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

African American Review, Winter, 2003 by Michael Rothberg

Yet a further similarity to Pynchon emerges when we realize that the hieroglyphic text in Mumbo Jumbo is also a kind of letter, having been sent into circulation in the mail in an attempt to defuse Jes Grew: "It's dispersed. Untogether. I sent it out as a chain book," recounts the evil Templar Knight Hinkle Von Vampton (69). PaPa LaBas, the novel's protagonist and "detective of the metaphysical" (212), uses his "2 heads" to follow the Text's trail. That PaPa LaBas's "father ran a successful mail-order Root business in New Orleans" (23) indicates that, for Reed, the institution of the post is susceptible to multiple influences. Less a system of communication than of prophylaxis or "communicability," Reed's post can serve as a material site of either discipline or resistance. Nonetheless, the desire for the healing presence of the Text in Mumbo Jumbo proves as ironic as Oedipa's quest for the Word. When PaPa LaBas finally locates Von Vampton and the Text, there is nothing to be found but a mise-en-abyme of empty boxes (196). The Text has been burnt by the proto-Nation of Islam adherent Abdul Hamid, as we learn in a hand-written letter from Abdul included in the text (200-03). The inclusion within the printed novel of the hand-written letter recounting the Text's destruction reinforces the association of the self-reflexivity and indeterminacy of textuality with the post.

Because Mumbo Jumbo has not staked its claim, as Lot 49 sometimes seems to do, on the possibility of transcendent meaning, the Text's absence resonates differently than does Oedipa's inability to locate the Tristero. Faced with the Text's disappearance and the seeming dissipation of Jes Grew, LaBas optimistically predicts, "We will make our own future Text" (204). Given Reed's refusal to make the Text "present," it is probably not wrong to read LaBas as invoking not a future presence, but a notion of the Text as futurity itself. Gates provides a powerful, poststructuralist reading of this scene: "Reed's open-ended structure, and his stress on the indeterminacy of the text, demands that critics, in the act of reading, produce a text's signifying structure. For Reed ... figuration is indeed the 'nigger's occupation'" (237). What is the relationship between Reed's act of critical "figuration" and Oedipa's "G-strings of historical figuration"? Is the critical performance, alluded to by Gates, different from the mysterious performance of the Tristero, an underground movement shrouded by "a new mode of expression ... a kind of ritual reluctance" (Crying 71)? While figuration is ambiguously related to power in Pynchon, since it could as well serve Pierce's monopolistic conspiracy as produce any challenge to it, in Reed the performative and poetic functions are clearly aligned with the liberating forces of disorder.

The paradox of Reed's novel is that, despite its relentless skepticism about all claims to authority, it seems to believe in its own metaphor of cultural revolution far more fully than ought to be possible; it thus skirts the question of the origins of its own cultural authority. Mumbo Jumbo simultaneously is the Text about which it tells and, in its exuberant improvisations and idiosyncrasies, is the result of the authoritative Text's impossibility. Mumbo Jumbo's schizophrenic relationship to questions of cultural authority both extends the incommensurability and indeterminacy already present in Pynchon's novel and relocates its attack on authority in the context of an epic culture war that it traces back to Egypt. In moving back to Africa, in however ironic a form, Reed takes a step beyond Lot 49's narrative of the battle of Thurn and Taxis and the Tristero, a European conflict over communication that emigrates to the United States. Mumbo Jumbo's Egyptian myth is far from an uncritical example of Afrocentrism, but it takes on enough consistency within the world of the text to constitute an alternative starting point, if not a pure origin, of culture--a concept put into question by the claim that "Jes Grew has no end and no beginning" (204). Through the figure of the conspiratorial Atonist Path, which battles Jes Grew over the centuries, Reed hyper-inflates Western hegemony, but only in order to hyper-deflate it. This two-step shuffle opens a space for the future of cultural production, but, like Lot 49, Mumbo Jumbo is also unable to locate this space in the present. (6) In the end, Reed's politics are simultaneously paranoid and utopian, and thus also reveal the links between paranoid and utopian modes of thinking history.