Superfluous words

Abstract

"In his 1975 essay, “The Novelist as Teacher,” Chinua Achebe says: “I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past—with all its imperfections—was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them” (45). Without denying the crucial role Achebe’s fiction has played in illuminating Africa’s past, in this paper I want to think about his writing and teaching—specifically his 1958 novel Things Fall Apart—in more prophetic terms. In particular I am interested in the novel’s capacity to speak to a contemporary crisis, one whose devastation, like colonialism, touches some places more than others, but that is global in scope. For purposes of clarity, we’ll call it the environmental crisis. My argument works on the assumption that environment, culture and politics always have been, but are now particularly, densely entangled. My principal thesis is that Things Fall Apart offers a vision and strategy of resilience for coping with the complex, potentially catastrophic, ecological and cultural changes that confront us today. Before looking more deeply into the concept of “resilience,” it is worth exploring briefly the idea that art, and literature more specifically, is critical to survival. The importance of art in promoting cultural sovereignty and freedom is uncontroversial to most people, if not always to their governments. This essay goes a step farther in suggesting we explore the idea of art’s contribution to not only human, but also planetary, survival. I’m not sure what Achebe would think of this, though his description of humans as “storytelling animals” (Home and Exile 59) suggests he would be willing at least to entertain the idea that art has an evolutionary as well as revolutionary function. One of the first writers to explore this idea (which has been taken up in various ways in the relatively new field of ecocriticism) was wildlife ecologist Joseph Meeker, whose 1972 book, The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology, offers a theory that speaks to Things Fall Apart in interesting ways."(pg 1)