Ralph Ellison's Acoustic Stereoscope: Reading Invisible Man through Günther Anders's Phenomenology of Music

Abstract:

This article is a reading of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) in light of Günther Anders's phenomenology of listening (1931) and hypothesized acoustic stereoscope (1949), proposing the latter as a source for the narrator's speculative desire to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong's "(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Bliue" playing simultaneously. Anders's obscure theories and notions about listening offer a way to conceptualize some of the novel's most enigmatic moments, including its descriptions of echo and its notoriously ambiguous final sentence. The article also explores Anders's career, possible social connections to Ellison, as well as Ellison's renewed interest in music in the late 1940s after years of ambivalence following his decision to stop pursuing music as a career. This recovered interest included working for inventor and sound engineer David Sarser. This part-time employment intersects with the philosophical questions and aural metaphors under investigation here, pointing to a different intellectual context for the novel's prologue and epilogue (1951) than for parts of the novel composed in the 1945–48 period.