Chinua Achebe: Father of African Literature 1930 - 2013 Lecture 3

1. Chinua Achebe: Father of African Literature 1930 - 2013Lecture 3 http://viennachinuaachebe.wordpress.com/ Derek Barker www.derekbarker.info Dr.Derek.Barker@gmail.com

2. Question? • Is Okonkwo a tragic hero?

3. Classical tragedy •  According to Aristotle, the classic tragic hero is “someone who is highly renowned and prosperous” usually of noble birth, and there is a “natural right ordering and proportion of traits within the human being that, if violated, produces calamity”. Classical tragedy can be defined as one that “involves the inevitable destruction of a noble person by means of character flaw, usually a disproportionate measure of a specific human attribute such as pride, jealousy or indecision” .

4. Modern Tragedy The modern tragic hero, on the other hand, is a product of a clash between the individual and the social environment. Arthur Miller, the famous playwright said, “each person has a chosen image of self and position, tragedy results when the character’s environment denies the fulfillment of this self concept.”  This is in contrast to Aristotle’s classic tragic hero because the hero is no longer of noble birth but gains stature in the action of pitting him/herself against the cosmos, and the tragedy becomes, “the disaster inherent in being torn away from our chosen image of what and who we are in this world.”

5. Begam I • Begam, Richard. “Achebe’s sense of an ending: History and Tragedy in Things Fall Apart” Studies in the Novel, Vol. 29, No. 3, fall 1997 • [Available online on Jstor for free].

6. Begam II • “Things Fall Apart” resists the idea of a single or simple resolution by providing three distinct endings, three different ways of reading the events that conclude the novel.

7. Begam III • First, Achebe writes a form of nationalist history. • Here the interest is essentially reconstructive and centres on recovering an Igbo past that has been neglected or suppressed by historians who would not or could not write from an African perspective.

8. Begam IV • As Achebe observed in 1964, four years after Nigerian independence: “Historians everywhere are re-writing the stories of the new nations – replacing short, garbled, despised history with a more sympathetic account.”

9. Begam V • Nationalist history tends to emphasize what other histories have either glossed over or flatly denied – namely that “African people did not hear of culture for the first time from Europeans; that their societies were not mindless but frequently had a philosophy of great depth and value and beauty, that they had poetry and above all, they had dignity” (Achebe)

10. Begam VI • Second, Achebe writes a form of adversarial history. Here the emphasis falls not on the reconstruction of an authentic past that has been lost, but on the deconstruction of a counterfeit past that has been imposed.

11. Begam VII • Adversarial history enables Achebe to write against what he himself has called “colonialist” discourse, against the attitudes and assumptions, the language and rhetoric that characterized British colonial rule in Nigeria.

12. Begam VIII • Third, Achebe writes a form of metahistory. This kind of history calls attention to itself as a piece of writing, a narrative construction that depends on principles of selection (what material will be included?), emphasis (what importance will be attached to it?) and shaping (how will it be organized and arranged?)

13. Begam IX • Yet Things Fall Apart is concerned not only with writing history, but also with fashioning tragedy. The novel offers a variety of responses to tragedy as well as history. • Disagreement over the classification of the book has resulted from a failure to identify Achebe’s multi-perspectival approach to the problem – a failure to recognize that the novel has 3 distinct endings

14. Begam X • The novel offers a variety of responses to tragedy + history • Nationalist history is associated with classical or Aristotelian tragedy • Adversarial history is associated with modern or ironic tragedy • Metahistory is associated with critical discourse.

15. Begam XI • The first ending centres on Okonkwo’s killing of the messenger, his failed attempt to rouse his people to action, and his subsequent suicide. • This ending presents the events of the novel from an African perspective: Okonkwo’s end = end of Igbo culture (see opening paragraph)

16. Begam XII • The opening scene establishes Okonkwo as a tragic protagonist: the great warrior who carriers with him the fate of his people • Okonkwo is identified with his community to the extent that it esteems the martial ethos • Igbo culture especially prizes those men who win distinction on the battlefield

17. Begam XIII • Although Okonkwo represents what is celebrated by his community, he is not perfect • In classical tragic terms, he has a flaw; he is guilty of “harmartia” (errors in judgement) • Achebe: “The tragic protagonist is the man who’s larger than life, who exemplifies virtues that are admired by the community, but also a man who for all that is still human. He can have flaws, you see; all that seems to me to be underlined in Artistotle’s work”

18. Begam XIV • Okonkwo is a great athlete and warrior, excessive both physically and in his high-spiritedness, what the Greeks called “thymos”(“whenever he was angry and could not get his words out quickly enough, he would use his fists”); and in his prideful arrogance, what the Greeks called “hybris”(“The oldest man present said sternly [to Okonkwo] that those whose palm-kernels were cracked for them by a benevolent spirit should not forget to be humble”.

19. Begam XV • Like many heroes of classical tragedy, Okonkwo’simmoderate behaviourconsistently places him at cross-purposes not merely with his fellow Umuofians, but with the gods themselves, and it comes as no surprise when, in the second part of the novel, he is sent into temporary exile for offending Ani, the Earth deity.

20. Begam XVI • If we are to appreciate the tragedy of the first ending – something that Achebe clearly intends – then we must recognize that Okonkwo’s faults are essentially virtues carried to an extreme, and that while he is obviously not perfect, he nevertheless represents some of the best qualities of his culture. • At the novel’s end, Obierika says: “That man was one of the greatest men in Umuofia”

21. Begam XVII • The crisis of the novel comes in the penultimate chapter when an impudent messenger, sent by the colonial authorities, orders a tribal meeting to disband. • Read p 188 “In a flash Okonkwo drew his machete…. He wiped his machete on the sand and went away”

22. Begam XVIII • The people of Umuofia have deserted Okonkwo and in the process betrayed themselves, but the wiping of the machete is the only eloquence he permits himself. It is an ordinary and everyday gesture, yet in the present context it acquires special significance: Okonkwo remains true to the martial ethos that his people have abandoned, here represented by the warrior’s care of his weapon; at the same time, he symbolically dissolves his connection with his people, wiping away the [Igbo] blood bond that joined them.

23. Begam XIX • Okonkwo’ssuicide (under the first interpretation of nationalist history / classic tragedy) is a logical and necessary consequence of an idealistic and absolutist position. [Or death by other means; but in classical tragedy, the hero comes to ruin/dies at the end] • Both nationalist history and heroic (classical) tragedy demand that he remain unyielding and that the Igbos honour their cultural heritage by refusing assimilation.

24. Begam XX • Even in this final gesture (suicide), Okonkwo functions as the true representative of his people. For, as he sees it, Igbo culture has willingly succumbed to its own annihilation, committing what is a form of collective suicide by submitting to the British. In taking his own life, Okonkwo has simply preceded his people in their communal destruction. Once again he has led the way.

25. Begam XXI • The “second ending” (second interpretation) is associated by Begam with adversarial history. • This view interprets events from the heavily ironized perspective of the District Commissioner. • Igbo culture is presented not from the inside as vital and autonomous, but from the outside as an object of anthropological curiosity, and its collapse is understood not as an African tragedy but as a European triumph (albeit ironically).

26. Begam XXII • Those who wrote historical and anthropological accounts of the Igbos were typically either representatives of the British government or their semi-official guests, and the colonial administration not only helped to enable such research by “opening up” various regions, but also relied upon it in determining local policy.

27. Begam XXIII • In the case of Igboland, the earliest anthropological studies were written by P. Amaury Talbot, himself a District Commissioner, and G. T. Basden, a missionary whose safety and well-being literally depended on the colonial office. Both Talbot and Basden were, by the standards of the day, sympathetic observers of the Igbos – indeed, the latter was a personal friend of Achebe’s father – but this did not prevent them from expressing in their published writing typically European attitudes towards Africans

28. Begam XXIV • Read P. 91 (final chapter) “Take down the body… In the book which he planned to write he would stress that point.” Achebe, in his essay “Colonialist Criticism” says: “To the colonialist mind it was always of the utmost important to be able to say: “I know my natives,” a claim which implied two things at once: (a) that the native was really quite simple and (b) that understanding him and controlling him went hand in hand – understanding being a pre-condition for control and control constituting adequate proof of understanding”

29. Begam XXV • Read P. 191 (final chapter) “Everyday brought him some new material …” till end. • Not true understanding needed, just enough to be able to “say” that one understands, and the proof of it being in the actual event of control • In this second ending (unlike the first ending, which reflects heroic tragedy) we have a transition from classical tragedy to the biting irony of modern tragedy.

30. Begam XXVI In presenting Okonkwo’s epic story as reflected in the first ending (Chapter 24/ Death of Okonkwo), Achebe offers a powerful counter-statement to the “dark continent” idea of Africa (the “nationalist history / reconstructive agenda”). But in the second ending he does something more. By ironically undermining the perspective of the District Commissioner, but exposing the latter’s personal ignorance (“a whole paragraph”) and political interests (“pacification”), Achebe seeks to confront and finally discredit the entire discourse of colonialism, those quasi-historical, quasi-anthropological writings that have treated Africa as nothing more than “a foil to Europe, a place of negations” (Achebe) .

31. Begam XXVII • The novel would read very differently if it ended with Chapter 24 / Okonkwo’s death (and without the DC’s ironic comments); it would function as classic / heroic tragedy and fall within a nationalist historical narrative. • By adding Chapter 25, our sense of Achebe’s approach to both history and tragedy is changed; if functions rather as modern / ironic tragedy and falls within an adversarial (postcolonial “writing back / re-writing” historical) narrative.

32. Begam XXVIII • The third ending of “Things Fall Apart” is located by Begam in Achebe’s second novel “No Longer At Ease” • Begam views the latter novel not only as a continuation of the first, but in part, also a rewriting of it • Both novels tell the story of a representative of the Igbo people who takes a stand on a question of principle and is destroyed in the ensuing collision between African and European values. • As one critic put it, the fall of Okonkwo’s machete is replaced by the fall of the judge’s gavel as we are transported from a heroic to a legalistic world

33. Begam XXIX • In moving from the first to the second novel, we observe Okonkwo’s traditional tragedy (first ending) transform itself into Obi’s modern tragedy, as the heroic gives way to the ironic • Begam finds the “third ending” of Things Fall Apart in a discussion on tragedy by Okonkwo’s grandson, Obi, a university-educated civil servant, with a British colonial officer within the novel. • Obi advances the opinion that suicide ruins a tragedy

34. Begam XXX Obi (in No Longer at Ease): Real tragedy is never resolved. It goes on hopelessly forever. Conventional tragedy is too easy. The hero dies and we feel a purging of the emotions. A real tragedy takes place in a corner, in an untidy spot, to quote W. H. Auden. The rest of the world is unaware of it. Like that man in A Handful of Dust who reads Dickens to Mr. Todd. There is no release for him. When the story ends he is still reading. There is no purging of the emotions for us because we are not there.

35. Begam XXXI • Obi draws a distinction in this passage between two kinds of tragedy. In traditional or Aristotelian tragedy, there is a clear resolution, an aesthetic pay-off that comes in the form of a “catharsis” (purging of the emotions); but in modern or ironic tragedy, the fall from a high place is muted and there is no catharsis.

36. Begam XXXII • Okonkwo’s story as viewed from the Igbo perspective (first ending, the fall of a great man) presents history in the form of classical or heroic tragedy. • Okonkwo’s story as viewed from the District Commissioner’s perspective presents history in the form of modern or ironic tragedy

37. Begam XXXIII • One of Obi’s remarks is particularly noteworthy: there is no purging of the emotions in modern tragedy, because “we were not there.” • These words perfectly describe the situation of the District Commissioner. He “was not there” in the sense that he was never in a position genuinely to understand Okonkwo, to appreciate who he was and what he represented.

38. Begam XXXIV • Begam says that the novel’s first ending is not in any way compromised because it is associated with the “conventional,” while the novel’s second ending is in some way enhanced because it is associated with the “real”. • If Achebe provides us with any controlling point of view, it comes from the third ending, which illustrates the vexed and ambiguous relation in which the postcolonial stands to his own past.

39. Begam XXXV • Because, with his remarks on tragedy, Obi is offering a narrative analysis of what is literally his own past. In describing a tragedy that ends in suicide, he is describing his grandfather’s tragic fall and its significance for Igbo culture after it was lost, after “things fell apart”. • What the novel’s third ending illustrates is that the boundaries between “conventional” and the “real”, the heroic and the ironic, are not clearly drawn.

40. Begam XXXVI • From Obi’s perspective – and, for that matter the reader’s – Okonkwo functions both as a literary persona and a living person, an epic hero and a historical anachronism. • Yet the novel does not invite us to select one of these alternatives

41. Begam XXXVII • We are not meant to choose among the three possible endings but to read all of them simultaneously. • If we are able to do this, we shall see how Achebe’s sense of an ending is intimately bound up with his sense of cultural loss; how the tragedy of the past necessarily depends on the perspective of the present; and how history is inevitably written for both “they who were there” and the “we who are not there”.

42. Question • Is “Things Fall Apart” an “African” novel?