658 The American Century: Literature since 1945instance, represents a subversive departure from the autobiographical style of earlier
African-American narratives. It also offers a parody of Invisible Man, for many
critics the masterwork of African-American fiction. Nor is he frightened of going
against the grain of any prevailing critical or creative fashion. The sheer slipperiness
of his works has, in fact, led to him being given many, wildly different labels. He
has been called a revolutionary and a reactionary (a judgment of his position that
he satirized in his poem “The Reactionary Poet” (1978)), a satirist and a post-
modernist. Perhaps it would be more accurate to see him as someone who uses
tradition to illuminate and reinvigorate tradition: combining continuity and the
spontaneous, the impromptu, in a cultural dynamic that Amiri Baraka described as
“the changing room.”
In some of his best work, for example, Reed has taken up a common theme of
African-American writing, the return to the past, to origins, and the revolt against
the present, and given it a new, multicultural twist. Reed has insisted, often, that his
abiding interest lies in the connection between then and now, the dead and the
living. “Necromancers used to lie in the guts of the dead or in tombs to receive
visions of the future,” he said once; “that is prophecy.” And, he added, “the black
writer lies in the guts of old America, making readings about the future.” With Reed,
what he tries to resurrect goes back to what he calls “the genius of Afro satire.”
This he excavates, and then explores, in his fiction, so as to catch a sense of reality
that is protean, spontaneous, and at odds with any definition of culture in singular
terms. “Nowhere is there an account or portrait of Christ laughing,” he tells the
reader in his 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo. “Like the Marxists who secularized his
doctrine, he is always stern, serious and as gloomy as a prison guard.” In order to
restore the laughter, and with it a sense of risk, the tricky, tricksy complexity of
things, Reed has elaborated what he describes as his “Voodoo aesthetic,” the
determining feature of which is its roots in plurality, a mutually reflective, uncoercive
“crisscross” of cultural forms. Monoculturalism, or what Reed has termed “Atomism,”
lies at the heart of Western thought: politically, people may be “left,” “right,” or
“middle” but, he argues, “they are all together on the sacredness of Western
civilization and its mission.” His task, simply and radically, is to “humble Judeo-
Christian culture,” with its presumptions to a monopoly on the truth, and to affirm
instead, not African-American culture as such (that would simply mean substituting
one monolith with another), but the multiplicity of cultures: to replace the cultural
subordination of “Western civilization” with the idea of a multiculture.
What all this means, for novels as otherwise diverse as Mumbo Jumbo (1976),
Flight to Canada (1976), The Terrible Twos (1982), The Terrible Threes (1989), and
Japanese by Spring (1993), is serious fun and a teasing, passionate waywardness.
Voodoo, Reed has said, “teaches that past is present”; and each of these novels, and
others, offers that lesson in a sly, subversive, jokily – and sometimes horrifically –
disjunctive way. The resistance here is to the narrow functional forms favored by
what one of Reed’s characters in Mumbo Jumbo dismisses as the “neo-social realist
gang.” More particularly, it is to any traditional kind of African-American narrative
that, as Reed himself has put it, “limits and enslaves us” by confining black experienceGGray_c05.indd 658ray_c 05 .indd 658 8 8/1/2011 7:31:37 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 37 PM