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Eloquence and Invisible Man
College Literature, Fall 2005 by Hanlon, Christopher
For his part, Ellison's protagonist witnesses something like the vanishing of what Emerson calls "mean egotism" in an abandoned basement deep under New York, where he can finally say only one thing with confidence: "I am an invisible man." Jazz itself, though it finally conceives musical patterns that would have been impossible otherwise, only discerns these patterns by delving deep into chaos and contingency, which is why Ellison recognized jazz aesthetics as an aesthetics of self-erasure, commenting that "the jazzman must lose his identity in order to find it" (1995, 267). For both Emerson and Ellison, the process of spoken self-invention entails a moment of self-annihilation, which is why both writers are drawn to metaphors of invisibility in the first place. Which is to say that Emerson's transparent eye is to "the current of the Universal being" what Ellison's transparent I is to the mellow, melodious voice that speaks for me and for you.
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Notes
Earlier versions of this essay received helpful commentary from Jeffrey Insko of Oakland University as well as Julie Campbell, Daiva Markelis, Francine McGregor, Dana Ringuette, Donnelle Ruwe, Martin Scott, and Angela Vietto of Eastern Illinois University. I am also indebted to an anonymous reviewer for College Literature.
1 See, for instance, Robert O'Meally, who traces Ellison's narratological and thematic incorporation of jazz throughout Invisible Man. C. W. E. Bigsby suggests that Ellison's improvisational narrative form amounts to an improvisation of America itself, what Ellison viewed as a political and cultural gesture akin to that of the founders, who "were improvising themselves into a nation, scraping together a conscious culture out of the various dialects, idioms, lingos, and mythologies of America's diverse peoples and regions" (qtd. in Bigsby 1987, 177). Houston Baker traces the blues aesthetics of Invisible Man through the "Trueblood episode," which spins its blues narrative out of the mythical phallic power of black males while also recognizing the cultural capital of its mystique. And describing it as "the true musical idiom of modernism," Berndt Ostendorf views jazz as both synthesizing agent and aesthetic "world" in which Ellison's anthropological, folldoric mindset comes to terms with his Modernist sensibility (1986, 147).
2 The organic mode of composition proper to the Emersonian essay has led some commentators to note that in certain ways, Emerson's prose is less formally constrained (for some, more "musical") than his poetry. Mutlu Konuk Biasing, for example, argues that "Emerson's concept of poetry as the language of law-or even language as law-makes clear that his idea of poetry is much more restrictive than what critics have termed the musical or inspired speech of his essays" (1985,11). Less inclined to inscribe broad aesthetic distinctions between the Emersonian essay and the Emersonian poem, but equally attentive to the musical elements of Emerson's eloquence, Brian Harding suggests that Emerson's -writing "attempted to express an idea of poetry that combined (through metaphor) the apparently irreconcilable qualities of architecture and music" (1985, 101).
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