Mastering Modern United States History

Both Snow White and the subsequent The Dead Father construct their situations around well-known, nearly archetypal stories, and both divest archetype of its seriousness, throwing the ideological implications into sharp relief. In a sense, Barthelme has decomposed cultural myths and recomposed them entirely of dreck: the result is at once deflating and curiously satisfying. Like Pynchon, Coover in The Public Burning, and DeLillo in Libra, Ishmael Reed writes experimental novels that reinscribe United States history as a record of conspiracy. The Free-Lance Pallbearers (1967) sets up the terms of an opposition that recurs in Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969), Mumbo Jumbo (1972), The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974), and Flight to Canada (1976), in which a repressive white power structure attempts to put down a polytheistic and multicultural counter-society. Reed marshals impressive documentation in support of this vision of postindustrial America as the end product of a series of suppressions, managed by the dominant Western culture because of this culture's ascetic rationalism, commitment to the technologies of annihilation, and envy of people able to enjoy themselves ...»