‘Steamed into Well-Done Mutton’: The Solar Plague and Discursive Formation in Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah

Abstract

Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah is studied under a rich variety of critical approaches,which is expected for such a major literary work. Some of the studies are under the umbrella ofdiscourse analysis. This paper is located within discourse studies, but in the specific aspect ofdiscursive formations. Of the available published studies on Anthills of the Savannah, manyexplore nodes which are seen by their authors as contact points to extra-textual history or socialreality or as signposts leading back to the author’s intended meanings. This paper goes to thedepths of discourse following the track, or as Jacques Derrida would say, the traces left by thesign end on signifiers like witness and the wilting, wild Sun of April, eventually permeating theentire narrative. A sign which is not a stand-alone complex of signifier and signified, but affectsother signs, giving them extra dimensions of meaning, and rendering them thereby symbolic, isof necessity itself symbolic and, moreover, in this present case, sustains a vision that thenarrative as one act symbolizes: the Last Days. The individual incidents are also affected:although they occur in narrative time, they are at the same time familiar as events of the LastDays, that is, apocalyptic. The study unveils the mythology of the Last Days, with its plagues, asthe formation sustaining the whole, and accounting for the work’s intellectual structure.