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Eloquence and Invisible Man
College Literature, Fall 2005 by Hanlon, Christopher
Emerson's image of the cautious, circumscribed preacher might call to mind Ellison's protagonist's eventual position as a speaker for the Brotherhood, the Marxisant organization on whose behalf the protagonist speaks fervently-and finally too eloquently-but whose leader, Brother Jack, eventually explains, "You were not hired to think" (1981, 469).
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But it should also remind us of what is probably the most famous episode from Invisible Man, where as a recent high-school graduate, Ellison's protagonist is invited to re-read his valedictory address before the white power-brokers of his small southern town. Shortly after arriving to deliver his speech, the narrator is forced to participate in a "Battle Royal," for which he is blindfolded with a handkerchief and forced to box a group of similarly-blinded black adolescents. After the boxing match, the protagonist is allowed to give his speech (remarkably, he remains eager to deliver it even throughout his humiliating ordeal), in fact a well-known passage from Booker T. Washington's Atlanta Day Exposition Address, (though Ellison seems to imply that in the diagetic reality of his novel, the boy remains the speech's true author). The satire here is bifocal. First and perhaps foremost, the outrageous conditions of the boy's speech (for which he remains clad in his boxing shorts, swallowing "blood, saliva and all" in order to pronounce every word faithfully for a group of white racists who barely listen) point up the ludicrousness of the Atlanta Day Exposition Address itself, in which Washington advanced his own accommodationist program of African American economic advancement at the expense of social equality. But in addition to initiating Invisible Man's sustained critique of Washington, the sequence initiates a series of questions that will continue to pervade Invisible Man, questions concerning the qualities and conditions of moving, eloquent oration. This is to say that the first public speech of Invisible Man is not only undercut by the inappropriateness of its specific message to the specific setting of its delivery (southern blacks, the young man explains, should "cast down their buckets" in "cultivating friendly relations with the southern white man who is his neighbor," presumably southern white men like those who have subjected the protagonist to an elaborate humiliation). Washington, in other words, is not Ellison's primary target here, and to focus on the fact that the speech comes from Washington is to miss Ellison's point about the (overly) poised way in which the protagonist pitches Washington's (obtuse) social program. Reading his pre-prepared text verbatim, apparently attempting to duplicate a prior performance from his high-school graduation, the narrator recalls that he "spoke automatically and with such fervor that I did not realize that the men were still talking and laughing until my dry mouth, filling up with blood from the cut, almost strangled me. . . . The speech seemed a hundred times as long as before, but I could not leave out a single word. AU had to be said, each memorized nuance considered, rendered" (30).
