The Numerous Depths of Invisible Man

Kafie – The Numerous Depths

The Numerous Depths of Invisible Man

By Javier Kafie

Blackface Minstrelsy as Problematic Popular Culture

Dr. Cathy Waegner

University of Siegen

June 2008

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In 1955, three years after the publication of Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison was asked in an

interview for the Paris Review if he thought his novel would last long in the American

consciousness. “I doubt it.” he answered, “It’s not an important novel. I failed the eloquence,

and many of the immediate issues are rapidly fading away. If it does last, it will be simply

because there are things going on in its depth that are of more permanent interest than on its

surface” (Ellison 175). Some fifty years after this comment, Ellison’s modesty was proven

wrong: Invisible Man is already a novel within the canon of American literature. Certainly, it

achieved this status thanks to the many “things going on in its depth” that not only portray,

present and reflect upon the struggle of the African-American since the time of the

Reconstruction, for Ellison’s novel elevates this struggle to a wider level that pertains to

humanity as a whole. In the present essay I will treat some of the elements which, to my mind,

construct this achievement. First I will consider the variety of discourses, the role of the

picaresque in the novel, and the uses of archetypes –especially its alternate definitions of the

“hero”. Afterwards the novel will be analyzed from a closer perspective, with a special focus

on its placement in history, the usage of emblematic historical characters and styles, and the

symbolic use of black and white throughout the story. With this method one hopes to unearth

some of the overlapping secrets of that subterranean world that makes Ellison’s novel a

masterpiece.

Voices

Our understanding of reality has become more complex and diverse in the last few

centuries and writers have been required to find methods to grasp the essence of this ever-

changing existence. Let us remember that one of the characteristics that make Don Quixote

one of the first modern European novels is its capacity to gather a diversity of discourses, and

since Cervantes’ times, the novel has become the most successful literary agent to describe

existence thanks to this capacity. As Ralph Ellison confesses in his Lecture on Initiation Rites

and Power, during the process of writing Invisible Man he had learned:

...that in such a large and diverse country, with such a complex social structure, a writer was

called upon to conceive some sort of model which would represent that great diversity, to

account for all these people and for the various types of social manners found within various

levels of the social hierarchy, a structure of symbolic actions which could depict the various

relationships between groups and classes of people (328).

Ellison’s musical education would prove to be decisive in the making of this model. As

pointed out in Ralph Ellison, Race and American Culture, Ellison did not perceive a

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degradation of high culture in the uses of the vernacular speech, but saw it as “part of an

ongoing process of self-renewal” (Dickstein 133) similar to the creative processes applied in

jazz. It is well known that Ellison studied music before becoming a writer. And although he

focused on writing symphonies, his admiration for jazz compositions has been expressed

before and after the publication of Invisible Man. I believe that due to his musical instruction

Ellison conceived his story – in an unconscious, analogous way – as jazz jam session which,

under the rules of harmony, rhythm and phrasing, allows every player to display his or her

musical proposal in shorts or long solos.

It suffices to look at the first hundred pages of Ellison’s novel to witness this diversity of

discourse “solos”. The first clearly independent discourse after the prologue is that of the

grandfather who calls for his descendants to “keep up the good fight” in a most strange and

ambiguous way: “I want you to overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree

’em to death and destruction...” (17). The riddling significance of these sentences will follow

the protagonist throughout the story and serve as a leitmotif (in a musical and literary way) to

his quest. On the second chapter, we find the independent discourse of Mr. Norton, who

insists on calling the protagonist “his destiny” (38). Perhaps the first fully developed

discourse found in the novel is that of Trueblood, whose story could be easily taken as an

independent “well phrased” (in a musical matter) tale because its rhythms and style differ

greatly from those of the narrator. Afterwards we find a myriad of not quite developed

discourses in the numerous veterans of the Golden Day, and one almost fully developed from

the “vet” specialist, who later on advises the young protagonist to “come out of the fog...”

(127). But perhaps the second and most fully developed speech in the first part of the novel is

that of Barbee, who tells a mythic version of the Founder’s life-story.

These discourses portray several and differentiated aspects of the African-American

experience in the American South at the time, and upon the protagonist’s arrival in New York

begins another phase of discourse gathering –the examples of which need not necessarily be

cataloged here.

However, Ellison’s method of discourse gathering and portrayal was not limited to a

musical model. It was also greatly influenced by one of Ellison’s “selected” literary ancestors:

Ernest Hemingway. Let us recall that Ellison recognized in Hemingway’s characters many of

the struggles of an – for him – emblematic African-American group:

I believe that Hemingway in depicting the attitudes of athletes, expatriots, bullfighters,

traumatized soldiers, and impotent idealists, told us quite a lot about what was happening to that

most representative group of Negro Americans, the jazz musicians –who also lived by an

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extreme code of withdrawal, technical and artistic excellence, rejection of the values of

respectable society (quoted in O’Meally 154).

Ellison knew that the struggle of the hemingwayesque hero was far deeper than a denial of

many aspects of the American way of life; it went back to the roots and dilemmas of morality

and humanism (a more extended study of this hero in Ellison’s novel is to be treated later). He

also knew and admired Hemingway’s ability to write precisely, to portray lucidly numerous

discourses and operations (like hunting and bull-fighting). Thus, Ellison studied

Hemingway’s style methodically during the last years of the decade of the 1930’s, it being his

objective to achieve the mastery of language required to transmit the message of a third party

clearly in its content and style but unpolluted by unnecessary nuances of its argot1.

The last variety of voices found in the novel has not to do with single characters, but with

its different – and overlapping – levels of intent. For Ellison does not only attempt to grasp

the variety of voices of a cultural group within the American society, but also concentrates on

their struggle for social awareness. Thus he provides a story of a character in search of

identity, a story of apprenticeship with numerous traits of a Bildungsroman (as considered by

Burke in his essay Ralph Ellison’s Trueblooded Bildungsroman). Evidently, the motor

impelling the novel has deep roots in humanism, namely humanity’s search for identity. In an

important passage of the novel, the protagonist remembers – quite emblematically – a class

where James Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man was discussed. The protagonist’s

thoughts could be used here as the central voice of the story:

Stephen’s problem, like ours, was not actually one of creating the uncreated conscience of his

race, but of creating the uncreated features of his face. Our task is that of making ourselves

individuals (286).

Laughter

Many novels try to extract the absurdity of life (or some of life’s situations) and convert

the tragedy of this absurdity into something comical. In a story that deals with such delicate

events as the oppression of a race throughout the centuries, laughter has to be treated

intelligently.

Indeed, after a long and complex process that involved scapegoating, denial and suffering

the African-Americans developed a form of entertainment that became crucial for the

1 A more thorough discussion is presented by O’Meally, who explains how Ellison preferred Hemingway’s method of getting the tone of the character/person instead of his/her dialect, as done in some instances by Richard Wright.

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American culture of the 20th century and a milestone for the creation of Invisible Man – a

form distanced from the stereotyped way in which whites saw in African-Americans simple-

minded entertainers. In a letter to Albert Murray, Ralph Ellison tells how he tried to define his

novel to columnists: “I tell them... that it’s the blues, but nobody seems to understand”

(Callahan 32-33). Defining something as amorphous as the blues is a hard task. However, in

the book The Devil’s Music, which treats the history of the blues, we find a definition of the

bluesman that serves our purpose:

Blind Lemon is almost the archetype of all bluesmen, living the rough life that is grimly

portrayed in his songs, full of fluid images of violence and death, the transience of relationships,

endlessly on the move, but at the same time full of humor and rugged independence (Oakley

128)

Concepts like “rough life”, “violence and death”, “humor” and “independence” are

paradigmatic in Invisible Man, but let’s first concentrate in humor because, interestingly

enough, the blues follow the same strategy of many exemplary novels: they perceive the

tragedy of life, but besides that they also see the humor in life and the humor within the

tragedy.

In his essay The World and the Jug, Ellison declares that “the blues are, perhaps, as close

as Americans can come to expressing the spirit of tragedy” (140). And we have various levels

of tragedy in Ellison’s novel. If these are not clear enough in the protean prologue of Invisible

Man (with its clear reference to the song “What Did I Do to Be so lack and Blue”, to be

treated later) they become real enough in the first chapter, also called The Battle Royal:

Chased by the troubling memory of his grandfather, the nameless protagonist is invited to a

gathering of the town’s leading personalities, which is to be “a triumph for our whole

community” (Ellison 18). Upon his arrival he learns that first he is to take part in a battle

royal. He and nine more adolescents are dressed in fighting shorts and taken to the center of

the hall, where they first witness a strip tease that arouses in the protagonist feelings of shame,

desire and hate. Afterwards they are blindfolded and made to fight one another with clear

threats that if they do not fight, they will be lynched by the audience. At the end of the fight,

the other nine fighters have agreed that the protagonist is to fight alone the strongest

opponent. He is knocked down and a few minutes later he and his companions are to pick up

their prize from an electrified rug. After the fight he is allowed to make his speech, which is

interrupted by his constant swallowing of blood and the steady flow of insults, threats and

indifference from his audience. At the end he is given a prize, a scholarship, which he takes

cheerfully, forgetting all the degradation he has gone through.

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This event triggers the series of incidents and disappointments that the protagonist endures

throughout the story. Many times he will be on the verge of a freeing experience: his story

would have been different had he listened to the advice of the lunatic veteran from the Golden

Day with whom he shared part of the bus ride to New York; or what would have happened

had he accepted the offer to study in Harvard from Mr. Emerson Jr., to whom he gave the last

of the “recommendation” letters? And why, at the beginning of the last part of the novel,

when walking around Harlem speculating at last somewhat clearly about his identity, does he

fall into the final trap of the Brotherhood? It seems that the life history of the protagonist is

full of fatalities, but that in every calamitous situation there is a hidden way out. The weight

of his failure rest solely upon his shoulders, and he must survive all this in order to transcend.

But he is not the sole character in the novel to experience adversity: What will happen to

Trueblood and his family after the (accidental, if we are to believe his story) rape of his

daughter? Will they live happily after that disastrous incident? What about the elderly couple

being evicted at the middle of the story; will they ever be able to live peacefully? What about

brother Clifton, his tragic death and martyrdom: did it bring any good?

But if Invisible Man is defined as “the blues” where is its humorous side? The clearest

representation of this humor is to be found in the last chapter of the novel: Ras the Exhorter,

who represents one variation of African-American leadership, seems to have lost his mind

during the Harlem Riot. From being a supposedly civilized (although certainly violent) human

being, the reader confronts him transformed in some sort of tribal warrior:

Ras the Exhorter (had) become Ras the Destroyer upon a great black horse. A new Ras of

haughty, vulgar dignity, dressed in a costume of an Abyssinian chieftain; a fur cap upon his

head, his arm bearing a shield, a cape made of the skin of some wild animal around his

shoulders. A figure more out of a dream than out of Harlem... (Ellison 447-448).

Minutes later Ras “flung, of all things, a spear” (228) towards the protagonist, and in case

this preposterous behavior is not enough to pull a laugh out of the reader, a few pages later

one finds a long passage in which a few young men advocate the absurd comedy of Ras’

transformation quite convincingly.

Ras, the potential leader of hypnotic speeches, has become an archaic tribal warrior

running amok through the streets of Harlem. His whole discourse of black superiority is

parodied, his voice silenced by the spear that the protagonist throws back at him. After the

long list of fatalities displayed throughout the story and in the midst of the riotous night of the

last chapter, Ellison finds something –although threatening– to laugh about. But most

importantly, this something is part of himself, part of the race he is trying to describe and

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defend, which means that in some way Ellison is able to laugh about himself –and this, after

all, is an inseparable characteristic of the blues.

The Hero

Ralph Ellison mentioned in several of his speeches, interviews and lectures that the first

sentence of Invisible Man came to him while reading Lord Raglan’s The Hero. On his lecture

On Initiation Rites and Power Ellison declared that at the time he was concerned with the

nature of leadership within the African-American community and the lack of suitable

conditions to enforce effective leadership in that particular group (328). Ellison explained that

he had to combine his studies on heroism, his studies of the American novel and his concerns

with the struggle and condition of his people in order to achieve a work that would deliver his

intended message clearly.

Thus, given social circumstances of the protagonist, it is impossible that Ellison’s hero

would arise from a royal family, and it would be unlikely that he would be conceived by a

virgin –these are the first two of a scale of 22 points that Lord Raglan ascribes to the hero-

myth2. However, the protagonist of Invisible Man fulfills many other of Raglan’s points: we

know nothing of his childhood and meet him for the first time at a version of an initiation rite

(The Battle Royal). He lives for a period of time in a foreign country and then is driven away

to make his way towards his “future kingdom”. For a period of time he is able to guide

uneventfully his little realm (endowed by the Brotherhood), but then he loses the “favors of

the gods and/or his people” and is driven from his city to meet “a mysterious death”. And

although his body is not buried he has, in his hole underground, a –parodied– version of a

holy sepulcher. So, it seems, one could use Raglan’s scale to interpret the story of Ellison’s

hero.

However, in order to reach the “things going on in its depths”, Ellison not only used Lord

Raglan’s ideas about heroism, but also the ideas of one of his principal “literary ancestors”.

There is passage in Invisible Man in which a reference to this ancestor is pointed out most

clearly. The protagonist just finished his theoretical education with Brother Hambro and is

taken out for a drink by Brother Jack in a bar called “El Toro Bar”. Brother Jack sits silently

and the protagonist observes a panel in front of him:

…I could see a scene from a bullfight, the bull charging close to the man and the man swinging

the red cape in sculptured folds so close to his body that man and bull seemed to blend in one

swirl of clam, pure motion. Pure grace, I thought, looking above the bar… (289).

2 The full scale is to be found in Annex 1.

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For anyone familiar with American literature of the 20th century the word “grace” in the

context of a bull-fight will inevitably remind of Ernest Hemingway. Let us remember that

Hemingway saw in the matador the pure image of heroism and in the practice of bull-fighting

a ritual of transcendence of death. This typology and its connections with Invisible Man are

studied at length in Robert G. O’Meally’s essay The Rules of Magic, Hemingway as Ellison’s

“Ancestor”. After considering how Ellison studied Hemingway’s style and approach to

description – a study already treated in this essay – O’Meally continues to argue that there are

enough reminders of the bullfight typology in Invisible Man. Of course we have the panels

observed at “El Toro Bar”, but to those we need to add the protagonist’s recalling of a bull

terrier called Master before giving his first speech as a member of the Brotherhood (272-273),

which he instantly compares with Brother Jack, calling him a “toy bull terrier” (273). Also

Ras the Exhorter is called a bull while fighting with Tod Clifton (“Ras rocked like a drunken

bull”, 279). First, O’Meally expounds Hemingway’s views about the beauty in the bravery

and nobility (of character) of bulls and the beauty in the tragedy of his inevitable death. Then

he explains that according to Hemingway “the matador is the prototype of the artist, the

idealized human” (171). He also has bravery and nobility, and most importantly, part of his

instruction consists on being gored at least once: “it is part of their initiation as seasoned

fighters; how one comes back from the injury (tempered and tested or defensive and

cowardly) determines one’s true mettle as a matador” (175).

O’Meally offers clear references that several characters are to be considered bulls to be

fought in the matador-education of the protagonist. He also explains that the principal bull the

protagonist has to fight is history, for his main objective is to achieve recognition from

society. However, O’Meally fails to provide a schematic sketch (a Laufbahn, we might say) of

the protagonist’s education. In this sense, the protagonist has been learning to fight bulls since

the beginning of the story. But ironically, the bull has been playing him and not vice versa. Or

otherwise: maybe, at the beginning he was being the bull the whole time, directed to a certain

death by the spade of the great history-matador.

It is clear that at the beginning of the story Ellison’s protagonist lacks the mysterious and

innate intelligence of the hero. He lacks his own criteria to observe the world around him and

to make decisions accordingly. Thus, he is played by the gentlemen at the Battle Royal, he is

played by Mr. Norton, by Bledsoe and eventually he is to have his ultimate match with Jack

and the Brotherhood. But before this last match is fought, something decisive happens in his

life: he is born again. And although his birth is symbolized by the explosion at the factory, the

moment of his conception happens truly (for he had some premonitions before that) when he

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decides to fight back. His first fight is against Lucius Brockway – a character that by sharing

the same race and history symbolizes part of the protagonist’s personality. Therefore, before

being re-born, he must fight a part of himself. Interestingly enough, Hemingway relegates the

same virtues of grace and bravery to both bull and bull-fighter. In Hemingway’s stories the

bulls are considered friends or brothers by the matadors, also as parts of themselves. Then,

perhaps re-birth of the protagonist is at the same time a metamorphosis and he is no longer a

bull that has to face death at the end of the fight and becomes a matador –or perhaps he

symbolizes both bull and bullfighter simultaneously3. After this re-birth comes a long passage

of nursing and caretaking, and only after that period is the protagonist ready for his last big

fight against Jack and the Brotherhood, the one where he is to receive the horns that will make

him a seasoned matador. Whatever the case might be –if he succeeds in killing the bull or if

he is to meet his tragic end at the arena wounded by the swords of the matadors, because

Ellison does not go that far in his story– the protagonist must eventually learn the primordial

lesson of heroism according to Hemingway: Yes, life is a fight, and a dirty one at times, but

both bull and matador must learn to fight it graciously and courageously. And although

O’Meally did not describe the protagonist’s path as previously done, he comes to a similar

conclusion: “The novel itself is his (the protagonist’s) act of supreme ‘grace under pressure,’

the ultimate Hemingway laurel” (182).

Seen from this point of view, the heroic typology described at the beginning of this section

requires some changes. The protagonist is not driven from his “kingdom” by the Brotherhood

and his people, as happens in points 16 and 17 or Raglan’s scale, and he is not to meet a

mysterious death with an unburied body and a holy sepulcher, as in points 18, 21 and 22.

Alternatively, after the protagonist’s (re-)birth he is to face his first adversary in a fight that

will define his identity. Afterwards there will be an attempt to kill him (point 6) and he will be

“spirited away” (point 7) to spend some time in a distant country (point 8, but without the

foster parents). Upon his manhood he is to return or go to “his future kingdom” (point 10) and

win a battle against a “dragon, giant or wild beast” (point 11). Of course, Ellison presented us

this saga up to Raglan’s 8th point, and at the end of the novel the hero is to re-emerge with full

manhood from his hiding place in the underworld to face life’s vicissitudes again.

If Ellison had portrayed the triumphs of a hero (i.e. from the 8 th point onward) in the

context of the historical circumstances of the African-Americans before, during and after the

3 It is known that Ellison’s symbolism is all but clear, and that is why Morris Dickstein prefers to focus more in the emblematic than in the allegoric aspects of the novel (Dickstein 146). Another example is given again by O’Meally: “Typical of Ellison, no easy equation works here: Jack is fyce, toy bull terrier, bulldog, bull, patron, and slavemaster (and many other things: bear, rabbit, money (“jack”) are just a few)” (173).

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publication of Invisible Man, his message would have been absurd, disorienting and perhaps

even insulting, for nothing of the sort (i.e. the full development of a hero in the cultural

conscience of the African-Americans) had happened yet and one could not know, even know,

what directions history will take. Hence, Ellison’s portrayal of the hero’s struggle is indeed

the best and the most adequate approach to transmit a message of hope and “grace under

pressure” for his people.

Black and Blue

Milan Kundera argues in his book of essays The Curtain that the value of a work of art

depends on its historical positioning. For example, if someone were to compose a majestic

sonata a là Beethoven in the 20th century, he would be perhaps praised as a master in

imitation, but not as great composer (12). “Our consciousness of continuity is so strong” says

Kundera, “that it plays a roll in the apperception of a work of art” (13). Works of art (and

especially novels) arise to the circumstances of an era; they voice the preoccupations, doubts

and weltanschauungs of the people who lived at a certain place in certain period of time.

This is precisely what Ralph Ellison did in Invisible Man. The novel was published at a

time when African-Americans started voicing their yearning for real social equality in the

USA, the time that set the bases for the Civil Rights Movement of the 60’s. Ellison’s novel is

classic in its approach to American tradition (reflected in its style) and prophetic in its

portrayal of potential Black Nationalism. Such a novel would be unthinkable a few decades

before and weak or even unnecessary (in its way to deliver its message) a few decades later.

Part of the greatness of Invisible Man is that it said something that needed to be said about the

American Society at the right moment to the right people – the American people 4. The novel

describes the struggle of the African-Americans in their search for recognition, but most

importantly, in their search of an identity (cultural and individual) after the traumata of

centuries of oppression. The message is clearly the one expressed by the protagonist in a

desperate moment: “Look at me! Look at me!... Everywhere I’ve turned somebody has

wanted to sacrifice me for my good – only they were the ones who benefited” (407).

As discussed before, Ellison paid great attention to the archetype of heroes when writing

Invisible Man. At the beginning and the end of the story, that is, at the prologue and epilogue,

there is a mention of an important figure that could fulfill the role of a hero not only for the

African-American race, but also for Americans in general: that person is Louis Armstrong.

4 In some of his essays of Shadow and Act, like Brave Words for a Startling Occasion, and The World and the Jug, Ellison states repeatedly that his novel was not thought for a white or black audience, nor did it describe a separate part (different, yes, but not isolated) of the American society.

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The protagonist declares in the prologue: “I’d like to hear five recordings of Louis

Armstrong playing and singing ‘What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue’ – all at the same

time.” A few sentences later he says that “Perhaps I like Louis Armstrong because he’s made

poetry out of being invisible. I think it must be because he’s unaware that he is invisible” (11).

The song is mentioned once again in the prologue and Louis is mentioned again in one of the

last paragraphs of the epilogue. If one considers Armstrong’s figure from our historical

perspective, these few mentions constitute more than a simple cameo appearance in a book

longer than four hundred pages.

Perhaps the central question would be if Armstrong was really “unaware that he is

invisible”, if he realized he was not being seen as a human being, his identity denied. After

reviewing Armstrong’s life’s story, one could come to conclusion that Armstrong was beyond

that question. Abbi Hübner describes in his biography Louis Armstrong: Sein Leben, Seine

Musik, Seine Schallplatten that since his childhood, Armstrong was able to win allies through

his charisma (95). His charisma was so strong throughout his life that he continued to win

allies, friends and protectors of all races and nationalities until his old age. However, this is

just a secondary reason; the main reason why Armstrong was beyond the question of race is

because he saw himself first as a musician, and then as a human being – and this statement

goes beyond quotations of him, like “first comes my music, then my trumpet, and then,

afterwards, my wife” (Hübner 102)5.

The most important thing in Armstrong’s life was to be able to play his music, and in doing

so, national borders or racial prejudices did not play an important role. He could play a “gig”

in a dangerous honky-tonk as much as in the Carnegie Hall; he toured several times in the

South of the United States in a time when it was impossible for a colored man to sleep in any

hotel in any given city. He also toured in Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia and received the

name of “Ambassador Satch” because after the Second World War he was seen as a promoter

of the American culture overseas. Furthermore, he was one of the only jazz musicians who

managed to continue working as such during the recession of the 30’s, and he continued to

play until his death in 1971 in spite of sickness and old age. Music was the dynamo that kept

him alive, and that, perhaps, is something that the protagonist of Invisible Man could not

understand.

Hübner mentions that Armstrong remained apolitical until 1957, when he uttered his

disagreement with the events taking place in Little Rock, Arkansas (91). But by this time

Armstrong was at the peak of his fame, his music was known and appraised worldwide and he

5 „Zuerst kommt meiner Musik, meine Trompete und dann erst meine Frau“ cited by Hübner from Max Jones and John Chilton The Louis Armstrong Story (1971).

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was one of the American figures who enjoyed the greatest international recognition. How

could it be possible that an African-American, a person of a group that suffered a centuries-

long lack of recognition of his humanity, could achieve all these? His career started in one of

the poorest black neighborhoods of New Orleans and by the decade of the 1940’s he had

appeared in several movies, recorded numerous successful platters, and toured across the

United States and other countries. The fact that an African-American was able to achieve all

this in a time when “Jim Crow” laws were still in usage in the South of the USA is a strong

enough reason to raise Armstrong to the stature of a hero for his race –and it was surely

enough a heroic figure for Ellison, for he earned a place in his novel among with other

important –and sometimes controversial– figures in the African-American history like

Frederick Douglas and Booker T. Washington.

Nevertheless, the fact that Armstrong enjoyed such fame and recognition did not lessen his

awareness of the problems raised by his race. This is more conclusive in his letters, many of

which were assembled together and edited by Thomas Brothers in Louis Armstrong, In His

Own Words. This book contains interesting pieces like “Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family

in New Orleans, LA., the Year of 1907”, in which Armstrong displays his early awareness of

discrimination (suffered not only by himself but also by the Karnofskys, the Jewish family he

worked for during his childhood) and other interesting pieces like “The Armstrong Story”,

that Armstrong planned to be the second part of this autobiography Satchmo: My Life in New

Orleans. But perhaps the most interesting and kaleidoscopic piece in the book is a letter that

Armstrong wrote to his manager Joe Glaser. After a long introduction where Armstrong

shows some of his views about women he suddenly changes the topic to present the real

reason of his letter. He tells Glaser that an old friend of him, “Black Benny”, gave him once

two very useful pieces of advice, and the second one was:

Something else Black Benny said to me, came true—He said (to me) “Dipper, As long as you

live, no matter where you may be—always have a White Man (who likes you) and can + will

put his Hand on your shoulder and say—“This is “My” Nigger” and, Can’t Nobody Harm’ Ya6

(160)

What could he mean with this statement? Was he acknowledging his inferiority in

comparison to Glaser? Was he showing an accomodationist view of life? Is he accepting a

sense of invisibility? Actually, what he is doing is playing a game of masks. He is saying, in

his very personal way, that he is thankful for all the help that Glaser provided him; but

Armstrong also uses this anecdote in the letter as the starting point of a subtle game of

6 Punctuation by Armstrong.

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persuasion (one might even say of coercion) in which he wants to make it clear to Glaser that

he must fulfill all his requirements (especially several bills he has to pay, some of them to

“Sweethearts” and friends) while he is touring in Australia and Europe. Armstrong is

imposing his will in this letter, not submitting to a greater force. He could and did fire other

managers in other occasions, for example in 1957, two years after the letter in question was

written, when his tour manager tried to sweeten Armstrong’s harsh commentaries about the

events in Little Rock. In an unprecedented matter of speech for someone of his race,

Armstrong told the media the following:

Mein Manager hat nur für sich selbst gesprochen. Meine Leute, die Farbigen, wollen ja gar

nichts Besonderes, nur eine faire Behandlung. Aber wenn ich im Fernsehen sehe und außerdem

lesen muss, wie eine Meute in Arkansas ein kleines farbiges Mädchen bespickt, glaube ich ein

Recht zu haben, wütend zu werden. Wollt ihr mir wirklich widersprechen, wenn ich immer noch

sage, ich habe ein Recht, mich über Ungerechtigkeit zu beschweren? (Hübner 92).

When talking about Arkansas Armstrong was referring to the incident in the city of Little

Rock that would be later known as the “Little Rock Crisis”, in which nine African-American

students were denied the entry to Little Rock Central High School by troops deployed by the

Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus. Hübner tells how for the first time in the history of the

USA an African-American was able to call a governor an “uneducated bumpkin” (92), and

threatened Eisenhower’s government to cancel a planned tour through the Soviet Union (92).

Twelve years later Armstrong wrote:

Ich finde, ich habe immer viel getan, um meine Rasse moralisch aufzurüsten, aber das hat man

nicht anerkannt. Ich bin nur ein Musiker und erinnere mich noch an die Zeit, als ich als

amerikanischer Bürger für mein Volk bei einem Aufstand zur Integration kein Blatt vor den

Mund genommen habe – war es Little Rock? Ich habe Eisenhower geschrieben. Der erste

Kommentar kam von einem Negerjungen aus New Orleans, als wir in einem Restaurant saßen.

Nachdem er gelesen hatte, was ich in den Zeitungen über den Handel von Little Rock

geschrieben hatte, kam er an unseren Tisch, sah mir direkt in die Augen, und sagte: ‚Nigger, Du

hörst besser damit auf, über die Weißen zu reden, wie Du es getan hast!’ Hmmm. Ich habe

versucht, den unnötigen Schlägereien ein Ende zu setzen, das ist alles“ (Hübner 93-94).

In the next few years Armstrong was criticized by the new generation of musicians,

including Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis, of being an “Uncle Tom” or “plantation” figure

(Hübner 94). For them, Armstrong’s smirk was a fake, a way of searching recognition in the

white audience. But other musicians who played with him, like Barney Bigard, knew that this

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was simply his character: “Er gab sich immer so, wie er wirklich war” (Hübner 95). And even

Davis and Gillespie retracted from their wrong opinions many years later (Hübner 94-95).

But again, Armstrong’s heroism is not wholly based on his political views in his late

career. His importance for his race and for the American people was achieved through his art.

And exactly this is what Ellison admires of a figure like Armstrong. In the introduction for his

book Shadow and Act Ellison remembers what kind of role model was crucial for his

education:

We hear the effects of this (the potential grow of the imagination and curiosity in the sensitive

youth that shared his conditions and location) in the southwestern jazz of the thirties, that joint

creation of artistically free and exuberantly creative adventurers, 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 won unconscious way have set an example for any

Americans, Negro or white, who would find themselves in the arts. They accepted themselves

and the complexity of life as they knew it, they loved their art and through it they celebrated

American experience definitively in sound (Ellison xiv).

No other paragraph could describe better the role that Armstrong, that “creative

adventurer”, played in the recognition of Ellison’s (and the African-American race at the

time) own identity. With innovative changes in musical patterns such as the shift of focusing

from collective playing to solo-playing, to creative discoveries like the “scat” singing,

Armstrong demonstrated that there was a way to find freedom (a freedom that could articulate

the struggle suffered by his people) in artistic expression. And without this acknowledgement

the young Ellison would have never thought it possible to become a writer who could treat the

problems of his race and its specific human situation.

There is another aspect where Ellison brings the struggle of his race nearer to a more

human or archetypical level: the treatment of the dualism of white and black, as seen in the

West as an analogy of good and evil respectively. Of course, as observed by O’Meally, there

is no “easy equation” (173) in Ellison’s metaphors. His treatment of white and black is varied,

sometimes with a clear significance, sometimes not.

Let us take a look at the first appearance of these two entities in Invisible Man. They occur

at the very first page, when the protagonist “bumped into a man, and perhaps because of the

near darkness he saw me and called me an insulting name” (7). Later we learn that the man

was a “tall blond man” (7) with blue eyes. The protagonist beat him to the floor and is ready

to cut his throat. He is standing “right there beneath the lamplight in the deserted street” (8)

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and thinks that the man has not seen him, therefore he decides to let him live and before

leaving him, he stares at him once again “hard as the lights of a car stabbed through the

darkness” (8). What is the meaning of darkness and light in this very first passage? It is due to

the darkness that the protagonist is insulted at the beginning. The man is blond, or a light

complexion, and he is to be killed underneath a light. But also, as he stares at him for one last

time, he does it as the light do when lighting him in the darkness. There seems to be a struggle

here between black and white, and it is certain that the darkness (i.e., the protagonist) is able

to see through the eyes of lightness. But is the man able to take the form of his opposite color,

to see through other eyes? Let us remember that the man has blue eyes, and that color has a

specific meaning in the symbolism of Invisible Man. Blue is the outspoken cry of the

protagonist through the novel, for he is “Black and Blue”. Hence, the eyes of the man, which

are also blue, tell us that there is a certain tragedy in his own being, a certain cry yearning to

come out. Perhaps this cry, this tragedy, is the fact that he is unable to see the protagonist, to

recognize him as a fellow human being.

The last was, however, one of several potential interpretations of the first appearance of the

white and black dualism throughout the novel. I’m certain that Ellison did not intend to

present a clear symbolism in his novel; since human experience is ambiguous his novel

required greater depth, the symbols not as clear as the difference between black and white.

There are other passages that represent this ambiguity well. The first one occurs in the first

chapter, the Battle Royal, as the protagonist stands next to the other nine adolescents to

witness the strip tease of the blond girl. Interestingly enough, he first at first uncontrollably

attracted and seconds later feels a “desire to spit upon her”:

I wanted at one and the same time to… go to her and cover her from my eyes and the eyes of

the others with my body; to feel the soft thighs, to caress her and destroy her, to love her and

murder her, to hide from her, and yet to stroke where below the small American flag tattooed

upon her belly her thighs formed a capital V (20).

Towards the end of the novel, the protagonist finds himself once more in the closeness of

another woman who represents lightness: Sybil. Again, his feelings are mixed, for he wants to

“smash her and… stay with her” (335) at the same time. Regardless of what she sees in him or

what he really is or vice versa, Sybil is undoubtedly attracted to the protagonist –and the

attraction is reciprocal. Why does the protagonist of the novel feel desire and repulsion

towards his contrary simultaneously? Is it a similar sentiment as that felt by Sybil, who asks

the protagonist to rape her? Does she want to unite those two obscure and antagonistic

experiences of desire and repulsion caused by the strangeness of the opposite? The fact that

15


one or more characters in the book feel this way strengthens the signification that symbols

(and especially the symbolic meaning in the dualism of black and white) may produce in

different people different or varied meanings, which is to say, with other words, that not

everything is simply “black” or “white”. Furthermore, being desire and repulsion almost two

opposite sides of one coin, the fact that the character is able to feel them both simultaneously

means that there might be some repulsion in desire or some desire in repulsion (a thesis that

many a psychologist would support) just as there might be some black (in a symbolic sense)

in white, and some white in black.

Conclusion

In a podium discussion printed afterwards under the name Creative Writing: Can it/Should

it be Taught? The British author and literary critic David Lodge argues that pieces of fiction

written by a beginner appeal only to the interest of those who know the writer personally and

thus can understand or identify themselves with his or her topic (177). On the other hand,

Milan Kundera states that novels know no national boundaries, that in this sense national

literatures are an unnecessary invention –Rabelais, a Frenchman, was better understood by a

Russian, Bakhtin; Dostoyevsky was best understood by Gide; Ibsen by an Irishman, G.B.

Schaw, etc. (Kundera 52-54). Indeed, good literature is that which possesses obscure

dimensions in its depths that connect with general concepts, archetypes and problems of

humanity. These are the factors that ensure the endurance of a work of art in the

consciousness of the people.

As seen so far, Invisible Man is an attempt to portray a particular reality within a whole –

the American society–, and by doing so, it provides a new facet to basic archetypes as that of

the hero and finally, it supplies a story that could be interpreted as the search of the individual

for his identity –all these objectives treated simultaneously. With all these strategies Ellison

endeavours to elevate his personal tale to more substantial height, to a language to be

understood not only by the few that know the struggle of his people personally, or for

Americans only, but by all humans alike. The magnitude of his message is not to be filtered

by its geographic origin; it is to be seen from a humanistic, transcendent point of view. Ellison

leaves his story in a moment in which one expects his protagonist to rise from his hole and

face the world. If he is to be a hero, according to Raglan’s scale, he is to fall and be barred

from his city and his sons denied their heritage. Nonetheless he is to fight for recognition, for

the perspective of a third party is necessary for the creation of an identity. Ellison’s

protagonist is to fight an uncertain battle in which his enemies change their features from one

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moment to the other, confusing him –they even dwell inside him. But at least he will fight

with “grace under pressure”, bringing nobility and a significance achieved through beauty to

his adventure. His path is tragic –as all paths destined to the unknown pasturelands of death

and extinction seem for us–, but now that he has understood who he is and has an idea of what

he wants he will walk his path honorably. The novelist and essayist Milan Kundera seems to

have understood something of the nature of the novel: “Human life as such is a defeat. All we

can do in the face of that ineluctable defeat called life is to try to understand it. That is the

raison d’être of the art of the novel” (20). In his Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison seems to have

understood this as well.

Works cited

Armstrong, Louis: “Letter to Joe Glaser”. Brothers, Thomas: Louis Armstrong, In His Own

Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. 158-163.

Callahan, John F: “Introduction”. Callahan, John F.: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: A

Casebook., ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. 3-19.

Dickstein, Morris: “Ralph Ellison, Race, and American Culture”. Callahan, John F.: Ralph

Ellison’s Invisible Man: A Casebook., ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. 125-

148.

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Ellison, Ralph: “Introduction”. Shadow and Act. New York: Random House, 1964. xi-xxiii.

--: “Lecture on Initiation Rites and Power: A Lecture at West Point”. Callahan, John F.: Ralph

Ellison’s Invisible Man: A Casebook., ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. 323-

343.

--: “The Art of Fiction: An Interview”. Shadow and Act. New York: Random House, 1964.

167-183.

--: “The World and the Jug”. Shadow and Act. New York: Random House, 1964. 107-143.

--: Invisible Man. New York: Penguin Books: 1952.

Hübner, Abbi: Louis Armstrong: Sein Leben, Seine Musik, Seine Schallplatten. Waakirchen:

Oreos, 1994.

Kundera, Milan: Der Vorhang. München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2005.

Lodge, David: “Creative Writing: Can it/Should it be Taught?”. Lodge, David: The Practice

of Writing. London: Secker and Warburg, 1996. 170-178.

O’Meally, Robert G.: “The Rules of Magic: Hemingway as Ellison’s ‘Ancestor’”. Callahan,

John F.: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: A Casebook., ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2004. 149-188.

Oakley, Giles: The Devil’s Music: A History of the Blues. New York, London: Harcourt Brace

Jovanovich, 1978.

Annex 1: Lord Raglan’s scale

1. The hero's mother is a royal virgin

2. His father is a king and

3. often a near relative of the mother, but

4. the circumstances of his conception are unusual, and

5. he is also reputed to be the son of a god

6. at birth an attempt is made, usually by his father or maternal grandfather, to kill

him, but

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7. He is spirited away, and

8. Reared by foster-parents in a far country

9. We are told nothing of his childhood, but

10. On reaching manhood he returns or goes to his future kingdom.

11. After a victory over the king and or giant, dragon, or wild beast

12. He marries a princess, often the daughter of his predecessor and

13. becomes king

14. For a time he reigns uneventfully and

15. Prescribes laws but

16. later loses favor with the gods and or his people and

17. Is driven from from the throne and the city after which

18. He meets with a mysterious death

19. Often at the top of a hill.

20. His children, if any, do not succeed him.

21. His body is not buried, but nevertheless

22. He has one or more holy sepulchres.

Source: Lord Raglan’s scale: http://www.tam-lin.org/abby/raglan.html

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The Numerous Depths of Invisible Man

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