The Horizon: The Potential of Idealism

In one of Jack's recent blog posts, he describes Eatonville as giving off a sort of Utopian vibe when Jody begins to build it up. This led me to  re-examine the idealistic value in Janie's nature  that we have seen so far in Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, in a new light. It is clear that Janie has some in-articulated ideal she dreams her life to live up to -- an ideal that is very much connected to some part of who she is that she is waiting for the right moment to reveal -- and it's intriguing to compare her to Bigger and the narrator who were also initially unable to articulate what it was that was propelling them towards where they were going in their journey to self discovery and increased awareness of circumstances.

It was surprising to me just how controversial Janie's idealistic nature was to others from discussions on recent blog posts and in class. It seems like she can be easily viewed in two ways: as bravely admirable or selfishly/childishly impractical. To me, however, she must fall somewhere in between as all idealistic approaches to anything must. People will praise and glorify the idealist who succeeds and scoff at the ones that don't, saying that they knew it along, that he or she had her heads too high up in the clouds. Last year, I took the "Utopias and Dystopias in Literature" course taught by Ms. Linder. I can see how Janie sees the potential of "Utopia" in the people she meets. It's not a exactly a romantic possibility she is searching for then -- although that is certainly part of it - but the potential of infinite possibilities in general. This is very much evident in the strength she has to marry Logan motivated by her belief that she may realize love and motivation to follow Joe Starks because of his big talk about creating something out of nothing, representing to her the "horizon." I feel a sense of foreboding with how smoothly things have been running in Eatonville (though I may of course be wrong) and in a similar way there is a sense of foreboding in all of Janie's hope, manifesting itself for instance through the revealing of Joe's true nature. As with most Utopian/Dystopian literature, things fall apart, or turn out to be more than they seem. I remember I'd open a book for last year's class already mentally preparing myself for that moment. In all honesty, I was under the impression that my initial belief that there was no point in attempting to make things perfect, or to be extreme, to even try and make things better if it will never exactly live up to the ideal, would be confirmed. I ended up realizing something else however. At the same time I was reading Arcadia, I was writing a paper about the Port Huron Statement for U.S History. (Please forgive me if this is too much of  a digression for you.) I was particularly struck by the last line of the document which reads, "If we appear to seek the unattainable, it has been said, then let it be known that we do so to avoid the unimaginable." Striving for Utopia is not particularly meaningless then, having a powerful, if unrealistic ideal that drives you is not completely pointless and childish. In essence, and I don't mean to sound platitudinous, there is something to be gained from trying. Perhaps it was the norm of the time to marry a Logan and stay with him, perhaps a real life Janie would leave and not find ideal love elsewhere but there would have been no possibility of change had she not left -- any revolution we have gone through throughout history was started out by an idealistic fringe that gradually became the norm.

I realize of course that there are many downsides to idealism. The ideal that one is chasing may not be a beneficial ideal or perhaps it deludes one from seeking truth -- which there is fulfillment in -- in being so consumed with the hope of seeking happiness. At times however, having an ideal in mind can help one to seek truth. It comes down to articulating the ideal so that one is self aware enough to avoid the dangers of idealism. I suppose in reality we all have our own, maybe subconscious versions of an ideal, ranging on different levels. Perhaps we are so quick to judge Janie because her ideal is illustrated so deliberately and instilled into the motif of the novel with such fervor by Hurston. The narrator in Invisible Man initially believes he just wants to climb up the ladder to the highest point imaginable for him but in the end he is able to articulate and realize that the "ideal" he is actually seeking is to realize his identity and in turn is able to come closer to truth. I understand that telling Bigger to go for it, go be a pilot, follow your dreams, is unrealistic but at the same time, in changing, in doing something (albeit killing women and writing a kidnap note), attempting to manipulate someone else for once, he is able to articulate more of what has been constricting him. However, it is significant neither Bigger or the narrator are ever able to completely articulate/figure things out, fulfill their own realized version of an ideal though they gain something from getting closer. Not to digress too much again but I can connect what I am trying to say about the potential of idealism to Plato's Symposium which we are reading in Intro to Philosophy. He has Diotima define love as the perpetual desire for absolute good. This absolute good is the ideal we are all striving towards but the truth of the matter is that we can never fully reach it -- we can never fully uncover the truth and yet we still love. In some ways, there is something to be said about giving up, living by the rules of a religion you may doubt just in order to cope and try to be happy. However, there is also something to be said about continuing to search for the truth you will never find because the search itself is the method of "coping." I do not see Janie's ideal as illustrated so far as detrimental and I am intrigued to see where Janie's idealism takes her.  

But I guess I'm what I

In "Theme for English B," -- one of the poems we read at that the start of the semester -- Langston Hughes writes: "But I guess I'm what I feel and see and hear." Through Bigger, Wright agrees that to an extent, we are what we see and hear -- as Max tells Bigger -- but we are more than that, who we are lurks somewhere in-articulated in the depths of the nameless unique force that propels us to feel what we, as individuals, feel so strongly. In Invisible Man, Ellison says that we are still more than all of that. We are not what we see and hear nor are we what we feel because the reality we, as individuals, are currently living, believing, and trusting in may not be true reality but someone else's "reality." In that case, we cannot only be what we feel -- for instance, the contentedness in delivering a speech after being forced to participate in a battle royale, or the strong foolish humiliation in playing the caricature of a lumbering brute in the bedroom -- because our feelings are often deluded, we cannot always trust them, we are made to dance, inside and outside of ourselves, under someone else's strings. There is something in both Wright and Ellison's approach however, that resonates in the same way, suggesting that there is a not yet articulated something and a not quite yet discovered reality that gives us our identity, and in ever coming closer to articulating and discovering -- as Bigger and the narrator do but never fully carry through -- we get closer to the freedom that must be felt in a complete self-awareness that will allow for an enlightened awareness of society and ability to deal with those outside forces. We see Bigger's closeness to a full self discovery make him readier to accept death and the narrator's closeness make him ready to come out of hibernation and attempt to connect with the outside world.

It' s little surprise then that Ellison was so upset at Grinell -- saying, "I am not a Tom, I am not a Tom." After all it's quite possible that being misunderstood, invisible, unable to connect, may have been one of his greatest fears. How could he be a Tom when in writing Invisible Man, in "disillusionment" after "disillusionment," he tells us not to bow down to Bledsoe or Norton or Emerson, not even unions, Brockway, the Brotherhood, or Ras -- whom may be of good intentions or of similar struggles -- but to ultimately bow down to ourselves. I have to confess this is the reason the documentary we watched in class made me feel the slightest bit discouraged. Ellison and the narrator blurred together as one in my mind and I envisioned Ellison standing up after having finally composed his last line, having uncovered a bit more about his sense of reality through the act of writing the novel, and telling himself that it was time to go out, time to further increase his own awareness and attempt to share it with others -- poised to write his masterpiece. I felt a little bit of  hopelessness then, when the documentary said that in all those years and manuscripts, he "never figured it all out" (I'm aware that Juneteenth is still an impressive book I plan to read but this is all slightly irrational). I don't know how I imagined Ellison to go --  free and enlightened above all mankind? It's possible that in the process of reading Invisible Man, I came to subconsciously immortalize Ellison, almost believing that in some ways, he was immortalizing me.

For all my love of Ellison however, I am able to see where some of the criticism he received is coming from, although I still do not believe his critics fully understood him. I write all of this with the luxury of using "us" and "we" because of the universality of the existentialism in Ellison's novel yet also comfortably, perhaps misguided and all-assuming, with a very privileged and unbreachable distance from the oppressive environment of the narrator. Someone like Amiri Baraka would surely point this out and he would not be wrong in doing so. Ellison and Baraka wrote in a time where suffocation boiled to the point that immediate change was needed and called for. Survival, frustration, and much needed stability must have been so predominant on the mind that one might argue there was no time to "hibernate" or find a way to live in the world as it was with a sense of identity because -- with some shades of Wright -- they would say changing circumstance must be prioritized, that one should be participating in marches instead of being there in spirit, that one should fight now not "cope" first (perhaps Invisible Man as a protest novel is not so obvious as Native Son). Although Ellison criticized the Black Arts Movement for placing politics above creativity, it's possible that perhaps politics -- dealing with how we feel in what we see and hear -- needed to be prioritized if any change was to be brought about.

Still one can understand how as someone chronically ill does not want to be defined by their illness, though the effect of dealing with the illness cannot help but shape who they are, Ellison would not want African Americans to be defined by their imposed suffering, embodiment of caricatures, or disadvantage. I suppose that at the end of the day, I believe the approaches of artists in the Black Arts Movement and Ellison's to have resonated effectively in their own right.

"Sybil, my too-late-too-early love"

I've heard and read on Michelle and Mr. Mitchell's blog entries several intriguing takes on the significance of the "Woman Question" and Ellison's portrayal of women as one-dimensional,  over-simplified in their extremity, and peripheral characters in Invisible Man. The possibility that Ellison is marginalizing women deliberately and ironically in order to make a statement is a really interesting suggestion though I find the possibility that the "Woman Question" is on Ellison's periphery of concerns -- and therefore the narrator's -- in reality, valid as well. There's no way to be sure of the author's intentions but I feel that to a degree, it is a balance of the two: Ellison notes the irony of the invisibility of women and incorporates that into the narrator's awareness but at the same time that observation is not of major concern to him or the narrator and as suggested from the characterization of female characters in the novel with a plot driven by male characters, his personal perception of women might actually be pretty misguided.

That said, while still a small, supporting role, and portrayed quite simplistically, Sybil's character and encounter with the narrator is heavy with symbolism and plays a consequential role in the narrator's self discovery in the idea she represents. She serves a purpose to the narrator that goes beyond being irritating and unfathomable. If Jack represents the misguided approach of the Brotherhood and what the narrator once supposed as freedom from the likes of Bledsoe, Sybil stands for the provocativeness and supposed freedom of Rinehart: the blurred lines between truth and lies, reality and fantasy and foreshadows its ultimate insufficiency (I don't think Ellison made an arbitrary choice in naming her Sybil).

The whole encounter between the narrator and Sybil gives off a mood of tragic irony. The narrator invites her to his apartment for the purpose of using her to get information about the Brotherhood and as the night goes on he begins to realize that Sybil similarly intends to use him to fulfill her sexual fantasy. He seems to feel increasingly like he is being turned into a Sambo doll at one point even thinking, "She had me on the ropes." Yet both of them are lost in this scene and lack any true control both of them desperate to make sense in their own way. She has the narrator sing and flex his muscles and he thinks: "I was confounded and amused and it became quite a contest, with me trying to keep the two of us in touch with reality and with her casting me in fantasies in which I was Brother Taboo-with-whom-all-things-are-possible."

The narrator finds it increasingly difficult to distinguish reality from fantasy in his mounting confusion about Sybil and what he desires from her. Although what Sybil suggests horrifies the narrator it moves the narrator in a strange way. He notes the paradox of her -- her innocence in relation to the horror of what she desires, seeming to find a vulnerability in her that he can relate to. He thinks. "But why be surprised when that's what they hear all their lives. When it's made into a great power and they're taught to worship all types of power?" The narrator conveys many ideas with this section but one of them is the tragic invisibility of the fantasy that is Rinehart. Sybil perceives him as the mythical black rapist -- a unreal power society has created -- just as the community has a multitude of false perceptions of Rinehart simply by how he pretends to embody whatever each group in the community want him to embody. When the narrator scrawls, "Sybil you were raped by Santa Claus" over her body, he implies that she does not see him for who he really is but a myth, an invisible man. However, he doesn't seem to blame her for it, seeming to begin to understand how invisible everyone is to each other in society and seeing her as a product of the way society functions.

The narrator continues to marvel at how unknown he is to Sybil, seeming to find her "naivety" and "carefree" attitude enthralling and endearing yet frustrating in its deludedness, thinking. "Was she calling me beautiful or boogieful, beautiful or sublime...I am invisible." Later on Sybil tells him to catch her and he runs, symbolizing the essence of all the ideas that have kept him running and how all of them have inhabited the twisted place between reality and unreality.

When the narrator gets involved with the looting, Sybil seems to remain at the back of his mind the whole time. When the others speak of a white woman starting the commotion he thinks, panicked, "But it couldn't have been Sybil." Later, he stumbles upon the hanging mannequins and thinks, "But are they unreal...are they? What if one, even one is real-- is...Sybil?" With the mention of Sybil, the narrator once again seems to feel the inability to distinguish between what is real and what is not, and feel again the fear of not seeing people, not being seen, losing control of / misinterpreting reality and the validity of certain ideals. In "Sybil," the narrator not only realizes the ultimate emptiness and impossibility of sustaining the self within the deluded freedom and manipulative power of embodying false identities -- yessing them to death in the fashion of Rinehart -- but the blurring between reality and unreality, illusions and disillusionment that has haunted him throughout his whole journey, realizing that he cannot escape the necessity and responsibility of attempting to grasp reality no matter how tempting accepting any one of society's multitude of apparent realities may be.