RALPH ELLISON’S MYTHICAL METHOD IN INVISIBLE MAN

A thesis submitted

To Kent State University in partial

Fulfillment of the requirements for the

Degree of Master of Arts

by

Kenton Bryan Butcher

May 2016

© Copyright

All rights reserved

Except for previously published materials

1
 Thesis written by

Kenton Butcher

B. A. Miami University, 2009

M. A. Kent State University, 2016

______________________________________ Advisor

Babacar M’Baye, Ph. D.

______________________________________ Chair, Department of English

Robert Trogdon, Ph. D.

______________________________________ Dean, College of Arts and Sciences

James L. Blank, Ph. D.

2
TABLE OF CONTENTS...............................................................................................................iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS............................................................................................................iv

CHAPTERS

I. Introduction: Ellison’s (In)Visible Myth.............................................................................1

II. Myth, Folklore, and Canonical Literature..........................................................................11

III. Joyce and Eliot: Ellison’s Antecedents..............................................................................26

IV. Ellison’s Mythical Method in Invisible Man.....................................................................39

CONCLUSION: RECURRING TRADITIONS...........................................................................64

WORKS CITED............................................................................................................................68

iii
 Acknowledgements

I would first like to thank my wife for her love and support. There are no words. Thanks to

Babacar M’Baye for his advice and infinite patience over the course of this project. I also wish to

thank Don-John Dugas, Tammy Clewell, and Jennifer Larson for their help and insight. Finally, I

would like to than the Kent State University English Department for taking a chance on me. This

program changed the course of my professional and academic future, and I am forever grateful.

iv
 I. Introduction: Ellison’s (In)Visible Myth

I knew the trickster Ulysses just as early as I knew the wily rabbit
of Negro American lore, and I could easily imagine myself a pint-
sized Ulysses but hardly a rabbit, no matter how human and
resourceful or Negro.

—Ralph Ellison “Change the Joke and Slip the Joke”

In Ellison’s prose and interviews, he suggests that African American folklore, myth, and

rituals do not exist in a vacuum, separated from the wider American society—black and white

cultures are entwined and inseparable. The African-American experience is a fundamental part

of America and the West in general, and it is “as rich a body of experience as one would find

anywhere. We can view it narrowly as something exotic, folksy or ‘low-down,’ or we may

identify ourselves with it and recognize it as an important segment of the larger selves with it and

recognize it as an important segment of the larger American experience—not lying at the bottom

of it, but intertwined, diffused in its very texture” (Collected Essays 214). In other words, one

cannot be removed without fundamentally changing the other. Herman Beavers notes that

Ellison’s comments on the cross cultural engagement between black and white American

cultures are “richly problematic” in that Ellison argues for “an American identity that issues from

cultural collaboration, even in instances where the participants are less than willing to

acknowledge it as such” (Beavers 1). American culture arises from “collisions between different

racial groups” (Beavers 1), and Ellison works to bring this fact to the surface of his novel,

Invisible Man, using an integrative narrative method.

1
 Ellison acknowledges that myths, rites, and traditions obfuscate America’s integrated

cultural history because individual and group participants perpetuate the spurious notion of racial

separatism and a brutal racial caste system. However, Ellison shows over the course of Invisible

Man that two cultures as culturally, historically, and politically entwined as the cultures of

African Americans and European Americans unavoidably inform and influence one another.

Ellison provides an example of this inevitable cross-cultural identification from his own life,

reminiscing that as a child, he and his playmates “fabricated [their] own heroes and ideals catch-

as-catch-can, and with an outrageous and irreverent sense of freedom” (Collected Essays 53). In

the minds of Ellison and his schoolmates, unhampered by rules of decorum or social constraints,

characters from their lives permeated and merged with characters they discovered throughout the

annals of white-dominated, Western cultures:

Gamblers and scholars, jazz musicians and scientists, Negro cowboys and soldiers

from the Spanish-American and first world wars, movie stars and stunt men,

figures from the Italian Renaissance and literature, both classical and popular,

were combined with the special virtues of some local bootlegger, the eloquence of

some Negro preacher, the strength and grace of some local athlete, the

ruthlessness of some businessman-physician, the elegance in dress and manners

of some headwaiter or hotel doorman. (Collected Essays 53)

Ellison’s imaginative practice of cultural integration did not cease when he reached adulthood;

Invisible Man emphasizes this shared and integrated cultural history on an individual and societal

level, and I will show that Ellison’s accomplishment rests on a narrative method that seeks to

synthesize antecedent cultural forms, specifically Greco-Roman myth, African American

folklore, and canonical Western texts.

2
 Invisible Man’s two epigraphs from Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno and T. S. Eliot’s

Family Reunion, respectively, speak to this narrative method. Thomas Volger suggests that the

first epigraph from Melville “suggests the nature of the change the invisible man undergoes in

the novel” and the second, from Eliot, “suggests the discovery of [Invisible’s] invisibility which

is an essential part of the change” (129). Although Volger’s assertion is certainly edifying, I

would add that the title of Eliot’s work, Family Reunion, suggests a (re)unification of entities

with a shared history. The context of the epigraph is that Harry is addressing a distant relative,

Mary, whom Harry’s mother designates as his future spouse:

HARRY: I tell you, it is not me you are looking at,

Not me you are grinning at, not me your confidential looks

Incriminate, but that other person, if person,

You thought I was: let your necrophily

Feed upon that carcase [sic]… (qtd. in Invisible Man)

In addition to the notion of invisibility, Harry’s words call forth several taboos—i. e., traditions

which govern human interaction, such as necrophilia and cannibalism. The epigraph foregrounds

Ellison’s fixation with myth as it functions in everyday events throughout Invisible Man.

Myths and traditions in Invisible Man work in such a way that Invisible and the other

characters participate in these rites both consciously and unconsciously. Invisible is reluctant to

bring such traditions to the forefront of consciousness, “given the large numbers of people who

wish to adhere to illusion” (Beavers 23). Initially, Invisible was one of the individuals who

adhered to illusion, and as a result, the traditions structuring American society cause Invisible to

“accept the rigid and restraining role imposed on [him] as true identity” (Tanner 83). Invisible is

not the only one with misapprehensions about his existential reality, as representatives of social

3
power in Invisible Man like “teacher[s], preacher[s], doctor[s], factory-owner[s], [or] Party

member[s]” spuriously attempt to “control reality, and they believe that they can run it according

to their plan” (Tanner 83). In Invisible Man, traditions mechanize consciousness and cause

individuals to act without considering why they act in such a way, and the narrator discovers that

the cyclical, repetitive traditions that undergird society perpetuate mindless adherence to social

practices that victimize subaltern groups, “the manner by which African Americans became a

resource whose purpose was one of providing white Americans with the raw materials necessary

to formulate a contingent identity” (Beavers 3).

In “The Art of Fiction” (1954), Ellison defines myth and its significance for American

(or any other) culture and society. For Ellison, myth and folklore address a specific question:

[W]hat in our background is worth preserving or abandoning? The clue to this can

be found in folklore, which offers the first drawings of any group’s character. It

preserves mainly those situations which have repeated themselves again and again

in the history of any given group. It describes those rites, manners, customs, and

so forth, which insure the good life or destroy it, and it describes those boundaries

of feeling, thought and action which that particular group has found to be the

limitation of the human condition. (Collected Essays 213)

In other words, myths and folktales initially arise as an instinct to preserve cultural values, and

certain American traditions encourage the mindless repetition of customs that perpetually

provide white society with the “raw materials to formulate a contingent identity” based on the

status of subaltern groups. As a result of the inherently cyclical nature of these traditions, the

events of Invisible’s life bear the mark of Absurdist repetition in that they occur over and over

again, and the Absurdity of Invisible’s existence accounts for what William Schafer calls

4
Invisible Man’s “cumulative plot”: “The novel […] [develops] the same basic episode over and

over in an emotional crescendo: the protagonist struggles idealistically to live by the

commandments of his immediate social group, then is undone by the hypocrisy built into the

social structure and is plunged into despair” (117). Invisible and the other characters accept this

innate hypocrisy of the social structure because of mindless adherence to myth, but first, I will

examine where Ellison derives his conception of myth and how to integrate it in his fiction.

Ellison attributes his conception of myth to the twentieth century Modernists, James

Joyce and T. S. Eliot. In “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke” (1963), Ellison writes, “I use

folklore in my work not because I am Negro, but because writers like Eliot and Joyce made me

conscious of the literary value of my folk inheritance” (Collected Essays 111-112). For Ellison,

Joyce and Eliot’s oeuvres are artistic exemplars regarding the use of myth and folklore in his

own fiction. Ellison continues: “When I started writing, I knew that in both The Waste Land and

Ulysses ancient myth and ritual were used to give form and significance to the material, but it

took me a few years to realize that the myths and rites which we find functioning in our everyday

lives could be used in the same way” (Collected Essays 216). Ellison discovers that Eliot and

Joyce use classical myth to give structure to their literature, and he also learned how to draw

from mythological and folkloric sources with which he was familiar from the time of his youth:

Western literature, Greco-Roman myth, and African-American folklore.

Critics such as Schafer and George Kent have explored Ellison’s use of myth and

folklore, and Kent goes as far as to claim that Ellison’s use of folk tradition “provides a veritable

textbook which can be adapted, according to one’s own sensibility and outlook” (170). However,

studies thus far have been essentially segregated considerations of the functions of African-

American folklore, Western myth, and canonical literature within Invisible Man. However,

5
scholars such as Patrice Rankine (Ulysses in Black, 2006) and Justine McConnell (Black

Odysseys, 2013) identify Ellison’s parsing of Greco-Roman myth and indicate that the classics

need not be considered exclusively Eurocentric, but these studies stop short of considering the

wide range of Ellison’s use of Western literature within Invisible Man. I will show that, in spite

of the clarity with which Ellison acknowledged his artistic debt to Joyce and Eliot, the

provenance of this oversight is that we have yet to consider that Ellison’s understanding of how

an artist may appropriate myth and foundational works of literature largely comes from Joyce

and Eliot.

According to Ellison, Eliot’s Waste Land has a uniquely American sensibility regarding

literature of the past in that The Waste Land “assumes possession, it abstracts, it recasts in terms

of Eliot’s sense of life and his sense of the possibility of language, of poetry, and of culture”

(Conversations 91). Ellison also notes that in “Fragment of an Agon” (1933), Eliot makes use of

“Under the Bamboo Tree,” a 1902 ragtime song co-written by James Weldon Johnson, and this

“was another connection which provided some sense of the complexity of the American identity”

(Conversations 314). Beavers explicates the significance of Ellison’s understanding of jazz upon

his artistry, and incidentally, this explains Ellison’s fixation with Eliot’s work, specifically The

Waste Land. Beavers writes:

The jazz musician’s struggle to be an innovator collides with the innovations of

his or her predecessors, and what crystalizes is a coherent tradition, not only in

terms of technical invention but also in the levels of virtuosity he or she must

achieve to stand as a watershed in the tradition. This dialogue assumes guises that

can be celebratory or revisionary (at times, radically so), as successive examples

of innovative skill dramatize the strain and grind of tradition. (5)

6
In other words, a jazz musician engages in a discourse where the individual asserts his or her

identity within a musical group, and yet simultaneously seeks to distinguish him or herself “as

individual, as member of the collectivity and as a link in the chain of tradition” (Collected Essays

267). In Eliot, Ellison finds a writer who engages with literature of the past and recasts it

however he sees fit and in so doing becomes a “link in the chain” of literary convention.

In addition to Eliot’s artistic influence, Ellison frequently credits Joyce as one of his

artistic predecessors. In fact, Ellison embeds a reference to Stephen Dedalus and A Portrait of

the Artist as a Young Man directly within Invisible Man when Invisible recalls a literature lesson.

The teacher lectures his students that “Stephen’s problem, like ours, was not actually one of

creating the uncreated conscience of his race, but of creating the uncreated features of his face”

(Invisible Man 274). Tanner writes that, in this moment of the novel, “[t]he narrator has

discovered […] that he is not free to reorganize and order the world, but he can at least exercise

the freedom to arrange and name his perceptions of the world” (89). As Invisible uses the

example of Stephen Dedalus to recognize his freedom to “arrange and name his perceptions of

the world,” Ellison uses Joyce as a model for how an artist can arrange his fictional world: what I

refer to as Ellison’s mythical method.

According to Eliot’s essay, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” (1923), the “mythical method” is

“simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving shape and significance to the immense

panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history” (“Ulysses”). As various critics

have noted, beginning with Stuart Gilbert, Joyce uses Homer’s Odyssey as an organizing

structure for the events of his novel. Ellison coalesces Joyce’s use of classical literature as

narrative scaffolding and Eliot’s parsing of classical texts to suit Ellison’s own artistic objectives

in Invisible Man. Ellison’s modifies the mythical method to riff on fragments of classical

7
mythology, western literature and philosophy, and African-American artistic traditions, and he

blends them seamlessly into a cohesive narrative with the structure garnered from Dante’s

Inferno and the classical trope of the heroic descent to the Underworld. Although scholars have

noted the aspects of Ellison’s mythical method—the appropriation of classical texts, the use of

African-American and Western myth, and the artistic influence of the modernists Joyce and

Eliot—they have discussed them as independent concepts that are unrelated, and I will bring

them together in the following chapters.

In Chapter One, I will draw from Ellison’s prose and interviews and critical works such

as W. B. Stanford’s Ulysses Theme (1954), Rankine’s Ulysses in Black, and Otto Rank’s The

Myth of the Birth of the Hero (1914) to elucidate Ellison’s understanding of myth as it pertains to

his mythical method and integration of various cultural figures and narrative forms. Chapter Two

will examine Ellison’s writings and comments regarding Eliot and Joyce and I will examine the

most edifying instances of Joyce and Eliot’s artistic impact within Invisible Man. And finally,

Chapter Three will analyze Ellison’s katabatic narrative structure based on Dante’s Inferno—a

method he derives from Joyce—and I will examine his parsing and appropriation Greco-Roman

myth, African American folklore, and the Western literary canon within each rung of society—

an artistic practice he derives from Eliot.

With this study, I hope to revive Ellison’s attempt to bring to the forefront the role myth

and tradition play in structuring human interaction along racial lines. This notion has been lost in

Ellisonian scholarship, as evinced by the largely segregated considerations of myth and authorial

influence upon Ellison and Invisible Man. However, as Ellison writes, defining the relationship

between an individual, a group, and a society is no easy task:

8
 Indeed, it [is] quite complex, involving as it does a ceaseless questioning of those

[racial] formulas through which historians, politicians, sociologists, and an older

generation of Negro leaders and writers—those of the so-called “Negro

Renaissance”—had evolved to describe my group’s identity, its predicament, its

fate and its relation to the larger society and the culture which we share.

(Collected Essays 57)

Invisible’s journey “examines the process by which American identities are formed,” and

Beaver’s claim can also describe Ellison’s mythical method; Ellison’s mythical method is a way

of “examining the codes and mores of the dominant culture and how the past configures life in

the present” (Beavers 4). Ellison’s engagement with the literatures of the past show that classical

literature can describe and enlighten the experiences of a young African American male. The

inverse, then, must also be true; Invisible’s experiences potentially resonate with all Americans

because “Ellison’s work speaks to (or for?) a shared destiny, a plight Americans, black and white

alike (among other groups who fit neither of these designations) must ponder within the context

of an ongoing experiment characterized as much by its failures as its successes” (Beavers 2).

Although Ellison’s mythical method can enhance cross-cultural awareness and

identification, readers and critics alike have disparaged him for political complacency. James

Alan McPhearson writes that the source of Ellison’s problems arises from the matter of self-

definition: “At a time when many blacks, especially the young, are denying all influences of

American culture, Ellison, as always, doggedly affirms his identity as a Negro-American, a

product of the blending of both cultures” (44). Categorization, especially racial categorization, is

a firmly engrained American tradition, and categories are inadequate because

9
 [t]o rely solely on racial categories as a way of establishing an aesthetic

sensibility is to draw on a resource that prohibits one’s ability to see the

complexity, the cultural hybridity that American life affords. That [Ellison] (and

thus, his protagonist) seeks to formulate kinship ties outside the African American

tradition intimates his belief in the dynamic nature of American culture. (Beavers

15)

I hope to bring these kinship ties to the fore by examining Ellison’s mythical method as it works

to show that, on the lowest frequencies, Ellison speaks for us all.

10
 II. Myth, Folklore, and Canonical Literature

In Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison recognizes violence towards African Americans in the early to

mid-twentieth century, particularly in the Southern United States, as a brutal tradition. Ellison

refers to the “Battle Royal” passage of Invisible Man and claims that this scene portrays a “vital

part of behavior pattern in the South, which both Negroes and whites thoughtlessly accept. It is a

ritual in preservation of caste lines, a keeping of taboo to appease the gods and ward off bad

luck. It is also the initiation ritual to which all greenhorns are subjected; […] the patterns were

already there in society, so that all I had to do was present them in a broader context of meaning”

(Collected Essays 216). In other words, Ellison merges modern American behavioral patterns

with what he sees as traditional, Manichean beliefs regarding the motifs of black and white

throughout Western literature and culture: good and evil, enlightenment and ignorance, pure and

polluted, virtue and sin, and so on. Furthermore, Ellison shows that cultural patterns, folklore,

and myth all arise from repeated human action, and appropriates and synthesizes these forms

within Invisible Man through his appropriation of the Western canon to construct his narrative.

Imitation, borrowing, and appropriation are fundamental artistic practices throughout

Western literature, and Ellison made no qualms about recognizing the literature and authors he

found most useful. Ellison’s studies began under Richard Wright’s tutelage and Ellison

11
reminiscences about the moment when Wright recommended Ellison study canonical literature:

“You must learn how Conrad, Joyce, Dostoevsky, get their effects” (Collected Essays 73-74). It

is clear that Ellison did precisely this, as there are traces from diverse literary figures and works

from America and Europe within Invisible Man. Although there is no shortage of criticism on

Ellison and intertextuality with the Western canon, no scholar has identified that his narrative

method may have come from his study of James Joyce and T. S. Eliot.

Scholars such as Patrice Rankine and Justine McConnell have argued that, like Eliot and

Joyce, Ellison incorporates into Invisible Man the foundational literature of the Western canon

such as the Greco-Roman myth. Although traditionally denied access to classical mythology and

entry into the Western literary canon, African Americans have traditionally engaged with these

texts, and Rankine uses Ellison’s Invisible Man as one example among others of African

American participation in the classical tradition. Accordingly, Rankine suggests that African

American engagement with the classics can enlighten the study of Greco-Roman mythology and,

specifically regarding Ellison’s engagement with classicism, observes: “[W]e find that, origins

not withstanding, black and white Americans alike share common cultural and literary models

that can be called upon to shape and reform our understanding of ourselves and the world around

us. Without this vernacular, there is no meeting of the minds, no shared meaning, no common

culture” (11). This is precisely the point Ellison seeks to illuminate in his work by saying that he

“was taken very early with a passion to link together all [he] loved within the Negro community

and all those things I felt in the world which lay beyond” (Collected Essays 71).

Moreover, Rankine and McConnell show that the classics need not be marked or rejected

as a Eurocentric field of study. In fact, Rankine shows that Ellison, among other authors,

engaged with the classics as a unique form of protest and subversion. Rankine argues that “to

12
study Ulysses, or Greek and Roman myth and folklore more broadly, is not to privilege [them]

[…] A black author’s use of the classics is not necessarily an esthetic concession and black

classicism can in fact be part of a radical cultural identity” (42). Although Rankine emphasizes

Ellison’s engagement with the classics, this same argument can be applied to Ellison’s

engagement with the whole Western canon. Ellison’s synthesis of African American literature,

traditions, and folklore with Western literature and motifs in Invisible Man is in fact a part of a

“radical cultural identity,” with which all Americans engage regardless of race and in spite of

various attempts to conceal or outright deny this fact, such as critical oversight or blatant

rejection of intercultural influence. For Ellison, learning to compose his novel forced him “to

relate [himself] consciously and imaginatively to [his] mixed background as American, as Negro

American, and as a Negro from what in its own belated way was a pioneer background” as an

early resident of Oklahoma (Collected Essays 56). Accordingly, Ellison relates himself and his

work to the Western canon and, as a result, uncovers the dialectical nature of narrative and

culture between African American tradition and the larger American culture in which it plays a

crucial role. In the preface to the 1980 edition of Invisible Man, Ellison reminisces that during

the composition of the novel, “creatures from Afro-American fables—Jack-the-Rabbit and Jack-

the-Bear—blended in my mind with figures of myth and history about whom I’d been reading:

those tracings of the sinister ties which bind the generations in that basic parade of human vision

whereby the sighted are often blind and the sightless most perceptive, the son his own father-in-

law, and the dedicated and self-righteous detective his own elusive criminal” (Collected Essays

353). The coupling of African American forms with Western myth and literature is how Ellison

gains entry into the canon of Western literature “to make some small contribution, and to whose

13
composite picture of reality [he] was obligated to offer some necessary modifications” (Collected

Essays 56).

Ellison’s synthesis of forms in Invisible Man is analogous to the development of the

novel in the context of the Western narrative tradition. In The Nature of Narrative (1966), Robert

Scholes and Robert Kellogg seek to clarify that the novel is not the “ideal” form of narrative as is

often implied in criticism, but only one of many narrative forms. Scholes and Kellogg trace the

evolution of narrative from ancient and sacred myth to contemporary fiction and liken the

phenomena to biological evolution. They write: “It is a kind of cross between a biological and a

dialectical process, in which different species sometimes combine to produce new hybrids, which

can in turn combine with other old or new forms; and in which one type will beget its antitype,

which in turn may combine with other forms or synthesize with its antitypical originator”

(Scholes and Kellogg 23). For Scholes and Kellogg, written narratives from across the globe

follow the same approximate developmental path of divergence and reintegration. For them,

“[a]ll art is traditional in that artists learn their craft from their predecessors [and] conceiving of

the possibilities open to them in terms of the achievements they are acquainted with” (Scholes

and Kellogg 17). Ellison’s appropriation of the forms with which he is familiar, such as the

Western canon, classical myth, and African American folklore, gives Invisible Man grounding

and cohesiveness in the chaotic form of the novel, and he achieves a (re)unification of apparently

disparate cultural forms in his narrative.

Although I argue that Ellison’s integration of various cultural forms in Invisible Man is

egalitarian, critics such as Houston Baker in Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature

(1984) suggest that Ellison’s literary criticism relegates African American folklore below other

art forms, writing that it seems “mere evasion to shy from the assertion that Ellison’s criticism

14
ranks folklore below literary art” (175). Although Baker continues that Ellison’s “critical

practice collapses in his creative practice” (175), the charges he levels against Ellison for

relegating African American folklore is spurious because Ellison considers both art forms

essential to his identity and his artistry. McConnell notes that “Ellison’s novel, in fact, positions

itself at the centre [sic] of a triangle formed by ancient classical literature, the canon of

nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature (almost by definition composed solely of white

writers, given the barriers surrounding the endowment of canonical status) and African American

folklore” (76) because these are the (seemingly incongruous) traditions which he inherited.

Before highlighting the Odyssean nature of Ellison’s narrative as does Rankine, McConnell

notes the diverse sources of Ellison’s narrative. In addition to noting Ellison’s clear study of

Joyce, Hemingway, and Stein, McConnell notes that the “framing prologue and epilogue of the

novel are clearly indebted to Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864), as well as to

Richard Wright’s novella, ‘The Man Who Lived Underground’ (1942). Furthermore, the

prologue and epilogue align Invisible Man with the ‘why do I write?’ theme of slave narratives,

in which literacy is equated with freedom” (McConnell 76). In other words, McConnell, like

Ellison, sees connections and similarities where others see disparate traditions—Ellison merely

uses the tradition within which he works in order to highlight the resemblances.

Ellison’s description of his engagement with classical and European literature left him

open to the criticisms of perpetuating the hierarchical relationship between African American

and European American culture, and, upon initial consideration, these charges appear valid. For

instance, although Ellison aligns his protagonist with trickster figures such as Brer Rabbit and

Odysseus, he also associated himself with Odysseus because it is easier or more logical for him

to identify with a human than with a rabbit (Collected Essays 112). This coupling of cultural

15
forms endows Ellison’s protagonist and other characters with a “unique perspective on human

affairs” that draws from various cultural forms by nature (Rankine 154). Take, for instance,

Ellison’s description of Invisible’s struggle against Monopolated Light & Power. Invisible uses

“their service and [pays] them nothing at all, and they don’t know it” (Invisible Man 5). Invisible

describes the intentionally superfluous waste of electricity in his hole in the ground, saying

“there are exactly 1,369 lights. I’ve wired the entire ceiling, every inch of it. And not with

fluorescent bulbs, but with the older, more-expensive-to-operate kind, the filament type. An act

of sabotage, you know” (Invisible Man 7). Like Armstrong, Invisible takes an instrument of

power and turns it into whatever he wants: light, warmth, music, and so on. Although identifying

Invisible with Odysseus indicates that white society is identified with the gods, this instance is

not black and white, so to speak. In African American folklore, “God” is not necessarily an

indicator of divinity and goodness since he or she is sometimes perceived as an ordinary being

with a position of privilege and nothing more.

In her collection of African American folklore, Mules and Men (1935), Zora Neale

Hurston recounts the tale “How Jack Beat the Devil.” However, in this tale and in others, the

devil is not cast as the prince of darkness and paragon of evil, locked in futile battle upon the

planes of heaven, as described by Milton. Hurston characterizes the Devil as a trickster figure,

akin to Brer Rabbit and Odysseus: “The devil is not the terror that he is in European folk-lore.

He is a powerful trickster who often competes successfully with God. There is a strong suspicion

that the devil is an extension of the story-makers while God is the supposedly impregnable white

masters, who are nevertheless defeated by the Negroes” (Mules and Men 248). Perhaps

indicative of Rank’s claim that the purloiners of myth will utilize what corresponds to their

current situation, the Devil does not become a figure of evil as much as one who maintains

16
stubborn defiance in the face of overwhelming odds. Pockets of resistance are possible even

under oppressive conditions and Ellison weaves together myths and characters that emphasize

stubborn tenacity and wisdom in confronting the economically, politically, and culturally

powerful rather than crying foul. Accordingly, Ellison integrates the inherited myths, forms, and

other traditions of his society to describe it from his vantage point. Using Western narrative

traditions to describe the West from a subaltern point of view is bound to be revealing. As

Rankine notes, in Invisible Man and other African American texts that engage with the classics,

“[w]estern myth works in tandem with African and African American folklore to form the

writer’s broader imagination. That is, classicism enriches—and is enriched by—these

correlatives […] In many cases, and particularly in the case of Ralph Ellison, the objective

correlative of classicism in African American literature merged with local idiom to form

unprecedented perspectives on American identity” (14).

W. B. Stanford’s Ulysses Theme (1954) demonstrates the wide spectrum of uses of the

Homeric character Ulysses throughout Western literature due to Ulysses’s greatest trait:

adaptability. Stanford accounts for discrepancies between the original Homeric myth and modern

authors’ appropriations of the characters and themes from the Odyssey, saying,

a professional writer rarely has time or patience to sift a complex tradition in its

entirety. He will usually rely on some fragmentary information and invent the

rest. Here chance may cause a revolution. If Dante had known the Odyssey he

might not have conceived his epoch-making portrait of Ulysses in the Inferno. If

James Joyce had not first met Ulysses in Charles Lamb’s Adventures of Ulysses

he might never have become aware of modern symbolisms in Ulysses. (Ulysses

Theme 3)

17
Stanford continues, saying that when an author latches onto a traditional character, “his

imagination can make a sudden mythopoeic leap beyond the slow tide of normal literary

development: then, quite unpredictably, a new conception of an ancient hero, a new major figure

in the annals of European literature, may spring into life” (Ulysses Theme 6). A proof of

Stanford’s claim is Ellison’s integration of mythical (Odysseus) and folkloric (trickster)

characters, which causes a new, “invisible,” figure to spring into life in Western literature.

Building upon Stanford’s study, Rankine reads Ellison’s appropriation of the “Ulysses

theme” in Invisible Man as a way of understanding Greco-Roman myth from a new vantage

point and thus enriching its literary value. Rankine argues this point eloquently and

convincingly, demonstrating several parallels between Greco-Roman myth and African

American folklore in Ellison’s fiction. Rankine shows that, rather than an esoteric, Eurocentric

subject, “Greek and Roman literature are part of a broad nexus of images and icons that served

the artists who handled them as material for esthetic, political, and social expression. The

classics are as diverse as any literature, and some of the ideas and icons that come out of Greco-

Roman culture are among the most persistent known to any society […] Ulysses, as a symbol of

the classics, is as much the voice of the oppressed as he is the oppressor” (65). Stanford’s study

of the Ulysses theme corroborates Rankine’s thesis that the classics, and the character of

Odysseus in particular, contain salient points of identification with African American culture.

Although he does not classify it as such, Stanford describes the character of Odysseus as

possessing a “double consciousness” of sorts in Homer’s depictions of Odysseus in his two

epics:

In the Iliad Odysseus lives among open friends and open enemies. All are heroes

together, honourable men and aristocrats, trained up to a definite code of etiquette

18
 in war and peace. In most of the Odyssey, on the contrary, Odysseus is generally

either alone or else accompanied only by some panicky followers and goes among

monsters, magicians, and usurpers. No etiquette or convention prescribes any safe

rule of conduct in such circumstances. Odysseus needs every atom of his inherited

cunning merely to survive. (Ulysses Theme 14)

Stanford’s dichotomy of Odysseus’s experiences between the Iliad and the Odyssey, between

being a member of in- and out-groups, both majority and minority, is an apt description of

Invisible. Being in, but not of, American society, “Invisible Man here [develops] an Odyssean

cunning in his ‘desire to hide’ and be duplicitous, but more tellingly, Brer Rabbit (or Buckeye as

he is known to children), known for his trickery” (Rankine 93).

Although Ellison’s use of the “literature of the oppressor” left Ellison open to charges

Eurocentrism, Rankine correctly identifies that Ellison achieves a “coupling, as opposed to

hierarchy that [Houston A.] Baker suggests, of black folklore with the Ulysses theme […] If he is

to achieve the mastery of self that is emblematic of Ulysses, he must come to terms both with his

broader (classically influenced) context and with his identity in an African American texture of

time, place, and circumstance” (137). Ellison’s notion of appropriating the larger Western culture

and its traditions, of which his own culture was a part, holds political significance and comes

largely from his study of James Joyce, who coupled Irish culture (that at the time existed within

an English-dominated society) with the Western tradition.

The specific point of connection between Joyce and Ellison’s use of classical literature is

visible in the specific works they use to structure Ulysses and Invisible Man. David Weir’s

Ulysses Explained: How Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare Inform Joyce’s Modernist Vision

(2015) argues that any understanding of Ulysses must pass through the literary figures of

19
“Homer, because he provides the narrative, Shakespeare because he supplies the plot, and Dante

because he inspires the structure” (1). Weir’s description of Joyce’s narrative deserves emphasis

because it could be related to Invisible Man. For instance, Weir shows that Dante and Joyce both

“write about an earlier stage of their lives from the perspective of maturity. They also write about

their homelands from the perspective of exile—forced in the case of Dante and voluntary in the

case of Joyce” (Weir 3). Significantly, Ellison’s narrator, Invisible, also writes about an earlier

stage of his life after his transformative experiences have occurred. Invisible writes from forced

and voluntary exile: forced in terms of African American political and social oppression and

voluntary because of his retreat into an underground lair. Perhaps most significantly, Weir claims

that Eliot’s “Waste Land employs something resembling a mythical rather than a narrative

method” (5), and although it is beyond the scope of this project to elucidate the disparity between

Joyce’s and Eliot’s mythical methods, what is significant is that as Eliot composes his poem

piecemeal from fragments of previous works, and Ellison composes his novel piecemeal from

literary fragments of classical, Western, and African American narrative forms.

Rankine traces Ellison’s understanding of myth to James Gordon Frazer’s Golden Bough

(1890), saying,

Frazer’s contribution [to the study of myth] was that of encouraging readers to

examine these tales across cultures so as to tap into their universal, transcultural

themes. The ritual approach to myth came to influence Sigmund Freud, who used

Frazer’s research in part to explain what he saw as underlying patterns of

unconscious thought, such as the Oedipus complex, the prepubescent male’s

symbolic overthrow of the father-figure […] The ritual approach to myth was

pivotal to Ellison’s thinking on American society and identity. (Rankine 125-126)

20
Although Rankine correctly identifies Ellison’s inclination to find fundamental similarities and

patterns of human thought in myth, he overlooks one of Ellison’s most important, self-

proclaimed influences upon his study and understanding of mythology: Otto Rank’s Myth of the

Birth of the Hero (1914).

Ellison directly alludes to Rank’s study of heroic archetypes in two separate interviews.

In a 1972 discussion with the author, John O’Brien compares a speech of Ellison’s character, a

blind preacher with the Hellenic name Homer A. Barbee, to the sermon of Father Arnall, who is

a character in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Ellison confirms that he read

Portrait, but emphasizes that his main concerns transcended that particular moment in Joyce’s

novel, saying, “I was also concerned with the problem of heroism and with the mythology of the

hero. I had read Rank’s The Myth of the Birth of the Hero. I wasn’t using these things

consciously, but they are just a part of my sense of how myth structures certain human activities”

(Conversations 231). Two years later, in an interview with John Hersey (1974), Ellison discusses

several characters’ speeches and claims that, “I realized consciously, or I discovered as I wrote,

that I was playing variations on what Otto Rank identified as the myth of the birth and death of

the hero. So in the rewriting that conscious knowledge, that insight, made it possible to come

back and add elements to the design which I had written myself into under the passion of telling

a story” (Conversations 280-281). Clearly, Ellison’s understanding of the ritual approach to myth

is at least partially, if not heavily, influenced by Rank’s study which emphasizes the thematic

commonalities regarding various heroic characters throughout history.

Rank’s analysis of heroic myths from disparate epochs, cultures, and geographic

locations emphasizes the remarkable commonalities between the heroic personalities he

examines. He states: “The history of the birth and of the early life of these personalities came to

21
be especially invested with fantastic features, which in different nations even though widely

separated by space and entirely independent of each other present a baffling similarity, or in part

a literal correspondence” (Rank 1). In other words, Rank’s study (which is psychoanalytic in

nature) reveals threads of similarities running through heroic myths, and the fundamental

similarities of heroic ideals and themes across time and space is akin to what Ellison seeks to

demonstrate in his coupling of African American folklore with the larger body of Western

literature and classical myth.

As Ellison later uses to elucidate the relationship between African American mythical

structures and Western culture, Rank argues that one potential reason for the thematic similarities

between the myths of different cultures is that of borrowing because “[n]othing new is ever

discovered as long as it is possible to copy” (3). According to Rank, this practice of borrowing

and copying is one potential cause of the thematic commonalities between characters from

Babylonian, Greek, Hindi, Roman, Hebrew, and Norse myths such as Sargon, Moses, Oedipus,

Paris, Gilgamesh, Romulus and Remus, Hercules, and Jesus among others. After a cursory

review of these myths and plotlines, Rank identifies a “series of uniformly common features,

with a typical ground work, from which a standard saga, as it were, may be constructed” (61) of

the heroic archetype. However, this is not to say there is a strict adherence to this prototype and

that variations to the basic theme do not occur. Rank also points out that “the appropriation of

mythical contents always represents at the same time an independent mythical construction;

because only that can be permanently retained which corresponds to the purloiner’s stage of

mythological ideation. […] [S]uch motives may produce new contents, which agree in their

fundamental motives” (3-4), and this back and forth borrowing are how Ellison understands

African American and Western myth operating.

22
 As Ellison understands them, African American myth and folklore are distinct from their

white and Western counterparts, but the two traditions inevitably bled and permeated into one

another. In a 1965 interview with Richard Kostelanetz, Ellison derides the misuse of the term

“ghetto,” as it implies, in its original European context, a traditional, social, and linguistic

distance from the majority culture, which, for African Americans and the majority white

Americans, has never been the case. Ellison argues that misused concepts such as these

[obscure] further the relationships between American whites and American

Negroes. Language for one thing, for another the patterns of myth—of universal

myths, so to speak, of Christian myth, and so on as they have been given

embodiment in terms of Negro patterns. It’s not too difficult to look at John

Henry and see the Hercules myth. If you are aware of the connections, if you

know where to look. It’s not too unusual to see that the rhetoric of a Negro

sermon, for instance, can be traced back to Shakespeare, if you know where to

look, or to the metaphysical poets. I’m not saying that these very often unlettered

ministers have read John Donne, but on the other hand they are possessors of a

living tradition. (92)

And later, in a 1973 interview with Hollie West, Ellison gives a hypothetical account of how

such permeations and cultural transmissions took place. Ellison said:

It’s a dialectical process. You tell me a story, or I hear you telling your child a

story. I’m a cook or a maid or a butler. I go back home and tell my kids the story.

Since there’s an element of rhetoric involved, I change it to fit in with the

background of my child, and then I enspirit it with my own motives for freedom

23
 or my own sense of humanity, my own sense of the complexity of human

experience. And so you’ve got a modification.

You can look and say, ‘This is a Negro story.” You look at ‘John

Henry’—that seems absolutely black. But you look a little closer and you

remember the tales of Hercules, you recognize the modification. I’m not saying

it’s not ours. But I’m saying it was not created out of the empty air but out of the

long tradition of storytelling, out of myth. (250)

Ellison considers that the demands of the African American sociocultural milieu transform the

heroic archetype of Hercules to suit its own needs. A derivative of this myth, John Henry

becomes a black man of legendary strength and determination, destined for victory yet doomed

to death at the “hands” of a physical entity ostensibly more powerful than a human: the modern

machine. From the earliest stages of European colonialism through language, music, and other

cultural forms such as folk tales and religious practices, Ellison’s novel seeks to bring to the

surface the permeation between Western and African American literature and cultural forms.

In addition to the African American and Greco-Roman mythological allusions, Ellison

signals his—and those of African American artists in general—participations in the European

literary tradition. Dennis Looney’s excellent book, Freedom Readers: The African American

Reception of Dante Alighieri and the Divine Comedy (2011), examines the long-standing

tradition of African American engagement with Dante. Looney highlights Ellison’s use of Dante

as a literary figure and emphasizes the structural similarities between the Divine Comedy and

Invisible Man. Looney suggests that Ellison uses Dante in order to “highlight a new kind of

mobility, not literal, not social, but the literary mobility of a new kind of American writer who

signals his arrival among the canonical writers of old Europe with an energized allusion to

24
Dante. Ellison […] enters the territory of European culture via the literary tradition Dante

represents” (94). Although Looney identifies the long standing engagement of African American

artists with canonical European literature, he fails to note the significance of Ellison’s coupling

of classical European artists with Invisible and one of the most well-known African American

artists of the twentieth century, Louis Armstrong, and I will examine this point further in chapter

two.

Like Scholes and Kellogg, who emphasize the Novel’s integrated forms (historical,

mimetic, didactic, and romantic), Northrup Frye also examines the synthesis of styles and

techniques in narrative in his Anatomy of Criticism (1957), and he too considers Joyce’s Ulysses

as the epitome of this amalgamation. “Ulysses,” Frye argues, “is a unity and not an aggregate,”

and this unity comes from “an intricate scheme of parallel contrasts. The romantic archetypes of

Hamlet and Ulysses are like remote stars in a literary heaven looking down quizzically on the

shabby creatures of Dublin obediently intertwining themselves in the patterns set by their

influences” (Frye 41). Ellison, looking at the same literary celestial bodies, charts his own

narrative course and uses Joyce as his guide. Ellison’s use of myth and Western canon is not a

direct copy of these traditions, but is, instead, a borrowing of motifs, tropes, and forms for his

own artistic aims. Ellison’s study of Joyce sharpened his critical and literary imagination like the

study of science and math sharpens logic, as I will reveal in the next chapter, which explores

Ellison’s study and eventual rendering of Joyce’s mythical method.

25
 III. Joyce and Eliot: Ellison’s Antecedents

In the Irish pantomime, Turko the Terrible, King Turko sings a song “anticipating the delights to

be derived from his magic rose, where he thinks ‘Invisibility is just the thing for me’” (Thornton

17). Stephen Dedalus recalls in Ulysses that his mother was fond of the song and “laughed with

the others when the actor sang “I am the boy / That can enjoy / Invisibility’” (Ulysses 10).

Joyce’s cultural reference within the first episode of Ulysses’s suggests Ellison’s narrative style

not only for the allusion to invisibility, but also due to the farrago of illusions embedded within a

larger framework. Although it is unlikely that Ellison conceived of his notion of invisibility from

a passing reference in Joyce’s Ulysses, Joyce’s influence upon Ellison is palpable. Robert List’s

book Dedalus in Harlem: The Joyce-Ellison Connection (1982) explores the connection between

the two authors. List’s study examines the extent to which Joyce influenced Ellison (as well as

Richard Wright) as Ellison learned his craft. List argues that Ellison “[was] profoundly

influenced by Joyce’s treatment of ‘race’ and ethnicity when [he] observed unsettling analogies

existing among oppression in Ireland, the United States, and Africa” (6). Furthermore, List

argues that Ellison’s portrayal of “invisibility” derives from diverse mythical, literary, religious,

and philosophical sources such as the story of Noah’s ark, Homer, sleeping warriors of European

folklore residing in middle earth, Hegelian discourse, William James, Andre Malraux, and

26
Fyodor Dostoevsky among others (64). However, “from Joyce,” List claims, “more than from

these diverse sources, Ellison gleaned the most” (65). List adumbrates Joyce’s “complex

improvisations on the invisibility of the Irish” including the reference to “Turko the Terrible”

among other allusions to invisibility and distorted imagery throughout Joyce’s oeuvre.

Although List makes salient insights and connections between Joyce and Ellison, he

relegates the significance of myth in Invisible Man and Ulysses to a five-page appendix. List

concedes that “[a]nother aspect of the Joyce-Ellison connection involves the deliberate yet highly

ambiguous parodies of classical sources these writers undertake with such analogous

improvisation” (281) and he briefly discusses Ellison in regards to Eliot’s analysis of Joyce’s

“mythical method.” However, List misaligns Ellison with Joyce’s use of “mythic frames to

evoke confusion rather than [with] Eliotic order” (281). List is correct in arguing that Joyce and

Eliot’s use of myth have dissimilar aesthetic impetuses, but he is incorrect in assuming that

Ellison’s use of myth favors one author’s method over the other. I will show in this chapter the

extent to which Eliot and Joyce are fundamental to the development of Ellison’s artistry and the

development of his mythical method.

Ulysses and The Waste Land serve as blueprints for how Ellison would use folklore,

myth, and traditional literature as a means to organize Invisible Man. In several interviews,

Ellison alludes Eliot and Joyce as the sources for the importance he attaches to myth and folklore

as well as other literature of the past and their ability to make readers aware of how tradition

functions in everyday life. When discussing his Modernist influences, Ellison claimed that Eliot

and Joyce showed him the impact of myth and ritual upon the creative process (Conversations

12), and he claims that studying Eliot’s use of Ulysses and other myths showed him the artistic

potential of the myths and traditions he saw functioning around him. In his studies leading to the

27
composition of Invisible Man, Ellison considered that “perhaps [he] could do the same thing [as

Joyce and Eliot] if [he] studied the significance of little social forms which we usually engage

ourselves in but not too consciously” (Conversations 261). Similarities between moments in

Joyce’s Ulysses, Eliot’s Waste Land, and Ellison’s Invisible Man suggest that Joyce and Eliot’s

work informed Ellison’s method of appropriating myth and canonical literature in his novel.

The eviction scene of Invisible Man is perhaps the clearest example of Ellison’s

amalgamation of ritual and emblems of the past. When Invisible sees an elderly couple being

evicted, he catalogues their possessions:

“knocking bones,” used to accompany music at country dances, used in black face

minstrels […] a straightening comb, switches of false hair, a curling iron […]

rock candy and camphor […] a small Ethiopian flag, a faded tintype of Abraham

Lincoln […] In my hand I held three lapsed life insurance policies with perforated

seals stamped “Void”; a yellowing newspaper portrait of a huge black man with

the caption: MARCUS GARVEY DEPORTED […] I read: FREE PAPERS. Be it

known to all men that my negro Primus Provo, has been freed by me on this sixth

day of August, 1859. (Invisible Man 210)

Schafer writes: “These bits of folk myth and history permeate the novel” (124), and I add that

they also coalesce with the allusions to Greco-Roman myth and canonical Western literature

Ellison embeds throughout the novel in a method he derives from Joyce and Eliot.

Asked about how literary influences manifest themselves in his work, Ellison said that he

learned to adapt and appropriate material through his study of Eliot and Joyce.

Joyce and Eliot, for instance, made me aware of the playful possibilities of

language. You look at a page of Finnegans Wake and see references to all sorts of

28
 American popular music, yet the context gives it an extension from the popular

back to the classical and beyond. This is just something that Joyce teaches you

that you can do, and you can abstract the process and apply it to a frame of

reference which is American and historical, and it can refer to class, it can refer to

the fractions and frictions of color, to popular and folk culture—it can do many

things. (Conversations 286-287)

Ellison considers Joyce and Eliot’s use of myth and popular culture as a vehicle through which

an artist can connect various points of culture: contemporary and historical, popular and esoteric,

idiosyncratic and universal, black and white, and so on. Furthermore, he indicates that his study

of myth not only showed him how it might be used in his fiction, but also expanded his

consideration of what precisely constitutes such traditions, saying, “[w]hen I started writing, I

knew that in both The Waste Land and Ulysses ancient myth and ritual were used to give form

and significance to the material; but it took me a few years to realize that the myths and rites

which we find functioning in our everyday lives could be used in the same way” (Conversations

12). Ellison sees social mores as mythic because they give form and structure to societal

interactions, and, like myth and folklore, these traditions—often brutal—arise from continual

repetition within various pockets of American society.

Like Joyce uses the Odyssey to structure his overall narrative (with considerable artistic

license), Ellison too uses Homeric myth to structure moments of Invisible Man. Patrice Rankine

is one of the only critics to recognize that the “folkloric motifs of the drunken ogre […] permeate

Ellison’s narrative” and that this “reveals a skillful deployment comparable to James Joyce’s use

of the Ulysses theme in his novel” (150). Although Rankine correctly argues that Ellison’s

narrative method is reminiscent of Joyce and that Ellison structures his narrative around classical

29
myth, Rankine only considers the Homeric allusions within Invisible Man’s overarching katabic

structure.

In a letter to his literary agent, Ellison clearly states that the overall theme of his novel is

Invisible’s simultaneous ascent through the social circles of American society and concurrent

decent into the Underworld. Ellison wrote that while “invisible man will move upward through

Negro life, coming into contact with its various forms and personality types; [and] will operate in

the Negro middle class, in the leftwing movement” only to “descend again into the disorganized

atmosphere of the Harlem underworld” (qtd. in Rich). As Rankine notes, Invisible indeed

descends into the Underworld, but it is a journey of stages rather than one continuous descent.

Ellison uses Joyce’s method of using a classical text to structure his narrative and substitutes

Joyce’s use of The Odyssey for his own use of Dante’s Inferno.

In his subterranean dwelling, Invisible listens to Louis Armstrong’s “What Did I Do to

Be so Black and Blue” and fantasizes about having five phonographs simultaneously playing the

song. Invisible admires Armstrong’s ability to appropriate the trumpet, a symbol of power,

authority, and oppression (for some) and his ability to “bend that military instrument into a beam

of lyrical sound” (Invisible Man 8). Invisible identifies with Armstrong’s artistry “because he has

made poetry out of being invisible” (Invisible Man 8). “Gin, jazz and dreams were not enough”

to satisfy Invisible’s mind, and he concludes that, like his artistic predecessors, his purpose is to

create art from his experiences: “Why should I be dedicated and set aside,” Invisible wonders,

“—yes, if not to at least tell a few people about it?” (Invisible Man 579). In the fashion of Virgil

guiding Dante to enlightenment, Armstrong’s music guides Invisible on his descent to the

foundations of African American artistry and identity.

30
 One night, Invisible accidentally smokes marijuana while listening to Armstrong’s song

and says, “I not only entered the music but descended, like Dante, into its depths” (Invisible Man

9). Invisible, with Armstrong’s music as his guide, descends through various levels of musical

forms that are entwined with this jazz and finds within it “a cave and I entered it and looked

around and heard an old woman singing a spiritual as full of Weltschmerz as flamenco”

(Invisible Man 9). As with other artistic forms like myth and folklore, African American music

does not arise from thin air; it engages with a long, living tradition and, inevitably, new forms

such as jazz contain traces of the older forms such as flamenco. Invisible continues his descent

through the music and, reminiscent of Odysseus’s nekyia where he meets his deceased mother,

sees “a beautiful girl the color of ivory pleading in a voice like my mother’s as she stood before

a group of slaveowners who bid for her naked body” (Invisible Man 9). The ugly history of

slavery and brutal practices associated with it underlie and continue to structure American

society.

Invisible continues his Dante-esque descent until he reaches the bedrock of Armstrong’s

music. Invisible finds a sobbing woman at the lowest level of his descent, and she tells him that

she loved her master because he gave her several sons, “and because I loved my sons I learned to

love their father though I hated him too” (Invisible Man 10). The woman speaks more about her

master, the father of her children, saying

“He promised to set us free but he never could bring hisself to do it. Still I

loved him…”

“Loved him? You mean…”

“Oh yes, but I loved something else even more.”

“What more?”

31
 “Freedom.”

“Freedom,” I said. “Maybe freedom lies in hating.”

“Naw, son, it’s in loving. I loved him and give him the poison and he

withered away like a frost-bit apple. Them boys woulda tore him to pieces with

they homemade knives.” (Invisible Man 11).

Invisible’s journey ends with his flight from the woman’s sons who are angry because Invisible

upset their mother. Invisible says

somehow I came out of it, ascending hastily from this underworld of sound to

hear Louis Armstrong innocently asking,

What did I do

To be so black

And blue? (Invisible Man 12)

Beneath Armstrong’s art, one finds layers of tradition and history where black and white cultures

intertwine. As Invisible discovers, this history is not necessarily pleasant to uncover. However,

Ellison argues that until we recognize that black and white cultures are not Manichean opposites

but intimately intertwined, we will never know the answer to Armstrong’s innocent question:

What did I do to be so black and blue? Why do we as a society interact with each other in the

ways we do? Invisible seeks to bring to the surface this entwined identity and shared cultural

history, and, like Dante, he will eventually emerge from the Underworld to relate his voyage to

the people on the surface. This descent, or katabasis, in the prologue combined with Invisible’s

clear identification with Dante signifies that Invisible Man is the protagonist’s account of his

passage through the various circles of American society; he begins in the rural south and,

ironically, “descends” northwards into the chaos of urban America where he discovers the

32
relationship between black and white identity and uncovers American traditions and myths that

continue to structure social interaction.

Ellison’s prose and fiction argue that myth, folklore, and classical literature tap into

foundational human experiences regardless of race or culture, transcending racial and cultural

distance to emphasize a shared humanity. Rather than valuing classical myth more than African

American culture or folklore, “Ellison demonstrates a desire to make the classical heritage, and

myth in particular, speak for him” (Rankine 123) like Joyce, his artistic predecessor, who also

made classical heritage and myth speak for him by appropriating the Odyssey, one of the

foundational texts in the Western tradition to give form to his novel. In addition to the Joycean

structure of Invisible Man, Ellison’s prose and interviews suggest that he combines Joyce’s

narrative method with Eliot’s ordered use of fragments within Invisible Man.

Leonard Deutsch’s short but illuminating article “The Waste Land in Ellison’s Invisible

Man” (1977) shows the extent to which Ellison finds The Waste Land’s “jazz rhythms

(“discontinuities”), its organization, its range of allusion, and its use of ritual and myth” (5)

useful, and Deutsch also notes several allusions to Eliot’s poem within Invisible Man itself.

Building upon Deutsch’s brief article, I argue that Ellison’s deliberate parsing of the literatures

of the past to create a new narrative is a clear homage to his interpretation of Eliot’s narrative

method in The Waste Land. Ellison attributes the beginnings of his literary education to Eliot,

and he recalls that while at Tuskegee, “I found myself reading The Waste Land, and for the first

time I was caught up in a piece of poetry which moved me but which I couldn’t reduce to a

logical system. I didn’t know quite why it was working on me, but being close to the jazz

experience—that is, the culture of jazz—I had a sense that some of the same sensibility was

being expressed in poetry” (Collected Essays 524). Ellison considers Eliot’s Waste Land to be

33
cut from the same artistic cloth as jazz, and Ellison recalled the strong impact that Eliot’s poems

had on him when he first read The Waste Land. Ellison writes:

The Waste Land seized my mind. I was intrigued by its power to move me while

eluding my understanding. Somehow its rhythms were often closer to those of

jazz than were those of the Negro poets, and even though I could not understand

then, its range of allusion was as mixed and varied as that of Louis Armstrong

[…] There was nothing to do but look up the references in the footnotes to the

poem, and thus began my conscious education in literature. (Collected Essays

203)

Jazz engages with and synthesizes musical styles and forms of the past and recasts them into a

new, American aesthetic, and Ellison considers Eliot as achieving the same effect through

literature. Eliot’s variegated use of existing texts within his own informs Ellison’s own use of

intertextuality in Invisible Man. Ellison asserts that The Waste Land is as American as jazz “in

the rather ruthless assault it makes upon the literature of the past. It assumes possession, it

abstracts, it recasts in terms of Eliot’s sense of life and his sense of the possibility of language, of

poetry, and of culture” (Conversations 91). In addition to the dismantling and appropriation of

the literature of the past, Ellison recalls a significant lesson regarding folklore that he learns from

reading Eliot as opposed to other African American writers at the time. Ellison says, “I was

reading [African American poets] very intensely and I felt something missing in them that I ran

into in Eliot, the folk tradition they had and didn’t know what to do with’” (Conversations 67).

Put another way, Ellison learns from Eliot how to use the myth, folklore, and traditions—

including the Western narrative tradition—with which he engaged over the course of his life “to

give form and significance to the material” in his novel (Conversations 12). Ellison sees in Eliot

34
the rhythms and traditions of jazz, the “discontinuities” of merging various cultural fragments

into a unified whole, and he imitates Eliot’s artistic practice in Invisible Man.

Harold Bloom describes The Waste Land as “a grand gathering of great fragments” (1),

and Grover Smith’s essay “The Structure and Mythical Method of The Waste Land” (1983)

explains how Eliot uses these fragments of myth, folklore, religious figures, and literature to give

the poem unity. Similar to Ellison’s notion that myth, traditions, and rituals are a way of

structuring and interpreting experience, Smith contends that

Eliot contrived […] a recipe for literature which should transcend narrative and

incorporate the hypotheses of the social sciences, and such discoveries as those

marshaled in Frazer’s The Golden Bough. These had in common a revelation of

the primitive, the savage and unconscious; they fathomed the regions from which

myth arose, the impulses that gave rise to ritual, and the process in premodern

minds that erupted in modern minds as poetry. (111-112)

For Eliot, traditional stories and epics like the Grail legend, the Fisher King, Greco-Roman myth,

and Dante’s Commedia among others can be traced back to the magical and religious traditions

and customs of ancient European societies. Incidentally, Ellison comes to interpret the traditions

and rites that organize modern American society as having roots in the colonization of America

and the amalgamation of European and African cultural forms.

In Invisible Man’s prologue, Invisible aligns himself with various cultural figures and

traditions; however, this is not merely a way for Ellison to gain cultural capital. It allows him to

connect African American culture with the Western literary tradition. Within his underground

lair, Invisible compares his situation to a hibernating bear who “retires to his hole for the winter

and lives until spring; then he comes strolling out like the Easter chick breaking from its shell”

35
(Invisible Man 6). He also compares himself with “Jack-the-Bear”, a character from African

American folklore, “for I am in a state of hibernation” (Invisible Man 6). Allusions to springtime

and its concomitant images and tropes foreshadow Invisible’s Dante-esque emergence from the

abyss, which he asserts in the epilogue: “The hibernation is over. I must shake off the old skin

and come up for breath. There’s a stench in the air, which, from this distance underground, might

be the smell either of death or of spring—I hope spring. But don’t let me trick you, there is a

death in the smell of spring” (Invisible Man 580).

In addition to the rituals, traditions, and images associated with the perpetual cycle of life

and death and the seasons, Ellison subtly connects Invisible to Greco-Roman mythological

figures that embody eternities of perpetual labor. Invisible’s grandfather prophesizes his

grandchild endless punishment in a nightmare Invisible has after the Battle Royal. Invisible says

That night I dreamed I was at a circus with him and that he refused to laugh at the

clowns no matter what they did. Then later he told me to open my brief case and

read what was inside and I did, finding an official envelope stamped with the state

seal; and inside the envelope I found another and another, endlessly, and I thought

I would fall of weariness. “Them’s years,” he said. “Now open that one.” And I

did and in it I found an engraved document containing a short message in letters

of gold. “Read it,” my grandfather said. “Out loud.”

“To Whom It May Concern,” I intoned. “Keep This Nigger-Boy

Running.” (Invisible Man 33)

Invisible’s life is filled with repetitive labor; he attempts to assert his humanity and

simultaneously accept the identities society ascribes to him only to find the two are irreconcilable

time and time again. Like Sisyphus, Invisible’s existence is filled with futile labor and endless

36
punishment. Like the Greek figures who are punished in perpetuity in the Underworld, Invisible

is punished as an African American in a racist society, and the punishment becomes more acute

as he descends through the various levels of society until his self-imposed exile.

Repetition, however, is not a hopeless prospect for Invisible once he comes to terms with

his existential reality and recognizes his invisibility. Like Albert Camus, who elevates Sisyphus

to his “Absurd hero” in Le Mythe de Sisyphe (1942), Invisible reaches Sisyphean recognition and

acceptance of his Absurd circumstances: because he did not recognize his invisibility, he had

been living a death. Camus conceives of Sisyphus as engaging in a revolt against the gods by

embracing his futile task of rolling his boulder up a mountain. Invisible, too, engages in a revolt

against the gods, Monopolated Light & Power. Both Sisyphus and Invisible’s victories lie in

their clear perspective of their existential situation. Sisyphus knows he has no hope of reprieve

from his task, and Invisible has no expectation of the end of his invisibility. Invisible recalls,

“after existing some twenty years, [I] did not become alive until I discovered my invisibility”

(Invisible Man 7). Now, he is aware of his form, and no longer has to live a death

Ellison couples Invisible with chastised mythological figures as a means of revealing the

protagonist’s difficult pursuit of social “freedom” in pre-Civil Rights America. However,

Invisible’s experiences and his clear perspective have helped him “develop a certain ingenuity”

to solve the problems of the world above his underground lair. “Though invisible,” or, perhaps

because he knows he is invisible, Invisible is “in the great American tradition of tinkers. That

makes [him] kin to Ford, Edison and Franklin,” and Invisible says, “call me, since I have a

theory and a concept, a ‘thinker-tinker’” (Invisible Man 7). Beavers claims that Invisible chooses

to align himself with Edison, Ford, and Franklin “because each bears the title of ‘inventor’” and

continues to emphasize that their discoveries, like Invisible’s will soon do, leads “to the

37
‘democraization’ of these products: they were successful in producing them cheaply enough for

the masses to acquire them” (24). Invisible’s discovery is of the same magnitude as electricity,

the light bulb, or the automobile because it has potential to be of the same transformative power

as these industrialists and scientists. After Invisible’s descent through Armstrong’s music, he

aligns himself with Ford, Edison, and Franklin to emphasize that his discovery will have

implications for all levels of society.

Ellison uses the integration of forms in Invisible Man to examine the results of the

fundamental gap in America’s democratic promises and oppressive social practices: the

emotional and psychological damage of the oppressed and the guilt and anxiety of the

oppressors. Ellison’s mythical method enables him to show “that the American novel had long

concerned itself with the puzzle of the one-and-the-many; the mystery of how each of us, despite

his origin in diverse regions, with our diverse racial, cultural, religious backgrounds, speaking

his own diverse idiom of the American in his own accent, is, nevertheless, American” (Collected

Essays 207). In the next chapter, I will demonstrate how Ellison uses Dante’s Inferno to structure

his narrative, draws from folkloric and literary fragments to populate the subsequent layers, and

how he couples Western literature and myth with African American narrative forms.

38
 IV. Ellison’s Mythical Method in Invisible Man

The scholarship that examines the connection between Ellison, Joyce, and Eliot is scarce.

However, a few critics examine the pivotal link between Invisible Man and The Waste Land.

Two of these critics are Steven Helmling and Mary Walsh who have both analyzed Ellison’s

aesthetic connections to Eliot and Joyce. Helmling’s article, “T. S. Eliot and Ralph Ellison—

Insiders, Outsiders, and Cultural Authority” (1989), explores Ellison’s self-study of Eliot; but the

essay then delves into comparisons of the authors’ unexpected accolades regarding The Waste

Land and Invisible Man. Another example is Walsh’s edifying article, “Invisible Man: Ralph

Ellison’s Wasteland” (1984), which notes allusions to Eliot that Ellison embeds throughout his

novel. But Walsh does not fully study Eliot’s impact upon Ellison’s narrative method. Helmling

and Walsh either limit their discussions to traces of Eliot’s poem within Invisible Man or they

draw from Ellison’s comments on Eliot and Joyce but do not provide an in-depth textual analysis

of the novel. In this chapter, I will analyze Invisible Man’s juxtaposition and synthesis of African

American folklore with classical Western literature and his use of classical literature to structure

the overall narrative.

Although I will demonstrate Invisible Man’s structural framework is rooted in the

Inferno, I do not propose a direct mapping of Invisible Man upon the works of Homer, Virgil,

Dante, or any other text. I suggest instead that as Joyce uses myth to give form and structure to

39
Ulysses, Ellison uses Dante’s Inferno and the classical trope of katabasis—the heroic descent to

the underworld—to give structure and unity to Invisible Man. As discussed in the previous

chapter, Ellison signals that his structural model is Dante’s Inferno. Ellison divides Invisible

Man’s twenty-seven chapters between nine significant locations as Invisible journeys from South

to North, descending through layers of American society, reminiscent of Dante’s descent through

the nine circles of hell in the Inferno.

In Ellison’s infernal depiction of American civilization, Invisible encounters an Eliot-like

juxtaposition of cultural forms inhabiting each level. Within each locale and rung of society,

Invisible finds amalgamations of European and African culture, folklore, and myth in addition to

the American rites and traditions that arise out of this cultural fusion. Similar to his unveiling of

integrated traditions and histories beneath the surface of Louis Armstrong’s music, Invisible

continually uncovers the integrated cultural history of American society. As he recounts his

heroic descent beneath the surface of contemporary American society, Invisible helps us

question the rites and traditions—which Ellison equates with myths—that continue to govern

American society, specifically American race relations.

Invisible brings to the surface the shared yet obfuscated cultural history between black

and white Americans through the farrago of allusions and references in his prologue. The novel’s

first sentence, “I am an invisible man,” recalls the opening line of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from

Underground, “I am a sick man…I am a nasty man” (3). In the following sentence, Invisible

refers to Edgar Allan Poe, the “Hollywood-movie ectoplasm,” and a “biochemical accident to

[the] epidermis” (3), alluding to the H. G. Wells novel. Invisible’s allusions are numerous and

variegated, drawing from novels, films, music, philosophy, myth, and folklore.

40
 In addition to deliberately coupling African American and Western cultural forms

throughout the prologue (and the rest of the novel), Invisible identifies the rites and traditions

that rendered him oblivious to his existential predicament. For the first part of his life, he was

unaware that he was “unseen,” and that “to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death” (7).

Here, Invisible recasts a theme from Dante’s Inferno and later in Eliot’s Waste Land. In Canto

III, Dante finds souls of people who lived a moral life but did not proclaim Jesus’s Gospel to be

in limbo. These souls share this dwelling with the angels who did not rebel with Satan, but who

also did not join God’s side. According to Cleanth Brooks’s article “The Waste Land: Critique of

the Myth” (1939), Eliot recognizes these neutral souls in the Inferno as embodying “almost

perfectly the secular attitude which dominates the modern world” (43) because “[w]ithout a faith

their life is in reality a death” (44). According to Brooks, Eliot employs Dante’s theme of living

death which results from acting with no purpose: “So far as we do evil or good, we are human;

and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least, we exist” (Eliot qtd.

in Brooks 44). Ellison takes up this thematic mantle in Invisible Man and considers that

mindlessly participating in rituals and traditions leads to a similar state of living death which is

depicted in Dante’s and Eliot’s works.

Invisible’s folly lies in his mechanically allowing others to dictate his actions, be they

benevolent or malicious. In chapter one of Invisible Man, Invisible relates for us the Battle Royal

where he encounters brutal rituals that govern race relations in his hometown. In the first layer of

Invisible’s descent into hell, the leading white men of his community invite Invisible to give an

address at a hotel. However, before he is able to give the speech, the white men force Invisible to

fight with nine other young African American men for the evening’s entertainment. They first

bring out a naked blonde woman with an “American flag tattooed upon her belly” (19), and she

41
begins to dance for the men in the room. As she dances, the men watch, and Invisible notes that a

merchant “followed her hungrily, his lips loose and drooling […] his posture clumsy like an

intoxicated panda […] This creature was completely hypnotized” (20). Rankine suggests Ellison

riffs on the “drunken ogre” motif and likens it to Odysseus’s confrontation with Polyphemus. I

add that not only is Ellison improvising on this theme, but also that his use of the drunken ogre

motif emphasizes the mythical nature of rites and traditions that function in Invisible’s everyday

life, including the taboo of miscegenation, anxiety regarding sexuality between black males and

white females, mob violence towards the black body, and the human sacrifice that concludes the

“ceremony.”

The Battle Royal suggests Ellison’s depiction of Southern traditions as mythic, arbitrary,

and hypocritical. By recasting the brutal Southern ritual of white violence upon the black body to

an organized, formal event, he emphasizes the incongruity between this practice and the tradition

of Southern gentility. The “town’s big shots” garb themselves in “their tuxedoes” (17) for the

ritual. In a ritualistic fashion, they bring out a white female to arouse the African American

males, and Invisible and the other fighters are caught between their biological urges to look and

the knowledge that black sexuality directed towards a white female is grounds for death.

Invisible describes his physical sensations and those of the other males, saying, “I felt a wave of

irrational guilt and fear. My teeth chattered, my skin turned to goose flesh, my knees knocked.

Yet I was strongly attracted and looked in spite of myself. Had the price of looking been

blindness, I would have looked” (19). He also notes the effect of the sexual arousal upon the

other fighters: “I saw one boy faint […] Another boy began to plead to go home. He was the

largest of the group, wearing dark red fighting trunks much too small to conceal the erection

which projected from him as though in answer to the insinuating low-registered moaning of the

42
clarinet” (20). The scene is set for all participants to play their “proper” roles in the ritual. Once

the African American men are aroused, due to the snake charming ceremony, the white men

move to the next stage of the rite; some of the “more sober” men help the girl escape, and the

blood sacrifice begins.

The African American boys are blindfolded and made to fight one another for the

entertainment of the white men. Invisible describes the brawl as “complete anarchy. Everybody

fought everybody else. No group fought together for long” (23) because the rite demands

disunity among the black males. After the fight, Invisible finally delivers his speech. The men

praise Invisible’s speech for its humility in spite of its deliverer’s slip of the tongue about “social

responsibility” (30), which has no place in the night’s ritual. At this point, Invisible’s role is to

embody sacrificial animal, not moral conscience. Therefore, he opens his reward for sacrificing

his dignity and finds a “gleaming calfskin brief case” containing a scholarship to the “state

college for Negroes” (32). The conclusion of Invisible’s sacrifice normalizes relations between

the groups: Invisible feels fortunate; the African American fighters receive payment for their

services; the white men become “philanthropists” and all participants come away from the

evening suppressing the evening’s events into the depths of their subconscious. Although he was

unaware of the mythical nature of the night’s events, Invisible will soon uncover the impetus

behind the ritual as he descends through the various layers of American society. The rite of the

Battle Royal returns “like a boomerang” in the lower circles of Invisible’s descent, and he finds

similar rites structuring race relations in the second circle of the American underworld: the

outskirts of the state college for Negroes.

Invisible initially describes the landscape as picturesque, verdant, and luscious: “It was a

beautiful college. The buildings were old and covered with vines and the roads gracefully

43
winding, lined with hedges and wild roses that dazzles the eyes in the summer sun. Honeysuckle

and purple wisteria hung heavy from the trees and white magnolias mixed with their scents in the

bee-humming air” (34). However, in hindsight, Invisible regards the landscape as a wasteland,

connecting the campus to the barren world of Eliot’s poem. Invisible is convinced that the

campus’s appearance was “the product of a subtle magic, the alchemy of moonlight; the school a

flower-studded wasteland, the rocks sunken, the dry winds hidden, the lost crickets chirping to

yellow butterflies” (37). The campus is a place of decay and torment of a more subtle variety

than in the previous circle. However, rites and traditions govern this lower layer as well.

Invisible discovers this fact through his interaction with the white philanthropist, Mr. Norton,

whom Invisible introduces in another allusion to Eliot as follows: “oh, oh, oh, those

multimillionaires!” (37).

Norton indicates the role of myth and tradition in the structure of the American social

order. Norton speaks of his “pleasant fate” that allowed him to “organize human life” by helping

the college Founder transform the “barren land” into its current form (39). Invisible is puzzled

since he asks. “How could anyone’s fate be pleasant? I had always thought of it as something

painful,” adding that his teacher recently made his class “read Greek plays” (40). Norton elevates

himself to the status of a god when he says that he feels his life’s work has been his “first-hand

organizing of human life;” but, as Invisible knows, fate rules gods and humans alike. The winds

of fate carry Invisible and Norton to the old slave quarter where they meet the hermit, Trueblood

who, like the white philanthropist , had an incestuous relationship with his daughter.

In Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, Oedipus’s violation of the taboo of incest brings a curse

upon Thebes, and Trueblood’s violation of the same taboo curses the African American

community with paranoia that Trueblood’s actions will reflect poorly upon the entire race. In

44
addition to the myth of Oedipus, Trueblood’s story connects to various myths and folkloric

figures. Trueblood’s description of his heinous act recalls the Brer Rabbit story of the Tar Baby,

where the more Brer Rabbit struggles to free himself from a tar-covered doll, the more ensnared

he becomes: “The more wrigglin’ and twistin’ we done tryin’ to git away, the more we wanted to

stay” (60). Furthermore, Trueblood’s wife describes the impregnation of Trueblood’s daughter as

a “black ‘bomination” (67) and this couples with Milton’s epic, Paradise Lost and Satan’s

incestuous relationship with his daughter, creating an unholy trinity. Trueblood concludes his

story waiting for retribution from God like Adam and Eve after taking a bite of the forbidden

fruit, but finds that nothing happens. In fact, Trueblood notes that things actually get better for

him because “the white folks treat [him] fine,” and Norton punctuates this fact by giving him a

$100 bill for sharing his story.

Again, tradition insidiously structures race relations in this layer of society. Norton plays

his role as a white philanthropist seeking to help African Americans, but his actions maintain the

racial status quo. Invisible performs the role of chauffeur and works hard hoping for a tip or

reward of some sort; however Trueblood receives the reward ostensibly for committing incest.

Norton’s desire to “organize and structure” human life seeks to keep African Americans in a

subaltern position even though he deludes himself into thinking that he is promoting racial

harmony. On the other hand, Invisible denies an important aspect of humanity to Trueblood and

himself. As Trueblood tells Norton the incestuous story, Invisible wonders: “How can

[Trueblood] tell this to white men, I thought, when he knows they’ll say that all Negroes do such

things?” (58). Although Invisible’s condemnation of Trueblood’s action is reasonable and his

fear that Trueblood will be taken as evidence of African American inferiority is understandable,

his anxiety denies African Americans the space for error and folly. Although Trueblood’s

45
incestuous relationship is a sordid example of moral decay, traditions influence both Invisible

and Norton to relegate African American humanity to incomplete considerations. Norton feels

faint after hearing Trueblood’s story, Invisible takes him to get a drink of whiskey at the bar-

brothel, the Golden Day.

The Golden Day refers to Lewis Mumford’s classic work, Golden Day (1926), which is

largely credited with establishing many American transcendentalist authors from the 1830s to the

1860s (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman among others) firmly

in the American literary canon (Nadel 94). Yet, for Alan Nadel, Mumford’s representation of the

“Golden Day” as a historical period is problematic because “[w]ere it not for the slave question,

we could perhaps write it off as a period of naïve and fanatical tunnel vision. But slavery was the

one question which absorbed all others, the most obvious proof of which is the Civil War” (93).

Mumford’s portrayal of the “Golden Day” as a time of prosperity and hope for the individual is a

gross oversight of “the obvious polarization of America” in that period. However, if Mumford is

guilty of letting his own bias for transcendental art cloud his critical judgment, Nadel is also

guilty of displacing his criticism of Mumford’s work onto Ellison’s use of the Golden Day in

Invisible Man. Ellison may have been critical of Mumford’s work, but criticizing Mumford is not

his ultimate goal.

Regarding American Romantic authors and transcendentalists, Ellison held them all in

high esteem for their direct confrontation of slavery in the nascent American democracy. Ellison

argues that in the first century of America’s existence,

there was a conception of democracy current in this country that allowed the

writer to identify himself with the Negro; and that had such an anthology of

writings on the Negro situation as seen by both white and Negro authors been

46
 conceivable during the nineteenth century it would have included such writers as

Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville and Mark Twain. For slavery

(it was not termed a “Negro problem” then) was a vital issue in the American

consciousness, symbolic of the condition of Man, and a valid aspect of the

writer’s reality. Only after the Emancipation and the return of the Southern ruling

class to power in the counter-revolution of 1876, was the Negro issue pushed into

the underground of the American conscience and ignored. (Collected Essays 147-

148)

Ellison’s Golden Day seeks to bring forward the fact that the subjugation of African Americans

is deep-rooted in American society and impacts all Americans; it is only recently that questions

regarding African Americans are considered to be the realm of African Americans.

The Golden Day is the inverse of the Battle Royal. The African American patients at the

insane asylum are allowed to visit the Golden Day periodically, and many of them had been

“doctors, lawyers, teachers, Civil Service workers; there were several cooks, a preacher, a

politician and an artist. One very nutty one had been a psychiatrist” (74). The men humiliate

Norton and Invisible for their entertainment as the big shots used Invisible and the other fighters’

for their entertainment during the Battle Royal. However, the white men brought their cathartic

ritual to a conclusion; but the patients have a chaperone, Supercargo, to ensure they do not bring

the ritual to conclusion. However, in spite of their “insanity” and exile from society, the patients

possess some of the most salient insight into race relations of any characters in the novel. The

patients are outside the control of social traditions and rituals that structure human interaction.

Invisible thinks that “it speared as though [the patients] played some vast and complicated game

with me and the rest of the school folk, a game […] whose rules and subtleties I could never

47
grasp” (74). The game is that the world of the inmates is chaotic and without form; they identify

traditions, but do not buy into them. They do not attempt to impose rules and forms upon society

with arbitrary rites and traditions. The Golden Day and the patients embrace truths that will

disrupt the “order” that traditional race relations impose on Norton’s and Invisible’s lives.

First, the patients show that the taboo of “miscegenation” that Southern rites, traditions,

and even laws seek to prohibit has persisted in American society for generations. Upon seeing

Norton for the first time, a patient says to his fellow inmate, “Look, Sylvester, it’s Thomas

Jefferson!” (77) and insists, to Invisible’s surprise, that “[Norton is] Thomas Jefferson and I’m

his grandson—on the ‘field-nigger’ side” (78). Again, the past bears a mark on modern society.

Upon hearing the patient’s words, Norton’s condition worsens, and the Golden Day further

descends into chaos. One of the patients, formerly an army doctor, takes Norton and Invisible to

an upstairs bedroom with a prostitute, Hester, “a great humanitarian […] the possessor of a

healing touch” (92), and evocative of the Greek goddess of domesticity, Hestia.

After the patients unveil the similarity between Norton’s philanthropy and Jefferson’s

oppression, America’s historical violation of racial “taboos,” the vet reveals to Norton and

Invisible “[t]hings about life. Such things as most peasants and folk peoples almost always know

through experience, though seldom through conscious thought” (91). The vet attempts to show

Invisible and Norton the paternalism and oppression underlying the rites and traditions in which

they unwittingly participate. The vet says that Norton is, to some, “the great white father, to

others the lyncher of souls, but for all, you are confusion” (93). Norton, perhaps unwittingly, is

an oppressor in a philanthropist’s clothing. Like the big shots in the Battle Royal, Norton

maintains the traditional racial hierarchy in America.

48
 Finally, the vet reprimands Invisible and acts as Anchises in Virgil’s Aeneid by predicting

Invisible’s future. Unlike Anchises, however, the vet does not predict the glorious founding of a

new city. He predicts that both Norton and Invisible will continue blindly following the

traditions that society lays out for them: “You cannot see or hear or smell the truth of what you

see—and [Norton], looking for destiny! It’s classic! And the boy, this automaton, he was made

of the very mud of the region and he sees far less than you. Poor stumblers, neither of you can

see the other. To you he is a mark on the scorecard of your achievement, a thing and not a man; a

child or even less—a black amorphous thing. And you, for all your power, are not a man to him,

but a God, a force” (95). The vet’s words suggest that traditional American race relations will

continue to dictate Invivible’s social interactions as he navigates the rest of his katabasis. The vet

becomes furious with Invisible and Norton for their ignorance, and he commands them to leave

the Golden Day and “descend the stairs into chaos” (95) to the next level of society.

The third layer of Ellison’s American underworld is the college campus, and it is the

realm of Dr. A. Herbert Bledsoe. When Invisible and Norton arrive at his office, Bledsoe dotes

on Norton, promising to discipline Invisible for irresponsibly taking him to see Trueblood and

the Golden Day. However, before Bledsoe doles out the punishment, they all attend the campus-

wide chapel meeting where Invisible recalls that visiting speakers informed the students “of how

fortunate we were to be a part of the ‘vast’ and formal ritual” of life on the campus. Invisible’s

identity is so entwined with societal rituals that he is unable or unwilling to heed the advice of

the vet from the Golden Day. In fact, Invisible dreads the thought of leaving the campus on

Bledsoe’s orders perhaps due to his dependence upon traditions to define his identity.

Fortunately, the lessons Invisible learns during his descent to the underworld are beginning to

take hold, and as he watches from a pew in the chapel, he sees “the platform and its actors as

49
through a reversed telescope; small doll-like figures moving through some meaningless ritual”

(117). The rituals give Invisible comfort and clarity regarding his social station; however their

arbitrariness becomes apparent to him. One of the guests rises to speak to the congregation to

reinforce the role of tradition in the students’ collective identity as young African Americans in

the post-bellum South. This guest is the blind preacher, Homer A. Barbee.

Influenced by Homer’s depiction of the ideal Greek in the Odyssey, Homer A. Barbee

weaves a mythic narrative regarding the birth and life of the college’s Founder to reinforce

notions of “proper” African American identity and decorum. Barbee’s sermon draws from

various sources to construct the Founder’s narrative, the first of which is the story of the Fisher

King from the Grail legends. According to Jessie Weston’s analysis of the folkloric elements

embedded within the Fisher King Grail legend, there is a close connection between the “vitality

of a certain King, and the prosperity of his kingdom; the forces of the ruler being weakened or

destroyed, by wound, sickness, old age, or death, the land becomes Waste, and the task of the

hero is that of restoration” (23). Barbee’s narrative begins after the end of the Civil War and the

moment when the American president was slain. He says: “…this barren land after Emancipation

[…] this land of darkness and sorrow, of ignorance and degradation, where the hand of brother

had been turned against brother, father against son, and son against father; where master had

turned against slave and slave against master; where all was strife and darkness, an aching land.

And into this land came a humble prophet, lowly like the humble carpenter of Nazareth” (118).

In addition to the Fisher King Grail legend, Ellison (through Barbee) draws from Rank’s

analysis of the transcultural heroic archetype, Myth of the Birth of the Hero, to construct the

Founder’s biography. According to Rank, the typical hero myth follows a typical groundwork

and contains minor variations (Rank 61). “The hero,” Rank also writes,

50
 is the child of most distinguished parents; usually the son of a king. His origin is

preceded by difficulties [...] As a rule, he is surrendered to the water, in a box. He

is then saved by animals, or by lowly people (shepherds) and is sucked by a

female animal, or by a humble woman. After he has grown up, he finds his

distinguished parents, in a highly versatile fashion; takes his revenge on his father,

on the one hand, is acknowledged on the other, and finally achieves rank and

honors. (61)

Likewise, Barbee uses several common features of the hero archetype to portray the Founder.

Barbee couples the Founder’s birth directly with Jesus and describes the Founder’s “precarious

infancy” when a cousin splashed the baby with lye and “he lay nine days in a deathlike coma and

then suddenly and miraculously recovered” (119). Like Jesus and Moses, the Founder was a

precocious youth with an innate capability of “a moving orator,” and eventually returned to his

homeland to lead his people. According to Barbee, the Founder completed his hero quest to bring

fertility back to the land because, at his death, a “great seed had been planted. A seed which has

continued to put forth its fruit in its season […] my heart swelled to return to this great institution

to move among its wealth of green things, its fruitful farmland and fragrant campus” (132).

Therefore, tradition fulfills its role of edifying Invisible’s identity and life’s path and he finds his

emotions “woven into [Barbee’s] words as upon a loom” (120). However, in his meeting with

Bledsoe after the meeting, Invisible finds the myth of the Founder’s mission of racial uplift

thinly disguising the college’s political and cynical motivations.

For Bledsoe, a Machiavellian politician, hard work and humility—the backbone of the

Founder’s message—are illusions he employs in order to gain political power. Bledsoe portrays

an image of African American humility to the outside world and gains power and prestige

51
through support from white patrons like Norton, who Bledsoe manipulates for his own purposes.

Bledsoe reprimands Invisible for not knowing that, as a black man in the South, his duty is to lie

to white folks like Norton and “tell them what they need to hear.” In an attempt to teach this

lesson to Invisible, Bledsoe expels the young man for the rest of the semester. Invisible resolves

to head North to find work and, while he is on a bus, meets the vet that treated Norton in the

Golden Day. Before the vet departs the bus, he reminds Invisible to “learn to look beneath the

surface” of society because it will teach him how to deal with “them.” The vet’s attendant asks

what he means by “they” and the vet replies, “the same they we always mean, the white folks,

authority, the gods, fate, circumstances—the force that pulls your strings until you refuse to be

pulled any more” (154). Invisible must learn Odyssean adaptability to navigate through his

American odyssey. But first, Invisible must recognize that the superficial appearance of the

social order is built upon an arbitrary mythic framework. He has not yet learned how and why

the social structure works the ways it does; however, his education continues in the fourth layer

of the American inferno: Harlem.

As the rites and traditions that structure life in Harlem increase in subtlety and

complexity, Invisible descends from a rural, bucolic setting into an urban, capitalistic mecca, and

finds people befitting the souls which are punished in Dante’s fourth circle for the sin of greed.

Armored cars and men with briefcases shackled to their wrists, “chained to money,” (165) roam

the streets without stopping. Although Invisible hopes to find economic and social opportunities

that eluded him in the South, the insidious nature of hierarchical race relations persists in the

liberal North. Furthermore, they are more difficult to identify and understand. The rites and

traditions that structure Southern life are crude, brutal, and typically target the African American

body. As Invisible continues his descent through Northern society, the myths that structure

52
society persist but become more complex and subtle. Northern traditions bypass brutalizing the

African American body; but the psychological harm they cause is equally effective at

maintaining the racial status quo. Invisible senses this change, and as he sits in his rented room,

he feels more afraid “than [he] had ever been in the South. And all the more, because here there

was nothing concrete to lay it to” (170). But, as he was blinded by the hope of social progress in

the South, Invisible is again blinded by the hope of economic progress: “Never before had I been

so curious about money as now […] Perhaps I would get a job here and after a few years would

be sent up and down the streets with millions strapped to my arms” (166). Invisible thinks he will

get his first break when he receives a response to his job enquiry, and he goes to see about a

prospect with a potential employer, Mr. Emerson.

Invisible meets a sympathetic soul in Emerson, who aligns himself with the nineteenth

century American writers Whitman and Twain, in addition to his namesake, Ralph Waldo

Emerson. Emerson attempts to gently reveal to Invisible that the letters of introduction Bledsoe

gave to him are a sham, but he cannot be direct. He then tries to show Invisible that he

empathizes with Invisible’s subaltern status by alluding to his homosexuality. But again, he only

gives allusions to being “thwarted” and “frustrated,” and trying to break the tension, he asks

Invisible if he has been to “Club Calamus” (185)—a reference to the Calamus poems frequently

considered to be Whitman’s allusion to his sexual orientation. The conversation remains indirect,

and in a final attempt at tact, Emerson tells Invisible “I’m Huckleberry” (188), who is trying to

rid his black friend of a damning letter. This conversation suggests the subtleties that Invisible

will now face in the North; He must learn to look beneath the surface of things and read between

the lines of all interactions. Frustrated at their inability to communicate effectively, Emerson

shows Invisible the double-crossing letter from Bledsoe. Bitter and angry, Invisible leaves, but

53
Emerson tells him of a potential job opportunity. Invisible calls the company and they tell him to

report the next day. When he wakes up that morning, Invisible descends to the fifth level of

society, where he spends his first day of work at the Liberty Paint factory.

In the Inferno, the walls of Dis contain the lower levels of Hell, and Virgil and Dante

must cross the river Styx on their approach to this world. Likewise, the Liberty Paint plant is on

Long Island, and Invisible crosses “a bridge in the fog to get there and came down in a stream of

workers” (196). Liberty Paint’s logo is a screaming eagle, and their motto is to “Keep America

Pure” by “making [white] paint for the government” (196-197), and Invisible’s first assignment

is to mix drops of black liquid into every bucket of white paint. The paint represents the function

of racial traditions in America—that blackness exists to provide a counterpoint to whiteness. The

white paint is not complete until the black droplets are added to it, even though the black drops

are not always seen.

Later, after accidentally stumbling into a union meeting, Invisible again witnesses an

example of the tradition at the core of American anxiety regarding race relations: the promise of

freedom at the simultaneous subjugation of minority populations. The union members ridicule

Invisible for being a “fink” when all he wants is lunch from the cafeteria. Invisible says, “I stood

trembling, afraid that they would ask me to join but angry that so many rejected me on sight.

And worst of all, I knew they were forcing me to accept things on their own terms, and I was

unable to leave” (222). Invisible wants to belong to the larger group, but he cannot reconcile its

hostile reception of him. His status in the union and American society is similar to that of the

droplets of paint; he is to be a counterpoint of the advantaged group and he is to have no say in

the matter. Invisible is in a lose-lose situation; he is angry at being rejected for no reason, and he

fears joining a group that does not want him. Invisible is almost at a point where he can identify

54
the traditions that maintain this cultural and political imbalance, but his lesson is cut short after a

factory explosion catapults him into a “fall into space” and he “seemed to sink to the center of a

lake of heavy water” (230), before he awakes within an even lower level of society.

After the accident, Invisible further uncovers the permeation between black and white in

the sixth rung of society. Rankine suggests that the moment Invisible regains consciousness after

the explosion, the Odysseus and Polyphemus myth becomes central to the narrative. Invisible

wakes up in a hospital to find “a bright third eye” (231) in the center of the doctor’s head. Like

Odysseus, who uses his cunning to escape Polyphemus’s cave, Invisible relies on his wilyness to

escape the hospital. Rankine posits that, similar to Odysseus, “Invisible Man must arrive at self-

and cultural- awareness to escape confinement” (140), and resorts to folklore, “the central

symbol for cultural memory,” (140) in order to assert a cultural synthesis between the trickster of

Western literature, Odysseus, and the trickster of African and African American lore, Brer

Rabbit. The doctor shows Invisible a card with the question, “Who was buckeye the rabbit?”, and

Invisible recognizes the similarity between the two folkloric figures, Odysseus and Brer Rabbit,

saying, “I laughed, deep, deep inside me, giddy with the delight of self-discovery and the desire

to hide it. Somehow I was Buckeye the Rabbit…” (241). Invisible melds the figures of the Brer

Rabbit with that of Odysseus, thus identifying his hybrid identity—an identity that has always

existed in spite of efforts to keep them separate and disconnected.

After his electroshock treatment, Invisible leaves the hospital. Standing in the street,

Invisible compares his experience to that of a black servant he read about in a psychology class.

He remembers the servant as a figure who “during a trance, had recited pages of Greek

philosophy which she had overheard one day while she worked” (249). This example shows

Ellison strong belief that individuals engage with multiple cultures consciously and

55
unconsciously, and that to deny this fact is to refute reality. Invisible takes a subway home where

he encounters his version of a lotus-eater: a candied-yam vendor. In Book IX of the Odyssey,

Odysseus’s men encounter the Lotus-eaters who feed the flower to the soldiers and “those who

ate of it left off caring about home” (Homer 86), and the soldiers lose their desire for nostos, or

the yearning to return home. After leaving the hospital, Invisible smells “the odor of baking

yams […] bringing a stab of swift nostalgia” (262). Invisible eats the yam, and as he enjoys the

treat, a growing sense of shame overtakes him. He muses that “you could cause [African

Americans] the greatest humiliation simply by confronting us with something we liked. Not all

of us, but so many. Simply by walking up and shaking a set of chitterlings or a well-boiled hog

maw at them during the clear light of day! What consternation it would cause!” (265). Like

Odysseus’s men who lose their desire for home, Invisible laughs about the fact that before his

epiphany in the hospital, he would have denied himself this treat of delicious food from home on

the grounds that it would hurt societal perceptions of race. He denies himself the chance to

identify with his homeland, a central component of his identity.

Later, Invisible wanders the streets, witnesses the eviction of an elderly couple, and finds

himself descending to the seventh circle upon a solicitation from the Communist-like group, the

Brotherhood. The Brotherhood invites Invisible to a gathering in the group’s headquarters: the

Chthonian—or the “underground.” Invisible—the integration of Brer Rabbit and Odysseus—has

his first encounter with Brother Jack, the namesake of Brer Rabbit’s nemesis: Jack the Bear.

Invisible ignores the “uncanny sense of familiarity” he feels upon entering the Chthoninan and

the intuition that he “had been through it all before” (300). Yet Invisible does not realize that he

is again entering Polyphemus’s cave; Brother Jack has only one eye, but this Cyclops fashioned a

glass eye, making him harder to detect.

56
 In spite of Brother Jack (-the-Bear)’s deception, the Brotherhood promises Invisible

genuinely egalitarian political policies, leading him to find the organization undeniable. As the

evening continues, Invisible finds out that the cost of joining the party is renouncing his new,

fused Brer Rabbit / Odyssean identity. Like Odysseus’s assertion of identity as “Noman,”

Invisible accepts a hollow “Brotherhood identity” written on a piece of paper, and he does not

foresee the Odyssean consequences of accepting an identity of erasure: “[Invisible] was

becoming someone else” (335). Again, having his identity ascribed to him rather than asserting it

himself, Invisible transforms into a Cyclops when he begins his brotherhood assignment as an

orator, and he declares that Harlem residents are all equally Cyclopean: “Think about it, they’ve

dispossessed us each of one eye from the day we’re born […] We’re a nation of one-eyed

mice—Did you ever see such a sight in your life? […] You know, if we aren’t careful, they’ll

slip up on our blind sides and—plop! out goes our last good eye and we’re blind as bats!” (343).

Invisible blindly accepts the Brotherhood’s policies without recognizing the Absurdist repetition

during his descent through the underworld. Invisible’s grandfather believed that the principles of

freedom in the Constitution would apply to him after Emancipation; he was wrong. In college,

Invisible believed hard work and humility would secure his liberty in the American democracy;

he was wrong. Now, Invisible believes that the egalitarian principles of the Brotherhood

transcend race; he is wrong. The Brotherhood accuses Invisible of “individualism” to keep him

from gaining too much political power with the Harlem residents, and consequently, they

transfer him “downtown” (408) to the eighth rung of Ellison’s world.

The Brotherhood assigns Invisible to lecturing on the “Woman Question,” and in this

level of society, Invisible uncovers the centrality of sexuality within the rites and traditions he

encounters throughout his journey. As Rankine notes, Frazer’s Golden Bough posits that stories

57
like Aeneas’s quest for the Golden Bough are fundamentally about fertility and mortality (125).

Ellison suggests that an underlying principle of the rites and traditions that govern race relations

are anxieties and misconceptions regarding interracial fertility—first hinted at in the bizarre

sexual component of the Battle Royal ritual. After his first lecture, Invisible meets a woman who

“glows as though consciously acting a symbolic role of life and feminine fertility” (409).

Invisible goes to the nameless woman’s home, and inside, sexual imagery surrounds the couple,

such as a “life-sized painting of a nude, a pink Renoir” (411). The woman reveals her sexual

desire for Invisible and also her own adherence to American rites and traditions surrounding

African American males:

“You give me such a feeling of security—although,” she interrupted herself with

a mysterious smile, “I must confess that you also make me afraid.”

“Afraid? You can’t mean that,” I said.

“Really,” she repeated, as I laughed. “It’s so powerful, so—so primitive!”

I felt some of the air escape from the room, leaving it unnaturally quiet.

“You don’t mean primitive?” I said.

“Yes, primitive; no one has told you, Brother, that at times you have tom-

toms beating in your voice?”

“My God,” I laughed, “I thought that was the beat of profound ideas.”

(413)

Echoing Frazer’s notion that sexuality structures the traditions that organize life, Invisible finds

that the Brotherhood’s ideology is “merely a superfluous veil for the real concerns of life” (420).

Invisible and the woman use the Brotherhood to act upon their desires and violate the taboo that

American rites and traditions forbid. The woman uses political ideology, but also the taboo of

58
incest, as a euphemism for the taboo of interracial sexuality: “’Brotherhood darling,’ she said,

gripping my biceps with her little hands. ‘Teach me, talk to me. Teach me the beautiful ideology

of Brotherhood” (415). However, recalling Trueblood’s violation of the incest taboo, Invisible

and the nameless woman’s violation of interracial sexuality does not bring divine wrath. The

traditions that govern their actions are manmade and arise out of ruling-class anxieties about

“fertility and mortality.”

Although violating this taboo can mean harm or even death for a black male, Invisible

recalls that violating this tradition is itself a tradition throughout American history—albeit a

largely unspoken one. When the woman leaves the room to answer the phone, Invisible’s mind

“whirled with forgotten stories of male servants summoned to wash the mistress’s back;

chauffeurs sharing the masters’ wives; Pullman porters invited into the drawing room of rich

wives headed for Reno” (416). The tradition of white male violence upon the black male body is

entwined with anxiety of black male sexuality towards white females, be it real or imagined.

Throughout the novel, Invisible is completely reactive; his actions are always responses

to preconceived notions about his identity. Another African American member of the

Brotherhood, Tod Clifton, reaches the same conclusion prior to Invisible. Clifton drops out of the

Brotherhood to assert control over his action and identity, but the police tragically shoot Clifton

dead in an altercation in the streets. Invisible organizes a memorial service for Clifton, but the

Brotherhood condemns the service as a display of individualism. Invisible, who is now fed up

with the Brotherhood, is insubordinate and asserts his individual identity in spite of the

organization. Removing himself from the Brotherhood and the other circles of society gives

Invisible the critical distance necessary to identify the rites and traditions he sees regulating

human relationships. He now sees the similar power structure that was historically organized

59
along racial lines in slavery, in the Jim Crow South, and, now, in New York with the

Brotherhood.

Next, Jack and Invisible clash when Jack attempts to reestablish his role as a leader of the

movement that should not be questioned; when Jack claims that he knows what is best for all

members of the Brotherhood, Invisible jokes, “Wouldn’t it be better if [Harlem residents] called

you Marse Jack?” (473). Jack flies into a fury, and Invisible describes the scene. Representing

Jack as an ogre, who is drunk with rage, Invisible says that Jack was “spluttering and lapsing into

a foreign language, choking and coughing and shaking his head […] as suddenly something

seemed to erupt out of his face […] A glass eye. A buttermilk white eye distorted by the light

rays […] He stopped, squinting at me with Cyclopean irritation” (473-474). Brother Jack / Jack

the Bear / Polyphemus reveals himself to Invisible / Brer Rabbit / Odysseus, and Invisible knows

he must leave to continue his journey. After his confrontation with the drunk ogre, Invisible

“went downstairs” (478) to the ninth and final rung of his Dante-esque journey: chaos.

When he reaches the ninth level, Invisible finds the shadowy figure of Reverend Bliss

Proteus Rinehart. As his name suggests, Rinehart changes form to suit his needs at any particular

moment. Rinehart is a gambler, preacher, musician, pimp, lover, con artist, and can fulfill any

other role society bestows upon him. He makes no qualms about this fact and does not attempt to

change perceptions; Rinehart is what he is. When Invisible doffs a hat and dark sunglasses,

Harlem residents mistake him for Rinehart. After several run-ins with people in the community,

Invisible has the same revelation as Rinehart:

[C]ould he be all of them: Rine the runner and Rine the gambler and Rine the

briber and Rine the lover and Rinehart the Reverend? Could he himself be both

rind and heart? […] It was as true as I was true. His world was possibility and he

60
 knew it. He was years ahead of me and I was a fool. I must have been crazy and

blind. The world in which we lived was without boundaries. A vast seething, hot

world of fluidity, and Rine the rascal was at home. (498)

Rinehart is able to manipulate any situation he desires and use the rites and traditions that govern

the world around him to his own advantage because he recognizes their arbitrary nature: he can

be a pimp and a preacher, a gambler and a lover, because he recognizes that they are facets of

humanity, not his sole identity. Invisible realizes that this same concept secretly dominated his

life, and he recognizes the folly of his allegiances: “I had switched from the arrogant absurdity of

Norton and Emerson to that of Jack and the Brotherhood, and it all came out the same—except I

now recognized my invisibility” (508). Invisible decides to test his new theory as he imagines

Rinehart would do, and he tries to have a sexual relationship with the wife of a Brotherhood

member, Sybil.

Invisible’s experience with Sibyl is a failure, but he discovers the futility of allowing

identity characteristics to be ascribed upon him. Evoking Virgil’s Aeneid, Sybil accompanies

Invisible in the final rung of his descent through the underworld, having met him during

brotherhood meetings “at the Chthonian [where] she was usually slightly tipsy and wistful”

(515). Invisible knows the traditions that will structure their encounter, saying that he knows she

is “casting [him] in fantasies in which [he] was Brother Taboo-with-whom-all-things-are-

possible” (517). To Invisible’s surprise, Sybil “made a modest proposal that [he] join her in a

very revolting ritual” (517) of a simulated rape as a sex-game. When Sybil reveals she has

always secretly desired that someone rape her, Invisible evokes the D. W. Griffith film that

characterized white anxiety towards black male sexuality after Emancipation and the Civil War:

“’What’s happening here,’ I said, ‘a new birth of a nation?’” (522). Invisible cannot go through

61
the act because “such games were for Rinehart” (523); but he learns from Sybil that tradition

structures all lives, not just African American ones. “Repression,” Sybil reminds Invisible, “Men

have repressed us [women] too much. We’re expected to pass up too many human things” (519).

Group characteristics can never adequately define an individual; casting African Americans as

rapist brutes is as limiting as casting white women as helpless victims. Sybil lashes out to affirm

her sexuality and her humanity, and on a larger scale, Invisible discovers that the Harlem

residents revolt against the oppressive American rites, traditions, and racial myths imposed upon

their humanity.

While with Sybil, Invisible receives a call that there is trouble in Harlem, and he finds a

macabre scene where “men seemed to rise up out of the sidewalks rushing into the store fronts”

(536). Invisible follows a young man named Scofield, and as they move through the streets, the

alcohol-fueled madness of the Golden Day has been spilled into the city: “Over there,” Scofield

says, “all you got to do is breathe, and you drunk, man. Drunk! Hundred proof bonded whiskey

flowing in all the gutters” (538). Scofield and Invisible meet with the group’s leader, Dupre,

who, in a Promethean moment, leads the group to steal coal oil to set fire to the decrepit

tenement where the rioters live. The residents evacuate the building, spread the kerosene

throughout, and set it on fire. Invisible is speechless: “They’ve done it, I thought. They organized

it and carried it through alone; the decision their own and their own action. Capable of their own

action…” (548). The residents revolt against the Absurd repetition of oppressive myths that

structure their world. In spite of the destruction, their world is one of possibility and action rather

than reaction; they affirm their humanity using their own criteria rather than having a narrow

conception of humanity bestowed upon them. Invisible runs from the fire, exhilarated, and

knows that he “had no longer to run for or from the Jacks and the Emersons and the Bledsoes

62
and Nortons, but only from their confusion, impatience, and refusal to recognize the beautiful

absurdity of their American identity and mine” (559). However, Invisible knows that

sleepwalkers are dangerous and to spring such a revelation upon the world before it is ready can

be dangerous, so he retires to his underground lair to write his story and share his discovery.

In the epilogue, Invisible recognizes that we are all implicated in the ill-informed

traditions that structure society because we all play a role, and the only choice we have is to

identify them or remain ignorant of them. “Why do I write,” Invisible asks himself, “torturing

myself to put it down? Because in spite of myself I’ve learned some things. Without the

possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget,’ and I can neither file

nor forget” (579). Invisible’s hibernation is over, and he emerges from the depths to tell his

story. But, lest we file and forget this story because we feel that it does not apply to us, Invisible

reminds us that although he is on the lowest rung of the social ladder, we are all participating in a

shared cultural tradition: “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”

(581). The experiences of an African American male under racism may seem to belong to a

small minority. However, as Invisible has shown through his uncovering and coupling of cultural

forms, the story of an African American male in a racist society is not entirely idiosyncratic to

Invisible’s character. On some level, rites, myths, and traditions structure all human life and

Ellison uses the experiences of a young, invisible male to make these traditions visible for us all.

63
 V. Conclusion: Recurring Traditions

The ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment of the United States constitution ended legalized

slavery at the end of the Civil War. However, as Michelle Alexander points out in her

illuminating book on American racial injustice, The New Jim Crow (2012), the amendment

contains a peculiar caveat: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for

crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or

any place subject to their jurisdiction” (Amend. XIII, Sec. 1). Although it is outlawed as a

societal practice, slavery is still a punishment for a crime. As Alexander demonstrates, this

seemingly minor legal caveat leaves an aperture through which the tradition of bondage can

permeate and regenerate in a new form: mass incarceration. Incidentally, the Sisyphean

repetition of legalized segregation, discrimination, and oppression has occurred time and time

again throughout American history in superficially altered forms.

Alexander’s study effectively traces the development of African American subjugation

since the colonial period of the American continent. “Since the nation’s founding,” writes

Alexander, “African Americans repeatedly have been controlled through institutions such as

slavery and Jim Crow, which appear to die, but then are reborn in new form, tailored to the needs

and constraints of the time” (21). In order to quell interracial unity among indentured servants in

the colonial period, the planter class “extended special privileges to poor whites in an effort to

drive a wedge between them and black slaves” (25) such as giving white settlers access to Native

64
American lands, privileged jobs on plantations, and legal protection to ensure that slave labor

would not compete with free labor (Alexander 25). Interestingly, Alexander notes that “before

Democracy, chattel slavery in America was born” (25), and it is a tradition that has mutated in

order to perpetually structure American society along racial caste lines. The myth of race has

structured American society since the colonial period and has since become interwoven into the

fabric of everyday life. Legal slavery died; however, the traditions it spawned are still alive.

Preceding Alexander’s study by sixty years, Invisible Man effectively describes and

predicts the cyclical and insidious traditions of oppression that govern race relations in American

society, the “boomerang” of history (6). Ellison’s mythical method addresses these recurring yet

protean aspects of American society in three ways. First, Ellison seeks to show that the traditions

that have structured American society before the founding of the United States continue to

structure American society. His appropriation of historical myths, traditions, and folklore to

comment upon the present signals the theme of recurrence not just over Invisible’s life but over

those of generations of African Americans. Second, Ellison’s mythical method shows that

African American experience does not only relate to African Americans because “Negroes [are]

human, and thus being human, their experience [becomes] metaphors for the experiences of

other people” (Collected Essays 539), and vice versa. If African Americans can find a character

with which they can identify in Homer’s Odysseus, the African American folk character, Brer

Rabbit, and Ellison’s Invisible can reveal fundamental human truths for the African American

population and beyond. Finally, Ellison’s mythical method uncovers the shared and frequently

obfuscated history between all Americans. As a result, what impacts one individual or one select

group impacts the entire society “just as the stock market or fads in clothing or automobiles

affect the lives of sharecroppers, whether or not the sharecropper knows that the stock market

65
exists” (Collected Essays 535-536) and vice versa. Ellison’s mythical method shows the

permeation between the various cultures that comprise American society, and the tension created

by the relationship between individuals and the social groups to which they belong.

In “Hidden Name and Complex Fate” (1964), Ellison alludes to his mythical method,

which he does not label as such, as follows:

It is our fate as human beings always to give up some good things for other good

things, to throw off certain bad circumstances only to create others. Thus there is

a value for the writer in trying to give as thorough a report of social reality as

possible. Only by doing so may we grasp and convey the cost of change. Only by

considering the broadest accumulation of data may we make choices that are

based upon our own hard-earned sense of reality. Speaking from my own special

area of American culture, I feel that to embrace uncritically values which are

extended to us by others is to reject the validity, even the sacredness, of our own

experience. It is also to forget that the small share of reality which each of our

diverse groups is able to snatch from the whirling chaos of history belongs not to

the group alone, but to all of us. (Collected Essays 208)

One aspect of this shared American history is its Absurd repetition. Recurrence is integral to

Ellison’s method because tradition, by its nature, is repetitive, even if it superficially changes.

After accompanying Invisible through the depths of American society, we see that there is no

hierarchical relationship between black and white cultures, only the repetitive attempt to

structure society along racial lines through law and custom. Firmly engrained social traditions

and the concomitant cultural rites, like any habits, are hard to break. However, studying Ellison’s

66
method is a means which can be used to identify and understand these social myths that continue

to structure everyday interaction, even when the myths inevitably change forms over time.

67
 Works Cited

Adell, Sandra. “The Big E(llison)’s Texts and Intertexts: Eliot, Burke, and the Underground

Man.” CLA Journal. 37.4 (1994): 377-401. Print.

Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New

York: The New Press, 2012. Print.

Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy: Inferno. Trans. Allen Mandelbaum. New York: Bantam,

1982. Print.

------. The Divine Comedy: Paradiso. 1986. Trans. Allen Mandelbaum. New York: Bantam,

2004. Print.

------. The Divine Comedy: Purgatorio. Trans. Allen Mandelbaum. New York: Bantam, 1984.

Print.

Baker, Houston A. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Print.

Beavers, Herman. Wrestling Angels Into Song: The Fictions of Ernest J. Gaines and James Alan

McPherson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. Print.

Bellow, Saul. “Man Underground.” Commentary. 13.6 (1952): 608-610. Print.

Bloom, Harold. Modern Critical Interpretations: T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. New York:

Chelsea House Publishers, 1986. Print.

------. Modern Critical Interpretations: James Joyce’s Ulysses. New York: Chelsea House

Publishers, 1987. Print.

Bone, Robert. “Ralph Ellison and the Uses of the Imagination.” John Hersey, ed. Ralph Ellison:

A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1974. 95-114. Print.

Bradley, Jonathan. “Whitman’s ‘Calamus’.” Explicator. 67.4 (2009): 263-267. Print.

68
Connor, Steven. James Joyce. 1996. Newcastle: The British Council, 2012. Print.

Davis, Robert Murray, ed. The Novel: Modern Essays in Criticism. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-

Hall, 1969. Print.

Deutsch, Leonard. “The Waste Land in Ellison’s Invisible Man.” Notes on Contemporary

Literature. 7.6 (1977): 5-6. Print.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes from Underground. Robert Durgy, ed. Serge Shishkoff, trans. New

York: Thomas Crowell Company, 1969. Print.

Eliot, T. S. “Ulysses, Order, and Myth.” The Dial. 75.5 (1923). Print.

------. The Waste Land and Other Poems. 1998. New York: Penguin, 2003. Print.

Ellison, Ralph. The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison. New York: The Modern Library, 2003.

Print.

------. Invisible Man. 1952. New York: Penguin, 2001. Print.

Frazer, Sir James George. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. 3rd Ed. 1911.

London: MacMillan and Co., 1920. Print.

Gifford, Don and Robert J. Seidman. Ulysses Annotated: Notes of James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Berkley: University of California Press, 1988. Print.

Gilbert, Stuart. James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Study. 2nd Ed. 1952. New York: Vintage, 1959. Print.

Graham, Maryemma and Amritjit Singh, eds. Conversations with Ralph Ellison. Jackson:

University Press of Mississippi, 1995. Print.

Gunter, Bradley. The Merrill Studies in The Waste Land. Columbus: Merrill Publishing

Company, 1971. Print.

Heise, Thomas. Urban Underworlds: A Geography of Twentieth-Century American Literature

and Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011. Print.

69
Helming, Steven. “T. S. Eliot and Ralph Ellison: Insiders, Outsiders, and Cultural Authority.”

The Southern Review. 25.4 (1989): 841-858. Print.

Hurston, Zora Neale. Mules and Men. 1935. New York: Harper & Row, 1990. Print.

Homer. The Iliad. Trans. Samuel Butler. Ann Arbor: Ann Arbor Media Group, 2004. Print.

------. The Odyssey. Trans. Samuel Butler. Ann Arbor: Ann Arbor Media Group, 2003. Print.

Joyce, James. Dubliners. 1914. New York: Viking Press, 1969. Print.

------. Finnegans Wake. 1939. New York: Penguin, 1999. Print.

------. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 1916. New York: Viking Press, 1964. Print.

------. Ulysses. 1934. New York: Modern Library, 1992. Print.

Kain, Richard M. Fabulous Voyager: A Study of James Joyce’s Ulysses. 1947. New York:

Viking Press, 1959. Print.

Kent, George E. “Ralph Ellison and Afro-American Folk and Cultural Tradition.” John Hersey,

ed. Ralph Ellison: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall,

1974. 160-170. Print.

Langerwerf, Lydia and Cressida Ryan, eds. Zero to Hero, Hero to Zero: In Search of the

Classical Hero. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010. Print.

List, Robert N. Dedalus in Harlem: The Joyce-Ellison Connection. Washington: University Press

of America, 1982. Print.

Looney, Dennis. Freedom Readers: The African American Reception of Dante Alighieri and the

Divine Comedy. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011.

Maddrey, Joseph. The Making of T. S. Eliot: A Study of the Literary Influences. Jefferson:

McFarland & Company, 2009. Print.

70
M’Baye, Babacar. The Trickster Comes West: Pan-African Influence in Early Black Diasporan

Narratives. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009. Print.

McConnell, Justine. Black Odysseys: The Homeric Odyssey in the African Diaspora Since 1939.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Print.

McPherson, James Alan. “Indivisible Man.” John Hersey, ed. Ralph Ellison: A Collection of

Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1974. 43-57. Print.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost. John Leonard, ed. New York: Penguin, 2003. Print.

Montgomery, Maxine Lavon. The Apocalypse in African-American Fiction. Gainesville:

University Press Florida, 1996. Print.

Nadel, Alan. Invisible Criticism: Ralph Ellison and the American Canon. Iowa City: University

of Iowa Press, 1988. Print.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. Trans. Walter Kaufmann.

New York: Random House, 1969. Print.

------. The Portable Nietzsche. Ed. and Trans. Walter Kaufmann. 1945. New York: Penguin,

1980. Print.

Ovid. Metamorphoses. Trans. A. D. Melville. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Print.

Rank, Otto. Myth of the Birth of the Hero: A Psychological Interpretation of Mythology. Trans.

F. Robbins and Smith Ely Jelliffe. New York: The Journal of Nervous and Mental

Disease Publishing Company, 1914. Print.

Rankine, Patrice D. Ulysses in Black: Ralph Ellison, Classicism, and African American

Literature. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006. Print.

Rich, Nathaniel. “American Nightmare: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man at 60.” The Daily Beast.

June 28, 2012. The Daily Beast Company. Online. February 4, 2016.

71
Sanders, Archie. “Odysseus in Black: An Analysis of the Structure of Invisible Man.” CLA. 13

(March 1979). 218. Print.

Schafer, William J. “Ralph Ellison and the Birth of the Anti-Hero.” John Hersey, ed. Ralph

Ellison: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1974. 115-126.

Print.

Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare: The Complete Works. 2nd Ed. Boston:

Houghton Mifflin Co., 1997. Print.

Slote, Sam. Joyce’s Nietzschean Ethics. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013. Print.

Sophocles. The Complete Plays of Sophocles. Moses Hadas, ed. 1967. New York: Bantam, 1982.

Print.

Tanner, Tony. “The Music of Invisibility.” John Hersey, ed. Ralph Ellison: A Collection of

Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1974. 80-94. Print.

Thornton, Weldon. Allusions in Ulysses: An Annotated List. 1961. Chapel Hill: University of

North Carolina Press, 1968. Print.

Virgil. The Aeneid. Trans. Allen Mandelbaum. 1961. New York: Bantam, 2004. Print.

Volger, Thomas A. “Invisible Man: Somebody’s Protest Novel.” John Hersey, ed. Ralph Ellison:

A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1974. 127-150. Print.

Walsh, Mary. “Invisible Man: Ralph Ellison’s Wasteland.” CLA Journal. 28.2 (1984): 150-158.

Print.

Weir, David. Ulysses Explained: How Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare Inform Joyce’s

Modernist Vision. New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2015. Print.

West, Cornel. Race Matters. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993. Print.

Weston, Jessie. From Ritual to Romance. 1920. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957. Print.

72