I Read The Page Again Because I Wanted To

a review of Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

The Invisible Man is a movie starring Elizabeth Moss about a mad scientist who uses science (?) to turn invisible and stalk his girlfriend (???). It’s a horror movie (hate) about a nerdy man (ugh). Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison is not that.

Invisible Man maps the experience of being Black in America for an unnamed narrator. His life is episodic; we watch him through the small-town South, his HBCU, a paint factory, a hospital, Harlem, an underground room.  The story that emerges is like a rickety wooden rollercoaster, twisting around and through; the reader must strap the fuck in. The book came out in 1952 but the stories feel current as white power structures continue to work as intended under the guise democracy. But the story is surreal, dancing between recognizable acts of racist violence--physical and interpersonal--and dreamlike sequences that make you need to read the page again. 

Can’t wait to understand this metaphor in 5-10 years.

Our knowledge of the narrator is purposefully clipped to shift focus on the societal shitstorm happening at a macrolevel. Following him from frame to frame, his identities shift as they slither through his grasp and ours. There are a lot of metaphors, I think. Milk, for example. In a sexy setting, a woman offers the narrator “wine or milk instead of coffee” and the narrator finds milk “strangely repulsive” which is not at all strange because nothing is less sexy than a cold glass of udder juice. There’s also the idea of blindness and vision which, if you recall from Cliffsnotes-ing The Great Gatsby in high school, is an FDA approved metaphor for ignorance/omniscience/etc. I stumbled through some of the metaphors in this book, perhaps because I was am a clumsy well-meaning white person overthinking things. Who’s to say! Ellison’s prose is universal and luxurious and made me need to read the page again because I really wanted to this time. 

The surrealism, pricked by moments of eery clarity, is Jordan Peelean, whose film Get Out expertly demonstrates the “racism as horror” genre. I wonder if Ellison would like Get Out. Or Atlanta. This article explores those parallels really well. 

Ellison reviewed books, too. Coincidentally, I read his scathing, fantastic review of Gunnar Myrdal’s American Dilemma, a looooong study of American race relations pre-WWII by a white Swedish sociologist who randomly said “Actually, I think I’m the authority on this matter because I’m impårtiål.” Please stick to your smörgåsbords, thanks. Invisible Man tells a clearer story of “American race relations” than American Dilemma ever could through its embrace of the unseen and interrogation of what’s democratic.

Thankfully, not every book on earth is written for my greedy little eyes and churning absurd mind. Invisible Man was not written for me to understand sociological phenomena or help me experience blissful universality. There are big ideas I will continue to chew on and little snacks I will come back to when I inevitably re-read this book in a less covid time. For now, I will think of what invisibility means for humanity and why, if offered wine or milk, anyone would ever choose milk.