SOURCE: Cowley, Julian. “What If I Write Circuses?: The Space of Ishmael Reed's Fiction.” Callaloo 17, no. 4 (fall 1994): 1236-44.

In the following essay, Cowley argues that Reed's literary aesthetic is “expansive and inclusive,” contending that Reed is trying to establish a collective identity for America as well as a “diverse, plural space, in which ancient multisensory experience and modern technological resources may combine to engender vital and creative cultural formations.”

“Tell us, Mrs. Lincoln, how do you feel having just watched your husband's brains blown out before your eyes?”¹ Feeling is the issue; specifically, desensitization in the society of the spectacle, an atomized pseudo-community of eye-witnesses at one remove, gorged on televised images of History-in-the-making. As a self-proclaimed saboteur of historical orthodoxy, Reed necessarily engages with the dominance of the eye in Western cultural formations. The West, as Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker have pointed out, “has invested every...