On Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
In 1936, Ralph Ellison moved to New York City to become a symphonic composer. While that career never materialized, the influence of music on Ellison’s work is clear. John Callahan, Ellison’s literary executor, writes in his essay “Frequencies of Eloquence: The Performance and Composition of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man” that the writing of Invisible Man entailed an “antagonistic co-operation” between Ellison’s voice and Invisible Man’s. “Invisible Man performed and [Ellison] composed the novel,” Callahan argues. What a description of the writing process! Here writing is represented as yogic: Ellison was the conduit through which the spirit of Invisible Man was channeled. Put another way, Ellison, in an act of empathetic genius became Invisible Man by connecting with Invisible Man’s voice as deeply as possible in much the same way as a cellist connects with a piece of music or an actress would inhabit a dark role. In 1945, Ellison heard a voice—the disembodied voice of a talented young black man searching for self and purpose. Maybe this voice was Ellison—his spirit, his soul. He was scared of it. But the story of how Ellison managed to represent this voice on the page is a lesson to any novelist. Rather than ignoring the voice or masking it with his own, he listened to it. He flinched. And then he stopped flinching. He surrendered. He wrote. Who knows what Ellison had in his mind? Mozart’s symphonies. The symphonies he wished to compose himself. Ellison must have heard other things, too: the folk stories told in the barbershop in which he once worked, his grandfather’s wisdom, memories of Duke Ellington tickling ivories in the Cotton Club. Inspiration was a flood, a geyser. He had to breathe, close his eyes, and write. The result is a novel that stands alongside anything written in the twentieth century. Ellison’s novel is a gift enough. But as Callahan and other scholars have noted, Ellison has also given writers a fascinating metaphor to use in understanding the novel: writing as jazz.
The Balance Between Structure and Voice
How can we think of writing as a performance? Callahan writes: “Retrospectively, even as he performs, Ellison distinguishes the task of composition from performance. He tells of his effort to tease out the character and story behind the solo voice: ‘I began to structure the movement of my plot while he began to merge with my more specialized concerns with fictional form and with certain problems arising out of the pluralistic literary tradition from which I spring’. Slowly, Ellison arrives at a form resilient enough to advance both Invisible Man’s distinct, uncategorical voice and identity and the novel’s craft.” It is clear that Ellison had some kind of plot graph going on or at least some idea of the architecture of the novel. The book is divided into twenty-five chapters. The story is fairly linear, moving from Invisible Man’s childhood to his college experience in the South to his involvement with a communist organization in New York City. But, from the very first line—“I am an Invisible Man”—not unlike another famous first line—“Call me Ishmael”—we know who is narratively in charge. This voice can be euphoric, mad, deafening, contradictory. From the prologue:
“Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it, it is a denial. But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me? And wait until I reveal how truly irresponsible I am. Responsibility rests upon recognition, and recognition is a form of agreement” (14).
Improvisation
What is the effect of having a first person voice be in charge? For one, there is no claim to objectivity. So this means that events that may be channeled easily through an omniscient third person voice are focalized through a point-of-view that will be selective with some details and oblivious (or evasive) about others. This is related to a term I’ve learned during my first semester of graduate school—point-of-telling—a term I don’t think I can do without when considering the craft of a novel. Point-of-telling is related to (a) the narrator; (b) the audience; (c) the reason for telling; and (d) the stakes. In the case of Invisible Man, (a) Invisible Man is telling the story; to (b) the American audience writ large; because of (c) the gross inequality; that (d) has essentially left him hidden underground. Invisible Man’s very humanity is de-valued in a country whose fundamental doctrine is a Bill of Rights. But Ellison adds a huge twist. While this oppression leads to unspeakable horrors, the potential of invisibility allows for other things: humor, anonymity, and experimentalism. ”But my world has become one of infinite possibilities,” Invisible Man writes in his lyrical epilogue that basks in ambivalence. “What a phrase—still it’s a good phrase and a good view of life, and a man shouldn’t accept an other; that much I’ve learned underground” (576).
The Art of Individual Assertion
Listen to Ella Fitzgerald scat. Callahan might call this the “art of individual assertion.” He references Ellison’s opinion that jazz is a form of combat: ‘true jazz is an art of individual assertion within and against the group.’ A jazz group achieves its full effect only if the musicians test each other’s skills and, through improvisation explore the full range of each member’s untapped potentialities. ‘Each true jazz moment (as distinct from the uninspired commercial performance) springs from a contest in which each artist challenges all the rest; each solo flight, or improvisation, represents (like the successive canvasses of a painter) a definition of his identity: as individual, as member of the collectivity and as a link in the chain of tradition.’” In a society as unequal as America where racial lines are seemingly drawn in permanent ink, what can be more of an affront to silence than a 581-page novel that ends like this: “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” For the jazz novelist, he designs a plot—a boy will look into, through, above his spirit—and he will listen to this voice and he will dance and riff and play, and his music will be symphonic (or not) and he will not care in the least what you think. The run-on verse, the high-pitched shriek, the lack of discipline: for Ellison, for Fitzgerald, for us?, these are all glimpses of the truth.
