After finishing Mumbo Jumbo I had a pretty big moment of clairvoyance. My first blog post was all about how confused I was by the book and all of it's small anachronisms, spelling "errors", and general non clear writing style. Now obviously, the book didn't remain an extremely confusing bunch of mumbo jumbo and I did get used to the writing style. The chapters about the egyptian story were especially an example of when I was fully grasping the things the books were saying. Anyways, the moment of clairvoyance that I had was that all of this was confusion and non traditionalism was quite intentional and an absolutely perfect example of postmodernism; I term I have strangely neglected to describe Mumbo Jumbo as up until now. But it all makes sense, from the first page Reed breaks all of the rules. Mumbo Jumbo is in every way a postmodernist novel. He doesn't use "proper" english, he doesn't spell out numbers instead using characters, and even when recreating a historical event he doesn't change the voice of the people who seem to talk in the same exact way that everyone else in the book talks. Another example of how non modernist this book is can be seen in the random pictures strewn about the novel. Some of which can be drawn to some relation to the text but most of which have no apparent relation whatsoever. This is heavily reinforced for me because in the first edition of the book, all of the pictures are completely different, which leads me to believe that the pictures don't hold too much meaning within them. Everything that Reed does seems to be postmodern because everything he does is not at all what would be expected of a novel. Mumbo Jumbo does not follow any of the rules that we have set for novels.
Anytime a novel deliberately draws attention to its own status as fiction/construction/writing, we're pretty much in "postmodernist" territory: that feeling of reading something that isn't even trying to create an illusion of reality but actually revels in the fact that it's a fiction (with an author behind it, who is willing to do whatever he wants, and is in totaly control of our experience throughout). The result of flaunting all these "rules" is to draw attention to the arbitrariness of the rules themselves. (And, if you look at some early novels by Laurence Sterne, such as _Tristram Shandy_, you'll see that "postmodernism" has been going on in this sense since the very beginnings of the genre. Novels have *always* toyed with conventions, and with the author's (invisible) controlling role.)
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