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Article Excerpt
When Ralph Ellison said that "the joke [is] at the center of the American identity," he also meant that the joker is at the center of American life. In a rapidly changing liberal society, with fluctuating 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 fixed principle, established once and for all, but 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 politics has focused on similar constructions of racial identity through complex cultural appropriations linked to masking, minstrelsy, and passing. But 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 appropriate response to the absurdities of American politics and history. (2) Accordingly, 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.
In Ellison's most important and best known work, Invisible Man (1952), the narrator does not learn how to joke until the end, when he finally concludes, "[I]t was better to live out one's own absurdity than to die for that of others." (3) Even then, however, the Invisible Man hardly proves a comfortable and confident 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 jokers 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 deironize politics and identity for everyone else. Ellison poses that problem but doesn't resolve it, issuing an insightful and still-relevant caution about the politics 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 comprehensively through the modern calculus of risk.
Ellison's master metaphor for American liberal society in Invisible Man is the game. The Invisible Man equates experience with a game dozens of times, and 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 specifically in the dynamics of gambling. When the Invisible Man eventually wonders, "What if history was a gambler, instead of a force in a laboratory 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 driver 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 disrupt the plantation hierarchy from within, but that hierarchy is fundamentally unshakeable. Jokers, however, disrupt a different kind of hierarchy, the aristocracy of kings, queens, and jacks who rule the deck of cards. Whereas Southern slave-owners patterned their social relations on fixed aristocratic castes precisely to inhibit social mobility, the aristocracy 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 upheavals. More importantly, it makes the joker the most consequential card in the deck, because only the joker can change identities, temporarily usurping and using royal power while leaving the basic power structure intact. Such disingenuousness has an important role for poker players, too, because poker rewards, and even requires, the sanctioned deceit otherwise known as bluffing. Poker often functions in American culture as a metaphor for the entire system of liberal-capitalist competition between equals. With 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 westerners in countless frontier novels, poker allows stoic heroes like Owen Wister's Virginian to act out key liberal values in a...
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