"1 + 1 = 3" and other dilemmas: reading vertigo in Invisible Man, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and Song of Solomon.

... the metaphor of the chain of communication picks up the sense of contingency as contiguity, while the question of the "link" immediately raises the issue of contingency as the indeterminate. (Homi K. Bhabha 188)

I won't even talk about the cultural heritage from Africa. (Ralph Ellison, Going to the Territory 66)

By representing aporia, dislocation, and caesura through vernacular space, Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977) asserts that Amos Tutuola's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954) and Ralph Ellison's In visible Man (2952) constitute linked gestures toward the diasporic sensibility within which Morrison situates her own work. This strategy of foregrounding aporetic impasse and lapsed rhetorical connections addresses a significant tension in Ellison's work, recuperating an apparent blindness toward African retentions operating at the level of deep structure in his own text. Morrison's revision explores these moments of blindness in Ellison's text and exposes their contours. Relying on black vernacular motifs inspired by Ellison, Morrison's narrative strategy also reveals that, taken together, the three texts chart both individualized and collective evolutions of diaspora consciousness across national and geographic boundaries. These generational shifts reveal sites of neocolonial cultural arrest, rupture, and vi olence, thematized through a network of allusions to ascent, suspension, and rotation. In contemplating these representations as spatiotemporal features of diaspora culture, Song of Solomon constructs African diaspora subjectivity through what I will call an aesthetics of vertigo that reconfigures the "psychogeography" of Black space.

This usage of the term psychogeography posits, after Lefebvre, that, in the production of social space, foreclosed zones of resistance can be made habitable. (2) Such transgressive spaces are frequently represented through narratives of cultural chaos inscribed as incoherence and vertiginous anxiety, as in both Ellison and Tutuola. Morrison participates in these representations, but claims a route to equilibrium by rewriting vertigo as a liminal site of creative tension that can be better understood in the context of African diaspora cosmologies. These hybrid cosmologies which support her protagonist's acclimation to a vertiginous, diasporic subjectivity are derived primarily from Yoruba and related traditions, including Ifa, Vodoun, and hoodoo, and from archetypal figures within these traditions, particularly Obatala and Eshu. For the purposes of this essay, vertigo is an element in Ellison's and Tutuola's work that for Morrison becomes a vernacular event that reveals a habitable space organized by diasporic cosmologies, in which autopoesis, self-creation, can be realized.

All three texts encode vertigo as more than inexplicable instances of perceptual disturbance. Vertigo captures the relationship of the internal experience of the colonized to the colonized environment. As the authors explore the uncharted spaces of diaspora subjectivity, they confront the unarticulated implications of vertigo as a cultural phenomenon. In environments organized by neo-colonialist constructions of race, the protagonists face unavoidable assaults on their humanity, sanity, and cultural coherence. In the aftermath of slavery, Tutuola's nameless protagonist occupies the emblematic position of having "no right to describe myself" (170). Milkman "lack[s] coherence, a coming together of the features into a total self" (Song 69). They experience the effects of colonialism and racism as psychological trauma, generally represented as fragmentation or splitting, framed by Du Boisian double-consciousness, as is evident when Tutuola's protagonist later comments, that "we left ourselves on the road" to beco ming "slave" and "master" (171). Because they inhabit places dominated by colonialist hegemonies that confront them with abnormally hostile negations, the protagonists lack spaces in which to redefine and voice themselves. As a vernacular trope, vertigo represents the temporal and spatial figuration of "the unhomely moment" described by Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture, a mapping of estrangement in which "to be unhomed is not to be homeless, nor can the 'unhomely' be easily accommodated in that familiar division of social life into private and public spheres. The unhomely moment creeps up on you stealthily as your own shadow and suddenly you find yourself... taking the measure of your dwelling in a state of 'incredulous terror'" (9).

The unhomeliness of exile provokes cultural and psychological paralysis. At the same time, it restructures familial, social, and cultural relationships. But a sense of cultural memory, history, and difference generates the protagonists' resistance to this epistemic violence, and the rupture created by this impulse finds its textual representation in the figure of vertigo. Prolonged episodes of vertigo result from the protagonists' recognition that the apparently fixed "facts" that govern their neo-colonial lives are, in fact, unstable--full of fissures, contradictions, and lies masquerading as universal truths. Vertigo is the only logical response to the lethal delusions of colonialism in these texts, a faithful reflection of a pathological environment. Its resolution depends on the characters' ability to stabilize the unseen, liminal spaces of their experience by achieving internal equilibrium in a communal process of psychogeographic remapping. In environments where all meaning is contingent, they must vali date themselves in the context of their own silenced memories and cultural processes, and claim the transgressive space of the vernacular as a place to begin reconstructing themselves as intact Black subjects. Yet as Tutuola's and Ellison's protagonists approach the thresholds of diaspora subjectivity, they encounter a discursive silence in the authors' lack of recourse to a viable theoretical framework. The discourses of neo-colonialism and Whiteness enforce this speechlessness, an aphasia that leaves the lived experience of diaspora unsupported by a framing vocabulary. This negation suggests not only discursive exclusion, but also an effective incarceration of identity and language. (3)

For Morrison, however, while troping her predecessors' unhomed terror, vertigo becomes a zone of potentiality offering rehabituation in a diasporic landscape that affirms the dislocated and untranslatable aspects of diaspora. Additionally, although the earlier texts privilege masculine encounters, Song of Solomon pointedly extends vertigo as a motif of Black feminist cultural production that yields a collectively nuanced diaspora subjectivity. Reconfiguring cultural heritage through vertiginous aesthetics in Song of Solomon locates its protagonist at a vernacular crossroads that privileges hybridity and brings the inflections of the past into the present. In effect, vertigo enacts "past-presence," a dynamic state of being that critic Edward Pavlic explains as a critical component of diasporic accretions of knowledge in his analysis of the "syndetic emergence narrative" that evolves from Ellisonian hibernations (169). (4) Song of Solomon negotiates vertigo by seizing it as an invitation to past-presence, throu gh which post-colonial subjectivity establishes a geography of diaspora confluences and contingencies.

These negotiations are possible because positioning Song of Solomon as third in this assemblage of texts sounds otherwise muted dialogic structures through trialectic interplay. Ellison and Tutuola write from distinct historical, geographic, and cultural locations in the United States and Africa. Though their novels were published within two years of one another, evidence has not revealed direct connections between them. Yet as Pavlic observes of Ellison's narrator, both confront the limits "of 'white' modernist understandings of cultural process as a solitary and stationery exercise of mind," ultimately inhabiting spheres of social exile in a "space where their minds swirl" in cultural suspension (165-84). In similar narratives about Black men as exiles in their own colonized countries, Tutuola, a Yoruba writing from his homeland in Nigeria, and Ellison, in the nomenclature of his time a "Negro" writing in the United States, thematize vertigo as a metaphor for colonialist distortions of self and community. P ublished twenty-three years later, Song of Solomon brings Ellison and Tutuola into critical relationship by strategically positioning their texts as ancestors to its self-consciously diasporic narrative. But in Song of Solomon, theorizing a neo-African, womanist gaze located at the interstices of vernacular culture relieves the anxiety of alienation, charts a diasporic landscape, and articulates the dislocations of exile by framing vertigo as a phase in a broader epistemological shift from aporia to autopoetic self-construction.

Various critics note Morrison's critiques of Ellison as canonical elder. In so doing, Morrison makes use of the Signifyin(g) relation elaborated by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in Signifyin(g) Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism, while Walker's identification of the quilt as a core trope of African American womanist fiction in In Search of Our Mother's Gardens also provides insight into Morrison's narrative strategy and critical stance toward Ellison. These theories constitute fundamental and by now familiar entrances to the critical discourse surrounding African American literary production. As Walker says of her archetypal quiltmaker, "If we could locate this 'anonymous' black woman from Alabama, she would turn out to be one of our grandmothers" (232). Walker's quilt is literally and figuratively an American event haunted by anonymity and dislocated memories. Similarly, Gates's elaboration of Signifyin(g), while grounded in an understanding of EsuElegbara (the Yoruba deity also know as Eshu) as Pan-African representative of indigenous Black hermeneutics, is also explicitly concerned with "Afro-American vernacular discourse" and "traditional African American figures of signification" (44). Both tropes engage Black vernacular traditions informed by formal links to memories of U.S. slavery, the Middle Passage, and a distant African heritage. I am arguing here that, as an addition and contrast to these concepts which originate in African American locations, vertigo is a nomadic trope that emerges from the transnational, hybrid attributes of African diaspora cultural process. Morrison is both Signifyin(g) on Ellison and constructing a narrative quilt of interwoven ancestral fragments, but vertigo is the figure through which her incorporation of Tutuola's text and the implications of its Yoruba aesthetic become intelligible.

The figure of vertigo subverts binary analytical structures and invites cultural and discursive pastiche, and Morrison's narrative strategy reproduces it by reaching outside the Western and African American lineage established by Ellison to include a Yoruba writer in her literary ancestry. Invisible Man resonates throughout the thematics and structures of Morrison's novels, a Signifyin(g) relationship initiated in The Bluest Eye (1970) and continued in later works. In discussing The Bluest Eye with respect to Ellison, Michael Awkward identifies Morrison's feminist revision of Invisible Man's Trueblood episode, finding that Morrison "evidences a self-conscious rejection of the models of such preeminent figures as James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison" (176). But the claim that Morrison in any way dismisses Ellison because she disagrees on some points underestimates their relationship. The elaborate interlocking of Ellison and Tutuola in Song of Solomon's construction suggests that Morrison is primarily asserting a " self-conscious rejection" of binary critical frameworks. Ellison poses what Morrison calls "a conflict, not a problem" ("Rootedness" 339). (5) In fact, Song of Solomon is heavily indebted to Ellison's intertextual strategies. Morrison creates resonances that replicate and extend Invisible Man's lushly allusive infrastructures, in which, as Alan Nadel notes, "the meaning of the allusion... may be found in the oscillation between the two texts which stimulates a reader's imagination in a way that causes him or her to see both texts anew" (55).

Morrison's incorporation of Yoruba critical and aesthetic discourse anchors this revision and realignment. Through Tutuola, the first Nigerian writer to depict the Yoruba cosmos in English, Yoruba aesthetics provide Song of Solomon's primary mythic and critical understructure. Yoruba aesthetics contour Morrison's approach to developing Ellisonian vernacular strategies. No writer is more cognizant than Morrison that ritual, Modernism, and jazz supply the "three encompassing frames that give meaning and direction" to ellison, or that behind this framework stands his awareness that "the ritual and nature of the jazz event owe a lot to an older... African tradition" (Ostendorf 96, 113). Rather than silencing Ellison as a pivotal albeit problematic elder, Morrison positions Tutuola as a mediating ancestor figure and puts every effort into pursuing dialogue with both. Nadel notes that such delineations of canonical descent and the allusive landscapes they describe are in effect "a covert form of literary criticism in that they force us to reconsider the alluded-to text, request us to alter our understanding of it" (59-60).

Morrison's critical foregrounding of this literary lineage contextualizes her work within African-centered literary and cultural structures. In so locating her text, Morrison forces readers to enter a neo-African imaginative landscape. This self-situating signification also extends Morrison's critical lineage to Yoruba, and beyond that back to Kemetic (Black Egyptian), origins. This is the centerpoint of Morrison's diasporic critical gaze, the lens through which the narrative filters and syndetically accretes Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, Celtic, and Native American cosmological motifs. The text itself is saturated by representations of the Yoruba orisas, Yemaya, Eshu, and Obatala, as well as others among the Seven African Powers who appear throughout the diaspora, while additional archetypes and the narrative structure radiate from the core Kemetic myth of Au-Set and Au-Set (Isis and Osiris). (6) Both Eshu and Obatala operate as archetypes in Milkman's characterization. In a direct diasporic pun on Ellison's employment of the trickster figure, Milkman has a psychosomatic limp that identifies him with the Yoruba trickster Esu-Legbara, also known by numerous other names including Ellegua, Eshu-Legbara, Eshu, Esu, and/or Legba. Because the Yoruba archetypes, in particular, circulate freely across diaspora cultures in endless rearticulations, the orisas provide access to this extensive philosophical and aesthetic heritage. This pluralist technique of engaging ancestral traditions prompts Morrison to foreground the Yoruba deities Eshu and Obatala, and also to rely on a fundamental Yoruba narrative structure known as "dilemma tales" as a strategy for negotiating Ellison and Tutuola.

Metaphorical and literal dilemmas of indeterminacy, liminality, and vertigo saturate all three texts. This fact becomes apparent and critically meaningful by virtue of the constituting third text, Song of Solomon, which establishes a processual paradigm within the trialectic. All three demonstrate the qualities of dilemma tales; although their articulations differ, each incorporates some of the genre's most recognizable motifs, and to some extent, its purpose. (7) Traditionally, dilemma tales are deployed to resolve problematic issues through collective observation, reasoning, and critical evaluation. They are distinguished by episodic structures, irresolvable conflicts (dilemmas) confronting the main character, and, finally, by the narrative's refusal to solve the dilemma, leaving the conclusion systematically indeterminate and typically marked by the explicit or implied interrogative "What to do?" At its core, the dilemma tale is structured to prompt an audience to participate, express a vested interest in the outcome, engage in debate and logical reasoning, construct arguments and judgments, and in the process witness itself acting as a unified community. "As much theater as narrative," such tales "speak directly to the community and the community directly responds" (Jablow 11, 30-33). They are popular artistic events that include music, singing, dancing, acting, improvisation, and audience participation. In the work of shaping the outcome anew on each occasion of a story's telling, the audience acquires a particular group identity through its collective emotional and intellectual labor. Tutuola, Ellison, and Morrison similarly leave audiences hanging, purposefully shifting the burden of interpretation, judgment, and resolution into the reader's hands. In terms of metaphorical space, this enactment of vertigo decenters expectations of authorial resolution and invites readers to participate in collectively solving the problem posed by the narrative.

Ellison is Morrison's necessary dilemma: the literary ancestor she can't quite live with and absolutely can't live without, whom it would be folly to reject or ignore. Morrison's stance in relation to Ellison is sustained by their common embrace of African American vernacular traditions and by Morrison's formal assertion of African diaspora epistemes. For Morrison as for Ellison, "Vernacular dance, vernacular language, and vernacular music represent... a total body of culture" (Ostendorf 97). This mutual embrace of the vernacular allows Song of Solomon to develop a recursive amplification of Ellison's Black Modernist dilemmatale. In this project, Morrison is at play amid multiple cultural traditions but, in taking on the authorial persona of Ellison's archetypal trickster, remains grounded in an Afro-diasporic vernacular aesthetic. Exploiting the vernacular "body" as process, she keeps a grip on Ellison through the vernacular, and taking him at his word pulls Tutuola into the dialogic whirl by linking to the creolized vernacular of his text. The trickster archetype is of particular significance here, as the anchor of this vernacular choreography and the figure traditionally associated with the space of the crossroads. Morrison reaches into the background of Ellison's refractions of the trickster included in the protagonist's characterization, and in characters such as Rinehart and Petey Wheatstraw, and she calls his Yoruba origins into view. Morrison recognizes that the African American trickster's primary ancestor is Eshu; and through Tutuola she opens the African American vernacular space to the Yoruba myths and ritual structures associated with Eshu and his archetypal partner, Obatala. Eshu the trickster is also master of the crossroads, arguably the most crucial figure in Yoruba and Yoruba-derived ritual.8 Eshu governs gateways, particularly those of communication, and, as the axis between the spiritual and material worlds of humans and ancestors, is always invoked at the beginning of rituals because without his assistance the goal of communication with gods and ancestors cannot occur. He both convenes community and shatters its calcifications, creating the space for oracular truths to emerge while posing equally provocative dilemmas. He serves the community by destabilizing rigid polarities in order to clear the path for fresh possibilities and new equilibrium. Song of Solomon engages all of these qualities of the trickster in revising Ellison. Through these intricate and playful renegotiations Morrison compassionately questions Ellison' s sense of African cultures and his relationship to the materials of a usable African past. Reading Morrison reading Ellison through Tutuola, we are forced to wonder exactly what Ellison knew and did not know, and to ponder his moments of epistemological confusion, lack, blindness, and/or ambivalence.

VeVe Clark offers assistance in sorting out such literary triads by presenting the marasa sign as a paradigm for comparative analysis of literary texts. Marasa in Haitian vodun tradition, or ibeji in Ifa, consists of sacred twins, usually depicted as male and female, representing binaries whose "dynamic interaction produces a third perception or event," a relationship best inscribed in the equation "1+1=3." (9) In effect, Song of Solomon invokes Invisible Man and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts as marasa, both origin and outcome, the twin constitutive elements and result of marasa's trialectic critical dance. But there is a critical difference between them. Whereas Ellison may not have, Morrison certainly knows Tutuola, having excerpted the entire first chapter of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (save eighteen lines) in The Black Book (1974), a documentary history of African American culture which she ghost-edited just prior to publishing Song of Solomon. Morrison employs Tutuola's text as a filter through which to respond to Ellison's metaphors of cultural alienation, exile, and dislocation.

In addressing similar border zones and forgotten areas of Yoruba culture in the wake of colonialism, Tutuola adapts and at the same time irreverently departs from the Yoruba canonical tradition of D. O. Fagunwa, author of the germinal Ogboju Ode Ninu Igbo Irunmale (1950). In the same spirit of license and loyalty toward venerated texts, Morrison recognizes the fact that Tutuola's protagonist inhabits a landscape inspired by Fagunwa's recordings of traditional Yoruba myth, a purely metaphysical reality generated by oral tradition and cosmology. On the other hand, Morrison recuperates Ellison's interest in flight by filtering it through West African folklore motifs that include birds, flying people, and wind, often represented in dance and rituals that emphasize vertical movement, spinning, and turning. Revising Invisible Man's arrested ascent in Milkman's successful flight also affirms Ellison's carefully considered jazz methodology. Milkman embodies Ellison's commentary in Shadow and Act regarding the vertigo of moving through multiple aesthetic identities, which he characterizes as a flight of self-surrender:

There is a cruel contradiction implicit in the art form itself. For true jazz is an art of individual assertion within and against the group. Each true jazz moment (as distinct from the uninspired commercial performance) springs from a context in which each artist challenges all the rest, each solo flight, or improvisation, represents (like the successive canvases of a painter) a definition of his identity: as individual, as member of the collectivity and as link in the chain of tradition. Thus, because jazz finds its very life in an endless improvisation upon traditional materials, the jazzman must lose his identity even as he finds it.... (Shadow 234)

Significantly, prior to beginning Invisible Man in 1947, Ellison had attempted a novel about flying that resulted in the short story "Flying Home" (1944), but he was unable to sustain flight as the central metaphor of a longer work (Ostendorf 101). Influenced by Ellison's ambivalence, Invisible Man sees himself in a capriciously drifting state, where "there were two of me: the old self.. . that flew without wings and plunged from great heights," and another, who spirals into vertiginous descent (371). Song of Solomon begins by externalizing Invisible Man's vertigo in the figure of "Mr. Smith... Jumping from the roof of Mercy" (8). Though Ellison and Tutuola clearly reflect on the need for an aesthetic that comprehends the dislocations and anxieties of neo-colonial exile and the continuing effects of the Middle Passage that characterize diaspora experience, the concept of a non-essentialist African diaspora theory does not exist in their time. Without an epistemological framework outside the binaries of racial discourse, Ellison cannot consent to the vertigo imposed by racism and colonialism. But Milkman can. At the end of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Tutuola's protagonist finds himself suspended in a zone of liminality nearly identical to Invisible Man's, but unlike him names an intention to return to the ancestral spirit world "because I dreamed a dream that I am present" (174). This intention becomes a cue toward Morrison's ancestor-oriented narrative strategy. The theoretical framework of African diaspora within which Morrison writes, a post1970s phenomenon, influences her protagonist's identity formation in ways that Ellison and Tutuola do not--in fact cannot--fully articulate.

In 1971, St. Clair Drake implicates the term diaspora as he argues that "the outcome of the Middle Passage for Africans is more accurately called 'The Great Dispersal'" (6). Contemplating the lack of meaningful terminology in his time, Ellison identifies the term Negro culture as a colonialist misnomer that criminally distorts African realities:

What I understand by the term "Negro culture" is so vague as to be meaningless .... one suspects that the term came into usage as a means of obliterating cultural differences between the various African peoples. In this way the ruthless disruption of highly developed cultures raised no troubling moral questions. . . . It is not culture which binds the peoples who are of partially African origin now scattered throughout the world, but an identity of passions. We share a hatred for the alienation forced upon us by Europeans during the process of colonization and empire and we are bound by our common suffering more than by our pigmentation. But even this identification is shared by most nonwhite peoples, and while it has political value of great potency, its cultural value is almost nil. (Shadow 263-64)

Ellison sought an identity formation located within a cultural paradigm, somewhere between the discursive poles dominated by pigmentation and the politics of suffering. Part of the problem of "who" Invisible Man is, is not knowing where he is. He begins to understand this meta-condition--Morrison later names it "the condition our condition is in" (Song 58)--when in the hole he begins to sense that his identity is diaspora personified. Ellison has an easier time naming Rinehart "the personification of chaos" (Shadow 181). And while Ras may bear some slight outward resemblance to a diasporic figure in the text, his actions and speech align with a racial and Black nationalist essentialism that Ellison ultimately rejects. For Ellison, Ras and Rinehart are two frightening sides of the same alluring coin who exist at apparent extremes, refractions of neocolonialist discourses of one-dimensional blackness. He rejects both of them as Invisible Man's possible models of liberated Black masculinity, because they personi fy the simplistic dialectics of Black male identity as dictated by White America in the 1950s. They constitute paired variations on a single exilic role, offering only the apparent options of wearing the mask of either Rinehart's caricature of chaotic alienation, or Ras's violent cynicism. Eventually, Ras tries to lynch the narrator, who then puts Ras's own spear through Ras's jaw. For Ellison, this impasse between his sense of hybridity and their essentializing dialectic becomes inescapable. Invisible Man is located in diaspora as much as it is located in him, but "it"--diaspora--is not a condition he is able to name, much less trust. After noting the "beautiful absurdity of their American identity and mine," he finds that "a definition of who they were and of what I was... would have been too narrow" (Invisible 559). Though he seeks a route through which to remember and relate to Africanness in the context of American hybridity, and not a purely African idiom, he is disabled by binaries; Ellison is as incap able of choosing an essentialist "ethnicity" as of hating "the West." Ellison's essay "The Little Man at Chehaw Station" is a meditation and manifesto on hybridity as a critical process in the formation of national, cultural, and individual identity. Writing in 1977, Ellison finds essentialist arguments for "ethnicity" analogous to "blood magic and blood thinking" (Going 21), an implicit reproduction of white supremacist discourse, rather than its repudiation.

Under the circumstances, as far as Ellison is concerned, African Americans are in a condition of perpetual psychic vertigo. His protagonist constantly attempts conforming to race, class, and gender roles constructed by the dominant discourse. These attempts fail. But at the end of these experiences--where the novel begins as he attains the narrative voice that is everything in an economy of African orality--the ability to construct his identity metonymically through the novel presents an index of personal agency. Invisible Man attempts to still the vertigo of his unhomely position by going underground to write. As Ellison observes in Shadow and Act, this retreat is a response to the stresses of double vision and chronically ambivalent relationships dictated by the term Negro:

Being a Negro American has to do ... with a special perspective on the national ideals and national conduct, and with a tragicomic attitude toward the universe.... It involves a rugged initiation into the mysteries and rites of color.... It imposes the uneasy burden and occasional joy of a complex double vision, a fluid, ambivalent response to men and events which represents, at its finest, a profoundly civilized adjustment to the cost of being human in this modem world. (136-37)

Incredibly, the hole that figures the narrator's ambivalence in Invisible Man describes such a "profoundly civilized adjustment" through its figuration of vertigo as a tragicomic "whirling on in the blackness... into another dimensionless room" (568). Some view the hole as proof of Ellison's entrapment within "white" modernism and thus total alienation from Blackness. But more than that, Invisible Man is cornered by the "white" aspect of a modernist gaze that governs public space, temporalities, and histories. Ellison clearly values his ancestors; he just doesn't know how to speak them. Within the threshold space of his womb-like refuge he becomes immersed in a "blackness" that. according to Ellison, represents "not that of a concealment in darkness in the Anglo-Saxon connotation of the word, but... the substance of its own inwardness" (Shadow 57). Here he becomes self-identified as invisible; that is, voice only. This is the paradigmatic crossroads of cultural consciousness in which he has the potential to r edefine his black vernacular self on his own black vernacular terms.

This is all well and good, but while Ellison's embrace of black vernacular cultural practice accomplishes a mythic telos that extends beyond a Joycean framework, the limits of modernist representation run him into a highly un-vernacular dead end. This crossroads of underground Blackness and possible emergence is for Ellison both promise and threat, an aporetic space that contracts as it opens. In no way, shape, or form does Ellison see vertigo as advancing a process; for him it is a dangerous, potentially lethal state of vulnerability. His nameless protagonist cautions that, "(by contradiction, I mean) is how the world moves. Not like an arrow, but like a boomerang. (Beware of those who speak of the spiral of history; they are preparing a boomerang. Keep a steel helmet handy.)" (Invisible 6). The anxiety concerns entrapment between a parenthetically contracted existence as underground persona and the aboveground master narrative. Aligned with the text's modernist agenda, the parenthetical double voicing here discloses extreme structural alienation from itself and its origins--its African background, its fundamentally communal character, and its sources within what Ellison perceived with affection and anxiety as a crucial, but disappearing. "Negro" folk culture.

As he interrogates the essentialist leanings of negritude, Ellison asserts, "I don't believe that my form of expression springs from Africa.... I've been reading the classics of European and American literature since childhood, was born to the American tongue and to the language of the Bible and the Constitution.... I also inherited a group style originated by a 'black' people, but it is Negro American, not African. And it was taught to me by Negroes or copied by me from those among whom I lived most intimately" (Going 303). Ellison also comments that "when I listen to a folk story I'm looking for what it conceals as well as what it states. I read it with the same attention I bring to Finnegans Wake or The Sound and the Fury because I'm eager to discover what it has to say to me personally" (Going 289). He might have looked at The Forest of One Thousand Daemons with the same rigor, but Wole Soyinka's English translation of Fagunwa's Ogboju Ode Ninu Igbo Irunmale (1950) did not exist until 1968. Ellison cannot claim a hybrid African identity, because although he resisted it, the latitude and longitude of the color line circumscribe his imagination. He readily asserts that, "despite the historical past and the injustices of the present, there is from my perspective something further to say. I have to affirm my forefathers and I must affirm my parents or be reduced in my own mind to a white man's inadequate--even if unprejudiced--conception of human complexity.... I am forced to look at these people and upon the history of life in the United States and conclude that there is another reality behind the appearance of reality which they would force upon us as truth" (Going 287).

In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Morrison later argues that scholars of American literature have demonstrated a "hysterical blindness" toward a fabricated and "always choked representation of an Africanist presence" in American society that serves to consolidate discourses of Whiteness and American identity (14,17). Given the pervasive impact of Whiteness and its invented Africanist presence as elements of liberal mainstream cultural formations, Ellison's inability to conceive an authentic relationship to African culture is unsurprising. But by nonetheless celebrating vernacular embodiments of culture, Ellison resolutely writes his way into the terms of his dilemma: how to claim a diasporic identity at a time and in a place that constructs Africa as at best an "objective" function of blood quantum, and at worst as social primitivism and cultural absence? What to do?

Morrison responds to Ellison's dilemma by following his suggestion, pursuing the "something further" he had to say by adding a layer of diaspora literacy. That memory of and relationship to diasporic history which for Ellison resides in silence on the "lower frequencies," inaudible, unspeakable, and virtually incomprehensible due to the cultural amnesia and enforced cultural illiteracy of his audience, Morrison retrieves and voices, bumping Tutuola as a "past-present" bass line. Because of the intrinsic heterogeneity of diaspora discourse, the formation supplies a frame capable of taking hybrid subjectivities into account and affirming "forefathers" and foremothers from an African-centered orientation. The process begins playfully, with a series of explicit puns, recycled images, and figurative tropes alluding to Tutuola's text. While Tutuola's protagonist becomes an acculturated "dead" in the town of the "Deads," Milkman's family name is Dead. More particularly, Pilate transforms Milkman by initiating him th rough visceral experience, blues, and Ifa-derived mysticism to the Black vernacular and the spiritual and ethical knowledge of his African past that flows through it.

In seeking alternatives to her characters' Ellisonian dilemmas, Morrison tropes vertigo in explicitly feminist and diasporic terms. Her strategy has three primary components: refiguring flight, spatial sensibility, and the male connection to the maternal body. Invisible Man's mother is absent, nostalgically evoked through Mary. Tutuola's protagonist sees his connection to his mother mutate into incomprehensibility under the ravages of colonialism. Milkman's mother is not only present, but he's known as "Milkman" because she breastfeeds him until he's more than five years old. Matrilineal relationships are central to Morrison's narrative. The female-identified knowledge that Morrison associates with orality, collective culture, and physical movement mediates the reading of Milkman's decision to sacrifice himself in the tradition of his African ancestor Shalimar. Milkman learns through Pilate that Shalimar represents the metaphysical philosophy that she passes on to him. This self-assertion through movement, sp eech, and mystical discursive structures validates an African diaspora gaze that reconstitutes Milkman's character.

In an Afro-diasporic aesthetic economy, Milkman's "flight" constitutes precisely the affirmation of self as individual, member of the collective, and link in the chain of tradition that Ellison most prized. Ellison felt that his novel attempted "a struggle through illusion to reality" (Shadow 177), but could not envision that reality as definitively African. He could not compose an Africa apart from Africanist discourse. As Clark suggests, the marasa paradigm helps reveal Morrison's interest in scrutinizing caesura within Ellison's vision. While Ifa aesthetics make Milkman visible in place and time, in the final analysis Ellison's Modernism is silencing. In contrast, when Milkman decides to give his life, he loudly declares, "'Over here, brother man! Can you see me? ... Here I am!'" The narrator describes him then as "bright as a lodestar" (Song 337). Morrison's allusion here to the North Star used by enslaved Africans escaping to freedom also invokes the West African "flash of the spirit" phenomenon that sig nals spiritual presence (see Thompson). In this hyper-visibility he becomes coded into the imagery of the North Star, reorganizing the space and shifting the emphasis from death to liberation.

The communality implicit in orisha archetypes replaces ego as the foundation of Milkman's identity so that, as the narrator explains, using imagery derived from Yoruba religious discourse, "his self--the cocoon that was 'personality'--gave way," and he feels the emergence of "a self inside himself" (Song 277). This reference recognizes that, in any religion inspired by Ifa, the devotee's goal in possession is to surrender ego in order to be filled with the presence of the orisa, making the archetype manifest by unlocking the awo (mystery) of the devotee's inner self (Fatunmbi, Qshun 2-3). Milkman's light is an archetypal reflection of spiritual immanence generated by the Obatala archetype, an implicit presence in the figures of all orisha, and in all manifestations of consciousness. According to Ifa principles including Nommo, the power of utterance that animates the cosmos, light signifies ethical social purpose. This evidence of Milkman's reconciliation with the ethics of Ifa suggests that a critical practi ce grounded in vernacular understandings of time, space, and subjectivity can effectively mediate the "unhomely" experience of cultural vertigo.

Placing Morrison's tightly woven connection to Ellison (without Invisible Man there could not be Song of Solomon) alongside her invocation of West African tradition also reveals a paradoxical allusion to Obatala in Ellison's text. As Bhabha explains in The Location of Culture, "Certain absences are so stressed [that] they arrest us with their intentionality and purpose, like neighbourhoods that are defined by the population held away from them" (198-99). Ellison's allusion to the orisa mimics the presence of African retentions in the deep structure of African American culture. The reference occurs through indirection, as subtext--or, in effect, underground--and becomes visible upon recognizing that Ellison engages in the black vernacular practice of code switching throughout Invisible Man. Certainly, Ellison thought extensively about cultural retentions and wrote of them in Going to the Territory, that "in the underground of our unwritten history much of that which is ignored defies inattention by continuing to grow and have consequences.. ." (Going 126). Although he makes space for such retentions, Ellison did not have a lens that would allow him to articulate their "consequences" in his own practice. Africa's imagined but unspeakable black presence in Ellison's ethos is arguably inscribed in the narrative as caesura, and in the context of African and African American naming practices, as anonymity, a sign of forgetting, displacement, desire, and possibility.

As he contemplates his ethos, Ellison characterizes U. S. English as a hybrid so that, "whether it is admitted or not, much of the sound of that language is derived from the timbre of the African voice and the listening habits of the African ear" (Going 109). Ellison sees the caesura that defines Africa's denied presence in language, but either does not see it or will not discuss its composition in his novel or in his critical practice. Worth noting here is the fact that Morrison has not been known to identify or openly name Yoruba or Ifa influences or archetypes in her work either, although she commented in 1993, "I have yet to read criticism that understands my work or is prepared to understand it. I don't care if the critic likes or dislikes it. I would just like to feel less isolated. It's like having a linguist who doesn't understand your language tell you what you're saying" (Leclair 376-77). At the risk of joining the ranks of such critics, I will suggest that in this atmosphere of coded silences in wh ich anamnesis depends on collective literacies, Obatala emerges from that vernacular space of submerged African intonations, rhythms, and archetypes that Ellison identified beneath the surface of American culture. We may never know with any degree of certainty whether Ellison was or was not intentionally coding Obatala into his narrative. What is certain is that Morrison recognizes principles associated with both Eshu and Obatala in Ellison's text, and in revising it makes the presence of these archetypes explicit.

According to Ifa, Obatala dwells in a "House of Light ... the invisible universe," generally appears as a male figure who weaves light and darkness to produce consciousness, and is himself the personification of consciousness (Fatunmbi, Obatala 1, 14). These archetypal themes of light, darkness, consciousness, and invisibility at play are both Invisible Man's obsessions and the medium of his existence. Such associations with Obatala amplify the epic tone heralded by Ellison's allusion to the Judeo-Christian God's introduction of himself to Moses, "I Am That I Am" (Exodus 3:14). When Invisible Man puns to the yam seller," 'They're my birthmark.... I yam what I am'" (Invisible 260), he stakes a claim to his own sense of hybrid identity. Motifs from well-known Obatala tales also surface in Ellison's text, including imagery of chains, the regenerative womb of darkness, imprisonment, blindness, slowness, repetition, purification of speech, sweet potatoes, and yams (see Karade 24-25, 29-30, 53, 66). Invisible Man's internal splitting later leads him to think "things are so unreal for them normally that they believe that to call a thing by name is to make it so. And yet I am what they think I am.. (Invisible 370). He remains thus divided in consciousness even within his own underground house of light. But if the promise held out by Invisible Man's connection to Obatala remains in suspension, Milkman becomes an extension of Ellison's muted allusion to Obatala. When Milkman leaps, he enters a space of surrendered ego, simultaneously in the possession of and performing both Eshu, leaping into space come what may, and Obatala, devotee of self-conscious ethical action.

Through this synthesis Milkman becomes both transformed and transformative, moving beyond impasse and epistemic breakdown. In Ifa, possession connotes a shifting interplay of subjectivities stabilized by the equilibrium of community and the ritual process. As dual possession by Eshu and Obatala leads Milkman to engage vertigo in the traditional manner of Sufi dervishes, shamans, and aborisha (devotees of the orisha), "he wheel[s] toward Guitar" (Song 337). Whirling establishes the crossroads space in which human and divine archetype meet. Although Milkman experiences Invisible Man's Du Boisian double-consciousness, rather than being consumed as a narcissistically isolated, split self, he allows the vertiginous to possess and move him into communally oriented action. At this moment of self-reconciliation, Milkman also becomes Guitar's teacher in the moral context governed by Obatala and Eshu's archetypal partnership; although Obatala "prefers to use reason and wisdom ... if one is too intransigent or refuses t o 'see the light,' Obatala's companion Eshu steps in ... to finish the job" (Neimark 98). No longer "flying blind" since coming to terms with "an extended past," Milkman experiences himself as an intact link in an ancestral collective consciousness. This makes him part of an ongoing Afro-diasporic epistemological chain that moves people and culture through the terrors of holocaust, exile, and even death (Smith 278-83). Through the example of Milkman's struggle to achieve emplacement as diasporic subject, Morrison suggests that through the aesthetics of vertigo we can at any moment open ourselves to infinite possibilities at the crossroads of culture. As Aretha Franklin sings in "Chain of Fools":

Every chain
Has got a weak link.
I might be weak, chile ...
But I give you strength.

Notes

(1.) See Bains, et al.: "Situationist psychogeography asks us to consider the possibility of remapping Notes space.... Find the flows of space and locate the spaces that hide unseen in the 'unconscious' of the city." As an experience that happens in these "unseen" zones, this essay references vertigo according to the QED definition of 'a disordered condition in which the person affected has a sensation of whirling, either of external objects or of himself, and tends to lose equilibrium and consciousness; swimming in the head; giddiness, dizziness.' A person experiencing vertigo may have physical sensations of whirling, spinning, and turning, usually accompanied by feelings of falling or actual falling, that lead to total spatio-temporal disorientation, It can be triggered by external stimuli, emotional trauma, or, as in Meniere's disease, traced to physiological conditions such as inner-ear stress, trauma, or fluid imbalance.

(2.) See Lefebvre 22. See also Shields.

(3.) Elisa Joy White provides a telling commentary on this condition in constructing an interdisciplinary paradigm for researching African diaspora identity formation in her essay "Forging Difference, Forging Sameness: An Exercise in the Interdisciplinary Study of Race, Class and Identity in the African Diaspora." White asks, "Are Africans of the Diaspora forever another entity, floating in their own diasporic space, claiming Africa as the center, but forever leaving it in the periphery?" (1). White poses this question upon Omoh T. Ojior's findings in Africans and Africans of the Diaspora that, "when asked if the description, 'Africans in the Diaspora' referred to 'Africans in Africa,' 52% of the respondents had 'no idea.' When asked whether 'West Indians' are members of the Diaspora, 46% responded that they had 'no idea'; and regarding 'Black Americans,' 47% noted that they had 'no idea.' " White comments that "what is even more interesting is that 22% of the respondents agreed that 'Blacks in the Diaspora a re not of the African race.' while 66% disagreed and 12% had 'no idea.'"

(4.) See also Bhabha 7.

(5.) Also see Pavlic 169. Pavlic finds that this formulation reflects Morrison's sense of "syndetic tensions" that generate intergenerational past-presence.

(6.) An orisa (also orisha, orissa, or loa) is a deity in Ifa and in associated religions that derive from Ifa. Among the most well-known of these are Voodoo/Vodun (Haiti), Candomble (Brazil), Santerla (Cuba), Obeah (Jamaica), and Hoodoo (U.S.). For comprehensive discussions of the influence of Yoruba and Kikongo cosmology throughout the African Diaspora, see Thompson.

(7.) This insight developed from Veve Clark's suggestion that my identification of the similar episodic structures of these texts corresponds to African dilemma tales. Also see Ogunjimi and Na'Allah 52-64.

(8.) See Deren, Divine Horsemen (1947-51) and Divine Horsemen (1953).

(9.) See veve A. Clark, "Developing" 40-61 and "Talking Shop" 267. This idea of paired principles reforming to produce a related but different third is common to "nature oriented and mystical philosophies from Asia, Africa and the Caribbean" ("Talking Shop" 267).

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Discoraphy

Franklin, Aretha. "Chain of Fools." Lady Soul. Atlantic, 1968.

Valorie D. Thomas is Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Pomona College, and the Intercollegiate Department of Black Studies of the Claremont Colleges. She is completing a book manuscript on vernacular space in African diaspora film and literature.