In an attempt to place Ralph Waldo Ellison’s novel 

Invisible Man within a Modernist

framework, Berndt Ostendorf writes,

‘Ellison … is a “Spätling,” a latecomer to Modernism. … Ellison’s Modernism … is not one of

crisis and despair, but of innovation and hope. He accepts the discipline implied in [Ezra Pound’s] slogan
“make it new,” but rejects the cultural pessimism of his ancestors.’[i]

Although Ostendorf’s description is right insofar that Ellison’s work is optimistic in its outcome
rather than as pessimistic as the majority of modernist novels, it does not seem to be in
agreement with the term Modernism in general. ]

postmodernists consider fragmentation ‘an exhilarating, liberating phenomenon, symptomatic

of [the] escape from the claustrophobic embrace of fixed systems of belief.’ [vi] Specifically,
postmodernist writing features fragmentation on different levels. Furthermore, postmodernists
attempt to write in a way that can be understood by everyone and seek to abolish the boundaries
between art and everyday life. According to their conception, there is a decline of the genius
view of the artist. In contrast to Modernism, Postmodernism assumes that art can only be
repetitious, but not original. Pound’s slogan ‘make it new’ therefore loses its validity.
Furthermore, postmodernist writers have been criticized for putting too much emphasis on style
and form rather than on content. In fact, some critics see Postmodernism as ‘a model which [unlike
Modernism]
 emphasizes not depth but surface.’[viii] Both modernist and postmodernist fiction is often full
of irony, sarcasm and pastiche. Other characteristics that are typical for both periods are the loss
of confidence in science, progress and rationality and the focus on subjectivity rather than
objectivity.

In short, one can characterize the postmodernist movement as an outgrowth of or reaction to

Modernism. The exact relation between Modernism and Postmodernism is difficult to define.
Jean-François Lyotard, for instance, claims that ‘a work can become modern only if it is first
postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state,
and this state is constant.’[ix] The following part of this essay will discuss in how far the main
ideas of Postmodernism, such as the existence of a multitude of selves, the absence of an all-
encompassing truth and Baudrillard’s idea of simulation and reality, appear in Ellison’s Invisible
Man. What are their implications for a classification of his novel as either modernist or
postmodernist fiction? The focus will be put on the question of identity as many critics have
pointed out that the narrator of Invisible Man is, in fact, on a quest for self-hood.

One of the most important concepts that Postmodernism embraces is that of the existence of a
multitude of selves. While modernists still held to the idea that there is a discoverable centre, a
wholeness which can be found amidst the increasing awareness of fragmentation, postmodernists
claim that such a discovery is impossible because there is no wholeness to discover at all. They
reject the notion of the unified, rational human subject. In fact, postmodernists believe that every
person consists of multiple selves that interact and that change at any moment.

In Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, it is not the narrator, but rather a minor character that represents
this concept. After Tod Clifton’s funeral, the nameless narrator is pursued by followers of Ras
the Exhorter. As soon as he puts on dark glasses and a hat, people mistake him for a man named
Rinehart, who, as the narrator soon discovers, must have a multitude of selves. For instance,
women approach the narrator confusing him with their lover, and ‘a couple of hipsters’ ask him
what he is ‘putting down’ (389).

Similarly, in the course of the novel, the narrator himself adopts several different identities. He
starts out as a naïve, uninitiated high school graduate who is eager to please whites. He ‘so
thoroughly and innocently subscribes to the [Booker T.] Washingtonian ethic’ that he consents to
fight in a so called Battle Royal even though this is, in fact, nothing but a public
humiliation. [xiii] It is not until much later in the novel, after being expelled from college, that the
narrator’s attitude begins to change. The gifted student becomes a labourer at Liberty Paints. An
accident occurs, and Ellison’s narrator finds himself in a hospital where he undergoes an
operation resembling a lobotomy and emerges with a ‘complete change of personality,’ as a
doctor points out (193). At first, the narrator cannot even remember his own name: ‘Who am I? I
asked myself. But it was like trying to identify one particular cell that coursed through the torpid
veins of my body’ (196). At the end of a long, confusing stay in hospital, it is a doctor who tells
the narrator what his name is. However, he wishes that the doctor had not done it and feels ‘a
pain [stabbing] through [his] head’ (200). Later, when returning to the boarding-house in town,
the extent of his change of personality becomes visible:

The narrator of Invisible Man introduces Ellison’s central metaphor for the

situation of the individual in Western culture in the first paragraph: “I am
invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.” As the novel
develops, Ellison extends this metaphor: Just as people can be rendered invisible
by the wilful failure of others to acknowledge their presence, so by taking
refuge in the seductive but ultimately specious security of socially acceptable
roles they can fail to see themselves, fail to define their own identities. Ellison
envisions the escape from this dilemma as a multifaceted quest demanding
heightened social, psychological, and cultural awareness.
The narrator of Invisible Man occupies exactly this liminal space, habitually taking conciliatory
stances to ameliorate tension between black and white communities (though whites are clearly
the aggressors in these feuds), but he later learns that his efforts toward reconciliation were in
fact manipulated by the “Brotherhood” that sought to undermine burgeoning, heterogeneous
forms of Black subjectivity in favor of a highly regulated model of Black collective
consciousness. The damaging effects of his transgression are nowhere more apparent than in the
Harlem riot scene, where the narrator confronts his unwitting collusion:

It was not suicide, but murder. The committee had planned it. And I had helped, had been a tool.
A tool just at the very moment I had thought myself free. By pretending to agree I had indeed
agreed, had made myself responsible for that huddled form lighted by flame and gunfire in the
street, and all the others whom now the night was making ripe for death. (553)
In the margins/center dichotomy of modernist thought, Ellison suggests here that to gain access
to the center is to subvert the political resistance of the margins, which in Invisible Man can be
read as both Black resistance against white hegemony and the individual against the social
collective within a specific racial category. In the above passage, the narrator gains access to the
Brotherhood, thinking that his conciliatory ambitions can improve “race” relations, but he
ultimately becomes the means of destroying Harlem’s counterculture. The “modernist strategy of
containment” operates fully in Invisible Man, forcing the narrator to choose between
membership in a “managed” political body of Black resistance and the alienation experienced
through his privileging of individual agency (Harper 122).

With this passage in mind, I would like to turn to postmodern treatments of “race,” which
overlap and borrow from modernism significantly, but which nonetheless advance Ellison’s
project by further unsettling the logic of a biracial system which generates the chasm of “double
consciousness” wherein the invisible subject resides. Ellison, as noted above, hints at the
“potentialities” of fluid postmodern constructions of identity, but they are ultimately aborted in
Invisible Man. In general, postmodernism emphasizes points of cultural conflict and contact in a
decentered cultural milieu, as opposed to the modernist privileging of individual and cultural
integrity. Mary Louise Pratt calls these “contact zones,” the “social spaces where disparate
cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other” (34), while Jean-Luc Nancy theorizes in his
definition of “community” that essentialist notions of “origin” or “identity” must be replaced
with the “the sharing of singularities” whose points of contact are “the borders upon which or
along which singular beings are exposed” (33). Here, the “limit” of these singularities constitutes
the site in which one “does not rediscover” an essential self but “experiences the other’s alterity”
(33); in other words, it is being defined in relation that is not predicated on simple subject-object
dichotomies. The risk in such formulations, of course, is obfuscating the material reality that
political power is often concentrated in one group, which may or may not be identified as the
“center,” but that nevertheless exercises its power over marginal or disenfranchised individuals
and collectivities. However, postmodern interpretations of social organization and community
also offer possible solutions that the modernist avant garde could not see: namely, the ability to
combine, appropriate, and transform subjectivities through the permeable membranes-the
“contact zones” and “limits”-of social and political beings.

In addition to these processes that generate invisibility in the black/white racial binary, it is also
reasonable to assert that modernist aesthetics inhibit the self-determination of Black subjectivity.
As Lawerence Hogue explains, “racial tradition” is often at odds with the broad cultural
movement we call “modernity.” Hogue’s explanation of modernist conceptions of racial identity
serves well to highlight the basic cultural tensions that produce invisibility in texts like Invisible
Man: Whereas racial tradition connotes wholeness, homogeneity, historical continuity, and a
sense of common ancestry or place of origin, classical modernity connotes the loss of
metaphysical meaning, rampant individualism, nihilism, hedonism, alienation, fragmentation, the
lack of social identification, and the lack of historical continuity. Whereas racial traditions
consider the past as a model, or a guiding example, modernity’s hallmark is the impulse to
experiment, to break with the past. (5) The pessimistic tone of Invisible Man is underscored by
Ellison’s critical investment in modernist aesthetics, wherein the project of historicizing Black
cultural “traditions” runs against the grain of the modern emphasis on the individual. In
modernism, broadly construed, the racialized subject is defined “as a unity” that cannot brook the
contradictions of plural cultures and traditions inhabiting a single subject (Hogue 5). For writers
such as Ellison who attempted to understand this system of racial coding, it means articulating
one’s relationship in reference to the broadly oppositional categories of “black” and “white” and
in terms of the individual’s relationship to a racial collective. While contemporary theorists of
Black subjectivity such as Mark Anthony Neale and Michelle Wright note that “Blacks in the
Americas were deconstructing white Western nationalist discourses” well before Derridean
deconstruction and post-structuralism, (Wright 27), it is also apparent that social conditions
during major twentieth-century Black cultural movements such as the Harlem Renaissance and
the Black Arts Movement define themselves against a white hegemony. In this cultural model,
transgression of perceived racial “lines” by an individual becomes the enemy of Black cultural
authenticity because it threatens the stability of selfdetermined representations of “black”
humanity. There is little room for racially ambiguous subjects; for an individual to be between is
simply to be “invisible,” lest one be a traitor.1

https://www.grin.com/document/19972

https://literariness.org/2018/06/01/analysis-of-ralph-ellisons-novels/

https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110422429-020/html?lang=en

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/76221742.pdf

file:///C:/Users/Umar/Downloads/ojsadmin,+24481-61150-1-CE.pdf

postmodernism historical, social and cultural concerns in Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, 1952