Magic and the Prestige in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man
- Issue:
- УДК / UDK: 82(092)
- DOI:
10.22455/2541-7894-2018-5-58-82
- Abstract:
Invisible Man is a theatrical novel. Invisible Man is an American novel, about the American experience. An experience, Ellison instructs, “in which the possibilities are many”. Specifically, Invisible Man is a novel about what becomes possible when the line between appearance and reality becomes blurred, and all that is left is the “mask” of reality, codified by ritualistic acts of concealing and revealing the “joke” of the present. In other words, Invisible Man is not so much about “race,” “racial authenticity,” “democratic equality,” “marginalization,” or the existential claims to the lived experience of being black. Ostensibly, it has these elements, but they are all mere ruses for something else, for the “joke” of these. And, by direct indirection, Ellison is telling us something about the manner, method, mode and articulation/disarticulation—that is, deployment—of the “joke” in the “theater of appearances” that is America. The novel is, in short, an examination of “what was really happening when your eyes were looking through”. In this sense of the “joke,” of the play between appearance and reality in the presence of the mask and its theatricality, Invisible Man is a novel that at its heart is concerned with magic.
- Keywords: Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, theatrical/secular magic, Existentialism, Ritual, Masking, Race
- References:
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