Chig Dunford and the idea of life in cycle: from insouciance to consciousness, and conversely
Résumé
The concept of cycle is among the main ones used by William Melvin Kelley in his last-published novel Dunfords Travels Everywheres (1970). This idea is to be understood physically as well as in the implicit construction of one of the two protagonists in that novel, Chig Dunford.
The presentation I intend to do will aim at showing the inner cycles in the construction of this character’s identity as an African American who comes to rediscover himself as such. The structuration of the novel itself is part and parcel of this construction. Indeed, as the reader opens the novel, the story is taken in medias res, but it is only by a detailed analysis that one realizes that, as a matter of fact, the real beginning of the story is chapters later and that the novel’s incipit is actually and really the continuation of its end – creating a never-ending process of story-telling and thus enclosing the characters (and by extension the African Americans) in a never ending struggle for their rights.
To that extent, the characters and more specifically Chig Dunford, never stop going from a relative insouciance as the novel instigates to an awareness that becomes more and more sensitive as it develops. Chig goes from the situation of an American Negro who gets along with his white friends in an imaginary European country, to feeling really apprehensive and caring about 20th century African slaves being carried to America on the liner he (Chig) is sailing on to go back home.
What is striking with this character is not just the succession of events that he goes through, but rather his reactions when he faces them. Chig’s insouciance is not that of an African American who does not know what it is to be black in that country in the 1960s. It is that of a Negro who has never faced the realities of being black in the USA. This means that he lived in a much secured environment with an affluent father, surrounded by amiable Whites and that he went to the best schools even if he lived in Harlem: he has never been in a group of Negroes. However, as the novel unfolds, Chig rediscovers his blackness in two ways: the first being the story itself and its events, the second in dream language; a language invented by Kelley to reveal the truth to his African American characters.
The creation of such an ambiguous but equally ambitious narrative tool is to be located in Kelley’s aim that is teach and talk to the Africamericans. His published novels were issued at the time of the Civil Rights Movement, and Kelley is a protest writer who inscribes himself in the Black Arts Movement.
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