Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: Literary Humanism and the Question of Human Dignity

Abstract

ABSTRACT:This essay celebrates the sixtieth anniversary of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart by returning to a cliché that the novel remakes African humanity. While the presumption of Achebe’s humanism has congealed into academic common sense, he does not belong to some of the brands of literary humanism developed since the ascendancy of High Theory. Examining Achebe’s literary humanism in the wake of anti-humanist French theory, which engendered defenses of literary humanism from aesthetic philosophers and postcolonial scholars, I argue that Achebe ascribes neither to propositional nor non-propositional literary humanism, but to the Saidean text-and-language-bound literary humanism by virtue of which he remakes African humanity after Europe in Things Fall Apart. I contend further that as a postcolonial writer his relationship to humanism remains nevertheless ambivalent. Achebe’s humanism in the novel is of aporetic form, “anti-humanistic humanism,” engendering an impassable paradox; qua Said, he is critical of humanism in the name of humanism. Whereas Achebe refashions the precolonial Okonkwo to humanist measure in Things Fall Apart, the figure of Okonkwo is paradoxically molded in the principle of Cartesian individualism of classical realism.