July 25th meeting: recap.

I started the meeting yesterday by addressing the Invisible Cities responses, which I thought were very strong in general.  The writing was thoughtful and clear, and the selections were very interesting and worth attention.  I had a few suggestions for students who wanted to improve.  One thing to look for (and I commented on this in many responses) are opportunities to move beyond observing something in the text and making a bold assertion about it.  In other words, many students were very good at noticing patterns, objects loaded with symbolic value and extended metaphors, but what was missing was a statement about why these things matter in the text.  You don’t have to constantly be making pronouncements throughout your paper, but occasionally stop and make an assertion about why all of the things you are noticing are significant.  And try to phrase your assertion in a confident way.  Another skill you should try to employ is the ability to appear resourceful with the text.  What I mean is if you notice something interesting in a selection, connect what you have noticed to other parts of the book.  This shows that you have some command over the material.  In essence, you would be writing “I see something happening here, and it is similar to something happening early in the book, etc.”  Or: “Here is something that also appears later in the book in a different, modified form which changes the reader’s understanding of it.”   

Invisible Man, being the huge and complex book that it is, led us in many directions but all of them were illuminating.  We started by trying to establish a sense of how the novel is structured or how it develops.  It has the elements of a Bildungsroman (a coming of age story of gradual social, intellectual, moral or artistic development) so we looked for moments of intellectual and social awakening.  Students brought up crucial scenes such as the Invisible Man’s interview with Bledsoe, his not-so-relaxing drive with Norton, the revelation of what’s really in Bledsoe’s letter, and his speech at the eviction.  One student noted that many of these moments are revelations of systems of social power and control that are under the surface of the culture the Invisible Man lives in. 

Apart from discussing these scenes, we also tried to address the style of the book, which was a topic that we kept returning to, as the style is highly unusual.  Many students found the tone of the book “creepy,” unsettling, darkly comic, and sarcastic.  I noted that the author distances the reader from the Invisible Man from the outset: the tone is aggressive and ironic, and one of the first things we see the man do is beat someone else up, possibly to death.  So we’re not feeling to empathetic at the beginning.  But the most unusual thing about the novel, it seems, is the almost caricature-like size and prominence of the metaphors and symbols, and the fact that many of the scenes seem so outrageous that they can’t possibly be imagined as really happening.  This led us to a discussion on literary styles such as the sophisticated use of irony and the “grotesque,” something that became associated with southern literature.  The grotesque style generally blows up or exaggerates elements of what we might think of as “real life,” creating a sense of things being surreal, dream-like, bizarre or disorienting.  I made the point that the grotesque style, when done well, doesn’t avoid reality or “the truth” by making a mockery of it: often the author’s purpose is to reveal or expose a truth by exaggerating elements of everyday life.  The significance of things and the relationships between things aren’t changed; how we imagine or visualize them is changed, however.  Ellison appears to very consciously be doing this (can you really imagine a Battle Royal happening??  Or a scene like the Golden Day??).  Please keep this in mind if you are tempted to criticize the book for being unrealistic or unbelievable.  Instead, ask yourself what ideas or conflicts are being dramatized and how the strangeness of the narrative might be necessary to get them across.

We finished by trying to make assertive statements in response to questions I provided, such as why the Invisible Man is never named, how Ellison is critiquing Booker T. Washington’s vision of African American’s social advancement, and what to make of the Trueblood episode, among others.  These will carry over to next time.

We will need to have the next meeting on Monday, August 12^th from 10-12.  The assignment is exactly the assignment you were given for the first half of the novel.  See the blog post for that.  Talk about surreal: hold on to your seats for the second half of the book.  A big thank you to everyone who came to the meeting yesterday.