Keywords
Invisible Man, Ralph Waldo Ellison, visual icons, aesthetic values
Submission Type
Research
Preview
Critics of Invisible Man seem to have been blind to the fact that Ralph Waldo Ellison was both music major and filmgoer. While struggling to create a seminal novel of Afro-American identity, Ellison was the cultural inheritor of a vast system of sounds and visual icons making up the national and - I daresay - the international tradition of aesthetic values. If the narrator of Juneteenth comes to claim a movie actress as his mother, so too does the unnamed narrator of Invisible Man seize upon music and film as possible sources of his being, as stable representatives of our national vision, of our collective desire. Of course, irony abounds in such a claim, reverberating like Shakespeare's Hamlet that "the play's the thing [to] catch the conscience of the king." Neither music nor film is a "stable" medium, in that both are dynamic, evolving entities: music only progresses through time, and all of us enjoy the "moving pictures." And so much of the history of music and of film is white man's history. Yet, Ellison, living in New York, plying his trade, and sharing an apartment with Saul Bellow, sees the "Hollywood-movie ectoplasms" (3 Modem Library Edition, Random House, NY 1952) and their mixture of "flesh and fantasy" as seductive possibilities for spiritual acceptance, for the narrator's integration of selfhood, and for the possible resolution to the paradoxes of American social life.
Recommended Citation
Lemco, Gary
(2004)
"The Aesthetic Mask: Cinematic and Musical Icons in Ellison's Invisible Man,"
The Utah English Journal: Vol. 32, Article 15.
Available at:
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/uej/vol32/iss1/15