This text is a draft. Please do not quote from it!

Invis­i­ble Man, the title of Ralph Elli­son’s 1952 novel refers to the lack of opac­ity of its main pro­tag­o­nist. Rather than read­ing this book as the exem­plary story of a con­crete, sit­u­ated indi­vid­ual – an African-​American intel­lec­tual before and dur­ing the so-​called Harlem Renais­sance – this article-​in-​progress will con­cen­trate on the fig­ure of thought that this cen­tral char­ac­ter expresses.

The Invis­i­ble Man’s most strik­ing fea­ture is his ongo­ing strug­gle for social and medial recognition.

“You ache with the need to con­vince your­self that you do exist in the real world, that you’re a part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them rec­og­nize you. And, alas, it’s sel­dom suc­cess­ful.” (Elli­son, 7)

In fact, as a con­cep­tual per­sona, the Invis­i­ble Man is the ele­ment that is unrec­og­nized by dom­i­nant discourse.

The flip side of the Invis­i­ble Man’s trans­parency is his extreme adapt­abil­ity. In Ellison’s novel, the main char­ac­ter goes through sev­eral meta­mor­phoses: he starts as a naive coun­try boy who sub­se­quently becomes an uppity stu­dent, a fac­tory worker, a civil right activist, a preacher, a pimp, until he finally real­izes that he is in fact defined by an inher­ent absence of a pos­i­tive identity.

“So after years of try­ing to adopt the opin­ions of oth­ers I finally rebelled. I am an invis­i­ble man.” (Elli­son, 462)

The main pro­tag­o­nist of Invis­i­ble Man is a con­cep­tual per­sona that can­not be pos­i­tively rec­og­nized within dis­course. He does not appear to have any other intrin­sic fea­tures but neg­a­tiv­ity and arbi­trari­ness. Fol­low­ing this line of argu­men­ta­tion, one could argue that the func­tion of the Invis­i­ble Man in dis­course is com­pa­ra­ble to that Jacques Der­rida’s dif­férance in texts; an irre­ducible absence that pre­cedes and obstructs any kind of meaning.

As opposed to dif­férance, how­ever, the absence of the Invis­i­ble Man is only appar­ent. Even though the main pro­tag­o­nist is excluded from all forms of dis­cur­sive rep­re­sen­ta­tion, this bare fact itself already pre­sup­poses his exis­tence. As such, his invis­i­bil­ity is a mod­i­fied form of pres­ence rather than an absolute lack. The few remain­ders of this persona’s pres­ence in dis­course can there­fore be cre­atively trans­formed into some­thing dif­fer­ent and expressed in another medium. The nar­ra­tor of Invis­i­ble Man dis­cov­ers the eman­ci­pa­tory poten­tial of adap­ta­tion while lis­ten­ing to a jazz record.

“Per­haps I like Louis Arm­strong because he’s made poetry out of being invis­i­ble. I think it must be because he’s unaware that he is invis­i­ble. And my own grasp of invis­i­bil­ity aids me to under­stand his music.” (Elli­son, 11)

It is the medial trans­la­tion from the (in)visible to the audi­ble – from texts and images to sounds and music – that can be inter­preted as a solu­tion to the prob­lem of recog­ni­tion in Ellison’s novel. The process of adap­ta­tion has the power to ren­der the unseen heard (and the unheard seen).

“So under the spell of the reefer I dis­cov­ered a new ana­lyt­i­cal way of lis­ten­ing to music. The unheard sounds came through, and each melodic line existed of itself, stood clearly from all the rest, said its piece, and waited patiently for the other voices to speak. That night I found myself hear­ing not only in time, but in space as well. I not only entered the music but descended, like Dante, into its depths.” (Elli­son, 11)

Louis Armstrong’s adap­ta­tion of trans­parency into jazz makes appar­ent that the Invis­i­ble Man is not really an empty, arbi­trary posi­tion in dis­course but an unrec­og­nized space that is actu­ally filled with poten­tial mean­ing. Through his descent into the depths of music, the Invis­i­ble Man dis­cov­ers that by pos­tu­lat­ing presence/​absence as an absolute and fun­da­men­tal dichotomy this promise is actu­ally over­looked. There is never com­plete absence, because even at empty spaces there is still mate­ri­al­ity. As a mat­ter of fact, it is the medium that by def­i­n­i­tion resists absolute negation.

In a per­verse way, this analy­sis of Armstrong’s music actu­ally cor­re­sponds with Theodor W. Adorno’s cri­tique of jazz. In his 1935 essay ‘On Jazz’, the philoso­pher deval­ues the often praised dis­so­nance and syn­co­pa­tion in this musi­cal genre as decep­tive. As opposed to the a-​metrical and atonal ele­ments in the music of Arnold Schön­berg and Alban Berg – Adorno’s com­posers of choice – jazz just offers irreg­u­lar mod­i­fi­ca­tions of meter and har­mony. These are not just for­mal dif­fer­ence, since Adorno believes that music tran­scends its aes­thetic mean­ing. He con­ceives the under­ly­ing rigid met­ric and har­monic struc­ture of jazz as sig­nif­i­cant man­i­fes­ta­tions of an omnipresent logic of a dom­i­nant dis­course (In Adorno’s words, cul­ture industry/​global cap­i­tal­ism). Although jazz at first seem to break with this hege­monic sys­tem, it actu­ally con­firms it. In other words, to Adorno jazz fails to be a real nega­tion because the struc­ture pre­vents it.