In the introduction to his magnum opus composed thirty-odd years after its first appearance, Ellison, echoing Du Bois, describes the protagonist of his short story “Flying Home” as “a man of two worlds […]
misperceived in both and thus […] at ease in neither.”48 “Clearly,” he says, the protagonist of Invisible Man also “possessed some of [these]
symptoms.” Referring to both protagonists, “[spokesmen] for invisibility,”
Ellison explains that they “had been forged in the underground of American experience and yet managed to emerge less angry than ironic.
That [they] would be a blues-toned laughter-at-wounds who included [themselves] in [their] indictment of the human condition.”49 Ellison gets at the idea that “our” society is one which depends upon a “play” (in many senses of the term) of masks. These masks serve a dual function. On the one hand, when understood as stereotype (as in a minstrel mask) they interfere with perceiving one’s full “humanity,” and, in this way, the racial theatre becomes more oppressive than the whip and the lash.50 On the other hand, Ellison encourages trying on different masks, being a chameleon of sorts, or a living work of art, in order to explore one’s individual and human possibilities. Ellison’s “humanity” refers to the fullness of being which the veil of culture adumbrates. In the American context, the stereotypes that constitute “comedies of the grotesque,” the iconography and phonography of minstrelsy, present the primary roadblock to freedom of being and to ethical relations with others.
“Archetypes,” he says, “like taxes, seem doomed to be with us always, and
48 Ellison, Invisible Man, xiv.
49 Ibid., xviii.
50 Although, as Saidiya Hartman would argue, one leads to the other.
so with literature, one hopes; but between the two there must needs be the living human being in a specific texture of time, place, and circumstance who must respond, make choices, achieve eloquence and create specific works of art.”51 This excerpt speaks to the nuances of Ellison’s understanding of humanity and identity. On the one hand, humanity describes that richness of character and being in the world that evades archetype, indeed, describes the opposite of archetype. Humanity, in a way, is prior to identity. At the same time, humanity achieves full expression when identity is not understood as mask or archetype, but as the articulation of “a specific texture of time, place, and circumstance.”
Most importantly, however, Ellison requires of the human some sort of action, perhaps creative in nature, in order to recover “the human complexity which stereotypes are intended to conceal.”52 The negation of
“comedies of the grotesque,” and especially the iconography and phonography of blackface minstrelsy, makes space for comic anagnorisis, or the recognition of one’s true identity—the recognition, as well, of the cultural configurations which obscure that identity.53
Given Ellison’s grand metaphor for America as a stage and American identity as theatrical, Ellison’s interest in “recognition” can be understood largely as an Aristotelian one. In Poetics Aristotle wrote of peripeteia, the unexpected “reversal” of situation in a dramatic plot, and of anagnorisis, or “recognition,” which peripeteia often effects. “Recognition,”
Aristotle wrote,
51 Ellison, “Shadow and Act,” 101 (my emphasis).
52 Id., Invisible Man, xxii.
53 Id., “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” 103.
as the name itself signifies, is a change from ignorance to knowledge resulting in either friendship or enmity towards those who are marked for good fortune or misfortune; and the finest recognition is the one which occurs at the same time as the reversal, like the one in Oedipus [Rex]” […] Now since this recognition occurs between men, in some cases only one of them is recognized by the other, and this occurs whenever the identity of the latter is already known; in other cases each must recognize the other, e.g. Iphigenia was recognized by Orestes from the letter that was sent, but a second recognition, in which Orestes is made known to Iphigenia, was needed.”54
This peripeteia, or flipping the script, if you will, followed by anagnorisis, is the revelatory moment of the punch line in comedy. It is precisely what occurs in the anecdote from Ellison’s essay of 1958 “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke” in which he writes: “Said a very dark Southern friend of mine in laughing reply to a white businessman who complained of his recalcitrance in a bargaining situation, ‘I know, you thought I was colored, didn’t you’.”55 Here, Ellison’s friend’s joke slips off what Ellison refers to elsewhere as “the yokelike anti-Negro stereotypes” through the “shock of recognition” which the joke of race accomplishes.56 Regarding the protagonist of Invisible Man Ellison writes,
So my task was one of revealing the human universals hidden within the plight of one who was both black and American, and not only as a means of conveying my personal vision of possibility, but
54 Aristotle, Poetics. London: Penguin, 1996, 12-13.
55 Ellison, “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” 108.
56Id., “An Extravagance of Laughter,” p. 648.
as a way of dealing with the sheer rhetorical challenge involved in communicating across our barriers of race and religion, class, color and region—barriers which consist of the many strategies of division that were designed, and still function, to prevent what would otherwise have been a more or less natural recognition of the reality of black and white fraternity. And to defeat this national tendency to deny the common humanity shared by my character and those who might happen to read of his experience.57
This comic anagnorisis is a public “pants-ing,” a kind of undressing, which finds its humor in revelation of the naked truth.