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

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2003 by Marc Singer

After undergoing the factory hospital's mechanical parody of birth, however, the Invisible Man regresses to a second childhood of physical and emotional fragility. He is nurtured through this stage by Mary Rambo, who promotes a temporality of ambiguous value to the Invisible Man. On the one hand, she represents a vital and revitalizing connection to the past; George Kent classifies Mary as one of the novel's "folk figures" (268) who preserves "the warmth, wit, coping power, and humanity of the folk tradition as it survives in the modern industrial city" (270), while Susan Blake similarly identifies her as a "positive interpretation of the black folk perspective" and one of the novel's few "anchors against chaos" (130). Mary restores the Invisible Man to health, Robert G. O'Meally argues, by singing the blues to him, "As if to pass along the source of her strength to the hero" (Craft 89). In this respect she resembles other custodians of folk culture like Wheatstraw, although she exhibits few of Wheatstraw's modernist and modernizing traits. Under Mary's care, the Invisible Man finally stops denying his Southern heritage and gratefully eats hot yams in a rush of nostalgia (262-67); Mary's influence "contradicts the past-denying nature" (Busby 54) of his rush to modernity in the first half of the novel. The Invisible Man himself recognizes Mary as "a stable familiar force like something out of my past which kept me from whirling off into some unknown which I dared not face" (258).

But such stability exacts a heavy toll. Ellison provides an early cue to the dangers of living solely in the past when the Invisible Man, flush with the thrill of eating his first yam, bites into a second and finds "an unpleasant taste bloomed in my mouth ... it had been frostbitten" (267). While Mary anchors the Invisible Man to his past, she also prolongs his second childhood, and while she restores his affection for his cultural tradition, she also uncritically preserves some of that tradition's accommodations to racism. Anne Folwell Stanford notes that Mary is a "mammy" figure (117) who preserves the stereotype of the "self-effacing, maternal care-giver" (118). (6) Kent similarly argues that Mary represents "the integration of the bitter past with the present, as can be seen by her possession of ... the bank topped by a minstrel figure" (270). Her "stable familiar force" finds its negative counterpart and parodic reflection in that bank, which the Invisible Man cannot discard. He can no more shake himself of the cast-iron stereotype than he could earlier pull himself away from Mary's maternal care; they are two sides of the same coin. By anchoring the Invisible Man to the past, Mary also preserves the more racist elements of his historical tradition, elements he can neither deny nor forget.

By the time he discovers and attempts to discard the minstrel figure in chapter 15, however, the Invisible Man has already been jolted from the temptations of uncritical nostalgia and second childhood by a palimpsestic encounter on the streets of Harlem. The Provo family's belongings, jumbled in a heap along the sidewalk by an eviction, awaken the Invisible Man to the immediacy of the past. The piled belongings comprise a physical record of a hundred years of history, arranged without any respect to chronology and juxtaposing such items as "an oval frame portrait of the couple when young ... a small Ethiopian flag, a faded tintype of Abraham Lincoln, and the smiling image of a Hollywood star torn from a magazine" (271). The final item the Invisible Man sees is the fragile, yellowing paper announcing Primus Provo's release from slavery in 1859, and he thinks, "It has been longer than that, further removed in time, I told myself, and yet I knew that it hadn't been" (272). The Invisible Man discovers that the past is, if anything, even more immediate than Ellison describes in "Harlem Is Nowhere," for it is concretely realized in the Provos' belongings. Awareness of the palimpsest then replaces simple nostalgia as the Invisible Man begins to think "not so much of my own memory as of remembered words, of linked verbal echoes, images.... And it was as though I myself was being dispossessed of some painful yet precious thing" (273). This sense of synchronic time, of the past as immediately present, kindles his awareness of his race's dispossession and stirs him to action.