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

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2003 by Marc Singer

This possibility of stepping inside a relativistic time then fuels an explicit rejection of other, more mechanistic modes of temporality:

        Once I saw a prizefighter boxing a yokel. The fighter was swift
        and amazingly scientific.... But suddenly the yokel, rolling
        about in the gale of boxing gloves, struck one blow and knocked
        science, speed, and footwork as cold as a well-digger's
        posterior.... The yokel had simply stepped inside of his
        opponent's sense of time. (8)

By implication, the ability to perceive alternative modalities of time can similarly trump or at least challenge the deterministic modes of "scientists" such as Norton and Jack.

The Invisible Man also hints at the long, painful, and often contradictory development of his awareness of these alternative modes of time when he says, "that (by contradiction, I mean) is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang. (Beware of those who speak of the spiral of history; they are preparing a boomerang....)" (6). This passage concisely summarizes the evolution of his philosophy of time: he first believes in a unidirectional, diachronic model (the arrow) not unlike Norton's concept of fate, then discovers circular, potentially synchronic modes (the spiral) such as the frantic cyclicality of the Golden Day. But after the bitter lesson of the Brotherhood's dialectics, the Invisible Man discovers that circularity can be just as fatalistic as linearity, just as much an instrument for maintaining the status quo and a weapon for continuing the dispossession of those who are already dispossessed (the boomerang--a refinement of the spiral with movement that is similarly circular, but teleologically directed and applied toward violence). (1) Ellison's symbolic representations of time prove equally mutable throughout the rest of the novel, as the Invisible Man continually revises his beliefs and reverses his opinions until he finally discovers a nondeterministic mode of temporality in the form of the palimpsest.

The Invisible Man introduces the concept of the palimpsest when he describes his own experience of stepping inside time, as he narrates his descent into Louis Armstrong's "What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue." Listening to Armstrong's record with the assistance of some marijuana, a drug that "destroys one's sense of time completely" (13)--referring, presumably, to linear time--the Invisible Man hears multiple tempos that correspond to progressively descending levels of caves. Each cavern presents scenes from different periods in African-American history, forming a subterranean palimpsest within the song. Similarly, the Invisible Man's hurried climb back out of the caves, punctuated by a collision with "a speeding machine" (12), is an ascent back out of the past into a clash with a violent modernity. This metaphorical journey into and out of history is only possible because time, like Armstrong's song, is a palimpsest, a simultaneous copresence and conflation of multiple periods.