As the semiotician Robert Scholes has claimed, "whoever called him Ishmael picked the right name. His hand is against every man's--and every woman's, too.... He is a black Juvenal."
Reed, named after a second cousin, does indeed bear more than a passing familiarity with Juvenal, the great Roman satirist. Like Juvenal's extant sixteen Satires, Reed's texts consist of strident attacks on the vices, excesses, and foibles of contemporary American middle- and upper-class mores. Situated in a recognizable historical past (the Harlem Renaissance in Mumbo Jumbo; the antebellum plantation in Flight to Canada; the mythical Western never-never land in Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down; or the fantastic futuristic kingdom of "Harry Sam" in The Free-Lance Pallbearers and, in a more contemporary setting, The Terrible Twos, 1982), Reed's works show that his fictional concerns are not directed at his contemporaries but at his antecedents and his heirs. This, of course, is the traditional apologia of the satirist, only one sign of how "traditional" this clever iconoclast truly is.
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