Realizing the Sacred: Power and Meaning in Chinua Achebe's Arrow of God

Like nationalist discourses, African literary criticism revolves around the question of authenticity. The distinctiveness of the African text and its distance from or subversion of European literary forms constitutes, it seems, its authentic quality. Thus, the "Africanness" of the African text is elaborated and celebrated through positing its appropriation of, on the one hand, the oral tradition, both in terms of form and content, and on the other, myth and ritual. Within African literary criticism, these considerations often provide the impetus for political judgments, prescriptive and proscriptive. This ideological move establishes the primacy of the political in the discipline. This is not surprising as African postcolonial cultural praxis has, from its beginning, allied itself in varied ways to the process of decolonization and social critique. The relation between the text and the world was pre-eminent. Writers like Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and Ayi Kwei Armah engaged with the extratextual world through different narrative strategies that were often oppositional and disjunctive. If we agree with Jonathan Culler that "the novel serves as the model by which society conceives of itself, the discourse through which it articulates the world" (189), then the African world presented to us was one rent by conflicts and contradictions: the scatological and the sublime, the demonic and the utopian, the mythical and the historical. Yet, at the same time it was also a world of profound unity. In both the "mythical" and "realist" writers, early postcolonial literary production aims towards a sense of totality—an idea of the interconnectedness of the African world.

In dealing with the political imperative, Chinua Achebe employs a strategy of metonymic recuperation, of substituting his specific traditional framework for an elaboration of African culture in the pan-Africanist agenda. He mobilizes Igbo history and culture to articulate the upheavals and dislocations of colonial and postcolonial existence. Implicit in this procedure is the belief in the unity and certain homogeneity, both political and metaphysical, of Africa. Similarly, Wole Soyinka offers Yoruba myths as a basis for the understanding of African religious, political, and philosophical thought and practice. This "primal phenomenon" posits a cosmological order in which "man exists in a cosmic totality" (3). The reciprocal porosity of the natural, social, and supernatural spheres derives from an animistic religious framework. Soyinka's appropriation of the term "myth"and its institutionalization through his theoretical writings have come to determine the terms in which his work and those who share similar aesthetic strategies have been analyzed.

"Myth," which minimally refers to a narrative about gods or mythic personalities, in common usage, often indicates error, fiction, make-believe, and superstition. The co-incidence of myth and falsity may be traced back to a Platonic privileging of reason over narrative, transcendent truth over myth. Plato warns the citizens of the Republic that "pleasure and pain will be enthroned in your city instead of law and the principles which the community accepts as best in any given situation," if they fall under the spell of myth (74). In his conceptualization, myth and narrative are opposed to rationality and truth. The dominant strand in African literary criticism that opposes myth to truth, be it historical or political, partakes of a movement that began with the birth of Western metaphysics and, as Jean-Pierre Vernant explains, is specific to Western thought: "The concept of myth that we have inherited from the Greeks belongs, by reason of its origins and history, to a tradition of thought peculiar to Western Civilization in which myth is defined in terms of what is not myth, being opposed to reality (myth is fiction) and, secondly, to what is rational (myth is absurd)" (186). This conception inaugurated in classical Antiquity "became clearly defined through the setting up of an opposition between mythos and logos, henceforth seen as separate and contrasting terms" (187). For Vernant...