Postmodernism and its Others

The Fiction of Ishmael Reed, Kathy Acker, and Don DeLillo

Jeffrey Ebbeson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781135922825
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The book analyzes Ishmael Reed [Mumbo Jumbo], Kathy Acker [The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec by Henri Toulouse Lautrec], and Don Delillo [White Noise], three authors whom critics cite as quintessentially postmodern. For these critics such works possess formal narrative and/or content qualities at odds with modernism. In particular, according to influential thinkers like Fredric Jameson, postmodern works possess narrative form and/or content which eschews reality, and embody a fundamental paradigm shift from the politically committed ideology of modernity and modernism to the politically relativistic ideology of postmodernity and postmodernism. The book contends that while the above authors do possess numerous so-called postmodern qualities, their critical forms and/or contents remain ethically and politically grounded. As most postmodern theory rejects such grounding, its discovery in these prototypical postmodern novels suggests problems with the postmodern category itself.

Chapter One
Politicizing Authority, Authorship, and Identity in Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo

Ishmael Reed’s work, like that of other writers addressed in this book, is fueled by deep political commitment. Reed’s novels frequently evince this resolve through his trademarked satire, which is scathing and politically ruthless. In perhaps his most famous novel, Mumbo Jumbo, Reed uses this trademark to present his own deeply personal but nevertheless socially critical authorial vision. Reed’s book interweaves this vision with a systematic undermining of white-western constructions of black identity and history. In so doing, Reed offers a version of authorship based on a personal reading of African-American tradition, but one which also has numerous affinities with poststructuralisms reconstruction of the concept.

His political project and kinship to postmodernism are visible through strategic maneuvers which undercut traditional unitary authorship by dispersing individual authorial voice and its authority. Probing African-American cultural inheritance, Reed unearths its historical-social connections to African and Voodoo tradition. He uses this rich inheritance to enact authorial dispersal, but it also grants him the power to reimagine self and author.¹ In this respect, Reed’s goals are bold. He actually wants to rethink the west’s whole notion of unity, be it unity of self, unitary authorship, textual unity, or some version of racial identity which encourages conformity, repressing both difference and multiplicity. Reed believes such notions mark the (white) west’s victorious erasure of blackness from history. Likewise, attempts by black thinkers to devise a unitary African-American identity—authorial and otherwise—are equally doomed, for they merely repeat the original (western) error.

As one remedy for this Reed consciously draws on historical voices issuing from African religious tradition, as well as the transported diaspora voices of Haitian Voodoo, and remnants of these within African-American tales, writing, dance, and music (especially jazz). As an author Reed employs these inherited voices within the novel, making them speak through various characters and references; but in so doing their speech does not reside simply in the past; rather, they are the sum of African-American identity up to the present but also its open departure point for the future.

At the same time, his method of employing these voices seems equally indebted to Africa, Haiti, and Voodoo. Evidence indicating this includes Reed’s Voodoo structures and terminology, which are largely drawn from Maya Deren’s Divine Horseman: The living Gods of Haiti (1953), an exhaustive study of Haitian Voodoo practices credited in Mumbo Jumbo’s bibliography. That same bibliography also cites Milo Rigaud’s Secrets of Voodoo (1969), another work on Voodoo practices. If one requires further evidence of influence, one need only peruse Reed’s Shrovetide in Old New Orleans (1977), or examine his poetry (e.g. Conjure 1972), and numerous interviews (e.g. Gover 1978).

This influence seems particularly important for understanding Reed’s refiguring of authority, authorship, and identity. Specifically, one must appreciate his methodical adoption of Voodoos syncretic practices.² “Syncretism” loosely means a particular cultures ability to include within itself numerous different signs and practices from other cultures (e.g. Voodoos absorption of Catholic “saints” as “loas” [Voodoo spirits]). Reed’s writing method and authorial vision follow this “syncretic” model. That is, Reed consciously borrows sources and includes them within his writing; he borrows voices, manipulates them, and allows them to speak according to his wishes. He captures these voices in numerous ways, borrowing at once from the quotidian language of twenties black jazz culture (seen in words like “Boogie Woogie,” “Pep,” “ragged,” and “jazzed up” Mumbo Jumbo 114-115) but also from the language of various academic discourses (e.g. psychological discourse as seen in excerpts from Jung, or Freudian terminology like “hysteria” Mumbo Jumbo 62, 169), as well as from photographs and drawings.

At the same time, such characteristics also appear similar to those found in poststructural-postmodernism. Reed’s dispersal of authorship through syncretic compositional technique—a technique closely resembling Fredric Jameson’s “pastiche” (Jameson 1983; 1997)—would seem to establish him as a “postmodern” writer. Indeed, Jameson cites Reed as exactly this sort of postmodern artist in both his short essay (“Postmodernism and Consumer Society” 1983, 18) and his widely read book (Postmodernism, or The Cultural logic of late Capitalism 1997, 26). Moreover, Jameson’s linkage between postmodern artistic form—art as disjointed pastiche—and poststructuralism’s refiguring of subjectivity—the individual as schizophrenic, psychically fragmented—would seem to justify such categorical claims, at least insofar as Reed’s syncretic form disseminates authorial unity. At the same time, it is also interesting to note that Reed’s collage-like compositional technique bears a certain resemblance to the older work of Brecht and Walter Benjamin. While this chapter is concerned to demonstrate Reed’s more postmodern aspects, such resemblances are central for understanding Reed’s attitude toward both authorship and African-American identity. As part of this I hope to indicate a certain tension within Reed’s work between an apparently postmodern desire for authorial dispersal and a seemingly modernist desire for a uniquely individual authorial voice. Such tension is evidenced here in moments of irony and in sections when the artist contends with the community, past writers, and history itself.

Reed’s satire a persistent practice in his fiction, is especially useful for investigating such issues. In the case of Mumbo Jumbo this satire both critiques and constructs. Specifically, it critiques unitary visions of textual authorship, as well as authorship of history, culture, and racial identity. At the same time, it is constructive, offering an alternative authorial vision directly tied to Voodoo and African notions of polytheism and syncretism. Moreover, it produces a series of tropes—jazz, dance, and cooking—which embody the African-Americanization of these Voodoo and African conceptions. These tropes announce the African-American writers location and activity within our culture; in this sense they enact Reed’s “Neo-HooDoo” aesthetic, his response to issues confronting African-American writers as they seek to reconnect and invigorate African ideas within an African-American tradition and history quashed by western ideals.

Satire: Critical and Constructive Functions

According to M. H. Abrams,

“Satire,” can be described as the literary art of diminishing of derogating a subject by making it ridiculous andevoking towards it attitudes of amusement, contempt, scorn, or indignation. It differs from thecomic in that comedy evokes laughter mainly as an end in itself, while satire “derides”; that is, it uses laughter as a weapon, and against a butt that exists outside the work itself. That butt may be an individual …, or a type of person, a class, an institution, a nation or even … the whole human race. (187)

In terms of Reed’s work, however, we may connect this definition of “satire” to a further definition of the term offered in Michael Jarretts brilliant book Drifting on a Read: Jazz as a Model for Writing (1999). As his book’s title suggests by the words “[d]rifting” and “read,” Jarretts text concerns the ways jazz can be used as a model for writing off of what one has read.⁴ But in the process of discussing how one writer may play off of the writing of another writer, Jarrett gives a further definition of satire. Specifically, Jarrett observes an historical connection between food and satire. In its literal meaning, “Satura, the Latin term from which we derive the English word ‘satire,’” signifies “mixed dish,’ ‘farrago,’ ‘hodgepodge,’ or ‘medley’” (Jarrett 24). In connection with this Petronius’ Satyricon—the first (complete) usage of satura as a writing trope—displays a first chapter clearly affiliating “literary composition with food preparation,”⁵ while the book itself represents the first literary invocation of satura “as a generative device or trope for writing” (Jarrett 25—26). I will save discussion of satire’s relationship to food for later, when I comment on Reed’s compositional technique as “gumbo.” For now, it seems important simply to remember Abrams’ definition of “satire” (satura) as a “derogating” technique designed to evoke “attitudes of amusement” or “contempt,” and its association with “mixed dish” or “farrago” as productive figures for writing. Thus, satire is both critical (“derogating”) and constructive (preparing a “mixed dish” of different literary forms, such as Petronius’ Menippean mixture of verse and prose forms).⁶ With this in mind, we can look at how Reed satirically critiques unitary authorships of all kinds.⁷

The Basic Mumbo Jumbo and Reed’s Critical Satire

In terms of plot, Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo follows two basic tracks, although it interrupts these in the middle of the book to narrate an alternative cultural, religious, and racial history. One track follows Hinckle Von Vampton, a Knights Templar, as he tries to translate The Text or The Book of Toth. This book is subsequently lost when the Muslim Abdul Hamid, hired by Von Vampton to translate the work, burns it for its lewd descriptions and narrative. Von Vampton and his group, the fanatical white Christian “Knights Templar,” want to translate The Text/The Book of Toth, but they also desire to destroy it, or at the very least, conceal its contents. Their desire stems from the book’s content, which is nothing less than an alternative historical account of civilization, one that runs counter to (white) western Christianity’s narrative of culture, race, and history.

Opposed to Von Vampton is PaPa LaBas and his Voodoo group. The novel’s second track follows the detective PaPa LaBas as he searches for that same Text as the cause of the “Jes Grew epidemic.”⁸ This Jes Grew we might loosely term the African-American spirit,⁹ whose definition remains highly contested not only during the period of the novels action, the Harlem Renaissance, but also today. LaBas, for his part, is a Voodoo houngan (priest) taking part in this battle of definitions. He worships many loas (spirits), which makes him a polytheist akin to Osiris, the ancient mythological king of Egypt. Hinckle and his band of Knights Templar goons are strict monotheists akin to Set, the rather nasty brother of Osiris. The two sides—LaBas’ and Hinckle Von Vampton’s—spend the novel locking horns over who will possess The Text/The Book of Toth. In the end, neither side achieves both possession and translation of the text. This is due in part to Hamid’s action and because Reed—as author—refuses the possibility of a final or last word, namely, definitive texts of any kind. In this respect, the interruption of the two tracks just noted indicates Reed’s attempt to rewrite the Bible—as well as customary western interpretations of historical cultural influence—by having his main character, the houngan (priest) PaPa LaBas, relate an alternative history of religion from a distinctly non-western and non-Christian perspective.

Here, however, an important point deserves emphasis. Mumbo Jumbo does, indeed, tell another version of history, and it does offer numerous oppositional discourses to those of dominant (white) western culture. We may list a number of strategies here, including the refiguring of meaning through intertextual reference (e.g. pictures, historical or other texts), and Reed’s employment of fictional speakers to characterize texts, historical figures, or cultural material. Significantly, however, these characterizations are not always trustworthy. His protagonist and sometime narrator, LaBas, for instance, can speak truth, but he can just as easily commit hyperbole, or worse yet, make entirely false statements. What, as readers, should we make of this? One possibility is that the sliding scale of communicative truthfulness is deliberate on Reed’s part. It injects a sense of irony, which is especially evident in the more outlandish claims by LaBas, and serves to undermine even the alternative historical-cultural constructions of African-American HooDoo; this, in turn, troubles formation of one absolute authoritative voice, even that of HooDoo.¹⁰ Preventing absolute authority in these matters does not necessarily mean an endorsement of absolute relativism on Reed’s part, but rather suggests a reintroduction of central issues regarding history and cultural identity; in particular, Reed appears to believe that all constructions of history and cultural identity involve ideology and power relations. The critical questions for Reed would seem to concern the ideological beliefs lurking behind these constructions, and who has the power to make them in the first place. If taken in this way, Reed’s mission is not to tell the true history and cultural identity of African-Americans; rather, his vision is but one assemblage, an alternative to the time worn hegemonic constructions offered by dominant (white) western culture. Such an interpretation would consider the ironic and outlandish claims of his African-American characters (e.g. LaBas) not as correctives in the absolute. The claims are equally ideological. But on the whole they might give voice to a previously silenced position while also indicating history and cultural identity are matters of contestation.

Returning to Reed’s narrative of this alternative history, one may observe that he isolates the beginning of religion in Egypt, and in the person of the black African Prince Osiris. Osiris is associated with nature both because he marries his sister Isis (goddess of nature) and because “people began to circulate stories that his mother was the sky Nut and the earth his father Geb” (Mumbo Jumbo 162). He practices worship of the many gods within nature through dance and music. The beauty of Osiris’ dance and its divine connections are recorded in The Text or The Book of Toth by his “faithful Birdman Toth” (Mumbo Jumbo 165). The Text or Book of Toth constitutes “[a] Book of Litanies to which people … could add their own variations” (Mumbo Jumbo 164).

Set, Osiris’ brother, “hated agriculture and nature, which he saw as soiled dirty grimy etc.” and “[h]e considered music ‘loud’ and ‘boisterous’” (Mumbo Jumbo 163). He believed music and dancing were a waste of time, and that people should be more disciplined and regimented. In addition, Set hated his brother. So, he killed him and installed himself as king to be worshiped. For Reed, Set’s belief system—one based on monotheism, regimentation, hatred of nature and all things carnal—is the root of Atonism, which precedes but also structures Christianity’s belief system in the future.

Tracing this Christian lineage is part of Reed’s rewriting or authoring of religious and cultural history. Thus Reed draws a genealogy of Atonism that extends from Set to Moses, the latter sneaking into the room where Isis guards Osiris’ precious book of dances (The Text or Book of Toth). To steal this book, Moses seduces Isis but does so when she is in “the Petro aspect of herself,” the Haitian Voodoo term for “left hand” or “aggressive” loas (spirits) (Mumbo Jumbo 180; Deren 62, 295. This results in Moses knowing only one side of The Text or Book of Toth, namely, the “aggressive” or “right side.” Thus, Moses’ knowledge of the book is “mangled” and “partial.” Here, Reed uses Haitian Voodoo to depict The Text or Book of Toth as having two distinct sides (i.e. a left hand, or “Petro” hand and a right hand, or “Rada” hand). Both sides have loas (spirits), but as Maya Deren notes, the more noble “houngans [priests] and mambos [priestesses] ‘serve with both hands’”; (Deren 68). As Moses possesses only one hand, the “Petro” (“left”) hand, he cannot possibly “serve with both hands” his knowledge and practical powers remain incomplete. In the end, Reed paints a heritage that extends from Set to Moses to Jesus, and ultimately to the Atonist Knights Templar and their military arm, The Wallflower Order.

Especially revealing for this essays concerns is how The Text or The Book of Toth—an embodiment of the African-American spirit indebted to the Voodoo conception of religion as consisting of both the”right” and “left” hands—does not involve a condemnation of either side, left (“Petro”) or right (“Rada”). The scheme does not appear to have, as Atonist-Christianity does, a manichean vision, which is to say, “a doctrine of… two contending principles of good (light, God, the soul) and evil (darkness, Satan, the body)” (Webster’s New World Dictionary 892). As Maya Deren’s work indicates, it would be a cultural misunderstanding to conceive of the right (“Rada”) and left (“Petro”) hands “on a moral plane, as an opposition between good and evil …” (61) “Rada” (“right”) rites remain essentially “benevolent, paternal and passive,” while the “Petro” (“left”) rites represent “aggressive action” or “rage,” but “not evil” (Deren 61—62). There is no moral equation made. In Mumbo Jumbo Reed even states as much: “The rites, principally Rada and Petro, are not inherently good or evil …” (213) Thus, we can see Reed’s redrawing of religious authority as directly opposed to Atonism and Christianity. There exists no condemnation of “difference”—Christian or otherwise—along the lines seen in Set and exhibited further in the Christian Knights Templar.

This makes Reed’s religious conception similar to poststructural attitudes concerning binary oppositions. That is, Reed does not favor “left” (“Petro”) or “right” (“Rada”) but sees them as implied by one another; each is the present absence of the other. As we shall see in the discussion of Reed’s writing tropes, this embracing of difference comes directly from Voodoo, which envisions an entirely different scheme of authorship, authority, and cultural identity. But it is interesting here simply to note how R...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction What is Postmodernism, and What Difference Does It Make?
• Chapter One Politicizing Authority, Authorship, and Identity in Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo
• Chapter Two Combative Textualities: Kathy Acker’s The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec by Henri Toulouse Lautrec
• Chapter Three Don DeLillo’s White Noise: Reading Consumers and the Politics of Commodified Education
• Chapter Four Repoliticizing Depoliticized Categories: Literary Inheritance, Textual Activism, and the Space of Reading
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index