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

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2003 by Marc Singer

The veterans-turned-mental patients of the Golden Day reject Norton's telic view of time, instead proposing that time moves in circles; one veteran says, "I'm a student of history" and proclaims, "The world moves in a circle like a roulette wheel" (81). As if to demonstrate this theory, the wheel of time has spun madly out of control in the Golden Day, rendering different periods temporarily synchronous. The mental patients identify Norton as General Pershing (72), Thomas Jefferson (78), and John D. Rockefeller (78), conflating him with various historical predecessors. The building, too, is a palimpsest of different establishments. When Norton asks what it was used for in the past, the bartender--who is named Halley, like a comet that cycles past Earth with clockwork regularity--informs him that "It was a church, then a bank, then it was a restaurant and a fancy gambling house, and now we got it.... I think somebody said it used to be a jailhouse too" (80). (5)

The building's history recapitulates a fall from spirituality into crass commercialism and social anarchy, a fall not unlike the one Mumford hyperbolically describes in American history after the Civil War. But Ellison is no adherent of Mumford, and he demonstrates that the building's past roles persist into the present. The Golden Day still acts as a "sporting-and-gambling house" (80), albeit not a fancy one, and it serves as a jailhouse and madhouse on the days the veterans are permitted to run rampant. More significantly, the force of those institutions the building once embodied--particularly the rule of Jim Crow law--has consigned some of the veterans, like the doctor, to the asylum. The bar even retains a parodic trace of the building's original religious function in the millennialist zeal of one of its patrons, a detail Nadel connects to the spiritualist fervor of the American Renaissance (89-92, 95). The Golden Day does not supplant its predecessors; instead it represents an accretion and culmination of all of them. Its patrons understand, far better than the young Invisible Man does, that they live within a cyclical repetition and accumulation of all previous eras.

The inmates also contradict Norton through their belief that they have no control over either time or history. The veteran doctor even blames Norton for the bar's temporal chaos, telling him, "The clocks are all set back and the forces of destruction are rampant down below.... you are confusion come even into the Golden Day" (93). Certainly there are immediate causes for the Golden Day's chaos--the arrival of a white man, the toppling of Supercargo and the superego he implies--but the doctor suggests that Norton has agitated the Golden Day beyond its normal state of disorder through his foolhardy attempt to control fate and destiny, an attempt for which he mocks Norton several times (94, 95). In response to Norton's attempted mastery over time, the veterans present their own model of time as a chaotic circularity, a repetition that operates beyond human control without any teleological goal.