Harlem Duet: Singing past ambivalence in Ellison's 'Invisible Man'
In Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, we journey with a nameless narrator who moves through a world that sees only shadows of his being—a world blind to the depth of his humanity. This novel does more than tell a story; it lays bare the complex, sometimes brutal fabric of a society unwilling to recognize the fullness of those it pushes to the margins. With each page, Ellison draws us into a search not only for identity but for a place where one’s existence is honoured, seen, and heard. In a voice both poetic and searing, he invites us to confront the illusions that blur our perception, challenging us to see beyond surfaces to the essential truths we often choose to ignore.
Yet, in the spaces of this novel, we encounter a language that can only be spoken by those who, like the narrator, move unseen and unacknowledged through the world. This is a language that resides in the non-linguistic; it takes shape in the quiet resistance of music of those who are seldom given the power to speak. This language does not merely adopt the confines of invisibility—it is born of it, it echoes the hidden knowledge held by those who have been forced to see without being seen, to navigate an existence that others have refused to acknowledge.
Only those with lived experience, who know the silence of oppression, can fully inhabit this language. They are fluent in the vocabulary of resilience, of survival against the grain, of finding meaning within erasure. For readers, Invisible Man becomes a portal not only into a world of injustice but into a rarefied space where sound becomes a means of reclamation—a way for those deemed invisible to make themselves unmistakably heard. Ellison’s work calls us to listen, to learn, and to ask what we might see if we dared to confront the invisible around us.
About The Invisible Man
Published in 1952, Invisible Man emerged in a period of intense social and racial tensions in America. Ellison crafted the novel during a time when African American voices were still struggling to find representation in a society marked by segregation and deep-seated prejudice. Ellison’s work arrived as both a narrative and a philosophical inquiry, one that dared to delve into the psyche of a Black man navigating a nation that rendered him unseen. In a literary landscape often hesitant to confront racial complexities, Invisible Man was revolutionary in its depth, using modernist techniques, jazz-like rhythms, and a powerful first-person perspective to illuminate the inner life of its protagonist.
Ralph Ellison himself was a complex figure, deeply influenced by his own experiences in America as well as by his literary predecessors. He studied music before turning to literature, and his love for jazz profoundly shaped his writing style, imbuing it with a fluidity and depth that mirrored the improvisational qualities of the genre. Ellison was also heavily inspired by existentialist writers and philosophers like Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard, bringing their influence into his exploration of identity, freedom, and self-definition. By weaving these elements together, Ellison created a novel that defied categorization, offering not only a powerful commentary on race but also a universal meditation on the human struggle for recognition and meaning.
Invisible Man was, and remains, a literary milestone—a novel that speaks to its time yet resonates far beyond it, challenging readers to consider the ways in which society defines and limits the individual. In examining Ellison’s work, we are invited to see how his life, his history, and his intellectual influences combined to create a novel that gives voice to the silent, that embodies a language born of invisibility, and that confronts us with our own blind spots in the search for justice and understanding.
The Unspeakable Speech
During a funeral scene that marks an important moment of transition in the novel, Ellison’s unnamed protagonist, forever the observer if never a wallflower, describes a moment of profound shift in the crowd:
Something deep had shaken the crowd, and the old man and the man with the horn had done it. They had touched upon something deeper than protest, or religion, though now images of all the church meetings of my life welled up within me with much suppressed and forgotten anger. But that was past, and too many of those now reaching the top of the mountain and spreading massed together had never shared it, and some had been born in other lands. And yet all were touched; the song had aroused us all. It was not the words, though he’d changed the emotion beneath the words while yet the old longing, resigned, transcendent emotion still sounded above, now deepened by that something of which the theory of Brotherhood had given me no name. (453)
I have a lot of thoughts about the symbolic relevance of music as an alternate mode of communication beyond this small reminder that, in my reading, Ellison positions music as a non-lingual language native to otherness. This is a language that resides in the invisible; only those who have the lived experience of the many of the oppressed characters in Ellison’s work have learned to speak.
In this excerpt, however, something is indeed transcendent. The sound of music is, in this moment, available and comprehensible to everyone. It is “deeper than protest, or religion,” with the power to evoke imagery rather than hide beneath it. It appeals to memory, creating a nostalgic sensory field that spans both sound and vision. Ellison has generally, to this point, put the agency of senses in the thematically dominant visual field. In this moment, however, sound has the power here. And what a sound it is.
The previous page describes a euphonium horn singing in duet with an old man. The euphonium is a deep baritone brass instrument revered for its rich, mellow, full-bodied tones. It is rarely found in orchestral contexts and is best suited to solo repertoire. As such, the euphonium is not only appropriate in the context the narrativized arrangement suggests, but it is also a symbolic embodiment of the non-verbal qualities of music that preoccupy the novel’s musical motif – the blues, the slave songs, and the sadness they embody. The duet – the sung lyric and the euphonium—combine to communicate emotionally across a sonic spectrum that spans the breadth of the communicational modes Ellison wields throughout his novel. The verbal and the musical exist, for this rarified moment, not in hierarchy but in harmony. “The song had around us all,” the protagonist says. Not in the tired “slave-borne” words, but in transcendent emotion that no political theory or traditional song can conjure alone.
All this in a work heavily characterized by its narrator’s ambivalence: the collisions of race and gender, the promises of possibility met with limitations and obfuscation; all its noisiness, rage, and frustrated attempts at ambition or justice. This moment, shining yet buried in the core of the work, demonstrates the potential for healing in its overwhelming sadness. Two baritones singing, in the lower frequencies, speaking for all. Just this once. Just before the novel burns its world to the ground. Boo’tiful.
A Taste
Though the Euphonium shares some similarities with the Baritone, it possesses a unique tonal richness that sets it apart—an almost haunting warmth that must be heard to be truly appreciated. In the context of Ellison’s work, this instrument’s deep, resonant voice adds a layer of complexity and depth to the scene, perfectly complementing the themes of invisibility and identity. To help you better understand the role of the Euphonium in this moment, here’s a performance clip. I hope this gives you a sense of how Ellison’s imagined duet might have sounded, carrying with it both the subtlety and power that the music—and the narrative—demand.
Happy reading.
smd.