Reading Experience I

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

In the summer of 2023, I began to read Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man. I must have read it decades ago but can’t say I recalled much beyond a vague sense of recognition and difficulty. Now, in the wake of a wave of racist violence that had swept through my adopted country, I wanted to read it again. I had also come across, in preparation for the present project, Ellison’s essays on the role of novels in American life, which led me to his writings on jazz. I remembered conversations with a friend involved in editing Ellison’s papers and then, serendipitously, heard from another friend in Basel about an exhibition of Jeff Wall’s “After Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue” that I had seen years ago at MoMa in New York City. A minute after deciding to reread it, a digital version was on my iPad.

Reading was slow, partly because medical treatments at the time left me tired and pensive. The language of the book itself resisted easy absorption, reminding me that American English is a foreign language—not only to me but also, as it were, to itself. As the narrator embarked on his adventures, the language seemed to splinter into dialects and speech patterns that, from Jim Trueblood to the brotherhood, shifted in tonal cadence and semantic rhythms. The same could be said of most “national” languages, including my so-called mother tongue; but in contrast to German, where linguistic diversity roots itself mostly in geography, American English seems more distinctly shaped by social, racial, and class segregations that traversed, and continue to traverse, the country. I remember trying to read Toni Morrison’s Beloved when it had just come out, in my first year in the United States; although I was at the time teaching and writing in English, at decisive moments I could not understand what was being said in the novel.

Ellison must capture this diversity of speech—from the sermon on the “Blackness of Blackness” to the bloody oration after the battle royale to the hero’s first experience of his own power of extemporaneous public speaking and its harnessing by the brotherhood—within the constraints of written language. I could sense how he chafes at the restrictions of alphabetic writing that make it so difficult to convey intonation, cadence, and bodily motion in written prose. I could sense this struggle, but only from afar, coming as I do from a language and culture that is notoriously scriptural. Nuance and tone in German is often indicated grammatically or by changes in the word order. The oral virtuosity of Black American languages in churches and song, though I can feel its persistence in jazz and hip-hop, belongs to an experience I cannot share. All I can do is acknowledge its presence and mourn its inaccessibility to me.

Six days into this reading, prompted perhaps by these reflections on the spoken, sung, and shouted word, I downloaded the audiobook. It is read by the actor Joe Morton—an imposing presence in each of his film and TV appearances—who delivers a masterpiece of recitation. It is hard to describe adequately the sensations his voice created in me: he is at the same time fearsome and authoritative, endlessly versatile but never exaggerated or comical. I know that members of the audiences of Charles Dickens’s readings often broke down in tears or even fainted, and this feeling of being helplessly under the sway of a narrative becomes palpable in Morton’s recording. His voicing of the diverse characters brings out the types of character encountered, and this gallery of types reconnected me to the experiences the narrator makes. The jealous and paranoid coworker, the maternal rescuer, the ideologue, the dropout, the fanatic—these are all characters I have encountered in my life, though not in this racial constellation.

Hearing and reading about slavery and racism in the United States evoke peculiar responses in German readers, expatriates or not: an intensified identification with the victims and an equally intensified revulsion against the perpetrators of injustice. I believe this stems from the historical fact that chattel slavery is the rare atrocity in which Germany was largely uninvolved, thus allowing German readers to reject any possibility of complicity. The blond man in Ellison’s prologue cannot possibly have been one of us.

One of the hooks that pulls my reading of this novel forward is the portrayal of ideology, exhibited most glaringly by the members of the brotherhood. Political ideology (to be more specific, Marxism) is a different, more diffuse discursive force than racism, and disentangling the two preoccupies the hero until the end. Members of the brotherhood claim they cannot possibly be racist because their ideology forbids it. Racism for them is a matter of intellectual confusion and nothing else. Growing up in the 1970s in (West) Germany, the conflict between ideology and prejudice was the neuralgic center in the conflict between the generations. The country was still—and in many ways, still is—reverberating from a past when these two forces were inextricably linked; antisemitism was justified ideologically, and Nazi ideology had antisemitism as its vital center. One of the ways in which the younger generation tried to liberate themselves from that past was to espouse the opposite ideology—Marxism in its many gradations, ranging from mild social advocacy to Maoist zeal. I recall ideologues—they called themselves “cadres”—of the ilk portrayed in Invisible Man visiting high schools in the 1970s, trying to recruit students for their particular faction. There was something mysteriously alluring in the promise that the right ideology would erase murky sentiments like racism, antisemitism, and sexism. I sympathize with the narrator’s temporary submission to ideology—to thought that is being thought elsewhere—because it promises to shelter him from the individual failures that seem to produce the inequities of racist experiences. In his journey, however, he experiences that ideological thought, abstracted from bodies and places, is empty thought. Yet what is supposed to replace it?

Is this attraction to ideology still comprehensible to younger readers? What takes the place of ideology today?

THESE ARE BUT A FRACTION of the sensations, thoughts, and ruminations that accompanied me while reading Invisible Man. They are not emotions but reflections and reactions, specific to this encounter at that time, between me and this book; in the way they came to me they seemed not to be mine but had me as their meeting point. They are singular and internal, but they record a real movement, a real change—on a most basic level I have become a (re-)reader of Invisible Man, part of a community formed and transformed by it.

My observations do not and cannot lay claim to originality; they do not attempt a new interpretation, or grapple with a new paradigm of analysis (a new “reading”). If I had been trained to attend to and articulate my reading experiences as I have learned to articulate impersonal judgments of literary knowledge, I am sure I could express them with more nuance and depth. Together, they make up the raw experience of my reading this book. I am an aged and professional reader; for young, “lay,” Black readers, these reactions will be much closer to the unsettled core of their daily experiencing. For anyone, however, these experiences are the “real right thing” (Henry James’s term) in our relation to literature.

And yet, should I venture to write about Invisible Man or to teach it in a lecture or seminar, none of these experiences would make it onto the page or on a slide. Neither in scholarly analysis nor in pedagogical practice and only rarely in nonacademic criticism does the reading experience come into sustained focus. In our conversations we may disagree on the interpretations of literary works, and on the choices of texts we read, but we cannot disagree that we have read them, and that this reading constitutes a temporally extended, spatially situated, and qualitatively specific, a singular experience. The “thatness” and singularity of reading experiences is the subject of this book.