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.
But yet does having a "neat-wrap up" and story line taking away from the "mumbo jumbo" aspect of the novel? Having such a "conventional" story-line + theatrics seems to be Reed further mocking the "classics".
ReplyDeleteYeah I was thinking about that while writing this. Had the book ended a couple chapters earlier, I would have understood very little of the book and would most likely write it down to a really weird waste of time. Although the wrap-up might detract from the overall experience of mumbo jumbo, I feel that it was well worth the tradeoff to allow the reader more insight into the foundation of the book.
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