Invisible Man Musically-Inspired or Inflected

Invisible Man

Musically-Inspired or Inflected Narration, Description, Motif Use and Structural Arrangement within Invisible Man (1953) by Ralph Ellison

Ralph Ellison, the African-American musician-turned-author, and best-known of his first novel Invisible Man published initially in 1953, was classically trained in musical composition at the Tuskegee Institute. Still, Ralph Ellison is much better-known, and remembered almost entirely today for his groundbreaking first novel. Within this work, whose storylines are, arguably at least, as beautifully; intricately, and complicatedly-yet-invisibly [double-meaning intended] blended as might perhaps be the instrumental/melodic mix within a deftly and delicately-composed symphony (see Heise, 2003).

Within Invisible Man (1994), a young, black, nameless (the author's lack of name for his novel's main character underscores his 'invisibility') ex-college senior is seen coming-of-age (uneasily, unevenly); after being transplanted, due not to his wishes but because he suspended (expelled, it turns out) from college. Arriving in the Harlem of Ellison's mid-1930's/early 1940's setting, the young man at first savors his new freedom, as described in sensual detail, to go where he wants; eat how much he pleases, and be himself (he thinks).

But in almost no time he starts to realize, taking his first of a series of increasingly hard and ever-surprising knocks Harlem itself gives him. Successive, escalating blows to his current non-initiated self-hood begin when he learns from a prospective boss's son who, taking what pity he can, informs him that the supposedly glowing recommendations he carries actually say not to hire him. In 1952, Saul Bellow stated, of Ellison's then-new Invisible Man, that this novel describes, uniquely:

the vast mass of phenomena, the seething, swarming body of appearances, facts, and details. From this harassment and threatened dissolution by details, writer tries to rescue what is important. Even when he is most bitter, he makes by his tone a declaration of values and he says, in effect: There is something nevertheless that a man may hope to be. This tone [is]... The tone of the very strongest sort of creative intelligence... [I]n a time modern imaginative writers make the... quest is for... middle-of-consciousness for everyone. What language is it... we...speak... The stature we can... claim the main address of consciousness? ("Man Underground")

Ellison's hero's prospects improve when the same boss's son points him toward a first job. But the first day at this new, physically demanding work, the barely-ex-college senior is knocked unconscious and wakes up in a hospital bed, imaginary musical sounds and peculiar accompanying images seeming to pipe their way through IV tubes at some point stuck inside him: "I saw a military band arrayed decorously in concert, each musician with well-oiled hair, heard a sweet-voiced trumpet rendering "The Holy City" as from an echoing distance, buoyed by a choir of muted horns; and above the mocking obligato of a mocking bird. (p. 230).

The latter is hardly the whistling (or other sound) of a happy tune. From here, moreover, heavier counterpoints to all he anticipates and first hopes to experience appear, fade, and then revisit him. This is his funhouse-like coming-of-age - off-kilter, out of sequence, off-key: all confounding but real.

It is the asynchronous; discordant sotto voce of Harlem. But now, half-waking, alone and confused; to anesthesia-induced sound-images, Ellison's protagonist resolves to re-start his progress toward... he knows not what anymore. This portion of Invisible Man especially is the first to suggest the extensiveness or influence on his later fiction of Ellison's musical background: descriptively; structurally, in imagistic ways, and atmospherically at once. More overt references to musical instruments, song lyrics, classical compositions, and jazz and blues performers will from here on also appear within and throughout the story (see Heise, 2003)

In ways like these, then, musical sounds; references, and motifs, implicit or explicit, underscore continually the nameless Invisible Man's actions, emotions, plans, and at times crazily-shifting moods. This is how Invisible Man seems to possess an intricate, tightly woven but always surprising (e.g., pretty melody followed by cacophony followed by a shrieking falsetto pitch; and then by percussion punctuation (running from place to place; being let down (emotionally and/or physically); dropping finally beneath the earth) (Heise, 2003).

Such varied sounds juxtaposed against intervals of silence could be compared to orchestra pieces. i.e., for instance, a lengthy but straightforward overture or prelude; succeeded by livelier, more dense and deep yet mainly sad-sounding, slowed-down movements that, in staccato notes; pauses, and trebling C. And E-sharps, form the main part of the piece. At the end of it all comes a dramatically violent, sharp and steep-rising crescendo followed by a clear, calm and measured finally that is flat: so flat, in fact, as to thud percussively and at once to the earth and after it fall wobblingly below it.

Ralph Ellison thus orchestrates the unpredictable actions and tone changes and of this novel with the skill of a maestro: from the narrator's grandfather's bassoon-like deathbed warning, to the fateful chance meeting with Norris to the expulsion from school to the narrator's discovery of the true content of the seven reference letters he has so industrially distributed, the parts of the story are as tightly controlled, juxtaposed, varied, blended, surprising, and climactic as a symphonic masterpiece. Ellison, through the voice of his unnamed narrator, "conducts" cadence, pace, rhythm of the main action, and even perhaps our own response to it. The first "movement" of the book starts where it eventually ends, in the black hole of the Invisible Man. Such invisibility propels the action: the narrator's struggle to be "seen" and recognized, including by his own true self:

All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive.

I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer... I am nobody but myself. (Ellison, p. 15)

Within this initial "movement" of the story, the narrator believes, as others have told him, the way forward is through college learning. So he does so, on "a scholarship to the state college for Negroes" (p. 32) from his town's [white] "big shots" (p. 17) (they publicly humiliate him and other black young men first). At college, he yearns to become an "EDUCATOR" (p. 114) like Dr. Bledsoe. Yet when rich, white, Mr. Norris, a benefactor, comes to campus and curiosity combined with circumstances lead Norris (the narrator, his driver for today, takes him there) to Jim Trueblood and his story of incest, and next the Golden Day, Bledsoe becomes furious enough to expel the narrator. Bledsoe obviously has no desire to truly educate others about the black community, almost as if concealing such truths from wealthy white donors will make them vanish. The unplanned outing to the dark underside beyond college is educational for Norris but not in a way that pleases Dr. Bledsoe. So the narrator is exiled.

The second, and core "movement" (see Heise, 2003) of the story takes place upon the narrator's arrival to New York, with no job, money, or friends. The letters from Dr. Bledsoe provide security but also happen to lead him to Emerson's son. Next is the Brotherhood; here the narrator begins his real education. Ironically, his goal to be an "educator" changes to one of wishing to inspire others by making rousing public speeches for the Brotherhood. After his first speech, however, they say it was too emotional.