Literature of the Americas Literature of the Americas 2541-7894 2542-243X IWL RAS Articles Magic and the Prestige in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man 2018 Copyright © 2026, IWL RAS 2026 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. 1. [Baker 1983] – Baker, Houston A. “To Move without Moving: An Analysis of Creativity and Commerce in Ralph Ellison’s Trueblood Episode.” PMLA XCVIII: 5 (October, 1983): 828-45. 2. [Baldwin 1963] – Baldwin, James. “Take this Hammer,” Interview with the National Educational Television by the KQED film unit San Francisco, 1963. 3. [Cruse 1967] – Cruse, Harold. Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. New York: New York Review of Books Classics, 1967. 4. [During 2002] – During, Simone. Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. 5. [Ellison 1980] – Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man (1952). New York: Vintage, 1980. 6. [Ellison 2003] – Ellison, Ralph. The Collected Writings, ed. John Callahan. New York: Modern Library, 2003. 7. [Heidegger 1981] – Heidegger, Martin. “Only God Can Save Us”, transl. by W. Richardson. In Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, ed. T. Sheehan. Chicago, IL: Precedent Publishing, 1981: 45-67. 8. 9. [Heidegger 1977] – Heidegger, Martin. “What is Metaphysics?” In Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings. New York: HarperPerennial, 1977: 89–111. 10. [Ortiz 2006] – Ortiz, Darwin. Designing Miracles: Creating Illusions of Impossibility. (The Netherlands: Magical Media, 2006), 15. Reprinted in Leddington, Jason. “The Experience of Magic.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism LXXIV: 3 (2016): 253-264. 11. [Stephens 2014] – Stephens, Michelle Ann. Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis, and the Black Male Performer. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. 12. [Tracy 2004] – Tracy, Steven C. A Historical Guide to Ralph Ellison. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2004. 13. [Trimmer 1978] – Trimmer, Joseph F. “The Grandfather’s Riddle in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.” Black American Literature Forum XII: 2 (Summer, 1978): 46-50. 14. [Watts 1994] – Watts, Jerry Gaffio. Heroism and the Black Intellectual: Ralph Ellison, Politics, and Afro-American Intellectual Life. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. 15. [Williams 1970] – Williams, Bert. Nobody: The Story of Bert Williams. New York: Macmillan Company, 1970.