Ellison, Ralph - The Invisible Man
1. Background
background of author: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/ellison_r_timeline_flash.html
1914-1994; studied trumpet and piano as Tuskegee; published one novel and many essays on jazz; won the National Book Award.
status of novel: 20th century work of genius
General trajectory: bildungsroman, the real and psychological journey from rural south, to a historically black college as scholarship student, to New York factory work, political involvement and disenchantment, to "hibernation" under ground.
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2. Race in America: W.E. B. DuBois
"Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line." (W. E. B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folks)
coming to awareness of self as an unavoidably racial subject-- a rite of passage for Fredrick Douglas, Booker T. Washington, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, Barak Obama
Stephen Colbert: "I don't see race"
DuBois: "double-consciousness"
Selections from the Novel (1952/3);
chapter 1 published as a short story in 1947
http://www.popartuk.com/g/l/lg86383-6+invisible-man-ranph-ellison-poster.jpg
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Rhapsody in Black and Blue, Armstrong 1932: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3CcAD_seww
* West End Blues, Armstrong 1952 (transcription and slides: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5Hbh_-IRs8
* PBS: On West End Blues: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxQGSmi5O6s
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3. Prologue
dramatization: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cctjuE95VA&feature=related
How does the narrator describe his invisibility? (385-6/3-4)
What is the symbolic power of his battle with "Monopolated Light and Power"? (6-)
Armstrong, "What Did I do to Be so Black and Blue"
jazz / blues as source of vision, act of resistance
the song
the discourse on time and rhythm
Descent into Hell - the dream vision - allegory / Dante
orality / sermon on "blackness of blackness"
dialogue with the mother, singer of spirituals
Music / Writing / Enlightenment
- through music, and the compulsion towards some revelatory truth about self and world
- to see music, to hear, to "make a music of invisibility" by "put[ing] invisiblity dwn in black and white" (by writing) (13)
http://www.chgs.umn.edu/histories/otherness/images/dancingsamboA.jpg
Little Black Sambo, Helen Bannerman. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17824/17824-h/17824-h.htm
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4. Chapter 1 -
"Battle Royal" (published as a short story in 1947)
PBS Dramatization http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=defTU3_2yrA
narrator's acknowledgement of past shame (15); separate but equal
Puzzle of the grandfather's deathbed message, and its "danger" (16) - confusion for N.
N's success and graduation speech about humility as the secret to progress
"Bring up the shines, gentlemen" (18)
discuss the spectacle and the distress, confusion of it as entertainment: why are they conflicted, crying, trembling? (20-21)
Explain the narrator's desire to speak, to be judged a good speaker - and the twisted irony of it (25)
The speech - (29)
its accommodationist theme of "cast down your buckets where you are"
the mistake of mentioning "equality
Final praise and the "prophetic dream" of his grandfather (33)
Concluding paragraphs of Invisible Man
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http://audibleword.net/upload/Armstrong-BlackAndBlue.mp3
What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue
Cold, empty bed, Springs hard as lead,
Feel like old Ned, Wish
I were dead
All my life through, I been so Black and Blue
Even the mouse ran from my house,
They
laugh at you, and Scorn you too
What did I do, to be so Black And Blue?
I'm white inside, But that don't help my case
'Cause I can't
hide, what is in my face, oh!
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?
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
Alternate, longer version with discography.
Dubois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folks (1903). from Chapter One: Our Spiritual Strivings
Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word. 1
And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,--peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe. It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the revelation first bursts upon one, all in a day, as it were. I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys' and girls' heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards--ten cents a package--and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card,--refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. . . . That sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the worlds I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine. But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them. Just how I would do it I could never decide: by reading law, by healing the sick, by telling the wonderful tales that swam in my head,--some way. With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.
After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,--a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,--this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. . . . He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face. . . . This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius. . . .
