The Widening Gyre

Way back in ninth grade (many, many years ago), I read Achebe’s Things Fall Apart for my English class.  Clara is entering ninth grade this year, and one of her assigned summer reading books: Things Fall Apart.  Different coast, 30+ years later. 

First, though, can I just say that this whole idea of assigned summer reading makes me very happy?  My kids all hate it, but I love it.  Just think, in the old days, I never had homework during summer vacation.  Never—not once in all my years of schooling did I ever have a single summer assignment.  This change is proof that civilization is not totally in decline—some things are improving.

I actually liked Things Fall Apart in ninth grade—indeed, it was one of the very few assigned books I enjoyed.  As I have noted in this space previously, over the years I have reread most of the books I was assigned and hated in high school—I have enjoyed them all.  The books were good—the method of assigning them sucked all the joy and life out of them.  Why can’t schools just let kids read the books and enjoy them?

I reread Things Fall Apart some time ago, and I think I enjoyed it more than I did in 9^th grade.  (It is hard to know—how accurate is a memory of pleasure?  How can I compare the pleasure from reading a book now, 15 years ago, and then 30 years ago?  Are recent pleasures more or less vivid than older pleasures?  Surely it varies, but how? Rumination topic for another day.)  I just reread it so that I can talk with Clara about it.  (Not that she will want to talk with me about it.  She won’t.  She is 13, and for reasons I cannot understand having a sprawling hour long discussion about a book is not something which causes young Clara to experience paroxysms of joy.  But, I reread the book anyway…just in case.  The triumph of hope over experience, to be sure.) 

It is an excellent book.  It is, indeed, one of the few books assigned by the Multicultural Types which is genuinely well worth reading. An African tribe and British missionaries and colonizers meet and, well, the title says it all.  Now this could have been a cheap moralizing book all about how bad the British are.  But, the African tribe is not portrayed in some idyllic light.  It is in many ways a brutal and nasty culture.  But, not uniformly brutal and nasty; there are some very admirable things there too.  The story has, mirabile dictu, nuance.  Our hero, Okonkwo, does not do well when he is faced with the massive cultural change the British will bring.  But, he wasn’t doing so well in his old tribal culture either. The British will inevitably destroy what is good in the tribal culture, but they also end what is brutally wrong in the tribal culture as well.  Nuance.  A virtue in novels not much appreciated in the modern age.

Naturally enough, I looked at the questions Clara will have to answer for her school.  (Not only does she have to read, but she has assigned questions to answer!)  I thought about answering the questions here, partly just for the fun of it, but also partly so that when Clara complained about how long it takes to answer all these questions, I could tell her I did them all in a rather short period of time.  But, looking over the questions, I realized a) it is probably only about 15-30 minutes of work if you write in complete sentences, and 2) the questions aren’t really all that interesting and thought-provoking.  An example—the question requiring the most reflection:

“Why is the novel’s title appropriate? What is it that fell apart? What future is suggested for the native people at the end of the novel?”

Suffice it to say that the title is quite appropriate. 

But, an even more interesting question:  is the poem from which the title is taken appropriate?  Now there would have been an essay question requiring some substantive thought.  Mere anarchy or not?  Rough Beast: the British?  All in all, I think the poem does work for the book.  But, even more interestingly, if we generalize the book in this way, we suddenly realize that this small African tribe crashing when it meets the British is not all that bad a description of the Europe on the verge of World War I.  There is much about the pre-War West we now find unattractive—colonization among other things.  The treatment of women in this African village bears a similarity to the way feminist types describe the treatment of women pre-War.  Violence, narrow-mindedness, absurd traditions: check.  “The best lack all conviction/ while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”  Not a bad summary of the modern age, that.  The ceremony of innocence is drowned in a Lust for Life.