Central to understanding Ishmael Reed's fiction is an analysis of the ways in which he creates and uses literary folklore. It has for him dual purposes: it is practical and theoretical. Practically it serves to advance the plot, provide structure, defend and raise questions about the nature of society. Theoretically it has at its disposal a vast and largely untapped reservoir of African and Afro-American history, folklore and myth. The components of the practical and theoretical categories are intricately interwoven into a fiction which raises external questions of verisimilitude … that are largely absent in the literary folklore of Killens, Chesnutt, Hurston and Alice Walker. Reed labels this confluence of history's external realities and myths' internal or subjective realities "La Bas," a term deeply associated with HooDoo.
In Reed, then, literary folklore can be seen as a structured innovation. The structure relates largely to historical parallels. The history, however, is rewritten through a process that Reed calls necromancy: using the events in the race's past to comment on the present and prophesy about the future. Through necromancy Reed offers us alternative views of slavery, the Harlem Renaissance and the sixties. The innovative aspect is also a function of necromancy: it asserts alternative views of history. This aspect also has a political reality which emerges as a set of reactions to changes in the external world. At such times it attempts to restore order by invoking the old gods, heroes, and heroines and a novel world view which is based on the old ways of HooDoo. His political literary folklore also seeks, however obliquely, to offer alternatives to existing reality. (p. 41)
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