The Color of Sound:Hearing Timbre in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man
What does it mean to hear color? Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man revolves around sight, but timbre, musically defined as the color of sound, combines sight with sound to explore the implications of hearing race. With music already in the forefront of critical work on Invisible Man, it is intuitive to move into musicological territory to consider what is essentially a problem of perception: can one characterize a voice as having a “black” sound, and what does that distinction jeopardize? Defining timbre in relationship to the body means developing a methodology to track subjective perceptions about voice, race, and differentiation in a shifting temporal structure and adds provocative dimensions to the narrator’s invisible body that attach to a shared history of hearing race. As such, thinking with timbre chronicles how voice is racialized in Invisible Man and, through a disturbing series of misrecognitions, asks if it should be.
After hearing the narrator of ralph Ellison's 1952 novel Invisible Man give a lecture, an admirer lures him back to her home and confesses that his voice makes her afraid because it is both powerful and primitive: "Yes, primitive," she insists, "No one has told you, Brother, that at times you have tom-toms beating in your voice?" (413). Occurring toward the end of a novel that repeatedly conflates visibility with aurality in increasingly complex formulations, the scene lays bare the misconception of a raced voice that undergirds the narrative's primary conflict: becoming visible in a racially-prejudiced society. In describing the narrator's voice as primitive, the admirer assigns color to his body using a stereotype of blackness. When the admirer continues that she hears tom-toms beating in his voice, she assumes exotic power in it as well. Essentially, here a woman hears a voice and traces it to an imaginary body.
The scene mediates race through an interdependent and unreliable combination of perceived sound and sight that comprises timbre, or the color of sound, rendering the black voice alarmingly re-embodied. While the novel overtly engages with music,1 the timbral element of music isolates a site of contestation, identification, and categorization that tracks subjective perceptions about voice, race, and differentiation throughout the novel. Timbre—a sound that written language cannot reproduce—consequently adds provocative aural dimensions to the narrator's invisible body that hold cultural stereotyping accountable in a hearing and seeing society.2 As such, Invisible Man shows timbre as a site of discernment that is itself contested.
Hearing timbre is predominantly a process of identification—a lost child will know its mother by the timbre of her voice.3 Calling it the [End Page 47] color of sound or the grain of the voice, no one has clearly defined timbre—nor, arguably, can anyone, given its overwhelmingly subjective reliance on culture, environment, and circumstance—yet it remains an established part of the Western discourse on sound.4 Timbre differentiates between sounds by aligning a sound with its source—one sound belongs to your mother, the other to a stranger—constantly orienting people in relationship to their surroundings.5 But as such, timbre exists in an overwhelmingly intuitive state of aural perception and, by extension, cultural association because it offers a way to differentiate between things that are otherwise the same in terms of pitch, loudness, and duration. Often, timbre refers to a quality of voice, which itself has no set location, existing in the ether between throat and air.6 In common use, it is almost exclusively employed alongside adjectives—golden, smooth, robust. But timbre functions as both verb and noun, the action of acclimation that orients subjects in relationship to surrounding objects via sight and sound as well as the originating site, particularly when timbre refers to voice.
For Invisible Man's Jim Trueblood, whose black body bifurcates his voice according to his collective listening audience, there are glaring racial implications of voice. A sharecropper "who had brought disgrace upon the black community," Trueblood fulfills a multi-faceted African American trope of supernatural entity, strong brute, entertainer, and menace in the narrative. He is a "hard worker," a "black-belt peasant" who "told the old stories with a sense of humor and a magic," but he is also a father who raped his daughter (46–47). As his story continues, a curious disagreement emerges about how others hear his voice. The narrator recalls that Trueblood was "a good tenor singer," and special white guests liked to listen to him sing "primitive spirituals" (47). The narrator continues: "We were embarrassed by the earthy harmonies they sang, but since the visitors were awed we dared not laugh at the crude, high, plaintively animals sounds Jim Trueblood made" (47). Here, two groups emerge separated by race—the "special white" guests and a community of black students represented by a resolute "we"—and, based on the corporal body these groups see, they perceive Trueblood's voice alternatively as a good tenor reprising primitive spirituals and as a crude, high, plaintive animal sound that represents the shared history of slavery behind his "earthy harmonies." The color of Trueblood's body defines two opposing vocal timbres. [End Page 48]
The scene is unsettling not only because of the stereotyping of Trueblood's voice based on his blackness, but also because it remains unclear what his voice actually sounds like. Even as the narrator establishes his character in relation to color, multiple histories—Trueblood as a subservient black man versus Trueblood as an embarrassment to the black community—hang in the wings. The problem of the subjective "primitive" and "plaintive" vocal characterizations that interpretations of Trueblood's vocal timbre raise perpetuates a notion of color for which the narrator must account for: the assumed bodies and voices attached to Trueblood as an object of subjective association. Others control what he looks like and what he sounds like based on the color they see and hear. Arguably, hearing timbre causes this misidentification by allowing any vocal color to associate with Trueblood's body unchecked because anyone hearing timbre can decide who he is without any material information beyond their individual sense perception.
At the end of Invisible Man, when the narrator states, "I must come out, I must emerge … I've overstayed my hibernation, since there's a possibility that even an invisible man has a socially responsible role to play," he takes ownership of something that scholars across disciplines have characterized as categorically ungovernable (581). Musicologists have wrestled over hearing timbre since its earliest English usage in the nineteenth century.7 To define timbre as the color of sound (the German word for timbre is klangfarbe, or "sound color") is to make an admittedly vague gesture to the intrinsic identifying principle of every sound.8 As music psychologist Carol Krumhansl states in her essay "Why is Musical Timbre so Hard to Understand?" (1989), defining timbre might be the biggest issue confronting composers, music technologists, and perceptual psychologists because of its ties to individual perception (43). "The most basic problem is the definition of timbre itself," Krumhansl writes, noting that the implicit assumptions of timbre's autonomy from other dimensions of sound betray its artificiality (44). She refers here to hearing perceptions—"Can we really assume the differences in spectral energy distributions are completely uncoupled from pitch perception mechanisms in hearing"—that are even further obscured by electro-acoustic music in which the apparent source can be easily manipulated. Something that sounds like it comes from a violin will sound like a trumpet with the flip of a few switches, though the original source is actually neither. [End Page 49]
The current debate about hearing timbre not only addresses what timbre is but also the validity of its source, making the term pertinent to interpreting the problem of visibility in Invisible Man. Because the timbre of a sound is changeable, particular in an age of electronic manipulations, many argue that using or investigating the term is wasted effort. Indeed, Michel Chion insists that electroacoustic music has made timbre invalid altogether in his essay "Dissolution of the Notion of Timbre" (1986). Because sound can be manipulated technologically, it no longer acts as a genuine attachment to a defined source: something that might sound like a flute is in fact a computerized tone on an electronic keyboard. Chion accuses modern scores as treating timbre as "a vulgar sonic body" making timbre a "pure acoustic fetish and a misleading concept" that encourages listeners to believe in the idea of sonic sources (238). In place of timbre, Chion encourages "everything that allows us to consummate the rupture of sound with its real source" and to let the concept of timbre effectively die (239).
Hearing timbre, however, is an unavoidable orientation of human experience, continuously working whether or not it is misleading and thus making it a philosophical necessity to define.9 In an interlude of his study Listening (2002; 2007), Jean-Luc Nancy turns his discussion of the sonorous to a preoccupation with defining timbre. "Actually, I never stop talking about timbre," he begins, "Even if it remains possible and true to distinguish it from pitch, duration, intensity, there is, however, no pitch, and so on, without timbre" (39). He follows with several statements, stipulating that timbre is "the very resonance of the sonorous" and "the resonance of sound: or sound itself" (40). Still later, he fixes timbre as the "communication of the incommunicable: provided it is understood that the incommunicable is nothing other, in a perfectly logical way, than communication itself, that thing by which a subject makes an echo—of self, of the other, it's all one" (41). For Nancy, as it is for musicologists and theorists alike, timbre lies beyond an absolute definition. "Timbre is above all the unity of a diversity that its unity does not reabsorb," he writes, "That is also why it does not yield to measurement or notation as do the other musical values" (41). At last, Nancy concludes timbre "is my body beaten by its sense of body, what we used to call its soul" (43).
Timbre is especially salient when referring to the voice, as it prevailingly does in Invisible Man. More than hearing a piano and listening [End Page 50] to its timbre, hearing vocal timbre dramatically heightens the stakes of visibility because the source of the sound is a living body, not an object. If timbre, as Nancy posits, is a reflection of the soul, the combination of voice and timbre achieves dramatic import. "What singles out the voice as special among the infinite array of acoustic phenomena, is its inner relationship with meaning" Mladen Dolar writes in A Voice and Nothing More (2006), but later adds "if we speak in order to say something, then the voice is precisely that which cannot be said" (14–15). Dolar argues that although the singing (as opposed to speaking) voice participates in a highly structured system of musical codes and standards, its musical attachment actually further obscures linguistic meaning because it turns the voice into a fetish object and opens a "gap that cannot be filled" (30). When attached to music in this way, the voice sinks into a kind of black hole of significations:
The voice as the bearer of a deeper sense, of some profound message, is a structural illusion, the core of a fantasy that the singing voice might cure the wound inflicted by culture, restore the loss that we suffered by the assumption of the symbolic order. This deceptive promise disavows the fact that the voice owes its fascination to this wound, and that its allegedly miraculous force stems from its being situated in this gap.
(31)
For both Nancy and Dolar, the concept of musical voice falls into a space of open-ended meaning. Timbre works to organize this elusive signification in relation to the self. Hearing timbre requires a subject's negotiation of this gap—either stretching across or fatally sinking in.
the time to recognition
The novel's overarching structure, a present-tense Prologue and Epilogue that encase the narrator's voiced recollection, mirrors the two-part sequence also attached to perceptions of timbre. Timbre functions according to a chronological two-part sequence that aligns sound with sight, meaning there is a small but significant delay between hearing a voice and tying it to a body. Body and voice then join together as a single perceived unit. Once a listener completes the sequence, however, it can seem as if body and voice were never separated. If the listener forgets the time of separation in the chronology driving the alignment, [End Page 51] then the alignment folds onto itself in a circle of false recognition. When the narrator declares, "The end is in the beginning" in the Prologue, he outlines how this temporal dictum of hearing timbre negates the alignment of black body with voice (6). If there is no recognized time of separation between voice and body, there is no opportunity for the narrator to become visible, as he continues: "I myself, after existing some twenty years, did not become alive until I discovered my invisibility" (7). The novel performs this misalignment on multiple levels, from first-person narration to the novel's overarching bookended structure, and frames the problem of visibility as one of coiled temporalities that variously perpetuate historical and a-historical plotlines.
The temporal implications of hearing timbre determine the narrator's invisibility, as the narrator parenthetically warns: "(Beware of those who speak of the spiral of history; they are preparing a boomerang. Keep a steel helmet handy)" (6). He identifies two spots as "the darkest of our whole civilization … but that is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang" (6). The narrator joins this looping conception of time to the misrecognition of his own body in these doomed "dark spots" of spiraled history. Light "gives birth" to his form, he says, "Without light I am not only invisible, but formless as well; and to be unaware of one's form is to live a death" (7). And in opening, the narrator characterizes his existence as barely liminal, "Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass" (3). The narrator attributes his formlessness to a "peculiar disposition of the eyes … of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality," suggesting a suspension of recognition at multiple points (through several sets of eyes) that ultimately fail to give his body agency (3).
In Invisible Man, timbre distorts conventions of narrative chronology by underlining the anomaly that timbre raises as a musical term operating in narrative. While chronological time marks an uncompromising forward-moving line, musical time—comprised of strict and felt elements like rhythm, meter, beat, and pulse—can both give shape and become shapeless. Thinking of musical duration as an image of experience, Susanne K. Langer suggests that, "Music spreads out time for our direct and complete apprehension, by letting our hearing monopolize it—organize, fill and shape it, all alone" (110). Musically, timbre [End Page 52] mediates recognition of characters in the novel by folding voice and body into its temporal structure from the outset, where the narrator describes his invisibility in terms of hearing time. "Invisibility … gives one a slightly different sense of time, you're never quite on the beat," the narrator explains, "Sometimes you're ahead and sometimes behind" (8). The narrator posits a peculiar rhythmic equation here where listening determines visibility. While this equation implies chronological temporal movement, the narrator continues by proposing an unmoving temporal image where, "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" (8). Time in the novel moves erratically, and as the narrator recalls how a "yokel" knocked out a prizefighting boxer by stepping "inside of his opponent's sense of time," he illustrates how predicting its pattern lays bare a dark site of human vulnerability.
The Prologue performs this vulnerability by isolating an image of sound using italics. Coming between the narrator's expository statement "I am an invisible man" and his closing "But what did I do to be so blue?" the four-page italicized section substantiates that music only sounds his visibility insofar as music generates a chronological timeline. Shortly before breaking into italics, the narrator says he has discovered "a new analytical way of listening to music" where "the unheard sounds came through, and each melodic line existed of itself, stood out clearly from all the rest, said its piece, and waited patiently for the other voices to speak" (8–9). This is the originating site of timbre, where unheard sounds begin to resonate individually and the sound sources have yet to appear. The narrator then finds himself "hearing not only in time, but in space as well," not only entering the music, but also descending, "like Dante, into its depths" (9). Stylistically devising a temporal environment manifested by sound, the narrator begins to speak in italics:
And beneath the swiftness of the hot tempo there was a slower tempo and a cave and I entered it and looked around and heard an old woman singing a spiritual … 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 slaveowners [sic] who bid for her naked body, and below that I found a lower level and a more rapid tempo and I heard someone shout"
(9) [End Page 53]
Tempo, the rate per unit of time, marks the narrator's descent. And in this new temporal pattern below, he uses timbre to orient himself with increasing adroitness. First, the narrator hears an old woman singing a spiritual but does not see her. On the next level down, hearing timbre substantiates a raced body, voice, and history when he sees a "girl the color of ivory" and hears her pleading in a voice he recalls is like his mother's. The further this frozen image of musical time absorbs him, the closer he gets to his racialized invisibility and his potential liberation from it.
But more than one mode of time determines his body's viability at the end of this aural margin, where rhythmic and patterned musical time overlap with chronological time and evince the fragility of the time it requires for others to recognize him. The narrator describes "a profound craving for tranquility" that will never be realized, as he is isolated in a temporal node where peace will always be just out of reach (12). He expresses this tragic unfulfillment in musical terms, where too many sounds have crowded for timbre to function in a clearly defined construct of hearing a voice and associating it with a body according to a distinctive color: "The trumpet was blaring and the rhythm was too hectic. A tom-tom beating like heart-thuds began drowning out the trumpet, filling my ears" (12). Referring to the sound as a "tom-tom beating" filling his ears and drowning out other sounds in a rhythm that has become "too hectic," the narrator gestures to the woman who racializes his voice as primitive. Her misapprehension of the narrator's body reveals itself here as stemming from a consequence of temporal multiplicities: he speaks here in a present-tense Prologue but will later recollect how his admirer racialized his voice. The narrative casts forward and backward simultaneously, writing a retrograde history and spinning it into the very a-historical spiral the narrator initially warns his readers about. The woman has prepared a "boomerang," and he is without a "steel helmet" (6).
While the Prologue and Epilogue act as present-tense bookends of the novel, the Epilogue unfolds as a distinctly different moment in terms of how the narrator perceives his existence: "The world is just as concrete, ornery, vile and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me" (576). The narrator remarks that he is, "not complaining, nor am I protesting" his invisibility in the Prologue, despite how he aches "with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you're a part of all the [End Page 54] sound and anguish, and … you curse and swear to make them recognize you" (3–4). Alternatively in the Epilogue, the narrator questions his invisibility using the variously shifting musical and chronological temporalities that the novel proffers. He is less certain of his invisibility here because of the re-embodied voices he can now recall from the past: "Perhaps that's the way it had to be; I don't know. Nor do I know whether accepting the lesson has placed me in the rear … That, perhaps, is a lesson for history … I try belatedly to study the lesson of my life" (572). And although the narrator "not only entered the music but descended" having discovered "a new analytical way of listening" to Louis Armstrong's "So Black and Blue" in the Prologue, here he rises up: "Of course Louis was kidding … Old Bad Air is still around with his music and his dancing and his diversity, and I'll be up and around with mine" (581). Finally, when the narrator announces that he "must come out, I must emerge … I'm shaking off the old skin and I'll leave it here in the hole," he decisively cuts the line that characters have recognized in the past from his voice to his body and creates a new one—vitally, he gives himself a name. "It's damn well time," he says (581).
a history of misapprehensions
When the narrator re-emerges in the Epilogue "shaking off the old skin" after the twenty-five-chapter recollection of what he did "to be so blue," a string of bodies and voices litter the ground (501; 14). Because hearing timbre is subjective, it often proliferates new, imagined sound sources for those looking at the narrator. In Invisible Man, this tendency manifests as mad constellations of cultural appropriation by other characters—"primitive spirituals" and "tom-toms beating"—and leaves piles of strange bodies that the narrator must parse and racially reconcile (47; 413). This accrual happens in the mind's eye, where a double and even triple consciousness of seeing can emerge. When the admirer calls the narrator's voice "primitive," the novel proffers alternate scenarios: The narrator hears the woman's voice without a preconceived history of hearing it, "simply being there with her and the sensed possibility of a heightened communication" (411). But the "tom-toms" she hears beating in his voice are a sound she has already heard—a stereotype she recalls and implants on the body she imagines belongs to his voice (411). A history of such racialized misapprehensions and cultural categorizations makes it possible for her to do so. There is little [End Page 55] wonder that as she repeats the word "primitive," he laughs at her. They see two different bodies.
The contrast between the narrator's perception and hers uncovers an alarming flexibility in the diegesis where hearing timbre generates multiplicities of body and voice. As Alexander Weheliye explains, "By way of explicating how he is refused representation in the field of vision, the protagonist also insists on the intersubjective workings of his invisibility rather than construing it as an ontological absolute" (106). Quoting W.E.B. Du Bois' Souls of Black Folk (1903), Weheliye cites "the double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of the world that looks on" to argue that looking through another's eyes makes the subject of double-consciousness something visual rather than aural (qtd. in Weheliye 107). The peculiar thing about the novel's treatment of this double-consciousness, Weheliye points out, is that "formlessness elides the protagonist only insofar as the music sounds his invisibility" (109).
The novel's characters deploy perceptions of timbre that ensnare the narrator in a racialized stereotype in which his voice aligns with a body not his own. In the first chapter, when the narrator fights blindfolded in the Battle Royale and has to rely on what he hears to survive, he remembers that when "I raised my gloved hands to push the layers of white aside a voice yelled, "Oh, no you don't, black bastard!" (22). What begins as a distinct separation between hearing a voice and seeing a body—in the Battle Royale, the white audience sees his body, but he can only hear their voices—develops into a confusion between body and voice that occurs when the two misalign. Whenever the narrator explicitly asks others to see him, characters counter with misappropriations of sound instead. Brother Jack recruits the narrator, for instance, motivated by the sound of his voice and not the color of his skin, though the two are implicitly linked:
I heard a series of arpeggios sound on the piano behind me and turned to look, hearing the woman Emma say not quite softly enough, "But don't you think he should be a little blacker?"
"Shhh, don't be a damn fool," Brother Jack said sharply. "We're not interested in his looks but in his voice."
(303)
With piano arpeggios as the aural backdrop, the sound of the narrator's voice doubles as race itself. Moreover, when Emma protests that [End Page 56] perhaps he "should be a little blacker?" the narrative reveals his voice actually determines the color of his body. And this principle of vocal timbre equating race motivates the narrator's first speech as part of the Brotherhood, when he cries for recognition: "Look at me!" and later, "I stand here before you!" (345). In this scene, the narrator demands acknowledgement of his body through his voice: "And now, at this moment, with your black and white eyes upon me, I feel … I feel … suddenly that I have become more human [. … ] I am a new citizen of the country of your vision" (344–46). This scenario in which sight overlaps with sound and originates a sense of belonging—here, specifically citizenry—escalates in varying configurations chapter after chapter, always from an outside perspective where others determine who the narrator is based on perceiving color aurally—that is, as timbre. Each reoccurrence deepens timbre as a necessary and increasingly pressing point of inquiry even while the concept remains vulnerable to subjective experience.
Hearing timbre evolves and expands in the novel to underline its unreliability in increasingly transparent racialized scenarios, and as it develops, the causal relations between sight and sound elicit the failure of one calling the other into existence. As the narrator sits waiting to give his first speech for the Brotherhood, he imagines a remote eye watching him from a distance that was nevertheless still his eye. The part of him that "observed listlessly but saw all, missing nothing," the "dissenting voice" and the "cynical, disbelieving part" threatens internal discord from the outside (335). Suddenly assuming a new personality, the narrator's body becomes alien. He looks at his legs as if seeing them for the first time—"independent objects that could of their own volition lead me to safety or danger" he thinks: "I was becoming someone else" (335). Wondering in flashes of panic how his transformation would happen, he thinks it might be as simple as being "looked upon by so many people, to be the focal point of so many concentrating eyes" (336). While his transformation begins as a visual consequence, the audience is not merely a collective of sight but also of sound, droning in one united "distant, churning sound" (337).
The disorder of senses becomes stranger still when the narrator loses his sight as he steps up to the platform, fully on display (337). As in the Battle Royale scene, spotlights blind the narrator so that the audience can see him, but he can only hear them thundering as a chorus of clapping hands and singing, "No more dispossessing of the dispossessed!" synchronized in one breathing, articulating entity (340). This [End Page 57] collective eye generates a foreign body, causing dual voices to emerge: one embodied by a collective hearing; the other discarded, unrecognized, disembodied and left floating. While the narrator blames his sightlessness on the glaring spotlights, he cannot begin to perceive anything without a body, and he cannot begin to claim autonomy while his voice hangs suspended in the ether.
While many of the accrued, imagined bodies and voices in Invisible Man originate with the narrator from a first person perspective, the most egregious misapprehension happens to a young black woman the narrator observes. Early in the narrator's recollection, a "thin brown girl" stands up "noiselessly" to sing a solo during a vespers service in front of the black student body, Dr. Bledsoe, and a host of white honored guests and trustees (116). Outlining her vocal autonomy and the imminent threat against it, the narrator recalls the girl sang "as though singing to herself of emotions of utmost privacy, a sound not addressed to the gathering, but which they overheard almost against her will" (116). As her voice grows louder, her voice severs from her body and mutates into a weapon in the minds of others that she no longer controls—something that seeks to "enter" and "violate" her:
Gradually she increased its volume, until at times the voice seemed to become a disembodied force that sought to enter her, to violate her, shaking her, rocking her rhythmically, as though it had become the source of her being, rather than the fluid web of her own creation.
(116)
The previously established timbre—the orientation of sight with sound, body with voice—breaks when different eyes gaze at her. The white guests "turn to look behind them, to see the thin brown girl in white choir robe standing high against the organ pipes, herself become before our eyes a pipe of contained, controlled and sublimated anguish" before exchanging "smiles of approval" (117). Her voice becomes an independent force, timbre its motivation.
A history of suffering nestles plainly in the gap between hearing and seeing black sound, as the narrator describes her voice from his vantage point: "I could not understand the words, but only the mood, sorrowful, vague and ethereal," he recalls, before specifying, "It throbbed with nostalgia, regret and repentance" (117). Her voice embodies [End Page 58] a long-standing tradition of black, female suffering, shadowy memories that recall sexual abuse and slavery, not unlike what Fred Moten hears in Jessye Norman's voice. Moten describes a recording of Norman singing and thinks of a "photo-phonographic haint tautology" that confronts us, finally, with the objecthood of the black body in performance—the black voice separated from its body. For Moten, Norman's recorded voice is "irrepressibly visual" despite the severing of voice and body that occurs at the site of the phonograph (280). Referring to this history of "black sound" in opera, Moten raises the point that the vocal timbre associated with a black singer is often "visually figured as a certain aural duskiness, smokiness, or huskiness" (278). The specifically "deep" sound is "tied to a kind of deep-throatedness that is sometimes seen as a function of training but has often been linked to supposed anatomical features specific to black bodies," where Moten indicates listeners mark the low, deep sounds as black "whether they come from a black singer or not" (279–80), meaning a perpetual attaching, re-attaching, dismembering, remembering of Norman's voice to body (281).
Invisible Man complicates the perpetual separation and reunion of black body and voice because it demands reconciliation of a multiplying subject with a singular history. This includes reconciling the spiraling history of hearing timbre—the multiple temporalities forging a-historical routes across a historically plotted diegesis where chronological time constitutes a subject. When it comes to reliably identifying a history of black sound in other contexts, that sound becomes almost impossible to untangle from cultural and social histories of hearing timbre. Arguing that the audibility of race—whiteness or blackness—relies on the accrual of listening practices that change over time "to conform to the sonic color line's norms," Jennifer Lynn Stoever points out that the inherent difficulty in tracing and recording the racialization of voice lies in pinning down a continuously moving target (7). Hearing timbre in Invisible Man adds the charge of doing so while that target is also reproducing.
When the singer sinks into her seat in a "controlled collapsing," her voice is excised from her body, casting aside the history it reflects, because a collective group looked at this thin brown girl and, hearing the timbre of her voice, misaligned it with an imaginary body that was not hers. In the process, this group reinvents the explicitly feminized black history of her oppression to fit their perception of tone and color. [End Page 59] The "disembodied force" that enters the thin brown girl early in the novel is both dystopian and regretful. Though the narrator does not understand what she is singing, he explicitly feels sorrow, nostalgia, and regret. A victim to her elite white audience, she ends trying to balance and sustain "the simmering bubble of her final tone by some delicate rhythm of her heart's blood, or by some mystic concentration of her being" (117). In her voice, the narrator hears centuries of attachment and community formed through oppression as well as her individual essence, her "heart's blood," as she collapses. Timbre catalogs the racialization of voice here as holding the archive of black sound while looking ahead bleakly, where the black body exists severed from a voice, spent of its history, and jettisoned.
This disembodiment happens gradually in Invisible Man as it has for centuries outside of the text. The narrator does not have a name because his voice has been re-embodied a-historically. "Things are so unreal," the narrator explains in the Prologue, "that they believe that to call a thing by name is to make it so. And yet I am what they think I am" (379). In the Epilogue, the narrator makes this process of imaginary re-embodiment explicit: "It came upon me slowly, like that strange disease that affects those black men whom you see turning slowly from black to albino, their pigment disappearing as under the radiation of some cruel, invisible ray," until finally, "you stand naked and shivering before the millions of eyes who look through you unseeingly" (575). Leaning in with italics, the narrator states: "That is the real soul-sickness, the spear in the side, the drag by the neck through the mob-angry town, … the trip to the chamber with the deadly gas that ends in the oven so hygienically clean" (575). In a gesture to the novel's seesawing temporal frame, he admits that he has "tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties" (580–81). When, in closing, the Invisible Man asks if "on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?" he connects his voice to body by way of timbre (581); when he asks, "Must I strive toward colorlessness?" he also asks if he must accept the often racialized terms of timbre's embodiment (577). Hearing timbre fosters a meeting of the body and the black voice when the site of discernment is uncertain and exposes the imaginary black body and its re-embodied voice. Hearing timbre in Invisible Man is to hazard that it will give pattern to this chaos. [End Page 60]
sydney boyd is a Spatial Humanities Project Manager Fellow in the Humanities Research Center at Rice University. Her research brings together musicology and literary study to explore how musical duration affects literary perceptions of temporality in the twentieth-century novel.
notes
1. Since its publication, scholars have established thorough command of sound in Invisible Man covering jazz, oration, acoustics, as well as voice using a broad range of methodologies to think about the role sound plays in a novel that famously revolves around sight. As John S. Wright remarks, scholars "have devoted no small measure of attention to the musical sources of the book's experimental attitude—to jazz and blues, in particular" often through a study of Ellison's musical background (140). These studies attend, in detail, to the ways in which hearing uncovers various forms of racial premise in the novel. Christopher Hanlon, for instance, discusses the Invisible Man's rhetoric in the Brotherhood speech scenes by using music as a theoretical lens. Hanlon argues, effectively, that these speeches are "more than strictly 'political'" because they draw "upon a tradition of call-and-response oration that also informs the improvisational styles of jazz composition" and establishes persuasive groundwork for a necessary cross-media reading of the novel (76). Scholars have built on this extensive body of criticism to consider how aurality represents black culture, subjectivity, and identity in and beyond the novel. David Copenhafer, for example, argues that voice translates as vision in a close reading of Louis Armstrong's "So Black and Blue," a song that first appears in the novel's Prologue. Likewise, Alexander Weheliye's discusses Du Bois, DJ mixing, and black cultural sound production to posit a distinct audibility in Invisible Man that represents black culture "as a sounding and hearing culture" (535).
2. When discussing Invisible Man, scholars often indirectly use the concept of hearing timbre as a way to isolate and critically enrich how we understand sight. Although he does not use the term "timbre" explicitly, Herman Beavers investigates Invisible Man with the specific aim of combining hearing and seeing with certain spaces. Beavers engages with philosophical aesthetic rhetoric of sight and sound—"I would urge us to think about the ways that invisibility privileges the ear over the eye" (93)—and draws from sound studies to tackle the political ramifications of noise as an ontological, critical term, writing that, "In essence, the audience listening to the narrator is hearing a sound whose origin it cannot discern" and later "he speaks from the awareness that the black body is analogous to a 'noise' polluting the public sphere's visual field" (87–88).
3. Hearing timbre is a highly subjective identification process that relies psychologically on a listener separating similar from dissimilar sounds or voices, even when all measurable factors remain constant. In "Sound Source Mechanics and Musical Timbre Perception," co-authors Bruno L. Giordano and Stephen McAdams state: "The term timbre denotes those attributes of auditory sensation that allow a listener to tell that two sounds differ even when they are equated for pitch, loudness, and duration, and when they have the same spatial location and are produced in environments with the same reverberant properties" (155). Scholars have debated the degrees of similarity and hearing perception in relationship to the voice for centuries. Pietro Blaserna's treatise The Theory of Sound in Relation to Music, published in English in 1876, shows how widely the conversation of vocal identification ranges from philosophy and science to religion: "There are scarcely any two individuals who have exactly the same timbre of voice. Timbre and inflection are the safest means we have of recognising [sic] a person" (147).
4. Western musical notation consists of duration, intensity, pitch, and timbre.
5. Psychologist Diana Deutsch states that the perception of musical timbre has to do with how one's senses work together to organize familiar sound sources with the unfamiliar through proximity and similarity. "When we listen to music, we do not simply process each element as it arrives; rather we form simultaneous and sequential groupings out of combinations of elements. Listening to music therefore involves a continuous process of decision as to which elements should be linked together" (168). Her assessment largely relies on the proximity of objects as a person sees them and hears them, introducing the concept of space and community into her discussion of temporality, perception, and difference.
6. Mladen Dolar provisionally defines the voice as "what does not contribute to making sense" and continues: "The voice is precisely that which cannot be said… it eludes any pinning down, to the point where we could maintain that it is the non-linguistic, the extralinguistic element which enables speech phenomena, but cannot itself be discerned by linguistics" (15).
7. The centuries of thought summed neatly by Maurice Merleau-Ponty's curt statement, "I am myself time," which positions linear time as the determining mark of lived experience (489).
8. The changeability of hearing race has sparked an unexpected interdisciplinary turn to opera, where the tightly controlled and meticulously trained operatic voice makes a compelling case study of the cultural implications undergirding timbre. As Nina Sun Eidsheim asks: "Given that all American classical singers are trained in a musical culture that, equally for all of them, is bound to a secondary (European) culture, and given classical music's minimal indulgence of individual style, what singles out African American classical singers as nonetheless inhabiting a particularly 'black' voice?" (644). Eidsheim focuses on Marian Anderson, an African American woman who was one of the most celebrated American contraltos in the twentieth century, and investigates how and why a wide range of writers, musicians, and scholars refer to Anderson's voice as characteristically "black" (643). Eidsheim cites several compelling instances where critics and scholars race a voice according to its timbre, such as a 1903 Washington Post article that noted, "a peculiar vibrating quality in the negro voice, due, perhaps, to a peculiar arrangement of the vocal chords [sic], which is not found in the white race" and concludes that, without any real scientific evidence to back such a claim, this distinction of color must lie outside of sound (qtd. in Eidsheim, 644).
9. See Nancy Niedzielski's 1999 linguistic study on cultural stereotyping and listening perceptions of race, in which she concluded three points: "a) Listeners use social information just as they use visual and other information to create or calibrate the phonological space of speakers; b) stereotypes about given language varieties affect the way in which listeners calibrate the phonological space of speakers of those varieties; and c) people's stereotypes about their own variety can be inaccurate, and the phonological space calibrated for members of their own speech communities reflects this inaccuracy" (63).
