Download Chinua_Achebe's_Things_Fall_Apart

231 Pages·2009·0.96 MB·English

by  Harold Bloom

Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations
The Adventures of Great Expectations Portnoy’s Complaint
Huckleberry Finn The Great Gatsby A Portrait of the Artist
The Age of Innocence Gulliver’s Travels as a Young Man
Alice’s Adventures in The Handmaid’s Tale Pride and Prejudice
Wonderland Heart of Darkness Ragtime
All Quiet on the I Know Why the The Red Badge of
Western Front Caged Bird Sings Courage
As You Like It The Iliad The Rime of the
The Ballad of the Sad Jane Eyre Ancient Mariner
Café The Joy Luck Club The Rubáiyát of Omar
Beowulf The Jungle Khayyám
Black Boy Lord of the Flies The Scarlet Letter
The Bluest Eye The Lord of the Rings Silas Marner
The Canterbury Tales Love in the Time of Song of Solomon
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Cholera The Sound and the
The Catcher in the Rye The Man Without Fury
Catch-22 Qualities The Stranger
The Chronicles of The Metamorphosis A Streetcar Named
Narnia Miss Lonelyhearts Desire
The Color Purple Moby-Dick Sula
Crime and My Ántonia The Tale of Genji
Punishment Native Son A Tale of Two Cities
The Crucible Night The Tempest
Darkness at Noon 1984 Their Eyes Were
Death of a Salesman The Odyssey Watching God
The Death of Artemio Oedipus Rex Things Fall Apart
Cruz The Old Man and the To Kill a Mockingbird
Don Quixote Sea Ulysses
Emerson’s Essays On the Road Waiting for Godot
Emma One Flew Over the The Waste Land
Fahrenheit 451 Cuckoo’s Nest White Noise
A Farewell to Arms One Hundred Years of Wuthering Heights
Frankenstein Solitude Young Goodman
The Grapes of Wrath Persuasion Brown

Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations
Chinua Achebe’s
Things Fall Apart
New Edition
Edited and with an introduction by
Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations:
Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart—New Edition
Copyright © 2010 by Infobase Publishing
Introduction © 2010 by Harold Bloom
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,
or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from
the publisher. For more information contact:
Bloom’s Literary Criticism
An imprint of Infobase Publishing
132 West 31st Street
New York NY 10001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart / edited and with an introduction by Harold
Bloom. —New ed.
p. cm.—(Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60413-581-7 ((hardcover: alk. paper): alk. paper) 1. Achebe, Chinua.
Things Fall Apart. 2. Igbo (African people) in literature. 3. Nigeria—In literature.
I. Bloom, Harold.
PR9387.9.A3T523965 2009
823’.914—dc22 2009020349
Bloom’s Literary Criticism books are available at special discounts when purchased in
bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call
our Special Sales Department in New York at [phone] or [phone].
You can find Bloom’s Literary Criticism on the World Wide Web at
http://www.chelseahouse.com.
Cover design by Ben Peterson
Printed in the United States of America
MP BCL 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
All links and Web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of
publication. Because of the dynamic nature of the Web, some addresses and links
may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid.
Contents
Editor’s Note vii
Introduction 1
Harold Bloom
Chinua Achebe Writing Culture: Representations
of Gender and Tradition in Things Fall Apart 5
Kwadwo Osei-Nyame
The Portrayal of Igbo Culture in Zulu:
A Descriptive Analysis of the Translation
of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart into Zulu 23
D. N. Mkhize
The Plight of A Hero in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart 39
Patrick C. Nnoromele
Undignified Details: The Colonial Subject of Law 51
Ravit Reichman
“A Mouth with Which to Tell the Story”: Silence, Violence,
and Speech in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart 69
Joseph R. Slaughter
Realising Irony’s Post/Colonial Promise:
Global Sense and Local Meaning in
Things Fall Apart and “Ruins of a Great House” 99
Mac Fenwick
vi Contents
Making Use of the Past in Things Fall Apart 115
Oliver Lovesey
The Depiction of Masculinity
in Classic Nigerian Literature 141
Frank Salamone
Problematizing Polygyny in the Historical
Novels of Chinua Achebe: The Role
of the Western Feminist Scholar 153
Andrea Powell Wolfe
The Possibilities and Pitfalls of Ethnographic Readings:
Narrative Complexity in Things Fall Apart 177
Carey Snyder
Chronology 197
Contributors 205
Bibliography 207
Acknowledgments 213
Index 215
Editor’s Note
M
y introduction prophesies canonical survival for Things Fall Apart,
since its eloquence, compassion, and loving insight surpass the “post-
colonial” academic ideology that currently overvalues Achebe’s best book
and founds its judgments on political grounds alone. Some of the essays
necessarily included here seem to me to praise Things Fall Apart for the
wrong reasons.
Kwadwo Osei-Nyame relates the cultural significance found in the nov-
el, after which D. N. Mkhize describes the complexity of translating Things
Fall Apart into Zulu, and then Patrick C. Nnoromele illustrates the condition
of Achebe’s hero.
Ravit Reichman sees British law in Africa as an imposition and a fic-
tion, while Joseph R. Slaughter invokes the inevitable Franz Fanon to com-
ment on the phenomenon of silence in Things Fall Apart. Then Mac Fenwick
sees irony as a major resource for postcolonial writing.
In a comprehensive and useful essay, Oliver Lovesey meditates upon
the relation between history and fiction in Achebe, while Frank Salamone
contributes an informative account of the representation of masculinity in
Nigerian literature.
Andrea Powell Wolfe offers a feminist critique of Nigerian marriage
customs, after which Carey Snyder refreshingly considers some of the
limitations of ethnography when confronted by Achebe’s mastery of narra-
tive techniques.
vii

HAROLD BLOOM
Introduction
chinua achebe’s things fall apart
T
hings Fall Apart is a historical novel, set in the British colony of Nigeria at
about the turn from the nineteenth into the twentieth century. Since Chinua
Achebe was born in 1930, he goes back a full generation, to the Nigeria of
his parents. The story’s famous opening establishes a characteristic tonality:
simplification through intensity (a Yeatsian formula):
Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and
even beyond. His fame rested on solid personal achievements. As
a young man of eighteen he had brought honor to his village by
throwing Amalinze the Cat. Amalinze was the great wrestler who
for seven years was unbeaten, from Umuofia to Mbaino. He was
called the Cat because his back would never touch the earth. It was
this man that Okonkwo threw in a fight which the old men agreed
was one of the fiercest since the founder of their town engaged a
spirit of the wild for seven days and seven nights.
The drums beat and the flutes sang and the spectators held
their breath. Amalinze was a wily craftsman, but Okonkwo was
as slippery as a fish in water. Every nerve and every muscle stood
out on their arms, on their backs and their thighs, and one almost
heard them stretching to breaking point. In the end Okonkwo
threw the Cat.
Now in early middle age, Okonkwo is an angry man, a victim of his
own impatient temperament, and of his sense that he had a bad father. His
quite likable father was a failure, in debt to everyone, and Okonkwo himself
1