Achebe’s style is identified through a close reading of an extract his first novel, Things fall Apart, employing the tools of stylistics. The insights gleaned from this reading are then extended to the rest of the novel to show how complex and integrated the structure of that work is. The global objective is to demonstrate that Achebe employs simple language to talk about everyday, mundane situations appearing to produce texts which, at first reading, seem to offer little of thematic interest and little depth of analysis. Instead, simplicity of style and content hide a rich implicational style in the telling of a story which has profound psychological, social and historical importance, producing novels of great stature, akin to writers of the stature of Joyce, Mansfield and Woolf. The analysis begins by identifying those linguistic traits which render the language “simple”: syntactic complexity, including range of syntactic structures, depth and quantity of rankshift, parataxis and hypotaxis, cohesion, sentence length; simple lexis (basically concrete lexis referring to the hic et nunc of the external world); a lack of metaphors and other tropes; repetition; third person omniscient author, without intrusions, related to a seeming lack of emotion and psychological insight. When, however, the concrete, simple, direct language coupled with the concrete, mundane conceptual content is subjected to close scrutiny, it reveals unexpected riches. Achebe continuously flouts Gricean maxims and turn-taking norms; he exploits parallelism, redundancy, downtoning, speech and thought presentation; style markers showing the extract to be “conversational” in style rather than descriptive. The analysis of these features enable the deep messages to be revealed. The result is a socio-historical portrait of Igbo society and its political repercussions in the colonial context, a portrait whose relevance is underlined through comparisons to other works by Achebe, including his essays, and to other writers, including Conrad, the latter example being pertinent to showing that Achebe is intertextually “writing back to the Empire”.
The Art of the Word in Achebe.
DOUTHWAITE, JOHN
2004-01-01
Abstract
Achebe’s style is identified through a close reading of an extract his first novel, Things fall Apart, employing the tools of stylistics. The insights gleaned from this reading are then extended to the rest of the novel to show how complex and integrated the structure of that work is. The global objective is to demonstrate that Achebe employs simple language to talk about everyday, mundane situations appearing to produce texts which, at first reading, seem to offer little of thematic interest and little depth of analysis. Instead, simplicity of style and content hide a rich implicational style in the telling of a story which has profound psychological, social and historical importance, producing novels of great stature, akin to writers of the stature of Joyce, Mansfield and Woolf. The analysis begins by identifying those linguistic traits which render the language “simple”: syntactic complexity, including range of syntactic structures, depth and quantity of rankshift, parataxis and hypotaxis, cohesion, sentence length; simple lexis (basically concrete lexis referring to the hic et nunc of the external world); a lack of metaphors and other tropes; repetition; third person omniscient author, without intrusions, related to a seeming lack of emotion and psychological insight. When, however, the concrete, simple, direct language coupled with the concrete, mundane conceptual content is subjected to close scrutiny, it reveals unexpected riches. Achebe continuously flouts Gricean maxims and turn-taking norms; he exploits parallelism, redundancy, downtoning, speech and thought presentation; style markers showing the extract to be “conversational” in style rather than descriptive. The analysis of these features enable the deep messages to be revealed. The result is a socio-historical portrait of Igbo society and its political repercussions in the colonial context, a portrait whose relevance is underlined through comparisons to other works by Achebe, including his essays, and to other writers, including Conrad, the latter example being pertinent to showing that Achebe is intertextually “writing back to the Empire”.
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