Campus xenophobia and the multicultural project: ethical criticism and Ishmael Reed's 'Japanese by Spring'.

Expensively kept, economically unsound, a spurious and useless political asset in election campaigns, racism is as healthy today as it was during the Enlightenment. (63)

--Toni Morrison, playing in the dark

Although ethical criticism offers a valuable discourse for exploring concepts of community, goodness, and love and their centrality in the moral construction of literary works, it also provides us with a useful methodology for considering the function of these philosophical constructs in regard to the most fractious issues that confront the academy today, the especially divisive notions of culture and race. As Samuel Fleischacker perceptively observes in The Ethics of Culture (1994), "Writers on culture usually show little understanding of what makes an argument or decision ethical, while writers on ethics have rarely done much serious thinking about culture" (ix). Because issues associated with racial prejudice and cultural division continue to plague our post-secondary institutions, they merit particular attention in any study of contemporary academic fiction. The ethical interpretation of these enduring social dilemmas in novels about university life also underscores the tremendous ideological gulf that exists between monoculturalism and multiculturalism, the two disparate schools of thought that dominate the intellectual conversation regarding these subjects. The controversial emergence of the multicultural project in recent decades, as well as the ensuing "culture wars" that bifurcated the national debate over higher education during the late 1980s and early 1990s, demonstrates the incendiary nature of the scholarly and media response to the multiculturalist agenda for engendering an atmosphere of pluralism and racial and cultural inclusiveness in our institutions of higher education.

In Japanese by Spring (1993), Ishmael Reed satirically illustrates the social and intellectual rancor that accompanied the localization of the culture wars during the early 1990s. In addition to depicting the divergent nuances of the scholarly response to multiculturalism, Reed's novel offers a blistering attack upon the various cultural and racial factions of the academy and the bankrupt value systems that he critiques from within its hallowed corridors. Reed's academic satire intersects a number of significant intellectual issues, moreover, including the ethics of multiculturalism, the dangers inherent in the monoculturalist position, and finally, the fundamental notions of authorship and narrative authority. By approaching his text from so many disparate perspectives, Reed demonstrates the ways in which racism and cultural exclusion infect our institutions of higher learning from a wide range of often unexpected locales. In this manner, Reed consistently problematizes the ethical stances of his academic characters in Japanese by Spring, especially those figures who champion the tenets of monoculturalism. In his essay, "Soyinka among the Monoculturalists," for example, Reed reveals his particular antipathy for academics who deride the pluralistic intentions of the multicultural project: "I distrust the monoculturalists' point of view so much that when they praise something I become suspicious," he writes, "and when they condemn something, I feel that there must be something praiseworthy about it" (211). In his Introduction to Multi-Ethnic America: Essays on Cultural Wars and Cultural Peace (1997), Reed describes monoculturalism as an "anti-intellectual coalition" that frequently employs dubious phraseology about a "common culture" in order to resist the ethical mandates of multiculturalism (xvii).

Reed's efforts in support of the multicultural project manifest themselves in his satiric novels directed toward the American institutions that, at least in Reed's estimation, bear the responsibility for the nation's bankrupt cultural value systems. (1) Yet Reed's narratives frequently confound readers because of his intentional elevation of ideology over character in his fictions. The unusual brand of satire that marks Reed's narratives finds its roots in his aesthetic of Neo-HooDooism, which, in the words of Jay Boyer, "refers to those forces which do not lend themselves to an understanding through reason" (8). A complex amalgamation of historical, cultural, and artistic elements, HooDoo perceives the dangerous ways in which social institutions invariably displace, and ultimately control, individual identity through their collective power. In a 1972 interview with John O'Brien, Reed describes his narrative approach:

   When I say that I am working on a "hoodoo" aesthetic I know I'm serious and
   I know what I'm talking about and this falls in line with that. They have
   in Voodoo a thing they call gros-bon-ange, and the gros-bon-ange is that
   which separates from the person after death. It carries all of his
   essential elements, the qualities that make him unique from other
   individuals. And this is what I try to do. I'm not interested in rendering
   a photograph of a person. I'm interested in capturing his soul and putting
   it in a cauldron or in a novel. (35)

In this manner, Reed attempts to reinvigorate fictionally the cultural and moral life of the individual in the face of an omnipresent Western culture. Yet "the evils Reed attacks are not just African-American problems," Kathryn Hume writes, because "his focus on control demonstrates that he belongs to a group of bitter satirists-female and male, black and white--whose experience with cultural lies appalls them" (516). Reed's especially volatile form of satire seeks to expose the ways in which institutions, particularly academic and governmental bodies, abuse their missions in order to maintain their circles of power and fulfill the personal ambitions of their leaders.

"A self-proclaimed saboteur of historical orthodoxy," according to Julian Cowley (1236), Reed explores a variety of satiric targets in Japanese by Spring, a novel that traces Benjamin "Crappie" Puttbutt's quest for tenure on the campus of Jack London College, a den of racism and monocultural education in Oakland, California. Puttbutt encounters racial and cultural prejudice in nearly every quarter of the institution, from the jingoistic student newspaper and the monolithic administration to the exclusionary Department of African-American Studies and the ironically named Department of "Humanity." In Ishmael Reed and the New Black Aesthetic Critics (1988), Reginald Martin writes: "As satire is usually based on real types, Reed draws from history and the news as non-fictional events to satirize America's mono-cultural arrogance and the price paid in the face of that arrogance by those who are not `vital people,' that is, a member of the dominant culture or the moneyed class" (108). In Japanese by Spring, however, institutional power infuses the policy makers and intellectual gatekeepers of Jack London College with the "vitality" of which Martin speaks, although this state of affairs suddenly ends with the purchase of the college by a Japanese conglomerate that subsequently initiates a devastating program of cultural redefinition on campus. As this essay will show, Reed's depiction of Jack London College's existing racial problems--later compounded by the cultural dilemmas that accompany the Japanese occupation of the institution-reveals his interest in highlighting the ways in which any monoculturalist ideology ultimately results in racist and culturally exclusive policies. In this way, Reed offers a scathing commentary on the insular, self-serving philosophy of multiculturalism's opponents. An ethical reading of Japanese by Spring demonstrates the manner in which Reed implicitly composes a moral corrective for the cultural infractions of the monoculturalist agenda. Because of its emphasis upon repairing the cultural and social injustices of the human community, ethical criticism possesses the capacity for producing meaningful critiques of narratives such as Reed's Japanese by Spring that confront the moral challenges inherent in contemporary academic life. By using the interpretive strategies established by the ongoing project of ethical criticism, theorists such as Wayne C. Booth and Martha C. Nussbaum advocate the interpretive power of ethical criticism, as well as the value of its critical machinery to scholarly investigations regarding the nature of literary character, the cultural landscapes of fiction, and the ethical motivations of satire, the narrative maneuver that Booth ascribes to our desire to "make and remake ourselves" (14).

In Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (1990), Nussbaum illustrates the nature of ethical criticism's recent emergence as a viable interpretive paradigm: "Questions about justice, about well-being and social distribution, about moral realism and relativism, about the nature of rationality, about the concept of the person, about the emotions and desires, about the role of luck in human life--all these and others are debated from many sides with considerable excitement and even urgency," she writes (169-70). In its desire to examine the ethical nature of artistic works, ethical criticism seeks to create a meaningful bond between the life of the narrative and the life of the reader. (2) In addition to functioning as a self-reflexive means for critics to explain the contradictory emotions and problematic moral stances that often mask literary characters, ethical criticism provides its practitioners with the capacity for positing socially relevant interpretations by celebrating the Aristotelian qualities of living well and flourishing. In this way, ethical criticism evokes the particularly "human character" of literature of which Tobin Siebers extols the merits in The Ethics of Criticism (10). Because of Reed's own interest in satirizing monoculturalism and the unethical manner in which ideological regimes enforce compliance with their political and cultural agendas, ethical criticism provides a particularly useful method for reading Japanese by Spring.

Ethical criticism offers a powerful mechanism, moreover, for explaining the manner in which Reed's HooDoo aesthetic operates in his fictions as an unconventional means for capturing a given character's essence in order to satisfy the novelist's satirical aims. Reed's commitment to the HooDoo aesthetic--and its emphasis upon ideology over character--produces many of the reading difficulties that often antagonize and alienate his audience. In contrast with many practitioners of the academic novel, Reed employs his characters as one-dimensional vessels for his critiques of monoculturalism and university life. Unlike David Lodge's Philip Swallow--one of the multidimensional characters from Lodge's trilogy of academic novels, Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses (1975), Small World: An Academic Romance (1984), and Nice Work (1988)--Puttbutt functions as the one-dimensional vehicle for Reed's satire in Japanese by Spring. While Lodge revels in his characters' interpersonal experiences and satirizes academic life via their adventures at scholarly conferences and as they pursue the latest intellectual trends, Reed manipulates the deliberately flat characters of his fictions in order to achieve his narrative objectives. For Lodge, academic characters such as Swallow and Morris Zapp provide him with opportunities for satirizing academic life as they eagerly divert themselves with the triviality of departmental infighting, pedantic scholarly debate, and an unceasing tide of international conferences and clandestine affairs. In Japanese by Spring, Reed employs his literary characters as ideological types, or, in the case of Puttbutt, as ideological ciphers via which the novelist can contrast the exclusionary politics of monoculturalism with the pluralist aims of multiculturalism. Because Reed eschews conventional characterization in favor of the depiction of the HooDoo essences of his characters, the symbolic representations of his protagonists and the ideological impact of the rhetoric and images that they encounter take on greater significance in his fictions.

In Japanese by Spring, Puttbutt, an African American junior professor at Jack London College and a product of the affirmative action era, adopts an accommodationist attitude in order to secure tenure from the institution's predominantly white power structure. In addition to questioning the ethical stances of the institutional forces that seek to derail Puttbutt's campaign for tenure at Jack London College, Reed critiques Puttbutt's self-effacing motives when the Japanese regime engages in its own monocultural power play with his apparently eager support. A former Black Panther, erstwhile chairperson of the black caucus at the Air Force Academy, and the author of a Master's thesis in which he traces instances of racism in Shakespeare's Othello, Puttbutt abandons his progressive racial agenda when he arrives at Jack London College in an effort to curry the favor of the institution's largely white administration, a coterie of right-wing intellectuals led by President Bright Stool, allegedly hired by the Board of Trustees "because he vowed to put an end to capricious demands for a global university" (41).

As the narrative of Japanese by Spring unfolds, Puttbutt enjoys a substantial international reputation as the author of the recent best-seller, Blacks, America's Misfortune, a volume in which he inaugurates his persona as an African American apologist. "We blacks must buckle down so that the whites will respect us," he tells a television reporter. "Unless we do so, we will become like some of our less fortunate brothers and sisters; part of a permanent underclass." In this way, Puttbutt registers his racially stylized image as a "team player." "He hoped that those who were about to reward him lifetime security were listening," Reed writes of Puttbutt's television interview, and that they "would read these quotes. Would respect him. Would award him tenure" (18-19). Despite the publication of numerous critical articles and frequent invitations to participate in European speaking engagements, lectures that, remarkably, account for more than 20 percent of his income, Puttbutt seems unable to earn tenure among his less prolific, and often less celebrated, colleagues. (3)

As the meeting of Puttbutt's tenure committee approaches, he intensifies his efforts to win support from the college's largely white establishment, as well as from the powerful chairman of the Department of African-American Studies, Dr. Charles Obi, and Jack London College's most generous alumnus, Robert Bass, Sr. Although Dr. Jack Milch, chairman of the Department of Humanity, reassures Puttbutt about the prospects of his upcoming tenure hearing, the junior professor becomes concerned during his visit with Milch because of his senior colleague's overt feminist posturing. While in Milch's office, "Puttbutt noticed that the entire walls were covered with photos of Anita Hill," Reed writes. "Every inch. Covers of magazines with Anita Hill's picture. Newspaper clippings" (22). Puttbutt also sees volumes of verse on Milch's desk by April Jokujoku, a prominent African American feminist rumored to be considering a lucrative position at Jack London College. While Puttbutt prepares for his visit with Dr. Obi, Effie Singleton, one of the chairman's numerous secretaries, warns Puttbutt about impending budget cuts and the fragility of his position on campus: "The word is," she tells him, "that they're going to bring in April Jokujoku to take your job" (27). During his visit with Dr. Obi, a monoculturalist practitioner of Afrocentrism and an advocate of the African language of Yoruba, Puttbutt endures a lecture from the senior professor regarding his "counterproductive" behavior. "Man, you one serious motherfucker," Obi observes; "you never come to the black faculty cocktail parties, and the liberals in the Humanity department say that you don't mix with them. How do you expect to get ahead if you're not collegial?" Obi exclaims (31). Rather than merely focusing on Puttbutt's response to his senior colleagues' remonstrations, Reed concentrates our attention instead upon the monoculturalist parallels between Milch's accommodationist rhetoric, evidenced most notably by the conspicuous images of Hill and the prominently placed volume of Jokujoku's poetry, and Obi's strident Afrocentrism. By highlighting these signifiers of academic power and acceptance against the flat contrast of Puttbutt's one-dimensional character, Reed succeeds in demonstrating the junior professor's tenuous position in the academy.

In his abiding effort to win tenure at any cost, Puttbutt also tacitly contributes to the college's racial malaise through his regressive accommodationist persona. In the classroom, for example, he only tolerates the outrageous, white supremacist behavior of Robert Bass, Jr., so as not to antagonize his student's father, the powerful owner of Oakland's multinational Caesar Synthetics and the college's most spirited patron. Sporting a shaved head and wearing a swastika armband, Bass, Jr., frequently disrupts Puttbutt's lectures with racial diatribes. He also irritates the junior professor through his prejudicial caricatures of Puttbutt in the college's right-wing newspaper, Koons and Kikes. Yet the administration of Jack London College remains "reluctant to discipline some of the right-wing students," Reed notes, "because the students received full backing from right-wing corporations and law firms" (14). Reed's depictions of student racism in the post-civil rights era find their origins in the cultural and political realities of contemporary post-secondary institutions. As Shelby Steele observes: "What has emerged on campus in recent years--as a result of the new equality and of affirmative action and, in a sense, as a result of progress--is a politics of difference, a troubling, volatile politics in which each group justifies itself, its sense of worth and its pursuit of power, through difference alone" (178).

Yet Puttbutt's single-minded drive for tenure prompts him to remain silent regarding Jack London College's own "politics of difference," to operate instead as an apologist for racial unrest on campus. During his television interview, for instance, the junior professor effects a frown of concern to underscore the gravity of the college's racial conflicts, while simultaneously undermining the progressive efforts of African American students in order to bolster his personal crusade for job security by currying the favor of the white campus power structure:

   "The black students bring this on themselves," he said, sucking on a
   menthol cigarette.... "With their separatism, their inability to fit in,
   their denial of mainstream values, they get the white students angry. The
   white students want them to join in, to participate in this generous pie
   called the United States of America. To end their disaffiliation from the
   common culture. Black students, and indeed black faculty, should stop their
   confrontational tactics. They should start to negotiate. They should stop
   worrying these poor whites with their excessive demands. Affirmative
   action. Quotas. They get themselves worked up. And so it's understandable
   that they go about assaulting the black students. The white students are
   merely giving vent to their rage." (6)

By coldly accepting the white students' racist behavior as the natural product of their anger and racial animus, Puttbutt abdicates his ethnic identity for the express purpose of securing lifetime employment among the culturally and ethically fractured environs of Jack London College, as well as for the possibility of someday having the financial capacity to live among the college elite in posh Oakland Hills, the predominantly white neighborhood overlooking the campus. Yet community, Lawrence Blum warns, "should not come at the expense of racial justice and cultural identity" (200). In Puttbutt's ethically challenged world, however, the interpersonal consequences of his rage for professional acceptance seem insignificant in comparison with his desire to align himself with the prevailing ideology.

Puttbutt supplements his tireless enthusiasm for tenure with his study of the Japanese language, an enterprise that he began in Colorado Springs during his tour of duty with the Air Force. He believes that knowledge of Japanese will provide him with the key to his future, although he sycophantically tells Dr. Marsha Marx, the head of the Women's Studies department, that he wants to learn Japanese in order to translate the verse of "some medieval women court poets" (58). In fact, "Puttbutt figured that with Japanese under his belt he would adjust to the new realities of the coming postsettler era," Reed writes, "a time when the domination of the United States by people of the same background would come to an end" (47). In this way, Reed demonstrates Puttbutt's secret accord with the multicultural project, despite his monocultural public persona. While awaiting the college's tenure decision, Puttbutt travels weekly to downtown Oakland, where he studies Japanese with Dr. Yamato, the tutor who introduces the junior professor to Japanese by Spring, Puttbutt's textbook for his language studies, as well as the Ur-text of Reed's novel. Puttbutt feels that he can acquire Japanese as easily as he had once mastered the artifice of literary criticism: "All you had to do was string together some quotes from Benjamin, Barthes, Foucault, and Lacan and you were in business," Puttbutt muses (49).

Despite the assurances from the chairpersons of the African-American Studies, Women's Studies, and Humanity departments, the college, fulfilling Effie's covert prophecy, ultimately denies Puttbutt the tenure that he so covets, although "they hoped that he would continue on the year-to-year basis and that they felt him to be an asset to the department" (69). His anger reaches a fever pitch as he recounts his recent, blasphemous activities on behalf of job security: "denouncing affirmative action, criticizing blacks for exploiting white guilt." He remembers writing an editorial against divestment in South Africa; he also recalls arguing that "racism was an illusion" (70). He becomes further outraged when he learns that the administration has utilized the savings from his chimerical promotion in order to procure the services of Jokujoku, who will be appointed full professor in the departments of Women's Studies and African-American Studies at the dazzling sum of $150,000 per semester. The college also promises her an array of computer equipment, two secretaries, a bodyguard, and a mountain retreat, fringe benefits awarded to Jokujoku in spite of the fact, Reed ironically observes, "that her whole pitch was about the oppression of underclass females in the ghettos" (32). (4) Puttbutt's own accommodations at the college amounted to a poorly lit office that he shared with the other lecturers and two teaching assistants. After learning about Jokujoku's appointment, Puttbutt drowns his sorrows, appropriately enough, in several bottles of sake. Again, such scenes resonate, not because of Reed's deliberately indifferent narration of Puttbutt's supreme moment of emotional crisis, but rather, because of the novelist's overt description of the symbolic nuances of cultural power and ideology. By contrasting Jokujoku's astonishing fringe benefits with the junior professor's lowly professional accommodations, Reed highlights the power discrepancies engendered by policies of monoculturalism.

When Puttbutt returns to Jack London College after a long night of turmoil in which he symbolically tries on his old Black Panther beret, he discovers an institution at sea in its own identity crisis. During the night, an unidentified Japanese organization purchases the college for $100 million. The Japanese occupation of Jack London College and their subsequently radical redefinition of its mission, its culture, and its curriculum provides Reed with a valuable means for demonstrating the dangerous results of a monoculturalist agenda. The cultural redefinition of the college by the Japanese also allows Reed to underscore the awesome capacity of racial difference as a mechanism for effecting cultural change. "Race is, by any standard, an unprincipled source of power," Steele notes, "and on campuses the use of racial power by one group makes racial, ethnic, or gender difference a currency of power for all groups" (182). By depicting the Japanese in the act of reshaping the institution in their cultural and historical image, moreover, Reed underscores the derogatory core of racism and its penchant for asserting the superiority of one race over another. As Mitchell Silver observes: "Racism holds that some human groups, defined by their nationality, language, culture, ancestry, or belief systems, are biologically incapable of certain cultural achievements or certain forms of social life" (53). As practitioners of biological racism, the Japanese in Reed's satire reveal the ways in which a monocultural ideology must reconfigure both the historical past and the political landscape of the present in order to implement their program of cultural redefinition.

Capitalizing on his anger against the existing administrative establishment of Jack London College, the Japanese cleverly choose Puttbutt as the vehicle for their monocultural ideology. After being mysteriously summoned to the president's house, Puttbutt discovers the identity of the college's new president, Dr. Yamato, his language tutor. Having forced President Stool into early retirement, Yamato shares with Puttbutt his agenda for "civilizing" the faculty and students of Jack London College. "The reason that the Americans are so backward is because of what they call their core curriculum," he tells Puttbutt. "We will help them.... Show them that there are some things that all educated people must know in order to be culturally literate," he continues. "Get them to realize that there's more to life than Captain Video" (89). After appointing Puttbutt as his second in command and rewarding him with a spacious office, Yamato outlines his plans for altering the college's cultural philosophy. In addition to proposing the dismissal of many of Puttbutt's colleagues, Yamato intends to shut down the Department of Humanity, while collapsing the departments of African Studies, Chicano Studies, Asian-American Studies, Native-American Studies, and African-American Studies into a single unit, the Department of European Studies. Yamato also wishes to eliminate the study of Plato, Milton, and, most notably, Hegel: "This ignorant man maintained that the Chinese had no philosophy. What rubbish," he bellows. "The entire history of Western philosophy could be covered in one week" (90-91). By concentrating our attention upon the manner in which the culturally insular practices of one regime beget those of another, Reed demonstrates the ways in which unregulated bastions of power quickly avail themselves of monoculturalism's politics of hegemony.

Puttbutt engages in the process of culturally redefining Jack London College with unchecked, vengeful glee. He revels in delight, for example, as he informs Dr. Obi and Dr. Milch of the new status of their departments on campus. He particularly enjoys demoting Professor Crabtree, whom he correctly credits with undermining his tenure case, to a lectureship in freshman composition. "Chappie was so happy," Reed writes, "that he was beside himself" (132). As he informs each faculty member about their altered professional status on campus under the Japanese regime, Puttbutt cheerfully presents each stunned employee with a copy of Japanese by Spring. In one instance, Puttbutt finds special satisfaction in a visit from Robert Bass, Sr., who apologizes for his son's white supremacist behavior and indentures Bass, Jr., into functioning as Puttbutt's servant. As a New Critic, Puttbutt takes particular pleasure in the dismissal of Jack London College's avant-garde literary theorists:

   He had sent a letter to the campus deconstructionists, informing them of
   their termination. The letters said you're fired. Those who believed that
   the words "you're fired" meant exactly that could finish the semester.
   Those who felt that the words only referred to themselves would have to
   leave immediately. (132)

In addition to satirizing the unethical ways in which Yamato's regime implements the tutor's monocultural program of Japanese acculturation on campus, Reed clearly questions the spiteful manner in which Puttbutt effects his revenge upon the former elite of Jack London College. Reed further underscores the dangers of monoculturalism by illustrating Puttbutt's enthusiastic absorption of Yamato's cultural doctrine for the express purpose of possessing institutional power.

In addition to renaming the institution after a Japanese war criminal, Yamato disbands the college newspaper and removes the giant statue of Jack London from its esteemed place in the center of campus. He also changes the name of the Student Union building to Isoroku Yamamoto Hall in honor of the mastermind behind the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor. As one faculty member remarks about the new profile of Jack London College, "It's become nothing but an indoctrination center for Japanese propaganda" (153). Yamato later institutes a culturally skewed IQ test for the college's faculty and students, while also expelling all American-born Chinese and Japanese students because he believes that they might act as agents for American interests. Rumors also persist that Yamato tortures student dissenters and drafts attractive coeds into service as geisha girls. (5) After most of the college's faculty and student population fails the IQ test, Yamato considers hiring an entirely Japanese professoriate. "Maybe Americans should be put to work at things that will not strain their capacities," Yamato argues, "wrapping packages and opening doors for their betters, or ladling out ice cream, taking hotel reservations lest they become a permanent underclass among developing nations" (145). Even Puttbutt finds himself increasingly unable to fathom the right-wing fanaticism of Yamato's rage for a Japanese culture unadulterated by the excesses of Western life and thought. "Homogeneous," Reed writes, "Puttbutt was having a humongous pain from this word" (108).

As Yamato's radical monoculturalist agenda becomes even more pronounced on the former campus of Jack London College, the national news media and the American intelligentsia begin to respond to the tutor's despicable campaign against pluralism and

diversity. Yamato's culturally regressive antics particularly vex the multicultural sensibilities of the public persona of Ishmael Reed, who appears as a character within his own narrative. As the antithesis of Roland Barthes's late author who "enters into his own death" when "writing begins" (142), Reed appears in Japanese by Spring as a fully realized representation of his biographical self. "Remember," Reed playfully remarks, "the author was dead in the age of theory" (129). Reed not only undermines traditional conceptions of authority, but also provides himself with yet another voice for registering his disgust with any culturally exclusive program, especially one as derisive and unsettling as Yamato's. (6) Reed's narrative self operates, moreover, as the author's personal forum for undergirding his satire with several useful anecdotes regarding the value of the multicultural project, while also providing readers with an ethical corrective for Puttbutt's perfunctory efforts on behalf of Yamato's monocultural redefinition of Jack London College.

Reed's narrative counterpart makes his most dramatic appearance during a visit to the college's Faculty Club, where he encounters an ebullient Puttbutt at the height of his powers as Yamato's right-hand man. Puttbutt had once written a book review of one of the fictive Reed's novels during his era as an African American apologist. "For those looking for plot, character development, and logic, skip this one," Puttbutt writes about Reed's work. In addition to observing the fawning manner in which Puttbutt's colleagues parade about him, Reed's visit to the Faculty Club allows him to report on the evolution of the junior professor's formerly polemical cultural mindset. "I'm not taking sides anymore," Puttbutt informs Reed; "from now on my policy is one of enlightened self-interest." Puttbutt later tells the novelist about his dream of someday owning a palatial estate in Oakland Hills, while also regaling Reed with his cultural vision of the future. "This is the book that got me to where I am now," he tells the novelist after giving him a copy of Japanese by Spring. "You'd better get with it brother," Puttbutt continues, because "the twenty-first century is going to be a yellow century." Reed's fictive counterpart departs the Faculty Club in a state of confusion regarding Puttbutt's cultural development: "This man who was a one-man black public relations department on behalf of Western civilization was now a big Asia booster," the bewildered novelist muses (131).

Reed's fictional visit with Puttbutt underscores the wide spectrum of the junior professor's cultural state of mind, an intellectual progress that catapults Puttbutt from Black Panther to African American apologist to, finally, a self-interested, ethically vacant capitalist. Reed's appearance as a character in the novel also allows him, as author, to extol the humanistic benefits of multiculturalism, while simultaneously demonstrating what he considers to be the anti-pluralistic agendas of women's studies, Afrocentrism, and Eurocentrism, among other biological and cultural biases. Yet, as Robert Elliot Fox argues in Conscientious Sorcerers (1987), the "danger for Reed" in presenting his public self in his fictions "is that of self-caricature" (6). A number of instances in the novel indeed seem to lend credence to Fox's assertion. At one juncture, for example, Reed writes: "Ishmael Reed was wondering was there no end to the sacrifices he would be called upon to make on behalf of Western civilization" (200). In other moments he refers to himself as "a real Ishmaelite" (46) and "Dear I. R." (187). Unfortunately, Reed's fictional appearance in Japanese by Spring threatens to dilute his very meaningful message regarding the dangers of monoculturalism. As Tsunehiko Kato astutely remarks: "What troubles me about Reed's position is not that he criticizes Eurocentrists, Afrocentrists, or accommodationists among black intellectuals, but rather the way in which he creates the impression that he is the only one doing the right thing" (127).

Reed's activities as a literary character allow him, as a matter of course, to privilege his multicultural agenda over the ethically and culturally questionable voices, at least in his estimation, that he wishes to critique, particularly those of the feminist movement. Like Eurocentrism and Afrocentrism, Reed vilifies feminism for the exclusive nature of what he believes to be its monocultural cause. Reed's attacks upon feminist ideology receive special attention in Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's Letters from the Front (1994). Gilbert and Gubar object to the ways in which the protagonists of Reed's fictions "retaliate against ferocious, predatory feminists who appear to have abrogated the pacts between the sexes and the generations" (357-58). Reed's acerbic characterization of Jokujoku, her outlandish appointment at Jack London College, and the marginalization of Puttbutt in order to satisfy her staggering financial demands seem to support Gilbert and Gubar's conclusion. In his review of Japanese by Spring, Kato similarly admonishes Reed for failing "to do justice to black women writers who deserve credit for raising the level of current debates" (127). Yet Reed ascribes his satire of the feminist movement to his express interest in challenging what he perceives to be its demonization of the African American male. "I have always had a suspicion," he remarks in a 1993 interview with Brace Dick, "that black men have been singled out by the white feminist movement to bear the burden of misogyny" (345). In addition to describing the feminist treatment of African American male culture as "barbarism," Reed defends his enduring battle with the feminist movement as an effort "to try and keep an African-American male heritage intact" (348-49). Reed's elevation of ideology over character in his fictions in order to deliver his cultural salvos clearly succeeds in alienating various social and ethnic factions of his potential readership. Yet his scathing depiction of the powerful trappings of cultural hegemony allows him to underscore the tenuous spaces inhabited by characters like Puttbutt who, despite his overt willingness to accommodate the whims of any dominant ideology in Japanese by Spring, never truly succeed in walking amongst the privileged corridors of cultural and institutional power.

In this way, Reed reminds us of the inherent dangers of any agenda that neglects to avail itself of the values of inclusiveness and pluralism. While the harshness of Reed's critiques of feminism often result in his own vilification as a misogynist, his skepticism about the feminist movement's neglect of the culture of African-American men emerges from his distaste for any even remotely monoculturalist ideology. For this reason, Reed consistently challenges the agenda of Afrocentrism in Japanese by Spring. In addition to mocking Dr. Obi's adoption of the Yoruba tongue, Reed infuses the latter half of his narrative with liberal doses of Yoruba phraseology reproduced without the benefit of English translation. Through his depiction of the Yoruba language, Reed implicitly demonstrates the exclusionary nature of any unfamiliar dialect, and likewise, what he believes to be the monoculturalist ideology of Afrocentrism. Although Reed clearly problematizes the cultural singularity of the Afrocentric movement, he recognizes nevertheless the precarious social status of African Americans in the present day, an uncertain social position that Reed illustrates through his intentionally flat characterization of Puttbutt. As Lucius T. Outlaw cautions, "The increasing social diversity and complexity in America being played out in the debate and efforts regarding multiculturalism present the challenge of once again having to work out what it means to be African and American in the late twentieth century" (48). Reed also laments the separatism that continues to divide the races in contemporary American culture. While he notes somewhat despondently in Airing Dirty Laundry (1993) that "America is a land of distant cousins" (273), Reed offers a remarkably optimistic vision of the future in Japanese by Spring.

Although Puttbutt ultimately flees the racially hostile environs of Jack London College as United States military forces descend upon Yamato's regime and the posh real estate of Puttbutt's beloved Oakland Hills burns in an apocalyptic effigy, he chooses the distant shores of Japan as the next destination on his progress away from the monocultural ideals that plagued his youth and the professional crises of his middle age. In this manner, Reed creates a surprising accommodation in his narrative between the nation of Yamato's ethically bankrupt ideological machine and the Japan of the historical present, with its own possibilities for the inclusive, multicultural future of Reed's vision.

Reed's powerful denunciation of monoculturalism in Japanese by Spring also underscores the ethical potential of multiculturalism as a means for establishing community and embracing difference. As Manthia Diawara notes: "Cultural studies, in its attempts to draw attention to the material implications of the worldviews we assume, often delineates a literal and candid picture of ways of life that embarrass and baffle our previous theoretical understanding of those forms of life" (202). For this reason, Patricia S. Mann adds, "The academy must transform itself in response to the culturally diversified community of students" (208). In his forceful satire of modern American academic life, Reed champions the ethics of multicultural education through his disturbing illustration of the devastating aftermath of an extremist ideology's rise to power. In a 1990 interview with George Paul Csicsery, Reed notes that "in the twentieth century we've seen a lot of disasters happen because of people who thought that they were right and everybody else was wrong" (338). In Japanese by Spring, he implicitly challenges us to consider the possible validity of another point of view, to attempt to understand and embrace racial difference, and to realize, finally, the ethics of cultural studies.

Notes

I am particularly indebted to MELUS's anonymous readers, whose generous commentary helped shape the direction of my essay during its various stages of revision.

(1.) Although Reed actively supports the aims of the multicultural project, he nevertheless problematizes the movement's terminology in a 1995 interview: "We were the first ones to use the term `multicultural,' and I wish we never used it because now it doesn't mean anything. Academia got a hold of it and now it's just a big hustle. Anybody is multicultural" ("Gathering" 373).

(2.) For a useful definition of "ethics" and discussion of its emergence as a viable reading paradigm during the past decade, see Harpham. "Understanding the plot of a narrative," Harpham writes, "we enter into ethics. Ethics will always be at the flashpoint of conflicts and struggles," he continues, "because such encounters never run smooth" (404). As Booth observes, "the word `ethical' may mistakenly suggest a project concentrating on quite limited moral standards: of honesty, perhaps, or of decency or tolerance." In Booth's postulation of an ethical criticism, however, "ethical" refers to "the entire range of effects on the `character' or `person' or `self.' `Moral' judgments are only a small part of it" (8).

(3.) Reed's depiction of Puttbutt's struggle for tenure surely finds its antecedent in the novelist's own tenure dilemmas in the English Department at the University of California at Berkeley during the mid-1970s. The department ultimately denied him tenure because, incredibly, "two colleagues felt that Reed's work was too innovative to win acceptance within the department," according to Jon Ewing. In a 1977 interview with Ewing, Reed recalls the events surrounding his own tenure battle: "I told the chairman of the department that I thought racism was a factor. I didn't say it was a racist decision.... I'm not so simplistic as to believe that it was merely racism. But I think if you get 40 whites in a room, there's going to be some racism, a racist element. I think you could put that into a computer" ("Great Tenure Battle" 219, 221).

(4.) Clearly, Puttbutt's dismay regarding the nature of Jokujoku's outrageous salary and perks hardly results from a monoculturalist ideology, but rather, from an academic world that has come to revere its own star system, as well as to rely upon management models that reward select individuals while marginalizing others. Interestingly, Jokujoku's name derives from the Yoruba word joku-joku, which literally means "corpse-eater" and refers to a bird of prey, the vulture.

(5.) In his review of the novel, Kato objects to the efficacy of Reed's depiction of Yamato's right-wing extremist organization: "Reed's satire on this point is an example of the exaggeration which often characterizes his narratives," Kato argues. "Actually there are no right-wing groups in Japan with clout and money who seek to restore the Shogunate. There is no social and cultural basis for the existence of such groups since the capitalist economic developments dating from World War II. Reed's knowledge of Japan," he adds, "is still rooted in stereotypes of old Japan or images of the new Japan that are narrowly focused on its potential as a market for American commodities" (126-27).

(6.) Reed's depiction of his own public persona contributes to the roman a clef flavor of Japanese by Spring, a novel that also features thinly disguised portraits of the "culture warriors" of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Such figures include, perhaps most notably, Reed's pejorative characterization of D'Gun ga Dinza, a loosely veiled portrait of Dinesh D'Souza, the controversial author of Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus. D'Souza appears in Reed's narrative as an "anti-diversity personality" and a "foreign mercenary" from an "Eastern think tank" (109, 112). In addition to drawing heavily from a wide range of personalities from American popular culture, Reed offers a satiric portrayal of Jack London College's Professor Himmlar Poopovich, a paranoid scholar with a Nazi past who maintains that blacks lack the equivalent brain size of whites, thus undermining their collective intelligence. In this instance, Reed likely targets the phrenological studies of J. Philippe Rushton, a developmental psychologist at the University of Western Ontario. Rushton's arguments regarding race, brain size, and intelligence ignited an international controversy during the early 1990s. Several of his colleagues subsequently called for his dismissal from a tenured professorship as a result of his controversial biological study, Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective.

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Kenneth Womack is Assistant Professor of English at Penn State, Altoona. In addition to serving as co-editor of Oxford University Press's Year's Work in English Studies, he has published numerous articles on twentieth-century British and American literature. His anthology, Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Culture, and Literary Theory (co-edited with Todd F. Davis), is forthcoming from the University Press of Virginia.