Mumbo Jumbo Literary Elements

Novel

New York City in the 1920s

An unnamed, third-person omniscient narrator; however, the novel is also a pastiche of other genres and texts and includes other voices from book excerpts, quotes, and dictionary definitions.

Tone: bemused, euphoric, zealous, lively, mirthful, nostalgic, mischievous

Mood: energetic, nostalgic, pensive, ebullient

PaPa is the protagonist; Hinckle Von Hampton is the antagonist (more broadly, the Atonists are the antagonists, and all who work to promote Jes Grew are protagonists)

Will PaPa LaBas be able to find the Text so Jes Grew can spread as it ought to? Or will the Atonists get, once again, in the way?

PaPa and Black Herman reveal that the box containing the text of Jes Grew is, in fact, empty; it has been destroyed.

1. Reed foreshadows Earline's possession by saying she "finds it necessary to go through the most elaborate toilet ritual these days" (28) and that PaPa has noticed her gait for the first time, which he characterizes as "serpentine" (51)
2. Reed foreshadows trouble with the loa by starkly indicating that Earline has not fed them properly
3. PaPa saying "someone is coming" (39) foreshadows Benoit Battraville's arrival

1. Describing the murder of President Harding, Reed writes "They finished the job" (148)
2. "It has been an interesting 2,000 years but this is the end of the road" (153)

1. There are dozens, if not more, allusions to historical, literary, cultural, and political events/figures/ideas from the 1920s, including, but not limited to: Booker T. Washington, President Harding, Charlie Parker, James Weldon Johnson, Marcus Garvey, the war in Haiti, and Prohibition.
2. There are also historical allusions to the Bible, the Grail myth, Egyptian mythology, the Depression, and WWII
3. Some of the characters are allusions to real-life people: Nathan Brown is Langston Hughes, Hinckle Von Hampton is Carl Von Vechten
4. Being "Milled and Humed" (68) is an allusion to John Stuart Mill and David Hume, philosophers
5. "Wotanian" (74) is an allusion to Wotan (German name for Odin) from Norse mythology, especially as captured in Wagner's opera "Der Ring des Nibelungen"

There is so much imagery in this text, but the most compelling is that which evokes jazz, for the syncopated, improvisational, collaborative nature of jazz is mirrored in Reed's structure and the tone of his novel.

Harding's prose is "a prose style so bad that it had charm" (59)

Reed parallels the 1920s and the 1970s; he sees similarities between Nixon and Harding's administrations, funk and jazz, The New Negro and Black is Beautiful, etc.

1. "The city's head is once more calm" (17)
2. "They don't have the guts of real gangsters" (49)

1. "America is born at 3:03 on the 4th of July, Gemini Rising. It is to be mercurial, restless, violent" (16)
2. "Fear stalks the land" (48)
3. "I think we ought to turn the act around. Stand it on its head. Upside-down the Plantation" (104)
4. "You actually have been talking to a seminar all night" (138)
5. "The Book was not going to be their whore any more and gave them the worst of itself" (188)