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Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (1958)

Here’s an introduction to Chinua Achebe, freely adapted from Wikipedia:

Chinua Achebe, born Albert Chinụalụmọgụ Achebe (1930 to 2013), was a Nigerian novelist, poet and critic, who is regarded as a central figure of modern African literature.

His first novel and magnum opus, Things Fall Apart (1958), occupies a pivotal place in African literature. It has been described as the most important book in modern African literature. It has sold over 20 million copies worldwide and been translated into 57 languages, making it the most widely studied, translated and read African novel.

Along with Things Fall Apart, the two subsequent novels, No Longer at Ease (1960) and Arrow of God (1964), make up the ‘African Trilogy’.

The trilogy was followed by a fourth novel, A Man of the People (1966) but then this regular output of a novel every two years came to an end and was followed by a 21-year gap. After this long gap came his fifth and final novel, Anthills of the Savannah (1987), a finalist for the Booker Prize which turned out to be his final work of fictions and was itself followed by a long silence of 26 years until Achebe’s death in 2013.

The primacy and influence of his early novels, especially Things Fall Apart, led Achebe to be referred to in the West as ‘the father of African literature’, although he vigorously rejected the title.

A glut of summaries

The text of Things Fall Apart consists of 25 chapters divided into three parts with a glossary of Igbo terms at the end.

It tells the story of Okonkwo, ‘strong man’ and tribal elder of the village of Umuofia in the Igbo society of what would become south-east Nigeria. It paints an in-depth portrait of traditional Igbo society and then shows the impact on it of western Christianity and colonialism. All this is embodied in the story of Okonkwo’s decline and fall.

As the most heavily studied and commentated African novel, the full text of Things Fall Apart is available online in numerous places:

Things Fall Apart online

And there are any number of study guides:

Not to mention scores of book-length academic studies of Achebe and tens of thousands of academic papers on this novel. While selecting which edition to buy online I read various plot summaries. The Everyman Library edition I read it in comes with a summary on the back, a summary in the introduction by contemporary Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and a brief summary in the biographical note.

In other words, this is one of the most over-summarised and analysed-to-death books I’ve ever read. Before I’d read a word of it, I felt tired out by, and over-familiar with, the whole idea.

I can’t see any point summarising the plot or listing the characters, since this has already been done, countless times, probably better, more thoroughly and more sensibly than I could ever do.

Outside the book itself one thing that interests me is the enormous discrepancy between the ‘implied author’, the author’s voice, the omniscient narrator of Things Fall Apart who is an expert in traditional Igbo society of the 1890s, soaked in tribal life and culture and language and custom – and the reality of Achebe’s own life as a sophisticated globetrotting academic, first leaving Nigeria to work for the BBC in London in the 1950s, then travelling round Africa as a young writer in the 1960s, travelling to the US and Brazil as representative of the breakaway state of Biafra in the late 60s, going to teach in America in the 1970s. After being involved in a serious car crash in 1990, Achebe went for medical treatment to the US, was offered what turned out to be a series of academic posts, and never went back to Nigeria. He lived in the States until his death in 2013 i.e. for 23 years i.e. over a third of his adult life.

Reading the list of his awards and honours makes you wonder whether he was one of the most honoured writers of the 20th century. It’s certainly intimidating. If so many thousands of scholars, hundreds of fellow writers, institutions and prize committees think he’s a master, who am I to dissent?

Immersive technique

What becomes clear within just a few pages is how totally immersive the book is. It’s the authority which gets you. Every paragraph, almost every sentence tells you something about the traditional life Achebe sets out to depict. The narrator doesn’t look at Okonkwo, his life and acts, the values of his village and culture, from the outside, with the benefit of hindsight – it feels right from the start like you are right there, inside that world, totally inhabiting it.

Achebe rarely states facts (in the style of, say, the historical novelists Giles Foden or William Boyd, who give you paragraphs of factual explanation which could have been lifted from encyclopedias). Instead the learning is demonstrated by doing. He shows, doesn’t tell. We learn what we learn about Igbo society through the values, expectations and actions of Okonkwo and those around him (the village elders with their countless proverbial sayings, and the older, wealthier villagers who intervene and judge behaviour and infractions, come in particularly handy here).

In a calm, unhurried and unobtrusive way, the novel conveys a vast amount of lore about belief in spirits, customs surrounding marriage, war and the planting of crops, lots of detail about the daily round of village life. Look at the amount of information conveyed in just this one paragraph.

Okonkwo’s prosperity was visible in his household. He had a large compound enclosed by a thick wall of red earth. His own hut, or obi, stood immediately behind the only gate in the red walls. Each of his three wives had her own hut, which together formed a half moon behind the obi. The barn was built against one end of the red walls, and long stacks of yam stood out prosperously in it. At the opposite end of the compound was a shed for the goats, and each wife built a small attachment to her hut for the hens. Near the barn was a small house, the ‘medicine house’ or shrine where Okonkwo kept the wooden symbols of his personal god and of his ancestral spirits. He worshipped them with sacrifices of kola nut, food and palm-wine, and offered prayers to them on behalf of himself, his three wives and eight children. (p.12)

It’s the calm authoritativeness of this tone which put the reader right there, not only in the physical location, but in the mindset of the people who live there.

Okonkwo

One aspect of this lack of hindsight or outside commentary, of the way we are plunged right into the tribal world he wishes to convey, is the way Achebe doesn’t sugar coat his portrayal of the central figure. Okonkwo is depicted entirely in his own terms, without external commentary and, in particular, authorial criticism.

Thus we learn that he was a strong man, defined by his ability to win wrestling competitions, but also his achievements in war. We learn of his success in farming which means the storehouse in his large compound is always full of yams and so he can afford to maintain a household of three wives and 8 children.

Achebe doesn’t strive to make Okonkwo an attractive figure, indeed there are lots of reasons to find him unattractive or even repellent, by modern standards.

Domestic violence

Most obviously, his family are all terrified of his capricious temper.

Okonkwo ruled his household with a heavy hand. His wives, especially the youngest, lived in perpetual fear of his fiery temper, and so did his little children.

When one of his wives, Nwoye’s mother, dares to ask him a question:

‘Do what you are told, woman,’ Okonkwo thundered.

He regularly beats his wives for even small infractions of routine and duty. When his third wife, Ojiugo, goes to visit a neighbour and is gone too long, Okokwo beats her ‘very heavily’ on her return. His other wives beg him to stop but ‘Okonkwo was not the man to stop beating somebody half-way through’. Later, on a slight pretext, Okonkwo gives his second wife ‘a sound beating and left her and her only daughter weeping.’ When his second wife, Ekwefi, makes a slighting remark he grabs a rusty old gun he owns and tries to shoot her as she scrambles over the wall of his compound to escape. (He misses.)

He thinks his eldest son, Nwoye, is getting lazy and so regularly beats him. This fear of a tyrant’s capricious moods reminds me of the extended portrait of Idi Amin in Giles Foden’s terrifying novel ‘The Last King of Scotland’, and of Wojchiec Jagielski’s parallel portrait of Amin and of the psychopathic figure of Joseph Kony, head of the Lord’s Resistance Army, in his book ‘The Night Wanderers’.

Warrior

In my review of Jagielski’s account of the Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda I wondered whether the endless civil wars and insurgencies which so many African countries seem to be plagued with should be regarded not as a new phenomena but as a return to pre-colonial culture when every tribe was at war with all its neighbouring tribes.

Achebe’s account of the conflicts between the village of Umuofia and its neighbours seems to bear that out. We are told that Okonkwo has fought in two tribal wars and killed five men (p.47). He is a ‘strong man’ in his culture and Achebe explains what that means without any hesitation.

In Umuofia’s latest war he was the first to bring home a human head. That was his fifth head; and he was not an old man yet. On great occasions such as the funeral of a village celebrity he drank his palm-wine from his first human head. (p.10)

Weak father

The narrator suggests that a lot of Okonkwo’s behaviour is a reaction against his father, Unoka, who was perceived, within their culture, as being weak. Unoka borrowed lots of money and died in debt. He spent the borrowed money on palm wine and partying. He didn’t work hard at the main male occupation of planting yams and so didn’t have many in his yam store (a major indicator of wealth). People laughed at his poverty. He didn’t like fighting. He left his son no title. (The clan employs just four titles; only one or two men in each generation attain the fourth and highest; p.86.)

Okonkwo is depicted as growing up ashamed of his weak failure of a father and determined to be the opposite. This partly explains his permanent bad temper. He holds himself to a high standard of behaviour, it has required unremitting effort to get to where he is today, he feels he can’t afford to relax and so snaps at the slightest sign of dereliction of duty, whether by his 12-year-old son or any of his wives. Hence the fiery temper they’re all afraid of, hence the constant tellings-off and beatings.

Okonkwo ruled his household with a heavy hand. His wives, especially the youngest, lived in perpetual fear of his fiery temper, and so did his little children. Perhaps down in his heart Okonkwo was not a cruet man. But his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness. It was deeper and more intimate than the fear of evil and capricious gods and of magic, the fear of the forest, and of the forces of nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw. Okonkwo’s fear was greater than these. It was not external but lay deep within himself. It was the fear of himself, lest he should be found to resemble his father…And so Okonkwo was ruled by one passion-to hate everything that his father Unoka had loved. One of those things was gentleness and another was idleness. (p.11)

Thus:

Okonkwo never showed any emotion openly, unless it be the emotion of anger. To show affection was a sign of weakness; the only thing worth demonstrating was strength. (p.22)

Hence his unstinting work ethic. Hence his success, which all agree is well deserved.

If ever a man deserved his success, that man was Okonkwo. (p.21)

Superstitions

Jagielski’s book is saturated for 300 pages with the belief in spirits of the Acholi people he describes. Achebe’s narrative also is soaked in belief in spirits and the best way to appease them.

Darkness held a vague terror for these people, even the bravest among them. Children were warned not to whistle at night for fear of evil spirits. Dangerous animals became even more sinister and uncanny in the dark. A snake was never called by its name at night, because it would hear. It was called a string.

In particular the villagers regularly consult the Oracle of the Hills and the Caves. When Okonkwo offends against the tradition of the Week of Peace by beating his wife during it, he is intimidated by Ezeani, the priest of Ani, ‘the earth goddess and source of all fertility’, into making a mighty penance (one she-goat, one hen, a length of cloth and a hundred cowries).

Sexism

‘Sit like a woman!’ Okonkwo shouted at her. (p.33)

I imagine every female reader of the book has been offended by Achebe’s depiction of women, and hundreds of thousands of feminist students and academics have noted and critiqued it. But it’s part of Achebe’s technique of acceptance of tribal lore and customs, the good, the bad and the brutal. They’re all described flatly and frankly, all taken together completely oblivious of whether they offend modern sensibilities, and it is this frankness which gives the book its extraordinary power.

Anyway, in Okonkwo’s society women are very much second-class citizens. They must obey their father and then their husband in everything. They are breeding stock and their job is to bear and rear children.

She was about sixteen and just ripe for marriage. Her suitor and his relatives surveyed her young body with expert eyes as if to assure themselves that she was beautiful and ripe. (p.51)

They are involved in agricultural work but of certain defined types:

His mother and sisters worked hard enough, but they grew women’s crops, like coco-yams, beans and cassava. Yam, the king of crops, was a man’s crop. (p.18)

And:

Yam stood for manliness, and he who could feed his family on yams from one harvest to another was a very great man indeed. (p.25)

There is no insult worse than being called a woman (p.19). The word agbala means both ‘woman’ and also ‘man who lacks a title’ i.e. a woman is like the lowest form of man. When Okonkwo hears his 12-year-old son grumbling about women, it makes him happy.

That showed that in time he would be able to control his women-folk. No matter how prosperous a man was, if he was unable to rule his women and his children (and especially his women) he was not really a man. (p.39)

Brutality

Cutting off the head of your enemy, cleaning it and using it a drinking vessel indicates a pretty brutal culture. Okonkwo’s routine beating of his wives and children gives the reader a sense of a widespread culture of brutality in the domestic sphere. We are told it is a tribal tradition to take twins, put them in earthenware pots and throw them away in the jungle, presumably because they’re perceived as bad luck (Achebe doesn’t casually mention this custom, but makes a point of it, mentioning it on pages 95, 107 and 109).

But nothing in the first six chapters had prepared me for the abrupt decision by the village elders to kill Ikemefuna, the hostage boy who had lived with Okonkwo for three years, for him to be hacked down by machete, or for Okonkwo to join in hacking him to death. Having read so many books about the Rwanda genocide it was difficult for the echoes of millions of Africans hacked to death with machetes and hoes not to come screaming into my mind at this moment.

Part 1

A woman of their tribe, the wife of a man named Udo, is killed by a neighbouring tribe. The elders meet and arrange compensation, which is that a virgin from the offending tribe should be sent to Udo to be his new wife, and a young lad from the offending tribe be handed over to our guys.

The elders decide that this boy, Ikemefuna, aged 14, should reside in Okonkwo’s household temporarily. We are shown the poor boy’s distress and unhappiness, being parted from his family for no wrong that he’s done.

Chapter 5

The feast of the New Yam approaches. Detailed description of wives and daughters cooking in Okonkwo’s obi.

Chapter 6

Description of a wrestling festival, an entire day of wrestling matches in front of the assembled village, with cheers and praise for each victor.

Chapter 7

For three years Ikemefuna lives in Okonkwo’s household. He is a pleasant boy, gets on with everyone, a fount of folk stories, Okonkwo’s own son, Nwoye, grows to love and look up to him.

A huge plague of locusts arrives. They haven’t had one for years, only old men remember when. The villagers welcome the locusts because they are good to eat (roasted in clay pots, spread in the sun to dry, then eaten with solidified palm oil if you want to try this at home).

Okonkwo is informed that the elders have decided that the boy Ikemefuna must be executed. Ogbuefi Ezeudu, the oldest man in this quarter of Umuofia, warns Okonkwo to have no hand in his killing. Next day men come, confer with Okonkwo, then tell Ikemefuna he’s going to be taken back to his village. He makes tearful farewells, especially to Nwoye, then sets off with the men. A long trek out beyond the village and into the sandy paths through woodland. A man walking behind him makes a sound to warn the other men, draws his machete and hacks Ikemefuna down. Contrary to Ogbuefi’s advice, Okwonko steps forward and joins the other men hacking Ikemefuna to death.

When Achebe wrote this he wasn’t to know that Africans hacking fellow Africans was to be practiced on an industrial scale in Sierra Leone, Uganda, Rwanda, but we know, and a million ghosts walk over the text at this moment.

Chapter 8

We learn that Ikemefuna’s killing was commanded by the Oracle. Okonkwo’s friends say nobody had any choice in the matter but chide him for taking part. It’s the kind of action will bring curse a whole family. For days afterwards Okonkwo is depressed and listless. He needs activity or, lacking that, talk with friends.

The negotiation of a bride price for Akueke, the ripe 16-year-old daughter of Okonkwo’s friend, Obierika. Description of her elaborate formal wear and body painting. Discussion of different customs in the adjacent villages i.e. the variety of folk customs.

Chapter 9

Okonkwo’s favourite daughter, Ezinma, falls ill with a fever, iba. Extended passage describing ogbanje children i.e. spirits of dead children who go back into the womb to be reincarnated and plague their mothers. Because Ezinma’s mother has borne no fewer than ten children of which nine died young. Account of how, a year previously, a holy man Okagbue, had been brought in to find the fetish or iyi-uwa which Ezinma, like all ogbanje, had buried deep by an orange tree.

Chapter 10

Description of the trial, by the nine egwugwu or ‘masqueraders who impersonate the ancestral spirits of the village’, of Uzowulu, accused of beating his wife so badly and regularly that her in-laws came and rescued her, refusing to hand her back. Hence this big trial which is attended by the entire village.

Chapter 11

Ekwefi and Ezinma are telling each other folk tales when Chielo approaches, the priestess, possessed by the god Agbala, and insists the Ezinma goes away with her, carries her off piggyback. Distraught, Ekwefi decides to follow them in a long passage through the black night haunted by evil spirits, first towards the nearest neighbour village, and then back to the circle of hills amid which lies the tiny opening in the rocks which gives entry to the cave of the Oracle.

Chapter 12

Okonkwo’s friend, Obierika’s wife cooks up a feast for kin attending the uri of his daughter, the day when her suitor would bring palm wine as a gift to her relatives. It is a communal feast prepared by many women, and accompanied by ritual gifts. Eating, drinking, singing and dancing goes on till late into the night.

Chapter 13

Ezeudi, eldest man in the village, dies, the message carried at night by the ekwe, a type of drum made of wood. The funeral is a long complicated cultural event, with eating, and dancing funeral dances. Spirits appear i.e. men in costumes, often terrifying the mourners. The world of the living and of spirits interpenetrate. After all:

A man’s life from birth to death was a series of transition rites which brought him nearer and nearer to his ancestors. (p.85)

As the dancing and firing of guns and clanging of machetes reaches a crescendo, there’s a disaster. Okonkwo’s gun explodes by accident and a piece of metal pierces the heart of the dead man’s 16-year-old son who now lies dying right in the heart of the ceremony, right in front of everybody.

There is nothing for it but for Okonkwo to flee the clan and live in exile for seven years. It is carried out peaceably. His belongings and yams are stored in the obi of his friend Obierika. Then Okonkwo and his family flee back to his motherland, to a little village called Mbanta, just beyond the borders of Mbaino. Then Ezeudi’s kinsman storm Okonkwo’s compound, kill his animals and burn it to the ground. They have no malice, They are merely acting out the justice of the earth goddess.

Part 2

Chapter 14

Okonkwu is taken in by his mother’s family. They give him land to build a compound on and yams to sow and tend. The eldest surviving family member is his mother’s brother, Uchendu. He performs cleansing ceremonies. It was the time when the long summer heat was broken by heavy rain. Okonkwo has to start out all over again and often acts defeated and depressed.

He has arrived at the time of the marriage of the youngest of Uchendu’s five sons to a new bride, a process of numerous ceremonies spread out over months. Description of the ‘confession’ ceremony.

Uchundu calls his extended family together and delivers a stern lecture to Okonkwo, telling him that many in that family assembly have had harder knocks and setbacks to overcome than he, Okonkwo, has. So he needs to man up and look after his wife and children.

Chapter 15

In the second year of Okonkwo’s exile his friend Obierika comes to visit him and is presented to the old patriarch, Uchundu. He brings news of the arrival of the white men. One first appeared in the village of Abame. The holy men consulted the oracle which said white men would bring destruction, so they killed him. Obierika then heard from survivors who made it to Umuofia that the white men returned with a horde of Africans and massacred almost the entire population of the village of Abame.

Chapter 16

Two years later Obierika returns to visit Okonkwo. During that time white Western Christian missionaries have arrived and built a church in Umuofia. Missionaries also arrive in Mbanta, five blacks led by one white man. A comical account of the white man’s attempt to proselytise, as translated by an outsider with a heavy accent. Most think the tale of the Trinity is nonsensical, but the appeal to love, and the music of the hymn they sing, appeals to Okonkwo’s sensitive son, Nwoye.

Chapter 17

When the Christians ask for some land to build a church the village elders give them part of the evil forest.

Every clan and village had its ‘evil forest’. In it were buried all those who died of the really evil diseases, like leprosy and smallpox. It was also the dumping ground for the potent fetishes of great medicine men when they died. An ‘evil forest’ was, therefore, alive with sinister forces and powers of darkness. (p.105)

The villagers expect their evil spirits to strike down the Christians but when it doesn’t happen, they gain more converts. When Okonkwo learns his son is attending church he grabs and starts beating him. Uchundu happens to arrive and tells him to desist. Nwoye walks away without a word, leaves Mbanta and returns to Umuofia where the Christians are building a school. Later, alone by his fire, Okonkwo worries that his entire culture, all belief and customs, will be erased. How could he have sired such an effeminate son?

Chapter 18

The Christians thrive and attract more converts, albeit generally the lowest weakest members of the clan. Rumour comes that they have set up not only a church but a government in Umuofia and are judging miscreants. That they hanged a man for killing a missionary. Trouble caused when the leader of the Mbanta church, Mr Kiaga, accepts osu. These are the caste of permanent outsiders, cursed, distinguished by their long dirty hair, something like the untouchables of India. Kiaga makes an impassioned defence of all being free and equal in the eyes of God, which confirms many in their faith and the osu convert en masse.

One of the Christians is alleged to have killed one of the village’s holy pythons. This gives rise to a debate among the elders. Okonkwo wants to drive the Christians out with extreme violence but is overruled, much to his disgust.

Chapter 19

Okonkwo’s seven year exile approaches its end. He sends money to Obierika to begin to rebuild his compound in Umuofia. And he throws a huge feast for his extended family in Mbanta.

Part 3

Chapter 20

Okonkwo is determined to return and regain his place in his village, determined to build a bigger compound and attain the highest title. But he finds Umuofia much changed. Some men of high caste have thrown away their tribal titles to convert. The white man has built not only a church but a court where the District Commissioner tries cases and a prison where black men are locked up.

It is an important fact that the administration i.e. the court and prison, are served by black men from a long way away, who have no sympathy with the clan in fact despise it.

These court messengers were greatly hated in Umuofia because they were foreigners and also arrogant and high-handed. They were called kotma.

His friend Obierika explains that there are only two white men, driving them out or killing them would be easy. The problem is the number of tribesmen who have converted and committed to the new regime. What to do about them? Hence the title of the book:

‘The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.’ (p.125)

Chapter 21

The white head of the mission in Umuofia is Mr Brown. A lot of its success is due to the way he is calm and respectful of local belief. He has many long debates about religion with an elder in a neighbouring village named Akunna. Brown realises a frontal assault won’t work so he builds a school and a hospital. Soon the locals realise that being able to read and write opens opportunities to earn good money in the court or prison.

From the very beginning religion and education went hand in hand. (p.128)

Okonkwo is disappointed that his return doesn’t cause much stir. The mental world, the horizons of the village people have been immeasurably expanded.

The new religion and government and the trading stores were very much in the people’s eyes and minds. There were still many who saw these new institutions as evil, but even they talked and thought about little else, and certainly not about Okonkwo’s return. (p.129)

Okonkwo’s son Nwoye has now taken the Christian name Isaac and gone to the capital of the British colony, Umuru on the big river, to attend the training college for teachers. When Mr Brown makes a courtesy call on Okonkwo the latter tells him next time he’ll be carried out of his compound.

He mourned for the clan, which he saw breaking up and falling apart, and he mourned for the warlike men of Umuofia, who had so unaccountably become soft like women.

Chapter 22

Mr Brown succumbs to illness and returns to Britain. He is replaced by the Reverend James Smith who is much more doctrinaire and unforgiving. One of the most zealous converts, Enoch, confronts the masqueraders dressed as gods at the annual ceremony to honour the earth deity, and tears off his mask, thus revealing him to be an ordinary mortal. Ripples of shock throughout the village.

All night the Mother of Spirits haunted the village and in the morning all the egwugwu from all the surrounding villages assembled in a show of strength, made a huge song and dance and then marched on Enoch’s hut which they trash. Then on to the church. The black converts flee but the Reverend Smith stands his ground, along with the interpreter, Okeke.

The egwugwu deliver a speech saying they will restrain themselves from killing Smith out of respect for his brother, Brown. But they will smash down his (red-earth) church, and this they do.

Chapter 23

The District Commissioner (DC) returns from a trip and invites the six head men to a meeting. Here he lulls them into a false sense of security then has the court officials, in effect the black police, jump them, handcuff them and throw them in the cells. The DC says he’s decided to fine them 200 cowries for breaching the peace, and promises they’ll be well treated while the money is collected, but the moment his back is turned, the kotma shave their heads and whip them. The six headmen are plunged into despair.

The court messengers or kotma then tell the villagers that they must pay a ransom of 250 cowrie shells, planning to keep the 50 surplus shells for themselves. Here we see the seeds of the institutionalised corruption which will cripple all African nations.

Instead of celebrating the festival of the full moon, the entire village is silent and subdued as if in mourning.

Chapter 24

A great meeting of the village, to which people from other villages come, starting off early in the morning. A series of speakers set off to address the great assembly on the destruction the white man is bringing to their life, when round the corner come the five leading ‘court messengers’ or kotma.

Okonkwo, all the fury and frustration of his entire life, and his unjust exile, pent up inside him, leaps from his seat to confront the lead messenger. He refuses to be cowed and rudely informs Okonkwo that the meeting is to be terminated. All his fury bursts and Okonkwo draws his machete and hacks the man to the ground then chops his head off.

The world spins round him but already he knows Umuofia won’t rise to support him. All their brave words are void. They have become women. He lives in an effeminate world. He flees.

Chapter 25

When the District Commissioner goes with armed men to arrest Okonkwo, his friend Obierika takes them through Okonkwo’s compound to the tree where Okonkwo has hanged himself. He then explains at length that a man who kills himself is unclean which is why they cannot cut him down or bury him. He asks the DC to get his men to do that. Then the village elders will carry out the appropriate cleansing rituals.

In its last paragraph the entire novel undergoes a massive heave, like tectonic plates, a vast shift of focus. For 25 chapters the narrator has entirely occupied the minds and customs of the villagers and soaked us in their mindset and culture. Now in these last few paragraphs the perspective changes to share with us the thoughts of the English District Commissioner. It tells us that in his many years of ‘bringing civilisation to different parts of Africa’, he has learned not to demean himself with simple tasks like cutting down a hanged man. He will leave that to his men. Meanwhile what the leaders have just told him about their attitude to suicides might well make a chapter in the book he’s been pondering for some time about native customs.

Well, he reflects, in a killing aside, maybe not an entire chapter. Maybe a paragraph. After all, he thinks, with what the entire preceding text has shown us to be breath-taking ignorance,

Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate. There was so much else to include, and one must be firm in cutting out details. (p.146)

Thus we see how the rich and complex life of a major figure, a complex nuanced character, Okonkwo famed throughout the nine villages, is erased, elided, destroyed, reduced to a small paragraph in a colonial book of African anthropology. It’s a really cutting, stinging ending.

For the Brits haven’t killed anyone, let alone carried out some awful colonial massacre. The book is all the more powerful for showing that they did something much worse. They erased entire cultures. They destroyed people’s identities. They took away people’s reasons for living.

Thoughts

I doubt I can say anything which hasn’t already been said a thousand times before. I bet there are hundreds of scholarly papers relating the novel to the sociological and cultural impact of white Europeans on traditional black African cultures. And just as many pointing out the book is a tragedy which complies with the Greek idea of a central figure crippled by a tragic flaw. In Okonkwo’s case his flaw is his righteous anger, his resort to violence in the belief that he is more righteous and validated than everyone around him. Thus the immediate cause of his death is the blind rage which overcomes him when the chief court messenger provokes him.

But the overriding impression the book leaves is of its immense poise and finish. Miraculously, it doesn’t feel dated. It feels timeless in the way of a true classic. It feels like it has always been true and always will be. All the incidents hang together and are of a piece. It feels immensely solid and authoritative.

Tiny footnote

The W.B. Yeats poem the title is taken from (The Second Coming) was obviously a favourite of Achebe’s. Twenty-five years later, in his long essay, The Trouble with Nigeria, he casually uses another phrase from it, ‘mere anarchy’ (chapter 7).

Credit

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe was published in 1958 by Heinemann. References are to the 2010 Everyman edition.

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Pornography, simile and surrealism in The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash

WARNING: This review contains quotations and images of an extremely brutal and/or sexually explicit nature.

The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) is packed with deviant sexual activity, described with a cold clinical detachment, and Crash (1973) is notorious for being one of the most pornographic ‘serious’ novels of the post-war period, not just pornographic but deliberately and studiedly perverse, in that the story is about how the lead characters – both men and women – become fixated on the erotic potential of car crashes.

All this can easily appear gratuitous, designed purely to shock, or to generate publicity and sales.

But apart from all the external arguments we can invoke to defend Ballard, there are arguments in the works themselves which go some way to explaining their extremity.

In particular, one of the recurring characters in The Atrocity Exhibition, the psychiatrist Dr Nathan, is given several speeches where he explains the reason behind the lead character’s obsession with sex – and with extreme, fetishistic sex of the kind Ballard describes in these two books. These two or three speeches explain Ballard’s motivation, contain interesting insights about modern society, and unwittingly shed light on Ballard’s broader approach and technique.

1. Perverse sex resists the trivialisation and commercialisation of sexuality

During the 1960s sex came out of the closet and into all forms of art and media, advertising, music and movies, the mini-skirt, the pill. Ballard’s shock novels both became possible because of this swift liberalisation of social attitudes, but they are also in some measure a reaction against the modern ubiquity of sex:

‘Now that sex is becoming more and more a conceptual act, an intellectualization divorced from affect and physiology alike, one has to bear in mind the positive merits of the sexual perversions. Talbert’s library of cheap photo-pornography is in fact a vital literature, a kindling of the few taste buds left in the jaded palates of our so-called sexuality.’

The argument is that, as the imagery of sex becomes more ubiquitous in advertising and popular culture, our personal enactments of it unavoidably repeat images, positions, postures, maybe even words and phrases, which we have all seen in the tide of increasingly ‘liberated’ movies and TV dramas. So how can we escape from the sense of simply going through motions done much better on the silver screen by glamorous movie stars, or detailed in a thousand ‘How To Have Better Sex’ books and magazine articles, or in the highly sexualised fiction that we can now read? How can we escape from the nagging feeling that our sex lives have been colonised and occupied by the mass media?

By doing things ‘normal people’ would never dream of.

Thus, at a basic level – level 1 – the characters’ obsession with perverse sex is to some extent justifiable as a rejection of the safe, tame, commercially packaged and sanitised sex lives which are increasingly pushed on us from all directions.

(The irony of David Cronenberg making a glossy movie out of Crash was that he was incorporating into film a glaring example of a work which was trying to rebel against being incorporated into film. Hollywood eats everything. Turns everything into two-hour glamorisation and trivialisation, converts the weird and uncanny into a tried and trusted set of gestural and facial clichés. Which is why I loathe film as a medium.)

2. Car crashes are sexually liberating

But not only is extreme fetishistic sex a way of escaping the stifling ‘norms’ of how-to guides in magazines and on daytime TV – Dr Nathan goes on to assert that there is something specifically exciting and arousing about car crashes.

‘Talbot’s belief – and this is confirmed by the logic of the scenario – is that automobile crashes play very different roles from the ones we assign them. Apart from its ontological function, redefining the elements of space and time in terms of our most potent consumer durable, the car crash may be perceived unconsciously as a fertilizing rather than a destructive event – a liberation of sexual energy – mediating the sexuality of those who have died with an intensity impossible in any other form: James Dean and Miss Mansfield, Camus and the late President.’

Think how vital car crashes are to Hollywood movies, both comedies and catastrophes. Think of the orgasmic pleasure it gave hundreds of millions of cinema-goers to watch the whole world blow up in an orgy of crashing cars, airplanes and tube trains in the blockbuster Armageddon movie 2012, and all the many others like it.

Disaster movies are just a shallow, celluloid re-enactment of something much darker and fiercer in human nature: that we revel in destruction. Ballard is just taking this meme – embedded in countless examples of the most popular popular culture – and pushing it to one absolute limit.

The notion that witnessing car crashes allows the release of sexual energy among onlookers lies behind the semi-satirical ‘survey’s which make up the last sections of The Atrocity Exhibition. These assure us, in the po-faced language of questionnaires and social science, that witnesses of car crashes experience a sharp increase in their libido and report marked increases of sexual activity with their partners in the weeks that follow. Car crashes are hot!

3. Car crash sex is one way into a new form of sexuality

If you combine the two ideas above – 1. that fetishistic sex is a way of avoiding the commercialisation of our own sex lives, and 2. that car crashes are exciting – then you move towards a conclusion, a third idea: that car crash sexual fetishisation may be the gateway into a brand new form of human sexuality.

The deformed body of the crippled young woman, like the deformed bodies of the crashed automobiles, revealed the possibilities of an entirely new sexuality.

This view is repeated again and again in Atrocity Exhibition and Crash, that humans are evolving new relationships with their brutal built environment and with each other, and that the combination of the two – of concrete motorways and shopping precincts and multi-story car parks – is creating a new, dissociated, alienated psychology which is giving rise to a new, hard-edge psychology of sex.

4. Car crashes are telling us something

But then there is a fourth level of meaning: beneath the (normally forbidden and repressed) sexual elements which are liberated (in Ballard’s view) by car crashes, there is another, much deeper level of significance. For while we consciously deplore the loss of life etc, we are nonetheless attracted, compulsively attracted, to the scene of car crashes and to re-enact them over and over again. Why?

For Ballard, the assassination of President Kennedy forms a kind of religious apotheosis of the theme: and God knows American culture, from Oliver Stone to Don DeLillo, has been compelled to replay that moment in Dealey Plaza over and over again, picking at the scar, endlessly hoping the psychological devastation of that one fateful moment can be forced to reveal its true secret, to unfold the real conspiracy which led to the president’s death.

The fruitless investigations and countless personal obsessions with the Kennedy assassination are all trying to do the same thing – to get to the bottom, to find the truth about the world. For it all to make sense.

This is a fourth way of interpreting the meaning of car crashes: they are a weird and perverse emblem of humanity’s obsessive need to make sense of the world.

Dr Nathan, in The Atrocity Exhibition, describes one of the other characters as attempting to restage the Kennedy assassination but this time ‘so it makes sense’, and in the annotations he later wrote for the book, Ballard is (as usual) totally candid about the importance of the JFK assassination to the entire book.

Kennedy’s assassination presides over The Atrocity Exhibition, and in many ways the book is directly inspired by his death, and represents a desperate attempt to make sense of the tragedy, with its huge hidden agenda. The mass media created the Kennedy we know, and his death represented a tectonic shift in the communications landscape, sending fissures deep into the popular psyche that have not yet closed.

For all the characters in Crash, the crashes they’ve been involved and the systems of scars and scar tissue left woven into their bodies are telling them something, are codes whose code books have been lost, ciphers of some meaning trembling just beyond reach.

If you think this sounds eccentric or exaggerated, just cast your mind back to the public reaction to Princess Diana’s death in a car crash: it was epic, it was awesome, the entire nation came to a halt, vast crowds gathered outside Kensington Palace and queued for days to sign the book of condolence. And then her funeral. Every commentator at the time highlighted the sense of excess, that the nation seemed to be traumatised far more than the facts of the matter seemed to justify. My own interpretation was that it was us we were grieving for, for all our lost illusions, dreams and hopes which this fairytale princess had come to symbolise.

And then consider the conspiracy theories about the role of the driver, and the pursuing cars, and the role of MI6 or the Royal Family in ‘assassinating’ her, or was it the Russians or… or… Anything, no matter how far-fetched, in order to give meaning, purpose, shape and coherence to what was, in fact, just a stupid pointless car crash, like so many hundreds of thousands of others.

Well, it is the same forlorn, doomed quest for the elusive meaning at the heart of the violent confrontation between man and machine, for the sense of any meaning at the heart of our lives, which the characters of Crash are condemned to pursue, right up to the book’s logical and senseless climax.

5. Car crashes are examples of Ballard’s obsession with junctures and juxtapositions

But these four interpretations of car crash sex – the sexual and the psychological and the ontological – themselves overlay an even deeper level of meaning: for in The Atrocity Exhibition in particular we come to realise that the protagonist’s obsession with sex is in fact a sub-set of a much deeper obsession – an obsession with the way things are put together – with the modern world of junctions and conjunctions.

Seen from this perspective, sex is just the most garish and compelling avatar of a far deeper and more abstract structure which exists throughout the world as we know it, which is the joining together of disparate parts.

The Primary Act. As they entered the cinema, Dr Nathan confided to Captain Webster, ‘Talbert has accepted in absolute terms the logic of the sexual union. For him all junctions, whether of our own soft biologies or the hard geometries of these walls and ceilings, are equivalent to one another. What Talbert is searching for is the primary act of intercourse, the first apposition of the dimensions of time and space. In the multiplied body of the film actress – one of the few valid landscapes of our age – he finds what seems to be a neutral ground. For the most part the phenomenology of the world is a nightmarish excrescence. Our bodies, for example, are for him monstrous extensions of puffy tissue he can barely tolerate. The inventory of the young woman is in reality a death kit.’ Webster watched the images of the young woman on the screen, sections of her body intercut with pieces of modern architecture. All these buildings. What did Talbert want to do – sodomize the Festival Hall?

This passage explains in a flash the bizarre linkage of sex and architecture which runs throughout The Atrocity Exhibition and recurs in Crash, in its fetishisation of concrete motorways and multi-story car parks.

Modern brutalist architecture reveals the junctions of floors and ceilings, uprights and flats, struts and pillars, with crushing candour – and it is not altogether irrational to see the brutal slotting of concrete floors into concrete stanchions, stark geometric arrangements of prefabricated parts slotted together to create complicated cantilevered structures – with even the most basic sexual positions; even the missionary position, seen from outside, is quite an unwieldy network of limbs arranged in funny and strikingly geometric angles, four arms, four legs, bearing weights or bent at strange angles – all to arrange for the slotting of a vertical member into an oval orifice.

Seen – just seen – actually observed with no moral or sentimental framework whatsoever – sex is a complicated assemblage of moving parts for dubious ends.

Above all, the interest in angles, angles of entry or penetration, the rectilinear arrangements and poses of the human body, can be quite easily made to seem half-abstract.

The identification of splayed human bodies with the splayed metal plates of cars which have been in catastrophic crashes is not, in the end, that far-fetched.

Modern art and angles

This fetishistic approach seems less exceptional when taken out of the context of novels and literature altogether, and placed in the tradition of modern art.

Remember Ballard was very interested indeed in modern art, confessed in interviews to wanting to have been an artist, and litters his stories with art references. In these respects – exploring sexual perversion, and the geometric aspect of the human body – art was waaaaay ahead of written literature, having discovered the geometry beneath the skin of human beings fifty years before Ballard was writing his rude books.

Nude Descending a Staircase by Marcel Duchamp (1912)

Indeed, Duchamp’s famous painting Nude Descending a Staircase is directly referenced in The Atrocity Exhibition, in The Great American Nude chapter:

Koester parked the car outside the empty production offices. They walked through into the stage. An enormous geometric construction filled the hangar-like building, a maze of white plastic convolutions. Two painters were spraying pink lacquer over the bulbous curves. ‘What is this?’ Koester asked with irritation. ‘A model of A/ 3 1 ?’ Dr Nathan hummed to himself. ‘Almost,’ he replied coolly. ‘In fact, you’re looking at a famous face and body, an extension of Miss Taylor into a private dimension. The most tender act of love will take place in this bridal suite, the celebration of a unique nuptial occasion. And why not? Duchamp’s nude shivered her way downstairs, far more desirable to us than the Rokeby Venus, and for good reason.’

‘Far more desirable to us than the Rokeby Venus’? Discuss.

Bellmer and fetish dolls

Ballard was particularly attracted by the Surrealists, and The Atrocity Exhibition references a dozen or so Surrealist paintings and artists, and the idea of bodies regarded as weird fragments, taken to pieces and reassembled to make bizarre new biologies, was one of Surrealism’s basic strategies.

This is most crudely obvious in the obscene and disturbing mannequins made by the German Surrealist artist and photographer Hans Bellmer (1902 to 1975). Bellmer made his first recombined ‘dolls’ in 1933, was forced to flee to the Nazis, was welcomed to France by the Surrealists, and after the war continued to produce a stream of erotic drawings, etchings, sexually explicit photographs, paintings and prints, often – the transgressive little tinker – of pubescent girls.

Plate from La Poupée (1936) by Hans Bellmer

This is not just like Ballard, it virtually is the Ballard of The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash, in which men fetishise parts of the female body, pose women in awkward and anti-romantic positions, imagine women’s bodies as multiple fragments or as specific zones blown up to the size of billboard hoardings.

Bellmer explained his thinking thus:

What is at stake here is a totally new unity of form, meaning and feeling: language-images that cannot simply be thought up or written up … They constitute new, multifaceted objects, resembling polyplanes made of mirrors … As if the illogical was relaxation, as if laughter was permitted while thinking, as if error was a way and chance, a proof of eternity.

This could be Ballard talking.

Or take the surprise final work by Marcel Duchamp, the notorious (for the tiny number of people who have heard of it) Étant donnés, which Duchamp laboured over (allegedly) from 1946 to 1966 in his Greenwich Village studio, and which was only discovered after his death.

It consists of a common-or-garden wooden door which contains a peephole through which you see a brutal photo of a nude woman lying on her back with her face hidden, legs spread, and one hand holding a gas lamp against a landscape backdrop.

Étant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau / 2° le gaz d’éclairage (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas) by Marcel Duchamp (1946 to 1966)

Shocked? You’re meant to be. Puzzled? Ditto.

Ballard and the French tradition of épatant la bourgeoisie

In fact, the more you think about it, the more ‘traditional’ Ballard’s two extreme books seem – just not in the well-mannered English tradition.

The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash have nothing in common with the polite and subtle novels about upper-middle-class life of an Anthony Powell from this period, or the works of the so-called Angry Young Men (John Osborne, Kingsley Amis), or the kitchen-sink dramas which came in in the early 1960s (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning et al).

But they are entirely in the tradition, the very long tradition, of French literary attempts to ‘épater la bourgeoisie’ or shock the middle classes.

This French tradition goes back at least as far as the self-consciously decadent poets and writers of the 1890s, or further back to Arthur Rimbaud writing in the 1870s or further back to Baudelaire’s poems about hashish and prostitutes, Les Fleurs du Mal in 1857, or maybe all the way back to the Marquis de Sade and works like The Hundred Days of Sodom (1785) which set out to scientifically catalogue every kind of sexual position and perversion conceivable to the mind of man.

By 1924 when André Breton published his Surrealist Manifesto France had had seventy years or so of ‘radical’ artists determined to use sex and obscenity to disrupt what they saw as the placid banality of bourgeois life.

Courbet scandalised the bourgeoisie with his Realism, Flaubert with the ‘immorality’ of Madame Bovary. Monet scandalised the bourgeoisie with his naked women at a picnic, the Impressionists with their shapeless ‘daubs’. Zola scandalised the bourgeoisie with his blunt Naturalism and frank depictions of Paris prostitutes (in Nana). The Decadents scandalised the bourgeoisie with their over-ripe dreams of drugs and unmentionable perversions. The Cubists scandalised the bourgeoisie with their collages and geometric shapes. The Surrealists shocked the bourgeoisie with their revelation of the sexual perversions lurking just beneath the surface of human consciousness. And so on…

In other words, in France, there is a very well-established and totally assimilated tradition of artists, novelists and playwrights doing their best to shock the bourgeoisie. Seen from this perspective Ballard is hardly a pioneer, more of a late-comer which, I think, sometimes explains the rather bloodless and placid feel of even his most ‘scandalous’ novels. Even when I first read them in the 1970s I had the sense that I’d somehow already read them and now, 40 years later, I think that’s because he was in fact channelling well-established tropes and notions (albeit from the Continental tradition) and simply updating them for the age of helicopters, napalm and multi-story car parks.

Surrealism, the art of juxtaposition and Ballard

At the core of Surrealist practice was the idea of the jarring juxtaposition of completely disparate elements.

It was while reading Les Chants de Maldoror, published in 1869 by Isidore-Lucien Ducasse under the pseudonym the Comte de Lautréamont, that the godfather of the French surrealists, André Breton, discovered the phrase that became foundational to the surrealist doctrine of objective chance:

as beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.

Striking juxtapositions are a core element of the Surrealist aesthetic.

Thus when Ballard makes systematic, obsessive and repeated comparisons between the splayed bodies of naked women and a) the hard angles of brutalist concrete architecture, and b) the splayed metal and shattered windscreens of car crashes, he is following the Surrealist aesthetic to a T.

Although our imaginations are bombarded with adverts, films and novels encouraging us to think of sex as a smooth and sensual affair, not very different from eating a Cadburys Flake, anybody who’s actually had sex knows that it can also be quite energetic and brutal, that it contains elements of aggression and domination, compliance and submission which are hovering on the brink of possibility, waiting to be isolated and encouraged.

Since Fifty Shades of Grey became the fastest-selling novel of all time, we as a culture have become much more open about aspects of bondage or BDSM as it is now known and marketed in High Street sex shops, leading to a great deal more sexual experimentation of the kind Ballard describes in his books.

The identification of sex with car crashes was deeply shocking in the repressed 1960s, and upsets the simple-minded to this day, but both visually and conceptually, I am persuaded by Ballard that it is born of a deep, latent similarity between the two events.

Similes and Surreal juxtapositions

This gesture, the idea of the unexpected linking together of disparate elements, echoes some of the points I made in my essay about the importance of similes in Ballard’s writing.

Ballard uses similes a lot. So do other writers, but from his earliest novels Ballard as a writer is notable for the striking and outré comparisons he makes: a woman’s eyes are like dragonflies, wrecked cars look like Saurian lizards, high rise buildings tower overhead like glass coffins.

Ballard’s mind is always making comparisons and correlations, moving from the real concrete thing being described to often wild and unlikely analogies so that when you read a Ballard text you are not only reading about things themselves but are continually projected or flung into the full flood of his uncanny imaginarium.

This is another way to understand the obsession with geometry, planes and angles in The Atrocity Exhibition. It is like the technique of simile but converted into the language of geometry. You can think of all the references to angles and geometry as like being structural containers for similes, but without the actual content. Lines from the draft of a painting waiting to be filled in.

Looked at from this point of view, the linkage of porno sex to car crashes, and the various angles and shapes made by women’s bodies to the architectural shapes of concrete flyovers or modernist hotels, is in a sense only taking the metaphor-making tendency intrinsic in all Ballard’s fiction to extremes.

Ballard himself acknowledges the weirdness and extremity of some of his analogies at various points in the text:

This can be carried to remarkable lengths – for example, the jutting balconies of the Hilton Hotel have become identified with the lost gill-slits of the dying film actress, Elizabeth Taylor.

Extremes of disgust, in some critics’ minds; but extremes of delirious insight and extraordinary beauty, in my opinion. I am particularly haunted by his obsessive use of the idea that human faces contain implicit lines and planes which project outwards, forming complex three-dimensional geometries.

His eyes stared at Travis, their focus sustained only by a continuous effort. For some reason the planes of his face failed to intersect, as if their true resolution took place in some as yet invisible dimension

The planes of their lives interlocked at oblique angles, fragments of personal myths fusing with the commercial cosmologies.

The planes of his cheekbones and temples intersected with the slabs of rainwashed cement, together forming a strange sexual modulus.

For English readers in 1970 this was weird and revolutionary stuff and it still has the power to stun and disorient today. But deep down, is it anything more than a putting into words of the visual effects created by about ten thousand cubist portraits from fifty years earlier?

Young Man in a Gray Sweater (1914) by Diego Rivera

Ballard’s fundamental strategy in these two shattering books is to contrast the soft and (for most people) precious and sentimental idea of the human body, especially its most sensitive, erogenous and private zones – breast and pubis, penis and vulva – and juxtapose them with the most public, hard-edged, angular and manufactured objects of the modern world – cars, roads, brutalist buildings.

Although the books contain hundreds of individually brilliant similes and metaphors, I couldn’t help thinking that underlying most of them and the deeper structures of the books’ themes and ideas, were the profoundly disruptive and innovative strategies of early 20th century Modernist art.