VISIBILITY CLEAR

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison is one of my favorite books, and over William Faulkner's The Sound & the Fury and Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn I consider it The Great American Novel. I read this book many years ago, but in the light of the current political headlines I might as well re-ruminate on its greatness now.

Ellison was African-American, and one of the reasons that pushed him into writing the book was to curve through words the image of an intellectual African-American - some kind of a discourse against the then notion that an intelligent black is an oxymoron - and the book, as he says in a latter Introduction, was fashioned as a "raft of hope, perception, and entertainment that might help keep us afloat as we tried to negotiate the snags and whirlpools that mark our nation's vacillating course towards and away from the democratic ideal".

What, then, is the democratice ideal? More significantly, What, or who, is an Invisible Man?

Ellison, through his alter-ego narrator, explains the metaphor right at the outset of the novel's Prologue:

"I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me."

The invisibility factor springs from the mind of the black narrator who seemingly argues that white America was morally blind to his black predicament, and that his constantly being taken for granted caused him to doubt his very own physical existence - a sad allegory to the breaking down of his self-confidence.

Ellison knew, first-hand, the intensity of the black people's social struggle, but in his readings of literature by and about the blacks, he was astounded by the black-protagonists' lack of intellectual depth - and so he rebounded from this stereotype by making his narrator possess a very intelligent persona. It is no surprise then that the narrator's politics is centrifugal, a thinking that clings towards the left.
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Many years forward and the Invisible Man has evolved into a Barack Obama, a liberal intellectual whose win the last presidential election not only kept the raft of black hope afloat but enabled it to veer towards the democratic ideal - an ideal that transcends the literature of Faulkner and Twain, an ideal that bespeaks of true political equality, an ideal world in the realm of a new American society where the blacks and the whites, the reds, the yellows, and the browns, are visible to one another, one hundred per cent, an ideal where all people regardless of color are capable of kindling and fulfilling the great American ambition.

And so indeed, The African-American Man is now, emphatically, a truly Visible Man.