Ellison’s Invisible Man

Abstract Ralph Waldo Ellison was no stranger to what he called “our national library,” the Library of Congress. In 1964, more than a decade after publication of Invisible Man, he brought his middle name out of hibernation at the library’s Jefferson Building, where an elegant room, looking out on the Capitol, now bears his name and houses his most cherished books. His talk that evening was called “Hidden Name and Complex Fate.” In my mind’s eye I see him then, almost fifteen years before I knew him, speaking in a confident, steady voice that would rise a little at first, as it did when he was nervous or impatient, and, after he relaxed, settle into a southwestern drawl. I can see him— dreamy, boyish, wistful, intense, and stubborn, by turns—as his warm, defiant, brown eyes flashed up from his manuscript to individual faces in the hall.... “[Ralph Waldo] Emerson’s name was quite familiar to Negroes in Oklahoma during those days when World War I was brewing,” Ellison remembered on that evening thirty-five years ago, “and adults, eager to show off their knowledge of literary figures, and obviously amused by the joke implicit in such a small brown nubbin of a boy carrying around such a heavy moniker, would invariably repeat my first two names and then, to my great annoyance, they’d add ‘Emerson’.” Unlike the invisible protagonist of his eponymous novel, who allows his name to be changed by others, Ellison merely “reduced the ‘Waldo’ to a simple and,” he hoped, “mysterious ‘W’.” Trying to have it both ways, Ellison told his audience at the Library of Congress that he “did not destroy that troublesome middle name of mine; I only suppressed it.”