Content provided in partnership with
Eloquence and Invisible Man
College Literature, Fall 2005 by Hanlon, Christopher
Other commentators on Invisible Man have concluded that Ellison's novel mounts a sustained critique of Emersonian ethics, suggesting that Ellison rejects "Self-Reliance" as irreducible to-and also insensitive of-the powerful social forces that burdened African Americans throughout the twentieth century.
- More Articles of Interest
- Invisible Man and African American radicalism in World War II
- John F. Callahan, ed. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man: A Casebook
- "A slightly different sense of time": palimpsestic time in...
- Tribe Creates New 'Gold Standard' in Preventing Blindness.
- Cultural Contexts for Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. - Review - book reviews
Still other readers of Invisible Man have focused upon the novel's musicological qualities, the ways in which the narrative experimentation of the novel incorporates Ellison's early love of and expertise with music, pulling together an authorial voice that draws upon the techniques of several musical forms in order to re-invent the American novel.1 None of these commentators, however, have considered that these two facets of Invisible Man-the novel's musicological commitments, on the one hand, and its struggle with the legacy of Emerson on the other-may shed light upon each other, that part of the Emersonian tradition that is Ellison's inheritance might be the musical, harmonic, and improvisational understanding of eloquence that Emerson outlines most explicitly in the 1870 essay devoted to this topic but that also circulates through much of Emerson's writing prior to this work.2 In exploring this possibility, then, I am suggesting at least two things about Ellison's relationship with Emerson. The first is that, viewed in such a way, Invisible Man affiliates itself with a crucial strain of thought, running throughout Emerson's writings, that ponders the musical qualities of eloquent communication and links these qualities to a promise of speakerly rebirth. But another premise from which I proceed is that imposing, larger-than-life figures like Emerson lead a protean life in American literary and intellectual history, since the resonance of such essays as "Self-Reliance," "The American Scholar," or "The Poet" shifts in accordance with whatever desires or values a given generation of readers brings to them.3 In Invisible Man particularly, the name of "Emerson" marks a site of contest and struggle where various interests compete to authorize their values through reference to an "Emersonian" tradition. In this sense, Ellison's affiliation with Emersonian values of eloquence does not come about through a simple process of "transmission" and "reception," nor even through a Bloomian mise en scène wherein Ellison unconsciously if productively misreads Emerson. The Emersonian strains at work in Invisible Man constitute a series of appropriative gestures on Ellison's part; they are deliberate, revisionary attempts at constituting an Emersonian tradition that resists other versions of "Emerson" that are largely antithetical to the sort of American intellectual history Ellison wishes to write. The Ellisonian reading of Emerson is a transformative reading, faithful to the wide-ranging ramifications of Emerson's philosophy even as it assimilates its particular components into Ellison's specific and progressive philosophical aims. This is to say that before Ellison's protagonist is able to learn the kind of improvisatory give-and-take Invisible Man values, Ellison himself enacts such give-and-take with Emerson as duet partner. To put it still another way, Ellison's reading of Emerson is a reading undertaken in the spirit of "Quotation and Originality," in which Emerson tells us that "Original power is usually accompanied with assimilating power ..." (1990, 433).What Henry Louis Gates, Jr., refers to as "signifyin(g)," the spoken tradition of "expressive doubleness" by means of which generations of African Americans have commandeered existing oral or written texts in order to re-direct the thematics of those texts along their own lines of intent, is for Emerson the paradoxical genius of "originality" itself, since "In hours of high mental activity we sometimes do the book too much honor, reading out of it better things than the author wrote,-reading, as we say, between the lines" (435). And we might liken this stratum of meaning the Emersonian reader discerns "between the lines" to what practiced blues and jazz players call microtones-the "notes between the notes" or tonal gradations that lie unscripted, invisible, within the apparently blank spaces of the measure.4 Ellison's metaphor for this mode of Emersonian reading, the kind of reading to which Invisible Man subjects Emerson himself, also emphasizes the musicological dimension of "reading . . . between the lines," suggesting that only "on the lower frequencies" of any text do we find the matrix of possibilities for reconstruction and renovation.
