Saturday, February 27, 2016
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.
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I definitely agree with your observation that Reed deliberately omits certain details and focuses on others when constructing his narrative. Rather than be as balanced as possible, he is giving the western-biased narrative a taste of its own medicine.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that Reed's voice and the way he writes is certainly unique. You also do a good job at explaining they way in which he writes. Through reading this book, we have all come to learn that Reed has a clear bias against the traditional western based narrative. Omitting details allows him to, like you said, tell the story he wants to tell that clearly goes against the common western narrative.
ReplyDeleteThe way Reed has put his book together is indeed uniquely done, especially how he incorporates excerpts from other books into his own. By doing this he makes Jes Grew seem as though it's a real thing that I've just never heard about it. I have found that the book has become more coherent after having finished it, so I too can see and appreciate how its different elements all fit together to make a narrative about social conflict.
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