Order in Chaos: Mumbo Jumbo

Mumbo Jumbo is a book that doesn’t easily lend itself to immediate interpretation, and yet the narrative that comes together at the end of the book is a coherent story that questions and critiques aspects of society in ways that still have meaning today. The battle between people obsessed with order and keeping everything under control against those who are constantly innovating and coming up with new ways to experience life is one that has existed in different forms throughout human history. This basic struggle is critiqued in many ways throughout the novel, with the main vehicle for it being Jes Grew and the impact it has on American culture in the early 20th century, where Jes Grew is analogous to the beginnings of jazz music which gave people unique and different music that wasn’t initially a part of mainstream American popular culture.

Earlier this semester, I wrote a blog post on how Reed’s voice and his distinct way of describing certain things while omitting others seemingly at random helped emphasize the point the book was making. Finishing the book has given me perspective on that point and made the book as a whole a much more complete experience. The book forms a narrative out of seemingly disconnected, disjointed events, however these events come together to represent the struggle between the establishment and novelty. The incredible thing about Mumbo Jumbo is that while discussing the struggle between new ideas and established social norms, the novel itself breaks the established norms for writing a novel. Right from the start, it doesn’t even pretend to be a conventional narrative, and this decision only helps drive home the point that the the novel makes through the content delivered.

In many ways, the narrative of Mumbo Jumbo is a structure that can be applied to many different situations throughout history. The narrative is framed as a struggle for the Book of Thoth between different factions and societies in an attempt to either quell or spread Jes Grew. However, this in turn represents the attempts of whites to suppress the growth of Jazz music and the influx of black culture into the American mainstream. This narrative is an example of a more general social phenomenon, which is the idea that new ideas and changing culture can scare some people and create conflict similar to the culture conflict caused by jazz in the early twentieth century. Now that I have finished the book, I appreciate the entire narrative and how, despite the individual parts being written in a jarringly unique style, the book forms a coherent narrative that explores this social conflict while simultaneously challenging the norms for a "standard" novel, and threatening the established standards for a good book by changing the way a novel can be written.

Mumbo Jumbo: Voice and Description

Mumbo Jumbo is an interesting book to read for many reasons. One of the main reasons that the book is so different and jarring than most other novels is the way Ishmael Reed tells the story. There are parts of the book where the voice becomes so distant that you would think that the line was part of a summary rather than part of the actual novel while other lines are just as descriptive and detailed as any other novel. There seems to be an effort to give the audience only part of the picture and leave the rest to be interpreted by each reader for themselves. This ambiguity in certain sections of the book along with the pace at which the book whips from one storyline to the next without much warning makes for an extremely disorienting and confusing start to the novel. The entire book seems to embrace the idea of a narrative being confusing and disjointed. The idea that a historical narrative can be told through a coherent story from a fixed perspective is challenged throughout the book with the style that Reed uses.

Here is an example of a sentence that seems to be more at home in a synopsis of the chapter than actually in the chapter: “They see Berbelang and a well-dressed young blond White man whom they recognize from the society pages as Thor Wintergreen, the son of a famous tycoon.” (Reed 30). This sentence describes Papa LaBas and Earline seeing Berbelang and Thor Wintergreen. However, the distance in this sentence was striking to me since Reed just tells us they meet these two instead of describing the scene or how they met them. It goes directly from them meeting to then describing dialogue, eliminating details about the atmosphere or the manner in which the meeting took place in a way that seems more like summarizing events than writing a novel.

This scene is made even more interesting by the way Reed treats the interaction between Abdul, Black Herman, and Papa LaBas, where everyone’s reactions and their thoughts are seemingly much more apparent and the characters get their own description before the meeting with Papa LaBas. We get the picture of Papa LaBas entering the room and the reactions from both Black Herman and Abdul in a way that is strangely omitted in the interaction with Berbelang and Thor Wintergreen. Right away, we see the difference in the descriptions, as Papa Labas is seen standing in the doorway after we get a detailed description of both the room and the appearance of the characters inside the room that Papa Labas will be interacting with. As Papa LaBas walks into the room, Abdul is described as staring “sneeringly at his shoes. Then his face.”(Reed 33). This is one of many examples where Reed mixes and matches different elements that are often considered standard in a novel to create a chaotic narrative, and one that isn’t coherent and clean nor is it intended to be.