Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (16 page)

There is something spellbinding in Ellison’s lurid depiction of racist fun and games: the leering and drunk white power brokers, aroused by both the naked white woman and the jolted, contorted young black male bodies, seem like a textbook exercise of displaced energies, of obscene puns such as current/currency. And we also register some very old racist clichés about black people—they have rhythm, they can dance—by noting how gruesomely Ellison has updated them, put them into electric shock form, turned them into torture.

Against this anarchic backdrop the protagonist tries manfully to deliver his speech, trips up in saying “social equality” instead of “social responsibility,” is chastised for his error, but is at the end of the day rewarded for his dutiful performance: he receives a calfskin briefcase. This briefcase is to be one of the chief icons of the novel, and it will accompany the boy right through his adventures and trials, up to the final moment when he jettisons it. But already now, that briefcase reveals its potent message via the dream the boy has that night: he’s in a circus with his grandfather—a man who has offered his wisdom to the family in the guise of “yessing” white folks until they either vomit or bust wide open—who insists that he open the briefcase, and inside it he finds this message: “To Whom It May Concern: Keep This Nigger-Boy Running.” Here is a formula for the entire novel, it seems to me, as well as a disillusioned picture of racial arrangements in twentieth-century America. Given the way Ellison has packaged this venom—a script hidden in a briefcase as fantasized in a dream but later to be actualized when the boy finally sees the diabolical contents of the letter of introduction he is carrying from his college to various job interviews—we begin to grasp how slippery things are going to be here, how arduous it might be to get underneath the surface of things.

We move from the Battle Royal to the university, where our protagonist has a leadership position but is, once again, poised for a disaster he will fail to interpret. It comes in the shape of chauffeuring Mr. Norton, the philanthropic white trustee (who is mourning, in Poe-like libidinal terms, the death of his daughter). The student and trustee come across Jim Trueblood. What white Norton has dreamed and repressed, black Trueblood has enacted, but done so in hallucinatory fashion. This black farmer has sired a baby on his own daughter and has become something of a minor tourist attraction of the area. Not unlike the Ancient Mariner, Trueblood has a story to deliver himself of, and once again, it will be enacted in dreams, as if only this oneiric discourse allowed Ellison to bring into his text the powerful and poetic cargo it needs.

Trueblood and his wife share their bed with his eldest daughter, we learn; the girl sleeps in the middle. It is pitch dark; mother and daughter sleep, father feels keenly the presence and smell of the girl, hears her say “Daddy” in her sleep, begins to reminisce about his salad days, feels Matty Lou start to squirm against him, and then commences to dream. What a dream it is. It centers on going to see (white) Mr. Broadnax looking for “fat meat,” going through the front door, finding no one, going through the bedroom door, smelling “woman,” hearing and seeing a grandfather clock strike, seeing a white lady step out of the glass door, clad in a silky nightgown with nothing else on, wanting to run but having no exit (except the clock door), being grabbed around the neck and held tight by the woman, being kept out of the clock, flinging her onto the bed, seeing little white geese come out of the bed, hearing a door open with Mr. Broadnax saying “They just nigguhs, leave ’em do it,” trying again to exit via the clock door, getting inside and finding it hot and dark, going up a dark tunnel, approaching the machinery that is making all that noise (resembling the power plant by the school), feeling it get hotter and hotter, running, then flying, then sailing, yet always in the tunnel, finally spying a bright light that bursts “like a great big electric light in my eyes,” feeling scalded, yet finally outside and in the cool daylight again. (I have chosen to write this oneiric sequence as one long, unbroken, breathless sentence, so as to convey its utter authority.)

Sequences like the Battle Royal and Trueblood’s dream announce that we are in modern territory, faced with a kind of writing that is wildly emancipated, possessed of a poetic logic that cries out for interpretation: the sort of thing unavailable to and unimaginable by novelists of earlier times. A quantum leap beyond even the displacements on show in Dickens’s portrayal of Pip, Ellison’s growing-up story now comes to us as an urgent psychic phenomenon of remarkable density, pointing toward layers of affect, desire, and censorship that might well have subtended the affairs of Lazarillo or Pablos or Rastignac but that only now make it into writing.

Back to Trueblood. Not knowing how to make amends for his incestuous behavior (even though hit with an ax by his wife), Trueblood eventually ends up singing the blues.
Singing the blues
. At this point we realize how self-aware this fiction is, how even its most primitive scenes of violence and transgression eventuate into art, into form. One feels that Ellison’s entire novel is obeying this injunction.

I rehearse this astonishing episode in detail to convey how compelling and dictatorial it is, how it is hell-bent on utterance, on finding a language for libido’s dance, no matter how much it interrupts and makes a mockery out of any docile plot scheme. This material wants out. Above all, Ellison is offering us a code language for the way power is conceived in this book. For we can scarcely fail to see that the woman’s body and the sexual drive are inseparable from the heat and noise of machinery, imaged in the clock and the glass door but also referenced in the power plant near the school. There is much to ponder here. Body/clock/machine/power plant emerges as a gestalt, a cluster of seemingly distinct things now united as carriers of energy, gesturing toward an entire discourse of occulted power. Displacement reigns everywhere in the strange world that Ellison is charting: a place of liminality, transgressions, imperious circuits, and raw hunger, a glowing map of how power is always disguised, lives in dreams and drag, operates behind the scenes, makes all people do its bidding, resists the light of day and the clarity of design.

I have intentionally played the professor here by insisting long and loudly on the figurative connections and emerging coherence of Ellison’s prose. But please note: the protagonist himself—an unfathoming witness—understands nothing, nothing whatsoever. Hence he is doomed to endless repetition: he will encounter still further enactments of this same systemic force, coming at him in repeated episodes of trauma and lunacy but never turned into personal knowledge. And here is one key interpretation of the book’s title: not only are black people invisible to white, but it is the very nature of ideology—what levers and forces actually govern the world you inhabit—to be invisible to its adherents. Ellison’s novel may well frustrate today’s readers, because it seems as though it takes an awfully long time for its young hero truly to catch on, to grasp the actual meaning of what is befalling him. “Don’t you realize? Don’t you get it?” we want to scold him.

But hold on. The body grows up a lot quicker than the mind does. Maybe we’re always playing catch-up (at best) or blindman’s bluff (at worst) with the ideological makeup of our condition; maybe we’re always as benighted as this young man is. Oedipus never saw clear until late, late in the game. Remember the innocence of Blake’s chimney sweep: he never did get it right either, never did lay bare the sources of power that consign him to living death in chimneys. Maybe the integrity of
Invisible Man
lies just here. The Vautrins who offer a printout of society, who take the young aside and show them exactly what is to come—such figures may exist in literature but never in life. Deans and professors, as I said, fail at this task, for they are as much cogs in the machine, victims of the “murky mirror,” as students are. Maybe all of us are caught up in the midst of arrangements whose logic we can never make out, even though it governs our lives both inwardly and outwardly. Do you really know what is in that briefcase you’re carrying through your life?

At his best, Ellison goes about this gulf between event and explanation like a poet, like a writer who composes musically, with a certain number of motifs that are going to be sounded and resounded, even if in different contexts and with seemingly different colorations. Hence, after the utter fiasco with Mr. Norton—the episode with Trueblood is followed by a still more manic incident, this time at the Golden Day (bar and brothel), where we see a mix of madmen and damaged veterans engaged in bouts of violence and philosophical speculation about the evils of race in America—the protagonist is called in to the formidable head of the school, Mr. Bledsoe, to get some much-needed reality lessons. Bledsoe cannot believe that our man has been idiot enough to take Norton to Trueblood’s farm, and he wants the boy to understand that he, Bledsoe, is not going to put up with such idiocy. Like so many of Ellison’s characters, he then launches into his own tirade about the absolute control he exercises in the school: “I’s big and black and I say ‘Yes, suh’ as loudly as any burrhead when it’s convenient, but I’m still the king down here. I don’t care how much it appears otherwise. Power doesn’t have to show off.” (One remembers the grandfather’s “yes strategy.”) This is followed by a prophetic piece of advice: “You let the white folks worry about pride and dignity—you learn where you are and get yourself power, influence, contacts with powerful and influential people—then stay in the dark and use it!”

For my money, this is what Balzac’s Vautrin would sound like in an American racial setting. We are not far, here, from a dialectics of invisibility: if you want control, you exercise it hidden. Bledsoe, the theorist of operating in the dark, it turns out, is as good as his word: he sends the boy out into the world with sealed, poisonous letters of introduction tucked away in his precious briefcase. Poor hero: blindsighted in every direction, misreading what has happened to him, being set up for further misadventures—more in the line of Simplicius or a chimney sweep than Lazarillo or Pablos or Rastignac.

How would you write a novel and chart an education, following this vision of occulted power? As I said, Ellison’s protagonist is excruciatingly slow on the uptake, finding himself in crisis after crisis, where others are doing the controlling and he is playing the marionette. The crescendo arrives when our man takes on a job at Liberty Paints, where his task is to assist in the production of its great specialty paint, Optic White, “the purest white that can be found,” a white that is used to paint national monuments. Our first surprise here is the discovery that white may be no more than an optic. (Toni Morrison would take this perception a good bit further in her book
Playing in the Dark
.) To the protagonist’s amazement, the fellow responsible for producing Optic White is a surly, uneducated, little old black man, working some three levels underneath the main factory, named Lucius Brockway. He, and only he, has the secret. He is the power magnate. All the others, the whites, the so-called engineers and trained folks, “they just mixes in the color, make it look pretty. Right down here is where the real paint is made.” Brockway divulges the core truth: “we the machines inside the machine.” It is the yearned-for wisdom of this novel, even if expressed in an industrial figure: Bledsoe and Brockway embody it; can the protagonist get there? Lazarillo and Rastignac saw into the machinery of their world; can Ellison’s hero do as much?

Brockway, being utterly paranoid about being replaced by the young, thinks the protagonist is a spy, and very quickly things spiral out of control, producing a homicidal battle between these two figures, with distinct Oedipal implications. At this point, nourished by resentments building ever since Battle Royal and Bledsoe, our man (brought up to respect his elders) finally pops, and another battle royal takes place. The two start to tear each other apart, no holds barred, but the stronger boy overcomes the old man. (At some primitive level, this is what must darkly fuel the story of both growing up and growing old; we will see more of its threatening power in the second half of this study.) However, in the process the gauges—the gauges! don’t forget: we’re in a factory—have been ignored, and the machines, as if cued to the manic humans, go haywire. Gauges swing madly, needles dance, wheels resist, goo covers hands, and it all closes with an explosion: “I seemed to run swiftly up an incline and shot forward with sudden acceleration into a wet blast of black emptiness that was somehow a bath of whiteness.” Everything comes together, we realize: the clock door, the heat, the violence, the pulsions, the machinery, the power plant. These are the icons of the system, and they are grinding the protagonist to bits.

“Shot forward,” Ellison writes; a rebirth is about to happen. The hero will wake up in a clinical setting, reduced to zero, not knowing who he is, turned utterly malleable, fodder for an experiment, faced with mocking white-coated figures who intend to make him anew. This black youth’s growing-up story is pathologized, enters the medical regime, showing us that victimization takes on new guises in the twentieth century. Our man lies there, paralyzed, now the perfect specimen for behavioral engineering. In a book filled with violence, this almost refrigerated scene is the scariest. The critical step through the clock door seems to have been taken. He is
in the machine
—but as cog, not as controller. Machines hum, voices are heard as he is prepped, then there is a whirring “that snapped and cracked with static, and suddenly I seemed to be crushed between floor and ceiling.… I was pounded between crushing electrical pressures; pumped between live electrodes like an accordion between a player’s hands.” The musical image is telling: the entire quest of this book is to move from being “played on” to becoming a “player.” There is much cruelty in this sequence as the personnel shoot current into him, make his body dance (blacks do have rhythm, they remark), his teeth chatter, his mouth fill up with blood. The treatment is supposed to erase all prior identity markings, and it does: he is now a blank sheet. Only one faint memory stays: that of Buckeye the Rabbit, blending with Br’er Rabbit, creatures of black folklore, as if to say, here is the permanent residue of race and it will not go away.