Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man As Jazz
Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man As JazzInvisible Man As Jazz
Invisible Man by Ralph (Waldo) Ellison, is intriguingly complex. It narrates the history of a life, but is unfinished at the end. Its incomplete structure echoes that of jazz music, where the written form does not contain the extent of the music. In this way, Ellison uses the book to prepare the reader for something, for some final confrontation which is suggested but never recounted. It is a chronology of a man manipulated (monopolated) by those about him until he realizes the extent of the control and rebels against it — or begins to.
The force of the novel is tied to its openendedness. Ellison leads the reader through changes upon changes: of location, characters, ways in which the narrator connects to the reality around him. When the novel ends, the reader’s mind is still braced for those continuing changes, and, deprived of them, the mind continues, creating its own, solving the puzzle individually and invisibly.
The novel ends before the anticipated action, before the inevitable bursting point of the unnamed narrator’s brooding and anger. In this way, Ellison the fiction writer finds a way to defeat the expectations of the novel-reader. Even those versed in the avant-garde attempts of the early twentieth century, are left expectant due to the power of the conventional content against which Ellison writes his book. The novel ends, but the story is not concluded, the battle not resolved. Just as jazz music fails to follow standardized Romantic form, Ellison’s novel fails to follow faithfully the traditional Aristotelic pattern of exposition, rising conflict, climax and denouement/resolution.
So, how is the novel structured, and how does Ellison lead us to the silent end, and why does it work? To answer this we must begin with a quick look at the context. The novel, written in the 1950’s, is set in the 1930’s, the big-band jazz era. Ellison was trained as a trumpet player in this decade, and the link to music in Invisible Man cannot be ignored. Ellison’s novel — as Written Jazz music — deliberately does not follow the patterns of classical form (in some respects). What is written is not what is heard. The sheet-music is a mere guide to performance.
Music in the novel is an ever-present force, coloring–with nostalgia, revulsion, or absorption–the narrator’s reactions to events; the novel is densely packed with references to bits of old blues, snatches of children’s rhymes, and jazz, in the narrator’s memories and in the action, and sometimes both. The most important link occurs in the prologue. Smoking marijuana, listening to Louis Armstrong, he writes:
. . . I discovered a new analytical was of listening to music. The unheard sounds came through, and each melodic line existed of itself, stood out clearly from all the rest, said its piece, and waited patiently for the other voices to speak. That night I found myself hearing not only in time, but in space as well. I not only entered the music but descended like Dante, into its depths. And beneath the swiftness of the hot tempo there was a slower tempo and a cave and I entered it and looked around and heard an old woman singing a spiritual as full of Weltschmerz as flamenco, and beneath that lay a still lower level on which I say a beautiful girl the color of ivory pleading in a voice like my mother’s as she stood before a group of slaveowners who bit for her naked body, and below that I found a lower level and a more rapid tempo and I heard someone shout. . .
Beneath the music he finds a world of history, a deeper narrative. The southern Baptist preacher, the ex-slave woman who loved her master, her dispossessed sons. And the music intrudes, moves him around (”. . . a voice of trombone timbre screamed at me. . .”).
He vows never to do that again: “. . . to see around corners is enough (that is not unusual when you’re invisible) [, b]ut to hear around them is too much.” But the event suggests an interesting premise: if there is narrative beneath that music, could there be music above the narrative? The last paragraph of the novel seems to support this:
“Ah,” I can hear you say, “so it was all a build-up to bore us with his buggy jiving [by ending before the resolution]. He only wanted us to listen to him rave!” But only partly true: Being invisible and without substance, a disembodied voice, as it were, what else could I do? What else but try to tell you what was really happening when your eyes were looking through? And it is this which frightens me:
Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you? (Epilogue)
The lower frequencies, the lower levels beneath the frequencies.
Invisible Man is written like jazz music. What is written is the preparation, the framework for performers to use as a basis for their improvisations in exposition and climax, and to resolve the whole piece.
Jazz music was as much a rebellion against Romantic music as the experimental writers of the twenties and thirties were rebelling against the traditional narrative and poetry. While Invisible Man is innovative in overall structure, it is not wholly divorced from traditional novel writing. Narrative-wise, it does hold together and follow standard structures of development. It is chronological; it is not technically disjointed, it follows the appropriate prose style for the author/narrator, an educated southern black man.
Nonetheless, the novel does resemble a jazz form. A jazz “head” (the written part of the tune) could be as classically structured as a short Mozart piece. A head frequently follows a blues pattern of chord changes (as did much early Mozart), with a rise and slight fall, and a hook near the end to keep you listening while it ends and the solo begins. So too, the book starts with a prologue, a scene outside the chronology which introduces the form of the narrative, like an anacrusis to a melody. Then there is the body of the work, constantly moving forward (through time), the melody riding the changes, with frequent hooks and stops and transitions while some new texture holds the melody in place, until we reach the point of the narrator’s disillusionment. Here there is a sharp change in the music. Maybe the horns and the guitar which have been keeping the melody in place have dropped out. There is a short period of disquiet, and silence. Then a punch of violent energy when the lead instrument is trying to find something, anything, to which to cling. The narrator is lost. What are the changes? Where am I going? What’s going on? And then he notices: the bass is still there. It is holding some sort of structure. It is a soft, leading tone that’s still pulling the tune somewhere, but the melody is not following it, it is not playing now. It is thinking about its solo. All there is, is a steady drive forward. And we know there is something yet to happen. But nothing more is written.
So what is there? Some five-six hundred pages of words following only in part a structure of fiction laid down in stone by a Greek arguer three thousand years ago. Ellison truncates the form, cuts it off at the climax, and thereby makes a point about individuality, about humanity. Words cannot define people. They can merely guide. And this is his guide, his head for the soloist, the black man searching for an identity among the many potential manipulators. Consistent with both the form and content, Ellison does not tell us what happens. This paper was taken from the internet; if used in a class it has been used dishonestly. To do that would say what the man is and what he should be; it would manipulate him in the manner the narrator fights so desperately against, and rob him of his personhood, and lock him in his invisibility.
And what music is this above the narrative? Again, there is no definitive answer. But there are clues. The melody is most likely a trumpet (Ellison’s or Armstrong’s). Big band jazz usually also had a full background horn section of a dozen or more instruments, and a rhythm section of guitar, piano, bass, drums, percussion; sometimes (Nelson Riddle) there was also a string section further fuzzing the difference between jazz and “serious music.” That is probably who is playing the music. So what are they playing? Something by Cole Porter or George Gershwin? — doubtful, white men probably would not fit as forces behind the novel, when it is about the exercising of personal black identity. The composer would probably have to be closer to the protagonist. Duke Ellington, Count Basie? — maybe.
To solve this one, we must take into account a broader time frame. The action in the book takes place in the thirties, for several years. And the prologue/epilogue is several years after that. So we are probably into the fifties now (when Ellison wrote it). Thelonius Monk, Miles Davis? But Ellison himself was a musician. He was the author of the book, why not him? He was the craftsman of the narrative, pulling all these influences, events, decades together for the propeller that is the novel. It is probably only him who could construct the appropriate music.
Though lacking resolution, the novel does describe guidelines, providing a background upon which the reader/participant can make educated choices. As a result, each reader has the opportunity to learn many of the lessons the narrator has learned, without, however, learning who the man is. He is still invisible, because it is not written who he is, how he fights the system (like Frederick Douglas not giving the circumstances of his escape in order not to educate slave- owners in how better to avert such acts), or what action takes place; but he is there and he is fighting and he has not lost, though he has not yet won.
One of the driving forces in the novel is the major theme of man vs. the establishment; present throughout, it is illustrated by the particular example of the narrator’s dream-interception of the memorandum in his brief case: “To Whom It May Concern, . . .Keep This Nigger-boy Running” (Ch. 1). Outside forces are constantly moving the narrator and using him for their own ends. They trick him all the time. He allows himself to be tricked. And he frees himself. The importance is not that he becomes free, but that he exercises his own will for himself. He takes his fate from the manipulators of the establishment, the surface mind-set of moving upward (as Ellison takes his novel from the grasp of the ancient Greek theoretician), unentwining it from the knots of other men’s influence, pulling himself into his hole, to heal. And when this happens, he is no longer running. He has accepted his invisibility, but realizes that they cannot use him if he does not allow it. But he does not reverse the situation and use his intelligence and experience to manipulate others like the many-faced anti-manipulator, Rinehart; he realizes that at some point, polar opposites meet. He still seeks to do good, to move to action, and make things right.
There is history in the past, but the present and future are yet unwritten. Those who would control history and enslave it become chained to a falsehood, because history is aware of those plots, and it will not allow it. And here comes a man, a man with no illusions, who has played the follower and (within the limits of his authority, his “personal responsibility”) the manipulator, and emerges from it unscathed, uncorrupted. And here is his paradox: he becomes everyman, yet desperately individual; he becomes the down-trodden who will not endure more; he becomes the ruler, sick with power who cannot live with his evil and hopes for redemption; above all, he becomes the champion of individuality. Indivisible, with liberty and justice. . ., free, a tightly coiled spring to action, like a melody to be unfolded, but not disdaining an occasional discordant note. A jazz theme for the future. The reader knows the head, and is waiting for someone to solo over it.