Reason to the Madness

Mumbo Jumbo really lived up to its name. It was a wild ride of lingo and jive, exploring the deep secrets of our world. For the longest time, I had a lot of trouble understanding anything I was reading. It was like reading something backwards, nothing making sense until the basic plot points are explained. In classical literature, the foundation of the text would come first and support the rest of the novel, but in this postmodernist book everything is flipped.

At the end of the novel, Reed does explain the origins of "Jes Grew" and ties PaPa LaBas into the present world, bring some much-absent sense into the novel. Just like the epidemic, the book seems to be searching for it's own meaning. Amidst a rocky start (the first 50 chapters or so), it all starts to make sense as Reed brings the novel to a close. In that sense, his writing mirrors his words, reinforcing all the points he makes. Having found its soul and meaning, both the novel and the epidemic started to become understandable, and, by extension, less dangerous to the reader and the world. The epilogue successfully un-alienated the book, proving the necessity of a second read with the knowledge of the first in mind for a completely different read.

Although a tough read, looking back, it was much less like a book that I'm accustomed to and much more of an overall deep experience (like treatment at the Mumbo Jumbo Kathedral). In class we discussed similarities to a movie script, perhaps insinuating that Reed chose the wrong medium for his story, but I feel that Mumbo Jumbo only works as a novel; providing the author ultimate control over the reader's understanding. Reed managed to take thins a step further than most books, thinking ahead like a chess player. He wrote the book around the reader's perception of the novel, altering completely the experience we had when reading his story. A movie would have been extremely difficult to craft to encompass all the hidden meaning, keeping the reader in the dark until the final scene. For better or worse, the final moments turned a weird disjointed narrative into a truly memorable text.

Lost in Translation

Mumbo Jumbo really lives up to its name. Everything seems to make sense on its own, but put all together it becomes a bunch of gibberish. The weird formatting of the book is a good place to start my list of issues. Usually, when I read a book, I have some expectations of what I will get out of it. There are some standards that have been established by years of published word, and Mumbo Jumbo manages to break all of them. I can see the point of starting the book at the cover, as we discussed in class, forcing the reader to go back and truly attempt to comprehend the meaning of the string of words. It feels weird at first because of out expectations, but I think that it does end up serving an interesting purpose for the experience of the reader. It really makes the book stand out the moment you open it, even before you start reading.

Once you do start reading though, things go a bit crazy. Right off the bat, the reader is lost. With "a Creeping Thing" and "Judas Eye" and "HooDoo Queen", I was already puzzled and confused. A complete lack of explanation for these things leaves the reader longing for some justification for an already crazed ramble. Reading like a first draft, the text has the style of no style. Sentences are abrupt and short, but then spout into page-wide explanations and descriptions. People speak in jive, and writing anything in slang is complicated and requires forethought and planning. That aspect really contradicts with the rest of the text, riddled with errors and typos. The text doesn't flow; it jumps from place to place. Half the meaning is completely disguised by unknown words that sound Creole and describe hidden topics. At this point, I'm intrigued, but I also feel extremely lost, counting on the continuation to bring some reason to the craziness of this book. It can only be written like this completely on purpose or totally out of neglect, but since the book seems constructed, I tend to lean to the former. At this point, I'm even inclined to think that the weird writing and confusing text is completely on purpose, but perhaps the train of thought is incomprehensible when incomplete. For now though, I'm lost, but hooked with high hopes for the rest of the book.

And that's only the first chapter.