White Negro: Jeff Wall's Uncle Tom

Abstract

'I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor I am one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me'. Such are the first words of Ralph Ellison's novel, Invisible Man, which was published in New York in 1952. These few words say it all. It is a man who speaks. And who says I. The novel starts with I. It is written in first person, where I comes before all the rest, even before the fact of being invisible (although he is only invisible to the eyes of others). The text is clear: this man is first a subject (of language) before he becomes an object (of vision or non-vision). The imaginary and the symbolic cannot be disassociated. For good reason. They nullify neantisent one another as one denies the other. Or to be more specific, in Lacanian terms, it is the other, the big Other in capital letters (you and me), who denies the one the speaking subject, or rather the writing subject (the narrator): he (we) does not see it. This denial of the gaze is a denial of existence. We do not know the cause. Not yet. What is not stated in Ellison's Prologue, which Jeff Wall chose to illustrate (1999-2000) is that the invisible man is a black man (Fig. 28). We might deduce it from various allusions scattered through the text. This blackness only becomes explicit in the following pages: in the core of the narrative. Everybody knows Ellison's novel, which was, in his time, a cultural event: both a racial manifesto and a cult book. It relates the adventures of a