The Authors Are Messing With Us: Will It Continue?

After reading the first few sets of chapters of Mumbo Jumbo, and reading Ragtime, there

are a few things I’ve noticed in terms of the author’s style. One of the things we have

focused on over the first few days of Mumbo Jumbo, is how different the style of narration is

for Reed’s novel. For example, Mr. Mitchell had to warn us to not miss the first chapter,

because it comes before the publication information. We talked about how this is kind of like

a movie, with the first part coming into the story and then there are the credits and author

and editors and producers and stuff and then the rest of the movie comes on. This isn’t so

true nowadays with modern movies, but Mumbo Jumbo was written in the 70s.

One thing I noticed about both novels is that they both incorporate social issues from

multiple time periods. In Ragtime, we have the clear example of the pseudo Black Panthers

picked up and dropped through time into the Ragtime era. Coalhouse Walker and his crew

are something relevant and real to both the timeline of the narrative, and when the novel

itself was actually published. In Mumbo Jumbo, a similar scenario occurs. A group of African

Americans are being oppressed and harassed by the white people. The epidemic of Jes

Grew is only an epidemic to the racist white people who want nothing to do with black

culture. I think the role of the theme of race relations will only grow as we continue to read

this novel. Maybe that’s a part of writing history as fiction. You can take time periods and

characters with issues and adapt them and drop them into other timelines. I expect to see

more of these parallels with the date of the book’s publication and the time period of the

narrative with the rest of the books we will read this semester.

Another thing I noticed was how the author seems to mess with us. For Ragtime we seemed

to spend a lot of time talking about how Doctorow was messing with us. He would randomly

to drop in a Harry Houdini in an accident right next to the little boy. He could do anything he

wanted as long as he could wiggle out of it by writing that they didn’t not say they did this,

and they didn’t say they didn't do it. For Mumbo Jumbo, I see this kind of messing with us in

a different way. I see the way he put the chapter before the publican information. To me, this

breaks the illusion of the story. Another thing that breaks up the narrative is that the novel is

itself littered with typos. We could probably find significance somewhere when he’s making

typos like Jew Grew, but we don’t. Their only purpose right now is to break the illusion of the

story. I was thinking about how this could show that it’s not supposed to be a narrative but

more of a factual representation. Reed wants us to be broken out of the story and reminded

that this is just a book. But then again, maybe it's for a different purpose. Another way the

immersion is broken is that sometimes the text is all wavy. We talked about how this is

representative of the texts of the time with the typewriters available. But does that mean that

this text isn't supposed to be refined? Doctorow changed his position in the novel like 300

 pages into it by saying “we”, and “at this time” (referring to the 70s). Is this what makes a

text postmodern or a history as fiction novel?

I think that the novels will definitely differ a lot over the course of the class because of how

the novels we read were published in near chronological order. I think there will be less of

the author messing with us. I predict that we will see more of the characters dropped into

novels, to represent the history part of History as Fiction. If you guys have any other

thoughts on what the rest of the books are like, or what the anti-immersion means in Mumbo

Jumbo, please leave a comment.