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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
Magic, Phantom, and Mannequin in African American Culture
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America's pleasure attractions, carnival amusements, and carnival festivals invite a world of play that substantially includes magic, the occult, carnival-masquerade, and spirit possession. American variety shows frequently juxtapose the aboriginal and the paranormal, primitiveness and modernity, the soul and the body to divulge and display the hidden secrets of origins and supernatural powers. As Victor Turner suggests, masks, disguises, and "other fictions of some kind of play are devices to make visible what has been hidden, even unconscious," allowing "the mysteries [to] revel in the streets"-or, for that matter, the circus tent, the amusement park, or the theater playhouse (Performance 125). Normally enforced divisions can be symbolically crossed in the numinous spaces of carnival, and the social taboos associated with race and mysticism can be entertained and given expression in a collective realm of fear and fantasy, revelation and masquerade. They provide a secular version of institutional religion t hat explores the ineffable, the esoteric, the exotic, and the unmentionable. Ellison's Invisible Man engages these forms of carnival in relation to his principal guiding metaphor, namely "invisibility" as disappearing act, unseen object, and clairvoyance. The entrance into the otherworldly region of imagination becomes a negotiation of power, play, and opposition in "this" world-requiring a "second sight" (7) that pushes the Invisible Man to the extreme outer limits of self and other and forces him to contend with the elements of carnival on a wholly different symbolic level.
It is no coincidence that along these lines the more grave constructions of "whiteness" and "blackness" in the United States have often historically relied on the power and authority of magic. While the element of play may seem frivolous and trivial, it can also connect with the specter of racial imagining that provokes, to use Richard Slotkin's phrase, "regeneration through violence"--the violence which enacts the myth of purity of both race and nation. Ellison's "tragicomic" vision (mentioned previously in relation to Harris's New World carnival poetics) thus combines the element of carnivalmasquerade and the history of racial violence in America. The "magical" and the "mythical" intersect in intensely fierce oppositions that bring together, and estrange, whites and blacks, violent rituals and carnivalesque play. The highest rank of the Ku Klux Klan is not incidentally the "Imperial Wizard," who convenes order in the secret society and under him, among others, follows the head of the local chapter, the "Ex alted Cyclops," and the state chief executive, the "Grand Dragon." The organization fashionably refers to itself as the "Invisible Empire," and historians have noted that the Klan during Reconstruction initially hooded themselves white in part in order to parade as ghosts (Trelease). (8) Ellison's tropes of invisibility, the Cyclops, spooks, magic, and whiteness, then, signify multiply in terms of the Invisible Man's dual sense of invisibility and in the implied oppositions to right-wing AngloSaxonism that is invoked by continual narrative allusions to lynching. (9)
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