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The Gospel According to Ishmael
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10170 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1993 |
3,721 Words |
| Author
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Playthell Benjamin
Playthell Benjamin is a regular contributor to the Village
Voice, the Manchester Guardian, and the Sunday Times of London
and is the author of a forthcoming novel entitled Tall Tales
from the Life and Times of Sugarcane Hancock and a collection
of essays, Return to the Land of the Flowers. |
JAPANESE BY SPRING
Ishmael Reed
New York: Atheneum, 1993
225 pp., $20.00
When the group of international scholars and students from twenty nations who had gathered at the Sorbonne in February 1992 heard Ishmael Reed open his reading with lines from his new novel Japanese by Spring, which was then a work in progress, almost everybody cracked up with laughter. And as he continued to read from his manuscript--a hilarious tale about a Japanese takeover of Jack London College, a small, elite, private liberal arts college in Oakland, California--it became increasingly clear that we were witnessing the birth of yet another masterwork from the writer whom the Nation has justly designated "the brightest contributor to American satire since Mark Twain." The finished product has justified our faith. For Japanese by Spring is a unique narrative that is at once a tour de force of literary innovation that violates nearly all the conventional wisdom about composing a novel, and an erudite fictive polemic satirizing both the intellectual pomposity and hypocrisy of the Eurocentric cultural elite, who have traditionally run our universities, and the vulgar opportunism and banality of radical feminists and Afrocentric ideologues.
Chastising the charlatans on all sides of a question while seeking to enlighten the untutored mob is characteristic of Reed's literary oeuvre--a body of work that now includes nine novels, four volumes of poetry, two anthologies, three plays, two television productions, and three collections of essays, with another nearing publication. In his most recent essay collection--and most controversial--Writin' Is Fightin' Reed provides us an unabridged glimpse of his take on the writers craft:
I don't have a predictable, computerized approach to political and social issues in a society in which you're either for it or agin it. Life is much more complex. And so for my early articles about black on black crime, I've been criticized by the left, and for my sympathy with some "left wing" causes I've been criticized by the right, though from time to time I've noticed that there doesn't seem to be a dime's worth of difference between the zealotry of the left and that of the right.
Reed, who calls his career "Thirty-seven years of boxing on paper," which is the subtitle of the book, believes that the writer must view all dogmas and orthodoxies with a jaundiced eye. "I think that a certain
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