The Terrible Threes by Ishmael Reed, and: New and Collected Poems by Ishmael Reed

Abstract

Essay Reviews The Terrible Threes. By Ishmael Reed. (New York: Atheneum, 1989. 180 pages, $16.95.) New and Collected Poems. By Ishmael Reed. (New York: Atheneum, 1988. 233 pages, $22.95.) The writing of Ishmael Reed—up from underground, now becoming something of a commodity—penetrates, at its best, the clash among factions in contemporary culture. It is profoundly pluralistic, displaying so many forms of life—racial, religious, political—from Republicans to rednecks and Rastafar­ ians—much as if the diversity itself, dealt out in the form of collage, were designed to thwart any attempt at ethnic definition. The publication of these texts, along with the reissue of four others—Mumbo Jumbo, The Free-Lance Pallbearers, The Last Days of Louisiana Red, Yellow-Back Radio Broke Down —marks a turning point in the career of this novelist, poet and playwright. Their appearance discharges a seminal force into the mainstream of American literature, actualizing a narrative which imbibes and redeploys the many codes of mass culture so handily that it challenges any aesthetically limited notion of ‘literary’ discourse. Here we have a “cultural text,” as Fredric Jameson puts it—dialogically infused (in Bakhtin’s sense) with several speech communities —which actively puts ‘culture,’ its institutions and means of production, on display. Reed’s brand of satire—biting, conniving, bold—resonates with interventive renditions of recent history. These are witnessed and undergone by such figures as Nance Saturday, the law student turned detective then limo driver, and his ex-wife, Virginia, a television newscaster. Both serve the aims of social realism as one vein in Reed’s writing. Such characters disclose the details of everyday urban life in The Terrible Twos and Threes. But Reed’s is not a fiction of character. No single ‘inner life’isexplored, and the narrative has no presiding consciousness. Rather, it is constituted of vignettes and fre­ quently scathing sketches which function more for their exemplary nature than for the sake of a story. There is, for example, the jazz musician who gives up his trombone for pop composition on the synthesizer: a move no Jessdegen­ erative, as presented here, than his concomitant fall into cocaine addiction. Along with this, we encounter record producers who manage both his ‘music’ (which is no longer music in a standard sense) and his life. Synecdochically this figure, Moog Fryer, embodies something of the fate of civilized life in tech­ nocratic times. Talent, craft, character and skill are forsaken with the new, postmodern means of production: the synthesizer, which reproduces sounds of all instruments, artificially, electronically, by program, but which takes 260 Western American Literature little skill and no feeling to play. When the new means of production, after being adopted, are taken away—as when Moog loses his synthesizer to pay the producers for more coke—practically nothing is left, nominally or virtually, of the one who gave himself over to them. The postmodernist ‘loss of self’ occurs in several ways. Reed’snarrative blends cameos of political and religious figures, often cast along mock epical lines. The Terrible Twos sketches Presidents Truman and Eisenhower caught in a Dantesquean Inferno. They are forced to reflect on the consequences of their decisions in war and to remain there for future poli­ ticians to see. The Terrible Threes provides glimpses of the Pope fretting over the bankruptcy—financial, moral, spiritual—of the Vatican, as well as fearing the work of a cunning Satan: the one he figures, “behind deconstruction, genetic enginering, liberation theology, and pro-choice” (77). At the very same time this speech genre isparodied—the assimilation of three dissimilar (meton­ ymic) traits to one (metaphoric) cause, Satan—this moment in the text exem­ plifies the figural character of superstition, prejudice, ideology and world view formation. Overall Reed presents imaginary scenes which recall the recent past and possible futures while fusing realist, mythic and mock epical senses for action and place. These incidents and suspicions chronicle the times, yet they are also moments in a larger allegory apprehending collective history and the transmission ofideologies. Paradoxically, in spite and because ofits phantasma­ goria, this neo-realism—operating, again, as one mode among others—fulfills Lukac’sgoal for realism in general:that ofapprehending the...