Vol. II. Issue. III September 2011 - The Criterion: An International ...

www.the-criterion.com The Criterion: An International Journal in English ISSN 0976-8165
Detective Techniques Used In Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo And
Reckless Eyeballing
Dr. R. Krishnaveni
In viewing the peripheral world of wild and black folk culture as a passive
spectator of a thematic that does not touch the modernity, rather than as a constitutive
moment of modernity. African American writer views the crises of modernity and the
subsequent post modern critique solely within the white European – North American
moment. Wild, black folk culture and the periphery are the other face, the alterity,
essential to modernity. Ishmael Reed’s novels are modern paradigm and assume
planetary post modernism.
In his novels, Ishmael Reed uses Jazz age and Harlem Renaissance to undermine
instrumental reason and to show how the novel and Western metaphysics are constructs,
and thus why certain issues of heterogeneity, difference, and fluidity and the critique of
closure linearity and absolute truth do not belong exclusively to a European-centered post
modernism. But, unlike other African American writer, Ishmael Reed uses Jazz and other
African American cultural symbols more visibly in the novels. The novels begin like a
film: the action starts in medias res, like a detective story, before the title page. Only after
the initial reports of the spontaneous epidemic one can get the title, publisher, date,
epigraph and dedications. Then, like a film, it returns to the story.
This paper analyses the technique of detective stories, in the linear form of
narrative and intertexuality and also focuses how it resembles a typical dime-store
detective novel or television movie and the adherence to a singular truth supported by the
Western detective story. Ishmael Reed in Mumbo Jumbo writes a detective story that
shows it as a linguistic invention. The novel dramatises the direct confrontation between
European and African Centric thought and culture. As the novel opens, there has erupted
what Ishmael Reed, signifying on Harriet Beecher Stowe, calls a ‘Jes Grew’ epidemic,
which he associates, specifically, with African religious practice and dance. Jes Grew,
writes Ishmael Reed, is “an anti-plague” which enlivens the host; it is as electric as life
and is characterised by ebullience and ecstasy. Establishing, from the outset, the schism
between Western and African sensibilities and recalling Loop Garoo’s Innocent VIII,
Ishmael Reed adds that terrible plagues are due to the wrath of the Christian God; but Jes
Grew is the delight of the African gods.
From one side march the protectors of the great Western way-Ishmael Reed calls
them the “Wallflower Order,” and links them with the Knights Templar. The Order, in
turn, is described as being a part of the “Atonist Path” (ADIC 4) - after the Egyptian King
Akhenaton, a sun worshipper who, like Blake’s Urizew, or Saint Paul, attempted to
establish The One Law, ending polytheistic worship and effectively severing human ties
with the natural world in a variety. The Order’s twentieth-century goal is the same as it
has been historically: to stamp at native religions and their texts. In this case, the ancient,
lost Book of Thoth, which one can learn, has surfaced after centuries of absence.
Opposing the Atonists is LaBas, who unlike his antagonists, is a pluralist, and a
player, like the Egyptian mythological figure Osiris, whom Ishmael Reed discusses in the
long fifty second chapter of Mumbo Jumbo. The climax of the novel embodies an
exquisite parody of the traditional detective novel’s scene of confrontation and
disclosure. LaBas gathers together the book’s living principles in Villa LeWaro and
Vol. II. Issue. III 90 September 2011