ABSTRACT

Modernity itself can be described by an undermining of folk values, eroding certain long-standing traditions by confining them to the margins of industrial civilization. Translated into modernist terms, this erosion is precipitated by the famous shift from the provinces to the metropole: the subsequent privileging of urban cosmopolitanism suggests a coup de grace for folk culture, given that the rural or regional was its traditional topos. Accordingly, Invisible Man is populated with folk characters, folk situations and folk objects. A trickster-racketeer and a black Confidence Man, Rinehart is simultaneously the novel's most visible character, and its most invisible. Modernist disregard for the trickster is all the more striking if we return to the possibility- pace Joyce, Woolf and Mann that there might, in fact, be a proto-modernist precedent, even a remote one. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., identifies the model for the Western black trickster as Esu-Eleggbra, a figure from Yoruba mythology, originating in West Africa.