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86 ch a p ter fou r Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God and the Pragmatics of Proverbial Irony Surprise is beyond the great, yet the great is proven in surprise. —Igbo proverb Chinua Achebe published his first and now universally canonized novel Things Fall Apart in 1958, a sequel, No Longer at Ease, in 1960, and Arrow of God in 1964. Dan Izevbaye sees as what is perhaps Achebe’s most important influence “his contribution to the advancement of a new postcolonial consciousness” (33). Achebe has had enormous influence on African fiction. As Simon Gikandi points out, Achebe’s “seminal status in the history of African literature,” lies in “his fundamental belief that narrative can [ . . . ] propose an alternative world beyond the realities imprisoned in colonial and postcolonial relations of power” (3). Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God are strikingly similar in that both novels build this “new consciousness” on Achebe’s “appropriation of Igbo proverbs for domesticating the English language” (Izevbaye 33). In so doing, according to Izevbaye, Achebe connects “the roots of wisdom that are reflected in the speech genres of African oral cultures with the age of literacy and the printing press” (33). Gikandi interprets Arrow of God as “a novel predicated on the loss of narrative authority, set in a situation where meanings cannot be taken for granted” (52). One of the most widely recognized thematic problems of Arrow of God is precisely that of the need for cultural and social change. Although the protagonist Ezeulu “assumes that the truth is fixed in both time and value” (70) and that his utterances as the priest of Ulu carry that timeless value, he himself paradoxically believes “that doctrines must change to account for temporal shifts” (75). It is important to understand therefore how Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God and the Pragmatics of Proverbial Irony 87 the traditional proverbs that Achebe incorporates into his fiction can carry meaning while at the same time questioning all authority, old and new, and generating a consciousness of change and the need for change. The double meaning and subterfuge of irony are factors that need to be considered in the analysis of proverbs’ role in Achebe’s representation of traditional Igbo discourse. But can proverbs be ironical? Can they be brought together in a novel to facilitate and even generate a writer’s ironic vision of shaken wisdom? Norrick (1985) makes a methodological distinction between the study of proverbs in texts and as texts (2). We have discussed the importance of proverbs in Kourouma’s En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages and their role in the production of ironic meaning, but that should not prevent us from recognizing and investigating proverbial expressions as a significant aspect of African literary discourse. Such discourse is not only a modern offshoot of literatures written in European languages but also a traditional mode of expression. To the extent that proverbs are a part of oral and traditional culture, we do well to consider Liz Gunner’s assessment : “What the African records and the ongoing production of culture in Africa make clear is that orality is not an amorphous, vaguely communal preliterate state awaiting redemption by various manifestations of modernity. It is rather a protean presence, changing, interacting, and producing a different kind of cultural equilibrium on the African continent , defining its own modernities through language” (8). Proverbs are a source of irony and a witness to the way irony has functioned in African cultures over many generations and continues to function today. By studying both linguistic and cultural aspects of proverbs in Achebe’s Arrow of God, it will be possible for us to better discern the way irony serves as a conceptual bridge between traditional oral literature and literary texts written in a European language. Norrick takes the greatest pains to justify the study of proverbs as texts since this is his primary focus. Although he recognizes the frequent if not characteristic conversational use of proverbs, he also notes that they can be and often are anthologized as collections of discrete texts. He adds that “[e]ven when it occurs as an integral part of a larger spoken or written text, the independent meaning of a proverb plays a major role in determining its semantic contribution to the text as a whole” (5). Furthermore, the inclusion of such proverbs in an anthology supports the recognition of their traditional status by showing their value as something to be collected and conserved. [18...

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