The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Chinua Achebe · a novel in three parts and twenty-five chapters · William Heinemann, London, 1958 · reissued in 1962 as the first number of the African Writers Series · written in English and scored on Achebe’s English as published, read from knowledge; no text in hand, quoted only where the words are certain
Mode
Tragic novel of a great man and his clan; a society shown whole, then shown being taken apart
Mythos
The great man undone by a single excess; the chi that says yes when a man says yes; the ogbanje child and her buried iyi-uwa; Ani, the Earth, and her law; the gyre of Yeats’s poem as the book’s shape
Phase
Umuofia before any white man is more than a rumour; seven years of exile in Mbanta as the missionaries come; the return to a clan with a church, a court and a prison; set in the 1890s
Presentation
Fiction in three parts and twenty-five chapters, told in the clan’s own voice, with its proverbs and its judgments, turning in the last paragraphs to the District Commissioner; an epigraph of four lines from Yeats’s “The Second Coming”, which gives the title; Igbo words left in the text, glossed by context
Register
Plain, rhythmic and exact, from the wrestling match and the palm wine through the oracle’s night and the boy’s death to the court, the burning of the church and the hanged man
Scale
One village and one man: a compound, a clan, its gods, its courts, its harvest and its wars, with the colonial state at its edge
Governing Proposition
In Umuofia, a clan of nine villages, Okonkwo is a great man, and all his strength is set against the memory of his father, Unoka, a debtor with a flute. He takes a hand in killing Ikemefuna, the boy who has lived three years in his house, because he is afraid of being thought weak; his gun goes off at a funeral and kills a clansman’s son, and he is sent for seven years to his mother’s village. While he is away the missionaries come, his son Nwoye goes over to them, and when he returns to Umuofia there are a church, a court and a prison. The wager of the book is that an African society had an order complete in itself, with its own justice, speech and fault lines, and that colonial rule did not bring order to it but took one apart, entering by those fault lines; and that this could be told from within, in English bent to carry the clan’s own voice.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Over the novel stand the first four lines of Yeats’s “The Second Coming”, and the title is taken from them. The book is in three parts. Part One, chapters 1 to 13, is Umuofia before contact and runs to more than half the book; Part Two, chapters 14 to 19, is seven years of exile in Mbanta, the mother’s village, as the missionaries come; Part Three, chapters 20 to 25, is the return. It was published by William Heinemann in London in 1958, and in 1962 it became the first number of Heinemann’s African Writers Series, which Achebe then edited.
It begins with a reputation: “Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond” (ch. 1). The sentence is spoken as the clan would speak it, and the narration keeps that voice throughout, its proverbs, its judgments and its silences. Okonkwo has his yams and his barn, and a name beyond the nine villages; behind him stands his father, Unoka, a debtor with a flute, and the whole of Okonkwo’s strength is set against that memory.
Many Igbo words stand in the text untranslated, glossed by context, and there is no narrator to explain them. The reader is placed inside the clan’s reasoning, not outside it looking in. That placing is the book’s first decision, and the rest depends on it: the English novel of Africa, from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson, which Achebe said he answered, had seen Africans from outside.
Movement II
Part One shows an order complete in itself. Among the clan “proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten” (ch. 1): speech is the instrument of reason, and the elders argue by it. The egwugwu, the masks, come out to hear Uzowulu’s case; there are the wrestling match, the bride-price talk, the Week of Peace, in which Okonkwo beats a wife, and war settled by negotiation with Mbaino.
There is the night Chielo carries Ezinma on her back to the oracle, Ekwefi following in the dark and Okonkwo waiting with his machete at the cave mouth. Ezinma is an ogbanje child, with her buried iyi-uwa. By firelight Ekwefi tells her the tale of the tortoise and the birds, in which the tortoise takes a new name for himself, and falls.
The locusts come. The order has its fault lines, and the book shows them as plainly as its justice: twins are left in the forest, the osu are outcast, and there are men the clan calls efulefu. Most of these set pieces come back to bear weight later; two or three show custom for its own sake, and the book is the slower for them.
Movement III
Ikemefuna lives three years in Okonkwo’s household. Then an oracle’s word is for his death, and Ezeudu warns Okonkwo to take no hand in it. The boy walks out with the men, his mind on whether his mother is still alive.
He cries, “My father, they have killed me!” (ch. 7), and Okonkwo cuts him down because “he was afraid of being thought weak” (ch. 7). The register does not rise to meet it; the plain telling is the height. In Nwoye something breaks, a wound he will carry into the church.
At Ezeudu’s funeral Okonkwo’s gun goes off and kills Ezeudu’s son. The killing of a clansman is a sin against Ani, the Earth, a feminine sin, and that law fixes the exile: he is sent for seven years to his mother’s village, and his compound is burned. The chance is not only chance: the warning has been disregarded, and the debt is paid.
Movement IV
In Mbanta the missionaries come. Obierika reports that the oracle of Abame named the white men locusts, and the locusts of Part One return as a word. The first converts are the men the clan calls efulefu. Nwoye goes to them, drawn by the hymns, and his turn answers a real wrong; Okonkwo comes to think his chi is against him.
Part Three is the return to Umuofia, and it moves faster than the rest; months pass in a paragraph. There are a church, a court, a trading store and a prison. The missionaries divide into a good one and a bad one, Mr. Brown and the Reverend James Smith; the pairing is schematic, and the book is weaker for it. Enoch tears the mask from an egwugwu, and the church is burned.
The elders are humiliated. Obierika says what has happened: the white man “has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart” (ch. 20). The clan that bends is taken; the man who cannot bend breaks.
Movement V
The messenger is killed. Okonkwo’s body hangs from a tree behind his compound, and over it Obierika says, “That man was one of the greatest men in Umuofia” (ch. 25).
Then, for the last paragraphs, the narration steps out of the clan’s voice and into the Commissioner’s mind. The man’s story is to be a paragraph in the book he means to write, and the novel ends on its title: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger. The form enacts the erasure the book is about, and the irony is left without comment.
The tale of the tortoise and the Commissioner’s paragraph obey one law: the story belongs to whoever tells it. The book is the clan’s telling set against the officer’s, written by a Nigerian in his twenties, in the colonial language, before independence. It opened a series and a field, and Ngugi, Adichie and many others have named it as a beginning.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive, and the spine passes it. Take out Ikemefuna and Nwoye has no wound to carry into the church. Take out Ezeudu’s warning to Okonkwo to take no hand in the boy’s death, and the gun that goes off at Ezeudu’s funeral is only chance, not a debt paid. Take out the exile and the return has nothing to measure what was lost. Most of Part One’s set pieces bear weight: the egwugwu return as the mask that Enoch tears away, the locusts return when the oracle of Abame, as Obierika reports it, names the white men locusts. What holds the axis here is two or three chapters of custom shown for its own sake, and the haste of Part Three.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. An African society had a moral, legal and religious order complete in itself, with its own justice, its own art of speech and its own fault lines; and colonial rule did not bring order to it but took one apart, entering by those fault lines. Both halves are shown, not argued: the clan’s arbitration, the Week of Peace, the proverb as an instrument of reason; and the twins left in the forest, the osu, a boy killed at an oracle’s word, the efulefu who are the church’s first converts. Obierika states the outcome, and the last page shows the same events as a paragraph in an officer’s book. Held off the top because in Part Three the missionaries divide into a good one and a bad one.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The register is plain and the book rarely lifts it, which is right for it, so height comes from situation, not from style. The peaks are real. Ikemefuna’s cry, “My father, they have killed me!” (ch. 7), and Okonkwo cutting him down because “he was afraid of being thought weak” (ch. 7): one of the great terrible moments of the century’s fiction. Chielo’s night journey with Ezinma on her back, Ekwefi following in the dark and Okonkwo waiting with his machete at the cave mouth; the egwugwu coming out; the body behind the compound. Between them long stretches are level by design. This is the lowest axis of the twelve, held there by frequency, not by height; Part Two is the flattest.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Myth built, and built twice. The first construction is the tragic action: a great man whose single excess, the fear of being his father, drives him against the balance of the gods and the clan, and who falls with his world. Nothing in the book stands outside it. The second is Igbo cosmology used as structure, not décor: the chi that says yes when a man says yes, and that Okonkwo comes to think is against him; Ezinma the ogbanje and her buried iyi-uwa; Ani, the Earth, against whom the killing of a clansman is a feminine sin, which fixes the exile in the motherland. Okonkwo stays particular, in his yams and his barn. Held a step down because the archetype is mostly the Greek pattern, kept close to the surface.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The inheritance is double, and the turn is against both. The English novel of Africa, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson, which Achebe said he answered, had seen Africans from outside, as darkness or as comedy. Achebe took the European realist novel and the classical tragic form and set them inside an Igbo village before contact, in English bent to carry Igbo speech, proverb and tale, with no explaining narrator to translate. The last turn is structural: one page inside the colonizer’s mind, and the irony needs no comment. The stake was real: a Nigerian writer in his twenties, in the colonial language, before independence. Held below the top because the form is inherited whole, and Tutuola had brought Yoruba narration into English in 1952.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The proportion is the argument: more than half the book shows Umuofia whole, before any white man is more than a rumour, so that when the church arrives the reader knows exactly what is being broken. A novel that began with the missionaries would know the conflict and not the loss. The exile places the hero outside his world just as it begins to change, so that he comes back to find it gone. The narrator speaks as the clan’s own voice, and that voice is the instrument: the reader is inside the culture’s reasoning, its cruelties included. The turn to the Commissioner in the last paragraphs enacts the erasure the book is about. Held off the top because Part Three is compressed.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: nearly seven decades of reading, criticism and teaching across the world, without exhaustion. The questions stay open. Is Okonkwo the clan’s hero or its deviation, when Obierika questions the clan’s customs too, but without the gun? Does the book mourn the old order or indict it, when Nwoye’s turn to the hymns answers a real wrong? Where do the women stand, Ekwefi, Ezinma and Chielo, against Okonkwo’s use of the womanly as an insult? What does the clan’s voice in the narration conceal? Postcolonial theory, feminist criticism and readings of its orality have each found more in it. Held a step down because the surface is lucid and much of what returns is the same disclosure seen again.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The field is the novel in English of the twentieth century, and within it the literature of Africa as it entered that language. The intrinsic force: the book showed that the African novel in a colonial language could tell an African world from within, in its own idiom and dignity, in a form at once the West’s and not; a reorganisation of possibility. It was not the first African novel in English (Tutuola, Ekwensi) or in French (Camara Laye’s L’Enfant noir, 1953), and that holds it below the top. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it became the founding text of modern African literature by common use; it opened the African Writers Series, which Achebe edited and which published a generation of writers; Ngugi, Adichie and others have named it; it is the book most often taught as the beginning of postcolonial fiction; and it changed how the West’s own novels of Africa are read.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at sixty-eight years. Form: the text survives whole, as published, and has been in print throughout; nothing is lost. Presence: as wide as that of any novel of its age, read in schools across Africa, the Commonwealth and the United States, and translated widely. Fabric: colonial Nigeria and the decade of independence that produced it are history, and the book is read for what they pressed upon; its setting is the 1890s, and its prose has not dated. The figure is the highest a survival of under seventy years carries. It does not stand level with survivals of centuries: the oldest epics and the great novels of the nineteenth century hold more on this axis.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Command of the medium, read to the same anchors as any prose. The sentences are lucid, rhythmic and exact, and the proverb is a working part of the sentence, not an ornament: the speech of the elders runs on it and the narration reasons with it. The opening sets the method, “Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond” (ch. 1), a reputation stated as the clan would state it. Scene construction is strong where it matters most: Ikemefuna’s walk with the men, his mind on whether his mother is still alive; Chielo’s night. The narrator’s irony, which never comments, is the book’s finest craft. Charged: Part Three, where months pass in a paragraph; the schematic pairing of Mr. Brown and the Reverend James Smith; flat passages of custom in Part One.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the folk tale of the tortoise and the birds, told by Ekwefi to Ezinma by firelight, and the Commissioner’s dry paragraph on the hanged man at the end. One law governs them: speech is power, the story belongs to whoever tells it, and a world exists only as long as its own telling holds. The tortoise who takes a new name for himself and falls; the clan whose account of itself is replaced by the officer’s. Okonkwo’s rigidity and the clan’s flexibility are the same law from two sides: the man who cannot bend breaks, and the clan that bends is taken. The range runs from comic wrestling and palm wine to murder, suicide and conquest, and holds. Charged a little because Part Three’s register of incident and politics is not prepared in full.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Judged as what a short novel holds, and it holds a whole society. Consciousness, in Okonkwo’s fear, Nwoye’s grief and Ekwefi’s love. The family, in a polygamous compound, its wives, its sons and its favoured daughter. Labour and wealth, in yams, sharecropping, titles and barns. Law and the polity, in the egwugwu court, the village assembly and war settled by negotiation with Mbaino. The sacred, in Agbala’s oracle, Ani, the chi and the ancestors. The natural order, in harvest, drought, locusts and the forest. History, in conquest, the church, the court, the trading store and the prison. They are integrated: each order is an instrument of the clan’s balance, and each breaks in the same fall. Held here because the scale is one village and one man, and the colonial state appears only at its edge.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
Pressure on Tradition at 9.1, then The Unconcealment and The Imperishable at 9.0. A book that showed the African novel in a colonial language could tell an African world from within, and that became the founding text of modern African literature; a disclosure that colonial rule did not bring order but took one apart, by its fault lines; and a text whole and in print since 1958, read across Africa, the Commonwealth and the United States.
Limiting Dimension
The Sublime at 8.4, held by frequency, not height: the peaks of Ikemefuna’s death, Chielo’s night and the hanged man stand among long level stretches, and Part Two is flat. Next above it, The Encompassed at 8.5, one village and one man with the colonial state at the edge, and The Inevitable, The Bottomless Well and The Made at 8.6, charged with custom for its own sake, a lucid surface and a compressed Part Three.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.8, The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: Pressure on Tradition at 9.1, The Unconcealment at 9.0, The Imperishable at 9.0, The Archetypal Deep at 8.8 and The Swerve at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 8.4, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.5. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, at 8.8, which The Sublime, The Encompassed and The Bottomless Well hold down.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, scored as one novel in three parts and twenty-five chapters, as first published by William Heinemann, London, in 1958, and reissued in 1962 as the first number of Heinemann’s African Writers Series. The epigraph, the first four lines of W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming”, from which the title is taken, is part of the work. No Longer at Ease (1960) and Arrow of God (1964) are context and are not scored. The novel is in English and every axis is scored on Achebe’s English as published; no translation stands between. The book is in copyright and no text is in hand; words are quoted only where they are certain, briefly, and chapters are cited only where the citation is sure. Facts that could not be verified, among them the novel’s length in words, the number of languages into which it has been translated and the figures commonly given for its sales, are not given.