NEWSLETTER #56 - aisna

AISNA Newsletter 56, p. 32
odyssey is reduced to ludicrous proportions, gangrened by absence : "And those women were
roughly able to sing songs of the skewered lamb and waters driven back by faith or oath. They were
dry. The boards on which they sat, scraped of fodder, might have burst aflame if the sun were
caught briefly in the eye of a watch glass. They traveled in three lifeless dories with dead oarlocks
and rotted sails; they sang stiffly; managed to hold the reins. They backtracked, chewed the sand
and made their way over weary, salty miles to see one woman their own age brought to bed" (82).
Such nefarious visions would only spell an inversion of values were it not for a syntax that
stubbornly performs deprivation and loss, a rhetoric of the once-was gnawed at by a host of
privatives and cancellations that leave no chance to idealized values or the could-bes of
representation : "Not a gull circled their heads, there were no rushes from which the crane could
jump and fly with its ill-concealed legs and gawky call. The last drippings of the river lay eighteen
feet deep […] backed without roe or salamander into the shallows"(133) : descriptions feed on what
the reader may have salvaged of less bankrupt visions to animate a landscape of nightmare.
The fantasmatic apparition of Mississippi steamboats in the imagination of women playing
poker (76) follows a negative description of times not only gone by but laminated into nonexistence:
[Thegna] "had tacked no rawhide sheets across the window, no smoke heavy on
eyeshades filled the room. There were no watch chains on embroidered waistcoats, no weapons
concealed in the finery, the feathered fronts of silken shirts. Black cigars, gold teeth, long wallets
next to hot and scented breasts, these were buried under the young willow limbs of wing dams on
the river." At the end, as Luke is killed by his own gun, when comes "that cool baying of the rising
head, the call to kill, louder and singsong, […] the nasal elated sounds of the cowboy's western
bark," its sound reads weak and whimpering: "Yip, yip, yip."
For the name of his protagonist in Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, "The Loop Garoo Kid",
Ishmael Reed used that of actor Lash LaRue who, in the forties, embodied "the man in black" and
"the king of the bullwhip" in "Song of Old Wyoming". And for one of his three epigraphs, an
excerpt from "The Rustler", a cowboy song that refers to "the hoodoos". The villain, here, is "Bo
Shmo and the neo-social realist gang" (38). When he "lean[s] in his saddle and scowl[s] at Loop,
whom he consider[s] a deliberate attempt to be obscure. A buffoon an outsider and frequenter of
sideshows" (38), he prefigures the reception the book met from conservative critics. Loop Garoo's
retort speaks for Reed's eclectic position in his all-out attack on genre itself : "What's your beef with
me, Bo Shmo, what if I write circuses ? No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything
it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o'clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by
demons." (40) "Collage", "jigsaw", "circus", "an expedition into the unknown" (29), the novel
methodically implements a no-holds-barred strategy of crazed havoc. Born in a psychedelic age that
lends its colors to the revolt of the children who "decide[…] to create [their] own fiction"(18),
against the grownups and the old of Yellow-Back Radio, it savages received ideas, official
historiography and usual distributions. It reverses ideological and racial logics, as when the first
page upgrades "spades" to "trump", when the barkeep wryly declares that "one of them historians
remarked […] the real American personality begins with the frontier" (63), when an epigraph
reminds us that "Roy Rogers' movie double's name was Whitey Christensen". The black and white
dots separating sections do more than remind us of the logo of a famous radio brand : they install
the reversal of black and white, of cat and dude, of voodoo and western at the typographic heart of
the text.
The novel ransacks popular genres and artistic currents. The caricature of Pope Innocent as
mafioso is inserted in a cartoon-like episode where he sprays a preacher with DDT, relayed by the
sci-fi comic strip tonality of the landing of the Flying Brush Beeve Monster (42) out of which
strides "a plainclothes, patarealist Indian" (43), cigarette holder in hand : Chief Showcase, partial to
Pierre Cardin originals, expatiates on a dubious traditional friendship between Blacks and Indians
(48). Giant Sloths, straight out of horror comics, frolic among monstrous characters borrowed from
gore, vaudeville and slapstick fond of "Jive talking dada" (155) ; a queer green mustang keeps
having surrealist nightmares and dreams of World War II; a corrupt congressman from New Jersey