THE TYPOGRAPHY OF INVISIBLE MAN / 679
Theatre Journal 57 (2005) 679—698 © 2005 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
The Blackness of Blackness . . .
Reading the Typography of Invisible Man
Jennifer DeVere Brody
[Performance] is trying to find an equation
for time saved / saving time
but theatre / experience / performing /
being / living etc. is all about
spending time. No equation or . . . ?
—Suzan-Lori Parks1
Redoubled blackness is determined in the encountering time of a caesura.
—Fred Moten2
Pick up any playscript and you are bound to engage with its typographical
elements. The dialogue that composes and comprises the script calls upon us—critics,
readers, actors, dramaturges, and directors—to interpret not only the words presented,
but also the inevitably present blank spaces, parentheses, colons, fonts, typefaces,
italics, ellipses, etc.3 Though an author may wish to guide us in our reading (as does
Tony Kushner in the introduction to Homebody/Kabul, where he notes: “A sentence
ending with a ‘. . .’ indicates that the speaker has trailed off . . . [and] A sentence ending
with a ‘—’ indicates that the speaker is interrupted by someone or something”),4 in
Jennifer DeVere Brody is an associate professor of English, Performance Studies, and African American
studies at Northwestern University. Her recent work appears in Screen and Textaasdassdasand Performance
Quarterly. Her book, Punctuation: Art, Politics and Play, will be published by Duke University Press.
This essay is dedicated to the late Marvin Sims. I wish to thank Harry Elam and Michael Main, as
well as E. Patrick Johnson, Alexander Weheliye, Kevin Bell, Jillana Enteen, John Keene, and other
Northwestern colleagues for their comments on this essay. So, too, I am grateful to participants in the
Black Performance Theory group and members of the Theatre Department at Brown University for
their generous discussion of this work.
1
Suzan-Lori Parks, “From Elements of Style,” in The America Play And Other Works (New York:
Theatre Communications Group, 1995), 13. Cited in Rebecca Schneider, “Driving the Lincoln ‘Cross
History’: Viewing History, Almost, Not Quite,” in Un/Sichtbarkeiten der Differenz: Beitrage zur Genderdebatte
in de Kunsten, ed. Annette Jael Lehmann (Tübingen: Stauffenberg, 2001), 116.
2
Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2003), 71. Subsequent references are noted in the text.
3
See, for example, Anthony Hammond, “The Noisy Comma: Search for the Signal in Renaissance
Dramatic Texts,” in Crisis in Editing: Texts of the English Renaissance, ed. Randall McCleod (New York:
AMS Press, 1994), 203—49.
4
Tony Kushner, Homebody/Kabul (London: Nick Hern Books, 2002), 5. Significantly, the Homebody’s
monologue that takes place during act one is all about reading and speaking. Not only does the play
open with this character reading from a guidebook; later she self-consciously proclaims: “I speak . . .
I can’t help myself. Elliptically. Discursively. I’ve read too many books, and that’s not boasting, for I
haven’t read many books, but I’ve read too many . . . So my diction, my syntax, well, it’s so irritating,
680 / Jennifer DeVere Brody
practice, we are free to imagine and even produce our own supplements to the printed
matter in/of the text. What I wish to emphasize here is the ambivalence of such marks
that are perpetually open to interpretation and improvisation. Exactly how long is a
beat? How does one translate the pitch of bold typeface? How does one sense and
interpret an italicized word? Can we think of such notations as notes—as both
shorthand and music? How does typography cue us to action and vice versa? My
questions are informed in part by the following quotation from Marshall McLuhan’s
controversial and typographically innovative production, The Medium is the Massage,
which reads: “Reminders—(relics of the past)—in a world of the PRINTED word—
efforts to introduce an AUDITORY dimension onto the visual organization of the
PAGE: all effect information, RHYTHM, inflection, pauses. Until recent years, these
EFFECTS were quite elaborate—they allowed for all sorts of CHANGES of type faces.
The NEWSPAPER layout provides more variety for AUDITORY effects from typogra-
phy than the ordinary book page does.”5 Despite the dubious priority accorded types
of print in this passage, it helps us to re-cognize the role typography plays in our
perception of things and concepts. In highlighting typography, I want to remember
that writing has been a tool of colonization and power.6
So, too, this inquiry is complicated by Ed Bullins’s play, The Theme is Blackness
(1967), which reads in its entirety:
SPEAKER: The theme of our drama tonight will be Blackness. Within Blackness One may
discover all the self-illuminating universes in creation. And now BLACK-
NESS—
(Lights go out for twenty minutes. Lights up.)
SPEAKER: Will Blackness step out and take a curtain call?
BLACKNESS7
Bullins’s drama, appearing more than a decade after the 1952 publication of Ellison’s
Invisible Man, replays one of its retroactively produced antecedent themes (and here the
term should be thought of in its most musical guise). In this drama, as in Invisible Man,
there is an unnamed speaker, the concept-metaphor of blackness is played out against
an idea of illumination, blackness is repeated with a difference, the action is circular, it
appears between parentheses—bracketed as if in a black hole, the blackness of
blackness is performed viscerally for an audience, and the blackness of blackness is
“encountered in the time of a caesura,” as Moten would say. As such, Bullins’s play
surprisingly shares much with Ellison’s earlier text. This genealogy goes against a more
popular version of literary history in which members of the 1960s Black Arts movement,
such as Bullins, presented a radical break with the more assimilationist and conserva-
tive artists, including Ellison, who wrote during the 1940s and ’50s. In my reading,
I apologize, I do, it’s very hard, I know. To listen. I blame it on the books, how else to explain it?” (12).
While the generically-named Homebody theorizes her idiosyncratic way of speaking as one that has
been influenced by printed matter, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man has a different problem: he struggles
to articulate in writing the influence of music and vernacular speech into a form. One final note:
although Kushner lays out the rules for reading his text, he deviates from them immediately when the
Homebody interrupts herself—which is rendered parenthetically with an ellipsis rather than a dash!
5
Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, produced
by Jerome Agel (New York: Ginko Press, 1967), 117.
6
See Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), especially 16—29.
7
Ed Bullins, The Theme is Blackness: The Corner and Other Plays (New York: Morrow, 1973).
THE TYPOGRAPHY OF INVISIBLE MAN / 681
however, both texts are exemplars of experimental (black) performative conditions. In
both Bullins’s play and Ellison’s novel, blackness is simultaneously visceral and elusive,
enveloping and intangible, material and conceptual. Both texts let us see in the dark,
hear in the silence, and feel in an empty arena the blackness of blackness. The embodied
experience is played out against a series of always already inscribed notions of what
blackness “is” and “ain’t” and of our expectations of its overdetermined value. That
blackness is invisible—is tied to the ocular—is the premise that Ellison’s famous novel
at once seeks to acknowledge and to undo through its complicated rendering of scenes
that stage and restage formative moments of blackness in American culture.
In this essay, I think about the role typography plays in eliciting and soliciting
(black) sensations and sensations of blackness—in moving us to respond to the calls
(as in hailing) of black ink.8 More specifically, I offer a reading of a scene from Ralph
Ellison’s experimental novel, Invisible Man. By examining punctuation’s (inter)actions
as cultural performances, this essay and the larger project from which it is drawn
argue that punctuation plays a key role in our quotidian movements and missteps,
stopping, staying, and delaying the incessant flows of information—not to mention
styling our movements. The essay aims to show how punctuation-typography
simultaneously comprises, composes, compromises, and even choreographs the nu-
anced gestural performances of the blackness of blackness in Ellison’s text. The larger
goal of this endeavor is to press the issue of the link (or leak) between black ink and
embodied forms of blackness—of being black and black being.9
The amount of published material on Ellison and jazz/blues is daunting to any
scholar.10 Nevertheless, for all their detailed attention to the THEMATIC of jazz, many of
8
I take much of my understanding of typography from Johanna Drucker: “Typography renders
apparent the relative, rather than the absolute, value of symbolic systems. No easy closure on
signification is available in typographically experimental work . . . Material specificity enters into the
final sum of semantic and symbolic value which collapses the planes of imago and logos in an
uncomfortable and disturbing blend of presentational and referential modes which displace the fictive
categories of presence and absence.” Johanna Drucker, The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and
Modern Art, 1909—1923 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 245—46. See also Richard
Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style (Toronto: Hartley and Marks, 1992); and Julie Stone
Peters, Theatre of the Book 1480—1880: Print, Text, and Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2000).
9
Indeed, a similar idea occurs in Miranda July’s lovely film Me, You and Everyone We Know (2005).
The “biracial” black brothers recognize themselves in the computer printout—black punctuation
marks on a white page—and voice the title of the film.
10
A search of “Ellison and theatre” yields few results: instead, the voluminous (and often luminous)
scholarship on Ellison’s life and published works looks to related genres such as folklore, ritual, myth,
history, and music—especially the blues and jazz. How, then, might one approach this conjunction? To
begin, one can turn to the continually shifting biographical record: as a young man growing up in
Oklahoma, Ellison knew Ida Clark, the personal assistant of the established theatrical grande dame,
Emma Bunting. As was customary during the decades of Jim Crow segregation, traveling black
workers roomed with black families. “During the late 1920’s, the Ellisons were privileged to host an
unusual houseguest. A black woman from England named Clark would come and stay at the Ellison
household during the theater runs of Emma Bunting’s company . . . As Bunting’s personal maid, Miss
Clark had access to the exciting world of professional theater . . . Clark introduced an unfamiliar accent
and speech pattern into the house and delighted Ralph with her own rendition of high society theatrics
. . . She showed him how black might fit into the world of Shakespeare and Big Ben, places that Ralph
might have been inclined to imagine himself excluded from.” (Lawrence Jackson, Ralph Ellison:
Emergence of Genius [New York: Wiley Press, 2002], 41.)
682 / Jennifer DeVere Brody
these critiques have downplayed the significance of Ellison’s typographical composi-
tion—relegating it to a lower frequency whose relative invisibility seems not to speak at
all. For all the reams of paper devoted to explicating Ellison’s work in musical terms,
little has been said about how the white background of the mise-en-page mediates and
materially produces the blackandblue marks of invisible music. In musical notation,
specific symbols such as rests, notes, and the like provide a blueprint for performance.
Analogously (we still work with this technology even in this era of the digital), we might
argue that other typographic devices (boldface, punctuation, italics, spacing, etc.) serve
as the dramatic guidelines for the written word. There are multiple ways to construct a
genealogy of such experimentation—but suffice it to write here that whatever their
source, such typographic elements can be read as an important resource for reading
Invisible Man. Virtually every page of Invisible Man can be read as a psychovisualauditory
event. For example, chapter nine (the Peter Wheatstraw episode) employs the conven-
tion of scriptio continua, inwhichwordswerewrittenwithoutspace. Arguing for the
performative aspects of such analphabetic symbols, I follow the visual or spatial turn in
cultural studies, whose concern is less with “logos” (the word) than with “logo” (the
icon)—with aspects of “visual rather than textual rhetoric,” to paraphrase Anna Scott.
Even more specifically, however, I am interested in seeing how various marks on the
stage of Ellison’s page come to signify the “blackness of blackness” that “is . . . and
ain’t” sighted sound. With this last remark, I gesture toward the way in which
characteristics of the ellipsis work as analogues of the character Invisible Man. Both
characters are ambivalent, are singular yet multiple, heard but not seen, black but
blank. Before offering an explication of these contentious points, I want to say
something more about how we might temporarily join discussions that have previ-
ously occurred separately.
As Ellison famously wrote, “history is like a boomerang”: it is not teleological, but
rather replayed through the return—an event that elapses time and space. This idea
recalls Rebecca Schneider’s reading of “the archive and the repertoire” (pace Diana
Taylor) that argues that “theater does not disappear . . . but rather it reverberates, . . .
it enters or begins again and again . . . via itself as repetition—like a copy or perhaps
more like a ritual—as an echo in the ears of a confidence, an audience member, a
witness.”11 The fact that this description mixes sight and sound—includes the echo
and the witness—suggests that sensory perception, like memory and history, is both
multifaceted and entangled. In a brilliant reading of the “interwoven visual and aural
contours” of four jazz poems, Meta Jones argues that “typographical techniques . . .
[are not merely orthographic but also] prosodic.”12 Some of the experimental typogra-
phy that appears in the text of Invisible Man includes the following: the use of italics to
mark some of the dream sequences and stress important words; the use of boldface
and larger font to mark the various signs, slogans, and rising intonation; the lack of
spacing and/or insertion of extra spaces. Although typographical experiments may be
construed as part of a Western modernist tradition dating back at least to the novelist
Laurence Sterne, Ellison’s innovation was to put these black marks into the service of
black subjectivity. Thus, in my reading, the blackness of blackness signifies a certain
excess associated with black performance. In this I follow Marcellus Blount, who
11
Schneider, “Driving,” 115.
12
Meta Jones, “Jazz Prosodies: Orality and Textuality,” Callaloo 25.1 (2002): 77.
THE TYPOGRAPHY OF INVISIBLE MAN / 683
notes: “While the term performance can be applied variously to a range of cultural and
literary phenomena, I use it to designate verbal performance viewed as a cultural
event . . . the term vernacular is associated with the modern concept of folklore as an
intricate interaction between performer and audience that relies on linguistic,
paralinguistic, kinesic, and thoroughly contextual codes and conventions . . . In
written texts that draw on the aesthetics of vernacular performance, the relations of
orality and literacy are continuous.”13
In her essay on Ellison and visual art, Elizabeth Yukins argues, “As an artist,
[Ellison] had to transfigure his conceptions and his sense of rhythm and form into the
specific and sometimes restrictive artistic medium of writing.”14 While her analysis is
confined to his posthumously published novel Juneteenth, one can see and hear
elements of this technique in Invisible Man as well. I extend Yukins’s insights about
Ellison’s use of cubist and collagist techniques by allowing us to see and hear how a
graphic element figures in such renditions. Let us note here that Yukins argues for the
role of the visual in Ellison’s work, whereas other scholars seek to play up the role of
music in the text, for example, “Ellison plays with language as he would a trumpet,
taking lyrical flight in improvisational passages that stylistically emulate his artistic
ancestor, ‘Satchmo’ Armstrong . . . Invisible Man is a musician’s novel, a book meant to
be heard as much as read.”15
In a letter to his longtime correspondent, Albert Murray, documenting the comple-
tion of the “you-know-what” that was to become Invisible Man, Ellison wrote, “Is it a
rock around my neck; a dream, a nasty compulsive dream which I no longer write but
now am acting out (in an early section the guy is obsessed by gadgets and music, now
I’m playing with cameras and have recently completed two high-fidelity amplifiers
and installed a sound system for a friend); a ritual of regression which makes me
dream of childhood every night (as a child I was a radio bug, you know, and take it
from me after getting around with the camera bugs and the high-fi bugs and the model
train bugs, you’ll have no doubts as to the regressive nature of this gadget culture); or
is it a kind of death a dying?”16 This rich quotation hints at a practice that Ellison
would take up in composing his text. Although he began writing by hand, having his
wife Fanny work as his typewriter, he typed as well as orally recorded his novels.
Fanny remembers hearing him talking out loud to the characters in his work. She also
claimed that when her husband “[couldn’t] find the words at the typewriter, he [went]
upstairs and play[ed] the trumpet.”17
The relationship between Ellison’s “bio” and his “graphy,” like that between his
fiction and his criticism, has been intertwined repeatedly. My contribution to this
axiomatic way of entering Ellison scholarship is to read a scene in a PBS television
13
Marcellus Blount, “The Preacherly Text: African American Poetry and Vernacular Performance,”
in “Performance,” ed. Kimberly Benston, special issue, PMLA 107 (1992): 582—93.
14
Elizabeth Yukins, “‘An Artful Juxtaposition on the Page’: Memory, Perception, and Cubist
Technique in Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth,” PMLA 119 (2004): 1248.
15
Scott Irwin, “A Bugler of Words: Ellison’s Musicality and the Jazz/Blues Tradition in Invisible
Man,” Oakland Journal (Winter 2004): 110.
16
Ellison to Albert Murray, 24 January 1950, quoted in Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph
Ellison and Albert Murray, ed. Albert Murray and John F. Callahan (New York: Vintage International,
2000), 8.
17
Robert G. O’Meally, The Craft of Ralph Ellison (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 7.
684 / Jennifer DeVere Brody
documentary on his life and work, aired in 2002.18 Toward the end of the film (the first
to dramatize scenes from his magnum opus Invisible Man—regrettably, the director
chose to render the scenes in a hyperrealist style that flattens Ellison’s dramatic text),
the audience sees the writer in his office, composing the beginning of his second novel,
posthumously published as Juneteenth. The camera zooms in on a large tape recorder
perched precariously on the edge of Ellison’s paper-cluttered desk. The clear plastic
reels of the recorder spin black tape at high speed as the camera pans upward to reveal
Ellison, microphone in hand, simultaneously reading typescript and speaking aloud.
His voice becomes invisibly inscribed—in a medium shot we hear the voiceprint
played back in reel/real time. Ellison smiles and laughs, nods his head acknowledging
the “joy in repetition,” to quote the artist Prince. Such a scene reveals much more than
the writer’s process or even the long-standing practice of writers presenting dramatic
readings of their work (here I am thinking of those popularized by Dickens and other
nineteenth-century professional writers): indeed, the entire sequence suggests, as
Ellison himself wrote in a letter to his interlocutor, Albert Murray, that he often acted
out his narratives. The film returns us to this scene, showing how Ellison has rewound
the tape; during playback, his affect changes, as he shakes his head with satisfaction at
the sound of his recorded, deferred, and differently technologized voice. In voicing his
text, Ellison relies on the technology of the voice, as well as the recording machine.
This kind of temporal disjunction appears again and again in Ellison’s novel. In other
words, Ellison’s use of the recording device points out the simultaneity of what is too
often taken to be a binary opposition between orality (spoken speech) and textuality
(written word). In contrast, I want to think of orality and textuality as co-conspirators—
simultaneous mechanical actors that maintain and produce movement.
In his introduction to the 1981 edition of Invisible Man, Ellison relates one of several
different origin stories about how he came to write his novel. He remembers that:
Shortly before the spokesman for invisibility intruded, [he] had seen, in a nearby Vermont
village, a poster announcing the performance of a “Tom Show,” that forgotten term for
blackface minstrel versions of Mrs. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. [He] had thought such
entertainment a thing of the past, but there, in a quiet Northern village, it was alive and
kicking, with Eliza, frantically slipping and sliding on the ice, still trying—and that during
World War II!—to escape the slavering hounds . . . [ellipsis in original].19
The passage records two annunciations: the intrusion of the voice of an invisible man
and the advertisement of a blackface minstrel show. The theatrical underpinnings
evident in these stereotypes of black performance retroactively provide a previously
overlooked origin for the genesis of one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated
American novels. Encountering these “strangers in the village” (pace James Baldwin)
provides the writer Ellison with an opportunity to recognize the endurance of black
popular forms in American culture. More specifically, Ellison’s vivid re-reading of the
still active and kicking, still-running theatrical event from the nineteenth century
serves, in its re-presentation, to keep the image in circulation. Far from having
outlived its entertainment value, the “world’s greatest hit”20—replete with its live
translations from page to stage of the most prurient scenes of melodrama and
18
American Masters Series: Ralph Ellison: An American Journey, dir. Aaron Kirkland, PBS, 2002.
19
Ralph Ellison, “Introduction,” Invisible Man (1981; repr. New York: Vintage International, 1990),
xvii—xix.
20
Harry Birdoff, The World’s Greatest Hit: Uncle Tom’s Cabin (New York: Vanni Press, 1947).
THE TYPOGRAPHY OF INVISIBLE MAN / 685
violence—trades on and in a nostalgia for a past that, as its recurrence attests, has not
passed. “Forgotten but not gone,” to use Joe Roach’s phrase, the Tom show is a (North)
American staple.
The narrator of Ellison’s novel-to-be is characterized as an intruder as well as a
“spokesman for invisibility.” He is a voice without a visage, although he has a vision
and a story to tell. Ellison has seen “a poster announcing the performance of a ‘Tom
Show,’ that forgotten term for blackface minstrel versions of Mrs. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s
Cabin.” Although Ellison directs our attention to the ubiquitous black-and-white
image of Eliza on the ice, such theatrical posters include writing—or, more specifically,
typography. As noted earlier, numerous critics have commented upon and elegantly
analyzed the jazz language of Ellison’s magnum opus, but few have seen the actual
typeface and typography of the text as an element performing in the service of such
jazz aesthetic politics. Borrowing Nathaniel Mackey’s rendition of Zora Neale Hurston’s
formative work, we can see not only nouns singing and swinging in Ellison’s text but
also punctuation marks and especially the poster as a peculiarly modern intertext for
the novel itself.21 In short, I want to notice the notices that appear in the text as
signposts and signals that provide viewers with opportunities to scrutinize sheets of
sighted sound (and commodity culture)—those printed quotidian documents that
help to compose the blackness of blackness in very graphic ways. If doubleness is
constitutive of black performance, then we must learn to see the suprasegmentals and
analphabetic symbols that appear throughout the text as complicated material in their
own right/write. Where earlier modernists experimented with the form of the novel—
adding and deleting punctuation for effect and affect—Ellison’s experiments also help
to mediate and imprint call-and-response and other modes of black vernacular theory.
Brent Edwards would see such excesses in the text as part of a larger implementation
of what he terms “scat aesthetics.”22
Ellison claimed that after typing the first sentence of the novel, “I am an invisible
man,” he ripped the page from the typewriter and wanted to destroy the paper. He
pondered the “origin” of such a sentence and then “the words began to sound with a
familiar timbre of voice.” He recalls: “And suddenly, I could hear in my head a
blackface comedian bragging on the stage of Harlem’s Apollo Theatre to the effect that
each generation of his family was becoming so progressively black of complexion that
no one, not even its own mother, had ever been able to see the two-year-old baby. The
audience had roared with laughter and I recognized something of the same joking, in-
group Negro American irony sounding from my rumpled page.”23 Such a phenotypi-
cal phenomenon can be seen in the black folk humor that produced the nickname
“blue” for Negroes so dark-skinned they were blue-black. The blackface humor of the
text is integral to explicating the blackness of blackness as an inescapable ethnic
notion. In Invisible Man, theatrical posters, placards, and other printed signs appear to
break up the otherwise uniform print.
21
Nathaniel Mackey, “Other: From Noun to Verb,” in Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-
Culturality and Experimental Writing (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993), 265—85.
22
Brent Hayes Edwards, “Louis Armstrong and the Syntax of Scat,” Critical Inquiry 28.3 (Spring
2002): 618—49. See also Alexander Weheliye, Phonographies: Grooves in Afro-Sonic Modernity (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2005).
23
Robert O’Meally, ed. “Introduction,” in New Essays On Invisible Man (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988), 11.
686 / Jennifer DeVere Brody
Given these insights into Ellison’s practices, we should not be surprised by the fact
that the printed Invisible Man begins with two epigraphs that record dialogue, the first
from a scene in Melville’s novella “Benito Cereno” (1856) and the latter from T. S.
Eliot’s play The Family Reunion (1939). There are also moments in Invisible Man in
which Ellison employs different forms of typographical excess to overscore, under-
score, and represent important shifts in the narrative: for example, the use of italics in
the dream sequences, parenthetical asides, lack of spacing, capitalization, and line
breaks. Indeed, retrospectively, the book reads as if it were a Beat poem. For all of
Amiri Baraka and other black nationalist poets’ denouncing of Ellison as an Uncle Tom
and apolitical writer, they nevertheless seem indebted to his formal experimentation
with the mise-en-page. Even the very use of the term “blackness” as a signifier for the
new movement might be indebted to its appearance in the novel, which deployed the
term in contradistinction to Ellison’s contemporaneous citation of the term “Negro.”
The first edition begins with an “I” that is printed in font so bold it has no seraph. The
first fragmented sentence in bold reads I AM AN invisible man. The use of capitaliza-
tion makes a fragment that is reminiscent of Ellison’s stutter, with its near-rhyme
between AM and AN (missing in a near-rhyme making a Man). Could we hear Ellison,
with the stutter he famously tried to stop, recording “I am Man—(sotto voce) invisible
Man.”
Although in classical rhetoric the ellipsis has been understood as a scheme rather
than as a trope, more current scholarship, according to the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the
English Language, notes that classical rhetoric increasingly is read in figurative terms.24
I argue that the proleptic, proliferating, and perforating figure of the ellipsis performs
in Ellison’s text (as it does here) as a point of contention. More importantly, however,
this essay is interested in explicating a key moment in Invisible Man that dramatizes
typography as a form of experimental (and perhaps even experiential) blackness,
foregrounding the unusual use of typography as a means of expressing the blackness
of blackness. This is a playful, if deadly serious, endeavor that seeks to understand
such a tautological phrase as inscribing blackness as a nonessential character. I ask you
to look askance at the ellipsis and to listen to them/it—as if in an hallucination. Now
we occupy an imaginative place of ludic play where lucidity loses its appeal. Like
Ellison’s fictional character, we enter a layered cave in an impossible time-space
continuum—the passage is by turns violent and pleasurable. Significantly, however, it
calls upon us as readers to witness the existential angst of the character. In analyzing
the fragmentation of accounts of those survivors of state terror (such as the Holocaust
and the disappeared in Argentina), Anne Cubilié suggests, “The complexity of issues
raised by this dialogic and temporal confusion . . . the narrative collage style in which
the book is written works against strong reader identification with a single authorial
voice...[instead] the text works to create an engaged and critical reader . . . While one
can read the book as a distanced spectator, eliding the gaps and reading only the basic
narrative structure, the form of the text encourages a performative, engaged, witness-
ing relationship with the reader.”25
24
David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987), 70.
25
Anne Cubilié, Women Witnessing Terror: Testimony and the Cultural Politics of Human Rights (New
York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 172.
THE TYPOGRAPHY OF INVISIBLE MAN / 687
Invisible Man can also be read as a kind of “poetry/play”—a term Deborah Richards
uses to describe a genre akin to “a closet drama—a play to be read aloud rather than
performed”—that also helps to suture the sound/image binary. Remember, Ellison
read the entire text out loud even as the priority of speaking/writing/reading remains
undecidable. The point here/hear is to recognize the simultaneity and untranslatibility
of this ritual practice and to re-member the “interanimation of vision and sound”
(Moten 71) recorded through recoding in Ellison’s work. Then, it is up to the audience
(in multiple senses of the term) to “. . . fall for your affectation or flail you for
requesting their attention.”26 We can imagine Ellison, like so many other writers, as
one whose “work is a collaboration of voices [in which one] takes the role of director,
producer, and editor.”27 I mention Richards in the context of this reading of Ellison
because she conceives of her work as “a collection of episodes . . . [She] discovered that
Japanese sumi brush painting is purposely left incomplete. The viewer has to become
an active participant . . . [The] reader reads the gaps as well as the content of the
poem.”28 Not only is this an excellent summary of the larger narrative of invisible man,
it also makes a case for the active role of the witness/participant that accords with
Ellison’s well-documented ideas about call-and-response and the potential of art to
transform action. Richards’s work is a palimpsest on which the evidence of what has
happened before is apparent. She describes her style as being “like watching a play
from the wings. If I continue the analogy, I would say that with my work you get a
closer look at the strings holding the puppet up. Perhaps you even see the puppeteer
working the limbs” [one can think of the scene in Invisible Man with the minstrel
doll].29 Such techniques are at play in Ellison’s text—especially in the figure of the
ellipsis, which appears throughout.
The ellipsis appears to de-compose the page and speech: as such, it labors to contra-
dictory ends. It marks a strategic deletion that produces not only deleterious effects
(lack); but also, and simultaneously, affective desire (excess). Like the strategy of
silence that many employed as a form of power and which has been examined by
black feminist critics such as Darlene Clark Hine, the ellipsis can be read as “saying
something obliquely”—or, as Linda Brent says, “telling it slant.” In speech, the ellipsis
runs rampant. It is an everyday occurrence. Here I am concurring with Fred Moten’s
idea that there is an “intense relationship between experimentalism and the everyday
(which includes but is not reducible to what people call the vernacular) that animates
radical artistic practice in the 2nd half of the 20th century.”30 Ellison, as a scholar of
vernacular culture, a musician, and an interpreter of black forms, employs the ellipsis
as both a mark and a strategy in Invisible Man. At times in Ellison’s text, the ellipsis can
be read as a site that invites improvisation: one might even say that the ellipsis as a
present figure of absence is paradoxically more meaning-full, rather than meaning-
less.31 By this I mean to point out that rather than seeing the ellipses as empty—not
26
Deborah Richards interview with Charles Rowell, “The Halle Berry One Two,” in Callaloo 27
(2004): 1013.
27
Ibid., 1006.
28
Ibid., 1004.
29
Ibid.
30
Fred Moten interview with Charles Rowell, Callaloo 27 (2004): 957.
31
Avital Ronell, in The Telephone Book, suggests that “punctuation hails our sonic gaze”—a phrase
that perfectly captures Ellison’s problematic as theorized in Invisible Man. See The Telephone Book:
Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (1989; repr. 1991, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press), 117.
688 / Jennifer DeVere Brody
doing or acting on the page—they could be rethought as active agents that suture the
call-and-response of Ellison’s dialogue and, in other spaces, as the marks that hail the
reader as a participant, inviting the audience into imaginative engagement with the
text. The mandate to “keep this nigger boy running” can be read typographically in
the repetition (always with difference) of the ellipsis throughout the entire novel.
The ongoing black blues tradition of the changing same has been documented and
replayed by many who subscribe to the aesthetic and theoretical idea that it is “in the
break” that the music and movement of invisibility and improvisation take place.32
This notion of the break or change is constitutive of a modern black tradition reaching
back, if you will, to an (African) past that can only ever be reconstructed by
remembering the radical break—known euphemistically as the Middle Passage—in
the transition. In the following reading, the ellipsis is read as revealing, evoking, and
performing as Ellison’s effective/affective strategy of racialized performance.
Let us think about Invisible Man in terms of the elisions and embodied excesses
performed in a pinpointed part of its prologue which itself is performed explicitly for
an audience/viewer, as signaled by its use of first-person direct address. Here we
witness the warped texture or the weave of space, time, temperament, and tempo of
the text. The situation in the text is a reefer-induced hallucination in which Invisible
Man “slips into a break” that is like a spatiotemporal warp . . . like the “beam of lyrical
sound ben[t] by Louis [Armstrong’s] military instrument.”33
He seems to be caught in limbo between time spent/spending time, past-passed
and present.
. . . beneath the swiftness of the hot tempo there was a slower tempo and a cave and I entered it [cave
or tempo or both?] and looked around and heard an old woman singing a spiritual as full of
Weltschmerz as flamenco, and beneath that lay a still lower level on which I saw a beautiful girl the
color of ivory pleading in a voice like my mother’s as she stood before a group of slave owners who
bid for her naked body, and below that I found a lower level and a more rapid tempo and I heard
someone shout:
“Brothers
And sisters, my text this morning is the ‘Blackness of Blackness.’”
And a congregation of voices answered: “That blackness is most black, brother,
Most Black . . .”
“In the beginning . . .”
“At the very start,” they cried.
“. . . there was blackness . . .”
“Preach it . . .”
“. . . and the sun . . .”
“The sun, Lawd . . .”
“. . . was bloody red . . .”
“Red . . .”
32
See for example, Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, Blues People; Robert Ferris Thompson, Flash of the
Spirit; Houston H. Baker, Jr., Blues Ideology and African American Culture; John Callahan, In the African
American Grain: Call and Response in Twentieth-Century Black Fiction (Middletown: Wesleyan University
Press, 1988); Aldon Nielson, Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical
Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). For a reading of queerness in Ellison’s
text see Roderick Ferguson, Aberrations of Blackness (University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
33
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 8. Except as noted, all material cited
is from this edition and will hereafter be cited in the text.
THE TYPOGRAPHY OF INVISIBLE MAN / 689
“Now black is . . .” the preacher shouted.
“Preach it, brother . . .”
“. . . an’ black ain’t . . .”
“Red, Lawd, red: He said it’s red!”
[8—9]
The ellipses here signify an hallucinatory sequence whose spatiotemporality is
“preposterous”—like a boomerang, its “end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.”34
Thinking elliptically (with the ellipsis) helps us to understand Ellison’s ethical call-
and-response. Ellison’s text notes, with and through the ellipsis, a suspended space
and space of suspense where “the unheard sounds came through, and each melodic
line existed in itself, stood out clearly from all the rest, said its piece, and waited
patiently for the other voices to speak. That night [he continues], I found myself
hearing not only in time, but in space as well” (8). We witness the performative labor
the ellipsis does in this famous passage of Ellison’s text. It is noteworthy that the
passage rendered in italics repeats the word “tempo” three times in its opening
paragraph. The swift hot tempo gives way to slower tempo and ultimately to a more
rapid tempo. Each shift in tempo takes the narrator to another level, signaling the
impossibility of separating time from space—a concept-metaphor substantiated by the
ellipses in the passage—back, which is to say, below . . . a passage that “is and ain’t.”
The tempo never stops: rather, like the ellipsis, it is figured relationally—as “more or
less” (t)here. It is in this section of the text that a dialogue ensues between the old
woman and the invisible man about the terms love, hate, and ambivalence—the latter
glossed as “a word that doesn’t explain it.”
As we have begun to map out, the ellipsis is ambivalent, enigmatic, paradoxical—
the presence of absence [or vice versa] that like the blackness of blackness “is and
ain’t.” Isaac Julien praises the passage for having the preacher show that “blackness is
an open-ended identity.”35 The ellipsis self-referentially points to a variable deictic
space in which “the entanglement of subject and object . . . embraces the reader within
the narrative as a variable ‘you’ who is fully dependent on, and constitutive of its
corollary, the ‘I.’”36
The blackness of blackness is both textual and performative—figured as, in, and by
the ellipsis. Even the previous paragraph illuminates or serves to illustrate and narrate
the ellipsis. For when the dream, which is recorded in italic type, enters into the depths
(remember, we read the book layer by layer—creating the illusion of entering its
depths—and it has a prologue and an epilogue that take place in the same space), the
narrator continues: “beneath that lay a still lower level on which I saw a beautiful girl
the color of ivory pleading in a voice like my mother’s as she stood before a group of
slave owners who bid for her naked body, and below that I found a lower level and a
more rapid tempo . . .” (9). The page that forms and frames the ellipses (framed again
by quotations) is ivory-colored, like the (not)black slave mother, who, it bears
repeating, is the condition of possibility for the birth of (the) blackness of the sun/son.
Law-d (think logos) over by an overlord in the form of the white master’s bidding on
her body, it is she who carries the trace of blackness that gives birth to the trauma
34
Mieke Bal, Quoting Carravaggio (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 195.
35
Isaac Julien, quoted in Gina Dent, ed., Black Popular Culture (New York: Dia Press, 1992), 255.
36
Ibid., 202.
690 / Jennifer DeVere Brody
experienced and expressed in Invisible Man.37 This is in fact one of the harbingers of
the strategy of racial performance that is performed in the novel’s engagement with
both the “speakerly and preacherly text.”38
The miscegenative mixture is the trope that animates the text. The spiritual aspects
of the text are less metaphysical than temporal and cultural (in the sense of tied to
tempo—to the here-and-now as opposed to some conception of a transcendental
eternal space above the line). Kim Benston explains, “Ellison ironically displaces ‘white
mythology’s’ fable of the origin with a story of the beginning-as-blackness. At that
beginning, the passage suggests, we find enacted a series of complex differences and
dislocation, first imagined as descending through cultural realms . . . [then] plunging
toward a site where language, in the crucible of national and family romance, has both
the impulse and the power to declare its own absence.”39 I would argue, however, that
the ellipsis presented in the second epigraph and throughout the prologue in fact
marks the “beginning of blackness” that performs such a vital element and idea. For, if
we read the typography of Invisible Man, the ellipsis appears as the first (in)co-hear-ent
mark in the text—an initializing site/cite of trouble that recurs in the text’s opening
stages. The ellipses are at once distant and near, transparent and opaque. Their beat ...
nicks the page—confounding and connecting senses and sensations simultaneously
while gathering into its orbit a host of other binary oppositions so as to move beyond
them. When Ellison’s text records and repeats the word “red” as in the color of the
bloody sun, I see and hear the term, literally, “read.” The history, his story and ours, is
bloody, red, black and ivory—but also read, and heard, in black and white.40 The
speech act mixes the sacred and the secular, recording, reverentially, a profound
profanity. Ellison also asks: “Could this compulsion to put invisibility down in black
and white be thus an urge to make music of invisibility?” (13—14). In terms of my desire
to read punctuation-typography’s aspirations problematically and materially, I think
that this is an important question for which ellipses may provide a partial, imprinted
answer. Before I elaborate on this elaborate point (and these elaborate points . . .), let
me complete my reading of the paragraph. “But I am an orator, a rabble rouser—Am?
I was, and perhaps shall be again. Who knows? All sickness is not unto death, neither
is invisibility” (14; original italics). The phrasing here signals the open end of Invisible
Man’s sentence of blackness that concludes with the repetition of the epistemological
query, “Who knows?” As the text asks later: “Who knows but that, on the lower
frequencies, I speak for you?” (568). Again, the ellipses open the spatial/temporal gap,
mark the break, are represented in, and in fact are the break between these determined,
determining questions. Thus, the ellipsis at once “is and ain’t.”
The ellipsis in Ellison’s text may be read as a means of understanding black
performance, or, more pointedly, the performance of the blackness of blackness. In
such settings (pun intended), these graphic analphabetic symbols function as shadow
37
One thinks of Hortense Spillers’ “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” here as well. See Spillers, Black,
White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2003).
38
Blount, “Preacherly Text,” 582—93.
39
Kimberly W. Benston, Performing Blackness: Enactments of African-American Modernism (New York:
Routledge, 2000), 9.
40
There is a joke that transforms the yoke of racist humor. The not/joke is a retort and goes as
follows: “What is black and white and red and floating down the river? A white man telling nigger
jokes.”
THE TYPOGRAPHY OF INVISIBLE MAN / 691
figures that both compose and haunt writing’s sound and substance. We remember
that Ellison, with his stutter, vocalized every page of Invisible Man—recording and
recoding his language in a process that he called acting, but which required the use of
machinery to capture the sound. There is no priority here in the circulation of the text.
Hearing the unheard music of Invisible Man requires us to respond with ear, eye, and
mind. Indeed, those moments in the text in which words break apart, dialect becomes
dialogue, spaces appear and disappear, where punctuation proliferates, perforating
the page and our passive silent reading—those are the interactive moments of Ellison’s
work that turn us into audiences—things seen as written and written as seen. Ellison
played out his work vocally in the rhythm of a jazz musician. Although he left his
musical training behind, Ellison was still a composer of sound and visual rhythm. On
the matter of literary value and literacy, I follow those who advocate for an expanded
view of writing: one that cannot demarcate the ends of speech and the beginning of
writing and where it is impossible to have a “text” without a “con” or writing without
a concept of embodiment—however spectral and tenuous.
We remember, as alluded to in the opening of this essay, that the script in theatre as
well as in our daily repertoire is that which allows us to repeat our lines. Typography
and punctuation perform as do mouth movements, facial contortions, and other
somatic gestures. Such “. . . excess outlines other possibilities not taken, not voiced.
There is no transcendence here; all elements (at the very least), all these implications
coexist in the performance . . .” (italics added).41 Indeed, such gestures both frame and
exceed the “lines” all subjects are given to perform. As such, the ellipsis can be read as
signifyin(g), “. . . as expressive potentiality, articulating a syntax where, in Billie
Holiday’s phrase, the meaning used to change. Scat works ‘the accompaniments of the
utterance’ in a given medium: in song, the vocal play that liquefies words; in
performance, the excessive, oblique physicality, of mugging; in writing, the overgrowth
of punctuation, self-interruptions, asides, that exceed the purposes of emphasis,
intonation, citation. Inarticulacy is telling because the proliferation of index points at—
structurally suggests—an expressive syntax that is unavailable but inferred through
its accompaniments’” (italics added).42 The ellipses, as I am reading them here, form a
corollary between the different and yet analogically related experiences of silence and
invisibility. They supplement experience and call attention to the scripted-ness and
excess ascribed to black performance. Others have called such “notes” grace notes, or
perhaps we might even think of them as akin to theatrical stage business. I read
punctuation marks as figures of speech that cannot resolve the tension between aural/
oral and visual and other “tangled skeins,” to re-cite and resituate Linda Brent/
Harriet Jacobs’s euphemism for slavery’s material as well as miscegenated practices,43
or what Alexander Weheliye calls “the surplus gift inherent to Afro-diasporic double
conciousness . . . [whose] excess comes in the form of a phonography that rebuffs any
separation of the two forces in this compound [speech/writing] whether it rolls up in
the sphere of literature or music.”44
41
Edwards, “Syntax,” 645.
42
Ibid., 648—49.
43
Harriet Jacobs (Linda Brent), Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. 1865; repr., Classic Slave Narratives,
ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Penguin, 1987).
44
Alexander Weheliye, Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic-Afro-Modernity (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2005), 36.
692 / Jennifer DeVere Brody
The ellipsis marks both presence and absence. On the page, it is a visible element
that signals missing information, and it does so in the English language through the
repetition of a dot such that it becomes a series.45 In short, the ellipsis, in its singularity,
is not a “single” mark; but rather a triple “one” or a “complete multiple.”46 Ellison
himself spoke of the significance of “our unity-in-diversity, our oneness-in-manyness.”47
Here, one can extrapolate and read the ellipsis as a figure that is at once singular and
collective, denoted by a series of dots (a run of ellipses) whose connotations are a con
akin to “unspeakable things unspoken,” to borrow Toni Morrison’s suggestive phrase,
or perhaps, to revise her words, unbreakable things unbroken.48 This (im)possible
construction lays and delays the groundwork of sentencing, leaves a final resolution
open to questioning: “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”
asks Invisible Man at the conclusion (not end) of his text. The ellipsis tarries with
negative space and suggests the not (t)here. Ellipses (un)cover (un)familiar ghosts.
These blank black bullets bore into our psyches, asking us as we read them to project and
imagine what might be . . . behind, beyond, and within them. Like empty signifiers,
they mark a desire whose meaning can never be fulfilled but must always be filled.
Such comments concur with the tenets of close reading, in which each mark on the
page matters—is the matter of/with writing. Such countersyntactic cues provide clues
to the importance of improvisation in Ellison’s sermonic section of text. Typography
becomes song in its excessive expression.
The ellipsis in particular defies the supposed value of punctuation for prescriptivist
punctuationists who subscribe to the view that punctuation can harness speech and/
as writing in an enlightened drive for clarity and rationality. What I want to
underscore here is the way in which Ellison’s gestural use of typography seeks to
liberate such markers from their conformist strictures. They are, in fact, part and parcel
of the novel’s improvisational impulse—we might even say that they provide the page
with a pulsing visual rhythm. The very word “point” itself is elliptical for “full (or
perfect) point; full (or complete) pause; full stop.”49 This last point relates to my earlier
discussion of ellipses as delaying sentencing. We are made aware of that which either
goes unsaid, exceeds saying, or cannot be said. The ellipsis can stand for what need
not be said, for what may be redundant to say, as well as for what cannot be said, for
that which exceeds locution and is therefore impossible.50
45
Here one may think of Peter Stallybrass’s work on Renaissance conceptualizations of the term
“individual,” which Raymond Williams explains once was synonymous with “indivisible.” See Peter
Stallybrass, The Cultural Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1991), 594.
46
The term “complete multiple” is the title of a catalogue of Richard Artschwager’s work published
in New York by Brook Alexander Editions, 1991.
47
Ralph Ellison, “The Little Man at Chechaw Station,” in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John
F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 503.
48
Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in Literature,”
Michigan Quarterly Review 28 (Fall 1989): 1—34.
49
Eric Partridge, You Have a Point There: A Guide to Punctuation and Its Allies (London: Routledge,
1953), 8. Subsequent references to this work are noted in the text.
50
See Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, trans. Greg Rabassa
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 90—91. The author was a typesetter, self-taught man of
letters, and translator; his prescient nineteenth-century novel provides examples of two different types
of elliptical performance.
THE TYPOGRAPHY OF INVISIBLE MAN / 693
The ellipses mark the space of difference—where the practically nothing but
(im)practically something will be (not) said and (not) written—or, “said in silence.”
Jason Merchant, in The Syntax of Silence (2001), claims that the primary goal of the
discipline of theoretical linguistics “is to develop a theory of the correspondence
between sound (or gesture) and meaning. Nowhere does this sound-meaning corre-
spondence break down more spectacularly than in the case of ellipsis. And yet various
forms of ellipsis are pervasive in natural language—words and phrases that by rights
should be in the linguistic signal go missing . . . [This] is possible because ellipsis is
parasitic on redundancy . . .”51 Here, Merchant explicates three key ideas associated
with the definition and work of ellipses: redundancy, silence, and omission—which
are also figures of blackface performance.52
Re-reading Invisible Man, I was struck by the following line: “The end is in the
beginning and lies far ahead” (6). I render this phrase as Ellison’s eloquent elaboration
of the ellipsis, given that the end and beginning of the ellipsis is recorded in a
horizontal train distinguished only by the space in-between, which is another black
(w)hole. Entering such open-endedness confounds our orientation . . . we are disori-
ented yet present. The use of ellipses by Ellison and other artists punches a hole
(Moten would say it cuts “in the break”) in the illusion of perception, adding
dimension by disrupting the seemingly seamless relentlessness of the line—of linear-
ity, whether horizontal or vertical—that directs writing. Ellipses function as points of
disorientation and perhaps democracy. Like a palindrome and a palimpsest (or
perhaps even the book itself), ellipses may be read backwards or forwards and in
terms of surface and depth. Their multifaceted structure of many-in-one that forms a
complex, yet unified, web may be read as supporting Ellison’s radical democratic
content. Ellison’s use of ellipses helps us to rethink the line according to artist Paul
Klee, who conceived of it as “dots going out for a walk.”53 As Ellison’s unnamed
narrator tells us, “The point now is that I found a home—or a hole in the ground” (6).
I tend to read this line literarily rather than literally, which is to say that I interpret
Ellison’s point to be that this home is a “hole in the ground(ing)” of being—if not a
becoming that moves even in its apparent stability. The distinction between being and
becoming here suggests the home/hole is also a drop in the bucket of opaque
51
Jason Merchant, The Syntax of Silence: Sluicing, Islands, and the Theory of Ellipses (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2001), 94.
52
Eric Partridge’s parsing of the term is a means of opening up what will be my more detailed
discussion of Ellison. Partridge defines “dots” (to use his British locution for ellipsis) in a tellingly
entitled essay, “‘Twopence Coloured’: Compound Points or Multiple Punctuation; Plurality of Dots.”
The twopence coloured refers to hand-colored prints sold from the Punch and Judy theatres,
connecting the term not only to commodity culture, but also more significantly to the co-terminus
nineteenth-century practice of blackface minstrelsy, which is the quintessential form that figures the
mimicked relation of performing blackness. The archive of work on minstrelsy includes Robert Toll,
Blacking Up (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974); Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy
and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford Univesity Press, 1993); Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of
Subjection (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); and James Hatch, Brooks McNamara, and
Annemarie Bean, eds., Inside the Minstrel Mask (Middletown: University of New England Press, 1997).
53
Paul Klee, redacted in Peggy Phelan, “Warhol: Performances of Death in America,” in Performing
the Body/Performing the Text, ed. Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson (New York: Routledge, 1999),
225.
694 / Jennifer DeVere Brody
whiteness, destined to disappear in America’s will toward whiteness, an idea Joe
Roach suggests when he names miscegenation, “as . . . an opportunistic tactic of
whiteness.”54 Invisible Man seeks to re-member the blackness of whiteness that the
term “American” would seek to erase.
Another formative meditation on race and American culture is W. E. B. Du Bois’s
endlessly repeated pronouncement: “The Problem of the twentieth-century is the
problem of the colorline.”55 In After Whiteness: Unmaking an American Majority, Mike
Hill justifies employing, or rather deploying, only an elliptical version of Du Bois’s
over-cited axiom. He justifies his strategic citation of the line, which he never presents
in full but only in its cut version, explaining:
The epigraph above from Du Bois, which I leave deliberately incomplete, is perhaps one of
the most oft repeated aphorisms ever cited in contemporary scholarship on race. In that
sense, to those familiar with such work, the phrase may sound a little worn. But then again,
how else to begin to think about color and categorization, which of course includes
thinking about whiteness, than through the extraordinary figure of Du Bois? Even in the
simple reluctance to repeat his celebrated phrase yet once more.56
The epigraph evokes a problem about citation (and re-citation) that is at the heart of
theatrical practice and performance—its twice-restored behavior—and therefore gets
one thinking from the get-go about repetition and time. This ongoing racial drama was
played out similarly in Ellison’s ellipses—a sentence he did not want to finish, as he
remembered standing before the poster for the Tom show, about to embark on the
composition of Invisible Man.
Hill returns to the phrase later in his text, when he repeats his reasoning about why
Du Bois’ line in (t)his historical moment must be elided, emended, elliptical: “Part One
of this book began with a certain reluctance to repeat Du Bois’s famous maxim that
‘the problem of the twentieth century is . . .’ et cetera. By way of introduction, my
intention in leaving out the key term ‘colorline’ was to signal my sense of the overuse
of this phrase. There has been no more repeated line in race scholarship over the last
twenty years than that one, I remarked. The idea of not repeating it again, or in almost
not repeating it, was not just an academic language game. I wanted to signal a more
substantive political problem having to do with subjective citationality at the begin-
ning of the twenty-first century.”57 Such ideas fit as well with Ellison’s interest in
warping history—of not succumbing to an idea of history as a linear, progressive
timeline. To my mind, this is an elaboration of the problematic involved in the
performance of “colored contradictions”—to recite the title of a collection of African
American plays—especially in Ellison’s work.58 It may be no coincidence that E.
Patrick Johnson elaborates on this concept in an eloquent redaction of Marlon Riggs’s
54
Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1996), 6.
55
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk. Quoted in Mike Hill, After Whiteness: Unmaking an American
Majority (New York: NYU Press, 2004), 21.
56
Hill, After Whiteness, 67—68.
57
Ibid., 42.
58
Harry J. Elam and Robert Alexander, ed., Colored Contradictions: An Anthology of Contemporary
African-American Plays (New York: Plume Books Penguin Press, 1996). The title comes from the last line
of George C. Wolfe’s play, The Colored Museum.
THE TYPOGRAPHY OF INVISIBLE MAN / 695
film, Black Is . . . Black Ain’t. For the title, like Riggs’s naked black body in the film,
recites and resituates, signifies on, Ellison’s ellipsis and black performance more
generally. I concur with Johnson’s argument for the simultaneity of being and
becoming that “refus[es] to privilege identity as solely performance or solely
performative and by demonstrating the dialogic/dialectic relationship of these two
tropes housed in and by the body.”59
As mentioned earlier, a quotation from T. S. Eliot’s play, The Family Reunion,
provides a beginning or entry (as well as an ending) to Invisible Man. It reads:
. . . I tell you, it is not me you are looking at,
Not me you are grinning at, not me your confidential looks
Incriminate, but that other person, if person,
You thought I was: let your necrophily
Feed upon that carcasse. . . .
The four dots that provide the open ending of the quotation offer our first encounter
with such marks in the text. Eliot’s ellipsis here graphically illustrates and performs
the repetition of the “not me” that is a central thematic of Ellison’s novel. The epigraph
points the way towards the profusion of ellipses that appears in the oft-quoted text on
the “Blackness of Blackness” in Invisible Man (9). Despite the numerous commentaries
on this passage of (the) text, none, to my knowledge, has thought about how the
ellipses signify and are signifying there. Do the dots function punctuationally—
marking mere pauses in dialogue? Are they meant to mimic spoken language in an
impossible transcription of aurality/orality? Or rather, is the work of the ellipsis more
ludic than lucid? I suspect that the ellipses (t)here signify the tempo figured in and by
“the Blackness of Blackness.” In my reading, ellipses serve as a kind of instantiation of
the complex and dynamic (racial) subject that arguably is the main point (pun
intended) of the dialogue. They regulate the timing of the call-and-response, signal a
shift in tempo, invite the reader to enter the dialogue and more.
In his introduction to the 1981 edition of Invisible Man, Ellison explains that “writing
about invisibility had rendered [him] either transparent or opaque.”60 So, too, in the
same essay, he speaks of Invisible Man as “a ‘character’ . . . in the dual meaning of the
term.”61 These statements both allude to the ellipsis: a figure or character, like the
performing stereotype, that is neither transparent nor opaque but somehow both
simultaneously. Moreover, in his disquisition on democratic fictions, Ellison employs
the ellipsis in a key paragraph that reads: “. . . it now appeared that the voice of
invisibility issued from deep within our complex American underground. So how
crazy-logical that I should finally locate its owner living—and oh, so garrulously—in
an abandoned cellar. Of course, the process was far more disjointed than I make it
sound, but such was the inner-outer, subjective-objective process of the developing
fiction, its pied rind and surreal heart . . .”62 Ellison suggests that invisibility, erasure,
and fluidity—all things figured (out) by the ellipsis—are major themes of the novel as
59
E. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2003), 42.
60
Ellison, “Introduction,” xvii—xix.
61
Ibid.
62
Ibid., xviii.
696 / Jennifer DeVere Brody
well as its central philosophical concepts—which, I contend, are performed in a formal
sense by the ellipses. Ellison claimed that the visual arts and early studies of
perception influenced his thinking about identity—a fact that allows us to think of the
text as a negotiation of the aural/oral matrix.
Perhaps, then, we can imagine the ellipsis set out like bait waiting to be swallowed,
leading us literally down into the narrator’s den as well as into the depths of the text
. . . Recall the first printed ellipses that appear in the epigraph of the text, itself an
elliptical redaction of Eliot’s text as a (w)hole. Ellipsis is an imaginary figurative and
figured space in the analogy between figure and ground that is now punctured and
un-done with punctuation. We may read ellipses as figures of history as well as
hysteria and haunting—as Invisible Man’s quintessential (re)marks. Moreover, to
repeat this particular point, the ellipses are contra-dictory figures that are (t)here to
mark the (k)not-(t)here of and in the text. Ellipses, we might say, stand (in and for) the
music of invisibility, or perhaps more precisely, music’s invisible tempo—seen only by
the musicians. Here, Ellison riffs on the “music of invisibility,” especially when he
signifies upon Louis Armstrong’s song, “What did I do to be so black and blue?” The
lyrics appear set off from the rest of the text. The perceived opacity of the ellipsis is
revealing and has been rendered as the “blankness visible” that is so important to
Ellison’s experiment with new modes of (black) performance.63
Like Ellison, punctuationist Eric Partridge begins to elaborate on the ellipsis’
capacity to mark temporality. Partridge claims that the ellipsis can be used to highlight
a “hiatus in the thinking, a pause in the action, or a hesitation in the dialogue” (84).
This statement is reminiscent of the musical interlude in the blues—that productive
gap that is filled in by the audience’s expectation, or more precisely, its meditation on
what has passed and what is to come. Such remarks become a recurrent trope in
Ellison’s figuration of invisibility, as the following quotation exemplifies: “Invisibility
. . . gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat.
Sometimes you’re ahead, and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible
flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which
it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around” (8; emphasis added . . . by
my use of italics). This quotation understands and theorizes time as ellipsis and vice
versa. It is this passage in particular that inspires Fred Moten to ask: “How to activate
the noise’s transcendence of the ocular frame?” The ellipses appear to answer Moten’s
astute and searching query, for they “put another metaphysics forward” (68). We
return, then, to the productive performative simultaneity of the aural/oral/visual
performance of the ellipsis.
In Invisible Man, the unnamed narrator thinks that “A hibernation is a covert
preparation for a more overt action” (13). Such statements are also part of the
narrative’s construction of suspense that perhaps not coincidentally are made with
suspension points (the British term for the ellipsis). “Multiple dots are equally
suitable—many would say unsuitable—for the expression, or at least the intimation,
either of suspense, when they are called Points of Suspense, or of reverie” (Partridge
63
See Charles Mills’s discussion in Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1998). Other essays appear in the special summer 2003 issue of boundary 2, “Ralph
Ellison: The Next Fifty Years,” edited by Ronald A. Judy, in which excellent essays by Kevin Bell and
Alexander Weheliye, among others, appear.
THE TYPOGRAPHY OF INVISIBLE MAN / 697
85). The opacity of the ellipsis is the “blackness visible” that is such an important part
of Ellison’s experimental performance of blackness. In other words, the ellipsis carries
a “negative capability” that can interrupt the flow of time: it can temporarily shift the
direction, change speed and tempo. We can think of punctuation as theatrical marks
that choreograph thought. Such syncopated out of sync sinking sensations are
suggested and sustained by the ellipsis in the text. The dots are the nodes, the literal
points, where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. The ellipsis provides us a
point of view from which, and with which, to enter the theatricalized space of time.
Indeed, Ellison’s wrenching rendering of the wench in the cave exemplifies such a
defiant gesture—allowing us to enter into the paced space of time. The tempting
tempo of the ellipsis leads us into a contretemps . . .
The ellipsis in Invisible Man performs the “figure of a figure,” “the blackness of
blackness,” the “rind and the heart” (21)—not so much an external mark of internal
desire, but rather a neither/nor figure whose meaning-content is (re)inscribed, and
sounded invisibly, with each review—and therefore is open perpetually to possibility.
The form and figure of freedom, rendered with restraint (remember the ellipses is both
contracted and expansive), the ellipsis is the black (w—does this w stand for
whiteness, for writing, the West—all three and more?) hole of our mutually consti-
tuted racialized culture. Anne Cheng argues astutely that some of the characters in
Invisible Man seem “more stylized than racialized. More to the point, [they] expose the
idea that racialization is always a matter of style rather than essence—a performance of
type that can be either self-stereotyping or self-identifying.”64
In this essay, I have been thinking about the performance of typography as playing
a role in such productions. Where Cheng perhaps means this abstractly, we might
supplement her musing with a concretization of her words, or as Johnson would say,
a fleshing out and materialization. The ellipsis seems more stylized than racialized—
as a performance of (material) type, although its blackness cannot be elided.65 I suggest
that the ellipsis functions as yet another figuration and materialization for understand-
ing and underscoring Ellison’s synaesthetic mix. Invisible Man drifts off and thinks:
“If, I thought, one could slow down his heartbeats and memory to the tempo of the
black drops falling so slowly into the bucket yet reacting so swiftly, it would seem like
a sequence in feverish dream . . . I was so deep in reverie that I failed to hear Kimbro
approach” (197).
He recalls the earlier scene of hallucination, where he finds the founding ancestor—
the foremother who comes afterwards in the narrative of the text. He tries to temper
his temper—to change the tempo . . . but “the rhythm was too hectic. A tom-tom
beating like heart-thuds began drowning out the trumpet, filling my ears” (12).66
64
Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation and Hidden Grief (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2001), 132.
65
See Jeffrey Masten, Nancy Vickers and Peter Stallybrass, Language Machines: Technologies of Literary
and Cultural Production (New York: Routledge, 1997).
66
Tempo was also a kind of coin currency in nineteenth-century Japan. In the OED the term tempo
resides among related terms such as temper, tempera, temperamental, temperature, temperance,
tempest, and temple. All seem to have a role to play in Ellison’s elucidation of the blackness of
blackness. The main root, however, is attributed to a Latin source, “tempus,” meaning time. The first
definition listed is “The timing of an attack in fencing so that one’s opponent is within reach.” Second,
698 / Jennifer DeVere Brody
This passage from Ellison’s text contrasts with another from the same era that comes
from Strunk and White’s famous stylebook, The Elements of Style. In the latter,
suggestion #21, “Prefer the standard to the offbeat,” cautions against the peril of using
“the crossbred language of mutilation.”67 Such temptations are carried by sound and
rhythm, something emphasized by the use of onomatopoeia: a trope that stresses the
commensurability of sound and word. So, too, we might think here of how jazz
performs and reforms the standard—or, as James Snead would say, how repetition is
a figure of black culture that heralds the cut in contradistinction to the cover up.68
Indeed, the excessive use of breaks and interruptions that mimic emergent patterns of
speech and silence might be traced to an African-derived beginning in the letters of
Ignatius Sancho, an eighteenth-century black British composer, grocer, and correspon-
dent of Lawrence Sterne. Sancho was wonderfully innovative in his use of punctua-
tion, as his epistles—which are chock-full of dashes, exclamation points, and the
ellipses—attest.69 The performance of the ellipsis in Ellison’s text helps us to under-
stand, if not apprehend, the performativity of the blackness of blackness—that is and
ain’t—not only on the stage of the page, but also in the performance of everyday life.
tempo is a musical term signifying “Relative speed or rate of movement; pace, time; the speed at which
music for a dance is or should be played.” Thus, I think it is felicitous (pace Austin) that Ellison’s
preface to the preaching mentions “flamenco.” Finally, tempo can refer to “the rate of motion or
activity (of someone or something).” The temporal, unlike the sacred, is secular time. Temporal:
“Belonging or relating to a particular time or period; of passing interest, ephemeral.” Metaphysically
speaking, what is temporary, “occurring or existing in time, not from eternity.”
67
William Strunk and E. B. White, The Elements of Style (1959; rept. New York: McMillan Press, 1979),
80.
68
James Snead, “Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture,” in Out There: Marginalization and
Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Min-ha, and Cornel West
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 213—30.
69
It should come as no surprise, then, that Strunk and White’s prescriptive pamphlet, The Elements
of Style, written in the same era as Invisible Man, deems subcultural style (pace Dick Hebdidge)
dangerous, primitive, native, and, by extension, “black.” They write:
The young writer will be drawn at every turn toward eccentricities in language. He will hear the beat
of new vocabularies, the exciting rhythms of special segments of his society, each speaking a language
of its own. All of us come under the spell of these unsettling drums; the problem for the beginner is to
listen to them, learn the words, feel the vibrations, and not be carried away. Youth invariably speaks to
youth in a tongue of his own devising: he renovates the language with a wild vigor, as he would a basement
apartment [emphasis added]. By the time this paragraph sees print, uptight, ripoff, rap, dude, vibes, copout,
and funky will be the words of yesteryear . . . more appropriate to conversation than composition.
[81—82]
Importantly, Ellison’s entire opus belies the impossibility of this prediction. Moreover, Strunk and
White unwittingly prove Ellison’s understanding of the profound influences of blackness on American
race relations. It is precisely the blackness in whiteness that composes American culture.
.
This page was last modified on 2006/05/09, by mistersquid,and was exported to HTML on 2006/08/27 using version 3.5.4 of Tinderbox.