Masquerade, magic, and carnival in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man - Critical Essay

African American Review, Summer, 2002 by Christopher A. Shinn

The element of carnival-masquerade offers a wide lens through which to view black-white race relations by mirroring and magnifying racial practices in the United States. Perhaps no work of African American literature exemplifies this point more sharply than Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), which intensifies the narrator's perceptions of race by viewing various images of whiteness and blackness through carnival's distorted mirrors. (1) While this grotesque exaggeration reflects the particularly jaundiced twentieth-century condition of race in the United States, it also involves a re-assessment of carnivalesque perception itself, for precisely in the simultaneously distorted and imagined field of vision, the Invisible Man gains a sense of his own potential to maneuver, be creative, and magically "see around corners" (13). Carnival, as it were, includes an ambiguous space in which subjects assume several racial and class positions to negotiate as well as consent to specific power relations through psychic a nd social forms of masquerade: not just during carnival but also in the more normalized "carnivalisms" that appear in the cross-cultural and intra-racial performances of everyday life. (2) The discussion that follows analyzes the theoretical terms of engagement concerning the concept and practice of carnival-masquerade and then addresses how these ideas on carnival relate to Ellison's Invisible Man and African American culture more generally. Along these lines I suggest that carnival emerges in the text--and in historical context--in a complex mutuality of U.S. racial imagining that involves masking, magic, and ritual sacrifice. These elements create the condition of possibility for a distinct carnival poetics that the Invisible Man can use to redefine himself in terms of the socially responsible and artistic role that he intends to play. This carnival poetics, I argue, is significantly mediated through play itself--the space of creative distortion and experimentation in the African American tradition.

Theoretical Considerations: From the "Carnivalesque" to a New World Carnival Poetics

The festival of carnival, as a concept and cultural practice, has been expressly noted by literary critics such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva, Robert Da Matta, and Richard D. E. Burton, among others. It often facilitates a nostalgic return to the familiar pre-Lenten street world of lavish costumes and masquerade, laughing choruses, parades, pageantry, and grotesque consumption of drugs, food, and intoxicants. Ellison's work indeed includes elements of carnival-masquerade that have led a number of literary scholars to propose theoretical connections and critical analyses of Ellison's Invisible Man and the carnivalesque. These critics include, among others, Elliott Butler-Evans, Dale Peterson, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Houston Baker, and Wilson Harris. With the exception of Wilson Harris, whose inventive references to "carnival muses" and "carnival twinship" place Ellison's Invisible Man within the wider spatio-temporal configuration of the Americas, these other writers almost exclusively apply Mikhail Bakht in's notions of the "carnivalesque," "heteroglossia," or "parody" to the study of African American culture, proposing multiple theoretical affiliations of the Bakhtinian "carnivalesque" and a distinct, socio-linguistically-coded "blackness."

Butler-Evans, Peterson, Gates, and Baker connect Bakhtin's "carnivalesque" and Ellison's double-voiced narrator and narrations in terms of African American signifying practices and Bakhtin's analysis of parody. In The Signifying Monkey, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., uses Bakhtin's definition of parody to illustrate how Signifyin(g) in African American culture enables its speaker to pose challenging and oppositional verbal self-assertions. For Bakhtin parody fundamentally operates in the form of disguise: Its dialogic exchanges parade as versions of the "same" (characteristically using similar figures of speech), yet within these utterances deliberately incisive double meanings and implied cut-downs are introduced. "[In] parody, as in stylization," Bakhtin explains, "the author employs the speech of another, but, in contradistinction to stylization, he introduces into that other speech an intention which is directly opposed to the original one. The second voice, having lodged in the other speech, clashes antagonisti cally with the original, host voice and forces it to serve directly opposite aims. Speech becomes a battlefield for opposing intentions" ("Typology" 185-86). Ellison's use of "double-voiced discourse," then, exemplifies how Signifyin(g) works in producing lively cultural exchanges within an African American cultural tradition as well as within a larger U.S. discourse on the politics of literary representation. Ellison responds to these cultural forces by "signifying back and black." (3)

Although Gates never directly invokes the world of carnival, his juxtaposition of Bakhtinian parody and Ellison's Signifyin(g) leads Elliott Butler-Evans, Houston Baker, and Dale Peterson, in turn, to build upon a socio-linguistic "blackness" en route to the Bakhtinian "carnivalesque." In his essay "The Politics of Carnival and Heteroglossia in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man: Dialogic Criticism and African American Literature," Elliott Butler-Evans identifies Bakhtin's "carnivalesque" as a "sprit" that "displaces hierarchies and subverts the dominant order" through the cultural formation of complex polyphonic narratives (118). Butler-Evans focuses on how the heteroglossic voices of carnival--from Trueblood's "primordial, vernacular Black voice" to the" 'literariness' of the protagonist's voice" -- transform the African American narrative into an "alternative textual modality" that moves away from the limitations of an "eminently commodifiable classic realism to a textual con struct with a far more complicated and indeterminate structure"--what he later associates with specific dialogic forms of communication among various "black" and "American" (U.S.) cultures, employing techniques of "pastiche" in Gates's post-structuralist terms (117-18).