Mumbo Jumbo Essay Questions

How does Reed's novel embody his conception of time being a "pendulum" rather than a "river"?

Reed plays with the concept of linearity in his novel, jumping back and forth like a pendulum rather than moving straight ahead in a chronological fashion. Tamiko Fiona Nimura expands on this, explaining that a pendulum's range of motion has both long and short sweeps, which is borne out by the very long exposition at the end of the novel and then brief bursts of other time periods like the 1970s. There are sweeping jumps of time and "a pendulum's path is inclusive, encompassing the time periods between each endpoint of each sweep." The chronology is dialectic, including "multiple paths, multiple presents, and multiple futures along the same continuum" and "generatively engaging the binaries of past and present yet refusing any easy synthesis of thesis and antithesis."

What is Reed's view of America?

Reed provides an amusing and savagely accurate picture of America, all accomplished through metaphor. First, he skewers the foundations of the country, built on slave labor growing a cash crop. Then, he implies it is hypocritical, meretricious, and prone to chicanery; it is not elegant like Britain but rather "the tobacco auctioneer, the barker...the traveling salesman who can sell the world the Brooklyn Bridge every day, can put anything over on you and convince you that tomatoes grow at the South Pole." It's a "smart-aleck adolescent who's 'been around' and has his own hot rod" (all quotes pg. 16). America is a joker, a liar, and a con artist, which would all be more amusing if that didn't result in so much tangible pain and suffering both within the country's boundaries and without.

What does Reed's novel reveal to us about the actual historical decade of the 1920s?

Though Reed engages with multiple time periods in the novel, its central narrative is set within the 1920s. He aptly conveys the era's ferocious sense of energy and growth, its fecund culture, its racial and class tensions, its isolationist foreign policy, the issues of Prohibition, the past of WWI and the future of the Great Depression and WWII, and much, much more. Reed's goal is to challenge a teleological, Westernized view of history, but he still does give the reader "facts" about the decade and thus an authentic sense of its personages, events, and vibes.

How are the 1920s and 1970s similar?

In multiple interviews, Reed has stated that he wanted to write a novel about the 1920s since it was similar to his own time of the 1970s. Such similarities include: Jes Grew manifests as jazz in the 1920s and funk in the 1970s; Black people have a cultural and political renaissance in both decades; Harding and Nixon are similar figures (as Reed claims); Haiti in the 1920s and Vietnam in the 1970s are both selfish, misguided wars met with intense guerilla resistance, Haiti.

How does Reed employ humor in his novel?

The novel is full of irrefutably bleak or heavy elements—white, monotheistic hegemony; violence and death; spiritual possession; an imminent Depression; and much more. However, it is also a deeply funny and clever novel, with Reed wielding his humor like a reaper's scythe. Lizabeth Paravisini locates much of this humor in his "parody of the conventions of detective fiction and film," such as with the "parodic portrayal of the Knights Templar as ineffectual gangsters, and of Hinckle and Safecracker as bumbling musclemen." The final scene of PaPa LaBas and Black Herman "gate-crashing a high society party to arrests Hinckle and Safecracker, only to have the guests refused to hand them over until they 'explain rationally and soberly what they are guilty of'" (183) is emblematic of such humor. There is also the "cultural gap between the Western and African traditions and the anachronistic use of language [that] are exploited with comic results," with Reed's description of Thermuthis crying like people Alabama did—"crying proper" (185)—serving as an excellent example.