Ishmael Reed's Gaming with Time

 REED'S GAMING WITH TIME

 

 

Reed, Ishmael.  The Terrible Fours.  Montréal: Baraka Books, 2021.

ISBN 978--77186-23-1     $22.95

Among living American writers, Ishmael Reed is s superb iconoclast. He smashes all the cognitive idols   identified by Sir Francis Bacon and a few that Bacon failed to identify. In his plays, satirical essays, poems, and fictions we discover the power of writing to expose and dismantle stupidities.  He entertains us.  He enlightens us.  His mirrors, as it were, motivate readers to experience the truth of things unseen as they get on with their ordinary lives. Or it may that readers are so  saturated with data that they see everything in order to see nothing.  Like his literary ancestors, Reed disturbs the peace with his uncanny analyses of what many of us deem inconvenient: the tension between the actual and the real.  One character describes America as "home. A country where truth and fiction were always trading places" (119). The Terrible Fours explores the hidden dimensions of America's sordid political histories.

It is easy to think of this novel as a collage, a verbal equivalent of visual compositions by Romare Bearden. Found items and some characters  from The Terrible Twos (1982) and The Terrible Threes (1989) are rearranged with new bits of uncommon  global information that Reed delights in collecting.  Readers (secondary narrators) must co-conspire with Reed (the primary narrator) the plot that is essential for story into being.  The effect is tantalizing.  The novel is fundamentally a meta-narrative along the lines of Mieke Bal's dense speculations in Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, 2nd ed. (1994) regarding the relationship between  primary fabula and embedded fabula.  There is the printed text and the text manifested in the act of reading.

"Another possible relationship between the two texts presents itself when the two fabulas are related to each other.  Then there are two possibilities..   The embedded story can explain the primary story, or it may resemble the primary story.  In the first case the relationship is made explicit by the actor narrating the embedded story; in the second the explanation is usually left to the reader, or merely hinted at, in the fabula" (53-54).

Readers who have an appetite for theory in all forms will find Reed's novel to be a banquet, a feast of dialogic imagination.

The Terrible Fours turns the weapons of iconoclasm against the conventional genre-expectations we might have for a novel.  Reed's strategies are purposeful, because he is always trying to liberate us from Plato's allegorical cave.  He takes what Clarence Major accomplished in Reflex and Bone Structure (1996) to a new level. The novel continues to elaborate the scatological themes of The Free-Lance Pall Bearers (1967), bringing into the twenty-first century what Reginald Martin in Ishmael Reed and The New Black Aesthetic Critics (1988) aptly described as Reed's brand of syncretism and synchronicity. Reed's gaming with time is familiar to readers who have followed his distinguished career. Readers who have not read Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down,  Mumbo Jumbo, Flight to Canada, or The Last Days of Louisiana Red are not familiar Reed's methods of inductive reasoning, and they may have to read The Terrible Fours several times to detect how the book immerses us in critical opposition to the status quo.

In my blog "Ishmael Reed and the American War of Words" (1912), I suggested

"Trillions of words have been spent shaping and mapping the American mindscape since 1492, Reed's sustained efforts to keep us somewhat honest about that fact have been  commendable.  His fictions, poems, plays, and recordings are a moral looking glass for envisioning what we might be.  His nonfiction, however, is at once testimony and indictment of what we are."

After reading The Terrible Fours, I must change the last sentence to read "All of Reed's work is testimony and indictment of what we are."

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            May 11, 2021 

 

 

REED'S GAMING WITH TIME

 

 

Reed, Ishmael.  The Terrible Fours.  Montréal: Baraka Books, 2021.

ISBN 978--77186-23-1     $22.95

Among living American writers, Ishmael Reed is s superb iconoclast. He smashes all the cognitive idols   identified by Sir Francis Bacon and a few that Bacon failed to identify. In his plays, satirical essays, poems, and fictions we discover the power of writing to expose and dismantle stupidities.  He entertains us.  He enlightens us.  His mirrors, as it were, motivate readers to experience the truth of things unseen as they get on with their ordinary lives. Or it may that readers are so  saturated with data that they see everything in order to see nothing.  Like his literary ancestors, Reed disturbs the peace with his uncanny analyses of what many of us deem inconvenient: the tension between the actual and the real.  One character describes America as "home. A country where truth and fiction were always trading places" (119). The Terrible Fours explores the hidden dimensions of America's sordid political histories.

It is easy to think of this novel as a collage, a verbal equivalent of visual compositions by Romare Bearden. Found items and some characters  from The Terrible Twos (1982) and The Terrible Threes (1989) are rearranged with new bits of uncommon  global information that Reed delights in collecting.  Readers (secondary narrators) must co-conspire with Reed (the primary narrator) the plot that is essential for story into being.  The effect is tantalizing.  The novel is fundamentally a meta-narrative along the lines of Mieke Bal's dense speculations in Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, 2nd ed. (1994) regarding the relationship between  primary fabula and embedded fabula.  There is the printed text and the text manifested in the act of reading.

"Another possible relationship between the two texts presents itself when the two fabulas are related to each other.  Then there are two possibilities..   The embedded story can explain the primary story, or it may resemble the primary story.  In the first case the relationship is made explicit by the actor narrating the embedded story; in the second the explanation is usually left to the reader, or merely hinted at, in the fabula" (53-54).

Readers who have an appetite for theory in all forms will find Reed's novel to be a banquet, a feast of dialogic imagination.

The Terrible Fours turns the weapons of iconoclasm against the conventional genre-expectations we might have for a novel.  Reed's strategies are purposeful, because he is always trying to liberate us from Plato's allegorical cave.  He takes what Clarence Major accomplished in Reflex and Bone Structure (1996) to a new level. The novel continues to elaborate the scatological themes of The Free-Lance Pall Bearers (1967), bringing into the twenty-first century what Reginald Martin in Ishmael Reed and The New Black Aesthetic Critics (1988) aptly described as Reed's brand of syncretism and synchronicity. Reed's gaming with time is familiar to readers who have followed his distinguished career. Readers who have not read Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down,  Mumbo Jumbo, Flight to Canada, or The Last Days of Louisiana Red are not familiar Reed's methods of inductive reasoning, and they may have to read The Terrible Fours several times to detect how the book immerses us in critical opposition to the status quo.

In my blog "Ishmael Reed and the American War of Words" (1912), I suggested

"Trillions of words have been spent shaping and mapping the American mindscape since 1492, Reed's sustained efforts to keep us somewhat honest about that fact have been  commendable.  His fictions, poems, plays, and recordings are a moral looking glass for envisioning what we might be.  His nonfiction, however, is at once testimony and indictment of what we are."

After reading The Terrible Fours, I must change the last sentence to read "All of Reed's work is testimony and indictment of what we are."

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            May 11, 2021