It has been ten years since the appearance of The Last Days of Louisiana Red. Often the passing of a decade will bring changes in the way we read and thus affect our perception of an author and his work. But although a recent appraisal of Ishmael Reed (in Frederick R. Karl's American Fictions: 1940-1980 [New York: Harper and Row, 1983], 370) states that he “has broken free of restraints of realism, naturalism, expressionism,” most assessments of his work do not reflect this belief. Indeed, in an introduction to a very recent interview (“Straight Talk from Ishmael Reed,” City Arts Monthly, October 1983, 9) David Armstrong makes this exemplary statement: “As in all Reed's projects, these diverse efforts [his novels] draw upon folklore and fantasy, media and music, hoodoo and history to provide a running commentary on American popular culture—and prescribe cures for what ails it.”

Most commentators have emphasized this social aspect of Reed's work: that he seeks “to provide a running commentary on American popular culture,” on the one hand, and that he seeks to “prescribe cures for what ails it,” on the other. One reason for this overwhelming social emphasis on the part of the critics centers on Reed's exciting and original prose style and its connection to American popular culture. In an interview with John O'Brien contained in The New Fiction: Interviews with Innovative American Writers (Joe David Bellamy, ed. [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974]), Reed states:

I've watched television all my life, and I think my way of editing, the speed I bring to my books, the way the plot moves, is based upon some of the television shows and cartoons I've seen, the way they edit. Look at a late movie that was made in 1947—people become bored because there was a slower tempo in those times. But now you can get a nineteenth-century 500 page book in 150 pages. You just cut off all the excess, the tedious character descriptions you get in old-fashioned prose and the elaborate scenery.

(131)

But the shared cultural basis for Reed's style ought not to conceal his concern with “editing”—his highly wrought fictional conceptualization, the way a 500-page book can be achieved in 150 pages, and his sense of the imaginative basis of existence.

Certainly, the novel has always been centered in society. But the world of fiction is not simply the world of life with “the names changed to protect the innocent.” And Ishmael Reed understands this only too well. Describing his technique in creating Mumbo Jumbo to John O'Brien, he said, “I took all these things, used the classic techniques of the detective novel, as well as Egyptology, Western history, black dance, American civilization, and the Harding administration—all myths to explain the present” (134). This statement confirms the prevalent social mode in Reed's work but it does not transform fiction into journalism. “Myths to explain the present”: but myths are not always true; there are many possible explanations for any event, and the present is often nothing more than a predominant way of thinking—an imaginative act.

Thus it may come as no surprise that in the same conversation with O'Brien, Ishmael Reed stated: “Often reality is art,” and “it works both ways—art can reflect and create reality” (135). Reality—when perceived through a creative sensibility—may be seen to be art. Art not only reflects the reality in which it is created but acts, as well, to create reality. The critical viewpoint is incomplete which says that The Last Days of Louisiana Red is a social novel satirizing the political activism of the sixties and questioning the matriarchal theory of black society in America. The novel creates a world, a vision of reality through fiction that must be balanced against its social criticism in order to perceive the novel's ultimate workings.

A decade has revealed how Reed's novel seeks to pattern, arrange, and restructure myths in order to create a world that has the chance to stand clear of them. Thus, the social material is always presented so as to reflect a mythic dimension. This is made quite clear in the opening pages of The Last Days of Louisiana Red (New York: Random House, 1974):

When Osiris entered Egypt, cannibalism was in vogue. He stopped men from eating men. Thousands of years later when Ed Yellings entered Berkeley, there was a plague too, but not as savage. … Men were inflicting psychological stress on one another. Driving one another to high blood pressure, hardening of the arteries, which only made it worse, since the stabbings, rapings, muggings went on as usual. … Louisiana Red … is what all of this activity was called.

(6)

Louisiana Red is identified with plague: we are invited to think about the present reality of the novel's Berkeley in relation to the mythic conception of the plague—and, ultimately, with the plague that tormented Thebes when Oedipus was king. The Oedipus myth and its eventual conclusion in the tale of Antigone forms the frame upon which the fictional events of the novel rest. Indeed, Chorus, the character who is the modern embodiment of that ancient institution, points out that the Antigone story “‘closely parallels the Egyptian story of Osiris and Isis, so there were probably Egyptian writers who had a hand at it first’” (28). So we have Osiris entering Egypt, Oedipus entering Thebes, Ed Yellings entering Berkeley … and the plague, now retitled Louisiana Red.

It is no monumental discovery to note that Reed's characters exist as modern figures in Berkeley and also as the current manifestations of mythic prototypes: the novel realizes this correspondence masterfully. Hence, Oedipus is Ed Yellings; Eteocles and Polynices, Oedipus's warring sons, are Wolf and Street Yellings, respectively. Sister Yellings fulfills the role of Ismene, Oedipus's daughter. And Minnie Yellings is meant to be Oedipus's daughter Antigone, holding forth against Creon in the person of Papa LaBas. What interests me is how this correspondence to a mythic prototype transforms the social nature of the fictional material.

LaBas's strong words to Minnie at the climax of the novel—after Ed's destruction and the slaughter of each brother at the other's hands—were often viewed as being “the voice” of Ishmael Reed, the author:

You, Minnie. You take yourself so seriously. You couldn't stand for your Dad and your brothers to run a Business as they sought. You and your roustabouts and vagrants just couldn't stand negro men attempting to build something; if we were on the corner sipping Ripple, then you would love us, would want to smother us with kindliness.

(125)

The quarrel intensifies until Minnie answers:

“Well, no man tells me what to say or think. Negro or white, you or Max.”

“O, you're denying the very lucrative benefits that go along with being a black woman in a white man's country? …”

“What lucrative benefits are you talking about—rape?”

“You say it was all rape, huh? … A lot of you begged for him and fought over the trinkets he threw at you, nursed him and taught him how to fuck, loved the bastard children he gave you more than your own. You are defiling the truth of history when you deny this.”

(127)

LaBas's words here have several dimensions. They exist as an expression of LaBas's anger after the tremendous loss of life caused by Louisiana Red; they exist as a critique of the supposed complicity between black women and white men that contributed to “‘the philosophy of slavery—the philosophy of inferiority in which the slave's plight was compared to that of fellow slaves: the ancient Hebrews’” (125); but most significantly, perhaps, they exist as the words necessitated by the mythic prototype of Creon's confrontation with Antigone. Thus, LaBas's accusation that Minnie is “defiling the truth of history” has itself a mythic—and therefore, a non-historically determined—origin.

The novel resounds with the confrontation between myth and history, with the question of whether fate or the individual determines the outcome of life. Wolf Yellings tells his brother:

Our family has had its share of troubles. But now, for the first time, with LaBas at the helm, I feel that things don't have to be so accursed. It's not fate that's holding us back. We just have to learn to cut it, Street; that's what LaBas has taught me.

(98)

But this realization—that “it's not fate that's holding us back”—does not prevent Wolf from shooting Street and being killed by him, thus fulfilling the fateful expectation of the Eteocles-Polynices feud.

Ms. Better Weather paraphrases LaBas's words to Sister:

What he's saying … is that your family was destroyed not by fate but by a conspiracy. Not Que será, será, whatever will be will be, but plain old niggers and white front men up to ugly.

(165)

But when one of those conspirators, the Nanny, is revealed to be Lisa, in league with Maxwell Kasavubu to spread Louisiana Red, she is presented by Max as follows:

You are a fugitive from justice, you know, you bag woman. (Reads) “Real name: The Hammerhead Shark.” The title you picked up in that caper when you hit a man on the head with a hammer, put a hex on a congressman, double-crossed Jack Johnson, stabbed Martin Luther King, brought charges against Father Divine, brought down Sam Cooke in a blaze of gunfire and bad-mouthed Joe Louis.

(154)

Hence, the historical or actual conspirator—the human cause of all this strife—is depicted as a mythic character: a woman of legendary proportion, the bag lady who “brought down” a congressman (Adam Clayton Powell?), the fighters Jack Johnson and Joe Louis, Father Divine, the soul singer Sam Cooke, and who stabbed (!) Martin Luther King. We might be justified in terming this mixture of myth and history, of reality and fictional distortion, a Gumbo, for which

the word “evolution” fails to apply, … for it is an original conception, a something sui generis in cooking. … The olden Creole cooks saw the possibilities of exquisite and delicious combinations of making Gumbo, and hence we have many varieties!

(3)

There can be no single authorial voice in this novel, just as a Gumbo is comprised of many ingredients and appears in many varieties. The vision of life presented varies from Street's view

Do you know what the people want? They want lots of blood; monkeys roller-skating; 200 dwarfs emerging from a Fiat, and lots of popcorn—that's what they want. Scorn you when you alive, but if you die—a hero's funeral.

(90)

to the philosophy of LaBas, who “subscribed to the viewpoint that man is a savage who does the best he can” (175).

At times, history is seen as a veil, camouflaging the pervasive effects of fate and black magic; LaBas seeks to prove that the prototype for Cab Calloway's Minnie the Moocher was not “just a good gal but they done her wrong,” as the song says (LaBas calls these “liberal social-worker lines”): “‘She was no helpless object swept away by forces beyond her control but a dedicated agent of the sphinx's jinx. … [People] will be on the lookout for this character posing as a victim of history while all the time she is a cruel jinx’” (35). And Chorus, in fact, disputes the historical basis of myth: “‘Do you suppose that Zeus really gave a hang whether Polynices was buried? Zeus was too busy chasing tail to be bothered with such trifles’” (55).

Since the novel persistently has highlighted the tension between figure and fulfillment, between the mythic frame and the contemporary social trappings, between Thebes and Berkeley, the culmination of this formal struggle within the novel ought to appear in the depiction of the fate of Antigone. Creon's conception of the law mandates that Antigone be put to death. Were Minnie to meet the same fate, the point would be clear: we live our lives in the paths carved out ages ago by the mythic fates of our ancestors. History is little more than the story of this influence. The novel would be a neat conceit illustrating the parallel between present event and mythic past.

But Minnie does not meet Antigone's fate. Although her infractions are arguably more severe, LaBas pleads for Minnie to Blue Coal (who is the novel's equivalent of Zeus), and she is spared. Does this suggest that history—the actions of human individuals—may prevail over the fateful mandates of our mythic past? Not necessarily. For Ishmael Reed illustrates that there are “many varieties”!—not only for Gumbo, but for myths.

Chorus informs us:

Now about this Antigone. According to writing found written on Egyptian papyri, there's a later episode of the myth. In this version, Creon, due to the counsel of Teiresias, was able to save Antigone. … When Creon saw how incensed the population was towards him, he relented and freed Antigone.

(62-63)

When one mythic “variety” is not adequate to “explain the present,” the answer is to substitute creatively another one, more “exquisite and delicious”; thus, “the word ‘evolution’ fails to apply.” But even here the suspected orderly relation between the second myth and reality is undermined by the later portion of the tale. Chorus continues that the Athenians

sent Antigone on tour. She teamed up with her nanny, a confidante and rough-looking woman from the old days; formerly Antigone's nurse, but now making a reputation from her “readings.” In these “readings” Nanny depicted the Theban males as weak and simpering while Antigone would play the guitar.

(63)

What is clear is the ongoing process, the way we create myths that influence lives until life insists upon the creation of new myths in order to change life. And in so doing, the fictionality of both enterprises is established. “Often reality is art,” Ishmael Reed stated; “it works both ways—art can reflect and create reality.” The Last Days of Louisiana Red is about the creative process by which we make the fictions that both sustain and imprison us. But we have the imaginative power to change these myths: “Storytelling,” Reed told John O'Brien, “will always exist … literature will be kept alive and will endure” (141); thus, we may not only reflect reality through art but also create it anew.