Modernisms and Modernities in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart

Abstract

In this article I argue that Nigerian author Chinua Achebe ostentatiously co-opted Yeats’s poem ‘The Second Coming’ in the title of his 1958 novel Things Fall Apart to mobilize a modernist gesture in order to bookend what is in fact primarily a rehearsal of markers of modernity (realist narration, the structure of the historical novel as defined by Lukács). The latter rehearsal was central to Achebe’s claim for the fully-fledged rationalist character of the Igbo polity and his bid to put his society on a par with European modernity. Crucial to this claim for parity, however, was Achebe’s countervailing manipulation of residual markers of modernism to force a wedge into the monolith of modernity so as to disable those elements of modernity that disqualified African societies from parity with Europe, as against those elements that were desired as offering parity. By the same token, Achebe’s ‘countermodernism’ also foregrounds other versions of history that resonate with global alter-modernisms and thus posits alternative modernities.

Keywords:

• modernism
• modernity
• historiography
• globalization
• Achebe
• Things Fall Apart
• Lukács
• historical novel