ANTECEDENTES POR ANTIGÜEDAD EN LA DOCENCIA:

It is no secret that Reed has made a career out of grotesque and unconventional satires of American life, but also from his frequent spats with feminist movements.3 _{Most commonly compared to a generation}

of postmodern writers including Kathy Acker, William Burroughs, and Norman Mailer, Reed’s novels are also often strangely aligned (for crass grouping by skin colour) with Toni Morrison and Alice Walker.4

Stylistically, it is easy to see the postmodern aspects of Reed’s work but it is also possible to trace them within a history of a “Black aesthetic”, as does Reginald Martin.5 _{Usually extremely playful, Reed’s metafictive}

creations also mount critique of both their conditions of production and the environments depicted. For instance, the plot of Reed’s 1972 novel, Mumbo Jumbo, revolves around the advocacy of a counter- Western trickster spirit known as Jes Grew (a homophonic reference to spontaneity: ‘just grew’) that manifests in dance and jazz. Some have argued that this fixation on folk magic — or ‘hoodoo’ — that pervades much of Reed’s writing has broader social implications. Kathryn Hume, for example, traces Reed’s hoodoo influence to a desire for presentness, a form of eluding the coercive structures of control that decree an obligatory preparedness against the future,6 _{an aspect that then chimes}

well with the core line of the (then unwritten) Pynchon novel: “to fetch them through the night and prepare them against the day”.7

Part of Reed’s antagonism, however, has certainly been directed at the academy. As Hume points out of Mumbo Jumbo:

3 Ishmael Reed and Bruce Dick, ‘Ishmael Reed: An Interview with Bruce Dick’, in Conversations with Ishmael Reed, ed. by Bruce Dick and Amritjit Singh (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), pp. 344–56 (pp. 345, 348–49); see also Womack, p. 124.

4 Madelyn Jablon, Black Metafiction: Self-Consciousness in African American Literature (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997).

5 Reginald Martin, Ishmael Reed and the New Black Aesthetic Critics (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988).

6 Kathryn Hume, ‘Ishmael Reed and the Problematics of Control’, PMLA, 108.3 (1993), 506–18 (p. 509), http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/462618.

7 Pynchon, Against the Day, p. 805; Reed was quite clearly an influence on Pynchon who suggested that the reader should ‘Check out Ishmael Reed. He knows more about it [Masonic mythopoesis] than you’ll ever find here’. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, p. 588.

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[i]ndustrialism and capitalism reduce the already narrow Western values to a yet narrower materialism, and efficiency becomes the primary virtue. In the 1920s of Mumbo Jumbo, these values are promulgated by the Wallflower Order, a coterie representing the Ivy League, the Social Register, and other wealthy upper-class white institutions. This Wallflower Order rules America. Its members are wallflowers because they cannot dance.8

That such Ivy League universities are referenced as members of the elite, prejudiced Wallflower Order in this text is significant for this study and, indeed, demonstrates the lineage within which the critique of the university, via sly side-swipes, is rooted within postmodern fiction. Harking back to the reading of Bolaño’s critique of the university that I undertook in Chapter Four, the university structure here is not one of universal enlightenment, but is rather entwined with repression and regression.

In Mumbo Jumbo, there is one passage in particular that lends itself to a reading as a critique of the university. While the plot of Mumbo Jumbo

defies clear synopsis, the passage in question to which I will refer relates the autobiography of Abdul Sufi Hamid, a Muslim convert previously known as “Johnny James”, born on the “Chicago South Side”. Hamid goes on in the novel to destroy the Book of Thoth, the presumed sacred Text of Jes Grew, after growing disgusted with the supposedly lewd content therein. However, the passage that I am about to discuss is important because, as Steven Weisenburger has noted, Abdul appears “to be the sole character exempted from Reed’s satiric ridicule”.9 _The

passage also throws ridicule on institutions of learning.

Indeed, Hamid claims to have “always wondered why the teachers just threw the knowledge at us when we were in school, why they didn’t care whether we learned or not”. Furthermore, he observes that “the knowledge which they had made into a cabala, stripped of its terms and private codes, its slang, you could learn in a few weeks” and it certainly “didn’t take 4 years”. In fact, Hamid claims, “the 4 years of university were set up so that they could have a process by which they

8 Hume, p. 509.

9 Steven Weisenburger, Fables of Subversion: Satire and the American Novel, 1930-1980 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), p. 167.

would remove the rebels and the dissidents”. In this text, the university becomes an enforcer of social norms, a space in which students are expected to internalise the value structures of broader society and to leave rigorous social critique behind. As the passage continues:

[b]y their studies and the ritual of academics the Man has made sure that they are people who will serve him. Not 1 of them has equaled the monumental work of J.A. Rogers, a 1-time Pullman porter. Some of these people with degrees going around here shouting that they are New Negroes are really serving the Man who awarded them their degrees, who has initiated them into his slang and found them to “qualified”, which means loyal.10

This is, as with the entirety of Reed’s novel, a confusing passage that merges several different strands of critique into one. First of all, the religious terminology of the setup must be noted. The esoteric jargons of the university become “cabala”. While this also chimes, etymologically, with ‘cabal’, the term for a secret grouping that must include the novel’s Wallflower Order, it also clearly links in to Jewish mysticism and textual interpretation. At the same time, however, Hamid is a convert to Islam whose holistic system of learning incorporates aspects of religion, alongside other disciplinary practices. Certainly, he was not born into the faith: “I wasn’t born with a caul on my face, PaPa LaBas”, he notes, “[n]or was my coming predicted by a soothsayer as yours was, Black Herman”.11 _{Furthermore, we are told that Hamid’s new education is}

one in which he “was borrowing from all of these systems: Religion, Philosophy, Music, Science and even Painting”, which perhaps yields an intertextual link to the eponymous subject of Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game (1943).12

The questions that could arise here are multiple: why is the academy affiliated to Jewish mysticism in Hamid’s tale? (A hypothetical answer: because the claimed theological role of university English, apparent in Robert Alter’s discussions of the ‘sacred’/theological nature of canons, can appear to be to produce meaning from arcane texts through recodings, decodings, and permutations of language, which are all, in

10 Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo (New York: Atheneum, 1989), p. 37. 11 Ibid., p. 36.

189 8. Discipline and Publish

Kabbalistic frameworks, permutations on the name of God.)13 _{Why does}

this particular religious take lead to hegemony? Is this an anti-Semitic trope? While I do not propose specifically to address the last of these questions, Weisenburger does propose a way to approach these issues. In Weisenburger’s take, the contradictions that centre around Hamid position him as “a potential threat to the opposition between Atonism [part of the Wallflower Order’s conspiracy] and Jes Grew that is driving Reed’s satire”.14 _{By featuring Hamid as a mass of contradictions, the}

character can represent the “synthesis” of the “primary opposition” against the “normative center” of Mumbo Jumbo; at once a character who embraces plurality while also espousing monotheistic dogmatism.15

The position of the university and formal higher education within this synthesis is clear: it represents the dogmatic, unified past against the spontaneous freedom and plurality of the future Jes Grew. The association of the university’s knowledge systems with Jewish mysticism is, therefore, not necessarily a congruent juxtaposition. It is rather meant to signal the esotericism, privileged exclusionary, and hidden nature of the doctrinal teachings of higher education, even if this cloaking is an aspect that Hamid himself later propounds in various ways. If this critique of the university is not necessarily coherent, it does not mean that it lacks force. The place of the university within an evolving dialectic towards plurality is cemented, but the side on which it is placed is not the forward-thinking, supposed liberal humanist, critical-centric institution. It is, rather, the tool of the past and authority.

This criticism of the academy as authoritarian was most explicit in Reed’s 1993 novel, Japanese by Spring. This text, clearly a campus novel, revolves around the changing fortunes of its unloveable protagonist, Benjamin ‘Chappie’ Puttbutt. The son of a US military general, Puttbutt is a black academic at Jack London College, where, in the hope of achieving tenure and finding acceptance with his white colleagues, he writes screeds against affirmative action that blame the black population for its own social inequality. This seems to be a manifestation of an older Black aesthetic into the plot, in Martin’s terms, which involves “hating a society which loathes one’s self, while at the same time doing

13 Alter, Canon and Creativity. 14 Weisenburger, p. 168. 15 Reed, Mumbo Jumbo, p. 168.