The Tyranny of a Literary Critic
From: THIS DAY[Nigeria] of 15 May 2012
Achebe and Soyinka
By Erasmus Ndulue
Before the advent of internet and cyberspace, book reviews were confined to obscure academic journals and elitist magazines. Then, most book reviews were characterised by some level of objectivity and sparks of in-depth intellectual rigour. Now, book reviews and literary criticism, both informed and uninformed, are flooding the blog sites, ceaselessly. Unfortunately, this trend is prone to abuses, as even the administrators of a good number of these sites lack the capacity to check the excesses of the bloggers.
It is the duty of a well informed literary critic or book reviewer to demystify complex literary works, as they are presumably, well equipped to execute that task. Therefore, deconstructing a literary work does not mean that the work must be celebrated. The flaws in a literary work can be projected with a detached, and, an uncanny presence of mind, without perhaps, sending wrong signals that the critic has an axe to grind with the author of the book being reviewed.
Ikhide Ikheloa's review of Akachi Adimora Ezeigbo's latest offering, Roses and Bullets would not pass as a book review in whatever ramifications. It is, merely, a comic relief, meticulously designed to send readers reeling on the floor with laughter. But book reviews are serious intellectual engagements, and not an avenue to showcase the latent talents of a road side comedian. Ikheloa summed Roses and Bullets, thus: "this is a deadly boring book…This book should be an instrument of torture in police stations. The victim will confess to an imaginary crime just to be allowed to rest…All insomniacs should skip Valium and buy this book; they will be cured." This is telling. Ikhide Ikheloa had earlier confessed that he stopped reading the novel halfway, as it was inducing him to sleep. How could a serious minded critic review a book he stopped reading halfway. Could it be illogical to charge Ikheloa of intellectual laziness?
Ikheloa, in his review of Maja-Pearce's A Peculiar Tragedy: JP Clark and the Beginning of Nigerian Literature, recollected, as playful secondary school student, his preference for more accessible poems. He conceded that Soyinka's Abiku gave him headache, hence his passion for JP Clark's version of Abiku. Thus, his literary trajectory has exposed his preference for "easy reading against quality" works of first-rate literature.
Salman Rushdie's Midnights Children and Margaret Atwood's Blind Assassins are not quite accessible but they are acknowledged, universally, as great literary works. Attempts to straitjacket literary works into the narrow prism of "readability and accessibility" should be discountenanced in the interest of intellectual development. In fact, when the Man Booker Prize judges listed "accessibility and readability" as the criteria for the published shortlist in 2011, it generated a serious controversy in the literary world. Eminent critics and publishers accused the judges of "dumping down".
The furore generated by the shortlist prompted a group of critics to come up with a new literary prize in UK: The Literature Prize, with literary excellence, as its sole prerogative. Overwhelmed by the fusillades fired by critics, the chair of 2011 Man Booker Judges, Dame Stella Rimington, a graduate of English literature, and the former Spy Chief of M15, likened the intrigues playing out in the publishing world to the "destabilisation plot-worthy of KGB at its height".
Ikheloa's inconsistency is further illustrated in his admiration for Osofisan's subtle and deft use of words in his (Osofisan's) review of JP Clark's America, their America, as published in JP Clark: A Voyage. Ikheloa acknowledged that Osofisan, clinically projected the strengths and weaknesses of the work without malice. How come he didn't apply the requisite restraint expected of a critic in his assessment of Ezeigbo's Roses and Bullets?
Critics, weather of malevolence or benevolence hue, are very influential. Some gullible readers have swallowed Ikheloa's pontifications by making up their minds not to read Roses and Bullets. Of course, critics are human with their peculiar prejudices and foibles. A certain American critic, one Matt Steinglass, who also writes for Boston Globe, dismissed Soyinka's towering memoir, You Must Set Forth at Dawn, as "weird and mere farcical political interventions". This critic, obviously blinded by "primordial chauvinism" (apologies to Niyi Osundare) exhibited so much undisguised hostility to Africa's first Nobel Laureate, that one wondered whether he was reviewing a completely different version of the well-received memoir.
You Must Set Forth at Dawn is one of the most engaging memoirs ever written, although not flawless. It is in the class of Leon Edel's volumes of biography on the revered American Writer, Henry James. Margaret Busby, the editor of the anthology, Daughters of Africa, described Soyinka's memoir in the Guardian of London of May 26, 2007, as: "the most engrossing and unusual memoir I have ever read for ages…nuanced, lyrical…Soyinka is a master of gripping drama." Even Ikhide Ikheloa did a good job in his review of the book in 2006, prompting Molara Wood, the erstwhile arts editor of the defunct 234next to dub it: "the review of reviews".
A critic should not be held hostage by mood swings, as that would damage his reputation, irreparably. By deploying what the erudite scholar, Adebayo Williams, once termed "Literary Cudgels" to lampoon Maja-Pearce's controversial biography on JP Clark: A Peculiar Tragedy, Ikheloa, surreptitiously crossed the Rubicon, in the use of foul language. He even branded Maja-Pearce a drunk and a cheat for running down the revered JP Clark.
In 1987 or thereabouts, the eminent poet, Odia Ofeimun, dismissed the first six chapters of Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah, as "a near disaster". But the Somali writer, Nurudin Farah, reviewing the book that same year in the defunct West Africa Magazine, acknowledged the book "as an outstanding work by Africa's most accomplished writer'. Twenty years after Ofeimun's unflattering review of Anthills, the panel of judges for the 2007 Man Booker International Prize, headed by Elaine Showalter, a professor of Humanities at Princeton College singled out Anthills, not even the acclaimed Things Fall Apart, as Achebe's masterpiece.
One's academic background is no handicap to one emerging as a notable literary critic. Kole Omotosho and Abiola Irele, read Arabic and French, respectively, but they are among the most respected African literary critics. Ikhide read biological sciences, and he is reputed to be a voracious reader; that is encouraging in a clime where philistinism is celebrated. He is in good stead with Toyin Akinosho, a respected literature enthusiast, who read geology.
But the unconventional style of literary criticism, which Ikhide Ikheloa, sartorially, branded moonlighting, is indeed, a gentler offshoot of Bolekaja criticism, made popular by the troika of Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie and Ihechukwu Madubuike, in the 1980's. Soyinka, in his inimitable style, famously dismissed such pedestrian criticism as "neo-tarzanism". Ikheloa was, obviously inattentive while reading Roses and Bullets or fatigue took a better part of him, whatever might have prompted such an escapist review of the voluminous work, it is certain he strayed from the path of literary probity. The truth is that no critic, no matter his level of academic accomplishments, can convince our compatriots that there is nothing worthy of celebration in the 500 page-novel, Roses and Bullets.
• Ndulue, a poet, writes from Lagos.
By Erasmus Ndulue
Before the advent of internet and cyberspace, book reviews were confined to obscure academic journals and elitist magazines. Then, most book reviews were characterised by some level of objectivity and sparks of in-depth intellectual rigour. Now, book reviews and literary criticism, both informed and uninformed, are flooding the blog sites, ceaselessly. Unfortunately, this trend is prone to abuses, as even the administrators of a good number of these sites lack the capacity to check the excesses of the bloggers.
It is the duty of a well informed literary critic or book reviewer to demystify complex literary works, as they are presumably, well equipped to execute that task. Therefore, deconstructing a literary work does not mean that the work must be celebrated. The flaws in a literary work can be projected with a detached, and, an uncanny presence of mind, without perhaps, sending wrong signals that the critic has an axe to grind with the author of the book being reviewed.
Ikhide Ikheloa's review of Akachi Adimora Ezeigbo's latest offering, Roses and Bullets would not pass as a book review in whatever ramifications. It is, merely, a comic relief, meticulously designed to send readers reeling on the floor with laughter. But book reviews are serious intellectual engagements, and not an avenue to showcase the latent talents of a road side comedian. Ikheloa summed Roses and Bullets, thus: "this is a deadly boring book…This book should be an instrument of torture in police stations. The victim will confess to an imaginary crime just to be allowed to rest…All insomniacs should skip Valium and buy this book; they will be cured." This is telling. Ikhide Ikheloa had earlier confessed that he stopped reading the novel halfway, as it was inducing him to sleep. How could a serious minded critic review a book he stopped reading halfway. Could it be illogical to charge Ikheloa of intellectual laziness?
Ikheloa, in his review of Maja-Pearce's A Peculiar Tragedy: JP Clark and the Beginning of Nigerian Literature, recollected, as playful secondary school student, his preference for more accessible poems. He conceded that Soyinka's Abiku gave him headache, hence his passion for JP Clark's version of Abiku. Thus, his literary trajectory has exposed his preference for "easy reading against quality" works of first-rate literature.
Salman Rushdie's Midnights Children and Margaret Atwood's Blind Assassins are not quite accessible but they are acknowledged, universally, as great literary works. Attempts to straitjacket literary works into the narrow prism of "readability and accessibility" should be discountenanced in the interest of intellectual development. In fact, when the Man Booker Prize judges listed "accessibility and readability" as the criteria for the published shortlist in 2011, it generated a serious controversy in the literary world. Eminent critics and publishers accused the judges of "dumping down".
The furore generated by the shortlist prompted a group of critics to come up with a new literary prize in UK: The Literature Prize, with literary excellence, as its sole prerogative. Overwhelmed by the fusillades fired by critics, the chair of 2011 Man Booker Judges, Dame Stella Rimington, a graduate of English literature, and the former Spy Chief of M15, likened the intrigues playing out in the publishing world to the "destabilisation plot-worthy of KGB at its height".
Ikheloa's inconsistency is further illustrated in his admiration for Osofisan's subtle and deft use of words in his (Osofisan's) review of JP Clark's America, their America, as published in JP Clark: A Voyage. Ikheloa acknowledged that Osofisan, clinically projected the strengths and weaknesses of the work without malice. How come he didn't apply the requisite restraint expected of a critic in his assessment of Ezeigbo's Roses and Bullets?
Critics, weather of malevolence or benevolence hue, are very influential. Some gullible readers have swallowed Ikheloa's pontifications by making up their minds not to read Roses and Bullets. Of course, critics are human with their peculiar prejudices and foibles. A certain American critic, one Matt Steinglass, who also writes for Boston Globe, dismissed Soyinka's towering memoir, You Must Set Forth at Dawn, as "weird and mere farcical political interventions". This critic, obviously blinded by "primordial chauvinism" (apologies to Niyi Osundare) exhibited so much undisguised hostility to Africa's first Nobel Laureate, that one wondered whether he was reviewing a completely different version of the well-received memoir.
You Must Set Forth at Dawn is one of the most engaging memoirs ever written, although not flawless. It is in the class of Leon Edel's volumes of biography on the revered American Writer, Henry James. Margaret Busby, the editor of the anthology, Daughters of Africa, described Soyinka's memoir in the Guardian of London of May 26, 2007, as: "the most engrossing and unusual memoir I have ever read for ages…nuanced, lyrical…Soyinka is a master of gripping drama." Even Ikhide Ikheloa did a good job in his review of the book in 2006, prompting Molara Wood, the erstwhile arts editor of the defunct 234next to dub it: "the review of reviews".
A critic should not be held hostage by mood swings, as that would damage his reputation, irreparably. By deploying what the erudite scholar, Adebayo Williams, once termed "Literary Cudgels" to lampoon Maja-Pearce's controversial biography on JP Clark: A Peculiar Tragedy, Ikheloa, surreptitiously crossed the Rubicon, in the use of foul language. He even branded Maja-Pearce a drunk and a cheat for running down the revered JP Clark.
In 1987 or thereabouts, the eminent poet, Odia Ofeimun, dismissed the first six chapters of Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah, as "a near disaster". But the Somali writer, Nurudin Farah, reviewing the book that same year in the defunct West Africa Magazine, acknowledged the book "as an outstanding work by Africa's most accomplished writer'. Twenty years after Ofeimun's unflattering review of Anthills, the panel of judges for the 2007 Man Booker International Prize, headed by Elaine Showalter, a professor of Humanities at Princeton College singled out Anthills, not even the acclaimed Things Fall Apart, as Achebe's masterpiece.
One's academic background is no handicap to one emerging as a notable literary critic. Kole Omotosho and Abiola Irele, read Arabic and French, respectively, but they are among the most respected African literary critics. Ikhide read biological sciences, and he is reputed to be a voracious reader; that is encouraging in a clime where philistinism is celebrated. He is in good stead with Toyin Akinosho, a respected literature enthusiast, who read geology.
But the unconventional style of literary criticism, which Ikhide Ikheloa, sartorially, branded moonlighting, is indeed, a gentler offshoot of Bolekaja criticism, made popular by the troika of Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie and Ihechukwu Madubuike, in the 1980's. Soyinka, in his inimitable style, famously dismissed such pedestrian criticism as "neo-tarzanism". Ikheloa was, obviously inattentive while reading Roses and Bullets or fatigue took a better part of him, whatever might have prompted such an escapist review of the voluminous work, it is certain he strayed from the path of literary probity. The truth is that no critic, no matter his level of academic accomplishments, can convince our compatriots that there is nothing worthy of celebration in the 500 page-novel, Roses and Bullets.
• Ndulue, a poet, writes from Lagos.
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