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| Achebe rejects endorsement as 'father of modern African literature' Nigerian novelist says he resists the tag 'very, very strongly' because it obscures the role of many other writersNigerian author Chinua Achebe has spoken out about his dislike at being labelled "the father of modern African literature".The author of the multi-million bestseller Things Fall Apart, Achebe was given the label by Nadine Gordimer as he was awarded the Man Booker International prize two years ago; it has been frequently used both before and since. But the author said yesterday that he "resisted that very, very strongly"."It's really a serious belief of mine that it's risky for anyone to lay claim to something as huge and important as African literature ... the contribution made down the ages. I don't want to be singled out as the one behind it because there were many of us – many, many of us," he said when asked about the title.Achebe was speaking to the student newspaper of Brown University, the Brown Daily Herald, before a welcome event at the university as he joined the faculty as professor of Africana studies. He will be overseeing a new initiative at Brown, the Chinua Achebe Colloquium on Africa, which the university said would be developed "in keeping with his life's work to foster greater knowledge of Africa".Achebe said that the idea of the colloquium would be "to take issues that come up". "Today Africa is a continent of issues wherever you look, and so I thought the best thing to do now is not to limit ourselves to one or two or even three issues, but to look at Africa bursting with problems and find out what we can do in each case," he told the student paper."For instance, the issue of governance, which is a major problem – presidents that do not want to retire when their terms are up, elections that are rigged, violence at elections ... Whatever we are doing, we're not doing right. Nigeria has been independent for nearly 50 years and look where we are."Achebe, 78, is the author of numerous novels, including Arrow of God, A Man of the People and Anthills of the Savannah as well as his 1958 debut, Things Fall Apart, and a wide range of short stories and poetry. He is also known for his essays, with his 1975 piece An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness savaging JosephConrad's novel as "thoroughgoingly racist".His new book, The Education of a British-Protected Child, is a collection of autobiographical essays reflecting on his upbringing in Nigeria, and is due out from Allen Lane in January in the UK. The publisher described it as "a vivid, ironic and delicately nuanced portrait of growing up in colonial Nigeria and inhabiting its 'middle ground', examining both his happy memories of reading English adventure stories in secondary school and also the harsher truths of colonial rule". Its contents "span reflections on personal and collective identity, on home and family, on literature, language and politics, and on Achebe's lifelong attempt to reclaim the definition of 'Africa' for its own authorship".Chinua AchebeFictionAlison Floodguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Improv Tonight The story of Chicago’s Second City comedy troupe, told through interviews with its acclaimed alumni. feeds.nytimes.com |
Shorn of dissent, Britain's high culture is little different from The X Factor Great writers used to pit themselves against the world. Today their successors fight for a glut of awards, fellowships and festival appearances and the result is creative bankruptcyYou might want to disown the shallow vulgarity of the Christmas season's celebrity-fest, but it's going to be difficult. Tonight, as The X Factor judders towards its climax, with Strictly… pirouetting in its slipstream, Ant and Dec having gibbered over their prisoners in the jungle, and piles of celeb memoirs and cookbooks hogging the front tables of bookshops, what newspaper can be immune to the danse macabre of self-exposure? Then roll out the hand-wringing commentary about a society cursed by the obsession with fame.But old-fashioned anxiety about contemporary frivolity is not the whole story. The gorgeous chintz of celebrity-phobia conceals some strands of sheer condescension. One thread goes something like this: The X Factor is a pop-cultural phenomenon that appeals to 10-year-old girls. We, who are thankfully above such things, pressing our scented handkerchiefs to the nasal passages of exquisite good taste, can take comfort in the polar separation of elite and mass culture in all their manifestations.That's where the trouble starts. Celebrities are not just for Christmas. And how separate, really, are high and low culture? On closer inspection, there are many aspects of posh culture that are, essentially, X Factor Redux. The imminent Costa prize, for example, is a literary event of some consequence. This year it will pit Hilary Mantel against Colm TóibÃn. You might think you could hardly get more exalted. Yet the grammar of Costa's sponsorship and presentation would be utterly familiar to Cheryl Cole.Something has happened to Britain's creative community and there's no better way to understand this than to go back to a speech that Graham Greene, one of the most admired novelists of his day, gave in Germany in 1969 "on the virtue of disloyalty".Responding to being awarded the distinguished Shakespeare prize, Greene used the occasion to extol the writers and artists for whom he had the most respect, those who by their calling were "troublers of the poor world's peace". Pointedly, he identified that bourgeois Stratfordian, William Shakespeare, Gent, as an establishment poet for whom he had little sympathy. Instead, with perverse glee, he praised "the sulphurous anger of Dante, the self-disgust of Baudelaire, and the blasphemies of Villon", noting with approval that their fates involved traumatic exile, an obscenity trial and the threat of hanging.From there, in the depths of the cold war, it was a short step to Dostoevsky before a firing squad, the persecution of Sinyavsky and the sufferings of Solzhenitsyn in the Gulag. Then he went back to Shakespeare. Two years before he wrote those complacent lines, "This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England", in Richard II, says Greene, Shakespeare's fellow poet, Southwell, had died on the scaffold after three years of torture. "If only Shakespeare had shared his disloyalty," Greene writes, "we could have loved him better as a man." Shakespeare had funked his obligation to challenge the state and was somehow diminished by his willingness to let "the state poison the psychological wells".The storyteller's task, Greene declared, was "to act as the devil's advocate". Born in 1904, the son of a headmaster, Greene was a child of his generation. He distrusted authority, loathed the state and nurtured a visceral hatred of officialdom. His veneration of disloyalty was unique to his psyche, but it was shared by his contemporary, George Orwell. In Why I Write, Orwell declared: "When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, 'I am going to produce a work of art.' I write it because there is some lie I want to expose."Orwell was more of an artist than he liked to let on, but both he and Greene – not alone in the last century – saw the writer's vocation to be a protestant in a catholic society; to see the virtues of the communist in a capitalist state, and vice versa; above all, to elicit sympathy and understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of conventional approval. The writer's duty, said Greene, was to be "a piece of grit in the state machinery". This vital contrarian instinct has deep roots in the English intellectual tradition. Tom Paine once wrote: "We must guard even our enemies against injustice."To many writers and readers who have come of age in the past 10, or even 20, years such ideas of disloyalty will seem quaint, even outlandish. Many admired contemporary novelists would consider the conditions of isolation, penury and disdain that inspire the virtue of disloyalty as the evils of an ancien régime of creativity now properly dumped in the dustbin of history. They do not want to be part of some ill-kempt awkward squad whose default position is the saeva indignatio (savage indignation) of the Roman satirist Juvenal. In the same way, some journalists will aspire to be "public intellectuals" and some film stars will claim to be "goodwill ambassadors". In a word, everyone wants to join the system, not keep it at arm's length. This much is new.The sure test of this proposition is to ask: whatever happened to the avant-garde? Once upon a time, it was respectable, even essential, to nurture one's art free from the taint of conventional taste. Now what ? Well, there is no avant-garde to speak of and even the experimental and the outré generally takes place within the matrix of the establishment. The "habit of art" has become the "addiction of charm".Where, I wonder, did this change in mood come from ? The short answer is: the market, a booming global economy, combined with the internet, in which every semi-articulate voice has become enfranchised into the kind of creative marketplace that would have Greene spinning in his grave. In the 40 years since Greene was speaking, artists of all sorts – writers, musicians, film-makers, painters and sculptors – have been showered with rewards and approbation to an unprecedented degree.State patronage, and before that, aristocratic sponsorship, has always been present, but the really corrosive rust in the creative imagination has been the money and attention lavished on good and bad alike. For the first time in the history of British (though not American) culture, it has become possible for mediocrity to sustain an above-average living as a freelance dunce. The panic-stricken search for a voice of one's own has been overtaken by an equally urgent quest for belonging.At the same time, occasional episodes suggest that a belief in the power and responsibility of art to make trouble has not been completely squashed by consumerism. The Salman Rushdie affair of 1989 was about many things, but an important part of the frisson that it inspired was the prospect of a lone writer bravely risking his life for his creative integrity.Apart from the passionate démarches of the late Harold Pinter, there have been precious few equivalent moments of risk since the burning of The Satanic Verses in Bradford. Rushdie himself has become reintegrated into a literary community notable for its indifference to illegal wars, clandestine torture and the state-sponsored oppression of human rights. Until the recession of 2008-09, the creative community, like the world at large, gorged itself on a diet of unsustained credit, merrily cashing the blank cheques of intellectual bankruptcy.This cascade of money has brought with it a dismal retinue of lesser evils: prizes, fellowships, conferences, festivals and, worst of all, the fatal seduction of unfettered applause. Success is all very well, no doubt, and maybe it does, in the words of the cliché, breed success. But it also sponsors complacency and an appetite for entertainment, sapping the instinct to ask awkward questions of the status quo. It's surely no accident that this past generation, roughly 1980 to 2010, has seen more distinguished artists of all stripes accept peerages, knighthoods and other establishment baubles, from (Sir) William Golding (1988) to (Sir) Stephen Spender (1983), whose celebrated line "I think continually of those who were truly great" now has a rather hollow ring to it.In the arts, the appetite for true greatness is never satisfied. The hunger for an authentic and original vision does not fade. In this X Factor season, you will find many intelligent people, good readers and passionate theatregoers, complaining about the curse of celebrity and its shameful triviality. What they overlook is that, in the creative community at large, this now exhibits itself as vanity. On all sides, in books, plays, contemporary music and painting, from Alan Bennett to Damien Hirst, the corrosive effects of artistic vanity are all too visible. Never mind Greene's "virtue of disloyalty", we are now confronted with its polar opposite: the vice of complicity.The paradoxes of complicity are, happily, not without irony. Poor reviews of Hirst's recent exhibition at the Wallace Collection no doubt gave him the satisfaction of being a pariah, but they were an unintended consequence: the space had been bought and lavishly restored by the artist.In conclusion, the dreadful cultural cost of complicity is simply stated. If disloyalty encourages the writer to roam at will through human hearts and minds, and gives the novelist a fourth dimension of sympathy and intuition, then complicity just narrows the creative arteries. It propagates a me-too-ism in the community that works against originality and promotes a wannabe mentality that has nothing to do with Ezra Pound's famous injunction to "make it new".Such lowered standards extend to the media, too: journalists following other journalists, like sheep; reviewers schmoozed by PRs; the newspaper commentariat looking over its shoulder, as it did in the run-up to the Iraq war. The complicity of all artists makes them fearful of risk, vulnerable to propaganda, and the prisoners of conventional wisdom. Disloyalty liberates, complicity enslaves.Costa book awardsBooker prizeHilary MantelColm TóibínGraham GreeneThe X FactorRobert McCrumguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Leading authors demonstrate against jailing of Liu Xiaobo Writers including Don DeLillo, Edward Albee and EL Doctorow join New York protest against detention of writer and human rights activistAcclaimed US authors including EL Doctorow, Don DeLillo and Edward Albee gathered on the steps of the New York Public Library on New Year's Eve to protest against the imprisonment of Chinese writer and human rights activist Liu Xiaobo.The authors called on China to release Liu, who was given an 11-year prison sentence on Christmas Day for "inciting subversion of state power" with his writing. "We want to express and explain our outrage, to commit ourselves to working for Liu's release, and to urge all those in this country and around the world who care about free expression to join us," said Kwame Anthony Appiah, author and president of PEN's US branch.The assembled writers stood in the snow to read aloud from the passages of Liu's writing that were cited by the court in Beijing when condemning him to prison, as well as from poems he wrote to his wife during a previous three-year term of "re-education through labour" during the 1990s, calling his sentencing "shameful".Liu is the co-author of the Charter 08 campaign for political and human rights reform, in which he writes that "we should end the practice of viewing words as crimes". A member of the Independent Chinese PEN Centre, he was arrested last December before the Charter was made public, and has been detained for the last year.The New York rally, staged by the writers' organisation PEN's US centre, saw DeLillo read from Liu's poem "Longing to Escape", dedicated to his wife Xia: "a cat closes in behind / you, I want to shoo him away / as he turns his head, extends / a sharp claw toward me / deep within his blue eyes / there seems to be a prison". Doctorow read from the poem "One Letter", which opens: "one letter is enough / for me to transcend and face / you to speak"."We are proud to stand here in solidarity with our fellow writer, Liu Xiaobo, and with his family, and we call again for his release," said Appiah. "And to him, we say: old friend, we will not forget you, we will not rest until you are free."PEN America later delivered a letter on behalf of its 3,400 writer members to the Permanent Mission of the People's Republic of China to the United Nations, calling on Chinese president Hu Jintao to "to undo this egregious injustice and free Liu Xiaobo immediately".CensorshipChinaDon DeLilloEdward AlbeeHuman rightsAlison Floodguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Apocalypse literature now, and then Writers have been imagining the end of the world since soon after it began, but today's practitioners deliver a new kind of bleaknessHumanity has always imagined its own destruction. Each generation believes the end is somewhere round the corner, and our catastrophic fantasies are a good barometer of what's currently troubling us. Thousands of years ago, we heard about a flood sent by God to flush out his people in their sinfulness; later, the Book of Revelations forecast all sorts of grisly finales. The truth of imminent calamity was all around us; it was just a case of seeing. The word "apocalypse" derives from the Greek "to uncover".When science started to replace God, intimations of armageddon remained. It seems that we still believe we require punishment for our wicked overreaching. The typical scenario was a Big Bang followed by the realm of the future medieval – a kind of reversion to pre-industrial society without the structures to keep it in check. Technological progress was thus unmasked as an all-too-brief brief and illusory veil for our inherent barbarism. We weren't always sure how our advances were going to kill us (ideological implosion; chemical catastrophe; cybernetic revolt), but one way or another we were due a damn good purging.After London (1885) by Richard Jefferies found a world ravaged by unspecified cataclysm. Industrial development was subdued; the land reclaimed by nature. René Barjavel's Ashes, Ashes (1943) censured humanity for its dependence on electricity, when the supply was summarily cut off, with disastrous consequences. As our weapons improved, so did the coherence of our terrible imaginings. In the 19th century, Ignatius Donnelly envisaged "dynamite bullets"; HG Wells predicted the ballistic missile. Then we split the atom and our writers got busy: Pat Frank, Nevil Shute, Andre Norton, Gudrun Pausewang, Philip K Dick and countless others have played with the post-nuclear holocaust scenario to alarming and memorable effect. Outside influences have also remained a threat: alien invasion; global pandemic; meteor impact; random acts of blindness.Today, of course, the big fear is environmental. And this seems to have had a subtle (or maybe not so subtle) effect on our bards of the apocalypse. Put simply, the difference between the current threat and older ones is this: we are all, personally, to blame. Almost everyone (especially in the well-read west) is doing their bit to make the world a warmer place, and thus we are all implicated in the calamity that will this time surely spell the End. Previously, we could blame naive scientists or tyrant villains, world leaders or fickle fate; and though there is an argument for collective culpability in the Bible (in which case, we've come full circle), it did at least offer us the option of throwing our hands up at a cruel and vengeful God. Now we're all directly responsible and I think the bleakness of recent books reflects this.Will Self's The Book of Dave is a Swiftian satire in which a waterlogged future London is steeped in malevolent superstition (the people worship the ravings of a former cabbie). Similar themes are present in The Pesthouse by Jim Crace in which the author set out to overturn America's "optimistic narrative". Enlightened rationalism has gone the way of plenty; the downtrodden victims of ecological collapse worship a bizarre and oppressive sect. Pernicious religious fundamentalism is also seen as the answer to impending eco-tragedy in Liz Jensen's The Rapture, in which humanity eventually gets its just deserts. In these three very different books, greater spiritual redemption is seen as a hollow illusion. The moments of warmth are fleeting and individual. The world seems better off without us.The best contemporary example of post-apocalyptic gloom is Cormac McCarthy's relentlessly despairing and brilliant The Road. Of course, the relationship between father and son is full of beauty. But humanity's redemption is ultimately slight – certainly on a macro level. We've screwed it, says McCarthy. Irreparably. And this realisation knocks us for six. It is part of what makes the book so powerful.The Road may have its precursors; but I wonder if the feeling we get from engaging with its message is rather more unique to what is happening today. Has the timbre of contemporary guilt informed the fiction now being produced? And does it change the way in which we reread the apocalyptic writing of the past? The era of decadent consumption is also an era of private culpability. Are we, then, even more willing than historically to use our literature as a tool for collective punishment?FictionScience fiction, fantasy and horrorCormac McCarthyPhilip K DickToby Lichtigguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |