seem, about how the contexts of language and history complicate any literal-minded interpretations of things, and make us vulnerable to real dangers if we ignore their complexities. The narrator of Invisible Man is constantly discovering that there is no meaning independent of context, that the world, as he puts it, is less “solid” than he thought, though he nevertheless holds onto the search for right interpretations because he will die without them.
In a traumatic scene, his college president, Dr. Bledsoe, expels him from the school, saying:
“You’re nobody, son. You don’t exist—can’t you see that? The white folk tell everybody what to think—except men like me. I tell them; that’s my life telling white folk how to think about the things I know about. Shocks you, doesn’t it? Well that’s the way it is. It’s a nasty deal and I don’t always like it myself. But you listen to me: I didn’t make it and I know I can’t change it. But I’ve made my place in it and I’ll have every Negro in the country hanging on tree limbs by morning if it means staying where I am.”
He was looking me in the eye now, his voice charged and sincere, as though uttering a confession, a fantastic revelation which I could neither believe nor deny. Cold drops of sweat moved at a glacier’s pace down my spine....
“A man gets old winning his place, son. So you go ahead, go tell your story; match your truth against my truth. The broader truth.”8
Ellison’s narrator stops paying attention. “I no longer listened, nor saw more than the play of light upon the metallic disks of his glasses, which now seemed to float within the disgusting sea of his words. Truth, truth, what was truth? Nobody I knew, not even my own mother, would believe me if I tried to tell them. Nor would I tomorrow, I thought, nor would I.”9
The meanings in Invisible Man are dizzying, but no more dizzying than those faced in America’s schools of poverty. The ironies, the unreliability of pronouncements, the mirrors within mirrors that confuse reality and appearance—these conditions are our normal state. In Ellison’s story, we have a school administrator punishing a student apparently to ensure his own standing with the white power brokers who lend him authority. Should the narrator believe that the exemplary president of the college is so self-hating, has so internalized hatred of his own people? Or is this only a stance the president assumes to advance his interests rationally in the racist context? Hard to believe the first interpretation; hard to believe the second. “I could neither believe nor deny,” the narrator concludes.
And how can we convey in any definite way the nightmarish intricacies of confusion and vertigo induced by dysfunctional schools. No one believes the young people when they try to tell the simple truth about their experience. They are doubted and distrusted from the moment they walk in the doors. And it is difficult for them even to believe themselves the next day.
Ellison’s protagonist is chastened again and again as his people and the country try to teach him that no words or symbols correspond in any simple way to “reality.” “I’ve come a long way from those days when, full of illusion, I lived a public life and attempted to function under the assumption that the world was solid and all the relationships therein. Now I know men are different and that all life is divided and that only in division is there true health.”
If we are going to have an effect on the world through our speech and action, we will have to learn to build health from confusing division. Health will not come from any literalist instructions or commands, but rather from complex, ambiguous terms in fluid and ever-changing combinations.
This is actually what human beings do, and in particular what Africans in America have been doing from the start. The crucial black cultural forms that function as tools for survival are spectacularly allusive, multivalent, and elaborate as symbolic systems: music, folklore, folk art, dance, and verbal inventiveness are immense cultural achievements now permeating the whole world’s culture, and they are in no way literal-minded.
In struggling to create his novel from the ground of black culture, Ellison turned to the work of his friend and mentor, Kenneth Burke. Burke was developing a theory of “dramatism,” the understanding of human motivation through the elements of drama. The protagonist’s remark that “all life is divided and only in division is there true health” could have been lifted from Burke’s A Rhetoric of Motives, which Ellison was reading as he composed Invisible Man.10 In a section titled “A metaphorical view of hierarchy,” Burke writes:
So the myth of society’s return to the child, or the child’s return to the womb, or the womb’s return to the sea, can all point towards a myth still farther back, the myth of a power prior to all parturition. Then divided things were not yet proud in the private property of their divisiveness. Division was still but “enlightenment”.…
Partition provides terms; thereby it allows the parts to comment on one another. But this “loving” relation allows also for the “fall” into terms antagonistic in their partiality, until dialectically resolved by reduction to “higher” terms.11
Burke and Ellison work the vein of rhetorical tradition that accepts the necessity of division—terms for and against, dizzy meanings heading off in all directions—but that seeks to harness division and fragments of meaning for common purposes and common ends. Burke’s guiding analogy for this approach to understanding human action is the genre of drama. A play necessarily divides competing principles between characters that battle and strive with each other. Within the play, one character or another may come out on top, but seen from a different vantage point, the roles of the opposing characters contribute together and collaborate in a common aesthetic purpose—the effect of the play as a whole.
Somehow or other, we must come to understand the roles of young people in this way. We must try to conceive of a unity of action where the young people, being themselves, contribute not to the state’s ends, but to an end worked out in the common good. The underlying difficulty is that schools of poverty necessarily bring together people of fundamentally different statuses in the social hierarchy: adults and youth; the educated and the uneducated; middle-class teachers and working-class youth; and increasingly, white teachers and students of color. Fortunately, the Burke/Ellison rhetorical tradition is especially useful in studying communication between different kinds within complex hierarchies. In literal terms, the powerful simply have power and the powerless do not. This is what makes us feel so trapped in schools. But in the imagined world of a play, both the powerful and the powerless contribute to the movement of the plot, influencing each other, and contributing to a totality that is beyond the absolute control of either party.
Once we understand young people as genuinely equal actors in the drama of the nation, not as pawns or victims or props, many more possibilities will begin to come to mind for entering the action and moving it along toward insurrection. In fact, they are moving us along already.
3 Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970).
4 Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America (New York: Basic Books, 1977).
5 Jonathan Swift describes the literalism of the Great Academy of Lagado in Gulliver’s Travels: “An expedient was therefore offered, ‘that since words are only names for things, it would be more convenient for all men to carry about them such things as were necessary to express a particular business they are to discourse on.’…[M]any of the most learned
