Invisible Man

I am an invisible man. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids – and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me.

Wow. This is one of those classic books you finish and then say to yourself, “How could I not have read this before?” This is the kind of book that makes you contemplate in horror the hundreds, maybe thousands, of reading hours you've squandered on every blandly amusing three star novel on your bookshelf. Equally celebrated and derided when it was released in 1952 (and officially recognised with a National Book Award), Invisible Man is anything but bland; and whether one believes that first time novelist Ralph Ellison helped or hampered the nascent Civil Rights Movement with this bildungsroman of a Southern black man trying to find his place in Jim Crow America, this book and this author refuse to be forgotten. I give it all of the stars.

I'd read before of the unnamed protagonist of the prologue – hiding in his warm basement with 1369 light bulbs and some Louis Armstrong records – and whereas in my previous ignorance I had assumed that he suffered from some sort of mental illness, we learn right away that he is merely hibernating and: A hibernation is a covert preparation for more overt action.The meat of Invisible Man is this protagonist's story; what led him to the hole and his slow recognition of his own invisibility.

This isn't the type of book that I could read quickly. After the first chapter – with a sickening battle royal and a young Southern black man who attempts to retain his dignity in servility; giving a speech (with swollen eyes and a mouthful of blood) on “Negro humility” to a group of piggish white men – I had to put the book down and breathe. The scene had been so vivid and upsetting that it needed to be absorbed and contexualised before I could move on. Could this have happened? Could I bear to witness more? The protagonist's college days – and Jim Trueblood's disturbing story, and the shell-shocked veterans at the Golden Day, and Dr. Bledsoe's interpretation of Black Power – every tragic detail felt like the recording of history; if this story isn't technically true, it's certainly truthful. I kept needing to stop and breathe. 

When the narrator moves up to Harlem and his prospects seem to improve (if one forgets the betrayal of the letters of introduction and the worst first day on the job ever at Liberty Paints), finding a way to be a “credit to his race” and a “leader of the people” within the Brotherhood (if only he were blacker...), I was lulled into the protagonist's own complacency – making the climax nearly as surreal and upsetting for me as it was for him. Where was the space to breathe? We find it in the hidey-hole with 1369 lightbulbs and some Louis Armstrong records and the ending is the beginning is the end. But that's just the plot.

Ralph Ellison has said that if he wasn't a writer, he'd have been a jazz musician and he acknowledged that Invisible Man was partly an experiment in writing in a jazz style. While it isn't as “experimental” as that sounds (this is much more reader-friendly than Faulkner or Joyce), the prose oftentimes bebops off into unexpected places.

Then somewhere in the procession an old, plaintive, masculine voice arose in a song, wavering, stumbling in the silence at first alone, until in the band a euphonium horn fumbled for the key and took up the air, one catching and rising above the other and the other pursuing, two black pigeons rising above a skull-white barn to tumble and rise through the still, blue air.

Ellison also has a keen ear for dialect, which he skillfully lays down on the page: from Southern mammies to Harlem zoot-suiters to a displaced African, Ellison recognises that “black” does not mean one homogeneous thing and distinct voices go a long way towards establishing character. He also allows that “white” America is not homogeneous either – and while many of the worst things that happen to the protagonist are at the hands of white people, he knows that they're generally not evil, just misguided or self-absorbed or blinded by their own ideologies. In a scene that resonates with our own times, a young and unarmed black man is shot and killed in a confrontation with a police officer. The funeral scene for young Clifton – in which the protagonist gives a powerful speech on race relations – has been repeated too many more times in recent history:

This cop had an itching finger and an eager ear for a word that rhymed with “trigger”, and when Clifton fell he had found it...I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.

Sixty-plus years later, Invisible Man still has the power to provoke and disquiet. I loved the concept and its execution; the big picture and the small details; the snapsot that it provides of its own time and the context that it gives for our own. This is a must read book; leave the bland books untouched.

I tried to not get too political with this review, but that "I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers"  line really shook me up. I tend to be on the side of law and order and don't presume that all cops are out to gun down unarmed black men, but it certainly happens too often to ignore. I wanted to believe that Trayvon Martin was responsible for the misunderstanding that led to his death -- otherwise you need to accept that a black kid isn't safe just running out for Skittles and who wants to live in that world? -- but then George Zimmerman turned out to be a violent loose cannon, and who wants to be on his side in this? I couldn't figure out how I felt about the gunning down of Michael Brown: friends might have called him a "gentle giant", but he was still a giant who had just assaulted a convenience store owner and who refused a cop's orders to stop advancing upon him; how scared was that cop? Yet, was deadly force the only answer? Here in Canada, we just got the results of the trial of the cop who shot and killed Sammy Yatim, armed with a knife on a Toronto streetcar -- and while there's enough video evidence for us all to play armchair analysts and declare how we would have peacefully defused the situation, this cop said that he felt deadly force was his only recourse and that he feared for his own life. Yet, what about the fact that this cop was already on the force's radar as someone who drew his gun too often? There are too many incidents in the news, and after reading a sixty year old novel, it's powerful to realise that there have always been too many incidents -- and when a black youth is standing in front of a cop with a drawn weapon, this isn't just a particular event but a continuation of an event that has been playing itself over and over again since the days of slavery. No one such event can be evaluated in isolation; even though the lethal results are entirely personal.

In one of those moments of serendipity that define my life, I was watching The Daily Show the other night when Trevor Noah was interviewing DeRay Mckesson of the Black Lives Matter movement. I have been confused about the fairness of people responding #AllLivesMatter whenever someone posts #BlackLivesMatter (because there's truth in that, too, isn't there?), but Mckesson put that in perspective for me: no one would seriously stand up at a breast cancer fundraiser and say, "Oh yeah, well colon cancer matters too" (I'm paraphrasing; it might not have been colon cancer exactly, but that's the drift). And that's so true isn't it: it's entirely reasonable for a group to highlight an area of concern without other people needing to get defensive and insert their own concern; it's not a competition and we all have plenty of concern to go around. And more than that, Mckesson has some strategies, too, for ending the shooting down of black youths by cops (he said there's already been 60 such incidents so far in 2016; can that be true?) and they can be found over at Campaign Zero. What's better than not feeling impotent -- invisible -- about the whole issue in the end?