![]() Rendered socially invisible by race, the act of witness was cruelly denied to Ellison’s unnamed narrator, a man looking back on his life and the ways in which he was ignored – ignored by the white man on the street, and ignored by the Communist Party, a party that saw in black America the unsullied purity of unreified man, a belief system that inevitably threw the cloak of invisibility over the very group they purported to represent. The problematic nature of the cloak of invisibility is also at the core of Ralph Ellison’s famous 1952 novel, also called The Invisible Man, and also a tale of anger and rage, but this time in the context of the African American experience in the Southern states of the 1940s. Without an audience of some kind, actions are rendered meaningless, lacking context for their significance (no wonder workplaces are a battleground for visibility). In the great tradition of Horror movies, it turned out that invisibility for Griffin was not the promised land, in fact nothing like it, instead landing Griffin in a version of hell with no-one to notice the hell he was in.Īs Griffin discovered, it is never good enough just to be able to see (no matter how detached) – one must also be seen one’s action must be witnessed. This cloak of invisibility resulted in gargantuan levels of anger, bitterness and resentment, anger at the betrayal of his assistant, bitterness and resentment at the world in general, a world upon which he threatened to unleash a reign of terror.įor Griffin, respite from the unending judgement of others turned out to be a route to isolation, resentment and loneliness, a regression to the world of the child (see Absence as a presence that attacks), a child unable to hold the gaze of the mother, resulting in a world of confusion, fear and anxiety. The 1970’s Invisible Man series (with David McCallum), which portrayed the protagonist as a troubled but sympathetic character, was a far cry from Wells’ novel – a story of a scientist called Griffin who, after experimenting with optics, made himself invisible. The Invisible Man (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Wells’ short novel The Invisible Man was originally published in 1897, and was subsequently made into a horror movie in 1933, a film that stayed faithful to Wells’ original story. The question of invisibility has been the subject of some significant literary works over the years. But while people sometimes say they want to escape the gaze, deep down, they don’t really mean it. The gaze of others is inescapable – there is no hiding place. On a whim, the source of value can be taken away, the cloak of invisibility once again returning to do its damage. The people whose acknowledgement one so craves and desires, can of course, change their minds. To be valued is what one really wants – to be valued, however, by other people. To be visible is a prerequisite for acknowledgement, and to be acknowledged is to be valued. Sadly, a lack of wealth, fame and glamour is no guarantee of invisibility either, the double-edged nature of the relational world affecting everybody to a greater or lesser extent. The endless morality tales about the rich and famous suggest that the need to be noticed, to be seen, is at best a double-edged sword, giving in one hand while taking away in the other. But people are right to assume that celebrities protest too much at their visibility when they clearly find it difficult to live without it. The desire for attention, in one way or another, affects everyone to some degree, not just the procession of celebrities whose fame, glamour and attention seeking grab the headlines and the public imagination (some of it). For what’s worse than a dirty look than no look at all? Even the experience of someone ‘looking right through you’ at social events (like you’re not even there) leaves people disoriented, hurt and disrespected, a painful experience that cuts right to the bone. To be noticed by others by whom one desires notice is as human a need as food and shelter, and its absence can be a reason for stress and anxiety. This is a significant benefit of an intersubjective existence – no-one dislikes anything more than to remain invisible in a social world dependent on attention, acknowledgement and recognition. For all the trouble it brings, the omnipresent watchful gaze of the relational world does have its benefits. You get noticed, for one thing.
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