Blood of Mugwump: A Tiresian Tale of Incest

by Doug Rice

Rice's parasitical language is akin to the acts of those naked 18th century pirates of desire. In  Blood of Mugwump,  Rice cannibalizes the likes of Joyce, Faulkner, Burroughs, Eliot, and a whole host of angelic others. Now trapped inside a kinetic body that is always changing from male to female, Doug Rice (the youngest Mugwump) sets out to discover himself in his sister's body. All the while the familial matriarch, Grandma Mugwump, feeds on the flesh of young Doug. Once through the looking glass, Doug realizes that Caddie (his polysexual Faulknerian nightmare of a sister) is more terrifying and holy than the average saint. A frenzied sexual virus, genetically conveyed, mutates and possesses the meat of Doug's and Caddie's bodies forcing them to love each other in unspeakable, yet classical, ways. 

Genres: Fiction

140 pages, Paperback

First published September 13, 1996

About the author

Doug Rice is the author of When Love Was, Here Lies Memory, An Erotics of Seeing, Dream Memoirs of a Fabulist, Faraway, So Close, Between Appear and Disappear, The Sacred Book of Silence (translated into the German as Das Heilige Buch der Stille), Blood of Mugwump (translated into the French as Le Sang des Mugwump), Skin Prayer: fragments of abject memory, and A Good CuntBoy is Hard to Find. His work has appeared in numerous anthologies qnd journals including Dirty: Dirty, Avant Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation, Alice Redux, Kiss the Sky, Phantoms of Desire, Discourse, Gargoyle, Zyzzyvya, Fiction International, and others. He is the recipient of an Arts Residency at the Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart, Germany) 2010-2012. He teaches Creative Writing and Film Studies. He has a B.A. from Slippery Rock State College, studied for an MA under John Gardner at SUNY-Binghamton, has an MA from Duquesne University and studied for his PhD at the University of Pittsburgh.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 3 out of 5]

A manic fable that has the feel of (more polished and considered) automatic writing. A work of playgiarism (cf. Federman) that uses violent sexual language to tell a warped tale of autobifography (cf. Brooke-Rose). Tiresome in the last third.

[Michael · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book made me genuinely wonder if maybe the NEA should have its funding cut. I don’t shock easily, and this book, if you don’t shock easily, is just the height of tedium.

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

A hallucinatory descent into the meaning of family, of body, and of language. This book is not meant to be read quickly, though its small size may lead some to believe otherwise. While Faulkner wrote exquisitely long, baroque sentences about time and place, threading the reader down long corridors of meaning and allusion, in "Blood of Mugwump" Rice uses short bursts of truncated clauses, chipping away at the skin of the reader until, well within the anti-gravity of the story, you no longer understand what's going on and yet you do, you do, in this primal, in this primordial sense.

In the tradition of Kathy Acker and other postmodernists, this book takes to greater experimental depths what writers such as Helene Cixous and Luce Iragiray unearthed when they broke ground. Gender identity, "writing with invisible ink," subconscious storytelling, all these and more Rice recruits as the officers of his non-story. Those familiar with the writing of James Havoc may be better prepared for the relentlessly transgressive subject matter, but the book's narrative will not be as easy to crack. This is meant to be a riddle. What kind of riddle, I can only guess, though don't let that dissuade you from trying to solve it.

At turns tactile and groping, deaf, loud, bright, and dark, "Blood of Mugwump" becomes the book equivalent of a sensory deprivation tank. Just as with Faulkner, you cannot read this quickly. It will challenge you, it will disturb you and it will frustrate you, but if you give this Chinese finger trap a little slack you'll find in "Blood of Mugwump" a uniquely gratifying experience you're unlikely to find elsewhere.

[Jordan · Rating 3 out of 5]

At the close of this book, I am still not sure whether the person is writing out of artistic passion, working through deep-seated personal issues, or merely imitating Faulkner and Burroughs. The text veers between word salad and poetry. Yet there’s a deep, autobiographical vein amidst the phantasmagoric imagery that’s quite compelling.

[J.C. · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a haunting fairy tale. When reading it I kept seeing the images the sentences were producing, the language of the Mugwump tale, and was often disoriented by how densely extreme it all was.

[Justin Paddock · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have a feeling I am not smart enough to understand this book.