"A slightly different sense of time": palimpsestic time in Invisible Man

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2003 by Marc Singer

Ralph Ellison once argued, in a panel discussion with William Styron and Robert Penn Warren on "The Uses of History in Fiction," that novels have the potential to rearrange time, a potential that grants novelists "a special, though difficult, freedom. Time is their enemy, and while chronology is the ally of the historian, for the novelist it is something to manipulate or even to destroy" (Ellison et al. 63). In these remarks, Ellison does not claim that novelists should disregard historical fact but rather that they are not bound to abide by any chronological record of events. They are instead free to reorder and analogize history, to combine events and elide them, as they try to "get at those abiding human predicaments which are ageless and timeless" and to "tell us ... the symbolic significance of what actually happened" (64).

Despite Ellison's claims for the agelessness and timelessness of the novel's concerns, however, Invisible Man is a novel deeply preoccupied with time and history. Scholars have long recognized its extensive historical engagements; as Eric Sundquist writes, "Through the first-person narrative of his anonymous protagonist, Ralph Ellison recapitulated the course of modern African-American history" (1). Yet Ellison also presents his protagonist with several conflicting models of history and, even more fundamentally, with several conflicting modes of time itself. While Invisible Man portrays a journey through a telescoped and allegorized African-American history, it also interrogates the diverse means by which people perceive time and attempt to impose competing narrative, historical, or political structures upon it. The novel manipulates time and abandons linear chronology to examine how variant temporal and historical structures can govern, circumscribe, or potentially empower the individuals who are subjected to them.

The role of history in Invisible Man is hardly a new subject in Ellison scholarship; the novel's historical allusions and parallels have been documented by numerous critics, beginning most notably with Russell G. Fischer and continuing with the work of Susan L. Blake, Richard Kostelanetz, and Eric Sundquist, among others. The earliest scholarly work in this area tended to regard the novel as a historical parable, in which "Each stage in the protagonist's personal history corresponds to an era in the social history" of African-Americans (Blake 126; see also Fischer 339). Other scholars, such as John Callahan, reversed this formulation, reading the novel's historical content as a reflection of or set of stages in the protagonist's intellectual development. More recently, critics such as Kimberly W. Benston, Robert G. O'Meally, and Deborah Cohn have examined the novel's presentation of various competing models of history, with a particular emphasis on the Brotherhood's quasi-Marxist dialectics; Cohn and O'Meally further argue that Ellison attempts to expand the boundaries of history to include the previously unacknowledged records of African-American and vernacular culture. But although these critics have devoted considerable attention to the forms of history on display in Invisible Man, few of them have addressed the novel's equally important examination of the forms of time, an examination that underwrites and informs Ellison's historical commentary.

The historical ideologies encountered by the Invisible Man are reflected in a Northern patriarch's belief in deterministic fate, a group of disaffected veterans' conviction that all history is chaos, a black nationalist's desire to return to African origins, and a heavily symbolic representation of Marxist teleology and Hegelian dialectics. Yet these competing ideologies are often predicated on--and sometimes indistinguishable from--conflicting modes of time. The characters' emphases on fate or chaos or national origin often stem from their convictions about, or their desires for, temporal stasis, repetition, or regression. But Ellison rejects each of these ideologies of history, and their attendant modes of time, usually because they project a reductive or deterministic model of African-American identity. In response he searches for other models of time and history, models that he hopes will reflect African-Americans' experiences without dictating their futures.

Ellison ultimately arrives at the form of the palimpsest: a synchronous conflation or superimposition of multiple historical periods upon the present. The term, originally denoting a parchment on which one text has been overwritten with another, has been used to refer to narrative conflations of time at least since H.D.'s novel Palimpsest. According to Margaret M. Dunn, the traces of past writing legible beneath the present text make the palimpsest "a symbol for recurring patterns of human experience" (55), and in this sense time in Invisible Man is also palimpsestic, as the novel constantly provides echoes of past eras within the narrative present.

Unlike H.D.'s novel, however, Invisible Man employs the palimpsest as the narrative representation of a distinct, racially specific mode of temporality. Ellison first outlines this temporality, and elaborates on its causes, in his essay "Harlem Is Nowhere." Written as Ellison worked on the manuscript for Invisible Man, "Harlem Is Nowhere" proposes that