SOURCE: Martin, Reginald. “Ishmael Reed's Syncretic Use of Language: Bathos as Popular Discourse.” Modern Language Studies 20, no. 2 (spring 1990): 3-9.

In the following essay, Martin provides a stylistic and thematic analysis of Reed's fiction, focusing on his linguistic metaphors.

Ishmael Reed extends the notion of syncretism into the level and texture he uses in his novels, thus creating a type of contemporary bathetic language, whose principal rules of discourse are taken from the streets, popular music, and television. In Reed's novels, it is not uncommon to find the formal blend of language mixed with the colloquial, as it is Reed's contention that such an occurrence in the narrative is more in keeping with the ways contemporary people influenced by popular culture really speak. By purposely mixing the myriad aspects of language from different sources in popular culture, Reed pulls into individual cardinal functions (one closed set of narrative actions...