In Richard
Hardack’s “Swing to the White, Back to the Black: Writing and ‘Sourcery’ in
Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo”, there
are several intriguing ideas brought up. While we got to begin discussing some
topics in Hardack’s essay, I want to think about it a little bit more. Particularly,
I want to talk about Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Already, we
have talked about Reed being like a “white ‘transcendental’ writer”,
specifically Emerson. Adding on to that, Hardack believes that Mumbo Jumbo is a “parody of and homage
to Emerson’s works” (Hardack 132). Although there are some similarities that we
discussed in class, in terms of the relation of god(s) and nature for Emerson
and Reed, I really don’t see a big connection to Emerson in Mumbo Jumbo, much less it being a parody
of Emerson. I certainly did not even remotely think of Emerson or that style of
writing while reading Mumbo Jumbo.
Reed says things throughout Mumbo Jumbo
like Set “perhaps invented taxes” and Jesus “was a sorcerer…who went around the
countryside performing tricks” (Reed 170). However, Ralph Waldo Emerson in “Self
Reliance” (something that should be familiar from Freshman English) says things
much more like “It must be that when God
speaketh he should communicate, not one thing, but all things.” Sure,
there might be passages that relate the two writers better, but just looking at
style and tone itself, even the content in general, they just don’t seem to
relate. Even if there is this connection with Reed
and Emerson, I don’t see Reed intentionally doing so. Just from looking at Mumbo Jumbo as a whole and getting a
feel for Reed’s intentions and goals, it just doesn’t seem like something he
would do.
However, even though I am pretty sure there is no connection
between the two doesn’t mean there isn’t one. I would expect Hardack to know
much more about Emerson than me, who hasn’t read Emerson since freshman year.
And even though I think Reed wouldn’t intentionally parody Emerson, I could be
wrong. It’s not like Mumbo Jumbo is a
simple book to understand, and Reed is not a simple author. And so while I feel
pretty sure that there is no Reed-Emerson connection, I want to hear what you
think about the topic. What do you think
about Reed and Emerson? Do you see the connection Hardack is making?
I am likewise no expert on Emerson (even though I'm currently teaching freshman English--we didn't read "Self-Reliance" this year!) but I too was perplexed by this argument. There is a very important sense in which Jes Grew is aligned with Nature, with loas as a kind of "natural" force in the world that humans can interact with but not control, and the critique of Atonism does seem to bear some general resemblance to the anti-materialist critique of transcendendalists. In other words, maybe Emerson would agree with Reed's satire of Atonism and its synthetic "headquarters," and he does trace JG all the way back to Osiris and a kind of mystical oneness with Nature. But at the same time, Emerson would represent the kind of Eurocentric author that Reed would be skeptical of, and the argument that he's "really" writing a kind of veiled transcendentalism smacks uncomfortably of the kinds of "validating" things Hinckle says to black poets in the novel, "praising" them by comparing them to white writers like Whitman. I can imagine Reed bristling at the notion that his very original Jes Grew trope is simply reheated transcendentalism.
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