Notes for reading INVISIBLE MAN

·         Blueprint Notes for a Reading of Invisible Man (1952)

*In "Blueprint for Negro Writing," (1937) Richard  Wright noted the Negro writer's "vision need not be simple or rendered in primer-like terms; for the life of the Negro people is not simple.  The presentation of their lives should be simple, yes; but  all the complexity, the strangeness, the magic wonder of life that plays like a bright sheen over the most sordid existence, should be there. To borrow a phrase from the Russians, it should have a complex simplicity. Eliot, Stein, Joyce, Proust, Hemingway, and Anderson; Gorky, Barbusse, Nexo, and Jack London no less than the folklore of the Negro himself should form the heritage of the Negro writer."  1937. Wright's mind had already pondered what is stated plainly in

Kluger, Jeffrey. Simplexity. New York: Hyperion, 2008.

"Complexity, as any scientist will tell you, is a slippery idea, one that defies almost any effort to hold it down and pin it in place.  Things that seem complicated can be preposterously simple; things that seem simple can be dizzyingly complex." (page 11)

Kluger reminds us we are wired to be awed by a star ("…just a furnace, a vulgar cosmic engine…" 12) more than by a guppy ("…a symphony of systems ---circulatory, skeletal, optical, neurological, enzymatic, reproductive, biomechanical, behavioral, social."  Those systems, assembled from cells, "have subsystems; the subsystems have subsystems……it's the guppy we ought to praise." (12)

Despite his humorous  denial late in his life that he wasn't enormously influenced by Wright, Ralph Ellison absorbed an important idea from Wright, an idea for which Kluger's observation is a meaningful gloss, especially when Kluger further reminds us that "across all disciplines ---chemistry, physics, astronomy, biology, economics, sociology, psychology, politics, even the arts ---investigators are making similar discoveries, tilting the prism of complexity in new directions and seeing the light spill out in all manner of unexpected ways." (12)  Yes, Invisible Man is a guppy not a star. 

Concerned with African American impact on classic American literature, we experience , through reading,   a reciprocal impact of classic American literature on African American narratives.  Those narratives expose that the bright sheen they cast on sordid existence is often the dull but ominous fog present in Melville's "Benito Cereno" and Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In Uncle Tom's Cabin, Mrs. Stowe produced a surplus of fog and sheen.  Invisible Man returns the spilled light to the prism of complexity, returns us to a grappling with D. H. Lawrence's notion in Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) of "the true democracy, where soul meets soul, in the open road. Democracy.  American democracy where all journey down the open road, and where a soul is known at once in its going" (186).  The simple Homeric plotting of Ellison's novel complements the complex Homeric plotting of James Joyce's Ulysses ----n.b. Joyce was one of Ellison's literary ancestors. The secret name of the unnamed narrator of Invisible Man is Telemachus Hamlet.

Like some early 20th century Russian formalist  literary critics -- Boris Tomashevsky, Victor Shklovsky, Boris Eichenbaum, Ellison desired  that art be disconnected from politics and not be confused with  sociology.  Read his collected essays, especially "Hidden Name and Complex Fate" (1964) . Our reading of Ellison's novel from many angles and on many levels restores what we need most: the simple complexity of cognition. In 2018, we can speak for our visible selves at a higher frequency outside the pit of pity.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            July 8, 2018