Content provided in partnership with
Masquerade, magic, and carnival in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man - Critical Essay
African American Review, Summer, 2002 by Christopher A. Shinn
What invisible man begins to learn figuratively and painfully, within the Cyclopean code that he inhabits, is the fascination of helplessness, the proneness to fall back into, with each arousal from, the Cyclopean nightmare that pursues him as much in his own skull, or Anancy skin, as in rituals of entertainment others impose on him-- repulsive arts, exploited sciences, fake renascences. (111)
- More Articles of Interest
- The critical response to Ralph Ellison. - book review
- John F. Callahan, ed. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man: A Casebook
- Cultural Contexts for Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. - Review - book reviews
- Invisible Man and African American radicalism in World War II
- Invisible desires: Homoerotic racism and its homophobic critique in Ralph...
The Invisible Man comes to consciousness of his own victimization, but according to Harris this revelation will not prevent him from wearing and embracing the Cyclopean mask and imposing limitations on his own vision in the dangerous internalized spaces of "political theater." He accepts his own domination with every momentary or prolonged "fascination of helplessness," leading to a return of the "Cyclopean nightmare" (111). By the same token, however, the possibility for bridging these otherwise antithetical forces into a complex and co-existent community remains alive within a "womb of space" that the carnival muses creatively embody, offering a "rich evolutionary potential" in the midst of a "tragically debased fertility" (109).
Harris's reading of Ellison's Invisible Man offers an imaginative expansion of the carnival concept itself that concomitantly sharpens the terms of engagement and opens up a richly metaphorical sense of a New World carnival poetics. It puts in check the particular utopian dimension of carnival that literary critics have often stressed and upon which an EllisonianBakhtinian connection via Baker and Butler-Evans has been theoretically proposed. As the carnival concept travels from premodern Europe to the New World, it retains, on the one hand, the critical ideas of Bakhtin on dialogism, parody, and masquerade that one discovers in comparable forms within African American cultural practices of Signifyin(g). In addition, Dostoyevsky's own "tragicomic" vision further links Bakhtin and Ellison within the complex network of Dostoyevsky's "underground"-moving in a discursive line that bridges Rabelais and Dostoyevsky for Bakhtin, and Dostoyevsky and the Invisible Man for Ellison. Not unrelated to these connections is the fact that both Bakhtin and Ellison probe new left possibilities from below state- or partycensored lines: the Bolshevik Revolution, Stalinism, and the politically left Brotherhood (similar in form to the American Communist Party). The "carnivalesque" informs how these particular utopian-Rabelaisian or myopic-Cyclopean visions are, in many ways, deeply imbricated in potential intertextual readings of their own works. A New World carnival poetics implies that situating the "carnivalesque" within the singular domain of Bakhtin-Ellison, despite its conceptual and creative possibilities, presents various limitations. The strategy here is not to reject Bakhtin's model of the "carnivalesque," but to put it in dialogue with other critical paradigms that represent various inter-American geographical locations, carnival poetics, and performances of New World African identities.
Find Research Guides for:
Find Featured Titles for: Home & Garden
Most Popular Articles in Reference
- The importance of understanding organizational culture
- Credit card attitudes and behaviors of college students
- What factors attract foreign direct investment?
- Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...
- How to set performance goals: employee reviews are more than annual critiques
- More »