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Masquerade, magic, and carnival in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man - Critical Essay
African American Review, Summer, 2002 by Christopher A. Shinn
Possession involves a struggle for power to control or be controlled, inhabit and be inhabited. In the midst f the carnival-riot, several doubles emerge in which, within the pairing, one determines the fate of the other. These "carnival twinships"--to use Wilson Harris's term--surface in the novel in relation to African American folk practices of hoodoo; indeed, in Haitian voodoo, the presence of twins marassa) constitutes an essential feature of the folk religion (Bourguignon). Ellison's twins include, among others, the Sambo doll and Tod Clifton, the mannequin(s) and Sybil, and the Invisible Man and his Brotherhood identity (for which he is given a name that he then becomes). The Sambo doll and Clifton, for instance, mirror each other as they reflect aspects of the minstrel tradition; Clifton become a puppet of the Brotherhood, manipulated and made to dance. As he stands on the street corner peddling Sambo dolls, he uses ventriloquism to speak outside of himself and from inside the Sambo doll (432). Clifton performs the part of a vendor in an amusement park concession booth with his particular carnival inflections, turning into the fetishized doll that he is attempting to sell. The transference between the doll and Clifton renders the latter inanimate and makes the former a play object possessed by him.
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In addition to the Sambo doll, which symbolizes the spirit-possession of Clifton and the Invisible Man by the Brotherhood, Ellison mirrors the Invisible Man's victimization in still another doll--this time the female mannequin-as-Sybil, the modem, commodified equivalent of the curio shop doll which, like the hoodoo doll, is pinned. During the carnival-riot scene, "Ras bent down from the horse, saw me [the Invisible Man] and flung, of all things, a spear, and I fell forward at the movement of his arm, catching myself upon my hands as a tumbler would, and heard the shock of it piercing one of the hanging dummies. I stood, my briefcase coming with me ... 'Betrayer!' Ras shouted" (557). The mannequin-as-Sybil is hung and speared in a curious inversion of a lynching scene sand by Ras, no less, the Ethiopian king (13)), speared Christ-like and pinned hoodoo-like as well. The mannequin-as-Sybil represents the "carnival muse," the female victim and symbol of the modem metropolis in the Harlem store window, with shade s of the ritual sacrifice of virgins among the Aztecs that Wilson Harris mentions. Ellison thus combines lynching and ritual sacrifice in relation to the modem social roles women must play (dancing like the kewpie doll, the naked blonde woman in the battle royal, for instance) and the minstrellike performances of black men in the novel (dancing as Sambo dolls). Even as they mirror one another, however, they reflect these white and black images unevenly, as though on display in America's distorted carnival mirrors. Upon the mannequin-as-Sybil the Harlem mob exacts its revenge, attempting to exorcize the ghost of the past. In her drunken stupor, Sybil not insignificantly calls the Invisible Man her" 'brute and boo'ful buck'" (528)-- becoming more" 'booo'ful' " and "'booooooo'ful!' "with every toast and turn--suggesting the ghostly, the phantasmal, as the novel's distant inferences to the Ku Klux Klan and lynching echo and re-emerge.
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