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Eloquence and Invisible Man
College Literature, Fall 2005 by Hanlon, Christopher
Ellison's connections between improvisation and the attainment of an "original" voice, an attainment coinciding with an achievement of "self-determined identity" and thus facilitating a form of "rebirth," suggest a certain correspondence with both Emerson's musicological descriptions of eloquence and his habit of attaching self-reliance to a mode of spontaneous, "impertinent" speech. Emerson's descriptions of self-reliant speech often emphasize an improvisational dimension, requiring us to "Speak today what you think now in hard words and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said to-day" (1983, 265). Emerson gives us this advice in view of his famous insistence that "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds"-that is, in light of his understanding that at times, the most powerful obstacle to self-reliance is indeed our tendency to imagine ourselves beholden to our past statements and formulations, to imagine that we are simply what we once were, and that only. Against the imagined rebuttal that without at least some degree of consistency in our speech we risk incoherence, Emerson reminds us that "The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks" (266), or that though the surface of contradiction, revision, and experimentation making up the texture of self-reliant speech may appear as a broken and uneven landscape when viewed from up close, these same elements "are insignificant in the curve of the sphere" they ultimately shape (265).
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So as Ellison assesses jazz improvisation as a technique for self-definition, Emerson values contradictory, revisionary, and above all spontaneous speech as the hallmark of self-reliance. This is not to lose sight of the obvious fact that Emerson's own addresses were carefully rehearsed events, culled from journal entries and often reworked over years of delivery, just as it should not be to lose sight of the fact that improvisation is only possible for musicians (jazz or otherwise) who have spent years honing their craft. Indeed for neither Emerson nor Ellison does successfully improvised performance or selfreliant speech resemble or verge upon bedlam, since neither abandons tradition so much as it expands the boundaries of tradition proper to any given moment. One of Emerson's ways of saying this is to explain that he hopes his whim is somewhat more than whim; another is to urge the self-reliant speaker to "Speak your latent conviction, and it be the universal sense" (1983, 259).The alternative to such bravado is for Emerson the elocutionary equivalent of self-dismemberment: "We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents" (260). Lacking self-reliance, our speech lacks declarative force, becoming instead derivative, formulaic, utterly non-disruptive and cautious:"! hear a preacher announce for his text and topic the expediency of one of the institutions of the church," Emerson recalls. "Do I not know beforehand that not possibly can he say a new and spontaneous word?" (264). The preacher Emerson describes becomes little more than the mouthpiece of an institution, a kind of propaganda machine that only imitates the qualities of authentically eloquent speech; but self-reliant speakers, as Emerson put it as early as Nature, "pierce this rotten diction" by breaking with conventional modes and mores of expression (1903-04, 1.30).8
