Dunfords Travels Everywheres by William Melvin Kelley

Dunfords Travels Everywheres Reviews

• 
  Jonathan

  Well I am certainly going to be re-reading this, thats for sure.
  
  I guess there are different ways to swim in the wake of the Wake. Joyce was engaged in guerrilla warfare and his techniques are applicable to any attempt to break apart the dominant language of the coloniser, the oppressor. WMK is doing something here that seems vital and important and something that I hope would inspire others.
  
  One thing to note too is that, as I read it, we move in and out of different levels of dream - some are closer to the waking mind, and some closer to the Wake-ing dream. What may seem to be a more "realist" "plot" section coming from nowhere, may be easier understood if we see it that way.
  
  But fundamentally there is a hell of a lot to talk about here. This text is in need of a phd thesis or 30 and much more. A silly goodreads review is not really the place to get into it all.
  
  Simply put: This is well worth your time. It is "experimental" in all the right ways, and much easier to read than you might be led to think. Just read with your eye and your ear and you will be fine. Plus, of course, the Wake is for swimming and playing in. Some of the puns are sure to make you chuckle at the very least.
  
  Read it. Read him.
  
  Here is a snatch of the dream voice, here coming from the mouth of a slave owner buried deep in the dreaming mind:
  
  “Owe years, those were god dies for ebonybody. We used the sleep of the mighteous, nhiver reaching for depistle tucked unfriared under the pea-low’s ear. Hyde hichup my bogey, two Arraybian stoolions spyking Sworehili pilling it, and raid out to see my biggers singing spurituals in the caught-tom fields. And a shappier bunch of laboratoratatives have been never seen by any onionshop stuard! How could a goodies work hurt any Toddy? They know horwell off they wise. Idlelady and me, us trulelie’d bought them interr the light. We sivved yum from the salvagery conseeyouming Puert Africo, given the grieft of servilization. “
  
  “grieft of servilization” is worth the price of admission (Mind your hats goan in!) alone, as far as I am concerned.
  
  
  I found this neat little summary in an article online, which I think will be useful to readers
  (
  https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-...) :
  
  "It introduces two protagonists. On the one hand, there’s Chig Dunford, a middle-class student who has lived in Harlem all his life but has only known private schools and a culture alienated from the Black experience. At the beginning of the novel Chig is in an imaginary European country, then aboard a liner that takes him home. He comes face to face with enslaved African people who’re being transported to America. On the other hand, there’s Carlyle Bedlow, a Harlem hustler who lives off his petty thefts. Carlyle’s confronted with one of his friends having to sell his soul to a “White Devil” in order to save his mother from dying. The two characters represent a certain aspect of Blackness, but are both at a certain point in the story obliged to face that Blackness and the meaning it has in mainstream American society. Notwithstanding their differences, Kelley considers the two characters share a common background and that’s why he melts their identities into a single one in their dreams where they become Mr. Chiglyle."
  
  This link explains why, in the "dream" sections, the name morphs and shifts from one to the other, stopping off at variants along the way. But I would also say that it may be our protagonists are not really our protagonists, and the dreamer is not necessarily one of those being dreamed. Certainly the final section, before we loop back to the beginning in good Wakean fashion, suggest something more universal is going on...
  
  From an interview with WMK which may also help to help situate things a little (and can be found here
  http://www.graat.fr/kelley.pdf):
  
  "first of all, what I was trying to show was that the middle-class Chig and the working-class hustler Carlyle, were having the same dream, and that the dream was a dream of freedom....
  
  ...I would say we should call ourselves gold, because that’s what we were. We were money! That’s more true about what we were. We were money. If you have 500 slaves, you could go to the bank and put up the 500 slaves as collateral, and they’d give you money. And I don’t think we ever really redefined ourselves. We’re still a market....
  And at the end of Dunfords, as a matter of fact I wrote: “MAN! BE! GOLD! BE,” and then you come back to the front, “Boy.” So, Africans were Africans. Then they were turned into gold. Man be gold. And then you humiliate them, and you make them a boy. So that’s what happens there. Man be gold be boy. And we’ve never gotten over that. We’ve never been free, basically. We were on the plantation, and then instead of like Jamaica, where we refused to work on the plantation, we ended up working for the same people who had been our owners before, in the sharecropping system. Anytime we showed any kind of entrepreneurial spirit, anytime we showed any desire to build a business, own a business, they cut it out from under us. And then now, we ended up on welfare. So there again, we’re being supplied.
  
  .....
  
  I wrote one of the Diops in Senegal, and said, “You know, I think we should go to phonetics.” You know, go to the phonetic alphabet and change that. Because it’s like what Joyce was saying about English. He says, “My soul frets in the shadow of his language.” And he was trying to say basically, you took our language away from us. You took Gaelic away from us. You took our Celtic languages away from us, and now you’ve imposed English on us and it’s always yours. It’s your English. That was what I was trying to do in Dunfords. I was trying to create a language that wasn’t English but that could possibly be understood by brown-skinned people. Based on their principles. "
• 
  Nathan "N.R." Gaddis

  Well this is embarrassing. Here's a novel I paid serious BURIED money on behalf of, a novel straight out of The Wake, whose introduction to me lay direct=next to Barthelme, Federman, Burroughs ; some tough company ;; in a chapter titled "Everybody's Joyce". And I'm looking here at SIX (.6.) ratings and ZERO (.0.) R/reviews and but one Listopia listing (just saw that one and voted this one up). And but I just can't get excited about it. Like one gets clobbered when digging into
  There Is a Tree More Ancient Than Eden which is just huge. I can't quite rave about it like one raves about Federman. I'll adVOCate for it, but not like for Miss MacIntosh. What I mean -- it's a fairly straightforward novel with two threads ;; I think of those threads maybe more as tableaux than as plots only because maybe ploddy=people would complain if we allowed consideration in that direction. But what really calls attention to this nugget and the reason it's disappeared from the literary landscape are the several dream sequences which are written in a very well=wrought Wakese. And really aren't to be missed. And are to be studied. And annotated upon. But clearly, if the dreaming of X and the fiction=experience of X are related, that relation will only be revealed in a second and third readings which I had intended to do, but, well, see above lack of excitement. But please what this book does need is at least an eighth and ninth and tenth gr=reader. Do have your annotating pen at ready when you pick this up. [I understand there's an e-edition available from one of those internet=libraries]
  
  Kelley's got a few other novels which will deserve our collective attention.
  
  Sample ::
  
  [Just prior to the outbreak of the first Wakese ::] Where on earth had those words come from? He tried always to choose his words with care, to hold back even anger until he found the correct words. Luckily, he had never suffered a pronunciation problem. His family lived in Harlem; he had grown up there, but had no trouble saying that, they, these, those or them.
  
  Then :: "Witches oneWay tspike Mr. Chigyle's Languish, n curryng him back tRealty, recoremince wi hUnmisereaducation. Maya we now go on wi yReconstruction, Mr. Chuggle? Awick now? Goodd, a'god Moanng agen everybubbahs n babys among you, d'yonLadys in front who always come vear too, days ago, dhisMorning we wddeal, in dhis Sagmint of Lecturian Angleash 161, w'all the daisiastrous effects, the foxnoxious bland of stimili, the infortunelessnesses of circusdances which weak to worsen the phistorystematical intrafricanical firmly structure of our distinct coresins: The Blafringro-Arumericans." [not proofread in my transcription. sorries.]
  
  Which, well, is just one more piece of evidence that Wakese is the language of the post-colonial world. The Irish Finnegans Wake. The Yoruba Tutuola. Desani's All About H. Hatterr. Kelley's Dunfords Travels Everywheres. Most of Our South Of The Border. Which reminds me, the three epigraphs to our novel ::
  
  Melvin B. Tolson --:
  The Futurafrique, flight-furbished ebony astride
  velvet-paved miles, vies with the
  sunflower magnificence of the Oriens, challenges the snow-lily
  diadem of the Europa.....
  
  James Joyce --
  The language in which we are speaking
  is his before it is mine...
  I cannot speak or write these words
  without unrest of spirit.
  His language, so familiar and so foreign,
  will always be for me an acquired speech...
  My soul frets in the shadow of his language.
  
  Amos Tutuola --
  We slept in that a bush, but when it was about two o'clock in the night, there we saw a creature, either he was a spirit or other harmful creature, we could not say, he was coming toward us, he was white as if painted with white paint, he was white from foot to the topmost of his body, but he had no head or feet and hands like human-beings and he got one large eye on his topmost. He was long about 1/4 of a mile and his diameter was about six feet, he resembled a white pillar. At the same time that I saw him coming toward us, I thought what I could do to stop him, then remembered a charm which was given me by my father before he died.
  
• 
  Zadignose

  A strange amalgam of ideas, scenes suggestive of potential for fuller development, ambiguous events, and suggestions that many or all events are either dreams or some kind of research project/experiment, all interspersed with odd language-play that includes puns; phonetic substitutions; alt-grammar; spelling, punctuation, and spacing trickery; and cryptically mangled dialect. It had enough ideas to intrigue me and hold my interest so I would come back to it after a long hiatus. Its appeal is in its mystery and its suggestions for further narrative development. But I can't say that it fulfills its promises, and some ideas seem like throwaways. One could make quite a project of studying it, though. I'm not sure I'm up for a reread yet. Just writing a translation of some of the more cryptic passages and then rereading one's own translation might help work some things out. I admire the author's chutzpah in not giving any flying doughnuts about making sense or being reader-accessible. So let's say I had a lukewarm reaction overall, and I still have one arched eyebrow.
• 
  Charlie

  I started at the ending with Kelley, like (to use the popular comp for this book) starting at Finnegan's Wake without touching Ulysses let alone Dubliners or Portrait. This is a wild novel about being black Americans in a postmodern Europe, and its one I had to let wash over me at various points. In terms of experimental deconstruction of language, it isn't impenetrable per se, as Kelley dissolves language in terms of phonetics, but it still forces you to enunciate. Excited to weave my way through Kelley's other novels now that they are all easily available.
• 
  marcus

  dBlack obscourannest maknifssto, seeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
• 
  Deborah Schuff

  I could not finish this book, because I could not get involved with the opening characters. Then the author changed style, and I could not understand the lingo he used. This is the second novel William Melvin Kelley wrote, and it may be brilliant, as wonder-ful as his first novel. I just could not get it.
  
  Tried reading it again and did finish it. I still don't understand half of it, but I liked the parts I did understand.