Key things to consider when reading the following quote.

1) This is an excerpt from Chinua Achebe’s novel No Longer at Ease
2) He published this novel in 1960
3) Achebe is Nigerian
4) He is of Igbo descent
5) He is a black man
6) He wrote his novels in English
7) He is revered as a prominent post-colonial writer

Quote:

“Mother’s room was the most distinctive in the whole house, except perhaps for Father’s. The difficulty in deciding arose from the fact that one could not compare incomparable things. Mr. Okonkwo believed utterly and completely in the things of the white man. And the symbol of the white man’s power was the written word, or better still, the printed word. Once before he went to England, Obi heard his father talk with deep feeling about the mystery of the written word to an illiterate kinsman: ‘Our women made black patterns on their bodies with the juice of the uli tree. It was beautiful, but it soon faded. If it lasted two market weeks it lasted a long time. But sometimes our elders spoke about uli that never faded, although no one had ever seen it. We see it today in the writing of the white man. If you go to the native court and look at the books which clerks wrote twenty years ago or more, they are still as they wrote them. They do not say one thing today and another tomorrow, or one thing this year and another next year. […] In the Bible Pilate said: ‘What is written is written.’ It is uli that never fades.’” (251)

The edition from which I pulled this quote was published in 2010 by Everyman’s Library and features Achebe’s African trilogy – of which No Longer at Ease is the second novel in that sequence. This particular publication of Achebe’s trilogy compiles his work in hard cover, includes a bound bookmark, has a refined binding pattern, endpapers at both ends of the novel, and a book jacket with a picture of a rather somber-looking Achebe…Last class we spoke about the act of interpretation and our inability to engage with absence. The various processes by which we interpret and derive meaning from cultural objects inevitably reflect our subjective ‘readings’, which remain contingent upon the tools we use to guide us through our readings. Ideology – ideology! That powerful word – subsequently manifests in our acts of interpretation by reflecting how we are complicit in its production and perpetuation by virtue of the fact that we cannot ‘not’ read a cultural object through the ideological frameworks that already guide our readings. Absence is impossible.

With these ideas in mind that I entirely lifted from our seminar, (and I sincerely hope that I have accurately interpreted, or at the very least rudimentarily assimilated, what we discussed in our last class) I accessed the Everyman’s Library website to glean an understanding of their goals as a publishing house. Under the ‘About Everyman’s’ tab bellow the ‘quality’ section, the webpage states that “Everyman’s Library continues to maintain its original commitment to publishing the most significant world literature in editions that reflect a tradition of fine bookmaking.” An ambitious and worthwhile endeavor, no doubt, and there are several ideas that we can interpret from this basic statement in relation to Achebe’s trilogy. Everyman’s commitment to publishing the most significant works of world literature implies a set of conventions from which a governing body (at lease I assume it is a governing body) selects what they deem to be significant world literature. Additionally, the tradition of ‘fine’ bookmaking that they attempt to honor andemulate is firmly rooted in material practices. A text that they choose to publish is “printed on acid-free natural-cream-colored text paper and [includes] Smyth-sewn, signatures, full-cloth cases with two-color case stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, and European-style half-round spines.” Not only is each book published according to these material standards, Everyman likewise includes a coding system according to the color of their books’ cloth bindings. The colors denote the following:

Scarlet = Contemporary Classics
Navy = 20th Century
Burgundy = Victorian Literature/19th Century
Dark Green = Pre-Victorian/Romantic/18th Century
Light Blue = 17th Century and Earlier
Celadon Green = Non-Western Classics
Mauve = Ancient Classics
Sand = Poetry

Accordingly, based on Achebe’s African Trilogy and its materiality, we can deduce that Everyman’s Library considers Achebe’s work to be a significantwork of contemporary classic literature; an important enough contribution to world literature to the degree that it merits Everyman’s acid-free natural-cream-colored text paper. This assessment seems to be a rather basic and self evident conclusion; however, I see it as a more complicated reality based on the nature of his writing and what he represents as an ‘African’ writer. Consider the quote that I have provided from No Longer at Ease, particularly when Achebe writes of Mr. Okonkwo that he:

“believed utterly and completely in the things of the white man. And the symbol of the white man’s power was the written word, or better still, the printed word.”

One of the fundamental issues that post-colonial literature classes will approach is the notion of the colonized subject who articulates his/her trauma in a form and through a language that they derived from their colonial oppressors. Achebe has stated that he had no issues with his use of the novel form or his appreciation for English as an aesthetically expressive language – fair play that was his choice as a freethinking artist. As a writer of contemporary classic literature (thanks Everyman for the qualification), his place within the Englishliterary tradition is absolutely warranted based on his qualities as an artist; although the manner in which he is appropriated within the English literary tradition and revered based on his writing nevertheless raises a question in my mind: if Achebe’s work gains increased notoriety and respect given its inclusion in Everyman’s publication as great work of world literature and an aesthetically refined material document (which perhaps elevates his work beyond the average post-colonial text), then what happens when we rethink the importance we place on physical texts as cultural objects, while we begin to reconsider the importance of print standards, digital publications, and alternative forms of text?

This is where I think elements of Gitleman’s paper “Near Print and Beyond Paper: Knowing by *.PDF” and Kramer and Bredekamp’s “Culture, Technology, Cultural Techniques – Moving Beyond Text” are appropriate sources for addressing this question. Kramer/Bredekamp state that “It is indeed no longer possible to ignore the signs that the idea of culture-as-text is eroding […]” (23) and one of the ‘frontlines’ that he identifies as proof of this erosion refers to “The recognition that culture-creating practices are fluid. ‘Culture’ is no longer confined to what is enshrined in works, monuments, and documents in stable and statutory form” (23). Like the Uli that Mr. Okonkwo implicitly devalues by favoring the ‘white man’s writing’, the written text – much like Uli – is as transient and fluid. Given our current critical setting in which we reconsider the significance of the written text, it seems that other forms of cultural expression through language and writing have the same importance and cultural significance. Written text does not occupy the same hierarchical privilege that it previously maintained, particularly when filtered through the equalizing and destabilizing implications of non-material texts – at least this is what I interpret from our class discussions and our readings so far.

Like Gitleman suggests in relation to PDFs, these non-tangible texts consistently offer its users the opportunity to rework its uses and meanings: “PDF technology imagines its users—that certain uses and conditions have been built in to the technology—at the same time that actual users continue to imagine and reimagine what PDF files are for, howand where they work, and thus what they mean” (117-8). Granted PDFs seem much different from novels and it may seem absurd to link Achebe with Gitleman’s essay by virtue of their differing intentions; however, Gitleman’s reimagination of meaning which PDFs entail effectively frames the way that I think we can consider the process by which we derive meaning from Achebe’s quoted section and his inclusion in Everyman’s library. Consequently, I wonder if readers of Achebe’s novel who read his book when it was first published in 1960 – in its original material form – had the same reading experience as a reader who encountered his novel for the first time forty years later in Everyman’s publication? I doubt that they did given Everyman’s current ideological ends. There is a shift in meaning and interpretation based on different material encounters with this text, but certainly we can infer that the novel’s materiality – guided by its publishing standards – influences the reader’s interactions with its ideological ends.

Gitleman’s PDFs indicates a universality, malleability, and vast accessibility, which transcend the static implications of ‘enshrined works’ that Kramer defines. We can see the language of universality and changeability in seemingly mundane instances such as Gitleman’s description of PDF 1.7: “at Adobe’s instigation, PDF 1.7 was adopted as an open standard by the International Standards Organization in 2008, so it will continue to be developed by relevant communities of practice and remain open to all” (118). The potential for this technology to be readily accessible to anyone with the prospect of its continued development, suggests the evolution of text that enables significant development within a fixed medium. Its ‘open’ nature invites change and rethinking outside of a static manifestation such as a printed text or form such as a novel. So I wonder what can happen when a post-colonial writer encounters such textual shifts?

If we return to the Everman’s Library webpage, we see that Joseph M. Dent – who was the founder of this publishing house – endeavored to create a similar universality:

Dent promised to publish new and beautiful editions of the world’s classics at one shilling a volume, ‘to appeal to every kind of reader: the worker, the student, the cultured man, the child, the man and the woman’, so that ‘for a few shillings the reader may have a whole bookshelf of the immortals; for five pounds (which will procure him with a hundred volumes) a man may be intellectually rich for life.’

Dent’s promise reflects a rather humble endeavor with multiple benefits for various people across a variety of economic, social, and intellectual backgrounds. In its current manifestation – and in relation to Achebe – this universal accessibility is filtered through a long-standing literary and publication tradition that represents a problematic reality for post-colonial writers. To be canonized, yes, this is phenomenal. Yet, this canonization remains contingent upon a system and set of cultural values that remain associated with a national history defined in part by its colonial pursuits. However, what Gitleman and Kramer/Bredekamp push towards in relation to PDFs and evolving cultural forms can rework meaning and form in ways that liberate the outdated notion of a printed text as a privileged cultural form. I am not trying to suggest that if we convert Achebe’s works into PDFs or if other post-colonial writers publish their works outside of traditional publishing houses, then they will overcome the colonial implications imported through novel writing and publishing standards. I am not going to suggest some reductive, inappropriate, and overly sentimental conclusion that suggests that this shift in print forms will somehow negate an aspect of centuries’ worth of colonial oppression in Africa. I suppose that I am just wondering what happens when we begin to reconsider – as we have been doing in this course – the ways in which printed text (in this case Achebe’s) no longer occupies the same privileged position as cultural artifacts as we think about other forms of writing and textuality, and their significance as cultural expressions.

Works Cited

Achebe, Chinua. No Longer at Ease. Toronto: Everyman’s, 2010. Print.

Gitleman, Lisa. “Near Print and Beyond Paper: Knowing by *.PDF.” Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents. Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2014. 11-35. PDF.

Kramer, Sybille, and Horst Bredekamp. “Culture, Technology, Cultural Techniques – Moving Beyond Text.” Theory, Culture & Society 30.6 (2013): 20-9. PDF.

Random House. Everyman’s Library, 2006. Web. 22 Sep. 2014. http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/classics/about.html