For the final blog of the month, I wanted to use
this space to take a deeper into some of the seminar notes I had come up with
my our group’s presentation on Clifton-Riots from Invisible Man, which I felt I wasn’t able to voice very well
due to time and well, a sore voice! Here, I want to look into the conversation,
rather a key line, between Brother Jack and the Brotherhood against the
Invisible Man following his speech at Clifton’s funeral, which is critical in
bringing out some of Ellison’s finest commentary on the essence of the struggle
between power and control. IM finds himself facing off against Brother Jack and
the theoreticians of the Brotherhood, and in trying to explain himself to them
Jack simply states, “If so, listen to me: you were not hired to think” (pg
469). Brother Jack’s words to IM are critical in understanding the nature of
Ellison’s portrayal of manipulation and domination across the novel, which in
essence is characterized by blind submissiveness. By saying that it is a blind
submission and adherence is critical as well, as the idea of sight and
blindness is also a key recurring thematic motif in the novel as well for this
very reason. Looking at blindness in the novel, one only has to think of the
two most prominent, the blind Reverend Barbee and the half-blind Jack, who find
themselves literally impaired in their vision of what lies before them.
However, with the IM, his blindness is found on a much more metaphorical level,
as it is something that is impressed upon him by Jack and the Brotherhood, who
would keep him blind to the outside world by making him out to a piece of clay,
able to molded and sculpted into whatever they deem most fit or necessary for
their circumstances. By IM saying that he is starting to think is, in the perspective
of the Brotherhood, an attempted maneuver to undermine their authority and
domination in IM’s attempt to try to mold himself and his own identity instead
of having it all done for him by the Brotherhood. If one were to put it in more
visual terms, IM is “Sambo the dancing doll, ladies and gentlemen. Shake him, stretch
him by the neck and set him down,-He’ll do the rest. Yes!” (pg 431). IM is
nothing more than a doll to the Brotherhood who by speaking out during the
funeral essentially tried to voice his own opinion and pull his own puppet
strings. Not only this, but it was IM’s attempt to bring himself out of the
blindness of thought and to try to see for himself, something that the
Brotherhood noted as being quite dangerous. From a historical standpoint, this
is the greatest caution and fear within a communist government, as uniqueness
of thought is an immediate deviation away from the Marxist doctrine that is
supposed to be followed and obeyed with religious piety. This was why Stalin
purged out millions of his own people during his early 1930s collectivization
of Russia and why he held the Great Purge Trials of upper level Politburo
members, a fear of an undermining of authority. Those in power will do whatever
it takes to maintain that role of reality for them, willing to provide whatever
illusion for the common people to believe and accept as their petty truth so
that they may stay in control. Until now, IM has believed that Brotherhood
illusion to be his own personal reality and self-identity while Jack maintains
supremacy, but in truth, Jack’s powerful line to IM is a shattering moment of
realization for IM, when he finally gets it, that he is but the servant, and
Jack the master.
Monday, March 31, 2014
Sunday, March 23, 2014
One
For this next blog, I wanted to accomplish two
things: first, I felt from my last poetry blog on post-World War I
disillusionment that I ought to explore that idea again here, and second, to
explore the ideas of loneliness, isolation, and the conceptual conflict between
truth and illusion as are constantly found in Invisible Man which we are currently studying in class. To
accomplish both these tasks, I looked to the lyrics of Metallica once again,
this time those of “One”, a dreary thrash ballad with a powerful message hidden
behind the words. The song’s lyrics are based off of the 1939 novel, Johnny Got His Gun by David Trumbo,
ironically written the same year of the breakout of the Second World War. The
story follows a World War I soldier who is hit by a landmine and nearly killed
but survives despite having lost his arms, legs, eyes, ears, and mouth, with
his brain and mind kept perfectly intact, leaving him a prisoner of his mind.
The impending result of such a horrendous atrocity of the war is a person who
is trapped within himself, doomed to suffer from loneliness for the rest of his
life, his only companion being his sporadic thoughts and dreams. The opening
lyrics paint a chilling picture of the soldier’s condition, saying, “I can’t
remember anything, can’t tell if this is true or dream, deep down inside I feel
to scream, this terrible silence stops me”. Of these lines, the second about
truth and dream, or rather what is and what seems, is what stood out to me, as
like the anonymous narrator in Invisible Man, one of the greatest tragedies of
life is not knowing how to tell the difference between the two, or worse,
believing that a dream is the truth or vice versa. The disabled soldier is
trapped in his own darkened mind, unable to experience the light of truth, and
as a result can never know what is actually real. As the lyrics continue, it is
revealed that there is one truth that the soldier knows: “There is not much
left of me, nothing is real but pain now”. Pain, torment, and discomfort are
the only truths that the soldier can ever identify with now because he has been
denied everything that would have allowed him to experience any other sort of
truth. Looking at this from a historical perspective, this is perhaps the
greatest attribute of post-WWI disillusionment of the “Lost Generation”, that
they had been exposed to what the world was really like. Four horrible years of
a stalemated battle of trench warfare along the French border taught countless
soldiers what life really consisted of, which was pain, suffering, and
ultimately death. The chorus reveals the agony of what the war has brought on
to the soldier, as he cries out, “Hold my breath as I wish for death, Oh please,
God, wake me”. From a literary perspective, these lines are an interesting way
to look at what the real nature of truth is. The soldier says “wake me”,
alluding to him being caught within the illusion of his own mind as a result of
his impairment, but if he were to be “awoken”, what would he wake up to? As
countless other writers of the time like Hemingway and TS Eliot noted through
their own works, the truth of the world that the soldier wishes to wake up to
is not much better than the confines of his mind, as it is equally filled with
pain, discomfort, and sorrow. Essentially, whether in the illusion of the mind
or in the light of reality, there is no escape from pain, for it is a horror
that plagues both imagination and reality. In a final analytical note, it is
necessary to look at the line of the second chorus, “Now the world is gone, I’m
just one”. Following the soldier’s failed suicide attempt after his tracheotomy
and his denied request to be displayed on a tour to show people the physical
atrocities of war, the soldier realizes that his destiny is in his hospital bed,
the world essentially having past away from him and being the only “one” left.
His fate is to fully experience isolation and loneliness, to never again be a
part of the world, his only memory of it being of all the pain and suffering
that it caused him. Ultimately, he will be “one” with torment and the bitter
memories of the past. As the doctor puts it in the film, “This young man will
be as unfeeling as the dead until the day he joins them”.
Tuesday, March 18, 2014
Invisible Man: A Crisis in Clifton
For this blog, after spending the past two days
working on Invisible Man seminar
research in class, I wanted to use the blog space to explore some points of
analysis from the section my group was assigned for the assignment, which was
looking at Brother Clifton’s fallout from the Brotherhood all the way to the
final Chapter with the rioting in Harlem. More specifically, I wanted to
analyze some of the comments that Anonymous makes to himself following Brother
Clifton’s death after he resisted arrest, shot dead on the streets while
selling the strange Sambo dolls. Perhaps before examining Brother Clifton
himself, it is important to look at the Sambo dolls that he sells on the
streets after going missing. In the words of Clifton, “Shake it up! Shake it
up! He’s Sambo, the dancing doll, ladies and gentlemen. Shake him, stretch him
by the neck and set him down, He’ll do the rest Yes! He’ll make you laugh, he’ll
make you sigh” (Ellison. 431). The doll can easily be understood to be working as
a foil to Anonymous and what the various elders and mentors of his life see
him. The Sambo dolls are puppets, pulled by the strings of a puppet master in
control and forced to do whatever it is told, with no thought given to what the
puppet may want because the puppet is not actually human and therefore has no individual
right to opinion or conduct of thought. In this way, Anonymous can very much be
compared to being like the Sambo doll, constantly being pulled in various
directions by the likes of Mr. Norton, Dr. Bledsoe, Brother Jack, and even Ras
the Exhorter to a certain extent, all of whom refuse to acknowledge the individual
identity of Anonymous since they know that his identity is linked to something
greater than himself, and thus has no need for one. At this point in the novel,
Anonymous does not so much identify his own personal manipulation by the
Brotherhood and others in life, which will come following the Harlem riot
realization, but correlates it more following Clifton’s brutal death as a fall out
from history. He reflects on the fallout
saying, “I’d forget it and hold on desperately to the Brotherhood with all my
strength. For to break away would be to plunge… to plunge” (Ellison. 435). Here,
Anonymous refuses to look to Clifton’s death as a dreary foreshadowing to his
own realizations about the Brotherhood, but instead backwardly uses it to
solidify his own illusion of what the Brotherhood means to him. Anonymous is
still desperate to maintain that the world that the Brotherhood shows before
him is one of truth and reality, something Anonymous longs for following his
first awakening after reading Dr. Bledsoe’s letter to Mr. Emerson, after which
he promised himself to never let himself be manipulated again from the denial
of truth. Yet here he is, with a new life and name within the Brotherhood, an
organization that he has so much confidence in, he is willing to take on a new
identity that is solely linked to it. In the opinion of Anonymous, Clifton fell
out of history because he failed to identify with the history and truth that
the Brotherhood had shown him, losing his identity and his life as a
consequence. Anonymous is willing to do everything in his power to make sure
that such a fallout does not happen to him, and in the process of doing this,
he signs away what fragment of individual identity he may have had left by
deciding to keep his parasitic relationship to the Brotherhood, something
without which would kill him.
Sunday, March 9, 2014
Killed Paive- July 8th 1918
For the first of my blogs this month, I decided to
mix in some of what I’m learning in AP European History, the events surrounding
the First World War, with my choice of a poem. For this month’s poem, I chose
Ernest Hemingway’s poem Killed Paive-July
8th 1918, one that heavily reflects on the perspective and
attitude felt by many in the months before The Great War’s conclusion, which
would leave an attitude of isolation and disillusionment, both of which would
ultimately define the “Lost Generation” in the year to come. It is a bitter
personal reflection, as Hemingway himself wrote this after being stationed in
Paive, Italy in July 1918, a few months before the 11/11/1918 Armistice, and
was an ambulance driver until he was severely wounded by a mortar shell.
Hemingway begins his harrowing close-encounter with death with the opening
lines, “Desire and all the sweet pulsing aches and gentle hurtings that were
you”. Clearly, Hemingway is reflecting on who this soldier was as a person
before he was ultimately found himself out on the front lines fighting a war.
He reminds the reader of how each and every person who lost their life in the
war isn’t just some number to be added to a long list of statistics, but a
living, breathing, and amicable person, someone who had dreams and desires for
how they wanted their life to be, just like any other person. Just like a
person also they had their own heartaches and painful memories, but no matter
how much we may not like to have these dreaded thoughts in our minds, it is
what makes us all human, one of the key elements that helps to separate us away
from mindless animals. The fact that Hemingway reminds us of just how human
each and every soldier was is critical in regards to what he says next, “Are
gone into the sullen dark”, because he now forces the reader to contrast the
qualities of humanity with their absence. As the soldier finds himself nearing
death, it is not just his body that will cease to exist, but who he was as a
person as well. All the qualities of humanity, both the passionate desire for
greatness alongside the pitfalls of pain and emotion, shall pass along into
darkness and ceasing to exist. The final portion of the poem is a sad telling
of the real event, in which when the mortar shell exploded, there was another
soldier in between him and the shell, who was killed instantly while another
had their legs ripped off. He hauntingly reflects on this experience by saying,
“Now in the night you come unsmiling To lie with me A dull, cold, rigid bayonet
On my hot-swollen, throbbing soul”. Hemingway’s lines here are a comparison
between himself and the dead soldiers who now lie before him, seeing how cold
and lifeless they have become in staunch comparison to his own pounding heart.
Hemingway had a first-hand encounter with the atrocities of war, seeing how
easily it consumes the lives of the soldiers forced to die on the front lines
for a cause pressed onto them by their country. Even though the war would end
in a few months, Hemingway knew from this moment onward that one can never
really go back to how things were, and it seemed that through all the
atrocities of war that he and everyone else in his generation felt a little
less human in the years to come.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)