Things Fall Apart: It's a Good Title

Originally, I was going to write from a Taylorism point of view, but, due to the art of procrastination, I am trying to compose an entry at nine seventeen on Sunday night, and far too lazy to create my own lens through which to view the novel. Therefore, I will analyze it from the postcolonial point of view. I am planning on using the Postcolonialism text that we received in class to focus on discussing what happens as the two cultures interact, with one essentially eliminating the other. I plan to bring up topics such as how all of the conflicts within the book occur due to each culture's individual viewpoints, and how this effects how history is viewed, which the passage you gave us in class discusses. Actually, in thinking about it, that idea in a way harkens back to 1984, with rewritten history and all, but more applied to multiple cultures rather than government and its subjects. It's like all of the books we studied have related themes... because they probably do. I just had an epiphany. Overall, I might analyze the novel in the opposite of the way I analyzed Brave New World: I will lament the lack of man's humanity, to a degree. Or rather, I will argue for rationality, in that it is essentially a uniquely human subject. The novel describes colonialism as Darwinian, in that, the culture with the stronger forces, better organization, and superior technology will win and eliminate the others. This leads humanity down the slope of cultural evolution where every missing link becomes extinct. Humanity tends to regard this type of extinction as bad, and has the unique characteristic of declaring that it doesn't have to be that way. If people in a culture would use rationality, even if they still maintained religious beliefs, they would be able to peacefuly coexist, for they could willingly exist the possibility of being wrong. However, seeing as this virtually never happens in reality, it is possible that people cannot truely think rationally, and that rationality is indeed another discourse in which no person is truely fluent. Therefore, it really is truely about Darwinism: the strongest, smartest, and most virulent culture succeeds. Other ones cannot compete, and the dominant hegemony becomes the culture that is "correct." It is not about the culture being logically correct, for there are sever logical flaws in both the white man's religion and the African's religious beliefs. It is about the culture being successful, which means that the predominant cultural beliefs must be correct, and must be spread ("of course Capitalism is the best little impressionable child, because it made America a world power. How? Well, look at all of the wealth, it could only come with such and such economic policies..."). Indeed, at the edges of every culture, things do, in fact, fall apart. However, every criticism is not based on pure rationality, but on the views of the culture forming it. Therefore, why feminists might decry "Things Fall Apart"'s mistreatment of women, that is only through a Western perspective, not some inherant knowledge of "true" right and wrong. Therefore, I will acknowledge that the author does not intend to say that the African tribe was a perfect society, and that the Europeans were bad, but that the African tribe was simply weaker, and therefore, eliminated. This was neither good nor bad, simply a fact, and that that is how human society progresses. As a result, I'm probably looking at it through a Darwinian lens, or even more of a Postmodern lens, even though I acknowledge that Postmodernism and Darwinism are Western Societal constructs that we use to assume that we are superior ("America is great because we let in alternative viewpoints... 'Things Fall Apart' is a tale of Darwinian survivial of the strongest, with no place for rationality").
Sadly, I am forced to conclude that I have no idea how I am going to view the novel particularily, nor do I have any significant insights that I think will lead to a great conversation in terms of an essay. However, I will probably ramble in such a way as this blog, just with references to the book, so, be warned. Oh, here's a quote from the theoretical text: "Marxism, poststructuralism, feminism, African-American cultural studies, and psychoanalytic criticism are all identifiable influences on postcolonial theory." This just basically says that postcolonial theory is based on other societal constructs, just not the dominant ones at the time. Therefore, I am unable to truely deconstruct the novel with postcolonialism because that is a construct itself. Fun stuff. Sorry for ant incoherence, it tends to happen on last minute rambles that I undertake.