Achebe's "Things Fall Apart" and Shyamalan's "The Village": Cultures and Chaos

Sorry to harp on Achebe, but he's been on my mind a lot recently. My class finished the book some time ago (beginning Jas. Baldwin's "Go Tell It on the Mountain" next), but recently we decided to watch M. Night. Shyamalan's "The Village" and compare the two.

I don't want to summarize the Shyamalan film here, but in a broad, structural sense, it works as a kind of opposite reflection of Achebe's work.

Things Fall Apart starts out by depicting pre-colonial Ibo culture. Within this culture there are questions that people ask themselves that concern contradictions or uncomfortable aspects of Ibo society (for example, the killing of innocent children as mentioned in the earlier post).

But there are other questions that the Ibo don't even know how to frame until another cultural system (Christianity/colonialism) is placed next to their own as a kind of frame of reference. A person can question specific elements of the system (even if he realizes that there are no satisfying answers); but he can not question (or doubt) the system itself. Until, of course, he is shown another system.

This is the genius of Achebe. And this is what he so detested in Conrad's lop-sided view of Africa. And the movement from simple (one system: Ibo culture) to complex (two systems: Ibo culture and Christian/colonial culture) is the path Achebe's novel takes.

"The Village" offers an interesting departure from this path, while affirming the same epistemological truth concerning how self-consciousness is a prerequisite for doubt (you must be conscious of your own consciousness in order to doubt it; and you can only allow doubt to color a perspective when it is no longer the perspective, but merely a perspective).

Shyamalan's villagers appear to exist in a society that is much like the Ibo society. No one questions where the village leaders of Umuofia are when the egwugwu hold court in chapter 10. Nobody seems to notice how similarly some of the leaders and egwugwu walk (except for the narrator). So, too, when "Those We Do Not Speak Of" enter the town, none of the villagers notice that certain town elders are absent from the chaos. (The viewer doesn't even know to look for it the first time through the film.)

But Shamalayan's departure (and his plot twist at the end of the film) is actually a reversal of Achebe's path. We are no longer moving from simple to complex; we are now moving from complex to simple. It turns out the eponymous village is anachronistic. It is not simple; it is "simplified" (in the etymological sense of being made simple).

Shyamalan's village elders turned away from the complexities of modern society (illustrated by the flashback where they tell anecdotes--apparently in a grief therapy session--recalling acts of pointless violence). Leaving modern society, they attempted to create a simpler one. And the choice that the protagonist (blind Ivy Walker) has to make in the end is whether or not to re-introduce complexity into the lives of the villagers, whether or not to give them the chance to be doubters.