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Eloquence and Invisible Man
College Literature, Fall 2005 by Hanlon, Christopher
"It is the doctrine of the popular music-masters that whoever can speak can sing"-or so Emerson opens his essay "Eloquence," included in the 1870 volume Society and Solitude. As Emerson describes it near the end of his career as an orator, verbal eloquence becomes a form of musical expression, not only inasmuch as both share the formal elements of pitch, rhythm, and meter, but also to the extent that both make "instruments" of their audience. Hence, "Him we call an artist who can play on an assembly of men as a master on the keys of the piano,-who, seeing the people furious, shall soften and compose them, shall draw them, when he will, to laughter and to tears" (1903-04, 7. 65). The Emersonian speaker is a "master" of men, an Orphic wordsmith who "will have them pleased and humored as he chooses." But eloquence is for him no mere art of domination, the art of propaganda Emerson keeps in mind as he paraphrases Plato's definition of rhetoric: "the art of ruling the minds of men" (7. 64). The symphonic and harmonic dimensions of eloquence suffuse Emerson's essay of 1870, so that when he describes the eloquent speaker's art as that of "compos[ing]""the people," he does not primarily point toward the power of the -word to dominate and control un-self-reliant minds. Composing the people may involve calming them, as it did for Emerson during the opening moments of the Civil War and later, after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, but it also means constituting them as a group, composing them as a "social organism." But more so than either of these, Emerson thinks of eloquent composition as a process of musical collaboration that draws upon, channels, provides a conduit for energies already in circulation among "the people." "Of all the musical instruments on which men play," Emerson explains, "a popular assembly is that which has the largest compass and variety, and out of which, by genius and study, the most wonderful effects can be drawn." This is because "An audience is not a simple addition of the individuals that compose it. Their sympathy gives them a certain social organism, which fills each member, in his own degree, and most of all the orator, as ajar in a battery is charged with the whole electricity of the battery. No one can survey the face of an excited assembly, without being apprised of new opportunity for painting in fire human thought, and being agitated to agitate" (1903-04, 7. 62-63).
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Emerson's model of spoken composition, proceeding from the recognition that every listener is also a potential speaker ("How many orators sit mute there below!" [1903-04, 7. 63]), also captures the most charged moments of eloquence to appear in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, a novel that measures the self-reliance of its nameless protagonist through his growing acumen as a public speaker. Midway through the novel, Ellison's narrator stands before a massive audience after his initiation into the political organization called the Brotherhood, observing that "The audience seemed to have become one, its breathing and articulation synchronized" much like the "social organism" or "battery" to which the Emersonian speaker both addresses and connects himself. The Brotherhood has hired Ellison's protagonist as a political agitator, but having achieved only measured success with past public speeches, he now approaches his first large audience with trepidation. Fumbling at the lectern and blinded by the spotlight, he makes an awkward beginning:
The microphone was strange and unnerving. I approached it incorrectly, my voice sounding raspy and full of air, and after a few words I halted, embarrassed. I was getting off to a bad start, something had to be done. I leaned toward the vague audience closest to the platform and said, "Sorry, folks. Up to now they've kept me so far away from these shiny electric gadgets I haven't learned the technique. . . . And to tell you the truth, it looks to me like it might bite! Just look at it, it looks like the steel skull of a man! Do you think he died of dispossession?"
It worked and while they laughed someone came and made an adjustment. "Don't stand too close," he advised.
"How's that?" I said, hearing my voice boom deep and vibrant over the arena. "Is that better?"
There was a ripple of applause.
"You see, all I needed was a chance. You've granted it, now it's up to me!"
The applause grew stronger and from down front a man's far-carrying voice called out, "We with you, Brother. You pitch 'em we catch 'em!"
That was all I needed, I'd made contact, and it was as though his voice was that of them all. (Ellison 1981, 341-42)
In the end, the speech is fabulously successful; after finding his point of "contact" within an otherwise inscrutable mass of listeners, the protagonist delivers a virtuoso spoken performance drawing its strength from the audience's enthusiastic participation. The format of his speech is, in a way, generic: "I had to fall back upon tradition and since it was a political meeting," the narrator explains, "I selected one of the political techniques that I'd heard so often at home" (Ellison 1981, 342). But more than strictly "political," his chosen technique is also spiritual and musical, drawing upon a tradition of call-and-response oration that also informs the improvisational styles of jazz composition. The anonymous point of contact in the audience becomes for the protagonist a kind of duet partner or Greek chorus, ostensibly speaking for the audience as a whole and encouraging the spoken composition onward. This dynamic of collaboration (wherein it becomes difficult, as Emerson's 1870 commentary implies it might, to distinguish between speaker and listener) finally gives way to a moment of sanctification: as the protagonist nears the end of his speech, he finds himself at "a natural pause [where] there was applause, but as it burst I realized that the flow of words had stopped. What would I do when they started to listen again?" (344) Feeling suddenly "naked, sensing that the words were returning and that something was about to be said that I shouldn't reveal" (345), the protagonist throws himself into the welter of coagulating phrases, achieving as he does so a new but long-sought stature:
