Invisible Man Meeting #1, July 25.

Our first discussion of Invisible Man was very wide-ranging and exciting, and as we could have isolated and tracked the many motifs that Ellison works with in the novel, we instead discussed impressions of Ellison’s style and technique, thought deeply about the meaning of identity in the novel, and discussed the complicated roles of historical figures and social institutions in the novel. I will mention a few of the major discussion points, as the interrelationships that we uncovered are too numerous and complicated to detail here.

We noted the episodic nature of the book and found that the narrative breaks at the point in which the Invisible Man is reborn, after his electro-shock “therapy.” One student noted that there is a major shift in the Invisible Man’s engagement with the world after the rebirth: he moves from being a passive figure who honors the tacit expectations of his social environment – particularly at the college – to a person who is managing a more pervasive anger and can be direct about it. The student noted that the Invisible Man’s rage would erupt periodically and intensely before his break and became more of a state of being afterward. Another register of the Invisible Man’s change was obvious in his speech making: the content and contexts for his speeches (say the Battle Royal speech compared to his eviction speech) changes significantly, and this is worth the reader’s attention.

This led to some discussion on the stylistic choices that Ellison makes and how those choices tie in with the bigger themes of the book. Some students commented on the tone of the first part of the book, in which there is a sustained irony that colors the story as the Invisible Man tells of his college years, a tone that lightly mocks the character’s limited understanding of the forces bearing down on him at the time and is also critical of the pretensions of the college, its founders and administrators. I noted that this tone seems to collapse after the Invisible Man’s rebirth. The ironic tone compliments a theme that Mr. Cook pointed out, that of being a “part” of something and “apart” from something, a deep conflict that haunts the book. It allows the narrator to fully inhabit the deep sincerity of his youthful system of beliefs, but it makes clear that there is an impending break upon the horizon and the narrator is “apart from” and not “a part of” that world. Other students noted the interpolation of dialect speech, and others noticed passages (such as Rev. Barbee’s speech) that seem deliberately hackneyed, long-winded, or elevated in a way that seemed inappropriate or absurd, and this has the effect of pushing the reader out of the novel a little, giving the reader a sense of being at turns inside and outside the world of the book. We tried to understand Ellison’s decision to include scenes that seem to ignore the boundaries of what we think of as “real” life, i.e. the Battle Royal scene, the chaos of the Golden Day, the electro-shock therapy scene. Why do we often ask ourselves “is this really happening?” And why is Ellison forcing us to ask this question?

Here we pick up the thread of “identity,” which is clearly one of the most problematic themes in the book. We asked ourselves why the Invisible Man is nameless. Some felt that the lack of a name strips down any associations one might have with that name and encourages us to concentrate on the character’s individual consciousness and interrelationships. Mr. Cook noted the character’s struggle to insist that the core of his self is unknowable and can not be co-opted, as so many in the book attempt to do. The essence of the self is a mystery. We also wondered about the deep sense of shame and nausea the character feels when his name is called or his deepest memories are exposed, and we asked how this may be tied up in the problem of the name. It is also important to note that Ellison gets some comedic mileage out of the namelessness of his character, and that may points in the book are simply very funny, which relieves the book of a solemn, self-important or portentous tone.

I could go on forever and have probably glossed over points that meant a lot to some participants. This can not be helped when a discussion goes as well as this one did. Themes like power, lack of control, social institutions that are duplicitous or overlap with others, “play” and humor as a response to oppressive and hypocritical cultural expectations, all played a part in the discussion. For those who were not able to come, please write in the comment section of this post with a 250 + word response to either the ideas brought up in discussion or your own thoughts that have been percolating as you have been reading. Thank you, Mr. Telles.

July 11th meeting for Invisible Cities

Our July 11 meeting was a great start for the program: participants were open to the uniqueness of Invisible Cities and were resourceful and specific with their evidence from the text when discussing ideas. Here are some of the ideas discussed:

1) Mr. Cook made the point that the book implicitly encourages us to be more sympathetic to Polo's way of thinking, and Mr. Cook asked whether we can understand or appreciate Khan's position. Later in the class, students argued that elements of Polo's cities (or imagination) such as the cities that are always in flux, in a state of becoming or decaying, unknowable, etc., can cause a deep level of frustration or anxiety. In this way, Khan can be reassuring in his striving for solidity, full understanding, and completeness.

2) Students found the image of "the abyss" to be significant, and one student made the point that the cities' inhabitants, as well as Khan and Polo themselves, often work to protect themselves or deny this unknowable darkness (a particularly clear example being the city suspended above the abyss). When approaching the subject of the abyss (or death, if you will), even in metaphor, Khan and Polo shut down their discussion (i.e. Khan's imagined city of only departures).

3) Other motifs / themes that students pointed out are waste and rubbish as the underside of opulence or idealized forms, the interplay between memory and language (how articulating memory in language can erase or replace memory), Kahn's urge for control being frustrated by the complexities of Polo's descriptions, and the ever-present friction between fear and desire.

4) I asked the students for examples of images, passages, or ideas in the book that they had particular trouble understanding or placing within the framework of the book. One student mentioned the city of smiling faces that multiply all around Polo, while Polo, strangely, does not seem to be disturbed by it. Other students suggested this may be connected to a motif of denial in the book, and it was noted that there is also a motif of faces: faces that are barely recognizable, covered, or in this case, identical and unnervingly happy.

I mentioned that I found myself wondering about the female images in the book. Each city has a feminine name, and there are often very vivid female images. Besides Khan and Polo, there are few male figures that make much of an impression. One student said that this seemed to be Polo's way of keeping Khan's interest -- the manipulations of a storyteller. Others thought it might be tied in with desire, but we were not able to make a satisfying connection.


For those who were unable to come: thank you for sending your quotation response journals. If you were not able to come, we are asking that you respond to one or more of the ideas above in a blog comment. Please write these responses before the next meeting, and they should be around 250 words. They can be attached as a comment to this post.

We're going to tentatively schedule our next meeting for Monday, July 25 at 9:30. The same rules apply: if you are unable to come, please send along a copy of your quotation response journal and look for the blog post afterward. The text is the first half of Invisible Man, chapters 1-15. Thank you, Mr. Telles.