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

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2003 by Marc Singer

Before the Invisible Man can discover the form of the palimpsest, however, he must encounter a series of characters who articulate their own contradictory models of temporality. His exposure to these models, and their weaknesses, gradually teaches him how different concepts of time can inhibit or empower human agency and how the past exerts a continuing influence on the present. The university trustee Norton, for example, promotes a paternalistic view of fate, yet is also invested in returning to and preserving the past--a philosophy both deterministic and retrograde in its implications. Norton speaks incessantly of fate and destiny (39-42) and reveals that his "real life's work" is not finance or philanthropy but the "first-hand organizing of human life" (42). This controlling aspect of Norton's patronage becomes even more pronounced when he tells the Invisible Man, "You are important because if you fail I have failed by one individual, one defective cog" (45), and when he twice mentions his interest in training African-Americans to become mechanics (44, 45). Any mention of science or machinery always signals danger in Invisible Man, but Norton's figuration of black students as cogs in his machine--whether defective or not--is a more blatant signal than most. Norton proposes a mechanistic model of time in which African-Americans' political, social, and economic futures are not only strictly predetermined but are also important only as karmic guarantors of his fate, his destiny.

While the Invisible Man obligingly attempts to accept this temporal creed, he remains blind to its retrograde and reactionary consequences. Norton initially reminisces about visiting the campus grounds when "Slavery was just recently past" (39), when he "came down ... to see the barren land" (39) of the newly liberated freedmen. Given his obsessions with the campus's "trees ... flowers ... [and] fertile farmland" (38) and his annual returns "each spring" (39), Norton apparently envisions himself as a fertilizer and redeemer of the once-barren land. But for Norton to maintain this personal Waste Land narrative each spring, the land must remain in perpetual need of redemption; African-Americans must always linger in the ashes of slavery if they are to continue to receive his helping hand. (2) For all that Norton purports to be interested in fate and destiny, his paternalistic dream presupposes a kind of temporal stasis, preserving the misery of the past so that he might always alleviate it. Ellison hints at this temporal and cultural retardation by surrounding Norton with allusions to the culture of antebellum America, from his injunction to learn about Emerson (41) to a Golden Day veteran's disingenuously mistaking him for Thomas Jefferson--complete with a mocking reference to Jefferson's descendants "on the 'field-nigger' side" (78). The line not only ridicules Norton's own anxieties of familial purity, but it also confronts him with another truth that he has suppressed with equal vigor: it reminds him that the Jeffersonian America he nostalgically commemorates was built on slavery.