Eloquence and Invisible Man

"It is the doctrine of the popular music-masters that whoever can speak can sing"-or so Emerson opens his essay "Eloquence," included in the 1870 volume Society and Solitude. As Emerson describes it near the end of his career as an orator, verbal eloquence becomes a form of musical expression, not only inasmuch as both share the formal elements of pitch, rhythm, and meter, but also to the extent that both make "instruments" of their audience. Hence, "Him we call an artist who can play on an assembly of men as a master on the keys of the piano,-who, seeing the people furious, shall soften and compose them, shall draw them, when he will, to laughter and to tears" (1903-04, 7. 65). The Emersonian speaker is a "master" of men, an Orphic wordsmith who "will have them pleased and humored as he chooses." But eloquence is for him no mere art of domination, the art of propaganda Emerson keeps in mind as he paraphrases Plato's definition of rhetoric: "the art of ruling the minds of men" (7. 64). The symphonic and harmonic dimensions of eloquence suffuse Emerson's essay of 1870, so that when he describes the eloquent speaker's art as that of "compos[ing]""the people," he does not primarily point toward the power of the -word to dominate and control un-self-reliant minds. Composing the people may involve calming them, as it did for Emerson during the opening moments of the Civil War and later, after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, but it also means constituting them as a group, composing them as a "social organism." But more so than either of these, Emerson thinks of eloquent composition as a process of musical collaboration that draws upon, channels, provides a conduit for energies already in circulation among "the people." "Of all the musical instruments on which men play," Emerson explains, "a popular assembly is that which has the largest compass and variety, and out of which, by genius and study, the most wonderful effects can be drawn." This is because "An audience is not a simple addition of the individuals that compose it. Their sympathy gives them a certain social organism, which fills each member, in his own degree, and most of all the orator, as ajar in a battery is charged with the whole electricity of the battery. No one can survey the face of an excited assembly, without being apprised of new opportunity for painting in fire human thought, and being agitated to agitate" (1903-04, 7. 62-63).Emerson's model of spoken composition, proceeding from the recognition that every listener is also a potential speaker ("How many orators sit mute there below!" [1903-04, 7. 63]), also captures the most charged moments of eloquence to appear in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, a novel that measures the self-reliance of its nameless protagonist through his growing acumen as a public speaker. Midway through the novel, Ellison's narrator stands before a massive audience after his initiation into the political organization called the Brotherhood, observing that "The audience seemed to have become one, its breathing and articulation synchronized" much like the "social organism" or "battery" to which the Emersonian speaker both addresses and connects himself. The Brotherhood has hired Ellison's protagonist as a political agitator, but having achieved only measured success with past public speeches, he now approaches his first large audience with trepidation. Fumbling at the lectern and blinded by the spotlight, he makes an awkward beginning:The microphone was strange and unnerving. I approached it incorrectly, my voice sounding raspy and full of air, and after a few words I halted, embarrassed. I was getting off to a bad start, something had to be done. I leaned toward the vague audience closest to the platform and said, "Sorry, folks. Up to now they've kept me so far away from these shiny electric gadgets I haven't learned the technique. . . . And to tell you the truth, it looks to me like it might bite! Just look at it, it looks like the steel skull of a man! …