SLIP THE YOKE
221
-to the service of God, and in that there are many men in his image
while he is himself unseen; he is phallic in his role of "lover"; as a
numbers runner he is a bringer of manna and a worker of miracles,
in
that he transforms (for winners, of course) pennies into dollars,
and thus he feeds, (and feeds on), the poor. Indeed, one could ex–
tend this list in the manner of much myth-mongering criticism until
the fiction dissolved into anthropology, but Rhine's role in the formal
structure of the narrative is to suggest to the hero a mode of escape
from Ras, and a means of applying, in yet another form, his grand–
father's cryptic advice to his own situation. One could throw Rhine–
hart
among his literary betters and link him with Mann's Felix Krull,
the Barron Clappique of Malraux's
Man's Fate
and many others, but
that would be to make a game of criticism and really say nothing.
The identity of fictional characters is determined by the implicit
realism of the form, not by their relation to tradition; they are what
they do or do not do. Archetypes are timeless, novels are time-haunted.
If
the symbols appearing in a novel link up with those of universal
myth they do so by virtue of their emergence from the specific tex–
ture of a specific form of social reality. The final act of
Invisible
Man
is not that of a concealment in darkness in the Anglo-Saxon
connotation of the word, but that of a voice issuing its little wisdom
out of the substance of its own inwardness-after having undergone
a transformation from ranter to writer.
If,
by the way, the hero is
pulling a "darky act" in this, he certainly is not a smart man playing
dumb. For the novel, his memoir, is one long, loud rant, howl, and
laugh. Confession, not concealment, is his mode. His mobility is
dual; geographical, as Hyman points out, but, more importantly, it
is
intellectual. And in keeping with the reverse English of the plot,
and with the Negro American conception of blackness, his movement
vertically downward (not into a "sewer," Freud notwithstanding, but
into
a coal cellar, a source of heat, light, power and, through asso–
ciation with the character's motivation, self perception) is a process
of
rising
to an understanding of his human condition. He gets
Ius
restless
mobility not so much from the blues or from sociology but
from the circumsance that he appears in a literary form which has
time and social change as its special province. Besides, restlessness of
the spirit is an American condition that transcends geography, so–
ciology, and past condition of servitude.
