3.1 PREPARING TO ACT
The word “action” conspicuously appears in both the prologue and epilogue of Invisible Man, arrestingly bookending the narrator’s chronological account of his experiences. It expresses a desire, perhaps political, yet one that remains unfulfilled at the novel’s close—the term itself nearly as ambiguous as at the novel’s start. The narrator boldly declares at the end of the prologue, “I believe in nothing if not in action” (IM 13). Then, in the epilogue, he understands his reflections to lead inexorably to “action.” “[W]hy do I write, torturing myself to put it down?
Because in spite of myself I’ve learned some things. Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget,’ and I can neither file nor forget. Nor will certain ideas forget me; they keep filing away at my lethargy, my complacency. Why should I be dedicated and set aside—yes, if not to at least tell a few people about it? There seems to be no escape” (579). What he has learned compels some sort of action. At the end of the epilogue, the narrator announces that he is at last leaving his underground room, his place of “hibernation,”
which, as he tells readers in the prologue, is “a covert preparation for more overt action” (13).
152 In common usage, this term is routinely pejorative and implies extremism, fanaticism, and violence. Despite the word’s etymology and connection to the word military and soldiering, it is not strictly or necessarily connected to violent activity. In Ellison’s usage, it certainly leaves open the possibility of violence, but its essential quality is committed engagement. So King’s “nonviolent direct action,” as well as Gandhi’s “satyagraha” movement and Thoreau’s “civil disobedience,” are instances of militancy. I take up the question of militancy again in the next chapter relative to Ellison’s detractors in the 1960s and to some recent scholars’ consideration of the postwar Ellison as appropriately “political.”
The text that the narrator has produced, the story or “lesson” of his life, is now repositioned as preparation for action (572). He is “shaking off the old skin,”153 “coming out” of his “hole” and hibernation, compelled at last to act (581). In Burke’s terms, which Ellison knew, the narrator’s attitudinal shift here—emerging from his narration and reflection on his experience—constitutes
“incipient action,” the beginning of an act (GM 242-43). Burke understands the moment of incipience as “a region of ambiguous possibilities,” the point of beginning where an act is
“partially but not fully in existence” (GM 242).
The uncertainty of the narrator’s professed desire to act, then, maintains a sense of possibility. As the novel ends at this moment of incipience, the ambiguity of the word “action”
comes to signify “possibility” itself, the uncertain, hesitant moment prior to acting. The suspension of that moment seemingly trumps and stalls action. Part of the difficulty is that by the end of the novel the narrator understands that to begin is inevitably to limit the field of what is possible. And this is a preoccupation of Invisible Man: in setting out, in beginning, there is the tendency to misapprehension, rendering things invisible in acts of naming. Nonetheless, the narrator recognizes that he cannot and must not defer indefinitely. “I suppose it’s damn well time. Even hibernations can be overdone, come to think of it. Perhaps that’s my greatest social crime, I’ve overstayed my hibernation, since there’s a possibility that even an invisible man has a socially responsible role to play” (581). After the narrator announces his social obligation, the novel concludes with his stated intent to leave his hole and to act. This action is not strictly symbolic and certainly not the solitary symbolic production of the writing of his life story.154
153 This image of “shaking off the old skin” bears resemblance to Burke’s discussion of “rituals of rebirth” in Attitudes toward History as “dramatic change in identity,” these occurring “[p]articularly in periods extremely transitional in emphasis” (II: 216, 215; 318, 317).
154 In his treatment of the Burke and Ellison, Timothy Parrish prefers to read the narrator’s stated belief in action as
“symbolic,” arguing that in conjunction with the final lines that speak directly to the reader such symbolic action,
The narrator suggests, at the very least, that such action requires the presence of and association with other people, even if the form “social responsibility” would take is not clear. If we keep in mind Burke’s understanding of attitude as incipient action as we read the epilogue, limits are already present for action has already begun; it is “partially in existence.” Although the possibilities may be ambiguous and a course is not absolutely set, what can occur, the forms action might take, have narrowed in particular ways. Indeed, in the epilogue the narrator reflects on beginning as a problem, as both a moment of invention and change and as the hardening of form. Edward Said, in his extensive consideration of beginnings, observes this difficulty to be integral: “we can say that formally the problem of beginning is the beginning of the problem. A beginning is a moment when the mind can start to allude to itself and to its products as formal doctrine” (Beginnings 42). The narrator’s terms and story have already taken on the status of doctrine even if ostensibly opposed to doctrine. The narrator’s “final” statement in the epilogue has the weight of doctrine even as it appears hesitant. That the narrator feels that he has learned lessons (in the process of narrating his life) indicates as much.
When the word “action” became an important part of Ellison’s lexicon in the early 1940s, it signified a political imaginary that Invisible Man at least partially abandons and eclipses. The tension that I have described between the narrator’s concomitant desire for “action” and for
“possibility” marks the novel’s distance from Ellison’s own beginnings, for here the risk of foreclosing what he terms “possibility” constrains what “action” might be. The Ellison of the Cold War truncates the parameters of what is possible, seemingly denying certain paths in the name of pluralistic openness and freedom. The narrator opines, “Until some gang succeeds in putting the world in a strait jacket, its definition is possibility” (IM 576). “I assign myself no
the narrator’s writing of his story and Ellison’s writing of the novel, would “demand action on the part of his reader”
(141). Really?
rank or any limit…. [M]y world has become one of infinite possibilities” (576). This sense of possibility expresses a negative conception of liberty. Invisible Man tells us that without impositions, presumably the objective of “gangs,” the world is essentially free. This expression of negative liberty—that is, fealty to possibility—itself becomes a straitjacket, for it may routinely deny the legitimacy of efforts to create conditions for freedom, to conceive liberty positively. From this viewpoint, such efforts are always dangerous to “freedom” and pose too great a risk. Therefore, they cannot commence. The lines that I quote concerning the narrator’s desire to act, however, are also traces from Ellison’s earlier radical writings and of a militancy he then termed “positive action.” This is an action of resistance to dominant patterns of oppression and includes (symbolic) action that creates positive forms to support ways of living in shared liberation. As such, these lines concerning action in Invisible Man refer back to another Ellison and remind us of the limits of a course that he took and, yes, the possibilities of some that he abandoned.