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Eloquence and Invisible Man
College Literature, Fall 2005 by Hanlon, Christopher
Emerson's liberal abolitionism, like the liberal abolitionism of many of his peers in Concord and Boston, often consisted of a paternalistic attitude toward African Americans, which in turn rested upon the assumption that Africans were less rational and more childlike than Europeans. And yet, when we consider the great premium Emerson places on autonomy, on self-reliance, and also how closely these values are tied to Emerson's sense of the self-reliant voice, his assumptions about the capacity of "negroes" to reach such ideals become more difficult to pin down. After hearing speeches by Toussaint L'Ouverture and Frederick Douglass in 1844, Emerson recorded his impression that
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now it seems to me that the arrival of such men as Toussaint if he is pure blood, or of Douglas [sic] if he is pure blood, outweighs all the English & American humanity. . . . Here is Man, & if you have man, black or white is an insignificance. Why at night all men are black.The intellect, that is miraculous, who has it has the talisman, his skin and bones are transparent, he is a statue of the living God: him I must love & serve & perpetually seek & desire and dream on: and who has it is not superfluous. (Emerson 1960-82, 5.63)
For Emerson, the eloquence of Douglass and L'Ouverture is the eloquence of self-reliance itself, the sort of eloquence he believed would liberate all African Americans. Offering individual exemplars of Emerson's more general sense in "Eloquence" that the successful public speech was a fundamentally musical event, orators like Douglass and L'Ouverture signaled a new "occasion of.. .jubilee" in which "the black race can begin to compete with the white; that in the great anthem of the world which we call history . . . after playing a long time a very low and subdued accompaniment they perceive the time arrived when they can strike in with force & effect & take a master's part in the music" (1960-82, 5. 63).
It is Emerson's unpatronizing accolade for such speakers as Douglass and L'Ouverture, resonant with the eventually deleted assertion from "Eloquence" ("The negro too is eloquent"), that I want to emphasize here, but in doing so I do not mean to suggest that Emerson's attitudes toward race, or indeed on self-reliance, are uncomplicated at any level. Rather, it is Emerson's very inconsistency on such issues that makes him such a contested figure for all sorts of intellectual historians, including Ellison himself. Invisible Man, for instance, circulates the name of Emerson in ways that question which values the name signals and for whom these values resonate. At an early point in the narrative, Mr. Norton, a white college trustee whom the young protagonist chauffeurs for the better part of an afternoon, asks the boy, "You have studied Emerson, haven't you?" Embarrassed that he has not, the boy replies, "Not yet, sir. We haven't come to him yet."
"No?" [Norton] said with a note of surprise. "Well, never mind. I am a New Englander, like Emerson. You must learn about him, for he was important to your people. He had a hand in shaping your destiny. Yes, perhaps that is what I mean. I had a feeling that your people were somehow connected with my destiny. That what happened to you was connected with what would happen to me. . . ." (Ellison 1981, 41)
