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Eloquence and Invisible Man
College Literature, Fall 2005 by Hanlon, Christopher
In at least this sense, Norton represents the sort of individual "Self-Reliance" deplores, not the sort of individual the essay values. Norton's desire to associate himself with an Emersonian tradition he barely understands thus marks off "Emerson" as a site of interpretive dissent for Invisible MiW.This is to say that in depicting Norton as a self-professed "Emersonian," Ellison does not dismiss Emersonian philosophy as impertinent to the racial and social struggles Invisible Man depicts. Rather, he includes the name of Emerson within the horizon of these struggles, contesting the various renditions of "Emerson" that have sometimes eclipsed his abiding relevance to the problem of "the color line" and the forms of self-consciousness it engenders. Norton's misreadings of Emerson are precisely what Ellison wants to contest, but the protagonist's reply to Norton's early query as to whether he has studied Emerson-"Not yet, sir.We haven't come to him yet."-comments more widely upon Emerson's posthumous reception and philosophical legacy. In certain ways, Ellison's novel suggests that we have yet to come upon Emerson-that if, "on the lower frequencies," Ellison's narrator speaks for us, then his journey toward self-emergence and self-reliance coincides with the project of extracting a living dimension of Emersonian thought from an ossified and nominally "Emersonian" narrative. While Invisible Man may complicate and often challenge the idealism Emersonian philosophy represents, it does not simply discard the hopes this philosophy articulates. Rather, Invisible Man capitalizes upon Emersonian motifs that are more submerged than those readers such as Norton typically use as shorthand for Emersonian thought in toto. In other words, Ellison reads Emerson in an Emersonian way.
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So if there are in fact Emersonian figures to be found in Invisible Man, they appear in less grandiloquent guise than Norton, and certainly not as either of the "Mr. Emersons" who enter the narrative after the protagonist's arrival in New York. It is telling that Ellison chooses here to divide his "Emerson" in two, presenting to us a young Emerson apparently wracked with Freudian angst, tyrannized by and alienated from Emerson, Sr., the absent father who never appears directly in the narrative but toward whom the novel's protagonist has been misdirected. Young Mr. Emerson bars the protagonist's way to Emerson, Sr., but Emerson, Sr., we discover, is himself part of the conspiracy to "keep this nigger boy running": the letters of introduction with which the protagonist has been provided by his college headmaster (one of which he is now attempting to deliver to the elder Emerson) instruct their addressees to deny him assistance, since (as the letters say) he "shall never, under any circumstances, be enrolled as a student here again" (Ellison 1981, 190). Having set off in search of one Emerson, the protagonist finds another; attempting to deliver a message he has not read to Emerson, Sr., he instead receives that message from Emerson, Jr. (who reveals to the protagonist the contents of the letters he has been delivering and thus enables him to begin the process of making his own way in the world). But again, this is not to say that young Mr. Emerson lives up to his surname; for one thing, he offers the protagonist little more than an un-Emersonian, nihilistic resignation as he dismisses the very notion of the self as passé: "Identity! My God! Who has any identity anymore anyway?" (187) In Invisible Man, Emerson's thought channels not through the characters who speak or bear Emerson's name but rather through those who speak in Emersonian fashion.
