Eloquence and Invisible Man

My shoulders were squared, my chin thrust forward and my eyes focused straight into the light. "Something strange and miraculous and transforming is taking place in me right now . . . as I stand here before you!"

I could feel the words forming themselves, slowly falling into place. The light seemed to boil opalescently, like liquid soap shaken gently in a bottle.

"Let me describe it. It is something odd. It's something that I'm sure I'd never experience anywhere else in the world. I feel your eyes upon me. I hear the pulse of your breathing. And now, at this moment, with your black and white eyes upon me, I feel ... I feel. . . ."

[. ..] "What is it son, what do you feel?" a shrill voice cried.

My voice fell to a husky whisper,"! feel, I feel suddenly that I have become more human." (Ellison 1981, 345-46)

There is much irony in the narrator's statement that this speech for the Brotherhood has effected his transmogrification, has allowed him to become more "human," especially since though the protagonist's audience recognizes and values this moment of becoming, the Brotherhood itself largely does not. Precisely inasmuch as the speech is steeped in the sort of community identification call-and-response engenders and the Brotherhood strives to efface, and precisely inasmuch as the speech abandons quasi-"scientific" ratiocination in favor of emotionally charged oratory, many of the Brothers resent it and their new fellow traveler deeply But the speech nevertheless marks a crucial turning point for the protagonist of Invisible Man, whose journey along the color line of 1930s America has up until now been a steady descent into a hell of racist Je-humanization. It is also, moreover, a quintessentially Emersonian moment, inasmuch as the protagonist's re-humanization is facilitated through his re-birth as an eloquent speaker. As in Emerson's "Self-Reliance," where the burden of speech is precisely the burden of speaking oneself into existence (the un-self-reliant individual, Emerson complains, "dares not say, 'I think,"! am'" in an elocutionary gesture of auto-genesis akin to "I am that am"), Invisible Man invests the public words of its protagonist with the capacity to re-substantiate the self whose existence other selves have effaced. In this way, Ellison's novel formulates its own ethos of spoken self-creation along Emersonian lines. As a collaborative but also improvisational model of eloquence, the protagonist's first speech for the Brotherhood privileges spontaneous expression over rehearsed argument: its achievement is thus to commit itself to the Emersonian challenge, "Speak what you think now in hard words and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said to-day" (Emerson 1983, 265).

At moments such as this, the protagonist of Invisible Man finds himself within the context Ellison would later identify-echoing the musical metaphors of Emerson's essay on eloquence-as that of the American author, whose audience is "a far more receptive instrument than may be dominated through a skillful exercise of the sheerly 'rhetorical' elements-the flash and filigree-of the artist's craft" (1995, 492). For Ellison, indeed, Emerson's sense of spoken performance as an orchestral event carries over into a musicological understanding of written composition. Of the American writer's readership, Ellison explains that "Like a strange orchestra upon which a guest conductor would impose his artistic vision, it must be exhorted, persuaded, even wooed, at the price of its applause" (492). The American writer Ellison describes "playfs] artfully upon the audience's sense of experience and form"; his audience is that which "he is called to play as a pianist upon a piano," though "this second instrument can be most unstable in its tuning, and downright ornery in its responses," a fact that Ellison regards as "a special, most American problem" (496). Such collaborative interaction between writer and audience, Ellison explains, comprises an act of "democratic faith" entailing "an incalculable scale of possibilities for self-creation" (494).