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Eloquence and Invisible Man
College Literature, Fall 2005 by Hanlon, Christopher
More than any other spoken performance in Invisible Man (I would suggest, even more so than the narrator's eventual eulogy forTodd Clifton), this speech is energized by its tempo and rhythm, its dramatic repetition (not only "Yes, yes, yes!" but also the building momentum of the ironic phrase "law-abiding") and the Ciceronean wink and nudge of ending rhymes like "turning the cheek every day of the week." So begins the protagonist's career as a public speaker, for it is this event that will draw the attention of the Brotherhood, the shadowy political organization that hires the protagonist as a political agitator and mouthpiece. The speech is finally unsuccessful as an effort to quell a burgeoning riot (at a later juncture in his speech, the protagonist is rushed by a group of men who decide to follow through on their original plans), but as an act of Emersonian auto-genesis, it is utterly successful, since over the course of this speech, the protagonist re-invents himself as a public orator. Ellison figures this reinvention as a moment of rebirth; as the protagonist flees the scene of his brief but transformational intervention, he passes a car from which he sees "a man leap out with a physician's bag."
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"Hurry, Doctor," a man called from the stoop, "she's already in labor!"
"Good," the doctor called. "That's what we've been waiting for, isn't it?"
"Yeah, but it didn't start when we expected it." (Ellison 1981, 287)
"What a time to be born," the protagonist thinks as he passes by, and it should be clear here that the birth with which Ellison is concerned is the protagonist's new birth as a public intellectual, a speaker whose voice is now-as Emerson would say-"agitated to agitate."10 In this way, the re-birth of Ellison's narrator resembles the sort of speakerly self-creation advocated in "Self-Reliance," where so often, Emerson describes the affirmation of the "I" as a simultaneously elocutionary and melodic act. "Speak your latent conviction," Emerson insists, "and it shall become universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the last judgment" (1983, 259). In speaking before the crowd before his phrases have fully taken shape, the protagonist initiates the process of elocutionary self-invention the was always Emerson's truest subject matter; though this process will ultimately end where the novel begins, in the catastrophic revelation that "I am an invisible man," the laying-bare of selfhood Ellison describes variously as a form of "invisibility," of "hibernation," or of "going underground" is itself presented as preliminary to some as-yet unrealized-but newly attainable-moment of becoming. The hibernation of Ellison's protagonist is of a piece with that process Emerson describes in Nature, where transcendentalist selfhood comes only at the price of selfhood itself: "Standing on the bare ground-my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space - all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God" (1903-04, 1. 10).
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