Okonkwo and the Storyteller: Death, Accident, and Meaning in Chinua Achebe and Walter Benjamin

Abstract

Walter Benjamin's essay The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov famously exam ines the transition from oral to written narrative, a _transition Benjamin elucidates with a dichotomy between what he calls and This transition from the oral to the written is also central to Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart, and to Achebe's writing about literature more generally. This essay brings Benjamin's trenchant analysis of narrative, and its func tioning within an emergent modernity, to bear on Achebe's work; its primary aim is to use Benjamin's theory to discern crucial tensions in Achebe's novel. At the same time, however, it might offer the addi tional benefit of demonstrating how Achebe's novel, in its vivid par ticularity, can illumine the more shadowy corners of Benjamin's terse and gnomic prose. What I argue, in brief, is that Achebe's novel can be seen as a portrait of Igbo culture precisely at the moment of transition from one Benjaminian discursive category to another, from story to novel.1 By this I emphatically don't mean merely that the novel shows us a society in transition, or that it combines elements of oral narra tive practice with novelistic devices and structures: it deploys, after all, a European genre, the English language, and the medium of print.