Protesting Reason: William Melvin Kelley’s Absurdist War on a Philosophy of Violence
Micah Katz-Zeiger
James Baldwin argues in his essay Everybody’s Protest Novel that the failure of the protest novel is its denial of the complexity of human experience. The “truth” behind society, the elucidation of which is the alleged project of the protest novel is, according to Baldwin, not to be found by reducing humanity to discrete categories and studying them objectively, but rather by delving into the human “Web of ambiguity [and] paradox” (Baldwin 15). Charles Johnson expands on Baldwin’s notion of truth by suggesting that fiction creates truth on two distinct levels. The first level is the particular truth that characters in fiction construct for themselves through their negotiation of the “ambiguity” and “paradox” of life, and that is thus in a constant state of flux (Johnson, 80).
The second layer of truth produced in writing is the meaning that the writer extracts from the experiences of their characters, a universal truth that reflects the convictions of the writer as they pertain to the actions and thoughts of their characters, and the environment which gives rise to these phenomena (Johnson 81-82). Baldwin’s concern with the protest novel is that it skips the experiences of the characters almost entirely, turning them into mere vessels for the writer’s already-formed universal truths. What Baldwin fails to account for, however, is the possibility of a novel that protests exactly this trend of dehumanization—a novel whose aim is to reject reason and give way to a more human absurdity. William Melvin Kelley’s A Different Drummer is such a novel.
By narrating a Great Migration story through the absurd lens of a theoretical South, A Different Drummer protests the social and psychological conditions of the South that entrench both its white and black citizens in an inherently violent system of reason. The act from which the novel reaches back two hundred years in history to tell occurs on the night of Thursday May 30th, 1957, when Tucker Caliban spreads rock salt across his property, slaughters his animals, and burns down his house, destroying all objects that tied him and his family to the South. The majority of characters in the novel approach Tucker’s actions through the prevailing philosophy of reason (with all of the violent connotations that come with it) and pursue the question, why did Caliban do it? with a pathological monomania that parallels General Dewey Willson’s pursuit of “The African” so many years before the events of the novel. Just as, at the end of his pursuit, Willson murders the African for his crimes against reason (which include being black, being able to outsmart and disarm white men, and participating in various unsavory types of pagan stone-worship), the men on the porch murder the man they believe to be responsible for proliferating the protest started by Tucker Caliban’s rebellious actions (although their choice of Bennett Bradshaw as the recipient of punishment is absurdly ironic, given his envy for Caliban’s “primitive” revolution).
A few characters in the novel, however, accept that Caliban’s actions may have been fundamentally unexplainable, thus resisting this inherently violent pursuit of reason (although, as we will later discuss, even these characters approach this notion of inexplicability from a problematic standpoint, still rooted in reason). At the discursive level of its characters, A Different Drummer fits James Baldwin’s description of the failed protest novel, for almost all his characters sacrifice their humanity in order to enforce the system of reason. However, when the novel is analyzed on Johnson’s proposed second level of meaning (that of its author’s intentions) we begin to see that it is exactly this sacrifice that Kelley is protesting. By proposing a system of the absurd thought that honors the inherently illogical and inexplicable nature of humanity, Kelley protests the violent psychological conditioning of the South, which enforces an inherently violent system of reason.
The men on the porch of Thomason’s store embody the philosophy of reason in their necessity to explain Tucker Caliban’s actions through a single theory that they can all understand. At the start of the book, Mister Harper provides the prevailing explanation that Tucker Caliban burned down his farm and left for the North because of The African’s blood running in his veins (Kelley 25). When young Bobby-Joe voices his doubt of this explanation, he is faced with a common question, which embodies all the failures of reason as a philosophy for understanding human life: “Can you give a better reason?” Thus, Mister Harper’s explanation is not believed because of his knowledge of Tucker Caliban as a person or because of any proposed motive, but simply because an explanation is required, and no better one has been provided.
So when, at the end of the novel, Bobby-Joe finally proposes a new theory, saying that it was Bennett Bradshaw who started the exodus, that Tucker Caliban could not possibly have been “Smart enough to start all of what we got on our hands,” (Kelley 192), the men on the porch change their minds just as easily as they were convinced by Harper in the first place. And when the very same Bennet Bradshaw comes driving through town, they use this reasonable conclusion to justify the inhuman violence within them, which their society has taught to them since General Willson killed the African so many years before. When Dewey Willson looks into the eyes of one of the men about to lynch Bradshaw, he sees that they are
Completely blank, that very blankness a sign of the renunciation of alternatives, of tenderness or brutality, of pleasure or pain… it was a gaze which signals the flicking off of the switch which controls the mechanism making man a human being: it said: now we must fight…violence is already with us, part of us (Kelley 197).
By describing this impulse to violence (inspired and justified by reason) as a renunciation of humanity, Kelley suggests that reason is inherently violent and contrary to human nature. However, according to Kelley, there is some other faculty at the heart of what makes us human, the same one that drove Caliban to burn down his farm and that we will call the absurd.
As opposed to reason, which leads to violence and a loss of humanity, the absurd is a pure expression of human life, which resists categorization and logical explanation and brings the subject closer to freedom of action. While most of the characters in A Different Drummer are concerned with explaining Tucker Caliban’s actions, Caliban himself offers no justification. The closest he gets to an explanation is when he answers Harold Leland’s question, “Why’d you do all those evil, crazy things” by saying, “You young, ain’t you, Mister Leland… And you ain’t lost nothing, has you” (Kelley 50). In the framework of reason laid out by the men on the porch, Tucker Caliban’s statement would not be considered reasonable at all, and would not constitute a theory as to why he did what he did, because it contains neither evidence nor motive, just a reminder that Mister Leland did not in fact lose anything when Tucker burned down his farm—that his actions, though they may have seemed evil, were only evil to himself and his own property, and so cannot constitute a breach of law or morals. Yet, when analyzed through the philosophy of the absurd, Tucker’s actions do have a justification; he is simply doing what his humanity tells him he must do.
The roots of Tucker Caliban’s absurd thought process can be traced to a conversation he has with David Willson in which he tries to explain why he wants to buy a portion of the Willson plantation. He says, “Don’t matter if [Bethrah] is right. It don’t even matter if I’m wrong. I got to do it, even if it’s all wrong. If I don’t do it, ain’t none of these things going to stop. We’ll go on working for you forever. And that has got to stop” (Kelley 186). His thought process is still partially logical—he desperately wants to end the cycle of slavery and indentured servitude that has defined his family’s relationship to the Willson’s since their arrival on American soil. However, the seeds of absurdity are planted here as well, for he does not know or care whether he is doing the right thing; he only knows that it is what he must do.
Tucker Caliban does not know whether buying the plantation will actually lead to his freedom, but some deep voice of humanity within him still tells him he must do it. Bethrah, Tucker’s wife, suggests that perhaps Tucker’s apparently profound connection to his own humanity is due to his lack of education. She says to Dymphnah, “Those of us who go to school… we lost something Tucker has… When we have to do something, we don’t just do it, we THINK about doing it… And when we’re through thinking about it, we end up not doing it at all. But Tucker, he just knows what he has to do. He doesn’t think about it; he just knows” (Kelley 114). Although Bethrah’s words come from a place of great love and reverence for her husband, Kelley’s own history as a highly-educated man, as well as the frequent reference to Tucker’s character as primitive and unfit to lead a revolution such as the one waged in the State suggest that the author of the novel, in fact, has a more complicated take than Bethrah on the relationship between absurdity, reason and humanity.
Rising beyond the discursive level of characters and plot to the level of the author’s own convictions, we can see that Kelley is not simply interested in rejecting reason because it is an inherently violent philosophy; he wishes to renounce that theory because it provides people with an oversimplified view of humanity, one that attempts to provide universal answers to questions that are particular and complex. Kelley accuses the men on the porch of the crime of refusing to accept that Tucker Caliban’s actions cannot be explained by any one theory, and in the process simplifying and restricting their own humanity and that of Tucker Caliban’s. Inversely, Bethrah is guilty of oversimplifying Tucker’s actions by attributing them to his lack of education, and of sacrificing her own humanity by believing that simply by renouncing her education and following in Tucker’s footsteps she can free herself from the shackles of reason. In fact, to renounce reason for no other purpose than to achieve an idealized state of un-reason brings one no closer to realizing one’s own humanity than does the unequivocal acceptance of reason as reality. And so, if none of the characters in A Different Drummer besides Tucker Caliban are truly able to access their own absurd humanity, it is because Kelley wants to make a broader argument—that the social space in which those characters live and were raised so fully enforces the philosophy of reason that to reach the absurd is made virtually impossible. This is the brilliance of Kelley’s philosophical protest: he does not reject any particular institutions or idea, as Baldwin claims most protest novels do, but rather the entire philosophical system of reason, which restricts and ultimately destroys humanity.
Micah Katz-Zeiger ‘18 is a musician, writer and very enthusiastic (if sometimes graceless) dancer. He is currently studying in Havana where he is conducting research on Cuban Hip Hop. In the future, Micah hopes to pursue a path in Jewish leadership and education, combining his love of music, spirituality and critical analysis to foster queer Jewish communities committed to fighting racism, transphobia and Israel’s ongoing Occupation of Palestine.
Works Cited
Baldwin, James. Everybody’s Protest Novel. Indianapolis: College
Division, Bobbs-Merrill, Print.
Johnson, Charles, and Rudolph P. Byrd. “Philosophy and Black
Fiction.” I Call Myself an Artist: Writings by and about
Charles Johnson. Bloomington: Indiana 1999. Print.
Kelley, William Melvin. A Different Drummer. New York: Anchor,
- Print. Original Publication 1959 by William Melvin
Kelley