Dead letter office: conspiracy, trauma, and Song of Solomon's posthumous communication

African American Review, Winter, 2003 by Michael Rothberg

Going Postal

Focusing cultural conflict through questions of postal address, Morrison targets the institution central to The Crying of Lot 49. The "Not Doctor Street" passage calls for a short genealogy of the post in Pynchon's and Reed's postmodern novels--a digression that will allow us to reapproach Song's opening. Pynchon's novel, with its elaborately staged postal conspiracies, fantasizes a series of underground communications networks outside the "government monopoly" of the U.S. Post Office (Crying 52). Like Morrison's "word-of-mouth" news and the "Grapevine Telegraph" of Mumbo Jumbo' s Harlem (20), Pynchon's Tristero and W.A.S.T.E. movements receive their impetus from marginal figures and dissident forces. Morrison's "quasiofficial" mailing addresses, like Reed's narrative of "Jes Grew's Communicability" (18), signify on Pynchon's hyperbolic meditation on the power/knowledge nexus of information distribution. But these three alternative communications systems also move in different directions. Lot 49's postal undergrounds are of ultimately indeterminate social location, both because their existence is always hovering just beyond confirmation and because their politics refuse consistent mapping on any known political geography. Throughout the novel, Oedipa seeks to strip away "the breakaway gowns, net bras, jeweled garters and G-strings of historical figuration" that make up the "unique performance" of the conspiratorial mail deliverers, the Tristero (54). But her journey into what one of her paranoid informants sees as "a parable of power" (54) leaves her uncertain where "figuration" leaves off and "power" begins--or even where the two intersect.

Through their invocation of the vernacular of black culture, Song of Solomon and Mumbo Jumbo would seem to solve the problem of Lot 49's undecidable relations of power and community by locating their countercultures squarely within African American contexts. Yet Mumbo Jumbo, like Pynchon's earlier novel, also uses the post to perform indeterminacy. In Lot 49, actor/director Driblette asks, "Why ... is everybody so interested in texts?" (78). Reed responds by explicitly linking the notion of textuality to the "hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate" after which Oedipa unsuccessfully quests (Crying 24). In Mumbo Jumbo, the "Text" sought by Jes Grew, Reed's equivalent of the countercultural underground, turns out to be written in hieroglyphics--it is an anthology of Egyptian dance steps choreographed by Osiris and transcribed by Thoth, the god of writing. For Pynchon, the hieroglyph hints at, but ultimately frustrates, hermeneutic operations, leaving the interpreter faced with a social text whose key either has been irretrievably lost or never existed in the first place. In his savvy rewriting, Reed renders that pictographic form multiply significant: The reference to hieroglyphics at once gestures toward Africa, suggests the veve emblems of vodoun, satirically extends Pynchon's use of the muted postal horn, and self-reflexively calls upon Reed's own image-text collage form. Reed seems to avoid the binary logic that immobilizes Oedipa by suggesting that, while meaning may not be transcendent, it may still be available to black artists in the heterogeneous cultural heritage they inherit and transform.