However, the mid-century (circa 1960) educated urban Nigerians that Achebe portrays in No Longer at Ease were living at the time when what Ong refers to as secondary oral culture was emerging world-wide, thanks to the communications media that accentuate sound.
Now, Ong's pioneering study of print culture in our Western cultural history is also his pioneering media ecology account of the aural-to-visual shift in cognitive processing in our Western cultural history, his massively researched 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (for specific page references to the aural-to-visual shift in cognitive processing in our Western cultural history, see the "Index" [p. 396]). Peter Ramus (1515-1572) was the French Renaissance logician and educational reformer and Protestant martyr whose works in logic were extremely popular for a time.
Concerning Ong's account of both primary oral culture and secondary oral culture, see Ong's seminal 1967 book The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for cultural and Religious History, the expanded version of his 1964 Terry Lectures at Yale University.
Now, subsequently to the publication of his seminal 1967 book, Ong published one of his most perceptive essays, "World as View and World as Event" in the American Anthropologist (August 1969).
It is reprinted in volume three of Ong's Faith and Contexts, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (1995, pp. 69-90).
I discuss Ong's 1969 essay extensively in my article "Walter Ong and Harold Bloom Can Help Us Understand the Hebrew Bible" in Explorations in Media Ecology (2012).
Now, the titles of those two novels by Achebe contain literary allusions. The title Things Fall Apart is a line in William Butler Yeats' poem The Second Coming, and the title of No Longer at Ease contains a line from T. S. Eliot's poem The Journey of the Magi. For further discussion of Achebe's choice of those two titles, see Judith Illsley Gleason's book This Africa: Novels by West Africans in English and French (1965, pp. 81-93 and130-136 and 140).
For a relevant critical assessment devoted primarily to Achebe, see Chinwe Christiana Okechukwu's Achebe the Orator: The Art of Persuasion in Chinua Achebe's Novels (2001). In the "Foreword" (pp. ix-xi), Chinyere Grace Okafor of Wichita State University says, "Okechukwu studied English in universities in Great Britain and Nigeria, has a Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., taught English language and literature in various institutions in Nigeria, and is at present a Full Professor at Montgomery College in Rockville, Maryland, where she teaches English, Literature, and Writing" (p. ix). In Okechukwu's "Acknowledgments" (pp. xiii-xiv), she thanks "Dr. Jean Dietz Moss, Professor of Rhetoric and director of the Rhetoric Program at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., my teacher, mentor, and supervisor, who not only encouraged me to explore the academic field of rhetoric, but exercised great patience and showed a great amount of caring throughout the duration of putting this work together" (p. xiv). However, I am sorry to report that she does not even mention Ong's work.
In any event, Okechukwu discusses Achebe's Things Fall Apart in Chapter 2: "Audience and Oratory: Things Fall Apart" (pp. 13-43) and Achebe's No Longer at Ease in Chapter 4: "Locale and Argumentation: No Longer at Ease" (pp. 77-97).
Now, for a biography of Achebe, see Chinua Achebe: A Biography (1997) by the Nigerian poet Ezenwa-Ohaeto (1958-2005; Ph.D. in literature, University of Benin, 1991).
But also see the Wikipedia entry on Chinua Achebe:
Now, in Ong's seminal 1967 book The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History, mentioned above, he discusses Achebe's novel No Longer at Ease.
In it, Ong says, "In his sensitive novel No Longer at Ease, concerned with the acculturation of his native Nigeria, Chinua Achebe cogently portrays ([1961], pp. 126-127) the awesome impression which knowledge of writing has made on a thoughtful elderly man, who is fascinated by its order and stability and rather given to explaining this order and stability to illiterate kinsmen. He urges them to meditate on Pilate's words (which he quotes in oral fashion, that is thematically, not verbatim, suppressing Pilate's 'I'): 'What is written is written.' The same man is even more impressed by print. He never destroys a piece of printed paper, but in boxes and the corners of his room saves every bit of it he can find. Order so assured as that of printed words deserves to be preserved, whatever the words say. It appears reasonable that such experience of this spectacularly ordered environment for thought, free from interference, simply there, unattended and unsupervised by any discernible person, would open to the overstrained psyche the new possibility of withdrawal into a world away from the tribe, a private world of delusional systemization - an escape not into violence or tribal magic, but into the interior of one's own consciousness, rendered schizoid but once and for all consistent with itself" (Ong, 1967, pp. 136-137).
Now, in an interview published as "Named for Victoria, Queen of England" in the journal New Letters (1973), Chinua Achebe (1930-2013), born Albert Chinualumogu Achebe, revealed that his father, an Anglican catechist, had served as the real-life model for the elderly man he portrays in the ways that Ong describes. In the interview Achebe says, "'My parents' reverence for books was almost superstitious. . . . My father was much worse than my mother. He never destroyed any paper. When he died, we had to make a bonfire of all the hoardings of his life'" (p. 20).
"Named for Victoria, Queen of England" is reprinted in Achebe's Morning Yet on Creation Day (1975, pp. 116-124) and in Achebe's Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays (1989, pp. 30-39).
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