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Call Me/It Ishmael: The Sound of Recognition in Call It Sleep and Invisible Man
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
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These are, respectively, the first sentence of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and the last sentence of Henry Roth's Call It Sleep. Each centrally keys into the title (and a governing trope) of its particular text; each locates its subject precisely. Ellison's protagonist speaks to us from within a state which he calls “hibernation”; David Schearl takes leave of his readers by entering into one – what the penultimate sentence tells us we “might as well call …sleep.” I want to read these two remarkably contiguous moments alongside each other for a moment before I proceed to a discussion of exactly what such reciprocal facing of texts might entail.
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References
NOTES
1. Ellison, Ralph, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage, 1972)Google Scholar; and Roth, Henry, Call It Sleep (New York: Avon, 1968)Google Scholar. In the former, the narrator enlightens us, “Now, aware of my invisibility, I live rent-free in a building rented strictly to whites, in a section of the basement that was shut off and forgotten during the nineteenth century” [5] (p. 5; hereafter the page numbers for the two volumes are cited in the text).
2. Facing Black and Jew: A Thematics of Recognition (work in progress). As this article exemplifies, this project couples texts by African American and Jewish American writers, reading them through, against, and alongside one another. The title hints at the Levinasian spirit in which the book proceeds: “face” as the ethical (and ethnic) site of moral summons and answerability), but also a conscious attempt to perform literary history with an ethicopolitical edge, that is “facing” at each other (and by extension at us) two ethnically marked American literary traditions.
3. Bakhtin, Mikhail, “Discourse and the Novel,” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Holquist, Michael (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 367.Google Scholar
4. See Boelhower, William, Through a Glass Darkly: Ethnic Semiosis in American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984)Google Scholar, and Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988)Google Scholar. I address both in my “Incognito Ergo Sum: The Value of Ethnic ‘-’ in Cahan, Johnson, Larsen, and Yezierska,” in Ethnicity, Modernism and Modernity, ed. Gates, Henry Louis Jr., and Jarab, Josef (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).Google Scholar
5. Faulkner, William, “Faulkner at Nagano,” in Essays, Speeches, and Public Letters, ed. Meriwether, James (New York: Random House, 1966).Google Scholar
6. Bakhtin's, Mikhail phrase. See the relevant observations in Bakhtin, “Discourse and the Novel,” 365.Google Scholar
7. This last distinction, as I demonstrate later, possesses only superficial validity at best.
8. Gates, Henry Louis Jr., “Bad Influence,” New Yorker (03 7, 1994): 94–98.Google Scholar
9. To organize the diversity of American Jewish literature around a Jewish “theme” or “characteristic” will always seem arbitrary after a certain point, if theme serves categorical purposes before descriptive ones. Lyons's, Bonnie K. survey of postwar fiction, “American-Jewish Fiction Since 1945” (in Handbook of American-Jewish Literature: An Analytical Guide to Topics, Themes, and Sources, ed. Fried, Lewis [New York: Greenwood, 1988])Google Scholar, is representative in this respect, with its many headings like “T'shuva,” and “Menshlichkayt vs. Manliness,” “The Celebration of Talk,” and even something as centrally Jewish as “Time, History, and Memory.” Not that such categories aren't apposite, of course; but as with literary history in general, they function as retro-constructions of text, not mirrors. By contrast, Wisse's, Ruth argument, in “Two Jews Talking: A View of Modern Yiddish Literature (in What Is Jewish Literature? ed. Wirt-Nesher, Hana [Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1994])Google Scholar, about the centrality of Jewish argument, for example – that it is both religiously and culturally denning for Jewish self-understanding as well as for Jewish standing within a non-Jewish world – suggests a more flexible and reliable model for analyzing, assembling, and reading secular Jewish culture in America.
10. At the time, African American authors understood their contributions as part of a flowering of “New Negro Literature”; the more recent term, “Harlem Renaissance,” is now uniformly employed to denote both the period of cultural production and the body of texts produced (see Huggins, Nathan, Harlem Renaissance [New York: Oxford University Press, 1971]Google Scholar; Lewis, David Levering, When Harlem Was in Vogue [New York: Oxford University Press, 1989]Google Scholar; and Douglas, Ann, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920's [New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1995]).Google Scholar
11. Another parallel within difference: the same could just as well be said for Invisible Man, the uncanny coincidence of Ellison and Roth both being essentially one-novel authors only strengthening the convergence here. (While aware of Roth's ongoing publication of his multivolume second novel, I hazard to regard it pace Roth himself as a continuation, even perhaps a restaging, of his earlier and famous text.)
12. As the overarching title implies, recognition plays a central role in my Facing Black and Jew: A Thematics of Recognition. See also my “Incognito Ergo Sum” and Narrative Ethics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995)Google Scholar for a more generalized working out of the concept in nonspecifically “minority” discourse, and also Taylor's, CharlesThe Politics of Recognition: An Essay (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).Google Scholar
13. Bakhtin, Mikhail, “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel,” Dialogic Imagination, 250.Google Scholar
14. Here, then, is probably the clearest difference between Roth's purposes and those of proletarian writers like Michael Gold. If Call It Sleep's telos is a closure of sorts, it is one merely promised by the novel's own terms – a fragmented world of bits and pieces awaiting some purely affective or internal synthesis.
15. Compare the conventional slave narrative trope, as found, for example, in Harriet Jacob's brother's “A True Tale of Slavery”: “He left us the only legacy that a slave father can leave his child, his whips and chains” (Jacobs, John S., “A True Tale” in The Leisure Hour: A Family Journal of Instruction and Recreation [London, 1861], 86Google Scholar [my italics]; I thank Jean Fagan Yellin for this reference).
16. Obviously, the link to “patriarchy” here – even more – flagrant in a text like David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident – sets the stage for a body of writing by black women writers (for example, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place, and Alice Walker's The Color Purple), which recasts cultural transmission as a drama, set of roles, and thematics associated instead with women. At its best, such work gives voice to a fuller sense of heritage, of a culture and its stories sinuously “passed on.”
17. Ellison's novel resists subtlety in this respect, too. But its very obviousness, – for example, Trueblood's dream in the first chapter, the various Freudian objective correlatives (e.g., the fart) at the beginning of chapter 2, the “partly uncoiled firehouse” at the beginning of chapter 19, and the name and character of Supercargo – demonstrates its utility as one more “discourse” to be ranged within the novel's scoring of many voices.
18. We discover later in the novel that Albert actually is a parricide (of sorts): “Didn't she tell you that my father and I had quarreled that morning, that he struck me, and I vowed I would repay him. … I could have seized the stick when the bull wrenched it from my father's hand. When he lay on the ground in the pen. But I never lifted a finger! I let him be gored!” (390). The idolatrous ornament of the bull's horns is thus even more laden with now-Oedipal meaning.
19. Invisible Man himself makes the connection to William Boelhower's recurrent image for ethnic semiosis almost irresistable here: “Could this be the way the world appeared to Rinehart? All the dark-glass boys? ‘For now we see as through a glass darkly, but then – but then –’ I coudn't remember the rest” (480, my italics).
20. See Bakhtin's, Mikhail discussion of character in Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays, trans. Liapunov, V. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 172 ff.Google Scholar
21. See my “Incognito Ergo Sum.”
22. The text suggests that both David's sexual mystification and his father's violence to such perceptual alterations. The change is rendered even more movingly several pages previous: “Solidities baffled him now, eluded him with a veiled shifting of contour … The sunlight that had been so dazzling before was mysteriously dulled now as though filtered by an invisible film. Something of its assertion had been drained from stone, something of inflexible precision from iron. Surfaces had hollowed a little, sagged, edges had blurred. The stable lineaments of the mask of the world had overlapped, shifted configuration as secretly and minutely as clock-hands, as sudden the wink of an eye” (274).
23. In addition to initiating the novel's constant as toward mix and mosaic, the casual ethnic assemblage in the prologue is answered in the climatic rendering of mingled voices and ethnicities in the penultimate chapter of Book 4: “David opened his eyes. Behind, between them, and around them, like a solid wall, the ever-encroaching bodies, voices, faces at all heights, all converging upon him, craning, peering, haranguing, pointing him out, discussing him” (432).
24. Here, too, the text announces but holds in reserve narrative possibilities that it exploits later on (in chapter 19 of “The Rail” [391–93], an almost comic crosshatching of incidents and information explodes in a frenzy of mtsrecognition, central to which is Albert's “discovery” that he is not David's actual father). Plot dynamics, such as they are, however, turn out to be more a function of random accretion and coincidence of detail than any teleological necessity, and thus plot more plausibly serves the dictates of “recognition” – as thematic prime mover – than the other way around.
25. As I pointed out earlier, Roth is not unique among his modernist Jewish contemporaries in fashioning a composite form out of distinct idiolects, be they Christian and Jewish, or Biblical and secular. Dahlberg's From Flushing to Calvary or Reznikoff's By the Waters of Manhattan, for example, conspicuously exploit this kind of Wasteland-style patchwork. But Roth could not have selected his scripture idly: the verses from Isaiah and the chapters from Exodus that they accompany both climax in Revelation (the Torah portion describing the giving of the Ten Commandments on Sinai), the central issue in Call It Sleep. The prominence, as well, of the taboo theme in both sedrah and haftarah plays off the text's (and David's) preoccupation with idolatry and mystified sexuality.
26. Sleep, incidentally, has illusory or sedative force in Invisible Man, as well: Invisible Man frequently speaks of having awakened out of a stupor, for example, “I'd been asleep, dreaming” (433) or, as he says of himself in the prologue, “I … walk softly so as not to awaken the sleeping ones [for] there are few things as dangerous as sleepwalkers” (5).
27. Deleuze and Guatteri's vexed formulation from “Towards a Minor Literature,” in Kafka.
28. Fanon, Frantz, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Markmann, Charles Lam (New York: Grove, 1967).Google Scholar
29. See the earlier note in reference to Gates's article, “Bad Influence.”
30. Schwartz, Delmore, Genesis (New York: New Directions, 1943), 117.Google Scholar