Teaching (and Being Taught By) Invisible Man
I’ve illuminated the blackness of my invisibility—and vice versa. And so I play the invisible music of my isolation. The last statement doesn’t seem just right, does it? But it is; you hear music simply because music is heard and seldom seen, except by musicians. Could this compulsion to put invisibility down in black and white be thus an urge to make music of invisibility? –Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Last fall, I was nervous about teaching Invisible Man for the first time. Who wouldn’t be? You carefully carve out one week, preferably two, on your ordered and symmetrical syllabus, the syllabus that looks up at you in July and says, yes dear, the pieces will simply fit and this is how when in fact you know that the syllabus is a fair-weather friend who supports you in general, but when things go off the rails tends to simply shrug and look away, whistling as if it has nothing to do with it. So you march into class clutching your syllabus and your discussion plans, and then you see your actual students and hear their actual responses and it all loosens up into an appropriately unpredictable ten-week adventure. So it was with my University of Chicago undergraduate literature seminar last fall, “American Literature and American Segregation.”
So when Drew Dir emailed mid-quarter to invite us to Court Theatre’s upcoming read-through of Ellison’s Invisible Man, I was grateful for a number of reasons—the least scholarly one being that I figured that the week carved out for Invisible Man was bound to get “massaged” anyway, so we may as well head that off at the pass. I polled the small class and after some back and forth made a graceful switcheroo of the syllabus so that the students could, in an ideal world, read the novel over the weekend before the Monday evening performance. We would meet as a class to discuss novel and performance at our regular time the following day. And of course, ever-conscious of my own memories of being a student, I promised them a small reward if they showed up (one less reading-response assignment over the course of the quarter). As for my non-pedagogical self, I was curious about this unprecedented event—how would it feel to see this novel approaching the stage? To suddenly “see” Invisible himself? I admit that I wondered: would this work? Or, more to the point: what work would this do?
As predicted, after seeing the read-through our original course syllabus went officially out the proverbial window: we subsequently ended up spending a little over two weeks with the novel, our discussion growing richer and more provocative with each meeting. I realized that an entire course in literary and American history could be built around the book, and that such a course could be a deeply experiential exercise in reading American history from approximately 1845 to 1952. I also realized that hearing talented voices narrating the story affected the students’ experience of the novel in ways that I could not have anticipated, and that, even more unexpectedly, being confronted with the all but empty stage behind the actors fired a few students’ imaginations in quite powerful ways.
We met as a class the following day with the express purpose of discussing how the read-through changed or affected our reading of the novel, since almost the whole class showed up for it. I expected the bulk of the students’ comments and reactions to be centered around assessing the actors’ performances, and on the writer’s inclusion choices—e.g., was Invisible’s presence and intonation worthy of how he spoke in our imaginations? Did Trueblood emerge as equal parts captivating, horrifying, and sympathetic as he should have been? Would we have liked to see more time spent with, for example, the yam scene? the eviction? Mary? Etc. After all, the read-through was admittedly quite long, and the stage quite sparse: actors seated in a row in folding chairs, dressed in their own clothes with scripts in hand and almost all voicing multiple characters, with an indistinct stage scene in half-darkness behind them. The script moved through the novel with a fidelity to Ellison’s prose and plotting that was admirable and at times electrifying, hardly leaving anything out.
I walked into class the following day expecting to talk primarily about dimensions and dynamics of voice—a discussion that would resonate with one of the novel’s most important themes—and principles of selection one might consider when adapting a story from a novel to the stage. What else was there to discuss? As one who has ever been a teacher might predict, what there was to discuss, it turned out, was pretty much anything but that which I anticipated. Under normal circumstances I would have worked my own questions into the discussion anyway, with a crowbar if I had to. That is, after all, what I am paid to do. In this case, however, I quickly and humbly realized that their responses to the read-through were far more interesting than my class prep.
Instead of analyzing what happened on the stage, my students were far more interested in discussing all that could have been on it. One strong response, for example, earned immediate group agreement and struck me as particularly poignant: a desire to see the briefcase. The list continued, with a level of engagement that I had not seen thus far in the quarter: the light bulbs. The sloe gin fizz. The Optic White paint. The evicted couple’s artifacts tossed onto the street. And even the Battle Royale. In fact, poetically enough, the students’ suppressed desire to see Ellison’s story seemed to be the primary response elicited by the read-through, a desire to see the elaborate and relentless architecture that accumulates with every chapter, every page. The discussion then turned to an energetic one regarding how these scenes could possibly be staged—some of the ideas for evoking an off-the-grid underground bunker lit with 1,369 light bulbs were astonishingly creative, if somewhat dangerous and almost certainly illegal.
In general, therefore, the read-through elicited and stimulated the students’ unfulfilled desire to see Ellison’s Invisible Man; but in one important way the performance had the opposite effect. The group generally agreed that it did not like seeing Invisible himself. Hearing his voice was right, but seeing that voice issuing from a body at all times during the read-through profoundly disrupted something for them in the telling. This led to a discussion of the paradoxical dynamic inherent to the social, personal, and national experiences of seeing and being seen, and the power lost and gained in the balances of visibility and invisibility—categories of knowing and feeling that Ellison proves as key for not only consciousness and personhood, but for democracy as well.
The most sensitive and thoughtful student response to the read-through addressed precisely these dynamics, and addressed another missing element in a way that surprised and delighted me. Posting to the course website the evening of the read-through, this student wrote a response with this essay’s epigraph as its point of departure:
Watching the reading tonight, it struck me that perhaps the biggest challenge in adapting this text for a theatrical format is that of grappling with the duality of the Invisible Man’s voice—he is both acting in the moment of the scene, and also narrating outside of it. How would you do this on stage? Would the actor speak his dialogue and then step away every few moments to address the audience directly? This method works in, say, Shakespeare’s comedies, but I’m not sure it would be effective here; first because I think too much narration takes away from the freedom the audience has to interpret as we like and the satisfaction that comes from figuring these things out ourselves, and second because it throws off the rhythm that is, I think, a desperately important component of the novel.
And so I got to thinking about how an actor/director/playwright could make manifest the narrator’s internal struggles and epiphanies using little or no text at all, which got me to thinking about tangible symbols of the narrator’s journey towards accepting invisibility, which led me immediately to music. Both in the conventional sense and simply in terms of rhythm and sound, music plays a prominent role throughout the narrative, often cropping up in the moments of deepest turmoil or clearest revelation. This passage from the prologue illustrates (with such beauty, I think) the narrator’s relationship with music—it is an intangible thing made tangible (he wants to feel the music vibrate, not just hear it), it is an invisible thing made visible (at least to musicians).
The last line of this passage sums up the whole novel for me. Ellison evokes the image of sheet music—black notes on white paper—and the artistic endeavor of producing music and translating it into a form you can hold in your hands, and relates them seamlessly to the Invisible Man’s black and white world and his endeavor, artistic in its own sense, to make himself a real, tangible being, but also to accept his invisibility—to “make music” of it.
I think Ellison himself would have appreciated the poetry of this response. Reading it again, I look forward anew to the final staging of the novel and the role that music will undoubtedly play. After all, as this student writes more eloquently, what better way to evoke and call upon the power sleeping in that which remains invisible?
Rachel Watson is a PhD candidate in the English department at the University of Chicago, studying American and African American literature. Rachel is grateful to her former student, Margaret Brooks, for her contribution to this essay, and to the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture at the University of Chicago for sponsoring the course.
