On Ishmael Reed's Postmodernist Art Of Parody

Ishmael Reed(1938-), one of the most original precursors of postmodernist writers, has remained the most controversial and the most widely reviewed African American male author since Ralph Ellison. While there are sympathetic critics who hail Reed as the best American satirist since Mark Twain and as the most pronounced proponent of multicuturalsim, the critical labels plaguing Reed's literary career have often been equally negative, and confusing—"a conservative, a radical, a black nationalist, a sexist and a crazed fool." Indeed, the very labels that define Reed's identity—male, African American, and postmodernist writer—suggest challenges as well as promising directions of a critical study on Reed's fictional writing.Ishmael Reed's philosophy of art, as embodied in his "New-HooDoo Aesthetic[sic]," is marked by conscious attempts at deconstructing the Western meta-narratives and various strands of monopolizing and totalizing powers that Reed terms "Atonism." His novels have consistently sought to expose the myth of American Atonism in all its manifestations—be it political, cultural or aesthetic—and to free the "possessed" victims from the psychic attack of their monocultural Atonists. Reed's "aesthetic," however, is syncretic and elastically inclusive, oriented towards multiculturalism. While he proclaims his place in African American tradition by modeling his own aesthetic principles on the subcultural belief system of Voodoo, Reed nonetheless rejects the essentialist definitions of that tradition. By presenting a rich array of diversified black individuals in his texts and by reexamining the heterogeneous identities under the rubric of "blackness," Reed critiques black essentialism and its cultural representations even at the time when black cultural nationalism is the defining ideology. In defiance of political correctness, Reed also challenges some feminist essentialism and some black feminists whom Reed holds responsible for perpetuating racial stereotypes in their representation of African American males.An iconoclast bent on creating a literary system of his own, Ishmael Reed has produced the kind of fiction that, grounded as it were in the subcultural traditions, is characteristically postmodernist. His narrative is characterized by collages, fragmentations, jazz inspired plot structures and an idiosyncratic fusing of narrative voices infatuated with Voodoo terms, black argot and standard English; his depthless characters are typical postmodernist "cipher" figures abstracted out of a mixture of "high" literature with popular cultural forms such as T.V., radio, and comic books; and his anachronism, created out of an original blending of fact and fiction, of myth and imagination, radically disrupts the temporal order and lays bare the shams of "official" history. The most remarkable feature of Reed's literary subversion, however, is his parody of conventional forms of fiction, an art whose cultural politics remains a contesting ground in postmodernist critical theory.This dissertation therefore aims at a sustained critique of Reed's fiction by focusing on Reed's postmodernist art of parody, drawing freely from postmodern theory, contemporary African American literary theory, and general insights from contemporary cultural theory as it seeks to examine, from the perspective of the functionalist approach, the way Reed parodies and rewrites the Eurocentric novelistic conventions as he deconstructs the epistemological claims behind those conventions. Based on nuanced analyses of Reed's innovative revision of classic genres such as the American Western (fiction of the American West), the fugitive slave narrative, and the detective and academic novel, the present study seeks to explore how Reed consciously extends the tradition of fictional writing by raising questions about modes of literary representation as well as presenting the historical, political, social, and cultural issues that have direct bearings on the marginalized cultures, especially on the African American diaspora. A critical investigation into Reeds' art of parody will contribute, hopefully, to some misconceptions in contemporary contention among literary critics over the nature and cultural politics of postmodernist parody.Accordingly, the dissertation, apart from the Introduction and Conclusion, is divided into five chapters. The Introduction first highlights the significance of the present study by placing Ishmael Reed in the critical milieu of contemporary African American literature, and by sketching the deplorable phenomenon of "literary tokenism" that contributes substantially to the under-representation and misrepresentation of Reed's works. It then illustrates the range and complexity of Reed's fiction by outlining Reed's literary career, the evolvement of his Neo-HooDoo Aesthetic and the major formal-thematic concerns in his nine novels that witness not only the advent of postmodernist fiction but also the decline of the 1960s radical politics, the rise of neo-conservativism and the backlash against multiculturalism. The literature review that follows indicates that the critical response to Ishmael Reed is helplessly divided: while there is critical consensus that reads Reed as one of the few innovative African American authors whose works are characteristically postmodernist, there are equally diverse castigations that tend to subject Reed and his work to "political correctness." One latent controversy vastly ignored in the Reed critical cannon, however, is the cultural politics of the Reedian postmodernist parodic art.Chapter 1 Satire's Edge: Ishmael Reed and the Postmodernist Parody situates Reed's fiction in postmodernist literary criticism, especially in debates over the nature and cultural politics of postmodernist parody, by combining the analysis of the diverse aspects of these contentions with sample readings of Reed's texts. Postmodernist parody has remained a contesting ground in the critical discourse, not that it has been variously defined as "ironic quotation, pastiche, appropriation, or intertextuality," but that critics have held conflicting views over the cultural role it plays. My focus is placed on the theories by Fredric Jameson and Linda Hutcheon, not only because both of them are prominent literary critics representing different theoretical backgrounds, but also because they have in varying degrees cited Reed and his works in their critical postulations. To illuminate the conflicting accounts of postmodernist parody as a neutral practice void of "ulterior motives," a value-free, decorative, de-historicized pastiche of past forms (Jameson) and as a paradoxically subversive form "double-coded" in politics (Hutcheon), the first two sections are organized in a contrastive fashion, each with an analysis of theoretical formulations under discussion followed by a trial reading, after the model analyzed, of Reed's texts that exhibit features validating the claims of both Jameson and Hutheon. As the theoretical framework for this dissertation, Chapter 1 concludes with an overall assessment of the pros and cons of different "stories" of the cultural politics of postmodernist parody, arguing for a pluralizing analysis that would take into account the inter-related elements concerning the discussion of cultural productions: text (works), producer (author), audience (reader), and world (context).The chapters that follow, Chapter 2 through to Chapter 5, are focused attempts at the further explorations of the issues posited in Chapter 1, especially the critical consciousness in Reed's parodic art and Reed's concern with historical and cultural representation. The choice for a concentrated reading of Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, Mumbo Jumbo, Flight to Canada, and Japanese by Spring is informed not only because they are all paradigmatic Reedian parodic texts revising the separate genres of the Western, the detective, the slave narrative and the academic fiction, but also because, written at different phases of Reed's literary career, they represent more or less the breadth and depth of Reed's critical and artistic vision.Analyses on Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down in Chapter 2 start with an overview of the conventions of the popular Western. If formulaic stories of the American West are "literary codes conventionally expressing cultural codes" trying "to maintain a culture's ongoing consensus about the nature of reality and morality", parodic postmodernist Western seeks to foreground the codedness of such consensus and subvert any consensus about cultural, social and literary conventions. While he parodies the Western at the level of geographical and temporal location and plot, Reed subverts the conventions by a twist of those in conflict, or those taking part in the three-sided game: the townspeople, the villain, and the hero—by turning the roles of these inside out. Reed's greatest inversion of character, however, is the inscription of a black cowboy-cum-HooDoo trickster/houngan called Loop, who is an impossible amalgam of myth, history, fantasy and fiction, a hybrid character upon whom is endowed the subcultural tradition and secret forces of anarchy, individualism, and freedom—forces characteristically suppressed in the "official" imperialistic culture. Determined to rupture the novelistic convention because "it is tied to Western epistemology," Reed refashions the conventional Western as well as challenges its epistemological claims. Like Mumbo Jumbo, Reed's Western is characterized by formal innovation that is definitely postmodernist, and worth noting is his disruption of temporal order, termed variably either as a Voodoo-derived concept of "synchronicity" or as postmodernist "creative anachronism" that brings past, present and future into virtually a similar time frame. However, as I concluded at the end of this section, Reed's postmodernist experimentation, especially his schizophrenic "anachronism," is by no means a coding game without consciousness for cultural critique or losing its sense of historicity. His creative "anachronisms" strongly resemble strategies postmodernist revisionist fictional writers utilize to question the legitimacy and reliability of "official history"—in Reed's words, to wage "artistic guerilla warfare against the Historical Establishment." As the discussion in Chapter 3 indicates, Reed's most successful efforts to "sabotage" the official (read "white") history lie, arguably, in his revision of the detective fiction in Mumbo Jumbo. The detective fiction, known best of all as originated in Edgar Allan Poe's "tales of ratiocination," has witnessed a generic development through Conan Doyle, the British "Golden Age" writers, as well as the American "hard-boiled" subgenre writers in the inter-war period. Whereas classic detective fiction almost invariably featured a typically reclusive and eccentric detective and emphasizes his penetrating ability to sort out mysteries, its American "hard-boiled" counterparts not only "transformed the cerebral art of classical detection into physical action" (Elliott 372), but also challenged the generic convention in terms of the detective persona, setting, use of language, and social criticism.The most violent deconstruction of the detective convention, however, is the proliferation since the 1960s of the "anti-detective novels," the postmodernist parodic detective genre that evokes the impulse to detect "in order to violently frustrate it by refusing to solve the crime or ...by inverting, suppressing, or occluding other essential features of the detective-story model (crime, victim, detective), ultimately by undermining its very rationality." Postmodernist anti-detective novels dismantle virtually every convention of the classic genre. The mystery here "is a maze without an exit" or "a rhizome of infinite possibility and uncertainty"; the detective, no longer the "central and ordering character," becomes one of the "decentering and chaotic admission of mystery, of non-solution"; and unlike his traditional counterparts, his quest is beset by indirection, delay, indeterminacy, and multiplicity. If classic detective fiction's emphasis on realism, linearity and rationality foregrounds its epistemological certainties, the anti-detective novel consciously seeks to undermine those certainties and raises unsettling questions about narrative, interpretation, subjectivity, the nature of reality, and the limits of knowledge.African American novelists, as recent studies indicates, tend to consciously parody and rewrite the traditional literary genre to articulate ethnic themes. They have, as the study by Stephen F. Soitos indicates, developed a culturally distinctive pattern of formulaic variations by reinventing the Western detective formulas and by restructuring their underlying values. Soitos has identified a pattern of rewriting that "forms a matrix of four tropes." Central to Soitos's tropes are the detective persona, "who shares a sense of community and family that doesn't exist in the mainstream detective tradition" and the trope of "hoodoo" that, as Soitos' discussion of Mumbo Jumbo shows, refers to the worldview a black detective embodies.A close reading on Mumbo Jumbo per se reveals that it is a typical anti-detective text where Reed deftly embeds political, cultural, and ethnic-conscious themes by parodying the detective convention—by flouting the genre's essential components: the mystery, the detective persona and the narrative structure.Firstly, Mumbo Jumbo, despite its parody of the detective fiction's structuring formulas, presents a mystery that would promise only non-solution or solution only in abstract terms. Reed aligns the central mystery, Jes Grew, along its missing Text, with uninhibited, creative and improvisional Orsirian forces—the secret forces of nature that may have irrepressible "outbreaks" in varied forms, including Voodoo religion, jazz, dance and cultural movements in African American history. The villains accordingly are the predominantly white Western Atonists, who, obsessed as they are with rationality, inhibition, and an insatiable desire for power to colonize the Other, finds the Jes Grew phenomenon a deadly threat to their culture. Reed thus rewrites the genre's definition of "mystery" by elevating it to the metaphysical level, one that allegorizes "a confrontation that is cultural rather than criminal." Hence the significance of Reed's rewriting.Secondly, Mumbo Jumbo also subverts the detective persona. Reed's PaPa LaBas, unlike the formulaic "genius" of rationality engaged in a quest for some teleological or transcendent "truth," is an elusively hybrid character whose trickster identity can be traced to African mythology, Voodoo religion, and Reed's Neo-HooDoo Aesthetic. Describing himself as "a jacklegged detective of the metaphysical," this houngan detective uses intuition and Voodoo supernatural consciousness, instead of scientific reasoning, to arrive at the "metaphysical" truth and the "truth" he tells, remarkably, constitutes a subverted version of the history of world religion and culture, one that argues vehemently for the inclusion of marginalized cultures in historiography.Finally, Mumbo Jumbo deconstructs the linearity and the underlying logic of the classic detective fiction with its fragmented narrative structure and narrating devices. Modeling on the film narration and ending with a puzzling six-page "Partial Bibliography," Mumbo Jumbo is typical postmodernist text characterized by its collage of textual forms, mixing drawings, photographs, footnotes, dictionary definitions, quotes from other texts, and random signs or handbills into what Reed calls "a literary gumbo." The novel's coding structure is further complicated by Reed's idiosyncratic use of Voodoo- derived narrative voice and jazz inspired narrative modes: Reed's unmediated narrative voices and shift of focalizers effect a confusing array of 'voices' that is hard to be accounted for in conventional theories of narratology, and his mixture of narrative modes further impede the process of decoding.Mumbo Jumbo's fragments, anachronisms, narrative experiments and similar penchant for "the play of signifiers" exhibit formal features typical of a postmodernist text, and yet its questioning of the nature and legitimacy of Western enlightenment knowledge and history that ends in a reconstructed history grounded in African American dispora is, epistemologically speaking, ostensibly modernist. In decoding the textual messages and judging the cultural politics of an "amphibious" text as such, the way a reader participates in the "game" of reading and decoding becomes crucial, as indicated in my discussion at the end of the chapter on critical controversies over the nature of Jes Grew in general and on Reed's critical project in Mumbo Jumbo in particular.Chapter 4 discusses Reed's parodic revision of the slave narrative in Flight to Canada. Despite its role in anti-slavery political activism and its status as an important African American literary legacy, the autobiographical slave narrative has increasingly come into critical scrutiny for its inadequacies—its romance and melodramatic sentimentalism shy away the ethical problems of slavery and veil the true identity of the slave subject; and its inevitable trap in complex mechanism of literary production that contributes little to the slave author's quest for freedom in literacy. Following a brief account on the generic development of slave narratives, I devote the major space of the chapter to the examination of Fight to Canada as a text of the neo-slave narrative and the way it revises the ante-bellum history and responds to the 1970s slave historiography.The formal subversions that mark Fight to Canada are suggestive enough that it is a paradigmatic text of the neo-slave narrative: the genre's "I was born..." formula is replaced by a poem, followed by shifts from the first-person to a third-person narration that continues throughout the rest of the novel. Again, postmodern anachronisms abound: Slave/poet Raven travels by jumbo jets and post-bellum slaves are enjoying the luxury of technology of modernity such as telephones and cars. Such anachronisms, however, should not be read for sheer formal novelties. Believing that the "underground stuff" that "established historians left out of their work" are more fascinating, valid, and "real" than the "official" history, Reed proceeds to question the validity of "official" records concerning the political and moral commitment of Lincoln and Stowe, two important cultural icons associated with abolitionism.In the light of Julia Kristeva's theory of intertextuality, a given parodic text not only references its predecessor text but also points to the cultural and socio-historical conditions that shape the production of that text. On the sheer intertextual level, Flight to Canada parodies and revises Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, texts of Edgar Allen Poe, as well as Josiah Henson and his autobiography, The life of Josiah Henson. Reed's parody of Stowe critiques the white appropriation of black cultures that remain unacknowledged; his frequent references to Poe's texts, along with his portrayal of the plantation owner Arthur Swille as a dedicated sado-masochist, seek a cultural explanation of the nature of slavery. If Stowe's novel tries to convince readers that slavery is a sin rather than social ills, crimes, or political vices, Reed's text shows that it is as much a social ill as a refraction of a culture obsessed with a lust for wealth and a decadent past. Reed's cultural rewriting is further exhibited in his character inversion : Uncle Robin is not the characteristically tractable and submissive Uncle Toms in need of the benevolent care of a paternalistic master; the slave/poet Raven Quickskill, who is to pen Robin's autobiography, is no longer subject to restrictions that plagued the best known slaver narrators such as Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown; and finally, the meaning of slavery and freedom is defined anew—freedom does not exist in some Utopia place like Canada, nor is slavery a visible shackle—it is but "a state of mind."Cultural appropriation, along with the plight of "the slave within," lies at the heart of Reed's themes. Reed's anachronisms weave a fantastic web of "the apocryphal history" versus "official" history written by white historiographers. Reed seems to act in the light of the New-historicists' dictum of textuality of history, and I agree, with Linda Hutcheon and contra Jameson, that such questioning of authority of the "official" textualized history means the problematization, rather than the loss of historical perspective. Reed's concern with white (mis)appropriation of black culture and the white historiography of black history hardly sounds a false alarm, as is illustrated in my discussion of the extra-literary references Fight to Canada evokes: the publication of William Styron's The Confession of Nat Turner in 1967 and the historiography of slavery by the revisionist cliometricians in 1970s.Chapter 5 begins with an analysis of the general features of academic fiction as the genre has been defined and developed in recent decades, noting in particular the genre's "postmodern" turn—the rise since the late 1970s of a subgenre, "critifiction." My discussion on Japanese by Spring per se follows a brief account of the major contending grounds of multiculturalism and the American "cultural wars." Reed rewrites the conventions of academic fiction by presenting "cipher" characters, by giving the plot an incredible turn, and finally by introducing a fictional character called Ishmael Reed. The protagonist Puttbutt is the outcome of Reed's idiosyncratic abstraction of the "soul" of persons he observes; as an ideological "cipher" character (representing black neo-conservatism), Puttbutt functions, as he interacts with other cipher characters in the fiction, as ideological types or ciphers by which Reed parades different monocultural factions in the fictional Jack London College: the predominantly racist Miltonists, feminists, black lesbians, and Arrocentricists as well as academic hustlers and tenured radicals.Reed underscores the dangers of monoculturalism by bizarre plot twists—the Japanese purchase and subsequent cultural redefinition of, especially the "core" curriculum, of Jack London College. Reed's jazz inspired plot shift serves not only to reference ruminations over political and cultural implication of U.S-Japanese trade wars in the 1980s, but most emphatically, to demonstrate the dangerous results of any monocultural agenda, for the Japanese chauvinists are simply repeating how the Eurocentricists have defined other marginalized cultures, a redefinition that turns out no more than another version of monoculturalism.Ishmael Reed's authorial intrusion into the fictional world crossing the ontological demarcation between fiction and fact is a move that exhibits the very postmodernist feature of Japanese by Spring. Contrary to most metafictional writers who enter their texts to comment on the act of narration, Reeds' presence here serves not so much to foreground the fictionality of narration as to comment on the content—to merge the empirical Reed's satirical target and multicultural consciousness, through a transworld-identity by the name of Ishmael Reed, with the multicultural projects dramatized in the fictional world of Japanese by Spring. Such merging, effective as it were for Reed the author, brings varying degrees of difficulty to the reader's perception and identification of Reed's satirical jabs. In cases where Ishmael Reed steps into the fiction to become the character Ishmael Reed, much of the ideology and consciousness becomes apparent because of Reed's four-decade career as an outspoken social critic and as a controversial satirical writer; passages featuring the names of Alice Walker and bell hooks, Author Schlesinger Jr., David Dukeas as well as Ronald Reagan and George Bush point palpably to Reed's cultural and political critique in his nonfiction work. However, in cases where the fictional Reed voices his critique of monoculturalists by omitting or changing proper names, in a roman a clef manner, much of the message demands a measure of ex-literary decoding on the part of the reader, as is evinced in Reed's satire of neoconservatives such as Shelby Steele, Dinesh D'Souza, William Bennett and Allan Bloom.In the Conclusion, I outline some observations based on this study:1) Ishmael Reed is one of the prototypical postmodernist parodists who deftly fuses formal innovations with a sustained ethical, political, and historical critique of dominant white Western culture as well as daring a challenge to monocultural tendencies in the political agenda of marginalized groups. Utilizing a signifying system grounded in his Neo-HooDoo Aesthetic, Reed has courageously asserted his freedom to deconstruct the novel by combing theme and form to promote a genuine sense of literary and social-political freedom. His fiction calls for a sympathetic understanding of, and willingness to embrace, new forms on the part of the critical community who might otherwise measure Reed's fiction in a conventional light and judge Reed's writing as "muddled, crazy, [and]incoherent."2) Reed's multicultural sensibility is rooted in humanist values of modernity: freedom, individualism, community and ethnic values. He deconstructs Western "metanarratives" and essentialized claims to truth in order to reconstruct, to restore a multicultural tradition centered on the subcultural experience. Reed champions those "dogged populists" rejecting the co-optation into "capitalistic institutions" and embracing genuine cultural pluralism purged of political factions defined by narrow ideologies and crass materialism. His critique of black or feminist essentialism, therefore, does not mean the negation of existential racial or sexual problems. Failure to understand the implication of Reed's vision has often resulted in undeserved castigations from black and feminist critics and in much misreading of Reed's texts.3) Jameson's observations of Ishmael Reed's parodic fiction are largely informed by an emphasis on the formal properties and coding strategies of a text. Without considering authorial intention, the reader's role and, more important, a sustained close reading of adequate sample texts, the textual features of Reed's fiction justify many of his claims. But as this study indicates, whether in terms of aesthetics or the critical consciousness embedded in Reed's text, Jameson tends to misappropriate Reed's text as a sample. Hutcheon, on the other hand, has rightly foregrounded the problematics of the representation of history and opened up the possibility for cultural critique in postmodern parodic fictions, but the realization of that possibility remains contestable. The study of Reed's parodic art helps us to re-conceptualize our current notions of the cultural politics of postmodernist fiction, especially the cultural politics of those oppositional writings by ethnic writers who adopt postmodernist techniques without falling to nihilistic language games.