Ishmael Reed the Illuminatus

Ishmael Reed in 2019 (Creative Commons photo, source). 

Jesse Walker sends me a bit from an interview with Ishmael Reed, author of Mumbo Jumbo and other books: 

Q. Have  you ever received an honorary degree or grant or award for your writing?

A. I haven't received an honorary degree or grant, but I was recently made an honorary pope by the Bavarian Illuminati (for the writing of Mumbo Jumbo) which, according to the sealed papers I received in the mail, was founded in 1090 A.D. by Hassan i Sabbah. They read the book and don't think it was "muddled," as one of the "Sister" critics thought. (I get my strongest criticism from some of the "Sisters." I guess this is because they want me to improve and do better, god bless them.)

I asked Jesse for a citation, and he replied,

It originally appeared in the June 1974 issue of BLACK WORLD, and it was reprinted in the books SHROVETIDE IN OLD NEW ORLEANS and CONVERSATIONS WITH ISHMAEL REED. I should probably add that he is interviewing himself.

Your query prompted me to look up whether that issue of BLACK WORLD is online, and sure enough it is:

https://books.google.com/books?id=rjkDAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

I have posted on the connection between Illuminatus and Mumbo Jumbo, see this post, and also see this post. 

Jesse also asked me to post the query he made on X, looking for a Reed essay, here is is:

1. In my memory, I first learned of Zora Neale Hurston in an essay about her by Ishmael Reed, then dug up TELL MY HORSE at the library. But the only Reed essay about Hurston that I can find is...his intro to a reprint of TELL MY HORSE, which couldn't have led me *to* the book.

2. That intro was reprinted in Reed's book AIRING DIRTY LAUNDRY, which I've read, but it didn't come out until 1994, years after I encountered TELL MY HORSE. She is mentioned in some of his essays—and in MUMBO JUMBO—so it's possible I went digging after reading one of those.

3. But it's possible that he really did write an extended essay about her that was not the TELL MY HORSE intro & that I'm just doing a bad job of finding it. So I put the question to Twitter: Do any of you know of this article that I think I'm remembering but might be imagining?

New Ishmael Reed play

Today's blog post is brought to you by synchronicity.

A few minutes ago, after the power came back on in our house (there's a winter storm moving in), I got a new email from Gary Acord, and he mentioned that he had recently begun reading Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo. Reed was one of Robert Anton Wilson's favorite writers, and the book is name-checked at the beginning of Illuminatus!, as I mentioned here.

I then clicked on a brand-new email from Nick Helseg-Larsen, and discovered that he had sent me a link to this article, from TheaterMania about a new plan by Reed. Excerpt:

The Final Version, a new play by MacArthur Genius Grant Award winner Ishmael Reed, is currently running at Nuyorican Poets Café through January 19.

The play follows Communist Party-sponsored black writer Lee Ransom, who in 1939 chooses to publish his novel, Let the Red Flags Unfurl, with an uptown publisher under the condition that he cut two of his radical characters. Twenty-six years later, he must decide again whether or not to publish his novel when a publishing company expresses interest in printing the original version.

I was going to post about something else, but how can you argue with the universe?

Reed's 'Mumbo Jumbo' and Illuminatus!

I just finished reading Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, in the course of which I made an interesting discovery: Illuminatus! misquotes the book (or, depending on how you look it, Illuminatus! paraphrases it.)

At the beginning of Illuminatus!, on the title page for Book One:

The  history of the world is the history of the warfare  between secret  societies.

                                                              -- Ishmael Reed, Mumbo-Jumbo

This is what Reed actually wrote: "Someone once said that beneath or behind all political and cultural warfare lies a struggle between secret societies." I'm not clear if Wilson and Shea were relying upon memory or if they felt the need to rewrite what Reed actually wrote. The Reed quote would arguably have been stronger if Wilson and Shea had actually quoted what he wrote, lopping off the first four words. Note also that the title of the book is wrong. It's  Mumbo Jumbo, not Mumbo-Jumbo. 

The resemblances between Mumbo  Jumbo and Illuminatus! are interesting; both describe the struggles between secret societies, although in Reed's work it's the white monotheists (the bad guys) versus the black polytheists (the heroes). In an interview in The Illuminati Papers, Wilson says, "I didn't read Mumbo Jumbo until about 3 years after Illuminatus! was finished. The same is true of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. The astonishing resemblances between those three books are coincidence, or synchronicity, or Higher Intelligence (take your pick). I love everything Ishmael Reed writes, and I once sent him an official Discordian certificate making him a Pope in the Legion of Dynamic Discord." So the paraphrase from Mumbo Jumbo presumably was inserted late in the publishing process.

Here is a good review of Mumbo Jumbo from one of my favorite critics, Ted Gioia. I am not sure I can agree, however, with Gioia's comment that "you are best served if you come to this novel with a deep knowledge of history." Ignorance of history is helpful in many places in the section near the end of the book where Reed offers his grand conspiracy theory of history, because the narrative has many jarring mistakes. Constantine was not converted to Christianity in "the late 4th century B.C.," A.D. 378 is not the correct date for the destruction of pagan temples by Emperor Theodosius (the Alexandrian Serapeum was destroyed in A.D. 391 or so), an ancient Egyptian could not have come to South America and made contact with the Incas, and so on.