Jason Puskar
Risking Ralph Ellison
When Ralph Ellison said that “the
joke [È] at the center of the American
identity,” he also meant that the joker is
at the center of American life. In a rapid-
ly changing liberal society, with fluctuat-
ing standards and values, the joker is
an “American virtuoso of identity who
thrives on chaos and swift change.”1
For the joker, identity is not a ½xed prin-
ciple, established once and for all, Ma
a fluid masquerade, an ironic display
of masks and styles, gestures and titles,
which accrue around a space that comes
to be known as the “self.”
A great deal of work on identity pol-
itics has focused on similar construc-
tions of racial identity through com-
plex cultural appropriations linked to
masking, minstrelsy, and passing. Ma
Ellison is more optimistic about these
dynamics: he sees the absurd mix of
styles that emerges from what he calls
“pluralistic turbulence” as the only ap-
propriate response to the absurdities
of American politics and history.2 Ac-
cordingly, anyone who assumes too
serious a relationship with his own
identity–anyone who refuses to play
the joker–will likely be duped by more
powerful jokers still.
© 2009 dall'Accademia Americana delle Arti
& Scienze
In Ellison’s most important and best
known work, Invisible Man (1952), IL
narrator does not learn how to joke un-
til the end, when he ½nally concludes,
“[IO]t was better to live out one’s own
absurdity than to die for that of others.”3
Even then, Tuttavia, the Invisible Man
hardly proves a comfortable and con½-
dent joker. He retracts a joke he plays on
a drunken woman attempting to seduce
him, and he abandons the joke he plays
on the Brotherhood almost as soon as he
undertakes it. Ellison endorses joking as
a survival strategy in liberal societies,
but he also worries about the power jok-
ers could acquire, and the violence they
might do with it. If the joke really is at
the center of American identity, Invisible
Man raises the possibility that those in
power might claim joking as their own
prerogative, and systematically deiron-
ize politics and identity for everyone
else. Ellison poses that problem but
doesn’t resolve it, issuing an insightful
and still-relevant caution about the pol-
itics of mid-century liberalism. Liberal
society might facilitate joking through
its own chaotic turbulence, Ellison
hopes, but it also might inhibit joking,
if it merely simulates that turbulence
by structuring daily life ever more com-
prehensively through the modern cal-
culus of risk.
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Jason
Puskar
Ellison’s master metaphor for Ameri-
can liberal society in Invisible Man is the
game. The Invisible Man equates expe-
rience with a game dozens of times, E
Bledsoe and Burnside “the vet” both
urge him to play it better. Ellison stocks
the novel with many different kinds of
games, the most prominent of which
is boxing, but he grounds his analysis
of joking speci½cally in the dynamics of
gambling. When the Invisible Man even-
tually wonders, “What if history was a
gambler, instead of a force in a labora-
tory experiment,” he begins to see the
world as Ellison does, as a game ideally
suited to jokers, rather than agents of
brute force. The Invisible Man clearly
has poker in mind because he goes on to
wonder whether history has an “ace in
the hole.”4 Poker, especially stud poker,
surfaces regularly throughout the novel
at a number of key moments. The seven
letters the Invisible Man receives from
Bledsoe seem to him like “a hand of high
trump cards” in a game of seven card
stud; Burnside advises him to “Play the
game, but raise the ante.”5 And in an
oblique but telling reference, a taxi driv-
er archly pronounces the Invisible Man
a “game stud.”6
That Ellison prefers the term “joker”
over the traditional African American
folk term “trickster” reveals much. Brer
Rabbit and other tricksters defy and dis-
rupt the plantation hierarchy from with-
In, but that hierarchy is fundamentally
unshakeable. Jokers, Tuttavia, disrupt
a different kind of hierarchy, the aris-
tocracy of kings, queens, and jacks who
rule the deck of cards. Whereas South-
ern slave-owners patterned their social
relations on ½xed aristocratic castes pre-
cisely to inhibit social mobility, the aris-
tocracy of the deck of cards undergoes
periodic reshuffling. Standing in for
modern liberal society, the deck of cards
acknowledges real power disparities,
but it also expects regular power up-
heavals. More importantly, it makes the
joker the most consequential card in the
deck, because only the joker can change
identities, temporarily usurping and us-
ing royal power while leaving the basic
power structure intact. Such disingenu-
ousness has an important role for poker
players, pure, because poker rewards, E
even requires, the sanctioned deceit oth-
erwise known as bluf½ng. Poker often
functions in American culture as a meta-
phor for the entire system of liberal-cap-
italist competition between equals. Con
no house to take a cut, and no referee
to enforce the rules, the players manage
things for themselves. The preferred
game of cowboys and rugged western-
ers in countless frontier novels, poker
allows stoic heroes like Owen Wister’s
Virginian to act out key liberal values
in a world both refreshingly and terrify-
ingly free of law and order.
Tuttavia, even as Invisible Man absorbs
and extends this traditional account of
poker, the novel also presents a second
set of references to a very different kind
of gamble, the lottery. When the Invis-
ible Man pays Mary Rambo a hundred
dollars, he pretends the money came
from “playing the numbers.” Later, he
compares his superstitions to those of
“chronic numbers players.” But of all
the gamblers in the novel, the most im-
portant is B. P. Rinehart, the “number
Uomo,” who runs an illegal private lot-
tery in Harlem.7 Unlike poker games,
lotteries are centrally organized and ver-
tically structured. They inhibit interac-
tions between players and make each bet
a private affair between a single player
and the house. So if poker idealizes lib-
eralism as free and voluntary play among
equals, the lottery introduces important
cautions and quali½cations, and suggests
that a liberal society might be more sys-
tematically structured and centralized
84
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than it ½rst appears. This is especially
true given that “Rine the gambler” is
also the most flamboyant and successful
joker in Invisible Man; for like the joker in
a deck of cards, Rinehart has no identity
except when passing for someone else.
By shadowing its persistent references to
poker with equally persistent references
to the lottery, and by linking both to jok-
ers and joking, Invisible Man asks readers
to consider that perhaps American lib-
eral society is not just a game that facil-
itates joking, but is, instead, a game per-
petrated by a joker. That joker promises
to dispense what the Invisible Man calls
“in½nite possibilities” through the en-
ergizing risks of gambling, but he does
so without actually participating in the
game.8
Poker and lotteries do share certain
basic features intrinsic to all gambles. In
both, players make deliberate choices
that lead to, or correspond with, one of
a number of different possible outcomes
that cannot be known in advance. Possi-
ble outcomes are always ½nite and limit-
ed, Tuttavia, so when the die is cast the
player does not exactly throw open the
doors to chaos and anarchy. Instead he
or she starts an operation that has just
six possible results: gambles generate
uncertainty, but they structure and limit
uncertainty, pure. Compared to the po-
tentially limitless set of contingencies
one might experience in daily life, IL
gamble actually narrows the possibili-
ties considerably. In doing so, the gam-
ble compels deliberate choice at the mo-
ment of uncertainty, as the gambler bets
on the future course of events and ac-
cepts full responsibility for the outcome.
Traditional liberal economic theory
tends to treat gambles in terms of ra-
tional choice. Informed agents choose
to take risks through investments, In
occupational hazards, or at the roulette
table, having calculated whether they
stand to gain or lose in the process. Ma
rational choice theory has never been
very good at explaining why people bet
against the odds or the house, and so it
charges many gamblers with calculat-
ing badly, acting irrationally, or substi-
tuting superstition for reason. Ellison
turns that argument on its head. IL
Invisible Man’s determination to “play
in face of certain defeat” sounds like an
irrational choice, but it also may have a
more political purpose.9 To put it sim-
ply, free and responsible individuals do
more than just choose to gamble; the rit-
ual of the gamble also validates players
as responsible and free. At the moment
of the gamble more than one thing can
happen, which con½rms the open-end-
edness of the world. Allo stesso tempo,
the gamble compels an act of choice at
precisely the point where multiple paths
branch toward the future. The differen-
ces between those possible outcomes
con½rm that the gambler’s choices
are decisive. Thus it matters not at all
whether the gambler wins or loses; Esso
only matters that the gamble structures
his or her choices as real choices, both
freely made and genuinely consequen-
tial, which losing demonstrates just as
well as winning.
If these dynamics were limited to casi-
nos and card games, they would be inter-
esting but isolated cultural phenomena.
Ellison, Anche se, recognizes that gam-
bling is really just one manifestation of
a much broader politicizing of risk by a
burgeoning risk industry. Modern risk
analysis turns a whole range of activities
into gambles: statistical prediction and
analysis makes eating shell½sh, driving
small cars, breathing urban air, or even
exposing oneself to the sun seem like
wagers in an uncertain game. The point
is not that these kinds of activities are
gambles in any essential way, but that
Risking
Ralph
Ellison
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Dædalus Spring 2009
85
Jason
Puskar
modern society de½nes them as such,
by estimating odds, publishing that in-
formation widely, and then asking citi-
zens both to choose wisely among the
various options and to bear responsibil-
ity for the results. Purveyors of risk in-
formation usually claim that their ra-
tional and scienti½c assessments help
individuals choose safer or more bene-
½cial courses of action. Perhaps so, Ma
in the process they also confront risk
consumers with an ever proliferating
array of private risk situations. Attempt-
ing to mitigate one risk, such as the risk
of breast cancer, forces an encounter
with a new risk, such as the risk of radi-
ation from a mammogram. The island
of safety and security that risk analysis
promises to deliver never comes into
view because each risk decision only
delivers us to ever more numerous and
vexing risk assessments still.
German risk theorist Ulrich Beck ar-
gues that residents of modern risk soci-
eties undergo what he calls risk “individ-
ualization,” a process in which the appa-
ratus of risk analysis produces citizens
who regard themselves, and agree to
be regarded, as private, decisive, and re-
sponsible agents, capable of navigating
a complex and changing world. Accord-
ing to Beck, in a risk society “new forms
of ‘guilt ascription’ come into being,"
as risk experts “dump their contradic-
tions and conflicts at the feet of the in-
dividual and leave him or her with the
well-intentioned invitation to judge all
this critically on the basis of his or her
own notions.”10 I would take Beck’s
analysis a step further and say that en-
counters with risk actually produce lib-
eral individuals, ideal subjects thereby
validated as responsible and free, E
so theoretically equipped to go it alone.
In this context, institutionalized gam-
bling is but one of many instruments
of liberal subject formation, and not
substantively different from risk insti-
tutions like the weather bureau or a de-
partment of public health. Even as insti-
tutions of risk analysis cater to an al-
leged capacity for free choice, they also
create the capacity for free choice by
structuring uncertainty in ways that af-
ford agents with endless opportunities
for decisive action. Gamblers, Poi, do
not really gamble at all, but simply lay
claim to liberalism’s most cherished
virtues–freedom and responsibility–
Quale, at worst, they buy at the cost
of their long-term losses.
Although Invisible Man acknowledges
the appeal of these dynamics, it also rec-
ognizes their danger. Again and again,
the Invisible Man discovers that he had
been “[UN] tool just at the very moment
I had thought myself most free.”11 The
primary gamble through which this oc-
curs is not a conventional gamble at all,
but the risky business of improvisation-
al speaking. To speak without a script,
to voice words spontaneously and im-
pulsively, promises freedom from rig-
id prescription and plan. Super½cially,
the novel can be read as the story of the
Invisible Man’s growing ability to speak
spontaneously and for himself. His ½rst
speech after the Battle Royal cribs Book-
er T. Washington’s Atlanta Exposition
address. In it the Invisible Man “spoke
automatically” and “could not leave out
a single word. All had to be said, each
memorized nuance considered, ren-
dered.” Only when he deviates from
the script, either by accident or impulse,
and says “social equality” instead of
“social responsibility,” does he seem
to speak for himself.12 Eventually such
impulsivity becomes the norm. When
he speaks at the eviction he confesses,
“I didn’t know what I was going to say.”
During his ½rst speech to the Brother-
hood he admits that he “gave up trying
to memorize phrases and simply allowed
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the excitement to carry me along.” By
speaking improvisationally, the Invisi-
ble Man courts risk, hazarding some-
thing that might be lost in the process,
which turns out to be nothing less than
the self: “If they laugh, I’ll die!”13
The novel predicates its apparent ap-
proval of improvisation’s risks on the
aesthetics of jazz, about which Ellison
himself was expert. One common ac-
count of jazz sees it as a proving ground
for spontaneous, free, and improvisa-
tional self-assertion. If early versions
of that argument sometimes linked jazz
improvisation to suspect notions of Af-
rican primitivism or libidinal irrational-
ità, more recent arguments read impro-
visation more productively, as an escape
from false consciousness or as opposi-
tion to Western rationality. Such claims
have a great deal of merit, but mapping
them onto the Invisible Man’s oratori-
cal improvisations implies a similar af-
½rmation of his own unscripted impuls-
es, a reading the novel ½nally does not
sustain.
The most obvious problem with that
reading is that Brother Jack informs the
Invisible Man that “you were not hired
to think,” only to speak.14 His improvi-
sation thus must be purely formal, mere-
ly channeling the ideas of others. Elli-
son’s reservations about improvisation
appear more subtly in the novel’s treat-
ment of a conflicted source, Ralph Wal-
do Ellison’s own namesake, Ralph Wal-
do Emerson. Invisible Man is haunted by
Emerson. Two characters named Emer-
son play key roles in the Invisible Man’s
fortunes, and a third, Mr. Norton, es-
pouses an obviously parodic theory of
Emersonian transcendentalism and
self-reliance. Ellison’s quarrel seems to
be speci½cally with “Self-Reliance” and
with the sovereign self that dominates
that essay, and which commands cir-
cumstance, answers only to its inner
constitution, and grandiosely writes “on
the lintels of the door-post, Whim.”15
Ellison might approve of the whim it-
self, but he largely rejects Emerson’s
con½dence that whims issue from stable
selves that precede such impulsivity. In
Invisible Man, the only people who com-
mand circumstance to this degree are
powerful despots like Bledsoe, or power-
ful egotists like Mr. Norton, who advises
the narrator, “Self-reliance is a most
worthy virtue.”16 Accordingly, Ellison’s
Emerson is not the exuberant egotist of
“Self-Reliance,” but the depressive stoic
of “Experience” and, more important-
ly, the visionary daredevil of “Circles,"
whose identity also turns out to be tied
to the experience of risk.
Emerson’s “Circles” describes a world
that could be the Invisible Man’s own:
“The universe is fluid and volatile”;
“The new continents are built out of
the ruins of an old planet”; “Perma-
nence is a word of degrees”; “All that
we reckoned settled, shakes and rattles”;
“People wish to be settled: only as far
as they are unsettled, is there any hope
for them”; “Life is a series of surprises”;
“The way of life is wonderful: it is by
abandonment.”17 Such a richly contin-
gent world is ever ripe for the visionary
self, at home in these dynamic condi-
zioni. Ellison would agree to a consid-
erable degree, but more than Emerson,
Ellison worries about the political and
institutional sources of that self. Late
in “Circles,” Emerson tells a parable of
precarious life that helps to clarify the
nature of their disagreement. “Geoffrey
draws on his boots to go through the
woods, that his feet may be safer from
the bite of snakes,” Emerson says. Lui
continues:
Aaron never thinks of such a peril. In
many years, neither is harmed by such
Risking
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Ellison
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Dædalus Spring 2009
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Jason
Puskar
an accident. Yet it seems to me that with
every precaution you take against such
an evil, you put yourself into the power
of the evil. I suppose that the highest
prudence is the lowest prudence.18
Aaron’s risk-taking, his vulnerability
to harm, in fact protects him from the
greater danger of precaution. But cru-
cially, Aaron “never thinks of such a
peril,” acting with a blithe indifference
that registers as openness to experience.
A listener, rather than a reader, can more
easily detect a telling pun: the ear would
not be able to tell whether Aaron “never
thinks of such a peril,” the snakes, O
whether he never thinks of “such appar-
el,” the boots. Infatti, Aaron must never
think of either. Just as “a peril” is both
the double and the opposite of protec-
tive “apparel,” so, pure, the instinct for
precaution is embedded in the very per-
ception of danger. This helps explain
why Emerson ½nally dismisses the delib-
erate, conscious courting of risk through
“gaming,” an arti½cial contrivance he
likens to “drunkenness” and “the use
of opium and alcohol.”19 The courting
of danger simply inverts, rather than es-
capes, the cringing care for safety. For
Ellison the case is different. There sim-
ply is no available mode of pure impro-
visation that lacks consciousness of risk;
there can be no natural spontaneity that
has not been transformed already into a
self-conscious and deliberate game.
Di conseguenza, the novel ½nally punctures
the Emersonian fantasy that improvisa-
tional speech might release a real, VERO,
or stable self that preexists the act of
speaking. Indeed it is during improvisa-
tional moments most of all when the
Invisible Man becomes aware that he
is speaking for someone else, a possibil-
ity that haunts his composition of the
book and that ½nds expression in its fa-
mous last line. After the Invisible Man’s
½rst Brotherhood speech, he says, “What
had come out was completely uncalcu-
lated, as though another self within me
had taken over and held forth.” Later he
says, “I had uttered words that had pos-
sessed me.”20 Sometimes in Emerson
the spontaneous self is literally reborn,
but at this moment when the Invisible
Man feels that “the new is being born,"
his journey down an auditorium tunnel
toward the light replays his earlier and
more violent rebirth at the factory hos-
pital, where doctors performed some
sort of lobotomizing electro-shock treat-
ment without his consent. Nothing dam-
ages the fantasy of self-reliant improvi-
sation more than the thought that flits
through the Invisible Man’s mind when
he likens the microphones at the Broth-
erhood speech–“shiny electric gadg-
ets,” he calls them–to the “little gadget”
of the lobotomy device.21 Linking an in-
strument of improvisational speaking
with one of psychiatric control and even
punishment, Ellison ½nally collapses any
meaningful distinction between them.
Accordingly, when the Invisible Man
wonders, “[W]hat if history was a gam-
bler, instead of a force in a laboratory
experiment,” his second metaphor, IL
laboratory, reveals his real target. IL
problem with the members of the Broth-
erhood is not that they think like com-
munists, but that they think like scien-
tists, “cultivating scienti½c objectivity”
and af½rming that “everything could be
controlled.” In rejecting the merits of
the gamble, the Brotherhood’s scienti½c
rationality endorses the rigid and risk-
less dynamics of the machine. “Don’t
kid yourself,” the Invisible Man ½nally
retorts, “The only scienti½c objectivity
is a machine.”22 As if to remedy this sit-
uation by transforming the laboratory
into a gambler’s den, the novel arranges
a gallery of failed and unreliable instru-
ments that cannot, or do not, stabilize
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the world. Clocks refuse to agree; blue-
prints lie abandoned; even a steam
gauge in the paint factory’s “uproar de-
partment” proves defective.23 That ma-
chines break and fail is entirely for the
best in a novel more worried that ma-
chine rationality might succeed too
BENE. For in this regard, Ellison and Em-
erson wholly agree that a fluid and vol-
atile world is far superior to a rational
and mechanical one. The greatest dan-
ger in Ellison’s novel would be the im-
position of a logic so complete that hier-
archies of status and power never could
be shuffled again.
Remarkably, Poi, Ellison refuses to
wax nostalgic for the alleged purity of
the living human voice, despite the nov-
el’s skepticism about machine rational-
ità. Although the novel is preoccupied
with jazz music, it does not represent
a single live jazz musician. The Invisi-
ble Man hears live organ music, a blues
song, and boogie-woogie church hymns,
but he only hears jazz through mechani-
cal recordings on the radio-phonograph
in his basement, in “groovy music on
the juke,” and over a “record shop loud-
speaker.”24 There is no pure and natu-
ral human voice in the novel that can try
to claim the spontaneity and authentic-
ity of jazz improvisation because there
can be no pure and natural self prior
to the systems that give rise to it. Even
the radio-phonograph in the Prologue,
which at ½rst seems an instrument of
liberation, becomes, by novel’s end,
just another identity-producing gad-
Ottenere. The jazz music it plays actually re-
plays earlier performances, which it re-
hearses over and over again, the same
way every time.
Rather than countering the machine
with an allegedly spontaneous and natu-
ral human voice, the Invisible Man pits
machine rationality against machine ra-
tionality, through his plan to play ½ve
separate recordings of Louis Arm-
strong’s “What Did I Do to Be So Black
and Blue” simultaneously. Mechanical
cacophony, contrived through imperfect
synchronization, mixes up mechanical
routine. Once the Invisible Man recog-
nizes that his own voice is already en-
graved by other voices, once he under-
stands that even his improvisations are
just reassemblies of other speeches,
he also realizes that his best option is
to practice an eclectic and messy mis-
alignment of forms and styles that can
be combined–though never created–
anew.
Despite Ellison’s obvious skepticism
about liberal individualism in its most
traditional forms, Emersonian and oth-
erwise, he attempts to rehabilitate and
af½rm the individual by de½ning him
or her in far more quali½ed terms. Rath-
er than recovering that natural, Adamic
innocence that Emerson called “origi-
nality,” Ellison prefers to “improvise
upon the given,” as he put it in one of
his most important essays on art and
music, “The Little Man at Chehaw Sta-
tion.”25 Improvisation turns out not
to be a matter of authentic or spontane-
ous self-expression at all, but a method
of assembling a speci½c cultural inher-
itance, which accumulates over time
and even against one’s will, like the clut-
ter that gathers in the Invisible Man’s
briefcase. In other words, improvisation
does not necessarily militate against
conformity, as in Emerson, but against
mechanical rigidity, whether in private
identity or social structure. In this way,
an individual’s improvisations are really
the source of the “cacophonic motion”
and the “chaos of American society”
that Ellison prizes most, and that scram-
ble all relations of status and power so
that no hierarchy can ever become per-
manently and intractably ½xed. Ellison’s
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Dædalus Spring 2009
89
Jason
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“pluralistic turbulence” generates plu-
ralistic mingling, and so, pure, a messy
mix of classes, races, nazioni, langua-
ges, cultures, styles, and aesthetics that
never do settle down: “in this country
things are always all shook up, so that
people are constantly moving around
and rubbing off on one another cultur-
ally.”26 No one ever starts from scratch,
nor is anyone purely and entirely him-
self. Jazz improvisation is valuable not
because it liberates the player from the
composer’s score, but because it reas-
sembles preexisting scores, mixing up
the codes, misaligning the records, E
shuffling the deck.
One of Ellison’s most richly imag-
ined metaphors for the effects of such
pluralistic turbulence appears in “Che-
haw Station” as a “light-skinned, blue-
eyed, Afro-American-featured individ-
ual” who stops Manhattan traf½c and
pedestrians alike with his “Volkswagen
Beetle decked out with a gleaming Rolls-
Royce radiator,” from which he emerges
wearing “black riding boots and fawn-
colored riding breeches” and a “dashy
dashiki.” American, European, and Af-
rican forms and styles blend the cultures
of the Volk and the aristocratic elite. IL
resulting ½gure bursts from his vehicle
like “a dozen circus clowns,” which is
to say that he is not only a little ridicu-
lous, but also a self-conscious “Ameri-
can Joker.”27 His eclectic reassembly of
recognizable forms recycles available
materials and makes a joke of them in
the process.
In contrasto, the Invisible Man’s prob-
lem in most of the novel is not that he
lacks a true self, or even a useable self,
but that he lacks the ability to play jokes
like this, as even Tod Clifton ½nally
learns to do. Against Burnside the vet’s
advice to “Play the game, but don’t be-
lieve in it. . . . Play the game, but raise
the ante, my boy!” the Invisible Man
continues to believe in the game too
readily and too often. Burnside should
know: he pronounces himself “more
clown than fool,” which is to say, more
given to joking than to mental illness.28
When he tells the Invisible Man to
“raise the ante,” Burnside’s poker slang
reminds the Invisible Man that he had
better learn how to bluff, pure, given
the hand he was dealt, and given that
no one, really, is ever exempt from the
game. Even Brother Jack is in the game,
despite his pretensions to scienti½c ob-
jectivity. His name marks him as a mi-
nor aristocrat among the face cards and,
as such, a key player in power’s most
formidable con½gurations. Though Jack
would deny it, the Invisible Man even-
tually concludes that even Jack is out to
“ball the jack,” gamblers’ slang for stak-
ing everything on a single bet. Bledsoe is
more candid about his role in the game:
“after you win the game, you take the
prize and you keep it,” he says. And hav-
ing done so, he is “still the king,” not
just royalty, but the mightiest face card
of all.29 These kings and jacks are jokers,
pure, Ovviamente, for every king is only a
joker in the master’s clothes. The strata-
gems they use to claim and keep power
show why the Invisible Man, if he is to
keep his shirt, will have to stop believ-
ing in the game and assume the ironic
detachment that would allow him to
start playing it instead.
If poker thrives on, and even requires,
the ironic distance of joking, the lottery
positively inhibits joking. What joke
could a lottery player contrive? Struc-
turally resistant to irony, the lottery re-
quires players to believe in the game,
even though the real winners are those
who operate the racket. In Invisible Man,
the real lottery winner is Rinehart him-
self, with whom Mary Rambo may be
placing her bets in a lottery she has been
“playing for years,” despite her mount-
90
Dædalus Spring 2009
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ing debt.30 Jack and Bledsoe do not need
to play the numbers because they have
no shortage of ways to experience their
own freedom and power, but Rinehart
sells liberal selfhood to Mary Rambo
on the installment plan. Like any other
commodity, the prerogatives of liberal
selfhood are in greatest demand where
they seem to be in the shortest supply,
and so the numbers game has always
flourished among the poor and the
working classes, for whom structural
inequalities most limit options and op-
portunities. The risk apparatus of mod-
ern liberalism, including all of Beck’s
methods of risk individualization, are
thus especially good at keeping people
like Mary Rambo committed to key lib-
eral ideals, ideals that entail, most im-
portantly, accepting responsibility for
one’s own fortunes. As an instrument
of risk individualization, as a technol-
ogy of liberal self-production, the lot-
tery eliminates opportunities for iro-
ny, producing a more traditional, self-
reliant liberal identity, and ½xing it in
place. The only thing worse than hav-
ing no jokers in such a game is having
a joker in charge of the game, as Rine-
hart takes charge of the numbers. IL
joke is on the players, courtesy of “Rine
the rascal.”31 He doesn’t play the lottery
himself, but he doesn’t need to: he takes
the bets, keeps the pro½ts, and knows
the score.
In the end, Ellison’s novel permits
nothing to stand as a master metaphor
for “the beautiful absurdity of . . . Amer-
ican identity,” not even poker, Quale
the lottery ½nally challenges and un-
dermines.32 Several years after publish-
ing Invisible Man Ellison offered a more
pointed caution about the lottery when
he acknowledged that Rinehart “trans-
forme (for winners, Ovviamente) pennies
into dollars, and thus he feeds (E
feeds on) the poor.”33 Those parenthe-
ses seem to mark minor quali½cations,
but in fact they quarantine devastating
facts that Ellison could not incorporate
into his more optimistic accounts of jok-
ing. Crucially, Ellison penned this extra
caution about Rinehart in 1958, just a
few years before state-sponsored and
state-run lotteries began replacing pri-
vate games like Rinehart’s, following
the widespread legalization of gam-
bling in the United States. Ellison may
not have anticipated the incorporation
of the lottery into the apparatus of the
state, but he certainly did recognize that
if society were structured like a lottery,
it might ½x identity in place and stabi-
lize, rather than shuffle, hierarchies
of status and power. Unlike the fanci-
ful game in Jorge Luis Borges’s “The
Lottery in Babylon” (1941), with its
ruthless egalitarianism, Ellison’s more
culturally speci½c lottery suggests that
Americans’ widespread enthusiasm
for chaos and swift change might be
used against them institutionally and
even governmentally, inculcating low-
income quietism while shifting costs
and responsibilities down the socio-
economic scale. If liberalism really is
more like the lottery than like poker,
the joke is on the players, because the
capacities they regard as innate–the
capacities they believe they bring to
the table–are really produced through
their participation in the game.
Ellison never does link American soci-
ety exclusively with either poker games
or lotteries, and so he avoids committing
to either a naively optimistic or a cyni-
cally paranoid view of American society.
Instead he keeps both versions in play
and tacitly acknowledges that even his
own faith in democratic pluralism might
already be compromised, if it turns out
to be enrolled in a higher game still. For
a writer who really was a committed lib-
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Dædalus Spring 2009
91
Jason
Puskar
eral pluralist, that is an extraordinary
concession, and one that shows how
rigorously Ellison could scrutinize even
his own most cherished positions. Quello
is to say, Ellison himself ½nally refuses
to believe in the game completely and
uncritically, and in fact ironizes his own
political commitments. No doubt one of
the things he liked about liberalism was
that it changes substantively and contin-
ually over time, as it has through its vari-
ous classical, corporate, and social-
democratic permutations. More than
½fty years after the publication of In-
visible Man, when liberalism and now
neoliberalism increasingly seem like
the only game in town, Ellison’s fear
that the joker might capture the opera-
tion without anyone knowing it seems
more relevant than ever to how the
game is being played.
ENDNOTES
1 Ralph Ellison, The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Mod-
ern Library, 2003), 108, 110. All references to Ellison’s Collected Essays refer to one of two
essays: “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” originally published in Partisan Review in
1958, and “The Little Man at Chehaw Station,” originally published in The American Scholar
in 1977–1978.
2 Ibid., 504.
3 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage, 1952), 559.
4 Ibid., 441.
5 Ibid., 163, 153.
6 Ibid., 531.
7 Ibid., 324, 381, 491.
8 Ibid., 576.
9 Ibid., 577.
10 Ulrich Beck, The Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. Mark Ritter (London: Sage,
1992), 136–137. For important reflections on related risk dynamics, see the essays collected
in Tom Baker and Jonathan Simon, Embracing Risk: The Changing Culture of Insurance and
Responsibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
11 Ellison, Invisible Man, 553.
12 Ibid., 30–31.
13 Ibid., 290, 341, 276.
14 Ibid., 469.
15 Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson and Jean
Ferguson Carr (Cambridge, Massa.: Belknap Press, 1987), 30.
16 Ellison, Invisible Man, 108.
17 Emerson, The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ferguson and Carr, 179–180, 184,
189–190.
18 Ibid., 186.
19 Ibid., 190.
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20 Ellison, Invisible Man, 353–354.
21 Ibid., 346, 341, 235.
22 Ibid., 505, 382.
23 Ibid., 322, 175, 212.
24 Ibid., 425, 443.
25 Ellison, The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. Callahan, 511.
26 Ibid., 508, 504, 518.
27 Ibid., 509–511.
28 Ellison, Invisible Man, 153–154.
29 Ibid., 576, 142–143.
30 Ibid., 325.
31 Ibid., 498.
32 Ibid., 559.
33 Ellison, The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. Callahan, 110.
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