Theorizing the Invisible Body

II. Theorizing The Invisible Body

One of the easiest, but also one of the least rewarding, readings of Henry Park’s role in Native Speaker is to explain his dilemma as a result of the condition of the modern Korean-American. As literary critic Tina Chen argues, “Henry’s vanishing acts… are a logical extension of his personal history as a Korean American struggling to negotiate the divide that separates how others perceive him and how he sees himself.” Henry Park is not, as Tina Chen claims, an invisible man. He is, even in his own words, only “hardly seen.” To claim that he is wholly invisible undermines the very complexity that pervades Lee’s text; and acts as a refrain on the complexity that includes both it and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.

Ralph Ellison’s protagonist is not invisible either; he is only invisible to the people passing him on the streets of New York City. He can be seen by the men and women who share his ethnicity in the prologue. Ellison’s unstated definition of invisibility is the incapacity to be recognized as an individual, and by this definition, Ellison’s protagonist is blind himself. When Ellison’s unnamed protagonist confronts a man in the street, he first realizes that the other man “had not seen me, actually” and later mocks the man when he reports that he’d been mugged, berating him as a “Poor fool, poor blind fool… mugged by an invisible man!” Yet, this blind man nevertheless is only described as “a man” with blonde hair and blue eyes. In terms of penetrating the façade of the man he confronts, Ellison’s protagonist cannot claim to have seen the other man. By his definition, Ellison’s protagonist too is blind. Anne Cheng, in Passing, Natural Selection, and Love’s Failure discusses the connection between racial blindness and invisibility in the fiction of Ellison and Chang-rae Lee, but unlike Chen, does not see the metaphor as so simplistic in its entailments. For instance, although “white visibility” relies on the invisibility and assumed normality of whiteness, “black invisibility” acquires its shape precisely through its very visibility as difference. Yet, the result of both is quite similar.

Where this leaves the situation of Asian-Americans, or specifically Korean-Americans, is even less specific. The tropes of invisibility only include “white” and “black”. What exactly constitutes the difference between “white visibility” and “black invisibility” is even less clear if applied to Ellison’s text. Both Ellison’s protagonist and the man on the street cannot discern much about the other. What they lack is the capacity to be differentiated, the incapacity to be an individual and not a repetition of the norm, and an inclusion in no other category than “The Other.” What seems to underlie every form of racial blindness is the sense of Otherness that is constituted only through appearing different than someone else. If this is the case, then one need not think of invisibility in terms of race, but instead as the result of social blindness.

This blindness and invisibility leads to an obliteration of identity itself. Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble discusses gender not as a solid construct but instead as a “repeated stylization of the body” that over time produces the “appearance of substance.” Butler’s description of gender could be analogized to any facet of identity. Identities congeal in the performance of that identity. One needs to be able to perceive a distinctive performance, whether another’s or one’s own, to recognize a subject as an individual holding their own identity. The problem both Ellison’s narrator and the man he bumped into encountered was that neither could recognize anything in the other that others would not do. In this case, since their behavior did not differ from a perceived norm, their individual identity became akin to invisible.

According to philospher Michel Foucault, the knowledge that one can be seen is itself the basis for modern sociality. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault describes Bentham’s Panopticon. The Panopticon was a prison where each cell looked in toward a central tower with Venetian blinds or some other means to prevent the prisoner from seeing inside the tower. Each prisoner, without knowledge of the tower’s interior, might believe that the guards in the tower could be looking at them at any time. Ideally, the prisoner would internalize this belief, and would adjust their behavior to reflect the belief that they could be seen at any time. Panoptic structures are reproduced in almost all public spaces: the school, the hospital, the corporation, etc. If visibility is the basis for social behavior, then invisibility is the basis for asocial behavior.

Philosopher Hannah Arendt’s arguments in On Violence suggests that the asocial individual is also the one with the least power. According to Arendt, “The extreme form of power is All against One, the extreme form of violence is One against All.” Further, Arendt explicitly defines power as, “the human ability not just to act but to act in concert.” Although Arendt’s work was specifically tailored toward political revolution, her definitions might serve as a theoretical basis for understand the relationship between violence and vision if one extends her metaphor. The invisible individual, reduced to asociality, lacks the capacity to represent themself and will never be able to act in concert. Instead, they will always be reduced to acting in violence, forced to pit themselves against all else, and perhaps even themselves.