Typos

We've barely started Mumbo Jumbo, and Ishmael Reed has straightaway thrown convention-breaking text at us: a distinct lack of quotation marks; the use of 1 in place of one; and Chapter 1 before the title page and everything else that usually comes before the story begins. However, the most subtle broken convention, yet the most startling when you notice it, are the typos scattered in the text.

Usually, if there's a typo within a published text, there will only be one or two, maybe three if the editing staff was really sleepy. But Mumbo Jumbo has a quite a few (four in the first sixty pages, by my count). Some of them are quite unfortunate - a "Jew Grew" rather than "Jes Grew" on page 17, for one - but with so many typos sprinkled throughout the text, I started to seriously question whether these were mere mistakes or if Reed had intentionally placed them there.

What tipped me off was a passage on page 47, when Reed is describing the sort of Dirty Work the Wallflower Order does to people who threaten the Atonist Path. He writes,

"Their writings were banished, added to the Index of Forbidden Books or sprinkled with typos as a way of undermining their credibility."

Since the Wallflower Order seems to be protecting all things Western and Mumbo Jumbo is a book with voodoo and African culture in it, Reed sprinkling his book with typos makes his book seem like a 'banished' book that had undergone edits by the Order,  a way of making his fictional Wallflower Order come to life. But this is pure speculation on my part.