Dreamlike Writing
Ellison has a way of making some scenes in his book, often the most symbolism-heavy ones, have a dream like, or rather, often nightmarish, quality. Dramatic scenes tip over into absurdity, and, as Mr. Mitchell phrased it, not too many steps from comedic depictions. Even though the violence in the book serves a completely serious and consequential purpose in the book, Ellison choses to take us further from hyper-realistic description and further from the characters' point of view.
The first scene with this quality was the Battle Royal chapter, where teeth were falling out and blood was pouring and bodies jerked as they were electrified. While many authors make violence and pain gruesome and and realistic by adding in more detail about smaller aspects of it, Ellison almost goes the opposite direction - he adds in tons of baseline descriptions of the events taking place, but only surface level physical feelings of the characters. Readers cringe in discomfort as the narrator swallows blood as he talks for the third time, but his other injuries from what sounded like hours of fighting are forgotten.
The next fight scene comes even closer to comedy, when the narrator takes Norton to the Golden Day and a massive brawl starts. With descriptions of the fight being interspersed with humorous dialogue and a stark contrast between the half-dead Norton and the patients, this scene again does not seem to be written with the goal of realism in mind.
The last instance we've come across so far of this sort of writing is not another fight but rather the hospital scene in chapter 10, where the narrator is hooked up to machines and getting inspected by doctors, before they shock him into losing his memory. This scene was the one that got me thinking about the connections between the scenes in the book, because I came away from reading it wondering if I had missed the fact that it was supposed to be some odd coma nightmare that the narrator had while he healed from his injuries. Since he walked away with his memories intact again but having retained a change in character due to the ordeal, it truly felt as if it was symbolic for the character's own mind pointing him to distrust of authorities and doctors. Apparently it was supposed to be a real event after all, but I think think that whether it's real or not is that significant to the story - in fact, the scene being interchangeably real or not points to how it's main purpose is a symbolism-heavy way to progress the narrator along.
The trend here is that the violence in the book serves not to make readers relate to the character more, or understand his experience in more detail, as these kinds of scenes in other books often are. Instead, these highly extreme scenes coincide with the most symbolism-heavy scenes in the book. The over the top, yet almost skimmed over, gore serves to make the reader think about it, and what it means in the context of the novel, rather than experience it themselves as they read. And this makes sense for what we've seen from Ellison so far - his book has incredibly heavy handed symbolism, from the white paint factory, to the college's power plant, to doctors trying to make the narrator forget everything about his life. The use of the theatrical fight scenes just adds to the very direct symbolism inserted into important scenes by not allowing readers to relate too much to characters and instead focus on the actions of the scene.
It's tricky to talk about comedic elements when a character is being abused and dehumanized so relentlessly, but I do often think back to a quote I've seen attributed to Ellison. An interviewer was asking him some tortuous question, unpacking the symbolism in the novel in a serious way, and Ellison cuts him off to say, "Look, didn't you find the book at all *funny*?" As the narrator's consciousness continues to develop, we'll see that he increasingly sees racism in America as fundamentally absurd, ridiculous, murderous and harmful but also something that constantly creates the most absurd situations (like the narrator proudly declaring his freedom to eat a yam in the street, not caring who sees him). One way to think of it is that the narrator is the butt of a giant joke for the first half or more of the novel, but then he gets wise to the joke, and tries to find a way to maneuver within it. We also see his satirical/ironic/sarcastic intelligence start to emerge more and more, as he realizes that laughter can undermine pompous assertions of supremacy and authority sometimes more than anger or confrontation.
ReplyDeleteThe dream-like writing and scenes that happen are also all being told by the narrator, so it brings up the question as to how close these things really were to reality. I mean, boxing in a ring with a naked white women walking around and crawling on an electrical wire doesn't really seem like something that would ever happen, especially not followed by a graduation speech. Is the narrator purposefully making some things up? Is he creating metaphors within his stories to get the point across more to whoever he's writing for?
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