Percival Everett's Signifying on Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man in erasure

In a series of important interviews, Percival Everett has made it clear that Ralph Ellison's work has been a major influence on his own writing and aesthetic principles. In a 2003 conversation with Forrest Anderson, he listed Invisible Man, Moby Dick, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as significant sources of inspiration for him (Anderson 56). In another interview during the same year, he emphatically stated "I love Invisible Man" (Mills et al. 84). Two years later he observed to Anthony Stewart that Invisible Man, like Moby Dick, is a novel that he revisits on a regular basis because of the stylistic brilliance and thematic depth (Stewart 143). In that same conversation, he stressed that Ellison was a writer who provided him with a literary foundation upon which he could build his own work: "It's because of his arguments that I get to assume [my] position with ease" (Stewart 137). To use terminology that Ellison was fond of, he regarded Ellison as a literary "ancestor," a writer integrally related to him in terms of his artistic visions rather than a "relative," a novelist who simply operated in the same time period and perhaps came from a similar background (Shadow 145).¹

It is not surprising, therefore, that many of Everett's best novels make significant reference to Ellison's work, especially Invisible Man. Glyph (1999), for example, centers on a boy "genius" (26) named Ralph who reads Invisible Man at the age of four and undergoes two experiences that strongly echo key scenes from Ellison's novel: the battle royal and the hospital episode. At one point in the book, Everett presents a dialogue between Ellison and Aristophanes in which the novelist points out that art "strips away the illusory veil covering our culture" (79), revealing a condition of "war" (79) between the individual and society. This strongly reverberates against the grandfather's advice to the hero of Invisible Man that his life would be a "war" (16) against white society. Glyph also meditates enigmatically on the number of lights in the invisible man's underground abode. American Desert (2004) employs an important setting central to Ellison's novel, a vast "underground" (214) beneath a military base in New Mexico. As the protagonist is descending into this dark, ominous world, he wonders, "Would he be another Lucius Brockway […] tomming through the paint factory?" (163). By the end of the novel, he becomes a kind of Rinehart, lost in a bewildering series of roles but having no core self (Brockway is referred to briefly in Assumption (2011) but never actually materializes in the plot, becoming another of Everett's invisible men who simply disappear.) Zulus (1990) at one point contains a puzzling passage: "E is for Ellison and his optic white sitting invisible outside of history, watching what can never be his" (143). I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009) has a character who closely resembles Ellison's vet, Percival Everett himself, who as a college professor advises the central character to "Be yourself" (124). Unlike the invisible man, who finally understands this advice from the vet and achieves a kind of existential selfhood, Everett's bewildered antihero is never quite up to the task and settles for an amusing assortment of empty roles.

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This extremely persistent pattern of direct allusion in a series of texts by one novelist to the work of another writer is highly unusual, and it would be very difficult to find anything quite like it in American or African American literary traditions. But the book that signifies on Ellison's work in the most complete, artful, and significant way is erasure (2001). In that novel, Everett constructs very elaborate, meaningful patterns of references to Invisible Man as a way of defining how contemporary America has developed new ways of rendering black people "invisible" by erasing their individuality and encasing them in empty social roles. Like Ellison, Everett emphasizes that, while African Americans are particularly victimized by what the protagonist of Glyph calls "self-erasure" (9), all Americans, and indeed all citizens of modern culture, suffer a similar...