Ellison's allegiance to this school is clear from the very beginning of the novel, when in the Prologue he describes his "hole" as being the brightest spot in all of New York City: "...and I do not exclude Broadway. Or the Empire State Building on a photographer's dream night...Those two spots are among the darkest of our whole civilization--pardon me, our whole culture (an important distinction, I've heard)..."

oral tradition! and music!

Ah, bridging the gap...

I wonder if Ellison, as photographer, viewed this role as bridging the gap between visibility and invisibility. It reminds me of Susan Sontag’s description of a photograph from one of her essays in On Photography : both a “pseudo-presence and a token of absence.” IM, through his “act of sabotage” of stealing power from Monopolated, is exerting both his presence and his absence (light as vessel for photography, light as illumination)—“Nothing, storm or flood, must get in the way of our need for light and ever more and brighter light. The truth is the light and light is the truth.”

The onus of representation was on black artists versus the literal government backing for white ones; the way that governmental help was filtered through monocultural behemoths like Life magazine created a content loop that by its very nature locks out black life!

In IM, Ellison critiques the notion of history as progress, saying the world moves like a boomerang, not an arrow. The jazz-fueled prologue, the IM’s love of Louis Armstrong who’s “made poetry of being invisible…because he’s unaware that he is invisible. And my own grasp of invisibility aids me to understand music” is not simply there for aesthetic appeal. When we think about the complicated question of identity, both IM’s and the black community as a whole, existing outside of time and history, it’s important to understand the subversive nature of blues music as an alternate form of history that encompasses an entire culture (the groove of music!)—the tradition of African folk and spiritual culture that slaves worked into a new form of music as they worked the plantations. Existing, as Ellison says, “outside the groove of history” is to exist in a form that excludes whiteness from its origin, while therefore being inherently defined by whiteness.

“I’ve illuminated the blackness of my invisibility —and vice versa. And so I play the invisible music of my isolation…you hear this music simply because music is heard and seldom seen, except by musicians. Could this compulsion to put invisibility down in black and white be thus an urge to make music of invisibility?”

Ellison is constantly having to confront the paradox that boils down to blackness having been subsumed by the white world. The idea of being “heard but seldom seen” rings true with the way in which musical styles created by Black artists are propagated and “legitimized” in the eyes of larger society by white artists. The foundations of nearly every popular genre of the past century lie with Black artists who are very rarely properly appreciated in their time, the quickest white artists to assimilate the style often becoming the biggest.