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Eloquence and Invisible Man
College Literature, Fall 2005 by Hanlon, Christopher
The speech is not simply bad because the scene of its delivery lays bare the naïve philosophy it espouse, and it's not simply bad because history had already shown Ellison upon which side of the Du Bois/Washington divide to situate himself. More primarily for Ellison, it is bad because of its unmoved and unmoving recital, because even in spite of the appearance of "fervor" the protagonist attempts to project through his inclusion of "memorized nuance[s]," such rhetorical flash only constitutes the simulation of an inspired voice. Its inept delivery is in keeping with the speech's irrelevant logic, the let's-just-all-get-along wisdom the speech offers an imagined audience of black southerners but which is now rehearsed for a set of white men who recoil from the phrase "social equality." Even as the protagonist departs from his script in uttering these disruptive words, he does not improvise so much as he is improvised upon: sensing the dangerous ground he has opened up, he quickly substitutes the words "social responsibility" and hence returns to the prudent conventions of Washingtonian segregation. And so as an address that ventriloquizes the actual speech of Washington and hence strives to mimic the tradition of oratory authorized by such figures as he-the speech is constructed of what Emerson describes as the parlance of the derivative. "We are like children," he explains, "who repeat by rote the sentences of the grandames and tutors, and, as they grow older, of the men of talents and character they chance to see-painfully recollecting the exact words they spoke" (1983, 270-71).
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As an aspiring public speaker, the young protagonist of Invisible Man is a mnemonic impersonator of other voices, and as he later recollects the numerous speeches he gave prior to his expulsion from college, the narrator recognizes and theorizes his failures in terms of musical dissonance and cacophony. In the campus chapel, he recalls, "I too had stridden and debated, a student leader directing my voice at the highest beams and farthest rafters," but though these speeches and debates once provided the boy with self-satisfaction, in retrospect the narrator finds them "a play upon the resonances of buildings, an assault upon the temples of ears" (Ellison 1981, 112-13).
listen to me, the bungling bugler of words, imitating the trumpet and the trombone's timbre, playing, thematic variations like a baritone horn. Hey! old connoisseur of voice sounds, of voices without messages, of newsless winds, listen to the vowel sounds and the crackling dentals, to the low harsh gutturals of empty anguish, now riding the curve of preacher's rhythm I had heard long ago in a Baptist church, stripped now of its imagery. . . . Ha! as upon a xylophone', words marching like a student band, up the campus and down again, blaring triumphant sounds empty of triumphs. ... the sound of words that were no words, counterfeit notes singing achievements yet unachieved, riding upon the wings of my voice out to you. . . . (Ellison 1981, 113)
