Ishmael Reed has received more critical responses than almost any other contemporary African American male writer. In spite of Reed’s ongoing conviction, as he and other black male artists have been misrepresented and virtually ignored, the press, scholars, students, journalist, fellow writers, and other assorted groups have studied his work. Born February 22, 1938, Reed has produced, since the Publication of The Free-Lance Pallbearers, five novels, four books of poetry, numerous reviews and critical articles, editor to five issues of major small multicultural press literary magazine, and collected two books of essays. To this day, Reed is considered to be a major literary leader of third world press, and continues to been a very affluent and busy writer.
Throughout his wide-ranging works, it becomes apparent that Reed incorporates the impact of Afro Americans on the culture of the United States in the corpus of American letters. His tone and style are sometimes of satire and parody, but his intentions are deadly stern, as evidenced by his numerous essays advancing his major contribution—in the art of neo-hoodism.
Recently, critics have inadequately labeled Reed’s fiction, and have deemed his collection of works as less interesting than his earlier, more notorious writings. To the naïve reader, these novels seem more straightforward in their plots and messages, and seem to have a much less tentative technique. However, the ostensive clarity is in fact part of a much more intricate and inventive style than that which can be characterized as “rhetorical” in the broadest and most enveloping sense. In Reed’s Reckless Eyeballing, the overall storyline has a such deeply developed foundation that the plot, theme, and character are built primarily on the way which the spectators will interpret and possibly misconstrue the novel. Reed stretches the definition of the rhetorical aspects of the literary text as part of a larger attempt to reformulate how his own works relate to the African American folklore. Critics have noted that African American writers often are particularly aware of their precursors and traditions. Reed, however, not only carefully positions himself in relation to tradition in the abstract, but also anticipates in the novel’s plot and structure towards the reaction of actual readers who shares that tradition, in a problematic way. Indeed, this reception in Reed’s recent fiction becomes the primary “context” of the novel. The drive to reconsider how we are to trace the African-American traditions and to what degree in which that tradition can remain independent of the readings given it by conventional American literary culture comes from this implication. In order to further understand such rhetorical workings, one can explore Reed’s recent novel, Reckless Eyeballing (1986).
Critics and skeptics almost unanimously agree that Ishmael Reed is assaulting feminism in Reckless Eyeballing. His central character, Ian Ball, is known as a notorious sexist, yet we witness Ball’s suffering during his harassment by powerful women in the theater world. As Reed climatically summarizes Ball’s persecution by unveiling him as “two-headed,” he seems to be using that customary African-American trope of black “double-consciousness.” This trope is divided into two identities: one partially created by the white hegemony, which is more acceptable; the other disconcerting to that same mainstream society, but more authentic, defines black perception. By identifying the trope conventionally, we stammer straight into Reed’s trap, a common mistake by Reed’s critics.
Reed revises double-consciousness as “two-headedness”; he consequently uses this latter term to submit both to an alternative kind of split consciousness that unreservedly parodies double-consciousness. This kind of split consciousness (or two-headedness) not only allows a person to respond to individuals as unique entities, but also to make gross ethnic, racial, and sexual generalizations. With this two-headedness, one is able to like a Jew but consider anti-Semitic slanders. Similarly one can spout feminist hostility about men, yet recognize individual men to whom they do not apply. It is important to understand this form of two-headedness, because it allows one to: read the text more effectively, and to explain why it has so often been misinterpreted. Reed plays both forms of two-headedness against one another, deceiving the reader by delivering what we think we ought to be given. And just as Ball’s struggle in New York is played out on the fictional (and literal) stage, so too does the friction between these two forms of two-headedness clearly exemplify the politics of literary reception. Through this subtle metafiction, Reed ultimately comments or “signifies” on the reading and misinterpretation produced from the readers expectations. Through anticipation and discouragement such prejudiced interpretations of Reckless Eyeballing, Reed exposes the racial and sexual stereotypes that infuse mainstream literary reception.
On the most elementary level, Reckless Eyeballing tells the story of playwright Ian Ball’s ascend to fame in New York. However, Reed focuses his novel on the price Ball plays for his triumph; a price on which Reed insists even in the scene of his protagonist’s success:
Broadway. People in mink coast arriving from the suburbs. Chartered busses in front of the theater. Interviews. Women. Gol-lee, he said to himself. He was becoming “blamable.” Producers would be lining up. Three-hour lunches. Talk show. People magazine. Parties. If only Cheste Himes and Jake Brashfor were less controversial, more amiable, more tones down. If only they had cooled it. They could have had all of this too. (116-17)
By assuming a second role at odds with his more authentic identity (by “cooling it”), Ball divides his individuality in two; this split is the most obvious form of two-headedness.
This two-headedness echoes the traditional African-American theme of “double-consciousness.” W.E.B. Du Bois describes this traditional trope, this figurative construct for representing black experience, in The souls of Black Folk:
After the Egyptian and the Indian, the Greek and Roman, The Teuton and Mongolian, The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born worth a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, --a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused concept and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unrecognized strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keep it from being torn asunder. (Gates 722-23)
The reconciling of these two “selves” is a key theme of the most common and traditional form of African American writing, the autobiographical novel of entrance into white society. Reed makes clear throughout the novel that Ball is torn between just such irreconcilable drives—between a more basic or genuine but often controversial self and a politically smart identity. In the background of Ball’s struggle in the New York literary scene is the mystery of the “Flower Phantom,” who throughout the novel attacks prominent feminists and shaves their heads; the Flower Phantom turns out to be Ball’s schizophrenic alternate irreconcilable drives: “Ian’s head told him that this man was a lunatic who should be put away for a long time, but his gut was cheering the man on. His head was Dr. Jekyll, but his gut was Mr. Hyde” (51). When Reed finally introduces the actual figure of two-headedness by the end of the novel, he climactically foregrounds the mental conflict on which he has more subtly insisted throughout the novel. However, before Ball was born, we discover, that he had been hexed: in jealous anger, his father’s first wife declared that Ball “would be born a two-head, of two minds, the one not knowing what the other was up to” (146). What is important for the reexamination of Reckless Eyeballing, however, is not the cultural opposition two-headedness suggests, but the conventionality of the form through which Reed asserts the opposition. Although the opposed characteristics associated with white and black cultures are consistent with his previous works, Reed’s use of the trope of two-headedness with its basis in the tradition of double-consciousness belies his characteristic rejection of “expected” forms of African-American literature. Loop Garoo, the central character of Reed’s second novel, Yellow Black Radio Broke-Down, clearly addresses such expectations and asserts the individuality and freedom of artistic form:
What’s your beef with me Bo Shimo, what if I write circuses? No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons. (36)
Given that Reed rejects the expected and acceptable forms of minority writing, it would be surprising if his use of two-headedness were so decorous and conventional. Reed’s subordination of gender to ethnic issues plays on one another “stereotype”— the reader’s personal assumption about Reed’s own sexism. Reed’s antifeminism remains a powerful force in his writing in part because it instances the crucial issue of the subordination of the individual and all other cultural issues to an overarching ethnic basis for society. However, it can be perceived that Reed’s use of this apparently typical sexism is to trick the readers into reading the novel in a way to reveal their own cultural assumption about the African-American tradition. The use of two-headedness and the interaction it has within the novel must be understood in order to grasp Reed’s literary style. Henry Louis Gates’s discussion of “signifying” and intersexuality in black literature provides a starting place for understanding how these two highly divergent forms of two-headiness interact in Reckless Eyeballing. The term “signifying” in African-American culture has the specialized meaning of repeating another’s discourse with some difference and with the purpose of parody and revision. Gates applies the concept of signifying to the black literary tradition in general: “It is clear that black writers read and critique other black texts as an act of rhetorical self-definition. Our literary tradition exists because of these precisely charitable formal literary relationship, relationships of signifying” (693). According to gates, the black literary tradition has developed because of an implicit intersexuality such that, as a matter of course, any text must in some way modify the trope and forms used by its precursors to represent black experience. Whether or not individual readers come to the novel expecting the trope of double-consciousness, with expectations that stress the generality of black experience and the universal application of simple tropes to explain that experience through the use of this clarity, Reed encourages them to accept that explicit trope of two-headedness and thus to associate themselves with the traditional expectations of African American literature. The frustration that readers find when trying to apply that satisfying final trope to the novel as a whole in order to unify and explain the strivings of its character makes obvious how useless and misleading simple “labels” are in general, and the traditional expectations of universal black literary forms in particular can be. At the same time that the readers realize the danger of generalized statements and the extent to which society provides specific “labels” for ethnic groups, they recognize that the belief created by the literary establishment in the traditional and generalized representation of black experience is wrong and had, in fact, led to their initial misreading of the novel. Although Reckless Eyeballing has been called “an instance of the diminution of power [Reed’s] work of the 1980’s has manifested, compared to his truly innovative work of the 1960’s and 1970’s” (fox 79), but the information presented suggests that Reed uses more complex and innovative style than his much-praised early work. What differentiates these two styles is how Reed uses signifying to interrelate the African-American and mainstream literary traditions.

Works Cited
Dick, Bruce, and Pavel Zemliansky. The Critical Response to Ishmael Reed. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999. Print.
Reed, Ishmael, Bruce Dick, and Amritjit Singh. Conversations with Ishmael Reed. Jackson: University of Mississippi, 1995. Print.
Settle, Elizabeth A., and Thomas A. Settle. Ishmael Reed, a Primary and Secondary Bibliography. Boston, MA: G.K. Hall, 1982. Print.
Du Bois, W. E. Burghardt. The souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. “The ‘Blackness of Blackness’: A Critique of the Sign And the Signifying Monkey.” Critical Inquiry 9 (1983): 685-723