So, the first chapter is like a movie scene. Well that's not all. Towards the end of the first chapter, we get two italicized paragraphs. These two paragraphs, in a way, seem like an excerpt from a diary at the time. So Mumbo Jumbo moves from a climactic first scene onto a diary entry? Oh we're not done yet. We get a Louis Armstrong quote kinda in the middle of nowhere, followed by the definition of Mumbo Jumbo. And then we get the tiny chapter two that's narrated in a histroy textbooky kinda tone. The book does settle down after the first few chapters and starts to develop a more follow-able storyline, but this isn't to say that Mumbo Jumbo isn't postmodern because it simply jumping from one type of media to another and constantly switching tones is just one of the many ways it screams Postmodernism.
Thursday, February 6, 2014
Postmodernism!
Is it just me, or did the first few chapters of Mumbo Jumbo scream Postmodernism? In class today, we talked about how the first chapter is like the first scene of a movie. The way the the wording is and the scene we can so vividly imagine just makes it seem as if we're watching a scene from a black and white movie. Now, this idea of the first chapter being like the first scene of a movie hit me immediately after I finished the chapter. I felt as if I was reading the opening credits to a movie after the climactic first scene that ended with 10,000 being dead by morning.
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I agree that there are many postmodern aspects to Mumbo Jumbo. It is really crazy how much the first chapter is like the collage (of styles, etc.) that we talked about in the beginning of the year. As you said, that is only one of the many ways in which Mumbo Jumbo is postmodern, but I think it is a big one. Another is the irony, which was rampant in Ragtime, and has also appeared quite a bit in the small part of Mumbo Jumbo we have read.
ReplyDeleteThe "movie" aspects you describe in the opening chapter do persist, in various forms, throughout the novel. I would agree that this is "postmodernist", if only because another pop-cultural form (not just the movies, but 1930s-40s crime stories specifically) is being used as a point of reference for another artform entirely (the literary novel). This is related to what I describe as the "cartoonish" aspects of much of the novel--like when Woodrow Wilson Jefferson (a rather cartoonish name, that) is described as looking like a "crocodile wearing granny glasses." How to picture that without resorting to cartoon imagery?
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