Findings

I’ve always liked Ralph Ellison’s ideas about invisibility in Invisible Man. Here’s a sample from the opening pages:

I am an invisible man… I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me… When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination — indeed, anything and everything except me… I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either. It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.

He goes on to describe the anger that boils up out of the “doubt that you really exist” as a result of being unseen. So being invisible is a mixed bag. Sometimes it’s an advantage, but ultimately we’re meant for visibility, and his book explores this rich metaphor on many levels.

Here’s Eudora Welty’s comment on the subject:

My temperament and my instinct had told me alike that the author, who writes at his own emergency, remains and needs to remain at his private remove. I wished to be, not effaced, but invisible — actually a powerful position. Perspective, the line of vision, the frame of vision — these set a distance. (One Writer’s Beginnings 87)

It’s invisibility (boy do I have a hard time typing that word!) in a different context than Ellison’s, but similarly double-edged; on the one hand it’s “powerful,” but on the backside is the potential of tipping into “effacement.”

At a level much less significant than either of these writers, I can affirm the psychological truth of what they’re saying. It brings back the memory of experiences as a child with an older boy down the street from us. Jimmy was really a sweetheart of a boy, but he was about 3 years older than I and when he would come over to play with my brother, he was convinced that he had to talk baby-talk to me. It used to infuriate me. So what did I do?

I pretended I couldn’t talk.

I remember that complex inner awareness of frustration at being regarded as less than I was, mixed with a sense of superiority that I knew more than Jimmy did, mixed with the knowledge that I could make him feel silly any time I wanted to by revealing that I could speak quite well. But I chose not to, I suppose because it felt powerful. I think the danger lies in the chance that you might play the role for too long, and forget the hidden truth of who you are.