Propaganda

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Reading the dialogue between any of the characters in Invisible Man as they discuss Brotherhood ideology is an adventure into a bizarre rabbit hole. I keep trying to read into it as with any other aspect of the novel, but the words feel empty. It’s difficult to figure out what their ideology is. You can look deeper and deeper and then all you end up finding is rhetoric.

Here’s a good line to illustrate this: “The people are fully aroused; if we fail to lead them into action, they will become passive, or they will become cynical. Thus it is necessary that we strike immediately and strike hard!” (pg. 363). Throughout other parts of the novel, you get a slight sense of their views on race perhaps, but other than that we have no idea what the Brotherhood beliefs. What do they mean when they say “action”? What does that look like? What does “striking hard” mean? What are they trying to do at all?

This reminds me of the narrator’s speeches, where as readers we question whether he’s saying anything of substance at all. But for the Brotherhood, it doesn’t need to mean anything. It just has to make people feel something. Rhetoric is like spicy food: you can either take a solid bite of a habanero, or eat spicy chips until your stomach is writhing in pain. Similarly, the words can either say something precisely and make you feel something, or just be repeated to the point that you might as well believe in it.

It’s fairly obvious that Ellison is alluding to the Communist Party with the Brotherhood, and I wouldn’t be surprised. My mother told me about how she remembers watching television as a kid, and there would be updates about the “five year plans” (a staple of communist nations), and how the state news casters would go on about how “they had in only one year surpasses their five year plan, and how production was up, and how Yugoslavia was becoming a major world power”, and on and on. Like most stories that come from my mom, it’s so nonchalant. This kind of comedic, absurd television program to her is portrayed as another part of life. That story felt like an episode of Invisible Man; a surreal, hilarious, and mildly horrifying detail that’s “just part of life”. The rhetoric of the Brotherhood is another one of those surreal details, and it’s hilarious how vague their rhetoric is. By making their lack of substance so hyperbolically empty, Ellison is trying to satirize just how boneless the rhetoric of seemingly progressive parties is. Especially when you compare it to the tone and substance Ras the Exhorters monologue

The “piece of early Americana”, the “Jolly-N figure”, whatever you choose to call it, relates to this same idea. We get an image of a racist caricature of a black man having gold coins shoved down his throat. Are those coins meant to symbolize education? Wealth? Or perhaps the rhetoric of the Brotherhood? By having the narrator carry the broken statue into the Brotherhood with him, is he trying to show us that all this Brotherhood will do is mindlessly shove ideas down the narrator’s throat? We do get the image that he does buy into the Brotherhood ideology, and is just going into another situation and letting the tides of time and society carry him along, without becoming self-reliant quite yet. Or does it mean something that the statue is shattered? When will he discovered his invisibility?

Comments

  1. Aidan GarrettOctober 9, 2018 at 8:13 AM

    Great post! I feel like it's interesting that we never learn what the actual beliefs of the Brotherhood are. I think it could be so that the reader can simply identify the Brotherhood as an institution that is trying to control the narrator.

    ReplyDelete

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