Loving the Invisible Man
Or, what happens in a world without props.
NOTE: The following contains vague spoilers for Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.
In 1897, H.G. Wells wrote a book about the egotistical Dr. Griffin, who develops a drug that turns him completely transparent. That’s right: The Invisible Man. At first, Griffin wears clothing and a face mask to preserve the outlines of his body, but he soon ditches his clothes to sneak around the countryside in complete oblivion, wreaking havoc as he goes.
But the physical transparency Griffin experiences is not the only kind of invisibility there is—at least, not according to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). “I am an invisible man,” the protagonist begins:
No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. 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. (3)
What does this mean? It takes the rest of the novel for the protagonist, retelling his story from the beginning, to figure it out.
In brief, that story is this: Ellison’s protagonist, a talented speaker, receives a scholarship to a prominent Southern Negro college led by Dr. Bledsoe. After an unfortunate incident in which the narrator gives Mr. Norton, a rich white trustee, an unintentional tour of the college’s seamier suburbs, Dr. Bledsoe expels him for a semester. Carrying letters of recommendation from Dr. Bledsoe, the protagonist moves to New York to work up enough money for his return to college. But Bledsoe’s letters were actually denunciations, and the narrator discovers that he’s been permanently expelled. Without a college to return to, he stays in New York. After a disastrous employment experience and even more disastrous medical response, the protagonist eventually becomes an orator for the Brotherhood, an ideological organization dedicated to fulfilling history by resisting dispossession and organizing the masses for social good. His plummet from Brotherhood leadership is the climax of the book.
(If you’re wondering about the hero’s name, he never gives it. He’s invisible, remember.)
In large part, the protagonist’s idea of invisibility rests on the absence of love. From his Southern college to his Harlem soapboxes, Ellison’s narrator meets only (or, almost only) people who care for themselves at heart. Mr. Norton funds the college for the benefit of his own destiny. Dr. Bledsoe hoards the power of representing the black community through his position at the college. Brother Jack manipulates the crowds only to reach his organization’s utopian vision. None of them care about the narrator as a person, as someone who is valuable for his own sake.
Here I thought they accepted me because they felt that color made no difference, when in reality it made no difference because they didn’t see either color or men….And now I looked around a corner of my mind and saw Jack and Norton and Emerson merge into one single white figure. They were very much the same, each attempting to force his picture of reality on me and neither giving a hoot in hell for how things looked to me. I was simply a material, a natural resource to be used. (508)
Way back in 1785, Immanuel Kant warned against treating people as a means rather than as an end, and even earlier than that some guy named Moses heard from God that we ought to love our neighbors as ourselves. The characters in Ellison’s story fall short on both counts. As the narrator puts it, he is invisible because they are blind: they live in a dream world—their own world, self-centered—that ignores the real value of those around them.
Part of the reason this blindness is so dangerous is because dream worlds work like vacuum cleaners, sucking outsiders in. Midway through the book, Ellison’s narrator stops to buy yams from a Big Apple street vendor and realizes that all his life he’s been siphoning gas from others’ worldviews, conditioning himself to agree, even passionately agree, with the views of his betters, but never pursuing his own inclinations. In a sense, he didn’t see himself as a valuable, unique personality, with ideas and visions worth pursuing: he was invisible to himself.
But there’s a bigger problem with siphoning gas: the tank eventually runs dry. Dr. Bledsoe deceives the narrator out of school; Emerson refuses him a job; Brother Jack forces him to neglect his constituents. These were the people and ideas that the protagonist had founded his life on, had thought to find meaning from—but each of them cracks. As his authority figures topple, the narrator finds himself cast out, one by one, from all he once thought solid and stable. Who can he trust? What is real? What is certain? Who is he? “I wanted the props put back beneath the world,” he writes—but are there any props to replace (500)?
During this upheval, the protagonist is wandering through Harlem at night, wearing sunglasses. The eyewear is an attempt at disguise (he has enemies on the streets), but it causes him to be chronically mistaken for a fellow named Rinehart. Rinehart, he learns throughout the evening, is a numbers runner, gambler, briber, lover, and minister. All of them, together, at once, vibrantly, with no contradiction. He realizes:
The world in which we lived was without boundaries. A vast seething, hot world of fluidity, and Rine the rascal was at home. Perhaps only Rine the rascal was at home in it.
After his Rinehart impersonation, the protagonist finally understands the problem with the Brotherhood’s leaders: “they had set themselves up to describe the world,” when the vast possibility of the world defied description (507). And because they knew the pattern of history, because they understood what was truly important, the world they lived in was their world. Other people who happened to exist in that world were like animated cardboard cutouts, ready for interaction and suitable deployment. They were expendable, with the expense marked as “sacrifice.”
There’s a dilemma for us here. The people surrounding the protagonist refused to see him as a person because they wanted him to conform to their own worldviews, their “pictures of reality.” But all of us have our own picture of reality, and (by definition) we apply that picture to all of reality. Put another way, we’re all biased—about everything, simply by virtue of being unique people with particular thoughts and opinions. So is it possible for us biased people to look at others and see more than our own reflection? Can we see ever become we see?
Probably not. At least, not in a world without props underneath it. If nothing else, Ellison’s novel demonstrates the shifting and elusive character of human identity. It takes 581 pages of introspection for the protagonist to realize that he is not even visible—it’s unlikely that anyone outside the protagonist has the psychic ability to intuit that identity from a few casual or extended encounters. If we can barely identify ourselves, how can we expect others to know our identity? And where would they find the time for the investigation? They’re probably preoccupied with their own identity, anyway.
As a result, we here on Planet Earth are left with trillions of unique, unfathomable perspectives separated by the infinite gulf of individuality. As Ellison’s protagonist concludes, “Now I know men are different and that all life is divided and that only in division is there true health.” In a world like this, love means realizing and embracing the diversity of humanity, not forcing one particular view of reality on another. “It’s ‘winner take nothing’ that is the great truth of our country or of any country. Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat” (576-7).
But wait: Ellison’s conclusion is that diversity is good. This is a moral idea, so we could phrase it as a pair of imperatives—Support Diversity. Oppose Conformity. Looked at this way, it sounds like Ellison’s narrator is trying to force his own view of reality on us. Think of all the people who don’t want to support diversity! (You don’t have to read Ellison’s novel to realize that there are many of them.) What right has the protagonist to impose his perspective on these people? They are, after all, just as human as he is. By rights, Diversity should discriminate against no perspective, least of all the Anti-Diversity view. Protect our right to be conformists!
I’m only being partially facetious. It should be pretty obvious that Ellison’s narrator is right: individual diversity is good and ought to be embraced. But in affirming this, the protagonist has stuck a prop back under the world. The moral worth of individuality is an objective piece of reality that all people should realize. It’s not that the protagonist is forcing his views on others; rather, he’s describing the way reality is and inviting them to participate in it.
But this means that Ellison’s narrator has found a way to see the world accurately. He’s not staring into self-reflecting sunglasses, nor is he sightlessly snoring up a dream geography. He sees. And this is only possible because there is a prop to the world after all, something that transcends the trillion milling individual perspectives to hold reality together. Individuals can find this prop, hold onto it, and with its aid begin to see each other clearly. And if there’s one prop, there may be others.
Talking about objective things is sticky, because there are so many objective claims out there and (as Ellison’s protagonist learns) too many of those claims are inadequate or even pernicious. Who decides which ones are right and wrong? Technically, it’s not a person’s decision; objective truth, by definition, transcends individual perspectives. But we should argue and debate and discuss these things, because somehow our limited perspectives can in fact lead us to objectivity. Ellison’s narrator got there. On top of this, the fact remains for all of us that a well-ordered life is impossible without objectivity. Without a prop to base them on, for example, it’s impossible to say that diversity is important, or that we ought to love one another. But we can say these things, so we know the props exist. And if they exist, it’s probably not impossible to find them. (Ellison’s already given us one to go on, and others have uncovered more—try that Moses guy I mentioned earlier.)
This boomerangs us back to the beginning: invisibility stems from lack of love, which is itself the result of perverting our objective world. Those who live in dream worlds think that they themselves are objective truth, but those who love have stepped into the real world, the world in which all of us are humbled before transcendence.
And the great glory is that this humility is not debasing. Rather, it shows us that in terms of complexity and wonder, a person’s life—any person’s life—is roughly equivalent to the Grand Canyon multiplied by St. Peter’s Cathedral and raised to the power of a Wisconsin cornfield. To think that we can love other people! May God strengthen us for the attempt. It won’t be easy (erasing selfishness never is) but it’s worth it—objectively speaking.
Should I read it? The content is difficult: the first chapter, especially, is a brutal picture of racist cruelty, and although the rest of the book is (generally) less barbarous, the racism is still pretty baldly portrayed. Also, watch out for language and a couple explicit sexual scenes. But in general, I highly recommend the book — its poignancy and commentary on the human condition make it worthwhile reading.
Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison
Vintage Books, 581 pp., New York: 1980.
