UNIVERZITA PALACKÉHO V OLOMOUCI
FILOZOFICKÁ FAKULTA
Katedra anglistiky a amerikanistiky
Bc. Zuzana Uhlířová
The Role of Music in Ralph Ellison’s Work
Diplomová práce
Vedoucí práce: prof. PhDr. Josef Jařab, CSc.
Olomouc 2015
Kopie zadání e
Prohlašuji, že jsem diplomovou práci na téma “Role hudby v díle Ralpha Ellisona”
vypracovala samostatně pod odborným dohledem vedoucího práce a uvedla jsem
všechny použité podklady a literaturu.
V Olomouci dne 1. května 2015
Podpis ....................................
Děkuji prof. PhDr. Josefu Jařabovi, CSc. za odborné vedení práce, poskytování rad a
materiálových podkladů k práci.
Content
Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 5
1 Life of Ralph Ellison .................................................................................................................. 8
1.1 Oklahoma City ...................................................................................................................... 10
1.2 Tuskegee Institute ................................................................................................................. 12
2 Work of Ralph Ellison ............................................................................................................. 14
2.1 Ellison and Murray................................................................................................................ 16
2.2 Jazz Writings ......................................................................................................................... 20
3 Music in Invisible Man ............................................................................................................ 22
3.1 Blues Characters ................................................................................................................... 29
4 Black American Folklore in Invisible Man .............................................................................. 35
4.1 Louis Armstrong ................................................................................................................... 37
4.2 Andy Razaf ........................................................................................................................... 39
4.3 Django Reinhardt .................................................................................................................. 42
4.4 African American Folk Songs ............................................................................................... 44
4.5 Peetie Wheatstraw ................................................................................................................. 54
4.6 “Many Thousands Gone” ...................................................................................................... 57
4.7 Oral Narratives ...................................................................................................................... 61
4.8 Hip Language ........................................................................................................................ 64
5 Invisible Juneteenth ................................................................................................................. 67
5.1 “Cadillac Flambé” ................................................................................................................. 71
Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 73
Resumé ........................................................................................................................................ 75
Works Cited ................................................................................................................................ 79
Anotace ....................................................................................................................................... 85
Annotation................................................................................................................................... 86
4
Introduction
Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man was published in 1952 and it immediately became a
literary classic. One year later it won the National Book Award and in 1965 it was
declared the most important novel since the end of WWII by survey of 200 prominent
literary figures. In following the story of a black youngster struggling to survive and
succeed in a racially divided society, Ellison summarizes the course of modern African
American history. The importance of its message has been proved by the number of
editions that have been published over the last few decades.
The use of music in the work of Ralph Ellison indicates his personal interest and
life-long passion, together with his African American cultural roots. Attention to the
influence of music on Ellison affords a better way to understand his artistic intentions as
well as his own reaction to critics of the novel. Much work has been done on the
relationship between the novel Invisible Man and jazz. The relationship between the two
is hard to ignore in light of Ellison’s passion for jazz music, his writings on the subject
in Shadow and Act (1964), and in interviews he provided. Additionally, the content of
the novel contains many allusions to the genre. His countless blues and jazz references
help the reader understand the cultural context and the role of African Americans in the
history of the United States.
The narrator in Invisible Man refers repeatedly to Louis Armstrong and encounters
characters with names recalling actual musicians, such as Peter Wheatstraw referring to
blues singer William Bunch, who adopted the name Peetie Wheatstraw; or Rinehart
whose name indisputably recalls Romani jazz guitarist Django Reindhart. The novel is
full of lyrical verses from songs and characters from oral narratives. Horace A. Porter,
current chair of Iowa’s Department of American Studies, highlights Ellison’s musical
roots in Jazz Country: Ralph Ellison in America (2001), a study that addresses Ellison’s
comments and essays about jazz and jazz musicians. Porter explains the importance
they possessed for him and claims that for young Ellison they personified African
American experience.
As a boy he got a chance to see musicians like Duke Ellington and Louis
Armstrong play in Oklahoma City, which inspired him immensely. In their
performances, Ellison and his boyhood friends recognized the group’s own unique
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cultural attributes. This could be in jazzmen, ballplayers and tap dancers; or in gesture,
intonation, timber and phrasing. Although they did not fully understand the significance
of the style, they recognized within it an affirmation of life beyond all question of their
difficulties as Negroes (Porter 4). In his essay “Living with Music,” Ellison asserts that
jazz music provides people with the feeling of being alive and part of the community.
Especially in case of African Americans, music has been an exultation of life in the face
of hardship and affliction. Knowing well that jazz heavily influenced Ellison, critics
have endlessly analyzed Invisible Man in the context of his musical passion. The range
of topics is broad, but critics often address Invisible Man’s proclamation of America’s
democratic potentiality. Although a single essay cannot be all things for all people, the
works together build a complex structure that provides a valuable contribution to the
study of the novel.
The perspectives differ from critic to critic. For example, Marc Singer considers the
novel a journey through a telescoped and allegorized African American history.
Together with Paul Anderson, they explore the relationship between music and other
aspects of the novel, such as temporality and narrative. Throughout the next several
chapters I will explore how Invisible Man’s narrator employs a jazz aesthetic and
African American folklore that celebrates the uniqueness of Black Americans in the
United States. Thus, by necessity, my concern is not only with jazz, but also with folk
songs and oral narratives.
I will be examining these components of Ellison’s work: the power of the written
narrative, jazz aesthetics, Black American folklore and contemporary language. All of
these elements work together throughout the novel to assert that music does not
necessarily need to be listened to, but it can be expressed via words with the same, if not
more accurate effect. Furthermore, in case of the African American community, it has
allowed them to fight historically oppressive forces in a non-violent fashion.
Most importantly, Invisible Man demonstrates that one can learn from the
jazzman’s soloist techniques and improvisation to express their own unique
individuality. It is my contention that by doing so, the narrator resists the homogenizing
tendencies that the college, the Brotherhood, and Ras the Exhorter promote. By
adopting jazz temporality in his own narrative Invisible Man can uniquely express his
own subjectivity while simultaneously rejecting their attempts to misuse him.
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As for the structure of the work, it is important first to establish that Ellison’s
passion for music comes from his childhood. Growing up in Oklahoma City in a family
that supported his talent, it is no surprise that young Ralph became very close to the
contemporary music scene. Later, when studying at Tuskegee Institute, he learned more
traditional music theory informing what would later become his career.
Chapter two will then launch into an investigation of Ellison’s writing before and
after his enormous success with the publication of Invisible Man. I will examine his
relationship with one of his schoolmates, an American literary and jazz critic Albert
Murray. Though they did not become close friends until after Murray graduated, their
mutually influential relationship was reflected in detail in the book Trading Twelves:
The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray (2000). This collection
informed the thinking and writing of both men from the time of the writing of Ellison’s
Invisible Man, through Murray’s social-aesthetic works and novels, up to Ellison’s
death in 1994. Later I will examine Ellison’s jazz writings collected by Robert
O’Meally, who is a respected authority in the field of jazz studies.
In the following two chapters I will focus on Invisible Man itself. To be more
specific, chapter three will deal with the jazz aesthetics used in its narration and
examples of blues characters who accompany the narrator. Chapter four moves to Black
American folklore in order to emphasize into what extent Ellison promotes the heritage
of his ancestors. Necessarily, this chapter will briefly explore the history of African
American songs and language connected to the novel to suggest that most African
American writing is a form of protest.
The final chapter will evaluate Ellison’s work after the publication of Invisible
Man. His highly expected second novel was never finished and the readers had to wait
till the author’s death for his manuscript, eventually edited and published by his friend
John F. Callahan.
This thesis will bring to light aspects of Invisible Man and other literary works of
Ralph Ellison, especially the power of the written narrative, jazz aesthetics, Black
American folklore and the use of contemporary language. I will demonstrate that
Ellison’s unique writing style is a form of protest that affirms life and the experience of
African Americans throughout history, in the same way that music does for Ellison
himself.
7
1 Life of Ralph Ellison
Ralph Waldo Ellison was born in Oklahoma City in 1914 (or perhaps 1913, as
Arnold Rampersad suggests), only a few years after the Territories were granted
statehood. He grew up among people who were optimistic, tough, and aggressive (The
Craft of Ralph Ellison 7). His parents, Lewis Ellison from Abbeyville, South Carolina,
and Ida Milsap Ellison from White Oak, Georgia, had left Chattanooga, Tennessee, to
test the proclaimed greater freedom of the western state. At least Oklahoma had no
long-standing tradition of slavery or segregation. As it turned out, segregation laws
eventually were imported from neighboring Texas and Arkansas; but, even so, the
blacks who had trekked and wagon-trained west to escape southern oppression fought
hard for their political rights. Ellison recalls that Oklahoma blacks felt that “no matter
what their loves had been, their children’s lives would be lives of possibility.” This
sense of possibility, the fighting spirit of the people, and the vast expanses of
undeveloped land gave Oklahoma a frontierlike aspect. Despite its frontier edges,
however, it was an established place. As Ellison said, although it was a capital city
which was smaller than Kansas City, St. Louis or Chicago, in Oklahoma City he felt
much better (The Craft of Ralph Ellison 7).
Ralph’s father, Lewis Ellison, worked as a construction company foreman and
then as an independent businessman selling ice and coal. Ellison states that especially
after his father’s death in 1917, the Ellisons were poor – at times extremely poor (“Tell
It Like It Is, Baby” 196). Still, Ralph and his younger brother Herbert were made to feel
that the worlds of the rich and the white were approachable. This early confidence
started off with Lewis Ellison, the avid reader who named his son after Emerson. It was
reinforced by Ida Ellison, a determined woman, a stewardess in her church who valued
action in this world. She brought home records, magazines, and books discarded in the
white homes where she worked as a maid. And Mrs. Ellison saw to it that her sons had
electric and chemistry sets, a roll-top desk and chair, and a toy typewriter. Her activism
extended to politics. “If you young Negroes don’t do something about things,” she
would tell Ralph and Herbert, “I don’t know what’s going to happen to this race” (The
Craft of Ralph Ellison 8).
For Mrs. Ellison’s part, she was an ardent supporter of Eugene Debs’s Socialist
Party and canvassed for the party’s gubernatorial candidate of 1914. In 1934, after
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Ralph had gone off to Tuskegee Institute, she was often jailed for attempting to rent
buildings that Jim Crow laws had declared off limits to blacks (Hersey 4). The tendency
to protest against these racial segregation state and local laws enacted after
the Reconstruction period in Southern United States was projected in the future work of
Ellison.
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1.1 Oklahoma City
Oklahoma City was music-centered and its heroes most revered were the
musicians. Ellison himself wanted to become a musician who could read music as well
as improvise. His supervisor of music instruction taught him music theory at Douglass
High School, and Ellison picked up a working knowledge of several brass instruments
as well as the soprano saxophone. But trumpet was his favorite instrument. As firstchair trumpeter in the Douglass school band, and then as the group’s student conductor,
Ellison played light classics and marches at church recitals, graduation exercises,
football games, and parades. Ludwig Hebestreit, conductor of the Oklahoma City
Orchestra, also gave Ellison private music lessons and, in return, young Ellison cut his
lawn (The Craft of Ralph Ellison 9).
What Ellison admired the most was the elegant style, artistic discipline, and
seemingly endless capacity for self-expression of jazz musicians. These men and
women, some of whom played by ear, stood out as the exemplary heroes and role
models of the center of Oklahoma’s black neighborhood, known as Deep Second (Craft
9). At the Aldridge Theater and at Slaughter’s Hall, Ellison heard King Oliver and Ida
Cox as well as the Old Blue Devils Band, with Walter Page, Oran “Hot Lips” Page,
Eddie Durham, and Jimmy Rushing. In Halley Richardson’s Shoe Shine Parlor, a
gathering place for jazz players, Ellison heard Lester Young playing with and against
other tenor saxophonists, “his head thrown back, his horn even then outthrust, his feet
working the footrests” (Craft 9).
In his introduction to Shadow and Act, Ralph Ellison explains how growing up
in Oklahoma City inspired him to overcome a “renaissance man.” He consistently holds
up his native Oklahoma to prove a point concerning both his own background and the
country as a whole:
One thing is certain, ours was a chaotic community, still characterized by
frontier attitudes and by that strange mixture of the naive and
sophisticated... that mixture which often affords the minds of the young who
grow up in the far provinces such wide and unstructured latitude, and which
10
encourage the individual’s imagination – up to the moment ´reality´ closes
in upon him – to range widely and, sometimes, even to soar. (Shadow and
Act xiii)
According to Ellison, the ideal renaissance man is symbolized by the Oklahoma jazz
musician. He writes:
We hear the effects of this [attitude] in the southwestern jazz of the thirties,
that joint creation of artistically free and exuberantly creative adventures, of
artists who had stumbled upon the freedom lying within the restrictions of
their musical tradition as within the limitations of their social background,
and who in their own unconscious way have set an example for any
Americans, Negro or white, who would find themselves in the arts. (xiii)
Such musicians succeed in constructing their identities through music because of, and in
spite of, racial prejudice or “the limitations of their social backgrounds.” Ellison’s
phrase, “freedom lying within restrictions,” can be applied to the process of inventing
forms and expressions of both personal and artistic freedom. The musicians improvise
as they go along. Given their dedication to jazz, Ellison says, “Whatever others thought
or felt, this was their own powerful statement, and only nonmusical assaults upon their
artistic integrity... were able to compromise their vision” (Shadow and Act xiv).
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1.2 Tuskegee Institute
At nineteen Ellison went to Tuskegee Institute as a scholarship student to study
music, wanting to write a symphony that might encompass his varied experiences. He
wrote as a poor black boy who never felt inferior to anyone because of race or class; and
as a classically trained musician who wanted to capture their explosive power in
classical forms (Craft 10).
Ellison majored in music and music theory and worked toward composing his
symphony. Financial problems forced him to leave after three years there, but these
were crucial years for his development as an artist. Eventually he “left the Deep South,
but the Deep South never left him” (Craft 10). The conscious study and practice of the
art of writing he began there became a prominent part of his life. His concern with
history and race and their effects on individual character marks him as a distinctively
southern black American writer.
Living in Alabama was very inspiring for Ellison. The old slave quarters, the
slower pace of life, the accents, and the more formal manners were something new to
him. In addition to the many people who contributed to his growth as a thinker and an
artist, there were constraints to cope with in the Deep South. Both white and black
Alabamians attempted to force him to play roles he found distasteful. Nonetheless, he
converted the essence of his Tuskegee experience into the symbolic action of Invisible
Man, which explains certain aspects of his college years in Alabama.
The protagonist of Invisible Man is a student at the “beautiful college.” In
Chapter five he listens to Reverend Homer A. Barbee’s account of the college founder’s
life. Speaking in the college chapel, which according to O’Meally strongly resembles
Tuskegee’s old chapel, Barbee’s words are humorously reminiscent of Founder’s Day
speeches delivered at Tuskegee each spring (Craft 12). Barbee says:
And into this land came a humble prophet, lowly like the humble carpenter
of Nazareth… I’m sure you have heard of his precarious infancy, his
precious life almost destroyed by an insane cousin who splashed the babe
with lye and shriveled his seed and how, a mere babe, he lay nine days in a
12
deathlike coma and then suddenly and miraculously recovered. (Invisible
Man 118-119)
The protagonist contemplates this tradition of the college and wishes that somehow he
could have exhibited the Founder’s enthusiasm for personal progress and dedication to
the race. What the narrator of the novel did was exhibit extreme eagerness when he
endured the degradation of the battle royal. This fight is broadly similar to the mass
boxing tournaments involving many young blacks desperate for cash during the
Depression. The battle royal in the novel is not, however, completely the same as the
actual ones. The biggest difference is that the protagonist had not prearranged the act
with his fellow participants. Thus, the Invisible Man’s heroic efforts were turned to
farce as he had to contend with the white audience along with the other fighters who
were angry at him for cutting into their night’s pay. Before being given a scholarship to
the beautiful college, the Invisible Man was blindfolded, kicked, boxed, and tricked.
The campus has been designated as the Tuskegee Institute National Historic
Site, a national Historic Landmark. Tuskegee University’s campus is the only school in
the United States to hold this distinction. It was founded in 1881 as a normal school for
black teachers, where a core curriculum in mathematics, science, language, and
literature was always offered. As early as 1900, Tuskegee had a music department, and
by the thirties the music school had been established to prepare both music teachers and
concert performers (Craft 13). Its first leader, Booker T. Washington was determined to
promote Tuskegee as a trade school modeled after his alma mater, Hampton Institute.
He promoted education of the “head, heart and hand,” as the school’s motto announced.
Washington never supported programs for Afro-Americans which were exclusively
academic, and he tended to criticize them in his writings and speeches. What he
expected from his students was knowledge of “actual things instead of mere books
alone” (Washington 57).
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2 Work of Ralph Ellison
With the publication of Invisible Man in 1952, Ralph Ellison moved, suddenly,
into the front ranks of American writers. Before that unexpected moment of public
success, however, he had published ten short stories (two later used in the novel) and
thirty-seven essays on literature and politics. Ellison didn’t publish a second novel.
Instead he seemed to be taking on the role of an invisible underground man in his own
right. Still he published twelve stories after Invisible Man, along with dozens of essays
and interviews, some of which were collected in Shadow and Act.
In his work we see the evolution of a central theme: the more conscious a person
of his personal, cultural, and national history, the freer he becomes. Ellison quickly
became dissatisfied with the typical naturalistic scenarios in which characters,
struggling to survive the harsh American environment, are eventually overcome by
impersonal forces. To Ellison, this kind of fiction was tedious and it failed to capture the
richness and variety of black American life. Influenced by a broad range of writers,
including Eliot, Malraux, Hemingway and Joyce, Ellison began to focus on characters
who manage to endure (Ostendorf 107).
Accordingly, we see in Ellison’s work a shift in style from social realism to
surrealism. His efforts to devise a language to express the diverse world as seen by his
self-aware characters led him to experiment with symbolic forms generally unused by
the writers of realism. “Flying Home,” “King of the Bingo Game,” Invisible Man, and
several of the Hickman stories, appearing after Invisible Man, employ modernist
techniques – surrealism, multiple perspectives, stream of consciousness (Ostendorf 1079). But what makes these works distinctively Ellisonian is the infusion of black
American folklore.
His close connection to folklore and music is evident from Shadow and Act, a
collection of essays and interviews written over a twenty-two-year period. Its title is
taken from lines in T. S. Eliot’s 1925 poem “The Hollow Men.” In his collection,
Ellison arranges his materials according to three general themes. The first third of the
book investigates literature and folklore, the second deals with Negro music and the
blues and jazz artists who have created it. The last part offers a cultural and political
examination of the relationship of the Negro subculture to the rest of the nation. In
14
addition to presenting his reformulation of what the novel is and what it should attempt
to do, and offering a celebrated definition of the blues, Ellison argues for the
interrelatedness of all experience and proclaims that, at least on the level of the
imagination, integration has been achieved in the United States.
15
2.1 Ellison and Murray
Albert Murray (1916-2013) was an American literary and jazz critic, novelist,
essayist and biographer. Born in Alabama, he attended the Tuskegee Institute and
received a Bachelor’s degree in 1939. He later earned a M.A. from New York
University in 1948. In 1943 he entered the U.S. Air Force, from which he retired as a
major in 1962.
Murray began his writing career in earnest in 1962, after he retired from the
military. His first book The Omni-Americans: New Perspectives on Black Experience
and American Culture (1970) received critical acclaim. Though they did not know each
other at Tuskegee, Murray and Ralph Ellison became close friends shortly after Murray
graduated. Their mutually influential relationship – reflected in the book Trading
Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray – informed the
thinking and writing of both men from the time of the writing of Ellison’s Invisible
Man, through Murray’s social-aesthetic works and novels, up to Ellison’s death in 1994.
In “The Function of the Heroic Image,” Murray provides a brief overview of the
assumptions and intellectual point of view underpinning his books, which parallels that
of Ellison’s. He says that The Omni-Americans grew out of his “reaction to the ever-sopopular oversimplifications of the so-called social sciences” (570). He criticizes social
scientists and their comments on race. He avoids their categorical thinking about
“races” and writes: “There’s no social scientist in the United States that can define what
is black and what is white. Absolutely none, not in scientific terms. No such definition
is possible. And yet you’ve had survey after survey after survey, which divides people
and draws conclusions based on ‘racial differences’” (Murray 571). Murray, like
Ellison, turns to literature, “the human discipline,” as Murray calls it, with its “great
minds” and “marvelous metaphors.” He says: “I know the vital statistics. I know the
facts. But I´m looking for something better. And that something better is a story of the
possibility of glory on earth” (“The Function of the Heroic Image” 571).
One sees in Murray’s writings dimensions and characterizations of heroic action.
He says his experience had taught him to take on the responsibility. Like Ellison, he
does not agree with African Americans being categorized as mere victims. Murray says
that his vision “had nothing to do with being a victim. It had to do with the fact that if
16
you were faced with a problem, the problem was a dragon and you were the hero. So
you had to forge a sword and find out how to rip at the scales” (“The Function of the
Heroic Image” 572).
Murray, like Ellison, views the blues as a heroic and life-sustaining form. “As a
form,” Ellison asserts in “Richard Wright’s Blues” (1945), “the blues is an
autobiographical chronicle of a personal catastrophe expressed lyrically” (Living with
Music 103). In one of the closing passages in his masterwork on Afro-American music,
Stomping the Blues (1976), Murray echoes Ellison:
What it [the blues] all represents is an attitude toward the nature of human
experience… that is both elemental and comprehensive. It is a statement
about confronting the complexities inherent in the human situation and
about improvising or experimenting and riffing or otherwise playing with
(or even gambling with) such possibilities as are also inherent in the
obstacles, the disjunctures, and the jeopardy. It is also a statement about
perseverance and about resilience and thus all about the maintenance of
equilibrium despite precarious circumstances and about achieving elegance
in the very process of coping with the rudiments of subsistence. (251)
Murray shares with Ellison a faith in the power of great literature and art as well. As he
explains in an interview with Louis Edwards, for him, jazz and the jazz musician are
central to his “whole literary, philosophical system of American identity” (Edwards 82).
The discussion of jazz was an ongoing activity for both Murray and Ellison. In their
correspondence Murray encourages Ellison to write about Jimmy Rushing, and Ellison
suggests to Murray that he write and clarify certain aspect of the blues. They share and
trade ideas on a range of topics, and they are usually in agreement (O’Meally 576).
One of such topics is their more positive assessment of Harlem. They do not see
its inhabitants or other blacks in the United States as living lives wholly separate from
the general circumstances and cultural attitudes of other Americans. In “Harlem Is
Nowhere,” one of Ellison’s earliest essays, written in 1948, Ellison attempts to puzzle
out the fundamental situation of blacks in New York. It shows a developing young
17
writer applauding the white psychiatrist, Dr. Frederic Wertham, who had established,
primarily for Harlem blacks, the Lafargue Psychiatric Clinic. Ellison notes that the
clinic “rejects all stereotypes” and situates the black American “as a member of racial
and cultural minority, as an American citizen caught in certain political and economic
relationships, and as a modern man living in a revolutionary world” (Shadow and Act
295). In this piece, written four years before the publication of Invisible Man, Ellison is
already attempting to correct the typical characterization of African American
personality.
In June of 1951, Ellison writes Murray to inform him that he has completed
Invisible Man. He and Albert Erskine, his editor, are “preparing it for the printer, who
should have it in July or August.” He tells Murray that perhaps both of them will have
books published in the same year. Moreover, he makes comments that sum up the
aesthetic point of view to which he remains faithful to the end:
I believe that we’ll offer some demonstration of the rich and untouched
possibilities offered by Negro life for imaginative treatment. I’m sick to my
guts of reading stuff like the piece by Richard Gibson in the Kenyon Review.
He’s complaining that Negro writers are expected to write like Wright,
Himes, Hughes, which he thinks is unfair because, by God, he’s read Gide!
Yes, and Proust, and a bunch of them advance guard European men of
letters… If he thinks he’s the black Gide why doesn’t he write and prove
it?... Then all the rest of us would fade away before the triumph of pure,
abstract homosexual art over life… No, I think you’re doing it the right way.
You’ve written a book out of your own vision of life, and when it is read the
reader will see and feel that you have indeed read Gide and Malraux, Mann
and whoever the hell else had something to say to you – including a few old
Mobile hustlers and whore ladies, no doubt. (Trading Twelves 35)
18
In the same letter, Ellison summarizes what he had tried to achieve in Invisible Man:
“For me it’s just a big fat ole Negro lie, meant to be told during cotton picking time over
a water bucket full of corn, with a dipper passing back and forth at a good fast clip so
that no one, not even the narrator himself, will realize how utterly preposterous the lie
actually is” (Trading Twelves 36).
Porter believes that in using “lie” in the previous quote Ellison means hyperbole.
He is also referring to African American humor, which works in Invisible Man as an
antidote to racial prejudice (Jazz Country 72). Murray shared Ellison’s viewpoint on the
general role of the African American artist. They agreed that serious art about African
Americans should reflect the artist’s own original vision. Furthermore, they believed
that any artist could, if necessary, steal various artistic techniques that would enable that
artist to make his or her own vision articulate and unique (Porter 73).
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2.2 Jazz Writings
Robert O’Meally collected the very best of Ellison’s inspired, passionate jazz
writings in his unique anthology, named Living with Music: Ralph Ellison’s Jazz
Writings (2001). As stated before, Ellison wrote numerous essays on jazz that became a
respected source for jazz experts and enthusiasts. His work included a tribute to Duke
Ellington, critiques of Charlie Parker, and recognition of the process of changes at
Harlem’s Minton’s in the 1940s. He wrote on a wide range of musical topics, as well as
composers.
O’Meally is the Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English and Comparative
Literature at Columbia University, where he founded the Center for Jazz Studies. In
2002 he shared what brought him to publish Ellison’s essays. In his interview with Joe
Maita he spoke about his teaching at Columbia, where he put together a handout for his
students that consisted of Ellison’s writings on music. After years he realized that this
pile of documents was the best book on jazz he knew. This is how O’Meally decided to
publish his collection of Ellison’s essays on jazz music and popularize it among the
wider public.
In this collection, readers are reminded that the winner of the U.S. National
Book Award for Fiction in 1953 was first an accomplished trumpeter and a student of
musical composition. In his essays Ellison vividly conveys the profound role that music
has played in the lives of black Americans. As he wrote in the title essay, “In those days
it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live”
(Living with Music 3).
In this essay, “Living with Music” (1955), Ellison describes the importance of
music in his life, as it provided him with understanding, order and both social and
cultural identity. At the beginning he talks about his childhood, when he played the bass
horn. He expresses his disagreement with the common notion that it is necessary to
learn what a person is supposed to hear and feel. This traditional approach bore young
Ellison and he eventually gave up on playing the instrument.
His next love-hate encounter with music followed when he lived in an apartment
with very thin walls, where Ellison was “trying to write” (Living with Music 5). The
neighborhood was in general a great source of noise, but the most intimate one was
20
coming from the apartment right above. His neighbor loved to sing, but unfortunately
she would sometimes shriek. After one year Ellison was eager to call the cops, but the
singer presented a serious problem: “could I, an aspiring artist, complain against the
hard work and devotion to craft of another aspiring artist?” (6). Eventually he bought a
speaker system, which he used to drown and contradict her music. It was not until he
moved away when he realized how much he missed her.
Ellison wished society would bestow more honor on jazz music, which was for
him possibly the most powerful, or at least the most enjoyable form, because “perhaps
the enjoyment of music is always suffused with past experience” (13). In most of his
jazz writings, he refers to Oklahoma and looks at the jazz created when he was a child:
“It seems a long way and a long time from the glorious days of Oklahoma jazz dances,
[and] the jam sessions at Hally Richardson’s place on Deep Second” (13). Ellison stays
skeptical towards recent development in contemporary music. He claims that modern
jazz artists tried to capture the white avant-garde by cutting off from the heritage of the
African American jazz artists. Ellison’s notion of nostalgia and racial awareness revel
Ellison to be a complex thinker, at once joyful, and at other times critical.
“Living with Music” is an essay dealing with Ellison’s struggle in learning to
play according to the rules, his love for singing, his respect to both contemporary and
classical musicians, his understanding of jazz and classical music, and his struggle to
write. From his writing style in all of his essays on music in this collection it becomes
clear how honest and passionate he was about the role of music in one’s life.
21
3 Music in Invisible Man
Ellison was formally trained as a musician and his love for music did not leave
him even during his writing career. The awareness of his education, together with a
number of his essays on jazz and the blues, has many times provided readers a key to
the development of character and idea in Invisible Man. “Jazz, like the country which
gave it birth,” he wrote in a 1958 analysis of guitarist Charlie Christian, “is fecund in its
inventiveness, swift and traumatic in its development and terribly wasteful of its
resources.” Some of the best jazz musicians have gone unrecorded or have witnessed
their most original ideas pass anonymously into the public domain. “Because jazz finds
its very life in an endless improvisation upon traditional materials,” Ellison added, the
musician “must lose his identity even as he finds it” (Ellison qtd. in Porter 72). The
improvisation on conventional materials, accompanied by the invention of new melodic
techniques, defines both the determination of his hero in Invisible Man and Ellison’s
own attitude toward his novelistic craft.
Invisible Man is a retrospective and episodic tale. Isolated in a Harlem cellar, a
young intellectual often referred to as Invisible Man reflects upon the consequences of
his actions. He starts out fighting in a black battle staged for the sadistic amusement of
the important white men in his southern hometown. He survives an explosion in the
basement of a paint factory, and during his consequent hospitalization he narrowly
avoids a prefrontal lobotomy. He expresses disapproval when an elderly black couple is
evicted from their Harlem apartment. He is oppressed by a Communist-style
organization, the Brotherhood and his friend Tod Clifton is shot dead by a white cop.
The origin of Invisible Man is related to a joke Ellison heard a comedian tell at
Harlem’s famed Apollo Theatre on 125th Street. O’Meally recalls the introduction to the
Franklin Mint edition of Invisible Man, in which Ellison says that the opening line – “I
am an invisible man” – came to him and would not go away. Frustrated, he snatched the
page from the typewriter, intending to destroy it. Later, Ellison recalled a voice:
And suddenly I could hear in my head a blackface comedian bragging on
the stage of Harlem’s Apollo Theatre to the effect that each generation of
his family had become so progressively black of complexion that no one,
22
not even its own mother, had ever been able to see the two-year-old baby.
The audience has roared with laughter, and recognized something of the
same joking, in-group Negro American irony sounding from my crumpled
page. (New Essays on Invisible Man 11)
In the novel, a race riot breaks out in Harlem after Clifton’s death, and Invisible
Man escapes an angry mob of militant blacks determined to hang him. He ends up in a
Harlem cellar, listening to Louis Armstrong singing “What Did I Do to Be So Black and
Blue”: “Sometimes now I listen to Louis while I have my favorite dessert of vanilla ice
cream and sloe gin. I pour the red liquid over the white mound, watching it glisten and
the vapor rising as Louis bends that military instrument into a beam of lyrical sound.
Perhaps I like Louis Armstrong because he’s made poetry out of being invisible”
(Invisible Man 8).
Considering Ellison’s background, the presence of Louis Armstrong in the
Prologue is no surprise. To Invisible Man, the sound of Louis Armstrong singing is both
a source of inspiration and entertainment. He wants to “feel” the music’s vibration with
his ear and his “whole body.” There is no doubt that the music helps satisfy all of his
senses. Armstrong’s playing of “What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue” is associated
with Invisible Man’s favorite dessert, allowing Ellison to highlight the sweet American
originality of Armstrong’s sound. The patriotic colors – the white ice cream, the red
sloe gin, the transmuted blue notes on Armstrong’s voice and horn – add up to a prelude
for the novel (Porter 72). In this moment, the protagonist also reveals that invisibility
“gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes
you’re ahead and sometimes you’re behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible
flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from
which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around” (Invisible Man 8).
Porter believes that American culture is “jazz-shaped,” and that Invisible Man
reflects the musical process and form of democratic culture. Yet he does not regard
either Ellison’s novel or his essays as obviously experimental or improvisational. He
strives to take the American novel beyond the achievement of James, Melville, Stowe,
Faulkner, and Wright by including and exploring the ambiguous presence and
23
vernacular energy – the speech, accents, faith, and wild humor – of African Americans
(73).
Ellison directly addressed his use of jazz aesthetics in Invisible Man. In 1965,
Richard Kostelanetz asked him, “Would you say then analogously your book is to
Western literature as jazz is to Western music? And, in effect a product of Negro
American culture? Which is still American, which is still Western?” Ellison responded:
Yes, I would just point out that they are both Western, they are both
American precisely because they try to use any and everything which has
been developed by great music and great literature. As for music, on the
other hand, I suspect that the one body of music which expresses the United
States – which expresses this continent – is jazz and blues. What we have
with Western music, with so-called classical music, is an American version
of Western classical music. (Conversations with Ralph Ellison 93-4)
According to Porter, Invisible Man is a jazz text that rearranges true historical events in
highly imaginative ways, as it plays countless variations on familiar literary and cultural
themes. It raises questions and reflects upon topics suggested by other writers such as
Melville and Emerson; historical personages such as Frederick Douglass and Abraham
Lincoln; and events such as the Harlem riot in 1943. He claims that its most radical and
innovative jazz moments are those in which the narrator takes the reader on
philosophical journeys concerning the difficult task of being an American and an
American writer.
In Cultural Contexts for Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1995), Eric Sundquist
writes that Ellison’s novel constructs history as if it were a “jazzy composition or
performance.” History in Invisible Man is “a form of subjective temporality – a
constructed story, not a set of objective facts.” He concludes:
His intricate individual variations, or riffs, on motifs or images, as well as
the protagonist’s self-evident improvisation of new identities in a spiraling
series of new circumstances, are lesser elements of the book’s grander
24
design, which narrates the course of modern African American life in the
nameless protagonist’s experiences. (11)
Among the many respects in which Ellison’s novel might be compared to a jazz
performance, his sense of history as a form of subjective temporality is perhaps the most
profound. It is while listening to Armstrong when the narrator discovers the temporal
structure he looks for: “Invisibility…gives one a slightly different sense of time”
(Invisible Man 8). Although Armstrong is unaware of his invisibility, the narrator’s
grasp of being invisible helps him understand Armstrong’s music. This knowledge
provides him with tools necessary for creating his own temporality in opposition to
objective homogenizing forms of time. As in a jazz solo performance, the way in which
swing and syncopation are implemented is left up to him and he is allowed to improvise
freely.
In the novel, time present is indeed remembered time past and it is the mature
and highly conscious narrator who decides what comes next. He allows only specific
characters to appear, tell their stories and leave. Although he might allude to them
afterwards, they rarely reappear. Porter compares these characters to the players in a
jazz performance, who get inspired by the narrator. As well as the performers, some,
like Brother Tarp, tell their stories in brief. Others, like Jim Trueblood, take long solos.
There are also characters, who provide provocative turning points. To such examples
belongs the vet in the Golden Day, who is the very first to call the narrator invisible and
“a walking personification of the Negative” (Invisible Man 94). Last but not least, the
narrator himself expresses his opinion in a series of speeches. To the most prominent
ones belongs his speech at his high school, an unplanned sermon after seeing the
expulsion of the old Harlem couple, or his tribute to Tod Cliffton, a fellow from the
Brotherhood.
Ellison’s complex individual variations on motifs, as well as the protagonist’s
improvisation of new identities under constantly changing circumstances, are just a few
of many elements of the book’s composition. His narration focuses on the course of
modern African American life in the nameless protagonist’s experiences. In telling the
story of America from a black perspective, Ellison knowingly faced the task of bringing
those on the margins of society to the center. To such examples belong the zoot-suited
25
hipsters of Harlem, speaking a “jived-up transitional language full of country glamour”
and wearing “costumes [that are] surreal variations of downtown styles,” concludes:
“They were outside the groove of history, and it was my job to get them in, all of them”
(Invisible Man 441-43).
Attention to the influence of music on Ellison affords a better way to understand
his artistic intentions as well as his own reaction to critics of the novel. For despite its
mostly favorable reviews and critical history, Invisible Man has hardly gone
unchallenged. For instance, socialists criticized its cultural heterogeneity, as they were
offended by Ellison’s rejection of the communist sympathies he had shown in the 1930s
and his proclamation of an ironic faith in democracy. These views are evident both in
the novel itself, as well as in Ellison’s early published essays. Some critics focused on
characters or scenes that appear to provoke racist stereotypes. Sundquist remembers
how a fellow novelist, John Oliver Killens, writing in the black magazine Freedom in
1952, criticized Ellison for creating individual characters, such as Bledsoe, Rinehart,
and Trueblood, whose actions threatened to underscore racist interpretations of black
social life as inherently pathological: “Mix a heavy portions of sex and a heavy portion
of violence, a bit of sadism and a dose of redbaiting (Blame the Communists for
everything bad) and you have the making of a bestseller today….It is a vicious
distortion of Negro life” (Cruise qtd. in Sundquist 12).
In his study The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary
Criticism, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., calls Invisible Man a “talking book.” Ellison’s book,
like others by African American writers, helped “to establish a collective black voice
through the sublime example of an individual text, and thereby to register a black
presence in letters” (131). Gates claims that it is an exemplary work, because it speaks
across two centuries and seeks to address the essential unity in the diversity of
American life.
In 1981, as the novel approached its thirtieth anniversary, Ellison added a long
introduction in which he says:
So my task was one of revealing the human universals hidden within the
plight of one who was both black and American,... as a way of dealing with
the sheet rhetorical challenge involved in communicating across our barriers
26
of race and religion, class, color and region....I would have to... give him
[Invisible Man] a consciousness in which serious philosophical questions
could be raised, provide him with a range of diction that could play upon the
richness of our readily shared vernacular speech and construct a plot that
would bring him in contact with a variety of American types as they
operated on various levels of society. (Invisible Man xxii)
Invisible Man uses spirituals, blues, folk tales, sermons and popular lyrics to “talk” and
express an amount of black voices and sounds, incorporating and celebrating indigenous
American culture. Porter claims that the novel resembles New York City itself: “It is an
extravaganza of sounds – various voices, idioms, and accents surfacing here and there,
sermons, speeches, folk rhymes, advertising slogans, profanities shouted on Harlem
streets” (76).
Yet Invisible Man brings more than the combination of the oral and the written
in the African American literary tradition, and it provides more than a fascinating
conversation with African American and American literature. Ellison writes as a jazz
musician who takes familiar themes and techniques from classical and popular
traditions to make them bizarre and new. Similarly, he improvises upon genres and uses
modernist techniques like the flashback, interior monologue, and stream of
consciousness.
There is no doubt that Invisible Man does not interpret the experience of a single
man only. It touches the topics of democracy, race, and technology as a narrative in
world history. Ellison’s widely discussed modernist theme, invisibility, characterizes
the anonymity of modern life and is tied to the search for identity sought by a jazzman
trying to come into his own. In “The Golden Age, Time Past,” Ellison says that the
jazzman must “‘find himself,’ must be reborn, must find... his soul. 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” (Collected Essays 245).
In the novel’s concluding chapter, a riot breaks out, recalling the actual Harlem
race riot of the summer of 1943. By placing this event in the final chapter, Ellison calls
27
a special attention to it, and again, it is not without a connection to a musical
performance. This chaotic night is followed only by the narrator’s reflective comments
in the epilogue, and it could be therefore read as the climax to the story. In his
discussion of the singer Jimmy Rushing, Ellison declares that the true jazz artist must
find ways “to reduce the chaos of living to form” (Porter 83). Ellison is in league with
such jazz musicians as his selection of street noises – human voices and laughter,
together with gunshots and sirens, are in a flawless balance permitting a series of
surrealistic images to unfold.
28
3.1 Blues Characters
Invisible Man is a blues novel not just because of the quotes in the text but also
because of the forms and the improvising spirit of the blues and jazz that had been
allowed to shape the narrative (Jařab 736). The narrator is visited by a series of folkblues people who attempt to help him understand how to live in the world. Because of
his poor education, the narrator cannot comprehend the importance of these characters
and the messages they give him. Therefore the examples they present go in many cases
unnoticed. The characters proved nevertheless unforgettable not just for the narrator, but
for the readers as well.
Sundquist points out that just before the narrator’s first blues encounter with
Louis Armstrong amid his 1,369 light bulbs (1,369 being the square of 37, Ellison’s age
when he finished the novel in 1951), he tells us to call him “Jack-the-Bear,” because he
is “in a state of hibernation” (Invisible Man 6). While Jack-the-Bear is an allusion to his
underground hibernation from which he must emerge, the name of a heroic character
from Afro-American folklore (Invisible Man 247, 263, 277), and the title of a Duke
Ellington composition; more importantly Jack-the-Bear was the nickname of a bluesplaying Harlem stride pianist of the 1920s. The narrator is thus clearly identifying
himself and his tale as blues-inspired. This connection fits nicely with Murray’s
description of the novel: “Invisible Man was par excellence the literary extension of the
blues. It was as if Ellison had taken an everyday twelve bar blues tune (by a man from
down South sitting in a manhole up North in New York singing and signifying about
how he got there) and scored it for full orchestra” (Omni-Americans 167).
In a sense, Louis Armstrong is the hero of the novel. He is both the first and the
last of the narrator’s blues visitors, “the Prometheus of the blues idiom” in Murray’s
words, whose “assimilation, elaboration, extensions, and refinement of its elements
became in effect the touchstone for all who came after him” (Stomping the Blues 191).
The way that Armstrong “bends that military instrument into a beam of lyrical sound”
and makes “poetry out of being invisible” (Invisible Man 8) serves as a model for the
same task that must be undertaken and completed by the narrator.
“Black and Blue” and “Potato Head Blues” demonstrate that the blues have
nothing to do with resignation, defeat, and despair. The narrator of Invisible Man,
29
however, is not sufficiently aware of this until the end of the novel. When he descends
into the depths of “Black and Blue” and journeys through the levels of Afro-American
music and experience, he cannot understand what he has seen and heard, and he ends up
retreating (Sundquist 27). It is this blueslike pattern and a lack of complete
understanding that marks the narrators encounters with folk-blues characters throughout
the novel. It is this pattern, in which we can find the answers to the question at the
conclusion of the prologue, “But what did I do to be so blue?” According to Sundquist,
singing his own blues song and turning his pain into art leads to gaining a sense of
identity, permitting him to leave the dark.
One of the striking individuals during the narrator’s college career is Jim
Trueblood, whom the reader meets in the chapter “Trueblood’s Song,” and his
connections to the folk-blues tradition. His crime of incest, linked through his dream
with violation of racial as well as family taboos, threatens to hurt his family and to
spread chaos at the root of the community. In this “autobiographical chronicle of
personal catastrophe expressed lyrically” (Ellison’s definition of the blues in “Richard
Wright’s Blues”), Trueblood is a wounded man whose singing of the blues and
powerful blues narration lends him the power to endure. Trueblood’s blues drive the
blues away. It is also fascinating to consider the economics of this chapter. The officials
of Invisible Man’s college, who formerly had invited the black farmer to campus to
perform spirituals, offer Trueblood $100 to leave the country when they first hear his
story. Invisible Man was hoping a wealthy white trustee of the college, Mr. Norton,
might reward his performance as an eager chauffeur and flattering tour guide, maybe he
would win “a large tip, or a suit, or a scholarship.” But Trueblood is the one who gets
Norton’s hundred-dollar bill. It remains disputable, what the meaning of Norton’s
payment for Trueblood’s blues is.
Trueblood sings “primitive spirituals” on occasions when “special white guests”
visit the college. However, the narrator notes that he and the other students are
“embarrassed by the earthy harmonies” (Invisible Man 46) of Trueblood and his country
quartet. Further, he refers to Trueblood’s singing as “crude, high, plaintively animal
sounds” and notes how everyone at the college hated the “peasants” (46-47). This
passage stresses the link between Trueblood and the grandfather. Both are peasants who
have knowledge of and an intimate connection to their folk past, and both are rejected
30
by the narrator. The most important passage in Trueblood’s tale comes near the very
end:
I thinks and thinks, until I thinks my brain go’n bust, ’bout how I’m guilty
and how I ain’t guilty. I don't eat nothin’ and I don’t drink nothin’ and caint
sleep at night. Finally, one night, way early in the mornin’, I looks up and
sees the stars and I starts singin’. I don’t mean to, I didn’t think ’bout it, just
start singin’. I don’t know what it was, some kinda church song, I guess. All
I know is I ends up singin’ the blues. I sings me some blues that night ain’t
never been sang before, and while I’m singin’ them blues I makes up my
mind that I ain’t nobody but myself and ain’t nothin’ I can do but let
whatever is gonna happen, happen. (Invisible Man 66)
Sundquist considers Trueblood an existential hero who takes control of his life and
decides his own fate and destiny. Through the conscious creation of art, specifically by
singing the blues and thereby keeping himself in touch with his folk tradition,
Trueblood discovers and reaffirms his identity and gains the strength to go on with his
life by facing up to his past mistakes and future responsibilities. Like the grandfather
and the slave woman, Trueblood is at home with ambiguity and paradox (“how I’m
guilty and how ain’t guilty”). And as Ellison says of Bessie Smith in “Richard Wright’s
Blues,” Trueblood sings “lustily as he probes his own grievous wound” (63).
There is also a connection between Trueblood and Louis Armstrong. Trueblood
bends the negativity of his life into a form of artistic affirmation as Armstrong bent the
notes of his trumpet into the beauty of the blues. Unlike the narrator at the battle royal,
who also performs for whites and gets paid, Trueblood is in control of what happens
because he is in touch with his folk past and therefore knows who he is. He is nobody
but himself, while the narrator is nobody but what others have created (Sundquist 35).
Paralleling the narrator’s move from the South to the North, his first blues
encounter in New York is with an exemplar of the city - rather than country - blues.
Sundquist later remembers Peter Wheatstraw, named after the blues singer Peetie
Wheatstraw, who, like the character in the novel, was known as the “Devil’s Son-in31
Law.” While pushing a shopping cart full of blueprints, Wheatstraw sings a verse from
the Count Basie and Jimmy Rushing blues “Boogie Woogie.” When the narrator hears
the song, he tells the reader that “some memories slipped around my life at the campus
and went far back to things I had long ago shut out of my mind” (173). Wheatstraw is
here linked with Trueblood, as representing a living folk-blues sensibility that the
college has attempted to stamp out. The narrator has forgotten the correct response to
the folk question “[I]s you got the dog?” (173). Furthermore, he has difficulty with the
ambiguous, contradictory, blues-toned language of Wheatstraw.
The narrator, rather than Wheatstraw, is the believer in plans, blueprints, and
organized, logical, “scientific” thought. Wheatstraw’s cart full of unused plans should
be a sign to the narrator that this is not the way the world works. The narrator’s final
comment, “God damn… they’re a hell of a people!” (177), indicates his distance from
and lack of identification with the folk past represented by Wheatstraw (as well as by
the slave woman, his grandfather, Trueblood, the vet, and Susie Gresham) and connects
him to the school officials who referred to the blacks’ “primitive spirituals” (Sundquist
48). Immediately after this conversation, thinking that a counterman has committed a
racial insult in suggesting pork chops and grits to him, he feels proud that he resisted the
dish as “an act of discipline” (178). When the narrator sees the same offer made to a
white man, he realizes his mistake. Unfortunately for him, it is too late. This scene
contrasts nicely to the yam scene later on. This time, the narrator is less reluctant to eat
soul food, but he is still naive in believing it will solve all his problems.
The next blues character is Mary Rambo. Sadly, many of the most interesting
exchanges between the narrator and Mary Rambo occur in a chapter edited out of
Invisible Man entitled “Out of the Hospital and under the Bar” (Pavlić 137). Ellison
originally planned to have Mary release the narrator from the machine at the paint
factory hospital. Even without this chapter, however, Mary is clearly another positive
folk-blues character in the narrator’s life. She cares deeply for the narrator, plays a
significant role in the community and she makes the narrator think of the blues, for
example when producing “a feeling of old, almost forgotten relief” (253). It does not
only echo Peter Wheatstraw’s contradictory comments on Harlem’s being both a bear’s
den and the best place to be (176) but is also a direct quote from a railroad porter
Ellison interviewed in 1939 for the Federal Writers’ Project.
32
Another example occurs when the narrator is attempting to pay Mary his back
rent after he has joined the Brotherhood, while she is more concerned about the bitter
taste of the morning coffee: “Guess I’ll have to get better filters,” she mused. “These I
got just lets through the grounds along with the coffee, the good with the bad. I don’t
know though, even with the best of filters you apt to find a ground or two at the bottom
of your cup” (323). More than any other passage in the novel, this statement conveys
the ambiguity or dialectic of the blues and demonstrates that the world moves “not like
an arrow, but a boomerang” (Invisible Man 6).
The narrator’s comments on Armstrong and the line “Open the window and let
the foul air out” (581) from the song “Buddy Bolden’s Blues” demonstrate finally that
the narrator has learned not only to live with but to relish the contradiction and
ambiguity of life, or what Ellison refers to in “That Same Pain, That Same Pleasure” as
“the mixture of the marvelous and the terrific” (Shadow and Act 20).
A singer’s performance does not always tell his/her personal story, but it may
enter the lives of others. Into one song, the artist is able to draw the experiences,
emotions, fears and dreams of others and to render these as though they were his/her
own. It is convenient to add a passage by Janheinz Jahn: “For the blues singer does not
in fact express his personal experiences and transfer them to his audience; on the
contrary, it is the experiences of the community that he is expressing, making himself
its spokesman… it is not the personal experience that is emphasized, but the typical
experience” (223).
It is apparent that the relation between the blues singer and the community he or
she sings to is crucial. This sense of involvement with others can make Invisible Man be
read as a political novel, although the notion of being a political writer was rejected by
Ellison multiple times. Larry Neal, one of the Black Arts Movement’s most prominent
thinkers and artists, wrote, in his essay “The Ethos of the Blues,” “Even though the
blues are cast in highly personal terms, they stand for the collective sensibility of a
people at particular stages of cultural, social, and political development” (117). Thus, by
emphasizing the existential blues elements of the novel, it becomes clear how both
Ellison and the narrator have made sense of their personal lives and their relationships
to the world around them.
33
The funeral of Tod Clifton provides the occasion for the title character’s final
speech and the commencement of his final stage of development. He identifies himself
with race, humanity, brotherhood, and ideology in general. Again, when he takes the
stage, he speaks in an improvisatory way. He also feels “a sense of failure” at his
inability to “bring in the political issues” as the Brotherhood would have wanted him to
do (459). But this time his speech aspires to the level of music and it is indeed inspired
by music, as it is not far from a mournful duet the narrator’s baritone and the
euphonium horn that rose up spontaneously from the crowd and “touched upon
something deeper than protest, or religion” (453) and stirred them all.
As the book’s several platform scenes suggest, Ellison regarded the making of
one’s true identity as an art of improvisation comparable to the performance of jazz.
Ellison wrote extensively on jazz music and its early legends. But “The Charlie
Christian Story,” an essay in Shadow and Act on the first master of amplified guitar, is
conveniently applicable to the study of Invisible Man’s theme, narrative structure, and
technique. Because it stresses the exhausting social aspect of the process of identity
formation, it serves also to explain the narrator’s vow in the epilogue that “the
hibernation is over” (567). For it makes clear the need to come out of hiding and rejoin
the human fray, as Ellison himself did every time he published a new work or made a
personal appearance. One passage in particular from the essay deserves to be quoted in
full:
“There is… a cruel contradiction implicit in the [jazz] art form itself. For
true jazz is an art of individual assertion within and against the group. 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… a definition of his identity: as
individual, as member of the collectivity and as a link in the chain of
tradition. Thus, because jazz finds its very life in an endless improvisation
upon traditional materials, the jazzman must lose his identity even as he
finds it. …” (Shadow and Act 234)
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4 Black American Folklore in Invisible Man
Folklore, an index to the Afro-American and thus to the general American past,
is a key to Ellison’s fictional world. Fascinated by the modern poets – particularly T. S.
Eliot – Ellison introduced more and more folklore into his stories, giving them not only
great accessibility, but a dimension beyond that of realism. In Ellison’s fiction, folklore,
stylized and transformed by modernist techniques, gives special resonance and power to
his language. The folklore itself is heavily metaphorical and Ellison links the central
question of identity to that of history and folklore. The protagonists of several short
stories and of Invisible Man are freed of their self-alienation and blindness with the
unlocking of the past.
Folklore is a dynamic, current process of customs, tales, sayings, dances, or art
forms preserved among a people. Afro-American folklore, characterized by sermons,
jokes, boasts, toasts, blues, spirituals, is without doubt a rich source for the writer. In
Ellison’s work, the values, styles, and character types of black American life and culture
are preserved and reflected in highly energized, often very powerful language.
Robert O’Meally’s Craft of Ralph Ellison is one of the best overall treatments to
date on Ellison’s work. O’Meally provides generous biographical material on Ellison’s
life in Oklahoma, his experiences at Tuskegee, and his early years “up North.” He also
offers detailed analyses of Ellison’s relationship with Richard Wright, his early short
stories, his publications since Invisible Man, his aesthetic theories, and his influence on
younger writers. The center of the book is O’Meally’s chapter on Invisible Man,
“Invisible Man: Black and Blue.” His theses are that folklore “is a key to Ellison’s
fictional world,” that Ellison “links the central question of identity to that of history and
folklore” (2), and that Even Ellison’s “most apt critics” have treated this aspect of the
novel “fleetingly” (78). Although O’Meally does not fully explore all aspects of
Ellison’s use of folklore, his work is groundbreaking. He also conveniently identifies
various pieces of music played by artists such as Count Basie, Billy Eckstine, Earl
“Fatha” Hines, Jimmy Rushing, and Bessie Smith.
Ellison argued that folk art accounts for, to a large extent, the black American’s
self-awareness and endurance. O’Meally believes that for blacks, folklore has served
art’s classic functions: it does not only delight, but it teaches. Refusing to succumb
35
totally to the white Americans’ mentality and world view, blacks created their own
ways of expressing themselves: “another instance,” observes Ellison, “of man’s triumph
over chaos.” Black folk art projects “symbols which express the group’s will to
survive… values by which the group lives and dies… the group’s attempt to humanize
the world.” As he said, “In the folklore we tell what Negro experience really is… with a
complexity of vision that seldom gets into our writing… We back away from the chaos
of experience and from ourselves, and we depict the humor as well as the horror of our
lives” (Collected Essays 80). During slavery, folk art was “what we had in place of
freedom.” Echoing Constance Rourke, whose American Humor Ellison studied closely
in the thirties, he says, “Great literature, the products of individual artists, is erected
upon this humble base” (Shadow and Act 171).
Ellison is by no means the first, nor the last author to find inspiration for his
work in Afro-American folklore. Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, James Weldon
Johnson, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Sterling A. Brown, and Langston
Hughes used it before Ellison, often with supreme skill. Although the list of African
American authors seems endless nowadays, Ellison will always belong to their pioneers.
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4.1 Louis Armstrong
In Invisible Man there are many musical references. In most cases these refer to
blues pieces, but the novel also mentions music that is not Afro-American, such as
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony (From the New World).
Louis Armstrong’s jazz, with the reference to “What Did I Do to Be So Black and
Blue,” acting as a foundational element of the novel. Also “There’s Many a Thousand
Gone” is integral to Ellison’s text. Although some readers might understand it just as a
song heard at Tod Clifton’s funeral, O’Meally highlights its lyrics, which “contain a
stern renunciation of slave life” (Craft 96).
Ellison’s passion for the art of Bach and Sousa served him well when he was a
college student. One of his jobs on campus was to wake his fellow students with a
trumpet call. When not studying, he spent nights practicing compositions of blues
singers such as Ida Cox, and the singing and trumpet playing of Louis Armstrong and
his imitators (Craft 10). Ellison’s inspiration in Armstrong did not end with playing the
trumpet. In Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Harold Bloom finds correlation between the
artists in the manner they speak to their audience (51). Ellison addresses readers across
racial lines and suggests that America’s democratic dream could be redeemed. As well
as Ellison, Armstrong faced criticism from people who felt addressed by his
performance.
Armstrong’s desire to use his power to reach a broad American audience
provoked the representatives of a younger bebop generation of the 1940s and 1950s. In
“The Golden Age, Time Past,” Ellison calls him one of the greatest innovators in jazz
history, who had become a comic Uncle Tom (Collected Essays 211). Bloom describes
Armstrong as a trickster, a person who exhibits a great degree of intellect and uses it to
play tricks or otherwise disobey normal rules and conventional behavior through
inventive disguises. Like Armstrong, Ellison is a character putting on a misleading
cover, not because of fear, but to transform his identity.
Profoundly aware of its complexity, Ellison created a relevant analogy of “The
Waste Land” by T. S. Elliot to Armstrong’s music. He came across this modernist
poem when studying at Tuskegee Institute, which had a significant impact on Invisible
Man as well. It is unsurprising that his sensibilities detected its musical aspects which
37
he mentioned in a speech, later turning it into a literary and autobiographical essay. In
Shadow and Act, reminiscing about his own education, he said:
Somehow its rhythms [of the poem] were often closer to those of jazz than
were those of the Negro poets; and even though I could not understand then,
its range of allusion was as mixed and as varied as that of Louis Armstrong.
Yet there were its discontinuities, its changes of pace, and its hidden system
of organization, which escaped me. (“Hidden Name and Complex Fate”
159-60)
Larry Neal, who is well known for his contributions to the Black Arts Movement of the
1960s and 1970s, wrote an acclaimed essay on Invisible Man called “Ellison’s Zoot
Suit.” Although he admits that “dealing with Ralph Ellison is no easy matter,” he finds
the novel an exemplary enactment in fiction of the “black aesthetic” (Neal qtd. in
Callahan 81). He furthermore praises the novel for its capacity to combine political
critique and psychological exploration and for its historical complexity. Neal’s essay
adverts to the novel’s power to speak on many different levels, because of which the
readers can be drawn into the protagonist's destiny for various reasons. As the haunting
final line of the book puts it, “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for
you?” (Invisible Man 581).
It is generally acknowledged that Louis Armstrong exercised a profound
influence on the development of jazz from the 1920s through the 1960s. It is
understandable that such a celebrity caught Ellison’s attention and gained a prominent
place in his novel. His spirit accompanies the protagonist for the duration of his
appearance. At both the beginning and the end of the novel, he meditates on the way in
which Armstrong’s music represents the deep social message of the blues as well as the
centrality of improvisation in African American art and life (Invisible Man 12, 581).
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4.2 Andy Razaf
The song from which Ellison’s protagonist derives his possibly most searching
quotation from a piece of music – “What did I do to be so black and blue?“ – was
recorded in several versions by Louis Armstrong. As mentioned before, Armstrong has
a multidimensional role in Invisible Man, but “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and
Blue” is of special significance in its own right. Armstrong first encountered the song in
1929 on the black musical stage of New York, where it had been belatedly inserted into
a show running as Hot Chocolates, with music principally by Fats Waller and lyrics by
Andy Razaf (1895-1973).
Barry Singer explores his story in Black and Blue: The Life and Lyrics of Andy
Razaf (1992), where he states that the song was apparently written to order at the
command of the mobster Dutch Schultz, the show’s financial backer, who wanted a
“funny song” about the tragedy of being black. “Black and Blue” in fact explored very
serious ground about prejudice and evoked a mixture of laughter and stunned
discomfort in the first audience who heard it sung on stage by Edith Wilson (Singer 1220). Armstrong recorded it the same year, and the song came to be regarded as one of
the first apparent instances of racial protest in American popular music. Hot Chocolates
also featured another famous Waller-Razaf collaboration, “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” and the
work of composer and lyricist gained a new life with the Broadway production in 1978
of Ain’t Misbehavin’, which closes with a bitter performance of “Black and Blue.”
Andrea Razafkeriefo, whose father was from Madagascar, shortened his real
name to Andy Razaf when he embarked on a writing career that was equally successful
up in Harlem and downtown in Tin Pan Alley (Sundquist 115). He wrote the lyrics for
more than eight hundred songs, among them many recorded by Armstrong, Billie
Holiday, Duke Ellington, Ethel Waters, and others. He was also a recorded vocalist and
a writer of poems published in Negro World in the early 1920s, some of which were
attacking Anglo-Saxon racism and lynching (Martin 173, 244). In addition to Hot
Chocolates, Razaf was best known for the shows Keep Shufflin (1928) and Blackbirds
(1930). Other Razaf songs that may have a bearing on scenes and motifs in Invisible
Man include “What Harlem Is to Me” and “Sambo’s Syncopated Russian Dance,”
which mocked African American fascination with communism and thus might have
39
inspired Tod Clifton’s street-corner marketing of the grotesque Sambo dolls in the
novel.
(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue
(Waller/Razaf, 1929)
Out in the street, shufflin’ feet,
Couples passing two by two,
While here am I, left high and dry,
Black, and ’cause I’m black I’m blue.
Browns and yellers all have fellers,
Gentlemen prefer them light,
Wish I could fade, can’t make the grade,
Nothin’ but dark days in sight.
Cold empty bed, springs hard as lead,
Pains in my head, feel like old Ned,
What did I do to be so black and blue?
No joys for me, no company,
Even the mouse ran from my house,
All my life through, I've been so black and blue.
I’m white inside, it don’t help my case,
’Cause I can’t hide what is on my face.
40
I’m so forlorn, life’s just a thorn,
My heart is torn, why was I born?
What did I do to be so black and blue?
Just ’cause you’re black, folks think you lack,
They laugh at you and scorn you too,
What did I do to be so black and blue?
When you are near, they laugh and sneer,
Set you aside and you’re denied,
What did I do to be so black and blue?
How sad I am, each day I feel worse,
My mark of Ham seems to be a curse.
How will it end? Ain’t got a friend,
My only sin is in my skin,
What did I do to be so black and blue?
(quoted in Mr J’s American Literature Site, 2007)
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4.3 Django Reinhardt
In chapter 23 of Invisible Man the narrator takes a major step in understanding
the nature of identity and how it can be manipulated to further one’s own needs. Up to
this point he has always defined himself narrowly and by someone else’s standards. The
events of the chapter combined with the introduction of Rinehart cause the narrator to
re-evaluate himself and his relationships with those around him. Instead of defining his
identity according to necessity, he begins to define it according to possibility.
Rinehart, who actually never appears in the flesh, proves one of the strangest and
most ambiguous figures in Invisible Man. His name is an allusion to Jean “Django”
Reinhardt, a gypsy Belgium-born French guitarist and composer. The musician is
regarded one of the greatest guitar players of all time and the first important European
jazz musician who made major contributions to the development of the guitar genre.
Furthermore, Reinhardt is a representative of bebop, a style of jazz that Rinehart is
literarily similar to.
The major similarity between Rinehart and the bebop musicians lies in rejection
of form and borders altogether. This allows Rinehart to occupy the identities of a pimp,
a gambler, a reverend, a lover, and a friend. His identity is therefore as fluid as this
improvisation based jazz style.
At first, the narrator is not sure if such an existence is even possible: “Still, could
he be all of them: Rine the runner and Rine the gambler and Rine the briber and Rine
the lover and Rinehart the Reverend?” (Invisible Man 498). He decides that he cannot
doubt it: “His world was possibility and he knew it… The world in which we lived was
without boundaries… Perhaps the truth was always a lie” (498).
He realizes that limiting himself has been foolish. This understanding changes
his relation to others as well. When talking to Hambro he feels “some deep change.” “It
was as though my discovery of Rinehart had opened a gulf between us over which…our
voices barely carried and then fell flat” (501). Later the narrator learns that sacrifice of
Harlem is needed in the interest of the Brotherhood. It is the first time he understands
that the Brotherhood has been using him and recognizes his invisibility. He decides to
launch his attack and utilize Rinehart methods in his favor (512).
42
At Brother Jack’s birthday party he finds his target and decides to seduce one of
the Brotherhood’s leader’s wife, Sybil, in order to get him information. His effort
requires adopting Rinehart’s world “without boundaries.” Unfortunately for him, Sybil
does not know anything about her husband’s political affairs and asks the narrator to
play the brutal black rapist. Suddenly, his role changes from spy to rapist and the
narrator recognizes that Sybil is projecting societal stereotypes onto him. He still
understands, though, it is him who is to blame: “Well, so I had set this trap for myself”
(521).
The narrator’s quest for information fails, but what is more important, he
achieves Rinehart’s fluidity. The result is however different from what he expected.
Assuming false identities does not empower him, instead, he experiences loneliness and
realizes that being Reinhart is eventually “too vast and confusing to contemplate” (499).
While he realizes the freedom that Rinehart’s personality represents, the narrator is
unable to embrace the shifting sands of Rinehartism.
His disappointment with Rinehartism evokes Ellison’s disapproval regarding
modern jazz. Together with many musicologists and critics, he discussed the value of
traditional jazz and compared it to that of bebop and modern jazz. His approval for
traditional jazz while remaining skeptical of bebop could be a mark of generational
conflict. The musicians he loved, namely Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and other
traditionalists were born between 1899 and 1916. On the other hand, Charlie Parker,
whose musical style Ellison did not consider historically significant, was born in 1920;
and Miles Davis and John Coltrane, whom Ellison overtly rejected, were born in 1926
(Brody). In other words, Ellison respected musicians who had their styles set by the
time of his maturity. In their traditional style he could see understanding of history and
community, promoting both the individual and the collective experience.
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4.4 African American Folk Songs
As far back as African American history stretches, it has been accompanied by
astonishing music. Some of the most timeless songs of empowerment and endurance
come from the American slave fields and communities of forced immigrants held in
bondage throughout the early country.
During this period, a large amount of the music produced among the slaves was
a series of calls they would make to each other in the fields, generally known as calland-response hollers. These were often about passing the time while the slaves worked,
they could be also aimed at spreading news or information, but most importantly, they
helped to sustain a positive mental attitude under inhospitable conditions. Other music
of the time came from religious ceremony. Excellent songs that have become
synonymous with the plight of every community since then that has stood up for its own
rights include spiritual songs like “We Shall Overcome,” “I Shall Not Be
Moved,” and “Amazing Grace.”
After years of prayers, the Emancipation Proclamation was issued in 1863 as a
war measure during the Civil War, in which Abraham Lincoln declared slaves
in Confederate-controlled areas to be freed. Most slaves in “border states” were freed by
state action and a separate law freed the slaves in Washington, D.C. Finally, slavery was
abolished on December 18, 1865 with the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States
Constitution, which affected approximately 40,000 remaining Kentucky slaves (Black
History, 2007). Many of the newly freed former slaves set off to northern cities like
Chicago and Detroit, others remained in their home-states. No matter where they
settled, they continued to sing the songs of overcoming, endurance, and faith that have
become fundamental to the history of the nation.
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5.4.1 “Run, Nigger, Run”
At the end of the first chapter, one central motif of the novel is set in motion.
The narrator dreams about visiting a circus with his grandfather, who refuses to laugh at
the clowns. Later he asks him to open his brief case and read what is inside: “To Whom
It May Concern: Keep This Nigger-Boy Running” (Invisible Man 33). The line
reappears to the narrator later on when he discovers the message of Bledsoe’s letter to
his prospective northern employers. Since then the idea dominates throughout the rest of
the novel, from his migration north to the moment he drops into a coal cellar while
running down the street during the riot. The protagonist’s continual movement is both
involuntary and ineffective. What Ellison does is recapitulate a common theme in black
folklore and literature. Sundquist points out the fact that Ellison later connected this
theme to “double-dealing” sociological theories such as “benign neglect” and “reverse
discrimination,” which, he remarked, translate: “Keep those Negroes running – but in
their same old place” (Invisible Man xv).
The theme of running can be traced in early African American culture to the
theme of escape from slavery commemorated in poetry, folktales, and songs. The
selection “Run, Nigger, Run” is a version of one of the earliest transcribed African
American songs, first documented in the middle of the 19th century, which is known
from numerous versions. It is not certain when the song originated, although John A.
Wyeth describes it as one of the oldest of the plantation songs of slaves working on
Southern plantations (Scarborough 23). Larry Birnbaum calls attention to lyrical
parallels in some versions to earlier songs, such as “Whar You Cum From,” first
published by J. B. Harper in 1846 (84). According to Newman Ivey White, the earliest
written documentation of “Run, Nigger, Run” dates to 1851, when a version was
included in blackface minstrel Charlie White’s White’s Serenaders’ Song Book. Later it
appeared for example in William Allen’s 1867 collection of black spirituals, work
songs, and ballads, Slave Songs in the United States (89). Slightly different variants
appear in later collections, most of them narrating a slave’s escape or offering advice
about avoiding capture by slave patrols (“patterrollers”) or dogs. This folk song was
released as a commercial recording several times, beginning in the 1920s, and it was
included in the 2013 film 12 Years a Slave. As in many black folk songs, nonsense
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rhymes can sometimes disguise or encode a serious message of resistance, as in this
variation cited by Scarborough:
Run, Nigger, Run
Dis nigger run, he run his best,
Stuck his head in a hornet’s nest,
Jumped de fence and run fru de paster;
white man run, but nigger run faster.
Do, please, marster, don’t ketch me,
Ketch dat nigger behin’ dat tree;
He stole money en I stole none,
Put him in the calaboose des for fun!
Chorus:
Oh, run, nigger, run! de patter-roller ketch you,
Run, nigger, run! hit’s almos’ day!
Oh, run, nigger, run! de patter-roller ketch you,
Run, nigger, run! hit’s almos’ day!
Some folks say dat a nigger won’t steal,
But I kotch one in my corn-fiel';
He run ter de eas’, he run ter de wes’,
He run he head in a hornet nes’!
De sun am set, dis nigger am free;
De yaller gals he goes to see;
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I heard a man cry, “Run, doggone you,”
Run, nigger, run, patter-roller ketch you.
Wid eyes wide open and head hangin’ down,
Like de rabbit before de houn’,
Dis nigger streak it for de pasture;
Nigger run fast, white man run faster.
And ober de fence as slick as a eel
Dis nigger jumped all but his heel;
De white man ketch dat fast, you see,
And tied it tight aroun’ de tree.
Dis nigger heard dat old whip crack,
But nebber stopped fur to look back;
I started home as straight as a bee
And left my heel tied aroun’ de tree.
My ol’ Miss, she prommus me
Dat when she die, she set me free;
But she done dead dis many year ago,
En yer I’m hoein’ de same ol’ row!
I’m a-hoein’ across, I’m a-hoein’ aroun’,
I’m a-cleanin’ up some mo’ new groun’.
Whar I lif' so hard, I lif' so free,
47
Dat my sisn rise up in front er me!
But some we dese days my time will come,
I’ll year dat bugle, I’ll year dat drum,
I’ll see dem armies a-marchin’ along,
I’ll lif' my head en jine der song –
I’ll dine no mo’ behin’ dat tree,
W’en de angels flock fer to wait on me!
(quoted in Scarborough, On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs 12-13)
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5.4.2 Jack the Rabbit, Jack the Bear
Jack the Rabbit and Jack the Bear are trickster figures, popular in a number of
cultures around the world and common figures of African American folklore. As in
many folktales, they frequently represent characters able to trick up or escape the social
order through humor, common sense, and perhaps most importantly, misdirection.
Throughout the black narrative tradition descended from slavery, animals often enact an
allegory of the relationship between master and slave, as anonymity was important to
blacks who encoded messages into their tales and songs during times of oppression. A
traditional black folk song uses the rabbit figure to point to the anonymity of storytellers
and singers alike in the history of slave culture: “Anybody should ask you who made up
this song, / Tell ’em Jack the Rabbit, he’s been here and gone” (Ramsey 1).
As the following selection from a railroad work song suggests, however, Jack
the Rabbit and Jack the Bear could be cited as comparatively wide-ranging metaphors
of African American experience in the world bondage, labor, and racism whose effects
and meaning remained especially sharp in the era of segregation.
In this song the act of lining the track refers to the strenuous labor of putting
railroad track in proper alignment. In African American folklore, a “jack” sometimes
refers to a charm or conjure (Puckett 168, 206ff.). In many tales Jack (or John) appears
simply as a cunning black man. As a grizzly bear Jack figures in convict work songs
(Courlander 106). A variant of the railroad work song published in 1925 offers less of a
narrative line than the selection below but includes a transcription of the groaning and
breathing (“um-uh”) that blends with the song:
Brother Rabbit, Brother Bear,
Can’t you line them just a hair?
Shake the iron, um-uh!
Down the railroad, um-uh!
Well, raise the iron, um-uh!
49
Raise the iron, um-uh!
(quoted in Odum and Johnson, The Negro and His Songs 262)
Barbara Foley goes back to “Out of the Hospital and Under the Bar,” published
in Soon, One Morning in May 1963 (394). This section of Invisible Man attached to the
Liberty Paints episode was excised by Ellison during revision. As the narrator strains to
lift an iron lid after fleeing from the hospital, the protagonist recalls a version of the
railroad song:
Jack the Rabbit
Jack the Bear
Caint you lift it
Just a hair?
(quoted in Foley 208)
This leads the protagonist to reflect in his own improvisatory way on the need to
“sing a song in silence in a strange land, Jack it up, bear it in the dark, its heavy as the
world” (Ellison qtd. in Foley 394). Likewise, when Ellison’s narrator speaks from his
state of hibernation, having escaped what Peter Wheatstraw calls the bear’s den of
Harlem, he recalls his earlier identity as Jack the Bear (Invisible Man 6, 168, 174). The
very first time the narrator addresses himself as Jack-the-Bear is in the Prologue, when
he has made a home out of a hole. His manhole can therefore be considered the bear’s
den, as Wheatstraw proposes in chapter nine. Right afterwards he adds that “it’s the best
place in the world for you and me, and if times don’t get better soon I’m going to grab
that bear and turn him every way to loose” (174). The narrator comes back to his
present residence in the Epilogue:
So there you have all of it that’s important. Or at least you almost have it.
I’m an invisible man and it placed me in a hole-or showed me the hole I was
in, if you will-and I reluctantly accepted the fact. What else could I have
done? Once you get used to it, reality is as irresistible as a club, and I was
50
clubbed into the cellar before I caught the hint. Perhaps that’s the way it had
to be; I don’t know. (Invisible Man 572)
It seems that Wheatstraw’s prediction is eventually fulfilled and the narrator accepts the
conditions which he lives in at the moment. It is his invisibility that placed him in the
hole, where he, in the first place, wanted to hide when running from a riot. As
Wheatstraw said, he could not have chosen a better shelter, at least for the present
moment. From the Prologue the reader also knows that the narrator finds positive
aspects of staying there: “My hole is warm and full of light. Yes, full of light. I doubt
there is a brighter spot in all of New York than this hole of mine, and I do not exclude
Broadway” (Invisible Man 6). It is certain that “light” does not refer only to the bulbs he
has in his basement. For the narrator, “The truth is the light and the light is the truth”
(Invisible Man 7). It is therefore his hole, his ´bear’s den,´ which he momentarily
considers his truth and his reality.
At the end of the novel, the narrator decides to leave the hole, but it is clear that
he does not want to let others to influence his beliefs, he stays being “turned every way
but loose.” Although he loosens himself physically, he is tied up emotionally:
I’m shaking off the old skin and I’ll leave it here in the hole. I’m coming
out, no less invisible without it, but coming out nevertheless. And I suppose
it’s damn well time. Even hibernations can be overdone, come to think of it.
Perhaps that’s my greatest social crime, I’ve overstayed my hibernation,
since there’s a possibility that even an invisible man has a socially
responsible role to play. (Invisible Man 581)
As he shakes off his skin, he finally exposes his real self to the public. He has no
intention in staying invisible, he wants to be seen and taken into account. He admits he
overstayed his hibernation, but he feels ready to play his part in society.
As mentioned before, Jack the Bear has many other connotations. Among them
belongs for instance the title of a Duke Ellington composition, or the stage name of a
1920s Harlem pianist. Nevertheless, Jack the Bear is foremost a nickname for survival
and wisdom of African Americans in the modern world (Savery 67).
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As in the following example, work songs frequently included limitless
improvised stories alternating with a rhythmic chorus such as “Jack the Rabbit! Jack the
Bear!”
Jack the rabbit! Jack the bear!
Can’t you line him just a hair,
Just a hair, just a hair?
Annie Weaver and her daughter
Ran a boarding house on the water.
She’s got chicken, she’s got ham,
She’s got everything I’ll be damned.
Old Joe Logan he’s gone north
To get the money for to pay us off.
(quoted in Chisnell, 2008)
The rabbit and bear characters are common in African American tales, often
containing negotiations of authority, similar to that between master and slave. Some of
them are handed down in the African and American traditions, some were popularized
in the nineteenth century stories of Joel Chandler Harris. The central figure of the Uncle
Remus stories is Br’er Rabbit, a syncope of “Brother Rabbit,” which has been linked to
both African and Cherokee cultures.
It can be suggested that its American interpretation represents the black slave
who uses brainpower to surpass obstacles and to commit acts of revenge against white
slave-owners. From this perspective, there is a direct relation to the narrator’s position
as Br’er Rabbit, as there have been several attempts where he was captured from both
white, as well as black people. In addition, the narrator also claims himself he wants to
get revenge on Bledsoe, who sent him away from Tuskegee with a degrading letter of
recommendation. There were, however, more people to take advantage of the narrator’s
speech abilities. To them belongs Brother Jack, abusing him to hide that he was more
interested in political power than in the rights of blacks. Such personalities can be
52
understood as the tar babies, traps made of tar in order to try and capture Br’er Rabbit in
folk tales.
The opponents in the folktales, mostly outwitted by the rabbit, can take various
shapes. Often it is the previously discussed bear, a fox, or a dog. In an urban setting
designated characteristics of folk figures might be even more fluid and unpredictable,
although in hip slang of the era, the rabbit might be a “cool cat” whereas the bear was a
“square” (Fullinwier 220). As Ellison’s varied use of Jack the Bear suggests, any
number of animal tales might be relevant to Invisible Man, whose protagonist must find
his way through a world of tricks, traps and illusion.
It is again Peter Wheatstraw who mentions a dog in his encounter with the
narrator: “What I want to know is … is you got the dog?” Later he tells the truth about
the narrator’s current predicament: the dog “got holt to you” (Invisible Man 173-4).
What he means is that the narrator is at the mercy of forces he cannot yet control,
chased like a running slave or an escaped convict by a vicious dog (Puckett 35).
Likewise, the remembered childhood figure of Buckeye the Rabbit, who drifts into the
narrator’s semiconsciousness after his accident at the Liberty Paints factory, derives
from a trickster figure with various incarnations, including a rhyme about a rabbit
whose short tail is a sign of his close calls and a work song with roots in escape (Talley
175).
The collection of African American folktales and songs became a major
enterprise among ethnographers and editors in the late nineteenth century. Although his
novel itself is a proof to the contrary, Ellison once lamented that the black achievement
in folklore had not often been matched in fiction. In the folklore, he argued, we “depict
the humor as well as the horror of our living. We project Negro life in a metaphysical
perspective and we have seen it with a complexity of vision that seldom gets into our
writing” (Conversations with Ralph Ellison 115).
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4.5 Peetie Wheatstraw
Soon after he arrives in Harlem, the narrator encounters a character who
identifies himself as Peter Wheatstraw (Invisible Man 172-77). Throughout chapter
nine, Invisible Man is confronted with a number of riddles and word games derived
from African American folklore and popular songs. The protagonist is apparently
estranged from the provocative blues story half told and half sung by Wheatstraw: “God
damn, I thought, they’re a hell of a people!” (177) Wheatstraw sings a vulgar chorus
from “Boogie Woogie Blues,” by Jimmy Rushing and Count Basie, invokes the folk
figures of Jack the Rabbit and Jack the Bear and strings together a thirty-five-syllable
word loaded with African American folk beliefs about conjure and prophecy: “In fact,
I’maseventhsonofaseventhsinbawnwithacauloverbotheyesandraisedonblackcatboneshighjohntheconquerorandgreasygreens.”. After the narrator’s request to “take it easy,”
Wheatstraw identifies himself as the “Devil’s only son-in-law” (176).
Peetie Wheatstraw was the stage name of William Bunch, an actual blues singer,
also known as the “Devil’s-Son-of-Law.” Ellison could have heard his music from the
more than 160 recordings released between 1930 and 1941. He probably saw some of
his performances in the Midwest and in fact played with him on a few occasions, for
example in Saint Louis (Sundquist 123). The music of Wheatstraw is little known today,
though it was some of the most popular music in the 1930s. He was one of the most
recorded prewar blues artists and his popularity was so great that he even continued to
be recorded through the most of the Great Depression (Komara 90). William Bunch was
a piano player, singer, guitarist, and songwriter living most of his life in East St. Louis.
Despite the fact that the only known photograph of Wheatstraw shows him holding a
guitar, he was more well-known as a pianist. He was 39 when his life ended a few days
before Christmas in 1941, when he was sitting as a passenger in the back seat of a car
that crashed into a standing train (Garon 103).
Garon examines the character Peter Wheatsraw in Invisible Man. In one
interview, Ellison claims to have known Peetie Wheatstraw and even to have played
trumpet with him on a few occasions and that the book character was based on
Wheatstraw’s mannerisms and attitudes. In a later interview, Ellison makes no
acknowledgment of having known Bunch and that the book character Peter Wheatstraw
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was only loosely based on “Afro-American mythology” (Garon 102). While Ellison and
others make mention of Peetie Wheatstraw existing as a figure in African American
folklore long before William Bunch, they don’t give any supporting evidence (Komara
91).
Komara furthermore mentions other writers, dealing with Peetie Wheatstraw’s
persona (91). For example Jon Michael Spencer, who in Blues and Evil states that
Wheatstraw derives from trickster figures, never mentions any earlier characters by that
name. Trudier Harris’s article “Ellison’s ´Peter Wheatstraw’: His Basis in Black Folk
Tradition” also examines African trickster influences on the Wheatstraw character but
does not offer any evidence of anyone using this name before Bunch.
The name was also a pseudonym adopted by other singers. Muriel Davis
Longini, the folklorist who reprinted the lyrics below among a broad sampling of black
folk songs from Chicago, identified the name of “Peetie Wheat Straw” as “the
pseudonym of a blues singer who makes recordings” (Folk Songs of Chicago Negroes).
She likely had in mind the real Wheatstraw, whose recordings frequently carried the
epithet “high sheriff from hell” or “the devil’s son-in-law.” Also Marilyn Elkins, in her
casebook of August Wilson, claims that “Peetie Wheatstraw” was a blues signature.
According to her opinion, any bluesman could sign off with that name and therefore
exhibit his ties to a history and a community of singers and songs (61). The original
song consists of these lines:
I am Peetie Wheat Straw, the high sheriff of hell,
I am Peetie Wheat Straw, the high sheriff of hell,
And when I lock you up, baby, you’re locked in a dungeon cell.
I am Peetie Wheat Straw, the devil’s son-in-law,
I am Peetie Wheat Straw, the devil’s son-in-law,
The woman I married, old Satan was her paw…
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After I married this woman, it was like being tied to a ball and chain,
After I married this woman, it was like being tied to a ball and chain,
It makes no difference, mama, I’ll treat you nice just the same.
(quoted in Muriel Davis Longini, Folk Songs of Chicago Negroes, 1939)
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4.6 “Many Thousands Gone”
“Many Thousands Gone,” the spiritual sung spontaneously by the crowd
gathered for Tod Clifton’s funeral is among the simplest, but most profound songs
created by African American slaves: “It was a song from the past, the past of the
campus and the still earlier past of home” (Invisible Man 452).
First transcribed as “Many Thousand Go” in William Allen’s Slave Songs in the
United States in 1867 (Allen 48), it has been reproduced in the majority of spiritual
collections since then, including such popular volumes as J. B. T. Marsh’s The Story of
the Jubilee Singers (1872). Frequently performed and recorded by Paul Robeson and
others, the song’s simple verses are subject to endless elaboration and exist in many
variants. There were possibly even earlier versions, but generally acknowledged are
those dated from the onset of the Civil War. “Many Thousands Gone” first touches on
the time when a slave will be released from bondage, independent of whether it happens
through emancipation, escape, or death. It may also be read as a tribute to the thousands
of Africans who have died in the middle passage from Africa to America, under slavery,
or through violence and hardship since (Sundquist 74). The words of the spiritual
conveyed various messages depending on whether the singer was a slave, runaway
slave, African American Union soldier, or emancipated former slave. Since it is a
spiritual song, it would have been primarily performed in informal settings with
minimal instrumental accompaniment.
The arguments over the cultural value and meaning of the spirituals in Invisible
Man were particularly pointed in the early twentieth century. In these sensitive years,
the middle class and a number of black schools expressed their disapproval of the
protagonist’s and his campus colleagues’ approach towards Trueblood and his quartet,
whose “earthy harmonies … [and] plaintively animal sounds” they find embarrassing
(Invisible Man 47). In an essay on racial dehumanization whose argument echoes
Invisible Man, James Baldwin chose the spirituals title as his own: “The story of the
Negro in America is the story of America – or, more precisely, it is the story of
Americans…. He is a series of shadows, self-created, intertwining, which now we
helplessly battle. One may say that the Negro in America does not really exist except in
the darkness of our minds” (“Many Thousands Gone”).
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Though the song deals specifically with the issue of slavery, it continued to be a
popular song and it was continually performed as blacks continued to fight for equal
rights. In recent years, many artists have played it due to its historical value. Paul
Robeson, a singer and actor who became involved with the Civil Rights Movement,
popularized Negro spirituals in the 1920s. He had a commanding presence, achieved
through the quality of his baritone and the feeling he brought to the songs he chose to
sing (Gaughan 2009). His adaptation of the spiritual is named “No More Auction
Block.” Traces of the melody can be also found in Bob Dylan’s song “Blowin’ in the
Wind.”
At Brother Jack’s funeral, the song is initiated by an older Negro man, but it
becomes a cultural melting pot, which includes “white brothers and sisters,” as well as
those who “had been born in other lands” (Invisible Man 453). For Ellison, music
represents a unifying element of cultures. In this case, a spiritual song about slavery,
America’s “original sin,” provides a very ironic means of reunifying Americans (Morel
63). Nevertheless, it serves its purpose: “And yet all were touched; the song had aroused
us all.” Ellison thereby clarifies that it can be Negro Americans who will lead
Americans of all races into a unity.
No more auction block for me,
No more, no more;
No more auction block for me,
Many thousand gone.
No more peck of corn for me,
No more, no more;
No more peck of corn for me,
Many thousand gone.
No more driver’s lash for me,
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No more, no more;
No more driver’s lash for me,
Many thousand gone.
No more pint of salt for me,
No more, no more;
No more pint of salt for me,
Many thousand gone.
No more hundred lash for me,
No more, no more;
No more hundred lash for me,
Many thousand gone.
No more mistress’ call for me,
No more, no more;
No more mistress’ call for me,
Many thousand gone.
No more children stole from me,
No more, no more;
No more children stole from me,
Many thousand gone.
No more slavery chains for me,
No more, no more;
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No more slavery chains for me,
Many thousand gone.
(quoted in Ballad of America, 2012)
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4.7 Oral Narratives
Sometimes it is not easy to determine the exact boundary between what we call
singing and what we consider speaking. In case of the artistic character of African
Americans it is doubly true. In 1939 Ellison participated in The Federal Writers’
Project (FWP), a United States federal government project to fund written work and
support writers during the Great Depression.
The overriding goal of the FWP was employment and the job saved Ellison from
“starvation and homelessness” (Jařab 2009). The project itself produced useful work in
the many oral histories collected from residents throughout the United States, many
from regions that had previously gone unexplored and unrecorded. Notable projects of
the Federal Writers’ Project included the Slave Narrative Collection, a set of interviews
that culminated in over 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white
photographs of former slaves (Born in Slavery).
It was then that Ellison recorded an interview with a Harlemite named Leo
Gurley. The narrative of “Sweet-the-Monkey,” is a tale of “a bad fellow who cut out a
heart from a black cat, climbed backwards up a tree, and cursed God” (Jařab 2009).
This trickster figure was able to do anything, even to disappear into invisibility, and
helped black people in their hard lives. Ellison must have found the mixture of outlaw
folklore with a motif of invisibility revealing. The range of participants in the FWP was
exceptionally diverse, from factory workers to farmers to railroad porters to hustlers to
housewives. The oral narrators who allowed the writers to record their life histories and
colloquial anecdotes created a richly textured portrait of America.
For most of its lifetime, the FWP faced criticism from conservatives and
particularly the House Un-American Activities Committee and its chair, Congressman
Martin Dies of Texas (Mangione 4). Federal sponsorship for the Federal Writers’
Project came to an end in 1939. Nevertheless, the program was permitted to continue
under state sponsorship until 1943. Only a few volumes of material, notably These Are
Our Lives (1939) and Lay Down My Burden: A Folk History of Slavery (1945),
appeared before the postwar period. A 1937 volume entitled American Stuff, which
included Richard Wright’s famous short work “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,”
featured six market songs of Harlem.
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There were many notable African American personalities in the Federal Writers’
Project. Together with Ellison and Wright it was for example Margaret Walker, Arna
Bontemps, or Zora Neale Hurston. Ellison’s own participation in the collecting of oral
narratives from 1938 to 1940, as part of the “Living Lore Unit,” was instrumental to his
discovery of the vernacular voices of Harlem street life that are crucial to the dialogue
of Invisible Man. In an interview with Ann Banks, whose First Person America reprints
a generous selection of short oral narratives, including several recorded by Ellison, he
remarked, “I hung around playgrounds, I hung around the street, the bars…. I would tell
some stories to get people going and then I’d sit back and try to get it down as
accurately as I could” (Banks xvii). He managed to have the stories recorded, “by using
a kind of Hemingway typography, by using the repetitions” (Bloom 30). As he told
another interviewer, however, complete accuracy in such a project was impossible: “I
couldn’t quite get the tone of the sounds in but I could get some of the patterns and get
an idea of what it was like” (Bloom 30).
It is worth noting that on yet another occasion Ellison recalled that the collecting
of street narratives occurred at the same time he was studying essays on the craft of
writing by Henry James and Joseph Conrad (Hersey 303). One of the narratives is the
source of Mary Rambo’s remark to the protagonist “Don’t let this Harlem git you. I’m
in New York, but New York ain’t in me, understand what I mean?” (Invisible Man 255;
Banks 243). A less extravagant version of the street slang the protagonist finds in the
mythical folk character Peter Wheatstraw.
Among the interviews we encounter stories of rural southern poverty, simple
songs, or street hollers such as the “Sweet Pertater Man,” a street market song, which
may have inspired the character of the yam vendor in Invisible Man (Ellison 263-69).
There is also another allusion worth mentioning. The multiple puns on “yam” and “I
am” in the passage jokingly allude to Exodus wherein Moses begins the story of
deliverance from bondage, so important in African American cultural history, and God
speaks of his unnameable name: I AM THAT I AM (Exodus 3:7-15). It is no
coincidence that the puns follow after the vendor states: “Yessuh” (266). The street
cries were also reproduced in B. A. Botkin’s 1956 volume, New York City Folklore, and
Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps’s 1957 collection, Book of Negro Folklore.
62
De Sweet Pertater Man
See dese gread big sweet pertaters
Right chere by dis chicken’s side,
Ah'm de one what bakes dese taters
Makes dem fit to suit yo’ pride
Dere is taters an’ mo’ taters,
But de ones ah sells is fine
Yo’ kin gi fum hyeah to yondah
But yo’ won’t get none lak mine
’Cause Ah’m de tater man!
(Ah mean!)
De sweet pertater man!
(quoted in Byrd, Six Negro Market Songs of Harlem, 1937)
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4.8 Hip Language
What is considered hip is continuously changing and does not refer to one
specific quality. Ellison was well aware of the contemporary hipster slang and he
incorporated it into the text in a brilliant way. Today we could probably call it stylish,
fashionable, or cool.
In Invisible Man, the manifestations of a street culture centered primarily on
black jazz are for example apparent in the hipster slang of Peetie Wheatstraw or
Rineheart. Very specific is also the hip style of the zoot suiters the protagonist meets in
the subway platform after Tod Clifton’s murder. The zoot suiters “speak a jived-up
transitional language” and are “outside the groove of history” but certainly in their own
groove (Invisible Man 441-43).
Ellison’s own musical training and his work in recording oral narratives for the
Federal Writers’ Project make his fascination throughout the novel with contemporary
fusions of language and music especially important. Hip language of the era was
codified in the jazz musician Cab Calloway’s two books, Cab Calloway’s Hepster’s
Dictionary (1938) and Professor Cab Calloway’s Swingformation Bureau (1944), and
the proliferation of a black urban vernacular, especially with the advent of bebop,
became a subject of interest for the black and white press alike (Anderson 315-16).
The term hip is recorded in African American Vernacular English in the early
1900s, derived from the earlier form hep. In the 1930s and 1940s, it had become a
common slang term, particularly in the African American dominated jazz scene. The
previous origins of the term hip and hep are not certain. After a number of researches
and speculations by both amateur and professional etymologists, no one was able to
provide sufficient information about the preceding meanings. Many etymologists
believe that the terms hip, hep and hepcat derive from the west African Wolof
language word hepicat, which means “one who has his eyes open” (Campbell 36). Some
etymologists reject this and they trace the origin of this commonly believed etymology
to David Dalby, a scholar of African languages who tentatively suggested the idea in the
1960s.
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The confusion concerning the word’s origins provides space for alternative
theories. One of them states that the term was inspired by the practices of opium
smokers, who commonly consumed the drug lying on the hip. As opium smoking was a
practice of socially influential individuals, the prestige it enjoyed led to the circulation
of the term hip by way of a kind of synecdoche (Lee 2). This etymology is however
rejected by many researchers and the true origin remains disputable.
In the 1940s, hip was definitely not about the language only. The language itself
was part of a much older and continuing evolution of black language interacting with
white mainstream culture. By the 1930s, the terms “zooty” and “zoot” had become
slang expressions among musicians and anyone else who aspired to being hip. What
Ellison calls attention to is the zoot suit, one of the more particular dress characteristics
of the war period:
“What about those fellows waiting still and silent there on the platform, so still
and silent they clash with the crowd in their very immobility, standing noisy in their
very silence; harsh as a cry of terror in their quietness? What about these three boys,
coming now along the platform, tall and slender, walking with swinging shoulders in
their well-pressed, too-hot-for-summer suits, their collars high and tight about their
necks, their identical hats of black cheap felt set upon the crowns of their heads with a
severe formality above their conked hair? It was as though I’d never seen their like
before: walking slowly, their shoulders swaying, their legs swinging from their hips in
trousers that ballooned upward from cuffs fitting snug about their ankles; their coats
long and hip-tight with shoulders far too broad to be those of natural western men.
These fellows whose bodies seemed – what had one of my teachers said to me? ´You’re like one of those African sculptures, distorted in the interest of design.´ Well,
what design and whose?” (Invisible Man 264)
A zoot suit is a men’s suit with high-waisted, wide-legged, tightcuffed, pegged trousers, and a long coat with wide lapels and wide padded shoulders.
This style of clothing became popular among the African American, Chicano (including
many Mexican Americans on the West Coast) and Italian American communities during
the 1940s and it was soon the subject of sociological analyses that focused on racial
pathology and urban disorders such as the Harlem riots (Clark, “The Zoot Effect in
Personality”). This phenomenon played a significant role in the spread of youth cults
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and potential gang formation (Redl, “Zoot Suits: An Interpretation”). In general it is
considered to have a major influence on the postwar youth culture (Firestone, “Cats,
Kicks, and Color”).
Sundquist describes an interesting comparison of the zoot suit culture and bebop,
which developed as the younger generation of jazz musicians aimed to counter the
popular swing style with a new, non-danceable music that demanded listening
(Sundquist 136; Lott 597). Bebop furthermore became part of the back wartime
language, expressing resistance to discrimination. Both of them were therefore
subcultures refusing to concede to the manners of conformity and submission.
As a musician, Ellison came across people using hip language both on the street,
as well as in clubs at live performances of music. Black culture was also the object of
study of a white musician Milton “Mezz” Mezzrow (1899-1972). His book Really the
Blues, an account of jazz, the blues, and urban street culture principally in Chicago and
New York, became an underground classic because his immersion in black culture
allowed him to tell its story in an authentic language. Published in 1946, the first-person
narrative, composed with the assistance of a folklorist and writer named Bernard Wolfe,
contains a number of descriptions and passages that are suggestive for Invisible Man.
One of such examples is the tendency of unhip listeners to stand in front of the
bandstand “snapping their fingers in a childish way, yelling ‘Get hot! Yeah man, get
hot!’” By using this quotation Mezzow anticipates the surreal scene in which the
protagonist undergoes shock treatment and imagines the doctor to say, “They really do
have rhythm, don’t they? Get hot, boy! Get hot! (Mezzrow and Wolfe 142; Invisible
Man 237). It becomes clear that contemporary hipster language and music were
inseparable for Ellison and his excellent ability to incorporate them both into his writing
provides the readers with an exclusive look into black culture.
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5 Invisible Juneteenth
Although his first novel took seven years to complete, it would be a short
duration in comparison with his second novel. Ellison began to work on the second
novel while in Rome in 1955, as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
In 1958, he returned back to the United States to take the position teaching American
and Russian literature at Bard College. The process of writing the novel was violated in
1967, when a substantial portion of the manuscript was destroyed in a fire that burned
the Ellison’s summer home in the Berkshire Mountains. Ellison claimed the damage
was too devastating and kept postponing its publication. Although the fire was a
setback, Ellison continued to receive praise. He was named a Trustee of the Kennedy
Center, became a member of the exclusive Century Club, received the Presidential
Medal of Freedom, and held visiting professor appointments at Bard College, Rutgers,
and Yale. In 1970 he was appointed Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at New
York University and he served in this position until 1980.
Ever since the publication of Invisible Man, Ellison was very active. He kept
publishing countless reviews, interviews, essays and critiques of literature, folklore, jazz
and other aspects of race and culture. A collection of his work was published in
1964, Shadow and Act, and another in 1986, Going to the Territory. Yet, during his
lifetime he never published a second novel. People knew he was working on it, though,
and kept asking him where the second novel was, or if he was suffering from writer’s
block. Ellison responded that he had plenty to write about, but he was just very hesitant
to release anything before it was ready. “I learned long ago that it’s better not to have
something in print that you feel isn’t ready,” he said (Mitgang, “‘Invisible Man,’ as
Vivid Today as in 1952”). The second essay collection entitled Going to the Territory
was eventually the last book published in his lifetime.
Ellison claimed to be devastated when a lot of the original manuscript
of Juneteenth (1999) was destroyed by a fire in 1967. However, it is not sure how much
of his work actually disappeared. The loss of the crucial, irrecoverable sections of his
manuscript appears to have been something Ellison made up to justify his lack of
progress. Arnold Rampersad, in his 2007 biography of Ellison, points out that,
following the fire, Ellison wrote to critic Nathan Scott of his relief that he still
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“fortunately had a full copy” of all his writing. A fuller version of the manuscript was
published on February 2, 2010, as Three Days Before the Shooting.
At the age of eighty, on April 16, 1994, Ellison died of pancreatic cancer in
Harlem, New York. Five years after the author’s death, through keen selections from
thousands of pages of Ellison’s unfinished work, John F. Callahan, Ellison’s longtime
friend, biographer and critic, helped finally put Ellison’s second novel together, editing
it in the way he thought Ellison would want it to be written. After he edited Ellison’s
2,000 pages of unfinished manuscript written by him over a period of forty years, he
published just over 360 of them as Juneteenth.
The novel received mixed reviews, with some wondering if the final product was
true to the novel that Ellison envisioned. But perhaps the best commentary on his work
came while he was still alive, from a 17-year-old girl who had recently read Invisible
Man. Told that Ellison had not written a second novel, the young woman was
shocked—not that he hadn’t written the book, but that anyone expected him to. “How
could he?” she said. “This novel has everything in it” (Mitgang). Josef Jařab reacted in a
similar way when Ellison complained about the number of people expecting his new
novel. His thought that Invisible Man “tells it all” and therefore “the job had been done”
Ellison found interesting and possibly revealing (736).
Although Ellison did not leave instructions concerning the novel’s completion,
he did discuss its genesis and development. He told John Hersey in 1974:
I guess it started with the idea of an old man being so outraged with his life
that he goes poking around in the cellar to find a forgotten coffin, which he
had bought years before as insurance against his possible ruin. He discovers
that he has lived so long that the coffin have fallen apart... But then it led to
another idea, which I wrote first, of a little boy being placed in a coffin in a
ritual of death and transcendence, celebrated by a Negro evangelist who was
unsure whether he was exploiting the circus-sideshow shock set off by a
child rising up out of a coffin, or had hit upon an inspired way of presenting
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the sacred drama of the resurrection. In my mind all of this is tied up with
being a Negro in America. (Ellison qtd. in Porter 94)
Porter claims that the narrator in Invisible Man turns out to be prophetic about Ellison’s
own relationship to his second novel (92). In the prologue he calls himself Jack the
Bear, temporarily in a state of hibernation. He returns to the image of hibernation in the
epilogue and describes the consequences of that liminal state: “So I took to the cellar; I
hibernated. I got away from it all. But that wasn’t enough. I couldn’t be still even in
hibernation. Because, damn it, there was the mind, the mind. It wouldn’t let me rest.
Gin, jazz and dreams were not enough. Books were not enough” (Invisible Man 564).
Although from the 1950s through the 1970s Ellison published eight sections of his
second novel, he never finished it. As the world waited for 42 years from the
publication of Invisible Man to the day of his death, Ralph Ellison appeared to
hibernate, like his character.
In Juneteenth, as in Invisible Man, a major theme is individual identity. Several
characters remain only partially identified, and others cut themselves off from their
pasts in various ways and with various consequences. In Sunraider’s case, the fact that
Ellison never reveals the name of either parent intensifies the significance of his quest
for a “true” identity. Furthermore, this character is known variously as Robert, Bliss,
Cudworth, Mister Movie-Man, Mister Big-City Man, and Adam Sunraider throughout
the novel.
The plot of Juneteenth is rather simple. What makes the novel so complex are its
subplots. The protagonist, Bliss, is a black boy, still light enough to appear white. His
surrogate father, Rev. Hickman, is a jazz trombonist turned traveling preacher. Young
Bliss’s job is to rise up on cue out of a coffin, which he hates because of the darkness
inside. In the middle of one of Hickman’s sermons a white woman arrives, declaring
that Bliss is her son and grabs him with her. The black sisters of the church rush
forward and take Bliss from her again. Bliss is not sure whether the woman really is his
mother or not, and this existential struggle traumatizes him.
A few years later, Bliss gets secretly into a theatre for whites only. Rev.
Hickman and the church members look for him. At the end, Hickman sees him coming
out of the theatre. A year or two later Bliss disappears completely. Bliss seems to be
69
forgotten for several decades, until there is an assassination attempt on the racist
Senator Sunraider, who is actually Bliss himself.
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5.1 “Cadillac Flambé”
It is hardly an accident that Rev. Hickman is a trombone player turned preacher.
There is one episode excluded from Juneteenth that attracts critics searching for
Ellison’s virtuosity. “Cadillac Flambé” was originally a short story published in
American Review in 1973. Only one paragraph from it was inserted by Callahan to give
Senator’s speech in chapter two greater continuity with the novel’s final scene (Porter
93). The story describes an angry black jazzman, who, unaware of Senator Sunraider’s
secret past, protests after one of his radio talks in a dramatic manner. Dressed in a white
suit, he makes a speech as he burns his white Cadillac on Sunraider’s lawn.
American readers were eager to read this tale after waiting for years since the
publication of Invisible Man. Although Callahan chose to leave “Cadillac Flambé” out
of Juneteenth, it emphasizes Ellison’s ongoing belief in both the power of jazz as an art
form and as a metaphor for the drama of democracy (Porter 95). McIntyre calls
Minifees’s interaction with the Cadillac a “duet.” He believes that it gives Lee Willie
Minifees, the jazzman and arsonist, the stage for his performance. A performance which
ends with the siren sounds of approaching police and firemen, blending with the sound
of the Cadillac’s horn.
At the beginning, McIntyre, with tape recorder to record bird songs and
binoculars in hand, is returning from a successful birdwatching expedition and a
pleasant brunch when Lee Willie Minifees, driving unexpectedly across Senator’s lawn,
stops him in his tracks. McIntyre views himself as the most objective of journalists, but
his blind spots are as revelatory as his insights. He describes the “majestic roar” of
Senator Sunraider that incited Minifees to destroy his white Cadillac. And with tape
recorder in hand, he captures the jazzman’s “typically Negro” voice. Using McIntyre as
narrator-reporter, Ellison extravagantly offers three points of view – McIntyre’s,
Senator Sunraider’s, and Lee Willie Minifees’s – three different, though distinctly
American, voices. Furthermore, McIntyre records a “duet,” the “swoosh-pop-crackleand hiss” of the flaming Cadillac as the jazzman yells, chants, and even sings for the
stunned onlookers.
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As Robert O’Meally says:
A jazz piece usually has no rigidly set number of sections: the vamp may
continue until it is virtually a piece unto itself; the choruses, solo breaks, and
out-choruses may repeat until the bandleader, on a given night, calls a halt
which can come quite suddenly and, for that matter, may meld easily into
the piece which comes after it, as if an entire evening’s performance was
one extended skyscraper with a variety of stories and styles blended into
one. (History and Memory in African-American Culture 249)
In the light of O’Meally’s description, “Cadillac Flambé” is clearly a jazz episode, in
which Ellison places his jazzman-arsonist at center stage. It is understandable that Lee
Willie Minifees, a bass player and therefore a representative of America, is the center of
most of the story. Porter understands Ellison’s writing as orchestration of American
images, objects, and scenes that highlight his own jazzlike performance (96). The writer
provides a number of clues that suggest a patriotic nature of this ritual. To them belongs
Washington, D.C. as the setting, a U.S. Senator, a white Cadillac, “leaping red and blue
flames,” and also Sunday as the day on which the burning occurs. Furthermore,
McIntyre’s words and phrases strongly suggest a ritualistic ceremony (“photographic
rite of spring,” “religious symbolism,” “sacrificial act,” “spirit’s materialization,”
“confession,” “ecstatic chant,” and “portentous political gesture”). McIntyre ultimately
concludes that Lee Willie Minifees’s burning of his own car in the senator’s lawn was
“so extreme a reply as to be almost metaphysical” (“Cadillac Flambé” 9).
As Grandt claims, “Cadillac Flambé” explores the connection between jazz,
violence, and the right of African Americans to self-determination and freedom in their
struggle to make their human voices heard (66). Even Ellison himself, when
remembering his own beginnings as a struggling artist, wrote: “those days it was either
live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to love” (Shadow and
Act 227). Lee Willie Minifees was by no means a beginning artist. His choice between
music and noise was, on the other hand, not an absolute one: in the ritual murder of his
Cadillac to the tune of jazz, he decides rather desperately to live with the “noise” of his
own music.
72
Conclusion
This thesis explored the impact of music on the work of Ralph Ellison. Growing
up in a music-centered city led Ellison to become a musician who could read music as
well as improvise. These qualities he later used exquisitely in the creation of his literary
work. In Oklahoma City he saw performances of great contemporary musicians, such as
Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, who inspired him immensely. It was then that he
recognized their unique cultural attributes.
Black music, folklore, and folk culture affect the very structure and texture of
Ellison’s writing. This thesis described the circumstances of his most acclaimed work
and the only novel he finished - Invisible Man. From the beginning of the novel, when,
in the prologue, the Invisible Man listens to Armstrong’s “What Did I Do to Be So
Black and Blue?” and in a hallucinatory state imagines a slave woman's tale, until the
end of the novel, black music, especially the jazz and blues, continually informs and
confirms the novel’s meaning.
It has been said that Invisible Man is structured more like a jazz composition
than a novel. The tensions that are captured in the novel may be compared to the
“antagonistic cooperation” which Ellison says characterizes the way jazz musicians
combine individual and communal impulses.
This thesis also focused on Black American folklore in Ellison’s work. Among
the greatest legacies of the folk culture are the folktales, many of which originated in
the slave era. Often these tales take the form of animal fables that pit Brer Rabbit
against Brer Bear. To complicate matters, Ellison seems to assign his hero the role of
Brer Rabbit at certain times while assigning him the role of Brer Bear at others.
Ellison’s own musical training and his work in recording oral narratives for the
Federal Writers’ Project make his fascination throughout the novel with contemporary
fusions of language and music especially important. Ellison has expertly grafted the
vernacular style onto the body and into the substance of his work utilizing all the
energy, insight, and poetry of an oral folk tradition. Invisible Man continues the AfroAmerican literary tradition by selecting from it, synthesizing the enduring aspects of it,
and expanding it to new parameters. In devising a new epic form supple enough to
73
contain a remarkably diverse set of materials, Ellison made unprecedented use of black
culture as a literary source.
As a trumpet player and lifelong jazz enthusiast, Ralph Ellison saw music as an
integral part of his life. He wrote about it frequently and he addressed black music in a
number of his interviews and essays. The publication of a book of essays twelve years
later after Invisible Man furthered Ellison’s growing reputation as a cultural critic. In
the collection Shadow and Act, he presents his reformulation of what Invisible Man is
and what it should attempt to do, and offers a celebrated definition of the blues. Ellison
argues for the interrelatedness of all experience and proclaims that, at least on the level
of the imagination, integration has been achieved in the United States. This book was
followed by another collection, Going to the Territory, which was his last published
book during his lifetime, while his long-awaited second novel, Juneteenth, was
published posthumously.
There have been many books published to reassess Ellison after his death. The
first one was written by Horace Porter and is called Jazz Country: Ralph Ellison in
America. This publication examines Ellison’s essays and views on culture in the United
States through the lens of jazz music. The book belongs to the most complex reviews of
the writer’s jazz background, containing his writings and comments about jazz and jazz
musicians. Porter further explores the influences of jazz musicians as sources of
Ellison’s inspiration in art and personal life. Finally, he highlights the significance of
the writer’s friendship with his African American friend and respected writer Albert
Murray.
This thesis explored aspects of the literary works of Ralph Ellison, with a focus
on his novel, which won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction in 1953, Invisible
Man. Its narrative, jazz aesthetics, Black American folklore and the use of
contemporary language create a complex composition resembling the one performed by
a jazz musician. Ellison’s unique writing style borrows from traditional jazz and utilizes
literary forms of solo improvisation in an effort to show his disapproval of the treatment
of blacks during the Jim Crow era by whites who felt threatened by black cultural
heritage. The thesis demonstrated that Ellison’s manner of expression is a form of
protest that affirms life and the experience of African Americans throughout history.
74
Resumé
Ralph Ellison patří k nejvýznamnějším spisovatelům 20. století. Román Invisible
Man, který publikoval v roce 1952, se okamžitě zařadil mezi literární klasiku, za kterou
v roce 1953 obdržel cenu National Book Award. Diplomová práce se věnuje tomuto
románu a roli hudby při jeho tvorbě. Zároveň pojednává o životě Ellisona a kulturních
vlivech, které ho při psaní ovlivňovali. Autor již od útlého mládí vyrůstal obklopen
hudbou, což ho vedlo k tomu stát se hudebníkem, který uměl nejen hudbu číst, ale
zvládal i bravurně improvizovat. Tyto schopnosti dokázal skvěle zužitkovat i při svém
psaní.
Hudba je neodmyslitelnou součástí Ellisonovy tvorby. Její zakomponování
v románech Invisible Man a Juneteenth, i v množství esejů, které během svého života
vydal, svědčí o jeho hluboké vášni a zároveň o kulturním dědictví, které jako
Afroameričan předával svým čtenářům. Je logické, že Ellisonovi a jeho vztahu k jazzu
se věnovalo již mnoho literárních kritiků. Sám Ellison na něj upozorňoval nejen v díle
Shadow and Act (1964), ale i v mnoha rozhovorech, které poskytoval svým dychtivým
fanouškům. Obsah jeho děl navíc obsahuje bezpočet referencí na blues a jazz, které
napomáhají čtenáři k pochopení kulturního kontextu a role Afroameričanů v historii
Spojených států amerických.
Hudba, folklór a lidová kultura ovlivňují samotnou strukturu a stavbu Ellisonova
textu. Vypravěč v románu Invisible Man se opakovaně odkazuje na Louise Armstronga
a potkává postavy se jmény, které nápadně připomínají skutečné osobnosti z hudební
sféry. Mezi nimi je například Peter Wheatstraw, neboli bluesový zpěvák William
Bunch, vystupující v 1. polovině 20. století pod uměleckým pseudonymem Peetie
Wheatstraw; či Rinehart, jehož jméno nepopiratelně asociuje jazzového kytaristu
romského původu Djanga Reindharta. Od začátku románu, kdy vypravěč poslouchá
„What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue?“ a představuje si příběh otrokyně, až po
samotný závěr románu slouží hudba, a to především jazz a blues, jako nástroj, který
nepřetržitě předává a dosvědčuje význam románu.
Invisible Man je plný nejen lyrických veršů z písní, ale i postaviček z lidové
slovesnosti. Jedním z největších folkových dědictví folkové kultury jsou folkové
příběhy, z nichž velké množství vzniklo během éry otrokářství. Tyto příběhy na sebe
75
často berou podobu bajek, ve kterých proti sobě stojí „Brer Rabbit“ a „Brer Bear.“ Je
zajímavé, že v případě románu Invisible Man je vypravěči přiřazována střídavě role
jedna i druhá.
Jedním z expertů, kteří se zabývají Ellisonovou tvorbou, je Horace A. Porter,
který ve své studii Jazz Country: Ralph Ellison in America (2001) poukazuje na
Ellisonovy hudební kořeny. Jazz a jazzoví hudebníci byli pro Ellisona velmi důležití a
rozpoznával v nich zkušenosti Afroameričanů během své trnité cesty k rovnoprávnosti.
Tato kniha patří k nejkomplexnějším zhodnocením autorova jazzového zázemí a
obsahuje jeho tvorbu a komentáře o jazzu a jazzových umělcích.
Ellison měl již jako malý chlapec možnost vidět hudebníky jako Louise
Armstronga a Duke Ellingtona hrát živě v Oklahoma City, kde vyrůstal. V jejich
vystoupeních zakusil jedinečné kulturní atributy, a to jak u hudebníků a sličných
tanečnic, tak i v samotné intonaci a způsobu vyjadřování. V tomto mladém věku si sice
neuvědomoval důležitost tohoto stylu, ale už si byl schopen povšimnout jejich poslání
jako zástupců afroamerické menšiny. K tomu se mimo jiné vyjadřuje i v eseji „Living
with Music“ (1955), ve které tvrdí, že jazzová hudba poskytuje lidem pocit, že jsou
naživu a součástí komunity. Obzvláště v případě Afroameričanů byla hudba ztělesněním
radosti ze života, ve kterém jinak čelili utrpení a těžkostem.
Jako hudebník a celoživotní jazzový nadšenec považoval Ellison hudbu za
nedílnou součást svého života. Často o ní psal a odkazoval se na ni v mnoha
rozhovorech a esejích. Vydání sbírky esejů dvanáct let po vydání proslaveného románu
podpořilo jeho pověst jako kulturního kritika. V knize Shadow and Act se znovu
vyjadřuje k tomu, čím Invisible Man je, co je jeho cílem, a také definuje blues. Zastává
se názoru, že vše spolu navzájem souvisí a tvrdí, že ve Spojených státech bylo
minimálně na úrovní představivosti dosaženo integrace. Tuto publikaci následovala
další sbírka, Going to the Territory (1986), která byla poslední knihou vydanou za
Ellisonova života. Jeho druhý román, na kterém se pracovalo přes čtyřicet let, spatřil
světlo světa až po jeho smrti.
Kritici jsou dobře vědomi vlivu jazzu na Ellisonovu tvorbu a již poskytli mnoho
analýz, zkoumajících román Invisible Man z hudebního pohledu. Rozsah témat, kterými
se zabývají, je velmi široký. Mnoho z nich považuje román za možnou proklamaci
demokracie v Americe. Přestože žádná esej nemůže uspokojit všechny čtenáře,
76
spojením těchto prací dohromady vzniká komplexní pohled umožňující hlubší
pochopení románu. Diplomová práce zkoumá, jakým způsobem vypravěč aplikuje
jazzové charakteristiky a afroamerický folklór oslavující jedinečnost Afroameričanů ve
Spojených státech. Z toho důvodu zde dostávají prostor i folkové písně a lidová
slovesnost, které k tomu neodmyslitelně patří.
Tato práce se zaměřuje především na formu vyprávění, jazzové charakteristiky,
afroamerický folklór a dobový jazyk. Všechny tyto prvky spolu v románu spolupracují
způsobem, který potvrzuje, že hudba nemusí být bezpodmínečně slyšena z úst zpěváka,
ani se nemusí rozeznívat z nástroje profesionálního hudebníka. Ellison je věrným
důkazem toho, že pokud je hudba vyjádřena písmem, má na své obecenstvo stejný, ne-li
větší účinek. Afroamerickým obyvatelům navíc umožnila bojovat proti útlaku, kterému
dlouhodobě čelili, bez použití jediné zbraně.
První část diplomové práce se vrací ke zdroji Ellisonovy vášně k hudbě,
konkrétně pojednává o jeho dětství v Oklahoma City. Jelikož ho rodina vždy
podporovala v jeho nadání, není překvapením, že mladému Ellisonovi přirostla soudobá
hudební scéna k srdci. Své vlohy se rozhodl rozvíjet při vysokoškolských studiích na
Tuskegee Institute, kde se přiučil více teorie hudební disciplíny, kterou si vybral za svou
budoucí kariéru.
Druhá kapitola hlouběji analyzuje tvorbu před a po ohromném úspěchu
s románem Invisible Man. Velkou inspirací je spolupráce se spolužákem a literárním
kritikem Albertem Murrayem. Tito milovníci jazzu se sice stali blízkými přáteli až poté,
co Murray na škole dostudoval, ale jejich vztah je detailně reflektován v knize Trading
Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray (2000). Dalším
odborníkem na slovo vzatým je Robert O’Meally, který nashromáždil nejlepší
Ellisonovu tvorbu spojenou s hudbou pro předmět, který vyučoval na univerzitě. Tato
antologie vzešla ve známost pod jménem Living with Music: Ralph Ellison’s Jazz
Writings (2001) a patří k nejlepším publikacím o jazzu obecně.
Následující dvě kapitoly pojednávají o románu Invisible Man. Kapitola tři se
zabývá jazzovými charakteristikami aplikovanými ve vyprávění a bluesovými
postavami, které vypravěči při jeho cestě dělají společnost. Čtvrtá kapitola se přesouvá
k afroamerickému folklóru, jehož pomocí Ellison propaguje dědictví svých předků.
Tato kapitola se také věnuje historii afroamerické tvorby, která naznačuje, že většina
77
její produkce je formou protestu. Poslední kapitola hodnotí Ellisonovu práci po vydání
románu Invisible Man. Jeho velmi očekávaný druhý román nebyl nikdy dokončen a
čtenáři na něj museli čekat až do autorovy smrti, kdy byly jeho rukopisy zpracovány,
upraveny a vydány jeho přítelem Johnem F. Callahanem.
Ellisonovo hudební vzdělání a práce v oblasti orální historie zdůrazňují
důležitost jeho zaujetí soudobým jazykem a hudbou během psaní. Autor odborně
zakomponoval lidovou mluvu do textu a podstaty své tvorby, v níž zužitkoval energii,
postřeh a poezii lidové tradice. Invisible Man tak navazuje na afroamerickou literární
tradici, jejíž části upravuje a rozšiřuje do nových rozměrů. Vytvořením nové epické
formy schopné obsáhnout pozoruhodně různorodý soubor materiálů učinil Ellison
afroamerickou kulturu zdrojem své literární tvorby.
Diplomová práce nastiňuje aspekty literární tvorby Ralpha Ellisona, se
zaměřením na román Invisible Man, který v roce 1953 získal cenu National Book
Award. Jeho forma vyprávění, jazzové charakteristiky, afroamerický folklór a soudobý
jazyk vytváří komplexní skladbu, kterou lze přirovnat k jazzovému vystoupení. Tato
práce demonstruje, že Ellisonův způsob vyjadřování je formou protestu, který utvrzuje
život a zkušenost Afroameričanů v dlouhodobých dějinách. Jedinečný styl, kterým
Ellison píše, vychází z tradičního jazzu, a umožňuje mu improvizovat způsobem,
kterým dává najevo svůj nesouhlas s nerovným zacházením Afroameričanů.
78
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Anotace
Jméno:
Zuzana Uhlířová
Fakulta:
Filozofická fakulta Univerzity Palackého
Katedra:
Katedra anglistiky a amerikanistiky
Název práce:
Role hudby v díle Ralpha Ellisona
Vedoucí práce:
prof. PhDr. Josef Jařab, CSc.
Počet stran:
86
Klíčová slova: americká literatura, 20. století, Ralph Ellison, hudba, folklór
Tato diplomová práce pojednává o vlivu hudby na tvorbu Ralpha Ellisona, se
zaměřením na román Invisible Man. Tento americký autor byl profesionálním
hudebníkem ještě před tím, než se stal uznávaným spisovatelem, a jeho vášeň pro hudbu
ho ovlivnila i v jeho spisovatelské tvorbě. Přestože Ellison odmítal názor, že je
politickým spisovatelem, román Invisible Man může být dodnes považován za formu
protestu. Práce podrobně analyzuje konkrétní příklady z Ellisonova románu Invisible
Man, který je bohatý na odkazy afroamerických umělců a folkových příběhů. Ellisonův
jedinečný způsob psaní je inspirován tradičním jazzem a za pomoci improvizace
vyjadřuje protest proti snaze bílých občanů Spojených států amerických podmanit si
Afroameričany spolu s jejich kulturním dědictvím.
85
Annotation
Name:
Zuzana Uhlířová
Faculty:
Philosophical Faculty of Palacký University in Olomouc
Department:
Department of English and American Studies
Name of thesis:
The Role of Music in Ralph Ellison’s Work
Supervisor:
prof. PhDr. Josef Jařab, CSc.
Number of pages:
86
Key words: American literature, 20th century, Ralph Ellison, Music, Folklore
This thesis explores the complex relationship between music and narrative form in
Ralph Ellison’s work, with the focus on his novel Invisible Man. This American author
was a professional musician before he became a respected writer and his passion for
music had a tremendous impact on his work. Although Ellison rejected the notion that
he was a political writer, Invisible Man still functions as a form of protest based on its
narrative form. This thesis analyzes the examples in Invisible Man, which are full of
allusions to African American musicians, folk tales, and black culture in general.
Ellison’s unique writing style borrows from traditional jazz and utilizes literary forms of
solo improvisation in an effort to protest the tendencies of white citizens of the United
States to subdue African Americans and their cultural heritage.
86