Invisible man
When Ralph Ellison said that “the joke [is] at the center of the American identity,” he also meant that the joker is at the center of American life. In a rapid- ly changing liberal society, with fluctuat- ing standards and values, the joker is an “American virtuoso of identity who thrives on chaos and swift change.”1
For the joker, identity is not a 1⁄2xed prin- ciple, established once and for all, but a fluid masquerade, an ironic display of masks and styles, gestures and titles, which accrue around a space that comes to be known as the “self.”
A great deal of work on identity pol- itics has focused on similar construc- tions of racial identity through com- plex cultural appropriations linked to masking, minstrelsy, and passing. But Ellison is more optimistic about these dynamics: he sees the absurd mix of styles that emerges from what he calls “pluralistic turbulence” as the only ap- propriate response to the absurdities of American politics and history.2 Ac- cordingly, anyone who assumes too serious a relationship with his own identity–anyone who refuses to play the joker–will likely be duped by more powerful jokers still.
© 2009 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences
In Ellison’s most important and best known work, Invisible Man (1952), the narrator does not learn how to joke un- til the end, when he 1⁄2nally concludes, “[I]t was better to live out one’s own absurdity than to die for that of others.”3 Even then, however, the Invisible Man hardly proves a comfortable and con1⁄2- dent joker. He retracts a joke he plays on a drunken woman attempting to seduce him, and he abandons the joke he plays on the Brotherhood almost as soon as he undertakes it. Ellison endorses joking as a survival strategy in liberal societies, but he also worries about the power jok- ers could acquire, and the violence they might do with it. If the joke really is at the center of American identity, Invisible Man raises the possibility that those in power might claim joking as
For the joker, identity is not a 1⁄2xed prin- ciple, established once and for all, but a fluid masquerade, an ironic display of masks and styles, gestures and titles, which accrue around a space that comes to be known as the “self.”
A great deal of work on identity pol- itics has focused on similar construc- tions of racial identity through com- plex cultural appropriations linked to masking, minstrelsy, and passing. But Ellison is more optimistic about these dynamics: he sees the absurd mix of styles that emerges from what he calls “pluralistic turbulence” as the only ap- propriate response to the absurdities of American politics and history.2 Ac- cordingly, anyone who assumes too serious a relationship with his own identity–anyone who refuses to play the joker–will likely be duped by more powerful jokers still.
© 2009 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences
In Ellison’s most important and best known work, Invisible Man (1952), the narrator does not learn how to joke un- til the end, when he 1⁄2nally concludes, “[I]t was better to live out one’s own absurdity than to die for that of others.”3 Even then, however, the Invisible Man hardly proves a comfortable and con1⁄2- dent joker. He retracts a joke he plays on a drunken woman attempting to seduce him, and he abandons the joke he plays on the Brotherhood almost as soon as he undertakes it. Ellison endorses joking as a survival strategy in liberal societies, but he also worries about the power jok- ers could acquire, and the violence they might do with it. If the joke really is at the center of American identity, Invisible Man raises the possibility that those in power might claim joking as