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Eloquence and Invisible Man
College Literature, Fall 2005 by Hanlon, Christopher
8 As Sheldon Liebman indicates, Emerson's later pronunciations concerning eloquence and speech grew out of his shifting readings in rhetoric during the late 1820s. During his years at Harvard, Emerson followed closely the advice of Hugh Blair, the eighteenth-century rhetorician whose advocacy of a measured and rational style would cause the early Emerson to exercise caution with his use of metaphor, to model his prose self-consciously upon that of figures such as Samuel Johnson, and to adopt an ornamental Latinate vocabulary. By the late 1820s, however, Emerson had begun to value spontaneity over convention, to believe that "an alehouse is a better school for eloquence than a college" (qtd. in Liebman 1969, 193). While Emerson still sought out models of eloquence in other writers, he was now drawn to those whose writing, like Carlyle and Montaigne, "draws strength and motherwit out of a poetic use of the spoken vocabulary," whose writing was "the language of conversation transferred to a book" (195). For an early and still intriguing assessment of Emerson's successes and failures as public orator, see Scudder (1935).
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9 Here is how Bergson puts it:
A very small element of a curve is very near being a straight line. And the smaller it is, the nearer. In the limit, it may be termed a part of the curve or a part of the straight line, as you please, for in each of its points a curve coincides with its tangent. So likewise "vitality" is tangent, at any and every point, to physical and chemical forces; but such points are, as a fact, only views taken by a mind which imagines stops at various moments of the movement that generates the curve. In reality, life is no more made of physico-chemical elements than a curve is composed of straight lines. (Bergson 1911, 31)
10 In this way of course the scene fits with the larger motif of death and regeneration treated since the inception of Ellison criticism, beginning with Jonathan Baumbach's 1963 essay.
Works Cited
Albrecht, James M. 1999. "Saying Yes and Saying No: Individualist Ethics in Ellison, Burke, and Emerson." PMLA 114: 1 (January): 46-63.
Baker, Houston A. 1984. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago.
Baraka, Amiri. 1963. Blues People: Negro Music in White America. New York: Morrow.
Baumbach, Jonathan. 1963. "Nightmare of a Native Son: Ellison's Invisible Man." Critique 6: 1 (Spring): 48-65.
Bergson, Henri. 1911. Creative Evolution. Trans. Arthur Mitchell. New York: Henry Holt.
Bigsby, C. W. E. 1987. "Improvising America: Ralph Ellison and the Paradox of Form." In Speaking ForYou:The Vision of Ralph Ellison, ed. Kimberly W Benston. Washington D. C.: Howard University Press.
Blasing, Mutlu Konuk. 1985. "Essaying the Poet: Emerson's Poetic Theory and Practice." Modem Language Studies 15: 2 (Spring): 9-23.
Ellison, Ralph. 1964. Shadow and Act. New York: Random House.
_____. 1981. Invisible Man. 1952. Reprint. New York: Random House.
_____. 1995. The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison. Ed. John F. Callahan. New York: Modern Library.
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