract humanism (as an escape from the realities of racism by imaginary projection of a universal "brotherhood" or a rationalizing universal tragic condition). Again and again invisible man tries to bring this vision into double focus, only to fall quickly back into a certain blurriness that is the other meaning of double vision. The visionary quality of Invisible Man , its attempt to live an aesthetic resolution of the "race problem," always also eventually falls back into the mess of blurred vision, into a history that has rendered "nonwhite" Americans invisible to the dominant race and often even to one another. Two kinds of formal protest, critique of the canon and critique of literary naturalism, unite around the question of the costs of canonicity as it stands for and stands in for the larger question of the place of African-Americans in the culture of the United States.

Eloquence, Audience, and Rhetorics of Liberation

Thus far I have concentrated on showing how the formal, "literary" strategies in the novel are inextricably tied to larger social questions of black oppression and liberation. Now I would like to reverse focus and talk about how attempts to isolate specific black liberation strategies advocated in Invisible Man return us to questions about formal rhetorical strategies. As a number of critics have pointed out, the plot structure of Invisible Man recapitulates the history of the African-American struggle for survival and liberation. Moving from slavery (the Grandfather) to Reconstruction and accommodationism (the "Battle Royal" and invisible man's version of the Atlanta Exposition address) to the migration northward to industrialism (the factory sequence), and so on, each of these historical moments is linked to one or more liberation rhetorics and strategies. This allows the text to make history present as an array of discursive legacies that are also current and future strategic possibilities. The strategies the text interrogates and puts into dialogue include folk tricksterism (as embodied in the Grandfather, Trueblood, and Peter Wheatstraw); Booker T. Washington's accommodationism (as embodied

in Bledsoe/Barbee); paternalistic philanthropic humanism (as embodied in Norton); a white-dominated Marxian humanism (as embodied in Jack and the Brotherhood); separatist black nationalism (as embodied in Ras the Exhorter/Destroyer); and a nihilist version of tricksterism (as embodied in Rinehart). Woven through and among these is another textual voice (the invisible narrator's? Ellison's?) that is torn between Cold War liberalism and a black radicalism symbolized by Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois.

I want to look more concretely at some key scenes in which these various liberation strategies run up against historical and rhetorical limits, and at suggestions in the text of a double-visionary strategy to escape some of these double binds. The rhetorical strategies through which the novel enacts its double vision of liberation can be seen best by concentrating on scenes in which the text raises questions about audience and interpretation that double back on the reader to raise questions about how to interpret the novel itself. The issue of audience, of rhetorical reception, first raised in the "blackness of blackness" "sermon," can also be seen as continuing our discussion of the text's "anxiety of affluence." In the first chapter of the novel, for example, the young protagonist's attempt to achieve success in the white world on white terms in his speech before the audience of white city "fathers" both figures Ellison's relation to his white critical audience and problematizes more generally the question of political audiences.

In the set-up to this speech in the "battle royal" scene, invisible man observes that he is anxious for the white male audience to hear his speech because "only those men could judge truly my ability" (25). And in the speech itself, invisible man's eloquence seeks to rise above the inarticulate rough and tumble of his fellow "black boys," to whom he feels "superior," in order to please his white auditors/critics (18). But while he is playing Booker T. Washington, the great white fathers read him largely as a minstrel show, giving invisible man the first of several lessons in the precarious relation between speaker (author) and audience. Much of the rest of the text can be read as an attempt to escape a logic by which acceptance by his audience can only come on white terms, on terms that betray his own people (as represented by his Grandfather), if not his own being.

The scene also serves to set up a notion of complex layers of oppression that are worked through, if never fully worked out, in the remainder of the novel. The battle royal is a site of multiple oppressions in which those in power exercise that power both directly and by proxy. Just as

invisible man has internalized white standards through which he tries to distinguish himself from his fellows, the resentment of the young black men is directed (with partial justification) against him even as they too are played as tools of the white fathers by brutally fighting one another. And the white stripteaser is at once oppressed herself, in terror of the predatory men, and oppressor, a tool used to excite unachievable desire in the young black men. She, with the flag tattooed on her stomach, is and is not America, is at once the American dream covered with the makeup that hides its true face (just as the glittering gold of the "coins" turns out to be worthless burnished brass), and a victim of that dream as it is built on the exploitation of women. Sexism and racism are linked here but not equated, since the former can be folded into a text that doubly oppresses black men and women. The "black boys" are made an audience to her performance, but unlike the white men they have no power over her, and they are in turn under the amused surveillance of those with the power to animate the object of desire; the white men vicariously use the sexuality of the young men to enhance and displace their own predatory virility. Both this concern with audience and this vicariously predatory sexuality are motifs repeated and developed in the following chapter (Trueblood's tale).

Always poised against this blurred vision induced by multiple oppressions is the possibility of telling the truth plainly. In the battle royal speech, for example, through a subconscious slip of the tongue, invisible man utters the words "social equality" in place of the more cautious "social responsibility." And it is ironically the mocking response of the white male audience of his smoker speech that elicits the taboo word "equality" from invisible man's political unconscious. Their taunting of his use of "big words" (later echoed by Brother Jack in his put-down of invisible man's independent political initiative) at once suggests the limits of black eloquence aimed toward a white racist audience and sets up an ironic pattern of invisible man learning from the in- or miscomprehensions of his audiences.

The Trueblood episode in chapter 2 ironically echoes and reverses the smoker scene. As a story within a story the episode momentarily displaces invisible man as narrator/orator and, in a kind of call-and-response answer to his speech in chapter 1, invisible man joins the great white father, Mr. Norton, as audience. Trueblood eloquently and craftily articulates the position of the inarticulate, which Ellison calls one of the prime, democratic functions of the novel (v–xx). But invisible man cannot yet hear this story on its own terms any more than the white au-

dience at the smoker could hear him. Instead he identifies with, while misunderstanding, the shock of Norton, and later, the disgust of Bledsoe at the crudeness of untutored blacks. The scene seems designed to push to the limits the text's attack on the kind of false gentility embodied in Norton and Bledsoe as proxies for all those critics who would have black writers write only about either purely uplifting characters or purely victimized ones. Trueblood's incest and subsequent blues-borne acceptance of the act confounds both these positions.

Invisible man is blind to the fact that Trueblood's story shocks Norton not with its crudeness but because it calls up the latter's own guilty complicity in incestuous desire. Norton's creation of a "destiny" for himself through aid to the Negro is tied ineluctably to a suppressed incestuous desire for his daughter in whose name he carries out his philanthropy. His desires, like Trueblood's, are incestuously in-turning, a re-creation of himself in the form of "the Negro," a denial of his complicity in the maintenance of racism analogous to his denial of his incestuous desires. But unlike Trueblood, he cannot face this truth about himself as the grounds for a new position. Norton's daughter's paleness and ethereal quality suggest a kind of inbreeding that allegorizes a white America whose search for purity robs it of substance.

But if Trueblood is more honest and less culpable than Norton in his incest, some critics have been too quick to celebrate Trueblood, ignoring an ironic reading of his name and the fact that it is precisely the whites who celebrate and reward him for his incest; if Trueblood is an assertion of true black manhood against racist castration, one stereotype is merely replaced with another—the superstudly, incestuous "natural man."^[30] If invisible man is wrong to condemn Trueblood for bringing down the race, ignoring the material conditions that contributed to his actions, there are limits as well to celebrating him as the true blood. Trueblood is lured into his sin through a dream that reverses the stereotype of black male lust for "the" white woman; he dreams of a voracious white woman who virtually rapes him. This image prefigures invisible man's own interracial sexual encounters later in the novel and echoes the battle royal scene, both scenes showing sexuality as a projected trap for black males, a distraction from and contributor to politicoeconomic oppression. Trueblood's blues reconciliation (he sings his way to acceptance of himself despite his incest) makes him more honest than Norton, but the fact that it only serves to reconcile him to incest casts a shadow over the reconciliation and makes clear that it can hardly be a model for social action. As a metaphor for the political, economic, and sexual double

binds imposed on black America, its image of self-acceptance is a simple survival technique. But it is at best a holding action. Trueblood does indeed move without really moving. Stripped of its no longer amusing comic elements, the episode becomes a tragic in-turning of aggression, an assertion of a denied manhood that denies independent womanhood to Trueblood's daughter and wife.

Trueblood's blues solution is, as it were, an aesthetic solution that leaves realities unchanged. Indeed the use of a blues song to reconcile a character to incest suggests that the truth of the blues itself can lead to a kind of pseudo-truebloodedness that is incestuously abusive, rather than the kind of "jagged grain" that keeps political struggle alive. If the priggishness of invisible man and the hypocrisy of Norton push the reader toward sympathy with Trueblood, his folk solution to his dilemma is also only a partial solution in the wider rhetorical context since it suggests a separate, black aesthetic resolution that is undermined by other elements in the scene. Trueblood is drawn as the anti-Remus, the black storyteller as trickster who undermines the minstrel show expectations of his auditors in a way that invisible man could not in his first speech. But by letting us see that in telling his story quite cannily with a white and would-be white audience clearly in mind, the narrator behind the narrator undermines any notion of pure folkness in Trueblood or his story, suggesting instead the ineluctable interrelation of black and white American narratives. Trueblood's blues solution to his double bind displaces but does not eliminate the problem; it attempts a purely aesthetic solution to a social problem. It is also made possible only by a silencing of black women; we do not hear the blues songs composed by Trueblood's wife or daughter.

Indications of Trueblood's wariness and canniness and his masterfulness as a storyteller set him up as another ironic embodiment of black authorship, one that ties craftfulness (much vaunted by Ellison) with craftiness (much needed in a black storyteller in racist America). It is clear that Trueblood has been and is in this version shaping his story to meet expectations and rewards of a white audience, a fact that should put the reader on guard as to the veracity of the larger story (invisible man's and Invisible Man 's) in which his story is embedded. It suggests that a black storyteller can never tell a story in unguarded fashion to a white or mixed audience, and it suggests that just as the appearance of total honesty of Trueblood's account fools his immediate audience, a similar joke may be being played on the other, wider, whiter audience, too. Indeed the whole level of black folk culture in the text becomes, as

a subtext more available to most black readers than whites, an analogue of the folkloric style of "puttin' on the white man."^[31]

If Trueblood is seen allegorically as a stand-in for Ellison, his dilemma becomes clearer. Like Trueblood, Ellison as storyteller is in a double bind; in portraying a character like Trueblood he risks all manner of (white) misreadings, all manner of minstrel interpretations. In constantly working on the edge of stereotype in his satiric characterizations, Ellison must have feared just such responses; in trying to use laughter to shatter the minstrel mask from within, he is in danger instead of confirming that mask.^[32] Indeed, Ellison's own anxiety about this problem was still palpable thirty years after the publication of his novel when in the introduction to the thirtieth anniversary edition of Invisible Man he wrote: "I would have to approach racial stereotypes as a given fact or social process and proceed, while gambling with the reader's capacity for fictional truth, to reveal the human complexity which stereotypes are intended to conceal" (xvii). This dilemma is thematized later in the novel through the minstrel bank and the Sambo doll, which continue to haunt invisible man despite his attempts to be rid of them. More generally, in pursuing through his intensely lyrical modernism and surrealism so resolutely an aesthetic solution to one "Negro problem" (the problem of Negro authorship), Ellison, like Trueblood, is in danger of fashioning an aesthetic resolution that leaves power relations unchanged. An ironic mirror of Trueblood, Ellison's refinement might be rewarded, as is Trueblood's folksy authenticity, through a mode that reinforces existing oppression. From opposite ends, Ellison and Trueblood participate in a no-win game in which the cost of elite acceptance is alienation from the folk, and the cost of folksiness is condescension.

Invisible man's next lesson in the ambiguities of authorship, leadership, and black power in a white world comes from Trueblood's apparent opposite and nemesis, Dr. Bledsoe. The character of Bledsoe, particularly in relation to his mouthpiece, the blind preacher Homer Barbee, reveals a good deal about the complexity of the position of the Civil Rights leader as it would emerge in the years immediately following publication of Invisible Man . Bledsoe embodies the degeneration of second generation black leadership, one that claims to be heir to the (ambiguous) legacy of a Booker T. Washington-esque "founder." For Bledsoe, black power has become nothing more than power over blacks and the subtle joys of walking among and manipulating whites. To maintain this power he needs and enlists the rhetorical powers of one who (probably) sincerely believes in that which Bledsoe cynically manipulates.

Homer Barbee is blind to the outdatedness of his message and to his manipulation by Bledsoe. But even after knowing of Bledsoe's treacherous personal philosophy and will-to-power, invisible man is moved by Barbee, not simply because he is naive but also because there is a partial truth in the founding tale he retells (a "barbarian" Homer, his telling of the black odyssey has dignity and can help decenter the story of Western "civilization" putatively begun by his ancient namesake). That truth is embodied not only in the bombastic bard's metaphors run amuck (as Keith Byerman shows, Barbee's speech deconstructs itself, becoming a vehicle of truth even as it manipulates),^[33] but also in the eloquent silence of one of his auditors, Miss Susie Gresham, the "gray-haired matron in the final row . . . who'll never be fooled by the mere content of words" (111–12). She hears beneath the flowery phrases of Preacher Barbee the cadences of truth, of possibility beyond the "blaring triumphant sounds empty of triumphs" (111). Susie Gresham, stereotyped mother figure of the race and like most of Ellison's female characters without much voice of her own, yet embodies not only the past but the future of black womanhood and stands for "Jane Pittman," Rosa Parks, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, for women who hear beneath the eloquence of kings a deeper, more grounded task, a radically democratic reshaping of the political landscape. Miss Gresham hears the eloquence but unlike Barbee she also sees clearly. Because she truly sees the promised land, she listens for the true music beneath the transient, self-serving sounds and images poured forth by preachers enamored of their own eloquence. Not yet allowed her own words, she nonetheless is the bearer of a tradition of profound resistance; "in that island of shame" she makes certain that invisible man is "not ashamed," offering a legacy signed by the music of her being and sealed without words.

In the next generation, Miss Gresham's eloquent silence will become the voice of Anne Moody who as a young Civil Rights worker (for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) recognizes that however beautiful it may be to dream, to dream you must be asleep: "By the time we got to Lincoln Memorial, there were already thousands of people there. I sat on the grass and listened to the speakers, to discover that we had 'dreamers' instead of leaders leading us. Just about every one of them stood up there dreaming. Martin Luther King went on and on talking about his dream. I sat there thinking that in Canton we never had time to sleep, much less dream."^[34] The same eloquence that allowed King to help mobilize so many served simultaneously as a soporific that put to sleep resources of self-empowerment in many African-Americans. Like

Barbee, King's sincere belief in his (American) dream is unimpeachable; but, to reverse the text's metaphor, his very ability to see (for others) from the mountaintop inadvertently could keep them blind, or at least keep them from seeing for themselves, thus leaving them visionless when he was brutally swept from the scene. And the Bledsoes and Nortons who came after continue to use both King's words and the words of black power countervoices to rise to positions of power over blacks.

Invisible Man 's interrogation of black liberation rhetorics is also embodied in a conflict between the written and the spoken word. The narrator implies in the prologue that he was a failed orator who turns now to written storytelling while keeping alive the possibility that he may once again be an orator (14). I want to suggest that one line of development in the novel is that of the invisible narrator learning to bring his speaking rhetoric closer to the rhetoric of his writing, closer to the sensual, dialogical languages that resonate as context to his more monological speeches. In turn, the text's texture can be seen as striving to imitate the richness and multivocality of a jazz ensemble.^[35] This begins to become clearer in the next of invisible man's oratorical performances, his speech at the eviction of the old black couple.

Invisible man's speech at the eviction can best be seen as a kind of jazz performance (and he clearly thinks of it as a performance, evaluating and reevaluating its effects almost independent of intention). Like all but his first speech, this one is improvised, and like much jazz improvisation this one takes off from a cliché (like a clichéd melody or musical phrase in jazz). Invisible man first tries out his humility riff, but so far is the idea of a "peaceful and law-abiding slow to anger people" from the truth of his audience that he is forced to ironize the phrase, to turn it around like a jazz trumpeter toying with a musical phrase until it has turned from sweet to harsh. The audience leads the way through their sarcastic response, until he must pretend and then, becoming caught up in the pretense, seems to cease to know himself if he is or was sincere. His speech has the opposite of its original intent by stirring or helping to stir the crowd to action. Here invisible man as character begins to learn the lesson of the ambiguities of rhetorical reception that Invisible Man as text has embodied in earlier scenes. And, as in the battle royal speech, something closer to the truth is drawn out of him inadvertently by the audience.

When a representative of the Brotherhood also misconstrues the intent of the speech and recruits him into the group, invisible man is led into his next key speaking assignment. His Brotherhood speech suggests the

complexities of rhetorical recyclings by improvising on the Southern populism of invisible man's youth flavored with the abstract radical humanism he has learned from the "Brothers." Here again a call-and-response pattern with the audience leads him on, shapes his discourse. "May I confess?" he shouts in a Baptist style that upsets the Brothers behind him but elicits, "You're batting .500, Brother," from the audience. These moments of contact with the audience, of concrete metaphorical connection, open up rhetorical possibilities that soon drown in the sea of abstractions derived from his mentors until he confesses only emptily that he feels "more human." The context of staring out into the bright lights even while calling for his audience to join him in taking "back our pillaged eyes" reflects back to the blind Barbee unwittingly singing someone else's song, working someone else's intent. And even his abstract confession is too much for the Brotherhood theoreticians behind him who seem to find it politically incorrect, "unscientific," in its emotionalism.

While modeled on elements in the Communist party, the Brotherhood (a hood over the brothers) here stands for all monological, sectarian rhetorics that mistake their blueprints for the world (mocked with foreshadowing by the jive-talking Peter Wheatstraw who sells old blueprints or uses them for the more concrete task of starting fires to keep him warm on the streets of New York; the blueprint scene is also a coded swipe at Richard Wright's "A Blueprint for Negro Writing"). Ellison has said that the Brotherhood cannot simply be equated with the Communist party, and recent work by Mark Naison makes clear that relations between Harlem blacks and the Communist party were far more complex and more positive than the Brotherhood's relation to the residents of Harlem.^[36] Rather I think the portrait of the Brotherhood should stand as a critique of the monovision (as embodied in the one-eyed Jack, antitrickster) and sometimes blindness of all abstract humanist languages, a critique that should be turned ironically back on the abstract (liberal) humanism in much of Ellison's own critical writing.

In this case, the seductive language of "scientific" logic in the Brotherhood ensnares both audience and party leaders alike, but the latter at least have the illusion that they are leading others while the followers are taught, as invisible man soon learns, simply to be obedient. Caught in the web of their own historical dialectics, the leaders dismiss huge chunks of life, entire forms of being, that don't fit their blueprint. And they can do so easily because they are not required, in the words of Ellison to Wright, to make "the theoretical world flesh."^[37] First the old couple at the eviction are dismissed as "outside of history"; soon the whole black

"race" is pushed either outside or (once again) to the margins of the vision.

The problem with the Brotherhood's vision is not that it theorizes a world; all discourses, however putatively concrete, including novelistic ones, do that. Rather the problem is that their vision is so seamlessly totalizing that it allows no room for the emergence of dissonant information that might lead to a practical or tactical shift in the theory. The role of fleshy, messy concreteness is to generate anomalies that require adjustment of the paradigm, or to force recognition that only multiple visions or theories or paradigms can encompass the complex realities of the historical situation. Moreover, the compensatory power of the Brotherhood's grand vision as embedded in its scientific analysis of history gets in the way of the search for real political power by disempowering all those folks who alone could provide the sources for change. At the same time, the hierarchical structure of the group encourages an internalizing of the power struggle within the organization itself. Only slowly does invisible man come to see that it is in the lived forms of daily life in Harlem that the power to survive, and with it the power to change, must lie.

But before invisible man comes to his realization of the need to actually interact and interthink with those whom one would seek to change, he has encounters with two more representative figures, two more dissonant voices within his community: the black nationalist voice of Ras the Exhorter/Destroyer, and the nihilistic multivocality of Rinehart the confidence man.

The portrait of Ras is in many respects the most impressive testimony to the dialogical, polyphonic quality of Invisible Man because while it is clear that neither Ellison nor invisible man cares for black separatism, Ras is given some of the most eloquent speeches in the novel. True, portrayed as a combination of Don Quixote, mad African prince, and Ahab (pursuing blackness as resolutely as the captain pursued whiteness), Ras is a comic figure (and invisible man gets the last "word" in the form of a spear through Ras's cheeks linking Ahab's harpoon to an African spear). But everyone in the novel is a comic figure at one time or another, and the very fact that only an act of violence, as opposed to eloquence, can quell that voice, is evidence of its (black) power.

One of the most moving scenes occurs during the fight between Ras, Clifton, and invisible man. Ras's "black and beautiful" speech catches even invisible man with its eloquence, and in the process Ras correctly predicts the Brotherhood's selling out of the brothers (and sisters) of Harlem (360–68). Yet another example of displaced power struggle, of a bat-

tle royal again aimed at the wrong target, the verbal and physical struggle sets the ground for Tod Clifton to emerge as an embodied synthesis of liberation voices, only to have that synthesis destroyed by disillusion, anger, and white police violence. Like the Black Panthers after him, Clifton commits revolutionary suicide because he is fed up with political tropesters who rhyme trigger and nigger.

Once again invisible man is shown not to be the author of his experience. Tod Clifton shows invisible man that he has been manipulated like a Sambo by the rhetorical moves of the Brothers. Invisible man then turns instead to the other brothers and sisters, those in whose name he has presumed to lead but whose names he does not even know. His final speech is very different in form and content from those that have come before. It is a kind of abdication speech that is actually the taking on of deepened commitment. It is concrete, sensual speech, and it turns its questions to the audience not "rhetorically" but with true dialectic, true desire to hear answers he no longer has.

Once again his audience reshapes his intent: "'All right, all right,' I called out, feeling desperate. It wasn't political. Brother Jack probably wouldn't approve of it at all, but I had to keep going" (446). Again and again he can only relate the concrete details of Clifton's death, the shot, the fall, the blood running from his shattered body. Instead of rousing them with tales of meaningful martyrdom, he tells the audience that Clifton foolishly believed in Brotherhood and died "like a dog" at the hands of "a cop [who] had an itching finger and an ear for a word that rhymed with 'trigger.'" "I do not know," he continues, "if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers. And I know too how we are labeled. So in the name of Brother Clifton beware of the triggers; go home, keep cool, stay safe away from the sun. Forget him. When he was alive he was our hope, but why worry over a hope that is dead?" (446–48). Once again the twists of his irony are such that he seems not sure himself what he is really telling the crowd. Does he really want them to "keep cool," or is he trying to shame them into action?

After delivering his last public speech over Clifton's body and routing Ras (race) the Destroyer, invisible man is presented with his last temptation—Rinehart, the preacher, pimp, lover, hipster, nihilist trickster. Invisible man is driven from Ras's pure black African identity to the identitylessness of Rine the runner. He is momentarily charmed and attracted by the deconstructive shiftiness of this confidence man. But ultimately he turns his back on this play of pure form, this slippery signifier, seeing Rine's position as at best an image of tactical flexibility but not a role

worth emulating in itself: "Then I looked at the polished lenses of [Rinehart's dark] glasses and laughed. I had been trying simply to turn them into a disguise but they had become a political instrument instead" (488). Rinehart suggests the element of political tricksterism he'll need to further his liberation cause, but it will be a tricksterism rooted in the needs of his "audience," one that is more rooted in and respectful of their lives, one dedicated to lessening rather than deepening their dupedom and exploitation.

Invisible man's attempt to try out this brand of tricksterism, his attempt to dupe the Brotherhood dupesters suggests, however, that the trickster mode cannot be easily or unambiguously deployed. The question of who is tricking whom emerges in the final chapter in the form of invisible man's attempt to fathom the meaning of the riot that erupts in Harlem. He is tortured by his possible role in bringing it about. Has he been duped again by the Brothers into fomenting the riot to give the Brotherhood more martyrs while illustrating the wisdom of their scientific logic that rebellion is premature? Is this battle royal in no significant way different from the first? But he overhears other theories, especially that it was started by Ras, that Ahab was impaled on his own spear. Or is the riot a collective improvisation; who can say, once set in motion, whether the intent of those who began (or think they began) it is relevant. It takes on its own life, its own forms.

These are questions of interpretation that reflect as well on the form(s) of Invisible Man itself. In being put in the position of being an interpreter of the riot and of his own role in it, invisible man embodies the ultimate position of the novel's reader: what will we make finally of the riot of form that is Invisible Man?

Tricksters, Trappers, and Tropesters

Ellison's invisible man had to remain underground despite the fact that he possessed the intelligence and awareness to envision a new discursive formation, because extratextual discursive formations had not been produced.
—W. Lawrence Hogue, Discourse and the Other

Contrary to claims that the novel abdicates political and "social responsibility" through the literal/literary hibernation in which its narrator

seems ensconced at the end, Invisible Man can be read as offering an important, nuanced radical democratic political analysis. The text shows that there is no rhetorical strategy, no cultural symbol, no political figure or figured politics that cannot abuse or be abused. There is no strategy that can guarantee "eloquence," that formal connection between idea and audience, no form that cannot be misheard or misread. There is no trope that cannot become a trap. Dangers lie at all points in the process, from the speaker-authors who can be and to some extent must be self-deceived, to the text of Invisible Man itself which flows from and into a river of language far too vast to be charted, to the receiving audience which often hears only what it wants to hear and seldom stretches to catch the new music or to see the less visible forms beneath the visible surfaces.

Against the struggle of each liberation voice to achieve dominance, the text searches for a kind of political trickster voice, embodied in the varied texture and self-subverting turns of the narrative itself, a voice that shows the necessity of recognizing the provisionality of all liberation discourses, their corruptibility and their divisiveness, even as it acknowledges their respective value as partial truths. This trickster voice enacts a fusion and points to the already fused nature of African-American and Euro-American sources, including black and white literary modernisms (though Ellison initially, for strategic reasons I discussed above, tended to downplay his debt to African-American literary roots) and a variety of ostensibly folk forms including the blues, jazz, the dozens, tall tales, jive talk, zoot suits, spirituals, and preaching.

Invisible Man suggests that "popular" forms of African-American culture have far greater polyphony and flexibility than do the systematic ideologies and rhetorics of black liberation, or than does the self-limiting form of the autobiography (long the major form of African-American self-expression). But neither these folk forms nor literary modernism are uncritically celebrated; the text shows that both modes are in their own differing ways inscribed with the scars of racism and complicity with racism. The text suggests that any liberation movement worth its name will need to address more complexly the range of positioned voices from which black oppression can be resisted, will need to show that these disparate voices are in fact discursive forms implicated in one another, and will need to respect the variety and diversity of these voices. Something like a fusion of folk wisdom, rhetorical self-consciousness, and political analysis will be required to bring such an array of voices together in concerted, irreducibly multiform movement.

The text celebrates the forms of American blackness and the blackness

of American forms, but these forms are not presented as pure but rather as hybrids (like jazz with its African syncopations of European martial music) whose purity is better guarded by recognizing their impurity, their cultural constructedness amidst a struggle to overcome white racism.^[38]

From this strategic perspective purity is the danger, for claims to purity always open themselves to corruption: indeed the purer one claims one's rhetoric or symbol to be the more in danger it is of being corrupt(ed). The pure blackness of black nationalism, whether political or cultural, led and leads only to greater insularity until only the blackest one of all forms a party of one (two counting the police agent). And a purely assimilationist strategy likewise denies complexity, whitewashes the legacy of racism and resistance. Rhetorics can be defended best when their capacity to be abused is clearly known. There can be no stopping, resting in the pursuit of a rhetoric of liberation because that rhetoric is always becoming available to enemies of liberation. Every vision must be double, must be, for example, both integrationist and nationalist. And every clear double vision will fall into blurred vision before long.

For every faked symbol like the smooth, unbroken link of slave chain abused by the too smooth Bledsoe, there is one like Brother Tarp's—less pure, a broken link, a mere prison chain not an authentic slave relic, it nevertheless more aptly caught the truth about the struggle against bondage. Tarp's open link is ready for the next political articulation, is open to the new political context. The other material symbols of historical and continuing racism, the gape-mouthed bank and the Sambo doll, like Bledsoe and Tarp's links of chain, can also be misread. For a nihilist trickster like Rinehart there are only various kinds of useful misdirections of his "readers." But for the politically savvy trickster these symbols are also reminders that words too are material signifiers with real referents in history. Neither invisible man nor the reader can afford to leave that signifyin(g) chain behind. Its weighty thereness keeps the past palpably present. If we free ourselves by opening up the chain of signifiers, it is only by feeling the link to networks of resistance and exploitation held in place by, among other things, material chains of language. Invisible Man makes clear that real metaphors connect the streets to the pulpit to literature and its criticism. Only by following such metaphorical links back to their sources will liberation be possible and literature be more than another veil. After all, in the next generation a zoot-suit riot and "the word" transform the Rinehart-like "Detroit Red" into Malcolm X, just as Miss Susie Gresham finds her words in Miss Ella Baker; together these active keepers of the faith signify the collective power of black women and men that will one day tear off the veils of racism.