Ishmael Reed's Rhetorical Turn: Uses of "Signifying" in Reckless Eyeballing

Abstract

Critics have failed to account adequately for Ishmael Reed's recent fiction, and generally dismiss it as less interesting than his more controversial early writing. These recent novels seem more straightforward in their plots and messages, and much less experimental in method. I would like to suggest, however, that this apparent clarity is part of a complex and innovative style. We might characterize this style as in the broadest and most pervasive sense-that is, its overall narrative strategies at the level of plot, theme and character are constructed primarily on the way the audience will read and even misread the novel. Reed broadens the definition of the rhetorical aspects of the literary text as part of a larger attempt to reformulate how his own works relate to the AfricanAmerican tradition. Critics have noted that African-American writers often are particularly aware of their precursors and tradition. Reed, however, not only carefully situates himself in relation to tradition in the abstract, but also anticipates in the novel's plot and structure the reactions of actual readers who share that tradition only in a problematic way. Indeed, in Reed's recent fiction this problematic reception of the work becomes the primary content of the novel. The implications of this move force us to reconsider how we are to trace the African-American tradition and to what degree that tradition can remain independent of the readings given it by mainstream American literary culture. I would like to explore such rhetorical workings in one particular recent novel, Reckless Eyeballing (1986). Critics and reviewers unanimously agree that Ishmael Reed is assaulting feminism in Reckless Eyeballing. His protagonist, Ian Ball, is called a notorious sexist, and yet we are invited to suffer with Ball during his persecution at the hands of powerful women in the theatre world. When Reed climactically summarizes Ball's victimization by revealing him as two-headed, he seems to be using that common African-American trope of black double-consciousness. This trope defines black consciousness as split into two identities, one acceptable to and partially created by the white hegemony, the other more authentic but disturbing to that same mainstream society. But if we simply read the trope conventionally, we stumble straight into Reed's trap, and this is what critics