I honestly dislike this book to a certain extent already. I get that Ishmael Reed is in fact writing a post-modernist novel, but I do think that this novel would be somewhat easier to comprehend if he had in fact used the historical context as to what the Jes Grew epidemic is referring to. Reed gives us a time and a historical context placing this story in 1920, so why not continue with the history?? Why not just write a novel about the spread of jazz music through out the United States at this time?? Would it not still be a post-modernist novel if he did this?? There are still the fictional characters and the obscure language that is put to use through out the novel, there is also the real characters and events such as the election of the mayor.
I'm not asking Ishmael Reed to have written the novel like Ragtime with the historical illusions but still keeping the story factual to a certain point, no not all. I find that the novel flows more naturally than that of Ragtime. I think it was Nikita that said Doctorow seemed to just throw fictional and historical things into the story just to show us that he could do it. Reed on the other hand, it seems as though he just wrote the story. Of course there was thought behind it in order to make the Jes Grew epidemic representative of the jazz spread, but Reed does not seem to make an effort to put in historical allusions and the interaction of historical figures and fictional characters, everything just seems to all happen and fit together quite well.
The novel has this deeper meaning that one must uncover, referring to the Jes Grew representation of jazz music. Though personally I feel that the meaning could have been more direct. I did not really get this meaning until it was discussed in class. I knew that Jes Grew wasn't an actual disease, but I had no idea there was a deeper meaning to it. It's a post modernist novel... I learned from Doctorow not to suppose that characters or events are real, Colehouse Walker for example. My main issue is that Ishmael Reed isn't direct with what he has to say, and to make matters worse he writes in this made-up language. The book is so playful for it to have a deeper meaning, it's distracting.
There are certainly slang elements in some of the prose, and other loose relations to traditional grammar rules, but I think it's an overstatement to call it a "made-up language." It's totally English, pretty much throughout. Maybe some of the language will come through more easily if you read it aloud (or "aloud" in your head, mouthing the words silently as you read). As I've tried to drive home in recent classes, the core of this novel is maybe more conventionally plotted and familiar than some of the surface-level wildness suggests.
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