The Mundus

N.H. Pritchard

The Mundus is Norman Pritchard’s magnum opus, a mysterious work that is both visual and poetic, literary and mystical. The work was composed between 1965 until at least July 1971, a six-year period during which the author refined and reworked its pages, seeking out new literary forms alongside personal transcendence. As Pritchard mentions in a letter to Ishmael Reed in 1968, “Literature in and of itself doesn’t seem to have a broad enough scope for me anymore.” Despite its ambitions and grand scope, The Mundus has gone unpublished for over fifty years.

Subtitled “a novel with voices,” The Munduscombines Pritchard’s earlier poetic innovations with his growing interest in theosophy, exploring a spiritual terrain he enigmatically dubbed the transreal. Appropriately, this lost masterpiece represents some of Pritchard’s most challenging work, with the text proceeding in small leaps and sublime fractures, stuttering across the page with sonic and visual momentum as it threads through an immersive, textual mist comprised solely of the letter “o”.

Pritchard found early success with his books The Matrix and EECCHHOOEESS, experimental texts that, in part, bear the imprint of the avant-garde arts, music, and poetry communities of the late 1960s, in particular the Umbra group, a collective of Black poets of which he was a leading member. But The Mundus finds Pritchard at his most radical and revelatory, putting forth a profound act of negation, while it delves readers into a primordial soundscape populated by language’s essential building blocks. An early pillar of Black poetics and a world unto itself, The Mundus must be sounded out not only with the mind, but also with the mouth, body, and soul.