SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue 1 - Journal - Page 58
Ellison has often been read as offering a self-referential meditation on figural opacity:
himself, a black man as a concept, and himself, a black man as a feeling. But instead of
reading the character as anything, I would posit that it is not a self-referential reading that
happens but a dualistic introduction, where Ellison introduces two characters and recasts the
protagonist as a minimally-speaking, luminescent nexus of the suspense-driven narrative–a
non-being, spectral protagonist: one that cannot be adequately incorporated into aesthetic
regimes.
Ellison writes: “I’ve illuminated the blackness of my invisibility–and vice versa”40
The excerpt plays on this and unsheaths two characters: the announced unnamed
physical, “ginger-colored” deuteragonist who narrates throughout, and the unannounced and
unnameable non-physical protagonist, the main force from which the story flows: Blackness,
which I will refer to as ‘the blackness.’ “the blackness” is a non-apparent apparition within
the plot that is not roped into the physical character's experiences. “the blackness” exists as
an absent presence constructed by and within an anti-black world, one which Ellison sets up.
As such, “...the blackness of my invisibility” spotlights a call toward the announced second
character. He uses ‘the blackness.’ Such a decision between ‘my’ and ‘the’ removes ownership
of Blackness, which classifies it as a leashable entity often reduced to Blackness as an interior
experience or condition one can own.
In Invisible Man, ‘the blackness’ of his (‘ginger-colored character’s) invisibility indicates
a disaggregate yet co-influential relation between two distinct entities that walk hand-inhand throughout the story–one which experiences the effects deriving from the source
cause: Blackness—the undeniable point from which everything radiates. As “the blackness”
exists, the “ginger-colored” man’s physical form undergoes constant dissimulation as he
permanently associates with Blackness as an unremovable collar, marking his indefinite and
infinite animalistic state.
The central question is how blackness and invisibility operate as mutually constitutive
forces that generate the "animal man."41 This generation occurs through a sophisticated
linguistic mechanism, specifically through the deployment of prepositions that enable
these conditions to fold into one another. Let us examine two crucial formulations. First,
"the blackness of my invisibility" establishes invisibility as a derivative of blackness. Yet
when we encounter "the invisibility of the blackness," we find this lineage inverted. Each
prepositional construction enacts a distinct form of erasure, and—this is critical—each
erasure paradoxically engenders a new mode of presence. What we observe here is not a
straightforward causal relationship but rather a resistance to linear determination. Neither
condition can claim ontological priority; instead, they exist in perpetual oscillation, each
continuously transforming into and emerging from the other in an endless cycle of mutual
constitution.
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson offers that ‘blackness’ and ‘the animal’ were forged together in a
process through which the black figural state is fetishized, brutalized, and utilized to stabilize
Ellison, Invisible Man, 13.
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World, Sexual Cultures
(New York: New York University Press, 2020).
42
Jackson, Becoming Human, 22.
40
41
35
