Any piece of literature that works within a defined historical or social context derives a portion of its rhetorical power from its ability to transcend that context and reveal something about the universal human experience. The colonization of Africa by European countries and the establishment of European social, political, economic and religious values as significant, and at times dominant, forces on the African continent have certainly formed the basis of much of what has happened there since the 19th century. To a large extent these events remain embedded in the African body politic, a fact that is reflected in the work of many African writers. It is, of course, useful to read the literary reflections of Africans if one desires to understand the particular experience of Africa during the past century and a half. Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart, with its authentic depiction of Ibo culture and the details of British colonization in the late 19th century, has no doubt served in this regard as an important educative tool for its many American and European readers. As with any great work of literature, however, Achebe's novel achieves not only the significant feat of illuminating the local, Ibo experience, but the more difficult one of linking that local experience to the broad sweep of human character and interaction. An examination of the novel's universality may logically begin with references to William Butler Yeats' 1919 poem "The Second Coming," from which Achebe took the title of his work. And whereas neither work is dependent on the other for its meaning, and each deals with its own particular ideas, the novel and the poem are linked by the clarity with which they portray each writer's perceptions of the patterns of human history.
In order to make sense of "The Second Coming," it is necessary to understand something of the complex blend of occult and mathematical ideas that underlie Yeats' vision of reality. In the early part of the 20th century Yeats and his wife, George, developed a cosmological construct that they called The System, and which drew its principles from physics, theology and philosophy. Among its fundamental ideas are the balance of opposing forces—a concept found in Buddhism and other eastern philosophies—and the notion of cycles of expansion and destruction, which finds expression in world views ranging from aboriginal Australian cosmology to modern Christianity. Infused into The System is the notion of 2,000 year cycles brought about by the interaction of the divine and the mundane, as in the Greek legend of Leda, Queen of Sparta—who according to the myth, was impregnated by Zeus—and the Christian belief in the immaculate conception of Mary through the Holy Spirit 2,000 years later. In "The Second Coming," Yeats carries the idea further, predicting an end to the Christian cycle with the verses "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?" The term "the Second Coming" is used in Christian theology to refer to the unspecified time when Jesus Christ will return, earthly life will end, and the kingdom of God will be established; however, Yeats seems to have meant the term in a broader sense, theologically speaking, as evidenced by his reference to Spiritus Mundi--literally, "the spirit of the world"--rather than to "God" or "Jesus." The idea of an end time characterized by disorder and destruction, as in the verses "Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned," is consistent with Christian belief as contained in the book of Revelations, but also reflects more ancient views, both biblical and non-biblical, of periodic destruction and renewal. Yeats' apocalyptic vision can be seen in many of his poems from the 1920s and 1930s, according to the Oxford Companion to English Literature, and is also described in Yeats' 1925 fictional work The Vision. It is also worth noting that Yeats had witnessed the awful destruction of World War I, a cataclysm that led many writers to doubt the future of human civilization, or at least to redefine their ideas concerning it. As Kwame Anthony Appiah puts it in the introduction to the Everyman's Library edition of Things Fall Apart, "he saw in the terrible destruction of the first decades of the 20th century signs that this Christian cycle was coming to an end."
Achebe's novel also deals with an enormous paradigm shift, the loss of cultural and political autonomy by African peoples with the onset of European colonization; and whereas there is no evidence in Achebe's writings that he meant his novel to be taken as a direct analogy to Yeats' poem, the use of a key verse from the poem as the title of the novel does lend emphasis to the epochal nature of the African colonial experience. Appiah notes the irony that, "the cycle that is ending is, for Achebe, an age of autonomy in his Ibo homeland; and the cycle that will follows will be a Christian cycle," whereas, in Yeats' poem, it is the Christian cycle that is coming to an end. Nevertheless, the idea of a change so sweeping that, as Yeats put it, "the center cannot hold" is relevant to Achebe's work. Okonkwo, the protagonist of Things Fall Apart, is, in a sense, a man without a center. According to Appiah, a professor of philosophy at Princeton University and author of such works as In My Father's House and Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race, Okonkwo's tragic downfall can be attributed to his "failure to seek balance between the manly virtues and the womanly virtues as understood in Umuofia." Okonkwo, shamed and obsessed by his father's "womanliness"—in other words, his lack of material success—attempts to distance himself from anything that smacks of femininity, whereas, as Appiah points out, "he lives in a culture that requires a balance between masculine and feminine."
For Yeats, the center cannot hold indefinitely because each age contains the seeds of its own negation and, in seeking to become its own opposite, it destroys itself: "Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer." In his notes for "The Second Coming" Yeats explained his use of the gyre as the opening image of the poem as a representation of the ultimate conflict within humankind: "In other words, the human soul is always moving outward into the objective world or inward into itself; this movement is double because the human soul would not be conscious were it not suspended between two contraries, the greater the contrast the more intense the consciousness." Yeats even included in his notes a diagram of a double cone, the narrow end of each centered in the broad end of the other, a static representation of the dynamic process of destruction and renewal—ending and beginning—that Yeats believed animated the universe. It is perhaps worth noting here that spiral and conical shapes also figure prominently in mathematics and science. An example is the so-called Fibonacci spiral, whose form can be observed in natural phenomena ranging from mollusk shells to the shapes of galaxies. Those mysterious energy sinks that physicists call black holes are also sometimes represented graphically as conical or spiral in nature.
In Achebe's novel, the widening gyre in which the falcon no longer hears the falconer could be taken as a metaphor for a culture that loses contact with its own roots and is thereby destroyed. In Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo also ultimately loses his son to the missionaries, an event that might superficially be equated to a falconer losing control of his falcon. There is no particular evidence to suggest that Achebe wished to draw such a connection between his novel and the image in Yeats' poem, however. Moreover, history shows that Africans have not entirely lost touch with their cultural roots, despite colonialism and the domineering influences of Christianity and Islam. Achebe himself was raised in a devoutly Christian household and educated at mission schools, and yet grew up to become one of the most powerful exponents of the authentic African voice in modern literature. Okonkwo's tragedy is that, for him, the advent of colonialism and Christianity does indeed represent the end of an age and the beginning of another, antithetical epoch. For Okonkwo, then, the events of the novel do represent a historical progression analogous to Yeats' vision of one vortex spiraling into oblivion as it gives birth to another that represents its mathematical and philosophical opposite. The thoroughness of Okonkwo's obliteration is encapsulated in the words of his friend Obierika: "That man was one of the greatest men in Umuofia. You drove him to suicide; and now he will be buried like a dog . . . " In a larger sense, however, the progression from African cultural autonomy, through colonization to modern statehood is more aptly described in dialectical terms, in which two opposing forces result, ultimately, not in the annihilation of one by the other, but in a synthesis that combines elements of both in a new paradigm.
One of the most striking images in Yeats' poem is the description of the Sphinx-like creature in line 14 which, the poet writes "Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it reel the shadows of indignant birds." In the poem, Yeats locates his creature "somewhere in the sands of the desert," which increases the temptation to equate it with the ancient Egyptian guardian of the pyramids. The Sphinx is a ubiquitous and multifarious symbol in art and literature through the ages, however, and to limit its meaning to something so concrete is obviously a mistake. Yeats, of course, does not call it a Sphinx or even give it a name at all. His notes, not to mention the placement of the image in the later part of the poem just before the ominous conclusion, suggest that he meant it to symbolize some sort of impending destruction. The conflicting natures of man and beast within the same being are also consistent with the poet's conception of the conflict inherent in the human soul. An analogy could be made between the duality of the Sphinx and the depiction in Achebe's novel of European religion and governance grafted onto the shoulders of the African people, an event which, to people such as Okonkwo, also portended destruction. To take this analogy to its conclusion, the Sphinx that is Africa--with its duality of traditional African and European influences--is still with us. It does get unruly and unstable from time to time, but, like the character the Dude in the Coen brothers’ film The Big Lebowsky, it abides.
As with specific apocalyptic predictions throughout the ages, the general destruction of world order that Yeats believed would come with the end of the second millennium has failed to come to pass, although, to be fair, we may still be within a reasonable margin of error. It is, nevertheless, perfectly reasonable to consider the broad sweep of human history as a series of interlocking epochs brought about by cataclysms, both natural and man-made, technological changes and other earth-shaking events. Moreover, often it is only with the perspective of history that one even sees that an epoch-making change has taken place. Among the many literary virtues of Yeats' "The Second Coming" is that generations of readers have seen in it echoes of events such as the Russian Revolution, the Irish Rebellion, the rise of Nazism and a host of other changes in the current of human history. Achebe's Things Fall Apart is similarly transcendent. True to its cultural and historical specificity, the story of Okonkwo is, nevertheless, a universal tale of a flawed but heroic individual whose vision is sharp, but narrow and who, like a mighty tree, is uprooted by the storm that leaves standing the smaller but more flexible blades of grass.
