Significance of the Battle Royal scene in Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man"
Invisible
Man is invited to present his valedictorian speech to a group of wealthy white
patrons at a Southern gentlemen’s club. When he arrives, however, he is forced
to participate in a blindfolded ‘battle royal’ against a group of men he
believes to be his ‘peers’: adolescent African American males. The irony of the
situation is, he finds no commonality with these youths, only bitter rivalry.
The
hypocrisy of the Southern socio-economy is figuratively actualised in the
poignant symbolism of the young black adolescents, who are induced to beat each
other to bloody pulps for the amusement of rich white patrons, with the promise
of coins as reward (which, they later discover, are counterfeit). Like many
members of the Jazz Age intelligentsia before him, Ellison is interested in
satirising the cultural apologue of an American ‘aristocracy’ built on slavery
in a pure, high capitalist society where there has never been a decline of the
ruling class. The mere prospect of wealth enflames a capitalist instinct in the
young men, and they are invited to perceive each other as rivals, not equals
who could work together for the greater cause. It is the first violent instance
in which Invisible Man bears witness to the anarchy that has turned children of
the same racial background against each other in a post-slavery world.
The
protagonist’s language depicts this past self as a bewildered ingénue figure,
hitherto oblivious to the control that the white proprietors of American ‘old
money’ have over the destinies of young African Americans:
“Everyone
fought hysterically. It was complete anarchy. Everybody fought everybody else.
No group fought together for long. Two, three, four, fought one, then turned to
fight each other, were themselves attacked.”
They all
begin to ‘[fight] automatically’. At this point in the narrative, Ellison
employs performatively robotic, short, rhythmic sentences filled with
monosyllables and disyllables, such as, ‘A glove smacked against my head’, or
‘Blows pounded me from all sides as I struck out as best I could’. Every
sensation is meticulously described. As the protagonist and his competitors are
blindfolded, the lack of visibility (it is a physical and metaphysical
blindness), emerges as a recurring trope.
The boys
are taken one by one out of the ring until just Invisible Man and a much larger
boy are left, and their blindfolds are removed. The other boys had known that
the last two in the ring would flight, and use the protagonist’s naiveté as a
measure of self-preservation. Invisible Man begs his larger opponent to ‘fake
like I knocked you out, you can have the prize’, in a desperate attempt for
survival. His competitor, however, is only interested in his own
self-preservation, and has the upper hand in their fight:
‘I’ll break
your behind,’ he whispered hoarsely.
‘For them?’
‘For me,
sonofabitch!’
Ellison’s
style evokes both poetic and cinematic imagery: it is a synthesis of the
auditory registers and visual lenses of language. As Invisible Man is reeled by
the bigger boy in their anarchic duel, he spins about from the blows ‘as a
joggled camera sweeps in a reeling scene’. Pleading for mercy, Invisible Man
bribes his rival with the pledge of ‘five dollars more’, to which the opponent
responds, ‘Go to hell!” He hears the white men waging monetary bets against
him, and ponders, ‘Would not this go against my speech, and was not this a
moment for humility, for nonresistance?”
The events
that follow concretise Ellison’s synecdoche of the blood money:
"I saw the
rug covered with coins of all dimensions and a few crumpled bills. But what
excited me, scattered here and there, were the gold pieces."
Invisible
Man and his opponent are told by the master of ceremonies to ‘come on up here
boys and get your money’, but are met with the audience’s laughter. The mere
appearance of money incites a visceral effect in the young protagonist. The
glittering configuration of money excites him; he is entranced not only by the
gilded prospect of symbolic wealth, but the shining beauty of the coins
themselves. One spectator remarks: ‘These niggers look like they’re about to
pray!’, as they kneel before the ‘good hard American cash’ in anticipation.
There is a link in this imagery between religion, capitalism, and the
subordination of ethnic identity: the young African American men have been
returned to a state of blind slavery, this time, to the American dollar and the
culture of consumption, an economy that is governed by rich, white American
males like the patrons of the club.
Unfortunately,
the ‘good hard American cash’ is another empty promise, a false advertisement
of happiness; the money they scramble over is literally made up of false
tokens. The blissful possession of gold comes at the price of violently
clambering over an electrified rug, a ruse set up by the establishment for the
amusement of its patrons. The boys are pushed into an electric ring of pain and
confusion, for what turns out to be an even crueller joke than they realise.
The narrator discovers that ‘the gold pieces I had scrambled for were brass
pocket tokens advertising a certain make of automobile’. Again, they are quite
literally bested by the mechanisms of consumption, this time representing the
deceptively persuasive ideologies and misleading practices of capitalist
advertising.
The battle
royale episode therefore functions as a dystopic formulation of the traditional
Bildungsroman rites of passage, where according to Barbara Foley, ‘naïve
protagonists, usually young, encounter various trials that enable them to test
their mettle. They undergo apprenticeships in the lessons of life and emerge
older and wiser’.
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