Of Plays and Novels 8-17-15

    [ I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. sch 10/5/2025] 

"Perversion" took my time this past week or two. I only finished Chinua Achebe's 1959 Things Fall Apart (Anchor Books) about an hour ago. I have read only 160 pages of Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible (HarperPerennial, 1999). I put my all into the play.

But let me talk about Things Fall Apart. I think Achebe won the Nobel. This novel does not appear on Entertainment Weekly 100 Best Novels of All Time, and I think it should have.

Okonkwo ruled his household with a heavy hand. His wives, especially the youngest, lived in perpetual fear of his fiery temper., and so did his little children. Perhaps down in his heart, Okonkwo was not a cruel man. But his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness. It was deeper and more intimate than the fear of evil and capricious gods and of magic, the fear of the forest and of the forces of nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw. Okonkwo's fear was greater than these. It was not external but lay deep within himself. It was fear of himself, lest he should be found to resemble his father. Even as a little boy he had resented his father's failure and weakness and even now he had still remembered how he had suffered when a playmate had told him that his father was agbale. That was how Okonkwo first came to know that agbale was not only another name for a woman, it could also mean a man who had taken no title. And so Okonkwo was ruled by one passion - to hate everything that his father Unoka had loved. One of those things was gentleness and another was idleness.

p. 13

Being someone who killed his father off in a war while riding in a bus to his second grade class, that passage caught my attention. This passage also establishes the unpleasantness of Achebe's protagonist. What makes Achebe's novel is his writing, impressive is how he makes this unpleasant protagonist into a sympathetically tragic figure unable to face the changes imposed by colonialism, or to adapt to those changes. Very clever writing.

Zora Neale Hurston has ahold of me. I think now of the novelist as anthropologist. Or maybe I understand what Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was going on about with his early novels like Player Piano and Cat's Cradle. Some of this novelist-as-anthropologist came to mind while reading Things Fall Apart. This is even though Things Fall Apart is a historical novel - even as it takes place during the Victorian Era colonization of Nigeria. So how could I play anthropologist of east central Indiana? I must think on that?

Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible also combines the anthropological and the historical. I need to think more on what I did with the short stories and will do with "One Dead Blonde".

Obsessing quite too much with "Perversion". I wonder with bemusement what will be the reaction to the preceding sentence. Surely someone will say too long, too much, of my life got caught up with perversion, or else why would I be in federal prison? I think the play is not bad as a literary effort and quite good as agitprop. I may even be on time, for a change! Reading the last 2 Acts tonight. Then I will impose on Russell for a technical critique. I hope to have it published by year's end. Yes, quite absorbed in it. Glad for the leisure time prison has given me for writing but also put out by having so much time to worry over the play.

sch

[10/5/2025: The play I was working on seems to have been lost, and 10 years later, I cannot recall its themes or plot! sch]