David Mikics
University of Houston
I. Ish and Ism
Ishmael Reed is a postmodern writer; he is also an African-American writer. The purpose of this essay is to reflect on the conjunction between these two roles in Reed’s work–and the somewhat surprising fact that they are in conjunction more than in conflict. Postmodernism, with its definition of the contemporary world as a realm of fragmentation, disassociation, and the post-personal, seems to dissolve the cultural continuities of community and individual ego to which earlier artistic eras remained loyal. Postmodernism, in other words, declares the death of cultural authenticity. African-American literature, by contrast, often seems to value cultural authenticity as a means of ensuring communal and individual self-assertion in the black diaspora.1 Reed’s work suggests how African- American tradition, which generally–not always, but generally–wants to depict the survival of a people and a culture in its original, authentic strength, can be reconciled with postmodernism, which destroys the notions of origin, authenticity and tradition itself.
Since the African-American tradition is posited by Reed as a definitive cultural value often repressed or distorted by modern mass culture, a value that can in some sense act as a critique of capitalist modernization, an allied question (one subject to much recent debate) will be whether Reed’s postmodernism damages the critical capacity of his project.2 Can postmodern techniques be the vehicle for a cultural critique, or must they be “affirmative,” acquiescing in the deterioration of art and political speech into commodities under late capitalism?
I have found the theory of Jurgen Habermas useful in posing these questions. In particular, Habermas’ distinction between a “lifeworld” of everyday experiential practice and a systemic, administrative complex that embodies the managerial necessities of late capitalism, and continually encroaches upon or threatens the lifeworld, seems to be replicated in Reed’s distinction (in his novel The Terrible Twos) between African-American subcultural experience and a destructive mass culture ruled by the commercial system. Habermas’ work is a sustained attempt to seek a means of resuscitating the lifeworld that has been impoverished by the managerial priorities of the welfare state (priorities that Reed aptly sees encoded in the pacifying, tepid character of many mass cultural forms).3 In this attempt, Habermas champions aesthetic modernity, with its emphasis on the unique, autonomous individual, as a more helpful lifeworld response to modernization processes than the postmodern dissolution of the individual as a category.
For Habermas, postmodernism is “affirmative”: that is, it tends to mimic the purely negative dispersal of subjective freedom enforced by modernization (the ability to consume what one wants) instead of asserting the critical potential implied by the more positive side of such modernization (the ability to think what one wants). Modernization’s corrosive effect on traditional cultural continuities also entails a democratic emphasis on individuality within intersubjective relations, and therefore, Habermas claims, any critical response to modernity must capitalize on its positive aspect, the promise of more intellectual autonomy for the individual, who now judges culture and its prejudices from a distance. According to Habermas’s argument, criticism within aesthetic modernity takes its most legitimate and useful form when it secures the rights of the individual subject to reevaluate and revise culture in a way that champions the power of the lifeworld while acknowledging the lifeworld’s confrontation with the social rationalization process. The need to acknowledge the effects of rationalization and modernization means that this advocacy of the lifeworld must not take the neoconservative form of an attempt to revive a cultural tradition in an unreconstructed way, for such an attempt would have to ignore the dangerous effects that modernization has already had on the lifeworld, its destabilizing of tradition.4
As I will suggest, Reed is certainly in accord with Habermas’ idea of a critically self-revising tradition, in Reed’s case African-American tradition, as the necessary form of an effective contemporary invocation of the lifeworld. But his work challenges Habermas’ assumption that such critical use of tradition must be coupled with the assertion of an autonomous modernist self. Reed suggests a subcultural rather than an individualist answer to the destructive effects of modernization. The postmodern aspect of Reed’s work, his attack on the notions of character and individual consciousness, does not invalidate its critical potential, as Habermas’ argument would imply. Instead, the subcultural practice of “neohoodooism” acts as a subversive force that seizes mass cultural phenomena and reuses them for the purpose of resistance. Habermas’s prejudice in favor of the individual not only compels him to deny the reality of the Freudian unconscious as a social formation that defeats the wish for self-possession central to his neo-Kantian notion of the individual,5 it also blinds him, along with other leftist critics of postmodernism, to the force of postmodern subversions, like “neohoodooism,” that do not base themselves on envisioning autonomous selves exercising political judgment.
Reed’s lack of desire for the autonomous self accounts for another, more obstreperous leftist objection to the discerning of a critical project in his work. Reed’s fiction, which is often hermetic in texture, does not pursue the definition of politics as a matter of attaining the self-empowering judgment (however difficult it may be to achieve such judgment) that is the goal of Brecht’s or Baraka’s radical theater. One answer to this objection would draw on Habermas’s terms. In his Adorno prize lecture, Habermas notes that in order for critical art to succeed in the contemporary moment, it must be supported by changes in the lifeworld: the burden of critique must not be placed on aesthetics alone without considering its reception in everyday life. Change cannot be legislated by authors, and given this fact, authors must not be faulted for not aiming to produce social change in an immediate way, for example through populist style or overtly revolutionary rhetoric. The prescriptive moralizing on the part of critics who insist on such features has at times been an inhibiting factor in contemporary African-American writing, since what such critics want cannot be readily delivered by writers intent on exploring the artistic implications of their material in the context of an ever more complex late capitalist society.
I would extend this answer to the demand for an autonomous political art beyond Habermas’s idea of attending to institutional and everyday contexts before individual literary works. Habermas cannot convey a nearly full enough picture of everyday life because he retains the goal of an empowered self freed, as much as possible, from alienation and false consciousness–his legacy from Kant and Marx. Reed’s artistic technique, by contrast, exposes the unconscious dimensions of ordinary existence, our styles of being, and it therefore necessarily gravitates away from injunctions toward clarifying one’s consciousness in preparation for political judgment. Reed’s work is more, not less, political because of his recognition that clarification is always an aspect of what Mumbo Jumbo calls the Wallflower Order, an attempt to repress and avoid the dense, Dionysian “Work” that an African-American form like jazz tries to acknowledge: “Jes Grew, the Something or Other that led Charlie Parker to scale the Everests of the Chord . . . the manic in the artist who would rather do glossolalia than be ‘neat clean or lucid.’”6 Reed’s novels aim at the recognition of the improvisatory changes that are always happening, and always repressed by, ruling culture, rather than (the way we usually think of political art) the gearing up for a change in or replacement of the consciousness that rules.
The utopian demand that the text be a lever, in and of itself, for such a decisive change in consciousness, without regard for its function within a larger social and institutional discourse, has often influenced current debates on the politics of literary study (for example, the ongoing revisions of the literary canon). Such utopianism must be regarded as an inevitable symptom of an era in which the relative absence of radical thought about institutions themselves is all too clear.7 In particular, the requirement that texts unequivocally declare their wholesome political uses, thus single-handedly transforming institutional contexts of reading, has weighed heavily (and, I believe, harmfully) on the choice of “black literature” for the new curriculum. For example, the common assumption that black writers should display an attractive, easily accessible communal optimism militates for the selection of For Colored Girls… or The Color Purple in introductory core courses that have room for only one African-American text. Such bias necessarily excludes the work of writers like Adrienne Kennedy, Andrea Lee, James MacPherson, David Bradley, Jay Wright–and Reed. The demand that African- American literature incarnate a positive representative function, praising the strength of cultural continuity and communal values, has dogged Reed throughout his career. The charge frequently made by both black and white critics that Reed is not properly representative of African-American literature seems to rest on the dangerous assumption that the black writer is bound to a representative goal: bound, that is, to present encouraging or correct portraits of his/her culture. This need for African-American literature to perform a representative function has complex historical roots, often involving the burdensome obligation imposed on black writers to legitimate black life for a white audience.8 In the 1990s, however, the wish for the representative is an anachronism, a symptomatic reaction against postmodern conditions in which, despite the continuing social and economic racism of American society, late capitalism has produced a diversity of intra- and interracial roles that erodes cultural uniformity in black America, as elsewhere.9 Since multifarious and contradictory modes of African-American life now exist on an unprecedented scale, any demand for representative description is bound to fail. I do not wish to claim Reed as a representative of a new postmodern strain in African- American life; that would simply be inverting the criticisms of those who deny Reed’s legitimacy. Reed’s work, because it is a partial (in every sense of the word) rather than a grandly unified vision of African-American experience, cannot be representative in any way. Rather, he creatively and successfully exploits a particular African-American subculture in order to invent his own brand of critical postmodernism.
As he rejects the idea of a representative or unified vision of black life, Reed also shies away from the easy acceptance of totality in affirmative postmodernism, which is another example of a representative strategy, one that says: this is our new world, from which no escape, or even critical distance, is possible. By indifferently combining the fragments of various traditions and histories, affirmative postmodernism sets even fragmentation under the sign of Baudrillard’s homogeneous, uniform “society of the spectacle.” By contrast, Reed via his subcultural strategy sets the plural cultural forces of postmodern society in conflict, propounding an aesthetics of resistance or social tension rather than reconciliation.10 Thus Reed “mobilizes a sense of a particular history of subject positions that will not be subsumed under the apparently seamless master text.”11
Before discussing Reed’s African-American critical postmodernism in more detail, I want first to differentiate him from postmodernists who do not oppose lifeworld to rationalization systems but who, instead, see postmodernity as the inevitable colonization of lifeworld by system. Frank Lentricchia has recently proposed Don DeLillo’s Libra as an example of critical postmodernism in its treatment of mass culture, of “an everyday life . . . utterly enthralled by the fantasy selves projected in the media.”12 DeLillo does not offer any escape from a media- absorbed world that has replaced the first-person self with third-person fantasies of the self. In DeLillo as in Pynchon, there are no local, popular cultural forces that would provide resistance to modernization; there is only an oppressive totality. In DeLillo, phenomena of resistance (The Names’ terrorism) or esoteric revisionism (White Noise‘s “Hitler studies”) are simply mirror images of the increasingly systematized society that they rebel against. No route is possible back to the authenticity desired by the modernists, since authenticity has itself become a mass cultural icon. (Thus DeLillo’s Lee Harvey Oswald in Libra wants to “be somebody,” an ambition that can only be realized within the confines of the mass media image.) Yet it is important to remember, as Lentricchia stresses, that DeLillo’s attitude toward this fragmented and imprisoning system, his image of postmodern America, is critical rather than celebratory. Postmodernist critique does not need to invoke adversarial forces like the high-modernist self or the utopian vision of a radically different society in order to avoid the pitfalls indulged in by the affirmative, pastiche-ridden, unreflective postmodernisms that are now shared by the advertizing world and a large sector of the visual arts community. What makes the difference in critical postmodernism is its reflective capacity, its dwelling on current social and aesthetic contradictions, rather than the dissolving of contradiction into easy juxtaposition dictated by the affirmative postmodern. Such contradictions often involve the survival of earlier aesthetic and cultural forms alongside or within postmodernity: thus the desperate desire for existential self in DeLillo’s Oswald, Barthelme’s protagonists, or Mailer’s Gary Gilmore (in The Executioner’s Song)–or the survival of premodern, subcultural secret society traditions in Reed.
Oddly enough, the critical edge provided by a subcultural survival like Reed’s vodoun has its near- counterpart in high modernism. Lionel Trilling, for example, praises Freud’s image of the “other culture,” the secret traditions Freud chose to ally himself to as counters to the dominant values of Austrian society. One of Freud’s other cultures was England; another was ancient Greece; and still another, Hebraic tradition.13 But Reed’s postmodernism again generates a key difference from the modernist Freud. For Reed, unlike Trilling’s Freud, the subculture or other culture is interwoven, despite its esotericism, with the imagery of mass culture, imagery that the subculture both mimics and, through its mimicry, resists. The jazz style celebrated in Mumbo Jumbo is, after all, a mass cultural form.
A similar attachment to mass-cultural image is at work in the postmodern treatment of character, again marking a difference from modernism. For Reed, as for DeLillo, the self is a caricature, a stylistic move determined by cultural stereotype rather than a modernist dream of individual authenticity. But the stereotypes are not, in his work, only the property of a mechanized mass culture, as in DeLillo. Their mass-cultural face may also stem from, or be appropriated by, African-American counterculture. Reed’s aesthetic of “sampling,”14 of inventively assembling snippets from the tradition with which he identifies (Neohoodooism) as well as the cultural syndrome he opposes (the Wallflower Order), thus presents itself as sustained dialogic satire.15
The sort of reconciliation between an African-American tradition and postmodernism that I have hinted at has been offered in the context of Reed’s work by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and the late James Snead, both of whom speak of Reed as demonstrating affinities between his own postmodern technique and the techniques of “signifying” in black culture. Snead specifically points to sudden rhythmic juxtaposition and syncretism, two features of African religion and music that are echoed in Reed’s work.16 Gates and Snead, by making their connection between Africa and Reed, imply that postmodernism can be rooted, even if only by analogy, in a specific cultural tradition, such as that of the African-American. Reed himself seems to concur in this analysis, identifying his own authorial practice with the Africa-derived folk tradition of vodoun.
Gates and Snead reading Reed are brilliantly helpful, and I will finally agree with their assessment of Reed. But I would like to introduce a possible objection to their readings that hinges on the ideological implications of presenting an element of the African-American lifeworld like vodoun alongside modernist and postmodernist artistic practice. The objection would go something like this: both Gates and Snead seem to imply that Reed claims an identity between vodoun and his own work because he perceives a natural, implicit analogy between modern and postmodern European aesthetics and black culture. One might argue against Gates and Snead by reminding oneself that such an analogy is not natural, but instead an ideological construct of twentieth-century European modernism’s attraction to “primitive” forms. In contrast to mass culture, which is made possible by the dissolution of traditional communal ties under advanced capitalism–the meeting hall or fete replaced by a million TV sets–popular or folk culture is by definition premodern: its premise must be an assumed community of style and cultural symbolism rather than the alienated perspective of the individual artist. From this perspective, the twentieth-century European or Euro-American artist’s frequent invoking of African and African-American popular cultural practice as an analogy to his or her own efforts, from Picasso’s interest in “primitive” art to Norman Mailer’s White Negro to the later albums of the American pop music group Talking Heads,17 is significantly problematic. The high culture/”primitive” analogy is motivated by nostalgia for the (supposed) immediacy or palpable, experiential knowledge that the alienated artist perceives in either colonized nations or the underclass of his or her own nation. As such, it is inevitably a colonial gesture. By failing to address this cultural-historical basis for the comparison that modern and postmodern European/Euro-American art habitually makes between itself and the premodern aspects of African/African-American culture, both Snead and Gates imply that such comparisons describe a natural or neutral similarity, instead of themselves enacting ideologically freighted gestures.18 In these two critics’ analogies between African-American art and the European modernist/postmodernist tradition, ideology disappears.
Reed’s identification of his art with vodoun shares something with the European modernist’s colonialist gesture: he desires to restore to his work a dimension of authenticity that has been lost in much of the modern world.19 In other words, Reed reacts against social modernization by allying himself to vodoun. After all, vodoun is communal folk culture, a survival of an era untouched by the atomizing, alienating effects of the modern mass media. There is, then, no precise fit between popular tradition and postmodern strategy, as Gates and Snead tend to suggest in their praises of Reed. The unique, eccentric character of Reed’s postmodernism, its antinormative nature, suggests that the popular is, in part, invoked as a way of grounding the postmodern in its very opposite, the force of folk tradition, as a counterbalance against its potentially uncontrolled, antitraditional mirroring of the fragmenting effects of late capitalism.20
The objection to Reed’s appropriation of the supposed authenticity of folk culture that I have just outlined is a serious one, but I believe one can acknowledge its seriousness while also making it defer to the gaiety of Reed’s work, which ultimately undercuts the proclamation of authenticity that one aspect of Reed still wants to make. Reed’s delight in subversive traditions, which is so well evoked by Gates and Snead, extends to the self-mockery of folklore itself, which becomes the madly esoteric and writerly venture of neohoodooism. In practical terms, Reed does not seem to be hamstrung by any gap between tradition and postmodern subversion. Instead, he aims, largely successfully, at a coherence of folk and postmodern expression in which neither element serves or counterbalances the other, in which they form a crazy whole. In other words, Reed wants to show the ways in which the popular uncannily anticipates and redeems what we thought were the properties of contemporary mass culture alone by being, so to speak, always-already postmodern, postmodern from way back. By presenting us with a partial or eccentric claim to contemporary mass culture, a creative appropriation of its reifying tendencies, he negotiates the Scylla and Charybdis of twentieth-century art: the stale modernist opposition between the reified and the creative, and the affirmative postmodern claim that reification subsumes all contemporary narratives into an undifferentiated whole. In contrast to the centrifugal atmosphere of affirmative postmodernism, in which traditional elements are used as mere decorative fragments,21 the premodern subculture that Reed celebrates provides an ad hoc, self-ironizing center of gravity for his work by endowing aesthetic eccentricity with the lure of tradition. Traditional culture has been irreversibly transfigured by the new aura of postmodern technological reproduction, but it still retains an otherness, a mark of difference.
II. Reed, Baraka, Pynchon: Postmodernism and Community
Well, and keep in mind where those Masonic Mysteries came from in the first place. (Check out Ishmael Reed. He knows more about it than you’ll ever find here.) Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow22 It is also significant that most of the [vodoun] houngans who claim the patronage of Ogoun belong to the Masonic Order. Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen23
In his career as a novelist, Ishmael Reed has frequently occupied himself with the images produced by American mass culture. Some of these images are the travesties of black life produced by white America–the antebellum stereotypes of Mammy and Uncle Tom invoked in Flight to Canada (1976), Reed’s parodic takeoff on slave narrative; or the Amos and Andy routines in The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974), a satirical pseudo-thriller. Some, on the other hand, are not specific to Afro-America, like the Wild West parodied in Yellow Back Radio Broke Down, Reed’s “Western” written in 1969. In The Terrible Twos (1982), which I will focus on in the remainder of this essay, Reed centers his analysis on a mass-produced and mass-marketed image of general import in American culture, that of Santa Claus. In particular, the novel has as its subtext the standard movie myth of American Christmas, Miracle on 34th St. As I hope to show, the ossified, stereotypical mythology embodied by this film is undermined by Reed’s radically unorthodox mode of narration–a mode that has itself been called filmic. Reed counters the ideologically dominant images of Miracle with his own subversive quasi-filmic techniques, unravelling one filmic mode by means of another.
As James Snead points out, Reed’s work, like much postmodern writing, has important correlations with the aesthetics of movie-making in its use of sudden and suggestive juxtaposition (montage), as well as with the similar principles of creative juxtaposition (which Snead calls “cutting”) active in African religion and music: “Reed elides the ‘cut’ of black culture with the ‘cutting’ used in cinema. Self-consciously filmable, Mumbo Jumbo ends with a ‘freeze frame’ . . . underscoring its filmic nature.”24 My aim in this essay is to explore some of the ways in which Reed uses familiar images from American film, and in fact opposes these official, mass-cultural images to an alternative culture of the “cut” or radical juxtaposition, which has affinities both with Euro-American postmodernism and with the African-American belief system of vodoun. As I have noted, Reed’s final aim is a therapeutic criticism of the numbing, homogenizing effects of modernization. Far from exulting in the culture of the mass media as the “affirmative postmodernist” would do, Reed in The Terrible Twos opposes the mass culture of Hollywood movies and TV to an underground folk tradition that partakes of vodoun habits of mind, specifically in its occult revisionary reading of St. Nicholas, otherwise known as Santa Claus. Reed’s hermetic St. Nicholas revolts against the official or established culture represented in The Terrible Twos by commercial capitalism’s image of Christmas.
Reed criticizes not only the late capitalist system itself; he also criticizes the most common reception of African-American culture within that system. African- American tradition has been taken as an offer of escape from official culture into a viable marginal one–now that the alienated, solipsistic subjectivity of European modernism, or the fantasies of postmodernism, which decenter subjectivity without offering a communal alternative to the now-defunct self, seem less than comfortably livable. For contemporary critical ideology, black writing seems to represent a potential for communal authenticity that has long been excluded from the Euro-American avant-garde. A drama like Slave Ship, as Kimberly Benston convincingly argues, achieves precisely what the Euro-American modernists cannot: a depiction of oppositional community based in an existing cultural reality.25 This escape from modernist alienation into black cultural authenticity is the pattern of Baraka’s career, as well as the goal of the “Black Aesthetics” movement of the 1960s and ’70s in which Baraka, along with Addison Gayle, Hoyt Fuller, Larry Neal, and others, played a prominent role.
As Gates has shown in his reading of Mumbo Jumbo, Reed criticizes such attachment to authenticity by attacking the essentialist aspect of the Black Aesthetics/Black Arts movement (and, before it, the Negritude movement). Reed opposes the notion of blackness as a “transcendental signified,” an authoritative, static and univocal symbolic presence.26 Instead, Reed reveals black discourse to be, in postmodern fashion, decentered and polyvocal. Where does this postmodern aesthetic strategy leave Reed in terms of the communal emphasis of African-American culture? Houston Baker has cited Reed’s fiction as a return to “the common sense of the tribe”27: but how can such a collective or tribal orientation coexist with the atomizing, depersonalizing effects of postmodernist technique also evident in Reed?
One approach to a definition of Reed’s decentered communalism, his subversive interest in the lifeworld’s subcultural traditions, is by way of a contrast with Baraka. Though both Baraka and Reed move from avant-garde alienation in early works like Baraka’s Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note and Reed’s The Free-Lance Pallbearers to an emphasis on the power of African-American cultural continuity, there are important differences. Reed’s “neohoodooist” aesthetic, as we shall see, is syncretic and assimilative, whereas Baraka’s black consciousness attempts the monolithic and univocal. In Reed, vodoun does not need to reject European influence in order to safeguard its purity; instead, it translates this influence into the terms of a newly indigenous New World culture.
In other respects as well, Reed’s vision of African- American culture should not be conflated with Baraka’s (or, say, June Jordan’s) equally powerful, but very distinct, definition of that culture. Throughout his work, Reed consistently rejects the invocation of ethnic community on a grand scale, opting instead for the investigation of the esoteric cultural practices, like vodoun, that appear as sect, secret society, or personal obsession rather than as mass movement. Reed’s choice of the occult and dispersed, rather than the fully public, continuities in African- American culture suggests that eccentric or idiosyncratic rewritings of culture are valuable precisely because they are idiosyncratic–and that such stylistic quirks may constitute the only existential rebellion still viable. The later work of Baraka, by contrast, like that of many other politically committed African-American artists, strives for community through its normative and explicit approach, the plain force of a quintessentially public rhetoric. Baker’s phrase “the common sense of the tribe” is a better description of Baraka’s mode in its willed commonness than it is of Reed’s willful peculiarity.
Having clarified his differences from Baraka’s more normative approach to African-American tradition, I now want to pursue a comparison between Reed and Pynchon,28 which will reveal an equally telling difference. To return to Habermas’s terms: Reed is interested in upholding the lifeworld and its traditions against the modernization process, whereas for Pynchon the lifeworld is merely an attenuated reflection of the systemic aspect of modernization.
Pynchon is a natural parallel for Reed; especially, Pynchon’s flaked-out whimsy in The Crying of Lot 49 bears a remarkable tonal resemblance to some of Reed’s work.29 There’s also a thematic resemblance between Pynchon and Reed: they both participate in the postmodernist polemic against authenticity by creating, for the most part, caricatures rather than “realistic” characters. Reed has his hardboiled detectives and monomaniacal radicals, Pynchon his male-bonded post-adolescents and femmes fatales. The sense that these figures, by-products of modernity’s obsessions, suffer or play out their stereotypical identities, instead of actively controlling them, is characteristic of postmodernism.30
Pynchon’s defiant authorial eccentricity imagines the rebellion against modernity, not as a viable cultural alternative, but as an intricate fantasy that rewrites the way of the world in a language of conspiratorial oddity. In Pynchon, as in DeLillo, subversive fantasies usually turn out to be as chillingly claustrophobic as official reality.31 The notion of escape from a hegemonic culture occupies Reed’s work as it does Pynchon’s, but the difference, I will argue, is Reed’s effort to ground the escape in an actual alternative–African-American– aesthetic, that of vodoun.
There is a striking passage in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 that dramatically evokes the possibility of subversive or alternative community as, at the same time, the threat of an utterly private world of paranoid self- delusion–a world that ironically and horrifyingly mirrors the oppressive totality of the increasingly rationalized contemporary universe. Pynchon’s Oedipa Maas, as she discovers the massive underground postal network called W.A.S.T.E. seemingly everywhere she turns, speculates to herself that Either you have stumbled indeed, without the aid of LSD or other indole alkaloids, onto a secret richness and concealed density of dream; onto a network by which X number of Americans are truly communicating whilst reserving their lies, recitations of routine, arid betrayals of spiritual poverty for the official government delivery system; maybe even onto a real alternative to the exitlessness, to the absence of surprise to life, that harrows the head of everybody American you know, and you too, sweetie. Or (here comes the second alternative) you are hallucinating it . . . . in which case you are a nut, out of your skull.32
Oedipa’s potentially paranoid fantasy may, this passage from Lot 49 suggests, be the only possibility for a rebellious collective imagination that remains in American life. Reed shares Pynchon’s distaste for what Oedipa Maas describes as the “exitlessness” of American life, the overwhelming pressure of a bland and univocal day-to-day rationality. The transhistorical Wallflower Order in Mumbo Jumbo, which tries to stamp out jazz dancing and all other forms of collective imaginative improvisation, is an openly malevolent version of such oppressive blandness.
Pynchon leaves us in the dark as to whether the secret community that Oedipa envisions actually exists; but if it does, it is invigorating only to the degree that it is also scary and sinister.33 Reed, by contrast, is able to depict the counterforce to Wallflower oppression not as an ontologically dubious fantasy, like Oedipa Maas’ underground postal-cum-waste-disposal system, but as an actual cultural phenomenon, what Mumbo Jumbo calls Jes Grew: black music, dance and verbal “signifying.”34
III. The Filmic Double
We are now ready to deal with the importance of mass culture in The Terrible Twos by way of its major filmic subtext, the “classic” Christmas movie Miracle on 34th Street. First, though, this is an appropriate time to briefly and somewhat violently summarize the novel’s plot: it begins with “a past Christmas”–the Christmas just following Reagan’s 1980 electoral victory, when charity has been abandoned in favor of Lucchese boots and Gucci handbags. A top male model named Dean Clift, represented by Reed as a know-nothing automaton sunk in infantile dependency on his wife, whom he calls “Mommy,” is running for Congress from the “silk stocking district” in Manhattan. By the novel’s second section, set during “a future Christmas,” Dean Clift–a composite portrait of Ronald Reagan and Dan Quayle–has become president. Meanwhile, Santa Claus has become even bigger business than he was in the 1980s: a character named Oswald Zumwalt, head of a company called the North Pole Development Corporation (or Big North for short), has secured “exclusive rights” to Santa. (A class action suit is filed by thousands of rival Clauses, “black, red and white,” but they lose.) Zumwalt establishes a Christmas Land at the North Pole “to which consumers all over the world [will] fly, Supersaver, to celebrate Christmas” (TT, 64).35 Meanwhile, President Clift has signed a bill giving Adolf Hitler posthumous American citizenship. The economy’s in trouble–a loaf of bread costs fifty dollars. The hungover president’s eyes “look like two Japanese flags.”
In the midst of this dangerous atmosphere of crisis, a sect called the Nicolaites has sprung up, determined to rescue Santa Claus from his position as avatar of mass media commercialism. The Nicolaites are dedicated to the original image of the fourth-century St. Nicholas as a forthright defier of imperial authority, a populist whose miracles rivalled Christ’s, causing the Vatican to declare him moribund in the ’60s in the face of popular enthusiasm for Nicholas’ cult. The Nicolaites succeed in kidnapping Big North’s official Santa Claus and momentarily replacing him with their own spokesman, a black dwarf known as Black Peter. (As we shall see, Black Peter is St. Nicholas’s somewhat sinister accomplice in some versions of the Nicholas legend.) The flamboyant and persuasive Black Peter, projecting his voice ventriloquist-style into a false Santa Claus, delivers a condemnation of the hardheartedness of American commercial capitalism and, in particular, capitalism’s exploitation of Santa. Finally, President Clift, after being taken on a Dantesque tour in which he meets the damned souls of dead American presidents, realizes the error of his ways and, like Jacob Marley in A Christmas Carol, suddenly overflows with charitable Christmas cheer, passing out Redskins tickets and championing disarmament. At the novel’s end, President Clift has been placed in a sanatorium by his shocked former supporters and a manhunt is on for Black Peter.
President Dean Clift is not only like Jacob Marley but also like Claude Rains in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, another conversion narrative, in which Rains as the supposedly populist, but actually cynically self-interested, congressman finally breaks down and admits his own corruption, thus becoming dangerous to the corporate interests that support him. But the major subtext of The Terrible Twos is Miracle on 34th St (1947; written and directed by George Seaton). In this film, Kris Kringle, the real Santa Claus hired by Macy’s to play Santa Claus, represents a critique of commercialized Christmas and a polemic in favor of Christmas charity, which is ideologically defined by Miracle as both the antithesis and the salvation of corporate commercialism. By the end of the movie Kringle, played by Edmund Gwenn, succeeds not only in converting hardnosed businesswoman Mrs. Walker (Maureen O’Hara), to his humanitarian gospel, but also her much harder-nosed child, played by the preteenage Natalie Wood. Kringle’s most important convert, however, is Mr. Macy himself, who by the end of the film becomes a fervent supporter of his Santa’s claim to be the Santa Claus. Though the film retains enough cynicism concerning Macy’s profit-oriented motives for his support of Kris Kringle to save it from sentimental idealization of the American corporation, the point is nevertheless quite clearly made that Macy’s is now a kinder, gentler store as a result of Kringle’s presence. Kringle even unites Macy and Gimbel as, in the spirit of Christmas generosity, both begin referring customers to the competing store and vying for the privilege of rewarding Kris himself for his services. By being an authentic rather than a false, merely commercial Santa, Miracle‘s Kris Kringle ameliorates the grasping commercialism of Macy’s, infusing it with the heartwarmingly populist, anti-greed “true” spirit of Christmas. Miracle‘s ideological goal is to claim that mass culture can become popular culture: to present the corporation in a newly beneficent, populist role by showing it embracing anti-commercialism. Kris may protest against the consumerist version of Christmas, but he nevertheless works happily at Macy’s, advising its customers to buy Macy’s toys. At the film’s end, Kris’s own populist beliefs are recognized and partially adopted by Macy’s. The parallel to Macy’s in Reed’s novel is Zumwalt’s Big North, which has secured exclusive rights to Santa Claus just as, in Miracle, New York’s largest department store owns Santa in the person of Kris Kringle. The difference, of course, is that Reed’s Big North, unlike Macy’s in the film, is openly malevolent and not at all liable to be affected by the “true” anti-commercial spirit of Santa Claus.
The three subtexts for Reed’s novel that I’ve mentioned, Christmas Carol, Mr. Smith, and Miracle, all enfold the political in the personal, reducing a political situation to a matter of human character, and showing a generous personality winning out over a cynical one. Reed implicitly argues that a similar ideological effect is accomplished by Reagan’s commercial success as the “likeable” President. Not for the first time in American history, but perhaps most remarkably, a President’s politics are obscured by his transfiguration into a fictively endearing mass media personality.
Reed’s The Terrible Twos deliberately obstructs the kind of metamorphosis of politics into individual personality that is so emphatically present in his source text Miracle on 34th St. This is where Reed’s postmodernist replacement of character with caricature comes in: Big North is a cold-blooded operation, and the “real” Santa Claus is a mere corporate stooge, not a kindly old gent like Miracle’s Kris Kringle. There is no pretense that the “reality,” the mimed authenticity, of this Santa Claus means anything more than the company’s ability to buy the name: no one at Big North, including their Santa, even considers the idea that the personality of Santa might have symbolic efficacy–he is nothing but an ersatz, infinitely reproducible trademark for Christmas consumerism.
The Terrible Twos presents not just a critique of commercialism and its lack of authenticity, but a revolt against it that takes the form of a hermetic inquiry into Church history–the “underground revisionism” alluded to in my title. As he becomes corporate property, the historical identity of Nicholas (known as Claus in northern Europe) as a populist Christian saint becomes more and more effaced. The self-imposed task of the Nicolaites, the secret society that opposes itself to Big North’s official, corporate Santa Claus in The Terrible Twos, is to resurrect the forgotten radical historicity of St. Nicholas, to oppose the phoniness of mass culture by invoking the subversive reality of popular tradition.
Like the Mutafikah in Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, the Nicolaites have formed a sect intent on returning a degraded symbol to its original, authentic power. In Mumbo Jumbo, the Mutafikah are a secret society that makes a career of “liberating” works of art from Western museums and returning them to their African, Asian or Native American places of origin. The Mutafikah stand against the Atonist (Christo- and Eurocentric) effort to reduce all culture to a single Christianized meaning–or else destroy it. But the Mutafikah are oddly comparable to Mumbo Jumbo‘s Atonists, who are equipped with their own secret societies, the Teutonic Knights and the Knights Templar, in their desire for singular and authentic cultural origins–origins with a racial basis.36 Reed’s purpose is not to engage in a moralizing comparison of the exclusionary essentialisms that sometimes inhabit radical critiques of a ruling ideology with the more palpable destruction wrought by that ideology. Instead, Reed, in Nietzschean fashion, implies the difficulty of achieving a truly radical break from any oppressive mode of thought without inadvertently duplicating its repressive need to exclude the other. Reed, like Ellison in his depiction of the Brotherhood in Invisible Man, asks whether a radical, conspiratorial alternative to the reigning culture is truly an alternative, if it is bound to reproduce some aspects of the oppression it protests. 37 Like the Mutafikah, the Nicolaites in The Terrible Twos are a thinly veiled allegory of 1960s radicalism: Black Peter takes over the Nicolaites as Black Power swayed white radicals in the ’60s. These groups’ efforts to establish an adversarial culture based on a faith in native origins are criticized by Reed in much the same terms he uses to attack essentialist definitions of “black aesthetics” and negritude.38 Refusing the belief in an exclusivist and prescriptive, rather than a multicultural, black art that was sometimes featured in the Black Aesthetics movement, Reed proposes in place of this purism a multicultural synthesis derived from the syncretism of African and Asian religions, “Neohoodooism.” In aligning his own critical principles with the African New World belief system of vodoun, Reed proclaims his place in African-American tradition while refusing the essentialist definitions of this tradition that would reject syncretism or the multicultural as a contamination of origins.
Papa LaBas, the sly, knowing old man in Louisiana Red and Mumbo Jumbo is, of course, a major deity in vodoun. In Mumbo Jumbo, LaBas invokes vodoun as both a refusal of the Atonists and an illuminating alternative to the monocultural purism of the Mutafikah and the Muslim editor, Abdul: LaBas speaks of “the ancient Vodun aesthetic: pantheistic, becoming, 1 which bountifully permits 1000s of spirits, as many as the imagination can hold.”39
The vodoun aesthetics described by Papa LaBas is centrally relevant to the arguments that occur among The Terrible Twos‘ Nicolaites over the true character and identity of St. Nicholas. On the one hand, as I have said, the Nicolaites’ quest for definitive origins, for the real St. Nicholas, marks them as loyal to a univocality, a concept of absolute and singular identity, that vodoun refuses. For this reason Reed links the Nicolaites to another African New World belief, Rastafarianism, which fervently invests authority in a singular black origin and destiny. When Black Peter proposes replacing St. Nicholas with Haile Selassie, the Nicolaites are “split down the middle” over which deity to follow (44). Yet Brother Peter’s argument for Haile Selassie does partake of vodoun aesthetics in its oddball perception of cultural analogies; his logic is, finally, far more vodoun than Rastafarian. Although Black Peter aims to replace Nicholas with Selassie, the associationist logic of his argument is implicitly syncretic: it suggests a conflation of Nicholas and Selassie that is more vodoun than Rastafarian. Black Peter states that Selassie and Nicholas are “‘one and the same’” because they both ride on a white horse; Nicholas punished a thief as Selassie punished “the teef Mussolini,” Nicholas flew and so does Selassie (by airplane), and so on (46). Like the African religions from which it derives, vodoun routinely synthesizes deities of different tribes, including the Christian saints. For example, vodoun believers argued that since St. James is surrounded by red flags and carries a sword, he is essentially similar to the martial Yoruba deity Ogun, who is also clothed in red. But instead of being replaced by Ogun, St. James is conflated with him to become the vodoun spirit “Ogu-feraille.”40 Reed’s “neo- hoodooism” likewise blends Nicholas and Selassie in The Terrible Twos into “Selassie-Nicholas,” or, alternatively, “Nicholas-Selassie” (177), so that the syncretism of Europe and Africa is in its technique a distinctively African combination. In Reed’s earlier novel, Yellow Back Radio Broke Down, the Pope himself speaks of Europe’s unsuccessful attempt to Christianize the African slaves in the New World, an attempt thwarted by the capacity for multicultural juxtaposition implicit in the “elastic” discourse of vodoun: “the natives merely placed our art alongside theirs.”41
The vodoun religion syncretizes not only West African spirits with Christian saints, but also the generally “cool” or peaceful West African religions with the fiercer beliefs of the Kongo. In fact, many scholars identify two seemingly opposed, but actually ambiguously combined aspects of vodoun, Rada and Petro: often a vodoun deity will have both a Rada and a Petro (that is, a good and a cruel) side. Petro, the aggressive, malevolent aspect of vodoun, derives its name from the legendary magician figure Dom Pedro (or Petre).42 Dom Pedro, of course, is Reed’s shady and mysterious Black Peter, present in some versions of the St. Nicholas legend as Nicholas’s sidekick or opposite number, his “blackamoor servant.” If Nicholas is benevolent and devoted to saving children, Black Peter, by contrast, is a kidnapper.43 The religious scholar Charles Jones notes that the pairing of the kindly Nicholas and the cruel Peter derives from an earlier ambiguity in the character of Nicholas himself, who is seen as both gentle and violent, a bearer of both gifts and switches.44 Gradually, as the Nicholas legend shifts to Northern Europe, Nicholas’ evil traits are exorcised and projected onto the figure of a black servant. Similarly, European Christianity projects its sins onto the Africans that it enslaves; the sins return, in Reed’s novel, via the image of Black Peter literally taking possession of Santa Claus, inflecting the ersatz, commercialized “innocence” of Christmas with the harsh truth of his satire. Reed thus restores the ethical ambiguity or doubleness of the original Nicholas, as well as the subversive power of this saint who openly criticized the Emperor Constantine,45 by allowing Black Peter to speak through him. It is interesting in this connection that, as Herskovits notes, St. Nicholas is regarded in Haitian vodoun as protector of the marassa, the spirits of twins.46
The ambiguous combination of good and evil in Nicholas, so similar to the equivocal, mixed nature of vodoun gods like Ogoun and the marassa, is replicated in the character of childhood itself, at once innocent and terrible. (Thus the double-edged title, The Terrible Twos.) Reed describes the severe, perplexing nature of this dualism in a passage I shall cite at length: Two-year-olds. In mankind’s mirific misty past they were sacrificed to the winter gods. Maybe that’s why some gods act so young. Ogun, so childish that he slays both the slavemaster and the slave. Two-year-olds are what the id would look like if the id could ride a tricycle. That’s the innocent side of two, but the terrible side as well. A terrible world the world of two-year-olds. . . . Someone is constantly trying to eat them up. The gods of winter crave them– the gods of winter who, some say, are represented by the white horse that St. Nicholas, or Saint Nick, rides as he enters into Amsterdam, his blackamoor servant, Peter, following with his bag of switches and candy. Two-year-olds are constantly looking over their shoulders for the man in the shadows carrying the bag. Black Peter used to carry them across the border into Spain. (28)
Just as Ogoun is both a healer and a warrior–and as the champion of the Haitian Revolution, a slayer of both master and slave47–so Nicholas/Peter are both gift-givers and conniving thieves. By reinjecting paganism’s vivid spiritual dualism into Christianity, Reed incarnates a world of shockingly energetic contrasts; a world that stands against the bland, homogenized commercialism of Big North’s, and Macy’s, corporate Santa. Part of this energy derives from the esoteric nature of Reed’s vision here, his zest for an off-the-wall hermeneutics that is, finally, too peculiar to be popular in the sense of “popularity” that Macy’s and Big North, and Miracle on 34th St., seem to have coopted. For Reed, Macy’s is mass culture as rootless, best-selling hype, despite its self-disguise as popular culture in Miracle. Reed presents, as a pointed contrast to the film’s duplicitous claim to folk status, a popular tradition just as strange as it is true, one that resists, and revises, mass culture through both its strangeness and its truth. Reed’s eccentricity finds its thematic roots in the popular culture of vodoun just as the bemused and outrageous improvisational comedy of his prose, the wry, crisply logical way with a joke that is so uniquely his, draws on the rhythms of African-American discourse. The result is a postmodernism in which Reed’s style perfectly illustrates his syncretic and subversive argument. If Reed does not invoke his connections to tradition in the service of an easily communal utopian optimism, but instead remains skeptical about the possibility of a full-scale alternative to the Atonists,48 he also insists on the historical presence of a secret, underground alternative to Wallflower culture, a revolt that is always occurring, in one scene or another.
Notes
1. Since the 1960s, the academy and the world of publishing have tended to favor those African-American writers who seem most overtly to invoke the communal inheritance of traditional African-American values. Writers like Andrea Lee who exhibit skepticism about the survival of tradition in a postmodern world are stigmatized by the critical establishment.
2. See, among many other sources, Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983); Seyla Benhabib, “A Reply to Jean-Francois Lyotard,” in Linda Nicholson, ed., Feminism/Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1990); Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986); Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991). Huyssen’s delineation of the limitations in Habermas’ championing of aesthetic modernity against postmodernity has influenced my own case for the critical capacity of postmodernism.
3. It is important to note, of course, that Habermas also emphasizes the gains in human freedom that have stemmed from the Weberian rationalization processes that enable the state to survive.
4. See Habermas’ Adorno prize lecture, translated as “Modernity: An Incomplete Project,” in Foster, ed., 3-15, and The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity.
5. As Paul Smith, Rainer Nagele, and others have pointed out: see Paul Smith, Discerning the Subject (Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 1988), 163-64, and Rainer Nagele, “Freud, Habermas and the Dialectic of Enlightenment,” New German Critique 22 (Winter 1981), 41-62.
6. Mumbo Jumbo (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972), 211. Thus Mumbo Jumbo‘s tongue-in-cheek genealogy of Jes Grew–whose contagious character means that it can never really be pinned down as lineage or inheritance–stretches from Isis and Osiris, to Dionysus, to Jethro, to vodoun.
7. On this point, see David Kaufmann, “The Profession of Theory,” PMLA May 1990, 519 -30.
8. On this issue of what DuBois called “double consciousness,” see Robert Stepto’s landmark From Behind the Veil (Champaign-Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, 1979).
9. On this point I have benefitted from Lawrence Hogue’s work in progress on African-American postmodernism, as well as a talk given by David Bradley at Trinity College (Hartford, CT), 1989.
10. Here as elsewhere in this essay, I am indebted to Hal Foster’s analysis of the subcultural as a viable force in postmodernism: see “Readings in Cultural Resistance” in Recodings (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1985).
11. This is Charles Altieri’s description of Paul Smith’s position in Altieri’s Canons and Consequences (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1990), 206. Altieri criticizes Smith for imagining a too easy transition from such practices of resistance to statements of political position, thus giving short shrift to those resistant modes, like Derrida’s and the later Barthes’, which do not add up to avowals of political responsibility. While agreeing fully with Altieri’s brilliant and subtle critique of Smith, I also have major misgivings concerning Altieri’s finding of deficiencies in Derrida’s and Barthes’s notions of responsiveness. For Altieri, the private, self-ironizing nature of Derrida’s later style needs to be compensated for by a publicly responsible or official subject, who will stabilize (or perhaps repress?) what is risky about such intimate ironies (see Canons, 209; see also Altieri’s essay on Ecce Homo in Daniel O’Hara, ed., Why Nietzsche Now? [Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1985], 410-11). I think that the model of compensation/stabilization, along with the zero-sum picture of bargaining, negotiation and consensus that tends to accompany Altieri’s official self, adds up to a dangerously limited way of conceiving the political. The invocation of the normative force of reasonable choice as a necessary supplement to aesthetics and private life is directly relevant to the antagonistic criticism of Reed. Instead of trying to make our private aesthetic obsessions publicly responsible by worrying that theorists like Nietzsche and Derrida, or writers like Reed, are not sufficiently interested in justifying liberal political judgment, I believe we ought to acknowledge–rather than look for ways of repressing–the gap between personal aesthetics and public responsibility, the unavoidable fact that defines (post)modern politics. Needless to say, my qualm here applies to Habermas, as well as Smith and Altieri.
12. Frank Lentricchia, “Libra as Postmodern Critique,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 89 (1990), 431-53. (Essay originally published in Raritan, Spring 1989.) The passage cited is on 443.
13. Lionel Trilling, “Freud: Within and Beyond Culture,” in Beyond Culture (New York: Viking, 1965). Freud, of course, was in fact Jewish, whereas the other “other cultures” cited in Trilling’s great essay were located purely in Freud’s imagination, not his biographical context. But, following a strategy which critical postmodernists might find appealing, Trilling tends to downplay this distinction: the adversarial use of the subculture/other culture takes precedence over the question of its literal historical presence.
14. I am indebted to Michael Jarrett for the analogy between Reed and sampling.
15. Lentricchia has noted the total absence of his own ethnicity from DeLillo’s work (in “The American Writer as Bad Citizen–Introducing Don DeLillo,” SAQ 1990 [89, 2], 239-44); and Pynchon’s prestigious New England ancestry is played as an elaborate self-exploding joke in Gravity’s Rainbow. There is, of course, an analogy between Pynchon’s “preterite” and Reed’s “neohoodooism,” but Reed claims a concrete cultural context (even if a slippery and self- displacing one) for his aesthetic slogan as Pynchon does not. It should be understood that I am not arguing that contemporary writers “ought” to use subcultural tradition in Reed’s manner, nor that Reed is a better writer than Pynchon or DeLillo for their failure to do so.
16. See Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “The Blackness of Blackness: A Critique of the Sign and the Signifying Monkey,” and James A. Snead, “Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture,” in Gates, ed., Black Literature and Literary Theory (New York: Methuen, 1984).
17. The Talking Heads’ Speaking in Tongues (New York: Sire, 1983), whose title humorously endows commodified pop with a quasi-religious aura borrowed from alien traditions, draws on Nigerian Juju music; their later record Naked (New York: Sire, 1988) is similarly indebted to Zairian soukous. For a very useful treatment of the analogy between modern art and “primitive” art as an attempt to construct “universalism,” see James Clifford, “Histories of the Tribal and the Modern,” in his The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988).
18. For a treatment of this issue of appropriation in the context of the Cuban Afro-Cubanismo movement, see Roberto Gonzalez-Echevarria, Alejo Carpentier, The Pilgrim at Home (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1977).
19. Reed’s status as an African-American writer who claims Africa-derived folk culture for his own just as Yeats claims Celtic folklore should prevent us from simply identifying his authorial ideology in respect to Africa with that of Picasso, Stravinsky et. al.; one might choose the claiming of African folk culture in Aime Cesaire, Jay Wright, Edward Brathwaite, Toni Morrison and Derek Walcott for an extremely various set of comparisons to Reed.
20. I am here arguing against the easy conflation of ethnicity, political opposition, and postmodernism in Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1988), 60-70. Hutcheon programmatically ignores the conflicts among modernist, postmodernist, and nostalgic or premodern desires in texts such as Morrison’s Tar Baby in order to claim a (false) harmony between postmodernism and African-American self-assertion.
21. Lee Breuer’s dreadful Warrior Ant comes to my mind here, but any reader will be able to supply his/her favorite examples.
22. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (New York: Viking, 1973).
23. Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen (New Paltz, NY: Book Collectors Society, 1970 [1st ed. 1953]), 134.
24. James A. Snead, “Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture,” in Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., Black Literature and Literary Theory, 72. See also 67: “In black culture, the thing (the ritual, the dance, the beat) is ‘there for you to pick up when you come back to get it.’ If there is a goal . . . it continually ‘cuts’ back to the start, in the musical meaning of ‘cut’ as an abrupt, seemingly unmotivated break. . . .” For a very helpful analysis of the technique of “cutting” in African music, see J.M. Chernoff, African Rhythm and African Sensibility (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979).
25. See Kimberly Benston, Baraka: the Renegade and the Mask (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1976).
26. See Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “The Signifying Monkey,” in Black Literature and Literary Theory, 297.
27. Houston Baker, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987), 56; see 69.
28. See Cornel West, “Minority Discourse and the Pitfalls of Canon Formation,” in Yale Journal of Criticism 1 (1987), 199. West’s essay is a very important and persuasive statement, though I disagree locally with his view of Reed.
29. A comparison might also be drawn between Reed and Don DeLillo, whose recent Libra advances a conspiracy theory of the JFK assassination not unlike the conspiracies so doggedly pursued in Pynchon’s and Reed’s novels, though DeLillo’s tone of dire, hard-boiled historicity differs from theirs. For remarks on Reed and Pynchon, see Reginald Martin, Ishmael Reed and the New Black Aesthetic Critics (New York: St. Martin’s P, 1983), 2; see also 43.
30. This point is argued by Fredric Jameson in an interview in Social Text 17 (1987), 45, in which Jameson contrasts the passivity of the postmodern individual subject to the “collective subject” present in “third world literature.” This “collective subject” is an interpretive construct similar to Baker’s “common sense of the tribe,” the communal emphasis of much African-American literature. See the related (and problematic) article by Jameson, “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” in Social Text 15 (1986), and the response by Aijaz Ahmad, “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness,” Social Text 17 (1987).
31. For two opposed points of view on this issue in Pynchon (whether his notion of the subversive is sinister and hopeless or liberating), see, respectively, the essays by George Levine and Tony Tanner in Levine and David Leverenz, eds., Mindful Pleasures (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976).
32. The Crying of Lot 49 (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 170-71. (The passage is cited by Tony Tanner in Harold Bloom, ed., Thomas Pynchon (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), 188; see Tanner’s commentary on 187.) The third alternative that Oedipa considers–that “a labyrinthine plot has been mounted against” her–exposes the negative potential of the secrecy whose positive side is the liberating “density of dream.” Among the many remarkable features of this passage one might notice Pynchon’s punning connection, in lamenting “exitlessness,” between American failure and the sense of constriction, on the one hand, and American success and wide open spaces, on the other (cf. Latin exitus and Spanish exito)–a frontier ideology also dear to Reed (see, among other texts, his introduction to his anthology of California poetry, Calafia [Berkeley, CA: Y’Bird, 1979]). The dominant image conjured by Pynchon’s “exitlessness” is that of a Southern California freeway like those driven so often by Oedipa, but without exits: the frontier as labyrinth or imprisoning web.
33. The possibility of subversively liberating moments does, as Levine insists, exist in Pynchon, but these are only moments, not full-scale traditions or communities. The radical or revolutionary movements in the book, even when grounded in community, are just as macabrely threatening as the establishment they combat (for example, the mass- suicidal Hereros of Gravity’s Rainbow [315ff.]).
34. For a useful survey of Reed’s adversarial relation to various “black aesthetic” critics, chiefly Addison Gayle, Houston Baker, and Amiri Baraka, see Martin’s book. Reed asserts that he writes within an African-American aesthetic, but he identifies such an aesthetic with a stylistic and structural approach (similar to the concept of “cutting” described by Snead), rather than with revolutionary content, as does Baraka. See Martin, 2; see also Reed’s important introductions to the anthologies Yardbird Lives (New York, 1978) and 19 Necromancers from Now, as well as his famous run-in with the socialist realist Bo Shmo in Yellow Back Radio, (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969) 34-35. A simplified critique of Reed’s polemic in this passage is presented by Michael Fabre, “Postmodernist Rhetoric in Ishmael Reed’s Yellow Back Radio Broke Down,” in P. Bruck and W. Karrer, eds., The Afro-American Novel Since 1960 (Amsterdam: Gruner, 1982), 177, who sees it as championing “art” against “commitment.”
35. Page citations to The Terrible Twos are from the Atheneum edition (New York: Atheneum, 1982).
36. Despite the multiplicity of the cultures that the Mutafikah want to liberate, their faith is in the singularity of each of these cultures, and in their own singularity as quarrelsome representatives of these cultures. A Mexican tells an Anglo revolutionary during a Mutafikah meeting that he suspects him because “you carry [Cortes and Pizarro] in your veins as I carry the blood of Moctezuma”; a Chinese attacks a black member by claiming that “you North American blacks were”–and are–“docile”– because “the strong [Africans] were left behind in South America.” (Mumbo Jumbo, 86-87.)
37. For recent remarks along these lines, see Valerie Smith, Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1987), 102.
38. In his Preface to the 1975 anthology Yardbird Lives (ed. with Al Young; New York: Grove, 1978?), Reed attacks the critics who “in 1970” (just before the publication of the volume edited by Addison Gayle, The Black Aesthetic) “were united in their attempt to circumscribe the subject and form of Afro-American writing.” He goes on to announce that what he calls “the ethnic phase of American literature” is now over, “counterculture ethnic, black ethnic, red ethnic, feminist ethnic, academic ethnic, beat ethnic, New York School ethnic, and all of the other churches who believe their choir sings the best.” Reed proclaims that “the multicultural renaissance is larger than the previous ones because, like some African and Asian religions, it can absorb them” (Yardbird Lives, 13-14).
39. Mumbo Jumbo, 35.
40. See R.F. Thompson, Flash of the Spirit (New York: Random House, 1983), 172-77, Deren, Divine Horsemen, and Melville J. Herskovits, The New World Negro (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1966), 324-25, which lists other vodoun syntheses of pagan and Christian.
41. Yellow Back Radio, 153.
42. See Thompson, 179ff. On the ethical ambiguity of vodoun deities and its relation to the twin modes Petro and Rada. On Dom Petro/Petre, see Thompson, 179. It is interesting to note that the Bacchic or Satyrlike sexuality of Reed’s Black Peter (revealed as a clever impostor in the sequel, The Terrible Threes, 40, 42) can be cross- referenced to the phallic energy frequently associated with the trickster figure in African legend via a pun concealed in his name (the “black snake” of blues tradition). On the “phallic trickster,” see Houston Baker, Blues, Ideology and Afro-American Literature (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984), 183ff. Baker remarks that “the trickster is also a cultural gift-bearer” (like Peter/Nicholas!).
43. St. Nicholas was noted for rescuing children, usually in groups of three.
44. See Charles W. Jones, St. Nicholas of Myra, Bari, and Manhattan (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978), 43, 61, 307ff. See also 309: Nicholas “thinks in dualities.” (Reed evidently relied heavily on Jones’ study in writing The Terrible Twos.) The duality persists, in diluted form, in the present-day Santa who may give lumps of coal as well as candy.
45. For Nicholas’ defiance of the Emperor Constantine, see Jones, 34.
46. Herskovits, 324. On the marassa as representative of “man’s twinned nature,” see Deren, 38-41.
47. See Deren, 130-37.
48. Such skepticism is even more prominent in the sequel to The Terrible Twos, 1989’s The Terrible Threes, which ends with the officially-sponsored kidnapping of the now-leftist Dean Clift.