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| Jan 01, 1970
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Nov 21, 2015
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| 3.73
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Carthage holds a certain fascination for me, as a classics scholar, in that it was an empire of power, influence, and grand personalities--and yet the
Carthage holds a certain fascination for me, as a classics scholar, in that it was an empire of power, influence, and grand personalities--and yet the legacy Carthage has left to us, her history, her culture were deliberately erased, burned to the ground with nary a trace remaining, and then replaced with the politicized fictions of Rome, who destroyed her, followed in her footsteps, and replaced her. The shadow of Carthage looms large across the ancient world, but she is always a shadow: dark, unknowable, menacing, cloaked in rumor. Her real presence, her real character still remain unknown to us. Some things we do know: that she was a colony of Phoenicians who became a power in their own right, the figures of Hanno the navigator, Hannibal the general, and some other greats, mostly sprung from the grand Barca line. Yet our knowledge is always filtered through Roman eyes, Roman words--to the point that the great Roman cultural epic, Virgil's Aeneid, personifies Carthage in the figure of Dido: the angry, jilted lover intent on preventing Rome's ever being born. In the end, warmongering Cato's oft-repeated lineCarthago delenda est--'Carthage must be destroyed'--was followed to the letter. In preparation for this book, the follow-up to his acknowledged masterpiece of psychological Realism,Madame Bovary,Flaubert spent months researching, burying himself in ancient histories, trying to recover the lost empire--even visiting its former site. One can see the fruits of his labors in the book's mostly delightful details--which at their best evoke the poetic list-making of Ovid or Milton--while at other times, they run to the banal, as a certain lengthy explanation of the difference between the catapult and the ballista. There is definitely a sense that Flaubert is working more in the milieu of history here, not melodrama--which is unfortunate, because the story cries out to be told with pathos and character, to be sung. We're never allowed into the characters, psychologically--instead of seeing their thoughts develop toward the moment of decision, Flaubert sticks us with mere descriptions of what has happened. What a Shakespearean performance this might have been--full of contentious dialogues, arguments, coercions, seductions--I longed to see these grand figures strutting the stage, demonstrating their mastery, their force of personality, their depth of emotion. It's no wonder that luminaries like Mussorgsky and Rachmaninoff tried to craft operas from the tale. Without these passionate struggles, these subtle turns and manipulations, the entire melodrama grows ever more flat, preconceived, inevitable. Yet, as the author, himselfwrote: "I would give the demi-ream of notes I've written during the last five months and the ninety-eight volumes I've read, to be, for only three seconds, really moved by the passion of my heroes." Sometimes, alas, the work simply does not come together as we wish it might--as indeed weknowthat it can, for that is what draws an artist to the project in the first place: his sure knowledge that there is a story here worth telling, and the reader surely comes away with that same impression, that there is fertile ground here. The bloody anecdotes--especially an early one about the crucifixion of a full-grown lion--are rife with opportunity for symbolism, for multilayered writing, if only it had all come together. If only. They do not work as pure history--Flaubert lacks that scholarly depth and breadth, for all his researches--but neither can he quite turn them to an artistic purpose. In the end, the most interesting way to view the work--and indeed, likely the reason it failed--is as a grand piece ofOrientalism.We do not quite get Carthage-as-Carthage, but neither do we get Carthage-as-France. Instead, we get a distancing, a view of Carthage as unknowable, as impossible to sympathize with--that same distance that the Orientalist stance was constructed to produce. It is either fitting or ironic that we end up here, since in many ways, Carthage-by-way-of-Rome is the original example of the Orientalist posture: the foreign power is destroyed, conquered, converted, and then rewritten by the conqueror as self-justification. The voice of Carthage, its power and influence was so great that Rome had to reduce it, to transform it into something less threatening--even as Rome dutifully copied both the technology and the methods which Carthage established as the necessities of the first true maritime trade empire to dominate the Mediterranean. Aeneas is not merely a snub to Carthage, after all--but also an attempt by Rome to rewrite Persian greatness into their empire, which was always more Cult of the God King thanRhetoric of the Demos--then, in the wake of the Renaissance and the Reconquista, the European powers once again take on the Roman cause and identity, intent on making an abused lover of Islam, which had so long dominated and loomed over them. For France, Algeria became the colonial site wherethey most fully exploredthe perverse decadence that is the ruler's right--at the same time blaming the natives for whatever was inflicted upon them, through the standard process of Orientalist distancing--a process we still use to this day, insisting that any group who cannot prevent themselves from being dominated must, in some way, be asking to be so dominated. The most extreme example of alienation and vilification crafted by the Romans against the Carthaginians is the Tophet--a site where, it was claimed, infants were sacrificed to the brutal gods as offerings to stave off defeat, disease, and blight. Flaubert repeats this accusation in the most florid and merciless way, as the blood-mad crowd gives up child after child to the mechanized maw of their titanic idol. Recent archaeological study suggests that the Tophet was used for interring the numerous stillbirths and victims of high infant mortality in the ancient world. Though clearly influential on adventure writers like Haggard, Kipling, and Mundy, Flaubert does not quite achieve the rollicking pace that make those stories enjoyable. Neither can he deliver upon the wild personalities which might have carried the tale as a proper melodrama--the required psychological distance between himself as a French citizen and the necessarily depraved East is too vast a gulf for authorial sympathies to bridge. Neither can it quite be called a history--it is rather too close and personal, too invested in the blood and depravity for its own sake to maintain more objective judgment. Perhaps Melville--if anyone--could have melded these disparate types of story, through extended symbolism and precisely-constructed moments into a tale that managed, ultimately, to hang together and surpass the mere sum of assembled parts. In the end Flaubert, despite his particular skills and the time he invested, could not. ...more |
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Oct 31, 2014
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Nov 20, 2014
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Oct 31, 2014
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| 1420923870
| 9781420923872
| 1420923870
| 3.93
| 4,050
| 1907
| Jan 01, 2005
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Oct 21, 2013
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| 1597800368
| 9781597800365
| 1597800368
| 3.91
| 861
| Nov 1981
| Feb 01, 2006
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liked it
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In the hands of its most talented practitioners, Sword & Sorcery can be thrilling, scintillating, and deeply ironic--which makes it all the more regre
In the hands of its most talented practitioners, Sword & Sorcery can be thrilling, scintillating, and deeply ironic--which makes it all the more regrettable to see just how thoughtless and cliche depictions ofraceandsextend to be in the genre. Part of what excited me about the prospect of reading this hard-to-find series was that it is very much about race, a self-aware deconstruction of one of the genre’s historic failings. It is that--as well as a dip into African History, a fascinating (and vast) slice of the human story that is too often ignored and downplayed--especially in the face of the endless pseudo-Medieval setting that covers the fantasy genre like a fetid swamp. However, the parallels with modern, Colonial slavery and the complexities of identity of American Blacks born to that tradition are a bit too on-the-nose. I would have appreciated more of a Humanistic look at the role slavery has played in human history, as well as the way that racial identity is coded and manufactured socially--it’s a vast and important set of ideas that needs more than simply the xenophobia of Lovecraft versus the modern, post-Civil Rights view to encapsulate it. It was pleasant--particularly after trying theKane series--to read stories which are so intensely focused upon the hero's internal life: his decisions, thoughts, experiences, and emotions. Never was there that struggle to connect the character to the world and to the story--as so often crops up in tales of ‘impossibly muscled’ heroes who cleave their way from danger to danger by the sweat of their brow, but otherwise remain aloof. Unfortunately, Imaro’s successes were too often the result of a sort of generic ‘strength’--an overcoming by gritting one’s teeth, and simply coming out the other side unscathed. It’s always a shame to see a writer give in to such a simplistic resolution--but it's very common, and not only in the fantasy genre. There are few things more escapist, more wish-fulfilling than the notion of achieving something simply by wanting it enough, willing your way through, and forcing your preferences on the world. If only the world would bend to us, recognize that we are right, and let us have our way--but such a fantasy makes for a poorer story. I wished that these internal struggles felt as personal and emotional to the character as his motivations. Intense conflict is such a great place to reveal a character, to show how he differs from everyone else on the page--what unique approach he takes, in light of his experiences and personal style. Of course, that requires the imagination and skill of a seasoned author, while this is only Saunders' preliminary outing. There's certainly a lot of room for improvement, but also a lot of strong elements that make the story engaging and readable. I'll have to give Imaro another try, down the road, and see how he progresses. ...more |
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Dec 10, 2014
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Dec 15, 2014
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May 26, 2013
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| 0141439521
| 9780141439525
| 0141439521
| 3.79
| 50,256
| Sep 1885
| Jan 29, 2008
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Sep 03, 2008
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Aug 13, 2008
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| 0192835505
| 9780192835505
| 0192835505
| 3.57
| 13,408
| 1887
| Oct 22, 1998
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Dec 10, 2008
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Jul 08, 2008
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| 1406503177
| 9781406503173
| 1406503177
| 3.69
| 12,800
| 1888
| Dec 21, 2005
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liked it
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I must admit I find the modern backlash against colonialism to be somewhat ridiculous; as if colonialism were something new, something purely European
I must admit I find the modern backlash against colonialism to be somewhat ridiculous; as if colonialism were something new, something purely European, something malicious and unnatural. What else has mankind done since it rose in Africa but displace its neighbors? What else does any animal do but seek to thrive where it can? Any successful group soon becomes cramped as their population rises, and hence spreads out to new areas. In this way, each species has developed and then expanded to its limits. Whenever there is a significant change in environment, a new species takes over the place of the old. But this does not in any way lessen the worth of the displaced group. It is a mistake to see Darwinian evolution as leading towards 'something greater'. Human beings are no better than jellyfish, indeed, place a human being underwater with only small fish for his sustenance, and see how long he lasts. No animal is better, each is specialized for a certain environment. Mankind has colonized the world, but so have ants, and pound for pound, there are more ants than people. Humans have altered their atmosphere and environment, but so did algae millions of years ago, and they drove most of the other animals extinct. Our ability to affect the world does not make us unique. Populations of early man expanded across Africa and out into Europe and Asia. Some of these were Homo Sapiens, like modern man, others neanderthals, australopithecines, and other variations. These different groups fought for territory and resources, and one-by-one, wiped each other out. The expansion of animals across the globe is never one of peaceful balance. There can be no balance in a constantly-shifting environment. Eventually, we began to develop early cultures, not because any group of humans was 'better', but because of environmental effects (for a theory about what sorts of effects these were, check outGuns, Germs and Steel). The populations who developed things like agriculture and tool-use were able to expand, and when they expanded, they ran into the neighboring populations, who they fought, slew, sublimated, and combined with. Humans moved all around the globe, taking over land from other groups and wiping out the previous cultures. There is archaeological evidence that suggests that when the most recent migration came to America from Siberia, they completely wiped out the previous inhabitants and their culture. Places like Australia, America, and Oceania are remote, so new waves are infrequent. Africa, Europe, and Asia, on the other hand, have been in a constant state of flux since prehistory. The Indo-Aryans conquered northern India, the Phoenicians founded Carthage, the Trojans founded Rome (on the heads of the Latins), and the Old Testament Jews committed wholesale genocide on the Amalekites and the Midianites to expand the tribe of Israel. As cultural ties grew stronger and new technologies were developed, larger and larger areas could be taken over and ruled by a single culture. The Roman Empire and China expanded under their technological and social successes, sublimating all the distinct peoples who surrounded them. In Europe, Rome fell, giving way to the North Africans, the Byzantines, and the Normans. Each group took what they could and tried to homogenize the cultures in the territories they controlled. But they did not destroy the cultures they conquered. Cultures are always in constant flux, growing, changing, mutating, combining, and cleaving. There is no 'pure culture' in the world, nor has there been, and though some have been destroyed, their traditions and practices did not actually disappear. Take for example the epic of Gilgamesh, the product of a nearly forgotten culture. Though the tradition it comes from is lost to time and its cities are buried beneath the sand, when we rediscovered Gilgamesh, it became clear that the story had influenced many cultures, including the writings of Homer. Forgotten, but not annihilated. The conquering culture overwhelms some parts of the previous culture, but it adopts others, often without recognizing it, and thus both cultures progress and change. Just as the Indo-Aryans changed Indian culture, which changed Chinese culture, which changed Korean culture, which changed Japanese culture, so was the colonial conflict between Britain and India a cultural exchange. The terms of the exchange weren't fair, but such exchanges rarely are, and it certainly wasn't one-sided. By the time of colonialism, the geographical space in Europe had reached something approaching equilibrium. The most successful groups had sublimated those around them and expanded to an area of land they could roughly control and homogenize. Many wars were fought over the same pieces of land, which were passed back and forth again and again. Technologies increase more and more quickly over time, as illustrated by transportation at the beginning of colonialism. Tallships traveled to foreign lands, like America and Japan, and when they arrived, they discovered that the local cultures were not able to contend with the wartime technologies the Europeans brought with them. The unification of China and remoteness of Japan meant that new technologies, such as navigational aids, water-clocks, and gunpowder, were not widely adopted. The Chinese bureaucracy did not value these changes, because change always means political restructuring, and they had no threat of close neighbors (like Europe) to drive them to an arms race. The Europeans were not better or smarter than the Chinese, they were merely adapted to different requirements. It's rather like the case of Tibbles the cat: On Stephen's Island in New Zealand, there was a species of flightless bird. There was also a lighthouse. The lighthouse-keeper owned a cat, named Tibbles, who hunted the birds. By the time it was recognized that they were a new, unique species, Tibbles the cat had eaten them all. They are the only species known to have become extinct due to the actions of a single animal. The flightless birds were not 'less advanced' than the cat, they were merely specialized for a certain kind of lifestyle. The cat could not have survived on the island by itself, after all, which the wrens had no problem doing. The wrens were as good as they could be at surviving on a remote island, which meant they didn't waste energy on nonexistent predators. But, when conditions changed, they were overcome. It is said that the Aboriginal people of Australia have a social system whereby two members meeting for the first time, no matter how remote, can determine their genetic relationship to one another within a few sentences. Their culture is not an inferior one, it merely specializes in different areas. The Europeans had a different background than the people of Africa or the Americas. They were not better-suited to life in those parts of the world, as the many deaths of the Virginia colony showed, nor were their cultures in any way 'better', but they were specialized in killing people efficiently and holding land. Since the Europeans had already expanded roughly to their limits in Europe, it produced a great change when trains and steamboats allowed them to access remote areas of the globe. It was easier for them to fight for land in Africa, America, and Oceania than it was for them to fight for land against their powerful neighbors. They expanded, as humans always have, in waves, the more physically powerful culture dominating the one with other specializations. There is nothing new about this, except the range at which they were able to expand, and there is no 'pure culture' that did not establish itself after the displacement of others. Colonialism was remarkable because it was unprecedented for people to commit war on others so far away, and because in terms of military technology, it was often one-sided. The extinction rate for animals is at an all-time high right now, but this is chiefly because the variety of animals is at a high. Land has been separating and breaking up since the age of the super-continents, and so there are more islands, more mountains, and hence, more remote areas to produce extra-specialized animals. In the wake of global travel, many species are finding themselves in the position of the Stephen's Island Wren, as rats, cats, pigs, and rabbits are taking over the world. This is because the specialization only thrives in a closed environment. In open competition, the generalized animal survives. Think of weight classes in boxing. But it is a mistake to equate one sort of superiority with another. Just because you can kill another man does not make you smarter than him. And yet, for all his knowledge, it avails him not in death. This is the pain we feel from colonialism, that those who 'won' did not do so because they were smarter or better, but merely because they were more skilled at killing. But people do not kill merely to kill. We kill to propagate ourselves, our ideas, and our cultures. No culture ever really destroys another, and even the culture that 'loses' the war does not lose itself. The Africans who were enslaved by their fellows, sold to Europeans, separated, and forced to work did not lose their culture, even though they faced as daunting a path as can be imagined. Indeed, their culture combined with the European cultures in America and blossomed in new and unpredictable ways. Rome brought back people and culture from all of the lands into which it expanded, and was eventually overtaken by one small, insignificant group, The Christians. Cultural interaction is not a bad thing, and the pure, unadulterated, unchanging culture is a myth. And this myth is what allows White supremacists, Black nationalists, and Islamic fundamentalists to unite under the same banner of 'racial purity'. The mixing of cultures is natural and produces the most remarkable effects. It is by the transfer of ideas that humanity grows. Kipling is called an imperialist because he was descended from the most recent wave of conquerors in India. He was born there and worked there, and learned the language before he knew English. The British suffered the same fate under the Normans, who replaced half of the Germanic English language with French. Kipling claims no moral superiority to the Indians, nor does he pretend to know their culture, inside and out. In this story, particularly, he seems to recognize that even the most foolish, unremarkable man can achieve something when he has guns and other men do not. He does not claim that it is in the blood of the British to rule, nor the blood of the Indians to be ruled. Even in 'The White Man's Burden', one can see that he is more concerned with the cultural and technological relationship than with some in-born quality. Even so, Kipling and his contemporaries did not know what the source of European power was. They had the technology, but it would be many years until academics began to theorize why this inequality in technology developed. At the time, Europeans traveled around the world and found that no one else had developed steam power or guns, and surely they wondered why. The more simplistic stated it was the will of god, or some innate superiority of their evolution. But we still don't know what it was, for sure. We still don't know how racial difference affect the mind. We can all interbreed, which means we are all the same species, all related that closely at least, but beyond that, it is difficult to say just what our in-born differences may be, or how strong they are. While many cling to the ideals of egalitarianism, 'all men are born equal', this is clearly not true at all. Some are more mathematically-minded, some are taller, some stronger, some cannot parse words, some sickly, some attractive. It is almost impossible, at this point, to separate genetic elements from cultural elements, but slowly, we are learning to do so to some degree. Kipling does not put forth the ignorant ideal that 'Europeans are better', and even if some authors do, it is no more true than the ideal 'humans are equal'. Though just because we are not equal does not mean some are 'better', like animals, our differences specialize us for different tasks and different environments. Morality is a small and personal game. It is not the source of culture, it is the result of culture. Trying to fit human society into any ideal, from 'fairness' to 'equality' to 'superiority' is just mincing words. Colonialism is merely a new word to describe the balance of power between the physically dominant and those they overwhelm. I don't suggest that we ignore or excuse this unequal balance merely because it is ancient, natural, and as far as we know, inescapable, any more than I would suggest we stop fighting against death and disease because they are ancient, natural, and inescapable. I would only suggest that we try to look at the situation as a dynamic of political power. Colonialism was not a conspiracy, it was not a small, deliberate decision made by some few people. It was the predictable outgrowth of the interactions between states and people. When Kipling makes his most damning remark in 'The White Man's Burden', that English culture has become parent to the Indian culture's 'half-devil, half-child', he is describing the eternal relationship between any government and people. The populace is ignorant and violent everywhere, and they are the burden of the government, but also its supporters. Britain took on this burden willfully, sensing that the economic benefits it would bring would counterbalance the difficulty of maintaining it. Compounding this was the sense that India could be 'educated', pulled up into the 'modern world', as the West is still trying to do all over the world today. This sense that First World powers can and should transfer knowledge to the rest of the world does reflect the roles of child and parent, doubly so because the rest of the world at once resents and desires it. They desire the knowledge, production, and technology of the First World, but to get it, they must create an economic agreement. The First World trades what it has as dearly as possible, using the economic ties to increase their influence and their profit. It is not a new, remarkable, personal state of inequality, it is the same state we have been living under since culture developed, and the same state we're living under today. If there were a good pejorative definition of colonialism, it is that people in power feel they deserve to be in power, and people under their power resent that they are not in power. It is this unwarranted sense of entitlement which should chafe, not the facts of power dynamics. We are not created equally, we are not treated equally, and those of us who attain power feel entitled to use it. Demonizing this ancient, ever-repeating relationship isn't going to change anything, and it won't help us to better understand the world, ourselves, or power. Like many social debates about inequality, 'colonialism' boils down to entitlement vs. resentment, and neither stance is of any use to ideas or discourse. ...more |
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Mar 2005
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Aug 21, 2007
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Paperback
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| 0312159013
| 9780312159016
| 0312159013
| 3.43
| 522,295
| 1899
| Feb 15, 1996
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really liked it
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Like contemporaries Haggard and Melville, Joseph Conrad lived the adventures he wrote. He left his native Ukraine to escape the political persecution
Like contemporaries Haggard and Melville, Joseph Conrad lived the adventures he wrote. He left his native Ukraine to escape the political persecution of his family and became a merchant marine in France, sailing to the West Indies and gun-running for a failed Spanish coup. Soon after, he learned English and became a british citizen, eventually attaining the position of Master Mariner. Had his story ended there, he might have become merely a footnote in history: a successful seaman and minor writer of romantic adventures. Instead, he took a fateful steamship voyage into deepest Africa, an experience which forever changed him. Like the protagonist of the book which his journey inspired, Conrad found horror deep in the jungles. He witnessed the cruel depth of mankind, and not in the barbaric tribes, but in the colonial whites who ruled them. Far from civilization or law, these men became utter tyrants, mad with power and answerable to no one. Having lived under repressive colonial forces in his own troubled Ukraine, Conrad's deconstruction of this human subjugation was both sympathetic and satirical. Apparently unable to detect Conrad's sarcasm, Chinua Achebe accused him of the most profound racism. Doubtless, he was tired of his continent being defined in literature by an outsider. Why Achebe then chose to write his own, much more hopeless, racist, and sarcastic book in an attempt to replace Conrad's, it is difficult to say. When Conrad finally emerged from Africa, he was a different man. He said of the experience that it forced him to cease simply living, like an animal might; instead he found himself saddled with a profound self-awareness. As any writer can tell you, only two things issue from inescapable self-awareness: pain and art. Conrad's writings took a darker turn, resulting in his most contentious and influential work, 'The Heart of Darkness'. While his other stories are not without death and pain, they tend towards lighter fare, none quite reaching its inexorable brooding. Doubtless this is why it garners the most attention, dealing as it does with messy issues like race, nation, and death. The author's literary catharsis leaves us raw and shocked, but then it was always Cornad's intention to use writing as a means to share real experiences with his reader. Though often compared to other adventure fiction of the era, such as Stevenson's or Haggard's, like Melville, Conrad transcends his genre. His tight pacing and evocative, poetic prose help to elevate all of his stories, and here, his language is bolstered by an overriding, passionate, personal message. There is an ever-present thread of philosophy throughout all of Conrad's works, but rarely is it as naked and powerful. In some ways, the great interest paid to 'Heart of Darkness' is unfortunate, as it tends to ignore the rest of his varied and masterfully-constructed oeuvre, but the vast swathes praise and criticism are not misplaced: it is a Great Book. ...more |
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Jan 1999
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Jun 30, 2007
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| 3.73
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it was ok
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The act of writing is strangely powerful, almost magical: to take ideas and put them into a lasting, physical form that can persist outside of the min
The act of writing is strangely powerful, almost magical: to take ideas and put them into a lasting, physical form that can persist outside of the mind. For a culture without a written tradition, a libraries are not great structures of stone full of objects--instead, stories are curated within flesh, locked up in a cage of bone. To know the story, you must go to the storyteller. In order for that story to persist through time, it must be retold and rememorized by successive generations. A book, scroll, or tablet, on the other hand, can be rediscovered thousands of years later, after all those who were familiar with the story are long dead--and miraculously, the stories within it can be delivered to modern man in the very same words the ancients used. If, in Qumran cave, we had found the dry bones of the scribe who copied the dead sea scrolls instead of the scrolls themselves, we would have no access to any of his knowledge. Any library can be destroyed, whether the tales are stored in the mind of a bard or on the skins of animals, but unwritten history is much more fragile--after all, speech is nothing more than wind, which cannot be dug up from the earth a century later. All lands have their own histories, but sadly, we only get to hear a scant few in their own words. We know that Africa had empires as complex and powerful as those of Europe--beyond the well-known examples of Egypt and Carthage, the Romans give us secondary evidence of the great Central African empires from which they got their salt and gold, alongside many subsequent references--but in the end, these amount to little more than myths and legends. Carthage itself was so thoroughly destroyed that Rome basically erased their true history, replacing it with Roman propaganda and rumor-mongering, until inThe Aeneid,Carthage becomes nothing more than Rome’s jealous, jilted lover--instead of what she truly was: the template of naval dominance and mercantile power that Rome copied and built her empire upon. The African continent is just as full of ruins and archaeological treasures as Europe or Asia, but due to rampant social and economic instability caused by multinationals squabbling over resources and profits in the power vacuum left in the wake of post-colonialism, it’s not currently safe or supportable to research these sites and rediscover the cultures they represent. Hopefully someday, we will be able to uncover this wealth of knowledge, but until then, we can only imagine all that we have missed: the great loves and wars of Africa, the dark-skinned Caesars and Helens, the Subotais and Musashis of the savanna. But not all is lost to us. We still have pieces of the puzzle: the fact that fractal math, on which we base our computer languages,comes from North African divination(which is why Fibonacci had to go there to learn it), or the fact that most of the Greek and Roman texts upon which the Western literary tradition is basedwere passed down to usnot from Christian monks, but Islamic scholars (this is why Averroes appears in Raphael's School of Athens ,and whyhe and Avicenna appearalongside Plato and Aristotle in the works of Dante). The glory ofBenin City,the wealth ofMansa Musa--all these await the student of African histories. Plus, there are still storytellers in Africa--the lineages through which their histories have passed are not all dead. Though the words were not written down, we can research them, all the same--looking for lost ‘texts’, rare tales, and compiling them, collecting them, and finally giving voice to histories that have been too-long obscured. Knowing all of this, I thirsted for depth and complexity from Achebe--to get a view into one of the innumerable cultures of Africa. The power of a story from a different culture is in defamiliarization. Though all cultures share certain universal ideas: love, freedom, revenge, tyranny--the way they are expressed in each particular culture can be eye opening. So, they are capable of showing us familiar things, but making them feel new, making us look at them in a fresh way. Yet, that's not what I got from this book--indeed, everything in it felt immediately recognizable and familiar, not merely in the sense of 'universal human experience', but in almost every detail of expression and structure. I have read modern stories by fellow American authors which were stranger and produced more culture shock, more defamiliarization than this--but perhaps that was Achebe's intention. He expressed in interviews just how difficult it was for an African author to publish a novel at all--that no one assumed an African would want to write their own story, andthe manuscript was almost lostbecause the typing agency just didn't take it seriously. Back then, the very notion that Africa might have a history outside of Egypt was controversial--even though it seems simple and obvious to us now that of course every people in every nation has their own history, and the desire for their unique voices to be heard. So, perhaps it would have been impossible to write a more complex book, that it just wouldn't have been received--Achebe was among the first generation of his people to be college educated, in a branch of a London University opened in Nigeria taught by White, English teachers. More than that, he may have been trying to show that his own culture was just like the culture of his teachers--to stress the similarities instead of the differences. So then, it makes sense that Achebe is not writing a primer of his culture, but is rather reflecting European culture back at itself, from the mouth of an Igbo man (a brave and revolutionary act!). After all, he was the consummate Western man of letters, by his education, and everything about his book's form reflects that. It is written, not oral, it is in English, it aligns neatly to the Greek tragic structure and the form of the novel--and even the title is taken fromone of the most famous poemsin the English language. Achebe is hardly being coy with his inspirations here--he wants us to know that he is adopting Western forms, he wants us to recognize them, to mark them. He is aware that this is a post-colonial work, a work from a culture that has already been colonized, and is responding to that colonization. This is not a voice from the past--the discovery of Gilgamesh buried in the sands--it is a modern voice speaking from the center of the storm. The central theme is the onset of colonization, the conflict between the tribe and the European forces just beginning to encroach upon them. Likehis most notable lecture,this book is a deliberate response to writers like Conrad, Kipling, and Haggard. I'm not trying to suggest that it's a problem that Achebe is writing in the Western style, or that he's somehow 'too Western'--because it's any author's prerogative if they want to study and explore Western themes. Indeed, asSaid observed,it's vital that writers reach across these boundaries, that we don't just force them into a niche where 'women writers write the female experience' and 'Asian writers write the Asian experience'--because that's just racial determinism: due to the culture you're born in, you can only every write one thing (unless you're a White man, and then you can write whatever you like). Indeed, one cannot confront colonialism without understanding it, adopting its forms, and turning them against the power structure. Achebe himself recognized that an oppressed individual has to use every tool to his advantage to fight back--even those tools brought in by the oppressors, such as the English language, which Achebe realized would allow him to communicate with colonized peoples from countries around the world. Authors from all sorts of national and cultural background have taken on the Western style in this way, and proven that they can write just as ably as any Westerner. Unfortunately, that's not the case with this book. As a traditionally Western tale, there just isn't a lot to it. It is a tale of personal disintegration representing the loss of culture, and of purpose. It is an existential mode seen in Arthur Miller, Joseph Heller, and J.D. Salinger--but by trying to make the story more universal, Achebe has watered it down too much, so that it lacks depth, sympathy, and possibility. His existentialism is remarkable for its completeness. There is no character who is wholly sympathetic, nor wholly vile. There is no culture or point of view which is either elevated or vilified. Achebe is extremely fair, presenting the flaws of all men, and of the organizations under which they live, be they Western or African in origin. Like Heller or Miller, his representation of mankind is almost unfailingly negative. Small moments of beauty, joy, or innocence are always mitigated. They exist only in the inflated egos of the characters, or the moralizing ideals of the culture. Unlike Miller, he does not give us the chance to sympathize. There are not those quiet moments of introspection that makeDeath of a Salesmanso personally tragic. Unlike Heller, Achebe does not contrast the overwhelming weight of loss with sardonic and wry humor. This is not the hyperbole of Belinda's lock, nor the mad passion of Hamlet. Achebe's characters are not able to find their own meaning in hopelessness--nor do they even struggle to find it and fail, they cannot even laugh at themselves. They persist only through naivete and escapism, and since the reader sees through them, we see that this world has only despondence and delusion. The constant reminder of this disappointment makes the book difficult to connect with. Since all the hope we are given is almost immediately false, there is little dynamic possibility. Everything is already lost, we only wait on the characters to realize it. It is difficult to court the reader's sympathy when there is nothing left to be hopeful for. With no counterpoint to despondence--not even a false one--it is hard to create narrative depth, to reveal, or to surprise. Trying to write a climax through such a pervasive depression is like trying to raise a mountain in a valley. No matter how hard they try, there is no visible path to success. Nothing is certain, and the odds against are often overwhelming. Achebe felt this doubly, as an author and a colonized citizen. He succeeds in presenting hopelessness, sometimes reaching Sysiphean Absurdism, but with too few grains to weigh in the scale against it, his tale presents only a part of the human experience. Though we may know that others suffer, this is not the same as comprehending their suffering. The mother who says 'eat your peas, kids are starving in Africa' succeeds more through misdirection than by revealing the inequalities of politics and the human state. Achebe presents suffering to us, but it is not sympathetic; we see it, but are not invited to feel it. His world loses depth and dimension, becomes scattered, and while this does show us the way that things may fall apart, particularly all things human, this work is more an exercise in nihilism than a representation of the human experience. So, it ends up being one of those books that it more notable for its place in the canon than its quality. It was certainly a brave and revolutionary act for Achebe to write it, and to persist with it, but the book itself is less impressive than the gesture that produced it. For me, it becomes prototypical of a whole movement of books by people of non-Western descent who get praised and published precisely because they parrot back Western values at us and avoid confronting us with actual cultural differences, while at the same time using a thin patina of 'foreignness' to feel suitably exotic, so that the average Western reader can feel more worldly for having read them. It's flat works like The Kite Runner or House Made of Dawn which are just exotic enough to titillate without actually requiring that the reader learn anything about the culture in order to appreciate it--because of course every guilt-ridden Liberal Westerner wants to read about other cultures, butas Stewart Lee put it:"... not like that, Stew, not where you have to know anything..." In the most extreme cases you get something like The Education of Little Tree ,where a racist KKK member pretends to be a Native American and writes a book so saccharine, so apologetic and appeasing of White guilt that it can't help but become a best-seller--because it turns out that no one is better at predicting what comforting things Middle America wants to hear about race than a member of the KKK. Of course, I'm not suggesting that Achebe is anywhere near that--just that it makes obvious the problem with judging a book by its historical place rather than the actual words on the page. Indeed, it's downright insulting to the author and the culture. It's the same response people would have to hearing that a dog wrote a book: 'Wow! I've got to read that! "--which has nothing to do with the quality of the book, and everything to do with the fact that we have very low expectations of dogs. To treat a person the same way because they are from another culture is pure condescension. Just because someone is born into a culture, that does not make them representative of that culture--authenticity is not an in-born trait, which is the problem of the illusion of the 'pure voice', because there is no pure cultural voice, and to imagine there is is to reduce that culture to a stereotype. A woman can be a misogynist, an African American can hate his own people. To suggest that somehow, a person's views and perspective are in-born and unchangeable is simply racism--and it doesn't matter if the trait you are assigning to that race is positive or negative, it's still a limitation you're putting on that person. Non-Westerners are just as capable of creating great works of art as Westerners--but they are also just as capable of writing cliche tripe. Like any other human being, they run the gamut from brilliant to dull, from bigoted to open-minded, from staid to imaginative. As such, there's no reason to grade non-Western authors on some kind of sliding scale, to expect less from them, or to be any less disappointed when their works fall short. Of course, we shouldn't judge their work by Western standards, either--to blame a Japanese fairytale for not being Hamlet--unless like Achebe they are writing in a recognizable Western style and deliberately drawing that comparison. While there's certainly something to be said for 'getting your foot in the door', that isn't a defense of the book itself--of its plot, characters, or themes. It's also too much to place Africa on Achebe's shoulders--to pretend as if there aren't thousands of unique cultures, histories, and traditions there--and yet that is what we do. We make Achebe into a point of entry to a whole continent, which is a massive burden to place on anyone. Much better to look at the book itself--its words and images--than to try to make it into something that it is not. A book that lasts can't just be its place and time, it needs to have a deeper vein that successive generations can return to over and over, and I didn't find that here. Indeed, I find it ironic that Achebe has so attacked Conrad, because like Achebe’s work, Heart of Darkness is remarkable because it does take a stand against colonialism and racism. It is admittedly an early stand, and an incomplete presentation, just like Achebe’s. It works only because it is situated in that certain way, transgressive but nottoo transgressiveto alienate its audience--not quite able to escape being a product of its time, but still managing to point the way to the future. But Conrad is not merely revolutionary by his stance, he has also written a fascinating and fraught book, complex and many-layered, which succeeds despite its shortfalls.Things Fall Apart,in contrast, is a book that only works because of its positioning, and has little further depth to recommend it. I cannot say that the book was not effective, in its place and time--because it certainly was--or that it hasn't been inspirational, but in the end, Achebe's revolutionary gesture far outshines the meager story beneath it. ...more |
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