Embracing Chaos in Narrative Form: The Bebop Aesthetic and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

When Ralph Ellison began writing what would eventually become his landmark novel Invisible Man in late 1945, bebop had only just begun to permeate the streets and airwaves of New York City. In fact, Ellison's own life as he worked on the manuscript paralleled that of many of the jazz musicians who recorded the first bebop "sides" and played their music in public venues. At the time, Ellison would make the commute from his one-room apartment in Harlem to an empty eighth-floor suite in an office building at 608 Fifth Avenue. This space, provided to him by a fellow writer, allowed Ellison to craft his work within the hustle and bustle of mid-town Manhattan. At night, however, Ellison would return to his cramped Harlem apartment where, as he admits in his introduction to the 1981 edition of Invisible Man, "most of the novel still managed to get itself written" (xi). Around the same time, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, two of the primary innovators of the emergent music, ventured into the middle of the city in 1945 to record bebop classics such as "Salt Peanuts" and "Koko" and to perform in the nightclubs that lined 52^nd Street. But it was in the late-night jam sessions at Harlem nightclubs like Minton's Playhouse and Monroe's Uptown House that Parker, Gillespie, and other jazz musicians established the "modernist" musical innovations of bebop. More than a parallel in subway lines and taxi-cab rides, Ellison's and bebop musicians' trajectory from these two public spaces within two miles of one another represents the complex cultural terrain at work in both Invisible Man and bebop music as African-American aesthetic forms. These contemporaneous works and the contexts of their production reflect the tense interaction between seemingly opposing worlds: between the black community located in Harlem and the (largely white) mainstream world of mid-town Manhattan; the creative innovations of art and the commercialism of public performance; and an aesthetic rooted in black folk culture and an aesthetic influenced by white mainstream culture. Invisible Man and bebop, as products of this interaction, illustrate the intersections as well as the divisions between these two worlds and the role each had on African-American cultural production at this time.

My task in this essay is to examine Ellison's Invisible Man through the cultural and aesthetic framework of bebop, the form of jazz that achieved the height of its popularity between the years 1945-1950, the time during which Ellison wrote the novel.¹ Although many critics have characterized the novel as a "jazz novel" and have explored, in general terms, the elements of a jazz aesthetic in the novel, critics have ignored the specific connections between Ellison's work and the form of jazz that was emerging contemporaneously. As products of post-World War II sensibilities, both bebop and Invisible Man reflect Ellison's interest in the figure of the bebop virtuoso who struggles to achieve an individual identity through the creation of a unique improvisational voice. This figure serves as both a model and a corollary for the protagonist of the novel. As embodied by the prototypical bebopper Charlie Parker, the bebop virtuoso exists at the confluence of tradition and innovation, past and present, individual and communal identity. In essence, Ellison constructs the unnamed narrator as a literary bebop improviser who draws on the voices and reflections of other characters, redefines and comments on their statements, in order to emerge with his own improvisational voice by the end of the text. As he narrates his story from his underground dwelling in the Prologue of the novel, the protagonist achieves his sense of identity by improvising on elements of his past through key figures that represent both musical and cultural traditions within their narrative voices. By working his own narrative through the free-indirect speech of characters like the...