> At 04:22 PM 1/14/2010, Michael Smith wrote:
> >Much of this criticism falls into a familiar category -- people
> >reproaching an author for not writing the book they would have
> >written, if they could write books.
>
> Which wouldn't apply to Achebe of course.
Good point. In fact writers can be among the most given to this particular error. One thinks of Sam Johnson's famous bad call about Tristram Shandy.
That interview with Achebe was an awful muddle, and the journalist who wrote it was a ditz. And her little campus-PC come-to-Jesus moment at the end, where she cops essentially to the cardinal sin of "insensitivity" -- if you don't laugh at that, you have a heart of stone, as somebody once said in a different context.
So she's probably not a very good conduit for Achebe's thinking, which may very well be more subtle and nuanced than she makes it seem.
But if she's rendered him right, he seems to have two big points:
1) The narrator is just a proxy for Conrad himself. This seems tone-deaf to me. The narrator is a very well-realized figure with his own voice and manner, and his attitudes are the attitudes that a real person in his time and position would have had. Conrad could have taken the omniscient-author gambit in this book, but he didn't. Why?
2) Yeah, everybody was a racist in those days, but we expect better of a Certified Genius. Well, again, why? Shakespeare was a thorough-going reactionary and upholder of aristocratic privilege -- as was Homer. Milton was a Bible-thumper. Virgil was an obsequious sycophant to Augustus -- and even worse, to Maecenas, the Donald Trump of ancient Rome. Virgil wrote some of his most beautiful lines on the birth of a son to the contemptible social-climbing opportunist Pollio:
Ultima Cumaei venit iam carminis aetas; Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo. Iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna, Iam nova progenies caelo demittitur alto... Ille divom vitam accipiet divisque videbit Permixtos heroas et ipse videbitur illis.
Achebe is giving us thin, schematic, ahistorical stuff, if the Ditz is to be believed. Her Achebe is a guy for whom (if he's consistent, and nobody is, of course) everybody worth reading falls far short of his exigeant standards.
Of course, The Ditz also thinks Annandale-on-Hudson is deep upstate New York. (She should visit Utica sometime, or Saranac Lake.)
Incidentally, I had to laugh a little when I read that the stern anti-racist Achebe is an employee of arch-Zionist Leon Botstein. One can't blame Achebe -- we all have to make a living, and we can't always pick and choose where and how -- but it sorta fell into the Life's Little Ironies bin.
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Michael Smith mjs at smithbowen.net http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org http://fakesprogress.blogspot.com