Use of Symbolism in Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man"
Symbolism is the final literary trope this chapter considers crucial to the
success of Ellison’s artistry and central to his manipulation of different
forms of narrative representation. In literature, a symbol is defined as “a
word or phrase that signifies an object or event which in its turn signifies
something, or has a range of reference, beyond itself” (Abrams 311). Analyzing
the role of symbol in the novel necessarily initiates a discussion of
Ellison’s modernist tendencies. Like the other types of figurative language
discussed thus far, symbols facilitate Ellison’s portrayal of his narrator’s
inner being, and to a greater extent than other rhetorical moves, systematically
chart his growth. T. S. Eliot’s theory of an objective correlative offers a formal description of the role symbols occupy in Ellison’s text
and underscores their modernist roots. Eliot, the poet Ellison credits with
steering him away from music toward a serious study of literature, claims
“the only way of expressing emotion is by finding an ‘objective correlative’;
in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which
shall be the formula of that particular emotion” (Abrams 197). Accordingly,
he suggests this method should help the reader more easily access
and share the emotion the writer strives to express.
Ellison relies on symbols as his primary method for engaging moral
quandaries at the center of American identity. In doing so, he aims to correct
the oversights of high modernists like Hemingway, whom he greatly
admired but felt shirked the moral responsibility of the American author.
Ellison takes Hemingway to task for his contention that Huckleberry
Finn should have ended after Jim is stolen from Huck and concludes that
“Hemingway’s blindness to the moral values of Huckleberry Finn despite
his sensitivity to its technical aspects duplicated the one-sided vision
of the twenties” (Collected Essays 91). Winking at the knotty dilemma of
America’s discrimination and violence against blacks, Hemingway latches
on to the ritual of the Spanish bullfight, a symbol Ellison describes as
representing “amoral violence” in lieu of the morally ridden topic of race
(Collected Essays 93). Hemingway’s propensity towards violent images
of animal death links him to human defeat rather than triumph, and consequently,
Ellison accuses him of producing literature that celebrates
society’s failures and absolves readers of their “social irresponsibility”
(Collected Essays 95).
Ellison writes with no such negligence. He confronts Hemingway directly
by incorporating the symbol of the bull into his narrative. The narrator
first associates the bull image with Jack as he reminisces over childhood
memories before his first Brotherhood speech. Recalling the bulldog, Master,
whom he had not trusted as a child, he notes that Jack reminds him of
a “toy bull terrier” (338). As previously mentioned, when Jack takes him
to the El Toro Bar to inform him of his appointment over the Harlem District,
the narrator ponders two panels of bullfight scenes positioned in the
normal place for a mirror. The first depicts a matador challenging a bull
with elegant artistry, and the narrator marvels at the grace of the image
while Jack declares it “sheer barbarism” (358). The second panel pictures
the matador being gored. In a seemingly complete change of pace, during
his and Clifton’s fight with Ras, the narrator describes the Exhorter rocking
“like a drunken bull” and looking “bull angry” (369, 370). Changing
gears again, as he sleeps with the mystery woman, he dreams of being chased “by a bull” (417). In Ellison’s hands, the image that suppressed
discussions of moral difficulty for Hemingway becomes a standard bearer
for the moral equivocation afflicting myriad aspects of American social
interaction. A succinct catalogue of possible interpretations for the recurring
bull symbol might respectively connect Ellison’s bulls to duplicitous
politics, cultural misperception and degradation, white-incited intra-racial
violence, and the enactment of racially inflected sexual stereotypes. The
interconnected variety of the image displays the pleasure with which Ellison
manipulates the symbol while its interspersion corresponds to the
narrator’s barely perceptible development. Each reference registers his
movement from superficially associating Jack and the dog with an impenetrable
countenance, to discovering a divergent viewpoint between himself
and Jack, to connecting Ras’s temperament to Jack’s, to sensing the
danger of fulfilling derogatory stereotypes. Together, the images indicate
the necessity for conscious perception.
Leaving off from ribbing Hemingway, Ellison presents Sambo as a
peculiarly American symbol that foregrounds the moral quandary of racism.
The term Sambo codifies the racist characteristics associated with
blacks such as ignorance, unintended comicality, and lasciviousness as
well as the exaggerated visual stereotype of blacks with big red lips,
black skin, rolling white eyes, and wild hair. Ellison channels the narrator’s
developing sense of self through the presentation of Sambo. We
first witness the narrator encountering the term at the battle royal. As he
prepares to scramble for the money on the electrified rug, a blond man
encourages, “That’s right, Sambo” (26). Instead of feeling insulted or
wizened by the term, the narrator simply focuses on the task at hand,
signifying an unruffled familiarity with such derogatory language. He
has just finished the brutal violence of the fight, but he excitedly vows
to seize the most money, thinking “I would use both my hands. I would
throw my body against the boys nearest me to block them from the
gold” (26). His willingness to physically compromise himself for profit
ironically connects him to the other boys whom he scorns for their
regular participation in smokers and more pertinently, highlights his inadvertent
enactment of the Sambo stereotype.
When the narrator encounters an image of Sambo in Harlem, he exhibits
a different sensibility. Awaking in his room at Mary’s the morning after
his first Chthonian party, he sees the Americana piece that he previously
overlooked. Imagining himself newly enlightened, he disgustedly surveys
the “cast-iron figure of a very black, red-lipped and wide-mouthed Negro,
whose white eyes stared up at [him] from the floor, his face an enormous grin, his single large black hand held palm up before his chest” (319). The
memory of the astute Brotherhood members he met the previous night
transforms the bank into a sign of Mary’s cultural immaturity and his fellow
boarders’ uncivilized behavior. In a fit of rage, he bangs the iron bank
on the metal pipe until its head breaks open in crushed submission. His subsequent
inability to dispose of the broken bank wittily identifies the bank
with the narrator and symbolizes his continued enactment of the Sambo
role. Even his Chthonian invitation to join the Brotherhood is laced with
Sambo trappings: Emma inquires whether he is black enough; he foolishly
accepts a new name as he holds out his hand for $300; a drunk brother
insists that he sing a spiritual since “all colored people sing,” and he plays
the clown to cover everyone’s embarrassment with laughter (312). Yet the
narrator departs Mary’s house thinking that he is privileged to join the
scientifically sophisticated Brotherhood.
Ellison’s deft analogy between the narrator and the bank displays his
complex handling of the Sambo image. It remains a symbol for the disparaging
identity white America affixes to blacks, but Ellison refines
the many ways it manifests itself in black-white relations. The narrator’s
physical destruction of the bank artfully signals black Americans’ attempts
to conquer their abusive past, and his inability to rid himself of
the pieces stresses the difficulty of this endeavor. Although the narrator
perceives the insulting image the bank represents, a posture that is an
improvement over his unquestioning acceptance of the term during the
smoker, his obliviousness to the correspondence between his actions and
the inanimate object he loathes signals his continued lack of discernment.
He remains incapable of inferring from his experience a grasp of the reality
of his identity. For Ellison this incapacity offers a rich spin on Melville’s
construction of a Sambo figure. In The Confidence Man (1857), one of
the protagonist’s avatars is a comic, black-faced, and crippled trickster
who swindles passengers out of money through his clever begging. Ellison
confided to Murray, “I guess I told you that the bank image in Invisible
was suggested by the figure of Black Guinea. That son of a bitch with his
mouth full of pennies!” (Ellison and Murray 79). His exuberant appreciation
of Melville’s multifaceted formulation of the American charlatan, that
admirable rogue embodying the ingenuity and charm basic to American
success, accentuates the problem he creates for his narrator. Melville’s
manipulative confidence man plays (or at least uses) Sambo to exploit the
stereotype for monetary gain and the scene reflects Melville’s study of the
moral consequences involved in both enacting and accepting such roles.
Ellison’s narrator cannot detect this tension.
When he confronts Clifton’s outrageous Sambo doll, the narrator is
dumbfounded by the former brother’s injudiciousness. After an onlooker
in Clifton’s audience laughs at the narrator’s angry response to the mocking
doll and connects his childish anger to the doll’s merry performance, the
narrator wonders how Clifton could forget that the Brotherhood protects
them from “being empty Sambo dolls,” an “obscene flouncing of everything
human!” (434 – 435). He senses that something more is at stake in
Clifton’s act but cannot detect the rationale provoking the youth leader’s
behavior until he witnesses the Brotherhood’s duplicity. Ellison’s sly assembly
of Clifton’s insinuating spiel, the narrator’s discovery of the controlling
black string, and Jack’s revelation of the Brotherhood’s view of the
narrator together invest the Sambo doll with a critical task. It triggers the
narrator’s ultimate realization of his role in society. When he apprehends
the Brotherhood’s part in inciting the riot that tears Harlem apart, his own
Sambo status dawns on him. The complexity with which Ellison creates
this sequence emphasizes the brilliance of his artistry.
The narrator’s eventual sense of clarity regarding Clifton’s tortured embrace
of Sambo begs a reconsideration of his earlier assumption regarding
Mary’s bank. He originally concludes the decorative piece attests to Mary’s
cultural ignorance, an emblem of her unsophisticated sense of race. His
final desire to return to Mary’s suggests otherwise. Contrary to proving her
lack of judgment, the Sambo bank conveys her racial wholeness. Unlike
the narrator, she comfortably exists within the contradictions that define
her life. In fact, the relationship Ellison creates between Mary and Sambo
dramatizes another way in which his use of symbols relates to modernist
literary technique. The density of the Sambo symbol exposes his tendency
to invest with great meaning words and images tied to the folk heritage
of black Americans. This predilection fuels his more expansive argument
that black writers must not restrict their refutation of society’s denial of
their humanity to realistic, documentary-styled literature; rather, they must
discover and present black consciousness artistically. Ellison points to Picasso
as a master of this truth. He expounds:
[Picasso is] the greatest wrestler with forms and techniques of them all. Just
the same, he’s never abandoned the old symbolic forms of Spanish art: the
guitar, the bull, daggers, women, shawls, veils, mirrors. Such symbols serve
a dual function: they allow the artist to speak of complex experiences and
to annihilate time with simple lines and curves, and they allow the viewer
an orientation, both emotional and associative, which goes so deep that a
total culture may resound in a simple rhythm, an image. (Collected Essays
213–214)
For Ellison, the most meaningful symbolic forms of black life were
found in folklore, and he believes these forms also represent an essential
part of American culture. The varied expressions and images comprising
black folklore embody both the black and white history of the nation, and
Ellison insists that minority artists must integrate these forms into art helping
define American identity.
His contention stems from his expansive study of modernist literature. In
an explanation of the roots of his artistry he contends, “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). What is more, he credits his familiarity with works such as The
Waste Land (1922) and Ulysses (1922) for exemplifying how “ancient myth
and ritual were used to give form and significance to material,” leaving the
responsibility to recognize and transform them to the work of the artist (Collected
Essays 216). Thus, Sambo becomes more than an image of a very
dark person with exaggerated features. It is a marker of the racist attempt to
deny black American humanity; it embodies the confusion haunting American
identity formation; it characterizes the extent to which black and white
experience is intertwined. Ellison’s artistic transformation of an intended
symbol of racial bigotry into a method for exploring consciousness goes to
the heart of what he values in the integration of folk materials into art. He
notes a range of episodes, sayings, and images in Invisible Man indebted
to the wealth of black folklore. More than any particular saying or image,
he suggests that their import for readers lies in the willingness to find the
interconnections that grant the narrative meaning.
The narrator’s experience at the eviction provides a case in point. Directly
following his cathartic experience of eating a yam in the streets, the
narrator stumbles upon an array of objects he initially mistakes for junk.
When he realizes he is witnessing an eviction, he imbues the articles with
new meaning, contemplating them individually and collectively. Items
ranging from a portrait of the old couple to knocking bones to a breast
pump to freedom papers mingle in the dirty snow and elicit new emotions
from the narrator. Moved beyond understanding at the sight he wonders,
“why were they causing me discomfort so far beyond their intrinsic meaning
as objects? And why did I see them now, as behind a veil that threatened
to lift” (273). The old couple’s household goods attest to the varied history
of black Americans, visually tying them to the folk past the narrator
rediscovered in the yam, and they give his cultural awakening definition.
The pedestrian aspect of the individual objects recedes as the force of their
symbolism hits him. The veil he imagines, an echo of the veil held by the Founder’s statue at the college, clearly denotes the emotional and ideological
baggage blocking his move toward a clearer perception of society. Like
the vibrant and layered lore that captures the lives of folk like the Provos,
the random artifacts combine to tell an intricate story of their life.
The destruction of symbolic objects and images during the riot and
its aftermath offers a final example for contemplating the importance of
symbolism in Ellison’s art. This episode also ushers the narrator into his
ultimate procurement of personal and cultural insight and manifests what
some critics identify as the postmodernist strain in Invisible Man. Although
neither the term modernism nor postmodernism is easily defined,
the signature characteristics of both literary modes illuminate Ellison’s
narrative shifts. In “The Art of Fiction,” he ends his discussion of the
dominant styles in the novel by noting that “during [the narrator’s] fall
from grace in the Brotherhood, it becomes somewhat surrealistic. The
styles try to express both his state of consciousness and the state of
society” (Collected Essays 220). His description of the latter portions
of the narrative as surrealist gives meaning to the bizarre, dream-like
atmosphere he creates and indicates his move beyond a modernist approach.
If modernism identifies the literary movement committed to
making things new while lamenting the fracturing of culture as we know
it, postmodernism accepts this fracturing with less distress and locates
a generative quality in the breaks. Postmodernists accept the reality
of chaos, celebrate the intertextuality of contradictory parts, find value
in the illogical thought of subconscious states, and revel in the endless
interpretations that produce personal vision. As the narrator lugs
his briefcase toward the destruction of the Harlem riot, he is primed for
adopting such a perspective.
The physical destruction of Harlem signifies the mental and emotional
devastation its residents endure daily. In the unreality of the dark, the
narrator witnesses the explosion of their inner turmoil with a changing
sense of perception. He progresses from applauding their self-sufficiency
to recognizing the futility of their outburst to accepting his culpability in
bringing the events to pass. Amidst violent injuries, deaths, and senseless
waste, the narrator grasps the meaning of his identity. Confronting
Ras on his horse, he concludes “I . . . recognized the absurdity of the
whole night and of the simple yet confoundingly complex arrangement
of hope and desire, fear and hate, that had brought me here still running,
and knowing now who I was and where I was” (559). He comprehends
the necessity for Harlem’s expression of its discontent, but he
also apprehends the need for them to move forward through a positive understanding of their complicated consciousness. When he falls into the
hole and dreams of being castrated, he metaphorically associates physical
fragmentation with the path to wholeness and celebrates this accomplishment
notwithstanding the pain involved. His dream serves as a
prelude to his decision to burn the contents of his briefcase, a physical
symbol of his past, and displays his newfound ability to assess other
characters perceptively.
The narrator’s ironic assertion to the white men who accost him before
he falls into the manhole that he has them in his briefcase, notwithstanding
their ignorance of his identity and their blindness to their position, highlights
his expanding vision of society. In the blackness of the hole, he
discovers the light of self-knowledge as he destroys the documents and
paper artifacts signifying his past experiences. After burning his high
school diploma, a symbol of the extremity of his naïveté, he burns Clifton’s
Sambo doll. By the light of the “stubbornly” burning doll, he lights
the anonymous letter (568). Taking out the paper on which Jack scrawled
his Brotherhood, he realizes the papers have the same handwriting. The
shock of this discovery propels him into the darkness of the hole and the
light of self-discovery. Ellison suggests that only through such a violent
fracturing of all his protagonist thinks is stable can he begin to perceive
the reality of his life and position in society. The destruction, then, is not
lamentable but celebratory; it paves the way toward a discovery of the
truth of his human condition. In this way, Ellison suggests the universal
implications of his narrator’s journey.
Ellison’s sophisticated handling of figurative language underpins his
creation of the protagonist who embodies his artistic agenda. In many
ways, he travels a parallel journey with his fictional rabble-rouser turned
writer. Just as the narrator’s growing facility with language indicates his
evolving mental state, Ellison announces his own artistic maturity through
the publication of his first novel. Emerging out of the shadow of his friend
and mentor, Richard Wright, Ellison demonstrates rhetorical skills that
vouch for his artistic excellence and announce his creative potential. His
deployment of figurative twists and turns lends both density and lightness
to his narrative, congealing a text remarkable for its serious exploration
of race and simultaneous dedication to art. Ellison erects his house of fiction
upon the variegated literary foundation of past, contemporary, and
developing movements, but to peer through his novel’s windows reveals
his vivid sense of the architectural future of fiction. For all who are game,
he eloquently beckons.
Works Cited
Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace,
1999.
Ellison, Ralph. The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison. Edited by John Callahan.
New York: Modern Library, 1995.
Lieber, Todd. “Ralph Ellison and the Metaphor of Invisibility in Black Literary
Tradition.” American Quarterly 24 (1972): 86–100.
Murray, Albert, and John F. Callahan, eds. Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters
of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray. New York: Vintage Books, 2000.
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