Iron Man Lives Again...Partially Anyway

I have here a rough draft of my essay. My 'so what' section is not developed yet, and my citations are probably abysmal. I also have quite a bit more to include throughout the paper. But like I said, it's a rough draft.

An Ulterior Magnet: Connecting Ralph Ellison and Black Sabbath

Just ‘cause you’re black,

Folks think you lack,

They laugh at you and scorn you too.

What did I do to be so black and blue? – Louis Armstrong

The people who have crippled you

You want to see them burn – Black Sabbath

Everyone knows the story, they just all tell it differently. Our protagonist has been known to exchange slights with the best of the best; you may even hear how he told off the devil himself. In one version of this yarn he may actually be found in the hero’s shoes. In another, he is the anti-hero, victoriously slaying his enemies and walking away with a lady on his arm. He calls himself Stagger Lee and he is the baddest mother fucker this side of Tennessee.

Every community and culture recalls his adventures according to their liking. Just the same, each of these communities has given him a different name: Stack O’Lee, Set, Hershele Ostropoler, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov. Storytellers from all walks of life—from Derek McCulloch to “Mississippi” John Hurt, the Clash, and the Book of Genesis—have given this miscreant his place in their own history. He has been with us for so many years that it is almost easy to lose him in the grind of popular culture and media. He has, however, been hiding under our noses for the last fifty years in the last place we would have ever thought to look. In royal form, this Stagger Lee has been living comfortably in our psyches under two aliases, both of which are one and the same. We know him as Invisible Man and Iron Man.

In 1952, American literary critic and author Ralph Ellison published Invisible Man. It would go on to become the archetype of the search for identity in a modern era plagued by a miasma of racism and apathy. The disillusioned, ignored and violated masses finally had a testimony of their own. Ellison had drawn upon his history to create a new personality for this Stagger Lee. But instead of growing bold and blithe, he faded into a dispassionate collapse. This was the first part of our new story.

In the winter of 1970, four musicians from Aston, Birmingham, England released their second full-length album, Paranoid. The last track on the record’s first side, “Iron Man”, cemented the band Black Sabbath as pioneers in a burgeoning form of contemporary music—heavy metal. The song plodded along in a leaden style unheard of at the time, speaking of disappointment, insanity, and ultimate retribution. Where Ellison left off, Sabbath hit the ground running. An element of change had been introduced to the storyline, so we could see our Stagger Lee recreate himself once again. Here we are introduced to the individual in his last phase of change.

Throughout this essay, I will be focusing mainly on the correlation found between these two texts. Continuity, character, and history will all be a part of this task. We will begin in the depths of the American delta, following the infamous crossroads to find parallel evidence between Ellison and Black Sabbath in regards to the Blues, a common catalyst which had an undeniable influence on both parties. We will make our way to the bustling streets of metropolis, trailing these blues on their travels with famed practitioners and their eventual distribution to the world at large. Ending our journey right in the belly of industry, we will ironically find a very human element that ties these two components together.

Another piece of this puzzle will be violence. We will see retribution side-by-side with slaughter, as well as the kind of vitality that comes from the birth of identity. Works by the revolutionist author Frantz Fanon will be considered when trying to understand the role of brutality within the world of Invisible Man, as well as its contributions toward his transformation into Iron Man. This change of being will be given warrant by the works of Mikhail Bakhtin, Russian philosopher. His studies on the reality of character consciousness offer insight into our correspondence between literature and composition.

I hope to end on a very high, very loud note. In the final throws of attestation there will emerge a link that is very real, one that persists throughout time and circumstance. Why are we affected by two seemingly different worlds in the same fashion? How can we find the testimonial of the ‘other’ to be our very own? The famous question of ‘So what’ will hopefully be answered. Time and circumstance, however, are definitely not on our side. Separated by nearly five decades and thousands of miles, environments, and ideologies, we will in fact find ourselves at a crossroads of our own, one where Invisible Man meets Iron Man.

Who Are You: Where We Begin

It would be fair to assume that there is an important question at the forefront of our study which needs answering. To preface this question, it must be noted that I have not been imbibing any sorts of mind altering drugs. I came up with this all on my own.

Now to the question: what the hell can Invisible Man and “Iron Man” possibly have in common? The best way to answer that is by taking a look at the passage in the book which set me on this pursuit in the first place.

Toward the end of the novel, Ellison’s nameless protagonist has fallen into an ancient coal storage compartment, an obscure opening in the street that he presumed to be a sewer. To escape a mob, he refuses to come out and is finally shut up in total darkness when they reset the manhole cover. He wallows in the filth for quite some time before he calms himself down enough to fall asleep (568).

Somewhere between nightmare and revelation, he finds himself on a black beach beside an armored bridged which protracts the near-by stream. He imagines all the enemies from his past converging upon him. Brother Jack of the Brotherhood; Norton, the old patron from his college; the dean of the college, Bledsoe; Emerson, the businessman who would have lead him into obscurity; and Ras the Exhorter turned Ras the Destroyer, the militant Jamaican separatist from Harlem, they are all holding him down. They threaten him with emasculation unless he returns to their world:

“No,” I said. “I’m through with all your illusions and lies, I’m through running.”

“Not quite,” Jack said…”but you soon will be, unless you return. Refuse and we’ll free you of your illusions all right.”

“No thank you; I’ll free myself” (569)

As he asserts this self-reliance, they produce a knife and severe his genitalia, dangling them in front of his face before throwing them over the bridge where they catch at the apex and dangle there for him to watch on in misery.

Now, freed of all his illusions—in more ways than one—the protagonist accepts his identity as an invisible man and laughs in his enemies’ collected faces. They are infuriated by his insolence and demand to know what he has to laugh at. In a fashion very true to the blues, he tells them that, “I now see that which I couldn’t see” (570) – but at what a price. They gain in on him to investigate further:

And Jack came closer, threatening, and I laughed. “I’m not afraid now, I said. “But if you’ll look, you’ll see…It’s not invisible…”

“See what?” they said.

“That there hang not only my generations wasting upon the water—” And now the pain welled up and I could no longer see them.

“But what? Go on,” they said.

“But your sun…”

“Yes?”

“And your moon…”

“He’s crazy!”

“Your world…”

“I knew he was a mystic idealist!” Tobitt said.

“Still,” I said, “there’s your universe, and that drip-drop upon the water you hear is all the history you’ve made, all you’re going to make. Now laugh, you scientists. Let’s hear you laugh!”

And high above me now the bridge seemed to move off to where I could not see, striding like a robot, an iron man, whose iron legs clanged doomfully as it moved. And then I struggled up, full of sorrow and pain, shouting, “No, no, we must stop him!” (570)

Here is where Invisible Man begins his journey in becoming Iron Man.

To be one hundred percent clear on the association, here are the lyrics to “Iron Man” in their entirety:

Has he lost his mind?
Can he see or is he blind?
Can he walk at all,
Or if he moves will he fall?

Is he alive or dead?
Has he thoughts within his head?
We’ll just pass him there
Why should we even care?

He was turned to steel
In the great magnetic field
Where he traveled time
For the future of mankind

Nobody wants him
He just stares at the world
Planning his vengeance
That he will soon unfold

Now the time is here
For iron man to spread fear
Vengeance from the grave
Kills the people he once saved

Nobody wants him
They just turn their heads
Nobody helps him
Now he has his revenge

Heavy boots of lead
Fills his victims full of dread
Running as fast as they can
Iron man lives again! (Black Sabbath)

We will spend the rest of this analysis drawing connections between each text. Other portions of Ellison’s novel will be presented when necessary for support, and specific lyrics from the song may be recalled as well. I wanted to produce the stimulus for clarity’s sake, to get the proverbial ball rolling in the right direction.

One more uncertainty needs to be addressed however, and that is my integrity. Not my temperament or reputation, but my critical integrity. How can I possibly expect to be taken seriously in a dual study of an American literary classic and the most hummed chordal progression in history? Why does my interpretation bear more merit than those of critics on and above my sensical capabilities? An answer like ‘because’ may not seem worthy enough, but it very much is indeed.

The postmodern literary critic Stanley Fish supports this notion in “Interpretive Communities”, an excerpt from his most famous essay, “Interpreting Variorum” (1976). Fish’s focus throughout this study is the concept of literary interpretation. It is his contention, much like the formalists, that everyone, respectively, truly understands what it is they are reading.

In Fish’s estimation, when one reads a text they are not simply perceiving the text at face value, they are making two distinct interpretations: 1.) That the work is itself, and 2.) The work was written by the respective author. As simple (or confusing) as this mini process seems, once these decisions have been made (identifying empirical facts), recognizing certain predisposed traits in the text can be easily done:

That is to say, interpretive strategies are not put into execution after reading (the pure act of perception in which I do not believe); they are the shape of reading, and because they are the shape of reading, they give texts their shape, making them rather than, as it is usually assumed, arising from them (Rivkin & Ryan, 218).

In short, I see Ellison’s text as the first step in the transformation of a certain character, and Black Sabbath’s text as the second, eventual final step in that transformation, because I can—my “interpretive strategies” or more akin to such an association. Critic Jack Zipes famously found sexual connotations in Little Red Riding Hood stories, “transform[ing] an oral folk tale about the social initiation of a young woman into a narrative about rape” (227). We can at least give my hypothesis the benefit of the doubt.

What makes my interpretation more right than someone else’s, you may ask? Fish addresses this question very straightforwardly: as long as one respects another interpretive process, and acknowledges said process as being just as correct as theirs, no problems should arise. “My evidence is the entire history of literary criticism”, he says. I do not have to have the same opinion as Book Week did in 1965 when they called Invisible Man “the most distinguished American novel written since World War II” (Norton, 1537), nor do I have to agree with Rolling Stone Magazine’s vandalizing 1971 review of Paranoid.

How can I say that Invisible Man is ultimately Iron Man? Because I say he is, that’s how. Now that we are all on the same page—or at least in the same book, metaphorically speaking—let us begin.

Under the Sun: A History of Both Parties

To understand a story, one must first understand the storyteller. Of course they did not just spring from the earth, manuscript in hand or song in tow, and set out to change the world, they had to be shaped into their roles as raconteurs. I want to focus our attention on where each of our case studies came from before digging into their relationship with one another. When we understand how these very different artists came to create their respective works, we may just find that they are not so different after all.

Just as Ralph Ellison wondered what kind of person would say, “I am an invisible man”, we must first investigate the method for this wondering. Like any resourceful artist, Ellison drew his inspiration from the world around him, the world he knew.

Ralph Waldo Ellison was born in Oklahoma City on March 1, 1914. As a young man, he delivered newspapers as added support for his family; his father died when he was three years old, and to compensate his mother took any job she could find, mostly those in house work. Trumpet lessons from a family friend sparked his extended interest in music, and in 1933, he was accepted to the Tuskegee Institute as first trumpeter in the school’s orchestra. It didn’t take long for Ellison to grow despondent with the university, but he persevered as this would no doubt prove to be his lone opportunity at higher education.

His interest in literature began to blossom as he was gradually introduced to numerous titles in the broadening canon, his favorites being Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. These works gave him some much needed ground on which to stand and take note of his life. By way of Hardy’s Jude and Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger, Ellison began to develop an idiosyncratic opinion of his surrounding world (Allen).

Upon his third year of school, with just $100 in his pocket and a sense for bigger and better things, he moved to New York City where he found the support of author Richard Wright, who encouraged the young musician to pursue a career in writing. While the Great Depression ravaged the country, aspiring artists such as Ellison found a source of income as well as inspirational security in the Federal Writers’ Project, an operation created as a part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal to both employ out of work writers and gain an extensive stockpile of the country’s distinct histories. Much like W.E.B. Du Bois, Ellison traveled all over New York State interviewing African-Americans and cataloging tale after tale, story after story. This saturation of folklore and modernity, town and country, spiritual and standard would stay with him as an inadvertent focal point for his future work (Norton, 1536).

Wright eventually got Ellison a job working for the newly established New Masses, a vehicle for the budding Communist Party development in Harlem. Here he became an enforcer of sorts on political correctness in the paper’s didactic stories. His time with the aspiring politico community sculpted his opinions of society into a very pluralistic attitude (Allen).

In 1943, Ellison enlisted in the Merchant Marine to serve during World War II. In her essay, “The Visible Ralph Ellison” (2007), Brooke Allen comments on Ellison’s developing sense of ethos during his time at war: “Culture was universal, a gift for everyone; to reject any art, or music, or literature because it did not speak specifically to black people was sheer idiocy” (26). His ambitions were thereby limitless, and his marriage to the wealthy Fanny McConnell Buford in 1946 proved to be the security his imagination required. He was now free to complete the project he had started the previous years, a single sentence he had scribbled while on sick leave: “I am an invisible man”.

Over the course of seven years, Ellison created a character that was as unique as he was universal. His time in the Writer’s Project helped him to recognize the past, his past, and consider its effect on the present and even the future. He had to stake his own place in literature, his own voice; one that was black, but, as W.E.B. Du Bois famously indicated, also American. The most affective of these traditions is the blues.

When searching for common threads between the author and the rock act, one needn’t look any further than the blues. As a style of music, the blues has been more influential than any other cultural force of the last century. Rock and roll, pop, rap, and especially heavy metal owe their very existence to the blues. The music’s storied past is a long and tremulous ride, much of which is actually quite superfluous to the context of this paper.

Author Robert Springer approximates in his Authentic Blues – Its History and Its Themes (1995), “The blues is a form of oral literature, and, as such, both tenacious and fragile” (8). This literature has been kept alive through countless generations and has spawned some endearing prototypes. Our friend Stagger Lee is just one example of the Badman character, a swanky braggart that has no problem outsmarting authority figures but still revels in laying them to waste. Invisible Man itself has been described as a “blues novel”.

This blues impulse, as Ellison himself would famously characterize it, reaches across more than artistic mediums, it exceeds geography, race, and time. In the 2005 documentary film Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey, journalist and music critic Malcolm Dome says that “[the blues] is very much an oppressed music, and it very much spoke to people that needed something a little different” (Dunn). Author Andy Bennet gives support to this contention: “In the context of Britain such claims have been easily made given that, initially at least, heavy metal musicians and fans emerged from the manual working class…” (44).

In his book Popular Music and Society (1995), sociologist Brian Longhurst tells us that “blues reflects human life in general, though concentrating on the experiences relevant to the singer/composer and immediate audience” (137). Ellison polarized his political and social situation into a single note—Invisible Man. He utilized his history, playing the passages he liked and changing others to fit his objective. Poet and social critic Amiri Baraka presents us with this beast of evolution, of fluidity:

“the songs, the music, changed as the people did.” [The blues] “is, it seems, the deepest expression of memory. Experience re/feeling. It is the racial memory…The Blues (impulse) lyric (song) is ever descriptive of a plane of evolution, a direction” (115) (Werner, 152)

It is at a crossroads in this evolution where Black Sabbath appear.

Black Sabbath started out their career as an electric-blues band called Earth. Much like the rest of their constituency, the group had been seriously turned on to the assaults of electrified passion, discontent, and vitality that was coming from America. The pastoral of industry that ran across Europe after World War II did little but disenchant the country’s youth. Sabbath’s lead guitarist Toni Iommi described the band’s home town of Aston, Birmingham, England as “a shit-hole basically”. Bassist Terrence “Geezer” Butler, drummer Bill Ward, and vocalist John “Ozzy” Osbourne held no interest in the bright and beautiful picture of pop music. They connected more with the visceral evocations of this American blues. Nothing in their environment gave them a reason to rejoice, so they turned to this blues impulse; their playing became “more mean” (Dunn). Musically, more attention was paid to the sonic punctuation of the guitar and the guttural accent of the bass and drums. Things needed to be louder.

In 1969, things got plenty louder when Earth officially became Black Sabbath. Naming themselves after the 1963 Boris Karloff film of the same name, Sabbath decided to take their newly honed sound and continue evolving. Osbourne recounts Iommi as mentioning, “Isn’t it peculiar that people pay to go see horror films, why don’t we write scary music?” (Brian, Hardiman). Their first song, also called “Black Sabbath”, made use of this ideology, putting the melodic blues scale to terrifying work.

In the so-called blues scale, the root note progresses seven steps, all the way to its octave. The fifth note within this particular scale is diminished however, which means instead of a respective whole step progression, it only ascends a half step (Longhurst, 139). The result is a very jarring, spooky resonance. Black Sabbath’s achievement was nothing particularly new, as composers throughout time had made use of the “devil’s note” to equal effect, but their motivation certainly was (Dunn). Whether or not they were precisely privy to it, Sabbath was continuing the tradition of evolution Baraka had mentioned earlier.

The release of Paranoid in 1970 cemented that evidence even further. Black Sabbath’s new brand of music was a far cry from Muddy Waters singing “Hoochie Coochie Man”, but Iommi’s guitar rode under Osbourne’s voice on a newly constructed metal track of the blues. “Iron Man” is very much a blues, musically as well as in substance. Typical fashion finds the instrumentalist starting on the root chord, switching to the fourth periodically as the lyrics go on, and eventually climbing to the fifth step before returning to the root. According to Longhurst, Black Sabbath are following a structural method by which we can understand music in a semiotic sense. Developed by musicologist Richard Middleton, the process is a continuum of sorts, in which I have started at the second step:

“2. Culturally determined applications of (1), specific to musical materials (for example…time-frames, patterns of tonal and harmonic relationship)…

3. Style-specific syntaxes constructed from (2) (for example, available scales, intervals, rhythms, parameter relationships; preferred formulae, modes of combination). Distributionist, commotional and paradigmatic approaches are appropriate at this level.

4. Intra-opus patterns: the individual piece in all its uniqueness” (168)

Sabbath has taken a recognizable blues progression and inverted it. Instead of starting on the root, they begin at the fifth and move backwards.

Slowly, methodically, they create not just a piece of music but an aura; the music introduces us to the character even before we hear his roar of autonomy. Iommi’s guitar treads along, and the pronunciated attack of every beat and note plays together with the theme of the song—you can hear Iron Man’s footsteps and feel his anger (174). By designing this character, they have taken not just their music out of the previous tradition, but our protagonist as well. Invisible Man may have been a personality within the blues, but Iron Man is very much one of heavy metal.

Solitude: Granting Our Studies Their Liberty

Here is where we can give each character the gift of freedom.

It is apparent that both Invisible Man and Iron Man declare their independence at the onset of their respective journeys. One is supposedly intangible while the other is very much material. “I am an invisible man,” are this character’s first words to us. “I am Iron Man”, is likewise our first introduction to this personality. There is much more to these statements than simple intrigue or pandemonium however. These are revelations of identity. They are establishing themselves as conscious beings, not just to an audience, but to their initial authors as well—they become individuals.

We can find support for this notion in the work of the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. Critic and translator Tzvetan Todorov gives a great summary of Bakhtin’s notoriously dense studies in the seventh chapter of his Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle (1984). Herein, we are presented with a fascinating theory on the creative act itself.

This process is broken down into two methods: (1) the author puts themselves in their characters’ shoes in order to construct them, and then (2) jumps back into their own identity, a process Todorov calls exotopy. Through analysis of this concept, Todorov brings us to a conclusion concerning the relationship of artist and creation: once the artistic process has occurred, and a work or character is given consciousness (written down or recorded, it is sent out amongst a vast audience), the author no longer has control over that consciousness: “the best exotopy…does not confine the character in the consciousness of the author and puts into question the very notion of the privileging one consciousness above another” (103). As it is, Ellison’ and Black Sabbath’s hand in the matter is forfeit as soon as those respective texts go under the public’s eye. Discovering oneself now becomes a mission for the self.

Excommunicated from Ellison, Invisible Man goes on his adventure of self discovery only to find he is truly invisible to the rest of society. In the novel’s latterly introduction, he sorrowfully tells us:

You wonder whether you aren’t simply a phantom in other people’s minds…And, let me confess, you feel that way most of the time. You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world…you curse and your swear to make them recognize you. And, alas, it’s seldom successful. (4)

He has been utterly disillusioned and decided to hole himself up, away from the world that would ignore and misunderstand him. This imposed hibernation foreshadows his ultimate decisive act: “a covert preparation for a more overt action” (13).

After introducing himself, he tells his story. Every twist and turn lands him at the end. We are told of his dream, the one which finally opened his eyes to the obscurity of his existence. The epilogue of the novel brings us back to the beginning. We have not quite gone in a circle, but have come to understand our narrator inside and out. And it is time for him to become visible again. In a manic sort of suggestion, he seeks to relate to us:

You won’t believe in my invisibility and you’ll fail to see how any principle that applies to you could apply to me. You’ll fail to see it even though death waits for both of us if you don’t. Nevertheless, the very disarmament has brought me to a decision. The hibernation is over. I must shake off the old skin and come up for breath. There’s a stench in the air, which, from this distance underground, might be the smell…of death… And if nothing more, invisibility has taught my nose to classify the stench of death. (580)

He is evolving. He is coming back to the world he knew, not as a different person per say, but definitely a distinctive personality. Now is when he will feel vindication. Now is when we get to meet Iron Man.

Just as Invisible Man becomes his own being, so does Iron Man. The beat of change draws us in and a roar of autonomy bashes us over the head—“I am Iron Man!” (Black Sabbath) Valerie Smith would tell us we have a new, separate entity: “He creates for himself a persona that develops, indeed exists, in contradiction to the images that others have projected onto him” (110). Ellison’s nameless hero spends the entirety of the novel creating himself. Each experience is a step forward or backward. When we finally reach the end, it is still not clear if he has finished evolving. He has told his story once, as his old self. Now that he is free of his contextual inhibitions, he declares his new identity, recalling his story again.

To make a little more sense of this, I’ll turn to narratologist Seymour Chatman. Chatman works prolifically in narrative theory, exploring how narrative structures effect our perceptions of a certain text. As soon as a story beings, Chatman says, a narrator is created. We identify with this narrator as the authority in all matters we will hear of from now on. What must suppose is that the author and this created ‘narrator’ are different voices, the first using the latter to tell a story. Such would be the case for Invisible Man. At first, he is a product of Ralph Ellison, an alter ego of sorts. This is his first role as an identified “author-narrator”. Once he is established as an individual, thanks to Bakhtin’s concept (““The character’s consciousness is given as another consciousness, as belonging to someone else…(13:8-10; ef. 7-8)”” (Todorov, 104)), it is Invisible Man that produces this alter-ego of Iron Man. “Our sense of the implied author” has changed (Chatman, 99). There is a difference here that would prove as such.

Before coming out of his hole, Invisible Man scolds himself for staying in hibernation far too long: “Perhaps that’s my greatest social crime…since there’s a possibility that even an invisible man has a socially responsible role to play” (Ellison, 581). Passivity is no longer an option. His story revealed “the chief values to which this implied author is committed”; this lengthy reflection was his testimony, where he came from and how he got to where he is. When he bares himself anew to the world, his “chief values” have changed (Chatman, 99). He no longer needs time to search for his identity, and the music of “Iron Man” is verification of that. The bass drum pounds out his weighted foot falls. The guitar drones at his very presence. Now his narrative motivation is much more sinister.

This change of persona also reflects upon the character’s legacy. As a blues invention, Invisible Man was a creature of irony, a principle which is very familiar within the culture. Langston Hughes famously kept to this sense of the blues in his work, often alluding to the old sentiment of laughing to keep from crying. This ideology proved a “cathartic method for overcoming the ‘blues’” (Longhurst, 137), but proves useless to the character now. The sad irony of the blues mutates into the thunderous rage of heavy metal. The point of view remains the same throughout both texts, there is merely a change of reasoning, not face. In Understanding Popular Music (2001), Roy Shuker reminds us:

The ‘meaning’ of any engagement between a text and its consumer cannot be assumed, or ‘read off’, from textual characteristics alone. The text’s historical conditions of production and consumption are important, as is the nature of its audience, and the various meanings in which they mediate their encounter within the text. (14)

There is a history in Invisible Man that undoubtedly persists and changes in “Iron Man”. Ellison’s use of Louis Armstrong’s “What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue” throughout the novel is a literal evocation of this history. The song acts as a metaphor for the character’s life. He has been trampled and transgressed. We find this same despondency in “Iron Man”.

Black Sabbath maintain that impulse Ellison spoke of, but alter it ever so slightly. The transition from blues to heavy metal has an enormous effect on our character. Once, that impulse sought “to keep the painful detail and episodes of a brutal existence alive” within the conscience of Invisible Man (Norton, 49). Now, a lesser quality of that same impulse becomes more pronounced: “The impulse toward violence is palpable in Invisible Man; it is what gives the novel’s prose that very sense of being electrically alive, and dangerous” (Allen, 25). That tentative violence that Ellison transposed from his own life into his novel stays with his nameless protagonist, through the battle royal scene at the beginning of his story to the socialite Sybil who wants to be raped. Now that our man has a name, he stops talking about these impulses and acts upon them.

Symptom of the Universe: Finding the Ties That Bind

For the time being, we will have to hold off on this awareness of violence until we finish addressing the direct correlations between the character’s first story and this new retelling. Iron Man is at the helm now, but the account is still the same. To completely understand this connection once and for all, we have to take our narrator at his word. For the sake of continuity and coherency, I will address each verse of the song sequentially. This may seem like a petty attempt at making a point, but I believe we may all avoid a major headache by doing so.

Has he lost his mind?
Can he see or is he blind?
Can he walk at all,
Or if he moves will he fall?

Is he alive or dead?
Has he thoughts within his head?
We’ll just pass him there
Why should we even care? (Black Sabbath)

Here we have our newly realized personality reflecting on his past self. Chatman would explain this as our “implied author” being at “virtual odds with his ‘author’-narrator” (99). It is quite clear that Iron Man is berating Invisible Man. Why should we care about someone so passive; so invisible. This will not stand for an effective personality, resulting in the exhumation of our protagonist from his self-imposed exile. Valerie Smith points out that “To comply in part is to comply all together. He therefore resolves to sever his connections to society, to all organizations on which he had relied for self-determination, and to accept responsibility for creating his own identity” (109). His resentment toward the world is being revealed and he is building his case for retribution through his storytelling.

He was turned to steel
In the great magnetic field
Where he traveled time
For the future of mankind
Nobody wants him
He just stares at the world
Planning his vengeance
That he will soon unfold (Black Sabbath)

At first a far cry from anything coherent, we can make sense of Iron Man’s narration by thinking in slight metaphor. His being turned to steel is simply dispossession, disenfranchisement, and disillusionment. This magnetic field is the path of toil he has had to endure. Smith comments that “His disillusionment also makes him feel less defensive about his past. He now tries to consider and learn from his humiliations instead of running from them” (99). This insight hits the nail pretty much on the head. The road to invisibility turned him to steel, cynical and hard to the outside world. He has no real ideas where to go or what to do, but he has separated himself form mankind accordingly—us versus them.

This thought of time travel is far from absurd as well. Time traveling is exactly what he has done. Recall the scene when he buys a sweet potato from a street vendor after being released from the hospital:

I walked along, munching the yam, just as suddenly overcome by an intense feeling of freedom—simply because I was eating while waling along the street. It was exhilarating. I no longer has to worry about who saw me or about what was proper…but to hell with being ashamed of what you liked. (Ellison, 264-265)

This is not the first or last time he is faced with accepting his people’s past. It is his past just the same, a part of who he is. The future of any culture depends on reiteration, and he was more than willing to accept this responsibility. But life was not fair to him. Instead of embracing him, the world shunned him, ignored him—they turned him invisible. So he conceded and dissented, biding his time: “Here, at least, I could try to think things out in peace, or, if not in peace, in quiet. I would take up residence underground” (Ellison, 571). From the sub-terrain, he allowed this vengeance to build inside of him. The world would not notice him, so he will force them. What we will come to see is a baptism by fire.

Now the time is here
For iron man to spread fear
Vengeance from the grave
Kills the people he once saved
Nobody wants him
They just turn their heads
Nobody helps him
Now he has his revenge (Black Sabbath)

Finishing his story as Invisible Man, our character gives us the impression of having an advantage—“He leaves the reader with his conviction that the double-consciousness of being both narrator of and a participant in his own story empowers him in a way that his earlier duplicity did not” (Smith, 121) We may never know if Bledsoe was really as haughty as he was portrayed, or if the Brotherhood truly deceived him. Our narrator has loaded the dice in his favor. We are to accept that his college betrayed him, his social institution abandoned him, and the rest of the passed him by.

He justifies the imminent violence by professing these betrayals. His work for the Brotherhood was to be constructive for the better good of the Black community, for everyone in fact. Brother Jack lays it to him at his first meeting:

“Destruction lies ahead unless things are changed. And things must be changed. And changed by the people. Because, Brother, the enemies of man are dispossessing the world! Do you understand?” (Ellison, 307)

When our protagonist accepts their ideology and beings making progress within the community, this fervor is juxtaposed against resentment. He is becoming too much of a figurehead. They take away all of his public address powers, accuse him of treachery, and actually put him on trial. Brother Jack, the leader of the Brotherhood, wants liberation through regulation: “So that is the meaning of discipline, I thought, sacrifice…yes, and blindness, he doesn’t see me. He doesn’t even see me. Am I about to strangle him? I do not know…Discipline is sacrifice” (Ellison, 475). The people he tried to serve would not allow him his dignity.

He had put his faith in an institution for the second time, and again it swindled him. “The protagonist’s mistrust of the Brotherhood precipitates a period of reflection for him. This betrayal reminds him of the other people who have betrayed him in similar ways. Like Norton and Bledsoe, Jack and the others treat him as if he does not exist” (Smith, 106). His story becomes a tragic vindication. Now his words act as weapons instead of pleas for sympathy. Reinventing himself in the physical brings a corporeal brutality to his narrative.

According to Chatman’s studies, this process is known as speech act. “This is not linguistics in the strict sense: it is not concerned with the grammatical composition of sentences in a language, but rather with their role in the communication situation, particularly in their function as actual acts by the speaker” (Rivkin & Ryan, 100). As Valerie Smith said earlier, our character is in control. He tells us that Bledsoe is a treacherous cad, that Norton does not recognize him years later in a subway, that the Brotherhood betrayed him just like the rest of the world, and we believe it. When his transformation into Iron Man is complete (his return from this expulsary grave), and he is telling the story again, he exacts revenge upon is all of these past traitors. Within the realm of this account, Iron Man is slaying his enemies.

Heavy boots of lead
Fills his victims full of dread
Running as fast as they can
Iron man lives again! (Black Sabbath)

So now he has these boots of lead. Such an allusion is evidently filling his erstwhile victims full of some serious dread. And they have a reason to be nervous. The dream sequence in which Invisible Man sees his genitalia as his past, his present, and his future has come back to haunt the rest of his world.

He tells those who would afflict them to laugh when he knows they will later be running for their lives: “There’s your universe…all the history you’ve made, all you’re going to make” (Ellison, 570). His identity now fully realized, the impulse of violence that rested in him during his invisible days is given to fruition. The clanging of his boots has become a heavy load of retribution. All of the wrongs against him lie within this crushing act. But this backlash is not simply an extemporary performance. His evolutionary process would not be complete without it.

In order to understand this, we turn to psychiatrist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon. Fanon spent the majority of his short life exploring the process of decolonization. When the exploited masses of imperialist gain were despondent enough to strike back and reclaim the world that was theirs, Fanon took notice. His theories on the importance of violence in this process can be of great help to us, making sense of Iron Man’s vocational eruption of heavy metal thunder.

Fanon famously summarized that “violence is man recreating himself” (R. Smith). Becoming something new necessitates the destruction of something old. This destruction may be passive or it may be aggressive. In the case of our character, this rebirth proves to be very aggressive. Fanon says, “The exploited man sees that his liberation implies the use of all means, and that of force first and foremost” (Fanon, 61). From the beginning of his story that violence was in his nature. He understood “that this narrow world…can only be called into question by absolute violence” (37), but repressed that tendency, not due to shame, but responsibility.

Our character was to ascend the ladder of society and become a shining example of his race. Such a notion is demeaning, this is obvious, but working inside of this patronization proves to be the only method of success. He is not quite under the radar, nor is he using the system in his favor. Ambiguously, he is following the path they lay for him to the letter, by the letters. The letters of recommendation sent with him to New York prove to be his bastions of hope as well as his undoing; the veil is lifted from his eyes, but at the price of his confidence:

This case represents, my dear Mr. Emerson, one of the rare, delicate instances in which one for whom we held great expectations has gone grievously astray, and who in his fall threatens to upset certain delicate relationships between certain interested individuals and the school…I beg you, sir, to help him continue in the direction of that promise which, like the horizon, recedes ever brightly and distantly beyond the hopeful traveler. (Ellison, 191)

He had fallen into the trap laid for him by those who would ruin his course. Our protagonist returns to this slight as Iron Man. By destroying the institutions that abused him in the past, he is absolving himself of any shame or accountability for his descent in life. “Violence is thus seen as comparable to a royal pardon” (Fanon, 86). Iron Man lives again, now as an agent of retribution.

We have seen this transformation within our character’s world before. The leader of the opposing social movement in Harlem, Ras the Exhorter, undergoes a similar change in person and method. When we first meet the Exhorter, he is already more than willing to raise his arms against forces that would stop his message. The problem with this philosophy is its very nature, that of infighting. He sees the Brotherhood as bowing to the white society because they work with, but not within, its system.

[“]What is your pahst and where are you going?...Nowhere! Ras is not ignorant, nor is Ras afraid. No! Ras, he be here black and fighting for the liberty of the black people when the white folks have got what they wahnt and done gone off laughing in your face and you stinking and choked up with white maggots.” (Ellison, 375)

There is no clemency for such betrayal. But this preaching is not enough for Ras. He must have engagement; he sets an example for Iron Man.

“The time for ahction is here…

“It is time Ras the Exhorter become Ras the DESTROYER!”…

“I repeat black ladies and gentlemahn, the time has come for ahction! I, Ras the Destroyer, repeat, the time has come!” (Ellison, 485)

Now Ras is ready to exact his vengeance upon the world. The next time we see him, he is leading a crowd through riots, mounted on a horse in full Abssinian formal dress. Ras the Destroyer hurls a spear at our protagonist, chasing him down a calling his mob to hang him from a nearby tree for treachery.

I looked as Ras on his horse and a their handful of guns and recognized the absurdity of the whole night and of the simple yet confoundingly complex arrangement of hope and desire, fear and hate, that had brought me here still running, and knowing now who I was and where I was and knowing too that I had no longer to run for or from the Jacks and the Emersons and the Bledsoes and Nortons, but only from their confusion, impatience, and refusal to recognize the beautiful absurdity of their American identity and mine. (Ellison, 559)

In his misplaced zeal, Ras the Destroyer had helped Invisible Man move one step closer to becoming Iron Man. Where Ras was only looking to smoke out a rat, Iron Man seeks a total reckoning. He has created this character not as an impermanent lake duster, but as a rancorous identity. There really is no resolution in either text (“the story ends before he reenters society, the reader never know to what degree he will conform to institutional expectations once he goes back to the world” (V. Smith, 120)), so we are left with the understanding that Iron Man will only continue destroying. Now that we know he has absolutely no intention of conforming to any institutional expectations, those that have left him as steel to the rest of the world, we can allow the coda to take us away into the void of his loud, abrasive existence.