African American Deconstruction of the Novel in the Work of Ishmael Reed and Clarence Major

Abstract

Reenacting a mid-twentieth-century debate between Marxists and American Critics, scholars of African American writing during 1960s and '70s often disputed relative importance of attending to a work's content, as opposed to its form. More recently, disagreements have centered on 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 compositions of those African American writers whose works deconstruct novel as genre. Critics may argue which tendencies constitute heart (and soul) of African American writing, but fictions indisputably exist which, to quote Henry Louis Gates, simultaneously critique both metaphysical presuppositions inherent Western ideas and forms of writing and metaphorical system which 'blackness' of a writer and his [or her] experiences as a writer have been valorized as a 'natural' absence (Blackness 297). Foremost among contemporary African American writers who have undertaken this project a concerted, ongoing manner are Ishmael Reed and Clarence Major. Both, quite different ways, have produced important, rigorously anti-illusionistic works which, giving new freedom, direction, and shape to black cultural reality, have undermined bourgeois concepts and structural traditions which for centuries have defined the novel. 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; 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 verbal and visual, prosaic and poetic, old and new, fictive and factual, serious and satiric, African and American, traditional and popular. think linear novel is finished, he remarked 1978. a matter of fact, I don't think we're going to can [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 novel as genre is implicit his first book-length fiction, The Free-Lance Pallbearers (1967),(2) but with publication of Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down two years later, his deconstructionist project assumed status of a plot element. In Yellow Back, which he described 1974 as the dismantling of a genre done an oral way like radio (The Writer as Seer 25), Reed, a complex act of signification, inverts thematic patterns characteristic of traditional Western, toys with form of subgenre, and exposes racist assumptions of Western civilization, of which novel itself is very much a part. The protagonist of Yellow Back is Loop Garoo Kid, a black cowboy whose name associates him with loup-garou of folklore (figurally, one endowed with ability to metamorphosize(3)). Loop's actions, turn, associate him with Orleans Work, hoodoo. Born with a caul over his face and ghost lobes on his ears, he was a mean night tripper... (9). As book opens, Loop is company of New Orleans Hoodooine Zozo Labrique (14), a woman cast out of her native Louisiana by famed Marie Laveau. Members of a circus troupe, players, Loop and Zozo arrive Yellow Back Radio, a small town which has been taken over by local children, who have banished their parents. Enter villain, land baron Drag Gibson, who rides with his horde, murders Zozo and children, and returns merciless, delimiting order to a region which had, temporarily, been relieved from crush of civilization. Scenes within this and subsequent sections of novel are separated by two adjacent circles: one filled in black and other empty, white. …