The Fiction of Chinua Achebe

Jago Morrison

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781403986726
• eBook ISBN: 9781350308732
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: African Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Since the emergence of Things Fall Apart in 1958, Chinua Achebe has come to be regarded by many as the 'Godfather' of modern African writing. Over 150 full length studies of his work have been published, together with many hundreds of scholarly articles. This Reader's Guide enables students to navigate the rich and bewildering field of Achebe criticism, setting out the key areas of critical debate, the most influential alternative approaches to his work and the controversies that have so often surrounded it. The Guide examines Achebe's key novels - with the main focus on Things Fall Apart - and also discusses his less well-known short fiction. Including discussion of important Nigerian scholarship that is often inaccessible, this is an invaluable introduction to the work of one of Africa's most important and popular writers.

CHAPTER ONE

Things Fall Apart (1958): Challenging the Canon

As we saw in the introduction, Achebe’s first novel was written in the mid-1950s whilst he was working as a broadcaster for the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation (NBC). As Ezenwa-Ohaeto relates in his excellent biography,¹ in 1956 Achebe was sent to attend a radio production course run by the BBC in London, followed by a period working in one of the company’s departments. Achebe was encouraged by a Nigerian colleague to show his manuscript – which at that stage was a lengthy novel consisting of both Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease – to the established English novelist Gilbert Phelps (1915–93), a tutor on the course. Back in Nigeria, he decided to prune back the text severely and eventually sent a much shorter manuscript to Phelps under the title Things Fall Apart.

According to Ezenwa-Ohaeto, the manuscript was rejected by a string of London publishers. Even at Heinemann, with their well-developed West African markets, there was hesitancy about the sales potential of such an unusual offering. Eventually the book came to the attention of Alan Hill, one of the company’s most innovative editors, who sent the text out to specialist readers. As we saw in the introduction, the terse verdict of one of Heinemann’s educational advisers, Professor Donald MacRae, finally tipped the balance:

Heinemann’s normal fiction reader read it and did a long report but the firm was still hesitating whether to accept it. Would anyone possibly buy a novel by an African? There are no precedents. So the rather doubting bunch at the top of Heinemann’s thought of the educational department, who after all sold books to Africa and were supposed to know about Africans. So they showed it to one of our educational advisers, Professor Donald MacRae, who was just back from West Africa. He read it in the office and ended the debate with an eleven word report: ‘This is the best novel I have read since the war’.²

As Ezenwa-Ohaeto describes:

Thus Things Fall Apart was published in hardback on 17 June 1958 with a print run of 2,000 copies. The publishers did not ‘touch a word of it’ in order to correct it and ‘it achieved instant acclaim in the British national press, with enthusiastic reviews by such critics as Walter Allen [1911–95] and Angus Wilson [1913–91]’ . . . It changed the direction of Alan Hill’s publishing life and added a new dimension to the list of books published by Heinemann.³

EARLY CRITICAL RESPONSES

In fact, initial responses to the novel in the London press combined praise for Achebe’s vivid writing style with reservations about his handling of both traditional Ibo culture and the colonial encounter. According to the Times Literary Supplement on 20 June 1958, for example, the novel’s conclusion was flawed by its ‘confusion of attitude’. After his powerful depiction of African village life, the TLS reviewer maintains, Achebe loses his way when portraying the European missionaries: ‘For Mr Achebe owes much to missionary education, and his sympathies are naturally more with the new than the old. His picture of the collapse of tribal custom is perhaps less than compassionate’.⁴

For Honor Tracy, reviewing for the BBC’s own literary organ The Listener the following week, this initial sense of ambivalence towards Things Fall Apart is amplified, with admiration for the author’s stylistic accomplishment tempered by an open, colonial disdain for his subject matter. Achebe’s Iboland is, for Tracy, ‘mindless, dominated by vague and preposterous terrors . . . incapable of advancement by itself’.⁵ Would ‘Mr Chinua’ and his professional friends prefer to abandon their careers in order to wear raffia skirts and tend yams, she asks? Or is this essentially a work of hypocrisy? Whilst the novel might be a refreshing change from the usual diet of fiction, Tracy concludes, its portrait of the destructive effects of British colonialism is ultimately ‘facile . . . mere sentimentality’.⁶

Amongst academic critics, Achebe met with a much more positive welcome. According to G. D. Killam, who first writes about the novel in the 1960s, Things Fall Apart is to be hailed as ‘the first novel by a Nigerian writer to have serious claim to consideration as literature’.⁷ Killam’s main aim with Achebe’s work, in liberal humanist fashion, is to establish its literary credentials with reference to the standards of the Anglo-Irish English literary canon. Ultimately, he argues, the value of all Achebe’s novels as works of art must be disassociated from their particular ‘ “anthropological” or “sociological” biases’,⁸ and judged instead on their ‘universality’ and fidelity in reflecting the ‘human condition’.⁹ These are works which ‘bring news of a strange part of the world and of the values and attitudes of a group of people who have only recently achieved prominence in world affairs’.¹⁰ Whilst the novels’ meditations on themes of colonialism and cultural imperialism are likely to be of ‘local’ interest to Africans, what is far more important is to assess Achebe against the ‘general’ standards of the literary traditions of England. In Killam’s analysis of Things Fall Apart, therefore, the overriding concern is to establish Achebe’s technical proficiency and the soundness of his aesthetic judgement:

Achebe’s prose has been described as ‘leisurely’ and ‘stately’ and a casual reading of the book, especially the first part, supports such judgment. Because Achebe refuses to take sides in the issues he describes and dramatizes, his presentation is disinterested and this quality is reflected in the writing. Yet, restrained as the pace may be, it moves the story forward with a sense of inevitability, the momentum gradually increasing, until the first climax is reached, Okonkwo’s third sin against the Earth Goddess and his subsequent banishment. The casual approach and style quite belie the intensity of the life the novel evokes and from the outset Achebe’s absolute certainty of approach is established.¹¹

Killam’s commentary on characterization in the novel, similarly, is primarily motivated by a concern to identify the protagonist Okonkwo’s ‘universally’ human qualities and to discuss him in terms of his ‘representativeness’ as a figure of his time:

Okonkwo was ‘one of the greatest men of his time’, the embodiment of Ibo values, the man who better than most symbolized his race. His stature is presented as heroic. His story, as was men tioned above, is presented in terms which resemble those of Aristotelian tragedy – the working out in the life of a hero of industry, courage and eminence, of an insistent fatality (in this book symbolized by the chi, or personal god) which transcends his ability to fully understand or resist a fore-ordained sequence of events. Achebe suggests as well the flaw, or flaws in his nature – his inordinate ambition and his refusal to tolerate anything less than excellence, taken in conjunction with an impulsive rage to which he easily gives way and which produces irrational responses to situations.¹²

Dealing with the nineteenth-century West African context of Things Fall Apart, once again, the movement of Killam’s analysis is always from the particular to the general, and from the general to the ‘universal’. Discussing the cultivation of yams, for instance, he is keen to stress the ways in which Achebe’s representations of farming and cooking invoke a more abstract opposition of male and female principles in Um uofian life, and through them a sense of the larger ethical and spiritual structures within which the clan understands its existence. In the following extract, for example, Killam analyses a passage from the novel in which Okonkwo asks for seed yams from the senior clansman, Nwakibie:

The images again are chosen from nature and suggest the continuum of the natural world of which man is part and at the centre. There are several references in this passage which require further comment because they lead into a deeper consideration of the way in which Achebe uses environment not only to symbolize character and theme but also to define the moral and ethical principles on which Ibo society is based and which is his ultimate concern in the book.

The yam is king: a man’s wealth, status and reputation depend upon his possession of yams. Yams are food, true, and ‘he who could feed his family on yams from one harvest to another was a very great man indeed’. But as well, ‘yams stood for manliness’. With yams, which are wealth, a man could take titles in the clan; that is, he could achieve power and influence the conduct of the affairs of the clan. Conversely a man without yams was not able to take titles: he is described as agbala a word which as we have seen denotes ‘a woman’ and a man without titles. The two concepts are linked: to possess a female disposition is undesirable if not wholly unacceptable. Yet in the opposition between the man who possesses yams and the one who does not a paradox is apparent. While a continuing emphasis on male activities – acquisition of wealth and wives, the production of children, courage and resourcefulness in sport and war – informs the surface interest of the novel, all activity in Things Fall Apart is judged by what is or is not acceptable to ‘Ani, the Earth Goddess and source of all fertility . . . ultimate judge of morality and conduct’ in the clan. In other words a powerful ‘female principle’ pervades the whole society of Umuofia and sits in judgement of events in the community.¹³

For Killam, the ultimate tragedy of the novel is seen in terms of the interplay of these male and female principles. He is not unaware that the novel might in so...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Things Fall Apart (1958): Challenging the Canon
• Chapter Two: Things Fall Apart (1958): The Novel and Nigeria
• Chapter Three: No Longer at Ease (1960)
• Chapter Four: Arrow of God (1964)
• Chapter Five: A Man of the People (1966) and Girls at War (1972)
• Chapter Six: Anthills of the Savannah (1987)
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index