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Visible, Invisible

‘I am an invisible man. [...] That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact.’

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

He is a man of flesh and bone. Not a ghost, not a figure on a movie screen, but a being with a body that occupies a certain space, casts a shadow, may stand in the way or block the view, says the Black protagonist of Ralph Ellison’s famous 1952 novel Invisible Man. A person who speaks, looks people in the eye – and yet it’s as if he were surrounded by distorting mirrors in which those who come into contact with him see only themselves, or his surroundings. Anything except him. How can that be? Why is it that white people cannot see him?

Their eyesight is not impaired. There’s no physiological explanation; it is an inner attitude in the observer that blots the man out and makes him disappear. He does not exist to other people. As if he were air, or an inanimate object, a lamppost, at most something which forces them to step around it, but nothing that merits any greeting, any acknowledgement, any attention. To be unseen, unrecognized, invisible to others is really the most existential form of disrespect.1 The invisible, those who are not seen, are not included in any social ‘we’. Their words are ignored, their gestures overlooked. Those who are invisible have no feelings, no needs, no rights.

The African American poet Claudia Rankine also tells about the experience of invisibility in her most recent book, Citizen. A Black boy is knocked down in the subway by a man who ‘did not see him’. The man keeps going, doesn’t help the boy up, doesn’t apologize. As if no contact had occurred; as if no person had been in his path. Rankine writes: ‘And you want it to stop, you want the child pushed to the ground to be seen, to be helped to his feet, to be brushed off by the person that did not see him, has never seen him, has perhaps never seen anyone who is not a reflection of himself.’2

You want it to stop. You want not just some people to be visible, not just those who reflect some image that someone invented and declared the norm; you want just being a person to be enough, no other qualities or characteristics to be required, for a person to be seen. You don’t want the people who look a little different from the norm to be overlooked; you don’t want there to be a norm at all for what is visible and what is invisible. You don’t want people who deviate from the norm to be knocked down because they have a different skin colour or a different body, because they love differently or believe differently or hope differently from the majority whose image sets the norm. You want it to stop because it is an insult to everyone, not just to those who get overlooked and knocked down.

But where does it come from, this ‘peculiar disposition of the eyes’, as Ralph Ellison calls it? How do certain people become invisible to others? What emotions are conducive to this kind of seeing in which some people are visible and others are not? What ideas nurture this inner attitude that blots out or masks over others? Who or what forms this attitude? How does it spread? What historical narratives shape such distorting or selective visual regimes? How does the frame arise that dictates interpretative patterns in which certain people are invisible and insignificant, or perceived as threatening and dangerous?

And, most importantly, what are the consequences for the people who are no longer seen, no longer perceived as persons? What does it mean to them to be ignored or seen as something other than what they are? As foreigners, criminals, barbarians, sick people – as interchangeable members of a group, not as individuals with individual abilities and affinities, not as vulnerable beings with names and faces? To what degree does this social invisibility rob them of their sense of orientation, sap their ability to defend themselves? 

Love

‘Feelings do not believe in the reality principle.’

Alexander Kluge, Die Kunst, Unterschiede zu machen

(‘The art of making distinctions’)

‘Fetch me that flower!’ commands Oberon, the king of the fairies, as he sends his jester Puck in search of a magical aphrodisiac. The herb has an inescapable effect: a drop of its juice on the eyelids of a sleeping person causes them to fall madly in love with the first creature they see upon awakening. Because Puck is not exactly the wisest of fairies, and mistakenly administers the potion to other victims than those Oberon intended, the plot of A Midsummer Night’s Dream develops wondrous entanglements. The most sorely afflicted are Titania, the queen of the fairies, and the weaver Bottom. Puck enchants the unwitting Bottom, turning him into a creature with a huge donkey’s head. The good-natured weaver does not notice his deformation and is surprised to see everyone suddenly running away from him. ‘Bless thee, Bottom! Bless thee!’ says his friend Quince when he sees Bottom’s ugly figure, and tries to tell him as gently as possible what has happened: ‘Thou art translated.’ Bottom thinks his friends are playing a rude joke on him: ‘I see their knavery: this is to make an ass of me; to fright me, if they could’, he declares, and strolls away singing defiantly.

In this beastly transformation, Bottom comes upon Titania in the woods where Puck has applied the aphrodisiac to her eyelids while she slept. And the magic takes effect; no sooner does she see Bottom than she falls in love with him:

Nothing against donkeys, but – Titania, looking at a half-beast, is ‘enthralled’ and calls it ‘fair’? How can that be? What does she fail to see, or see differently? Is it possible that Titania doesn’t notice Bottom’s giant donkey ears? His shaggy fur? His huge muzzle? Perhaps, although she is looking at Bottom, she doesn’t see his exact outlines, his features. The creature appears to her as altogether ‘fair’: perhaps she is simply blotting out all those qualities and characteristics that do not fit that label. She is moved, stirred, smitten, and her euphoria seems to have shut down some of her cognitive functions. Or perhaps – another possibility – she does see his huge ears, his shaggy fur and his muzzle, but, under the influence of the love potion, she appraises these aspects of Bottom otherwise than she normally would. She sees the giant ears, but to her they suddenly seem enthralling and fair.

What the magic flower’s juice does as a dramaturgical device in Shakespeare’s play is something we are familiar with in our own lives: love (or lust) has a way of suddenly overwhelming us. It takes us completely by surprise and affects our whole being. It is entrancing; it drives us out of our senses. Yet Titania falls in love with Bottom not because he is the way he is, but only because he is the first being she sees on awakening. It is true that, in her enchanted state, she loves Bottom – what she sees in him really does look lovely to her – but, although she can even name reasons why she loves him, they are not the true source of her love. In the story of Titania’s love for Bottom, Shakespeare is telling us about those emotional states in which the object of the emotion is not the same as its cause. A person who has slept badly and wakes up irritable seizes on the most insignificant thing as an opportunity to discharge their anger. The object of their wrath is probably the first person they happen to meet, a chance victim, assaulted out of the blue – who has done nothing to cause the anger in the first place. An emotion can in fact be aroused by something other than the thing or the creature at which it is directed. Although Bottom is the object of Titania’s love, he is not the cause of it.

And there is another lesson hidden in this story: love, like other emotions, involves active ways of seeing. Titania’s perception of Bottom, the object of her love, is not neutral, but brings with it an appraisal and a judgement: she thinks of him as ‘fair’, ‘virtuous’, ‘enthralling’, ‘desirable’. The power of her infatuation prevents her from having any inappropriate – that is, unwanted – perceptions; the lover’s vision renders invisible any unpleasant properties or habits of the beloved. Anything that might be adverse to her love, anything that might impede the lover’s emotion and pleasure, is repressed – at least in the initial infatuation. In this way, the object of love is made to fit the emotion brought to it.

Many years ago, a young interpreter in Afghanistan explained to me why it is a good idea for parents to choose a bride for their son. After all, he argued gently but firmly, when you’re in love, you’re completely blind and in no position to judge whether the woman you adore really suits you. But experience teaches us that love is not a permanent form of mental derangement; eventually the magical effect of Shakespeare’s herb wears off – and then what? Then...