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CHINUA ACHEBE'S THINGS FALL APART1 HAS BEEN DESCRIBED by critics like Eustace Palmer as a splendid cultural manifesto: "he gives a powerful presentation of the beauty, strength and validity of traditional life and value."2 The writer himself had already clearly explained, in an article entitled "The Novelist as a Teacher," that such a rehabilitation was the aim of his novels and the reason behind his vision of the artist as a teacher:
I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past - with all its imperfections - was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God's behalf delivered them.3
I intend to show that Things Fall Apart goes even further, that it is a highly complex novel which not only refers to a past in need of rehabilitation at the time of the coming independence of Nigeria, scheduled to take place in i960, but also perceives the ambiguities of the present and anticipates the crisis of the process of national construction in Africa, which Frantz Fanon described in a chapter of The Wretched of the Earth entitled "The Pitfalls of National Consciousness."4 These two aspects of the novel - cultural rehabilitation, on the one hand, and assessment of the present political situation, on the other hand - are not to be separated: the past is a short-cut towards the future because a strong nation is a nation with a strong identity and traditions bring concepts and stories that enable a people to cope with modern realities.
To understand how a novel whose action is situated between 1850 and 1900 evokes contemporary and even future problems, the critic must think beyond the content of Things Fall Apart. To do so, I followed the ideas of the Romanian literary critic Lucien Goldmann. In his works published in France in the 1960s, he explained that we should take into account what he called the semantic structure, which he defined as the logic that organizes the relations between the characters as well as between the characters and their values. As a Marxist, he interpreted this structure as the way the author brings into a coherent whole...