SOURCE: Weixlmann, Joe. “African American Deconstruction of the Novel in the Work of Ishmael Reed and Clarence Major.” MELUS 17, no. 4 (winter 1991-1992): 57-79.

we assume a musical solo is a personal statement / we think the poet is speakin for the world. there's something wrong there, a writer's first commitment is to the piece, itself. how the words fall & leap / or if they dawdle & sit down fannin themselves.

—ntozake shange

1

Reenacting a mid-twentieth-century debate between the Marxists and the American New Critics, scholars of African American writing during the 1960s and '70s often disputed the relative importance of attending to a work's content, as opposed to its form. More recently, disagreements have centered on the appropriateness of critics' using contemporary theoretical models associated with Europe to help understand and interpret African American texts.¹ At once above and central to these debates are the compositions of those African American writers whose works deconstruct the novel as genre. Critics may argue which tendencies constitute the heart (and soul) of African American writing, but fictions indisputably exist which, to quote Henry Louis Gates, “simultaneously critique both the metaphysical presuppositions inherent in Western ideas and forms of writing and the metaphorical system in which the ‘blackness’ of a writer and his [or her] experiences as a writer have been valorized as a ‘natural’ absence” (“Blackness” 297). Foremost among the contemporary African American writers who have undertaken this project in a concerted, ongoing manner are Ishmael Reed and Clarence Major. Both, in quite different ways, have produced important, rigorously anti-illusionistic works which, in giving new freedom, direction, and shape to black cultural reality, have undermined bourgeois concepts and structural traditions which for centuries have defined “the novel.”

2

Ishmael Reed's self-conscious use of form is as noticeable as it is distinctive. His writing is pun-packed and moves to a variety of jazz and blues rhythms; the cinema informs his quick-splice scene changes; a metafictional impulse plays lightly through his tales; exuberant parody abounds; and purposeful anachronism penetrates his reader's defenses. Reed's literary canon is permeated by his unique blend of the verbal and visual, prosaic and poetic, old and new, fictive and factual, serious and satiric, African and American, traditional and popular. “I think the linear novel is finished,” he remarked in 1978. “As a matter of fact, I don't think we're going to call [books that are normally referred to as novels] ‘novels’ anymore—that is a name that is imposed on us. … I would call mine a ‘work’” (Northouse interview 229).

Reed's deconstruction of the novel as genre is implicit in his first book-length fiction, The Free-Lance Pallbearers (1967),² but with the publication of Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down two years later, his deconstructionist project assumed the status of a plot element. In Yellow Back, which he described in 1974 as “the dismantling of a genre done in an oral way like radio” (“The Writer as Seer” 25), Reed, in a complex act of signification, inverts thematic patterns characteristic of the traditional Western, toys with the form of the subgenre, and exposes the racist assumptions of Western “civilization,” of which the novel itself is very much a part.

The protagonist of Yellow Back is the Loop Garoo Kid, a black cowboy whose name associates him with the loup-garou of folklore (figurally, one endowed with the ability to metamorphosize³). Loop's actions, in turn, associate him with the New Orleans “Work,” hoodoo. “Born with a caul over his face and ghost lobes on his ears, he was a mean night tripper …” (9). As the book opens, Loop is in the company of “New Orleans Hoodooine” Zozo Labrique (14), a woman cast out of her native Louisiana by the famed Marie Laveau. Members of a circus troupe, players, Loop and Zozo arrive in Yellow Back Radio, a small town which has been taken over by the local children, who have banished their parents. Enter the villain, land baron Drag Gibson, who rides in with his horde, murders Zozo and the children, and returns merciless, delimiting “order” to a region which had, temporarily, been relieved from the crush of “civilization.”

Scenes within this and subsequent sections of the novel are separated by two adjacent circles: one “filled in” black and the other “empty,” white. More than mere scene dividers, the paired circles (• ○), whose origin may be traced to voudou and Umbanda, cleverly permit black to become the principal element in the design (the darkened circle comes first) and to be figured as a presence. White, figured dominantly in Euro-American literature as a presence, becomes the second element, figured as an absence. Less polemically, the circles, as Robert Elliot Fox has pointed out, serve as a metaphor for the essential duality of existence,⁴ which voudou images in its Rada (“right-hand”) and Petro (“left-hand”) rites. Like the Taoist yin-yang that appears in Mumbo Jumbo (166) or the vé vé design on that book's covers, the paired circles connote life's necessary multiplicity. Culture, Reed would have us understand, is not limited to the West, and life should not be constrained by a singular concept of “correctness.”

Neither should “the novel” be one thing, as Reed makes clear at the beginning of the second section of Yellow Back, in which Bo Shmo and his “neo-social Realist gang” (34) descend on Loop. “I think that the Western novel is tied to Western epistemology,” Reed told John O'Brien in 1973, “the way people in the West look at the world. So it is usually realistic and has character development and all these things that one associates with the Western novel” (63). Loop and Bo fire words rather than bullets at one another in a scene that dramatizes Reed's central objection to the novel as genre in the West. According to Bo, whose kinship with the Black Aesthetic critics of the 1960s is thinly veiled, “All art must be for the end of liberating the masses” (36). “A real collectivist” (35), Bo “can't afford the luxury of individualism.” Loop Garoo, on the other hand, argues that the novel “can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o'clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons” (36). Play and imagination, Reed feels, are at least as important for the writer as are seriousness and realism, whose relationship to genuine literary excellence has been greatly overstated.

A “social realist” by disposition “and not very original,” Bo and his gang end their confrontation with Loop by “smear[ing] jelly on his face and bur[ying] him up to the neck in desert” (37). But being deconstructive and extremely innovative, Reed has Loop rescued in a manner that exposes several of the author's formal and thematic preoccupations. Chief Showcase, “a kind of patarealist Indian [who] go[es] about inventing do dads” (38), descends in a homemade helicopter “right out of Science Fiction” (37) and saves Loop. Purposeful anachronism, the outrageous interjection of a deus ex machina, and a positive image of multiethnic unity here fuse in a scene that is quintessentially Reed's.

Sci-fi and the Western, along with the electronic and print media, blend as Yellow Back moves toward its close. With Loop wittingly facing a martyr's death at the guillotine, “The Field Marshall” and his black-hatted “sleuths” mete out vengeance to Drag Gibson's thugs with their ray guns, and Drag is “munched” to death by some “greedy and unnatural animals” (172-73). But the newly arrived conquerors have time only to “annex Yellow Back to the East” before being slain by passing Amazons (173). Prefacing this overtly irrealistic surface action are a series of verbal exchanges between Loop and the fifteenth-century Pope Innocent VIII, who has come to “purge” Yellow Back of Loop's “evil.” The dialogue, which is calculatedly wooden, pits hoodoo versus Christianity and reenacts, in a somewhat more sophisticated manner, the confrontation between Bo Shmo and Loop earlier in the book. Voudou, according to Innocent, is “elastic” (153), unlike the relatively rigid doctrines of Christianity; and voudou's American counterpart, hoodoo, is even more flexible—or, to use the Pope's word, which happens to be one of Reed's favorites, syncretistic (154). A clever, worldly man who defines himself and his religion in opposition to “heathen” practice, the Pope accuses Loop of cultism (“mass murder, sexual excess, drugs, dancing, and music” [162]). In replying, Loop assumes the offensive, recalling the Catholic Church's actions during the Inquisition, which Loop images as “the triumph of the clerk, the bureaucrat” (162-63). Hoodoo, he argues, is not only more fluid but more culturally expansive—“a much richer art form than preaching to fishermen and riding into a town on the back of an ass” (163).

Like hoodoo, with its ability to absorb traditions drawn from worldwide religious practice, “the novel,” in Reed's view, must not be tied to externally-imposed criteria. It need not be realistic or naturalistic; its narrative need not be linear; its story need not be told from a single point of view. Rather, the novel, as the term itself suggests, must ever remain new. Techniques associated with the print media are valid, but so are those borrowed from oral cultures, the electronic media, or anywhere else. One of the burdens of Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down is to discuss and display some of the variation Reed feels to be central to the project of contemporary writing.

Compared to Mumbo Jumbo (1972), Yellow Back appears rather tame, for in the more recent work, photos, production stills, drawings, posters, symbols, and the like are integrated with Reed's words to form what Henry Louis Gates aptly describes as “a book about texts and a book of texts, a composite narrative composed of sub-texts, pretexts, post-texts, and narratives-within-narratives” (“Blackness” 299)—not to mention a “Partial Bibliography.” Taking as its point of departure the detective novel, in much the same way that Yellow Back spins off from the traditional Western, Mumbo Jumbo evinces Reed's desire to deconstruct the epistemology of the detective novel subgenre, with its emphasis on realism, linearity, and ratiocination. Unlike the brooding, rational Sherlock Holmes or, for that matter, the hard-boiled sleuths of American fiction, Reed's detective, PaPa LaBas, is above all else intuitive. His name, as Gates has noted, suggests both the voudou loa (deity) Ésú, in Haiti called Papa Legba, a pan-African trickster figure, and Eh La-Bas, a phrase used in New Orleans jazz recordings of the '20s and '30s (“Blackness” 300). A “two-headed man” (or hoodoo) who “Works” out of the Mumbo Jumbo Kathedral, LaBas eschews “empirical evidence,” preferring to understand phenomena through dreams, feelings, and his “Knockings.” “… Before this century is out,” LaBas contends, “men will turn once more to mystery, to wonderment; they will explore the vast reaches of space within instead of more measuring more ‘progress’ more of this and more of that” (28).

Even more overtly than in Yellow Back, Mumbo Jumbo dramatizes the direct confrontation between Euro- and Afro-centric thought and culture. As the novel opens, there has erupted what Reed, signifying on Harriet Beecher Stowe, calls a “Jes Grew” epidemic, which he associates, specifically, with African religious practice (voudou) and dance.⁵ Jes Grew, writes Reed, is “an anti-plague” which enlivens the host; it is as “electric as life and is characterized by ebullience and ecstasy” (9). Establishing, from the outset, the schism between Western and African sensibilities, and recalling Loop Garoo's tête a tête with Innocent VIII, Reed adds that “terrible plagues were due to the wrath of [the Christian] God; but Jes Grew is the delight of the [African] gods” (9). Introducing the book's central mystery, Reed tells us, further, that “… Jes Grew is seeking its words. Its text” (9). And the search for that text is on.

From one side march the protectors of the Great Western Way—Reed calls them the “Wallflower Order,” and links them with the Knights Templar. The Order, in turn, is described as being a part of the “Atonist Path”—after the Egyptian king Akhenaton, a sun worshipper who, like Blake's Urizen, or Saint Paul, attempted to establish The One Law, ending polytheistic worship and effectively severing human ties with the natural world in its variety. The Order's twentieth-century goal is the same as it has been historically: to stamp out native religions and their texts—in this case, the ancient, lost Book of Thoth, which we learn, has surfaced after centuries of absence.

Opposing the Atonists is PaPa LaBas, who, unlike his antagonists, is a pluralist, and a player, like the Egyptian mythological figure Osiris, whom Reed discusses in the long fifty-second chapter of Mumbo Jumbo. An exemplar of Jes Grew, Osiris, we're told, “became known as ‘the man who did dances that caught-on,’ infected people” (184). In Reed's poem “why i often allude to osiris,” he remarks that “prefiguring J[ames] B[rown] he / funky chickened into / ethiopia & everybody had / a good time. osiris in / vented the popcorn, the / slow drag & the lindy hop” (43).

The climax of Mumbo Jumbo embodies an exquisite parody of the traditional detective novel's scene of confrontation and disclosure. LaBas gathers together the book's living principals in Villa Lewaro and proceeds to explain the Atonists' active role in the suppression of Jes Grew's Text. He tells, as well, of the reason for Jes Grew's recent eruption: The Text got out, falling into the hands of a Black Muslim named Abdul Sufi Hamid, who rendered its Egyptian hieroglyphics into English with the idea of publishing it. But Hamid was found out by the Atonists, who killed him yet failed to recover the Text, the Book of Thoth. LaBas, on the other hand, seems to have done so, locating the Book's jeweled holder—only to discover, in a moment of counter-epiphany, that the case is empty, the Book of Thoth having presumably been burned by the prudish Hamid, who felt that the Book depicted rites which were “lewd, nasty, [and] decadent” (231).⁶ Meanwhile, Hamid's translation, spurned by an indifferent publisher, has become a casualty of the postal system.

With the written text(s) of Jes Grew gone, its manifestations once more recede. But as LaBas explains to his assistant, there is no need for alarm, since Jes Grew's true Text is not a book but a feeling—or, perhaps more precisely, a state of mind and being. “Jes Grew has no end and no beginning,” LaBas tells Earline. “Jes Grew is life … We will make our own future Text. A future generation of artists will accomplish this” (233). Ultimately, Jes Grew is the music of Charlie Parker, the “second line” in a New Orleans funeral procession, the African American literary tradition—African American culture itself.

Mumbo Jumbo is interlaced with a plethora of pictorial and textual elements borrowed from external, and in many cases nonbellettristic, sources. There are photos, posters, and drawings; dictionary definitions, anagrams, and epigraphs; symbols, graphs, and newspaper clippings. And at the book's end there appears a 104-item bibliography drawn from such diverse disciplines as psychology, history, dance, religion, mythology, music, theatre, economics, journalism, design, literature, astrology, the occult, sociology, ethnology, art, oratory, political science, and the life sciences. Henry Louis Gates observes that, “just as our word ‘satire’ derives from satura, ‘hash,’ so Reed's form of satire is a version of ‘gumbo,’ a parody of form itself.” Gates adds that

the “Partial Bibliography” is Reed's most brilliant stroke, since its unconcealed presence (along with the text's other undigested texts) parodies both the scholar's appeal to authority and all studied attempts to conceal literary antecedents and influence. All texts, claims Mumbo Jumbo, are inter-texts, full of intra-texts. Our notions of originality, Reed's critique suggests, are more related to convention and material relationships than to some supposedly transcendent truth. … The device, moreover, mimics the fictions of documentation and history which claim to order the ways societies live.

(“Blackness” 301-02)

True enough, but, as Gates neglects here to state, though no doubt realizes, the principal aesthetic points that these seemingly digressive, even decorative, elements make is that a book need not be limited by genre or by discipline, that play is an acceptable (perhaps even necessary) element in art, and that the status of “fiction” need not be viewed as less than—or even other than—what commonly passes for reality.

In Mumbo Jumbo, Reed signifies on the Pursuit/Discovery/Disclosure-of-Truth pattern of detective fiction, in the process undermining the notion that “truth” is just one thing—or any thing. For Reed, truth, as a character states at the end of his 1976 novel Flight to Canada, is “a state of mind” (178). It can be experienced, felt, but not confined in a single form or shape. The way of singularity is the way of the Atonist Path. It is the way of Western thought and culture and the way of the traditional detective novel, in which the one or ones who done it are exposed. The African way, however, recognizes plurality, multiplicity, indeterminacy. It is the way of Papa Legba, the trickster, mediator, and signifier. It is the way of Papa Legba, the trickster, mediator, and signifier. It is the way that, like Topsy, “jes grew” and, avoiding fixity, continues to do so.

Reed returned to the detective novel subgenre in his next book-length fiction, The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974), but that book, less ambitious in theme and form, failed to move forward his deconstructionist project in any very meaningful way. It was with the publication of Flight to Canada two years later that Reed most fully examined the very concept of genre. Having explored some of the possibilities inherent in the Western and detective novel subgenres, Reed in Flight to Canada turned to an indigenous black pop-cultural form, the slave narrative, and in so doing produced what, for me, is one of his two great book-length works, the other being Mumbo Jumbo.⁷ Nominally the narrative of Raven Quickskill, an escaped slave poet, and told from both the first- and third-person points of view, Flight to Canada is, were one making traditional classifications, part prose fiction, part literary historiography, part sociopolitical historiography, part poetry, part drama, and part autobiography. And while the book lacks the visual dimension of Mumbo Jumbo, it employs effects borrowed from, as well as situations describing, the electronic media, especially television.

If Flight to Canada's contribution to the development of contemporary African American writing has been less widely acknowledged than it deserves to be, the reason might inhere in the fact that Reed's deconstructionist impulses tend to get a bit lost amid the book's fabulous surface action, with its freewheeling satiric style and abundant anachronisms. Here is a tale that opens with the narrator's observation that Edgar Allan Poe, who died in 1850 and from whose literary works Reed distills the quintessential nature of the Southern mythos he develops in the book, should be “recognized as the principal biographer” of the Civil War (10). Despite the book's nineteenth-century setting, men in it wear leisure suits and use Coffee Mate; Quickskill, who subsequently claims to have escaped the South on a jumbo jet, learns of Lincoln's assassination while watching a live television production of the play Our American Cousin from Ford's Theater; and Harry Reasoner and Barbara Walters can be seen discussing former Canadian Prime Minister Henry Trudeau and his wife Margaret on the evening news while Jefferson Davis schemes to undermine the Union. Reed wants us to understand that slavery continues to inform American social, political, economic, and cultural dynamics, although the war which was to have ended slavery was fought more than a hundred years ago.

Slavery and its corollary freedom are Reed's true subjects in Flight to Canada, and it is in this context that his attitude toward the concept of literary genre may be fully understood and appreciated. How ironic that critics debate whether Reed is a better poet or novelist,⁸ for he makes it clear in Flight to Canada that genre is one of the many capricious restrictions which Western culture has attempted to establish as meaningful. Like Reed himself, who begins Flight to Canada with a poem of the same name and punctuates it with the verse “Saga of Third World Belle,” Quickskill, we are told, is “so much against slavery that he began to include prose and poetry in the same book, so that there would be no arbitrary boundaries between them” (88). Generic distinctions, Reed makes clear, foster a kind of literary Jim Crowism. They would fragment what is, or should be, unified; fence off what should be open; restrict the writer's sense of identity, individuality, and the freedom to create.

What Flight to Canada offers us through its movement among a broad assortment of literary genres, as well as in and through time, is an emblem of the author's need to be independent of restriction if he or she is to produce significant work. As Reed exposes the schemes and lusts of Lincoln, Davis, Gladstone, and Queen Victoria; as he lays bare Harriet Beecher Stowe's callous theft of ex-slave narrator Josiah Henson's Life for use in Uncle Tom's Cabin; as Quickskill becomes an ever more thinly-veiled spokesperson for Reed's views on critics, audiences at poetry readings, those who would restrict the production and distribution of culture at all levels, the New York literary establishment, and so forth; as racist scenes from Our American Cousin flicker across the television screen; and as all of these blend with Reed's poems and prose fiction—a physical image of authorial freedom emerges. The book's structure does not simply reinforce meaning; it presents diversity-in-action. In Flight to Canada, Reed does not merely examine the effects of genre-based distinctions, he produces an overt representation of freedom.

By including a lengthy treatise on Egyptology (ch. 52) and “documentary” intra-texts within Mumbo Jumbo, and by appending a “Partial Bibliography” to the narrative, Reed suggests that products of an author's fictive imagination can contribute as fully to the world's thought as scientific and historical tracts do. In Flight to Canada, he begins on the first page of the narrative to eradicate what he regards as the false distinction between what passes for truth, on the one hand, and for imaginative fancy, on the other. “Who is to say what is fact and what is fiction?” asks Quickskill (7). History, he adds, “will always be a mystery. … New disclosures are as bizarre as the most bizarre fantasy” (8). Not content to rest the case there, Reed proceeds actively to blend historical and fictional characters and accounts. Only when liberated from the arbitrary enclosures which society attempts to erect around the writer is he or she able to explore the full range of human thought and knowledge.

Quickskill's former master Arthur Swille prattles that literacy is “‘the most powerful thing in the pre-technological pre-post-rational age’” (35). Quickskill himself phrases the proposition more clearly. Asked by a fellow escapee, 40s, “What good is words?” Quickskill responds that “words built the world and words can destroy the world” (81). Raven uses his verbal and imaginative talents to create the partly factual, partly fanciful poem “Flight to Canada,” the honorarium from which supports his escape from America; he also uses his literary endowments to “writ[e] passes … forg[e] freedom papers” and “fool around with [Swille's] books” (35). But the most impressive literary act in the book is performed by Uncle Robin, who we learn has used his creative abilities to “dabble with [Swille's] will” (171) and, in so doing, inherit his former master's estate.⁹

Flight to Canada anticipates critic Robert Stepto's thesis in From Behind the Veil that the themes of freedom and literacy are central to the African American literary experience (ix). Reed not only wishes to avoid self-negation, but like his protagonists Raven and Robin, he wants to soar above banal definitions of both “great writing” and “great black writing.” He reminds us that “there was much avian imagery in the poetry of slaves. Poetry about dreams and flight. They wanted to cross that Black Rock Ferry [from Buffalo's West Side] to freedom [across the Niagara River in Canada] even though they had different notions as to what freedom was” (88).

Because little in this relativistic universe which we inhabit is genuinely objective, Reed would have us believe that true significance resides within a self permitted to explore a full range of possibilities. And lest this position seem solipsistic, Reed is careful to add that those who achieve self-definition without relatively broad social concern and multicultural awareness do so at their peril. What he calls his Neo-HooDoo aesthetic is an understanding built syncretically upon information and beliefs drawn from investigation of and response to a variety of cultures. In its simplest form, Neo-HooDoo is the assertion of black prerogative in the face of the white West's attempt to negate African American identity; voudou is presented as a more than worthy antipode to Western rationalism. But as the Mu'tafikah group in Mumbo Jumbo, Quickskill's involvement with Princess Quaw Quaw Tralaralara in Flight to Canada, Loop Garoo's association with Chief Showcase in Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, and the essays collected in God Made Alaska for the Indians (1982) make clear, Reed's is a multicultural imagination sensitive to the accomplishments of black, red, yellow, brown, and white peoples.¹⁰ Neo-HooDoo is process as well as product; it is not limited by a single set of tenets.

3

Like Reed, Clarence Major has produced literary objects which deconstruct the novel as genre. As early as 1969, Major wondered aloud “if the present forms of the novel [we]re worth saving,” adding that “the word ‘novel’ itself is really inappropriate” (Shepperd interview 122). In 1973, he told John O'Brien that he was “working very deliberately” to break down what he thought were “the false distinctions between poetry and fiction” (137). Either quote might have come from Reed's mouth, yet each writer has approached his deconstructionist task in a fundamentally different manner.

In a 1964 essay, author Donald Barthelme reflected that, in the mature writing of Gertrude Stein and especially James Joyce, “… the literary work becomes an object in the world rather than a text or commentary upon the world—a crucial change in status which was also taking place in painting.” This fundamental shift in focus, Barthelme contends, produced “a stunning strategic gain for the writer.” No longer is the reader “listening to an authoritative account of the world delivered by an expert … but bumping into something that is there, like a rock or a refrigerator” (13). Having produced this “strange object,” the writer calls on readers to discern what they can about the work: “The reader reconstitutes the work by active participation, by approaching the object, tapping it, shaking it, holding it to his [or her] ear to hear the roaring within. It is characteristic of the object that it does not declare itself all at once, in a rush of pleasant naivete” (14).

The strategy Barthelme defines, and practiced in his own writing, has relevance for the work of Ishmael Reed, who, in a 1973 interview with John O'Brien, imaged himself not as a novelist or a poet but as “a fetish-maker. I see my books,” he said, “as amulets. … in ancient African cultures words were considered … to have magical meanings and books were considered to be charms” (63). In exploratory works like Mumbo Jumbo and Flight to Canada, Reed's disdain for traditionally structured print narrative is apparent. Theme and form combine to produce empowered and empowering objects that both defy facile categorization and promote a genuine sense of literary and sociopolitical freedom. Works, fetishes, amulets—they are not, in any normative sense, novels.

Yet Reed's works stray from Barthelme's definition of a literary object insofar as they sustain a rather intense “commentary upon the world.” Reed's The Terrible Twos (1982) and The Terrible Threes (1989), for example, demand to be understood within the context of the sociopolitical conservatism associated with the Reagan and Bush administrations, and Reckless Eyeballing (1986) overtly dramatizes the impact of the writing of black feminists on the shape of contemporary literary politics in America—at times becoming a roman à clef. Moreover, while some undergraduates have difficulty understanding Reed's work, and while it certainly rewards rereading and extended analysis, it is scarcely inaccessible. Strange, perhaps, but not alien, it “declares itself” more readily than most of Major's books do. One of the strengths of Flight to Canada is that its many, often bizarre components mesh so effectively; the book's somewhat convoluted narrative structure tends to mask the fact that it is a tidy work devoid of verbal or thematic fat.

Major's Reflex and Bone Structure (1975), Emergency Exit (1979), and especially My Amputations (1986) adhere far more closely to the pattern Barthelme delineates. According to Major, “The kind of novel that I'm concerned with writing is one that takes on its own reality and is really independent of anything outside itself. … I don't want to say that a novel is totally independent of the reality of things in everyday life, but it … certainly [does] not [involve] the kind of reflection that's suggested by the metaphor of the mirror” (O'Brien interview 130). Major's principal contribution to the African American deconstruction of the novel as genre has to do with his creating works which are, structurally and thematically, even more indeterminant than Reed's—books less linear and less fastened to “reality,” as it is conventionally conceived.

4

Written, like Reed's Mumbo Jumbo and The Last Days of Louisiana Red, with the detective novel tradition as a principal sub-text, Major's Reflex and Bone Structure (1975) is one of the most formally exploratory fictions of the 1970s.¹¹ More clearly disruptive, even discontinuous, in its narrative flow than any of Reed's works, Major's book undermines the central expectations of the who-done-it. Not only do we never learn, in any meaningful sense, who did, but we get fragmentary, not infrequently conflicting accounts of the details of the murder of Cora and her lover Dale. “I want the mystery of this book to be an absolute mystery,” says the narrator (61), who gets his wish. Clues concerning the crime pop up regularly, only to have the narrator inform us that he has made them up. And while we do learn, on the book's last page, that the narrator has, in one sense, caused the characters' deaths—“They step into a house. It explodes. It is a device. I am responsible. I set the device” (145)—his act is the act of a storyteller as storyteller; his device is a literary one. Any “real” explanation for the explosion will have to be found elsewhere.

In Reflex and Bone Structure, Major eschews even the most fundamental tenets of realism. Cora, for example, “dies” no fewer than five times in the book: in the explosion which scatters pieces of her body about a room (1); in a car crash (25); in an airplane crash (42); after being run over by a speeding taxi, which stops, “backs up and runs over her again” (111); and after being abused by four thugs, one of whom turns out to be Cora herself (110). The buffoons of the piece are the police detectives, who attempt, scientifically, to disclose the “truth” of Cora's and Dale's murders. Theirs is more an exercise in stupidity than futility. Their epistemology is no less flawed than are their methods.

Acted out against a backdrop that includes “real-life” events—black militancy; the Vietnam War; travel to the Grand Canyon, Greenwich Village, North Dakota, Russia, and so forth—the book's status as an artifact is rigorously upheld. One of the few metafictions in African American literature, Reflex combines the story of its own processes as a fictional work with the tale of Cora and her lovers, who include the narrator and a character named Canada as well as Dale. In fact, in certain important ways, Major's account of his novel's processes and construction supersedes the story of the book's characters. That Dale, the narrator, and the free-spirited Canada slide in and out of bed with Cora and otherwise interact with one another, involves the reader, as does the mystery surrounding Dale's and Cora's deaths; but it is the metafictional aspect of Reflex and Bone Structure which carries the book's intellectual weight.

Divided into two sections, “A Bad Connection” and “Body Heat,” which are further subdivided into more than a hundred seemingly disjunctive, sometimes contradictory prose fragments that range in length from one sentence to several pages, Reflex offers a thoroughgoing critique of the traditional novel's demands for narrative unity, character development, and the like. “Fragments,” opines the narrator, echoing the most famous pronouncement by any of Donald Barthelme's narrators, “can be all we have. To make the whole” (17). He later laments that “I find everything I touch falling to pieces, and the pieces themselves continue to break into smaller and smaller segments” (50). A problem for the narrator, this fragmentation is for Major a structural ploy which reinforces the theme of indeterminacy in the book.

Generally, the narrator insists that he is in control, that the characters are his to play with: “. … I keep them all moving going coming around, even when they don't care” (7). When Dale bothers the narrator, he simply “erase[s]” him (20). But the characters tend to be strong-willed. Canada, we're told, “invents and reinvents the world as he wishes it to be” (31). Dale images Cora “standing at the sink with an apron tied around her naked body” and sees her apartment as a “home … where he is boss.” But “that's Dale's vision. Cora erases it and replaces it with her own: she's at the sink, but she's fully dressed. … She is making supper for her man who will arrive soon.” Then “she realizes she must not confine herself to the kitchen. … she has many other sides. … She has endless meaning” (41-42). Even the book becomes a character of sorts: “This book can be anything it has a mind to be” (61, emphasis added), says the narrator, who on the penultimate page observes that “the book is pulling itself together” (144, emphasis added).

Ishmael Reed has a talent for drawing flat, two-dimensional characters that are well-suited to his parodic purposes. Major's characters are so flat that most cannot, in any conventional sense, be said to have identities. Introducing a technique that he would exploit more fully in Emergency Exit, Major denies the police detectives individuality. They could be distinguished, the narrator informs us, but he chooses not to do so:

The truth is I do not really give a shit about the names these men have who happen to be cops. One might be called U and he might be known to copulate with his victims, dead or alive. Another might be known as A because he looks like a bull, complete with horns. Still another could be called D as a symbol of door or doorway, and, if you like, you might even refer to one as B, if somehow you can see how he resembles a house.

(31)

Simultaneously, Major deconstructs the traditional notion that characters must be rounded and that their names should have symbolic significance. And this treatment is not reserved for supernumeraries. The most fully rendered of the characters, Cora, remains “elusive,” although the narrator claims that he “can handle” her (10); Canada, Dale, and the narrator are Jungian shadows of one another. Even gender distinctions are often eradicated: Cora “knows she is the opposite of what we have … clinically chosen to call ‘male.’ Yet, at the same time, she knows there is no opposite, really. … each man is partly female. And each woman is. … partly male” (73).

As in Reed's work, spatial and temporal dislocations abound in Reflex. As Canada, Dale, the narrator, and Cora sit around playing cards “to the sounds of Scott Joplin's piano. Roman soldiers break in. They say Agatha Christie sent them. They drag Cora outside and nail her to a cross planted in the sidewalk” (123-24). Earlier, Cora and the narrator are in bed watching a movie. Suddenly, “it's 1938. A Slight Case of Murder. Edward G. Robinson and Jane Bryan.” The narrator gets up to go to the bathroom and, looking in the mirror on his return, sees “Little Caesar … [and] wink[s] at him in the mirror. He winks back” (3). Some time later, “… Canada does a transatlantic lindy hop from Europe to the states and landing in a courtroom in the South, he accidently gets sentenced to the penitentiary as one of the Scottsboro boys” (46).

Not socially conscious in the way that Reed's books are, Major's work more radically deconstructs not only traditional notions of the novel but also our conventional means of perceiving and structuring reality. If Reed's project is preeminently epistemological and ethical—designed to return the reader to questions of belief and value—Major's is more distinctively metaphysical—designed to make the reader examine the very nature of what passes for reality. The proposition that fiction directly mirrors life is central to the so-called realistic school of American writing, of which the traditional detective novel, along with the preponderance of African American fiction, is so much a part. But in Reflex and Bone Structure, Clarence Major makes explicit what his earlier works All-Night Visitors (1969) and NO (1973) merely hint at: The writer creates his or her own reality. Literary works are necessarily bound to the phenomenal world only by their status as artifacts within that world (namely, those things we call books, or performances) and by virtue of their being extensions of authors whose imaginative acts brought them into existence. “I'm extending reality,” quips Major's narrator, “not retelling it” (49).

Implicit in Major's metafictional insights is a statement of the need to question all received “truths.” Modern physics (not to mention experience) has shown ours to be a multivalent world in which investigation is more likely to widen the number of possible alternatives than it is to ferret out a single, unassailable answer. And ours is also a world in which African Americans, along with members of other historically oppressed groups, must develop their own definitions of truth, refusing to permit themselves to be seduced by the subjective assessments others have attempted to institutionalize as irrefutable facts.

Emergency Exit (1979) moves forward the deconstructionist project announced in Reflex. Dedicated “to the people whose stories do not hold together” (vii), Emergency Exit tells of life in Inlet, Connecticut, where, in an “attempt to restore moral sanity and honor and dignity” (8), the town fathers pass a statute which mandates that “all males (over the age of 21) will be required to lift from the ground … all females (over the age of 18) and carry such females through, beyond, out of … doorways, entranceways, exits, across, beyond, thresholds, of all buildings, dwellings, public and private, taking stern and serious care that no physical part of the bodies of said females touch in any manner whatsoever the physical parts of such entranceways, doorways and exits” (6). The narrator, a salesman for Superior Pussy, Inc., wryly observes that Inlet has purity, cleanliness, proper conduct, and racism “deep in the psyche” (9).

Social taboos, especially those having to do with human sexuality, have long held a fascination for Major, whose sympathies are decidedly anti-Freudian. And these taboos are violated regularly by Emergency Exit's Ingram family—Jim and Deborah, and their children Julie, Barbara, and Oscar. A catalyst for the novel was Major's being labeled a pornographer when he traveled to northwestern Connecticut in February 1972 to give poetry readings (Weixlmann 156), and at the heart of the book is an ongoing critique of what Major sees as a repressive American society whose distorted attitudes about “purity” spill over from the plane of sex to that of race.

Hyperbole is one of the techniques which Major uses to ridicule the importance which this society has placed on Freudian symbology. Emergency Exit, from its title to its final page, is consciously overburdened with uterine and vaginal symbols. To offer one example, the “Threshold Law” of Inlet, home of Superior Pussy, a firm which manufactures prosthetic vaginas (and penises), embodies the central, painful paradox of the book: “Women were creatures who periodically lost, ‘wasted,’ blood; therefore, they were born eternally guilty and damned.” From this stemmed the practice of their being “lifted and carried across the threshold,” with the understanding that “… they could not touch the doorway. Yet they, the givers of life itself, were the source of the symbolism and ritual. They were the doorway of life” (1). The patriarchy is determined to strip women of the power inherent in their ability to bear children. “I think the metaphor has its place,” Jim Ingram tells his daughter Julie, “but the place is historical” (55). Ours needs to be an era of openness and disclosure. “The world,” as Jim later informs his son, “is not an orderly place easily defined by a cozy myth” (67).

A highly episodic, digressive, and self-conscious book, Emergency Exit exposes the Ingram family's sexual indiscretions to the reader. Julie has had a brief involvement with Barry Sands, “a handsome young Jewish man” (17) who seems attracted by her blackness, and Barry, in turn, is pursued by Janice Page. Julie's principal lover, however, is Allen Morris, a black Harlemite who had earlier had a brief affair with her sister Barbara. Prior to his involvement with Julie, Allen was living with a black woman named Gail, who doesn't want their relationship to end. Julie also recalls her affairs with two Africans, Jomo and Julius, and with an American named Johnny Hawkins. Julie's father, Jim, who works for the CIA, has for some time been having an affair with a white woman named Roslyn Carter; and her mother, Deborah, has maintained an off-and-on relationship with a character we know simply as The African. Amid this maze of triangles and triangles-within-triangles, the characters tend to blur in much the same way that Cora's trio of male lovers merge in Reflex, at times assuming a generic identity—“He” / “She” (152) or “One” / “Two” (181). Never memorable, the lovers' language sometimes becomes indecipherable, degenerating into what might be called linguistic static (126, 132, 140, 187, 194). At other times, the words and sentences are intelligible, but there is no way in which to match them with a particular speaker or set of speakers (see, e.g., 77-78).

To what is already a diverse mix, Major adds a staggering number of intra-texts: epigraphs, paintings, various kinds of lists, visual and linguistic collages, schedules, catalogues, concrete (and other) poems, charts, photos, dictionary definitions, book excerpts, and news stories. As a literary object, Emergency Exit is in the tradition of Mumbo Jumbo, right down to its bibliography (175-76), although the works on Major's list are, in the main, invented. From Donald Barthelme's Snow White, Major has borrowed the idea of offering the reader several pages of absurd questions mid-book (128-29). John Barth's influence is briefly felt (145). And Vonnegut's parody, in Cat's Cradle, of the opening line of Melville's Moby-Dick would seem to be the source for Major's introductory “Call me Dracaena Messangeana. I don't mind” (3). While these gleanings are, to a large extent, imaginative significations on the avant-garde tradition, black and white, in American literature, they tend to lack the emotional punch that Reed's plurasignifications regularly deliver.

Still, critic Jerome Klinkowitz is, I think, correct in nothing that Emergency Exit introduces a genuine technical innovation. By blending examples of what Klinkowitz calls “pure writing” (“words and sentences and even scenes free from the burden to tell some kind of story”) with passages germane to the narrative, “the stuff of the narrative sections, which because of its socially recognizable nature would tend to refer out toward the documentary world, is instead made to refer in toward the novel itself—toward these passages of pure writing that are sustained throughout the book.” The result, says Klinkowitz, is “an important step in the evolution of the novel … since it solves the biggest problem for fiction: the fact that its constituents, words, fight an otherwise losing battle with the outside world of reference in a way that notes of music and daubs of paint do not” (48).

One memorable instance of this technique occurs early in the novel, as the middle paragraph in a series of three which show Major's exceptional range. In the first paragraph, Major parodies the realists' propensity to burden their descriptions with physical detail. (“Barbara has brought her fairy lamp with her Julie is working her embroidery frame Oscar is picking his abscesses with a silver pin Deborah scratches his fissures Barbara has an X-ray of a growth in her bladder. … Everything is insured especially the Chippendale antiques and the canted candlestick holder.”) But with the very next sentence, the reader is treated to a passage of “pure writing”:

I (your narrator) parked my car on the road went down to say hello to thirty cows eating grass they all came to the fence to greet me. I cut the fence and they stepped across the threshold into the ditch followed me up to the car we went down to the local beer pub and got smashed. The bartender was so delighted he set us up twice. Said all we have to do is vote for his man. I can't remember the guy's name.

Direct segue to a Freudian parody: “Deborah is playing with the ring on her finger. She watches the finger ease up to the opening then she plunges the finger through the ring. She pulls it out with just as much ceremony. It's fun she says her husband continues to look worried …” (10). The least satisfying of Major's seven published novels, Emergency Exit nonetheless has its moments. Moreover, it extends the deconstructionist project announced in Reflex and Bone Structure and culminated (for now, at least) in My Amputations.¹²

Comprised of 112 paragraphs which range from approximately 100 to 2,000 words, My Amputations (1986) is unconventionally structured but less overtly the product of its author's formal preoccupations than is Reflex or Emergency Exit, on which Amputations signifies. The “blackest” of Major's deconstructionist works, Amputations more importantly signifies on the quest novel tradition in American and African American literature, typified by Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon.

Dedicated “to the people who must find themselves,” Amputations dramatizes the attempt of its narrator, Mason Ellis, to establish a stable identity. A would-be author and ex-convict, Mason has while in prison so intensely read the writing of The Author (identified in the book's final typescript, though not in the printed text, as Clarence Major) that, at least at times, he seems to have “convinced himself that he was the writer and no longer the reader” (40). Throughout the book he refers to The Author, or someone pretending to be The Author, as “The Impostor” or “The Other.” In what seem initially to be more lucid moments, but may not be, Mason hires a detective named Ferrand who informs him that The Author, a recipient of a ＄50,000-per-year grant from the Magnan-Rockford Foundation (MRF), has “assumed the name of Clarence McKay,” made a series of international investments, and gone into seclusion (22). This allows Mason to assume The Author's identity, go on a lecture tour of America—and subsequently Europe and Africa—and drain off some of what are supposedly The Author's funds from the MRF. But as Mason continues his search for wealth, status, and personal identity, he begins to fear that the MRF and/or Ferrand and/ or the agency which sponsors his overseas tour may simply be toying with him. Is he an impostor, or the author, or an impostor pursuing or being pursued by an impostor? Is he paranoid or attuned to a conspiracy? Are we to understand he is “the same Mason who in the joint had read The Author's works over and over again …” (40), or are there two, or more, Masons? In his most compelling confrontation yet with Jungian selves (Mason/Major's “amputations”), Major prevents his reader's being certain about this or most anything else. As Mason tells an audience at Sarah Lawrence, “I want to talk with you about the differences between fiction and reality, real characters and fake people—not because it's cute or literary but because my life depends on it. … You see, I'm in the process of inventing myself—in self-defense, of course. Think of me as a character in a book” (64). Real or imagined, “factual” or “fictional,” identity is process, coming to be, not defined product.

The world of Amputations is one of unbridled passion. Mason makes credible his claim that he places instinctual gratification before studied sublimation: He has sired more than three dozen children, and most of the stops on his lecture tour are accented by sexual intercourse. Here, and throughout his canon, Major withholds negative judgment from his protagonist. His heroes, like Reed's, are intensely sexual beings whose actions calculatedly subvert the status quo. Violence is also ubiquitous. Gun battles rage around Mason; arsonists' fires burn; beatings occur; bombs explode; the earth quakes; Mason is several times falsely imprisoned and once brutally tortured. If the world of Amputations has not exactly gone mad, it is certainly and unpleasantly decentered. And while Major never allows us to forget that his world is decidedly fictional, he also implies that it has elements that are all too real.

Indeed, one of the strengths of Amputations is that it blends the imaginative and the phenomenal so effectively that the reader is often unable to distinguish between the two. As Major points out, impostor authors do exist. Someone claiming to be Donald Barthelme submitted and had published several stories under Barthelme's name. Relatedly, that great postmodern creator of literary cabala, Thomas Pynchon, exists incognito or in absentia—or does he exist at all? Mason's life and Major's share many facts in common: Both were born on the same date, reared in Chicago, have a half-sister, did a stint in the Air Force, and so forth. It is sometimes impossible to tell where autobiography leaves off and literary self-creation begins. Fabulous at its outset, pseudo-naturalistic for a number of sections, filled with semi-chronological episodes that seem to betray the narrator's paranoia, and well-seasoned with metafictional allusions, My Amputations robs reality of its claim to genuineness. “… puzzling over the relation between ‘clear reality’ and confessional writing,” Mason recalls, “Jack Kerouac, in Vanity of Dulouz [, wrote] … : ‘I'll … get to believe … that I am not “I am” but just a spy in somebody's body pretending … ’” (42). “Truth,” the narrator feels, “was nothing other than the establishment of trust, agreement. …” (62). Professor Thomas Kakotu, whom Mason meets in Ghana and whom he describes as “a man of ‘like spirit,’” understands that “‘the imaginative foundation of human existence ha[s] some basis in the secular “dream” of our actual journey’” (195). Presumed to be paranoid but, from another standpoint, very much in touch with twentieth-century life, Mason is “writing a novel in which he couldn't figure out the difference between what was real and not” (103).

A problem for us all, the ambiguous nature of what passes for reality poses a very special threat to Mason, who is attempting to define his own very slippery identity. The book is laden with references to “forced connections,” one's propensity to insist on the reality of something perceived or desired to be real or true. The '60s, says Mason, was a decade in which people regularly attempted to forge their own “truths”: “Everybody in New York was serious in the sixties. The terror was not yours alone, then.” It was a time when “you could establish a forced logical connection between any two completely unrelated things: make a collage or cubist plot of yourself, your life.” However, “… politics, war, disillusionment were never the solutions” (186); what at the time seemed to be answers we know today to have been something more akin to platitudes. My Amputations here extends the concept of “A Bad Connection,” the title of the first half of Reflex and Bone Structure, which ends with the narrator's smashing a phone through which Canada has been speaking, only to hear him “talking to me through the pieces” (145). Reality, like identity, is created in an existential act of perceptual becoming, not by the application of pre-existing principles. Ours is a metaphysics born of desperation.

Ellison sought to answer the pessimism, the literal dead end of Richard Wright's “The Man Who Lived Underground,” in Invisible Man, which concludes with the narrator's hoping that there may yet be a socially responsible role for him to play in American society. Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon dramatizes Milkman's developing sense of rootedness and identity within the context of the African myth of flight, although the protagonist's liberating “flight” at the book's end may (or may not) be deadly. And Alex Haley's persona finds apparent connectedness and wholeness in Roots. The protagonist of My Amputations ends up in a more desperate position, one more akin to that of Oedipa Maas, the protagonist of Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. Having traveled across America and Europe in search of his identity, Mason returns to mother Africa as a would-be prodigal son, only to end up the bearer of a note like that given to the Invisible Man by Dr. Bledsoe: “Mason pulled it from his pocket and handed it over. The old man ripped it and read it aloud: ‘Keep this nigger … [boy running]!’” (204). The Invisible Man is several times given the opportunity to recover; Mason is not. Oppressed by the heat and humidity, dazed rather than illuminated, unable to separate his anima from his various personae, the narrator stands, numb, in a hut that smells of “cow rocks, turtle piss and smoke” as the book closes (205). At this point, even a forced connection is impossible.

Here, as in no previous work, Major's critique of realism spills beyond the literary into the sociopolitical arena. Less sanguine about the possibility of the individual's achieving a genuine African American identity than Haley, Morrison, or even Ellison, Major depicts a world more akin to Richard Wright's. For the African American writer in particular, identity has been a central issue, and Major in My Amputations, signifies on a tradition that goes at least as far back as the slave narrative, in which the individual's status as human or animal was ever a matter of debate.

5

Henry Louis Gates has argued persuasively that, “in literature, blackness is produced in the text only through a complex process of signification. There can be no transcendent blackness, for it cannot and does not exist beyond manifestations … in specific figures.” Relatedly, creators of “open-ended” works which emphasize “the indeterminacy of the text” demand “that we, as critics, in the act of reading, produce a text's signifying structure” (“Blackness” 316).

Major, when he writes of the forced connections made during the '60s, has in mind various groups and individuals, but especially those staunch supporters of a Black Aesthetic for whom blackness was an extant commodity the writer might simply pour into a literary mold. Both he and Reed would, I think, agree with Gates that to will blackness into existence, as it were—to present blackness as a transcendent signified, a preexisting essence—is to falsify blackness. Rather, that thing we call blackness becomes a presence though the author's figuration and signification combined with the reader's active involvement in the text as object. Theirs is an argument against Aristotelianism. To predefine the essence of someone or something, including genre and race, is to delimit and, ultimately, betray that person or object. Such dangerous concepts need to be deconstructed. The writer must be granted the freedom to explore new possibilities—to become, not just to be.

Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, Mumbo Jumbo, Flight to Canada, Reflex and Bone Structure, Emergency Exit, and My Amputations are among the more successful attempts by recent black writers to deconstruct a variety of cultural assumptions, including what the novel is, or should be. Ishmael Reed and Clarence Major have produced books of redefinition, artists' declarations of aesthetic, philosophical, and political independence. Not only transforming a variety of literary genres but also denying the wisdom of making generic distinctions, these works bring medium and message to a point of tangency, if not fusion.

Notes

1. An exchange printed in the Winter 1987 issue of New Literary History encapsulates the debate. In it, Joyce Ann Joyce takes issue with the critical practice of those African American scholars whose work incorporates insights gleaned from poststructuralism and deconstruction, most notably Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Houston A. Baker, Jr.

2. Franco La Polla insightfully examines the way in which Reed subverts the traditional notion of the novel as genre in The Free-Lance Pallbearers, although that novel, it seems to me, provides a muddier illustration of Reed's method than do several of his subsequent works.

3. See Reed's 1973 poem “Loup Garou Means Change Into.”

4. Fox's “Blacking the Zero” is a masterful essay which should be read in its entirety. Fox provides a significantly more detailed analysis of Reed's use of the double circle than I am able to present here. For an extended discussion of Reed's use of the figures 1 and 2 in Mumbo Jumbo, and the importance of doubles and doubled doubles to Reed's Neo-Hoodoo aesthetic, see Gates, “Blackness” 297-317.

5. Surely Reed recalls James Weldon Johnson's remark, in his preface to the 1922 edition of The Book of American Negro Poetry, that “the earliest Ragtime songs, like Topsy, ‘jes grew’” (283); two additional references to “the ‘jes grew’ songs” appear on the same page.

6. In his treatment of Hamid, Reed satirizes what he perceives to be the extremism of those belonging to the Nation of Islam. Throughout his work, he is quick to oppose black nationalistic excesses, although most of his barbs are designed to shred the fabric of white power and control.

7. The Terrible Twos (1982), Reckless Eyeballing (1986), and The Terrible Threes (1989), like The Last Days of Louisiana Red, sustain Reed's deconstructionist impulse, but none of these works marks a significant technical or thematic advance.

8. Marge Ambler, for instance, has argued that Reed “is a brilliant poet first and a novelist second” (125), whereas Robert Elliot Fox has insisted that the opposite is true (“Mirrors” 136-37). Fox at least adds that “. … it may not be necessary or useful to make severe distinctions between the two vocations” (137).

9. “The altering of Swille's will,” writes critic Robert Elliot Fox, “not only provides reparations in that the wealth of the master is now passed on, or returned, to the slaves, it is also a short-circuiting of the process of dynastic inheritance, suggesting that the autonomy and continuity of oppression can be broken. Furthermore, if we take ‘will’ to mean not simply a legal document but intention, determination, desire, then the rewriting assumes another dimension, for the black writer's quest for authentic expression, like Jes Grew's search for its Text, implies that the obedience to masters (the canonical authority of Western culture) has been rejected. There is a double refusal: a refusal to be silent and a refusal to (slavishly) imitate.”

10. “That's the beauty of Neo-HooDooism,” Reed informed Reginald Martin, “there are European influences in my work, as well as African, Native-American, Afro-American, and that's what Neo-HooDooism is all about” (186).

11. Useful discussions of the book appear in McCaffery and Gregory, and in Bradfield.

12. Major's more recent novels Such Was the Season (1987) and Painted Turtle: Woman with Guitar (1988) are quite traditionally structured, but what the future holds for his fiction is uncertain. Some of the stories collected in his latest book of fiction, Fun & Games (1990), are very traditional; others are structurally avant-garde.

Works Cited

Ambler, Marge. “Ishmael Reed: Whose Radio Broke Down?” Negro American Literature Forum 6 (1972): 125-31.

Baker, Houston A., Jr. “In Dubious Battle.” New Literary History 18 (1987): 363-69.

Barthelme, Donald. “After Joyce.” Location (Summer 1964): 13-16.

Bradfield, Larry D. “Beyond Mimetic Exhaustion: The Reflex and Bone Structure Experiment.” Black American Literature Forum 17 (1983): 120-23.

Fox, Robert Elliot. “Blacking the Zero: Towards a Semiotics of Neo-Hoodoo.” Black American Literature Forum 18 (1984): 95-99.

———. Conscientious Sorcerers: The Postmodernist Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Samuel R. Delany. New York: Greenwood, 1987.

———. “The Mirrors of Caliban: A Study of the Fiction of LeRoi Jones (Imamu Amiri Baraka), Ishmael Reed and Samuel R. Delany.” Diss. SUNY at Buffalo, 1976.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. “The Blackness of Blackness: A Critique of the Sign and the Signifying Monkey.” Black Literature and Literary Theory. Ed. Gates. New York: Methuen, 1984. 285-321.

———. “‘What's Love Got to Do with It?’: Critical Theory, Integrity, and the Black Idiom.” New Literary History 18 (1987): 345-62.

Johnson, James Weldon. “Preface.” The Book of American Negro Poetry. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1922. Rpt. in Voices from the Harlem Renaissance. Ed. Nathan Irvin Huggins. New York: Oxford UP, 1976. 281-304.

Joyce, Joyce A. “The Black Canon: Reconstructing Black American Literary Criticism.” New Literary History 18 (1987): 335-44.

———. “‘Who the Cap Fit’: Unconsciousness and Unconscionableness in the Criticism of Houston A. Baker, Jr., and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.” New Literary History 18 (1987): 371-84.

Klinkowitz, Jerome. “Notes on a Novel-in-Progress: Clarence Major's Emergency Exit.” Black American Literature Forum 13 (1979): 46-50.

La Polla, Franco. “The Free-Lance Pallbearers, or: No More Procenium Arch.” Review of Contemporary Literature 4.2 (1984): 188-95.

Major, Clarence. Emergency Exit. New York: Fiction Collective, 1979.

———. My Amputations. New York: Fiction Collective, 1986.

———. Reflex and Bone Structure. New York: Fiction Collective, 1975.

Martin, Reginald. “An Interview with Ishmael Reed.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 4.2 (1984): 176-87.

McCaffery, Larry, and Sinda Gregory. “Major's Reflex and Bone Structure and the Anti-Detective Tradition.” Black American Literature Forum 13 (1979): 39-45.

Northouse, Cameron. “Ishmael Reed.” Conversations with Writers II. Detroit: Gale, 1978. 212-54.

O'Brien, John. “Clarence Major.” Interviews with Black Writers. New York: Liveright, 1973. 124-39.

———. “Ishmael Reed: An Interview.” fictional international 1 (1973): 60-70.

Reed, Ishmael. Flight to Canada. New York: Random House, 1976.

———. “Loup Garou Means Change Into.” Chattanooga. New York: Random, 1973. 49-50.

———. Mumbo Jumbo. 1972. New York: Bantam Books, 1973.

———. “why i often allude to osiris.” Conjure: Selected Poems, 1963-1970. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1972. 43.

———. “The Writer as Seer: Ishmael Reed on Ishmael Reed.” Black World (June 1974): 20-34.

———. Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down. Garden City: Doubleday, 1969.

shange, ntozake. “takin a solo/a poetic possibility/a poetic imperative.” Nappy Edges. 1978. New York: Bantam, 1980. 3-13.

Shepperd, Walt. “Work with the Universe: An Interview with Clarence Major and Victor Hernández Cruz.” Nickel Review 12 Sept. 1969: 6-7. Rpt. in The Dark and Feeling: Black American Writers and Their Work. By Clarence Major. New York: Third P, 1974. 115-24.

Stepto, Robert B. From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1979.

Weixlmann, Joe. “Clarence Major.” Afro-American Fiction Writers after 1955. Ed. Thadious M. Davis and Trudier Harris. Dictionary of Literary Biography 33. Detroit: Gale, 1984. 153-61.