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Eloquence and Invisible Man
College Literature, Fall 2005 by Hanlon, Christopher
So what precisely is Wheatstraw's place in this narrative? Though his appearance in Invisible Man is brief, Wheatstraw serves as one of several surrogate father figures for the narrator, who also receives paternal guidance of varying worth from figures such as the grandfather, the vet at the Golden Day, the yam man in New York, and Brother Tarp-and who is also subject to the paternal tyranny of tricksters such as Bledsoe, Norton, and Brother Jack. But what distinguishes Wheatstraw from the array of possibilities these characters represent is that he models a loquaciousness-a lingua franca of shit, grit, and mother-wit-enacting his message of resilience at the register of spoken performance. His eloquence is both traditional and improvisational; though he addresses the narrator through a series of tropes and codes he assumes the boy will recognize (since both are, as he points out, "from down home"), he also deploys these codes in ways that enact the spoken equivalent of developing one's own "plan" as one proceeds. In this sense, Wheatstraw appears as one of a string of spoken performers in Invisible Man, but one who stands out for his improvisational powers. Unlike, for instance, the Reverend Homer A. Barbee, whose earlier speech at the protagonist's college is a tightly rehearsed repetition of other, similar speeches (as Barbee begins his speech, he remarks "my young friends, it is indeed a beautiful story. I'm sure you've heard it many times" [Ellison 1981, 119]), Wheatstraw's eloquence is an off-the-cuff, organic eloquence, an eloquence that foregrounds the possibilities of improvisation as opposed to strict recitation.6 To borrow a terminology once used by Charles Mingus, Wheatstraw appears as a "spontaneous composer" as opposed to speakers like Barbee, whose adherence to a pre-prepared script would make him a "pencil composer." And so though Wheatstraw qualifies as an Emersonian speaker whose wordplay blends whim with self-reliance, and though he is also a "blues man" who sublimates his adversity into art, Wheatstraw's improvisational abilities also connect him to aesthetic principles that formed the core of Ellison's relationship with jazz.
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For Ellison, improvisation enabled each jazz performer's emergence as a distinctive figure within a larger compositional group. "Each true jazz moment," he remarked in a 1958 essay on Charlie Christian, "springs from a contest in which each artist challenges all the rest; each solo flight, or improvisation, represents (like the successive canvases of a painter) a definition of his identity as individual, as members of the collectivity and as a link in the chain of tradition" (1995, 267). Ellison's commentary on jazz also describes his own Emersonian relationship with Emerson, a relationship that connects Ellison to a certain tradition even as it distinguishes him from that tradition. Simultaneously including the artist within a "chain of tradition" and providing an outlet by means of which this artist may distinguish him- or herself as an "individual," jazz concocts an equilibrium between the artist's sense of indebtedness and belonging, on the one hand, and this same artist's impulse to distinguish his or her own voice within that of "the collectivity," on the other. In this way, Ellison's understanding of jazz resembles T. S. Eliot's effort to mediate between individual genius and the efficacy of tradition in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," where Eliot describes literary tradition not as a monolith against which each artist must either turn his or her back or be subsumed, but rather as a form of aesthetic ground upon which the artist's idiosyncratic talents take root. Analogously, Ellison's understanding of improvisation requires that every jazz artist "learns tradition, group techniques and style" even as it affords this artist an opportunity for individuated "rebirth." "For after the jazzman has learned the fundamentals of his instrument and the traditional techniques of jazz-the intonations, the mute work, manipulation of timbre, the body of traditional styles-he must then 'find himself,' must be 'reborn,' must find, as it were, his soul," Ellison explains. "All this through achieving that subtle identification between his instrument and his deepest drives which will allow him to express his own unique ideas and his own unique voice. He must achieve, in short, his self-determined identity" (245).7
