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

Ellison characterizes the Invisible Man's descent to the underworld as an extreme emotional frenzy, orgiastic convulsion, and a trance-like state of consciousness somewhere between dreaming and waking--what, akin to an "acute fever," William James suggests actually offers the conditions of possibility for religious experience (6). In the underground the Invisible Man sustains an intensity of emotion that suggests a religious experience through specific allusions to a subterranean world, the dimensionless room, the narrow passage, a "state neither of dreaming or waking," loss of bodily control, and, above all, the vision or dream which follows. Indeed, in the candomble ritual of spirit possession, as Joseph Page notes, "The person possessed will shake convulsively, scream, gyrate wildly about the room, and flop to the floor like a rag doll" (362). All of the Invisible Man's outbursts occur after he almost ceremonially burns the doll of Clifton and the paper with his Brotherhood name written on it and experienc es a vision of his own death in the absolute darkness. The Invisible Man then declares that 'the end is the beginning"-echoing a common religious motif. All this imagery occurs with shades of the medieval world of Dante's Inferno, Virgil's Aeneid, and the fire-and-brimstone typology of the Bible. Ellison describes this emotionally cathartic episode as a kind of initiation in which the Invisible Man becomes a "seer" rather than being the "unseen," discovers his own clairvoyance and "second sight," and, after his own symbolic death, beholds his mystical and magical possibilities.

Magic, Mirror, and Lamp in Ellison's Carnival Poetics

No longer willing to allow his magical gifts to be used against him, or to relinquish them in pursuit of the dreams and visions of others, the Invisible Man of the Prologue and Epilogue (the narrator as self-conscious artist) turns America's negative aspects of vision, by which he is seen, into a creative "second sight." The carnival mirrors that distort and negate his being-in-the-world enable him ironically to develop his own distinctive carnival poetics. By carnival poetics, I mean to suggest that the very absurdities of racial imagining that determine the paternalism toward a childlike "other," (14) or the freakishness of race that shocks its curious and bemused onlookers, can become a useful, even creative distortion. This reverse process can make these viewers unknowingly complicit with their own duping through artfully crafted masquerade. It can create an opportunity for the alienated artistic "other" to "reflect back and black" against the jostling of black and white images that Ellison links to Weste rn aesthetic apprehension. For the Invisible Man, light and darkness especially hold imaginative possibilities to overturn the conventional metaphors of race that correspond to the mutually exclusive categories of "whiteness" and "blackness," an imaginative capacity to reflect a wider array of color, dimensionality, and space that alters Western perception itself. The 1,369 lights that he uses to illuminate his black hole represent not only his personal enlightenment (and the Enlightenment) but also his stolen magic lamp, kindling his active modem imagination. This light allows him to "feel [his] vital aliveness" and inspires him to "develop a certain ingenuity" (Invisible 7). Within the negative space of ambiguity, experimentation, creativity, and self-expression, the possibility of developing a carnival poetics emerges.