Oreo (21 page)

What makes this quirky novel accessible, despite its idiosyncrasy, is Ross’s lively
appropriation of popular culture genres, including jokes, cartoons, graffiti, advertising,
palmistry, cookbooks, and dream books. Ross borrows as heavily from such sources as she does
from the culture of high literacy represented by classical literature and “great books,”
dictionaries, thesauruses, and other reference works, as well as the scholarly essays,
handbooks, and bureaucratic pamphlets of academics, technical writers, and other
specialists. Oreo borrows without prejudice from elite as well as popular forms of writing
and speech, just as she takes equal pleasure in European classical music and “singing
telegrams well sung” (178). Ross exploits the double-edged humor of jokes incorporating
Yiddish in particular and of “ethnic humor” in general. On the one hand, Yiddish is
popularly associated with a certain brand of “Jewish humor”; on the other hand, Yiddish as a
language of foreigners, immigrants, or ghettoized Jews may simply “sound funny” to
non-Yiddish speakers. Ross also suggests that ethnic humor is a significant aspect of the
serious business of constructing American identities within a mainstream culture that
rejects some while appropriating other aspects of diverse ethnic groups. As the insider
humor of a minority group crosses over into American popular culture, becoming ethnic humor,
it allows some members of the marginalized community to make a living by laughing at what
makes an ethnic minority group seem “funny” or strange or incomprehensible to others.

As often happens, one minority ethnic group can also be pitted against another when one
group is comically portrayed or caricatured by the other. Ross satirically examines just
such scenarios, although she departs from the cultural script with a wisecracking heroine
who feels free to claim or discard whatever she wishes of African American, Jewish American,
and “mainstream” American cultures. Like its eponymous heroine,
Oreo
is a hybrid, a
product of racial and cultural miscegenation. While
Oreo
can claim a high-culture
pedigree as an innovative literary work retelling a classical Greek myth, Ross also
appropriates the lowbrow shtick practiced by performers of stand-up comedy, along with the
brisk hucksterism brought to you by advertising copywriters who collaborate with actors and
directors in the making of commercials for radio and television. Jokes, cartoons, graffiti,
and advertising cohabit with linguistics, classical mythology, picaresque novels, and
feminist manifestos as influences on the construction of the novel.

In
Oreo
the ancient Greek myth of Theseus’ journey into the Labyrinth becomes a
linguistically riotous feminist tall tale of a young black woman’s passage from Philadelphia
to New York in search of her white Jewish father. Ross’s brain-teasing humor gives
Oreo
its distinctive wit. It is essentially a ludic text, full of verbal games,
jokes, puns, and puzzles. Ross clearly delighted in inviting readers to play along with her
rollicking parody of classical myth. However, there is also a serious aspect to her
heroine’s playful wrangling with language. The Labyrinth that Theseus entered was a kind of
game created by Daedalus for King Minos of Crete; but the intricate maze served the serious
purpose of corralling the violent Minotaur. In certain Greek myths, solving a riddle is a
test of the hero’s ingenuity, suggesting that life itself is a game of wits. Oreo’s journey
is not merely a whimsical comic adventure, but also a meaningful quest for self-knowledge.
As she seeks the answer to the riddle of her origins, word games entertain the heroine in
her solo journey, and keep her wits sharpened for verbal duels with the assorted characters
she encounters on the streets of New York, who correspond to the bandits that Theseus slays
on his overland journey from Troezen to Athens.

A satire on relations between African Americans and Jews, as well as a topsy-turvy
treatment of racial and ethnic shibboleths and stereotypes in American popular culture,
Oreo
is also a formally inventive picaresque novel written as a series of
language games, comic translations, bilingual wisecracks, and arch etymological puns that
call to mind crazily erudite vaudeville routines performed by comedian Professor Irwin
Corey; elaborately constructed shaggy dog stories with absurdly far-fetched punch lines
delivered with the raised eyebrow of Groucho Marx; the high hipster monologues of Lord
Buckley; and the X-rated comedy of Lenny Bruce, Redd Foxx, and Richard Pryor. Ross’s
linguistic range stretches from scholarly wit and airy erudition to vernacular dialects and
stand-up comedy shtick. The author’s etymological puns trace her tongue back to its Greek
and Latin roots, at the same time that her novel updates an ancient myth with several new
twists, including a heroic feminist protagonist whose Labyrinth is the New York subway
system, and whose Minotaur is not a bull-headed man but a mannish bulldog named Toro. Like
James Joyce’s
Ulysses
, possibly one of its models, Ross’s novel is, on a smaller
scale, a zesty, pun-filled parody of a classical myth.

Oreo’s tongue-in-cheek mimicry of the Greek hero underscores Ross’s cheekiness as an
African American woman who travesties both James Joyce and the Greeks while blithely seeking
her place in a Western literary tradition. Ross’s clever parody is wildly irreverent in many
respects, drawing interesting parallels between the macho hero Theseus, who is credited with
the invention of wrestling, and her militantly feminist heroine, Oreo, who uses verbal wit
and martial arts to dispatch her male adversaries. Like Theseus, when Oreo comes of age, she
sets off to find an absentee father who has left behind clues to the “secret of her birth”
and tokens of a paternal legacy, “sword and sandals,” traditionally passed from father to
son.

If Theseus’ entry into the Labyrinth suggests the masculine hero’s return to the womb
followed by the rebirth of a new self through the feminine power of his guide, Ariadne,
Oreo’s quest to meet her deadbeat dad suggests a feminist daughter’s claim to self-knowledge
as well as her determination to challenge patriarchy and to contest the phallic power of the
male. Unlike Theseus and the Minotaur, who owe their existence to the perverse promiscuity
of gods and aristocrats, Oreo is the legitimate offspring of a middle-class couple who
happen to be of different races and religions; and unlike other feminist heroines of the
1970s, Oreo remains virginal throughout her often risky adventures. Although Ross stirs racy
jokes and spicy sexual innuendo into the mix of
Oreo
, it is perhaps because of
conventional strictures on the sexual expressiveness of black women that Ross prefers to
demonstrate her heroine’s physical and intellectual prowess in martial and verbal arts
rather than in sexual adventures such as those of Erica Jong’s Isadora Wing in
Fear of
Flying
, or Rita Mae Brown’s Molly Bolt in
Rubyfruit Jungle
, two novels
published in the year before
Oreo
appeared.

As a literary heroine, Christine “Oreo” Clark is both particular in her individual and
cultural identity and universal in her quest for self-knowledge. Though Oreo is a physically
beautiful young woman, what is most striking is her ability to amuse herself in any
situation, owing to her speculative intelligence and wry sense of humor. Her attention to
verbal quirks and habits of speech defines her character and calls the reader’s attention to
the artifice of language as a cultural construct, demonstrating the materiality as opposed
to the transparency of the spoken and written word. Christine Clark, nicknamed Oriole (the
bird), but called Oreo (the cookie), is the offspring of an African American mother and a
Jewish father. Oreo’s parents divorce shortly after her younger brother is born, and she
grows up knowing only the black side of her family: her African American mother, Helen, her
brother, Moishe (called Jimmie C.), and her mother’s parents, James and Louise Clark. Each
member of the family has a different idiosyncratic relationship to language, thus
contributing to Oreo’s semiotic competence and opening the text to a variety of verbal
experiments and variations on the spoken and written word.

James, Oreo’s black grandfather, is speechless following an immobilizing stroke that occurs
minutes after hearing that his daughter “was going to wed a Jew-boy” (3). Her grandmother
Louise speaks an almost incomprehensible southern dialect. Helen, Oreo’s mother, converses
in standard English sprinkled with Yiddish she learned from her father, who before his
stroke ran a mail-order publishing business selling religious publications to an exclusively
Jewish clientele. Oreo’s mother is a gifted professional musician and eccentric amateur
mathematician who ponders whimsical “head equations” whenever she suffers from boredom or
distress. Oreo’s younger brother, Jimmie C., expresses himself with a secret musical
language of his own invention, and prefers to sing rather than speak. When a neighbor’s
tomcat loses a fight with an alley cat, the woman announces, “My cat’s a coward.” The
sensitive Jimmie C., who has put his fingers in his ears during the cat fight, hears “Mah
cassa cowah,” thus providing the family with a strange new idiolect:

Ross’s novel can be read as a deliberate extension of the possibilities for expression,
humor, self-defense, intellectual stimulation, and aesthetic pleasure in the various mother
tongues or invented languages that the heroine can claim as her own, from the almost
unrepresentable dialect of her African American grandmother to the code-switching “Yidlish”
that is the lingua franca of several relatives on both sides of her family. In addition to
the vernaculars of her own blood kin, Oreo can also claim fluency in the salty street talk
of hustlers, pimps, and prostitutes, as well as the obscure erudition of cranky scholars.

Oreo’s ability to speak and communicate with a diverse cast of characters is a skill she
cannot take for granted. Her grandfather is silent for much of the novel; her grandmother
speaks a southern dialect alien to the northeast; her brother sings a secret invented
language that resembles a cross between baby talk and the ooga-booga lingo of natives in old
Tarzan movies. Oreo hears in his babbling a “radical” new language that serves as an
extravagant means of self-expression and self-defense, like black slang or the arcane scat
of bebop hipsters.

Ross seems to anticipate hip-hop culture’s technologies of sampling and distorting sound at
the same time that she satirizes the “mainstream” culture’s marginalization and
appropriation of racial and ethnic difference, when Oreo substitutes for her actor father in
the Harlem studio of Slim Jackson, the mute “Mr. Soundman.” Pitching the products of “Tante
Ruchel’s Kosher Kitchen,” she performs a shmaltzy shtick aimed at Jewish consumers. At the
very moment that she is searching for her Jewish roots, tracing her father through the
brothels and sound studios that are his accustomed haunts, Oreo replays her father’s
sold-out commercialism, even as her performance in the radio commercial calls into question
the whole idea of authentic ethnic identity. With the close proximity of commercial
recording studio and bordello, Ross satirically notes the pimping of creativity that
capitalist cultural production requires. Significantly, both establishments are located in
Harlem, where Oreo’s father sells his talent in order to buy time with black prostitutes and
to provide his wife with domestic help (also black women).

The satirical force of Ross’s parodic inversions relies on the reader’s awareness of
historical roles in which African Americans and Jews have been cast in the making of popular
culture. Oreo’s passable impersonation of a Jewish housewife inverts such popular culture
scenarios as Al Jolson’s performance in
The Jazz Singer
as the son of a Jewish
cantor who sings “jazz” in blackface in the first major Hollywood film to incorporate
synchronous sound. Oreo’s mimicry also brings to mind the radio production of
Amos ’n’
Andy
, in which characters speaking a comical black vernacular dialect were played by
white actors. The roles of Slim Jackson and Samuel Schwartz invert the more typical
relations of white producers and managers of black talent before the 1960s.

Ross aims her satire at the commercialization of culture that tends to produce reductive
and often degrading caricature, while it deprives many Americans of a richer, livelier
linguistic heritage. Although Oreo has an appreciation of the vernacular, she is also aware
of the power of the stereotype, which she manipulates to her own tactical advantage. The
closer Oreo comes to unraveling the clues that will enable her to find her father and
discover “the secret of her birth,” the more she relies on her talent for improvisation and
impersonation. She moves from her conventionally essentialist performance of Jewishness as
the niece of “Tante Ruchel” to an equally stereotypical performance of blackness as a spy in
her father’s house. At one point she impersonates a domestic day-worker in order to glean
insider information about the Schwartz family, pumping their black housekeeper for juicy
details as they gossip together like yentas. Later, impersonating the family’s trusted
factotum and confronted with an officious medical professional, Oreo’s acting combines
African American vernacular with body language borrowed from Hollywood’s stereotypical black
servants, in a calculated ploy to dig deeper into the Schwartz family’s business and
discover the secret withheld by her father.