SOURCE: Hume, Kathryn. “Ishmael Reed and the Problematics of Control.” PMLA 108, no. 3 (May 1993): 506-18.

[In the following essay, Hume examines Reed's treatment of control and power in his fiction and places him within the context of other writers dealing with similar thematic concerns.]

Spiked on meat hooks in Emperor Franz Joseph Park, Bukka Doopeyduk dies slowly, his agonies overshadowed by the hoopla of public demonstrations attending his execution. Like Damiens, the regicide whose torments are narrated in the first pages of Foucault's Discipline and Punish, Bukka suffers while the state inscribes its Kafkaesque discourse of power on his body. The message of this Foucauldian end? The protagonist of Ishmael Reed's Free-Lance Pallbearers is meat, and the country a shambles. Bukka is to be eaten by HARRY SAM, otherwise known as the good old US of A; he is fuel for SAM's governmental machine. His being consumed is what keeps that machine going, and as long as he participates in the food chain of consuming and being consumed, the system will continue.

Reed writes about power and about the aim of power, control. New conceptions of power and control, and of the subtle mental mechanics of oppression, have spawned several current schools of cultural and literary criticism—feminism, black studies, postcolonial studies, gay studies, and new historicism, among others. Control has thus been “in the air” for some time, and a number of novelists since the 1960s have reached the conclusion that control is a powerful lens for magnifying human interactions, a revelatory alternative to Freudian libido or Marxist economic forces.¹ Thomas Pynchon, Norman Mailer, Kathy Acker, William S. Burroughs, and Reed have all produced violent satires on the exercise of power in America or in Western society. All express themselves with apocalyptic and unsavory grotesquerie. All push power, and their art, toward the edge of … explosion? implosion? At any rate, they attempt to pierce the walls of power by the violative revolutionary force of their expression in hopes of reaching something beyond. Such visions of control are far from neutral; they attribute to control something just short of sentience and volition and interpret the forces of control as malignant. In such demonization, these artists echo the rhetoric and stances of what Richard Hofstadter calls the “paranoid style” in American politics.² When I talk about American or Western control culture, I mean the culture as seen by control artists, for of course any culture is a system of controls, but these are not always perceived as vicious, especially by those in privileged cultural subgroups.

Reed has been interpreted as the patricidal son of Ralph Ellison and as a raucous and razzle-dazzle but lightweight satirist.³ An examination of Reed's literary endeavor in the context of others struggling with the problematics of control, however, shows that Reed is more intellectually impressive than his critical reputation would suggest. His vision, though inscribed in satiric shorthand, is indeed coherent, and he challenges the structures of control with more of a solution than do his fellow control visionaries. He suggests a way of conceiving of life and society that could reroute the headlong Western (or American) rush toward apocalypse.

The first part of this article shows how issues of power and control are central to Reed's fiction, a stable core of concern lying behind his grimly flashy surfaces. The second part deals with characteristic images and subjects—such charged matter as problems with sexual identity and sexual relations, homosexuality, grotesque presentations of heads of state, efflorescent anality, Hoodoo, and violent revisions of founding myths. Critics treat these as individual to Reed, implicitly making them incompletely assimilated anal-stage anxieties, oedipal tensions transposed to government, and other such Freudian reductions. Each of these issues and symbols, however, appears in the works of several other control artists. Studying Reed in the usual contexts of postmodernism or the African American novel is helpful, but the context of writers obsessed with control gives a new and rather different picture of Reed's philosophical and artistic accomplishment.

I

Power is exercised when a person or state forces individuals to act against their interests or wills.⁴ The ultimate aim of power is control, control of the present ensured by planning the future. Western technological culture, preeminently in America, is governed by fear of the uncontrolled future. To avoid future famine (and keep prices up), the United States stockpiles food and lets it rot instead of giving it to those in need. To prevent other, less fortunate nations from seizing land and wealth someday, the powers that be stockpile warheads. Most Americans try to buy material security and happiness instead of pursuing life as a spiritual adventure or cultivating philosophical equanimity. Taming the future demands predictability. Western science reflects and reinforces this desideratum, for the first test of a new scientific hypothesis is whether it correctly predicts a result.⁵ Likewise, for technology and industry to be efficient, supply must be controlled and manipulated to meet demand, and workers are more highly valued the more they resemble automatons. Uniformity in people is enforced because individual differences and diverse cultural values do not mesh efficiently. In short, the major manifestations of control in modern culture are fear of hypothetical future dangers; materialism; the efficiency ethic; and repression of spontaneous, authentic impulses and cultural differences in favor of machinelike conformity.

Different facets of culture as control have attracted writers. Pynchon, in Gravity's Rainbow and The Crying of Lot 49, and Reed, in The Terrible Twos and The Terrible Threes, grimly portray the interconnectedness of everything that is pushing the technological world toward totalitarianism.⁶ Interconnectedness in the specific form of multinational corporations and technologies intrigues not only Pynchon but also cyberpunk authors such as William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. The human by-product of the multinationals' rhizomatous spread is what pains Acker. Her Don Quixote reminds us that the rule of these corporations will produce an Orwellian underclass equivalent to Pynchon's Preterite and Reed's surps in The Terrible Twos and The Terrible Threes. Mailer revolts against the pressure on individuals to fit a mold and despises the uniformity imposed even on those ostensibly in power. All these writers share one assumption: the control world is headed for partial or total destruction, whether through nuclear violence or through ecological or social collapse.

In three novels, The Free-Lance Pallbearers, The Terrible Twos, and The Terrible Threes, Reed launches grotesque attacks on American social, economic, and political avatars of control. In the country of HARRY SAM, control manifests itself not just through the hooks of public execution but also through secret cannibalism and sodomy in high places and through the media's shaping of the public mind. In Bukka Doopeyduk, we have a Candide-like—or, as Malcolm X would say, brainwashed—protagonist. Bukka does not understand that the National Ear-Muffle Factory provides the means for insulating oneself from the screams of victims. He does not doubt the words of HARRY SAM or the Nazarene state church, both of which enjoin hard work, patience, and perseverance and press their messages on him through omnipresent radios. Even when Chinese invaders take over the country, the message for the poor is the same: “EATS—SAVE GREEN STAMPS—BINGO—WED.” In other words, the poor are urged to consume goods, be consumed, and beget more consumers, while comforting themselves with the promise of luck in a game of chance.

In The Terrible Twos and The Terrible Threes, Reed traces the tangled skeins of interconnection in American power centers, showing how broadcasters buy legislators, how advisers close to the president answer to back-room industrial interests, how the military can be influenced or bought, and how fake Hollywood glamour creates the illusion of reality. The reader learns how a tiny group of fanatics not answerable to any legal power could bring about the nuclear destruction of an African nation. Blackmail, drugs, the sale of information, secret societies, the manipulation of images: these are what The Terrible Twos and The Terrible Threes are about. Reed seems to fear that this degree of interconnectedness may make the system impervious to legal improvements; Pynchon expresses the same insight in Gravity's Rainbow: “Once the technical means of control have reached a certain size, a certain degree of being connected one to another, the chances for freedom are over for good” (539). Pynchon suggests killing such vampire powers with traditional magic, and Reed, too, with his St. Nicholas and Black Peter from the Hoodoo island of Guinea, thinks of magic as possibly all that will work against so entrenched and densely woven a fabric of complicity and crime.

Control is also a helpful tool for understanding Reed's other novels. Reckless Eyeballing has confounded and revolted reviewers but makes some sense as a demonstration of how an alert and reasonably sophisticated individual persuades himself to submit to the forces of control. The results are nightmarish, though members of mainstream culture will not at first find them noteworthy: Ian Ball does not know his real self anymore. An island hex is the ostensible cause of his cloven personality, but magic only reinforces what his attempts to “make it” in New York have already effected: a split self with the inauthentic half dominant.

Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, like Flight to Canada and The Last Days of Louisiana Red, looks at the historical roots of control. The novel reinterprets the cowboy myths of taming the American West as grotesque and perverse cultural rape. Reed also challenges Christianity as a form of control in this book opposing the pope to his Hoodoo protagonist, Loop Garoo, a banished older son of God, cloven-hoofed, but a genuine spiritual power to be reckoned with. The cultural intolerance derived from Christianity and the contempt for those with less sophisticated technology and therefore less firepower are both important targets in this mock Western, as well as in the governmental worlds of The Terrible Twos and The Terrible Threes, in which television Christianity is also savaged.

Flight to Canada teases out historical contradictions at the roots of American thought. Far from being fundamentally democratic, Reed argues, Americans moon over a medieval dream of being lords and ladies, members of a happy aristocracy supported by the necessary servants and slaves. Pynchon's elite is wed to a technological rather than an aristocratic dream, but he too envisions a small, privileged group and an exploited mass rather than true democracy. For Acker, in Don Quixote, the groups are Landlords and Tenants. For Mailer—in the words of D. J.—they are high-grade assholes and all those who submit to their shit. Reed gets good mileage out of references to the Kennedy administration as Camelot. True Euro- or Anglo-American desires, he feels, surface in that symbolic naming and in the antebellum South, and he argues that morally these social longings are a Poe nightmare rather than a midsummer day's dream.⁷ The whip—instrument for writing the discourse of power on black bodies—is the ultimate reality in this nightmarish world, and its patterns have not disappeared from the world of today.

In The Last Days of Louisiana Red, Reed states that a debilitating pattern that originated in slavery is being repeated today through ignorance and greed. Black women attach themselves to white men, and this bond gives black women reason to conspire with their partners to keep black men subjugated. Readers have balked at Reed's analysis, seeing it as an attack on black feminists, but whether one agrees with Reed or not, the book clearly functions as part of Reed's scrutiny of control as practiced in the black community and in black-white interrelations.⁸

In Mumbo Jumbo Reed spells out his vision of the alternative to society as control. The Western way is conventionally derived from Athens and Jerusalem, and it claims for itself their philosophy and morality. Reed, however, anticipating claims for African culture made by Martin Bernal and Cheikh Anta Diop, traces the roots of Western culture to ancient Egypt, to Set and Osiris and to the first known monotheism, Egyptian Atonism. Monotheism nurtures the development of a control mentality; it encourages its followers to see themselves as a chosen people with a special relationship to an exclusive God. That sense of being chosen became part of Christianity and increased as Christianity merged with the Roman hegemonic culture, evolving through Catholicism to Protestantism. All other religions and ways of life are damned. All other peoples, therefore, can be treated as little better than animals, can be lied to or betrayed, can be robbed of land and wealth, can and indeed should be forced to abandon their own patterns and reduced to cultural and economic peonage under the one true way. Or, as one white American puts it in Mumbo Jumbo, African Americans “must adopt our ways, producing Elizabethan poets; they should have Stravinskys and Mozarts in the wings, they must become Civilized!!!!” (130). Industrialism and capitalism reduce the already narrow Western values to a yet narrower materialism, and efficiency becomes the primary virtue. In the 1920s of Mumbo Jumbo, these values are promulgated by the Wallflower Order, a coterie representing the Ivy League, the Social Register, and other wealthy upper-class white institutions. This Wallflower Order rules America. Its members are wallflowers because they cannot dance.

Throughout the history of Western culture, according to Reed, there has been an opposing force, Jes Grew, a spirit that manifests itself in his book primarily as dance but also as jazz, poetry, art, Hoodoo, and hedonism in general.⁹ The urge to dance wildly, eat hugely, make love with gusto, and enjoy oneself without being obsessed by the morrow becomes in this revisionary account not just the repressed desire of individuals but also a cultural impulse as old and as coherent as monotheism. Spontaneity characterizes this life-style. Lively and intelligent improvisation, whether in music (jazz) or in making a living (hustling), is admired more than careful planning, scrimping, and saving.¹⁰ Individual expressiveness is valued over uniformity and mass production in works of art, styles of walking, dressing, verbal battle (the dozens), and dancing, even in automobiles. Such pleasure need not preclude work, and Norman Harris characterizes Osiris as a “working sensualist” (“Politics”); one of Reed's examples of work in this world picture is the thousands of hours Yardbird Parker spends perfecting his playing. Overall, however, those who practice the Jes Grew philosophy live for the present to enjoy every moment to the fullest, not simply to become something else in the distant future. Toni Morrison contrasts this style with the Western way in Tar Baby. Jadine wants to “make it” in New York, but Son argues, “That's not life; that's making it. I don't want to make it; I want to be it” (266). For Reed, polytheism is the spiritual style suited to Jes Grew, and in the African manifestation of this outlook, polytheism is Vodoun or Hoodoo, with its ever-increasing multitude of numina called loas. Because of the Egyptian origin of Osiris, Reed identifies the Jes Grew mind-set as peculiarly African, as a black culture that counters the white order of analysis and death, but he clearly feels that variations on this outlook are compatible with a wide range of non-Western and nonwhite cultures.

Not only does Reed argue that this alternative style of living has existed in Africa, he suggests that the outlook has survived as a repressed but continuous tradition within Western culture, and much of what Bakhtin says about the carnivalesque in the medieval world bears Reed out.¹¹ Reed claims that various heresies, as well as tarantism and incidents of hearing voices, are manifestations of this spirit. Joan of Arc, he suggests, was possessed in a fashion recognized and valued in the Hoodoo tradition, and Tituba of Salem witchcraft fame, who was, after all, from Barbados, evidently introduced a number of girls to loa possession. The gap between official history and reality is evident in that only within the last two decades have Americans begun to become aware of Vodoun and to learn that it is widely practiced in the United States, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa, with a following large enough to make it a major world religion. Vodoun is a religion without scriptures and without a priesthood whose power derives from privileged access to scriptures. Because its perpetuation depends on improvisation rather than on conservation of an ancient, unchanging text, it lacks heresy and repression of heresy; and because it is practiced by dark-skinned peoples, its presence has been repressed in the consciousness of text-oriented white culture.

Western culture and Jes Grew clash most openly over the matter of technological accomplishment. To a Westerner, large buildings, complex transportation systems, and efficient means of mass killing are self-evident proofs of cultural superiority. Literally, might makes right. In describing the marines' invasion of Haiti, Reed has a Robber Baron comment that Haiti “doesn't have any culture either. I didn't see a single cannon or cathedral” (Mumbo Jumbo 24). PaPa LaBas, Reed's Hoodoo houngan and detective, “is contemplative and relaxed, which Atonists confuse with laziness because he is not hard at work drilling, blocking the view of the ocean, destroying the oyster beds or releasing radioactive particles that will give unborn 3-year-olds leukemia and cancer” (Mumbo Jumbo 50).¹² In the Jes Grew outlook, many Atonist technological achievements are work of the “left hand,” because they cause great evil to somebody.

To Atonists reading Mumbo Jumbo, the Jes Grew life-style does not look like much of an alternative, but their mental filters are programmed to screen out this possibility. Yet the Jes Grew philosophy has many advantages. To a degree, it already exists and thus cannot be ruled out as impossible. Many Third World villages, tribal peoples, and low-tech cultures survive without elaborate planning for the future because they depend on cyclical patterns and traditional answers to recurring problems such as drought. Technological life, by contrast, is linear, and its frequent drastic changes call for more complex plans. Because the future for low-tech groups (until recent times) consisted of traditional problems and solutions, it did not rouse quite the fear that a future without precedents can, and it did not demand such frenzied attempts at control. The indifference of many residents of Third World countries to saving money, to having regular jobs, and to amassing the Western versions of personal power and security is familiar and frustrating to capitalist investors and industrialists. These Third World residents see work as peripheral to what matters in life and concentrate on the here and now, not the future. Likewise, the poor in many cultures focus on the present and put less psychic energy into shaping the future than do the well-to-do in the same cultures. African Americans living in ghettos have proved the viability of the outlook and have found that such a culture can provide goals to strive for (witty or admirable self-expression), community recognition for individuals in their efforts, satisfaction for goals achieved, and an aesthetic rather than a material sense of life. This is not to romanticize ghetto life or to say that ghetto dwellers would not like access to the material benefits of the larger culture, but they have evolved modes of cultural interaction that encourage psychic survival in circumstances where survival is exceedingly difficult. In essence, they have a philosophy to live up to and measure life by, rather than just an accumulation of material possessions.

At the heart of this life-style, Reed puts enjoyment rather than bourgeois security or any sort of rigid code cultivating bravery or stoicism. He lauds creativity, individuality, and difference and accepts inefficiency as an inevitable side effect. PaPa LaBas, for instance, drives a 1914 Locomobile, “designed to accommodate the philosophy ‘small numbers make for distinction, quantity destroys’ and its production is limited to 4 per day” (Mumbo Jumbo 54). Presumably parts would be more readily available for a Ford. Reed's putting enjoyment at the heart of culture recalls Fourier, whose elaborate utopian system in Théorie de l'unité universelle is predicated on the argument that culture cannot be civilized until enjoyment rather than repression is the basis for social structures and activities.

What alternatives do other control artists offer? Mailer demands living on the adrenaline edge, seeking fear and testing courage by passing through and beyond fear at every opportunity. Courage is the key to his philosophy, and violence is a common component, whether as murder (An American Dream) or slaughter (Why Are We in Vietnam?). The technobourgeois Atonist path demands self-control and delayed gratification and operates through fear of the future and death. It promises an improved standard of living and personal safety but, by reducing all values to the material, may well bring about nuclear or ecological disaster in the long run, since halting the juggernaut through legislation would beggar too many voters. Acker finds no solution to this dilemma and laments the lack of an answer. Burroughs offers the transcendence of drugs and of time travel achieved through orgasmic deaths and transmigration to other bodies (Cities of the Red Night, among others), an answer that does not operate on the same plane of reality as the answers other control writers suggest. Pynchon sees no way that any organization can function without also imposing tyranny, and so he can only recommend individual withdrawal and small acts of kindness. He envisions the possibility of exchanging necessities through an informal black-market-style economy, and he values that relatively unstructured free enterprise much as Reed values certain kinds of semilegal hustling—Ed Yelling's Solid Gumbo Works, PaPa LaBas's mail-order Hoodoo, Nance Saturday's life as gypsy-cab driver and freelance detective. These men survive without truckling to the power structure and avoid contact with it as much as possible. Their hustles do not prey on the poor as do numbers games and do not exploit others or damage them as do pimping and dealing in drugs. Nance's ex-wife, a TV anchor, scorns him for not getting ahead in life, that is, for not improving his standard of living; his triumph, however, is freedom and sufficiency without excess. In The Terrible Threes, Nance even manages to aid others as king of his block; he fights landlords and building code violations, reports drug dealers, and helps individuals resolve their financial messes and make fresh starts.

Neither Reed nor Mailer tries to accommodate women within his system, but Reed is so bent on reestablishing black manhood that he can picture it only in conjunction with a differentiated and (many would say) subordinated black womanhood. Nor does Reed mention obligations to children, which make Atonists feel the need to plan ahead and delay gratification, to save if they can instead of improvising and hoping everything will work out all right. Children are an economic asset in nonmarginal, agricultural, tribal life, so sexual pleasure and spontaneity benefit women as well as men. In a high-tech urban life, however, children are an economic liability. Reed's hypothetical world presumably lies somewhere between those extremes of life-style, but how children would be made more relevant to activities and less crimping to parental life is not discussed.

One finds interesting parallels to Reed's Jes Grew in two recent utopias, Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia and Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time. Both these writers envision a good deal of personal freedom and creativity in limited-tech, semiagricultural societies. Their utopias, however, specify ruthless birth control and an equitable distribution of wealth; Piercy furthermore invests much of that wealth in the community rather than in individuals. Both measures minimize the burden imposed by children and hence minimize inequality between the sexes. Even the anarchistic Piercy shows long-term planning at the community level, and Callenbach envisions it at the national level as well. Such governmental actions obviate the need for individual planning but cannot be called improvisation. Reed has not detailed the structure of a society based on Jes Grew, partly because his concept of power is too negative to let him follow through to this set of concerns.

I would argue that among the answers to control, Reed's system offers a great deal to those who are not ensorcelled by desire for ever-expanding economic consumption. Reed's expositions of Jes Grew and the modifications obvious in Ed Yellings (productivity) and Nance Saturday (helping others) show that Reed incorporates improvements into his philosophy and spells out things that he originally took for granted. Reed's modifications also attest to the coherence of his vision. He can afford to present his idea in a shorthand form because his proffered life-style does in a sense already exist. Versions of the Jes Grew outlook flourish in pockets all over the world, wherever material possessions are not the most important measure of human worth and the good life.

One can understand Reed's perspective better by comparing it with an insight from Salman Rushdie's novel Shame. While viewing Büchner's Danton's Death, Rushdie's narrator remarks that Danton

gets the chop (miraculously staged) because he is too fond of pleasure. Epicureanism is subversive. The people are like Robespierre. They distrust fun. This opposition—the epicure against the puritan—is, the play tells us, the true dialectic of history. Forget left-right, capitalism-socialism, black-white. Virtue versus vice, ascetic versus bawd, God against the Devil: that's the game.

(240)

Rushdie, an elitist from a Muslim background, sees the common people as puritanical, whereas Reed locates the Atonist impulse among the white majority in capitalist America and Jes Grew among an oppressed black minority—but both writers see the cultural impulses to seek and to deny pleasure as the chief spiritual options. Note too that Rushdie's Islamic upbringing causes him to condemn pleasure to some extent in this and his other novels; the enjoyable things are vices and weaknesses. In this contrast, Reed is much more radical, upholding such pleasures as an alternative vision of culture. Epicureanism is subversive.

II

When Reed is read as an African American writer, his images and concerns seem peculiar to him—rampant anality and cannibalism do not (dis)grace the pages of Ellison or Morrison. One assumes that Reed's blaming women for his protagonists' problems reflects a personal hang-up. Likewise the grotesque presentation of homosexuality hints at inner aversion. Comparison with other control artists, however, suggests that these oddly assorted subjects are somehow inherent in the subject of control, though the slant of their presentation remains personal.

Take, for instance, Reed's betrayal of uneasiness over masculine identity vis-à-vis women. PaPa LaBas's scene with Minnie the Moocher is well known (The Last Days of Louisiana Red 134-41). He accuses her and women like her of being unable to stand it when black men accomplish something solid and of being able to love them only when they are “on the corner sipping Ripple.” He goes on:

We walk the streets in need of women and make fools of ourselves over women; fight each other, put Louisiana Red on each other, shoot and maim each other. The original blood-sucking vampire was a woman. You flirt with us, tease us, provoke us, showing your delicious limbs to our askance glances. … Your cunt is the most powerful weapon of any creature on this earth, and you know it, and you know how to use it. I can't understand why you want to be liberated. Hell. You already free—you already liberated. Liberated and powerful. We're the ones who are slaves; two-thirds of the men on skid row were driven there by their mothers, wives, daughters, their mistresses and their sisters. I've never known a woman who needed it as much as a man. Women rarely cruise or rape.

(137)

Reed considers pleasantly pert, subordinate women like Earline and quiet, supportive women like Sister Yellings acceptable, but overall he blames women for men's sexual longings. Robert Elliot Fox reminds readers of existing gendered power structures, however: “Who, after all, runs the world? Is phallocracy really seriously threatened by ‘cockteasing’ or ‘bitchiness’?” (“Ishmael Reed” 65). He points out that capitalism, imperialism, and the Faustian impulse are all manifestations of uncontrolled desire and that men's slavery to their sexual longings is not unconnected to these other avatars of control. In other words, sexual desire and the interrelations between the sexes are likely to be highly problematic when viewed in the context of control.

Similarly, in Mailer's code a true man must resist all attempts to control him; such definitions assume male aggressiveness and dominance. Therefore, powerful or independent women are a problem, so much so that Rojack feels he must kill his wife or be psychically killed by her and that the relations D. J. and Tex have with women are likely to be unspeakable. Burroughs's values are complicated by the homosexuality of his male characters, but his cast of villains is garnished with evil demons like the Countess de Gulpa. Acker's female Don Quixote finds what men offer inadequate to her needs; they seem unable to offer real love. Pynchon escapes this friction between the sexes, but mainly because most of his characters are loners and drifters. They gain freedom from antagonism by losing contact. Masculine identity, particularly with regard to women, seems to be one of the commonplace problematics of control, and thus love proves difficult to accommodate in any theory of control.

Masculine identity must also be defined in the context of the power of the state. The relation between man and state is fraught with the oedipal rivalry between the authority-father and subordinate-son; hence, there is often symbolic overlap between the man-eating giant of fairy tales (an infantile projection of the father) and the tyrannical head of state. HARRY SAM is such a figure, a cannibalistic father who threatens the protagonist's existence and his masculine identity (by sodomy). The state can eat its citizens, consume them—Reed plays on this “consumption” syllepsis. Attacks on heads of state, usually involving shit, vomit, rape, and perversion, characterize this power literature. Reed's “Hexorcism of Noxon D Awful,” one of the earliest of such attacks on Richard Nixon, depicts him eating cat shit—perfectly orthodox Hoodoo ill-wishing. Acker lambastes Nixon in Don Quixote through vomit, rape, and embarrassing sex. Philip Roth may have felt more anguish over the power of mothers than over that of paternal heads of state, but he too joined the flood of grotesque satires on Nixon, with Our Gang, and so did Robert Coover, with The Public Burning, which includes the final public sodomizing of Nixon by Uncle Sam. Pynchon does not take on heads of state so much as power brokers in general; however, his depiction of Brigadier Pudding eating shit and the portrayal of Weissmann's sadomasochism are part of his attack on control, and he casts his argument in terms of sexual and scatological perversions.

Reed argues in The Last Days of Louisiana Red and elsewhere that black men must reestablish their manhood, especially vis-à-vis white men and black women. At the same time, he wants, somewhat contradictorily, to argue that black manhood is unassailably genuine and that the manhood of white power brokers is fraudulent. He signifies the false masculinity of powerful whites by making them mincingly homosexual, their sexuality further warped by sadism, masochism, and necrophilia (HARRY SAM, Drag Gibson, Theda Doompussy, Arthur Swille).

Mailer also defines the aggression of the power brokers in terms of homosexuality, though the targets of his satiric vision are aggressive rather than effeminate, expressing tyrannical power through metaphorical homosexual rape rather than living as powdered and painted queens as Reed's homosexual characters do. To Mailer, the power brokers are supermasculine, while Reed argues their lack of masculinity. Pynchon's analysis of power as homosexuality puts him somewhere between Mailer and Reed; to Pynchon, homosexual attachments in the trenches during World War I were just love, but “[i]n this latest War, death was no enemy, but a collaborator. Homosexuality in high places is just a carnal afterthought now, and the real and only fucking is done on paper” (Gravity's Rainbow 616). Pynchon's portrait of mincing and sadistic homosexuals in high places is almost as hostile as Reed's, and the fucking done on paper corresponds to Mailer's image of rape by those in power. Reed represses this image of being raped by the powers that be; such a relationship comes too close to master-slave domination and its systematic attack on black manhood. Part of Reed's point in writing is to proclaim that he, as person and writer, has not let his manhood be thus diminished. However, this nexus of homosexual images governs his attitudes toward power, and it damages his ability to consider power in a positive fashion. To accept HARRY SAM for him means submitting to HARRY SAM's anal “goat-she-ate-shuns.”

Another concern that seems to belong to the problematics of control is shit. The Free-Lance Pallbearers is overwhelmingly stercoracious in its imagery. The reader encounters the oral shit put out by the white government, the filthiness of whites' behavior toward members of minority groups, the dung that passes for Dean U-2's scholarship, the anal aspects of homosexual copulation and rape, sewage as ecological pollution, and the stinking excrement resulting from cannibalistic consumption of minority children.¹³ Similarly, one can hardly read a page of Why Are We in Vietnam? without encountering some repulsive reference to shit—human or animal, metaphoric or literal. One of the most (in)famous of contemporary anal adventures, Slothrop's excremental journey down the Roseland toilet bowl, seems heavily derived from Reed. Like HARRY SAM, Slothrop goes down a toilet into a sewer. Pynchon's episode ends with a dog on meat hooks, as Reed's does with Bukka on hooks. Reed is clearly describing the Harvard jaunts to Roxbury and the Roseland in his story of Alfred and Lenore, and PaPa LaBas also mentions the Roseland. (Both Reed and Pynchon apparently draw on Malcolm X's autobiography, published in 1965.) Pynchon's description of Pudding's coprophagy is also an analysis of control, as is clear from Katje's dominatrix role. Controlling one's bowels is an early childhood achievement, and some kinds of control thus have anal-stage roots. Only in contemporary satiric modes, however, has that psychic connection been worked out so explicitly and in such florid detail.

Control artists have other common concerns, such as magic modes of thought. Presenting a Hoodoo that is a much sanitized form of Vodoun, Reed does away with the cruelty to animals necessary in many rites, indeed dispenses with blood altogether and intellectualizes all rituals. Mailer indulges in magical thinking when Rojack must walk the roof ledge twice in An American Dream; once would have been Mailer's usual fear-facing act, but a second attempt could magically have saved the life of Rojack's girlfriend. D. J. engages in telepathy and plugs into boreal electromagnetic currents. Pynchon explores myriad nonrational coincidences, including Slothrop's link to incoming rockets. Vodoun, as it creeps into white consciousness, makes more appearances in fiction. The loas have invaded the world computer network in Gibson's later cyberpunk novels Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. Acker's Don Quixote mentions Vodoun in her letter to Nixon (106-07) and later acknowledges that the loa named Papa Eleggua (whose other names are Papa Legba and Papa LaBas) is calling her. Burroughs's world is rife with magic rites whose aim is to transplant souls from one body to another at the expense of the second body's previous inhabitant. In most instances, the connection between magic and power is clear; magic is a tool by which individuals attempt to gain power over something or someone in ways not available to most people.

Though these control artists doubtless share other concerns, the final element I will examine in their shared vision is attention to foundational myths. Burroughs, Acker, Pynchon, and Reed all look to early American history for some explanation of conditions today. Reed pays more attention to the Civil War era but refers in passing to Salem and Thomas Jefferson. His foundational myths go back beyond early American history to Set and Osiris in Africa.

Acker, however, looks in some detail at early laws in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Having described the 1658 decree in Massachusetts Bay sentencing Quakers to death, she concludes that “[t]he United States is exactly as it was started: religiously intolerant, militaristic, greedy, and dependent on slavery as all democracies have been” (124). Pynchon describes the burning of William Slothrop's tract and wonders whether William Slothrop might represent the path America should have taken (556), the path to a world less obsessed with “shit, money, and the Word” (28).

Burroughs describes the articles drawn up by Captain Mission in Cities of the Red Night (xii). To those freedoms Burroughs adds sexual freedom and then states that had Captain Mission's colony been established,

mankind might have stepped free from the deadly impasse of insoluble problems in which we now find ourselves. … The chance was there. The chance was missed. The principles of the French and American revolutions became windy lies in the mouths of politicians. … There is simply no room left for “freedom from the tyranny of government” since city dwellers depend on it for food, power, water, transportation, protection, and welfare.

(xiv-xv)

Such reinterpretations of founding myths differ just as the authors' ideologies do, but all these writers focus on the abuses of control that developed early in American cultural history and argue that the abuses have continued, little modified, to the present.

Most of these writers would say that their readers are ignorant of true history and believe falsehoods, but Reed does the most to identify publicly accepted myths and rewrite them according to his own truths. The taming of the West had little to do with clean, white Marlboro-country suavity and heroism; our spirits have become insanely amalgamated with a lust for private property; Christianity, far from being the source of spiritual health, is a warped, antilife, antihuman force; Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln were not the idealistic and virtuous white fathers they are publicly held to be; the Confederacy did not represent a gracious and cultured form of life; what matters in Washington is not what appears on the evening news; America is closer to setting up concentration camps for racial “undesirables” than liberals would believe possible; the American Christmas is a ghoulish travesty¹⁴ and Santa a zombie gangster; blacks and the spirit of their culture are central rather than marginal to human culture and to the continued survival of the human race.¹⁵

Control in the runaway form these writers describe may well drag humanity to destruction; on that they seem agreed. On its own terms, control seems unstoppable. Fear of the future wins support for control, and its economic efficiency drives alternative social and economic systems out of business. Dismantling the system seems virtually impossible, and were some natural or nuclear disaster to accomplish the task, the price would be millions of lives. Most writers aware of the problem have found no solutions. Reed's answer is at best partial, and he gives no thought to how transitions might be made, but he does try to envision a different relation between people and the forces in life that affect their outlooks. Reed asks for some courage regarding the possibility of future disasters and implicitly demands more acceptance of death than American culture seems able to muster, but he makes no Maileresque cult of such courage. Rather, he recommends enjoyment of the present and extensive satisfactions of the body and thus challenges social scientists who disparage the underclass live-for-the-day outlook. Compared with the utopias of Callenbach and Piercy, Reed's society has a better chance of working on a large scale because it already exists in some forms in pockets of the world today. The source for Reed's answer—the life-styles of slum and tribe—is one of his most original contributions to control artistry. He finds his answers in the social group least affected by the forces of control, the group that seems least likely to challenge those forces.

Reed's works have often been treated as scattershot endeavors—Reckless Eyeballing as an attack on feminists; Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down as a Western; Mumbo Jumbo as a Hoodoo detective story; and The Terrible Twos, The Terrible Threes, and The Free-Lance Pallbearers as political satire. Most critics have found no stable core of concerns aside from a satiric attitude toward the world. I argue that Reed has an ongoing project in his explorations of control and that his grotesque vision of America resembles the visions of other artists sensitive to the workings of control. Reed and these other artists feel cheated of some lost element of the American dream and protest this betrayal with images of filth and violent perversion. The critique of America is flashy and is even compelling to readers disturbed by inequities in the country's treatment of its citizens. Reed's contribution to this strain in American thought becomes evident only when one looks at all his novels together. Examined individually, they are disparate and variably successful; however, the limitations of any one signify little in the series of hallucinatory portraits of America's soul. Each might be likened to a séance in which Reed depicts America as seen from the Hoodoo spirit world, much as Pynchon portrays America from the other side, Acker from a dreamworld, and Burroughs through a drug vision. The evils Reed attacks are not just African American problems; his focus on control demonstrates that he belongs to a group of bitter satirists—female and male, black and white—whose experience with cultural lies appalls them. Their artistic violence aims at breaking through to vantages beyond those of ordinary social and literary consciousness. Such perspectives, they imply, reveal truths normally ignored by privileged members of society. Those ugly truths, not the bourgeois self-image that the contented have cultivated to protect their own comfort, are the reality.

Notes

1. Although their lineage has become obscure, various systems for explaining control actually derive from Marx and Freud. Studies of ideology by the Frankfurt school and by Louis Althusser in “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” show how human subjects internalize the values of the ruling group. Demystifying such thought control has been central to cultural critiques focusing on issues of power and oppression. Frantz Fanon draws not only on Freud and Marx but on Adler as well to analyze the effects of French colonialism, and Adler's focal concern was power. In fiction, however, control seems largely to lack Marxist and psychoanalytic earmarks and is often simply another major schema for explaining human interrelations.

2. Hofstadter describes several waves of American political frenzy, all assuming “the existence of a vast, insidious, preternaturally effective international conspiratorial network designed to perpetrate acts of the most fiendish character” (14). He notes the similarities to the European millennialist mental complex described by Norman Cohn, which demonizes its adversary, perceives its own group to be persecuted, detects a trend that if not reversed will lead quickly to the end of civilization or of the world, and refuses to accept life as a tissue of limitations and compromises. The political groups mentioned by Hofstadter and analyzed at length by David H. Bennett, from the Know-Nothings to John Birchers, almost all identify with the white majority and occupy the far right of the American political spectrum. The control artists tend to share the fears of these groups, but most identify with minority groups and have Left-leaning politics. While seeming to hold somewhat Manichaean values in Mumbo Jumbo, The Terrible Twos, and The Terrible Threes, Reed is freer than most control artists from that simplistic mind-set, and even in those texts, he shows characters reversing tyrannical stances or proving themselves to be as much victims of tyranny as they are tyrants.

3. Reed's lack of pious respect for predecessors like Ellison is one of the issues that got him in trouble with the black aesthetics movement (see Martin, “Free-Lance PallBearer”). His signifying on Invisible Man's “Journey to the Heart of Whiteness” is discussed by Fox (“Ishmael Reed”), Gates (“‘Blackness’”; “Ishmael Reed”), and Schmitz. Reed mentions the influence of African satiric modes in his interview with Joseph Henry (88).

4. When Foucault analyzes power in The History of Sexuality (92-98), he stresses power's omnipresence and denies that it is imposed from above. Rather, it “comes from below; that is, there is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled” (94). Control artists, however, favor a more conventional distribution, a Manichaean division between the power brokers and the oppressed. For a survey of alternative views of power, see Hoy.

5. In “Industrialization and Capitalism in the Work of Max Weber” and One-Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse argues that the concept of technological and scientific reason is ideological. Jürgen Habermas develops this argument further in “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology,’” illustrating ways in which science is not value-free but predicated on controlling nature and dedicated to the politics of control. He sees fetishized science as more irresistible than older ideologies and notes its power to justify a dominant class while repressing another class; indeed, he argues, the efficiency ethic and its problem-solving prowess affect and limit the concept of freedom (111).

6. For a critique of the new-leftist assumption that all institutions are evil and resemble Hitler's totalitarian enterprise, see Glazer's “New Left and Its Limits.”

7. Joe Weixlmann analyzes the influence of Poe's “Raven,” “Annabel Lee,” and “Ligeia” on Flight to Canada and argues that Reed finds Poe's delight in self-torment and in the luxury of sorrow “utterly degenerate” (“Politics”; “Raven”).

8. Reed also satirizes such black leaders as Angela Davis and Eldridge Cleaver (see Harris, “HooDoo Solution”); for similar identification of targets in Flight to Canada, see Harris (“Gods”).

9. For analyses of Jes Grew and the Hoodoo aesthetic, see Byerman, Fontenot, Fox (“Zero”; “Ishmael Reed”), Harris (“Politics”; “HooDoo Solution”), Lindroth, Martin (“Syncretic Use”), and McConnell.

10. Jazz offers an obvious analogue to this life-style; for an analysis of Mumbo Jumbo in musical terms, see Shadle. Gates argues that Jes Grew celebrates indeterminacy and lack of closure, in addition to improvisation (“‘Blackness’”).

11. See the introduction to Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World. Linda Hutcheon notes that Bakhtin sees only the positive side of the carnivalesque impulse and ignores the destructive (“Contemporary Narrative”). Her insight is relevant to Reed as well.

12. Carter, Paravisini, and Weixlmann (“Culture Clash”) discuss Reed's use and parody of detective conventions.

13. For a discussion of the poetics of shit in contemporary literature, see Pops; for a discussion of Reed's use of shit, see Fabre (“Ishmael Reed”; “Dialectics”). Des Pres analyzes the “excremental assault” carried out by death camps to degrade prisoners in their own eyes and make it easier for their captors to kill them (51-71). Similar aims may be involved in control literature, though in these works the victim or the author is using shit against the oppressor to strip away pious pretense and name the tyrannical actions for what they are.

14. Gloria Naylor also reproaches the commercial American Christmas, in the depiction of Candlewalk in Mama Day. For observations on Reed's excoriation of Christmas through invocation of Dickens and Dante, see Hutcheon (Poetics 130-31).

15. Theodore O. Mason, Jr., analyzes both Reed's attack on Christianity and his revelation of “the hidden centrality of people of color” (100).

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