Study Questions for Reed's Mumbo Jumbo
Thad Curtz (for Politics of Identity)

1. The fundamental question, as always - What can this book contribute to deepening your understanding of the program's theme, the politics of identity, or to raising new questions for you about the issues we are working on...

2. The Title

Before you start the book, you might think about the title. "Mumbo jumbo". Make up a sentence using this phrase... Do you ever use it yourself? What does it mean in our language? What sorts of value judgements and assumptions are implied in its meaning? Why might Reed choose it as the the title for this book?

3. Writing and magic

According to the note on p. 7, "mumbo jumbo" comes from a Mandingo phrase designating a certain kind of magician. (Similarly, Reed titled one of the anthologies of recent Afro-American poetry he edited 19 Necromancers From Now.) A necromancer is a particular kind of sorcerer - worth looking up if you aren't clear about it already. Before you start the book, jot down every resemblence you can think of off the top of your head between an artist and a magician...

You will notice that Hinckle Von Vampton is also a writer, and has a variety of linguistic and magical powers. Exactly how do his and those of his assistant, Hubert "Safecracker" Gould, compare and contrast with those of Papa La Bas and Black Herman?

4. "Popular manifestations" (p. 139)

Among other things, Mumbo Jumbo is a detective story, and it follows a number of the conventions of the genre. (Reed wrote a sort of Western too, Yellow Back Radio Broke Down, and versions of several other popular kinds of writing.) Before you start, you might do a brief freewrite or make a list or talk with somebody about what you expect to find in a big city detective story, and then keep an eye out for those things.

5. Who's telling the story? And when?

A.
As in The Lost Steps, this book's narrator displays his erudition. On practically every page, he talks about some work or some person that many readers will not know about. Presumably, the author was well aware that this was going to happen. How do these references make you feel as a reader? Why do you suppose he decided to do it this way?

B.
Take a look at the first two pages... What's the tone of "A True Sport"? (Is it straight? ironic? sarcastic?) How about "A slatternly floozy" and "Loose. She is inhaling from a Chesterfield ciggarette in a shameless brazen fashion." Whose voice is that? What is its tone? How about "his poker pardner"? Who's talking there? On the next page, one of the doctors says they got reports that the first victims of Jes Grew were, "...doing something called the 'Eagle Rock' and the 'Sassy Bump'; were cutting a mean 'Mooche,' and "lusting after relevance". When does each of these phrases come from? How about the stretches in italics - why are those in italics and not others? What sort of voice talks in them?

C.
Is somebody telling the story?

There are alternatives... For example, at one point in the story, Papa LaBas and Battraville have the following exchange:

You are very erudite in not only your own history but the history of the world and in a language we understand. What is the reason for this?

You actually have been talking to a seminar all night. Agwe, God of the Sea in his many manifestations, took over when I found it difficult to explain things. (p. 138)

Or perhaps we are reading somebody like Abdul Hamid, who says:

I had no systematic way of learning, but proceeded like a quilt maker, a patch of knowledge here a patch there but lovingly knitted. I would hungrily devour the intellectual scraps and leftovers of the learned.... It occured to me that I was borrowing from all of these systems: Religion, Philosophy, Music, Science and even Painting, and building 1 of my own composed of their elements. It was like a Griffin. I had patched something together out of my own procedure and that became my style, my art, my process. (p 38)

D.
As with The Lost Steps, in reading this book, many of you may experience considerable gaps between this narrator's culture and values and your own. Do you feel any different about your encounter with this narrator's eruditon, and his representation of women, and other cultural gaps here than you did in encountering Charpentier's narrator? If you do respond differently to Reed's narrator, why do you respond differently?

4. Writing and Music (litany and liturgy)

As with The Lost Steps, this book is in part about music, but jazz rather than Beethoven. We suggested that The Lost Steps might in some ways be written like a piece of music. In what ways would you say this book is like a jazz performance? In what ways would you say it isn't?

Etymologically, "liturgy" comes from a couple of words that mean "the people" and "work". The book repeatedly says that Jes Grew is "seeking its text". What does that mean? Is this book it? (if you think it is, then why does Jes Grew need it, and what exactly might Jes Grew gain from being united with it?)

6. The Ideas

This book is what leading Atonist literary critic Northrop Frye categorizes as a "Menippean satire", a kind of writing in which, among other things, the characters mostly exist as the embodiments of various contending ideas. Make a list of what seem to you to be half a dozen of the most important ideas that the book relies on. For example, to grab a couple from early in the book, you might pick something like "...beneath or behind all cultural and political warfare lies a struggle between secret societies." or "...the Nursery Rhyme and the book of Science Fiction might be more revolutionary than any number of tracts, pamphlets, manifestoes of the political realm." (p. 18) Then consider each of the six or so ideas on your list and try to answer two questions about it for yourself.

A. Do you believe that this idea is true?
B. If you do not believe that this idea is actually true, do you think that it can be understood as a metaphor for something that is actually true about life and the world? If so, what is the truth that it represent metaphorically, and how does it work to express that truth...

(Do you think that a novel is better if the ideas it relies on are true? What about really old stories, like Dante or Homer, which are full of ideas most people don't believe any more - about the gods, and psychology, and geography, and historical causation? Do you think just some of the ideas ought to be true - about how people feel and act, say? Do you think that a fiction by a contemporary author is better when the ideas are true, but that a story from long ago and far away is different somehow? Or do you think that whether the ideas a novel is based on are true has nothing to do with why one reads fiction and why it matters?)